The Deluge, page 68
Tom was thinking of Rekia. Not long after they started sleeping together, when he asked her why they hadn’t just done that right away instead of fighting for five years, she said, “ ’Cause you’re an egotistical, white-privileged asshole.” She squeezed one of his triceps. “And you always wore these tight shirts that made your arms look good, and I know you knew your arms looked good, and that made me hate you even more.”
He wasn’t sure that she’d ever forgive him, and this scared him. After an entire adulthood spent swearing to himself that he’d never fall for the marriage trap, he was in love with this woman and already dreaming of their children.
On that same night, blessed with cool wind, Holly Pietrus, Liza Yudong, and Kate Morris sat on the steps of the west side of the Capitol and shared a joint. With the power out in the city, the only light beamed down from a quarter moon, but they could make out the inky outlines of shantytown tents and black scars from the fires. The trampled dirt and filthy plywood paths. The toppled fence and the busted National Guard vehicle still tangled in it liked a beached whale. Like Tom and Seth, they were talking about their old friend.
“Rekia told me if I came here, I shouldn’t bother coming back,” said Holly. Her eye was still a midnight blue with shades of yellow from the elbow she’d taken to save a painting.
“Rek is doing what she thinks is right. So are we.” Kate took the joint from Holly’s fingers and took a drag. The tip glowed bright enough to cast light on her face.
Liza said, “At least in prison they’ll have water, so I can exfoliate.” Kate and Holly laughed. “You think I’m joking. This is exactly as bad as I thought it would be. I’ve always hated camping.”
“Prison will be good,” said Kate. “A nice challenge for me.”
“The worst part is, I know she’s serious,” said Liza.
“Yep,” Kate nodded affirmatively. “It’ll be something I’ll have to conquer and make useful.”
“So you are insane,” said Holly.
“If you think about it, a general strike in prisons, a massive civil disobedience campaign in the heart of the prison-industrial complex? Then if you add a hunger strike on top of it all, not only are the garment operations not running, but they have to bring in all this medical equipment to force-feed you in the ass. We can bankrupt these private prison companies before they even knew what hit ’em.”
“Who is this ‘we’?” asked Liza. “I get low blood sugar.”
“You know you’ll follow me over the waterfall, bitch.” Kate shoulder-checked the smaller woman. “Don’t front. Don’t even make airs like you might front.”
Liza rebounded. “This weed sucks.”
Holly, who hadn’t been stoned since college, found herself belly-laughing at these two, a new audience for a shtick they’d clearly honed over the years.
“That’s been the fascists’ best move yet,” said Kate. “Cutting off our pot supply.”
Their laughter trickled off, and the joint ran out, and they fell quiet. Stoned ruminations took the three of them all kinds of places. Liza found herself drifting back to when she’d first met Kate at the other organization they’d been involved with. Everyone was so self-serious, no one got her sense of humor, and she caught sideways looks for not performing her “climate grief.” She found all the activisty screamingness of the thing tedious. All except this one girl. Kate Morris, she found, could take all the flak, arrows, and spitty people while Liza did her thing mostly behind the scenes. Not long after Liza turned in her resignation at FBF following Rekia’s little coup, she’d called Kate and told her they should try something weird.
“What’s weird, Liz?” Kate asked despondently. “What hasn’t been tried?”
“Don’t be such a stick in the mud. We could occupy the entire frickin’ capital if we felt like it.”
And from that one off-the-cuff response, the entire notion of their con emerged. Since Liza first began having anxiety about the end of the world and became determined to do something about it, she’d also resigned herself to the fact that nothing they did would likely work. However, if one had a great deal of fun in the process, it seemed to conjure belief in and of itself. Belief, in this case, was vital.
“Maybe my favorite thing about you,” Kate said to her once, not long after they’d acquired the domain name for A Fierce Blue Fire and were still working out of her and Matt’s apartment, “is that you’re not who you say you are.”
Liza had bugged her eyes and said, “I’ll be whoever you ask me to be, Kate, if you just let me shave your legs and armpits.” Kate thought this was so funny and laughed and laughed. Liza put on her most revolted face. “Why are you laughing? I’m absolutely not joking.”
Holly, who’d spent so many months sick with fear about her father, was mulling a random childhood memory: She’d been maybe eight years old, at the beach in La Jolla. She’d been playing with her friends, these two boys, Mark and Joey, and all three had taken off their shirts in the surf, and her dad had come over and yelled at her—like really yelled at her—to put her shirt back on. When she returned to her towel, sobbing, she argued her case to her mom. It made no sense that the boys could take their shirts off and she couldn’t, and there was no reason she should get yelled at for it. And the more her mom tried to explain the difference between boys and girls, the more certain Holly was that this explanation was nuts—she and Joey and Mark all looked exactly the same with their shirts off, so why would she get yelled at?
“It’s just one of those dumb things, Holly-bear,” her mom finally admitted. “Trust me, this will not be the last time you’ll feel like it’s bullshit being a woman.”
“Mommy,” she pleaded, because she hated it when her parents cussed.
