The Deluge, page 52
Dreck, to be sure, and perhaps too simplistic an explanation for the media empire he has built. He is tapping into real emotions of frustration and disillusionment, but a con it remains. None of this would comfort my mother, however. She now gestured to the TV, where The Pastor had been replaced by a commercial for collectible coins. She began to weep:
“It will be like in India. The women endure the worst of it. My friend—she and I grow up together—her daughter was raped in front of her children. The men cut off her breasts, stole every possession the family had, and left her to die. She survived, but this is not just some scary story. This is what is happening to Muslims every single day in my home.” She looked at me miserably. “Ashir, tell the people where you work, do not let this man hurt anyone.”
She reached out and took my hand, this small woman who’d gestated me. I assured her I would pass this message along.
As you know, in the first contest in Iowa, Senator L. Victor Love and Governor Pat Formisano tied in the Democratic primary while on the Republican side, the white separatist talk-show host Jennifer Braden defeated the president of the United States by four points, setting off a political earthquake.
* * *
In April I returned to Michigan to move my mother out of her home as the country was upended by what became known as the Great Eastern Flood. My colleagues and I had watched in awe from the offices on G Street as an astonishing confluence of hydrological events shattered our models, specifically a warm, wet winter saturating much of the Eastern Seaboard and Middle West, several tropical depressions moving from the Gulf to the Southeast, followed by three frontal cyclones, storms of phenomenal power, crossing eastward from the plains. As you well know, there was hardly a riverine municipality that did not experience some degree of flooding. Statistics are unwieldy, but I believe when viewing the flooding in aggregate, as one event, rather than a series of ill-timed, compounding disasters, FEMA will total approximately 3,800 fatalities across twenty-five states and $209 billion in damage, dwarfing Hurricane Alberto’s record-setting tally. The cities of Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans account for much of that human toll, as levee failures, sewer system overloads, spillway collapses, and other infrastructure failures left residents with little time to escape. It’s easy to forget that human lives exist behind the integer. I remind myself by thinking of the staff of a Missouri facility for the physically and mentally disabled who abandoned a bus full of patients in a roadway as a bridge began to wash out. The staff members escaped, and all forty patients drowned as the river flipped the bus and overtook it.
Back in Ann Arbor with my sister, her husband, Peter, and their two children, we had a glimpse of one of these extratropical cyclones, followed by four days of powerful microburst storms. The air turned green, and a tornado alarm began to blare. All the noise felt like broken glass being raked on the inside of my skin. I knew my panic was unnerving Noor and Gregory, and I had to retreat to a bathroom without windows and push the smooth side of a hairbrush over my arm to calm myself. The next day, on our way to the store, Peter and I saw homes with their walls ripped out, bikes, clothing, and lawn chairs in trees, cars blown onto their sides, and one structure where the roof had been cleanly removed. That particular storm system spawned three tornadoes across Michigan, none of which was as destructive as the flooding of the Huron River. Said Peter:
“Fuck me. Where’s Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt when you need ’em?”
In addition to the storm, my mother was insisting I go to mosque with her, and this had led to a bitter argument. She insisted it would pry me from the grip of a “great sin.”
Haniya tried to argue with her that my choices could be justified by Qur’anic text while I sat there silently, recalling my childhood when mosque and the imam terrified me. I recalled how he would take me to task for refusing to go through the motions of raka’ah, or how he ridiculed my Arabic pronunciation. Now both my mother and sister were in tears, as Hani tried to build a bridge from the dogma of our ancestors to her brother’s life. As they carried on, I marveled at how little power all of this wielded over me anymore. Finally, I left to go play trucks with Noor and Gregory.
That night, in my childhood bedroom where I’d once pinned up long reams of the basketball statistics I adored, Hani knocked on the door. We talked about the sale of the house until she finally asked a question I could not believe she didn’t already know the answer to: “Have you ever believed, Ashir? Maybe as a child?”
