He got up and tried to pull the picture off the wall, but they had attached it to where it was like a part of the wall. So he tried smashing it, and scratching it, with his bare hands. And right as he was about to give up, it came unmoored from the wall. Just a crack, but enough to be able to pry it all the way, pulling out some chunks of cinder block as it came free. Then he cracked it against the steel door, and shoved it through the slit. The metal frame clanged loudly as it hit the floor outside.
Then he sat back down and waited. He had already been there more than an hour, every minute one more that Joyce was still in their custody.
The door burst open, as fast as a door secured with five different locks can open. In came two uniformed guards and one suit.
“What the fuck’s going on in here?” said the older of the guards, a beefy white Texan with a name tag that said Stevens.
“Just waiting for you idiots to obey the law and produce my client,” said Donny.
Stevens grabbed Donny by the lapels and shoved him up against the wall.
“The only idiot in here is you,” said Stevens, up in his face with teeth bared like he was going to bite him for real. “Disrespecting our President.”
“He’s not the president, Jethro. He lost the election. Maybe that was above your pay grade. And this fight isn’t over yet.”
“That’s what you think,” said Stevens, slamming Donny against the wall.
“Up yours, fat boy,” said Donny, winded. “Every time you hit me is another year of time you’re going to do when we wake up from this bad dream. And then I am going to bankrupt you and your family.”
In those weeks after the coup, before everyone adjusted to the new normal, Donny actually believed that. In a way, he never stopped believing it. Even though it ended up taking another six years to get there, after they figured out elections and lawsuits weren’t going to suffice.
“I want to speak with a supervisor,” said Donny. “The customer service in this place sucks.”
The guy in the suit actually chuckled at that.
“Lay off him for a minute, Stevens,” said the suit.
Stevens dropped Donny back onto the bench.
“What’s the deal, here, Mr.—” The suit grabbed the clipboard the other officer was holding and looked at the top sheet. “Mr. Kimoe?”
“The deal is I have an order from a federal judge for the release of a prisoner, and you guys are giving me the runaround.”
The suit flipped the pages on the clipboard. “That would be Prisoner 11–07043–091?”
“Her name is Joyce.” Donny repeated it, with her full name.
“Uh-huh,” said the suit. “Do you understand why she was detained?”
“Yes. For her politics, which is why the judge ordered she be released.”
“The judge got it wrong.”
“Why don’t you tell the judge that.”
“That’s not my job,” said the suit. “And the orders we have say the orders of judges don’t apply during the emergency. At least not here in the borderzone.”
“Do you really want to defy the order of a federal judge?” said Donny. “Just to keep one college professor with a valid passport from exercising her right to leave the country and never come back?”
The suit looked like he was thinking that one over.
“What goes around, comes around,” said Donny. “Someday everyone in this building is going to be held accountable for what is happening right now. I don’t know if it’s going to take two days or twenty years, but it’s going to happen. And following orders from up the chain of command will not excuse illegality. Especially not illegal detention and interrogation techniques that we all know are torture.”
“Don’t listen to this snake, Perez,” said Stevens.
“Each of you are personally in contempt of court, and liable for the unlawful imprisonment of my client,” said Donny. “And I don’t even want to know what other crimes you may be perpetrating on her. But you can be goddamned sure I will hold you accountable for them. Especially if you do not free her right now. So ignore me at your own risk, Mr. Perez.”
“He’s Special Agent Perez to you,” said Stevens.
Donny corrected himself, and watched Special Agent Perez cogitate over the situation.
They heard the faint sound of a very loud scream muffled by sound baffling. Stevens nodded at his uniformed colleague to close the door.
“Is there someone with some decision-making authority I could speak to?” said Donny.
“Wait here,” said Perez. He pulled out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” said Stevens.
Perez didn’t answer. He stepped out into the hallway.
“Keep your hands where I can see ’em,” said Stevens. He had his truncheon out now.
Donny gave Stevens the finger, with both hands.
They waited there for what felt like a long time. He thought he heard the sound of Perez’s voice, but the air conditioner kicked on and muffled it through white noise.
Perez came back in.
“Come with me,” he said.
Stevens looked disgusted, and gave Donny one last shove from behind for good measure as they left the room.
When they finally brought Joyce out, she was wearing the red jumpsuit of a noncompliant detainee. Donny almost wanted to make a smartass remark about it, but saw the shackles and thought better of it.
“Where’s her stuff?” said Donny, and Perez had the guards remove her shackles. “She needs her passport.”
No answer.
“And what about her car?” asked Donny.
“Maybe you should just go while you can,” said Perez. “Deal with those things later.”
Joyce looked at Donny and nodded.
“Fine,” said Donny.
And then Joyce walked over to him, and they hugged for long enough that Perez said you need to go. He opened the door for them, and said follow me.
Perez led them outside into the Texas heat, light so bright even under the covered walkway that you had to squint. They passed checkpoints and stepped around barricades. And then they were standing at the beginning of the bridge, on the other side of which was Mexico.
