Shane leaned forward and held Bhattacharyya’s gaze. “Back us. Me and Quinn and the others who want to take this new direction. Back us, and the rest will have to go along.”
She shook her head. “Kai will not like this.”
“He won’t have a choice. We have to make it clear that decisions run through the three of us now. We are the vote, and they can take it or leave it.” Shane held her hands up, gesturing to nowhere and everywhere. “You’ve built a nice life for yourself. My question is, did you just want the sack of money this whole time? Or do you want to make sure they remember us?”
She held Archie Bhattacharyya’s eyes.
In the fall of 2024, Shane drove her ten-month-old daughter to a taqueria off the highway but far from home. It was after business hours, and the parking lot was empty, the windows dark. She’d thought it all through, bundled the baby girl whose name she would not allow herself to think, and it wasn’t even that cold anyway. The car ride put her to sleep, she was swaddled in a blanket, she had a hat—it would all be okay. Molly, the owner and part-time manager, she might not raise the baby, but she’d do the right thing by her. Get her to the right people. Shane could tell the woman was kind. Then her daughter might know adoption instead of foster care, that dim flashlight beam in an otherwise hard, starless night.
Speaking of hard, starless nights, she set the baby in her car seat on the concrete step at the back of the taqueria. In case the cameras were working now, Shane wore a hoodie and bandana. She didn’t like how trashy it was back there, how she could smell the dumpster, so she taped a note to the entrance for whoever came in first the next morning (There’s a baby girl in the back. Help her.). Then she walked to her car and drove away. She’d spent the first nine months terrified she’d mess up, not for her baby’s sake but because she knew what the system could do to a poor mother. A poor mother leaves her baby in the car while she runs into a pharmacy and that’s a mug shot. A poor mother finds her baby not breathing and that’s a different ballgame. But now she was free. She’d disappeared so many times in her life, what was one more, honestly. She’d had enough of this sad corner of this sad state in this sad country. She’d made a mistake, and now she would do her best to move on, dig up one of her escape plans and vanish across this lonesome planet.
She made it thirty-seven miles. She remembered the mile marker. She began to tremble, and then she began to weep, and then she spun the car around at the next exit and drove ninety mph back to that little restaurant in the desert.
Let me tell you about fear, she would have told her father. After their meeting, Shane would part ways with Archie Bhattacharyya and Quinn Worthington. She would switch vehicles and drift down a highway that appeared to her as a black rush of water. She’d return to Kansas where her daughter waited in the care of a boss she used to fuck. She would tell them fairy tales about where she’d been, and they would both believe her because everyone believed her. No one thought she was capable of what she was capable, and she understood that now more than ever before. It would take her months to understand what she had seen: the hollowness within her, within them all. A realization of how little there actually is inside the self. How if you shout into that empty space your voice only returns to you. She’d glimpsed this first when she set Lali down in a car seat on a filthy concrete step by a dumpster and drove away. But now she’d written herself a permanent and irrevocable dream, and the memory of Allen and Emmy and their son—she’d never be able to dig it up, tear it out by the roots, burn it, or poison it. Perry especially. He would always be there, lying on his back in the field, under the stars, in the night.
L
EVIATHAN
2033
He met Ash Hasan in the dining car of a 1930s train whizzing through the passes of snowcapped mountains, little Euro-gingerbread towns in the distance. No avatars, just two rumpled colleagues shooting the shit, ostensibly about the “sea level listening tour” Hasan was on with his latest congresswoman of choice. Ash, resolute in his devotion to data, insisted that Tony’s time would be better spent joining the government rather than attending the concert less than nine months away.
“Seth is forging ahead on the executive committee of the climate concert,” said Hasan, studying the glistening arugula salad in front of him. CGI food in a world gone hungry. “But seeing as how—”
“Just a bunch of old rock and pop fogies jamming in the capital,” said Tony. “No need for anyone to get excited.”
“—But seeing as how Seth and I are soon to become parents, I’m concerned. You understand why.”
“Not really. We’re going to prop the corpses of Eddie Vedder and Tom Morello up there, and some folks will say a few words to rally support for democratic solutions to global warming. What’s to worry about?”
Ash gazed at him, chewing his jaw so that his temple twitched. He looked out the dining car window toward the rays of a sunset spiking over pristine snowpacks. The tinkling of silverware on china and the low whispers of the conversation drifted over the rumble of the train. A man across from them rustled his paper as he flipped a page. The headline read MARS MISSION LIFTS OFF; JOURNEY TO TAKE 9 MONTHS TO RED PLANET. The joke going around was, Take us with you!
“Fatherhood will rearrange our priorities,” said Hasan. “Now Seth plans to actually attend the climate concert. He’s not being rational about the exigencies involved.”
“That’s a bloodless way to put it.” When Gail had gotten pregnant with Holly, their main concern had been the cost of raising a kid on grad student stipends. Hasan was loaded from building models for his brother-in-law’s hedge fund, so he and Seth would be A-OK. “Anyway, you’re going to be fathers!” said Tony, fake-lifting the glass of wine from the cream tablecloth. The vessel did not go with his hand, of course. “Congratulations! Welcome to the inescapable hell and joy that is parenthood.”
“It’s difficult to parse fact from rumor in Washington, but I’m urging you to take this new administration into consideration. It’s given me great pause.”
“You and everyone else who still reads a newspaper.” He nodded to the man across from them. Impossible to tell if he was an AI or just a guy looking for a quiet place to read in a coffee shop somewhere in Buffalo or Dubai. “They caught that kid with the Weathermen, and he’s sans lawyer from what I’m hearing.”
“This is even more disconcerting than the new enemy combatant statutes.”
“Don’t blame me. I voted for that snake Randall. Love put a capital D by his name and fooled a third of this stupid fucking country. Everyone wants to suck their thumb and jack off in a VR set, this is what you get.”
“There’s a rumor going around, Tony, about a list.”
He shut his mouth and looked at Hasan.
“What kind of list?”
Hasan took a moment to respond. His left hand was quacking, and he stared in consternation at his plate. The salad had ruby-red tomatoes, which glowed against the china.
“Political opponents of the president.” He hesitated. “With a special interest in those who happen to have Islamic backgrounds.”
“You’re Muslim? Since when?”
“Not practicing, no. But in people’s minds religious identifications follow you regardless of faithfulness to the liturgy. This list is being compiled, in secret, by the DOJ and Attorney General Greenstreet, but I have contacts within the FBI who are very seriously considering taking this information to the media.”
Tony sighed through his teeth. “Fuck,” he said.
“Indeed.”
“Well,” he tried to wrap his mind around this. Love gave him a sense of dread he’d not felt even in the Trump years. Anybody could see that plainly in the way Love had sliced apart the electorate to clear a path to the presidency. He’d sat the Democratic base in the corner while he fed Jen Braden money under the table through a PAC to siphon votes from Mary Randall (or so it was rumored). She ended up losing thirty-nine states, as the Republican base deserted her for a write-in campaign for the wingnut. Now the Senate Democrats were behaving not unlike their Republican colleagues had in their pathetic deference to Trump: playacting concern without doing much of anything to stop a clear and present danger. Dance with the one who brought you, and all. “Look, Ash, if you need anything from me, obviously, I’d do whatever…” He trailed off. “I’m not even sure what I’m offering. Help of any kind, I guess.”