The Deluge, page 42
Approaching Lafayette Square and the White House, following the pin Kate had dropped, I saw there was some kind of rally. There was chanting. A woman was straining to be heard over the noise, and it took me a moment to place her. Jennifer Braden wore a dark peacoat and punctuated her words with black-leathered fists. She was extremely beautiful, with coal-black hair, red lips glowing against porcelain skin, and a hat with netting over half her face, calling to mind a movie star of the 1930s. The PA system pushed her voice out over the park.
“… And what we’re asking for, what we demand: We want our country back! We want our borders impassible. We want security, and we want peace.”
Her crowd beat its hands in approval. There was another contingent behind a police barrier, a raucous counterprotest. Several robocams dispatched from various news outlets hovered, broadcasting. These levitating bots still made me uneasy with their too-languid movements and the cold surveilling surface of their glassy eyes. A jowly woman in front of me held a red placard with a photo on it. This stopped me cold.
Braden continued, “What we have endured in this country for too long is an acceptance of multiculturalism, an erosion of our Christian character, of our European ancestry.”
HUNT ALL TRAITORS TO EXTINCTION, read the sign. And above it a picture of a young girl in a headscarf with a bullet wound in her face. It took me a moment to understand the image as one of the Somali girls killed in Minneapolis in ’28.
I felt ill. Because I was staring, the woman’s eyes met mine. She looked like any overweight Middle American housewife. Pleased by my shock, she smugly returned her attention to the speaker.
“The white race, the Christian faith—my friends, we built the modern world. Every single achievement you see around you is because of us.” Braden thumped a hand above her breast. “And that is why it’s not enough to simply have pride. We must go out into the world, and we must fight for that truth.”
A rousing cheer lifted from the crowd to the sky. “Hell yeah!” screamed a short man with a wispy mustache. Clipped to his belt, he had what looked like a combat knife. The woman with the sign locked her elbows to hold her grisly image higher: a bloody hole in the cheek of a girl not yet a teenager.
I found Kate, Rekia, and Tom on the fringe of the counterprotest, all with identical dour expressions. The counterprotestors chanted with rage, “No Braden! No KKK! No fascist USA!” while police in full combat gear lined the fence of the White House, weapons angled at the ground.
“What the hell is this?” I shouted to be heard.
Rekia chucked her head at Braden. “We heard the Hot Nazi was declaring. No permit or anything, she just showed up at Randall’s front door.” The whole scene was so jarring, I didn’t quite register at first that Tom and Rekia were holding hands. Not until years later would I learn that the night PRIRA passed, Rekia and Tom had consummated their heated rivalry in our offices.
“And what has the so-called conservative Mary Randall done with her time in office?” Braden continued. “The country is terrorized by eco-fascists and Muslims while she coddles the socialist Left. She wants to raise the cost of energy, allow aliens to pour across the borders, tax you, restrict you, demean you, all so she can get a pat on the head from the New York Times.”
“Jew York Times!” someone cried.
Tom, ever the instigator, laughed loudly and began heckling the guy, asking him his name and where he worked. “The Zionist conspiracy is coming to get you, motherfucker!”
Braden took a hand from her peacoat and jabbed it at the White House behind her.
“Mary Randall, let me tell you something, you stupid bitch.” Braden salivated on the word, and the crowd went wild for it. “You are done! Your alliance with the greens, the dirt and scum leaking across our borders, the mongrels, the Black nationalists, the Muslim agenda—it is over! We are here! We are fighting back, and it Starts. Right. Now.”
The crowd roared in triumph. I watched a teenage girl beat her pink mittens together in applause.
“Can we please go?” I begged Kate.
“That is why, my friends, today I am declaring my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”
The crowd positively erupted. Signs and hats thrown skyward. Someone swept a large Confederate flag in a whirl. A muscular bald man, wearing a shirt with a picture of Anders Breivik, flexed every muscle of his arms and howled, “Braaaaaden!” Silently, the four of us agreed and slunk away down Connecticut Avenue. Braden’s sultry voice, the applause of her rapturous fans, and the chant of the counterprotestors borne along by the PA, followed us for blocks. Kate slipped her arm around my waist.