Donny held Joyce’s hand, and they walked. She was a little slow.
You could see a cantina there right past the bridge, painted with a big cartoon of the sun with a smiling human face, the logo of an old lager beer of the Mexican coast.
Before they could get there, they had to get past the Mexican checkpoint without a passport. It used to be there wasn’t even a checkpoint on the Mexican side, not for pedestrian crossers, until the refugees started coming in droves.
The guards stepped out when they saw Joyce’s prison jumpsuit.
“Buscamos asilo,” said Donny.
Asylum.
While they waited for the Mexicans to complete their paperwork, Donny tried to convince Joyce that the first thing they should do when she was released was get a medical examination.
“There’s an Amnesty office right here,” he said. “We can file a human-rights complaint at the same time.”
“No, Donny,” was the answer.
They went straight to a hotel instead. The most Mexico-looking hotel they could find in the row lined up there along the main thoroughfare leading into Matamoros. Donny offered to get his own room, but Joyce settled on two beds.
“It’s good to have someone close. Just not that close. Okay?”
Okay.
Donny went shopping while Joyce took a very long bath. He got her three sundresses, a western shirt, cheap sunglasses, some jeans, and a T-shirt advertising Playa Bagdad. She went with the jeans and the T-shirt, and the cheap tequila he got at the store next door. She put on the sunglasses, and you could tell she planned to never take them off again. They sat there all afternoon at the tiny table by the window, watching the sun slowly work its way across the square and hardly saying a word as they let the Cuervo work its way through their anxious minds. From w
here Donny sat you could see the border crossing, with the flag billowing there above the walls. The real purpose now was to keep people in on the other side. Maybe it always had been.
It wasn’t until they went out for dinner that Joyce finally was willing to talk about what happened. That she had not been tortured, just questioned, and humiliated in a menu of ways that were not in any way actionable. That she did not want to sue anybody. That the American courts were not where the fight could be won. That the way to fight these fascists was not with lawsuits.
Donny decided not to argue with her.
In the morning, Joyce’s application had already been approved. She was known. Donny didn’t apply for asylum, just a tourist visa. They took the new train to Mexico City, the one that ran on magnets or whatever and produced zero pollution.
Her friends met her there at the station, a cabal of people that a later historian explaining their role in what was going on in the world would call intellectuals but Donny called fucking professors and fucking writers. Donny knew one of them, Howard Moritz, a philosopher Joyce had worked with at Rice until he got a new job in Dallas and then a political secondment to UNAM. The other expat in the group was someone Donny had heard of but never met: Wade Camacho, the singer-songwriter from Austin who had the distinction of being the first musician ever to be denaturalized for the treasonous lyrics of his songs. They all had a dinner for her, and nobody really had much to say to Donny. Maybe it was the suit, even though he left the tie in his bag, because Mexico. They knew he was still a lawyer. Agent of the state, even if a double agent. Even if he was the one who got Joyce there in the first place.
Joyce sat next to Wade, and soon she was smiling, the first real smiles Donny had seen on her in a while. He couldn’t complain.
Donny hung out in Mexico City for a couple of days. He called up an old colleague from B&E, one of the guys who had been fired the same day as Donny in the purge. Hector was bilingual, and worked the US asylum cases from there. They had coffee at the library where Hector was working. Hector tried to recruit Donny to help with the project, but Donny said I have my own projects.
The next day was when he told Joyce he had to go back. She said I know. They both knew it was over, even if neither of them said it. Something had changed in the world that made what they thought they could get back gone forever.
He flew home. It would be a few years before that became impossible. He tried as hard as he could to get the immigration officer at the port of entry to arrest him, but no such luck.
Joyce got busy in a hurry, but Donny didn’t find out about that until a lot later. After she had disappeared for good.
Part Two
The Borders of Utopia
21
The consolation prize for spending the day traveling across Cancer Alley by bus, train, and boat was the discovery that they sold souvenir T-shirts in utopia. Donny didn’t buy one. But it was pouring rain when he stepped off the barge, and when he saw the canopied merch booth at the landing also sold hot coffee, he took shelter. He was paying for his cup and asking the kid for directions and whether there were any dry modes of local transportation available when he saw the little sign that said the proceeds from all sales went to the fund for the new school. So Donny blew eight bucks on a hand-tooled lapel pin. And when he got up the next day in his spartan room at the inn they called the Library, he put it on, the way some of his colleagues used to put the flag pins on when they wanted the judge to know which side they were on. This one was made from salvaged metal instead of industrial lacquer, with an image of a raccoon holding a book. Donny wasn’t sure what it really meant, but he liked raccoons. And when he looked in the mirror, he convinced himself it would work, and set out to save his ex-friend’s kid.
