The Deluge, page 85
“This wasn’t here when we left,” said Lali.
“I know, hon.”
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing. They’re just going to check our IDs.”
The line crept forward as they waved drivers through. But when there were only two cars ahead of them, the man began gesturing for the driver of the Chevy Suburban to get out. There was an argument. Lali was now watching intently.
“What is happening?” she demanded. Shane said nothing. “Mama, what are they doing?” Then the man with the gun pulled on the handle of the door. When it didn’t open, he reached through the window and unlocked it from the inside. He grabbed the driver by the arm and jerked her out, a middle-aged white woman wearing a faded dress with a chintzy flower print. She was protesting and trying to pull her arm back as the cop—or whatever he was—guided her to a trailer off the side of the highway. Lali was practically shouting. “What are they doing. Why are they taking her out? Are they going to take us out?”
“No, doll.” Another armed man got in the woman’s car and began driving it to the berm.
“Mommy,” Lali was crying, panicked. Shane’s heart beat so hard it hurt her chest, and she felt like throwing up. “Let’s turn around,” Lali sobbed. “Please, let’s turn around.”
They were one car back. A new border guard leaned into the window of the gray sedan in front of them. Shane had an ID with a white surname and wondered if she should reach for that now. Simone Schafer came in handy sometimes.
“Mommy, I don’t want to go. They’re going to take you. I know they’re going to take you.” Lali kept repeating this, and it was too eerie and specific a fear, as if she subconsciously knew what her mom had been doing all these years.
“Doll, you gotta stop crying, okay? It’s all going to be—”
She looked over and saw the stain in the crotch of Lali’s ill-fitting slacks. The first time in nearly a year. Now Lali’s crying was streaked with this new shame, and her sobs were just too loud. They were almost up.
Shane reached into the truck’s back seat for Lali’s backpack and shoved it onto her lap to cover her accident. Then she grabbed her daughter’s face.
“Baby, it’s fine. All right? I’m not going to let anything happen to me. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you. It’s you and me, right? They can’t touch us, right?” Lali had a single terrified syllable stewing in the back of her throat. She could smell the salt of her girl’s tears.
“Please,” Lali moaned. “Let’s just turn around. Turn around turn around turn around—”
“Lals.” She cut her off. “Lals. Who are we? We’re outlaws, right?”
Lali nodded miserably, choked, and nodded some more.
“I ain’t going anywhere and neither are you. Except home. You and me forever. Got it?”
Lali sobbed and nodded, and the car in front of them drove on. The man with the assault rifle waved them forward. She pulled on her dust mask and waited for two tumbleweeds to bounce past before pressing the accelerator. He was young, white, and the absence of emotion on his face made her skin crawl. He took her ID. Shane Acosta of Lawrence, Kansas. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked through the window at Shane. Then Lali. She could not help but think of how easy it was for men like this, in this same position at border checkpoints all over the world, to do whatever they wanted to a mother and daughter on their own.
“Lower your mask,” he said, and she did. He looked from her face to the ID and back.
“This all is new,” said Shane, giving her voice a friendly twang.
“This your daughter?” he said.
Lali let a sob escape and Shane willed her to be calm.
“Yes, sir. She had an accident while we were waiting, which is why she’s feeling silly.” Shane lifted the backpack to show him. Lali stared at the carpet while tears dripped from her eyes. The man said nothing. He handed back her ID and waved her on. Lali sobbed quietly as they put distance between themselves and the new haunted borderland.
* * *
Off the highway, they drove through the vanished municipalities of southern Kansas, abandoned downtowns and foreclosed suburbs looking even more ethereal in the dim, dead light. Most people had moved on years ago. The Ogallala in retreat, the great western drought dessicating the land, there simply wasn’t enough water. The ones who stubbornly remained, who’d dug wells halfway to the core of the Earth or rigged complex rainwater capture systems, were isolated and paranoid. One trailer, built on the remnants of an abandoned feedlot, had an enormous sign with neon-green spray paint beaming brightly through the gloom: FUCK OFF! NOTHING LEFT 2 STEAL!
