Cold Fire Read Free Page A

and more!—if it meant saving one innocent family of weasels, because God is each of those weasels.”
    As if moved by the woman's rhetoric, as if she didn't think it was eco-fascism, Holly said, “I give as much as I can every year to the Nature Conservancy, and I think of myself as an environmentalist, but I see that my consciousness hasn't been raised as far as yours.”
    The poet did not hear the sarcasm and reached across the table to squeeze Holly's hand. “Don't worry, dear. You'll get there. I sense an aura of great spiritual potentiality around you.”
    “Help me to understand…. God is butterflies and rabbits and every living thing, and God is rocks and dirt and water—but God isn't us?”
    “No. Because of our one unnatural quality.”
    “Which is?”
    “Intelligence.”
    Holly blinked in surprise. “Intelligence is unnatural?”
    “A high degree of intelligence, yes. It exists in no other creatures in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us, and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering, chaos, and ultimately to annihilation.”
    “God … or natural evolution didn't give us our intelligence?”
    “It was an unanticipated mutation. We're mutants, that's all. Monsters.”
    Holly said, “Then the less intelligence a creature exhibits …”
    “… the more natural it is,” Louise finished for her.
    Holly nodded thoughtfully, as if seriously considering the bizarre proposition that a dumber world was a better world, but she was really thinking that she could not write this story after all. She found Louise Tarvohl so preposterous that she could not compose a favorable article and still hang on to her integrity. At the same time, she had no heart for making a fool of the woman in print. Holly's problem was not her deep and abiding cynicism but her soft heart; no creature on earth was more certain to suffer frustration and dissatisfaction with life than a bitter cynic with a damp wad of compassion at her core.
    She put down her pen, for she would be making no notes. All she wanted to do was get away from Louise, off the playground, back into the real world—even though the real world had always struck her as just slightly less screwy than this encounter. But the least she owed Tom Corvey was sixty to ninety minutes of taped interview, which would provide another reporter with enough material to write the piece.
    “Louise,” she said, “in light of what you've told me, I think you're the most natural person I've ever met.”
    Louise didn't get it. Perceiving a compliment instead of a slight, she beamed at Holly.
    “Trees are sisters to us,” Louise said, eager to reveal another facet of her philosophy, evidently having forgotten that human beings were lice, not trees. “Would you cut off the limbs of your sister, cruelly section her flesh, and build your house with pieces of her corpse?”
    “No, I wouldn't,” Holly said sincerely. “Besides, the city, probably wouldn't approve a building permit for such an unconventional structure.”
    Holly was safe: Louise had no sense of humor—therefore, no capacity to be offended by the wisecrack.
    While the woman prattled on, Holly leaned into the picnic table, feigning interest, and did a fast-backward, scan of her entire adult life. She decided that she had spent all of that precious time in the company of idiots, fools, and crooks, listening to their harebrained or sociopathic plans and dreams, searching fruitlessly for nuggets of wisdom and interest in their boobish or psychotic stories.
    Increasingly miserable, she began to brood about her personal life. She had made no effort to develop close women friends in Portland, perhaps because in her heart she felt that Portland was only one more stop on herperipatetic journalistic journey. Her experiences with men were, if anything, even more disheartening than her professional