The Deluge, page 41
When Victor Love arrived on the political scene, he seemed an unremarkable politician even if the media had a bit of a love affair. A gay veteran who’d fought in Afghanistan and Iraq before starting his own military contracting business, which he built into a private security empire, he was a “reformed Republican,” extremely handsome, and quick on his feet. He had, as Kate put it, “Hot dad energy. Like you’re fourteen and meet your friend’s father, and you’re like, ‘I totally would.’ ”
Love had a scar on his cheek from battle. He wore a turquoise bolo tie. He had a dashing husband with a blinding smile. Love exuded centrist reasonableness, which only meant that he was a foot-dragger, one of the senators who drove us crazy with their hemming and hawing. Still, he blindsided us after the Ohio River Massacre, when he held a press conference to say:
“If we do not address this country’s security concerns, whether that’s radical eco-terrorists, Islamists, or white supremacists, if we do not address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, if we do not address the concerns raised by the coalitions of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, then I walk away from the bill, and I feel as though many of my fellow Democrats will follow.”
It was a deft tap dance, attacking a Republican president from the right while hippie-punching his own party and walking the line on intersectional platitudes. His resistance would only stiffen from there.
As Cy Fitzpatrick told me in the days following his colleague’s revolt, “Vic Love is exactly the reason I can’t wait to die and get out of this place. Guy’s been on the scene for all of a sneeze, and he’s already throwing elbows.” Cy beckoned me closer. His breath reeked of onion. “You tell that booty of yours, Kate, to watch this guy. He’s a snake in the grass.”
I relayed Cy’s warning to Kate, but by then it was already too late. Defections in the Republican ranks had begun, and nervous Democrats from carbon-intensive states looked over their shoulder at Vic Love’s early poll numbers against Randall and found their feet cold as well. When the Senate adjourned for the August recess without taking a vote, a sense of doom descended. Where Mary Randall had been steadfast in her 2030 State of the Union, jutting her finger at the sky and boldly challenging Congress, “This is our moment. This is how history changes. Those who step forward will be remembered for their courage and those who miss this opportunity will know the scorn of their descendants,” now her tune was changing. In press conferences and interviews, she slowly began backing away from the bill. In a Fox News interview, she promised, “This bill will never raise energy prices, it will not threaten jobs, and it will not threaten small businesses.”
“But what about a company in Ohio that manufactures equipment for natural gas producers?” asked Peter Doocy. “How can you say that to the workers in this company?”
“It will not threaten them,” she said. Her eyes were cold stones. “Their livelihoods will be safe.”
I never understood how she and her inner circle didn’t see how craven she looked in these moments. Then in late September, the midterms little more than a month away, we got word from Ash al-Hasan that there would be a vote on PRIRA in the Senate.
“Wait, what?” Kate demanded. As we were increasingly shunned, abandoned, and finally vilified by those who’d championed our cause, Ash had remained our ally and our last conduit to what was happening behind closed doors. By the time Kate hung up with him, the whole office had gathered around her. “These fucking rumors are true. They’re taking the Syracuse-Love version of the bill straight to a vote.”
* * *
At her worst, Kate could make me feel like I was vanishing before my own eyes. She passed by me in the offices that night, eyes locked on her phone, and her arm caught me in the rib. I imagined my body briefly turning to dense smoke, which she simply passed through.
Later that night, I found Kate, Rekia, and Tom in our drab conference room. Everyone else had gone home. Tom’s face was stitched tight with rage but not surprise. Rekia had a sob stuck halfway up her chest, and when I came in, she put a hand to her breast and sucked a little wind.
“Guess we did get them to vote on something in the end,” said Tom. He held a Rubik’s Cube, clicking the blocks around, the muscles of his forearms tense as he worked the colors. “We all might be in a gulag by the end of next month, is what they’re voting on.”
“Tom,” I warned him. “Not now, man.”
“We should have a response planned,” said Rekia. “Get people in the streets.”
