Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Anything to get it. Anything to keep it.

  Away from the station steps, Jean-Jacques approached the final group. It was the only place he hadn’t searched for Emmanuel. His steps were measured, his hands as clear from his pockets as he could get them. The police outnumbered the citizens two to one, but there was a force still churning here that suggested anything but aftermath. The resignation of the teens and the neutered energy of the white kids became harmless contrast. Fewer were handcuffed here, but there was shouting, throaty noise being tossed around like firecrackers. And it wasn’t coming from the police.

  He narrowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Sheepdogs. Most looked big and thick, wrapped in tactical vests and camo wear. A few had walkie-talkies on their hips. He spotted a couple of iron cross tattoos and holstered pistols. Protestors or not, there was no way the teenage scarecrows he’d walked past had started tonight’s brawl.

  The Sheepdogs seemed to be arguing with the police over two of their own being handcuffed. “We came here to keep order,” one said, his finger in a young police’s face. “You’re doing this wrong.”

  A tall Sheepdog with a walkie-talkie turned, his face cratering as he took in Jean-Jacques. “What you looking at, milk dud?” he said. “This don’t concern you.”

  The young police told the Sheepdog to calm down, but he persisted. Then some of the others saw Jean-Jacques, too, and began shouting themselves. Jean-Jacques started walking toward them. Milk dud, he thought. Funny. Because I’m bald. His blood turned fast as he repeated the slur in his head. Anger didn’t fill him so much as the cold thrill of reckoning did. This would be fun.

  “Wouldn’t do that, cousin.” Kreyol scratched at the air behind Jean-Jacques. He turned sideways to find Emmanuel rising up from a crouch. He’d been in the shadows. “Unless you want to end up in the back of a law rider.”

  “Where you been? What kind of gang shit you into here?”

  “Gang?” Emmanuel winced and crossed his arms over his stomach. The accusation seemed to pain him. “I’m no thug, man. I’m one of the good guys. Like you.”

  “Really.” Everyone thinks they’re the good guys, Jean-Jacques thought. Even wogs. He tried to get Emmanuel to explain the riot.

  “No time now. Follow me.” Emmanuel took off at a slow trot down a dark path, away from the station and siren lights. His body turned to silhouette in seconds. Jean-Jacques held still for a moment, considering his options. Then he followed, belligerent slurs trailing his steps.

  * * *

  Jean-Jacques didn’t care for regrets, nor did he have many. Not being with his mother when she died was one. Not keeping up with his kreyol was another. But from the wars? Regrets were foolish. Regrets were weakness. Duty trumped all, and duty meant looking forward, to the next mission, to the next room, to the next pull of the trigger. It meant being ever ready and staying vigilant. Regret got in the way of all that.

  Though there was the boy.

  In the days before the botched Tripoli raid and the cythrax bomb, the Rangers had stopped at a nearby base to finalize their prep. A base worker found Jean-Jacques there, picking up his laundry. Despite himself, he stopped to listen. Something about her desperation. The way it pierced her reserve. The way it penetrated his skepticism.

  Insurgents had taken her eleven-year-old boy. Not hostage, exactly, but not unlike it, either. They’d drafted him into jihadist school. But her child, her only precious child, was no soldier. She showed him a photograph. He had big, soft eyes and a smart angular face. He was to be a doctor, she said, or an aid worker. Someone who served others. That’s why they’d come here, to Tripoli, fleeing the lawless terror along the border. For a better life.

  Jean-Jacques couldn’t help it. He thought of his mother doing the same for him, getting them on a boat bound for land or bound for death, but bound for something different. He said he’d look for the boy. No promises, he said. But he’d try.

  After the cythrax bomb fell from the sky, Jean-Jacques had been the first survivor to find consciousness. He hadn’t wanted to. He remembered that more than anything. He’d wanted to stay lost in the other side, tucked into the cocoon of forever gone. But death forced him back to life, that specific blend of propellant, hot blood, and emptied bowels splintering his nostrils and then his mind.

  So he rose from severed ground and took in the end times.

