Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  I was in no real position to dictate terms but figured that too many people he trusted were dead, that he was short on patches to sew his patchwork with.

  Here’s the story I’ll do first, I said.

  I told him Nate’s story, what I had heard from Nate, and like I knew he would, he rejected it out of hand.

  Security issues, he said. That’s not on the list of what’s possible, not right now.

  I’m an internet writer and you’re not assigning me to write about the internet attack that precipitated the end of the world?

  My hands are tied.

  Okay, I get it. Security reasons. Hands tied.

  Then I pitched him the story I wanted.

  I said, The logistics of the disposal of close to 300 million human corpses in the United States alone. I’d like to figure out the architecture of the project, where it currently stands. The workers they enlisted from the civilian population. Lots of the bodies must still be out there, just lying where they fell.

  Rachel, I like that. I like that you came up with that. I’d love for you to tackle it. Down the road, when we get back on our feet, you can have this story.

  I thought you were on your feet.

  We’re on our feet but in a liminal period here. The New York Times Magazine is 100 percent legit, but for the moment we’re working in partnership with the government to get our reporters out in the field, just to move them around. So a government committee is working with us and other outlets on selecting the stories. But that’s it in terms of interference. How we report the stories is up to us. Believe me, they want us back. They want the media back online and functioning. They want information flowing, communication flowing, money flowing, as soon as possible. It’s not ideal, but it’s what needs to happen now. They value the fourth estate. They want to restore the world order. The want to restore the fucking economy, you know? These are the money guys, they can’t rebuild the economy without billions of little ones and zeros zipping around, capitalism doesn’t work without the flow of information and so they know that the absolute best first thing to kick-start our recovery and to ramp up rebuilding is to have a powerful and independent fourth estate.

  You believe that?

  I do. I really do. In a way. The world almost ended. The world suffered the most grievous fucking trauma imaginable. We’re not trying to build a perfect crystal palace, here. We’re not working in ideal space. We’re making scar tissue. You understand that? We’re putting a foot in front of another, and we’re generating the scar tissue. To get some rudimentary healing going. The world has been blasted in the gut with a shotgun, and then set on fire. It’s going to be a slow rehab. There is serious brain injury. There is necrotic flesh. We work. We do our work. That’s all we can do.

  I thought about commenting on your mixed metaphor. Then I thought: That’s what you want. You’re baiting me for some playful banter, like back in the day.

  I paused. I would just like to know where Dominique and Verena are.

  There was a long silence. I could almost see it, the man working his broad, clenched jaw, pressing thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. It occurred to me that I didn’t know where he was.

  Where are you calling from? I asked.

  He said, I’m in Modesto. That’s where we’re coordinating things for the moment. Northern California.

  The New York Times Magazine of Modesto.

  That’s right, he said.

  I said, I want to find out where Dominique and Verena’s bodies are. I want to know what happened to them after they died, with an acceptable degree of certainty. If they were buried, where they were buried. You can help me. Then I’ll help you.

  Galloway said, You are not the only one who has lost people. I am very sorry for your loss but this jokes thing could be a great, important piece. Didn’t you once write that we learn most about a system when it is breaking down?

  I said, I left my wife and daughter to report a piece for you. I should have been there, but I was working for you.

  You can thank me later, he said. I’m not kidding, I saved you, you fucking bitch.

  A face burned off, or badly decomposed. A face rendered to the bone by animals. A photo that was blocked or shadowed or blurred. There were many that couldn’t be seen, but then these were fewer as the weeks went by, presumably as multiple viewers marked a photo “unrecognizable.”

  They would not say how many were in the database of photos—millions, presumably—just as no one had said how many had been killed. It was generally accepted in Foshay that 90 percent of the US population was gone, which would mean close to 300 million dead, but this number was unofficial, and in fact was denied from time to time in the functioning entities, where it was said that the real number was much lower. “Closer to 50 percent” was a figure that had appeared more than once. At times it became abstracted, the faces all expressions of a single form, a face, neither living nor dead—pairs of the same face forever.

  After a few hours of the work, it sometimes happened that things would flip, and you would think the living ones were dead, or the dead ones alive, and it would really be true, that the faces burned off, or badly decomposed, or torn away by animals, were vital, ready to say hello, and the smiling photos from social media or the blankly gazing government ID photos were a funeral director’s approximation, embalmed and gone.

  The day Galloway called, a woman stood and screamed, That’s her, that’s my sister, that’s her purple blouse—this is her driver’s license photo, and here, that’s her dead.

  This happened, if not quite so dramatically, every week or two.

  Always there was the part of your brain looking for your own loved ones, the people you’d lost. You thought you saw them at times, ghosts of people from the office, a girl you knew in summer camp, the cashier at the convenience store, a television actor.

  It was impossible to work out the odds, exactly—how many people had you come into contact with in your life, how many had left an impression, how many faces were held in a brain?

  The supervisor took the woman’s arm, but she clung to the back of her chair—That’s her, you’ve got to save it, please save it, I need you to save it.

  Soldiers came in and took her away, she demanded that they save the photos, tell her more—there must be more.