Kate stood and, as if I emitted an anti-magnetism, seemed to just want to be in any room besides the one I was in. “They want me on MSNBC,” she said. Then she went about turning me to smoke.
Knowing I shouldn’t follow, I stood there dumbly.
“I’m the fucking sucker,” Tom said as he tweaked the sides of the toy.
“Those cowards,” Rekia moaned, and the tears burst from her eyes. Tom set the Rubik’s Cube aside and went to his archnemesis. He removed his glasses, folded them into his pocket, and took her in his arms. Rekia wept loudly into his shoulder.
On my ride home, helicopters barbed-wired the skies, the thump of their blades ever-present, and the drones buzzed along their routes a level below, all that sky traffic as unremarkable now as the driverless delivery pods. The penitentiary feel of the city had spiked following the Weathermen attack.
Kate didn’t come home that night. She’d been sleeping at the office a lot lately, sometimes elsewhere. I fed Dizzy, then smoked the only kind of weed that didn’t make me completely distraught. With the dog on my lap, I watched Kate appear by hologram on MSNBC. Kate had taken to wearing makeup when she made these television appearances, surrendering more and more to vanity, and I couldn’t blame her. Even with the makeup she still looked twitchy and sleepless. What I wasn’t used to was the fear in her voice. She told Nicolle Wallace that all was not lost, but you could plainly see she didn’t believe this.
“And the Senate?” Wallace asked with a newscaster’s funereal mourning. “We’re hearing they’re going to use the House bill to go to conference with new antiterrorism legislation?”
“They’re going to take her bill,” I told Dizzy, high but lucid, stroking the spot between the Australian cattle dog’s eyes. “They’re going to take everything we worked for and use it to hang her.”
“People will be in the streets,” Kate promised. Her eye twitched, and she rubbed its lid with a finger.
The next day it rained, and it kept up for three straight days.
Advocating for climate legislation, you can’t help but believe the weather to be a complicit force, an anthropomorphized boogeyman creeping closer and closer to the murder cabin even as all the partygoers assure you no one’s out there with an axe. When we needed people to take to the streets, it was more or less impossible. Twelve inches of rain fell over the Beltway in three days. East Potomac Park was underwater, and the Southwest Waterfront had cars floating down the streets. As far north as the Ellipse, people were trudging to work wearing rubber boots in ankle-deep water. The Potomac crested at twenty-seven feet, washing out weaker bridges and roads farther upstream. The gray-blue color of a ripe storm hung over the city in what felt like permanent night. Three days is a long time. You almost forget what the sky looks like.
Protests were sparse, objections few, unless you count the brain-dead social media outrage machine. All the energy and passion we’d spent a decade building, it all drained away faster than the district’s floodwaters. In the offices, the mood was total despair. I found Liza dabbing her eyes by the coffee machine. Tom was placing calls to building maintenance, trying to deal with a huge blister of water that had formed on the wall of the conference room. I heard Coral uncharacteristically raising their voice on the phone. In Rekia’s office, I asked her if she had any understanding of what had happened, how we’d lost everything so fast. She chose the moment to root around for lipstick in her purse, retrieving a deep red color.
“What if this is what they wanted? Or planned?” she said.
“Who? Planned what?”
“Gut-and-go legislation.” Rekia twisted the lipstick from the tube. “This is why I never trusted Randall. Our entire bill ransacked. Now it’s a bunch of money for seawalls and levies and beach sand in wealthy coastal districts, but mostly it’s the police state unbound. That’s not an accident. This stuff was ready and waiting. Someone just pulled it off the shelf at the eleventh hour. You don’t have to be the Weathermen to see that.”
The Left was properly freaking out about what PRIRA had become, but at that point I still thought a lot of it was hysteria. No, it was not what we’d been pushing for, but the idea that the fossil-fuel industry had used the bill as a Trojan horse seemed to me like Covid truther stuff.
“Now that’s paranoid. And please do not say that fucking terrorist group’s name around this office.”