“I’m sorry.” She kept rubbing Holly’s back for a while. Holly felt herself calming down. The world was not always fair, and people had very dumb ideas about things. That was the lesson, right?
Her mom laughed, and Holly remembered how beautiful her dark skin looked in the bright white sun. “That’s exactly right, doll. And most of the dumb ideas come from men like your dad who think they’re right about everything. Don’t tell him I said that, but it’s definitely the truth.”
Holly hadn’t missed her mom in a long, long time, but she did now. Missed her like hell. She went to sleep that night wishing it wasn’t the case that every wonderful thing about her mom felt like it originated in another life or a dissipating dream.
Kate Morris, on the other hand, was not thinking about her family, childhood, friends, or lovers. There were errant memories and traumas that might preoccupy anyone’s mind in such circumstances: listening to her mother cry as she tried to sleep in the passenger seat of their Honda Civic in a Fred Meyer parking lot after Sonja left Earl; this kid, Arturo, who used to tease her in grade school and called her an ogre one too many times, so she slammed the heel of her hand into his nose, and she had to see a child therapist for two years; or why not turn to thoughts of the partner she’d just left behind? She’d learned from every example in her life that men were scared, selfish, and weak. In the end, you could only rely on yourself. And Matt had gone and proved it to her once and for all. She’d listened to his car beat a crackling retreat down the gravel drive and took the moment to imagine herself as an old woman, when all these years of rain and thunder would be but a dim and painless remembering. Then she’d stood and returned to her office to keep working, and it was thrilling how very alone she was, how riddled with wounds.
But she had no use for memory at all that night.
Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peels of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don’t change, don’t learn, don’t fall, don’t flinch. All she’d ever feel was sorry for people who didn’t know what it was to want something more than their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she’d made with nothing but her ravaged voice.
Those in charge did not look at it quite as romantically. Urban heat and expensive bread had led to a summer of occupations and confrontations in capital cities around the world. In Pretoria, authorities opened fire with rubber bullets and tear gas, killing six. In Paris, protestors overturned a police vehicle, crushing two of their own. In Taipei, rioters battled with the army for six days until a typhoon blew through, soaked the city in two feet of rain, and buildings along the coast crumbled into the water. In Israel, a carefully calibrated plan to let only so much food and water into the Gaza Strip suddenly seemed overgenerous. They tightened the rations, and rocks and bottles flew and IDF vehicles burned. In China, the Ministry of State Security began detaining children they declared dissidents and returning their lifeless bodies to parents some weeks later. Protests against these brutal practices were becoming larger and more unruly, while the Communist Party blamed the CIA for sparking insurrection. There was a patient zero for all of this. The world’s leaders glared at what had gone on for more than three months in Washington.
President Love’s closest advisors huddled around him in Camp David, and he made sure to go berserk on them. He hurled a glass at the wall and told them they could resign if they didn’t like his plan. Of course, they were all on their knees after that, begging for forgiveness, and it made him sick to watch. Vic Love knew combat, and he knew from combat that the joy of violence is inborn, that people secretly love to supplicate themselves to men powerful enough to unleash it decisively. The only answer to this clusterfuck was to sow unparalleled fear. In fact, he should have been looking at it this whole time as an opportunity. This rebellion in the nation’s capital that had flummoxed and vexed him—he could use it as a proving ground. His nighttime disturbances echoed within the halls of Camp David, and his husband asked to be flown back to their estate. “You’re not well,” he told Vic before leaving. Vic told him to stay in Montana until he needed him for a magazine cover. It wasn’t that Vic never thought he would make a mistake, but he’d never imagined anyone outflanking him the way Morris had. In many ways, Kate Morris and Loren Victor Love were meant for each other in this moment, as the malformed soul of the old world seized and screamed in the death throes of whatever would be birthed next.
This time, there would be no warning.
JULY 31
“I’m taking the amnesty,” Holly Pietrus told the others. The siege had winnowed down to a core 21,582 hardy souls, still camped on the Mall and crowding the rooms of the Capitol. Morris, Yudong, Pietrus, Young, and Levine were gathered in the Speaker’s office. Kate had tacked a George Carlin poster to the wall behind her, the comedian’s eyebrows popping: When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat. It reminded Kate of her long years in this amazing swamp city, where despite the evil that went on, the guts were hip-hop and the skin was pure metal.
“We’re almost out of food and water,” said Holly. “Whatever happens next…” She trailed off.
Kate nodded. She clutched her hands in her lap and gazed at her big, rough thumbs. “What you’ve all done here is beyond brave. I don’t say this lightly, but the world will never forget this. And it will never forget you.”
“I’m here till the end,” said Tom. He lounged in the Speaker’s chair, cracking and shelling walnuts. He’d found both the walnuts and the little metal gripper tool in a private cabinet of a random office.
Kate nodded but said otherwise. “No, you need to take the deal, Tom. The rest of you too. I’ll stay.”
“That makes no sense,” he said.
Kate blew a breath up her face, lifting a strand of greasy hair from her eyes. “It makes perfect sense. I’ll make an announcement tomorrow laying it out for everyone: They can stay with me and suffer the consequences, or they can go with you all.”
“To do what?” Tom demanded.
