She frightened me awake. I thought I was still dreaming because my nightmare evaporated into a thing I wanted so badly.
“Matt,” she whispered. “Matt, come here.” She pulled me into her arms. Of course, I let her. She was crying. “I’m so fucking sorry. I’m losing my mind. I can’t even believe I did that. I’m so sorry.”
Tears traveled the pretty bulb of her nose. She was so expressive in her joy, but when she cried, she did so with an inverse calm. Her hurt ran out of her like a trickle of water seeping from pressurized rock.
“Now I gotta go to the abused boyfriends shelter.”
She laughed and said, “Don’t joke. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for everything. I adore you. I’m so lucky to have you.”
It was dawn by then, and the rain had at long last quieted to gray-black clouds. They hung low over the district, slouching eastward. We took a walk, got ourselves coffee and a doughnut to share. In a month, there would be a video of her on Renaissance, on Slapdish, a think piece, a hate piece, a fuck piece on every sleaze and scandal and political site, but that morning we walked the city aimlessly, cataloguing the damage the flooding had wrought: the downed trees and shredded limbs, the cars carried into errant arrangements by floodwaters, all the city crews in white hard hats, the yellow and orange of officialdom organizing the cleanup. Receding waters had left the district with wind-blown scabs of trash and deltas of muck clinging to the streets and sidewalks. We eventually found ourselves at Arlington National Cemetery strolling past the tombstones, the grass verdant with rain. Finally, we came to Kennedy’s gravesite, and looked out over the Potomac, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Capitol Dome all lined up.
“Why don’t we get away?” I said. “Let Coral and Rekia take over for a few months. We can go see our families. We’ll go camp and have sex in a tent. We can regroup.”
Hands tucked in her jacket pockets, Kate toed a batch of roses near the gravesite. Who, after all this time, was still delivering fresh roses to Kennedy’s grave?
“I love you, kid.” She said it slowly, mournfully. “If only the world wasn’t ending, I bet we could’ve made a real run.”
“We’re making a real run,” I said. “This is only a speed bump.”
She looked up at me. Thirteen years on. Thirteen years since I first saw her stomping down the dock in Colter Bay and couldn’t take my eyes off her. Now she smiled.
“It would be fun to fuck in a tent again.”
There, on the walkway surrounded by the faded white stones and beneath a sky nearly the same color, I kissed her as an unmarked helicopter thundered overhead.
After emerging from reconciliation, the bill went straight to Randall’s desk with a signing ceremony in the White House. “We can have security, prosperity, and a healthy environment,” she boiler-plated, her face grim, her words clipped. While most of the late-night quips were about the salad fleck in her teeth, Seth Meyers noted that she looked like a hostage. Her lips were tight and bleak, a flock of bipartisan politicians peering over her shoulder as she hastily scrawled her name, set the pen down, and seemed to drag her eyes up to meet the cameras. I wondered about the human being behind a moment like this. The quiet, whip-smart girl from Buffalo, who went from Catholic school to state government in a decade, from governor of that state to president of her country, who broke a political stalemate and seemed poised to usher in a revolution no one else could. Now she would live her life through the prism of this haunting compromise, having signed her name to doom. The bill extended most of the tax incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act until 2040, added new surveillance techniques for law enforcement, broadened the scope of permissible FISA warrants, and earmarked nearly $30 billion for the deployment of AI technology in the monitoring of Americans suspected of terrorist activities. That the Supreme Court would uphold all this was barely a question. The Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Research Act—the refund mechanism having been chopped out—was signed into law on October 4, 2030. A month later, most of the Far Right candidates denying the reality of climate change, promising new detention facilities for immigrants, and new curbs to the civil rights of Muslims, environmentalists, and other agitators against the state, won their elections.
We stayed in D.C. through the electoral bloodbath when so many of our allies lost, including Cy Fitzpatrick, deposed from the Senate seat he’d held for a generation. Though the polling had been telling us this was coming, that made it no less devastating. Joy LaFray resigned in scandal, and the details of her affair with her stepson were paraded across Fox News with triumphant glee. We planned to take at least four months off. Kate hadn’t taken anything more than a three-day weekend in seven years. The morning we were supposed to leave, as I loaded our bags into our electric truck, she texted asking me to meet her, Rekia, and Tom at Lafayette Square across from the White House. Why? I asked, but she didn’t respond.
A cold wind blew across the Potomac. Soon there would be snow, the bitterness of a D.C. winter. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say I’d come to hate this place, what it represented and whatever the weather did. As I cut through Foggy Bottom, I marveled at the normality the city could produce in the face of cataclysm. The terrifying future becomes ever more certain, and yet after some television squawking, a few despairing tweets, op-eds, and news analysis AIs telling humans what to think, people go back to their lives.
Approaching Lafayette Square and the White House, following the pin Kate had dropped, I saw there was some kind of rally. There was chanting. A woman was straining to be heard over the noise, and it took me a moment to place her. Jennifer Braden wore a dark peacoat and punctuated her words with black-leathered fists. She was extremely beautiful, with coal-black hair, red lips glowing against porcelain skin, and a hat with netting over half her face, calling to mind a movie star of the 1930s. The PA system pushed her voice out over the park.
“… And what we’re asking for, what we demand: We want our country back! We want our borders impassible. We want security, and we want peace.”
Her crowd beat its hands in approval. There was another contingent behind a police barrier, a raucous counterprotest. Several robocams dispatched from various news outlets hovered, broadcasting. These levitating bots still made me uneasy with their too-languid movements and the cold surveilling surface of their glassy eyes. A jowly woman in front of me held a red placard with a photo on it. This stopped me cold.
Braden continued, “What we have endured in this country for too long is an acceptance of multiculturalism, an erosion of our Christian character, of our European ancestry.”
HUNT ALL TRAITORS TO EXTINCTION, read the sign. And above it a picture of a young girl in a headscarf with a bullet wound in her face. It took me a moment to understand the image as one of the Somali girls killed in Minneapolis in ’28.
I felt ill. Because I was staring, the woman’s eyes met mine. She looked like any overweight Middle American housewife. Pleased by my shock, she smugly returned her attention to the speaker.
“The white race, the Christian faith—my friends, we built the modern world. Every single achievement you see around you is because of us.” Braden thumped a hand above her breast. “And that is why it’s not enough to simply have pride. We must go out into the world, and we must fight for that truth.”
A rousing cheer lifted from the crowd to the sky. “Hell yeah!” screamed a short man with a wispy mustache. Clipped to his belt, he had what looked like a combat knife. The woman with the sign locked her elbows to hold her grisly image higher: a bloody hole in the cheek of a girl not yet a teenager.