  Before he found an alive Pete Swenson, before he found an alive Sebastian Rios, before a still-alive Grady Flowers stumbled from the helicopter wreckage with a still-alive Mia Tucker, Jean-Jacques found the boy with big, soft eyes. He lay in a field of rice stalks, less incinerated than the other bodies but no less dead. And because of that, and because of the boy’s photograph and because of the boy’s mother and because of the boy’s mother’s desperate, desperate need and because in that minute Jean-Jacques felt certain he was the last person left on earth, he cradled the boy’s body with his own and wept.

  He’d lost the boy by not finding him. He’d failed the boy by not finding him. That the boy never would’ve survived the bomb even if he had was beside the point.

  He’d been her child. Her only precious child. He’d been her everything. So Corporal Saint-Preux wept, so very alone, with sorrow, with rage, with nothing in him and everything, too.

  Was the boy with big, soft eyes a regret? Did it matter? It didn’t to Jean-Jacques. The boy was dead. Most of the Ranger platoon was dead. Jean-Jacques lived.

  * * *

  They walked alleys and unlit side streets, together in their steps, alone with their thoughts. Jean-Jacques didn’t ask where they were going and Emmanuel didn’t say. Jean-Jacques was glad for the quiet. He had a lot to mull over.

  They reached a turtle shell of an overpass. Emmanuel walked up its small concrete slope. Jean-Jacques followed. They emerged onto an elevated train platform, long ago abandoned by the city. Moonlight revealed tracks covered in urban scrub, broken bottles and plastic bags and empty spray paint containers tangled up in patches of wild pale grass. In spots Jean-Jacques felt around with his boots to make sure track was still there. The summer night yo-yoed with indolence as they walked and it was strange to Jean-Jacques, being lost in his own nowhere instead of somewhere else’s.

  Below them, outlines of sprawling warehouses and trucking depots dotted the nightscape. Many were retrofitted spaces, breweries a century before, the last vestiges from a far-gone wave of refugees fleeing the Ottoman Purges. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren had scattered to the winds, Jean-Jacques thought, because once money got made, people here never stopped immigrating, even if they called it something else. To nicer districts. To suburbia. To the far West or deep South. Back to the old homeland, even, once it was safe again, for a semester of fuzzy nostalgia and partying. Carrying a name with scars but none of the memories. Your progeny get soft and stupid: that was the real American dream.

  Did Jean-Jacques want that for future Saint-Preuxs? Sure, he thought. Why not. As long as they still know what duty means.

  Emmanuel cleared his throat. He wanted to talk. Jean-Jacques knew he needed to play dumb about the Mayday Front. His cousin needed to be the one to bring him there.

  “Well. Those Sheepdogs seem nice.”

  His cousin forced a laugh. Those old babylons had been hired by Wall Street, he said. By the Council of Victors. To protect their business interests. The colonies were a moneymaker. Sending broken-ass veterans to wilderness camps, isolated islands away from public scrutiny, to serve as lab rats. Did Jean-Jacques know the government paid the colonies by the head? They wanted more bodies. They needed more bodies. It was all connected, Emmanuel explained, for capitalism and profit and American comfort. It was wrong. It was immoral. Emmanuel hadn’t thought much about it growing up, because no one did. The colonies seemed normal, seemed humane. They were anything but. He’d been enlightened recently. He’d become informed.

  “Think about it,” Emmanuel said. “That could be you someday. I mean, it won’t be. You got your shit to
gether. But still.”

  Jean-Jacques just nodded. Of course a kid who did strange things like baptize strangers on the street would grow up to find ideas like this. He should’ve known all along. Weird boys become weird men.

  About a mile along the tracks, they rounded a long bend. Slivers of white light bladed the darkness. Little Haiti’s Market Street, the Mache, came into view. Hundreds of bodies packed its walkway, more crowded than usual because of the long holiday weekend. Low-roofed storefronts snuggled in tight like children sharing a bed, painted in a rainbow array of blues, yellows, greens, and purples. Music rumbled up at them and he could almost smell the mixture of dank hash and lacquered, tangy sweat. He’d avoided the area growing up, as much as he could. Too many people, too much noise, too many opportunities for a fat kid to get fucked with by people he knew and people he didn’t. But about once a month, especially during the summers, the whole family went, so he went, too. So did Emmanuel, back when he’d been a boy priest.

  “Not too much’s changed, looks like,” Jean-Jacques said.