Rekia finished her quick primp and picked up her phone to signal that she needed to get back to work. The rain hammered the windows. “Yeah, well, maybe they’ve been right this whole time.”
On the street, an overflowing sewer grate had turned into a fountain and was spewing oily brown sludge five feet high as cars swerved to avoid it. I rode home, soaked immediately, my poncho of little use in the downpour. Often, I regretted giving up my car for a stupid e-bike. I showered, ate take-out leftovers, and fell asleep on the couch listening to the storm. Kate woke me when her keys rattled in the lock.
“Didn’t mean to,” she said. She dropped her bag and keys indifferently and oozed into the apartment. I could tell she’d been drinking.
“It’s okay.” I sat up. She went to the kitchen, ignoring Dizzy, who crept out from the bedroom to see her other human. I followed, feeling the first threads of anger but also because I missed her. She was never away for three entire days. She was wearing the same clothes as the day the bill died. “Where’ve you been?”
She pulled open the fridge and ducked her head inside. “Thought you knew better than to ask me that.”
“Just wanted to make sure you didn’t get kidnapped.” Dizzy put her nose on Kate’s leg, and she absently scratched beneath her jaw where she liked it. Yet that was all Dizzy got, as Kate shoved around cartons of spoiled coconut milk. Dizzy padded back to me. “You could have at least let me know you’re okay.”
“Did you eat that leftover Burmese?”
“It was going bad.”
She shut the fridge and pulled out her phone for a take-out order. She still hadn’t looked at me. I wanted to go to her, touch her dark gold curls, frizzy and wet from the rain, but I feared her hand whisking mine aside and an impatient Not now.
“I know how much you’re hurting. Trust me, I am too. We all are.”
She set down the phone and finally let her eyes find me.
“There’s a thing coming out about me,” she said. “It’s a video.”
“What do you mean, a video?” I asked, my skin tightening.
“With a guy. A guy I met up with in Philly last time I was there.”
How many times I’d been in this position, my hurt so vivid and her disposition so matter of fact. Here’s how it’s going to be, Matt. Don’t let me see you cry now.
“Anyone I know?”
She did not avert her gaze from mine. “He worked at our office. Yeah.”
She peeled off toward the living room.
“That’s impressive, Kate.” I followed her. The rain drummed on monotonously. Dizzy, sensing unpleasantness, slinked away. “We’re here on the eighteenth goddamn hole of our life’s work, and you’re making trips to Philly to fuck someone from the office?”
“I was in Philly speaking. It was an incidental fuck.”
“Who is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Who is it?” I repeated. “Who is my family going to have to watch you screwing online?”
She had the hint of a smile. Because part of her was no doubt proud: Fuck the patriarchy, fuck my haters, fuck the world, and fuck my “colonizing male” for thinking he has any say over what I do.
“It was Sandeep.”
I could feel my eyes strain out of their sockets. “The intern? The fucking kid intern?”
She turned away. “Enough, Matt.”
“He couldn’t even drink when we hired him! Do you ever stop and think for even a fucking—”
Before I could finish that thought, the sting of her palm spun my head sideways. My ear was ringing so hard that her next words were distant and half-lost in the fury of the raging cumulonimbus stalled over the city.
“Not the time, kid.” And she stalked off to the bedroom, leaving me there with the pinking of my left cheek. I reached up and touched it like my whole face was suddenly new. She’d never done anything like that before. I sat down on the couch and the shock followed a moment later. I stared out the window at the rain until I fell asleep again.
She frightened me awake. I thought I was still dreaming because my nightmare evaporated into a thing I wanted so badly.
“Matt,” she whispered. “Matt, come here.” She pulled me into her arms. Of course, I let her. She was crying. “I’m so fucking sorry. I’m losing my mind. I can’t even believe I did that. I’m so sorry.”
Tears traveled the pretty bulb of her nose. She was so expressive in her joy, but when she cried, she did so with an inverse calm. Her hurt ran out of her like a trickle of water seeping from pressurized rock.
“Now I gotta go to the abused boyfriends shelter.”