  I was jealous of her certainty, or her ability to convince herself of her certainty, but I was mostly annoyed that she’d disrupted the flow of faces. I liked the faces—they soothed me somehow, they were the most comfortable hours of the day.

  I would make mistakes on the other modules, hoping to be pushed back into Face Match.

  The passage of time became something else, suspended, purgatorial, a space you stepped into and left again that had nothing to do with the slow grind of the day, the slashing crawl of minutes. You were here, then you were gone, and hours had gone by.

  Of course I saw my wife and daughter, I saw Dominique and Verena.

  And of course I never saw them.

  I was in Andrea’s bed and she was grinding her pussy against my mouth. I liked it, not seeing Andrea, tasting, moving my tongue around, lost in a world of the now.

  I was thinking that, and then I was out of it, thinking of the now, and I started laughing into Andrea’s pussy—it felt dumb and joyful and frantic. Then Andrea shifted off, she pushed her forearm onto my neck and brought herself off, and then I bit her shoulder and her breast and I brought myself off too. Then my phone rang. It was Galloway, and I didn’t pick up.

  Why does he keep calling? Andrea asked.

  He wants me to leave here. He wants me to go out on an assignment.

  You’re not going to, Andrea said.

  I would have said no, but something in Andrea’s tone stopped me. Something needy and commanding. I felt a rage inside. I’m trying to tell you, I said.

  What, baby? she said. What are you trying to tell me?

  I see you so I can go back to my room and feel bad. I can think about Dominique an
d Verena and I can feel bad. I feel so bad when I leave here. Feeling good with you means nothing to me. Do you understand that? It’s just an experience I get through. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re an alarm clock that wakes me up so I can do other things. You’re just a beeping that annoys me enough to wake me up to how bad I actually feel. You’re helpful in helping me to get to the part where I can feel bad. To think about them and everything I’ve lost and feel like shit. You’re just a few minutes of something that wakes me up enough to feel something afterward that is real, just for a few minutes, before I lose it again.

  I said: All you are is a mallet I hit myself with.

  You don’t mean a word you’re saying, she said.

  I’m going to take Tom’s job. I’m going to leave here. If I stay here I will kill myself.

  You’re not leaving. You can’t trick me.

  You’re a piece of wood. You’re an inanimate object.

  You’re with them. You’re one of them.

  I can’t leave you, not really. I can’t leave a piece of driftwood. Or I can’t feel bad about it. I can’t feel bad about leaving a pebble.

  Andrea said, Driftwood!

  I picked up my pants and shoes off the floor. I stood there naked with my clothes in my hands and looked at her.

  Driftwood, I said.

  I’m driftwood! That’s funny. What a gift you have for metaphor! she said, jaw clenched, voice pitching up, That’s what I always tell people. That you have such a gift for metaphor.

  Her eyes were tense and shining and her mouth was pulled back in a grin. She was on the verge of something. And then, still standing, she was racked with sobs, she was doubled over, knees bent, top half of her body swinging down, head almost brushing the carpet. And it seemed like some jokey yoga pose of grief, and I heard myself laugh, and she was swinging back up, but before our eyes could meet I was gone again.

  Galloway said, I know where they are. With a reasonable degree of probability. There are three places where bodies in that area of Brooklyn were taken, but the most likely is Prospect Park. They dug up a field there, that’s where most of them went within the radius you think they died in.

  Prospect Park, I said.

  I’m only telling you this because I think it will make a good piece. I think it’s the perfect piece for you—the whole larger question of capital-G grief, of how we deal with loss on this scale, and individually, with the uncertainty of even something as simple as where a body is. Sure. That could be beautiful.

  He said, Rachel, are you there? You can do this piece. I’m sorry for yesterday. I’m under a lot of stress. I’m dealing with grief, too. You know that, right? You can have this. I promise. You can travel where you need to and think your thoughts and then you can write about what you’re thinking. But I need this other piece first.

  I said, Our phone calls, our emails, all switched over to systems that can be fully monitored. What do you think they really want?

  Okay, so sure, Galloway said, they want to know what you’re saying, they’ll know. But what are the options? That was already largely true, Rachel, as your own reporting indicated many times.

  Which part of Prospect Park? Which field?

  I don’t know.

  We all used to go there. I wonder which field it was?

  I can find that out. But you’ve got to do this other piece first.

  First, I visit Dominique and Verena. Where you say you think they might be.

  After.

  No. Now.

  After, Rachel. Not negotiable. My hands are completely fucking tied on this. I’m giving you a chance that any journalist would kill for—historians a hundred years from now would kill for this. To go into the room where some part of what’s left of the internet is, and poke around. Have I told you about the little room? They’ve got some sort of working archive of big chunks of the internet. I’m jealous! Aren’t you dying to surf the internet again?

  People stopped saying surf the internet a long time ago.

  That’s why I need you. You’re the internet person. This is what you write about. Write about it again. You want to see Dominique and Verena? They’re in there. Records of them. Trails. Traces. What’s left of their footprint. You can spend some time with that while you’re researching the piece.

  I said, That last day, we watched The Princess Bride. Me and Verena and Dominique. Then we put her to bed, and it was just the two of us, we watched Vanya on 42nd Street. It was her favorite. Then I went into the city, and they died, and I lived.

