I am singing at the top of my lungs, looking straight ahead, and at the far end of the field I see an armoured SUV pull up. It is like there is a voice in my head that tells me: keep singing as loud as you can and keep staring at the SUV. I watch bodyguards get out of the car with their guns drawn, and behind the bodyguards I see him, the man I had tried to strangle with the piano wire, stepping out of the vehicle, taking a moment to adjust, taking in the scene. I don’t know what he’s doing here but then suddenly think that I do. Emmett sent him. I start walking toward the SUV, one careful step at a time, sure that the cops will shoot me with each and every step, and I don’t know why, perhaps because I’m singing, perhaps because we’re all singing so loudly as if we are all one voice, but the cops don’t shoot, instead walk alongside me, their guns still pointed at my head. It takes only a few steps before our eyes meet. I am staring straight at the billionaire, we make eye contact, and I can see that he recognizes me. I can see that he recognizes me, that he hears me, hears all of us. And I can tell that, as he recognizes me, he is shaken.
Acknowledgments
It would have been impossible for me to complete this book without the generous support of two writing residencies. I would very much like to thank:
PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab with lead support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where I spent a beautiful time writing and exchanging in both Portland and Caldera, Oregon.
Centre Bang who allowed me a luxurious month of pure writing in Chicoutimi, Quebec.
John McConville for the use of Total Fortune Spray on the cover.
The unattributed quotation here is from Beverly J. Silver’s Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).