I picked up a toy model of a pirate ship I had built as a seven-year-old with our father. It had remained on the bookshelf in my old room all these years. “Not to my recollection. The first time I remember hearing the idea of God, I was five. I went to the library with Papa to try to figure out where these realms or kingdoms could possibly exist within the physical structure of the atmosphere or deep mantle. For maybe two minutes, I wondered if the beings and locales of those stories were contained in the mesosphere because it lay between the stratosphere where the jets fly and the thermosphere where astronauts would clearly bump into such marvels as akhirah. Obviously, this all collapsed rather quickly.”
My sister has a wide and beautiful face with cheekbones that stretch outward like they are trying to escape the skin. This gives her every utterance a calm that can often feel cold. Her social cues remain some of the most difficult I’ve ever had to read: “You were not actually that literal when you were five, Ash.”
“It only shocked me that none of this had ever occurred to anyone before. I tried to tell Mumma, and she smacked me.”
The sting of my mother’s hand stayed with me, and not only because of the guilt and confusion that followed, but because her reaction seemed endemic. What I felt in the drill of her hand as a child, I hear in The Pastor’s voice all these years later: The piffling anecdata of the faithful peddled as law and conscience. The world is in the throes of a desperate religious revival as believers plunk their heads into the sand to shield themselves from what is happening to the biophysical world. As she grows mentally frailer, I suppose there will be no reconciliation with my mother. Her moments of tenderness are fleeting, and her fury at my relationship with Seth seems the one thing she can easily recall. No doubt she will forget me before she forgives me.
* * *
It took us a week to make the arrangements for my mother to move to New York where Peter and Hani have been caring for her with their significant financial resources. I was left alone in Ann Arbor with the task of closing up our childhood home. Instead of ruminating pointlessly on uninteresting nostalgia, I took the opportunity to don my new VR set and enter The Pastor’s Slapdish worlde. I’d first had the idea in January when a man I’ll refer to as “Ned Stark” contacted me and asked that we meet clandestinely in VR. I thought of The Pastor’s gaudy megachurch-theme-park worlde, which was dense, crowded, and allowed anonymous entrants. I’ll spare you the description, only to say that Ned Stark and I met on a tower spire’s precipice where I couldn’t help but step my foot off the ledge repeatedly, musing at the strange disconnect between my brain telling me I would fall and my foot finding the carpet of my childhood bedroom.
“She wants to wait until after the primaries,” he said. I call him Ned Stark because that is the avatar he’d chosen. I myself was dressed as early NBA analytics hero Shane Battier. “Love has got it in the bag, it looks like, but the RNC can’t seem to manage to put Braden down. This all gets very different if Braden manages to pull this off.”
I asked: “What is the eventual plan?”
“We’re going to come together and reveal ourselves.”
“I’m putting a great deal of trust in you with this.”
The avatar made a cheap facsimile of a grimace. “Yeah, well, so am I.”
Across the futuristic Christian theme park, Jumbotrons displayed the shellacked smile of The Pastor. He’d been busy celebrating the spring’s flooding as his prophecy coming true rather than an excess of water vapor in the atmosphere powering the engines of devastating storm systems. He inveighed:
“And who is the one who foresaw this? Who, just a few months ago, warned you of this?” He flipped open his self-authored book of scripture and quoted: “ ‘For there will be fire and flood, and a man will appear giving warning of these tribulations. The vested powers will tell the people to ignore him for he may carry the blood of the Christ in his veins. This man will make rain, and he is the future.’ ”
* * *
President Mary Randall had the misfortune to launch her reelection campaign touting her supposed victory over the climate crisis with the passage of PRIRA then presiding over the catastrophe of the Great Eastern Flood. To get into the missteps of FEMA here is a bit much, but suffice it to say she took much criticism in the press and from the Democratic nominee, Senator Love, while also suffering broadside attacks for her failures to curb terrorism and illegal immigration from Jennifer Braden. Braden had recently stated, without evidence, that Randall had ordered the CIA to supply the al-Bawadis with smart bullets, and her rabid followers launched this baseless theory into the mainstream. However, as soon as Senator Russ Mackowski dropped out of the race and endorsed Randall, the Republican Party locked arms, and Randall accrued an insurmountable delegate lead. Braden’s rants grew more unhinged, and political prognosticators deemed her buried when she unleashed her taunt, “You dirty brown bitch,” at the president during the last debate. The scene at the Republican National Convention was particularly troubling as Braden’s followers, armed with assault rifles, attempted to surround the convention center in Charlotte.
