The Deluge, page 87
“Imagine trying to blockade JFK,” said Holly. “Security checkpoints for miles, surveillance even farther out. The advantage of gas stations is the logistics of a blockade are so much easier.”
“You’re too cautious,” Jenice told Holly. “We’re not about triangulating.”
“There’s a difference between cautious and strategic,” said Holly. “A strategy that doesn’t work isn’t any good. We need to diversify. Let’s go back to tax refusal, student loan payment refusal, mortgage refusal—”
“No, no, no,” said Jenice. “That’s weak! In some cities, they’re cutting gas hoses, pushing over cash machines, getting truly militant. We can organize lawyers and financial support.”
Liza cleared her throat loudly. She adjusted her ARs. I could see her reading or watching behind the glasses as she spoke, her eyes scanning invisible cues.
“How soon does that turn to Molotov cocktails?” she asked. “It sounds 6Degrees-ish. Gauche.”
Kate laughed.
“Ever since D.C.,” said Holly, “and what happened there. We can’t—I can’t—” Her eyes flitted nervously to Kate and Liza. I held my breath. The conversation was simply never that far from August 1, 2034. “We can’t have something like that happen again.”
“It might,” said Tavia. “We have to be prepared for that.”
“You weren’t there,” said Holly.
“Neither were you,” Tavia shot back. “You ducked out before the hammer came down.”
Holly kept her voice admirably calm. “We lost friends in that.” She gestured to Kate and Liza. “Don’t talk about it like I somehow lost my nerve.”
“I think we need to stay joyous,” I interrupted. Everyone looked at me. In a room where I was the only white woman and had a background in corporate America, it always felt like I was one mistaken comment away from being run out of the room. “We need to keep offering the positive vision. We know we can make a better world. It’s still out there waiting.”
“… If you’ll just join us,” finished Liza. I really loved her in that moment. This unusual interjection of sincerity seemed to defuse Holly and Tavia.
“Oh Jackie, you sexy PR flak,” said Kate. “I think we hold serve right now. We’ll have a Republican Senate to fight no matter what, with my good friend Russ Mackowski in leadership. But we have to see how this clusterfuck election shakes out. We need to know who we’re dealing with first.”
“Because if it’s The Pastor…” Holly said darkly. She scratched at her legal pad with a dull pencil.
Leaving the offices late that night, back across the glittering water reflecting the city like a starscape, back to my disintegrating relationship with the only man I’d made any kind of true and vital love work, I thought of the stories I’d told myself. How secretly and deeply ashamed I’d been for so long.
* * *
On December 19, the Dow fell 2,212 points, the third-largest single-day loss in history and coming after a year of anemic growth. VR/AR glued to his face, sweating his conversations with Peter and the analysts, Fred barely noticed my comings and goings. Fred, more passive-aggressive than confrontational, would sleep in his office for days at a time. We’d delayed the wedding until the fall of ’37. Sex had dried up entirely, and I daydreamed with envy about Kate’s many beds. The markets recovered slightly by Christmas, but the squawking heads could not pinpoint who to blame: the unresolved election, the crisis in China, the crisis in India, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, the aftermath of California’s ARkSTORM, and of course the rabid behavior of the Eurozone’s new unofficial leadership. Jennifer Braden loudly blamed the Seventh Day protests for slowing the economy. They needed to be “put down with more firepower than Vic Love used on the Mall.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized that The Pastor couldn’t be certified soon enough, if only to deal with this instability using the domestic security force built over the last four years by President Love. Krugman, the decrepit gadfly at the Times, was beating the drum about something else, and Fred dismissed this idea with so much hostility that I worried there might be something to it.