“To start a boy band—what do you think, Tom? To keep fighting.” Kate looked to the woman she trusted most. “Liza and I already discussed it. You’ll keep pushing, keep agitating. And you’ll hire the lawyers to stay up the government’s ass until we’re all out.”
“There’s no guarantee when that will be,” said Holly.
“Yeah, well, there’s not too much guarantee to anything, is there? I have to stay here,” she said plainly. “I have to make them come and get me.”
Their final meeting came to an end. They hugged and said their goodbyes. When Holly embraced Kate, she couldn’t help herself, and she broke down crying.
Seth Young and Tom Levine planned to leave the next morning. They tasked themselves with moving through the ranks of the remaining Blue Bands, explaining the choice everyone had ahead of them. Liza Yudong and Holly Pietrus left at dusk. They walked to a checkpoint on Fourteenth and Independence, where they were told to drop their backpacks and put their hands on her heads. They were zip-tied, processed for three hours, interviewed, and then released as promised.
The authorities went in that night.
The operation began at 3:31 a.m. on August 1. One moment there was darkness and only the stark splash of stars reigning over the Mall and the Capitol, and the next floodlights and helicopters. The 1,250-watt fluorescent light towers switched on with a cacophonous chorus of thunks, turning four hundred acres of D.C. into interrogation-room glare. The choppers swooped in, hovering low above the Mall, uncovering dark corners with searchlights. The occupation’s drones were shot out of the air, replaced by law enforcement’s and armed with fifty rubber bullets apiece. Twenty-five thousand Guard, police, and private security forces surrounded the Mall, but it was a core contingent of Xuritas Special Ops that breached the barricades first, firing live ammunition, the crackle of gunfire foreign to these civilians, nearly all of them mistaking the sound for leftover firecrackers.
Kelly Pasquina was sleeping near the barricade at Third and Pennsylvania when the commotion began and crawled out of her miserably sweaty tent to see black-clad soldiers and the bright smatter of muzzle flashes. Fear took her by the throat, so that all she could really hear was her heart throbbing in her ears. Then her older brother, Walt, grabbed her by the shoulders and barked in her face, “Get down!”
The first round of Xuritas bullets punctured the lungs and heads and rib cages of people who’d just emerged from their tents to see what the deal was with the lights. It changed the very nature of the crowd. These bodies, once friends and comrades, became terrifying obstacles. Logan Dougall, penned in, saw the men in black, eyes hidden by visors, saw bursts of gunfire slicing apart people beside him, and now it wasn’t just the bullets that were dangerous, but anyone blocking his escape. He threw elbows and stepped on groins and swiped away hands reaching for him. People ran with the panic of spotting a predator in open savanna. They all spilled east in the direction of the Capitol, looking for safety within its walls, but another Xuritas unit had driven through the barricades from that direction, cornering them. Dougall tried to spin and retreat before three bullets tore out the center of his chest.
Bullets, Kelly Pasquina realized, watching from the ground, had an almost unthinkable impact on the human body. Even though she came from a military family, even though she’d grown up watching as many Hollywood gunfights as the next gal, even though mass-shooting drills had been a part of her childhood, she’d never really considered what it is bullets do, the way they move bodies in ways they’re not supposed to move, and what comes out of the holes is so ghastly, and how the wounds make noises bodies are never supposed to make. How they carve and pulverize and fragment tissue, bone, muscle. Her brother, lying prone beside her, knew this all too well. That was the whole point of a bullet. A cold reminder of the simplicity and suddenness of death. Not that he was trying to explain this to his kid sister, weeping with panic.
Those involved with the decision to open fire on the encampment ran the gamut from principled dissenters to avid enthusiasts to those already leaking to major newspapers that they had tried to stop it without actually having done anything of the sort. The architects of the plan simply wanted to send a message. They weren’t there to massacre all twenty thousand people, but there would be no inspirational stand going viral this time. This time, there would be absolute compliance and a decisive end to the situation. A display of loyalty by the dead. With conservative bursts of gunfire, they herded the terrorists into the center of the Mall, at which point loudspeakers began demanding that they drop to the ground.
“Lie down with your palms on the earth. Do not move. If you lie down, you will not be harmed.”
The running, screaming people began to comply, not because they were necessarily listening to the loudspeakers over the thunder of the helicopters and the moans of the wounded and dying but because they could hear the snap of bullets all around them, and they could see others falling, leaving mists of blood, which looked pink and orange in the harsh fluorescent light. Bridget Zeckhauser felt a bullet clip her arm, and then another punch through her back, and when she fell onto part of a collapsed tent, she buried her face in the dirt and prayed to be transported away from this. Walt Pasquina saw her spill across the ground, could hear her screaming as she whipped one panicked arm covered in butterfly tattoos. Kelly lay on her stomach whimpering, trembling with shock. Walt grabbed his sister by the arm and shook her so she would look at him. “Stay put, stay down,” he said. “We’ll get through this, Kel. I love you.” And he sprang to his feet and ran toward the gunfire to help the woman with the butterflies on her arm. Of course he did, Kelly thought. That was who he was. It was the last time she saw him alive.