A drive that should’ve taken fourteen hours ended up at seventeen, and Shane, exhausted and twitchy, pulled in front of their small rental on a side street of a struggling college town. She wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed, praying for a sleep without dreams. She woke Lali. Backpack slung over a shoulder, Lali’s hand in hers, she pounded up the porch steps, the thud of their feet warped in the grim gray cloud enveloping the town. She worried what this air was doing to her daughter’s lungs.
As she slid the key into the lock, she noticed it. To the left of the door, above the mailbox stuffed with junk, their house number: 315. Something was wrong, and it took her a moment to make sense of it. The 5 was turned upside down and bolted back in so it read like an S.
31
At first, she only struggled to imagine how this could be, who would have done this, and she almost turned the key and opened the door anyway—she was just so very tired. But this oddity, it mattered, she was sure, and her mind went racing backward to find a context. Back through the Gulf Coast and Lawrence and a cabin in Wisconsin and a chain restaurant in Ohio and a fallow field in South Carolina on a too-warm winter night.
She withdrew her key.
“Why aren’t we going in?” Lali asked. She was still half-asleep. Shane looked all around the door. The windows all had the blinds pulled down as she’d left them.
“Lals, go back and get in the car.”
“But why?”
“Just do it, okay? And don’t get out no matter what.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”
With Lali back in the truck, Shane pushed through the brush on the left side of their lot, eyeing the neighbors’ house, though no one appeared to be home. In the small backyard, where she and Lali had once tried to grow tomatoes only to be defeated by raccoons, she approached the back door. She put her ear to it and listened, as if this would tell her anything. She dragged a filthy plastic lawn chair to the opaque bathroom window. Taking one more look around to make sure she was alone, she smashed the glass in with her elbow. She removed the remaining shards from the frame and poked her head in. The bathroom door was open, and through it, she could see the edge of the living room. It looked as if the furniture had been rearranged.
The problem was they couldn’t just leave. There was a folder, hidden in a hollowed-out shelf of the bookcase next to her piano, with information that could lead back to her original self. And maybe she didn’t matter so much. If it wasn’t for Lali, maybe she would just leave it all there and take her chances. She crawled through the window, careful to avoid scraping herself, and crunched over the broken glass on the floor. She eased her head out to peer down the hall.
There was a device on the back door that led into the kitchen and a wire curling through the dining room into the living room, where it connected to a central apparatus. Several chairs were arrayed there in a circle, each of them holding a car battery and flanked by cans of gasoline. Shane hadn’t learned everything about explosives over the years, but she’d learned enough. If she’d opened either the front or back door, the whole house would have gone up.
She allowed herself only a single flash of grief and rage. She’d told them Lali wasn’t with her. Or maybe they didn’t care that she might walk through the door with her child. Either way, this heartbreak, she understood, would follow her forever. Yet another sorrow to tally for people she’d once loved who were now, one way or the other, gone.
She gingerly stepped over the wires that led from one incendiary to the next, until she reached the bookcase. She pulled all the volumes from the third shelf, The Stand thunking to the floor, and removed the wooden plank they’d rested on. She stripped off a piece of electrical tape and shook the wood until the blue folder slipped out with its documents. One of the folktales her mother had written for her fell to the floor: “La Leyenda de Juan Machete.” She scooped it up, returned it to the folder, and tucked it all in the back of her jeans.
Looking around, she tried to think if there was anything else she should grab. Maybe a toy of Lali’s or at least her VR. Fifteen years in a place, and all of it was utterly disposable. She did take one book from the shelf, Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, because Kate’s notes were still inside.
