The Magic Book

by Fredric Shernoff

  What nobody expected was that Weber would utilize that “common man” story to great success, knocking through all contenders and clinching the presidency in a history-making upset. Pundits agonized over the victory, trying to figure out how a guy with no real experience had come from true obscurity and dominated the entrenched politicians in Washington.

  Expectations were high for the new president, but he only got two years to really shake things up before congress flipped and he was stalemated for the remaining part of his term. Still, two years was enough time to do plenty of damage to the systems and traditions our country prided itself on.

  The anger of Weber’s slice of the electorate didn’t diminish like people had hoped in the aftermath of his election. Instead it grew; an ugly malignancy that had been fully unleashed. Or so we thought. After the midterms in 2014, the furor got worse. Everything could now be blamed on the Democrats or the media. Weber himself remained something of a mystery. He wasn’t a fan of the limelight and he operated in secretive meetings. Every time he appeared on television, it just seemed so produced it was hard to take seriously. The only “real” info came from those who left the administration. They reported that Weber ruled through fear in his inner circle. By all accounts, he was one terrifying dude.

  This all set the stage for a highly competitive and combative election season that got its start in 2015 and plowed through to the end of 2016. The Democrats fielded several strong contenders (and several forgettable ones), and in the end, Massachusetts senator Barbara Handelman got the nomination and a narrow victory in the general election.

  Story over, yay for the good guys, right? Wrong.

  President Weber refused to concede the election to President-Elect Handelman. He claimed that the Indians had hacked the results to give Handelman the win. His base whipped into a frothing frenzy as Weber promised he would never stop fighting against a system that was trying to take him down.

  While many people sat back and waited out those last couple months before the 2017 inauguration, President Weber was secretly organizing an overthrow of the very government he had led.

  January arrived, and President Handelman took the oath of office with a fantastic amount of pomp and circumstance. A return to normalcy was heralded, and I and everybody I knew drank in the excitement that we had made it through tough years and come out on the other side. In her inaugural address, the new president spoke of healing old wounds and reuniting the country. She promised to never lose sight of the needs of those who felt their country was no longer theirs, but she would embrace everyone with an eye to the future and better lives for all Americans.

  Weber, who had still not accepted the results of the election, did not attend the inauguration. Nobody saw this as much of a shock. What was surprising was the little bit of information that started to come out in the first hour following the inauguration. Disruptions at some protests, pockets of crime, a hostage crisis at a DNC local headquarters somewhere in Iowa. I was only fifteen at the time, but even I remember the feeling of unrest from those reports.

  Cellphone videos continued to pour in as more and more of these little problem areas emerged. Suddenly, the broadcast cut away to the former President. He was in some kind of compound where loyalists had brought him when they smuggled him out of the White House. He looked grayer and more unpleasant than usual, almost as if his appearance was staged for the cameras.

  “To all the real Americans,” he began in what is now one of the most famous speeches in history, “A great injustice has been committed in the heart of our wonderful country. Enemies both foreign and domestic have instigated a rebellion, and they have given us a false election with a phony outcome. Barbara Handelman is not your president. I, Wolfgang T. Weber, remain the president of the United States of America.

  “To all those who have been oppressed as I have, I say: No more. It is time for our voices to be heard. I have asked our military leaders to enable us to take back a Washington, DC that has been stolen from us as our country has been stolen from us, and I am asking all of you to rise up. Take hold of those weapons that the enemy would take away from you and your families, and make sure that our country remains ours. God bless you, and God Bless all the true Americans.”

  With that, the media went absolutely haywire as reports flowed in, and we started to get a sense of what Weber had been up to between the election and the inauguration.

  The military did rise up, though not with the unity and overwhelming strength that Weber had anticipated. Most of the military leadership accepted the results of the election. It was the lower level officers and the young men and women in the military who became divided. They remained loyal to the country and its commander-in-chief, but they split over who that person actually was.

  The coup came from all directions and from all levels of authority. It wasn’t so much a takeover as it was a fracture. The second Civil War broke out two months before anybody would officially name it as such.

  Let me interrupt my history lesson for a second. My name is Ben Goldman, and I was born in the year 2001. Narrowly post-9/11, as people would say, but pre-a whole fucking lot else.

  All those events I described earlier, I witnessed from the perspective of a middle school and high school kid. I hadn’t yet been eligible for a learner’s permit to drive a car when the war broke out. It wasn’t just a normal war fought “over there,” like we had always heard about. This war was in front yards, in town squares, in movie theaters and schools all over the country. There was no order at first; no organized sides, and a significant difference of opinion about how to fight the battles.

  For some, and I will make a point to say that this applied to people on both sides of the conflict, there was a sense that civility must prevail. These people stuck to the protests and picket signs. I remember seeing them throughout my tenth grade year at Mifflin High, and not being so concerned.

