So Much for That. Lionel ShriverЧитать онлайн книгу.
and some other whathaveyou anymore, that’s all, or building anything new.”
Shep was immediately struck by the homework Glynis had done on this subject – there was no way that this regulatory timeline had been long lodged in her head as general knowledge – when she had conspicuously refrained from availing herself of the copious information at her fingertips about her illness. She was hazy on the side effects of drugs whose names and downsides were meticulously listed on a host of websites; she would not scroll down. Yet her searches on their home computer had apparently regarded not what was happening to her or what would happen to her next, but who was to blame. The misdirection of her energies was painfully typical.
“I’m not quite sure how I could have known.” He didn’t start the car, though he stared intently out the windshield as if he were driving. “The materials I used to work with were the same ones everyone used. Licensed plumbers, professional roofers … I never cut corners, or used a material that I knew other repairmen were careful to avoid.”
“You could easily have known, and you should have! Evidence about the dangers of asbestos goes back to 1918. The evidence was really beginning to accumulate by the 1930s, but the industry had the research suppressed. The specific link between asbestos and mesothelioma was made in 1964. That was before you even started Knack! By the 1970s, that asbestos could kill you was basically a known fact. I grew up surrounded by these stories, and so did you!”
“Glynis, try to think back,” said Shep, keeping his voice calm, reasoning, quiet. “During the early years I was putting in twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour days getting Knack off the ground. I didn’t have time to read the papers front to back. Much less to bury my nose in a microscopic list of ingredients every time I opened a can.”
“We’re not talking about your not having time to follow every twist and turn of peace talks in the Middle East. You had an obligation to keep up with health and safety issues that bore directly on your work. And to do whatever modest research might have been required to choose safe products over lethal ones. Never mind just you – or, by the way, your wife and children. What about your employees?”
“I no longer have employees,” he said quietly. “Glynis, why are you doing this? Are you getting back at me for Pemba?”
She was not to be sidetracked. “All these companies being sued up the wazoo for decades right and left, but no, you stick your head in the sand and totally ignore it!”
Shep himself had never been a man for causes. It was his nature to see two sides of things; worse, many sides, so that acquaintances often mistook him for having no opinions at all. He was attuned to particularities, complexities, and extenuating circumstances. He wasn’t critical of ideologues; he found Jackson entertaining. There were causes whose proponents had prevailed and improved matters. He was glad that his wife could vote, and that blacks no longer had to use separate water fountains. It was clearly a fine thing, too, that some firebrands had demonized asbestos, so that his own co-workers were no longer replacing insulation that could kill them, and wouldn’t risk being cast in this terrible role of contaminant by their own wives.
Nonetheless, he had also founded a company, and had a better-than-average understanding of what a company was: neither ogre nor abstraction. It was an amalgam of many people – including the odd slipshod employee or ruthlessly bottom-line zealot who could single-handedly undermine decades of collective diligence. It was an intersection of many products, each of which was connected to yet another company, also of many people, decent people who didn’t always feel like going to work every morning and still did, and each with its host of obligations – to stockholders, investors, health plans, and pensions. Yet a company was also an entity that somebody loved. Not that he was excusing poor practice, but corporate malfeasance was therefore both diffuse, and deeply personal. Given the diffusion, he couldn’t see the satisfaction in pointing the finger at “a company,” much less at “an industry.” After all, look at Glynis. In preference to railing at “an industry,” she was clearly far more gratified to locate a guilty party whom she could literally get her hands on.
He wondered if Edward Knox had any idea how anguishing was his suggestion that Glynis would have come by her cancer as the result of an embrace.
Yet if it helped her, if she hungered to tell herself a story, acquiescing to the part of villain was a service Shep could perform. Maybe it was a modest service, although it didn’t feel modest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea asbestos was so deadly. Or that it was in all those materials your doctor mentioned. But you’re right, I should have read those articles. Before working with any product, I should have made certain what it contained. I was irresponsible.” He choked a little on that last adjective, never in his life one applied to him, by himself or anyone else. “And now you’re the one who has to pay for that. It’s not fair. I should be the one who’s sick. I wish it was me. I wish I could shoulder it for you.”
He was not sure that this was true. But he suspected that in due course it would become true, which made it true enough.
When they returned home, Glynis allowed that she wasn’t very hungry, but Shep pressed that she had to keep up her strength. Though he knew that the suggestion was a life-long anathema to her, he even hazarded that before the surgery she should probably try to put on weight. After the violence of the Ft. Washington parking garage – no one had raised a hand, but that’s what it had been, violence – they were quiet, moving around each other with exaggerated deference. Shep volunteered to make dinner, not his usual duty. He wasn’t trying to imply that this was penance; he meant instead to imply that preparation of one meal was merely the beginning of a very long penance, more gestures and sacrifices and many more meals. She was not up for fighting, as she was not, really, up for cooking either, and she let him.
“Dad’s making dinner?” said Zach, shuffling into the kitchen. Whether from his age or nature, their fifteen-year-old was at a stage where he strove for invisibility. He turned to his father, who was peeling potatoes. “What’d you do wrong?”
Kids’ unerring intuition always impressed Shep, and made him nervous. “Where do you want to start?”
They had resolved not to tell the children about their mother’s illness until they were better able to prepare them for what to expect, and they’d confirmed her diagnosis with a second opinion. Or that was the excuse; doubtless they were simply putting off a painful scene. But Zach knew something was up. Since he almost never ate with his parents anymore, this sidle into the kitchen was a spy mission, the nosing through the fridge mere pretext.
Yet Shep was grateful for a third party to cut the tension, and to help manifest the appearance of a normal family – hungry foraging teenager, parents begging in return for some morsel from the well-guarded larder of his private life. A hackneyed tableau soon consigned to the past. In the months to come, Zach would have to learn to be a “good son,” and therefore an artificial one.
“You going out?” asked Shep.
“Nah,” said Zach – “Z” to his friends. His parents had christened him Zachary Knacker before they knew the boy. They’d liked the assonance, the clackety-clack steam-train cadence, which to its bearer sounded “like a character in Dr Seuss” (The Cat in the Hat probably being the last book Zach had read cover to cover). The name was too high profile for a kid desperate to keep his head down, so now he huddled at the end of the alphabet in a cryptic single letter.
“But it’s Friday night!” said Shep, who knew better. He was merely trying to keep his son in the kitchen. Zach never went out. He stayed in his room. His rare forays were to other boys’ rooms. They all lived online, and spent hours at computer games, a diversion of which Shep had initially despaired, until he got it. The attraction wasn’t blood and gore, or aggression. In the days he’d had spare time – whenever was that? – Shep himself had enjoyed solving crossword puzzles. He wasn’t very good at them, but so much the better; they only served their purpose incomplete. Comically low-tech in comparison, but the draw was the same. The reward of all these games was concentration, focus for its own sake; it didn’t matter on what. You couldn’t object to that,