The Deluge, page 80
He leads you behind the church, up the crest of the hill, and through a smattering of woods that separates his church’s land from the farm behind it. You walk along the ridge, trudging through the snow. The fallow edges of the field are rimmed with solar panels that glint in the bright sun while the woods beyond gather darkness in the space between the trunks. Ice coats the trees so they look crystallized, like sculptures. You step through some battered, fallen fencing, and he leads you along a trail through the field.
“We bought this property back when we had more parishioners,” he tells you. “Ginna wanted to build a farm, which would be nice right now. Obviously, those plans are on hold. Still, I love it. It’s so peaceful.”
“I went to see the APL folks up in Sugarcreek,” you confess. “That’s how desperate I been lately.”
He looks at you more with curiosity than fear. “How was that?”
“About what you’d expect.”
Your voices sound too crisp. Even as it renders the sunlight brighter, the packed snow makes the sound too precise, like the crack of Casey’s rifle. You brace your body against a freezing burst of wind.
“I certainly understand the allure,” says Andrade. “Powerlessness causes us to seek power any way we can. We’d sacrifice anything, particularly our conscience, to feel it. There is nothing more dangerous than the excitement of those suffering from a lack of agency and great bitterness of soul.”
“The day you saved me—’member that?”
“How could you even ask? Of course.”
“I had this feeling like, ‘This is it. This is where it all starts to turn around. I got this now.’ And then…” You wave your gloved hands in front of you like you’re signaling that a receiver didn’t catch the football. “It was all gone within a couple of weeks, and I was in a little eight-foot cell. You can tell yourself God is always with you, but… Empty is so much bigger.”
The reverend considers this.
“Not to get on one of my rants here, but let’s just say that many Christians these days have a deeply impoverished view of the notion of a Creator.” He waits for you, but you say nothing. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I don’t think nothing. I think all this talk of Jesus and salvation, it’s just a way to keep us all in line. I saw it while I was inside. Guys like me, we ain’t nothing but a walking dollar sign to most people. Probably to you too.”
“That’s a cynical way to look at it.”
You shrug, spit in the snow. “Never really got a chance to see it from any other vantage.”
Andrade nods like he takes this very seriously. He directs his gaze at the ground, thoughtful, vexed, searching. “Think about it this way, Keeper, about what God must actually be—a power vibrating in our every atom, built into the explosions of distant stars, and circling the dust of worlds you and I will never be able to contemplate. We are part of some vast, mysterious, eternal Whole set in motion by a force so awesome that it is ultimately unknowable. Do you feel me? We can’t always see the direction or meaning of it all, but to even glimpse this tiny corner of the Whole—what an incredible opportunity. What a grave responsibility.”
You glance back at your tracks. Four lonely boots leaving their tread marks in the pristine blanket. You keep walking. The clouds move in. A grim, milky cast falls over the field, the trees, the sky. You hock up buttery snot, bringing it from your throat and blow-darting it into the snow.
Finally you say, “That sounds very pretty. But it’s hard to square with… with what I been through.”
“I know you feel it, man. Maybe when you see your son laugh or when you get your arms around Raquel or even just when you’re alone, walking through a beautiful patch of Ohio.” He gestures to the snowy woods. “To save one life is to save all of humanity. Ever heard that? And now it’s simply time to save yourself.”
You know Andrade is trying to make you feel like you are this infinitely precious thing, but you can’t bring yourself to get past the opposite sense: that you are narrow and corporeal and alone.
“If you knew what… the things I done…”
You stop, and the reverend stops beside you. There’s a shard in your throat, so you choke on every other word to keep it at bay, to keep your voice hard.
“I’ve done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I’ve—I’ve hurt people. People I don’t even know or couldn’t even find again to tell ’em I’m sorry. Tell ’em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That’d just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.” Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. “We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I’m crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there’s slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But then finally, the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn’t collapse, and she’s shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then…” Your voice cracks again, and you let a small sob escape. “As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she’s just staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up…”
Now you can’t help yourself. You start crying, and it’s embarrassing, how you’re powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you’re still cradling her.
“I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.”
Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you’re surprised to see the reverend is also crying.
“I carried her out and handed her off. I never found out what happened to her. I’ll never know what happened to her.”
A soft smile folds into Andrade’s cheeks and the deep lines of his face catch his tears. He puts a hand on your shoulder.
“Despite all the mumbo jumbo I just talked, remember, brother, you are alive. You are alive, and as long as your lungs draw breath, you have love in you. And you have hope. No man or woman is beyond love or hope—I firmly believe that in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Every last person is worthy and capable of redemption. People might think that’s soft-headed, but it’s actually realistic. It’s the only belief I’d gladly die for. It’s never too late to begin again. You proved that to that little girl.”
He laughs heartily. In the winter, the sunset seems to change every day. This one descends like a hazel shroud, shadows gathering like the dark traces of a storm in its becoming.
