Sands Rising

by H M Wilhelmborn

  “Mom,” I said, “we’re new here. California isn’t the Finger Lakes. Don’t make waves.”

  “Well, we’ve been here a couple of months, Janet,” Mom said. “That’s a couple of months more than that new pastor, Jim, at our church. Yeah, that’s what he calls himself: ‘Pastor Jim.’”

  She scoffed as she mentioned his name.

  We walked into the living room, and there she was on the TV screen, Eleena.

  If you studied it carefully, which the camera wanted you to do, Eleena’s face conjured a map of the place from which she came. In that place, there were gullies cut by rivers that were once overflowing before they ran dry. The temperature rose so much that it left a parched landscape in its wake that pushed entire species to extinction—

  “Janet,” Mom said as she watched me staring at Eleena, “daydreaming again? Literature majors!”

  “Um, no, Mom.” I smiled. “I was just thinking about, um, Eleena over there.”

  “It’s those Water Weirdos,” Mom said as she gestured to Dad, “using people to make a name for themselves. What are they called? Oh, yes, the California Water Party. Arrogant. And they dress just as arrogantly as they sound. California Water Party, indeed! Have they ever thought of how much water it takes to make all those pretentious uniforms? Now they’re using this Eleena, who thinks they’re her friends. How our people have allowed themselves to be used for so long still escapes me. The continent has been plundered, pillaged, and destroyed, and we still have Eleena smiling at people who think nothing of her. It all makes you think that some people’s life motto is: ‘If I don’t let them use me, they won’t like me, and I need to be liked.’ They’re even everywhere now, the Water Weirdos. They’ll be running against Prune and the others in 2030. If I ever voted, I’d vote only for myself.”

  I grunted, and Mom gave me one of her looks as she broke into a smile.

  I shouldn’t admit this, but as much as I cared and fantasized about the world in which the kids I hoped to have one day might live as adults, I never really thought about the politicians who might lead them and the political agendas they might make a reality. My mom had learned from her mom that a woman should always appear more interested in politics than she actually was so that her mother-in-law didn’t think her an idiot.

  My grandmother and mother had thus appeared to vote at every election in their lifetimes. The truth was that they’d only pretended to vote at the ballot box without voting at all. All they were doing was anticipating a question they’d later receive, whose answer would be thought to have some bearing on their intelligence as women.

  “Did you vote?”

  And they always answered, “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  It was odd for an educated woman like Mom, an accountant by trade, to put on a show about voting, but some family beliefs die hard—or they never die at all.

  “Well, as you all know,” Mom said, “I’m a registered independent. I’ve always thought that all of our first ladies, except two, would have made much better leaders than the men they put in the White House. I would have considered voting for almost all of our first ladies if I were a voting kind of woman.”

  Eleena was now talking about the man she married, a soapstone sculpture collector who met her in the Southern African Federation when he lost his way. He drove onto her family’s farm on which cotton once grew, and he asked for directions.

  “He’s a dignified man.” Eleena smiled. “Reserved, and that was visible when he got out of his car. He had a slight paunch from all the desserts he liked to eat. Flan.” She laughed. “He liked flan, still does, which I find inedible; a wobbly mess that always looks like it suffers from an anxiety disorder.” She laughed again. “Mango lassi, too, he loves that, and I’ve grown to love it, too.”

  At least two of Eleena’s teeth were missing, which didn’t stop her from enjoying herself.

  “His name is Nirav.” She smiled. “Nirav. That’s my husband’s name. He’s the perfect man, and we have a lovely daughter: Mable.”

  She continued chatting about her life on a continent far from California, far from the California Homeland Channel, and far from the interviewers who probed her with questions about what life was like before everything changed.

  “If I hadn’t met Anton,” Eleena said, looking straight into the camera now, “I’d probably be dead. Anton Cola of the California Water Party was in the Peace Corps here when I met him. He was twenty-four, skinny, and an introvert. He told me he was from a place called Stockton, California, known for . . . For what is Stockton known? I do not remember now. I’m sorry.” She smiled. “Well, I met Anton, and he introduced me to you, Mr. Trehoviak.”

