Lives Less Valuable

Derrick Jensen

Description

At the heart of a city, a river is dying, children have cancer, and people are burning with despair. From the safe distance that wealth buys, a corporation called Vexcorp counts these lives as another expense on a balance sheet. But that distance is about to collapse.

Malia is an activist who has fiercely fought the everyday atrocities of environmental racism. After years of watching countless children die, she’s lost faith in the possibility of systemic reform. Dennis is a lawyer who still believes that if enough people have the correct information they will do the right thing. Dujuan is a young street thug torn by a chaos of grief and rage at his little sister’s death. And Larry Gordon is Vexcorp’s CEO.

Their lives converge when Dujuan mugs Malia. Her scornful comparison of Dujuan to Vexcorp triggers a storm inside him. That storm only clears when he identifies the real agent of his pain: Larry Gordon. Injury requires justice, so Dujuan kidnaps Gordon and assembles a rough court to try him for murder. He picks Malia to be the judge because she knows the facts and because, as Dujuan says, “You want this as bad as me.” As bystanders become involved and time runs out, Malia is forced to make grueling moral decisions between survival and loyalty, safety and courage, agency and despair.

Derrick Jensen has written a novel as compelling as it is necessary: with our planet under serious threat, Malia’s decisions face us all.

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604862829
• Langue: English

Extrait

www.flashpointpress.com
http://www.pmpress.org
Also by Derrick Jensen
Songs of the Dead
What We Leave Behind
How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization
Now This War Has Two Sides (double CD)
As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay In Denial
Thought to Exist in the Wild: A wakening from the Nightmare of Zoos
Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization
Endgame Volume II: Resistance
Welcome to the Machine
The Other Side of Darkness (triple CD)
Walking on Water
Strangely Like War
The Culture of Make Believe
Standup Tragedy (double CD)
A Language Older Than Words
Listening to the Land
Railroads and Clearcuts
part one
The dream is always the same. It begins with the slightest feeling of unease, as from a misplaced sound or a sudden silence: the too-quick stopping of birdsong or the scolding of squirrels. Then from Malia a moment of hesitation, that inevitable aversion to the warning she knows she must heed, that resistance to acknowledging an unavoidable reality. Each time in the dream she pays attention not to the sound nor to the silence, but to the red-tinted lettuce leaves in her garden, and to her weeding. She pays attention to her niece Robin, and notices sunlight glinting off the twelve-year-old’s dirty-blonde hair. She looks at the ground and notices the stems and leaves from yesterday’s weeding lying shriveled in the brown dirt.
And then again she hears a sound from the forest across the pasture. Finally, always too late, she realizes that something really is wrong. Finally, always too late, she says, quietly yet firmly, “Robin, inside.”
Always the response: “When I finish this row.”
“Now.”
“Just a minute.”
A moment’s inattention. In the battle between composure and panic, so often indecision wins out, spurred by a strange desire to appear calm when everything inside wants out, and everything outside is falling apart. The desire to remain asleep, comfortable, warm, hidden safely from what you know. A belief that if only you can remain steadfast in the dailiness of your activities, your world will never collapse. And so again Malia pushes aside the sounds, stoops to pick up a basket at her feet. She tells herself not to run, not to let even herself know anything is wrong.
She straightens, and hears another sound, then more silence. At last she understands, and in so understanding realizes the unforgivable stupidity of having ignored the warnings for so long. She starts to shout, “Run, Robin! Run!”
But the words never come. They are always too late. There is a shot, or silence, and an explosion of blood, red on the dirty-blonde back of Robin’s head.
Always in the dream the basket falls, slowly, and Malia runs, slowly, for the house. Gunshots. So slow she can almost see the bullets. More shots, like fireflies in the distant forest. Closer, Robin lies in the brown dirt, the back of her head gone, her skull open, jagged like a broken glass.
The doorframe splinters from gunfire. Bullets whine above her head.
Into the house. And then the voices. Always the voices. Her parents, Dujuan, Dennis, Simon, Ray-Ray, and now Robin. “Run,” they say, “Run.” More gunshots. Men approaching. Room to room she runs in this dream, each room smaller than the last, until she squeezes into rooms the size of coffins, rooms the size of desk drawers, rooms the size of matchboxes. She hides from the men, hears the gunshots behind her, and always the voice of Robin, “Run, Malia, run.”
The dreams. A moment’s inattention. A single moment.
***
Dear Anthony,
I hardly know where to begin. Would “I miss you” be appropriate? After all these years, finally I write. After everything that’s happened, somehow it seems unfair for me to suddenly reappear in your life, especially when our contact will necessarily be one way. I can write to you, but you, for obvious reasons, can’t write back.