Buried in a field near the fishing cabin in Tonganoxie was a waterproof box and its contents of cash and passports wrapped in plastic. She would drive northeast to pick it up, and then quickly double back west. After all these years to think about where they would go if they ever had to run, and she might as well have thrown a dart at a map now. Where do you hide in a world on fire, and you never know where the next border guard might be? In every direction lay nothing but another dark and burning city. She tipped over one of the gas cans in the kitchen, turned on all four burners, and tossed a towel on top.
Back through the bathroom window, grabbing her pack, hurtling into her truck, Lali asking where they were going, what was happening.
“What’s happening, Lals,” said Shane, buckling her belt, “is we’re going to blow this popsicle stand.”
In the middle of town, all the gas stations were surrounded by students wearing particulate masks or scarves around their mouths, holding signs about the dust, the system, the atmosphere, the deluge, and singing songs in the dirty fog. The drivers honked angrily, but the kids refused to let them pass.
Luckily, Shane’s truck was electric.
THE SEVENTH DAY
2036–2037
When I left the office midday, I lied to Carmen, the receptionist, and said I had a gynecologist appointment. “Tell the boss I’m sorry for missing the meeting.” I acted like I was in a hurry, perhaps stressed about a test result. Sitting on the foam-green plastic seats of the Staten Island Ferry, I kept trying to read my book while my mind wandered. When I met the man now scrambling toward the presidency years ago in that Chicago bookstore, I’d been a reader. I’d always had a book on my commute on the L, but when I moved to New York, I stopped taking the train. A car picked me up every day, and I’d spend that time thumbing through investor reports or my phone’s cornucopia of distraction. Now I was trying to become a reader again, but I’d chosen a tome both dense and horrific. A Savage and Unforgivable Empire described the race to profit from the ecological crisis. Not to mention, the man I’d known for a night all those years ago dominated the ferry’s TVs.
With the election thrown to the House of Representatives and going to a vote on January 6, The Pastor had consolidated support and was promising bloodshed if he wasn’t certified and sworn in on January 20. Maria had asked if I wanted to try an antianxiety medication, probably Ativan, but what was the point? Ativan’s calming effects were not up to the task of The Pastor actually sitting in the White House. The memories of this man itched under my skin, so I went outside to breathe fresh air as the ferry churned toward the tip of Manhattan.
I was meeting Moniza Farooki at the Trade Center Memorial, one of the most heavily surveilled places in the world. When I asked her if this was safe, she sent me an encrypted text: We will never meet all your top secret 007 prerogatives.
Her bombshell investigative feature, “The Fund That Would Rule the World,” had detonated on Wall Street that summer only to be quickly buried beneath the crisis in Bangladesh, the debacle in Pakistan, and an unhinged election. The documents I’d delivered to her described Tara Fund’s investment strategy, its long positions in the Arctic, Norman Nate’s solar management endeavor, Xuritas and the private security industry, and most damningly, CLK and its efforts to subvert elections with tactics that amounted to psychological warfare. If you thought about it, Moniza had pointed out, manipulating stock prices had become de rigueur for banks and hedge funds. One needed an edge, and this was the natural evolution in a decriminalized and deregulated financial world: pay a psychometrics firm to manipulate companies, elections, CEOs, politicians, shareholders, and anyone else who got in the way of a winning bet.
“No one innovates financial crime like hedge funds,” Moniza told me. “In another age, this would’ve been the biggest scandal in the history of finance. Now it’s just another Tuesday.”
Fred seemed less upset that Tara’s dirt had spilled in the New Yorker than the article’s insinuation that Tara was mostly a bit player in this drama, “and not a particularly profitable one,” as Moniza wrote. Despite being on the cutting edge of these tactics, Tara had actually lost money for two consecutive years. While most of the Street lawyered up, Fred fell into a funk about what kind of damage this would do to the fund’s reputation, if clients would ask for redemptions after their lock-in ended.