  Much worse were those who felt like random acts of violence were the answer, and worse than those were the terrorists who committed mass atrocities in Weber’s name.

  By the beginning of my junior year, the fighting crystalized into a formal declared war. Around this point, Weber, in one of his social media rants from his midwestern estate, denounced the USA and revived the Confederate States of America, a country he said represented “real America” better than the Union ever could.

  What made this Civil War and the sides fighting it so different than its predecessor in the 19th century was this new war lacked clearly defined boundaries.

  If anything, it could be said that the Confederacy represented the red states and the US represented the blue, but even that wasn’t exactly true. Take my home state of Pennsylvania for example. Even before Weber’s rise to power, Pennsylvania was divided between the cities, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and some geographically smaller clusters of population, which tended to vote Democrat, and the rural areas, some of them enormous, that were lightly populated and tended to vote Republican.

  In the wake of the country’s split into two nations, Pennsylvania’s Democratic government made it clear that the state would remain loyal to the United States of America. This caused five different splinter groups to form in the rural regions who pledged allegiance to Weber and the CSA.

  In almost all cases across the states, the splinter groups took on the cities. Their style of guerrilla warfare worked when coming up against an unprepared liberal society with what remained of the US military engaged in a different type of warfare with its counterpart on the CS side.

  People in the cities were not entirely without weapons, though, and the battles were fierce. Still, little by little, the Confederate loyalists captured territory, even as the military made inroads toward defeating the CSA soldiers in their strongholds.

  There was something more to these skirmishes, or so the rumors said. There was talk of great warriors fighting on both sides. Like something out of ancient mythology. I never saw any of these so-called modern-day Hercules types, so I didn
’t pay the rumors much mind.

  That was the world in which I spent the remainder of my high school days. We lived in fear of attacks, ready to hide under a desk in a locked and barricaded classroom at a moment’s notice. College wasn’t an option because young men and women my age were either going off to war or helping to fill a place in society that had belonged to somebody now away fighting.

  I got a job right out of school working at a military supplies depot on the old base in Willow Grove. Plans had been in place to redevelop the spot, but with the war things got all fucked up in a hurry. I worked as the low man on the totem pole for a while, lugging shit around with a guy named Brayden-Lee Lloyd, a lanky kid who vaped uncontrollably and liked to wax poetic about life and regale me with stories of his father, who ran a gas station.

  I got promoted to supervisor around the time of the Chicago Conference. This would have been in the spring of 2021, just a little more than four years after the shit had first started whacking into the fan. USA President Handelman, who had been reelected in a landslide and had just begun her second term, met with CSA President Weber, who had not held any elections and didn’t seem inclined to leave his position anytime soon. At this point, Weber had reached the ripe old age of seventy, and though he had always had the appearance of wear and tear on his face, hope that he might just kick the bucket one day by natural causes or the sweet grace of God seemed more and more futile.

  Speaking of God, it was around that time that some fringe groups started to refer to Weber as an actual modern-day motherfucking prophet. Like he had been sent to Earth by God to do Jesus’s work in some weird, ass-backward way. Me, I didn’t see the connection, but even in my part of the world there were plenty of people who thought the guy walked on water.

  Years of conflict had killed millions of people and devastated countless families and towns. Productivity and technological advancement in the states had slowed to a crawl. For the first time in almost a hundred years, the scientific world in America looked much as it had half a decade earlier. That’s not to say advancements weren’t being made around the world. Unfortunately, many of the other leading powers in the global economy had sought to distance themselves from a crisis-ridden North America, so there was limited access to the kinds of dazzling futuristic toys that were on the market in Asia and elsewhere. That rule didn’t apply to Weber’s administration, which seemed to be upgrading all the time.

  There were rumors, even in those early days, that Weber was using his prophet-hood to look into some seriously dark shit. Like voodoo-hoodoo type of shit, I guess. Magic. I read once that Hitler had people digging into that kind of thing back in the 1940s, so maybe it just comes with the territory. What I saw in my daily view of the world was simply stagnation of innovation.

  I don’t know if it was the death, the destruction, the lack of progress, or maybe the hit to GDP that motivated the leaders, but regardless, they held a conference in Chicago, Illinois, which you could probably gather from the historical name of the event. Days of discussions went on, and a temporary cease-fire was called into effect for the term of the conference. Of course, some smaller groups didn’t listen, but what are you going to do?

  By the end of the conference, the CSA had what it wanted—actual recognition by the United States as its own nation with its own government. Plus, the two leaders worked out a series of borders.

  The map was tough to draw, but they ended up with something that almost looked functional. The United States retained the Northeast, the West Coast, and Hawaii, while the CSA took the Middle States and the South and Southeast, plus Alaska. Texas seceded and decided to do its own thing. In hindsight, the Texans were the smartest of us all.

