The Deluge, page 69
As police and official military moved in behind Xuritas, bulldozing through the blockades on Third and Fourteenth Streets, they found the carnage. Dead bodies were indistinguishable from the terrified living until you got right up close and heard the sounds of their weeping or saw the death mask of the face. The D.C. Guard shot tear gas anyway. Metro Police coming in behind the first wave of Xuritas were told to zip-tie every pair of hands they found. They began dragging people away or serving up beatings with truncheons, but this felt almost ridiculous when you were standing in puddles of gore from people cut to ribbons by automatic weapons fire. Master Patrol Officer Andrea Sanchez, who’d worked every overtime shift she could that summer, who from the first day of all this had felt stirrings of dread, who told herself no matter what she would not do anything she could not explain to her seven-year-old son, took off her helmet and threw up. She would never forget what she saw there: The first body she came across was unrecognizable, just a sizzling pile of meat and blood. She stepped on something and had to stare at it for a second before she realized it was a piece of someone’s bit-off tongue, lying like a pink sponge on the sidewalk. The Xuritas forces stood around looking very self-satisfied, like, There you go, ladies, that’s how it’s done. Glad we could clean up your mess. Everything was so loud. So many terrified people screaming and crying and begging for help all at once. She stopped for a middle-aged woman who’d been shot in the arm and torso. She was shivering and crying. A dark pixie haircut and small butterflies tattooed on her forearms. A dead man with a crew cut was draped over her, like he’d tried to shield her with his body, but of course he’d probably just fallen there. Her eyes pleaded with Andrea Sanchez for help. Andrea got a tourniquet around the woman’s arm and told her everything was going to be okay. The woman’s skin turned a ghostly white, her lips purple, and she was dead long before any paramedics were allowed onto the Mall. Andrea stayed with her awhile, and then got up because there was a controversy brewing as their forces continued to the Capitol.
Loren Victor Love and his team had returned to the White House three days earlier after the heat storm had thinned their problem. He was getting his hair cut while he watched the live feed from the Situation Room. Everyone in there was very quiet. Secretary Caperno chewed on her forefinger. The national security advisor held a hand to his mouth and tried to breathe evenly. Vice President McGuirk excused himself after the bloodshed began. Meanwhile, President Love’s barber cropped his hair. He’d be going on TV in the evening to explain the severity of this crackdown, the necessity of it, and this was the only opportunity, he claimed, to fit in the trim. The barber wore white latex as he sheered the sides of Love’s skull and scissored the top. An assistant, also wearing latex gloves, carefully collected the hair in a plastic bag, using a forensic light to locate every last strand. He did the same with each of the president’s nail clippings. It was also why Love defecated in a special toilet with a disposable box. All of this organic material was taken to a kiln and incinerated. It was not exactly paranoia, given what could be done these days with access to a person’s genetic material, but to have the man there with the HandScope LED collecting stray hairs while the security forces of the president’s former company shot unarmed protestors “is fucking Bond villain behavior,” one unnamed source would later tell the Washington Post. And yet there were those who experienced a version of unadulterated ecstasy. The way some found joy in Kate Morris’s rousing speech, these men and women found such deep pleasure when news arrived of this decisive action.
Outside the Capitol Building, between the amassed police, military, and security contractors, no one knew who was in charge. All chain of command had been lost, and many of them could only stand around gazing at the nightmare in the floodlights. Others itched to add a few more bodies to the pile. EMTs and medics were finally allowed onto the Mall, and they worked past their shock and disbelief. As dawn broke and the first dim light peered over the horizon, a heavy fog rolled in. The infrared cooling of a humid air mass created a dense, smoky cloud that cloaked the combatants, the blood, the living and the dying alike. Soldiers wandered in and out of the smoke. Ghosts disappearing and reappearing. The last person to die in the assault would be killed when a police horse accidentally trampled her to death. She lay on the ground crying for someone to help her. The horse got confused.
Kate Morris never saw any of it. While sleeping in the Speaker’s office, one of the new Blue Bands rushed in to tell her there was shooting, and they needed to get to a windowless room. When she heard the pops of gunfire, Kate had a moment to wonder if this was what she’d wanted: to goad them into the unthinkable. Now she was trying to push past this girl, who was blocking her way like she was her bodyguard, begging her not to walk outside.
