1

Kraken’s Wake

"It's too late." Deidre shook her head, slurped her coffee, and would not meet her son's eye. Outside the Waffle House lightning flashed from underneath Hurricane Quinn. Thunder rumbled close behind.

The waitress scurried over, breakfast plates precarious in her arms. Adrian took his from her shaking hands with a smile and a thanks. A food service worker himself, he was scrupulously polite. (At least Deidre was pretty sure that's what he did.) Deidre nodded at the girl and took a knife and fork to her eggs Benedict. Thick yolk oozed out over the English muffin, glossy enough to glimpse her reflection. She looked even older than she felt. She was sure she hadn’t felt this tired the last time she’d seen her son, years ago now. Adrian let his oatmeal steam.

"Mom. You need to evacuate. Today."

"My window's closed." Deidre caught his eye, felt the corner of her mouth lift, shrugged her little shoulders inside her oversized milsurp jacket. The effect was immediate but miscalculated. Adrian set his spoon down and folded his hands together around his bowl.

“Why did you ask me to meet you here today if you just wanted to give me a hard time?”

He was trying to keep it cool, keep it together, but his voice was rising toward frightful volumes.

He had bristled like this in the early stages of that last fight of theirs. Deidre had replayed that last conversation in her head until it was etched into her forever.

“I saw your post about how you were coming to town. And it felt wrong to have left things… as they are.” She smiled up at him, feeling pathetic. She had said awful things to him when he had told her he was going to see his father, and she had meant them. It was no surprise that he had been reluctant to come and see her, even when his work brought him to the same 2 little town she had chosen as the center of her research. But it was good to see him. He was taking care of himself: no more dandruff on his eyebrows, no more stained or rumpled clothes.

He sat up straight, kept his nails trimmed, ate healthy. When the waitress showed him to the booth where Deidre had been waiting he slid right in like they met for mother-son catch-up in this exact booth every month.

“I see.” Adrian nodded, face unreadable. And then his brow furrowed, and he nodded to a spot over her left breast. "Is that a bullet hole?"

"This?" Deidre fingered its ragged edge. She took her time answering. She had never seen her son this way. “I know what it looks like. It’s not. Moth-eaten is all.” She smiled, bright and false. “But I like to think it’s a charm or a ward. Like death will pass over me while I’m wearing it. Silly superstition.”

The lights buzzed on and off. It wasn't past nine in the morning but the Maurepas sky was as dark as Deidre had ever seen it, the last three years she'd lived there.

"I'm glad we're in agreement." Adrian swept his oatmeal out of the way. His head bobbed on his neck, as though he were made of rubber, and then he found his spine again. "If you do not evacuate before landfall you could die. I cannot be a good son and let that happen."

Deidre had never been more proud of her son. More than the degrees on her walls, more than the research piled across her desk and floors and kitchen cabinets, more than the postcards he'd sent her from seventeen states since they'd last sat together, his gentle courage told her on the far side of those years of single motherhood, of worry and regret, that she had done alright.

"Adrian." She tried to summon up that motherly timbre once reserved for the most tender moments between them. Found it gone. "I'm not going anywhere." 3

He recoiled as though a childhood pet had bit him. In that instant it started to pour.

Somewhere a circuit failed and the Waffle House went dark. They sat there, together, the rest of the world washed away.

* * *

How to explain it to him? She knew she wanted to start like this:

We are Americans, citizens of the Sick Old Man of the twenty-first century. In the same way that the Ottoman Empire’s star had declined through the nineteen hundreds until it was dismembered in the First World War, America’s prognosis is very, very grim. I want to see how he'll die.

She wanted to tell him this even though it wouldn't work and she knew this because it had never worked. It had never worked with dates when it got to discussing work and it never worked with friends she might have had when she showed them her library/nest/crazy person house and it had certainly never gotten her tenure but she wanted to tell her son that anyway. She wanted to tell him the truth.

She would tell him he was born at a great and terrible point in history (weren't they all?) but the melodrama of it was too much. She would remind him she professed economic sociology most of his adolescence but she would feel like a squid shooting ink. If she told him she only wanted to understand he would consider that a shoddy reason to stand in the path of a hurricane.

What could there be to know in Maurepas, under the eye of a hurricane?

Deidre would smile at him. Her smile would catch the corners of her eyes like when she taught him the uses of playing cards and people-watching. Oh, so much. 4

Maurepas is average, and that is why she has made her living here. Average income

(falling), average life expectancy (falling), typical-for-the-Gulf-Coast demographics (polyglot and multiethnic). The soil, which the town had been built over as the territory was passed like a playing chip between the empires of the Old World and which had been recognized as a part of the United States by act of Congress in 1812, was oh-so-typically sinking into the sea as global temperatures year-after-year rose. And the bonds which might have held it together—social, economic, political, even the churches—were, as in town and cities across the continent, frayed and ready to snap.

She wondered if there were people who looked, across the Golden Horn in 1914, out into the Bosporus, or over the dams that held Lake Texcoco from falling on Tenochtitlan in 1521, and hoped to see then what she hoped to see. Some prescient way to hold still and calm a world about to go mad.

The world was getting warmer and no one did anything about it: they denied it was warming, or they said they cared and did nothing or next to nothing. Institutions which were supposed to represent the popular will instead worked for oil companies or tech companies or high finance and blamed their incompetence on foreigners or secret cabals. The beneficiaries of and originators of all of these problems used their dragonish hoards of wealth to buy doom bunkers in New Zealand or daydreamed about colonizing Mars with indentured servants—let the rest boil in their billions! America was the epicenter but it was happening everywhere—in

Europe, where the European Union dismantled collective welfare states and collective dreams to smooth the way for Brussels banks; in China, where “socialism with Chinese characteristics” looked suspiciously like processes of extractive capitalism which had inspired communist revolt in the first place; in Russia, where rival kleptocrats had waged wars to decide who would get the 5 chance to strip the copper wiring out of the walls since the fall of the Soviet Union. Everywhere under the sun the powerful dreamed of building castles in the sky while the dispossessed squabbled over the last piece of dry land.

There were instants when Deidre swore she could see it, bright and fragile as a soap bubble. A way forward, a real future. A theory and a practice that would take into account all the knowns, all the variables in flux, all the variables she for all her reading and theorizing hadn’t even identified yet. A technique to throw back the end of the world. And then it was gone, popped by some fresh piece of data pointing to one of a dozen immutable and interlocking failures overdetermining the death of the world.

In her better moods she plays that off as Mad Max hyperbole. Humans are adaptive, and though whatever emerges on the other side of the coming crisis will seem to her a strange cousin they may yet remember her, or more truly her people. And then she saw the wrong report in the news, watched the Maurepas police armored like Robocops beat another protestor, saw another store shuttered with the closing notice hastily scrawled on the back of a clipping announcing

Amazon's record profits--and she thought, that won't even be a tenth of it. She could see a hothouse Earth, younger sister to Venus, the masses drowning on top of each other in the murk while the immortal brains of Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos blasted off into space to ruin another world, offering the uncounted dead no more memory than her ancestors did the Native

Americans. She saw apocalypse, the hand of God or man or Satan peeling back the curtain to reveal that all of it was for nothing at all.

She could not see Hurricane Quinn but she could imagine it above her, its arms flung out across the face of the world like a kraken's to rip asunder the curtain and reveal— 6

She knew not what. Not yet.

The lights buzzed back on.

* * *

Deidre paid. Under the awning outside they peered through a curtain of rain into the lot.

Her phone buzzed and she checked the ID: just Thomas. Probably wondering where she’d stashed some hardcopy journal she’d had printed out in case digitals became unavailable. She ignored him, pushed away thoughts about what study and what phenomenon Thomas was looking at that very moment. Tried to enjoy this moment with her son instead.

"Where's your car?"

Adrain pointed around the corner. E-bike.

"You didn't!" A moment after it left her mouth she realized how mothering (smothering) she sounded. She couldn't help it: the rain was kicking into high gear now, but it had fallen all morning before they sat down to breakfast.

"It's not like I could catch an Uber." Evacuation had been mandatory.

Deidre laughed: "Yes, you could have." That didn't mean everyone in Maurepas could afford to leave.

Adrian brought the caution yellow bike around. Deidre noted with approval the helmet he clicked on. He kicked the pedals into place and checked its electric motor.

"It won't electrocute you, will it?" 7

Adrian shrugged. "Probably not." He had been away so long she did not know if he was joking.

"Why don't I drive you?"

"I'd appreciate it." He tightened his grip on the handlebar. "But. I would like to see your house first. Just so I know where to look to make sure you're okay."

"Fine." She had walked right into that one. "Your bike will fit?"

Adrian nodded. And then he took off through the ankle-deep water of the parking lot, dragging his bike, toward the old hatchback the same as had dropped him off at his first job ten years ago. Deidre ran after, smacking her car fob, hoping the batteries would leap back to life.

Given that she had not replaced them in years, they climbed in together soaked and grinning like they had gotten away with a million bucks. And couldn't look at each other.

Windshield wipers snapped back and forth. Thunder rolled through the streets. Turn by turn Deidre drove home.

"When does it make landfall?"

"Between eleven and noon. So we've got a few hours." Left unsaid: Which I will not use.

"So what will your research look like?" Adrian had opened his mouth without speaking twice, maybe trying to strike the right balance between passively inquisitive and ghoulishly interrogative.

"My control hypothesis is that Maurepas is on its own. The political situation is unworkable and Louisiana has been sinking into the sea since the turn of the millennium.

Mortgages and rents keep piling up on the assumption that everyone's foundations will last a 8 thousand years. Meanwhile people here struggle to get by and won't have the tools to help themselves."

"I don't understand."

"Well, in 2020—"

"I wasn't finished." Deidre blinked. She couldn't remember her son interrupting her, even as a morose teen. "I don't understand why you would stay here. You're talking about roads washing out, people getting turned out of their homes--what if you get hurt? What if someone wants something you have, or—"

"Adrian." She said his name three times. "That is the world most people in most places for most of time have lived in. That world will probably soon include America. If I am right, that world will overlap with ours right here, very soon. And I want to be the first to see."

Adrian propped himself against the window and stared through the rain as it failed to drive them off. "You want to be the first to die there."

To that Deidre said nothing. Maurepas' neglected streets, transformed into a panoply of water-based driving hazards, kept her from forming a sentence more complicated than "It would be an alligator" when Adrian said he thought he saw a crocodile. But even on a clear day there would have been no need to say much: Adrian was right.

It was not, at all, that Deidre wanted to die. (At 52 she still refused to butter her toast for the long-term health of her heart, a habit Adrian had needed one sleep-over at a more licentious home to break and never resume.) It was that if the storm did kill her, well, worse things could happen. 9

Put it this way: before she'd secured the grant money for her research in Maurepas, she'd served as an advisor for a student pursuing her doctorate. The student had come to her chattering about her project, an exploration of online conspiratorial thinking with long-range surveys to track voting behavior and attitude changes in participants. Deidre, whose interests were adjacent to if not directly abutting the impact of online communities and American paranoia, had signed on, and for three years the student had dutifully chipped away at her thesis. One day the young woman came in to her office, refused the customary coffee Deidre offered her, and started to explain. Midway she started to cry. At first it was only a trickle, but as Deidre coaxed more of the story from her, the levees burst, and she was bawling right there, in the middle of the

Waterman Building! It hadn't even been 10AM.

It turned out that the promising doctoral candidate's research had struck a nerve. Years of interviewing phlegmatic reactionaries and reading their grisly fantasies of revenge for imagined depravities had apparently given her nightmares. Deidre didn't understand much--something about a "day of the rope" they hoped was soon to come--but she did sympathize. Deidre's own work, which had examined suicides in British school children, the increasing prevalence of psychopathy in corporate boardrooms, and the efforts of the last prince of Saudi Arabia to pin his kingdom together with crucifixions, had troubled her more than she would ever say. But she had carved out her niche and made a reasonably comfortable career for herself, trauma and all, and so she thought she was being helpful and even motherly when she held her student's hand and told her:

"Someday you will learn to live with the nightmares."

