by Chris Weitz
No, Jefferson looks hollow, he looks beat, and I’m glad. He lied and turned my peeps against me, and now he can barely look me in the eye. It’s a strange thing that the eye, just an organ of perception after all, should have a moral force, a repulsive charge like a magnet pointed the wrong way, when you’ve done wrong. That’s how Mama always knew I was lying: when I couldn’t meet the power of her gaze. And when she knew, she beat me. And her beatings gave me strength in time, when I understood that she did it to save me from an even worse fate, if I were not constantly aware of every crosscurrent of danger pulsing through a white man’s world.
So Jefferson is quiet now, his head down, his body still, like if he didn’t exert any energy he’d be invisible. Like I’m a T. rex that only sees motion. Instead, it’s Donna, the little raggedy-ass one, giving the line this time.
It goes like this: They’re selling slaves down at the museum on the west side of the park. Your people were in bondage once. So you should help us free our people.
And I say to her, “Oh, now you’re against slavery.”
And she says, “Of course. I’ve always been against slavery. I’m against murder, too.”
So I say to her, “Well, if that’s the case, what did you ever do about it?”
And she says, “What do you mean? Slavery was over by the time I was born.”
“Actually,” says the fine-ass Indian-but-English-sounding dude who’s new to the whole scenario, and a welcome addition, I may add, “that’s not true. We still have slavery down in the Subcontinent; they just don’t call it that.”
“Well, not here,” Donna says.
“And you think you have nothing to do with slavery?” I say. “You have nothing to do with the past? You don’t have to have committed a crime to be part of it.”
Pretty much blank stares.
I pick up an apple from the bowl on my desk, one of the good ones we get from the farmers up in Strong Island. I push the bowl their way, as if to say, even though you’re out of line, I still maintain certain standards of hospitality. They don’t bite. They’re not hungry, on account of they probably think I’m gonna have them executed.
I say, “Let me put it to you this way. If something’s been stolen, and you end up with it, what should you do? I mean, if you didn’t do anything to get it, it just fell in your lap? Let’s say… okay. Let’s say your great-grandma had a gold ring stolen by the Nazis. Right?”
Donna is following so far.
I continue, “Well, it passes on down the line, until sixty years later some girl who didn’t have anything to do with World War Two, never gave the Nazi salute, wouldn’t hurt a fly, gets that ring for a present. Now, when she finds out it belonged to your grandma. What should she do?”
Donna thinks. I’ll give her credit—she’s already almost there. She says, “She should give me the ring back. It wasn’t hers in the first place. It wasn’t her family’s to give.”
“That’s right,” I say. “So. Where is the labor of my ancestors?”
I pause because they don’t have an answer; then I continue, “The fortunes they built. The houses. The roads. The mills. The industry. The country my ancestors built. The one you got to live it up in, with police to protect you from all the great-great-great-grandchildren like me nobody knew what to do with. When do you give us back what we made and you took from us? And you know what? We weren’t even asking for all of it. Just a little piece of God’s green earth where we could live and get treated like human beings. See?”
She’s nodding, like either she understands or she’s just pretending to, trying to get my help. But Blondie, not so much.
“Well,” says Blondie, “it’s all over now. All that’s in the past. We’re all in the same boat now.”
“That’s right,” I say. “It’s a clean slate. Nobody owes anybody anything. Nome sane?”
“Imani,” says Jefferson. He’s staring down at the pattern on the Indian carpet.
Now, I don’t really like that he can just say my name like that, like I was the same as anybody he knows, like any of my friends would say it.
“You can call me Madam President,” I say.
“Okay. Madam President. If it’s because of me… well, please don’t keep from doing the right thing just because of me.”
If I didn’t think I was doing the right thing, I wouldn’t be doing it. It’s not like I’m refusing to help these fools just to spite them. But I let him go on. I’m a good listener. It helps me figure out how to beat people.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “for everything. Maybe you were right. Maybe you should have just kept the Cure and killed everybody else. Maybe you had the right.”
Then he goes quiet. I don’t see why I have to finish his thoughts for him.
“But?” I say.
He shrugs. Says nothing. Then, like that kind of thing probably doesn’t matter anymore, he says, “Saving those girls is the right thing to do.” Which he’s already basically said.
So I say, “I don’t see why nobody else has to do the ‘right’ thing and I do. Who are those girls to me? Somebody else’s tribe, people I never met. And besides. Nobody ever knows what the right thing is until it’s too late to decide, do they?”
So I start thinking. I mean, I’m always thinking; Mama said I was thinking since the moment I came into the world. But now I’m thinking. Deep, deep down inside me, trying to get to what the right thing really is.
The white kids don’t know what to make of that. They look around at each other like they think I’m just done. It’s all right. I’ve gotten used to how people react to me, when I go away for a little bit like this. If people actually took any time to just sit and think when they needed to, they wouldn’t be surprised when they see me doing it.
“Well,” says Jefferson, “I guess we better go.”
“No,” I say, “that’s cool.”
They shoot glances at each other. Look at their hands. They don’t know what I mean.
I say, “I’m not going to do it because it’s the ‘right thing.’ I’m going to do it because it feels good.”