  Eleena paused as if she were waiting for someone to say something.

  “Mr. Trehoviak,” Eleena said. “You know what’s funny? Anton said that you were his ‘First Friend,’ and he was your ‘Second Friend,’ and I didn’t understand what he meant. I still don’t, so I just nodded. Anton Cola has made sure that my family has everything it needs since that first meeting. He visits a few times a year with his friends, who bring us medication for my hypertension and everything else we need in these times. Anton is documenting the changes everywhere so that he can prevent what is coming.”

  “How has your life changed from when you were a child?” Jeremiah Trehoviak asked.

  Eleena sighed, and the timer went off in the kitchen. Eleena hummed her song again as she rocked back and forth and wiped the tears from her eyes. She carried on humming her song as I went to the kitchen, took the lasagna from the oven, and inhaled the delicious warmth of basil, fennel, and Italian seasoning.

  A jet of saliva was released from my mouth as I thought of the mixture of ground beef and boerewors sausage, which we bought at the local Southern African store. In anticipation of enjoying the meal, I did my little happy dance in the kitchen.

  I heard the voice of a man, probably in his twenties, talking to Eleena. It was a deep voice, the kind one finds among men who speak and then pause for effect so that others have time to respond. Jeremiah Trehoviak asked the man to introduce himself, and he said his name was Anton Cola, a member of the California Water Party, which was founded in 2025.

  How had he met Eleena?

  He had met Eleena while serving in the Peace Corps. She struck him as someone “special, distinctive, the sort of woman who carries with her the tales of an entire community.” He introduced himself to her and asked if they could talk because he had observed her selling cotton cloth of various kinds at her local store, and he’d noticed that she’d dyed the fabric herself “in a manner that uses as little water as possible.”

  He also observed how people nodded and smiled respectfully at Eleena, how they gave and received from her with both hands outstretched as they entered her store. He also followed her one day during lunch—he was admitting this for the first time now—and sat a few tables away.

  He listened as she told a waiter to inform her boss that it was “imperative” to remove coffee from the menu because it was a wasteful product, especially since water was scarce in many parts of the Southern African Federation. Eleena did this long before water became the only issue of the day.

  The waiter responded that even if water were precious, the price of coffee would reflect that reality. The coffee shop was in the business, after all, of giving people what they wanted and could afford, as long as it wasn’t illegal. Had Eleena not heard of the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through the digestive systems of elephants? The market wanted the product, so it thrived. The elephants were happy, and so were consumers. Why deprive people of the things for which they were willing to pay?

  “How do you know about markets and such?” Eleena asked the waiter.

  The waiter was studying economics at the local university, and she was making a little money on the side as a server. Eleena retorted that just because there was a market for something did not make its sale ethical or right. The esse
ntial thing in life was following the “right path” in all situations and acting on principle, especially when the moment required it, no matter the cost or inconvenience.

  I served the lasagna with a roasted pepper and pine nut salad, and Mom, who usually insisted that we turn the TV off while we ate, asked that it remain on. Eleena’s Story, told over what turned out to be many years, like some extended international reality TV series, had just concluded its first installment.

  I glanced at the TV screen and saw the two men who were part of the interview standing with Eleena. They were, the scrawl on the screen said, Jeremiah Trehoviak, a man in his forties I was sure was shorter than I, and Anton Cola, a man in his late twenties or early thirties, who was much taller than I. Both were dressed in their CWP uniforms with multiple gold stripes on their shoulder boards. Jeremiah Trehoviak and Anton Cola faded from the screen, and Governor Prune came under attack from journalists employed by the California Water Party for “not doing enough about the environment.”

  At that point, we were in the first year of the drought here. Oklahoma and Kansas were already in the fourth year of theirs.

