The Boat of Good Intentions

Harmony House: Episode 28

“Harmony House” is a serial novel with episodes released every Tuesday morning. You can read the setup for the story or start from the beginning. Each episode comes with high-quality audio narration for you to enjoy on the go with the Substack mobile app.

Previously…

In the last episode, Cam attempted to entertain his three remaining companions in Houze during his live-stream for the show but the weight of their situation made it difficult. The gravity of GreenerTech’s crimes and fear for their lives made levity impossible. The question was raised as to why they should all continue to stay. Were they really safe? After, Schultz and the FutureAbode team called to offer encouragement and support. When asked if anyone wished to forfeit the game and go home, no one raised a hand.

The desert was growing on him, especially at sunset when he could sit on the patio of his rental house with a tumbler of good Scotch. Growing up in the cold, gray mist of northern England hadn’t prepared him for the pottery kiln heat of the American Southwest. In the brief walk between climate-controlled environments, he felt like an ant under a demented child’s magnifying glass.

Schultz drained the rest of the glass, enjoying the warmth as the whiskey radiated through his chest. He had been on some tricky jobs in his career, but this one was both a masterpiece and a nightmare. He watched the sun disappear over a mesa leaving an afterglow of color in striations so brilliant and varied they consumed his senses and stopped the squirrel in his brain. The colors made him think of the trip he and Keith had taken to a tiny coastal village in Spain so many years prior when they were both young and so in love, so full of ideals and revolutionary bloodlust as potent as the lust they felt for each other. Between them they had enough heat to raze the establishment— burn it to the ground and sow new seeds to make a better world.

He had to stop.

This romantic thinking was precisely what had landed him in this awful predicament. Keith could be so bloody persuasive. After more than twenty years, Schultz’s better judgment was still no match for that impish smirk, those sparkling mischievous eyes, and the taunting dare of a new adventure that could get them into good trouble. Keith loved that phrase. He invoked it as a mantra to assuage him of all his sins. At this point, those sins were considerable. But Schultz didn’t want to go there right now. Maybe just one more drink. One more drink, like an hourglass, he would sip slowly and allow himself to indulge in the past until its contents were gone. Then he would return to the problem at hand.

They met in the summer of 2002 when Schultz was just twenty-five. He was trying to make his first documentary which put him on the deck of a small boat in the middle of the Pacific with a feisty group of young activists who were stalking a Japanese whaling ship that had been operating illegally. The plan had been to sneak up on the vessel in the night, board it, and damage the harpoon cannons beyond repair or possibly throw them overboard. Schultz had not accounted for how the choppy sea would make the footage he shot on his handheld as dizzyingly nauseous as he felt shooting it. By the time they reached the whaling vessel, he had fed most of the Pacific with the contents of his stomach and was too weak to do anything but huddle in a fetal position below deck. Keith had been there with some saltine crackers and Gatorade.

Schultz had noticed him right away when they were loading their gear onto the boat that morning. He was an American with broad, suntanned shoulders and the perfect amount of stubble. He was a few years older than Schultz and he had this magnetism. He hadn’t been the leader of this mission, but he acted as though he was. He had confidence and swagger and he enjoyed being noticed. For the entire trip out, he had flirted with Schultz, at first only with his eyes, but later with considerable taunts about the young documentarian’s delicate stomach.

The mission had been a bust and his footage useless, but Schultz had met the love of his life. They had spent the next decade chasing good trouble, Keith leading the charge and Schultz tracking close behind with a camera. Keith’s passion for a cause was equaled by Schultz’s passion for Keith and that had worked for a time until Schultz grew weary of living like a college student and wanted some modicum of security and stability. He took a straight job working for a media company in London where he directed commercials. He was exceptional at it and moved up through the ranks like a man who had carried a load of bricks on his back for a decade and was suddenly free of that burden. Keith judged him silently, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying the Egyptian cotton sheets, lavish gifts, and vacations to exotic climes. They silently agreed to disagree as any married couple does. Whether it was a reaction to the comforts of their new lifestyle or simply his natural trajectory, Keith’s missions became more and more radical and dangerous.

With the climate crisis, Keith found his North Star. Here was a cause worthy of his sacrifice. It wasn’t just a few animals to save from extinction. It wasn’t just children in Indian sweatshops or women being mutilated in Africa. It was every living creature on the planet under threat. Such an extreme threat gave Keith the blank check he needed to do his work. There was no line he wouldn’t cross in his guerilla war against big corporations who were choking the planet.

When he was home in their bed, Keith did not share the details of his latest battles just as Schultz didn’t talk about his work on whatever reality TV project he was doing. If one of them did speak about their work, it was filtered and diluted so it would go down easy and not spark a fight. Good trouble did not exist when it came to their fragile relationship. Schultz caught glimpses of Keith’s secret world when he came home with deep, invisible wounds that made him cry out in the night or leave their bed and pace the kitchen floor. But Keith would never unburden himself. It’s better that you don’t know. Safer for you, my love.