Housing prices had plummeted 7.8 percent year over year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, the largest drop since the 2008 crisis, and this was after a 3.6 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2035 alone. Most of the metro areas where this was occurring were on the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast, particularly in and around Miami, where homes sat unsold, foreclosures had spiked, lending had tightened, and a full-scale abandonment of all homeowners policies by the hard-hit insurance industry was creeping outward like a cancer. Sound familiar? wrote Krugman. While poor minority neighborhoods turned to flooded ruins, the wealthiest Miamians scrambled for high ground, but now even those neighborhoods are experiencing untenable nuisance flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program has fallen nearly half a trillion dollars in debt despite Congress’s efforts to raise rates for at-risk properties. Rating agencies continue to downgrade the bonds of coastal cities and tax bases are collapsing, which then hamstrings much-needed repairs to the infrastructure needed to keep these cities dry. Much of this has been predictable, but that does not make it any less frightening.
On Christmas Eve, I got together with Erik and Allie in VR, the worlde a re-creation of our childhood home, now bulldozed into a field in distant Iowa. The computer-generated facsimile of our living room, built by Allie with Slapdish paintbox, had a number of missing details, including that the fireplace stone had not been brick. She had remembered to put in the banister where I’d found Mom.
Allie and Burt had rebuilt their home in St. Louis right back on the floodplain, but Allie assured us that the flooding had been once in a thousand years. I didn’t bother to explain to her the meaninglessness of that phrase. Erik was typically taciturn. He didn’t know what his own kids were up to because his ex-wife and her new husband had moved away two years earlier. “They got out while the getting was still good. They took a steep loss on the property, but at least they got something.” I asked if he was worried about his own home. “Worried? No reason to be worried. It’s already all over. Not literally underwater yet, but I owe about triple or quadruple what it’s worth, according to all the people trying to sell in the neighborhood.”
“But you don’t even live near the shore?” said Allie.
“Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s seeing what’s happening in Miami, and there isn’t one goddamn sucker left to put in an offer. Even on high ground.”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, without mentioning that I’d been basically paying his mortgage the past two years.
“Probably walk away if I can find a job somewhere else. Or live here till I drown. Depends a lot on how fast the water comes in.”
Fred and I went to his son’s Christmas party the next day. Fred Jr. always put me on edge. After spending a few years in a juvenile facility, now he was in his senior year at Brown as if nothing had ever happened. He resembled Fred in the eyes but was rounder in the face and carried himself with much more swagger. Nobody at the party was talking about anything other than the situation in the markets.
“It’s not 2007,” Freddy assured us. “Real estate’s in a slowdown for other reasons.”
“Such as?” someone asked.
“Regulation, as usual,” he said with confidence. He popped a carrot loaded with blue cheese into his mouth and talked as he crunched. “Tie the hands of homebuilders, homebuyers, and insurers, and this is the kind of mess you end up with.”
For New Year’s Eve, we attended an exclusive event at the Biltmore to raise money for Bangladeshi refugees, $20,000 a plate. This had been Fred’s Christmas gift to me, and I could feel him bending over backward, popping vertebrae to meet me in my new pursuits. “I understand why you left Tara,” he told me. “You spend your whole life getting ahead, and now you want to give a piece back.” But looking around the party, it was hard to take any of this seriously. The gilded edges of the hotel ballroom, the extravagant dresses, the crisp tuxedoes, the decadent meal. All the ostentation was in service of a twenty-minute holographic video displaying the plight of the Bangladeshis, just one of many peoples now forced into disease-stricken camps with no potable water, into the savagery of the Indian army, into a flotilla of makeshift boats in the hopes of reaching even more distant countries, no home, no peace, no rest, no justice anywhere on the horizon. And after it was over, they served dessert, Basque cheesecake with duck-egg crème brûlée.
Fred excused himself to find a scotch, and soon I grew bored with our table and followed. Slinking past dresses that cost tens of thousands of dollars in my own Lela Rose, I felt the ugly bifurcation of my life, trying to foment a revolution during the day and enjoying the splendor and privilege of my actual situation on nights and weekends. My dad once said to my mother, as bitterly as I’d ever heard him say anything, “Greed is a strange thing. You think it was made up by the Bible right until you see it.”
