Sands Rising

by H M Wilhelmborn

  I walked around the condo with their T-shirts as Nathaniel and Nathalie, the twins, asked why I was walking around with “Jon’s and Nate’s stuff, Mom.” I ignored them and sat in the backyard, where both my sons’ ashes are buried. I sat in the heat and dust until sundown, rocking back and forth as I coughed, cried, and keened while Mauru left me to myself because he knew that I needed to mourn on my own.

  I walked into the condo, where Mauru had prepared dinner. He’d made a vegetable casserole, which Jon had disliked. “Everything is now tasteless and bland, Mom,” Jon had said. Nate had responded that “This is the new normal, Mom.”

  I took a spoonful of the casserole and tried to engage with Nathaniel and Nathalie, our twins. Eating, breathing, and living felt like betrayals of my dead sons.

  Nathalie and Nathaniel hugged me, and Mauru joined them.

  “We love you, Mom.”

  There were two vacant seats at the table for Jon and Nate; I had insisted. Nathalie spooned some food into her mouth and chewed with her mouth open, which she had done as a child when tempted to spit something out. She and Nathaniel were nine now.

  “Nathalie, please,” Mauru said. “Mouth closed.”

  “Too salty, Dad,” she said, her eyes watery. “Why do you put this much salt in food sometimes? You also did this when Jon died.”

  She stood up and left the table.

  Nathaniel followed her. “You’re not the only ones missing them, you know,” he said. “You’re not the ones who die.”

  Barely two months after his eleventh birthday, Nathaniel (not to be confused with “Nate”) died. Who could have foreseen what devastation California’s longest drought would visit upon us and what violent impulses ecological changes across the planet would unleash in humans of all races, religions, shapes, and origins?

  Starting around 2043, we heard of the underground slave market of teenage boys. It was said to be “contained” in parts of the world where “traders” were buying boys from families in need of water, food, and medication, and were selling them across the globe before they died. I vomited when I heard of such a thing, had nightmares about it, and was glad that we lived in San Diego, California, where such a thing would never happen.

  That is until Nathaniel was kidnapped just outside our apartment complex in Rancho San Antonio in 2047 and sold into underground slavery right here in San Diego. Mauru, his dad, and my dad tracked the people down who did it and ended up killing two of them before dying from gunshot wounds themselves. From the injuries he’d sustained as a slave, Nathaniel died a few months after Mauru returned him to us.

  How do you survive memories of how one child’s death gave way to another’s, then another’s? You lose your husband to his bravery—your best friend and the best man you’ve ever known—and with him your will to live. You only continue living because you have a daughter, and she’s the most beautiful reminder of everything good you’ve experienced and of every wonderful person you’ve now lost.

  As I write my story from jail in San Diego, allowed only paper and a pen, which my attorney had to fight for, I realize that we should have left California a while back. We were preparing to leave when President Wilhelmina Lesyer, born and raised in water-rich Alaska, used the expanded powers available to her under the Patriot Act to declare a national emergency, which allowed her to “determine that a new Dust Belt has come into existence.”

  President Lesyer decided that the drought was “a threat to national security, and our fellow Americans in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah, are now in a federally administered quarantine zone until further notice.”

  The effect of the new Dust Belt was to give each affected state increased federal funding to manage the effects of the longest drought in American history, which in some states had gone on for many years, and in others, although it had started more recently, showed no signs of abating. Almost full autonomy on all matters affecting state water rights was granted to each state. Water rights, we learned, had for several hundred years been state matters with little federal intervention.

  We all became unwilling experts in everything water-related, and we discussed all our options at Mothers for Mercy meetings, at work, home, and everywhere else. You couldn’t go anywhere without people talking about water, dust, food, and about those two dreaded words, The Hatred. The weather became politicized, and we knew where people stood by how they talked about the weather.

  Mothers for Mercy fought.

  We lost.

  Our water rights cases that went up to the Supreme Court of the United States were assigned to a “master,” who recommended the same outcome in every case. Relying on the master’s recommendation, Chief Justice Cathay then ruled that the Supreme Court would not intervene in California’s water rights issues because they were “political questions involving the internal determinations of each state about something so fundamental to life as water, and a court of unelected judges in Washington, D.C., should never interject itself in such political matters and thus embarrass state governments in their internal affairs.”

  The Water Court, therefore, was free to roam as it wished in water-related matters, and it began sentencing people to death for “theft of water.”

  Earlier this year, 2050, I received my Section 1(a)(1) notice from the state engineer’s office. I was numb and a little confused. In my case, the death penalty was sought against me and two others. We were all found guilty of conspiracy to steal water, which amounted to “theft of water.” The sentence was the new punishment under California law, voted into law by referendum.

  The law is known as “Verdict by Ballot.”

  Under Verdict by Ballot, once the Water Court finds an individual guilty of specific categories of “theft of water,” those found guilty are sentenced to Verdict by Ballot in which the people of California decide during a referendum held every two years which of the guilty will die by public drowning for “theft of water.”

  I worked at the law firm that drafted Section 1(a)(1).

  I profited from it.

