“Those cowards,” Rekia moaned, and the tears burst from her eyes. Tom set the Rubik’s Cube aside and went to his archnemesis. He removed his glasses, folded them into his pocket, and took her in his arms. Rekia wept loudly into his shoulder.
On my ride home, helicopters barbed-wired the skies, the thump of their blades ever-present, and the drones buzzed along their routes a level below, all that sky traffic as unremarkable now as the driverless delivery pods. The penitentiary feel of the city had spiked following the Weathermen attack.
Kate didn’t come home that night. She’d been sleeping at the office a lot lately, sometimes elsewhere. I fed Dizzy, then smoked the only kind of weed that didn’t make me completely distraught. With the dog on my lap, I watched Kate appear by hologram on MSNBC. Kate had taken to wearing makeup when she made these television appearances, surrendering more and more to vanity, and I couldn’t blame her. Even with the makeup she still looked twitchy and sleepless. What I wasn’t used to was the fear in her voice. She told Nicolle Wallace that all was not lost, but you could plainly see she didn’t believe this.
“And the Senate?” Wallace asked with a newscaster’s funereal mourning. “We’re hearing they’re going to use the House bill to go to conference with new antiterrorism legislation?”
“They’re going to take her bill,” I told Dizzy, high but lucid, stroking the spot between the Australian cattle dog’s eyes. “They’re going to take everything we worked for and use it to hang her.”
“People will be in the streets,” Kate promised. Her eye twitched, and she rubbed its lid with a finger.
The next day it rained, and it kept up for three straight days.
Advocating for climate legislation, you can’t help but believe the weather to be a complicit force, an anthropomorphized boogeyman creeping closer and closer to the murder cabin even as all the partygoers assure you no one’s out there with an axe. When we needed people to take to the streets, it was more or less impossible. Twelve inches of rain fell over the Beltway in three days. East Potomac Park was underwater, and the Southwest Waterfront had cars floating down the streets. As far north as the Ellipse, people were trudging to work wearing rubber boots in ankle-deep water. The Potomac crested at twenty-seven feet, washing out weaker bridges and roads farther upstream. The gray-blue color of a ripe storm hung over the city in what felt like permanent night. Three days is a long time. You almost forget what the sky looks like.
Protests were sparse, objections few, unless you count the brain-dead social media outrage machine. All the energy and passion we’d spent a decade building, it all drained away faster than the district’s floodwaters. In the offices, the mood was total despair. I found Liza dabbing her eyes by the coffee machine. Tom was placing calls to building maintenance, trying to deal with a huge blister of water that had formed on the wall of the conference room. I heard Coral uncharacteristically raising their voice on the phone. In Rekia’s office, I asked her if she had any understanding of what had happened, how we’d lost everything so fast. She chose the moment to root around for lipstick in her purse, retrieving a deep red color.
“What if this is what they wanted? Or planned?” she said.
“Who? Planned what?”
“Gut-and-go legislation.” Rekia twisted the lipstick from the tube. “This is why I never trusted Randall. Our entire bill ransacked. Now it’s a bunch of money for seawalls and levies and beach sand in wealthy coastal districts, but mostly it’s the police state unbound. That’s not an accident. This stuff was ready and waiting. Someone just pulled it off the shelf at the eleventh hour. You don’t have to be the Weathermen to see that.”
The Left was properly freaking out about what PRIRA had become, but at that point I still thought a lot of it was hysteria. No, it was not what we’d been pushing for, but the idea that the fossil-fuel industry had used the bill as a Trojan horse seemed to me like Covid truther stuff.
“Now that’s paranoid. And please do not say that fucking terrorist group’s name around this office.”
Rekia finished her quick primp and picked up her phone to signal that she needed to get back to work. The rain hammered the windows. “Yeah, well, maybe they’ve been right this whole time.”
On the street, an overflowing sewer grate had turned into a fountain and was spewing oily brown sludge five feet high as cars swerved to avoid it. I rode home, soaked immediately, my poncho of little use in the downpour. Often, I regretted giving up my car for a stupid e-bike. I showered, ate take-out leftovers, and fell asleep on the couch listening to the storm. Kate woke me when her keys rattled in the lock.
“Didn’t mean to,” she said. She dropped her bag and keys indifferently and oozed into the apartment. I could tell she’d been drinking.
“It’s okay.” I sat up. She went to the kitchen, ignoring Dizzy, who crept out from the bedroom to see her other human. I followed, feeling the first threads of anger but also because I missed her. She was never away for three entire days. She was wearing the same clothes as the day the bill died. “Where’ve you been?”
She pulled open the fridge and ducked her head inside. “Thought you knew better than to ask me that.”
“Just wanted to make sure you didn’t get kidnapped.” Dizzy put her nose on Kate’s leg, and she absently scratched beneath her jaw where she liked it. Yet that was all Dizzy got, as Kate shoved around cartons of spoiled coconut milk. Dizzy padded back to me. “You could have at least let me know you’re okay.”
“Did you eat that leftover Burmese?”
“It was going bad.”
She shut the fridge and pulled out her phone for a take-out order. She still hadn’t looked at me. I wanted to go to her, touch her dark gold curls, frizzy and wet from the rain, but I feared her hand whisking mine aside and an impatient Not now.
“I know how much you’re hurting. Trust me, I am too. We all are.”
She set down the phone and finally let her eyes find me.
“There’s a thing coming out about me,” she said. “It’s a video.”
“What do you mean, a video?” I asked, my skin tightening.
“With a guy. A guy I met up with in Philly last time I was there.”
How many times I’d been in this position, my hurt so vivid and her disposition so matter of fact. Here’s how it’s going to be, Matt. Don’t let me see you cry now.
“Anyone I know?”
She did not avert her gaze from mine. “He worked at our office. Yeah.”
She peeled off toward the living room.
“That’s impressive, Kate.” I followed her. The rain drummed on monotonously. Dizzy, sensing unpleasantness, slinked away. “We’re here on the eighteenth goddamn hole of our life’s work, and you’re making trips to Philly to fuck someone from the office?”
“I was in Philly speaking. It was an incidental fuck.”
“Who is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Who is it?” I repeated. “Who is my family going to have to watch you screwing online?”
She had the hint of a smile. Because part of her was no doubt proud: Fuck the patriarchy, fuck my haters, fuck the world, and fuck my “colonizing male” for thinking he has any say over what I do.
“It was Sandeep.”
I could feel my eyes strain out of their sockets. “The intern? The fucking kid intern?”
She turned away. “Enough, Matt.”
“He couldn’t even drink when we hired him! Do you ever stop and think for even a fucking—”
Before I could finish that thought, the sting of her palm spun my head sideways. My ear was ringing so hard that her next words were distant and half-lost in the fury of the raging cumulonimbus stalled over the city.
“Not the time, kid.” And she stalked off to the bedroom, leaving me there with the pinking of my left cheek. I reached up and touched it like my whole face was suddenly new. She’d never done anything like that before. I sat down on the couch and the shock followed a moment later. I stared out the window at the rain until I fell asleep again.