On July 16, Seth and I happened to have a social occasion with Alice McCowen, former director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Though our relationship began on rocky ground during the maneuvering around PRIRA, we became allies in its failed effort and a mutual respect emerged. McCowen also began a relationship with my friend and mentor Jane Tufariello. All three of us now viewed one another as survivors of the wreckage left behind by that devastating legislative fight. Alice and Jane had us over for dinner, and it was difficult not to slip into talk of the loud and unpleasant election dominating the news. Alice was particularly irate at what she saw as the efforts to destroy her former boss and friend, the president:
“Before I left, I told Mary, the campaign staff, everyone, this whacko-bird, the Hot Nazi, she’s not to be taken lightly. And they all got caught flat-footed. I didn’t drag the Republican Party kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century to be a part of this horseshit. Meanwhile, everyone knows the Dems’ golden goddess first-female-feminist-idol Hogan basically watched a live feed of a guy getting tortured for thirty-six hours without blinking. The Beltway talks about how Mary doesn’t have the stomach to fight terrorism but look at the psycho act she had to follow.”
Jane put a hand on her arm: “Okay, Alice. Enough.”
“What? Hogan was one bloodthirsty cunt.”
Seth was laughing, finding this exchange very amusing, though I was irritated by the cross talk. It was at this moment when all of our phones, watches, and glasses issued simultaneous notifications of the events that would effectively end Mary Randall’s chances at a second term.
* * *
That night Seth remarked: “Twenty thirty-two is one of those years you have to turn off the news alerts.”
All we knew then was that a series of IEDs had destroyed a manufacturing facility in La Grange, Illinois. By the time Seth and I took a driverless home, several incendiary devices had set ablaze a processing plant for diluted bitumen in Fort McMurray, Alberta, while also nearly causing a forest fire. Multiple residents of Fort McMurray were injured, nearly a thousand evacuated, and forty-three structures destroyed. Finally, as we watched the news back at our condo, a third attack was reported at the Tucker Anacortes Refinery, seventy miles north of Seattle, when a missile struck the catalytic cracking unit. Seth gasped:
“A missile? What the hell is happening?”
The Anacortes attack had something new as well: fatalities. Two workers were killed in the strike.
Images played on a loop of the smoldering manufacturing plant in La Grange, the fire burning in the Canadian night, and the wrecked refinery in Washington, smoke and dark obscuring the damage. It was assumed on all the major networks that this was the work of the same faction responsible for the attacks on coal plants in the Midwest two years earlier, and both American and Canadian intelligence soon confirmed this. The media grappled for a nickname as catchy as the Ohio River Massacre but only managed the “July Surprise.” Before I went to bed that night, I received a call from the FBI requesting my presence in Anacortes.
* * *
Following the coal plant attacks of 2030, at the behest of Ms. McCowen, I began consulting with the task force pursuing eco-terrorism suspects. I already had a relationship with the FBI ever since they opened a case into the various death threats I’ve received since PRIRA was thrust into the spotlight. This is how I met Special Agent John Chen, a task force leader, and he has sought my perspective on the motives and thinking of the so-called Weathermen ever since. He feels they follow the science, economics, and politics of carbon pollution closely, and that I might provide insight into their thinking.
I arrived the next afternoon in Anacortes, a pristine town that abuts Puget Sound in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains, and checked into my hotel.
