The SWAT team fell back as the man in front of the dais exploded in an incendiary burst of orange, pink, and yellow flame. The fire was so breakneck and demonic it roared to the top of the chamber, scorching the ceiling black. The man lurched from his knees to his feet, stumbled forward three steps, silent, his face already cloaked in flame, his eyes two hot coals. He spun halfway left, then right, and finally fell forward. He hit the ground with a dense boom-whoosh, flames lapping up all around his ruined body, hot smoke billowing from his impermanent shell. Someone screamed for a fire extinguisher, but the sprinkler system kicked on, and a hard rain fell across the chamber. Quinton Marcus-McCall only heard the agonizing scream of the fire catching his skin, the bright-hot full-body torment, the discovery of total, eclipsing pain. But then he heard hushed voices thundering in his ears. Eons rushed over him, with each second taking on the duration of whole millennia—the reign of the sun, Earth’s corpus blooming to life, humankind’s dallying—all visible for those interminable nanoseconds as the souls of the dead whispered in his ears. The terror he’d felt his whole life, a siege that begins at birth, slipped away, and the more the dread of oblivion receded the more overwhelming the wave of love. His mom and dad and sister were there, and even his life’s sorrows now felt precious. The curse of this life, from the yawp to the ashes, finally blew apart, vanishing to wind and stars.
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TAPLES
, 2034
PRESENTATION CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
EYES ONLY: CONGRESSWOMAN TRACY AAMANZAIHOU
Ashir al-Hasan
December 5, 2034
Abstract: When we returned from our recent fact-finding mission, a public relations junket for which I now feel a measure of disdain, you asked me to complete this assessment of the domestic and global food situation as it stands after two years of skyrocketing prices. My apologies for this document’s tardiness. When you asked after my mental state in an armored SUV trundling over the dirt roads of rural Nigeria, I answered in such a way as to bring an end to the conversation. Here following is an effort to answer that query honestly, and perhaps use it to explicate the crisis of caloric deficit that is driving violence, insurgency, and faminogenic policy across the globe. Allow me to begin where I should have last month in the vehicle: with my friend, partner, and husband, Seth Andrew Young.
From the beginning of his participation in the Concert for the Climate, Seth and I argued. As I once alluded, I knew that Seth’s involvement was part of a larger plot to occupy the National Mall, although I doubt any of the participants could have predicted the action’s grisly endgame. Several hundred people lie dead, with thousands more injured or imprisoned in the effort to retake the core of the capital. Seth claimed he had no plans to actually participate in the occupation, that he was merely drawing from his years in government and knowledge of logistics and security protocol to facilitate a mass act of civil disobedience. Yet from our first date in Charlie Palmer Steak, Seth made no secret he cared deeply for climate and environmental legislation. He’d always wanted a way back in, and Kate Morris gave it to him. For the first week of the occupation, he left me and our au pair to deal with an infant, so that he might help Morris and her acolytes maintain their feeble grip on a few city streets and public monuments. We communicated frequently and tensely as he came to the decision to stay for as long as the occupation continued. Suffice it to say, my fury is hard to overstate. As city services shut down, and even Georgetown descended into a state of exception, I was forced to leave our condo and relocate to New York with my sister and her husband, Peter. When the Love administration offered amnesty to participants following the record-setting heat wave, Seth finally complied with my wishes to leave the encampment. That was July 30. Then came the assault. Two days later, he still had not sent word. We tried to engage the authorities, but even with my many connections, the hierarchies of government were in such a state of disarray that no progress was made. Though the government had attempted a media blackout, video leaked via a member of the occupation, who decided a novel idea would be to self-immolate on a live feed. It was arresting footage to say the least and the first indication that what had occurred on the National Mall was more than tear gas and arrests, that the carnage would dwarf what occurred in 2021. That night, with the children in bed, Haniya, Peter, and I huddled around the television as reports began to emerge of what had happened on August 1. Even Peter, never at a lack for a quip, was preternaturally quiet. In a way, that unnerved me more.
“This can’t be true,” Hani said at one point.
Then there was a doctor from a D.C. hospital telling reporters he had numerous patients riddled with gunshot wounds. He said: “There was a massacre.”
Hani turned to me: “Seth said they were about to give up.” Her tone was accusatory. “Ash, you said he and the others were going to leave.”
“That is what he said.” On television, there was footage of the ER. I’d never seen so much blood.
My sister can vacillate between boundless good humor and stony melancholy. She rarely weeps. It was disconcerting then, as she began to cry very hard and say to herself, “Astaghfirullah. Astaghfirullah.”
I had not heard my sister use Islam’s liturgical language since our father was alive. Why she was asking for forgiveness was beyond me, and I never inquired.
Residents and essential government personnel were allowed to return to the capital two weeks after the clearing, but I did not return until late September. It was remarkable how all partisans began by loudly condemning this outrageous action, calling it the slaughter it was, and then, quickly, conventional wisdom and official party lines were rescripted. I believe this was in no small part due to a conspiracy-theorist millenarian, who shifted the conversation in a matter of days. As a secure car took me across the Potomac for the first time since May, I watched The Pastor speak from the pulpit of his VR worlde:
“The liberal media says he acted brutally? Are you kidding me? President Love allowed our nation’s heart to be sacked by barbarians. He should have cut them down the moment they defied the sanctity of Christ’s chosen nation. Instead, he let them arrive like swarms of rats, carrying blasphemy and anti-American ideologies. If he fails to execute every last one of these traitors—when I’m president in two years—I will.”
It wasn’t a standard campaign declaration, but within hours of this speech, Republican competitors were scrambling to line up behind this message, if more tactfully. As the midterms approached, the Republicans seemed less interested in investigating the president’s atrocity than yanking people in front of hearings to ask why he hadn’t done it sooner. The Pastor has taken his place at the front of the phalanx. A few years ago, I’d dismissed him as a charlatan. Yet if his act was all a con to sell a potent new brand of religious zealotry, that zealotry was becoming unsettlingly convincing.