The student ended up dropping out with a conciliatory master's. And Deidre's department head told her to get to therapy. 10

The world was ugly. People died all the time, every day, for no reason at all. So if

Hurricane Quinn swept her to the Mississippi or an alligator snapped her up as she poked through the debris or she got tetanus and seized up in her kitchen and died--well, she had had a good run. A longer, healthier, happier run than most, in the grand scheme of things. And it would probably be better to get off the train now, rather than hold on another twenty or thirty years. She would carry on if she got the chance--but her nightmares had shown her plenty. And it would be good to get away from them.

Through the rain she made the last turn onto Glenn Road. Past her home were the levees and the ICE camp and then nothing for miles. Adrian rolled with the car's rightward motion, cheek pressed against the window. Poor kid, Deidre thought: he has no idea, the world that's waiting for him.

* * *

Outside her little European cottage a decade-old Chevrolet Volt was parked beside the garage. “Thomas is here,” Deidre mumbled to herself.

“Who’s that?”

Deidre winced: she was used to being alone. The garage door opened and she drove in.

Suddenly it was even darker than the outside. “My research partner.”

“You have a partner working with you? And you don’t want to leave?” Adrian’s voice was rising, his throat tightening, his face getting ruddy. “He can’t do the work himself, is he afraid of water?” 11

“My work is important to me” was all Deidre could get out. She killed the engine and her car’s dome lights died. She got out. Adrian sat there in the dark after she shut her door. Then he followed.

Pressed together beneath the narrow gable, shivering from the gallons of rain soaking into them from the evacuation from the car, Deidre made him promise: "Don't make a fuss." Into the house she called out to Thomas, and from somewhere inside a muffled grunt replied.

Adrian, fixated on the housekey in her hand and the retreat to warmth it promised, followed her in. He said nothing, but Deidre was painfully aware of how his eyes roved.

“Thomas,” she called. She struggled through a narrow gap between book stacks that might have become load-bearing. “I’d like you to meet my son, Adrian.”

On the other side of the gap Adrian scoured the floorplan for a basement in danger of flooding, tried to find some way to navigate his mother’s home. Thomas pressed through the book pillars and approached Adrian with a swagger. He held his hand out. Adrian shivered in his coat.

“Adrian,” Deidre said. Her voice sounded as though it came from far away. “This is my research assistant, Thomas. He studied under one of my colleagues at the University of

Chicago—”

Adrian held a finger up to his mother. Thomas’ eyebrows shot up, a kind of amused surprise on his face. Like Adrian was a precocious child who had just used a word they didn’t understand.

“So you work with my mom often, right? You over here often?” 12

“That’s right.” Thomas’ smile was strained.

“And you think it’s acceptable that my mother lives like this?” Adrian threw his arms wide. In that moment it struck Deidre that he might think the house weas about to collapse, and that he might hold it all up himself.

“Your mother is an adult working in a difficult field, on a problem no one has ever really worked on before.” Thomas shrugged. Lightning flashed and reflected off his eyeglasses. Deidre could see it from around the corner as she negotiated entrance to her kitchen. “Understanding requires sacrifice.”

“And what problem would that be?”

“How a society collapses, in real time, and how to minimize the damage its collapse causes.”

“And how does that, in any way, justify…”

“You simply don’t understand…”

Deidre sorted through her kitchen, trying to remember where she’d left the apples. Trying to remember where she’d left anything. Thomas and Adrian were talking, still arguing. She didn’t want to think about it. Defeated, apples rotted away, she left them where she found them and tried to scurry past them to find something else to occupy her attention.

Adrian and Thomas fell silent. Neither one of them would look at the other. Adrian stared out an unobstructed window, head nestled down into the ruffles of his jacket. “Mom,” he said.

“This is crazy.”

Deidre froze. "What is?" 13

"Your house is a deathtrap. I do not understand what you hope to accomplish by staying besides having something collapse on you. You should evacuate. Before you die here."

Thomas scoffed. Deidre, who had turned her attention to working a volume of Braudel out of its load-bearing position in a critical stack of books which held up, despite the steady efforts of gravity and mold, soggy banker's boxes of unfiled and eclectically organized research notes whose relevance she was certain she could recall only through the scuffed lens of Braudel, gave up. She sat on her butt in the middle of the floor. Through her home sprawled a pandemonium of dogeared volumes and hand-scrawled folios whose collective meaning, accrued through hundreds of millions of characters and thousands of hours of study, evaporated. The soap bubble popped with a crash of thunder.

Adrian and Thomas both found her there. She would not look at either of them. She hated to be seen like this with a mute and seething passion, never mind when she was witnessed by both her son and her research partner. To Thomas she was supposed to be a professional role model and mentor, not a compulsion-addled wreck collapsing over the ruins of her life. And she loved her son but she would not be pitied by him. She knew—had known—how to poison that connection between them, to hack it back like a weed, to turn it from condescending pity into fury and disbelief that he had ever bothered. Gotten so good at it, in fact, that he had left her home before he'd even reached the age of majority. But now it was gone.

Outside something exploded. Thomas looked mildly interested. Adrian jumped. Deidre's head lolled in the direction of the nearest window. Nothing to be excited about. Only lightning leaping from the earth and the air making way in Quinn's wake. 14

Adrian started with, "Mom, I love you," and ended with "You can't do this" and the words between fell away. When he was done Deidre asked him,

"Do you still want me to get you to work?"

He stared at her. Thomas had left the room without a word that Adrian and Deidre might have a private moment together, but Deidre wished he would have stayed. She felt naked there by herself.

Verbs fell away from her. Writing, interviewing, cataloguing, mapping, reflecting, editing, tracking, scouting, surveilling, surviving, revising, theorizing, surmising, detailing, doing, learning, knowing: blown away, all of it, or drowned. To resurface in Quinn's wake, bloated and pallid versions of themselves.

And with them went her grasp on the totality of the world. The facts, the relationships between facts, the relationships between relationships: gone. Adrian was right and she was wrong. She could not live this way. (Though she could certainly die this way.)

"I'll leave town," she said. "You promise you'll be safe?"

His eyes lit up. He nodded. Deidre stood.

"Then let's go."

* * *

They hugged goodbye beneath the restaurant's horrible neon facade. Retro-eighties, doomed to irrelevance almost as soon as it was conceived, but somehow flush with capital enough to fly her grown son around the country to train staff in opening locations. Her son who hugged her tight and told her he'd help sort her house out as soon as it was safe. They had loaded 15 everything she would need for a few weeks in a motel into her car before she left. There was nothing left to do but leave.

She didn't know if the highway would be empty but she avoided it and he didn't know if arterial roads would be flooded so she skipped them too. Instead she found a seaside road, or a road that was swiftly coming to be beside the sea, to take her home. In her pocket her phone buzzed. It was Thomas.

“Are you in a spot to talk?”

“Sure.” On the road ahead, where the sea met the shore, she’d be able to see where Quinn made landfall. Any minute now.

“Since you’re on your way out of town I thought I’d confirm a few things with you. I’m going to head up to the ICE camp and skip the visit to the shelters—”

“Thomas,” she said. Very patiently, she was sure. “Thomas. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. And then: “what?”

“I’m not… I’m staying. I have to be here. I have to understand.” She said it and it felt revealing a birth mark to a lover. Shameful and freeing.

“Your son was right,” Thomas said. He sounded like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. “This isn’t healthy of you, Deidre. This is compulsive. This is ill—”

“This is what I have to do.” She was firm. 16

“Okay.” She could picture Thomas nodding to himself on the other end of the line, pacing in what little room her home afforded him. “Then you’ll need to do it without me. If you need to lie to your son to do this… Then it probably shouldn’t be done.”

The line went dead about halfway through the sentence “I understand.” She held the phone to her ear and then set it down gently in the passenger seat. She would not leave

Maurepas. She would not let Thomas’ defection stop her. There was too much work to do, too much she needed to understand. Her life was a fair thing to wager for that, even if she was gambling at a moral hazard.

As Deidre followed the coast toward Maurepas' downtown, she wondered what it would look like to watch from orbit. The miles-high storm, arms flung out, sweeping over Maurepas' dim high-rises and creole tenements. The storm surge ready to slop over the levees and wash away the streets. The ocean like a thing hungry, whitecap breakers boiling against the slate gray sky.

She needed to pull over she was laughing so hard. She had lied to her son rather than break away. And now she was face-to-face with it, after all the years of study and preparation, for this very moment. How could she possibly describe the world to come in this kraken's wake?

17

The Last Star

The hurricane is howling outside the room and I am inside the room and I do not think either one of us is happy with the side we are on. The vertical blinds the motel installed sometime back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth are rattling with the storm and through a crack or a bullet hole in the window. I can't remember if the lights are off because I turned them off or because the storm has cut the electric or the power company has but they're off. My phone is glowing and I don't want to look at it because I don't want the light to wake me up. Who knows what I'll do if I'm up? I don't. The rattling of the blinds is terrible though, like something following me that knows it will catch me and so doesn't bother sneaking around.

There's a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model poster my older brother helped me sneak out of my parents' place. It'll do taped into place over the hole. It might be ruined and might not; I don't know, the frame is cracked but still basically there. I find it with my phone light and I don't think I'll miss it. The subject—some coquettish blonde I discovered when my glands were first coming online ten years or a lifetime ago—has this look about her, like she's holding something back. Which she is, it being a Sports Illustrated poster, but something back internally. Like you could do for her whatever the real stuff of romance is (fancy dinners? Sonnets? Duels for her honor? No one ever told me) and there would remain in her a place you could not reach. Real relationships, in my experience, are not like that. And I think Father H will be glad I'm doing away with this piece of my previous life.

I'm not in a cult, or anything. I'm in recovery. I'm here by mutual agreement. No brainwashing required. 18

Well. The day I got here, the day I rolled in and said I was ready to kick my unpleasant habit and forswear all painkillers, all narcotics and sedatives, all the fun cough syrups and nasty needles—there was a cult-y thing that happened. I pulled into the cracked lot and set to trying to do a decent job of parking ‘else they’d all figure I was still using and it took me a couple of tries—my palms were sweaty and I hadn’t tried to park well in months, ticket fines having dropped off my radar of things to care about along with shaving, the ACTs, baseball, my little brother, deodorant, conditioning, any food that took longer to make than the time it took to make

Kraft macaroni or a bowl of cold cereal, basically everything except using and masturbating and arranging my life to transition smoothly between those two things—and by the time I got out they were all there. Everyone cooped up at or staying in the Last Star. Father H was at the head of them but all of the junkies and burnouts he’d scraped out of trap houses and lockups were there. I stopped and they stopped, they wouldn’t quite look at me. But Father H held his arms out wide, and I took a step forward and he closed the rest of the distance for me, and he wrapped his arms around me in a huge bear hug. And the others followed. They were embarrassed and I was embarrassed but they told me it would be okay, not just Father H but all of them, all of them told me that—can you believe that?

I wanted out. I wanted out right then. No. No, it would not be okay. Why would it be okay? Why am I supposed to believe that? Fuck off with that. I ached, being there, in the center of all that attention, all of that useless love. Not that I wasn’t something pathetic. Doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it.

My phone keeps buzzing, even after the poster is taped into place. Not everyone agrees with me, that I am here of my own free will. When I told her about that scene out in the parking 19 lot, she was sure I was in a cult. That’s probably why we’re not supposed to be in touch with people from our previous life. The life our Substances made for us.

Hurricane Quinn is only whining when I give in and check my phone. She wants to be here, she says. She has nowhere else to go and she's scared and she wants in, after however many times she mocked me for being in. Quite a turnaround for her.

She does not text me: I want to be in with you.

I like this idea, that she and I occupy basically the same space (the walls of the Last Star are so corroded and permeable it will be essentially the same space, different rooms or not) and I think it is bad. I want it. Father H would tell me I like it because it is bad. Because I don't think I deserve something good. Because I have not given myself grace.

