Let Us Be True

by Alex Christofi

  There was a spot some way into that patch of green wood, a flat outcrop of rock surrounded by trees, where he liked to sit and think. He’d solved many writing problems right there, and ironed out niggles from his life. But as he approached it, he heard voices ahead of him, and smelled cooked meat. It turned out an encampment had sprung up there. A couple of old trucks were parked up, and there were half a dozen roughly built tepees constructed from branches, old tarpaulins and plastic sheeting. A skinned deer was roasting over a fire with men and woman sitting round it, and children were playing in the stream. All the people were black and, when they spoke, he could tell straight away they came from way down south: Alabama, Mississippi, somewhere like that, deep down in the Storm Country. They were living in the forest like Indians, and they really didn’t want him around.

  ‘What’s your business here?’ demanded a burly guy with a shotgun.

  ‘Just having a run, compañero, just having a run. Didn’t expect to find you guys here, to tell the truth.’

  The man wasn’t actually pointing the gun at Richard, but he had his finger resting on the trigger. Not far behind him, another big man was standing, unsmiling, with a machete.

  ‘You just keep on running, then. We don’t need no company.’

  ‘Okay. Well, this is kind of where I was headed, so I guess I’ll just turn round and go back.’

  ‘You do that. And find some other place to run from now on, you hear me?’

  As Richard made his way back through the green wood, he noticed something that he hadn’t spotted before. A few of the new trees from California were dying, attacked perhaps by the same fungus that had killed the trees in the forest beyond. They were only saplings, but one or two of them already had dead branches, with gray beards of lichen. He felt a stab of grief, so strong that it was almost like a physical wound.

  There was a deep contradiction inside him. On the one hand he loved history. He loved to think about it and write about it. He loved the drama and the sweep of it, the huge unstoppable forces, as elemental as glaciers or tides. On the other hand he didn’t like change. He wanted life to be steady. He wanted the world around him to remain exactly as it was. He might write books about history, but he was afraid to even think about the history that was happening right now, though his own wife was riding the wave.

  He would go to the next border rally himself, he decided. He would make himself go and watch.

  It was at Peace Arch, Blaine, right next to the border crossing that he and Holly had used when they went north to visit Ruby and Ossia. The arch itself stood on the frontier itself between the north- and southbound lanes of the coastal highway. It commemorated the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 between the USA and the British colonies that were to become Canada. A few years back, he and Holly had stopped to look at it. On the US side of the arch, an inscription read, ‘Children of a common mother’ and on the Canadian side were the words, ‘Brethren dwelling together in unity’. A symbolic iron gate inside the arch was permanently open, with the words ‘May these gates never be closed’ inscribed above it. And the park in which it stood, half in the US and half in Canada, had no border post of any kind, so a visitor entering the park from either end could wander freely back and forth across the international frontier, while on either side of them, traffic flowed north and south on the electric highway.

  Now the park was filled with many thousands of angry Americans, Slaymaker addressing them from a platform erected beside the arch itself. With Holly’s help, Quentin Fox had crafted a more flowery speech than usual for the occasion, in keeping with the rhetoric of the arch itself.

  ‘Don’t turn us away, Canada! Honor the pledge inscribed inside this arch! Don’t close these gates of friendship! Let us in, not just in ones or twos, but in our tens and hundreds of thousands, to establish new towns for ourselves in those northern lands of yours, where we can be prosperous and useful, contributing to the wealth of your country as well as our own.’

  Richard was standing on the western edge of the park next to the southbound carriageway, at more or less the meeting point of the park’s Canadian and American halves. The Canadians had established a line across the park about ten yards behind the arch and across roads on either side of it, defended by several hundred riot police with shields and body armor and helmets that hid their faces. On the American side of the frontier, there were a few dozen Washington State police on both the northbound and southbound roads. None of them had riot shields or helmets, they stood at ease, and there were no water cannons or armored cars waiting behind them, as there were on the Canadian side. If the Canadians had wanted to portray themselves as the heartless dogs in the manger depicted in the American whisperstream, they could hardly have done better.

  As Slaymaker’s speech progressed, Richard watched bouts of cheering and chanting morphing, more and more frequently, into abuse directed at the Canadians. The odd stone was thrown, and once an opened can of red paint. As far as he could tell from the coverage of previous rallies, the mood here was darker and angrier than it had ever been before.

  ‘Let us in, you Canuck bastards!’ shouted a very fat woman a few yards away from Richard. ‘Or are you just going to stand there and watch us starve?’

  At the end of his speech, Slaymaker asked if there was anyone from the audience who wanted to say anything. Holly had organized a parabolic microphone that could be focused on any part of the crowd, along with a camera that would zoom in and show the speaker on the same giant screens that had been displaying the usual Mercator maps of North America.

  ‘This arch is supposed to celebrate peace with the British,’ said an elderly woman, ‘but we shouldn’t never have made peace with them in the first place, if you want my opinion.’

  The whole crowd cheered.

  ‘I just hope for their sake that those Canucks never find themselves without a home like what’s happened to me,’ said a gnarled and suntanned farmer, ‘because, boy oh boy, we’re going to laugh in their faces.’