  Emmanuel scratched at his chin with long, lean fingers. “Let’s see if that’s true.”

  They hopped a ledge and eased down a rickety metal staircase. Large holograms of the American and Haitian flags projected up into the sky from the roof of an electronics store, though it took Jean-Jacques a moment to recognize the new Bicolour. Baby Doc was dead now, killed by a car bomb, his government overthrown. When he’d heard the news in the Mediterranean, Jean-Jacques had rethought some things about terrorism. About terrorists, too.

  Chain-link fencing ringed the Mache, a mixture of styles and heights meant to suggest security if not actually provide it—any child with an ounce of courage could find a way in, or out. That wasn’t new to Jean-Jacques. The armed guards at the makeshift entrance were, though, two alpine-tall young men in black muscle tees, long shotguns slung across their backs.

  Emmanuel nodded at the men, who moved to the side so they could pass through. Mossbergs, Jean-Jacques thought. Pump-action, 500 series. Fine show guns, angry-looking and burnished, good for clearing rooms in hellholes across the developing world. He doubted they’d be much use here. Crowd weapons needed exactness.

  “Welcome home, my brother,” one of the guards said as he passed through the gate, his kreyol cracking with awe. Big as they were, they’d have been kids when Jean-Jacques left Little Haiti. They were his age then, now.

  “Mesi,” he replied, meaning it. He decided to try to stop being a bitch. It was good to be back, even if it was only for a little while. It didn’t need to be more complicated than that.

  They moved into the crowd, Emmanuel exchanging pleasantries every few steps. Jean-Jacques didn’t know anyone, or at least he didn’t think he did, but the sticky eyes of recognition turned his way nonetheless. Whispers like riptides followed, and those deep-rooted anxieties of being noticed returned. Sweat pooled into half-moons under his arms and he felt his stomach clench. His pulse thumped and thumped. Emmanuel grabbed his shoulder and held his hand there.

  “Told you we’re proud,” his cousin said, nodding toward an adjacent café. Jean-Jacques saw a painting in the restaurant’s window. It was in the Artibonite style, like the one brought to Xavier Station. But this was a painting of him. He was in uniform, running at the observer, gripping a rifle by the handguard. It’d been adapted from an Associated Press photograph taken a few months before, after an attack in Benghazi. The artist had taken some liberties, though—he’d never hold a rifle like that, for one. But his chest wasn’t that defined, either. Nor his jawline so sharp.

  Three more young men in black tees with shotguns walked by, as if on a casual stroll. Jean-Jacques nodded their way and asked, “Police?”

  He’d been joking but Emmanuel didn’t take it as one. “One of our girls got gang-raped last year. Outsiders coming here, thinking they can take what they want. She was twelve. Who you think pay for that abortion after? Or her therapy? Not Empire City. Not the babylons. They didn’t even investigate it, not really. Now, who’s gonna make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to her baby sister?”

  An armed neighborhood watch, Jean-Jacques thought. That’s one way to do it.

  A child asked for his autograph on a scrap of paper. Jean-Jacques signed. Then a group of teenagers asked for a group photo. He obliged. Then another group of teenagers asked for a group photo, too, a brazen kid with a cocky smile challenging him to a footrace.

  “Time to bounce?” his cousin asked. People were beginning to gather around Jean-Jacques, calling his name, pulling at his arms, causing him to sway a bit. Even pretending at anonymity wasn’t possible anymore. He moved his shoulders to the beat of the closest dance song, to the crowd’s delight. He heard people talking about his smile, his teeth, his muscles. “I just wanna touch you,” a woman old enough to be his mother said, and then she did, rubbing her hand down his chest.

  “Read my mind,” he called back to Emmanuel, enjoying the homecoming for what it was.

  “Got some folks wanting to meet you.” His cousin’s voice sounded tart, wary even, like it hadn’t only been Jean-Jacques worried about mixing family with business. “If you’re game.”

  Mayday, Mayday, Jean-Jacques thought. Then he heard Pete Swenson’s words in his head, and he smiled at them, despite it all.

  Duty. She beckons.