I don't know if Father H will like that, I tell her. I don't know if he has a room spare.

But I'm already here, she says.

Outside the rain beats at me like I took its stash. The midday sun is gone, held hostage from us by Quinn and reduced to sending sickly light to let us know it's okay. Hand screening my eyes I finally find her squatting in her Taurus, flashing me her brights. They shine sickly.

The doors are unlocked. I swing myself into her passenger seat. It feels like I've carved an ass groove there. "Cut it out. You're gonna give someone palpitations."

"It's good to see you too."

I don't want to look at her because I'm afraid I'll fall into her like I always do or I'll see her wearing one of her long-sleeved Ts she uses to hide her track marks. Mine are healing up okay and I'm told I can show them here in the motel without fear or shame, but what I did to 20 myself and what we did to each other are two totally different territories. I need to restrain myself from looking at her because I am not equipped in any way whatsoever to handle that territory.

I don't know what to tell her. I'm clean. Preciously, achingly, carefully, painfully clean.

Father H keeps this place, as best he can, for people trying to stay that way. I get a glimpse of her shirt, sleeves tugged down to her palms, and I don't think she is.

"I don't know if you can stay."

She stares out the driver's side window. Away from me. West across Maurepas where a few lunatics are still out driving, where boats are battered against their wharfs, where sandbags have been piled high around its civic center full of government agencies and insurance companies. She is crying. She does not know where else to go, out there in all that driving dark.

She came to me because I am her last resort. The last of anything she has, after her Substance has dissolved everything else.

I certainly wouldn’t come here if I had a choice. The Last Star motel/halfway house is less a functioning recovery facility and more a squatting collection of burnouts barely held together by the threadbare respect offered to Father H. The old motel’s owners are long gone; management skipped town with the till just before I got here last Christmas. One room has collapsed and it is an all-star effort to keep the lights on. No one wants this place. It is the rockiest of bottoms for when the Earth itself, rather than yield another inch, takes you gently by the shoulder and says, “let me stop you right there.”

And her? She is not crying to mess with me. She doesn’t have a sketchy bone in her body. (That’s why she needs her Substance, or is powerless before it—she feels so much, I 21 think.) We are bad for each other but that was never because she messed with my head. She’s crying because she’s in a bad place.

My hand finds hers. Alone together again. I squeeze her.

“I’ll talk to Father H.”

* * *

Father H is cloistered in the old manager's office just under the extinguished sign which once read Last Star Motel. Under normal circumstances, the daily talks are encouraged but not mandatory (never mandatory) and feel like a trip to the principal's office. There is something about the need to go and talk to this authority figure, the only real one left in my life, that makes me feel sulky. As Quinn snaps at my soaked shirt and raindrops big as gumballs pelt me it feels like I'm a bug the universe is trying to exterminate. If it weren't for her I'd be warm in my blankets shivering. But she's here, and I am going to do right by her.

When I knock at the door there's a pause. I can tell by the shadows on the blinds that

Father H has others over. There must be a lull in the conversation or the prayer circle. I have interrupted.

The man who answers the door is a head taller than me, face windburnt and somehow incomplete-looking without sunglasses. Scars and tattoos cross his forearms, each with as much meat to cover as lamb's legs. There is something tense about him, like a bulldog ready to snap his chain.

And then he recognizes me. 22

"Gus!" he says, placing one entree-sized arm over my shoulder, steering me from the storm and into his homey quarters.

"Please don't call me that, Father H." Names belong to people. Most days I don’t feel like one of those.

He nods, so gentle, so understanding. So compassionate.

I shouldn’t be unkind. Out of everyone I’ve ever met, Father H is the one who most understands what a Substance does. How it inserts itself into your plans and shreds your memories until you are only this one moment of appetite. How it dissolves you.

"Is everything alright?" he asks.

I take the room in. We are not alone here. Half the Lost Star is gathered here, circled around the podium Father H dragged out of some abandoned Maurepas Public School System hulk. They are sipping coffee out of paper cups or leafing through Bibles or just doing me the favor of not looking me in the eye.

We are a sloppy shrieking Frankenstein of a detox clinic, halfway house, and mission.

Father H's ties to the Mother Church are bona fide—he wears the collar on Sundays, otherwise it's bulging button-ups—but so attenuated out here he's pretty much on his own. For an honest- to-God ex-biker, the kind I always imagine rolling down Bourbon Street on rattling Harleys in goose-flock formation, I get the sense he likes the independence. From the local diocese, anyway. For he is dependent on us.

We are a strange crowd to rely on. Injured fishermen turned to sifting through empty houses for man-portable electronics. Housewives for whom weed or alcohol or narcotics soothed 23 the boredom and then the pain and then the shame of being alone all day. Single parents who can't remember if the blackouts or Child Services came first. Petty crooks who are happy to tell you they should be dead a million ways and were finally scared into trying to set themselves straight. Admen who bought too much of their own hype and too much of their connection's blow.

What holds us together in this collapsing motel, in this town crumbling into the Gulf, is that Father H trusts us, and we are supposed to trust him. And in that reciprocal give-and-take we are supposed to find the strength to get over ourselves, kick our habits, come clean. (Finding

Jesus is encouraged, but the standard AA Higher Power is more than accepted.) And it sputters along. Urinalysis samples get delivered to a friend of Father H's at a lab downtown. Water and power are paid for, pockets outturned. Fights are settled peaceably, if not always amicably. Jobs are found and worked, references provided, addresses listed but thankfully never followed up on.

We all hold each other together.

"There's someone who needs to stay here."

The Father doesn't flinch. "Let's get 'em a bed." The gender-neutral term is a clear invitation. He's trying to balance stern and gentle in a way I don't buy. Reminds me too much of my own father.

"She's someone I know from..."

"Back when you were using."

"Yeah." I don't want to look him in the eye. So I don't. I find a space between the other

Last Stars to stare at. 24

"I see." He shifts his weight and it sounds like a mountain moving. I clench something to ready for my grace-walloping.

Father H ran everything from crank to horse tranquilizers, back in the day, with a special fondness—which we both share—for narcotics. (He picked up his from what can loosely be called a biking injury, by which he means the hawg fell off its kickstand onto his foot and his doctor prescribed him oxycodone; despite my years as a second-string baseballer I only developed my habit because I was helping dad with a home improvement project and swung a nail through the skin between my thumb and pointer finger. Go figure.) Forsaking and forsaken by his motorcycle club, having traded his bike for one last score, wandering across Texas' high plains with nothing but an aching hole in his heart that addiction had eaten into him, he was found by a community of Trappist monks. Nursed back to health and giving himself over to God,

Father H decided, after he had taken his vows and vestments, to return to his hometown and help other poor wretches willing to try and separate themselves from their addictions. All this while retaining the bulk and pugnacity such that, should, say, an out-of-house ex-baseballer ever try to rip him off to pay for his own habit, said ex-baseballer would be quickly confronted (again) with their own physical limitations and plain old bad luck. Hypothetically.

"And you think she would be a healthy addition to our community here?" He is asking me, giving me a look which tells me he already knows my answer.

"She needs somewhere to say." It's not a dodge but more of a plea: something to try and tug the reciprocal bonds of community my way, for once.

"If that is what you think best." What a careful little sentence! What a snare! He bows his head the tiniest increment, beatific. He is aiming grace like a loaded gun. 25

If I take her in and relapse or whatever, there will be no punishment. Father H has no real sanctioned authority here: we are basically squatters, outlaws, the Last Star's ownership long gone. So instead he tells us we are forgiven for all of the mistakes we make, that being human consists of making mistakes, that these mistakes hurt him and us too if we think about it, but really it's okay because we are forgiven.

The rest of the Last Stars are looking at me. I give them a little smile and wave. It reminds me a bit of my pre-substance days and I shudder. High school sports are a big deal in

Maurepas. Even I was picked out in line at the grocery store or waved to at the gas station. By spectators. People I didn't know. But people who thought I should know them, or acknowledge them. Because they had seen me, once, from far away, and knew the number on the back of my uniform.

I know this is not a good idea, bringing her here. I know I am going to pay for it at some point. I don't know how. Relapse? Cops? Debt? A brand new addiction and new depths of depravity? Who is to know? But I don't know how to stop myself. And I don't want to.

I have sat with these people and tried to sort it out. (Quitting means, among other things, finding new ways to fill time once occupied by pursuing, enjoying, and recovering from one's

Substance.) Why does this stuff work for them, and not for me? Allah, Jesus, Buddha, Xenu— why can they feel it when I can't?

They tell me about their lives when I ask them this. They tell it as a story, a movement, a piece of something bigger than themselves. Sometimes the conversation turns to my baseball days.

Didn't you feel like you were part of something? They ask. 26

And I think back. To petty frustrations, quiet rivalries, molehill triumphs. Conditioning, practice, dreams of a scholarship, working toward something day after day, like a little kid waiting for their tooth to fall out. And then it never happening. Pushing at it and pushing at it until everything else fell away when I put the uniform on. No play-offs or upsets or love of the game. Me and my inert self only.

No, I tell them. I don't think I did.

"I do," I tell Father H. "I do think it's best."

* * *

My room is 300 square feet of repurposed low-rent motel accommodations. I have a kerosene stove that does double duty heating cans of soup and incinerating roaches who scuttle into its cavities. The minifridge, long emptied of substances, is leaking a fluid which may pose a not insignificant health hazard. The previous tenant tore some of the copper wiring out of the wall, a garbage stink lingers even months after I cleaned the room and tried to shampoo the carpet, and two corners of the room are stained a filthy red which photos confirm grows each week. Nevertheless, it is mine, and mine alone. We agreed that she would take her own room but she has followed me here and I do not know how to stop her and I do not want to stop her.

We drag her bag in, all that she's salvaged from whatever life she's burned now. It hits the oily carpet with a heavy thunk.

"This is home," I tell her. "Maybe don't take your socks off."

She laughs. It's a good laugh. I haven't heard it in a long time. She sounds as cheery as she did back in high school, before all of this. 27

I sit on the bed and she sits on the bed. I look at my hands and try to remember what they looked like before the errant nail scar, before the track marks, before the muscle fell away and left me twiggy and flaccid. It wasn't that long ago.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks. I tell her and she waves me away. "Don't worry about that. Don't let the trends get in your head. You can't chart life like we used to do in pre- calc."

We both smile at that. Her face is pock-marked like an old parking lot and missing teeth.

I don't want to think what mine looks like.

We were both held back through pre-calc in HS. I heard her name called out that humiliating second year of that class, surrounded by juniors and nursing my stupid injury, biding my time until I could get to the nurse's station and take my Percocet, and recognized her. And she recognized me, too, and our eyes met: oh, ha ha, isn't this embarrassing for us, but at least we're embarrassed together.

It’s funny, to think of calling her that name now. It feels like it belongs to a different person. One with some muscles on her limbs, one with a bit more flesh under her cheeks. She looks little more than a thin lid over those appetites now, all twitchy and raw, worn down.

I’m sure I look the same way now.

When I told her how much baseball was bothering me, how much everything was bothering me, she had an answer. The world is dying, she said. It was like a glorious little secret of ours. It knocked down every boundary and made hollow every promise. We prophesied the hurricane we are sitting through right now. Quinn is only the start. Calamity after calamity will break the world like an eggshell. There will be famine and pestilence (we know this already— 28 she lost her aunt, her caretaker, back in '20 to Covid) and war, and death will reign over all. We will go out one way or another, we agreed as we talked over the day's latest bad news at lunch tables between pointless classes and in beater cars on the way home. It might as well be while we're blasted way out there. The junk lets us cast off the weight of it all so we can kick out into space. Weightless.

I say we, but I should say her and I. There was never a we. Her and I were just two dumbass high school kids who became two dumbass addicts and who are now two estranged people waiting out a hurricane. We fucked occasionally but it was not what you should think of as loving or beautiful. We had appetites that needed feeding, her and I both.

