The summer of ’36 was a riot on all our nerves. Our blockades lagged because people were falling to heatstroke all across the country. We tried to get shade and water to our people, but in New York City the wet-bulb temperature was reaching 109. We argued about calling off actions until this latest heat storm abated. Kate did not dismiss this easily, but ultimately, she couldn’t bring herself to tell people to stand down. “We need to keep escalating. We can’t take our foot off the accelerator now,” she said. Then a man drove his truck into a group of our people at a gas station near Austin. A seventeen-year-old kid was killed and four others injured. The driver, of course, had ties to the American Patriot League. Kate hit the airwaves to decry the violence, and she certainly could do so with passion, but it did not go unnoticed by me—or Fred, in our many arguments on the subject—that Kate seemed neither shaken nor surprised.
“It’s almost like she’s expecting to pick up right where she left off after the National Mall,” he said.
I didn’t argue with him. She had been driving hard all that spring and into the summer as the election overheated and all three candidates seemed to present a different path toward doom. We’d watched the presidential debate from the conference room, the one where The Pastor, when asked what he would do with women who’d had abortions, said, “All sinners have two choices: repentance or the sword.” When that grim smile crept into his face, I felt like I might throw up. Though Kate publicly endorsed Tracy Aamanzaihou, she confided her doubts to us during a September meeting. “If she helps this fucking loon win…”
Eager to agree, eager to move the topic away from the dark presence in my memory, the man waiting in the wings for the presidency, I said, “The guy who murdered over seven hundred of our people might actually be the far lesser of two evils.” The meeting got very quiet after that.
Jenice warned me afterward, “They were not ‘your’ people, Jackie. You were still slinging mud for a hedge fund then. You need to think before you speak.”
I was embarrassed and chastened. I never brought it up again.
About a week after the death in Austin, I looked up from my desk and saw Rekia Reynolds exit the elevator. The rest of the staff stopped typing. Before Carmen could ask who she was there to see, Kate emerged. Beside me, Liza stood and walked to the door.
“Nice to have you here, Rek,” said Kate. She looked tired but primed. She cast a hand around the room. “What do you think? It’s a fixer-upper, I’ll say that.”
“If you ever thought before you jumped, it’d be a miracle, Kate,” said Rekia. “A blessed miracle.”
Kate snorted. “That’s what you came here to tell me, Reynolds?” She gestured to her office. “Do you want to come in and talk, and not have it out in front of my folks maybe?”
Rekia’s eyes bounced between Kate and Liza. “You two are putting people’s lives in danger. Again.”
“No, I’m waking people up to the danger.”
“You get people killed, Kate!” I jumped as Rekia’s voice boomed in the close space. Her neck strained, and tears pushed into her eyes as she shouted. “You’re orchestrating confrontations to get people killed! Intentionally! And it’s nothing to you!” No one in the office moved. Rekia looked right at Holly, who stared at the ground, holding her pregnant belly. Rekia smacked tears off her face and lowered her voice. “That poor boy in Austin—you’re recruiting all these people from our membership rolls. You’re using them to fuel the rampage your ego’s been on the last four years.”
“Rekia.” Kate folded her arms. She met the other woman’s gaze, her voice stony and low. “Four years in which the planet has hit 446 ppm. Four years in which we’ve passed one-point-five degrees. Four years in which the seas have started rising an inch every thirteen months. We’re outta time, babe. Slow and steady won’t win the race.”
“It’s funny how these sacrifices never seem to include you.”
Kate smiled, let out a humorless chuff, and looked at the ground.
“The T12 vertebrae,” Rekia hissed. Tears collected in her eyes and this time she did nothing about them. “You know what that is?” Kate said nothing, and Rekia’s lip trembled. “Tom’s lucky he’s a para instead of a quad.” She shook her head. “He has days he can’t remember who I am. He doesn’t recognize his own parents. And you”—her face did a quick series of contortions—“you haven’t said boo to him.”
“You told me not to go near him.” A flash of fury lit Kate’s face, and then she lowered her voice. “So I didn’t, Rek. I just did what you asked.”
“You are a selfish woman.” Rekia smeared her arm across her eyes. I felt my own tears working up my throat. “I doubt you’ve ever known anyone you didn’t find a way to hurt.”
Rekia glared one last time at Liza, and then she walked out, slamming open the door to the stairwell. Kate went into her office. A minute later, Liza followed. Neither of them came out the rest of the day.
Before we sat down for the next meeting, Kate asked me if I was okay, and I forgot my own lie.
“The doctor yesterday? Carmen said you looked stressed.”
“No,” I said quickly. “Everything was fine.”
The guilt was less over ditching work than talking to Moniza Farooki. She was, after all, now living with Matt Stanton in North Carolina, splitting her time between there and New York. I’d only recently come to understand this was hot gossip in the activist world. When Moniza found out who I was going to work for, she said, “Be careful with Morris. She’s good at making you believe in her without any reciprocal interest.”
It was hard to tell if this was just the new love undercutting the ex. Yet what she said stayed with me, and the day after seeing her at One World Trade, I found myself mulling this at our meeting, studying Kate as she listened to Holly. The idea on the table was to move the actions higher up the economic ladder.
“Imagine trying to blockade JFK,” said Holly. “Security checkpoints for miles, surveillance even farther out. The advantage of gas stations is the logistics of a blockade are so much easier.”
“You’re too cautious,” Jenice told Holly. “We’re not about triangulating.”
“There’s a difference between cautious and strategic,” said Holly. “A strategy that doesn’t work isn’t any good. We need to diversify. Let’s go back to tax refusal, student loan payment refusal, mortgage refusal—”
“No, no, no,” said Jenice. “That’s weak! In some cities, they’re cutting gas hoses, pushing over cash machines, getting truly militant. We can organize lawyers and financial support.”
Liza cleared her throat loudly. She adjusted her ARs. I could see her reading or watching behind the glasses as she spoke, her eyes scanning invisible cues.
“How soon does that turn to Molotov cocktails?” she asked. “It sounds 6Degrees-ish. Gauche.”
Kate laughed.
“Ever since D.C.,” said Holly, “and what happened there. We can’t—I can’t—” Her eyes flitted nervously to Kate and Liza. I held my breath. The conversation was simply never that far from August 1, 2034. “We can’t have something like that happen again.”
“It might,” said Tavia. “We have to be prepared for that.”
“You weren’t there,” said Holly.
“Neither were you,” Tavia shot back. “You ducked out before the hammer came down.”