“Listen to me,” said Kate, trying to slip past her.
“No please no please, stop, stop,” the girl pleaded. Her name was Krystal Robison. She was nineteen and had left her second semester at the University of Maryland to join the occupation and earn her blue band.
“I need to surrender. I need to tell them we’ll come out.”
“They’re killing people, Kate, they’re killing people,” Robison begged, her eyes enormous moons of terror. “Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t.”
“I think they’re coming in,” someone cried.
Then there was an explosion.
The mayor had usurped the chain of command and demanded that Metro Police be in charge of retaking the Capitol. He was gulping and sweating and feeling dizzy from the images beaming back to him from the Mall. The media blackout, enforced by helicopter, drone, and a five-mile perimeter, would never work, he realized. People in his office were weeping. His public affairs specialist had simply walked out. Quit in the middle of a crisis. He felt like he was giving orders in a dream where nothing obeyed the laws of physics, like a stapler might just float past his vision in this realm of selective gravity. But he barked the order into the phone. City SWAT would take the Capitol. They were not to use any more lethal force unless absolutely necessary.
After the flash-bangs sent everyone to the floor, these officers stormed into the Rotunda. Occupiers dove down and clutched the marble with their faces and begged not to be killed. Many were sobbing, certain these men were going to murder them while they lay there. Overcome with terror, a few ran. They were tased or shot with beanbag rounds. Not a single live bullet was fired in the Capitol. But when Tom Levine saw the cops grab a small woman and practically rip her arm out of its socket as they threw her against the wall, he reacted by instinct, leaping to his feet and screaming at them to stop. The first blow fell across the side of his head, ringing his ear, sending his vision spiraling to dark. Then the clubs and boots descended, and he felt something in his body crack irreparably, and he never recalled anything else.
The occupiers were zip-tied and hauled to buses on the east side of the Capitol grounds where there were fewer corpses and a niveous fog obscured most of the blood. Kate had fallen when the flash-bang erupted, and her daze was such that she’d stumbled away, losing consciousness briefly. She came to at the gift shop. She saw the flashlights cutting through the smoke, so she put herself down on her stomach with her hands on the back of her head and waited. No one realized who she was when they brought her to her feet. They were putting sacks over the heads of the arrested. The last thing she saw was the sweaty upper lip of the cop, then the darkness of the cloth, the world reduced to chaotic white noise, sirens, screaming, weeping, and pounding helicopter blades. She smelled the overpowering sewage scent of their takeover and something coppery and wet overlaying it. She’d never smelled that much blood before, so she couldn’t place it in context. To keep herself calm, she thought about the top of the last mountain she’d climbed, when Matt had fallen well behind her, and she stood on the peak, and how gorgeous and eerily silent it was when the wind died away. She was trembling inside her black hood all the way to the bus—right up until she was thrown bodily into a seat beside a weeping man. She apologized for banging off him. The man said nothing. Kept crying. She had to say something. She was, after all, the reason he was there.
“It’s going to be okay,” Kate said. “Really, it is.” She just wanted to be helpful.
“I couldn’t find my wife,” he sobbed, and he thrashed in shame and fury beside her. His voice cracked: “They were shooting and I fucking ran. I fucking ran, and I don’t know what happened to her! I don’t know where she is!”
Finally, within the halls of the Capitol, Quinton Marcus-McCall made his way to the House Chamber. He went to a spot just in front of the Speaker’s dais. The Blue Bands had kept it immaculately clean, preserving this image of a sacred space of democracy while their members took to the global stage to demand revolution. He waited, smelling the fumes on his clothes and reading the Daniel Webster inscription etched on the wall behind the dais. He held a lighter. He had three cameras discreetly set up in various positions in the chamber, including the gallery level. He’d talked to Liza Yudong about how to beat the government’s signal blocking, so the footage could be downloaded to an encrypted drop box. He flicked the lighter open and closed with a shink-snap. He heard the authorities coming down the hall. He got to his knees.
The men entered the House Chamber, channeling down the aisles like quick water. Demanding all the usual things. Ordering him to get down on the ground. Hands in this place or that place. Not entirely unfamiliar to a Black man who’d once been a teenager in Detroit. He held up a palm. “Fellas, stay back. For your own safety.” And though they were confused, the police did indeed stop. “Just know I’m doing this outta love,” he said. He had such a calm disposition, his face downcast but also still as water. “And for anyone watching, forgive them. Forgive everything they’ve done today. Love this fallen world as hard as you can.”