  Over there, overgrazing and farming had stripped the ground bare of its protection, and sandstorms had swelled in the three counties of the Oklahoma Panhandle. The soil and wind bellowed magnificent warnings, destroyed visibility for miles, and brought the angels of early death: dust pneumonia, strep throat, valley fever, and malnutrition.

  Those were the diseases before The Hatred came along.

  At first, it was unclear whether Governor Prune understood the implications of what happened elsewhere for California. To put it in Dad’s words, it wasn’t yet clear whether Governor Prune was a leader who reacted or responded.

  “If you ever decide to vote,” Dad told me, “never vote for someone who reacts because they’re always on the defensive and they act impulsively, Janet. Vote only for those who respond because they are willing to think and even suffer a little before deciding, which decreases the overall suffering of as many people as possible because the leader has suffered in advance. A reactor, however, always increases the overall suffering of the population. The same advice applies to dating and anything else in which people’s lives and hearts are at stake.”

  Governor Prune was probably something other than a reactor or a responder since he preferred to wait until some things became irrelevant, which didn’t work with the environment.

  Linda Maywrot, the investigative journalist from the Golden State Herald, asked Governor Prune whether Californians had anything to worry about since 2027, the second year of California’s drought, was forecasted to be a particularly dry year as well. Could California become like, say, Oklahoma, and was the state prepared?

  “Obviously,” Governor Prune said, “we are clearly aware of what’s happening not only in the Great Plains but also, more importantly, at our own doorstep, where all kinds of asylum seekers and internal migrants threaten to overwhelm us. It’s about jobs, Linda. The issue is, therefore, not what is happening elsewhere, but what is happening in our own state?”

  Not too long after, Linda Maywrot published her article about the Great Bakersfield Dust Storm of 1977, which blanketed the sunlight, shattered windows, and ripped off road signs. When the storm met the rain further north, it dumped mud from the sky right here in California. People died, tens of millions of dollars went up in dust, and it was only later learned that a drought several years long, loose soil, and high winds had caused the dust storm. The punchline was that history might repeat itself if the drought didn’t let up; we should expect all the consequences of a landscape that no longer supported life.

  San Diego experienced its first sandstorm in June 2033 when the Santa Anas came through. High-velocity winds, the Santa Anas always bring dry weather with them, and that year the Santa Anas worsened the wildfires in the few parts of the county that still held dry vegetation.

  Wildfires made worse by the Santa Anas have already made their way into the history books.

  The Cedar Fire of 2003 spread at the rate of 3,600 acres per hour, and it destroyed 273,000 acres. The Witch Fire of 2007, which began when the Santa Anas threw down a power line, sending electrical sparks into the wind, burned over 197,000 acres. The Laguna Fire of 1970, long before I was born, also caused by a downed power line during the Santa Anas, burned over 175,000 acres.

  I remember our first sandstorm because Mauru, my husband, and I had just picked up Jon, our son, from day care. We had squabbled over what to have for dinner. Mauru wanted burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Jon, who was three, wanted “shlimps, Mom.” I was pregnant with Nate, and I wanted pizza with extra pepperoni.

  We settled on the ingredients we had at hand: linguine, garlic, mussels, and parsley. We finished dinner at about 7:10 p.m.

  We were seated on our porch in Rancho San Antonio, waiting for the sunset. As Mauru and I sipped zinfandels, Jon sat playing games on his foldable electronic device.

  Mauru stood up, placed his glass on the side table, and cupped his hands over his eyes. He told us all to go inside. He’d seen enough in the media to know that it was no rain cloud in the distance but something much more sinister rumbling on the ground, churning up everything in its path and growing like an enormous tumor in the wind the size of several football fields.

  We went inside and heard car crashes, an explosion, people screaming, and another explosion. We didn’t sleep much at all; fear has a way of rearranging everything. It expels sleep from a bedroom and invites paranoia, hopelessness, and exhaustion in its place.

