The Deluge, page 82
The wind at least cooled her skin. From the second-floor balcony, she could see over the tops of a few seaside units, all of them dark, two of them collapsed, the roofs pancaking down. According to the motel clerk, Parmesh, about a third of the homes had already been in foreclosure before Tropical Storm Solomon shoved five feet of water up the shore. The quaint Gulf tourist town she’d known as a girl, when her parents rented from this same motel one week a year, lost the fight to condo development and regurgitated seaside housing. Now homebuyers had all but vanished.
“Being ‘underwater’ on your mortgage ain’t exactly figurative around here,” Parmesh had told her. Parmesh had a lot of rehearsed lines he deployed with self-satisfaction, but Shane found him friendly and wry, so they’d chatted while Lali clicked quarters together at the vending machine and agonized over her soda choice.
Propping her arms on the railing, Shane breathed in the slate-heather dawn. The air smelled of the sea. Seagulls squealing, soaring, and diving. She remembered the family photo taken from the balcony of this same motel. Her father had shoved his digital camera into the hands of some poor lady passing by. In that picture, there’d been shoreline behind their heads. Almost all of the beach had since vanished, the sea scraping back and reclaiming raw earth.
Behind her, the AC rattled to life. The TV chirped. They must have fallen asleep with it on last night before the power went out. She stood there a while longer watching the sea.
Back in the room, Lali was awake, running a brush through her hair, watching the news. “Anything?” Shane asked.
ON THE MYSTERY OF VICTOR LOVE “Love did not appear on election night but instead sent his campaign manager to declare victory. He has not actually made a public appearance since two weeks before the election. The White House press secretary says he’s secluded at Camp David trying to deal with the situations in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and California. As we know, Aaron McGuirk resigned in protest after the events in D.C. and was never replaced. Now many are questioning Love’s mental health, not to mention the chain of command.”
THE PASTOR In Berkeley, fifteen people were killed after a man opened fire on a voting line. Voters faced intimidation at polling sites around the country as armed militias arrived to “protect the vote.” The Pastor had denied coordination with these forces, promising “biblical justice” would befall those denying his victory. Never had a presidential candidate promised executions of his political enemies. Now pundits debated if he was serious about executing members of their profession. “Why are we speculating about voices of moderation in his cabinet? He’s telling us what he will do.”
“Nope,” Lali said curtly. Only twelve and Lali already needed a preemptive exorcism for her surly teen posture. Shane knew better than to try a conversation this early, so she merely sat down on the bed. Two days after the election, and still no one knew who won, a debacle that was making 2000 and 2020 look relatively ordered and sane. The Pastor seemed to be close to the electoral college with 264 votes, but President Love had won the popular vote, and seven states were going to need recounts. Tracy Aamanzaihou received enough votes in those seven that she’d played the role of spoiler for Vic Love. Both Democratic and Republican camps were assuring their voters and the media that they had won.
She sat on her moist side of the bed, reading even grimmer news on the chyron below: pogroms in India, violence in the IDP camps in Arizona, FEMA overwhelmed as it tried to deal with the California refugee crisis, and President Love AWOL. She looked at Lali, who appeared to be taking it all in with her strange, inscrutable calm. The brush ripped at her hair. They’d driven down to Gulfport the day before, Shane concocting an obscure and unsatisfying excuse, which Lali was surely used to by now. The older she got, the worse Shane was at lying to her. She thought of leaving Lali back in Lawrence, but with the ligature of the world fraying, this scared her.
“You’ll be okay on your own today, Lals? I should only be a few hours.”
“I told you, yes.” Her eyes never left the TV. They had a fight a few weeks earlier about the amount of time Lali spent in VR. Shane had taken the set, and Lali hadn’t forgiven her.
The news pivoted, and abruptly there she was, dressed in a simple blue sweater with holes in the cuffs, speaking from the offices of her new operation.