She laughed and said, “Don’t joke. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for everything. I adore you. I’m so lucky to have you.”
It was dawn by then, and the rain had at long last quieted to gray-black clouds. They hung low over the district, slouching eastward. We took a walk, got ourselves coffee and a doughnut to share. In a month, there would be a video of her on Renaissance, on Slapdish, a think piece, a hate piece, a fuck piece on every sleaze and scandal and political site, but that morning we walked the city aimlessly, cataloguing the damage the flooding had wrought: the downed trees and shredded limbs, the cars carried into errant arrangements by floodwaters, all the city crews in white hard hats, the yellow and orange of officialdom organizing the cleanup. Receding waters had left the district with wind-blown scabs of trash and deltas of muck clinging to the streets and sidewalks. We eventually found ourselves at Arlington National Cemetery strolling past the tombstones, the grass verdant with rain. Finally, we came to Kennedy’s gravesite, and looked out over the Potomac, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol Dome all lined up.
“Why don’t we get away?” I said. “Let Coral and Rekia take over for a few months. We can go see our families. We’ll go camp and have sex in a tent. We can regroup.”
Hands tucked in her jacket pockets, Kate toed a batch of roses near the gravesite. Who, after all this time, was still delivering fresh roses to Kennedy’s grave?
“I love you, kid.” She said it slowly, mournfully. “If only the world wasn’t ending, I bet we could’ve made a real run.”
“We’re making a real run,” I said. “This is only a speed bump.”
She looked up at me. Thirteen years on. Thirteen years since I first saw her stomping down the dock in Colter Bay and couldn’t take my eyes off her. Now she smiled.
“It would be fun to fuck in a tent again.”
There, on the walkway surrounded by the faded white stones and beneath a sky nearly the same color, I kissed her as an unmarked helicopter thundered overhead.
After emerging from reconciliation, the bill went straight to Randall’s desk with a signing ceremony in the White House. “We can have security, prosperity, and a healthy environment,” she boiler-plated, her face grim, her words clipped. While most of the late-night quips were about the salad fleck in her teeth, Seth Meyers noted that she looked like a hostage. Her lips were tight and bleak, a flock of bipartisan politicians peering over her shoulder as she hastily scrawled her name, set the pen down, and seemed to drag her eyes up to meet the cameras. I wondered about the human being behind a moment like this. The quiet, whip-smart girl from Buffalo, who went from Catholic school to state government in a decade, from governor of that state to president of her country, who broke a political stalemate and seemed poised to usher in a revolution no one else could. Now she would live her life through the prism of this haunting compromise, having signed her name to doom. The bill extended most of the tax incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act until 2040, added new surveillance techniques for law enforcement, broadened the scope of permissible FISA warrants, and earmarked nearly $30 billion for the deployment of AI technology in the monitoring of Americans suspected of terrorist activities. That the Supreme Court would uphold all this was barely a question. The Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Research Act—the refund mechanism having been chopped out—was signed into law on October 4, 2030. A month later, most of the Far Right candidates denying the reality of climate change, promising new detention facilities for immigrants, and new curbs to the civil rights of Muslims, environmentalists, and other agitators against the state, won their elections.
* * *
We stayed in D.C. through the electoral bloodbath when so many of our allies lost, including Cy Fitzpatrick, deposed from the Senate seat he’d held for a generation. Though the polling had been telling us this was coming, that made it no less devastating. Joy LaFray resigned in scandal, and the details of her affair with her stepson were paraded across Fox News with triumphant glee. We planned to take at least four months off. Kate hadn’t taken anything more than a three-day weekend in seven years. The morning we were supposed to leave, as I loaded our bags into our electric truck, she texted asking me to meet her, Rekia, and Tom at Lafayette Square across from the White House. Why? I asked, but she didn’t respond.