I still do, to be honest. When she gets the baggy out of her purse and the needle and lights the kerosene stove without asking, I feel a pull more subductive than any toward her body. Like a riptide, ready to take me under. I still want the junk. But one thing Father H has been helpful with is in helping me understand it as a want, and not a need. I can get by without what I want. I will perish without what I need. But the me-translating of these base urges into semantics has a second nuance to it, double-edged: I must respect what I need, at least a little; what I want can be indulged in. Frivolously.

She kicks off her shoe, to get at the vein between her toes. The plunger in the syringe drops and then she does, sagging back into my bed. She is in the eye now of her own personal

Quinn.

Substances are not particularly fun for the people who aren't using them. So I talk.

"I think the Trappists did Father H wrong.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind and my filter is long worn away. I fumble my way through my case: how do you fit something like grace 29 or eternal love into a handful of sounds? If there is a God out there, how does trying to fit it into a syllable not crush it into something worthless?

She is nodding off.

I’ve seen it, I tell her. I’ve seen how useless all of this is. I’ve told her this story a thousand times, I must have, but I tell her again how I blew my baseball career. Because I was high in front of a college scout. How I saw, on their faces as I pulled away, signs of—everything a parent could feel, seeing their kid turn out that way. That was real, and I know it because I have never been able to share it with her. There is nothing that can. The love these people at the Last

Star try to trade like dirty needles? That’s just nothing.

She is drawn into herself totally now. I let Quinn moan and wail in my place until I don’t see the harm of it.

“I don’t want it to be, though. To be nothing. I want it to work. I want these people to mean something to me and to mean something to them. I want to know what Father H is talking about when he talks about God, and I don’t know how and it’s scary to think about, scary to try.

And I’m scared that there is something wrong with me, that it will never work, that I’m missing something that can’t be found and that I am just a ball bearing, sanded down and heavy and cold and nothing, and if I’m more than that what will everyone think of me, a dropout at twenty-three working a burger jockey job for minimum wage. I’d almost rather be a ball bearing but I know I need to try...”

My voice has hit a high whine or whimper. I look over to her and she has not registered anything I’ve said. The lights die and that is fine with me.

* * * 30

I awake to a rapping at the door, quick and urgent beneath Quinn's more general howls and the staccato rainfall.

"Gus," Father H calls. "Gus, this is a room check."

Our rooms no longer have locks on them, a source of endless disputes and arbitration for

Father H and his aides. He's knocking out of courtesy, but it's still dark out and our lights are still dead--it hasn't been long. He knows what he'll find. He'll kick her out and demand urine from me and when it comes back clean he'll be so gracious to me even though I of course nearly exposed myself and the rest of the Last Stars to a dread Substance and we'll all go on with our lives and she'll do who-knows-what to try and stay afloat and I'll be obliged to forget about her.

"Gus." His voice is firm. I hate my name. I wish I could get rid of it. Dissolve into nameless Substance.

She is dazed but yanked out of her stupor with one quick motion. I mime what we're going to do by my cell phone light. We need no words.

I will not let Father H cudgel me anymore. I will not abandon her. I do not love her but I know I cannot leave her.

The motel window slides open and anything Father H might have wanted to say is gone.

In its place is Quinn, like a vacuum over the face of the world. It is raining sideways and we feel it slap into our backs but it is lifting us up, her and I. She has her purse and her stash. I am away from Father H, outside the Last Star, running I do not know where at midnight as Quinn opens up on us. I am out in the parking lot where I was welcomed to the Last Star not so long ago and I can’t see the others all of them out here but I want to. I want to see the rain and the wind scour them, rip away the pockmarked flesh and the track marks and the scarred livers and the failing 31 kidneys. I want it to strip them of their dying bodies until there is nothing left but that pallid love they offered me that day. I want to see them wager it against this apocalypse. I want them to know they will lose. I want to stop hoping for anything else.

The pain of that treacherous slippery thought almost stops me right there. But she is there to tug me on, and if I cannot heal this ache, at least I will be numb to it soon.

32

Leadership is Delegation

“You can’t hold us up in Committee that long—”

On the other end of the line Representative Clydes’ Chief of Staff grunted. Perth could imagine him shaking his idiot head, lips wide and rubbery as worms. “Clydes’ hands are tied, ma’am,” he said, and Perth wanted to scream. “There’s nothing we can do for you folks. I’m sorry.”

Perth opened her mouth and nothing came out. She set the receiver down. With a single click the conversation with Representative Clydes’ people came to an end, and with it Perth's hopes for any federal relief to Maurepas, to anywhere in Louisiana, and to all the Gulf Coast.

There had been no yelling, no screaming, no hissed declarations of vendetta or promises of regrets to come. It was just that inertia was against them. Even the most canny legislator couldn’t legislate around physics. Only her emptied mug kept her forehead from smashing right into the desk.

It was absurd, she knew. She was barely even in Maurepas anymore, and when she was rarely saw more than her family’s den while they grilled her on the career they had scrimped and saved to prepare her for. She hadn’t even called them today, never mind her tenuous connection to the rest of town. And her disappointment was in no way commensurate to what would be unfolding in Maurepas overnight. But it was how she felt.

Imagine how Representative Comeau would feel. She had worked for him since he was stumping around Vermilion Parish. She had never failed him like this, never missed something so crucial. 33

With a huff she hoped did not sound too distressed she stood. To find the Rep or maybe throw herself out a window. Who knew?

He was right behind her, leaning on the half wall of her cubicle. A #1 Dad mug steamed in his hands, probably his fourth or fifth of the night. If it was the soothing chamomile tea Perth made sure the pantry stocked that he was drinking, he looked not at all like it was working for him.

"I came to see how you were holding up." He was filing down his h's, slipping out of his law school-polished diction toward Cajun vernacular. He was either very tired or very troubled.

While he claimed to feel no shame about his accent now that he had made it to Washington,

Comeau usually only let it out back home glad-handing or on TV when he needed to speak for his constituents. Said it made him sound a bit more authentic. "But the score’s pretty clear." He made a circle with his fingers on her forehead to mirror the ring on hers.

Perth laughed, because she didn't know what else to do. "Thanks, Gabriel. Clydes isn't interested in letting any Gulf Coast relief money move until the water settles. Check back in three months, chief of staff said."

"So that's..." Comeau counted names and caucuses off on his fingers. Problem Solver's

Caucus? Split down the middle. Southern Republicans? Not willing to risk their necks for New

Orleans and Houston. Democratic leadership? Stuck, supposedly, on how to pay for any sort of relief. "Everyone."

"Did you get through to the White House?"

"Madam President did not get on the line herself." Comeau's voice thickened with hurt and contempt. They were of the same party, after all, and he had campaigned vigorously for her 34 as a state official before making his own run for federal office. "But it was made clear to me that she was not especially interested in risking a constitutional crisis for Louisiana, Texas, and

Florida." The president, theoretically, could order the robust response Comeau was looking for, but not without taking one of Congress' most treasured toys: setting the agenda for federal spending. Such a move would be a stretch too dictatorial.

"They're never going to turn Texas blue with that attitude."

They laughed at that, together, first a chuckle and then something heartier. Something to shake off the despair. There was nothing for it. The strength of the country, sprawling across half a continent, the economic power which wound itself around every country under the sun, the political might which had thrown back fascism and ripped slavery from itself like a surgeon removing her own cancer—all of it came to nothing. All of it was so dysfunctional, so rotted and sclerotic, it could not bother to consider a weather report and provide aid to sixty million people living in one of its greatest ports and fisheries.

The value legislators from Ohio and Pennsylvania extended their constituents was not extended to Louisianans and Mississippians, for all the same maladies that troubled them— deindustrialization in the face of rising costs of living, with attendant drug abuse, early deaths, backsliding from the precious fragile security to own one’s home—and which Hurricane Quinn would only exacerbate. The governors of both New York and California, party apparatchiks with close ties to highly financialized and basically imaginary economies, were full of contempt for the fishermen fearing for their livelihoods and retail clerks whose stores were out of work because they had the temerity to vote red. The president, who had campaigned on a return to normalcy after the long tail of the coronavirus pandemic had made the largest growth industries 35 food delivery apps and body bag manufacturing, looked at graphs projecting a quadrupling of joblessness in impacted areas and shrugged her shoulders.

The work which Perth and Comeau had given their lives to was meaningless. The country was ungovernable.

This was not a new development. Perth and Comeau had arrived in DC with the last election, eager to protect Louisiana's fractal coasts and all the tour guides and fishermen who depended on them and who, in turn, had made Comeau's career, only to find the District was a unique and hideous ecosystem all its own.

(Perth and the other young staffers had found their names for it. The swamp, of course.

The quagmire. The morass. The colossal wreck. The hive of scum and villainy. The supermassive blackhole at the center of the world, reality-distorting, inescapable, voracious.

Their more senior colleagues would look at them with flinty stares.)

Deep into nights like this one they would try and troubleshoot the problem. It was

Obama's fault—no, the Republican reaction to Obama. 9/11 drove everyone insane. Fox News and then MSNBC sorted the voting public into opposing camps who could only come to mutual understanding now by hissing and spitting. The end of the Cold War had given American hegemonic dominance over the entire globe and convinced a class of self-centered old men that they were the uncontested rulers of the world, and in their rush to mold the world in their own image they had grown so evil Death would not touch them, and so they would cure the world and especially the greater District of Columbia and its outlying reaches with their venality and decadence until bloated and parasite-riddled like ancient lobsters they would finally collapse and perhaps bring the rest of the world down with them. 36

Whatever. All of it was true. None of it was. Perth had spent years trying to build a model of the world in her head. Book and monographs and college courses and hours spent comparing notes with fellow strivers who had reached this mountaintop of relative power and influence and found no summit but only mirage and snow blindness and Sherpas whose guidance was available for no less than a piece of one's soul and whom, Perth guessed, did not know the way a tenth as well as they claimed.

What she knew was this: American politics had reached a point wherein almost everyone who bothered to vote (there was an equal portion of the total US population which did not and so mattered to no one) was absolutely loyal to their party. Among many pernicious knock-on effects, this meant that there was no incentive for cooperation; that, in fact, such bipartisan cooperation opened elected officials up to primary challenges from all manner of rhinophymic used car salesmen and telegenic Hitler Youth members who could promise, convincingly, that while they would immiserate everyone who elected them, they would do a better job of infuriating liberals than the incumbent. This dynamic established, nothing was done. Nothing done meant each election cycle was not a progression, but a screeching stinking wheel-spinning, throwing shit everywhere and digging further into the slop. Therefore everyone who could use the aid of the most powerful government in human history, like the good citizens of Maurepas and all the state of Louisiana post-Hurricane Quinn, went untended to.

For this Perth knew only one remedy. She hoped she did not live to see it applied.

Although, sometimes, she did. To see her high school history teacher, her pensioner aunt, her old bus driver, the motorcycle cop and barista who she eavesdropped on as they flirted with each other at the Bluestone in Georgetown, the pastor at the church she'd attended once and never again, the girl she'd sat by in three separate data science courses, the constituents whose 37 calls she'd fielded from humble homes and McMansions in Louisiana's towns and byways, the faces she'd glimpsed in a million separate forgotten unremarkable moments—to see all of them united in one panoramic tidal wave that swept over Capital Hill and drag Senators to guillotines?

Priceless. Miraculous. Impossible. But, all the same, the only historically analogous solution to such a problem of institutional failure and collapse.

By turns Perth found it a gleeful and guilty fantasy. (Her therapist compared it to suicidal ideation. It was all in the hope for release, he said.) There was a parity to it, in that the men and women whose inaction and corruption had caused so much misery would finally have that visited back on themselves. The world might even be improved by their entirely (far too late) demises.

