Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Then they wanted to know where she’d been during the Palm Sunday attacks. They hadn’t been born yet. All they had were their parents’ stories.

  Mia looked back at a photograph of her younger self smiling in Martyrs’ Square in Old Beirut Town. She was wearing a desert camo uniform with a pistol holstered on her thigh. A week after that three helos in her squadron were hit by rockets in the Morning Islands, breaking like glass figurines along the sea top.

  This is their normal, Mia thought. Their entire lives, they’ve been seeing images like this, from people like me.

  “There’s time for two more questions for Ms. Tucker,” the teacher said.

  A boy in the front raised his hand. Mia ignored him and called on a girl in the near corner.

  “What about China,” she asked. “My family… they came from Taiwan.”

  “We’ll cover that next month, Yijun,” the teacher said. “What happened with America and China with Vietnam and Taiwan is… complicated.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” Mia said. The past hadn’t been the girl’s question. “The media sometimes makes things a bigger deal than they are.”

  The girl nodded, not entirely convinced.

  “Last question,” the teacher said.

  The boy in the front still had his hand up. Mia pointed to him.

  “Do you have a leg of metal?”

  “Chad!” the teacher shouted, while Quentin’s face dropped into his hands. Most of the other children’s eyes widened to saucers. There must’ve been a discussion beforehand about this, and young Chad had violated the accord.

  “I do,” Mia said. She reached down and raised up her chinos and black leggings to the calf. “Titanium.”

  The bell sounded and the class left in small herds, some stopping to knock the metal with their fists. Mia didn’t mind. They were eleven. The dean thanked her and left; Quentin apologized and thanked her and apologized again. He’s a good kid, she thought. She wanted so much for him to keep that sweetness in the coming years. The teacher approached last.

  “This was great. And, of course: America Honors the Warfighter.”

  “The honor is ours.”

  “You know,” the teacher said, “I thought a lot about joining up myself. Then college, and jobs… it never worked out. But I’ve wondered. What I’d have done in those situations. What I’d be like now.”

  “Did you.” Mia didn’t mean anything by that. She just couldn’t count how many times she’d had this very conversation with men her age. Her chat with the dean had been much more interesting.

  The teacher called Mia back as she reached the doorway. “Almost forgot—one more question for you. From a student home sick. Fair warning: he’s a strange one.”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “ ‘Dear Ms. Tucker,’ ” the teacher read from his laptop, monotone. “ ‘Why doesn’t America win at wars anymore?’ ”

  * * *

  The season of camo chic had arrived. It came with the first hints of fall, part of the long weekend built around Unity Day and family trips to the beach and elephantine sales on mattresses. The Council of Victors had summoned the holiday as both tribute and testament. A tribute to American past. A testament to American future.

  For much of Mia’s life, the season of camo chic meant something else, too. It meant a return to society, to fund-raisers and auctions, black-tie galas where the city’s elite could vie and flaunt. Merlot, tender veal, the catacombs of small talk, all in the name of country. The ritual of giving back to the warfighter mattered, and it mattered a lot. The donations raised, the causes championed, also mattered, and also mattered a lot. Real soldiers’ lives were impacted. Real soldiers’ families, too. If you were of a certain class in Empire City, you weren’t just expected back from summer travels for it. You were required.

  Years earlier, at one of Mia’s first galas, her grandfather had asked her to wear her dress greens from ROTC. Because I’m proud, he’d said. None of these other bigwig capitalists have grandchildren serving. She’d refused, though. She hadn’t earned the right to wear the uniform yet, at least not in the presence of the wounded veterans being honored. Her grandfather had been furious, but she’d stood her ground. It might’ve been the first time she’d told him no. It might’ve been the first time anyone had told him no.

  As Mia smoothed out her red sheath dress in front of the mirror—was it too tight? Too red? Did it clash with the leggings too much?—she thought about those wounded vets from years before. The one with the prosthetic hook who’d been so nice and funny before drinks. The one with the reconstructed face who tried to follow her to the bathroom. The one who told her to stay in college as long as she could, until the wars ended, back when that still seemed possible.