“What a lovely way to start our vacation, huh?”
The video of Kate having sex with the intern broke that night, chasing the story of the Hot Nazi throwing her hat into the presidential ring.
* * *
We never understood why Renaissance sat on that video until after the election, the timing a twist of the knife instead of a bombshell, but we also didn’t wait around to watch the news cycle enjoy it. That day we drove out of the district, breaking free of its clogged, gristled arteries, into the mountains of Virginia and down through the Shenandoah Valley, aiming to make the ridge of the Smoky Mountains by nightfall. We climbed in altitude, and snow appeared in the hills. Despite all that had happened in the past months, I felt immense gratitude that if the men and women of power let the continents vanish beneath the oceans, I would at least swallow seawater with Kate beside me.
We reached Pigeon River Campground on the Tennessee-North Carolina border after dark and unrolled our sleeping bags in the truck’s camper. Kate played music, something slow and plaintive, and took off my shirt by running her palms up my chest and flipping it over my head. We’d sleep without a single city sound for the first time in an eternity, but first we reached for each other, our troubles momentarily vaporizing in the hot contact of our flesh.
* * *
Our second stop was a hotel in Charlotte, to visit my sister and her family. Upon arriving Kate took out an infrared scanner, a radio frequency detector, and something called a nonlinear junction detector, and together we went over the entire room inch by inch.
“Lady, is this necessary?” I asked. She was perched on a chair, waving this buzzing box over a wall socket. “I know that video is fucking terrible, but…”
“Yeah, you think I filmed that, Matt?” She hopped off the chair. “Sandeep chose that hotel.”
“Oh, so your boy toy is a sleeper agent now? Spy from the deep state? Paranoia is an excuse to ignore the reality of a situation, Kate.”
She gave me an annoyed look. “And what reality is that?”
“That you’re selfish and fucked an intern because you thought it would be fun.”
“So I fucked an intern, so what?” She wagged the infrared scanner over a light fixture. “Jesus Christ, it was the best day of the kid’s life. This is actually serious, Matt.”
Kate was sure we were being monitored even before the Ohio River Massacre. We’d spoken to the FBI with our lawyers present about potential 6Degrees sympathizers within our organization. Kate was adamant that we cooperate, but the FBI was always pushing the line, asking for emails or employee data that we had to refuse to give up without a warrant. Kate never found a listening device in that room or any of the rooms we stayed in that year, but that never stopped her from searching.
We removed the batteries from our phones and stowed all the pieces in a Faraday bag. We’d left our laptops in a safety deposit box in D.C. We weren’t going to even look, we promised each other. But when we did peek, the news was harrowing. The video of Kate with Sandeep had been adapted to VR, and after giving an interview calling his relationship with Kate “coercive,” the backstabber had holed up behind lawyers. “Certainly, if you watch the video, she looks like a predator,” said Tucker Carlson while also calling the encounter “consensual if energetic.” Meanwhile, Kate’s left-wing critics were also having a field day.
They could take a little clump of cells, a woman in an open relationship, and metastasize it into a cancer. What angered me was how few women spoke up in her defense. There was something bawdy about Kate that the feminist commentariat did not like. She was rough around the edges; she used “the language of toxic masculinity”; she worked with pro-life organizations and politicians; she rejected sloganeering and hashtags of various leftist movements in favor of more complex and nuanced examinations of power. She didn’t perform the stations of the cross prescribed by the woke hive mind, and this made her enemies. Yet I do think Kate wore blinders when it came to being a public persona. She seethed that a woman couldn’t get coked up and have sex with a musician in a high-end restaurant bathroom without inviting trouble or couldn’t sleep with an intern a few times without it turning into a national spectacle. She wasn’t a victim of slut-shaming so much as joy-shaming. People simply couldn’t put up with all the ways she deviated, disappointed, and rejected conformity at every turn. I doubted Sandeep was any kind of spy for the national security state. I’m sure Kate slept with him a handful of times and then simply walked away and broke his heart.