That intuition was what she distrusted, what she thought a shoddy timber to build a funhouse with and an abominable one to make the center of one's political practice: the notion that someone's life could be traded for another's advantage. That treating anyone as nothing more than a tool or an obstacle, for even the best of reasons, would go where all paths paved with good intentions led. On that, she and the freshmen representative from Louisiana were in total agreement. It was what allowed Perth to work with Comeau and assure her family that they were, actually, doing good work in DC. It was what allowed them to laugh together now.

"So." Perth knew the answer to her question before she asked it. "What are we going to do?"

"There's nothing for it." Comeau shrugged his big shoulders. "We'll see what the damage is and do what we can and maybe we'll get Congress to throw us a bone by New Year."

It was an election year. They both understood how a failure to provide aid to constituents walloped by a hurricane would go over in an election year. They'd be lucky to keep their jobs. 38

But having the boss acknowledge it made it easier. Took the weight of the problem off her. Talk about the value of delegating responsibility to elected representatives.

Comeau's phone buzzed in his pocket. He winked and went, leaving Perth to consider how to polish her resume. If Comeau understood, she might tender her resignation before the election. It would be a bad look--rat from a sinking ship--but if she went back to Maurepas, did what aid work she could, well, she might make out okay. Might even position herself for a run of her own in the next wave election. And it would be hard and frustrating and devour her life, but maybe she would be able to do some good. Maybe she would be able to do Comeau proud. DC was a cesspit, yes, but there was nothing for that. Just keep your head down, plow on ahead.

Something will give.

She was still thinking about the future when Comeau called her. She found him in his corner office, rain drops patting against the windows and his tea steaming pathetically against the cold. He stared at his phone like it was something venomous.

"We have an opportunity." His voice was very quiet. Not excited at all. Frightened.

* * *

Their contact offered a meeting that night. Perth urged Comeau to take him up on it.

"Flo wanted me back home an hour ago." The office was empty. Lights had winked out across the National Mall, one by one. The Mall had stilled until they could forget there was anything out there but the storm.

"So I can go." It was an easy offer for her to make.

Comeau held his hands up. “I can’t hardly ask you to do that.” 39

“’ardly,” Perth repeated. She had grown up in Maurepas, could take a passable stab at the accent. “Listen to you—you’re exhausted. Go get some rest. I can handle one spooky Super PAC suit. Leadership is delegation.”

“This is my responsibility,” Comeau said. But he didn’t sound like he believed it. He was, Perth was sure, extremely tired.

“Boss.” She grabbed his coat. “Gabriel. I can handle this. Go home. Tell Florence I want to know how she likes her Peloton.”

Mumbling to himself, feet shuffling, Comeau took his jacket. They locked up together, took the last elevator down. She watched him walk off toward his car and shook her head. It was almost never that easy to win an argument with him.

Their man asked to meet them at an oily diner on the Virginia side of town. Perth realized, as she parked, that he had seen it from the 66 everyday she had driven into work.

Somehow she had never fixed it in her mental map of the city.

She recognized their man by his opal cufflinks. His sleeves were rolled up to keep clean of his quartered Rueben and so he'd set the cufflinks aside. They shimmered at her from across the store. She could tell at a glance they were worth more than any piece of jewelry or clothing she could own and there they were set carelessly on a linoleum tabletop.

She introduced herself as Comeau's stand-in after a long night. If a proxy was not what he was expecting, he hid it well. His eyes were bright and clear, a cool blue, eager like a good student. His name was Luther, and by the time she'd ordered from the surly waiter Perth was pretty sure she was, in fact, happy to meet him. 40

"The people I represent can help your team," Luther said.

"So I've heard." She smiled, genuine but not especially warm. She wanted him to work for it.

"We understand you're having trouble getting relief through either chamber. Although

Comeau's place on the budget committee means you won't have trouble getting in on the floor,

Republicans won't work with you unless their districts are being hit, and too many Dems are reliant on coalitions which..." He reached for his drink. "Do not hold the affected region in high regard."

Perth nodded along, did not correct him: which hold us in contempt.

"The bill you want passed is ambitious. Public housing to put roofs back over heads.

Infrastructure repair and development. Not a small sum given to environmental clean-up—for the tourist industry, I know. And did I not read something in there about taking equity in fossil fuel companies for clean-up work to be done?"

Perth felt her face redden. "We didn't expect that to get through." She said it quickly.

"But there's precedent for it--they tried for Boeing in '19, and these companies dumped billions into climate change denial, sand-bagged a response for forty years, got us into this mess—"

Luther held a hand up while he chewed his Rueben, fingers slimy with Russian dressing.

"—And then turned around and asked the federal government to build seawalls at taxpayer expense for their facilities along the Gulf Coast!" Perth sagged, elbows rude on the table. "So yes, we thought a taxpayer stake in their enterprise would be fair." 41

"No. It's a good idea." Luther dabbed at the corners of his mouth, met her eyes. "We can get it through."

"You're serious?" She reached for her drink, tried not to look too interested. This was not her first rodeo. There were lobbyists a-plenty in DC, brains pickled in testosterone and lined with hundred-dollar bills, convinced they could move mountains. She disliked them as a category and, while she conceded they might theoretically serve to connect elected officials (and their staffs) to constituents, would have their profession razed and reconstituted if she could. They were like squid, canny, spineless, predatory, alien. She would prefer them docile, oblivious, and marked by their owners. Like cows.

"I am," Luther said. "They'll get something through later, but everyday Congress lingers on Quinn is a day millions of dollars are lost for people who need them. If you hit them while it's urgent, you have the chance to do something huge for the region, beyond the scope of Quinn.

You shouldn't let a good crisis go to waste."

"And you're sure you can get it through?"

Luther nodded. "It'll be law by this time next week." Even in emergencies, the ship of state turned slowly.

"You can get it by the president?"

"Her?" Luther rolled his eyes. "She'll sign it. She won't stick her neck out. But she'll sign it."

That was that. All that was left was...

"So. What can our team do for you?" 42

From a valise on the seat beside him Luther fished out a stack of papers as thick as a phonebook. "We need this through Financial Services." His voice was hard.

Perth snapped the alligator clips off and flipped from section to section. She said nothing.

Comeau would get the bill through, and doubtless Luther and his allies could get it passed. But she wanted to know what she would be signing Comeau up for.

She had not been educated as either a lawyer or an economist, and the exact specifics eluded her, but the outline of the law took shape in her mind. At first it was about empowering the Federal Reserve to regulate cryptocurrencies, which had slipped onto the markets and caused more than their fair share of panics in the last decade. There was no better example of value as a psychological exercise, backed by nothing but their holder's faith that they might be worth something. And that faith could be easily manipulated until fortunes were traded for thin air.

But as she read it became clear the crypto regulation was a Trojan Horse for a much deeper change to the functioning of the American economy. The bill called for the grouping of the 50 states into eight discrete economic zones, each with its own currency. This was not new in

American history: in the nineteenth century, without a single central bank, each state had chartered its own, which had distributed its own money. But now hardly anyone used cash. They might notice that their bills would change, and they might not.

But on the macro level, the shift for most states away from the dollar would radically alter their economies. The dollar would remain the reserve currency of the world, the language by which so much of the world's wealth was communicated. Those who had invested in it would continue to float stateless and untouchable, their capital and credit finding purchase everywhere on the planet. For those without, those in poorer regions like Louisiana, like Maurepas, imports 43 and exports would need to be done by trading their local currency in for dollars. And that local currency would be weak and subject, even more than the dollar, to the caprices of the market and the whims of speculators. Even commerce with Texas would need to be done by changing currencies, value draining away like through a sieve. The bill's passage would be the final subjugation of the country's real economy to finance. Maurepas would be nothing more than a colony of the New York Stock Exchange. Perth would never, not in a million years, be able to look her family in the eye and tell them she was an honest public servant.

Don't let a good crisis go to waste indeed.

* * *

"I hope you understand that, if we are to move both of these items, we have a constrained timeframe." Luther reclasped his cufflinks, plate pushed aside. He smiled, but this time it was not a smile he shared with her.

People used each other in this place, this ecosystem, Perth knew. Occupational hazard.

And some of those same people developed elaborate, even megalomaniacal needs for power and control within that ecosystem—your Richard Nixons, your Ted Cruzes.

This was different. This was a subtle but titanic adjustment to how three hundred and fifty million people lived and worked with one another, passed over the remains of a Rueben sandwich in a greasy spoon.

"I understand." Perth collated the pages until they were plumb again. "I understand perfectly." Alligator clips snapped back into place, she tucked the bill into her purse. "Are you worried about any speedbumps for this?" 44

"I'm told it will survive legal challenges up to the Supreme Court." Luther made a vague motion with one hand. He was bored. "Regulating currency falls well within Congress's constitutional powers, and no single state is being interfered with. Only commerce between them. Comeau will not be expected to vote for it or even introduce it to committee. All that we request he do in exchange for our support is let nature take its course."

The cliché was revolting. Quinn was nature. (Basically.) The movement of a bill through

Congress was an intentional act by God only knew what crew of juiced-up speculators and billionaire oligarchs to rewire how all 20 trillion dollars of the American GDP moved. Perth watched him, how slack he looked in his seat, how dull his eyes were. He was the tip of the spear and could barely keep his attention on it. It was just a thing that happened.

"He might run against it next cycle."

"That's the honored Representative's prerogative. He can chase white whales from here until he retires. Call him King Fisher." Luther smiled at his own joke: the Kingfish had been another Louisianan by the name of Huey Long, about a hundred years ago. A forceful populist whose long list of public works included the towering Baton Rouge state capital that Perth had interned at not so long ago, he might have challenged FDR for the Presidency from his left—had

Long not been assassinated at the height of the Depression.

Perth had hoped to needle Luther, not have her boss jabbed at or threatened. But Luther spoke so casually, so thoughtlessly, whether he was weighing a life or a country.

She wondered if she was even real to him. She found it hard to believe she could be, to treat her so. 45

Opposite him she forced herself to smile. She told Luther goodbye and paid for her diet coke and braved the rain until she found her car. Safely inside, coat and seat adhering together with rainwater, she called Comeau.

"Perth?" He picked up immediately. She could imagine him, pajama'd and ready for bed by for the report he needed to settle down. His wife Flo would not be happy.

"It's me, Gabriel."

"How bad is it?"

Incredibly bad, she told him.

The only reason Luther's people would have the muscle to move Comeau's relief bill was because they had already had enough pull to gather a coalition willing to move their real priority.

Comeau's career would survive its passage because the impact wouldn't be felt, not for years and years. But it would be as big a blow for working people of the twenty-first century as the defeat of the union movement had been in the twentieth.

"I see." Comeau was quiet for a long moment. He might have put his hand over the speaker to talk to someone there with him. Perth sat in expectant silence. "And he was..."

"He seemed confident. I have his business card, so we'll be able to track any other projects his lobbying firm is working on. If they're for the same client we might be able to slow them down."

"No." Comeau sighed. His speech was slow and halting. Perth had never seen him like this before. "What I mean is. What do you think of..." 46

"It would be a disaster for our constituents. Like shifting to a high gear while biking uphill, making them pedal faster and work harder to go the same distance the dollar would have gotten them. At first they'll only feel it on imports, a little bit at a time. But there's no way it won't hit them on rent and mortgages before too long." Louisiana was poor, and Comeau's district, drawn away from the lucre of New Orleans, was especially so. There was no way for the vast majority of them to come out ahead under the coming changes.

Rain drummed on the car. At the other end of the line, Comeau finally said:

"Perth, I trust you."

She felt her stomach tighten.

"Now we're talking about my career here, and yours. I sent you out there to come see— do I trust them or no?"

Comeau had used her. Baited her into meeting Luther, judging his proposal, and shifting responsibility for what came afterward onto her. The Hurricane Quinn relief bill, Comeau's re- election, the possible economic partition of the United States all landed in Perth's lap.

