Blackmail Earth Read Free Page B

feeling out Sri Lanka, India, and China to see if they wanted to buy the country’s fishing rights. Testing the waters, so to speak. Or, perhaps more to the point, cashing in while they could. Maybe he should, too. Buy land in Asia or Australia and move, like other Maldivians were doing. Every man for himself on a sinking ship.
    But Rafan would never abandon his country, so he’d hunt for barges, and try to pile dirt on an island faster than the waves could wash it away. Sisyphus in the age of global warming. Truth be known, even the gossip about selling fishing rights was easier to bear than other rumors that he’d heard, rumors that teemed with memories of smoke and death and screams.
    In his white ball cap and dark glasses, white pants and white shirt, Rafan looked too impeccable to be Minister of Dirt. He looked better suited, in the most literal sense, to working behind a desk while a Casablanca fan stirred the sweet tropical air above his salt-and-pepper pate. He was distinguished looking, in the manner of some government officials schooled abroad, and a good head taller than most of his countrymen, who jostled one another in the tight confines of the narrow street.
    He maneuvered toward an alley as a muezzin’s call to prayer— adhan— quickened the crowd’s pace. Five times a day the call rose from loudspeakers to remind the faithful of their Islamic beliefs and obligations. It reminded Rafan how much his country had changed in the past decade.
    People peeled away to go to mosque, leaving men like him with the uneasy eyes of those who don’t want to be seen ignoring the call. Ten years ago there had been no muezzin and no need to worry about snubbing the faith. Now, more and more Maldivians prayed with the fervor of men and women facing the loss of their homeland, a diaspora like the Jews and Palestinians and so many others had known.
    The fever of faith had spread across the archipelago, along with anger hot as cook stones. Even the president and his ministers had made a show of praying underwater at their annual meeting in masks and flippers and oxygen tanks, all of them exhaling perfect bubbles of carbon dioxide and uttering “Allah akbar” before they signed hopeless proclamations with waterproof pens. But if God is so great, why do the pandanus trees bow to the sea, their roots eaten by salt, trunks by waves, until they lie facedown, limbs flattened and extended like worshippers heeding the muezzin? If God’s so great, why does He let the lesser deity Neptune swallow us alive?
    When Jenna had been with him, Rafan might have shared these inflammatory thoughts with her and his other friends. Not anymore. Better to let the believers loudly implore the heavens while he quietly moved the earth, taking dirt from one island to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. That’s what Jenna used to say. We could make that the official slogan of the Maldives—if we weren’t Muslim. We rob Peter to pay Paul all the time. Rafan thought immediately of the country’s biggest moneymaker: the half-million vacationers lured to the Maldives every year by the Ministry of Tourism. Europeans, Asians, and North and South Americans flew thousands of miles to stay in isolated island resorts; each traveler churned out as much greenhouse gas in an average ten-hour flight as a Maldivian produced in a month. But Rafan’s country needed money, so it welcomed the wealth of the developed world, and robbed the future—and the world’s children—while wearing the smiley face of tourism.
    The aroma of curried tuna drew Rafan’s eye to a food cart by the entrance to the alley. He hadn’t eaten in hours, though he hadn’t thought about food till now. It had been like that when he’d fallen in love with Jenna at the start of the new century. He’d walked hand-in-hand with her on this very street on New Year’s Eve 1999; and as the clock struck twelve he pulled her close and kissed her for the first time, hungry only for her, his