The Deluge, page 23
“And if Kate doesn’t get her way,” Rekia went on, “she can be so fucking mean.”
I left her alone and went to meet Tom and Coral. The closest bar was a sliver of stools and booths carved between D.C. row houses, with wood paneling and a handful of alcoholic regulars in suits. In those years, we did a lot of our drinking there.
“I was carrying Pelosi’s purse when the Republicans were trying to default on the debt ceiling,” said Tom. “I was around when Trump wanted to call the tax bill the ‘Cuts! Cuts! Cuts! Act’ but Paul Ryan wouldn’t let him. I don’t know what I’m still doing in this evil fucking city, but I know enough to know Rekia’s wrong.”
He downed an old fashioned and ordered another before I was a quarter of the way into my beer.
“She’s wrong about the endorsement?” I asked.
“If Randall loses and we’ve still got Hogan’s vindictive fat ass in the Oval Office?” said Tom. “Fuck that, Stanton. We’ve worked too long and hard to maneuver the GOP into confronting the carbon problem. Randall has the chance to be transformative. We can’t sit on the fucking fence now.”
I looked to Coral, who shrugged with their typical unexcitable neutrality.
“I see the merits to both arguments, honestly.” Tufts of their red hair stuck up in the back and several juicy zits crowded their temples and forehead, making Coral look even more like an awkward teenager than usual. Yet when they spoke, it was always with confidence and nuance. “The meeting got personal before we even took up other important issues.”
“More important than the fucking presidential election ten days away?” asked Tom.
I felt my pocket buzz. I thought it was going to be from Moniza Farooki, and if so, I wondered if I should float the Mackowski offer by a journalist who worked the climate politics angle professionally.
“Yeah,” said Coral. “Such as the New York office. We need a new director. The last three haven’t made it longer than five months apiece. The current one faked a case of Covid so she could walk away from the job for three weeks. I wanted to talk about Holly Pietrus.”
“What about her?” asked Tom.
But the text was from Kate: I calmed down a bit. Anyone at the bar with you? Katepologies forthcoming.
“She’s been angling for it,” said Coral. “Holly turned out crowds for those city council meetings, she’s hassling the mayor, she’s even got the Staten Island rep running scared that the Dem will pull an upset.”
“She’s ready for the big-girl job?” asked Tom. “The New York office eats people alive.”
“Not now,” said Kate, materializing behind us, dragging a stool to prop herself between me and Coral. I looked down at her text. She must have sent it from outside the door to the bar. “Holly’s father is still radioactive. Guy can’t stop himself from blaming affirmative action for climate change.” She pecked me on the cheek, her thick lips warm and wet and smelling of booze. “Just want to say sorry for the outburst. I’m what you might call ‘a white-hot ball of fucking nerves’ right now.”
“Holly’s not responsible for her father,” said Coral.
“Yeah, but we put her in the spotlight, and suddenly he’s the story,” said Tom. “We need to keep Tony Pietrus as far the fuck away from the movement as we can. He doesn’t put his foot in his mouth, he shoves in the whole leg up to the fucking hip socket.”
I wondered if Tom sat around thinking up these crude bon mots.
Kate said to Coral, “Let Holly keep doing good work.” She nabbed the bartender, ordered a whiskey ginger, then slipped her hand into mine, and this cue told me her heart had stopped racing from the fight with Rekia. “We’ll come back to it after the election.”
Kate used that voice she deployed to end all debates. Her final word could feel like a boulder being rolled up against a tomb, and I could see the small muscles of Coral’s face fall in disappointment. Rekia was right about one thing: Though FBF purported to be a democratic organization, there was one woman running the show. A pharaoh hiding in plain sight.
We had an early-morning drive to North Carolina, so we finished our drinks and left Coral and Tom at the bar. We walked through the lights of nighttime D.C., Kate pushing her bike along. Drunken twentysomethings in Halloween costumes were already streaking down the streets.
“Do you think I embarrassed myself today?” Kate asked.
“No more than you usually do.” I smiled at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is Reynolds furious?”