She did not want it. She would have run for office herself if she wanted that responsibility. She had only intended to be a good soldier, not saddled with needing to remember for the rest of her life that she was responsible for mass immiseration. The responsibility was supposed to be Comeau’s, but he had let her take it up, let her meet Luther and judge what would follow for him. Before the voting public that would never fly, of course. It might still tank his political career. But between him and his own conscience it might give him a break. 47

No wonder Comeau had looked like that when he'd finished the call—it would be a horrible weight to bear. But it was his job—he had asked for it, offered himself, sold himself as someone to make these kinds of decisions. And he had pawned the most consequential one of his career off on her.

Luther, at least, had the excuse of not knowing whose lives he manipulated.

"Perth? Perth? Are you still there?"

It took her a long time to answer.

* * *

Gabriel Comeau won reelection that year. By that time Perth was long gone. Picked up stakes and picked her way across washed out local roads and found her way back, once more, to

Maurepas.

Her mother found Perth with dad in the den, putting back together her desk from her DC apartment. Perth hugged her tight and saw how rough and scabby the dishwashing shifts had made her hands.

“Well,” her mother said. “Welcome back, I guess.”

“Dad and I are going inland to find a store that has shingles,” Perth offered. The disappointment was written plain on her mother’s face. “We’ll get the roof fixed ASAP. And I’m getting a consulting firm up and running, get some freelance work done…”

Her mother looked at her, not understanding. Her father patted her shoulder and nodded.

“We’re glad to have you back, sweetheart,” he said. But his smile was lopsided, hangdog. A terrible thought seized Perth: that they figured she’d have been better off, they’d all have been 48 better off, if she would have just stayed in Maurepas in the first place. She was the smarter and fiercer of their daughters and she had failed. What had her years of work gotten any of them?

She could point to Comeau’s relief bill, and that might keep the value of their house from sinking too far, but it wasn’t going to pay her student loan bills. And she couldn’t tell them about the relief bill’s shadow, which Luther had slipped right through Congress and was going to make itself felt across the country before too long. There had been no way to win against Luther and the forces that had put him there, and Perth did not know how to tell her parents that.

“Are you really happy I’m back?” Perth asked.

Her parents looked at each other and back to her. It took them a long time to answer.

49

An Ineluctable Method for Distributing Pain

Quinn had sunk the Maurepas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility ankle-deep when Galbraith got the emergency call. An inmate had managed to slip her bonds and resisted attempts by two facility guards to return her to her cell. He was already on his way to interrogate the American prisoner, crossing from one of the guard posts to the central processing center at the crest of the hill, and so he was first to respond.

Galbraith found her planted in the courtyard, panting ragged on the slope beneath the intake facility. Water streamed around her ankles, passing her guards on its way down into the internment barracks. Lightning burst over the trees to the west and Galbraith saw, from his vantage point at the top of the hill, the after-images of the guards as they charged her. When he blinked his eyes clear they were both thrown back off their feet, and the woman had only a chipped nail to show for it. Seafoam green, acrylic. One of the guards was rubbing, half-numb, a spot on his chin, where Galbraith figured the piece had been lodged.

"Ma'am," Galbraith called. Thunder brought him her attention, not any authority he could claim. His Spanish came out thick and slow and he needed to shout to be heard over the hurricane. "Surrender before you incriminate yourself further. You will face the heaviest penalties of the law should you continue."

The woman stared up at him, wet hair slicked over her face, baggy duck coat plastered to her body. Her belly might have been starting to swell with pregnancy. Galbraith felt her eyes dip from his face to the gun on his hip. He did not want to use it.

He went down the hill. His yellow rain slicker flapped like a cape. She raised a fist to him and he caught it and turned it and twisted her arm until she yowled like a trapped cat and tried to 50 hit him with her other fist and then the guards were there and the situation was under control.

They yanked the woman to her feet and she kicked splashing muddy water and the other guard punched her in the jaw.

"Settle," Galbraith said. To everyone.

The guards ignored him, forced the woman onto her knees in the cold water. Wind peeled her hair from her face and Galbraith told them to stop. "Who is she?"

The guards looked at each other, shouted possible names while they zip tied her hands behind her back: the inmates here, the inmates out on trial, the deported, the released. Finally they settled on one, toed the woman with their heavy boots. A look must have crossed

Galbraith's face because one of them asked: "What's it to you?"

Galbraith squatted before the captured woman. Stared down into her eyes. She stared back, chin out, cords in her neck standing out under her skin. He said to her: "I think we've met before."

* * *

All over. He’d met her all over. She had been a short order cook in an oil boomtown up in North Dakota. He’d ordered breakfast from her, enjoyed the omelette, and arrested her. She had picked tomatoes in fields in Florida, struck against low wages, had her bluff called, had been bundled off with dozens of others when ICE was called. Nannied for a family in California until one filthy-hot summer the fires burned their McMansion down and some shithead cop stopped her on her way out of town, concerned that she wasn’t quite the right color, and somehow her arrest records found their way into federal hands. 51

Galbraith had been with the agency his entire career. It was hard, at this point, to remember when he’d actually met her and when it had been his colleagues. Was she the woman hellbent on slipping out of El Salvador after she’d taken a wrong turn and seen a Sombra Negra crew blow apart a pack of mara gangbangers? Was she the woman out of Tijuana trying to trace the steps of her son or her brother or her lover—Galbraith could never remember which—trying to trace their unmarked route through this vast alien country? Had she ridden the freight train overawed locals knew as The Beast across shrieking rusted rails from Guatemala through

Mexico to ports unknown across the Rio Grande for a shot at sending precious American money back to some nameless drought-wracked village in Zone 3?

To Galbraith it did not matter. His job was to enforce the laws of the United States, and he did so. This meant enforcing them against the actions and intentions of women like this. He could admire her as much as he wanted: her fierce and stubborn will, her ability to shed happiness and even dignity to further her goals. He could even try and convey his respect to her over the towering barriers of culture, experience, and position. But he could not allow her to break the law. If she could not be bothered to obtain a visa then she had no business being in his country.

Under the weight of the pounding rain he rose from before her, and gently he brought her up too. He caught the pained look on her face before she wiped it away. “Make sure she gets some medical attention,” he told the guards when they took her.

They nodded their acknowledgement and marched her downhill. She looked over her shoulder at him, furious, frustrated, exhausted. He pitied her, and he smiled at her as gently as he could manage. Her need for rest was obvious and desperate. He hoped she found it soon, wherever she ended up. So long as that wherever was in America, he would always be near to 52 make sure she was on the right side of the barrier the law made between right and wrong he had been charged with tending.

* * *

The wind off the Gulf Coast like a trawler out of Maurepas caught every stink and served it up on a layer of oily solid humidity: the tuna cannery and its brine and broth, the industrial backwash of Port Arthur's belching refineries, and the teeming reek of massed and unwashed human bodies in the ICE barracks themselves. Along with the endless, fruitless chattering churn in Spanish to no end that Galbraith could imagine. The cries, the long low howling sobs: none of it, pitiful as it was, would make a difference before the law. They had trespassed against what was right and fair, and so now they had to suffer the consequences.

Galbraith would shudder to imagine what should come to pass without such bright clear boundaries. Parents might crush the life from their children and be abused in turn as they grew old. The poor and lost would have nothing and no one to turn to, no tool to secure their persons with. The great would steal from the small without consequence. No one would be safe, even in their own bed.

Consider the young American man they had found trying to infiltrate the camp. He thought himself, Galbraith was sure, a good humanitarian, out to do a good act. Certainly he was aware there would be consequences for doing such a thing, and Galbraith would make him feel the weight of those long years in a federal pen. But that there would be consequences for the intended recipients of the young man's humanitarianism--that, Galbraith wanted to make sure he understood. 53

They had placed the American in one of the facility's interrogation rooms and Galbraith had requested command of the investigation. The camp's director, who might have left the detainee there through Quinn and find higher ground himself, had been happy to give it to him.

Galbraith had never seen anyone in more need of a dose of reality than their American.

Rainbow rastaclat at his wrist, cheeks translucent and puffy like some hitherto-unknown species of sea mammal, beard poorly managed with expensive-smelling oil: and still he sat alone in a federal holding tank like his shit didn't stink. To look at him, the self-regard he wore the way

Galbraith's colleagues wore mirrored Oakleys, made Galbraith's lip curl into a sneer. From the other side of the one-way mirror he seemed to preen himself.

Galbraith uncapped his thermos. "Surprised he even knows how to handle a pair of bolt cutters."

His colleague, an agency veteran of comparable years by the name of Dezois, shrugged into a caution yellow rainslicker. "You know antifa trains these kids. We're gonna start finding

IEDS, pipe bombs mailed to us by hippie chicks in need of a real man."

Turned away from him, Galbraith rolled his eyes. "So you think he trespassed on federal property because he was brainwashed?" He took a sip. "To get laid?"

"Yes." His colleague rolled the thought around in his head like a marble. "Pussy and a pension, man. All I can ask for." He waddled toward the door, looked over his shoulder. "I'm headed into town. Sheriff needs volunteers. Sandbags to move, people to protect." Technically he was abandoning his post. That got to Galbraith, petty as he knew it was. But there were limits to what he could change.

"I'll catch up." Galbraith nodded to the kid in the tank. "We'll have a chat first." 54

His colleague gave a two finger salute and left. Galbraith drank his coffee, poured himself some more and a spare cup. He brought them in on a tray with a manila folder. The kid took the coffee without interest, handcuffs jingling.

"Fred." Galbraith flipped the folder open, pretended to read it for the first time. "Detained but not charged by Baton Rouge PD for debatably legal protests three summers running.

Graduated earlier this year from LSU, go Tigers, blah blah." He snapped the folder shut. "Fuck are you doing at my facility, Fred?"

Fred tongued the inside of his cheek. The gage in his ear made him look bovine, glassy- eyed, tagged.

"Do you know how much danger you put the inmates here in? You want to let them loose in a swamp in the middle of a hurricane? So some hick cop can hunt them for sport?"

"Don't pretend you care." Fred snorted. It was the first visible display of emotion since he had been cuffed. "None of these people here matter to you."

Galbraith opened his mouth, closed it again. The plan had been to scare the bejesus out of the kid, warn him off tampering with federal property, and send him back to blast warnings for them on Twitter. Much cheaper and less likely to draw bad press than mortifying him at trial.

But suddenly Galbraith found himself wondering how far a RICO case against him and the gang of shitheads who must have come with him would go. What the FBI had done to the mob, ICE could probably do to his friends. A few former activists as eyewitnesses, some Venmo receipts for rent, a trip up to Baton Rouge to talk to their DA for property damage and intimidating police officers, and they could bury him. 55

"You think you're Christ on his crucifix? You think you're here because you're taking a stand? You think you're brave because you act a thug?"

Fred started to ask, "Have you ever heard of the Johnstown flood--" and Galbraith slammed his palms on the table.

"Shut up." Galbraith stuck a finger in Fred's face. "Do you have any idea how many here, who I trust with a loaded gun at my back everyday, who could ruin my career and everything I have worked and sacrificed for, I have reported and informed on and had censured for the exact same shit that gets your panties in a knot?"

Fred's mouth and brow knotted up. Galbraith sank until they were at eye level.

"That's right," he said, grinning. "Who's the asshole now?"

* * *

Rain hammered on the tin roof above. In the silence between Fred and himself Galbraith felt a part of his mind wander, trying to picture what the night would look like when he was done here. Quinn had abolished the day. If he went outside he might mistake it for midnight when the sun was just over the clouds. Those clouds were pouring rain across Maurepas, across the camp-- would the ravine the camp was situated in stay above water? He was sure the levees would hold.

Across the table, Fred had been gathering himself up, playing with the chain of his handcuffs. Refusing to look Galbraith in the eye. Finally he found his balls, looked Galbraith in the eye, and told him:

"It's still you." 56

Fred looked at Galbraith like he was an inch tall. Before Galbraith could say anything he went on, sneering:

"Only one of us works for a eugenics organization."

"Idiot!"

Fred flinched. Good. Galbraith spread his hands wide over the table, a bird of prey at roost.