  We were without power until the next morning, and woke to a film of brown dust over everything exposed to the sandstorm.

  “What’s a sandstorm, Dad?” Jon asked over a breakfast of cornflakes and warm milk.

  Mauru took a bite of a buttermilk biscuit with strawberry preserves, chewed, and swallowed it. He patted our son’s head.

  “So, basically, um . . . drought, buddy.” Mauru paused and sighed, and I could tell that he was a little panicked from having experienced the sandstorm. “‘Drought,’” he continued, “is when you want to brush your teeth, take a shower, or drink water, and there’s not enough water to go around because not enough water came from the sky, the Colorado River, or the State Water Project. A drought means that everyone has to conserve water.”

  “Why can’t I play in my plastic swimming pool, Dad?”

  “High five, buddy!” Mauru smiled as he high-fived our son for intuitively linking the drought and the need to conserve water. “Now when there’s a drought, it means that there’s less water for everything: swimming pools, showers, and plants. It also gets so dry, which we never expected here in San Diego, that the governor puts new water rules in place. There are also a few really dumb people in this county—”

  “Mauru—”

  “No, they’re really dumb, babe. I’d never say that in class, but these dumbass people have been going around the county and uprooting any dead plant they can find because they’re worried about wildfires. Some of them are even storing it all for kindling in the future. Really dumb!”

  Mauru sighed and shook his head.

  I loved Mauru.

  He’s the only man I could have married and the only one I did. We had our ups and downs, way more ups than downs, and I’d choose him again. He asked me out at the Dairy Flirt about two years after Mom, Dad, and I moved to San Diego, and he said that he’d always wondered what it was like to kiss “a mature woman with a gap in her teeth.”

  I cracked up at his daring. I was only a year older than he was, and we went out a week later and played mini-golf. Mauru said something else that made me laugh.

  “Let’s make sure there aren’t any nosey teenagers around,” he said. “They upload everything to the internet, you know, especially adults making out on their second date.”

  When I got to work the day after the sandstorm, I put my bag down at my desk and headed over to the espresso maker. I got my morning fix, walked back to my desk,
and one of the associates to whom I was assigned walked up and asked if I’d enter her hours into the billing system.

  I liked my job as a legal secretary.

  My hours were always fixed, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

  I was paid overtime, and I got two bonuses a year, one in June, which was about 2 percent of my annual salary on average (about $3,000 in all before taxes), and an additional 8 percent of my salary as bonus each December (about $12,000 before taxes). (If I get any of the numbers wrong, I truly apologize. There’s a reason why I got low grades for my math courses at the University of the Finger Lakes.)

  It sure helped that I was the cofounder’s secretary, and he liked and respected me. Some days were more taxing than others, but you get that with any job. When court filings were due, many clients were coming in, or quite a bit of correspondence was coming in or going out, I was at work until about 7 or 7:15 p.m., and Mauru picked Jon up.

  The morning after the sandstorm, Larry Wagon, the cofounder of the law firm where I worked—Wagon, Shui & Xebec—came in a little late. He said he was on his cell phone the night before at a traffic light when the dust storm came in. Larry’s car windows were down, and he could smell the dust in the air about him. He saw birds fleeing ahead of the billowing brown clouds, and he pulled into the nearest strip mall for cover. He sneezed quite a bit and thought that his allergies might be acting up, so he walked into a drug store and got an over-the-counter steroid to ease his breathing.

  The steroid helped until the brown, orange, and reddish sandstorm hit the strip mall parking lot, where it shattered a few windows, dumped dust over everything, and set off car alarms, which went off like burglars had hit the place. After the sandstorm passed, Larry’s car didn’t start, and when it did, he drove to the nearest auto repair shop and had it checked. There was no problem, they said. It was just a coincidence that the car had stopped after the storm. Larry saw people stung by fast-moving sand, others coughing, and others whose eyes were red.