And he flicked open the lighter and touched it to his blue sweatshirt.
He’d jellied the gasoline himself not long after the first aborted effort to clear the Mall, siphoning from the Guard vehicle captured in the first intrusion. He knew they’d come again, and maybe this idea had been in his head a long time. Maybe as far back as his childhood when he was just an odd, bookish kid who spent too much time alone. That morning, when he heard the first shots ring out, he retrieved the can from its hiding place and soaked his clothes. During his six months of training in nonviolent resistance, as he prepared for this action, he’d also studied this process. Burn hot and burn fast. Go up quick, and the pain will only be a forgotten moment.
The SWAT team fell back as the man in front of the dais exploded in an incendiary burst of orange, pink, and yellow flame. The fire was so breakneck and demonic it roared to the top of the chamber, scorching the ceiling black. The man lurched from his knees to his feet, stumbled forward three steps, silent, his face already cloaked in flame, his eyes two hot coals. He spun halfway left, then right, and finally fell forward. He hit the ground with a dense boom-whoosh, flames lapping up all around his ruined body, hot smoke billowing from his impermanent shell. Someone screamed for a fire extinguisher, but the sprinkler system kicked on, and a hard rain fell across the chamber. Quinton Marcus-McCall only heard the agonizing scream of the fire catching his skin, the bright-hot full-body torment, the discovery of total, eclipsing pain. But then he heard hushed voices thundering in his ears. Eons rushed over him, with each second taking on the duration of whole millennia—the reign of the sun, Earth’s corpus blooming to life, humankind’s dallying—all visible for those interminable nanoseconds as the souls of the dead whispered in his ears. The terror he’d felt his whole life, a siege that begins at birth, slipped away, and the more the dread of oblivion receded the more overwhelming the wave of love. His mom and dad and sister were there, and even his life’s sorrows now felt precious. The curse of this life, from the yawp to the ashes, finally blew apart, vanishing to wind and stars.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ON THE ELEVATED PRICE OF GRAIN STAPLES, 2034
PRESENTATION CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
EYES ONLY: CONGRESSWOMAN TRACY AAMANZAIHOU
Ashir al-Hasan
December 5, 2034
Abstract: When we returned from our recent fact-finding mission, a public relations junket for which I now feel a measure of disdain, you asked me to complete this assessment of the domestic and global food situation as it stands after two years of skyrocketing prices. My apologies for this document’s tardiness. When you asked after my mental state in an armored SUV trundling over the dirt roads of rural Nigeria, I answered in such a way as to bring an end to the conversation. Here following is an effort to answer that query honestly, and perhaps use it to explicate the crisis of caloric deficit that is driving violence, insurgency, and faminogenic policy across the globe. Allow me to begin where I should have last month in the vehicle: with my friend, partner, and husband, Seth Andrew Young.
From the beginning of his participation in the Concert for the Climate, Seth and I argued. As I once alluded, I knew that Seth’s involvement was part of a larger plot to occupy the National Mall, although I doubt any of the participants could have predicted the action’s grisly endgame. Several hundred people lie dead, with thousands more injured or imprisoned in the effort to retake the core of the capital. Seth claimed he had no plans to actually participate in the occupation, that he was merely drawing from his years in government and knowledge of logistics and security protocol to facilitate a mass act of civil disobedience. Yet from our first date in Charlie Palmer Steak, Seth made no secret he cared deeply for climate and environmental legislation. He’d always wanted a way back in, and Kate Morris gave it to him. For the first week of the occupation, he left me and our au pair to deal with an infant, so that he might help Morris and her acolytes maintain their feeble grip on a few city streets and public monuments. We communicated frequently and tensely as he came to the decision to stay for as long as the occupation continued. Suffice it to say, my fury is hard to overstate. As city services shut down, and even Georgetown descended into a state of exception, I was forced to leave our condo and relocate to New York with my sister and her husband, Peter. When the Love administration offered amnesty to participants following the record-setting heat wave, Seth finally complied with my wishes to leave the encampment. That was July 30. Then came the assault. Two days later, he still had not sent word. We tried to engage the authorities, but even with my many connections, the hierarchies of government were in such a state of disarray that no progress was made. Though the government had attempted a media blackout, video leaked via a member of the occupation, who decided a novel idea would be to self-immolate on a live feed. It was arresting footage to say the least and the first indication that what had occurred on the National Mall was more than tear gas and arrests, that the carnage would dwarf what occurred in 2021. That night, with the children in bed, Haniya, Peter, and I huddled around the television as reports began to emerge of what had happened on August 1. Even Peter, never at a lack for a quip, was preternaturally quiet. In a way, that unnerved me more.