  I saw the CWP and its billionaire founder, Jeremiah Trehoviak, rise.

  I knew his people and attended confidential meetings.

  I had a part in my undoing and in the suffering of my family.

  I did this to myself.

  What’s even more distressing is that my execution may become the most public in our nation’s history. A powerful lobby is calling for all verdicts by ballot to be nationally televised. One cable company has offered over $9 billion for exclusive transmission rights of the public executions over the next ten years. Another has just offered $15 billion for exclusive rights over twelve years.

  What follows is the first part of my story, detailing how happy I was and who we were, the Whitaker Virdis family of San Diego, California, before the California Water Party rose to power. In sharing my story, maybe I can accept how all the signs were there, but I just couldn’t or wouldn’t make sense of them. Perhaps I can finally accept how “good people” like me helped the CWP win power and how my life unraveled by my own choices.

  With the help of the investigative journalist, Linda Maywrot, I write this to be serialized in the Golden State Herald. I am grateful to Linda Maywrot for helping me structure, write, and revise my story. Linda has promised that my story will only be published if I am executed by public drowning.

  I hope that day never comes.

  2

  Sands Rising

  I’ve been trying to remember the first time I heard of the CWP. At first, they were in the entertainment section of the blogs and newspapers, right alongside the columns aptly titled “Only in America” and “Dispatches from the City on the Hill.”

  The women dressed in what fashion magazines referred to as the iconic blue Lady Liberty Airways flight attendant uniforms from the 1950s.

  I caught my breath the first time I saw them.

  Although some thought the uniform a dated throwback,
there was something very appealing about it. The uniform brought out the very best in the CWP members, no matter who they were, as if it had located their deepest insecurities and had turned them into something visually stunning. The uniform also highlighted the “hunger,” yes, that’s the word, “hunger,” of those who wore it, as if it knew that they would never be satisfied until they got what they wanted, and who knew what the CWP wanted in those early days, around the time California’s drought began in 2026.

  The men wore double-breasted green wool blazers that looked expensive. They also wore a thin green tie with the letters “CWP” embroidered on it, a white cotton shirt, green slacks, and loafers with green socks. They often carried a small silver briefcase, and they were as diverse as the women and equally ravenous in their stares. Both men and women tempered that look, however, with smiles and an elegant bearing that transcended both body size and height.

  What was striking was that CWP members didn’t mind mockery at the beginning, and they smiled when referred to as “Automatons” and even as the “Water Weirdos.” They also wore shoulder boards which, we later learned, indicated their rank in their organization.

  Around the time the drought began in 2026, the CWP appeared on TV for the first time.

  Eleena.

  That’s the name of the woman they showed on their new TV channel, which they named the “California Homeland Channel.”

  Yes. Eleena.

  I had graduated from the University of the Finger Lakes with a major in comparative literature earlier that summer, and my parents and I had just moved to San Diego for the weather, the beaches, and the fact that it was diverse. Because both my parents had spent most of their lives in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, and my dad, in particular, loved the area, we had to convince my dad to move.

  My parents were both born in the Southern African Federation. My grandparents, on both sides of the family, moved to the US with their kids after they won permanent residence in the federal green card lottery. My grandparents chose the Finger Lakes region not only because it was different from what they knew, but also because it had access to lots of water. The Finger Lakes had already attracted many immigrants from the Southern African Federation, who now called it home despite the severe winters.

  Mom was one of three girls, and Dad was an only child; his brother had died from malaria as a child. Mom and Dad met at college in New York City.

  I was born in Cortland, New York, and it’s about the only place I knew well before we moved to San Diego—apart from Binghamton, Cicero, Ithaca, Rochester, Seneca Falls, Syracuse, and New York City, which is about a five-hour ride south from the University of the Finger Lakes.

  When Mom mentioned the possibility of moving to San Diego, I argued in favor of moving because I was tired of the glacial winters of Upstate New York, which devoured several months of each year in one go. Sometimes the hairs in my nostrils froze in the winter, and it felt like I was breathing through some mesh. What were we still doing in a place which, although hauntingly beautiful in the winter, seemed so intent on paying homage to the last Ice Age?

  Mom was in favor of moving because she wanted to get away from her “glib” sisters, my aunts Mary and Lucy, whom she didn’t like. Mom and I both talked loudly about how much more relaxed life in San Diego would be, how much more effortless and enjoyable, even though we’d only visited once: when Dad first brought us here for the annual meeting of the Association of American Immigration Lawyers since Dad was an immigration attorney.

  Mom repeatedly reminded Dad that, as an accountant, she could take her skills anywhere in the country, including to San Diego, and Dad could, too, since San Diego was right on the border with Mexico, which meant that there’d be opportunities for him to work with immigrants and their families.

  That was over two decades ago.

  By the time we moved here, I had already taken a few years off between high school and college, had worked as a receptionist at Dad’s immigration practice in Upstate New York, and had graduated from college.

  Roland Prune, an independent, was running for governor of California on a platform that acknowledged that the environment was “a problem,” but it was “only one problem among many, including too many taxes, a surge of asylum seekers, and a growing number of internal migrants from other states.”

