Termination Shock

Lotte returned the courtesy by not asking Saskia directly about the topic that had been the subject of so many text messages during the last few days. This would have been inadvisable anyway with staff in the next room. It was a curious thing about texting and other such faceless electronic communications that they enabled people to say things and to reveal sides of their personalities they’d have avoided in person. Certainly any stranger who had read some of the texts Lotte had sent to her mother in Texas would have formulated an image in their mind that was at odds with the somewhat unconventional but basically wholesome teenager now sitting across the table from Saskia, her strawberry blond hair in a loose braid falling down over the front of a powder blue T-shirt. Saskia just sat and gazed upon the girl for a few moments, pleasantly shocked, as all parents always were, by how she had grown and changed.

“What was all that about!?” Lotte asked.

“Texas?”

“Yes. I know the official story was that you were making a private visit to friends overseas, and you got delayed because of the hurricane. Fine. But I’m just wondering . . . ?”

“We should talk about it at some point, you and I. It was a conference about climate change.”

Lotte’s face registered approval.

“I know that this topic would be important to you, darling, even if it weren’t for—” And Saskia turned her hands palms up and sort of gestured in all directions. Meaning the incredibly bizarre fact that you are a princess living in a royal palace.

“Texas,” Lotte said. “I know the oil industry is very big there.”

Saskia conquered the urge to say something in a conversation-endingly didactic parental tone such as my sweet child, it is very big everywhere, and we own a good chunk of it. “It’s certainly more visible. Because it’s near the supply end. Where the oil comes out of the ground. Demand is all over, of course—more distributed, less obvious. Every car, every dwelling is part of it.”

“The air we breathe,” Lotte added. “That’s the dumping ground for all of it. Did you hear the branch crack in the night?”

“No, I slept through that!”

“I was thinking about that tree, taking carbon dioxide out of the air for so many centuries, converting it into wood by the ton, until it grew so heavy it could no longer support its own weight.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that light. But yes, that tree has seen a lot.”

“Maybe we could cut sections from the fallen branch—to show the tree rings going back to before the Industrial Revolution.” Lotte was just getting going on this idea when her phone buzzed and her eyes flicked briefly to it. Saskia, hardly for the first time, had to bridle her annoyance at the fact that this contraption was interrupting a perfectly good conversation. But Lotte was no stranger to multitasking. Her brow dimpled momentarily at whatever had come up on the phone—some kind of troubling news, apparently—and then she looked back into her mother’s eyes and returned to her theme. “Maybe there’s some kind of analysis that could be done in a lab. On that wood, I mean. On the different tree rings. Showing how a tree ring that was created two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, showed a lower amount of CO₂ in the air than the more recent rings.”

“It’s not my area of expertise,” Saskia answered, “but it seems quite plausible that such an analysis could be done.” She frowned and thought about it while Lotte diverted her gaze to her phone again and thumbed out a response. “Are you suggesting we send the fallen branch to such a lab for analysis? I’m not sure if it would be of any interest to scientists who do that sort of thing—”

Lotte executed a perfect teen eye roll and stuck the landing with a sigh. “Of course not, those people can get old pieces of wood anywhere. My point is that we are going to walk out there in a few minutes and get our photograph taken with that fallen branch, no? And what is the point of that? It’s to show people that we are aware that there was a windstorm. Fine. But there are other things going on besides windstorms that we need to show awareness of. So I’m just saying that when we are done getting our photo taken standing next to this fucking branch, instead of letting the maintenance crew haul it away and put it in a log chipper or whatever, maybe I cut some pieces out of it and use it as a way to show that we are also aware of bigger issues like climate change and the damage it causes.”

Saskia was just on the verge of saying that this was a wonderful idea when Lotte’s phone buzzed again and she stood up. “I’m worried about Toon,” she said. “I want to go to the beach.”

“Scheveningen?”

“Just north of there.”

“What’s going on with Toon?” This was a schoolmate of Lotte’s and a part of her social circle.