Tony sputtered out a sick laugh. He shook his head. “Fuck you too, Hasan.”
Holly, Dean, and Hannah came up to New Haven for election night. For months, the polls had been forecasting a tidal wave. The voting reforms Aamanzaihou had championed and managed to keep in ERASE—especially the expansion of the franchise to every citizen regardless of felony or carceral status—would shatter standard election maps, and an activated, angry, unchained electorate was finally going to get its say. A wave of reformers began winning early in the night, and that wave never seemed to crest. Deep red states from Arkansas to Kansas, Alabama to Oklahoma, threw out of office Republican incumbents who’d held power for decades, replaced by a mix of Green Tea Republicans, “eco-capitalists,” and socially conservative, fiscally populist Democrats. Blue states chucked out corporate Democrats, who would skulk into the private sector after having their electoral heads handed to them by candidates promising to sever, once and for all, the endemic power of money in the political process. Battleground states like Georgia and Florida uprooted incumbents in favor of some of the most diverse delegations in the nation, including a few who had come to this country as refugees during the Trump years. CNN was reporting that the ’38 midterm elections would have the highest turnout both by number and percentage of the population in the country’s history. Hannah wasn’t quite sure why her parents were freaking out, but Dean picked her up to dance with each new victory, and this delighted her so much she quickly figured out who to root for on TV.
As the hour grew late and Hannah began to fade, she crawled over onto Grandpa’s lap and watched sleepily from his chest. Tony stroked his granddaughter’s hair and tried to keep awake through the fog of the most powerful dose of painkillers he’d needed yet. He felt like he’d aged thirty years in the last two months; he looked in the mirror and no longer recognized the man he saw. The senator-elect from Texas gave a speech about how she’d been nine years old when she arrived in this country, how she’d been taken from her mother at the border and spent eleven months in a detention facility sleeping on a mat on concrete. “I fought not only to become a citizen and a senator of this country but its champion,” she said. “My story is not a condemnation of America but a testament to the power of its ideals, always ready to be renewed, reactivated, and restored.” Then all the news channels began to cut away from results to camera crews in Times Square, in Washington, D.C., outside the fortified gates of the White House, and in downtown Chicago where, spontaneously, thousands of people were spilling into the streets, carrying flags, performing the requisite “USA!” chants, hugging, laughing, crying, dancing. Then the images were coming from Los Angeles and Philadelphia and Seattle and Kansas City and St. Louis. Millions of people poured out into the night, this last election to which Tony would ever bear witness. Even as all this pierced the calloused armor of an old cynical asshole like him, he dozed off on the couch anyway, his granddaughter asleep in his arms, and he dreamed of a grand filament, exquisitely thin yet impossibly tough, and in this vision, he could reach out and feel its tensile strength, threading him to his descendants, to every dream of civilization, and to all those dense and lonely planets spinning their loops out in the expanding dark matter.
On November 17, with a blue-gray mist enveloping the tristate area, Holly picked him up, and they made one final trip to New York City to go to the American Museum of Natural History. It was the last thing Tony wanted to do while he had any strength left. He’d first taken the girls when they were little and the family was on vacation in the city. Catherine had a total meltdown, Holly had argued with Gail over what floors they should see, and he’d spent a hundred bucks in the gift shop trying to salvage the day. Over the years, though, after he moved back East, it became one of his favorite things to do with his oldest daughter. They would wander the halls with all those glass and plastic displays covered in grease from the hands of children, and he remembered how thrilling he’d found this place when his parents first took him. He wanted to be there the first time Hannah saw it, though she was still so young she probably wouldn’t remember him.
The three of them started on the fourth floor because they assumed the dinosaur fossils would be of the greatest interest to Hannah. Holly noted, as she always did, that the museum had the ugly scar of David Koch’s name gracing the Dinosaur Wing, a “call through time from one extinction event to another.” How disappointing it was to see how much VR had taken over the place, as two small brothers roughhoused by the famous mud-encased corpse of an Edmontosaurus, their goggles cracking off each other. Hannah would point to one of the massive skeletons and ask, “Dis?” as in What’s this one, Grandpa? Tony would dutifully read off the name, and she’d nod her head like, I see. That’s all very interesting. Then she pointed to the Hall of Vertebrate Origins.
“Toytle!”
The great apes turned out to be even more of a hit, except there was a plaque in front of the immense silverback explaining how the mountain gorilla subspecies had not been sighted in the wild in nearly seven years. For all intents and purposes, this cousin of theirs was extinct. After that, Tony noticed many more of those disclaimers. Whole habitat displays were devoted to the fact that those ecosystems were now more memories than realities.
He asked Holly how she was feeling about starting work again. She had come to terms with Rekia Reynolds and would be rejoining A Fierce Blue Fire to coordinate ecology programming in schools with a government grant from the ERASE stimulus. He made a joke about his corruption in writing a bill that would employ his daughter, but Holly only gave him a weak smile. She’d been quiet all day. In fact, she’d hardly said anything to him; mostly they just talked through Hannah.
Zipping along in the electric wheelchair they’d given him at the Eighty-First Street entrance, portable oxygen pack tucked behind him, they skipped down to the first floor to see the life-size blue whale suspended from the Hall of Ocean Life. Hannah’s eyes fixed on the ceiling, and she strained to take in this enormous creature, its back arched, preparing to dive into the ocean’s depths. Her small mouth hung open, blue light from the atrium roof bathing her wonder-struck face. Finally, like she’d just figured out something important, she uttered a small ooooh. Both he and Holly laughed. “It eats people, Gampa!” Hannah cried happily.
Tony tried to explain that this was not the case, that it had these plates in its mouth called baleen that filtered out everything except these tiny, tiny, tiny animals called krill, but this was a big lift for a not-yet two-year-old.
“No, it eats people!” she assured him.
“Actually, Hannah, this whale? It’s more like you than the dinosaurs upstairs. It’s actually so close to being like you, there’s hardly any difference at all. It even has a belly button.” He poked her in the belly button, and she shrieked a giggle for the entire Hall of Ocean Life to hear.
“Noooo, Gampa.”
“I’ll prove it!”
So they rolled beneath the whale and stared up at the beast’s belly button.
With Hannah fading, Tony wanted to walk a bit, so they went to the check-in and traded his wheelchair for Hannah’s stroller and his cane. His abdomen had been in so much pain lately, it hurt to stand, but he liked knowing he still could. Before they even got off the elevator for the second floor Hannah had passed out. He decided to finally address Holly.