“This is fucking unreal,” Kate fumed to Coral over speakerphone. We were sitting on a log, petrified with shellac, outside a charge station near the South Carolina border. “Let’s just spill my whole fucking sex life! Tell them I lost my virginity to a college student when I was thirteen, and I savored every last pump.”
“Do not tell anyone that,” I told Coral.
Coral was slow to respond. “You can continue to strike a pose as an apostate, but I’m warning you, Kate, this has cost us friends. Your activities have made us vulnerable.”
Kate gripped the phone like she was going to hurl it into the woods.
“Another country heard from,” she said brightly. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay out of sight for now. But, Coral, this new Congress is a true nightmare. This train’s still moving even if I decided to get a piece of ass once.”
We spent Christmas of 2030 camping in Tishomingo State Park in Mississippi then the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas until well into February. We hiked every trail we could find, swam in whatever freezing pool of water looked clear, and had sex at least once a day beneath a beautiful forest of spruce, aspen, and fir. We learned of the Mall of America shootings only after emerging from the wilderness. We were at a rest stop where a group of women in hijabs watched the news of an Islamist father-daughter team murdering thirty-three people in nine minutes. Mackowski and Braden hustled to outdo each other’s venom.
We kept on west, driving beneath a sky with island-sized clouds.
* * *
For many years after Wyoming, a part of me still held on to this dream I had of my life with Kate. We would spend a few years in D.C., she would get all the crazy activist passion out of her system, and then we’d go to North Carolina where I could write while making good money at my dad’s business. It’s incredible to recall how long I held on to that fantasy. Our third month living in that first dumpy apartment in Hill House, Kate took a trip to Savannah with a “college friend.” It wasn’t just that Kate demanded an open relationship, it was the way she made me feel small for any discomfort I gave voice to. Whenever I let her see that her dalliances got under my skin, she would ridicule my conception of monogamy as purely a form of sexist, patriarchal control. She brought home fresh venereal diseases and told me I would’ve caught them one way or another. But we also brought women home, had more threesomes than I can count. Her attraction knew no specific type or gender. At a show at the 9:30 Club, Kate met an Asian woman with bangs and tattoo sleeves, and they hit it off. That night I sat in a chair in our living room and watched the two of them for a long time before joining. Even the memory of that night still makes me weak with a very base lust. “I love sex,” Kate said during one of our early fights. “Our culture demands that a woman sleep with one man, loyal as a dog, for her entire life, and it’s bullshit. You’re beautiful and sexy and energized for only this fraction of a geologic nanosecond in all this darkness, so how can you not drink down to the last drop this thing that makes you feel vital and alive?”
“Because I don’t have the energy to fuck every night,” I said.
“Oh, I know,” she shot back.
I never got over it. I probably still haven’t. But after a while I stopped being surprised by it. I came to see these men she was with as passing fads, like she was reading a new book she couldn’t put down. Yet she would always finish it, close it, and return to me. I stopped fearing she would leave me for someone else.
“It gets it out of my system,” she explained after the embarrassment of the Frisk episode. “Half the reason people have quote-unquote affairs is they’re just bored. They want new dick, ya know? You want new dick too, Tar Heel, I know it. And we can always come out the other side still loving each other.”
Kate, in other words, encouraged me to sleep around. At first, I just couldn’t. Even the thought of spending the night with another woman scared me. We would have sex, and I knew the second it was over I would hurt. I’d never meet another woman who spoke her own particular language, who’d accuse me of “wanting new dick,” who I would hold at night and just feel such a deep, bone-pressure joy.
Moniza asked me if I would leave Kate.