  More big cheers. These speakers, with the license of being ordinary people, were expressing the vitriol that Slaymaker himself had been scrupulously careful to avoid. Richard wondered for a moment what that last speaker’s response would have been, back in the good years, if some destitute refugee from Mexico or Nicaragua has asked him for some of his land? But he knew that was a pointless exercise. People weren’t consistent. All of humanity possessed the same basic toolkit of principles but everyone selected only the ones that suited their present purposes.

  ‘Those Canucks could sure learn a lesson from you, Senator,’ said a large black woman from the South. ‘You coulda sat in your ranch in the mountains, enjoying the nice cool air. But here you are fighting for people like us. God bless you, Senator. If you want my opinion, you’re worth more than the whole damn nation of—’

  Suddenly a shot rang out. Richard didn’t see who fired it. Like everyone else, he instantly ducked, his heart pounding. But it was very near to him, and, in the stunned silence that followed, he saw a Canadian police officer, one of the many on the southbound carriageway just to his left, wince as the bullet hit him. The Mountie’s colleagues pushed forward and surrounded him, but they knew that they themselves were in the line of fire. Many pulled out their own guns, pointing them warningly in the direction of the American crowd.

  The crowd moaned and murmured and began to surge this way and that, like turbulent water along a rocky shore. And meanwhile, on the American part of the road, a strange new thing was happening, never seen before. The American police had drawn their guns and were pointing them, not at the crowd, but at their Canadian counterparts.

  ‘Keep this calm, people,’ Slaymaker bellowed from the platform, where secret service officers had moved swiftly to surround him. ‘Keep this calm. We don’t know what’s happened over there. I need you to be patient and show some American dignity. Wait till your way out becomes clear, and then leave the—’

  One of the Canadian officers interrupted
him with a loud hailer.

  ‘Any more shots in our direction and we open fire.’

  ‘You open fire, we open fire,’ shouted out an American cop. There was a loud cheer from the crowd and someone lobbed a stone into the Canadian ranks.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Richard muttered bitterly. ‘That’s really going to help.’

  ‘I want no more shots fired,’ boomed Slaymaker. ‘I ask our American police officers over there to put away their guns. And I ask our Canadian friends to do the same.’

  The American police did as he asked, but people in the crowd kept on yelling abuse and throwing things at the Canadians, in spite of voices around them calling out to them to stop, and the Mounties kept hold of their weapons. Richard sensed very clearly what was about to happen. So did everyone else in his section of the crowd, which, like some sort of heavy viscous fluid, was slowly pushing its way out of the park onto the part of the southbound carriageway that was safely behind the line of American police. It was impossible to move quickly at first, but more space opened up as people reached the asphalt and many broke into a run. Meanwhile behind them, their more reckless compatriots continued to taunt the Mounties, in spite of Slaymaker’s amplified voice continuing to call for forbearance.

  Richard opted to walk not run. He had never before been in a situation where bullets had been fired and more seemed likely. He felt oddly unafraid, even a little elated. This was history, he was thinking. This was what history was like.

  As he reached the American frontier posts, he heard a burst of gunfire behind him, followed by screams and wails. No one nearby knew what had happened. It was only later that he learnt that three American demonstrators had been shot dead. But in his mind he saw corpses like broken dolls, and still-living people bleeding to death in a no man’s land where no one could reach them.

  CHAPTER 36

  Slaymaker had come pretty well out of Peace Arch, that was Holly’s first reaction, sitting in the campaign offices in Seattle and flipping back and forth across the stuff that was appearing, second by second, in the stream and across the hubs. Lots of American flags were flying, tear-stained declarations of solidarity were pouring out toward the families of the three dead Americans from every corner of the country, and, above all, only a very small minority seemed inclined to blame Slaymaker. She’d have to wait a few hours for detailed polls, of course, but there was plenty of footage of the senator appealing for calm and trying to control the crowd, and the entire video of his speech showed him talking in a measured, statesmanlike way about the historic friendship between the two countries. Crucially, too, all the deaths were on the American side. The only shot that had actually come out of the crowd had merely injured a Canadian policeman, and not very badly, at that. At one point, the US cops had taken out their own guns, but they’d ended up helping the wounded rather than shooting back.

  Holly called Slaymaker and he got back to her as soon as he was safely away from the Peace Arch.

  ‘Hey, Holly! I guess you heard what happened?’

  She hadn’t been conscious up to that point of feeling anxious, but she could tell now that she must have been very agitated, because of the calmness that instantly came over her on hearing his voice. It was as if she could only now allow herself to recognize the sense of darkness and dread that had been building inside her. But she felt fine now, level-headed and in control. She listened to herself as she began to set out her thoughts on how to play this new situation, and realized that what been half-formed ideas up to that point were already crystallizing into a coherent strategy simply as a result of speaking to him.

  She was still talking with Slaymaker when Richard sent her a message to say he was okay. To her own shock she realized that it hadn’t yet occurred to her to call him.

  ‘Give me a minute to call Rick,’ she told the senator. ‘He was at the rally himself. I’ll call you straight back.’

  Rick was furious when he got home late that evening.