  They must’ve felt so alone, Mia thought. Surrounded by strangers celebrating the worst day of their lives. All for a good cause, though. Even the one with the hook had admitted that.

  Tonight’s event diverged from the season’s usual offerings. Speeches would be made and money raised and canapés trayed and paraded, but not for any foundation. Tonight’s event announced something different, something new yet old as the republic itself. Something for the season of camo chic but also beyond it. American Service. An idea. A pledge. And now a political party.

  Mia and Jesse were invited guests of General Collins, one of American Service’s candidates for the Senate. But only Mia would be attending. Since the war memorial bombings, her fiancé had only been home intermittently. The hunt for Jonah Gray had become his everything.

  “You must have some good leads.” Mia had tried not to sound naggy, or needy. Just interested. “That mug shot is everywhere.”

  “We do. But—it’s complicated, I guess.” Mia didn’t press. She just told him to make her proud.

  She still hadn’t told him about the pregnancy. To do so now seemed self-absorbed. Mia knew he’d make a great father; he gravitated toward kids and they reciprocated in kind. But her? The maternal warmth some women possessed had always struck her as foreign. The fact that she associated it with whatever the opposite of ambition was didn’t help.

  What would that look like at three in the morning when the baby was demanding milk from her breast and all she wanted was for it to stop making noise? What would that mean?

  She didn’t know. Semper Gumby, she reminded herself. Be flexible.

  Mia’s cell phone shook like static, breaking her from the mirror and the red dress. It was a state news alert. There’d been another mass shooting in Athens, this time in the Plaka quarter. The Greek government had imposed martial law and a curfew, and it’d held, for the night at least. No one wanted a repeat of the Acropolis riots.

  She began texting a childhood friend who’d moved to Greece after college, stopping a few words in. She scrolled up. For the past two years, she and her friend had mostly texted one another after an attack. “Just checking in—you okay?” “Hey—just saw the news. All good?” “You safe, girlfriend?” And so on, terror texts across the Atlantic, back-and-forths of fear and relief and promises to catch up properly soon.

  Mia set down the phone. I’m sure she’s fine, she thought. I’ll call tomorrow, for an actual conversation.

  * * *

  Mia took car service to the event. The party—officially billed as a “Declaration to Country”—was being held at a midtown restaurant known for its two-thousand-dollar truffled lobster risotto and where years before Secret Service shot dead a comedian with a cream pie. “Somehow,” the Imperial Times would later write, “that tragedy made getting a table for lunch even more impossible.”

  Body scanners marked the entryway like rock slabs. Men and women in formal wear moved through them with sporting patience, smiles and wisecracks never quite reaching their eyes. It was delicate work, maintaining one’s authority while feigning deference to the structures of modern life. Never let them see you sweat, Jesse would say. It’s how Mia had been raised. She removed her shoes for the body scanner and s
et her jawline to stoic.

  Security was pronounced, a range of city police, homeland marshals, and private contractors cutting against the crowd in drab mosaic. A squad of Home Guard had posted in a near corner, with full kits and assault rifles slung low. Mia couldn’t help but notice the uniform deficiencies—the untucked bootlaces, the rolled sleeves, the private wearing a death skull patch on his helmet cover. Not my fight anymore, she reminded herself. She walked by the Guardsmen with a curt nod.

  Past the entryway, Mia took a moment to soak in the air-conditioning and adjust to the ballroom’s faint lighting. The restaurant had once been a bank, complete with marble columns, soaring ceilings, and a large four-faced brass clock in the center. To her right, arriving guests took photographs in front of an American Service sign board with the party’s presidential candidate, a governor from out west who’d spent a tour in the Peace Corps. Mia went left, toward the appetizers.

  Two crunchy sake pickles and four yogurt cheese balls did little to blunt her hunger. She’d seemed to have passed through the morning sickness phase and gone straight to cravings, a trade-off she appreciated even if she could hear her grandmother’s voice as she reached for a puff pastry: “In the history of civilization, no one’s ever been impressed by how much a woman ate.”