The other issue the story highlighted had to do with the Sustainable Future Coalition and its ties to Tara’s head of investor relations, Fred Wimpel. The SFC, having won stunning victories with the defeat of climate legislation during Randall’s term and the election of its ally Loren Victor Love, wanted more. It wanted “carbon maximalism”; it wanted an administration that would not just stave off the challenge to fossil fuels but make a hard push toward new energy horizons. The sudden upswing in the fortunes of The Pastor, the article implied, were no accident, as it poured dark money into his campaign and set land mines for his competition. I’d never told Moniza about the night in Chicago. Whistleblowing was one thing, frightening intersections with vast historical forces another.
Walking up Greenwich Street, I stepped onto the vast tundra of the 9/11 Memorial and made my way to the northwest corner of Tower One’s footprint, my eyes grazing the names of the dead as I passed. I’d been in the ninth grade when these people lost their lives. I remembered getting out of gym and my friend Mandy taking me by the hand and leading me to science class where the TV was on and the towers were burning.
I turned as Moniza approached, pulling a hand from the pocket of her peacoat. She was a small but attractive woman with sleek black hair and immaculate Queen’s English. She wagged a device that looked like any old tablet. Supposedly, it used ambient noise and data streams to junk up surveillance devices without the surveilling party knowing. We’d met in public this way before. We walked past each other, stepping to the corner of Tower One, pretending to read the names. The water inside the fountain rushed into the center, a steady, soporific roar.
“And you tease me about James Bond shit. What was it that couldn’t wait?”
“Relax, darling, those are our offices.” She nodded to the fortress of glass and steel. “I’m flying down to Charlotte tonight. I didn’t have time to set up anything too clandestine.” I waited, and she chewed her tongue. The chances that Tara had private investigators following me were real, and I desperately wanted her to make this quick. “I thought I owed it to you to know: A source told me the SEC has opened an investigation into Tara. If the FBI gets involved, it could mean a Title III on your boyfriend’s phone.”
“A wiretap?”
She nodded. “Be careful what you say to him. And I’d talk to a lawyer sooner rather than later.”
“Do you think Fred did anything illegal?”
She ticked her head in ambivalence. “It’s become quite difficult to say what’s illegal anymore. On Wall Street or in Washington. Either way, I felt you deserved to know. It was never my intention to stitch you up.” Her voice was cool but sincere.
“I did it of my own free will.” I was thinking of Fred. The summer of ’35, after I’d delivered the file to Moniza, he and I spent some time apart. He went to London while I stayed in New York. When he returned, he was bearing an early edition of Sense and Sensibility, which he’d hunted down at a rare book dealer because, he said, he’d once heard me say it had been my favorite book in college. It was then I realized, to my dismay, that I still loved him.
“It may be that this will turn out a mere footnote in high finance anyhow.”
“What do you mean?”
I ran my hand over a name on the lip of the fountain: Jane Marie Orth. Just another woman who had no idea her life would come to an end at the hands of violent and insecure men.
“There’s something going on in the markets. My contacts who were around in 2007—they’re unnerved. There have been two years of falling housing prices all over the coasts and the insurance companies are canceling every homeowner policy they can wriggle out of.”
“ARkSTORM put them in a tough spot.”
“Yes, but insurance losses coming due can’t explain the whole situation. Maybe your partner and his fund did something illegal and maybe not. But it’s all the legal activities that appear to be the problem at the moment.” Before I could inquire further, she said, “Okay, that’s probably more gabbing than is safe. Good luck, Jackie.” And she peeled off into the wind, making haste toward One World Trade.
Riding back across the Upper Bay, passing the Statue of Liberty, I watched the cranes of the shipping yards and the field of wind turbines behind the calm green lady. I thought about the first time I’d visited the city to attend a friend’s wedding with Jefferey. How impossible and epic this place had seemed. How small it made my life in Chicago feel. Back on Staten Island, I rode the train past the abandoned graffitied buildings of the shore and the seawalls of sandbags now protecting inland structures from king tides and storm surges.