"Who do you think gave Wooten cover to document those wards? Who do you think kept her superiors off her back, made sure she could get those records published? You think we're all just Nazis eager to rip wombs out of brown people we detain for their own good? No one here can just want to do the right thing and enforce the law?"

"You stuck your neck out one time." Fred glared at him, eyes dewy, voice shaking. "And you still work here. She lost her job."

"Oh?" Galbraith smacked his head as though he didn't know. As though the ICE badge on his breast had stowed away there. "I still work here?"

He wanted to slam his palm on the steel table. Instead he slouched and sighed and looked down his nose. "What do you think happens if I get an 'attack of conscience' and turn in my resignation? Do you think my position is eliminated, Fred? Or do you think they give it to the first Neanderthal who manages to drag his knuckles over the finish line, who poisons water caches in Arizona between bouts of beating his wife and torturing lizards?"

The building shook with the tread of thunder. Galbraith kicked his legs up, noted the time—noon—and looked to Fred. 57

"And then what would I do, anyway? Go be a mall cop? Trade in a badge and gun for a pasteboard sign? Tweet hashtag-abolish-ICE and get close to chicks with blue hair for selfies?

Would I be making the right kind of a difference for you then, Fred? How's that going for you?"

"Fuck you."

Galbraith threw an empty paper cup at him. It bounced off Fred's face with a dull whomp.

"No, fuck you, Fred." But the caffeine had gone out of him.

"You think the whole world is as certain as sunset. Cowboys and Indians is the only game our sophisticated activist has ever played."

"None of this is a game to me."

"Yes it is." Galbraith raked his eyes to the ceiling. "I'll charge you with federal b-and-e and daddy will spring for a white shoe lawyer and you'll do easy time and cry on national TV about how nasty ICE was. In three years we'll run into each other in Georgetown where an NGO will have given you a do-nothing job because you're so brave and principled."

"That's not what I want."

"Oh?" Galbraith sat up, crossed one leg over the other. "You ever hurt someone, Fred? I mean 'they wish you were dead' hurt someone?"

Fred didn't look Galbraith in the eye.

"Maybe you have," Galbraith allowed. "But you took the wrong thing from it, is my guess. I remember--I was a kid, Fred. Couldn't have been past first grade. Teacher had bullet points up on the board: 'no hitting or spitting,' 'listen to your instructors,' 'treat others how you want to be treated,' all that. But there was always this big kid, Richie, and he was nasty and 58 mean. Awful. Especially to this one poor girl with orthodontic headgear. But he had a Patriots lunchbox, and Patriots jerseys he wore all the time, so I thought he was cool, and I wanted him to be my friend." Galbraith shook his head. Hard to think back to when he was so young. Fred said nothing.

"So I wanted to be this kid's friend. And he told me--he told me I should ask that poor girl--well, I don't even remember." He did. He would not share it now. "I laughed like it was a joke. Didn't even think about it. Just did it. Sat down right next to her at lunch and asked her.

Wasn't hard--she didn't have a lot of people around her, must have thought I was going to be her buddy. And she cried, Fred. She broke down and bawled right there. You know what my teacher told me when she found out what happened? I've never forgotten this. 'We have rules for a reason,' she said. I told her I didn't want to break them. She just shook her head and got on the phone to call my mom. That girl never spoke to me again. She left school not long after that. I don't think it was all my fault. But I think I had something to do with it." Galbraith sat silent for a moment. Stroked the stray hairs of his spade-shaped beard into place.

"And that's why you work for the American Gestapo," Fred said. "Because you broke a rule when you were six and feel bad about it." Fred shifted under his handcuffs with all the reverence of a high school delinquent bored by his principal's lecture.

"Because the world does not care what we want, Fred. It's a scary world out there. It doesn't care what we want. We have to stay on the right side of wrong if we want anything to turn out well. That's what ICE does." Rain hammered at the roof above like it wanted in.

Galbraith had to raise his voice. "It keeps people where they belong, whether they like it or not.

It's not about judging them, though some of my colleagues do take it there. And I try to keep them where they belong, too. Does that make me a bad person, Fred?" 59

Fred told him, without a moment's thought: "Yes."

* * *

No one had ever told Galbraith he was wrong after he'd finished that story. There was a contradiction there in Fred's response. Galbraith was sure of it.

"You think you're a doctor, sworn to the Hippocratic Oath," Fred said. He turned his handcuff chain about his finger, watching the links catch the light. "But you're not."

Galbraith watched the blood shine pink in Fred's index finger where the chain squeezed it. He could take away that finger if he reached across the table and pulled it taut. He nodded for

Fred to continue, and he did.

"Doctors only have to help people. A doctor treating a patient--she doesn't legitimize a mad shooter by her treating a gunshot wound, or a fire by treating a burn victim." Fred flashed him a lopsided smile, like he was trying to pass off a counterfeit bill. "They're probably doing the opposite, actually."

Galbraith drummed his fingers on the table. This was nothing he had not heard before.

"So your issue is I am legitimizing what happens here. What my colleagues do here." He jerked his thumb southward. To the Quonset huts where the children were chained with shaking mothers, and to the infirmary still pulsing everyday with underserved coronavirus patients whose doctors considered experimental treatments on them like they were tagged cattle and to the schoolhouse where teenagers were taught the rudiments of a language they did not know so that they could be deported to homes they had no memory of. "That's your issue? You think I'm a coward for that?" 60

"No. It's that the doctor's problem is simple and yours is not. You want to be a good person here and so you ask yourself how you do the least harm. But you're certain that you need to be here at all, that someone needs to be here--"

He stopped when Galbraith held a finger up. "So what, in your scholarly opinion, would be the right thing to do?"

"Well." Fred bit his lip, and looked up at him as though to deliver a soliloquy. "You need to ask who you're protecting, and what kind of work it is that you're doing." And that was that.

Fred sat back, very comfortable with himself.

As part of his training, Galbraith had been drilled in conflict de-escalation protocols which he found himself trying, for Fred's good as a future member of society complete with functioning fingers, to hold to. "I protect my fellow Americans. And I protect them from my fellow Americans." Thumb to the absent migrants.

"Your agency is only a little older than I am. There are states I can't rent a car in yet."

"Would I be better off at a more venerable agency, like the FBI or the CIA?" Galbraith took Fred's chin in his hand. "How do you think they'd treat you running your mouth off like this, you socialist pinhead?"

"No." Fred drew back, spread his hands the eight inches his cuffs allowed. "My point is, you work in a context other people have created, not one that has always existed. You have to have the imagination to see outside of that context if you want to do good." 61

"I have seen more here than you can imagine, Fred. And I will not make excuses for the good I've done here because it wasn't done in a perfect world. And look at you! What do you have to show for riding your high horse around, Fred?"

"I have the courage to act like the day was here. To do the right thing. Not the least bad."

The image of Fred with his bolt cutter, in the mud, trying to free a handful of people the federal government would only recapture and imprison rather than deport, came over Galbraith like an angry ghost. No fact, no case, no precedent of extrajudicial violence would bend him from his spot: Galbraith resolved to pry the certainty Fred clung to away if he needed Fred's own bolt cutters.

Galbraith stood. Fred, still chained down, flailed in his seat. Galbraith heard his mouth open and then, mercifully, he said nothing. He left Fred in silence.

The hall outside was drummed on by the rain. No janitor pressed their cart from the supply closet and no counsel snapped at Galbraith as he hurried to Fred's side. A call on the shortwave confirmed it: the camp was unstaffed. But not deserted. Through a window Galbraith could see, out in the dark, past his own grimacing reflection, water rippling at waist level, rising, surging through the doors and hallways of the internment barracks down in the ravine. Hundreds of the interned were stored in there.

Galbraith jingled the keys at Fred and tossed them. Even bound Fred caught them.

"Smallest one, turn clockwise." Fred sputtered but Galbraith ignored him. He was racking his brain, trying to remember where the keys would be. Trying to judge how many locks he would be able to break before the water rose too far. Not enough, he knew. He couldn't stand to wait for

Fred anymore and so he sprinted from the room down toward the barracks. 62

Fred followed him, first at a jog and then at a sprint. Even through the doors that

Galbraith slammed through, out into the crashing rain, toward the barracks drinking deep of the

Hurricane Quinn with hundreds trapped inside. Galbraith had to hand him that.

* * *

ICE's contractors had built the camp beneath a levee. The levee did an acceptable job at holding back the water, even as Quinn poured over Maurepas. What had been neglected was that the ravine was carved out of limestone, the same porous stone which had let Miami drown the year before. ICE's internal inquiries, made after the floodwaters dried, determined the camp's fate was the result of "entirely sympathetic negligence" and recommended distancing from the firm for "a year or two, until the issue is laid to rest."

The staff at the camp had trickled away as Galbraith and Fred had argued. When

Galbraith turned off the recording equipment to ensure no politically inconvenient questions arose, no one had any way of knowing he was there, and no one alerted him as they left. External probes into the conduct of ICE employees were met with notices that everyone, even hourly guards on the payroll of a for-profit prison company, were acting in the national interest of the

United States of America, were in possession of secret information too sensitive to testify on, and subsequently could not be prosecuted.

For Galbraith, this meant three things. One, the door to the infirmary on the hillside above the ravine was ajar, not because anyone had left it that way, but because the foundation the frame was built on was sliding down into the earth. Two, the only person he had to help him evacuate the entire camp and the eight hundred and thiry-seven migrants detained there was

Fred, still technically a prisoner himself. And three, the camp was very much in need of 63 evacuating, for beneath the sounds of thunder came the desperate hopeless cries in two languages from hundreds of mouths as a sinkhole opened up in the limestone beneath the camp. A rescue operation for the damned.

Galbraith slalomed through the water over linoleum askew. He was screaming to Fred, pointing toward the intensive care ward. Keys glinted under the emergency lights.

"Try all of them!" Galbraith thought he screamed it. But he was aware of his words only as a buzz in his chest. He was headed the other way. To the anchor ward.

They had made it a point to snatch up expectant mothers. A protocol from two or three administrations ago had them fast-tracked for deportation. "No more anchor babies," it was said among the camp's officers. "No more."

Lightning bleached the sky, burned itself into his retinas. Had all the circuits failed? Was he wading toward live wires? Had everyone already been cooked through? If he got there, would he even be able to get anyone out? No way to know. Had to keep moving. He felt himself moving so slowly. Everything in the familiar ward made new again, with just a ten degree gradient and water up to his hips. It stank of metal. Something brushed against his thigh. A loose needle or a fish.

In the ward there would be a girl. They had arrested her, Galbraith had been told, with dozens of others fleeing heightening violence far to the south. Her party had crossed the line somewhere in Texas, barefoot and starving, claiming refugee status. The trip to Louisiana had done her ill, for when Galbraith loaded her off the van handcuffed to the gurney she was curled in on herself in the shape of a comma. Galbraith had taken her hand and told her, in the Spanish 64 he had practiced for years, that she would be alright. And she told him she was to have been a mother.

The ward was full. The door Galbraith came in through was at the room's apex so that it was like looking down from the bow of a ship sinking from a hole in its stern. Patients in chains prayed or wailed or tried only to keep their heads above water. Galbraith did not have the keys.

Instead he had a thermos. There was not enough time.

The girl who would not be a mother used all the give in her cuffs to breathe while she still could. Across from her the woman with the chipped nails was screaming for help. No one had seen Galbraith come in.

He went to the woman with the chipped polished nails. He took her cuffed hand and followed it under the water and beat at the chain with his thermos. He beat at it and he beat at it and the woman said nothing and he groaned from somewhere deep inside himself. Like the plates of the earth moving, never to be put back into place. He had put these people here. He had been sure this would be the right place for them.

The links bent or refracted through the water. The thermos took dents. It only took one link, and the both of them straining together.

"Can you move?"

The woman scrambled past him, heaving her face above the water. She braced her legs for each step until she managed to haul herself up through the doorframe and was gone.