  Sorry, Grandma, Mia thought to herself between bites of pastry. But this isn’t about impressing.

  Mia grabbed a club soda from a passing waiter and began scanning faces. She recognized many in the crowd. The chief legal officer at her bank. Liam Noonan, the Navy SEAL turned bond trader, handing out business cards. The executive vice president of a pharmaceutical corporation who’d gone to Yale with her father, and was on the short list for new Sinai consul. A classmate of hers from Dupont who’d gained notoriety junior year for urinating on his RA’s door after a night of heavy drinking. When the RA opened the door in her pajamas, the stream didn’t stop. The college newspaper published the security footage to its website, and Dupont made national news that week for all the wrong reasons.

  He’d been suspended, of course, but let back into school the next semester. Last Mia had heard, he’d left the US-Deutsche DataCorp Group to run his own equity fund. The finance world had its fair share of fools, Mia knew. But what world didn’t?

  A man in a white tuxedo with neat black hair and a craggy face raised a hand to her in a half wave, fingers wrapped around a drink. She returned the gesture. Mia and Roger Tran had met again in his office to game-plan the meeting with the Lehman chair she’d secured. It had ended with him talking about his first visit to America three decades before: he’d been part of the lecture tour sponsored by the U.S. government that brought over Vietnamese refugees and soldiers to speak to the jailed American peacemongers. Her own mother had earned clemency through the program, though Mia kept that to herself.

  “We were tourists most days,” Tran had explained. “Imagine what the Grand Canyon looked like to an ARVN grunt from Saigon—what the big sky looked like, what the air smacked like! At night, we were driven to camps to tell the wild American youth how self-involved they were, how they’d been bad humanitarians and bad patriots. After combat? An easy job.”

  Tran had whistled then, low and sharp, before continuing. “Whoever put that together? Masters of messaging. Much to learn from it.”

  There was, Mia admitted, even if the story had bothered her more than it inspired.

  “Mia!” a voice whispered in the ballroom from behind her, quick and conspiratorial. “The RA Pisser’s here!”

  She turned to find Sebastian grinning like a sleepy jack-o’-lantern. She gave him a quick hug and smelled bourbon. He wore his normal sunglasses and canvas sneakers and a cotton seersucker suit she hadn’t seen since college. And where was his tie?

  “I’m trying to make it clear I don’t belong here,” he explained. The bourbon dripped from his words. “Finance and politics. We’re in the nexus of American church.”

  Mia wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but he seemed pleased by the phrase. She left it alone.

  “Some huckster gave me this.” Sebastian pulled one of Liam Noonan’s cards from his jacket. “Special Operations Lessons for Corporate Synergy,” he read in a voice fit for an infomercial. “Life is a war. Learn to thrive, from the battlefield to the boardroom. Join our business muster and dominate. All caps, DOMINATE, Mia. For the low, low price of five grand!”

  “You’re shouting,” Mia told Sebastian, because he was.

  “The RA Pisser’s here!” Sebastian repeated, dropping the card. “Wasn’t he a Sigma Chi? How high does the eagle fly! Douche-canoes.”

  “You need to eat,” Mia said, thinking she could manage another puff pastry herself. She steered him by his elbow to the far side of the appetizers, where there were fewer bodies and, she hoped, fewer inquiring eyes. In an assembly of sleek striving and dark, serious suits, the man in the wrinkled seersucker stuck out just as much as he’d wanted to. She settled them among a cluster of red, white, and camo balloons loose on strings.

  “How are you even here?” she asked.

  “Look at all these thirsty jackalopes,” Sebastian said, not answering her question, instead scooping up a handful of chocolate Goldfish cracker bites. “Rich kids who didn’t join up after Palm Sunday. Now they’re all growed up and sloppy with guilt.” He paused to burp into his fist. “Pet the vet, talk about your grandpa in World War Two. Do the army commando workout from Men’s Health three times a week. Deep down thinking you’re too precious for that life. So here’s some money, here’s some feelings, cleanse me, broken souls.” He burped into his fist again. “At least I tried.” He shook his head and grabbed more cracker bites.

