In the kitchen serving the Senate cafeteria, Seth Young and Tom Levine were splitting a can of tomatoes and the last of the beers they’d rescued from the walk-in refrigerators. It was July 20.
“So you and I did the same thing,” noted Seth. “Our partners told us not to go, and we did anyway. What’s that about?”
Levine speared a tomato and slurped it off the tines of the fork. “I don’t know. You said you weren’t going to stay more than a few days, I said I wasn’t going to be a part of this, but—”
“It took over. Like if you weren’t here, you wouldn’t go a day the rest of your life without thinking about it.”
Tom favored Seth with a grim expression. “Yup.”
“What I tried to explain to Ash”—Seth put his hands a foot apart—“is that ‘my god, honey, I’m doing this for Forrest. I’m not abandoning him or you or anyone else. This is our way of fighting for his future.’ ” He shifted his eyes to his new friend. During the attempted clearing, the explosion of a stun grenade had sent Seth sprawling onto his back. He couldn’t hear a thing and his eyes were stinging with gas. That was when Tom scooped him up by the shoulders, hauled him to his feet, and hustled him to safety behind a trailer. “I’m thinking of taking the amnesty,” Seth admitted. “I need to get back to my family.”
“No one would judge you,” said Tom without hesitation. He held their can up. “We’re almost out of tomatoes anyway.”
Seth was thinking about how anxious Ash had been when he met Seth’s family for the first time. Ash had no way of copping to his nerves, so instead, he got hyper-analytical and prattled on about obscure mathematical concepts no one understood—except that Seth’s dad was an engineer and a math freak himself. Seth watched with great pleasure as his dad engaged Ash on some arcane point, and Ash looked like he’d had sand blown in his face. He told Ash after dinner, “I’ve never seen you harder than when you talked to my dad about the singsong conjecture.”
“It’s Singmaster’s conjecture, Seth, and don’t be crude.” And Seth did what he always did to prove Ashir was not always so analyticaclass="underline" He put his hand on his crotch in the back of the driverless.
Tom was thinking of Rekia. Not long after they started sleeping together, when he asked her why they hadn’t just done that right away instead of fighting for five years, she said, “ ’Cause you’re an egotistical, white-privileged asshole.” She squeezed one of his triceps. “And you always wore these tight shirts that made your arms look good, and I know you knew your arms looked good, and that made me hate you even more.”
He wasn’t sure that she’d ever forgive him, and this scared him. After an entire adulthood spent swearing to himself that he’d never fall for the marriage trap, he was in love with this woman and already dreaming of their children.
On that same night, blessed with cool wind, Holly Pietrus, Liza Yudong, and Kate Morris sat on the steps of the west side of the Capitol and shared a joint. With the power out in the city, the only light beamed down from a quarter moon, but they could make out the inky outlines of shantytown tents and black scars from the fires. The trampled dirt and filthy plywood paths. The toppled fence and the busted National Guard vehicle still tangled in it liked a beached whale. Like Tom and Seth, they were talking about their old friend.
“Rekia told me if I came here, I shouldn’t bother coming back,” said Holly. Her eye was still a midnight blue with shades of yellow from the elbow she’d taken to save a painting.
“Rek is doing what she thinks is right. So are we.” Kate took the joint from Holly’s fingers and took a drag. The tip glowed bright enough to cast light on her face.
Liza said, “At least in prison they’ll have water, so I can exfoliate.” Kate and Holly laughed. “You think I’m joking. This is exactly as bad as I thought it would be. I’ve always hated camping.”
“Prison will be good,” said Kate. “A nice challenge for me.”
“The worst part is, I know she’s serious,” said Liza.
“Yep,” Kate nodded affirmatively. “It’ll be something I’ll have to conquer and make useful.”
“So you are insane,” said Holly.
“If you think about it, a general strike in prisons, a massive civil disobedience campaign in the heart of the prison-industrial complex? Then if you add a hunger strike on top of it all, not only are the garment operations not running, but they have to bring in all this medical equipment to force-feed you in the ass. We can bankrupt these private prison companies before they even knew what hit ’em.”
“Who is this ‘we’?” asked Liza. “I get low blood sugar.”
“You know you’ll follow me over the waterfall, bitch.” Kate shoulder-checked the smaller woman. “Don’t front. Don’t even make airs like you might front.”
Liza rebounded. “This weed sucks.”
Holly, who hadn’t been stoned since college, found herself belly-laughing at these two, a new audience for a shtick they’d clearly honed over the years.
“That’s been the fascists’ best move yet,” said Kate. “Cutting off our pot supply.”
Their laughter trickled off, and the joint ran out, and they fell quiet. Stoned ruminations took the three of them all kinds of places. Liza found herself drifting back to when she’d first met Kate at the other organization they’d been involved with. Everyone was so self-serious, no one got her sense of humor, and she caught sideways looks for not performing her “climate grief.” She found all the activisty screamingness of the thing tedious. All except this one girl. Kate Morris, she found, could take all the flak, arrows, and spitty people while Liza did her thing mostly behind the scenes. Not long after Liza turned in her resignation at FBF following Rekia’s little coup, she’d called Kate and told her they should try something weird.
“What’s weird, Liz?” Kate asked despondently. “What hasn’t been tried?”
“Don’t be such a stick in the mud. We could occupy the entire frickin’ capital if we felt like it.”
And from that one off-the-cuff response, the entire notion of their con emerged. Since Liza first began having anxiety about the end of the world and became determined to do something about it, she’d also resigned herself to the fact that nothing they did would likely work. However, if one had a great deal of fun in the process, it seemed to conjure belief in and of itself. Belief, in this case, was vital.
“Maybe my favorite thing about you,” Kate said to her once, not long after they’d acquired the domain name for A Fierce Blue Fire and were still working out of her and Matt’s apartment, “is that you’re not who you say you are.”
Liza had bugged her eyes and said, “I’ll be whoever you ask me to be, Kate, if you just let me shave your legs and armpits.” Kate thought this was so funny and laughed and laughed. Liza put on her most revolted face. “Why are you laughing? I’m absolutely not joking.”
Holly, who’d spent so many months sick with fear about her father, was mulling a random childhood memory: She’d been maybe eight years old, at the beach in La Jolla. She’d been playing with her friends, these two boys, Mark and Joey, and all three had taken off their shirts in the surf, and her dad had come over and yelled at her—like really yelled at her—to put her shirt back on. When she returned to her towel, sobbing, she argued her case to her mom. It made no sense that the boys could take their shirts off and she couldn’t, and there was no reason she should get yelled at for it. And the more her mom tried to explain the difference between boys and girls, the more certain Holly was that this explanation was nuts—she and Joey and Mark all looked exactly the same with their shirts off, so why would she get yelled at?