In capitals around the world, from London to Pretoria, Accra to Ottawa, Tokyo to Wellington, Brasília to Seoul, activists pitched tents and blocked traffic. They hung banners and sprayed the walls of their public buildings with graffiti; they came in numbers so dense that even the most prepared governments were caught flat-footed. Moscow deployed security forces to major public spaces. In Hong Kong, fifty thousand troops marched through the streets, the city militarily occupied before anyone could even leave their door with a sign. Liza Yudong’s app, however, was downloaded by nearly ten million Chinese devices in just forty-eight hours. They arrived faster than the tear gas and rubber bullets could uproot them, hungry people, desperate people, passionate people, and everyone in between, linking arms in the digital world, and demanding an immediate halt to the incineration of the planet, a blooming fascism, and the gangster capitalism that had led them all to this point.
Within the halls of the captured Capitol, lit by candles and a few generator-powered bulbs, cots, tents, and sleeping bags crowded all available floor space, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber to the Crypt where the sandstone columns had been handcrafted by slaves rented from antebellum plantations. They set up shop in staff and security offices, slept on couches, helped themselves to mini fridges stocked with every variety of snack and booze. In the city beneath the building, they found enough food and water to sustain the movement for at least another two months. They worked to assign and distribute provisions both within the Capitol and to those still holding the Mall. They moved their war room from the trailer behind the battered concert stage to the office of the Speaker of the House.
“They want to take down the rest of the paintings in the Rotunda,” said Holly Pietrus. They had a solar lamp set on the desk, and it cast an eerie, irradiated glow over their faces. The top organizers still wore their soiled, sweaty Blue Bands even after nearly three months. “The Baptism of Pocahontas, the Landing of Columbus, all of them.”
“Who does?” asked Seth Young.
“The tribes supporting us.” The leaders of these nations had set up several tipis in the Rotunda, where dead political leaders of the empire that had wiped away their ancestors typically lay in state.
“And another faction is demanding we take out all the pictures and statues of men,” said Levine. “Including the bust of MLK for his sexual misconduct.”
Kate rubbed her face and tried to blink away her exhaustion. She hadn’t slept more than a couple hours a night since the day of the attempted clearing. Everyone was looking at her, and she couldn’t help it. Maybe it was a whole childhood of her father telling her she was too white to understand this or that Native thing. Maybe she was remembering her first sting of pepper spray with the Oceti Sakowin at Standing Rock a lifetime ago, but some kind of deep, pent-up anger, directed at the wrong people, came bursting out of her then.
“Do we not have bigger fucking fish to fry here?” She saw the people around the desk recoil in the lamplight, so that the shadows jumped on their faces. She picked at a blood blister on her thumb. Even for someone who was fine with not showering for weeks at a time, she felt grimy, itchy.
Tom Levine, whose lungs still ached from inhaling smoke as he fought the flames during the incursion, whose fiancée had stopped answering his messages, was not about to let this moment be lost to squabbling. He had never in his wildest dreams imagined it would go this far, that he’d be back in these halls under such circumstances. He put his palms together in prayer and pointed them at his friend.
“Kate, we can’t be the mob putting their feet up on the Speaker’s desk in ’21. We can’t let the images of our people ransacking the halls stand. And we can’t start redecorating.”
“Maybe it’s time to ask,” said Seth Young, “what exactly we are doing here.”
Kate snatched up a tablet, streaming the news. The chyron read GLOBAL PROTESTS RESULT IN CRACKDOWNS; PRESIDENT LOVE SILENT ON SIEGE OF WASHINGTON.
“What do you think we’re doing here? It’s working, Seth.”
“Working how?” he asked slowly. Calm but very skeptical.
She threw up her hands, gesturing to august walls all around them, bugging her eyes at the obvious. “Look where we’re holding our meeting.”
He licked his lips and tried not to sound scared. He’d entered into this one reluctant step at a time, and now he was riddled with dread. He’d lived less than five blocks away during the Trump insurrection, which had demonstrated something frighteningly ephemeral about what constituted power. Now that he was part of such a thing, it scared him so much more. “I’m really worried this has gone too far.”
“Of fucking course it’s gone too far!” Kate exploded. “That’s the whole fucking point, Seth!” The veins in her neck straining, Kate stepped into his space, pointing at the carpet. “We need to keep people here. We need to keep up the disruption, the momentum, the panic of the people who pull the levers. The stock market is starting to freak out. People are rising up. Opportunities like this do not come often.”
“So we just sit here?” Seth asked, unable to meet her gaze, wondering if Ash had been right, wondering whose wagon he’d hitched himself to. “While we wait for them to try again?”
“Of course not.” The heads of leadership turned all at once to Liza. She was painting her nails purple, blowing on them, and then reapplying the little brush. “We have the law-making building. So we explain what laws we want to pass, the ones that the people who normally sit in these stupid chairs refuse to.” Liza rolled her eyes. “And to answer your question—yes, it does get tiring being the brains of the operation.”
For five weeks following the attempted clearing, the Capitol transformed into a twenty-four-hour stump speech, beamed out to the world. They recruited occupiers from every walk of life, gave them the Speaker’s dais, and together they painted a rolling, epic vision of a more just, equitable, healthy world. The feed never stopped. The speakers never let up this rolling sermon. A woman whose sons were both dead of heroin overdoses inveighing for an end to the drug war. A farmer advocating for regenerative agriculture. A doctor explaining the health benefits of electrifying the transportation sector. More viewers watched a student named Kelly Pasquina speak about the need for a global wealth tax than watched that year’s Super Bowl. Her brother, Walt, now wearing a Blue Band, appeared briefly in an interview. The reporter asked the Marine why he went AWOL. Pasquina replied, “I don’t care for politics. But the country’s a lot like me, in that we should listen to my kid sister.”
Who knows where it all may have led? Then, as the siege of D.C. stretched into its fourth month, the heat swept in.
JUNE 30
With authorities scrambling to cut water, power, internet, and supply routes, the temperature spiked to 109 degrees. A dome of high pressure descended on two-thirds of the nation, sending temperatures soaring into the triple digits, smashing records in every city it touched. In the last decade, dangerous heat waves had grown more fearsome but also normalized. Cities learned and instituted best practices, providing cooling centers, managing power grids, and sending social workers to the elderly and disabled, but the summer of ’34 was unprecedented not just in heat but duration.
The poor and elderly were in the most danger. Baby boomers, divorced, widowed, aging, constituted the largest generation of elderly people living alone in the country’s history, and the heat storm, as it came to be known, quickly became a quiet mass murderer. Hyperthermia is a nasty way to go. It begins slowly, with a bit of dizziness, and then ramps up quickly. For instance, Kyenna Blake, a seventy-seven-year-old woman living in Eastland Gardens, found the power out in the apartment where she’d lived the last forty years, where her children had grown up and then moved away, where her husband had died. She began by feeling puky, having trouble breathing. She went for the phone to call 911, but there was a wait. She was on hold. Like many victims of heat, she began to pull off her clothes because the feel of them against her skin was agony on her nerve endings. Then she vomited. Her muscles were shedding dead cells into her bloodstream, clogging her body’s plumbing, while pieces of her organs cooked. Her kidneys and bladder were the first to shut down. Her heart, mercifully, went next.