“We only have our numbers,” she told an interviewer. She had an edginess in her voice and a craze to her eyes. Hair still like a wild river. “We are the majority, locked out by a political process that can no longer respond to the will of the people. So we need to shut that process down. Forget about Climate X. I’m talking about mass disruption to our economic system. And it starts with putting our bodies between the corporate state and its ends. Deny them any ability to continue with business as usual—”
“But won’t that—” The interviewer cut her off, and there was cross talk before he won out. “Don’t you fear that could exacerbate the civil unrest we’re seeing right now? Won’t that lead to more violence?”
“Yeah, not if our fucking government stops murdering its own people!” Her face was taut, the vein in her neck pulsing. “Trust me, Vic Love, The Pastor, Koch Industries, Exxon—these motherfuckers don’t have enough prisons or bullets in the world. So on November 7, we’re going to stop working again, we’re going to blockade again, we’re going to shut down the economy again. And I promise you, we will keep fucking coming.”
And after the third f-word they cut away from her, the anchor apologizing to the audience at home.
“Please don’t watch too much TV, Lali. Read a book today or something.”
Lali muted the TV, flipped over on her side, and pulled the covers over her face. Her hair fanned out over the pillow. She claimed she wasn’t really a girl in America in 2036 but a “post-biological, auto-teleological superintelligence” from the deep future inhabiting an avatar in a role-playing game living a complete, mundane human life from cradle to grave. She was serious about this, as she was serious about most everything. Shane told herself this lonesomeness and anger was just a phase.
She passed Parmesh in the office, and he gave her a cheery wave before turning his attention back to local radio, the host musing on the fate of the Gulf Coast. She grabbed a bagel from the grimy continental breakfast buffet and was on her way.
She drove with an arm out the window to catch the wind in her open palm. Most of the homes along Route 90 were battered, destroyed, empty, foreclosed, or for sale, and it gave the land a hallucinogenic quality, like it was previewing itself in the fog of a dream. Across the Mississippi shore, she got a look at the damage Solomon had wrought. The streets were mostly clear now, but lined with snowdrifts of splintered wood, plaster shards, particle board, trash, and shattered glass. She passed trucks stamped with NRA and APL decals, the snarling Cerberus, Stars and Bars, and homes with enormous flags flapping for The Pastor. On the ocean side, empty pilings stretched skyward after pitching the homes they held into the water. They looked like supplicating arms. Beyond the shore, she could see ink-dot islands and sandspits washed by garbage. The sea was calm, the waves sighing in and out, foam bubbling on sand. A snowy egret drifted on the wind so that it remained stationary in the sky. She drove west and thought about what she would say to Quinn, Kai, and Murdock when they met for lunch.
THE WATER WILL COME The radio didn’t need to tell Parmesh Singh that. Pretty fucking obvious. The low-relief, sandy barrier islands were more or less already swallowed up, and there was so little protection from king tides that the water simply invaded whole neighborhoods. His parents had refused to sell in the ’20s when the writing was on the wall, and now all the motel could do was house the charity cases FEMA dropped on them and hope to dodge bankruptcy for a few more years. His dad blamed illegal immigrants and drug dealers.
23.6 MM PER YEAR Or .93 inches, said NPR. Scientists disagreed on how much faster the water might rise. According to the Tulane scientist being interviewed, the problem was that no human had ever seen an ice cap collapse before, let alone studied the dynamics that determined how quickly it raised sea levels. Insurers seemed to believe one thing while the real estate industry believed the diametric opposite and still scrambled to sell seaside properties, from Cape Cod to Houston, before entire continents of ice could melt into the oceans.
* * *
In the nearly four years since South Carolina, Shane watched Lali grow up. She stretched out, developed buds of breasts, learned how to read very well, and spoke a bit of Spanish for a while before a few girls at school overheard her and began the torment. She was smart but odd. She hated anything other kids liked and spent most of her time painting in her Slapdish worlde. Shane, of course, knew her password and kept tabs. Lali had built hillsides, a prairie, and weather that changed each time you entered. In this quixotic worlde, there were ruins to explore, most of which had incongruent medieval and colonial architecture. A family of pterodactyls would buzz the sky, and there was a strange black-purple pit in the middle of a church with no roof. It had what looked like teeth on the edges of its fleshy chasm, and when Shane peered into it, there was water or mucus below.