He pats you on the shoulder. “Let’s go get a sandwich, Keeper. I’m hungry.”
You trace your footsteps back over the field, boots crunching in the snow through the descent of night, which looks like a pool of mercury spilling across the heavens.
Book V
THE LONG WAY HOME
The New Yorker
A YEAR OF WONDERS
On the Unraveling of 2036. How Close Are We to the Brink?
By Moniza Farooki
October 27, 2036
There are years that simply rock the world, when events collide to produce unrest and dislocation on scales outside the imagination of those living at the time. Nineteen fourteen, 1968, and 2020 all come to mind. In 2036, two years of the highest food prices since World War II triggered famines in nine countries, the worst downturn since Covid-19, and at least three documented genocides. The planet is awash in civil wars, failed states, low-grade insurgencies, mass migration, and frightening xenophobic politics. Before 2036, the Nigerian civil war and the breakdown of the Arabian Peninsula had nearly obliterated those nations and inundated their neighbors with millions of refugees desperate to escape the bloodshed. The Chinese government continued its onslaught against its own growing internal revolt. Jakarta suffered the worst cholera outbreak of the twenty-first century after Typhoon Bini caused the wholesale collapse of seawalls. After decades of crack-up, the shards of the European Union appeared to be reuniting, born again in the image of Norwegian prime minister and convicted mass murderer Anders Breivik, whose government, fueled by a resurgent oil and gas economy and a mastery of social VR disinformation, has spread its venomous ideology across the continent. Hanging over all of this has been a US presidential race, which arrived like an ominous comet, with a reviled authoritarian president being belittled and homophobically denigrated by a wild-eyed former actor turned theocratic fascist. Little did we know the self-reinforcing crises of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF 2036, VR ENTERTAINER AND REPUBLICAN presidential candidate The Pastor held a rally at the North Charleston Coliseum & Performing Arts Center in South Carolina in which he declared, “This president will bring our economy roaring back to life with the earth’s bounty of gas, oil, and coal. He will feed the hungry and clothe the poor. He will enforce Christian will on America and American will everywhere else, and he will do so with the ultimate weapons if God calls upon him to.” It would be his first reference to the use of America’s nuclear arsenal but not his last. As he stormed through the primary, laying waste to perennial also-rans such as Senator Marco Rubio and establishment props like Congressman Warren Hamby (who would soon kiss his ring, literally, when selected as his running mate), The Pastor mentioned atomic weapons 211 times. His Slapdish worlde now implies that he is the Second Coming, and that Revelation will begin to play out when he is allowed access to the nuclear football. “Jesus came to John wielding a sword, and great storms and heat and fire descended, and those with doubt suffered like no humans had ever suffered before. For I am the Power,” he screamed, “who will deliver oil from the ground, life to the unborn, security for our borders, and the justice of an awesome God!” His supporters thundered their approval, writhed on the ground, spoke in tongues, and held signs proclaiming him not The Pastor but the Christ. He won the South Carolina primary by twenty-five points.
ON MARCH 5, AS THE PASTOR SECURED AN INSURMOUNTABLE delegate lead, Los Angelenos took shelter. For Californians, the Big One has always referred to the fury locked within the San Andreas Fault, but after the Los Angeles megafire it got reappropriated, even as the fire set the city on a rebuilding spree that would have made an Egyptian pharaoh blush. Yet, another Big One lay in wait. Atmospheric rivers have lashed and drowned California for generations, rainstorms of immense power that can drop millions of gallons of water in the span of a day. Scientists called the worst-case scenario ARkSTORM, a nine-hundred-year flood event that could overwhelm the state’s aging flood control infrastructure. Climate change made this biblical event that much more likely.
“We knew this El Niño year was particularly dangerous because the equatorial Pacific hit record-breaking temperatures,” said former NOAA chief Dr. Jane Tufariello. “It’s intensifying the drought devastating Asia and fueling unrest in China, but it’s also juicing the atmospheric rivers. We saw ARkSTORM coming, but that’s different from being able to do something about it.”
Mary Randall once called Tufariello “the best scientist in the government.” She has served presidents of both parties and may have the broadest institutional understanding of the climate crisis in the world. “I’m not shook by much,” she said. “But when I saw this coming, I was scared.”
The behemoth storm came whipsawing out of the Pacific, strafing Southern California before bouncing back briefly to make full landfall just south of the Bay Area. The rest we know.
In the course of two weeks, the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta transformed into an expanding lake of destruction, overwhelming a suboptimal system of levees and canals. Three million people living in the Sacramento Valley were given as little as thirty minutes to gather belongings and flee. When a levee breaks it sounds like an explosion that never ends, and what flows forth arrives with the violence of a tsunami. Hundreds died in their cars and homes, while floodwaters swallowed escape routes and left millions stranded without access to electricity, food, or drinking water. For hundreds of miles in every direction, corpses would be found in attics or floating miles downriver. Sacramento was underwater. One could look to the horizon and no longer see the Central Valley, just this new cold inland sea.
