I found Kate, Rekia, and Tom on the fringe of the counterprotest, all with identical dour expressions. The counterprotestors chanted with rage, “No Braden! No KKK! No fascist USA!” while police in full combat gear lined the fence of the White House, weapons angled at the ground.
“What the hell is this?” I shouted to be heard.
Rekia chucked her head at Braden. “We heard the Hot Nazi was declaring. No permit or anything, she just showed up at Randall’s front door.” The whole scene was so jarring, I didn’t quite register at first that Tom and Rekia were holding hands. Not until years later would I learn that the night PRIRA passed, Rekia and Tom had consummated their heated rivalry in our offices.
“And what has the so-called conservative Mary Randall done with her time in office?” Braden continued. “The country is terrorized by eco-fascists and Muslims while she coddles the socialist Left. She wants to raise the cost of energy, allow aliens to pour across the borders, tax you, restrict you, demean you, all so she can get a pat on the head from the New York Times.”
“Jew York Times!” someone cried.
Tom, ever the instigator, laughed loudly and began heckling the guy, asking him his name and where he worked. “The Zionist conspiracy is coming to get you, motherfucker!”
Braden took a hand from her peacoat and jabbed it at the White House behind her.
“Mary Randall, let me tell you something, you stupid bitch.” Braden salivated on the word, and the crowd went wild for it. “You are done! Your alliance with the greens, the dirt and scum leaking across our borders, the mongrels, the Black nationalists, the Muslim agenda—it is over! We are here! We are fighting back, and it Starts. Right. Now.”
The crowd roared in triumph. I watched a teenage girl beat her pink mittens together in applause.
“Can we please go?” I begged Kate.
“That is why, my friends, today I am declaring my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”
The crowd positively erupted. Signs and hats thrown skyward. Someone swept a large Confederate flag in a whirl. A muscular bald man, wearing a shirt with a picture of Anders Breivik, flexed every muscle of his arms and howled, “Braaaaaden!” Silently, the four of us agreed and slunk away down Connecticut Avenue. Braden’s sultry voice, the applause of her rapturous fans, and the chant of the counterprotestors borne along by the PA, followed us for blocks. Kate slipped her arm around my waist.
“What a lovely way to start our vacation, huh?”
The video of Kate having sex with the intern broke that night, chasing the story of the Hot Nazi throwing her hat into the presidential ring.
We never understood why Renaissance sat on that video until after the election, the timing a twist of the knife instead of a bombshell, but we also didn’t wait around to watch the news cycle enjoy it. That day we drove out of the district, breaking free of its clogged, gristled arteries, into the mountains of Virginia and down through the Shenandoah Valley, aiming to make the ridge of the Smoky Mountains by nightfall. We climbed in altitude, and snow appeared in the hills. Despite all that had happened in the past months, I felt immense gratitude that if the men and women of power let the continents vanish beneath the oceans, I would at least swallow seawater with Kate beside me.
We reached Pigeon River Campground on the Tennessee-North Carolina border after dark and unrolled our sleeping bags in the truck’s camper. Kate played music, something slow and plaintive, and took off my shirt by running her palms up my chest and flipping it over my head. We’d sleep without a single city sound for the first time in an eternity, but first we reached for each other, our troubles momentarily vaporizing in the hot contact of our flesh.
Our second stop was a hotel in Charlotte, to visit my sister and her family. Upon arriving Kate took out an infrared scanner, a radio frequency detector, and something called a nonlinear junction detector, and together we went over the entire room inch by inch.
“Lady, is this necessary?” I asked. She was perched on a chair, waving this buzzing box over a wall socket. “I know that video is fucking terrible, but…”
“Yeah, you think I filmed that, Matt?” She hopped off the chair. “Sandeep chose that hotel.”
“Oh, so your boy toy is a sleeper agent now? Spy from the deep state? Paranoia is an excuse to ignore the reality of a situation, Kate.”
She gave me an annoyed look. “And what reality is that?”
“That you’re selfish and fucked an intern because you thought it would be fun.”
“So I fucked an intern, so what?” She wagged the infrared scanner over a light fixture. “Jesus Christ, it was the best day of the kid’s life. This is actually serious, Matt.”
Kate was sure we were being monitored even before the Ohio River Massacre. We’d spoken to the FBI with our lawyers present about potential 6Degrees sympathizers within our organization. Kate was adamant that we cooperate, but the FBI was always pushing the line, asking for emails or employee data that we had to refuse to give up without a warrant. Kate never found a listening device in that room or any of the rooms we stayed in that year, but that never stopped her from searching.
We removed the batteries from our phones and stowed all the pieces in a Faraday bag. We’d left our laptops in a safety deposit box in D.C. We weren’t going to even look, we promised each other. But when we did peek, the news was harrowing. The video of Kate with Sandeep had been adapted to VR, and after giving an interview calling his relationship with Kate “coercive,” the backstabber had holed up behind lawyers. “Certainly, if you watch the video, she looks like a predator,” said Tucker Carlson while also calling the encounter “consensual if energetic.” Meanwhile, Kate’s left-wing critics were also having a field day.
They could take a little clump of cells, a woman in an open relationship, and metastasize it into a cancer. What angered me was how few women spoke up in her defense. There was something bawdy about Kate that the feminist commentariat did not like. She was rough around the edges; she used “the language of toxic masculinity”; she worked with pro-life organizations and politicians; she rejected sloganeering and hashtags of various leftist movements in favor of more complex and nuanced examinations of power. She didn’t perform the stations of the cross prescribed by the woke hive mind, and this made her enemies. Yet I do think Kate wore blinders when it came to being a public persona. She seethed that a woman couldn’t get coked up and have sex with a musician in a high-end restaurant bathroom without inviting trouble or couldn’t sleep with an intern a few times without it turning into a national spectacle. She wasn’t a victim of slut-shaming so much as joy-shaming. People simply couldn’t put up with all the ways she deviated, disappointed, and rejected conformity at every turn. I doubted Sandeep was any kind of spy for the national security state. I’m sure Kate slept with him a handful of times and then simply walked away and broke his heart.
“This is fucking unreal,” Kate fumed to Coral over speakerphone. We were sitting on a log, petrified with shellac, outside a charge station near the South Carolina border. “Let’s just spill my whole fucking sex life! Tell them I lost my virginity to a college student when I was thirteen, and I savored every last pump.”
“Do not tell anyone that,” I told Coral.
Coral was slow to respond. “You can continue to strike a pose as an apostate, but I’m warning you, Kate, this has cost us friends. Your activities have made us vulnerable.”