Lali was a solemn kid, so unlike Shane at that age when she’d made friends easily and, like her father, gabbed with anyone. She ached for Lali to find friends, but she kept talking about how she wanted to be homeschooled in the VR set. It was even more disturbing when she argued with her daughter about all the insects and plants tipping into extinction, year by year. Shane felt it was part of her duty to focus Lali’s attention on what would be gone by the time she was grown. But Lali said she didn’t care.
“How can you not care?” Shane begged her.
“It doesn’t matter. We have the other worlds now. They’re better anyway.”
It was such an obvious and unsparing thing for a child of her generation to say. How could her own daughter be such a dystopian cliché? Then again, what kind of mother had she been? She’d never taken Lali camping, the girl refused to hike for more than twenty minutes, and teaching her about songbirds, soil, or the savanna elicited eyerolls so dramatic it made Shane want to slap her.
Of course, as Lali grew, Allen’s youngest son, Perry, who never did manage to move out of his parents’ house, remained the same age. He lay there in her nightmares wheezing through a lung filling with blood. She and Allen sometimes talked about what happened. He didn’t haunt her so much as they had dream-arguments about why she’d done it.
6Degrees was supposed to start its new campaign in the fall of ’35, but a month before, Shane had mailed three postcards with pictures of San Diego—their signal that they needed to abort. Greetings from Tinkerbell, she’d written. This meant her source was telling her the op was in danger, which held off Quinn and the others for a while. A year of frustrated messaging followed. They kept asking what exactly her woman at the JTTF knew, and Shane kept feeding them bullshit. Just trying to delay.
By September, she was driving to check the mailbox in Tonganoxie almost every other day. Then she got a message from Quinn: the lottery ad featuring the small Asian girl, grinning and missing a front tooth as her mom scratched away at a potential fortune. They all had their photographic tags so the recipient would know who the piece of steganography was coming from. Shane sat down with her edition of The Stand and began to decode, only to quickly realize that the letters were coming out in a nonsense jumble. She sat for a long time trying to figure out if this was a bluff check or something had gone wrong with the communication, until, abruptly, it dawned on her: This message was meant for a different keystone. Which meant it wasn’t intended for her. Which meant the others were talking behind her back. Which likely meant they knew she was lying. She decided to confront the situation head on. She wrote to Quinn to tell her she’d sent this message to the wrong person. She asked what the keystone book was.
I can’t give you that information, Quinn wrote back. After decoding, Shane drove home and pondered. She watched Vic Love, The Pastor, and Tracy Aamanzaihou spar on a debate stage in Nevada while Lali did her math homework. Then Shane went to her desk, penned her message, and printed out the flyer right then.
Give me the keystone or I burn you all. Don’t fucking forget who I am.
In twenty years, she’d never been impulsive like this, and when she dropped the flyer into the USPS box that night, she knew the threat was irrevocable. She felt the claustrophobia of too many secrets and not enough allies. But she had to know what they’d said. Not knowing made the dreams with Perry so much worse. A week went by before she got Quinn’s reply: Willa Cather. My Ántonia. We should talk.
She went straight to the KU bookstore, found a copy, and decoded the flyer right there. She sat and stared at it for a long time.
Shane is out. Keep her dark. Same schedule. Central organizing goes through me now.
She didn’t have much choice after that. She told them they had to meet, the original 6Degrees. Minus Allen, of course. She chose the Gulf Coast city she remembered as a child because it was as anonymous as anywhere else these days. And obviously, she chose a public place.
The restaurant was perched on the edge of a bayou with nothing but dead cypress trees on the approach. Built in a time when developers figured the American shore would retain the solidity of a grade-school-classroom map, it was an upscale place she’d chosen on a whim, just far enough away from her motel so they wouldn’t happen upon where she was staying. They’d argued bitterly over shattering twenty years of protocol.
She found Quinn on the restaurant’s outdoor deck, overlooking the stewing Gulf. They hugged, and despite everything their embrace was tender. “Good to see you, sister.”