In Southern California, the Whittier Narrows Dam failed. The tempest exploded across the city of Pico Rivera, home to nearly seventy thousand people, most of whom, thankfully, obeyed evacuation orders. An eighteen-foot wall of water swept in, and every community from Pico to Long Beach experienced catastrophe. From the other end, the tidal surge blasted through the streets of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, soaking the overdeveloped floodplain as far inland as Anaheim. Coastal highways were washed back to dirt trails, and hundreds of landslides sent walls of rock, mud, and debris burying all structures along with those inside. Orange County filled with five feet of chocolate water as the Santa Ana River spilled over its levees and inundated homes. In Santa Barbara, a piece of mountain sheered away, shredding through two neighborhoods and killing every resident in under a minute.
Up and down the coast, waterlogged bluffs and cliffs collapsed into the sea from the power of wave energy alone, taking hundreds of houses with them. Electricity cutoffs disrupted emergency services and telecommunications. There was no power, no internet, and data servers were wiped out. Silicon Valley was dark. Police, firefighters, and other emergency workers could not rely on power grids or telecommunications networks. Hospitals and wastewater treatment plants went without power for weeks. Damage estimates range from between $750 billion and $1 trillion statewide.
As Coast Guard rescues continued throughout the spring, the California National Guard, the Red Cross, and A Fierce Blue Fire’s mutual aid network descended on the state. So did militias, looters, and Xuritas soldiers. The ferocity of the looting cannot be overstated: frenzied dashes through department stores, malls, grocers, jewelry stores, electronics centers. What began as a perilous search for food devolved into all-encompassing scavenger riots. Months later, after disturbing reports of mob violence and militia lynchings, Xuritas is still there, securing infrastructure and distribution points for food, water, and medical supplies, exercising dubious authority, harassing the nonwhite for proof of citizenship. With local police departments overwhelmed, the security contractor, for all practical purposes, is the law in California now. An estimated two million people now live in homeless encampments and abandoned retail stores in the deserts of the southeast counties while Arizona and Nevada threaten “deportation” for those who’ve spilled across the state lines, an internal refugee crisis not seen in this country since the Dust Bowl.
It is hard to imagine how California will recover. The severity of the flooding has demolished a cataclysmic amount of infrastructure in the state’s two largest population hubs. Perhaps more importantly, California’s private insurance market, already rocked by the 2031 fire, has completely collapsed. There is no taxpayer backstop large enough to insure all the property at risk and the battle to drop coverage and deny claims by insurers has only just begun. Wall Street is whispering about reverberations in the wider financial markets.
Like the LA megafire, the catastrophe wrought comparisons to a Hollywood blockbuster. Images of high-stakes rescues from floodwaters and terrified people running from landslides dominated the public consciousness, and yet as horrifying as it seemed for those two weeks in March, in the context of our permanent emergency, ARkSTORM barely had staying power. It opened, the box office was good, and then it was gone from the news in a matter of weeks. Twenty thirty-six was just getting started.
ON MAY 2, A TROPICAL DEPRESSION STRENGTHENED TO A CYCLONE in the Bay of Bengal. Cyclone Giri ratcheted to a monster, bursting the seams of Category 5 designation. By the time Giri made landfall it was a four-hundred-mile-wide superstorm that simultaneously lashed the shores of India and Myanmar. With sustained wind speeds of 210 mph and gusts reaching 255 mph, it was one of the most powerful cyclones ever recorded. Giri swallowed the Bangladeshi coast from the western deltas to Cox’s Bazar. A high tide brought a storm surge of twenty-five feet, and whole villages were swept away. In the Sundarbans, the islands connected like muscle sinew by mangrove forests, clay dikes toppled and shrimp farms were eradicated. The soil, water, and yellowed mud of these coastal flats is home to over nineteen million people who now have little possibility of return or renewal. Khulna, one of Bangladesh’s key ports, was effectively wiped off the map. To say there’s nothing left is incorrect because there are splinters left. There is twisted metal and plastic piping and brick rubble and collapsed concrete and drowned wildlife. There are bodies. Thousands of them.
For forty years, experts warned that Bangladesh was an unprecedented calamity waiting to happen. There was the unnamed 1991 cyclone that killed 138,000. Before that, in 1970, a cyclone killed half a million people when it hit Bhola in what was then East Pakistan and prompted my grandparents to immigrate to Britain. Both cyclones were smaller than Giri. However, size doesn’t explain everything. It’s almost more important to look at what has happened within Bangladesh itself—the human components that made this horrible outcome almost inevitable. Even when my parents took me as a child, Bangladesh was one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. I recall Dhaka as a teeming, claustrophobic sea where the sound of car horns and the zing of rickshaw bells produced a 24/7 cacophony. City and country continued their astonishing growth, with Dhaka swelling to twenty-five million. Most of this was due to migration, rural farmers watching their land vanish as the seas rose and saltwater intrusion destroyed their livelihoods.