“Maybe you both said stuff that you both needed to hear.” I could feel her looking at me as she rolled her bike along the sidewalk, like she was trying to decide something. I laughed and finally asked, “What?”
“Nothing, Tar Heel. Just trying to figure out what I did in another life to deserve you.”
“Probably charged a Confederate line, just you and your bayonet.”
“Ugh, such a masculine interpretation of heroism.”
“You’re a masculine interpretation of heroism!”
As we giggled, a group of loud, drunken women spilling out of a bar stopped me cold. “Holy shit,” I said, pointing to the five of them. They all wore hiking boots and cargo pants, along with sky-blue tank tops, their bare shoulders goose-pimpled in the cool October air. A few wore huge wigs, but others had permed and dyed their hair to get the proper color and volume. Kate burst out laughing.
“Are you fucking kidding? Look at these fire-hot bitches!”
They all turned to her. The first woman shrieked, screaming like in those VR worldes where Zeden showed up to surprise random fans at their sweet sixteens. Then the rest of them realized what was happening, and they too launched into a fit of screaming, gushing, and hugging. We were there for nearly twenty minutes while I held Kate’s bike and each of them got a selfie, followed by a group photo. I took a couple on my phone. They were drunk, emotions heightened, but a heavier white woman, who looked maybe all of a year out of college, started tearing up. She apologized to Kate, and the more she apologized, the harder she cried. She said, inexplicably, “This is better than meeting Cate Blanchett.”
For whatever reason, this made everyone laugh very, very hard.
* * *
We arrived at my parents’ house in Wildwood a few hours before the party. The wind swept cool air off the ocean as we walked into the decorative maelstrom my mother had organized with the acuity and determination of Spielberg re-creating D-Day. Several full-size skeletons crawled up the sides of the house, peering in windows while an enormous black plastic spider the size of a car crept over the roof. When we got closer, I saw these decorations were actually moving, the skeletons craning to watch us approach, the spider snapping its mandibles: robotics.
“It’s kinda cute?” I suggested. Kate bulged her eyes.
My dad shoved Oktoberfest beers in our hands, my mom threw my niece, Gwen, into my arms. Gwen, riled to the nines by her grandma’s Halloween spirit, breathlessly explained to her uncle that she was dressed as a ballerina. My mom was a “basic witch,” including heavy pentagram earrings along with yoga pants and a Jamba Juice smoothie. My sister, Cara, and her husband, who we all called Habswam because his first name was also Matt, wore the gauzy outfits of Beyoncé and Jay-Z from their latest album cover.
“Hey, Matty,” said Cara, hugging me. She had her phone out and was making a twisted, pained face.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Sorry. Putting it away. A school shooting in Minneapolis.”
Morbid curiosity led me to check my news app and find that fourteen children, Somali refugees, had been murdered by a gunman who’d stormed into their school. I put my phone away because my sister was right. These horrors occurred with such frequency now, it left one numb to fourteen-child body counts.
“What are you waiting for?” my dad demanded. He was dressed as Indiana Jones, with a fedora and a bullwhip hanging from his belt, white hair popping out of his shirt. “Get your costumes on!”
As we changed in the room that had been mine during summers on the coast, Kate asked, “What do you think we should do?”
I held my elfin ears and had my green tights halfway up my legs, afraid I’d shred them because I’d bought a pair a size too small. “About what?”
She shook her head and the turquoise beads on her cowboy hat rattled. Farm Girl was the idea, but it was hard not to inject the word sexy in front of it. “About Randall. The endorsement.”
I just shook my head. “Above my pay grade, sister.”
“In your heart of hearts?”
“There is no path, remember? We make the path as we walk.”
“Kid, that’s not an answer.”
I held my hands out in utter unknowing. “It means whatever we choose, that’s the path we’ll walk.”
Kate’s eyes fell to my bare thighs, and she started laughing. “God help me, you’re cute.”
She flicked the button lock on the door, the same one I used to engage when I got out the lotion as a teenager. “I’m going to call Rekia to apologize. But I’m telling her we’re going for it with the endorsement. Time for bold moves.”