Special Agent Chen sent a car for me the next day. At the refinery, I filled out the access-control log and donned booties, though we were to remain on the demarcated entry and exit paths of the crime scene. SWAT officers with MP5 submachine guns surrounded the perimeter, scrutinizing my visitor’s badge when we passed. Agent Chen greeted me with very little small talk:
“If there was any doubt after Ohio, this about wraps it up. These are not campus activists.”
“The complexity of geolocating a missile strike should narrow down potential suspects.”
“Not as much as we wish. Plenty of unscrupulous firms out there that will sell you discreet rush satellite tracking—every jihadi group in Africa and Arabia can buy them now. We think they 3D-printed most of the components and assembled the missile themselves, then launched it from a boat in the sound. Guided it via remote control the same way they did drones up in Fort McMurray. Satellite images haven’t been helpful yet because of the weather, but we’ll see.”
Agent Chen’s manner is lockstep professionalism. He is the consummate “by-the-book Boy Scout,” as my colleague Dr. Anthony Pietrus, who’s had previous dealings with Chen, once said. His silver hair was parted on a knife’s edge at the side of his head. He wore glasses and a pen in a plastic pocket protector on his shirt, a prosaic style even I would hesitate to adopt, regardless of its clear utility. I asked him:
“And the men who were killed?”
“Two workers in the cracking unit. A call came in to the refinery roughly thirty minutes before the missile hit, and the facility operations manager initiated an evacuation. Those two either didn’t hear the alarm or simply failed to heed it—we’re not sure.”
We approached the charred, burned hole in the side of the building. The missile had struck the base of the fluid catalytic cracking unit. Without this unit in operation, a refinery amounts to little more than a temporary storage facility for useless crude oil. Part of the wall had collapsed, and metal twisted into the sky. Orange hazard tape surrounded the site, and forensic chemists and other investigators in Tyvek coveralls combed the area while agents swarmed the scene with guns on their belts and clipboards in their hands. In the wreckage, I could see an intact coffee mug with the Seattle Seahawks logo, charred by fire, sitting atop a pile of blackened brick. Police drones swarmed overhead, surveilling the area. With their whirring rotor blades, they always appear to me as angry insects. I said:
“These fatalities were accidental then.”
“Depends on how you look at it. When they blew up those coal plants in Ohio, and grandmas cooked in their homes at the height of summer, was that accidental?”
“They take a great deal of care to avoid casualties. Doesn’t that tell you something about their motivation and psychology? Their objective seems persuasively aboveboard: trying to raise security and insurance costs for carbon industries to make them unprofitable.”
Chen delivered what I might call a “who the hell knows?” expression: “I’m done speculating. The investigation’s become so politicized—we’re following wingnut hunches more than we’re following actual leads. A QAnon senator picks up a conspiracy and suddenly the bureau is actually getting pressure to track down Kobe Bryant’s widow in case she knows something. I mean, it’s all just…”
He shook his head and trailed off. Aside from the activity of investigators tiptoeing over scattered detritus, the scene felt unnervingly still. The distillation tower reminded me of a forlorn lookout of an abandoned castle.
“The La Grange and McMurray devices were delivered by consumer drones?”
“TEDAC says it’s ingenious work. Hell, my daughter could pilot a drone when she was five, but these things were carrying complex IEDs.”
“Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that this district is represented by the chairman of the Unmanned Systems Caucus in Congress.”
“That’s who we have to thank for the sky the way it is? Robots crashing into each other every damn day?” His hands tucked into his pants, a stain of sweat under each arm and more breaking out on his brow, Agent Chen scuffed a foot at the dirt unhappily. “Between you and me, this investigation is a catastrophe. Ten years, and we have almost nothing to show for chasing backpack scraps and fertilizer receipts. A handful of arrests, none of which have yielded any insight into the operational core. We’ve had two computer glitches that have lost reams of evidence. Mismanagement up and down the chain of command.”