A cold wind blew across the Potomac. Soon there would be snow, the bitterness of a D.C. winter. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say I’d come to hate this place, what it represented and whatever the weather did. As I cut through Foggy Bottom, I marveled at the normality the city could produce in the face of cataclysm. The terrifying future becomes ever more certain, and yet after some television squawking, a few despairing tweets, op-eds, and news analysis AIs telling humans what to think, people go back to their lives.
Love had a scar on his cheek from battle. He wore a turquoise bolo tie. He had a dashing husband with a blinding smile. Love exuded centrist reasonableness, which only meant that he was a foot-dragger, one of the senators who drove us crazy with their hemming and hawing. Still, he blindsided us after the Ohio River Massacre, when he held a press conference to say:
“If we do not address this country’s security concerns, whether that’s radical eco-terrorists, Islamists, or white supremacists, if we do not address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, if we do not address the concerns raised by the coalitions of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, then I walk away from the bill, and I feel as though many of my fellow Democrats will follow.”
It was a deft tap dance, attacking a Republican president from the right while hippie-punching his own party and walking the line on intersectional platitudes. His resistance would only stiffen from there.
As Cy Fitzpatrick told me in the days following his colleague’s revolt, “Vic Love is exactly the reason I can’t wait to die and get out of this place. Guy’s been on the scene for all of a sneeze, and he’s already throwing elbows.” Cy beckoned me closer. His breath reeked of onion. “You tell that booty of yours, Kate, to watch this guy. He’s a snake in the grass.”
I relayed Cy’s warning to Kate, but by then it was already too late. Defections in the Republican ranks had begun, and nervous Democrats from carbon-intensive states looked over their shoulder at Vic Love’s early poll numbers against Randall and found their feet cold as well. When the Senate adjourned for the August recess without taking a vote, a sense of doom descended. Where Mary Randall had been steadfast in her 2030 State of the Union, jutting her finger at the sky and boldly challenging Congress, “This is our moment. This is how history changes. Those who step forward will be remembered for their courage and those who miss this opportunity will know the scorn of their descendants,” now her tune was changing. In press conferences and interviews, she slowly began backing away from the bill. In a Fox News interview, she promised, “This bill will never raise energy prices, it will not threaten jobs, and it will not threaten small businesses.”
“But what about a company in Ohio that manufactures equipment for natural gas producers?” asked Peter Doocy. “How can you say that to the workers in this company?”
“It will not threaten them,” she said. Her eyes were cold stones. “Their livelihoods will be safe.”
I never understood how she and her inner circle didn’t see how craven she looked in these moments. Then in late September, the midterms little more than a month away, we got word from Ash al-Hasan that there would be a vote on PRIRA in the Senate.
“Wait, what?” Kate demanded. As we were increasingly shunned, abandoned, and finally vilified by those who’d championed our cause, Ash had remained our ally and our last conduit to what was happening behind closed doors. By the time Kate hung up with him, the whole office had gathered around her. “These fucking rumors are true. They’re taking the Syracuse-Love version of the bill straight to a vote.”
* * *
At her worst, Kate could make me feel like I was vanishing before my own eyes. She passed by me in the offices that night, eyes locked on her phone, and her arm caught me in the rib. I imagined my body briefly turning to dense smoke, which she simply passed through.
Later that night, I found Kate, Rekia, and Tom in our drab conference room. Everyone else had gone home. Tom’s face was stitched tight with rage but not surprise. Rekia had a sob stuck halfway up her chest, and when I came in, she put a hand to her breast and sucked a little wind.
“Guess we did get them to vote on something in the end,” said Tom. He held a Rubik’s Cube, clicking the blocks around, the muscles of his forearms tense as he worked the colors. “We all might be in a gulag by the end of next month, is what they’re voting on.”
“Tom,” I warned him. “Not now, man.”
“We should have a response planned,” said Rekia. “Get people in the streets.”
Kate stood and, as if I emitted an anti-magnetism, seemed to just want to be in any room besides the one I was in. “They want me on MSNBC,” she said. Then she went about turning me to smoke.
Knowing I shouldn’t follow, I stood there dumbly.
