“I don’t think you think that’s true.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? When The Pastor’s president in about three hours, the financial implosion will be the least of our problems. All of us on the vagina squad will be forced to bear the bastard children of our mistaken sexual partners. Or he’ll just hang us. You nervous, Wall Street? You look like a lady who’s had an ah-bo-bo or two in her day.”
“Just a miscarriage.”
Kate’s jokey grin faded. I’m not sure why I told her that. I’d never told anyone about it.
After a moment she said, “I’ve had three. Abortions, not the other one. The first when I was nineteen, and I felt all the normal feelings you’re not supposed to say you feel. The next two I barely gave a second thought. Joked with the nurse about getting a card punched so the fourth would be free. Then went to a bar a night later for tequila shots. Didn’t even tell Matt.”
We passed a house close to the beach that was missing its porch, torn free by floodwaters that hadn’t even made the news in Midtown.
“Did you ever want kids?” she asked.
“Yes. For a long time. And then it just didn’t work out that way.”
“Why?”
“Fell in love with someone who already had one. How about you?”
“Nah.” She took a hand from her pocket so she could bat it at the breeze. “Didn’t interest me. I could lie and say I couldn’t justify it ethically in the middle of a mass extinction, resource scarcity, and ecological collapse, blah blah blah, but the truth is, kids were never gonna be my thing. I was built for speed.”
We reached Oakwood Beach where the wind blew harder and a gray steel cloud cut across a darker titanium sky. The road was filthy with loose litter and plastic debris coughed up by the bay.
Kate passed me a shy glance, which did not look at home on her tough and beautiful face. “What I’m trying to ask, Wall Street, is what’s your dissent? If you had to say something the rest of us don’t want to hear, what would it be?”
I shook my head in defeat. “It’s hard for me to give you a real answer to that. You’ve done things in your life that simply defy the laws of gravity. Things I didn’t ever think could’ve been pulled off. I admire you a lot, Kate. I always have.”
She had one eye scrunched closed from half a grin. “Even when you were working to stone me.”
“Even then.” I hesitated. “How do you live with this all the time? The fear.”
She looked darkly at the water. “Like when Love’s stormtroopers had just massacred seven-hundred-plus people and were closing in? Or when I was sitting in prison wondering if I’d ever see my family again let alone a lawyer?”
“Yes, that, but—I mean like right now. All of it.”
Kate hocked up the snot in her throat and thwapped a loogie in the sand. Across the Lower Bay we watched the turbid, white-capped Atlantic shifting plates of slate and blue.
“When I was in college, I went on a rafting trip up in Alaska on a wild river. One night we were camping, just me and a bunch of guys, so I kind of walked a good ways away from the fire because I needed to go a number two. So as I’m finishing up, kicking dirt over it, and getting my pants up, I look up and there’s this”—she held her hands wide—“this enormous fucking grizzly. I swear to God, it was the size of a car. Maybe only ten feet away, just watching me.”
“Jesus.”
“I was totally paralyzed. I just stood there, and me and this bear, we stared at each other. And I was so fucking scared, I could feel the tears on my cheeks, but I didn’t know where they were coming from. They didn’t feel like mine. Then finally, this bear, it just turns. And it goes ambling in the other direction like it was bored with me. That’s when I realized I hadn’t taken a breath in like a minute, and I still couldn’t move. I was frozen there for so long, and honestly, I couldn’t believe I was alive. It was such a beautiful creature, and it was so”—she shook her head—“so totally fucking terrifying I kind of used up all the fear in my life right then. Been living on borrowed fear ever since.” And then she looked at me, her eyes searching. “You’re no good to me if you ignore your instincts, Jackie.”
I cleared my throat. “Then I think you need to consider calling these protests off for now.” It was such a relief to say it. “I know it goes against your every fiber, Kate, but everything is in flux, and they’re targets. They’re fueling unrest. You could be a voice of stability instead of disruption. Does that make sense? What Rekia is trying to do with A Fierce Blue Fire—getting food to people who can’t afford it, shelter to all the displaced, a sense of solidarity—it’s not radical and it’s not as sexy, but people are really scared right now.”
“Oh, they’re not scared.” She looked back to the water. “They’re positively terrified. And that’s why we need to keep going. Controlled and careful, but we need to keep going. People need a vision and a demand, something to focus their anger and sadness on. They need to believe we can change this—I need to believe we can change this. I need to believe that no matter how fucked and horrifying things get, the possibility for a radical new world will never be over. It will never be too late. Not as long as I’ve got even one motherfucking breath in my lungs.”
I blinked a few tears out of my eyes and wiped them away. “Sorry. It’s more from exhaustion than anything.”
“Nah, girl, you’re feeling what’s real right now. You’ve spent your whole life in a cubicle and boardroom trying not to feel it. Have a cry!” She put a cold hand on the back of my neck and gave me a playful pinch. “When it rocks you once, it tends to rock you forever.”
I laughed. “I don’t understand how you’ve had the energy for this for twenty years.”
She curled a lip, bobbing her head back and forth. “Cocaine? Sex that makes the news? Global amounts of trouble?” I laughed harder. “When this is all over, Jackie, you and me will do a few jumbo rails and hit the town.”
“Oh my God, I’m definitely not doing that.”
Then she was on a tear describing what our outlandish night out might entail, and we were both cracking up. We ambled down the beach, me and this woman I barely knew, and it felt as though her laughter by itself might shatter the darkness I’d carried inside for so long.
After Kate took me on that walk along the Staten Island shore, I caught the ferry back to Manhattan, spending the ride glued to my tablet, toggling between updates about the vote in the House and the disintegrating financial system where all my assets and savings lay exposed and vulnerable. For all the work I’d put in to make my person and position secure, it turned out all that wealth was illusory, only as meaningful as the willingness of others to believe it had any value at all.
When I got off the ferry, I was looking for the black car, when someone touched my arm.
“Jackie.”
The look on Fred’s face was one I’d not seen in all the years we’d been together.
“Hey! What are you—”
“Just explain to me why.”
“Why what?” And when I said that, it was genuine. As if he was there to accuse me of reprogramming the cleaning bot to skip certain rooms in our home. I finally recognized what was clouding his face. I’d never actually seen him furious before.
“Why don’t we walk?” I suggested.
He looked north to the Covid-19 Memorial, the embattled stone nurse behind a mask and face shield intubating a dying man. He clenched his jaw and nodded. We started across the Battery to the east, both of us silently agreeing to head away from Wall Street, as if the contamination happening there was airborne even beyond the capabilities of that long-ago pandemic.