  I know that happened. I’m sorry.

  You want to know what I hate, Tom? I remember I didn’t laugh at all at The Princess Bride. I watched it coldly. And gradually Verena stopped laughing. She watched the way I was watching it, and she mirrored me, she became very serious. You know that movie. The lines about land wars in Asia or to the pain, it all seemed sad. But then near the end something changed and I was actually moved by it. I had this sense—I remember it—that I was watching ghosts reenact some old forgotten play. With Vanya I just laughed. I didn’t understand why. Maybe it was the actors in their street clothes, slipping into their roles and back out. It’s meant to have that effect, but the effect dissolves: you’re supposed to see just the play at some point, not actors assembled for a play. But I was seeing it that way the whole time, actors slipping in and out of their roles. It was as if this wasn’t Vanya the feature film, this was a documentary of actors in a certain production of Vanya.

  I see what you mean.

  I’m not explaining it right. It seemed like some kind of hell or purgatory. The last lines when the young girl—she’s supposed to be plain, not beautiful, but she’s a smart girl, and she looks totally fine, she just has the misfortune of not being as hot as Julianne Moore—in fact, I’m just realizing this now, as I’m talking: she has the same eyes as Andrea. Same face. Anyhow, she describes how heaven will come, she says these things, how they’ll live a life of radiant joy, and all the world’s evil will be bathed in a tender mercy. And they will rest. She says that again and again, to comfort her uncle. We shall rest. And I missed it—it’s this tender and beautiful moment, and I missed it and I ruined it for me and her. I mean, I was there, but I missed it. I don’t know how to describe it but I completely dissociated. My last moments with my family. And I started laughing—I was hysterical, I was laughing. And totally out of control, out of my body, or maybe I was just body, a heaving body with no mind I could get hold of. And she was holding me, and as I came back to myself, I thought it was both of us, that we were both laughing so hard, and didn’t understand why, but I wiped away my tears and it was just me. I thought we were both laughing at once, but it was just me, she was holding me and looking down at me and saying Shhh, shhhh, shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, be quiet now, you’re okay, be quiet now, you’ll wake Verena. I was on the floor, and I could hear back to a moment before and hear how sick my laughter had sounded. And I saw that look on her face, concern and tension and annoyance. And then you called and I pulled myself together. I went into town. She told me to stay, but I went.

  I’m sorry, Rachel.

  If I do the piece, I want to do it right. I want to talk to survivors, the people posting the jokes, and find out where they are now, and how they’re doing. That’s the only way the piece makes any sense. And it has to be in person. You have to get me to these places, to these groups of survivors, so I can talk to people whose jokes I’ve found.

  Not in person. By phone. By email.

  It doesn’t work otherwise. It has to be in person. It’s the government’s dime, right? Public-private partnership? It’s not out of your pocket.

  Okay, yes, finding one or two, that would be a great story. That’s a story. It’s a better story. You’re right. We’ll try. That’s why you’re good at this. Maybe that can be arranged.

  To do this right, I need a broad look at our life now, at how people are dealing with it.

  I’ll see what I can do. Let me call you back.

 
; He called me back in an hour. A car will pick you up in the Foshay in two hours.

  How many people do I get to visit?

  I think we’ll get you somewhere. At least one. At least that. That’s a story. First you go to the room with the internet. Start there.

  Is there anything you want from it?

  From what?

  From the internet. Anything personal?

  Like what?

  Something from the internet. From before. You understand?

  He paused. He said, I don’t have any photos of me and Jack. I don’t know if that’s something they would have. Certainly, we were photographed enough. But it doesn’t—I don’t know the details, I don’t know what’s left, if there’s photos or what.

  Do me a favor, forget everything I said about the Princess Bride and stuff. I don’t know why I told you that. Just forget I said it.

  You want me to forget it?

  I felt my voice pitch up. I felt my body wanting to scream. I said, I want you to tell me that I didn’t say it, you didn’t hear it, and you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.

  Sure, Galloway said. You didn’t say it. No fucking clue. You take care.

  The man who was my minder told me no written record, and when I asked, with a laugh that I hoped was both understanding and dismissive, But I can take notes off the record? he repeated No written record. I would be permitted, he explained, to take screenshots at my terminal. These screenshots would be vetted and transmitted to me at a future date.

  He was taking me to the room with what was left of the internet.

  He wore black slacks, a navy polo shirt, a black blazer, and what I recognized as $1,200 Louis Vuitton sunglasses. I was bothered by this. The clothes were not just weathered, they were cheap, they were discount department store clothes. Which was not a problem, but the combination was suggestive in our post-1/28 world. Twenty-dollar pants and thousand-dollar sunglasses, something there didn’t fit, something read to me as danger, as an implicit threat, in a government minder. In the state I was in, I thought that perhaps he didn’t know, didn’t understand the difference, and that was one type of signal. I thought that he might have had fine clothes at home, and that was another type of signal, one he was sending on purpose, though of course that was speculation, and doesn’t alter the signal itself, what I imagined I was seeing.