I hope you remember our relationship as fondly as I do, focusing not so much on its ending—which at the time seemed unbearably tempestuous to me, but now seems little more than a summer breeze—as on the time that made up its heart. Our relationship. It wasn’t my longest, but it remains my dearest, and by a long stretch my most passionate.
I hope that after all this time you can still decipher my handwriting. For that matter I hope you’re still living at the same place. I went to the library and looked you up on the Internet. Your address was the same. I’m glad for that, because that way I can picture you there, and I can picture us.
I can see you right now. You just walked to the corner to get the mail. It’s hot, and already the tall grasses are turning yellow and brown. Leggy sweet clovers cascade with blossoms, and the vetch has just started to add its purple to the riot. It’s dry. You kick up traces of dust with each step, and gravel rolls beneath your feet. As you walk, you don’t look at the first neighbor on the left, because you never much cared for him. He never liked you either (or me, if you remember), so today when he sees you coming he busies himself a shade too quickly under his hood, fiddling with the carburetor so the two of you don’t have to acknowledge each other. I remember these things. I remember so much about our time together. Little things, like this.
I guess the kids in the next house down don’t play foursquare anymore, unless something has gone very wrong developmentally. Most likely they’ve graduated to basketball and football. Or maybe by now they’ve graduated altogether, and don’t live there anymore.
The dogs are with you of course. Two. They were puppies then, and now they must be very old. Surely they’re walking more sedately than before, maybe arthritically. I hope they’ve not died. One way or another there’s been too much death these last few years. Theirs would add too much to the weight.
You reach the mailbox. A strange envelope. A typed address, and no return. You check the stamp: yes, first class, so it’s not junk mail. The postmark. You stop and stand in the middle of the street, wondering who the hell you know in Odessa, Texas.
Well, no one now. I’m mailing this on my way out of town. I’m sure you understand why I can’t say where. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave the next place. Several months ago I moved here, on the run from the latest—and worst—of the deaths. I needed some relief. The first day I asked a woman at a restaurant, “What do people do for fun in Odessa?” She said, “They move away.” I’ve saved a little money, so it’s time for me to go.
You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to write you, or come visit you. My family is all dead now. All of them. I don’t have anyone anymore.
And I really don’t have you. I did once, and I feel stupid for giving you away. I know that’s not how I saw it at the time, nor maybe how you see it now, yet that’s how I see it. But even that isn’t so simple. If we’d stayed together I don’t know if I would have followed this path, and despite it all, I’m not sure any other path would have been appropriate.
I don’t know why I’m writing. It’s stupid and dangerous. Yes I do. I need to talk. God, you don’t know how I need to talk, and despite our problems we always knew how to listen to each other. But once again it’s not so simple. It wasn’t just our listening that was so beautiful about our conversations; it was our back and forth. Do you remember that night at the top of the stairs in the public library, interpreting each other’s dreams, then describing the sexual play we each had in store for the other when we got home, only to learn to our horror that the stairs formed an echo chamber for the stacks? Knowing that everyone in the library had heard the details of your dream about the hermaphroditic tadpoles and the sixty-foot clam went a long way toward explaining the looks we got on the way out, though not quite so far, I’m sure, as the by-then-general knowledge that I was no longer wearing panties. And there was that time you got the book on the White Rose Society, and we stayed up all night talking about German resistance to Hitler. Do you remember? What was the name of that girl who was beheaded with her brother for distributing anti-Nazi literature? Sophia, I think. Isn’t it too much that the Nazis beheaded a woman whose name means wisdom? I remember how beautiful she looked in that black and white photo. Those conversations are why I’m writing to you now, not just because we listen to each other, but because we hear, we understand, we mostly agree, and as happened so many nights, we anticipate each other.
I’m tired, and I want to come home. I can’t, so this is as close as I can get.
If you are still friends with Charlie and the gang, please give them all a hug for me, especially Charlie. Of course do not tell them it’s from me. I wish I could deliver it in person. And I wish I could give you a hug. I miss you. I love you. I always have. Malia
***
Dear Anthony,
I’m on the road. Mississippi. I’ve never seen so much red dirt. Red dust, red clay, red soil packed hard as concrete. Everything’s hot as hell, unbelievably hot, the sort of heat that makes you forget you’ve ever been cool, that there’s ever been any other way to be except