“I’m the fucking sucker,” Tom said as he tweaked the sides of the toy.
“Those cowards,” Rekia moaned, and the tears burst from her eyes. Tom set the Rubik’s Cube aside and went to his archnemesis. He removed his glasses, folded them into his pocket, and took her in his arms. Rekia wept loudly into his shoulder.
On my ride home, helicopters barbed-wired the skies, the thump of their blades ever-present, and the drones buzzed along their routes a level below, all that sky traffic as unremarkable now as the driverless delivery pods. The penitentiary feel of the city had spiked following the Weathermen attack.
Kate didn’t come home that night. She’d been sleeping at the office a lot lately, sometimes elsewhere. I fed Dizzy, then smoked the only kind of weed that didn’t make me completely distraught. With the dog on my lap, I watched Kate appear by hologram on MSNBC. Kate had taken to wearing makeup when she made these television appearances, surrendering more and more to vanity, and I couldn’t blame her. Even with the makeup she still looked twitchy and sleepless. What I wasn’t used to was the fear in her voice. She told Nicolle Wallace that all was not lost, but you could plainly see she didn’t believe this.
“And the Senate?” Wallace asked with a newscaster’s funereal mourning. “We’re hearing they’re going to use the House bill to go to conference with new antiterrorism legislation?”
“They’re going to take her bill,” I told Dizzy, high but lucid, stroking the spot between the Australian cattle dog’s eyes. “They’re going to take everything we worked for and use it to hang her.”
“People will be in the streets,” Kate promised. Her eye twitched, and she rubbed its lid with a finger.
The next day it rained, and it kept up for three straight days.
Advocating for climate legislation, you can’t help but believe the weather to be a complicit force, an anthropomorphized boogeyman creeping closer and closer to the murder cabin even as all the partygoers assure you no one’s out there with an axe. When we needed people to take to the streets, it was more or less impossible. Twelve inches of rain fell over the Beltway in three days. East Potomac Park was underwater, and the Southwest Waterfront had cars floating down the streets. As far north as the Ellipse, people were trudging to work wearing rubber boots in ankle-deep water. The Potomac crested at twenty-seven feet, washing out weaker bridges and roads farther upstream. The gray-blue color of a ripe storm hung over the city in what felt like permanent night. Three days is a long time. You almost forget what the sky looks like.
Protests were sparse, objections few, unless you count the brain-dead social media outrage machine. All the energy and passion we’d spent a decade building, it all drained away faster than the district’s floodwaters. In the offices, the mood was total despair. I found Liza dabbing her eyes by the coffee machine. Tom was placing calls to building maintenance, trying to deal with a huge blister of water that had formed on the wall of the conference room. I heard Coral uncharacteristically raising their voice on the phone. In Rekia’s office, I asked her if she had any understanding of what had happened, how we’d lost everything so fast. She chose the moment to root around for lipstick in her purse, retrieving a deep red color.
“What if this is what they wanted? Or planned?” she said.
“Who? Planned what?”
“Gut-and-go legislation.” Rekia twisted the lipstick from the tube. “This is why I never trusted Randall. Our entire bill ransacked. Now it’s a bunch of money for seawalls and levies and beach sand in wealthy coastal districts, but mostly it’s the police state unbound. That’s not an accident. This stuff was ready and waiting. Someone just pulled it off the shelf at the eleventh hour. You don’t have to be the Weathermen to see that.”
The Left was properly freaking out about what PRIRA had become, but at that point I still thought a lot of it was hysteria. No, it was not what we’d been pushing for, but the idea that the fossil-fuel industry had used the bill as a Trojan horse seemed to me like Covid truther stuff.
“Now that’s paranoid. And please do not say that fucking terrorist group’s name around this office.”
Rekia finished her quick primp and picked up her phone to signal that she needed to get back to work. The rain hammered the windows. “Yeah, well, maybe they’ve been right this whole time.”