What I mean is, I’m going to help them. I’m going to get my girls together and send them to rain hell on those slavers. I won’t do it because it’s right, or for Washington Square, or because of the past.
I’ll do it to see those little fuckers piss in their pants. I’ll do it to make the Uptowners’ hair stand up on their necks because they know we’re coming for them next. I’ll do it to see the looks in the girls’ eyes when they realize they’ve been freed.
I’ll do it for me.
We’re taking five of the pickups to the slave market. My girls are in the beds, fifty in all, each with a 3-D–printed AR-15 in her hands. We come prepared.
“So what do you call them?” asks Rab—that’s his name. He means my girls.
“What, are you still talking to me?” I say. I can feel his arm rub up against mine as the truck jounces this way and that. I like it, but it makes me feel nervous. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“Can’t I talk to you?” says Rab, his head bouncing off the ceiling as I turn a corner.
The suspension is jarring, and there’s not much room in the cab, but I don’t mind. I’m not in the mood for a long walk, especially since I can imagine a few situations in which we will want to get out quickly.
“Why don’t you talk to your skinny little girlfriend?” I say. I’ve clocked the way he looks at Donna. They’re not together but they have been, is my opinion. She’s hiding it from Jefferson, who is starting to get it. But what do I know? I’m not exactly the mistress of romance or anything. I decide to answer his question anyway. “My girls call themselves the Slayer Queens,” I say. “Now let me concentrate on driving.”
But actually, I kind of like the way he talks, all fancy and British and everything. Outside, I’m mean-mugging, but inside, I’m like, Say more things!
I ask him, “You ever hear of Rojava?”
He shakes h
is head.
I tell him about how the Kurds—that’s these people up in the Middle East that never had a home—like, they’re beefing with the Turks, they’re beefing with the Syrians, they’re beefing with the Iraqis, nobody wants to let them have their own little piece of the earth. Everyone tells them to just shut up and move along.
“I’ve heard about the Kurds,” says Rab, only he pronounces it “kuuuuuuuds.” “But I’m not sure how they fit in here.”
“If you let me finish, you’d know,” I say, and I can’t help but feel like I’m flirting maybe just a little bit. I say, “They started this tiny country called Rojava, in a sliver of land up in the north of Syria, when everything started going to shit there, Assad and ISIS and all. They based their government on these books some old dude who everybody had forgot about wrote—this old professor who thought he was finished, just lying on the couch all day nursing his joints in some run-down cottage in Maine. Well, one day old dude gets an e-mail from somebody who says he’s the imprisoned Kurdish leader, who tells him, we’ve decided to adopt your political ideas for this new country we’re starting. Imagine that. Folks halfway around the world who think he’s the best thing since Karl Marx.”
“Intriguing,” says Rab.
“Anyway,” I say, “the idea is total equality, between races, between religions, between genders. Every government position has one man and one woman in it. Every cop has to go to two weeks of feminist training before he can put on the badge. They even have a brigade of female fighters, and the ISIS Kuffars are shit scared of them because they think that they can’t go to heaven if they’re killed by a woman.
“So when Solon lost his mandate and I got the presidency, I decided to emulate the Kurds and put together a little all-girl force of our own. People want to take a shot at us, let them come.”
Rab nods. He says, “I like a strong woman.” I take a look at him as he watches the road.
We move along MLK, past Marcus Garvey, down Malcolm X. Right on 110th, across the top of the park, the slick of Harlem Meer reflecting the sickly winter sun. Mean mugs. Shiny guns.
Slavers, my girls coming for you.
WHEN THEY DRAG WAKEFIELD AND THE other Gurkha dude in, my homey Guja and me are watching from a sort of crawl space above a big disused restaurant set in the vaulted guts of the station. Gooj scoped it out—behind an access door marked MAINTENANCE ONLY. Turns out he’s an infrastructure geek, has plans to be a building inspector once he’s finished decapitating people. Below us, through a metal grating with little holes that look like stylized flower petals, I can see a U-shaped counter topped with white Formica, strangely cafeteria-like amid the churchy formality of the oily redbrick walls. It’s some kind of board meeting of the Uptown Confederacy. These boys are nasty pieces of work from the various private schools that dotted the Upper East Side.
Among them, I recognize Evan immediately, his hair as blond and his cheekbones as high as ever. Observing him unnoticed from up here, without the distraction of his trying to kill me or vice versa, I consider him abstractly for the first time. Abstractly, he’s every bit as good-looking as his sister. They both have that Nordic, WASPy thing going on.
But he’s strangely unsexy. Oh, it’s not just that he’s a psychopath and murderer. I mean, when has that ever stopped anybody from finding somebody hot? All those serial killers who got girlfriends through the mail?
There’s something about Evan, though—it’s like your libido just bounces off the surface of his handsomeness. The Bad Boy appeal goes only so far until it curdles into something off-putting. In fact, his classical features are part of what makes him downright repulsive. The contrast between appearance and reality is too perverse; he’s a flower growing out of shit.
And then in walks Chapel.
