The Shell Collector by Hugh Howey

platform by a roughneck who’d been an army chaplain. Shelly’s father was CEO by then, and he said never come home again, and Shelly didn’t. Paps managed to borrow enough to buy an old platform that wasn’t producing. He spent five years refitting it and drilling where people thought he was crazy to drill. The story goes that the tugs sent to repossess the rig were throwing lines to haul the thing away when he struck a gusher. Five miles down. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Of course, he would have a dozen platforms running within a year of that day. And he made it a point to buy every one of the tugs sent to repossess his rig.”
    Wilde sips his coffee. The sky throbs with the light from the lighthouse. I don’t know how he lives within range of a metronome like that.
    “Paps gave us the world, you see. From his son to my father to me. He gave us the world, but he broke it before he handed it over. That’s his legacy. He gave me and my dad the world in a million little flooded pieces. If I remember anything else about him that’s not in the history books, I’d rather not say.”
    “To protect him? Like your grandfather?”
    Wilde laughs. “Yes, because whatever I say wouldn’t be kind.”
    “Tell me about your grandfather, then.” I make a show of turning the recording app off, show him my phone, thinking all the while of the FBI wire. “Off the record. I swear.” Off my record. I swear.
    “I’ll take your signature over your swear any day of the week,” Ness says.
    “You have both.”
    Wilde stares into his coffee. I take a sip of mine.
    “What was he like? From your reading, if not your memory.”
    “My grandfather was a complicated man. I like to say that he walked in his father’s shadow, but with a flashlight.”
    “To dispel those shadows?”
    “To erase him in a way, yes. By the time my father inherited Ocean Oil, my granddad was already blaming his father for destroying the world. It wasn’t just Ocean Oil, of course, but you couldn’t tell my granddad that. Sea temps were up five degrees and sea levels eight inches from when my great-grandfather was born.”
    “Everything I’ve read said the company bypassed your grandfather because of his age. Because of lack of interest.”
    “And I showed you the real reason.” Ness indicates the leather journal sitting on the coffee table. “My grandfather wanted to dismantle Ocean Oil—”
    “And that was why your father inherited the company instead?”
    Ness nods.
    I make a mental note of this. This is not the history anyone else knows. The popular accounts are of an unchanging and evil empire, handed from father to son, each of them perfectly like the other. A convenient tale, because it’s easy to understand. We can transfer our ire from one generation to the next, no forgiveness required, no need to get to know a man. Just judge him by his father’s sins.
    Studying Ness, I allow myself to consider for a moment that I’m wrong about him as well, that he has nothing to do with the fake shells. Maybe the person I think I know is just a caricature of the real man. I’ve sensed this before with other celebrities and political figures I’ve gotten close to, that they’re just people saddled with unachievable expectations. We make of them what we need them to be, good or ill.
    “So your father was supposed to keep the company safe,” I say. “But then he was the one who nearly tore it apart.”
    “For different reasons. Selfish reasons. He saw the laws making their way through Congress. He knew the end of big oil was coming, saw the peak of production. Hell, this was before Manhattan flooded for the first time and the levee project got underway. My dad refused to waste the company’s money lobbying against the inevitable—not because he cared about the environment, but because he hated to see lawyers get rich when they couldn’t win. The board of directors disagreed. They worked in the background to have Dad removed as