On the street, an overflowing sewer grate had turned into a fountain and was spewing oily brown sludge five feet high as cars swerved to avoid it. I rode home, soaked immediately, my poncho of little use in the downpour. Often, I regretted giving up my car for a stupid e-bike. I showered, ate take-out leftovers, and fell asleep on the couch listening to the storm. Kate woke me when her keys rattled in the lock.
“Didn’t mean to,” she said. She dropped her bag and keys indifferently and oozed into the apartment. I could tell she’d been drinking.
“It’s okay.” I sat up. She went to the kitchen, ignoring Dizzy, who crept out from the bedroom to see her other human. I followed, feeling the first threads of anger but also because I missed her. She was never away for three entire days. She was wearing the same clothes as the day the bill died. “Where’ve you been?”
She pulled open the fridge and ducked her head inside. “Thought you knew better than to ask me that.”
“Just wanted to make sure you didn’t get kidnapped.” Dizzy put her nose on Kate’s leg, and she absently scratched beneath her jaw where she liked it. Yet that was all Dizzy got, as Kate shoved around cartons of spoiled coconut milk. Dizzy padded back to me. “You could have at least let me know you’re okay.”
“Did you eat that leftover Burmese?”
“It was going bad.”
She shut the fridge and pulled out her phone for a take-out order. She still hadn’t looked at me. I wanted to go to her, touch her dark gold curls, frizzy and wet from the rain, but I feared her hand whisking mine aside and an impatient Not now.
“I know how much you’re hurting. Trust me, I am too. We all are.”
She set down the phone and finally let her eyes find me.
“There’s a thing coming out about me,” she said. “It’s a video.”
“What do you mean, a video?” I asked, my skin tightening.
“With a guy. A guy I met up with in Philly last time I was there.”
How many times I’d been in this position, my hurt so vivid and her disposition so matter of fact. Here’s how it’s going to be, Matt. Don’t let me see you cry now.
“Anyone I know?”
She did not avert her gaze from mine. “He worked at our office. Yeah.”
She peeled off toward the living room.
“That’s impressive, Kate.” I followed her. The rain drummed on monotonously. Dizzy, sensing unpleasantness, slinked away. “We’re here on the eighteenth goddamn hole of our life’s work, and you’re making trips to Philly to fuck someone from the office?”
“I was in Philly speaking. It was an incidental fuck.”
“Who is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Who is it?” I repeated. “Who is my family going to have to watch you screwing online?”
She had the hint of a smile. Because part of her was no doubt proud: Fuck the patriarchy, fuck my haters, fuck the world, and fuck my “colonizing male” for thinking he has any say over what I do.
“It was Sandeep.”
I could feel my eyes strain out of their sockets. “The intern? The fucking kid intern?”
She turned away. “Enough, Matt.”
“He couldn’t even drink when we hired him! Do you ever stop and think for even a fucking—”
Before I could finish that thought, the sting of her palm spun my head sideways. My ear was ringing so hard that her next words were distant and half-lost in the fury of the raging cumulonimbus stalled over the city.
“Not the time, kid.” And she stalked off to the bedroom, leaving me there with the pinking of my left cheek. I reached up and touched it like my whole face was suddenly new. She’d never done anything like that before. I sat down on the couch and the shock followed a moment later. I stared out the window at the rain until I fell asleep again.
She frightened me awake. I thought I was still dreaming because my nightmare evaporated into a thing I wanted so badly.
“Matt,” she whispered. “Matt, come here.” She pulled me into her arms. Of course, I let her. She was crying. “I’m so fucking sorry. I’m losing my mind. I can’t even believe I did that. I’m so sorry.”
Tears traveled the pretty bulb of her nose. She was so expressive in her joy, but when she cried, she did so with an inverse calm. Her hurt ran out of her like a trickle of water seeping from pressurized rock.
“Now I gotta go to the abused boyfriends shelter.”
She laughed and said, “Don’t joke. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for everything. I adore you. I’m so lucky to have you.”