“Then that’s the path.”
She slipped the overall straps off her shoulders and dropped them to the floor, kicking them away with her boots; the plaid shirt was next, but she kept the cowboy hat on.
Twenty minutes later, we were back downstairs, and the party was roaring. Kate split off to play with Gwen and talk to Cara, while my parents’ friends were eager to hear what little Matty Stanton was up to. None of them gave much of a rip about the climate, and it was almost eerie to hear them ask, “A fierce blue what?”
One must constantly remind oneself that American life is divided into pockets that, at this point, were nearly hermetically sealed. If Gombo Bolorchuluun, the Mongolian Master, who’d put together incredible back-to-back wins at the PGA Championship and the British Open, had walked in this would have blown their minds, yet most didn’t seem to know who Kate was. In a way, it was nice. No one wanted to talk about the election, and all our rancorous meetings were scenes from another person’s life. Then my sister found me.
“Hey, I think you better come break this up.”
I followed Cara to the dining room where a crowd had gathered around Kate and my father.
My dad was in the middle of “… he barely even plays anymore since he moved there.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Kate demanded. “What does that have to do with children getting murdered at their school, Dan?”
“He doesn’t play.” My dad shook his head; he was drunk and slurring. Kate was drunk and furious, a pink heat scalding her cheeks. “He doesn’t play, and it’s ’cause you got him running around chasing socialism fantasies.” He poofed his hands in the air like he was flicking water in her face.
“So what? Children. Murdered. I didn’t think it would be controversial to be Con on that.”
“Young people don’t even play anymore!” he cried. “The game’s dying because young people don’t even play!”
Some tubby guy dressed as Pennywise the Clown roared at Kate, “He’s saying Hogan’s a Democrat! And she doesn’t even want the Somalians here, so why should anyone else?”
Kate ignored him. Now the entire party was more or less silent except for a faction still chatting in the kitchen. “No one’s playing golf, Dan, because it’s a hundred fucking degrees out, and you’re using fans to cool the greens and slurping up an aquifer to keep the fucking courses from going brown.”
“Whatever, Kate.” My dad reached to the table to grab a handful of potato chips, which he stuffed in his mouth. “You’re a little girl. Doesn’t know a thing about anything.”
When my dad said this, Kate’s eyes bulged and the muscles in her neck tightened. I hadn’t stepped in yet because I didn’t want to make it worse, and Kate was usually so expert at defusing these situations. I quickly took her by the waist.
“C’mon, let’s go outside.”
She kept glaring at my dad. Then she slipped free of me, stepped to him, and shoved her index finger in his face. “Fuck you, you privileged prick. You’re a fucking cancer.”
My dad rolled his eyes drunkenly and pushed another handful of chips into his mouth. I saw my mom across the room holding her cheek in her hand. The only sound in the room was him munching until someone snickered softly. Kate let me lead her outside then, and we walked silently through my mother’s Halloween fantasyland and then through the salt wind to the darkened beach where we stayed for the rest of the party.
* * *
In the morning Kate insisted we leave first thing. She didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I couldn’t tell if this was out of embarrassment or fury.
After leaving Wyoming eleven years earlier, between our spat in Tennessee and arriving in D.C., we took a detour to Asheville where Kate had friends. At that point, I hadn’t even realized she’d been to North Carolina before, and I met this whole crew of crunchy types living together in a five-bedroom house. The friends were nice enough, but as the stories and inside jokes whizzed over my head, I couldn’t help but feel like Kate had already lived two lifetimes before she’d even met me.
On our last day we hiked out to a waterfall. Dozens of people swam in the shallow pools formed by the river tumbling down the mountainside. Others lay on boulders, sunbathing. Women went topless and men had beards down to their nipples. We hopped from slick rock to slick rock, and while Kate’s bare feet gripped the stones with ease, with each precarious step I worried I’d slip and crack an ankle. Along the way, she pointed out flora: a leatherback milkcap mushroom, which squeezed out a milky white juice and made your fingers smell like fish, a turkey tail she claimed could help boost the immune system of cancer patients, a little red partridge berry she fed me that tasted like wet cotton.