When we first met, I was in the brig of the Ronald Reagan, slowly going crazy from isolation. He appeared like a dream in the middle of the night and laid out the state of the world, at least as he wanted me to understand it. I learned that the rest of the globe had survived the Sickness and was held together with spit and glue and constant surveillance and the United States Navy. Chapel said he was from a group that called themselves the Resistance, which aimed to free humanity from the yoke of global tyranny and stuff.
But there was more. Or at least, I thought so. An affinity… an attraction. After a while, Chapel visited me for reasons other than political instruction.
I thought I was in love. I was ready to follow him anyplace.
And I guess I did follow him anyplace, given that I’m bent over in a crawl space in Grand Central. Rats be going by like, What are you doing here? Guja backs away, like he might have signed up for combat but not rodents.
While I fell for Chapel, Jefferson, of course, fell for Chapel’s con. He told us about the Reconstruction Committee’s plot to let all the surviving kids in the US die off before moving in to, as Chapel vividly put it, scrape off the goo and restart the factories.
So when he claimed he wanted to Save the Children, we were all on board, and we worked to get back to the last place I wanted to go—New York.
As for what Chapel wants now, or what he really wanted in the first place, who knows. Maybe he actually does want to Fight the Power. Maybe he just wants to Be the Power. Either way, since he’s got the biscuit, in theory he can pretty much do what he likes, on account of anytime he wants he can blow up the world.
This is, of course, a much, much bigger issue than the fact that he took off without saying good-bye. But you know, human nature is what it is, so the very personal experience of dumpage somehow manages to outweigh the geopolitics for me. I’m ashamed to say it almost feels as present to me as the fact that he shot Brainbox. Damn. Can’t even get my head around that yet.
Regardless, right now Chapel is surrounded by brutal, heavily armed ex-private-school boys. I can’t imagine Evan is going to be content with entourage status and just let somebody else run the world, so there’s a reasonable chance that Chapel’s going to end up with his throat cut. Which I guess would be satisfying in a that’s-what-you-get-for-what-you-did kind of way, except that the only thing worse than Chapel with his finger on the button is Evan with his finger on the button. I have, like, minimal respect for that kid’s good sense. Him and his sister both.
“Look, Peter,” Guja’s whispering urgently.
Wakefield and the Gurkha are shoved through the doors of the Oyster Bar and down to their knees in front of Chapel, Evan, and the Uptowner bigwigs. Something about the curve of the high ceiling makes it easy to hear the conversation that follows.
CHAPEL WON’T LET ME HOLD THE COOKIE or the biscuit or whatever, which is fucking lame of him. Like he thinks I’m going to fiddle around with it and launch a bunch of nuclear missiles by accident or something. Like I’m a five-year-old. Like he’s Dad, so he gets to hold the remote.
I guess I can’t figure out a particularly good reason why I need to hold it at the moment, other than that I want to, and that Chapel doesn’t want me to. It’s the old “want” and “need” thing again. I remember my father dadsplaining it to me in that particularly smug way that made me want to smash his teeth in with a hammer.
Dad liked to claim that most of what we think we need is actually what we want—this was usually because I told him I needed a car, or some cool shoes, or whatever. He even said that human wants were limitless. Like, once you had something you thought you needed, which really was just something you wanted, you always found something else to want, even if, in the end, what you wanted most was more time on earth.
One day, I thought I had him because I said I could think of a need, which was air, and then he said, Well, could you think of a situation in which you might be willing to sacrifice your life for something? And I thought, Absolutely not.
But I wanted to seem like a “good person,” so I said yes, and he said, Ah, you see? You didn’t actually need air in that case because you put something else you wanted ahead of it. In fact, you’ll find that whe
n it comes down to it, there is no such thing as a need at all.
Which was kind of his assholish way of saying I wasn’t going to get the convertible for weekends out in the Hamptons, which was totally unfair. He was really difficult to argue with at times like this, so I waited until I had a good comeback.
It was a few weeks into What Happened, after the Internet had gone down, and the doctors and the nurses had left, and the cook and the maids had quit. Dad had caught the Sickness and Mom was avoiding him like the plague (ha-ha), and he was stuck in his filthy bed in his huge bedroom upstairs.
I entered his room after knocking softly, like he’d want me to, and I walked over to his bed and sat by his side and smiled. He wasn’t used to my giving a shit about him, so I think he was really touched, even though he couldn’t speak by that point.
Dad, I want you to know that, no matter what happens, I will always remember you, and everything you’ve told me over the years.
A glimmer in his eyes. He could hear me.
Like, remember that time you told me that you didn’t need air?
Confusion.
Then I put my hand over his mouth and pinched his nose shut. I know that the traditional method is with a pillow, but if you do it that way, you don’t get to see their face as they’re dying.
I thought about DNA, and how I was cutting short the particular strain that had led to me. A phrase ran through my mind: destroying the evidence.
Then I thought about whether killing him wasn’t actually merciful, since he already had the Sickness, and that was almost enough to make me take my hands away. But by then I was too busy making my point, and I didn’t want to show weakness. Dad had always tried to beat and harass weakness out of me. So maybe in some way he was proud, you know, of his decisive son, who stayed the course. But he didn’t look proud. He looked frightened.