  ‘I could easily have been one of the ones who died, Holly. Do you realize that? No, I guess not. Because you haven’t even bothered to ask me. You knew I was at a demo where a fatal shooting occurred, but you didn’t think to call me until I messaged you, and even then, you didn’t ask me where I was in the crowd or what happened. But I’ll tell you anyway. I was very near the Mounties who started shooting. If I’d hung around for two more minutes, I’d have been straight in the line of fire.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was slow to call you. I feel really badly about that. I don’t know why, but somehow I just knew you were okay. But I should have called you anyway and I’m sorry.’

  ‘The shooting was your fault in some part, Holly. Have you thought about that? Your fault for helping your pal Slaymaker stoke up hostility.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I can show you the speech if you like. At no point did Steve advocate violence. Some random guy in the crowd fired a shot and the Mounties lost their heads. It could have happened in any crowd situation.’

  ‘Damn it, Holly, I was there! Don’t tell me what happened! The guy fired the shot only a few yards away from me. I felt the tension in the crowd beforehand, and I saw the fear on the Canadian side afterwards. Canada might look big on the map, Holly, but in terms of population it’s a small country, and you and Slaymaker are intimidating them. And yeah, okay, your—’

  ‘All we’re doing is asking them to take some responsibility for fellow North Americans who are victims of—’

  ‘Don’t spin me the fucking party line, Holly. I’m your husband, remember! I’m the guy you say you love! I was there, alright? I was an eyewitness to the provocation. Yeah, your precious Steve doesn’t call for violence. Yeah, he remains his normal affable self. But don’t tell me you haven’t noticed the rage beneath that amiable surface? The burning rage. I mean, for Christ’s sake, how could anyone have had a childhood like his and not be full of rage? He’s just very very good at managing it.’

  This was a genuinely new thought to Holly. She remembered the quality that had exhilarated her when she had watched Slaymaker at Opheim. She’d called it dangerousness, but she could see now that rage was another name for it: controlled and very concentrated rage. How odd that she hadn’t spotted it before, like a fish not noticing the existence of water. And how odd that she hadn’t thought of calling Richard as soon as she heard about the shooting. She had no explanation that was convincing even to her. The thing about having somehow known that Richard was okay was just a way of saying that it hadn’t even occurred to her to worry about him.

  ‘This was never going to be painless,’ she said. ‘This was never going to happen without conflict and anger. But if we left things as they were that would have been worse. Look what’s happening over in Africa, look at Central America. Do we want our own Memetic Hordes?’

  She felt a real passion rising up inside her as she was speaking. The deaths at Peace Arch, and her own odd indifference to Richard’s safety, had made it necessary for her to believe even more deeply in Slaymaker’s project, if she was to preserve her sense of herself as a decent person. And she was drawing on all of her professional skills to talk herself into doing just that, choosing her words and her arguments as she did for her clients when she rummaged on their behalf in the dressing-up box of human values – those fallen fragments from the third dimension – for the clothes that would show them in the best possible light.

  Jenny Williams flew to Ottawa for her meeting with Prime Minister Suzanne Ryan. At their initial joint press conference, the president made clear that she wouldn’t accept any sort of excuse for the indiscriminate killing of unarmed US citizens by Canadian police officers, and demanded reassurances that the officers concerned would be identified and brought to justice, but she also said that she couldn’t condone the inflammatory rhetoric of Senator Stephen Slaymaker.

  ‘I ask our Canadian friends to remember that the United States, like your own country, is a democracy. However much we might regret the language used by certain figures in both of our
countries, they are entitled to say what they wish. And when it comes to Senator Slaymaker, it’s important that we recognize that many Americans share his concerns, even if they disapprove of his methods. I ask the Canadian people to understand that anyone standing for election in America, myself included, must be able to convince ordinary American voters that something is being done to settle the displaced people from the southern and southwestern parts of the country that won’t put an unrealistic amount of pressure on our northern states. The US is spending more than any other country on the planet on reversing the carbon dioxide glut that’s at the heart of the problem, but – and I’m going to speak bluntly here – unless I can go home with a generous deal on the immigration issue, Canada may find itself having to deal with President Slaymaker not President Williams.’

  In her reply, the Canadian prime minister was noticeably careful not to dismiss out of hand what the president had to say about immigration, and she proposed an urgent summit conference of all the governments concerned, ‘to look creatively at the whole issue of migration to the North American Arctic, right the way from Alaska to Greenland’.

  ‘You see!’ crowed Holly, as she watched the news on the broadscreen with Richard. ‘You see! Some movement! No way would Williams have achieved that without Steve behind her playing the bad cop.’

  She noticed how Prime Minister Ryan was choosing to draw Greenland into the equation, softening the sting for her electorate by mentioning yet another sparsely populated Arctic land that could share the load. Someone on Ryan’s team had borrowed her idea!

  ‘And this was you?’ said Richard. ‘It really was you that made this happen?’

  He had studied the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, the decolonization of Africa, the American Revolution. He knew just how brutal the process of change was in the human world, and how ruthless the leaders of change had to be, whether history ended up labeling them as good guys or bad. But he had never expected to see it this close to him.