“I swear I’m not trying to poison you to get at the golf empire,” she said when I grimaced and spit it out.
“How do you know all this stuff?”
She made a face like she was sniffing the juice of a leatherback milkcap. “Dude, I read a book.”
We stripped down and crawled into a churning pool of freezing river water. This high in the mountains, the day could be hot and the water positively frigid. The trees towered overhead, catching the sun and sending light and shadows glittering across the forest. We swam over to the rocks by the waterfall because Kate wanted to look for salamanders in the crevices.
“Salamanders have the most biomass of any wild creature living in western North Carolina,” she said definitively, and when I only nodded, she looked at me. “Don’t you think that’s incredible?”
“Sure.”
“Matt, just think about how many salamanders you’d need to make up one bear!”
This made me laugh very hard.
We disappeared beneath the waterfall, scooting together, the skin of her hip chill but the thick muscle beneath it warm. Frigid water pounded my lap. Our backs rested against slimy green moss, which, Kate told me, was called rock snot.
“Really?”
“No, I have no idea what it’s called.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Tell me about it. Believe it or not, when I was a kid, it was not cool to know all the names of fungi and edible berries.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you really struggled socially.”
“Dude, I was a dork and a tomboy! You were the one who grew up popular and good-looking.” When I gave her a skeptical look, she said, “Really! Boys thought I was weird, and I hated everything girls talked about. Also, I was this tall when I was in sixth grade. I looked like a fucking circus act.”
Shivering under the cold thunder of the water, with sunlight cutting through the roaring shroud, there was no way I was buying that. She looked so beautiful, it scared me.
“Want to make out under this waterfall?” I asked.
“Why do you think I brought you here? Pretend like this is the first time.”
And so the kiss began delicately, tentatively, as pretend-Matt and pretend-Kate grew more confident. Later, we emerged to dry ourselves on a rock in the sun while she cut slices from an apple with a knife and fed every other one to me. Then we put our clothes back on as the sun set and the stars came out and the green forested mountains were limned with the silver light of a quarter moon. Of course, she knew most of the constellations. She put her head against mine so I could follow her index finger as she traced the line of Cassiopeia and told me stories I’ve long forgotten about this queen of the northern sky.
SHANE RIDES THE PANOPTICON
2028
She left for Kansas in a driving rain. The downpour had lasted two days, and even the dash from the back door of the safe house to her car left her half-soaked. Driving out of Berlin, New Hampshire, she cruised along the raging Androscoggin River. The muddy water crawled up the trees along the banks, threatening a blue-yellow NAPA Auto Parts store built too close to the floodplain. In the White Mountain Forest, a gray-black mist shrouded Mount Washington. She imagined illogical, long-lost beasts huddled from the storm: eastern elk lowering wet snouts and six-foot antlers or mountain gorillas sheltered beneath the sweet green depths of the red pine and balsam fir canopy.
She passed between the lakes dashed across the midsection of the state like spilled paint and stopped for lunch at a Subway outside Concord. She used the mirror to pin her hair back and affix the wig of dirty blond over her scalp, followed by a logo-less gray ballcap. When she held the switch hidden beneath the cloth, a low buzz briefly enveloped her skull. She paid cash for the sandwich. On returning to the car, tuna melt in hand, a bird fell out of the sky.
JANSI Had watched her drive away. When Jansi asked who she would be working with Shane With No Last Name gave her an impatient look but answered anyway: Jansi would be connected via a post office box to an engineering dropout in Georgia, an organic farmer in Maine, and a lawyer in Boston. Five years of proving herself useful, careful, and smart, three years of fortifying her cover, and now she was all the way in. It was going to be hard as hell to return to teaching seventh-graders geography after Thanksgiving break ended. “Will we see each other again?” Jansi asked. “No,” said Shane. “Definitely not.” Then, as an afterthought: “We’re calling you the Second Cell.”