  Mia was going to push back on his rant by saying he’d chosen to drop ROTC in college. No one had made him do that. But then Jared Kushner, a real estate prince who’d gone to prep school with her brother, walked by. He waved at Mia and she waved back. He was pretty and smart-looking, in a porcelain sort of way. Sebastian wouldn’t have any idea who he was but she didn’t feel like disagreeing anymore. Mia repeated one of her grandmother’s adages.

  “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die, See-Bee.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Allah.” Sebastian looked up at Mia and smiled. “That’s dark!”

  She arched an eyebrow at him while sensing a presence from behind that she couldn’t see. She wanted to turn but refused. She loathed that, the unknowing, the coiling tension in her chest. But still she refused. To do so would be submission. The presence neared. It was full and looming, and Sebastian’s nodded up at it. Of course, she thought. That’s how Sebastian’s here.

  “You all know each other, right,” Sebastian said. “From the hospital?”

  The presence stepped beside her and Sebastian without actually moving between them, batting aside an errant camo balloon. An arm like a ladder grabbed a puff pastry. It tossed the pastry into the air, where it disappeared into a constellation of white teeth and fleshy gums.

  “Hello, Mia.” He spoke through bites, in a voice more mild than she remembered. More cautious, too. “Been a while.”

  “Pete Swenson.” She hoped using his full name didn’t come across as coy. She flattened out her words to make sure. “How are you?”

  “Same old. Was just talking about you with Jackpot.” His disparate eyes shined at his casual reference to the general, black and green roiling together. He’d fitted into a black suit too small on him, though maybe that had been intentional. He needed a haircut and a shave, and he was as drunk as Sebastian, betrayed by a soft, droopy glaze. He’d managed a skinny tie, though, and his face and shoulders had finally filled out.

  That month in Germany: they’d all just survived a disaster no one could explain. Mia had lost a leg and her career, her very purpose of being. She’d gained a freak power she wasn’t ever supposed to use. She was a lot aimless, and not a little manic. And then there were the lurid dreams of blackness, the ones that came on like floods and onl
y relented to pills she feared even more than the dreams. Pass the days exploring the European countryside with a tall, handsome stranger? Why not. Pass the nights in his arms? Sure.

  It’d been fun, a reminder that there was life beyond war, and a lot of it. More than a lark, less than love. That’d been it, though. For her, at least.

  “Last I saw you…” Mia had been avoiding him, she knew. He’d known her when she hadn’t been herself. When she hadn’t been who she was now. Now that he was in front of her, Mia needed to reintroduce herself. “You put a hole through a wall. Right above my head.”

  Pete tilted his head, his green eye seeming to refract around her, like waves. She looked back, not staring, not glaring, either, holding to a five-count in her mind. Then she took a long sip from her club soda. The lights of the ballroom dimmed, the cocktail hour coming to an end. The last thing Mia saw before the room went dark was Sebastian’s mouth hanging open, mid-chew.

  Huh, she thought. Guess he really didn’t know.

  The babbling din faded out. A digital sign glowed into brightness in the shape of a silver tree, American Service’s chosen symbol. General Collins appeared on a stage in the center of the ballroom clenching a microphone in her right fist. She wore a gray suit and the ubiquitous West Point ring. Her short, styled auburn hair cut against the evenness of her outfit and she turned to the crowd with the grace of a piston. Many a retired general before her had failed at politics. Too stilted. Too rough around the edges. Too many acronyms. It didn’t matter what the message was if the messenger couldn’t appeal. Any stirrings of concern Mia may have felt in the moment, though, washed away as the general tapped the mic and began speaking.

  “Friends! Romans! Countrywomen!” General Collins paused to let polite laughter sound through the ballroom. “Thank you for being here tonight. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jackie Collins—you may call me ‘General’ ”—more polite laughter—“and I’m a proud American Service candidate for the Senate!”