It was dawn by then, and the rain had at long last quieted to gray-black clouds. They hung low over the district, slouching eastward. We took a walk, got ourselves coffee and a doughnut to share. In a month, there would be a video of her on Renaissance, on Slapdish, a think piece, a hate piece, a fuck piece on every sleaze and scandal and political site, but that morning we walked the city aimlessly, cataloguing the damage the flooding had wrought: the downed trees and shredded limbs, the cars carried into errant arrangements by floodwaters, all the city crews in white hard hats, the yellow and orange of officialdom organizing the cleanup. Receding waters had left the district with wind-blown scabs of trash and deltas of muck clinging to the streets and sidewalks. We eventually found ourselves at Arlington National Cemetery strolling past the tombstones, the grass verdant with rain. Finally, we came to Kennedy’s gravesite, and looked out over the Potomac, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol Dome all lined up.
“Why don’t we get away?” I said. “Let Coral and Rekia take over for a few months. We can go see our families. We’ll go camp and have sex in a tent. We can regroup.”
Hands tucked in her jacket pockets, Kate toed a batch of roses near the gravesite. Who, after all this time, was still delivering fresh roses to Kennedy’s grave?
“I love you, kid.” She said it slowly, mournfully. “If only the world wasn’t ending, I bet we could’ve made a real run.”
“We’re making a real run,” I said. “This is only a speed bump.”
She looked up at me. Thirteen years on. Thirteen years since I first saw her stomping down the dock in Colter Bay and couldn’t take my eyes off her. Now she smiled.
“It would be fun to fuck in a tent again.”
There, on the walkway surrounded by the faded white stones and beneath a sky nearly the same color, I kissed her as an unmarked helicopter thundered overhead.
After emerging from reconciliation, the bill went straight to Randall’s desk with a signing ceremony in the White House. “We can have security, prosperity, and a healthy environment,” she boiler-plated, her face grim, her words clipped. While most of the late-night quips were about the salad fleck in her teeth, Seth Meyers noted that she looked like a hostage. Her lips were tight and bleak, a flock of bipartisan politicians peering over her shoulder as she hastily scrawled her name, set the pen down, and seemed to drag her eyes up to meet the cameras. I wondered about the human being behind a moment like this. The quiet, whip-smart girl from Buffalo, who went from Catholic school to state government in a decade, from governor of that state to president of her country, who broke a political stalemate and seemed poised to usher in a revolution no one else could. Now she would live her life through the prism of this haunting compromise, having signed her name to doom. The bill extended most of the tax incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act until 2040, added new surveillance techniques for law enforcement, broadened the scope of permissible FISA warrants, and earmarked nearly $30 billion for the deployment of AI technology in the monitoring of Americans suspected of terrorist activities. That the Supreme Court would uphold all this was barely a question. The Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Research Act—the refund mechanism having been chopped out—was signed into law on October 4, 2030. A month later, most of the Far Right candidates denying the reality of climate change, promising new detention facilities for immigrants, and new curbs to the civil rights of Muslims, environmentalists, and other agitators against the state, won their elections.
* * *
We stayed in D.C. through the electoral bloodbath when so many of our allies lost, including Cy Fitzpatrick, deposed from the Senate seat he’d held for a generation. Though the polling had been telling us this was coming, that made it no less devastating. Joy LaFray resigned in scandal, and the details of her affair with her stepson were paraded across Fox News with triumphant glee. We planned to take at least four months off. Kate hadn’t taken anything more than a three-day weekend in seven years. The morning we were supposed to leave, as I loaded our bags into our electric truck, she texted asking me to meet her, Rekia, and Tom at Lafayette Square across from the White House. Why? I asked, but she didn’t respond.
A cold wind blew across the Potomac. Soon there would be snow, the bitterness of a D.C. winter. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say I’d come to hate this place, what it represented and whatever the weather did. As I cut through Foggy Bottom, I marveled at the normality the city could produce in the face of cataclysm. The terrifying future becomes ever more certain, and yet after some television squawking, a few despairing tweets, op-eds, and news analysis AIs telling humans what to think, people go back to their lives.