Handing over the Tara files to Moniza, I thought I’d cleansed myself—of ANøNosiki and CLK and asset management firms holding farmland and fresh water—but if anything, the feeling of grit on my skin grew worse. I found myself wishing I was in the Staten Island offices with Kate, Liza, Holly, and the rest.
I rounded a corner near the bathroom, passing a woman whose pink dress matched her wet lips, distended with collagen, and found Fred with Peter and Haniya O’Connell. They were talking to Russ Mackowski, the soon-to-be Republican majority leader, who hadn’t even had to challenge Doup to usurp the position. Fred, Peter, and Mackowski each had a scotch in hand as if playacting the smoke-filled rooms where men did business, while Haniya picked at a nail and listened. Mackowski held forth.
“… basically no place to let down the partisan façade anymore except charity functions, and even then you gotta be careful who you get your picture taken with. Get spotted within a foot of a Democrat, there goes your career. But hey, my wife’s a hopeless almsgiver just like yours,” he said to Peter while looking at Haniya. Then he laughed to show it was all in good fun.
I’d met Mackowski a few times, a tall, old, barrel-chested misogynist who filled a room with his thunderous voice, opinions, and self-regarding stories. He’d been the avant-garde of the neo-Confederate right, only to watch The Pastor come along and incinerate his presidential hopes yet again.
Haniya, beautiful in a custom-fit black sequined gown, smiled. It looked quite real. “You’d be in trouble, Russ? Imagine where my credibility would go. I study redistributive economics, and you make Mitch McConnell look like AOC.”
Mackowski liked this and laughed very loudly. Their heads turned as I slid in.
“You look gorgeous as always,” Peter said, kissing my cheek. His newly grown beard scratched my face. He nodded at Fred. “Leave this man for better days.” Despite everything I thought of Tara, I still found Peter so endearing, and again felt a constellation of guilt for what I’d done to them.
Mackowski smiled and leaned in to kiss my cheek as well. “Miss Jackie, you look lovely. Nice to see you again.” Before I could reply, he looked back to Peter. “And will we see you in Aspen?”
“Nah. Freak blizzard coming through. I told you, Senator, it’s the twenty-first century, the New Abnormal, bro. Read your Tony Pietrus.”
Mackowski chuckled again and sipped his scotch while Haniya made her exit. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said. And as she slipped out of the circle, she put her hand on my arm and, pretending to kiss my cheek, whispered, “I say we leave them if they make us spend one more minute with this asshole.”
For a moment, I was worried the senator would hear, but also, I’d always felt like Haniya didn’t like me. That argument at the dinner when I’d failed to side with her about Vic Love haunted me still, so I thrilled to this moment of conspiracy with her. I clutched her arm and met her eyes in total accord.
“Kansas,” Mackowski was saying as he skittled the ice around in his glass. “A total pig-fuck, excuse the language.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Fred. “If this vacuum of leadership continues, then maybe other governors start getting ideas. Maybe we’ve got a thirty-state secession crisis on our hands.”
With some dread I asked, “What’s the latest there?”
“Just this morning Governor Justis says the borders of his state are closed for good, and from what the FBI is telling us, he’s executed two more people.”
“Jesus.”
“No one can even get Vic Love on the phone,” said Mackowski. “It’s an open secret he’s had a total mental crack-up. Even though her side is still fighting to keep him in office.” He pointed after Haniya.
“Which is why I’m saying, now that the vote got thrown to the House, it’s best to certify The Pastor,” said Fred. “Force him to take cool-headed insiders into his cabinet, surround him on all sides with the forces of reason, the way the Beltway managed with Trump.”
“Nobody wants that fucking Pastor yahoo in the White House,” Mackowski said dismissively. “And I don’t want my time as leader spent trying to get him to heel and keep his freaky ass away from a microphone, let alone a nuke.”
“I don’t think we have a choice. He’s going to have the votes,” said Fred. “And Governor Justis could be the least of the problems if the markets don’t settle.”