Following her first feature as a cub writer for Vanity Fair, Moniza happened to be down in D.C. and asked if I wanted to grab a drink. We sat in a smoky bar without the smoke, drank cocktails, and talked transpolar shipping. Moniza was short and curvaceous, with deep brown skin, a round pixie face, and lustrous black hair she pulled over one shoulder and played with as we talked. She’d grown up in London and gone to Columbia, before working her way up at Vanity Fair. I made a joke about the expansion of shipping through the Northern Sea Route as the Arctic ice melted, and when she laughed, she put a hand on my thigh and leaned into my space, so that her long hair dropped briefly into my lap.
“Don’t laugh at what a nerd I am,” I scolded.
“It was a papa joke crossed with some nerdy book-reading,” she declared in that immaculate British accent. We went back to her hotel, and it was the first time I’d been with a woman without Kate involved since my college girlfriend. When we woke up in the morning, I put her against the wall and one of her thighs on my shoulder, brushing her clit with my lips and pushing two fingers as far inside her as they would go, a technique Kate had trained me in, and one that sent Moniza into conniptions.
“Jesus Mary,” she said after she came. “Jesus Mary, Tar Heel.”
Later, I would ask her to not use that nickname.
I followed Kate’s lead: We would tell the other that we had plans with a friend, and then one of us would take a leave of absence for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours. At first, Moniza and I would simply get dinner and drinks and retire to her hotel room, but then we began taking trips. We actually had to evacuate from Ocean City as a hurricane bore down, and the ruined weekend became a small miracle as we stayed in a dumpy motel off the interstate and did nothing but have sex, order takeout, and listen to the rain. Then I began visiting her in New York.
We saw each other like that, intermittently, for a year and a half. As the 2028 election geared up and FBF sank more and more energy into the final push, I stopped having any time. I had to cancel on her twice, and when she finally did come down to D.C., everything felt off. After dinner, we took a walk past the Nationals stadium, a game in progress. She was awfully quiet.
“It’s better if you just tell me what’s on your mind,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” She stared at the ground. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen you. I’ve spent more than a bit of time telling myself this is all for fun and play, but it would be nice to know.”
Then she didn’t say anything for a while. I waited, but she only walked forward with her gorgeous brown eyes cast down.
“Need to know what?” I finally asked.
She stopped, looked at me. “Would you leave her?”
So stupid, I told myself. I’d basically fallen in love with every woman I’d ever dated. She gazed at me, confident in her question but as vulnerable as I’d ever seen her.
“It’s not fair to ask me that. I’ve told you our situation. I’ve been totally honest about it.”
Moniza looked away, her face crumpling ever so slightly.
“No, you have,” she agreed quickly. She finally looked me in the eye. “She doesn’t deserve you, Matt.”
Embarrassed, I shook my head. “No one deserves anything or anyone. That’s not how it works.”
“I’m only saying—maybe you don’t want to hear this, but—Kate is a manipulator. She’s a user. I’ve known women like her my whole life. She takes endlessly from you. Charms you when she needs to, and then goes back to using you.”
“Moniza,” I said, as calmly as I could, “please, don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
She bit her lip, and the tears finally achieved their freedom.
“I love you,” she said. “I hate how hurt you are all the time. I would never treat you like that.”
“You don’t know anything about how she treats me.” Again, I said this with as much calm as I could summon, ignoring how she’d begun that statement.
She laughed, as if this explanation suddenly made total sense. “You’re right, I don’t…” Her voice choked with mourning. “I simply find myself missing you every day.”
In her hotel, we made love for the last time. I slipped out in the middle of the night, after she’d fallen asleep, and back home, I got in bed next to Kate. Moniza and I stopped speaking after that, but of course, what she’d said stayed with me. I would smell her unique scent—whatever alchemy creates a person’s odor—without warning, the way the pasture behind my childhood home would suddenly become fragrant after a heavy rain.