“This can’t be true,” Hani said at one point.
Then there was a doctor from a D.C. hospital telling reporters he had numerous patients riddled with gunshot wounds. He said: “There was a massacre.”
Hani turned to me: “Seth said they were about to give up.” Her tone was accusatory. “Ash, you said he and the others were going to leave.”
“That is what he said.” On television, there was footage of the ER. I’d never seen so much blood.
My sister can vacillate between boundless good humor and stony melancholy. She rarely weeps. It was disconcerting then, as she began to cry very hard and say to herself, “Astaghfirullah. Astaghfirullah.”
I had not heard my sister use Islam’s liturgical language since our father was alive. Why she was asking for forgiveness was beyond me, and I never inquired.
* * *
Residents and essential government personnel were allowed to return to the capital two weeks after the clearing, but I did not return until late September. It was remarkable how all partisans began by loudly condemning this outrageous action, calling it the slaughter it was, and then, quickly, conventional wisdom and official party lines were rescripted. I believe this was in no small part due to a conspiracy-theorist millenarian, who shifted the conversation in a matter of days. As a secure car took me across the Potomac for the first time since May, I watched The Pastor speak from the pulpit of his VR worlde:
“The liberal media says he acted brutally? Are you kidding me? President Love allowed our nation’s heart to be sacked by barbarians. He should have cut them down the moment they defied the sanctity of Christ’s chosen nation. Instead, he let them arrive like swarms of rats, carrying blasphemy and anti-American ideologies. If he fails to execute every last one of these traitors—when I’m president in two years—I will.”
It wasn’t a standard campaign declaration, but within hours of this speech, Republican competitors were scrambling to line up behind this message, if more tactfully. As the midterms approached, the Republicans seemed less interested in investigating the president’s atrocity than yanking people in front of hearings to ask why he hadn’t done it sooner. The Pastor has taken his place at the front of the phalanx. A few years ago, I’d dismissed him as a charlatan. Yet if his act was all a con to sell a potent new brand of religious zealotry, that zealotry was becoming unsettlingly convincing.
I shut off the speech when the driverless reached the National Mall. Seth and I met while running its length, and I still viewed the space with what one calls “romance” or “nostalgia.” To see it trampled and gouged into an ugly brown pit, laid waste by protestors and military forces alike, now defended with concertina wire, checkpoints, body scanners, FaceRec cameras, and endless clods of machine-gun-toting security forces, brought me great anguish. The fences were papered over with pictures of those who’d been killed along with a sea of votive candles, bouquets, and other commemorative detritus. That night, Saturday Night Live had its season premiere, and though I detest that cloying, obnoxious program, Seth was a devoted fan, and his amusement at such uninspired humor amused me. I’m sure he hadn’t missed an episode since the days of Will Ferrell in his boyhood. Of course, the performers had to begin with a somber song and feint toward grieving, and then it was on to an impersonation: Loren Victor Love as a grinning fascist full of bombastic militarized bravado. The narrative defines the caricature constructed around each political persona. Joanna Hogan had been playacted as homespun and bloodthirsty, hyper-competent but secretly savage. Mary Randall was portrayed by her comedienne as confident but embattled, besieged, and flummoxed as to why the multitudes of GOP faithful so despised her. In my few interactions with President Randall, I’d found her all too aware of what was happening to her and her presidency—almost resigned to it. It struck me that they had President Love wrong as well. Rumor has it, he very much enjoys his portrayal on the sketch comedy show, likely because, as with most men of machismo, he is insecure. My phone rang at some point during “Weekend Update.” It was an officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police. They had identified Seth’s body.