QUINN Thought Shane looked just awful. Old and overweight. She’d built this moment up in her mind for months, and here was the woman she’d so feared, a harried mother on the verge of collapse. Maybe they should have been feeding her even more money through Archie’s system. Maybe they shouldn’t have left a waitress spinning her wheels in a collapsing economy, which was probably what was fueling her shortsighted discontent. She was relieved that Shane at least didn’t have the kid with her, although at this point, there was nothing you could put past her. Shane had been unraveling ever since Allen.
“You too,” said Quinn. They took a seat. “So should we start with apologies?” Quinn asked her. “Because I can if you can.”
Shane swallowed. “Of course. I am sorry.”
“For threatening us.”
“Yes.”
Quinn nodded. She had her blond hair pulled back into a loose diagonal braid that pillowed into a side bun. She oozed the self-assurance of a woman with the upper hand in a salary negotiation. Shane opened her mouth to begin clearing the air, but before she could, Murdock and Kai were at the hostess stand and then on their way to the table.
“Shane, darling,” said Murdock, taking her in his arms. His fat stretched his plain white T-shirt to the point of comedy. She saw he had a new tattoo on his chunky forearm, a patch of crammed script she couldn’t make out. He’d shaved his head clean. But for the eyebrows, he looked a bit like Allen. “Where’s Lali-girl?” he asked. When he sat, Murdock overflowed the chair, his gut pushing against the table.
“She went with her friends’ family to the Ozarks for the week,” said Shane. “Easier that way.”
“Hey,” was all Kai said, and he hugged her as well. He wore a posh blue jacket over a black shirt, which looked too warm. His brow was as smooth as she remembered. He seemed never to age. His eyes were murky and sad. He looked quite beautiful.
She cleared her throat.
“I was telling Quinn how sorry I am for the threat. I just think we’re moving too fast on—”
“You want to get a drink first?” Quinn interrupted.
“A fantastic idea, Quinn,” said Murdock. Shane closed her mouth.
They ordered pints of hazy IPA, cocktails, and a dozen oysters. Shane stuck with water. The restaurant was filling up, like a meeting of the local chamber of commerce had let out, and all of Bay St. Louis’s slickest wheelers and dealers were hungry to support their most endangered restaurant.
ARCHIE Had put Kai in his place. He’d demanded there be accountability for Allen, that someone pay a price for what he’d had to read about online. All Archie wrote was, There will be no price. You take orders from the ladies now. Thx. Even as he hugged Shane, his oldest living friend, he wanted to scream in her face, How could you? First Allen and now this? Who the fuck are you?
“We shouldn’t go through with this,” Shane said abruptly. “Or I guess, you all shouldn’t go through with this. Since I’m no longer in the picture.”
Murdock looked out at the water. Kai cast his gaze at the clean white tablecloth and left it there. Only Quinn looked her in the eye.
“You see it, Shane,” she said. “All the years of talk about the end of the world, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s the beginning. And no one can wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.”
“That’s why we’re trying to build something that will outlast us,” Shane said fiercely. “That will live on no matter how dark it gets.”
Quinn took her fingertips to her eyes, closed and rubbed them. “Will it? With anything we’ve done so far? When all was said and done, Shane, a lot more was said than done.”
“What does that even mean?” she demanded.
“It means you were right in Wisconsin,” said Kai. His gaze did not leave the table. “And I was wrong. We spent all those years thinking we could chip away at their power, and all we did was give them a rationale to stop limiting their own violence. Or did you not see what happened in Washington?”
MURDOCK When Shane had been a young woman, beautiful and strong, she’d sat him down in the Bob Evans in Ohio to walk him through her plan. It sounded far-fetched, yes, but something about her bearing made it also seem realistic, plausible even. She had a weapon inside her—or she was the weapon—and he could feel himself craving the action again, the battle rhythm. And they made it happen. His bombs went off, and they all escaped like bandits in the night. Yet the more years that went by, the more implacable it all felt. The more they seemed like gnats on the heels of a few dark, fucked-up immortals, and the gods, they just swat you and carry on all the same. He wished then, only briefly, that none of this had ever happened. That he’d spent his life after the war drinking down his own beating heart instead.