  One highway running west to east was considered US territory, enabling citizens to get from one part of the country to the other. In the middle, smack dab in the center of Kansas, was a neutral zone where the side controlled in Washington and the side controlled from an expansive compound in Montana could meet for further discussions.

  You’d think those major developments would be the end of it, right? Well, it was technically the end of open conflict, but those pockets of red in the blue and vice versa remained. Once the new nation borders were formed, caravans of migrants began the process of relocating to whatever side better suited them. There was something of an open-border policy back in 2021, but that didn’t last long.

  In particular, the CSA wanted increased scrutiny and loyalty pledges from everybody coming in, and started kicking those who didn’t agree with President Weber out. By 2023, talk had started about a wall dividing the two nations.

  As for me, I was laid off from the military base because the war wasn’t really being fought anymore. In the fall of ’23, I got a job working on a farm out near New Hope. Sounds funny, right, for a liberal guy in the very liberal US to be a farmhand, but here’s the thing: somebody had to do these jobs. The only rural people left were those with strong family ties to their land, but many of that crowd had died in the war. So there were openings and needs in the United States that couldn’t be met by trading with the South or Midwest regions of the CSA. Weber’s views on trade were so brutal that we were better off doing things on our own.

  By the middle of the decade, most young people were going back to college. I was not so young, but I still entertained the possibility of getting a proper higher education. Unfortunately, money was so tight. Though the Handelman administration saw fit to offer free schooling to anyone who had served in the war, I discovered when I applied that lugging military supplies didn’t count as combat. So for me it was just work as usual, with no real possibility of change.

  Given my hours, I only had time for the occasional late-night drink with friends, and really no dating prospects to speak of. Those times with friends were challenging, given that my group, like so many others, had lost members in the war. I had lost several cousins as well, and the haunting specter of those violent ends colored every activity. Look, I don’t want to say that life was horrible. Life during the war? Now that was horrible. The post-war period was just difficult. Challenging.

  We moved toward our next presidential election, knowing that President Handelman would be stepping down after her eight years concluded. With almost everybody remaining in the United States leaning to the left, the choices became about who had the best ideas to make permanent peace with the Confederates and to rebuild our country’s infrastructure moving forward. My choice, Henry Rowan, a congressman from Vermont, got the win because of his push toward scientific developments and social programs to help everybody have a fighting chance at a good life.

  For me, the chance at a brighter tomorrow spoke to me, and I celebrated Rowan’s victory by getting shitfaced at a local pub and waking up at 11 the next morning with a headache that felt like I was being split in two.

  As far as the “other side?” The Confederacy still considered themselves to be in a period of conflict, and Weber used that as an excuse to postpone elections again. It was clear to us in the US that the whole idea of a confederacy was a joke, and that the whole thing was actually a dictatorship controlled from the highest level. If the people living in the CS knew it at the time, I couldn’t say.

  President Henry Rowan took the oath of office as our 47th president in January of 2025. He immediately began programs to rebuild our technology leadership and positive presence in the world. He tried to reach out across the great divide, but his initial overtures were rebuffed by Weber’s people.

  Within a year, two things happened. One, some people escaped from the CS and reported horrible humanitarian and civil rights abuses taking place in that country, and two, Weber broke the peace treaty. During the initial conflict, other nations had tried to remain neutral. Now the CSA invaded the USA with the full backing of Saudi Arabia. We realized instantly how fortunate we had been that other countries had seen fit to stay out of an American conflict for all those years. The addition of a foreign power tipped the balance in a hurry.

  O
ur allies stepped in, but it was too late. The territory fell quickly. Washington was taken by the end of 2025, President Rowan went into hiding, and the United States was no more. We entered the new decade as part of the revitalized Confederacy, an entity that appeared fully independent but one we presumed was very much indebted to the outside forces that had powered its rise.

  That’s where my story really begins. It was the spring of 2026, and I was living in a world that was both familiar and entirely transformed. All citizens of the former USA had our passports revoked, and the media was completely controlled by the state. That meant I couldn’t experience the rest of the world for myself and I could only understand it through the prism of the CSA. Sheltered as I was, it seemed like I was going to live in that new existence forever, trying to get by among the ghosts of the dead and the ruins of war. What I didn’t know was that my life was about to change completely.

  Nathaniel lowered the book. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Opellius nodded. “It’s a different world than the one we know.”

  “Too different. This conflict…so much violence for what?”

  “It seems they represented different views about the world,” Opellius said. “These ‘presidents’ were the leaders of the groups.”

  “None of the issues they disagreed about make sense to me.”

  “Nor to me,” Opellius said, “but I don’t think those words are for us, Nathaniel. It’s the reality of the Goldman’s life that we are to understand.”

  “Do you believe him? This Goldman?”

  “I don’t know,” Opellius said. “There are mysteries in the world. That much we know. The Goldman’s story hasn’t solved them or answered any of our questions…yet. That doesn’t make his story untrue.”