Peter sucked air through his teeth. “Can’t we hit the reset button, Russ? You moderate yourself to a Bush Forty-one stance and get on a ticket with like Amy Klobuchar circa 2020? She can hit interns with briefing books and you can run the country.”
Mackowski laughed very hard at this, his cheeks turning pink from all his good humor. Finally, he looked at me, curious. “Fred tells me you’ve joined forces with the eco-nuts.”
“Proudly,” I said.
“Well, everyone needs a hobby.” He swigged his scotch. “My wife took up bird-watching.” He set his glass on a nearby table where it rattled to stillness. “If you’ll excuse me.”
New Year’s Day came and went. Fred Jr. and his fiancée came over for a bit. A light snow left New York frosted and lovely. Fred and I stayed in bed for the first time in a long time. Then on January 2, Goldman Sachs filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and the world fell to its knees.
* * *
Holly had given birth to her daughter, Hannah, just after Christmas. With her out on maternity leave, the thoughtfulness and caution she brought to our meetings was in short supply. On January 5, the room was giddy about the panic roiling the city. “You can almost hear the hiss at trading desks,” snickered Tavia. “That’s fear pissing down their legs.” In light of this, it was supposed, our protests would gain urgency and acolytes.
Kate noticed my lack of enthusiasm. “You, Eeyore. What’s up?”
I hesitated. The white lady was about to sound sympathetic to Wall Street. “I just don’t think this is anything to celebrate. No one really knows what caused Goldman’s implosion. The Fed and Treasury have to use the resolution authority to wind it down, but Goldman’s holdings and balance sheet are global. Also, no one’s paying attention, but two major insurance companies filed for bankruptcy last week because of losses from ARkSTORM.”
As I suspected, I received blank stares.
“Good, let it all come tumbling down once and for all,” said Garrett.
“Fuckin’ A,” said Tavia.
“Are you suggesting something?” Kate asked me.
I swallowed. “Call off the escalation on the seventh.”
“Are you fucking dumb?” Tavia snapped, and Jenice put a hand on her arm. Tavia looked at her partner, aggrieved, like she was taking my side. “You don’t get opportunities like this. We can focus attention like a laser on these criminals.”
“This is a crisis of people losing their homes,” I said. “This isn’t just evil corporate bankers, Tavia. It’s middle-class and low-income people suddenly losing their most important asset, and the system is coming down around them.”
“Bitch, fuck the system! We are literally here to tear down the system.”
That night, less than twenty-four hours before they were to meet to certify The Pastor as the next president, the House of Representatives made the unprecedented decision to delay the vote by a week. D.C. had been locked down since the New Year in anticipation of the vote, and though there was a sigh of relief that the count would not be the target of a potential armed mob, it was becoming unclear if there would even be an inauguration at this point.
On January 7, as we coordinated our protests from the gas station where I normally did my part, the market plunged another nine hundred points. I was on the phone most of the day, reading about what was happening since cars had long ago stopped trying to get past us. In New York, the panic felt positively breathable. Later, I went down to our actions on Wall Street where bankers and traders scrambled past protestors clogging the streets. Many firms ordered their people to work from home, and offices emptied as the streets filled. Looking across the crowds that day, all I felt was fear. Though the climate crisis had pushed this financial calamity to our doorstep, the chants demanded that bankers jump to their deaths. I’ll never forget one sign I saw: ONLY BLOOD THIS TIME. More people spilled into the streets, and the NYPD presence swelled to meet them.
On January 9, the stock market plunged another eight hundred points and three more insurance companies filed for Chapter 11. The last of these was a giant: Sequoia National underwrote $19.7 billion in premiums and was 3 percent of the market. Regulators could not allow it to fail. A rescue package was cobbled together by Treasury and the Fed, buying up some of its most toxic policies and putting the full faith and credit of the US government behind payments. The chairman of the Fed was appearing on TV so frequently to explain his motives, he felt like the de facto leader of the country. Vic Love had still not appeared in public since October. Stimulus packages were floated, though one needed a president to pass such a measure.
