Annals of the Owning Class

During the night there was a noise from the east, a loud reverberating roar that echoed across the sky and rippled back like thunder, but it wasn’t thunder. Nor was it the dreaded airburst that in the murky hollows of our skulls we had been expecting for so long and at first assumed to have finally occurred.

[ And what if it really were the final moment of doing all the things we did—driving cars the size of living rooms, dining on lobsters and clams and plates piled high with cattle flesh, quaffing icy bottles of Pouilly Fuissé and inhaling the caustic fragrance from the refineries that lined the distant shore—who would mourn? ]

What we did was this: we closed our eyes and pulled our puffy quilts across our shoulders to resume the comforting dreams for which we had handsomely paid.

Later, in the cool brightness of morning, with the sun smiling down benignly on our great good fortune, the air fresh and welcoming, our skin tingling at the prospect of driving down to the beach along crushed-shell roads in tangerine convertibles, soaking up the rich radiation that gives vibrant life to the plants and flowers and all the little creatures on God’s green earth, we knew ourselves to be among the joyful few who deserve to occupy this opulent resort, for we were the righteous beneficiaries of a largesse of known origin, and the beautiful day was ripe for our ravishing, all laid out before us like a splendid Disneyland park as its gates open to a busload of lucky children [ or like a dark island woman spreading her knees and yielding to rape. ]

But when we stepped out onto the decks and patios of our baronial compounds to feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle morning breeze fluffing the fine hairs at our temples, our lazy eyes met the strange sight of a dense black column of smoke twisting out over the sea from a burning supertanker that had grounded at low water during the night. The keel of the enormous vessel had cracked like a stick under the weight of cargo at both ends, and the fore and aft halves angled down from the broken pelvis of the mid-section that hadn’t been engineered as a fulcrum and was now thrust upward by the crumpled steel hull. Huge hot flames from open ruptures were rising high into the sky, creating a secondary source of morning illumination, and already the wide surface of water between the inner and outer shorelines had filmed over with an eddying slick that diffracted the firey light into prismatic spectra and hurried southward with the incoming tide, bringing fresh Saudi crude onto the pristine sands below.

Quick change of plans: Hastily punching numbers on the finger-phones to book flights and cars and reservations for other islands farther down the archipelago where the massive spill will not stain the holiday. But no vacancies exist, even at big hotels in colonial harbors insufficiently exclusive for our requirements only days before. All are filled to the gunwales with pasty, mushroom-skinned northerners, like us in general aspect but whose accounts are not nearly so munificent. The deluxe second-tier suites that had not been adequate for consideration we now considered our due, and staff—servants—are set to the task, since we are the masters of this boat that must float, the great and powerful emissaries from the midland clusters of emerald buildings where minerals finally reduce to limitless oceans of money—the thing we make, the language we speak—and the great events await our arrival.