S
HANE
D
RIVES INTO THE
S
UNSET
2036
Shane woke two days after the presidential election in a humid motel room, the sheets soaked, thinking Lali had peed herself. The bedside lamp clicked and clicked like it was out of bullets, and then she realized the AC unit was silent. A power outage. Lali remained asleep, but it wasn’t another bedwetting episode—Shane had left behind a pool of sweat from dreams and heat. A dusky light split the blinds. She knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep anytime soon and eased out from under the damp sheets, careful not to wake her daughter. Quietly unlocking the door, she stepped outside into the muggy, fetid air.
The wind at least cooled her skin. From the second-floor balcony, she could see over the tops of a few seaside units, all of them dark, two of them collapsed, the roofs pancaking down. According to the motel clerk, Parmesh, about a third of the homes had already been in foreclosure before Tropical Storm Solomon shoved five feet of water up the shore. The quaint Gulf tourist town she’d known as a girl, when her parents rented from this same motel one week a year, lost the fight to condo development and regurgitated seaside housing. Now homebuyers had all but vanished.
“Being ‘underwater’ on your mortgage ain’t exactly figurative around here,” Parmesh had told her. Parmesh had a lot of rehearsed lines he deployed with self-satisfaction, but Shane found him friendly and wry, so they’d chatted while Lali clicked quarters together at the vending machine and agonized over her soda choice.
Propping her arms on the railing, Shane breathed in the slate-heather dawn. The air smelled of the sea. Seagulls squealing, soaring, and diving. She remembered the family photo taken from the balcony of this same motel. Her father had shoved his digital camera into the hands of some poor lady passing by. In that picture, there’d been shoreline behind their heads. Almost all of the beach had since vanished, the sea scraping back and reclaiming raw earth.
Behind her, the AC rattled to life. The TV chirped. They must have fallen asleep with it on last night before the power went out. She stood there a while longer watching the sea.
Back in the room, Lali was awake, running a brush through her hair, watching the news. “Anything?” Shane asked.
ON THE MYSTERY OF VICTOR LOVE “Love did not appear on election night but instead sent his campaign manager to declare victory. He has not actually made a public appearance since two weeks before the election. The White House press secretary says he’s secluded at Camp David trying to deal with the situations in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and California. As we know, Aaron McGuirk resigned in protest after the events in D.C. and was never replaced. Now many are questioning Love’s mental health, not to mention the chain of command.”
THE PASTOR In Berkeley, fifteen people were killed after a man opened fire on a voting line. Voters faced intimidation at polling sites around the country as armed militias arrived to “protect the vote.” The Pastor had denied coordination with these forces, promising “biblical justice” would befall those denying his victory. Never had a presidential candidate promised executions of his political enemies. Now pundits debated if he was serious about executing members of their profession. “Why are we speculating about voices of moderation in his cabinet? He’s telling us what he will do.”
“Nope,” Lali said curtly. Only twelve and Lali already needed a preemptive exorcism for her surly teen posture. Shane knew better than to try a conversation this early, so she merely sat down on the bed. Two days after the election, and still no one knew who won, a debacle that was making 2000 and 2020 look relatively ordered and sane. The Pastor seemed to be close to the electoral college with 264 votes, but President Love had won the popular vote, and seven states were going to need recounts. Tracy Aamanzaihou received enough votes in those seven that she’d played the role of spoiler for Vic Love. Both Democratic and Republican camps were assuring their voters and the media that they had won.
She sat on her moist side of the bed, reading even grimmer news on the chyron below: pogroms in India, violence in the IDP camps in Arizona, FEMA overwhelmed as it tried to deal with the California refugee crisis, and President Love AWOL. She looked at Lali, who appeared to be taking it all in with her strange, inscrutable calm. The brush ripped at her hair. They’d driven down to Gulfport the day before, Shane concocting an obscure and unsatisfying excuse, which Lali was surely used to by now. The older she got, the worse Shane was at lying to her. She thought of leaving Lali back in Lawrence, but with the ligature of the world fraying, this scared her.
“You’ll be okay on your own today, Lals? I should only be a few hours.”
“I told you, yes.” Her eyes never left the TV. They had a fight a few weeks earlier about the amount of time Lali spent in VR. Shane had taken the set, and Lali hadn’t forgiven her.
The news pivoted, and abruptly there she was, dressed in a simple blue sweater with holes in the cuffs, speaking from the offices of her new operation.
“We only have our numbers,” she told an interviewer. She had an edginess in her voice and a craze to her eyes. Hair still like a wild river. “We are the majority, locked out by a political process that can no longer respond to the will of the people. So we need to shut that process down. Forget about Climate X. I’m talking about mass disruption to our economic system. And it starts with putting our bodies between the corporate state and its ends. Deny them any ability to continue with business as usual—”
“But won’t that—” The interviewer cut her off, and there was cross talk before he won out. “Don’t you fear that could exacerbate the civil unrest we’re seeing right now? Won’t that lead to more violence?”
“Yeah, not if our fucking government stops murdering its own people!” Her face was taut, the vein in her neck pulsing. “Trust me, Vic Love, The Pastor, Koch Industries, Exxon—these motherfuckers don’t have enough prisons or bullets in the world. So on November 7, we’re going to stop working again, we’re going to blockade again, we’re going to shut down the economy again. And I promise you, we will keep fucking coming.”
And after the third f-word they cut away from her, the anchor apologizing to the audience at home.
“Please don’t watch too much TV, Lali. Read a book today or something.”
Lali muted the TV, flipped over on her side, and pulled the covers over her face. Her hair fanned out over the pillow. She claimed she wasn’t really a girl in America in 2036 but a “post-biological, auto-teleological superintelligence” from the deep future inhabiting an avatar in a role-playing game living a complete, mundane human life from cradle to grave. She was serious about this, as she was serious about most everything. Shane told herself this lonesomeness and anger was just a phase.
She passed Parmesh in the office, and he gave her a cheery wave before turning his attention back to local radio, the host musing on the fate of the Gulf Coast. She grabbed a bagel from the grimy continental breakfast buffet and was on her way.
She drove with an arm out the window to catch the wind in her open palm. Most of the homes along Route 90 were battered, destroyed, empty, foreclosed, or for sale, and it gave the land a hallucinogenic quality, like it was previewing itself in the fog of a dream. Across the Mississippi shore, she got a look at the damage Solomon had wrought. The streets were mostly clear now, but lined with snowdrifts of splintered wood, plaster shards, particle board, trash, and shattered glass. She passed trucks stamped with NRA and APL decals, the snarling Cerberus, Stars and Bars, and homes with enormous flags flapping for The Pastor. On the ocean side, empty pilings stretched skyward after pitching the homes they held into the water. They looked like supplicating arms. Beyond the shore, she could see ink-dot islands and sandspits washed by garbage. The sea was calm, the waves sighing in and out, foam bubbling on sand. A snowy egret drifted on the wind so that it remained stationary in the sky. She drove west and thought about what she would say to Quinn, Kai, and Murdock when they met for lunch.