Green Man

At midnight while La Betty dozed rain began to fall. La Betty’s slumber had been restless, perhaps because of the bubbles in the after-dinner Danziger Goldwasser paired with a gold-polka-dot chocolate truffles. On the edge of sleep La Betty heard the rain, and then mistook the raindrops on the window for Danziger Goldwasser bubbles. The bubbles were captivating. The bubbles glistened like little spheres of rainbow. They slid like tiny pools of pure mercury.

La Betty began sleepwalking. She left her bed and padded across her pricey Iranian Kashkoli Gabbeh rug. Moving as gracefully as a glider La Betty sidestepped the silk bonsai acacia tree atop her Osvaldo Borsani table. She stopped at the bedroom window without colliding into anything. La Betty marveled as the raindrops turned paper-white. They coalesced in sheets as they slid toward the bottom of the window. Most of them had a strange purple bubble in the middle. The raindrops seemed to be coagulating, and the purple bubbles organizing themselves as if they were forming strictly patterned lace. Then, as with a long fine-tooth comb, the coalescing droplets were plowed top to bottom. The paths of the comb’s teeth created narrow grass-green furrows. As La Betty dreamed she was witnessing all this, she began to walk backwards, not toward her bed but in a direction perpendicular to her bed. She drifted backwards along a line that intersected no objects or furniture. When La Betty reached a wall she woke up and opened her eyes. She expected to be in bed. The view before her was momentarily disorienting until she beheld the window’s conspicuous melding raindrops and the slender green lines. This concatenation of droplets, bubbles, green filaments and the formless night behind them was not amorphous. La Betty clearly discerned that from her distance the window framed an actual figure: a man with a serious face possibly dressed in a white lab coat with three pens in his left front pocket. He was focusing as if on a specimen, but the windowsill cut off the view.

Not looking up, neither moving nor moving his lips, the man was speaking. His voice was strained and saddened. He seemed to be pleading for someone to openly embrace and act upon his words.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us. No amount of money. If we
pollute and destroy no amount of money will save us. *

“Perfectly balanced with no bubbles added!” La Betty had always considered this slogan to be quite charming. It suited the present situation well enough, and La Betty felt smug about her allusion to both Goldwasser and the weather. She offered this slogan, as she so often did, to ward off interference and temptation by impious ghosts undead since the twentieth century. This particular entity was especially outré. Everyone that La Betty currently sees on television or the Internet has long since lost loyalty to Planet Earth. Shameless corporations have become faceless feudal lords. The borders of their financial territories are static, enforced by what was formerly known as international law. Nouvelle courtiers enjoy the delusion that technicians will fix the planet before all the great-great grandchildren are doomed. Nouvelle peasants, exhausted by environmentalism, have lost enthusiasm for any activity that would result in great-great grandchildren.

La Betty knew at once this portrait beseeching her to conservation was completely out of step with the late twenty-first century. This Green Man had to be a perverse interruption. His voice had to be the voice of an untrustworthy, offensive tempter. This unfashionable fiend was defying La

*Liberally modified David Suzuki quote

Betty’s ideals. To proclaim her values (the value of extreme wealth, the value of buying power, the value of shopping) La Betty insisted, “Perfectly balanced with no bubbles added!” She stepped forward readily to prove to the fiend she was unmoved.

As La Betty returned to the window, she began to chant soft advice to the sham environmentalist. “One word captures the moment. Mumm's the word. Mumm's the word. One champagne captures the moment.” La Betty wanted to further denigrate this watery figure but it abruptly dissolved. The raindrops and midnight were formless now. La Betty stood close to the window staring past the transparent rain, toward English Bay. She was already imagining magnificent ships on the waters, magnificent ships bringing exorbitant treasures inland.