It had stopped raining that Friday morning when Donny headed to court in the flooded ruins of New Orleans. The locals didn’t call them ruins. They called them liberated territory, and the law they applied in their new court, which they called the Tributary, was a new kind of law no judge had ever seen, even though they said it was the oldest and truest law in the world. Most of the so-called locals were people from someplace else, veterans of the uprising or latecomers who wanted to help beta-test a different kind of future. Donny used to feel like an honorary local, even when the city was under siege, and he expected to soon be reunited with some of his old comrades. But as he waited for the streetcar in the muggy morning air, he knew they might not be happy to see him. Especially when he was showing up on the other side of the case.
And when he checked his phone for news on the case he had left behind, all he got was the warning that he had no signal. Because one of the first things his old clients did when they took over the city was to climb up the towers and replace all the corporate phone cells with birdhouses. They had their own network, which they said was free and open, if you could figure out how to get in. So Donny cursed them, and then tried to convince himself that it was a good thing to be offline for a day, and just focus on the immediate task at hand.
He looked down the median that cut through St. Charles, first light on the dewy grass that had been allowed to go long, and noticed how quiet the city had become. No engines. No cars, no trucks, no honking, no grinding, no screeching brakes, no air conditioners, no amplified music, no overflying jets or choppers. Just birdsong—the sound of a tropical city gone back to green.
It looked and sounded pretty, but it mainly made him sweat, a sweat that started under his arms and in the small of his back, the kind of mugtown sweat you can tell by breakfast is going to make you want a shower and change of clothes by noon. He would have to make it until evening, when his transport was scheduled to take him back to his true habitat.
The thought of what awaited him back home if he failed made him look at his watch anxiously, wondering if they even had a timetable here in the city that capitalism forgot. He reflexively straightened his tie, even though he should have been taking it off.
And then, after what seemed like an hour standing there—but wasn’t even half that—he heard the bell of the approaching streetcar before he even saw it. Maybe because the front light was off, something that was no surprise given that the streetcar was the only means of independently powered transportation still running in New Orleans, off the power of the sun.
When she opened the door, the driver, a twentysomething white lady who wore a green jumpsuit and a revolver, gave him the look you would give a marooned time traveler you found at the side of the road.
“I hear this is the way to the future,” said Donny.
She laughed. And then she held out her hand.
“I thought it was free,” said Donny.
“Not for outsiders,” she said. “Unless you have a pass.”
“On my way to pick mine up now,” he said. It was almost true.
“Come on,” she said, not laughing anymore. “We need the funds. It’s for a good cause.”
“Hang on,” said Donny.
“Open your fucking wallet, man!” yelled a voice from inside the trolley. Donny looked back at the crowd of passengers, who were all looking at him. You could spot the tourists from their cameras, and the sandals, visiting from Asia or Europe to check out the big experiment. You could spot the American refugees from their luggage, here to punch in their hard-earned ticket out, headed for a better life at the other end of a long cruise. You could spot the locals from the way they looked at Donny.
The one who was yelling at him was a white-haired older lady sitting in front. She had a gun, too, sticking out of the purse on her lap, which looked like she had made it herself from found scraps.
“Cough it up, dude! We can’t afford your coat-and-tie bullshit.”
“Jeez,” said Donny. “Hang on. How much?” He set down his briefcase and reached for his wallet.
“Five,” said the driver.
He pulled out a worn five-dollar bill. Crisp ones were hard to come by these days, and not because they weren’t printing them.
&nbs
p; “Rupees, hon,” said the driver. “Five hundred rupees. Money we can use. If you’re paying greenbacks, I need twenty.”
“How about pesos?” said Donny, digging into the secret stash.
“Bueno,” said the driver, grabbing the cash and pocketing it.
The car lurched forward, and Donny stumbled his way to the back, almost tripping over the suitcases in the aisle. The bags and their owners were on their way to board ships for Guyana, Goa, or Godthab. Nodes in the network of newly minted sovereignties of which New Orleans was the newest, pockets of recovered ecological health in a blighted world that welcomed new settlers, especially if they had skills. Some were clutching their travel documents as Donny stepped over their bags. He found a seat in the very back, by the window, next to a nervous-looking couple telling each other stories of people who had been turned away after making it all the way here.
The streetcar clickety-clacked its way down the wide boulevard, through a city that had spent most of the past decade as a war zone. Along the avenue, it looked more like a city that had been abandoned, in no small part because much of it was, even there in those big old houses on what passed for high ground. Nature had always been winning in New Orleans, a city built on lush riverbanks and wetlands ever-ready to overgrow and devour any structure that didn’t put up a fight. Green fungus on stucco, levees failed, yards gone wild. It was hard to know how much of this de-domestication of the urban environment resulted from inattention and how much from intention. The new regime was running the city on a different model, one that treated the lawn mower as a weapon of mass destruction, and believed in letting the water go where it wanted. The human inhabitants supported by an infrastructure that followed nature’s paths instead of trying to control it.
It had been a long time since anyone conducted a census, at least of the living, but you didn’t need statistics to know that the population was a fraction of what it had been before. Maybe because when the wild came back out, the human wild, you knew that was how things had always really been.
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