  At the border with Mexico, right near the outlet mall at San Ysidro in San Diego, migrant and immigrant camps had begun to form, and Governor-Elect Prune was waiting for the federal government to do something about it or, he threatened, he’d send the Army National Guard in to “provide a definitive solution once and for all.”

  Still, San Diego seemed promising.

  Shortly after we moved here, I was at my parents’ home in La Jolla, not too far from the ocean, when a raspy voice, almost broken but still entrancing, was projected through the TV’s accompanying audio system in the living room.

  I was preparing dinner in the kitchen: spreading a layer of ricotta cheese over the lasagna noodles, and I had just tasted the sauce made of meat and boerewors sausage, a Southern African favorite, for seasoning.

  Mom was taking a quick shower because she and Dad had gone to La Jolla Shores earlier, and Mom wanted to “freshen up before dinner.” Dad was drinking some Chartreuse in the living room, which he loved.

  I laid the spoon of ricotta aside, raised it, licked it, smiled, set it down again, stood tall—as tall as a short woman can stand—and found myself even more enchanted by the woman’s voice coming out of the TV in the living room. Her voice was that of someone who’d lived through terrible things and had survived them so that she could transform her deep suffering into something, at the very least, from which others could learn and draw inspiration. I probably should have walked to the living room, sat with Dad, and watched Eleena, but her voice kept me in place, spellbound.

  I knew the accent.

  It transported me to a place where accents like hers were common, and even the air and soil recognized them as local. It was the place from which my own family had come: a place once abundant in languages, cultures, and people of all hues and beliefs. It was once abundant, too, in flora and fauna of all kinds.

  “Ah,” Eleena said, “I was a dancer in the nightclubs at one point, Mr. Trehoviak. I also did ballroom, traditional African dance, jazz, and conga. Traditional African dance was most intuitive for me, and the boys I met were also more fun than when I tried ballroom, for example. And, oh, yes, William.” She laughed. “That was the name of my first boyfriend. You know, he tried to impress me when I danced. He had buck teeth, but he was the sweetest boy around, and he only had two pick-up lines. The first was, ‘You’ve got a smile that could make a man forget how to say no.’ The second was, ‘How about we allow our tongues to wag at each other for a few minutes?’”

  Eleena laughed even more.

  “William, I later learned, used those lines on every girl he met,” she said. “When he used the first pickup line on me, I smiled at him. Then he tried the second one on me, and I burst out laughing.”

  A man’s voice, American and distinguished, asked how old she was when she met William.

  “Young enough to be flirtatious but old enough to think briefly about the consequences,” Eleena responded. “You know, Mr. Trehoviak, when you’re dancing, you’re free. And it always felt like my body was no longer my own, my thoughts were suspended, and my heart was soaring. I wasn’t thinking about age or anything like that. The only question I had was: ‘Can this man make me forget myself for a few minutes?’ Dance, you see, like all acts of creation, is only successful when you feel safe enough to forget yourself in the moment so that you become one with it. I guess that summarizes my life at that point: insouciant and liberated. That’s when I met William.”

  Eleena hummed a song now, and I smiled and found myself dipping the spoon back into the tub of ricotta and taking another spoonful before Mom walked in and asked what I was doing.

  “Preparing the lasagna, Mo
m.”

  “If that’s preparing,” Mom said, “then I wonder what eating looks like.”

  Mom helped me finish preparing the lasagna.

  “I wonder who that is on the TV,” Mom said.

  “A dancer, Mom. She’s telling us about William and African dance. She’s African. Her name’s Eleena.”

  Mom smiled at the thought of an African on TV. Worried, though, that people might say that African women did nothing but dance all day, Mom stopped smiling.

  “Some people,” Mom said, “have too much time on their hands. Who’s she talking to?”

  Dad came to the kitchen, stood at the door, and asked how long it would be before we had dinner.

  “Dad,” Mom said in response, referring to him by his title, “when you prepare a single meal in this home, you can ask when your meals will be ready. Till then, you’ll have to wait.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Dad said as he returned to the living room.

  “I didn’t marry William,” Eleena said. “It didn’t work out between us.”

  Mom sucked her teeth at the thought of anyone talking about the various lovers they had known.

  “In my day,” Mom scoffed as she put the lasagna in the oven and set the timer, “a woman never went on TV and listed all the men she’d known. There are things you keep to yourself. If you must say them, pray. Your grandparents would have been shocked to hear anyone, man or woman, air their dirty laundry on TV. It’s the culture these days for anyone who has a sob story, the more bizarre the better, to have their own TV show.”

  Mom shook her head.

  “This is why you see all these people crying on TV nowadays,” she continued. “They’re not crying about the past. They’re crying because they’re finally famous for eight minutes, and they can’t believe it. Then the cable companies play the orchestral music to go with it, almost like they’re mocking them. I won’t be watching this woman, Eleena. She’s making us all look bad, and they’ll be calling us by that terrible word because of her. She’s just as bad as the pastor at Living Heavens Church. What’s the name of the inexperienced new pastor we have?”