And then, one morning last year, he came down to breakfast holding a glossy brochure from FutureAbode that he had found on Schultz’s nightstand.

“Do you know who’s behind this?” he had asked, flinging it down on the breakfast table where Schultz was digging out of his inbox on the laptop.

Things had escalated quickly into a shouting match, each of them hurling heavy sharp objects excavated from the dark soil of their more than twenty years together. Schultz’s heart was racing. He felt like he might die. There was no way to slow things down, to de-escalate. The more he tried to make peace, as this was his forte, the more vehement his partner became. They were hurtling toward a cliff that led to a fall they would not recover from. For Schultz, losing Keith was paramount to losing a limb. He would not be able to walk through the world without him. So, he threw himself at Keith’s feet and begged for mercy.

Thinking of the shameful way he had pleaded for Keith’s love made his stomach turn over as he sat looking out at the dark sky, the hourglass of whiskey, empty on the table beside him. The sacrifices we make for love, he thought. He became a criminal, the benefactor of a terrorist just to avoid being alone. And now there was no turning back. Had it been worth it? The make-up sex and the few months of reliving their reckless youth as they plotted and planned the details for their takedown of Greener Tech using the vehicle of Houze and FutureAbode had been thrilling. Yes, it had been. To see Keith Darrow look at him with the same excitement and passion he did when he spoke of one of his missions was a powerful drug. It was an incredible rush for them to be aligned once again, working together on a mission bigger than their petty ideological squabbles.

It felt that way as he stole the blueprints for Houze and sent them to Keith along with hundreds of photos. It felt that way as he set up a shell company with an account where he could secretly fund their mission. It felt that way as he sent encrypted messages on a burner phone letting Keith know precisely what was going on in Houze. But it did not feel like a powerful drug now. It felt like the worst hangover.

Schultz was not built for this. He enjoyed his work in entertainment. He liked making people happy. He liked making his clients happy. It was much easier to plot the destruction of Houze and everything behind it before he knew the Jenson brothers or even Eve Baron. They were real people—good people, not without their flaws, but people who were trying to build something. However misguided, they were using their considerable resources to at least try to save the planet. They were, at least in spirit, on the same team.

The burner phone buzzed and vibrated across the glass countertop. Schultz looked at it and swallowed hard. The pool of warmth the Scotch had allowed him to linger in evaporated. He picked up the phone.

“Hi, you’re late. Everything okay?” he asked.

“No, no it’s not,” Keith said before his voice gave way to a shuddering gasp.

“What happened? Are you okay? Baby, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine. But… there’s a problem. One of them is… he’s dead.”

“What?” Schultz asked. “What the fuck happened? You killed someone, Keith?”

“No, I didn’t, but he’s dead. There was a confrontation and Mark, fucking Mark… the gun went off.”

“What! The guns were supposed to be loaded with blanks or empty. Oh my God, Keith what have you done? This can’t be happening.”

“I didn’t do this, Gabe. It wasn’t me. You know I would never do something like this. You must believe me.”

Schultz felt a wave of nausea swell, pushing his breath and ability to think above and beyond his reach. He dropped the phone on the table, stepped over to the edge of the patio, and threw up as he did all those years ago on the deck of a small boat in the Pacific.

He could hear the thin, urgent voice of his partner shouting across an expanse of thousands of miles through the pinhole of the phone’s speaker. The nattering whine of it, so different from the raspy baritone that once tickled the hairs in his ear as they lay, legs entwined in the dark stillness of early morning in their London flat. Keith had stretched the tether that bound them together so far over the years that it was little more than a strand of hair now and Schultz could feel it beginning to fray.

He rinsed his mouth and washed his face. The pinhole voice paused, awaiting a response. Schultz didn’t need to hear the question to know what it was. It was always the same. What’ll we do now? He was a dope fiend for this question. If he was being honest, more than Keith’s strong jaw, man-of-action idealism, or fiery contrarian nature, it was his ability to create seemingly unsolvable problems that attracted Schultz most. But this. This was something he could not fix, could he?

He walked back out to the patio and picked up the phone.

“My love, you’ve gone too far. I don’t know how I can fix this. I need time to think.”

He did not say goodbye, or I love you in the pleading way he had done for most of their relationship. He pressed the red button and set the phone down. Without closing the patio doors, he walked out into the desert. He was tired and felt old, but more than anything else, he wanted to feel small and inconsequential.

He could hear the distant musical refrain of the phone calling him back, but after a hundred more paces, the sound could just as well be the windchimes hung in a stranger’s backyard or a song playing in a car passing on the highway. He walked until he was small as a cold grain of sand beneath a billion stars, their indifferent light just a memory of illumination. 

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Who’s Who in Harmony House?

Having trouble keeping track of who’s who from one week to the next? It’s tough when you only get to visit once a week. I made a little cheat sheet just for you: