“And advertising,” I added. “Yes. A lifetime’s worth.”
“Well, we’re in a little bit of a PR battle here, if you haven’t heard.” She reached for my résumé without asking. “Maybe the great PR battle. And you can work gratis?” I’d left it right there in the same size font as everything else: VP for Strategic Communications; Clients include: United States Armed Forces, Adidas, Procter & Gamble, the Sustainable Future Coalition.
“Yes, that’s not a problem.”
Her eyes scanned the page for a moment, then she set it down.
“What drew you to the movement?” she asked.
“So,” I said the word slowly. Her energy was making the interaction asymmetric. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, and I finally decided I needed to play a more active role in trying to change the situation. The last few years have really scared me, and I want to help however I can.”
She pointed to my sketch pad. “What’s that?”
“Oh.” She reached for it before I could offer. “I drew up some branding ideas. A good symbol or logo would go a long way.”
She flipped through the images, stopping on a woman standing in a sea of people holding seven fingers aloft, her hands backlit by the dusk. “Cool,” she said. “You know, I never cared much for advertising. To me, it was a whole industry of evil bullshit meant to keep people unhappy and craving and alienated. But then just before D.C., I kinda came around. Can’t leave any tool in the box at this point.”
“I’ve had a dozen ideas since Holly’s friend put us in touch.” I started speaking very fast. “I really think there are a lot of methods that could draw people in who—”
“Wow,” she said. Her eyes had wandered back to my résumé and now went saucer-wide. “Are you kidding?” She flashed the biggest, brightest smile I’d ever seen. “Seriously, bitch, are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?” I said stupidly. She shook the sheet of paper in my face.
“What? You were with the SFC! The fucking people who nuked me and kneecapped PRIRA!”
“I was.”
“Who ran a fucking smear campaign and had rape threats coming into my office for two years?”
“That’s not what we did. I had nothing to do with that.”
“The fuck you didn’t!” She was still grinning. “Fucking cunt, you got some big ole balls on you, don’t ya? Get the fuck out of my office, then go throw yourself into the swelling seas you fucking hack corporate whore.” When I didn’t move, she stood, balled up the sheet of paper, and threw it hard at my face. I flinched as it bounced off my nose and scratched just beneath my eye. “You think I’m joking—get the fuck out!”
Through the doorway behind me, I could almost hear the staff stop what they were doing to listen in. I was frozen in my recoil from the paper. She picked up my sketch pad and began ripping out my designs, shredding them in front of me. “Get out, before I drag your ass out and throw you down the stairs—” She shredded another page and another, the confetti scraps fluttering down to the old dirty carpet. “Fucking get gone!” But I didn’t stand up.
“You said it was never too late.”
She ripped apart one more page. “What?”
“You said it was never too late for anyone. That we all had a choice to make. So this is my choice.” I was speaking too softly and forced myself to sit up, to uncoil. It probably looked like a small movement to her, but for me, it was like knocking over my chair. “I’m not going to sit here and grovel or apologize. I’ve made so many excuses and justifications to myself.” I thought of my dinner with Jefferey, and how I’d sat there parroting ideas I no longer believed in. But you have to keep saying those ideas out loud so that the alternative doesn’t become real. So that the full weight of who you are and what you’ve done doesn’t come bearing down. “And it was hard and painful to come to the—the understanding I’ve come to, but I did. And now I want to help. Any way I can. And if you don’t want me here, then I’ll go back to the gas station and keep holding my sign.”
My gaze fell back to my hands. I could feel her eyeing me. Then she walked around the table and grabbed the front of my top. I was sure she was going to hurl me to the ground. But instead, she pulled down my shirt and looked right at my breasts.
“Checking for a wire obviously.” She returned to her seat, folding her hands on the table. “I know, I know, they make bugs way smaller now. So how do I know you’re not a spy? Working for the SFC still and trying to undermine shit from within? Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Then why would I put it on my résumé?”
“Play to my ego. Duh. Make me think I converted you while you sow doubt in the ranks.”
“I’m not asking anything from you, Kate. I’ll make the coffee if that’s what you want.” I tried to reach for something deeper, but that’s hard to do when you’re face-to-face trying to explain the workings of your conscience. “I was ambitious and driven and wanted to make a name for myself. I put my head down and did the work. Like a lot of people in a lot of walks of life, I learned instinctually how to manipulate myself so I didn’t have to look at what I didn’t want to look at. But if it’s not too late for anyone, then it’s not too late for me. I’m scared, yes, but I’m here. And I’m ready.”
She gazed at me across the table, her face blank and unsympathetic. Behind me, in the central room, I heard a coffee mug tumble over and someone hiss “Damnit.”
“Okay,” said Kate. “You got me. You’re hired.”
I blinked. “Really?”
“To tell you the truth, I plan to run you into the ground like a mule. Can you start by drawing that one logo thingy again?” She reached to the ground and sifted through the scraps of torn paper, hoisting up a shred. “This gal?”
If Kate Morris had any further hesitation about me coming aboard, she never let me see it. I thought I’d have to earn her trust, but she put me to work and didn’t look back. Suddenly I was experiencing this person I’d always wondered about. She was loud and abrasive and could turn angry at the drop of a hat. Once, a volunteer left her laptop on the subway, and Kate exploded at her. The girl was gone the next day. Kate enjoyed a certain level of frat humor that I could never connect with. She’d let out a fart in the middle of a meeting, chew with her mouth open, or punch subordinates in the shoulder, playfully but hard. She’d steamroll into conversations or dismiss a bad idea with a curt “Yeah, no fucking way we’re doing that.” She rarely made it to 5 p.m. without cracking a beer, and she would drink until we left work. Mostly she slept on the couch in her office, but Garrett, her overworked assistant, confided to me that she had at least three different men with whom she sometimes shared a bed. “I get the trips to Brooklyn or Manhattan, but who the hell did she find to shack up with on Staten Island?” he wondered. And yet her focus, her passion, her work ethic were undeniable. She was a force of nature, practically elemental. She took an idea, like building out what Liza Yudong called the “blockade network,” and would hammer her programmers and engineers, these awkward, zit-faced young women she’d found at the College of Staten Island, until it was up and running. Her ability to recruit was breathtaking. She’d get on a VR set with some unknown anarchist artist co-op in Boise and within forty-five minutes persuade them to build a civil disobedience training center.
The organizational structure of this loose, fly-by-night militant network Kate had created was never settled. No one had a title. There was no hierarchy. People got paid when fundraising had a good couple of weeks, and I set them up with a $3 million donation that helped us build out that staff. Most people lived in shared apartments on Staten Island where the rent was cheap in the flood zone. A top-level meeting consisted of Kate, Holly, Liza, Garrett, myself, and a hard-charging married couple, Jenice and Tavia Ryan, who’d also once been field directors for A Fierce Blue Fire.