  11:35 P.M.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  IMPERIAL TIMES ALERT

  BREAKING: Mills Harrah, the former governor of Nevada and presidential candidate for the upstart party American Service, was shot and severely wounded this evening at a political fund-raiser in Empire City. Gunfire emerged from a hostage situation gone awry that’s left at least three others dead and a dozen hurt. Governor Harrah has been rushed to a local hospital and remains in critical condition…

  CHAPTER 13

  SWEAT SLICKED HIS palms, but Sebastian felt ready. Mind, spirit, gut, et cetera. He looked ready, too, according to the galaxy of studio cameras reflecting his own image back at him. A new corduroy jacket trimmed his shoulders and chest, the white button-up under it crisp like a tunic. He’d left open the top two buttons, as instructed. “Fratty chic,” he’d told the gay salesman at Banana Republic that morning, and they’d spent the next three hours figuring out exactly what that meant. His peacemonger shag had grown out since the summer, and he went through the motions of tidying his bangs. He’d swapped his aviator sunglasses for a pair of smart-looking brow lines. You’re ready, he repeated to himself. He’d shaved and everything.

  “Sixty seconds out.” Words from the void, obliging yet hostile.

  “Ever been on television before?” The newscaster leaned toward Sebastian, away from Liam Noonan, who was going over notes scrawled on an index card. Jamie Gellhorn was properly cast as an anchor lady with wavy honey hair and shiny north-star skin, but Sebastian knew she’d just returned from four months in the Barbary Coast. She had substance. She also didn’t wait for a response.

  “Be natural, you’ll be fine. Keep it succinct. Liam’s a pro—he’ll take good care of you, I’m sure.”

  Noonan grunted, his attention still on his cards. Sebastian swallowed to wet his throat.

  “Thanks,” he told Jamie Gellhorn. “For having me, I mean. You and Jake Tapper are the best.”

  “Tapper.” Jamie Gellhorn rolled her eyes. “I don’t nag at power, sweetheart. I speak truth to it.”

  Sebastian had forgotten they were on rival networks.

  The voice from the void called, “Thirty,” then “Ten,” then “Five.” The lights behind the cameras seemed to brighten. Sebastian straightened his back and tried to look pensive.

  “Welcome back to The Proving Ground on Empire News. I’m your host, Jamie Gellhorn. Happening around the world tonight—the Abu Abdallah trial begins anew. Designs for a new Lady Liberty statue are out, to great debate. And the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on assimilation boards—what does it mean for your hometown? But first, live from our studio in Emp
ire City, I’m going to chat with two foreign policy experts. Liam Noonan is a former Navy SEAL and author of Battlefields and Boardrooms: How You Too Can Lead at Life and Dominate. Welcome back to the program, Liam.”

  “Glad to be here.”

  “Joining Liam is Sebastian Rios, deputy assistant secretary for digital engagement, new media, and communications at Homeland Authority, and a survivor of a harrowing crisis in Tripoli a couple years back.”

  “Uhh, thanks, Jamie.” She’d inadvertently promoted Sebastian but he wasn’t about to correct it. He tried not to squint underneath his glasses; the room still seemed too bright. And hot—when had the lights turned so hot?

  “I want to begin with reports of American warfighters moving deeper into Africa, into Sudan and Chad. The War Department denies there’s any meaningful military presence there, only ‘advisors,’ but we’ve heard that before. With America at war in twenty-four countries—that are publicly known about—what do these new fronts mean for the Mediterranean Wars en masse?”

  “Well, Jamie, there’s two prongs to this,” Sebastian began, not sure why he was using the word ‘prong.’ He never used that word. “Can we even call them the Mediterranean Wars now? Some of these places don’t come close to having ports. It’s fast become the everywhere wars. There’s also—”

  “We are not at war with twenty-four countries!” Liam Noonan cut off Sebastian with something just below a shout. “Sorry to interrupt, hoss, but can’t let that go.”

  “What would you call it, then?” Jamie Gellhorn shifted her posture and attention toward Noonan.

  “We. Are. At. War. With. An. Ideology. One. Singular. Ideology.” Noonan’s talking points were pronounced and bullish. “We can’t win, we won’t win, until our country accepts the threat for what it is: wog fanaticism. One fight. One enemy. Then and only then will we turn our military loose to do what it’s meant to do. By any means necessary.”