The room had listed to a forty-five degree angle. He gave up on walking out. He was a public servant with a duty. 65

He went to the girl. She grabbed at him from underneath the water. He looked for a scalpel. He imagined slicing through the flesh over her hand until it came off like a glove and she could slip out. He could see nothing. The water cushioned her bonds against him. So he held her hand until she could not hold his back.

The building's roof began to collapse as its foundation divided itself between what laid on solid ground and what laid on nothing at all. Walls buckled and rooms sank into the murk.

Louisiana limestone predates the dinosaurs by as great a span of time as the dinosaurs predate aeroplanes. Underground rivers and caves wind like abscesses through its body. In the aftermath of Hurricane Quinn, bodies identified as coming from the ICE Maurepas Detention Facility were discovered as far away as the Florida Keys and the shore of the city of Merida, on the Yucatan

Peninsula, more than two thousand miles to the south. Most were never recovered.

Galbraith swam out, one stroke after another. He closed his eyes to hide them from the dirt. He never told anyone how as he swam blind, head dipping beneath the water, he felt hands reach after him, touched shapes which vanished into the deep. Heard, not the churn of flowing water or even voices or tinnitus static, but nothing at all.

Galbraith hauled himself onto the muddy bank. Near, by the light of the hurricane's eye, he could see Fred. Peeling away from him in ones and twos were perhaps three dozen of the formerly detained. Beneath the water—Galbraith did not want to do the arithmetic. He only sat.

The rain fell down and it fell down and it would not wash him clean.

66

The World-Ender

In the dark of the sub-Quinn restaurant where he'd been working the graveyard shift he finally found time alone with Tonya. "I made pizza," he said. Like it was a magic trick. He pulled it out of the oven, managing a flourish with an oven mitt on. "Like when we opened. But this time it's vegetarian--"

"Adrian," Tonya said. "I'm pregnant."

"Oh." Adrian had spent maybe a week with her as a co-worker the last time the company had rotated him through town, most of it the kind of in-uniform time made bearable by mutually appreciated charms and mutually shared gripes, and vanishingly little of it the kind of out-of- uniform time which ought to result in such an…issue.

He had been happy to see Tonya again after his mother had given him a lift into work from their breakfast rendezvous. He'd let himself daydream about talking over the strangeness of meeting his mother for the first time in years with Tonya, impressing her with his sensitivity, inviting her back to the hotel room the company had put him up in for the night. It was juvenile, and for that he felt at least a little guilty—he didn't want to be one of those kind of people—but he could also get away with it. What harm would it do, after all?

And then Tonya had dropped this on him. The world-ender. Adrian felt his lips make a kind of fallen-over C shape, and he said "Oh" again.

Ronald creaked the office door open, wheeled himself between Adrian and the desk light so his face was overshadowed. "Are you using the company oven again?" 67

"Sure am, Ronald." Adrian put on his best customer service smile, one that signaled to anyone employed under such circumstances that they were not looking forward to talking to whatever shithead was currently demanding their attention. The last time he had been through, it had cracked a smile on Tonya's charming face. This time it only made her scowl and turn on her heel.

"Are you at least going to share some?" Ronald asked.

Adrian reached for the nastiest thing he might say to a supervisor who wasn't technically his boss—he worked for corporate, not local store managers, so there wasn't a ton Ronald could really do to him—and then realized what he actually said. "Yeah. Sure."

He set a paper plate down on Ronald's desk and sank into the spare chair. "You're not having any?" Ronald asked. He elbowed Adrian's ribs. "You poison it or something?"

"No." Adrian didn't laugh at the joke. He stared up into the exposed cross-braces where the office's ceiling tiles were supposed to be. His fingers drummed on the linoleum surface of

Office Max's bottom-barrel desk. The same product installed in every store, everything the same as it was in stores like this all over the country. He had imagined his future like a little forever, a bubble sealed away from his mother and everyone else. Airport to airport, crew to crew. Until he made the choice to settle down. And this monsoon-dark night had washed it all away.

Well, no. He corrected himself. Their conception hadn't exactly been immaculate. He had done as much as Tonya had. And it was only equitable that he share in what they had done. He took a moment to imagine what that equity would look like. Dirty diapers. Disappointing report cards. College tuition. Working—where? Here? What would domestic life with Tonya look like?

Would she even want that, would he be exiled from his child, would it be right if he was— 68

"Kid?"

Adrian started. He expected Ronald to chuckle. Instead, the older man took off his glasses and offered him a smile. Adrian smiled back. Ronald looked better without the glasses.

They had made him look like a mole.

"You need to get some rest?" Ronald checked his watch. "If the coffee's not working and you want to get some rest in a booth, I can look--"

"No. Thanks." Adrian tried to force himself to smile. All that happened was his lips flattened themselves together. "You ever--you ever feel like the future is wide, wide open? Could be good, could be bad, but it's definitely going to be different and you have no real idea how much of each or what shape any of it will have?"

"Yeah." Ronald crossed his arms, folded one leg over the other. Tried to look the wise older man, and not doing a bad job of it. "That's happened to me once or twice, bud. Best advice

I can give?"

Adrian waited.

"Give up now."

* * *

It wasn't the Coriolis effect that made Adrian circulate through the restaurant after Ronald finished with him, but it pleased him to imagine it was. He could make a game of it, changing trash can after trash can, moving from one to another with as few steps and as little time wasted as possible. Really for all the time he had to burn it would probably be better to waste as much of both as he could, but the work kept his mind occupied. Let Adrian imagine himself as just a 69 mechanism on its course. No one blamed a hurricane for its movement, likewise the product of atmospheric moisture and the turn of the Earth on its axis. It had no agency. He envied it.

Ronald had caught on to what they were talking about pretty quick. Said he'd noticed how distracted she'd been the last week, how she'd gone out after closing for drinks but stuck to

Coke. Ronald had worked with her a long time, apparently. Trained her when she was just a kid.

Seen her handle upsets and breakups with cool detachment. Ronald had told Adrian, very quickly into their conversation, that she was not fishing for sympathy or a handout to go get the procedure.

The trash bags hung over his shoulders like booty from a distant war. When they got too cumbersome he brought them out to the trash cart, to be run out when the weather calmed. The trash cart was right there by the office, where Ronald kept himself busy. Ronald was scrupulous about not making eye contact when he heard Adrian coming. Ronald probably did dislike him.

Figured him for Mister Jet-Set, here to correct the tiny details of how Ronald's line cooks plated entrees and, apparently, his waitress's egregious lack of children born out of wedlock. Probably had hoped, or at least never wanted, to see Adrian again after he'd left town the first time. Then the reports came in on Quinn, and Adrian had been asked to come back to help keep the ship sailing smoothly.

So when Ronald said "there is no winning this," Adrian tried to consider his source. But

Ronald had kept at it—told him how he'd had a good degree from a good school, got a good job, then one day the whole industry blew away across the Pacific. And here Ronald was. Being hella depressing. 70

It reminded Adrian of his mother, poring compulsively over the most depressing news she could find. Turning doomscrolling into an academic career. Trying, supposedly, to understand the world around her and where it was going as it was ravaged by climate change. A worthy enough cause, sure. But all the work seemed to do was make her miserable until she could barely run her life, she was so paralyzed with dread and anxiety. There was an appeal to it,

Adrian knew—it felt like it was virtuous, it felt like she was doing something useful. But it was stupid. He had barely managed to convince her to leave town rather than try and risk death to advance her research that tiny bit more. Even now it frustrated him how stuck she was, how much of her misery was self-inflicted. If she could just change her perspective that tiny bit more, she might be able to live a normal life. But she didn’t. And she probably wouldn’t without help.

Help which he doubted she would ever get.

The last trashcan was waiting for him up in the dining room, by the front counter. Right by Tonya. She had her back turned to him as he came up. He scuffed his shoe on the tile so that he couldn't sneak up on her. She knelt, rummaged around in one of the cupboards under the counter. Quinn was expected to break sometime past dawn, and management's hope was that

FEMA people, eager for somewhere to eat besides Waffle House, would blow in not long after, thankful for the restaurant’s well-inland position and serviceable fare. (The House was notorious among restaurant industry stalwarts and emergency management personnel alike for never closing, even in the most dire emergencies, with FEMA management reportedly using the increasing constriction of a House's menu to gauge how hard-hit disaster areas were down to particular zip-codes.) Adrian blanched when the thought crossed his mind that Tonya might already be earmarking FEMA tips for some piece of baby gear or another. 71

Tonya did not look at him. She was elbow-deep in that cupboard, tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth to focus. Adrian tried to catch her eye. Totally missed. Didn't look away from her as he slid the trash can out from under the counter, the bag's cellophane sides shaking as he knotted it shut and replaced it. Tonya turned to look at him.

"What?"

"Nothing." He said it too fast. "Just trying to get the trash changed."

"Do you need help?" She sprung up to her full height.

No. He mouthed it, shook his head. Didn't even look at her. By the time he plopped the bag in the trash cart Adrian didn't know what to do with himself. The store felt intolerably close and uncomfortably small. So he threw the back door open and resolved to run the trash out to the dumpster. He wasn’t made of sugar. He wasn’t going to melt.

He knew what a bad dad was like. He had one. Deidre had raised him herself: grad student babysitters, Latchkey in the library with the other faculty brats while she, he understood now, basically started developing her present condition. Until he got older, and nutted up to ask where his dad was. When she wouldn't tell he'd tracked him down through class directories and

Facebook and found his home and threatened to go meet his dad the next time he got into it with

Deidre. He had been 17 then. He was 25 now. He could still see the veins standing out on her temples like tree roots. She'd screamed at him, told him the best thing she had ever done was to keep him out. And he'd screamed back and he'd left.

Quinn was screaming outside, too. Adrian was impressed with the dark. Streetlights were unreliable and at least one of the store's bulbs had been blown out. Quinn smothered the stars out of the sky. Walking out into the rain was like getting sprayed down with a hose. The cart 72 wouldn't stay steady now, and it would get even worse trying to run it back in once the trash was dumped and it was free of ballast. Adrian kept going. He'd done dumber things.

His father was living out of another university town, fucking every undergrad who batted her eyelashes at an older man in tweed. Tried to offer Adrian a beer when he showed up on his doorstep. Said he'd tried to contact him all these years. Almost made Adrian believe it.

The dumpster lid did not want to open. Adrian went in through the side, hurled bag after bag into its cavernous interior. In the little concrete pen they had the dumpster set in so customers wouldn't notice it, it occurred to Adrian he could very easily be crushed to death if the hurricane picked it up and threw it. Like a bug getting smacked with a newspaper. But it wouldn't be that bad. It would be awful, obviously. But he wouldn't need to live into the future.

His dad had been lying to him, of course. He had not cared about Adrian. His mother had been right: Adrian was better off without him. Without one of the people who had made him. He didn't want that for his kid. He didn't want Tonya to have to say that in ten years. But he didn't know what to do, how to try and live. It was Ronald's insistence on giving up or his dad's choice to get out. If there was another option, Adrian didn't discover it by the time the last of the trash was sagging into the dumpster. He dragged the cart behind him like he was a donkey and ran hard for the back door, slamming through before Quinn could rain one more drop on his head.

Tonya and Ronald stood at the office, conferring. Ronald poked his head out and Tonya stared at him. He must look like a soaked cat.

"Trash is out," Adrian said. He made sure not to drip onto Tonya as he passed her by.

* * * 73

The first oozing protozoan life grew in the sea. Generation by generation they assembled their primitive little metabolic toolkits, bequeathed to their multifarious descendants across the face of the Earth, under the basic assumption that time flowed in one direction only, without stops or reversals.

The sea had upended itself and the sky was a rumpled void. As Deidre peered up at it from between the window boards, she allowed herself to fancy it was the very substance of the universe itself. That the hourglass was emptied, that time would freeze, the sea and the air would forget their momentary incompatibility and dissolve together.

One moment before collapse, Deidre might have said. All become one.

She tried to imagine it, to throw her life's work of understanding the lives and deaths of societies into the dustbin. She could not. There would be no single, definitive collapse. Empires always have long half-lives; a nuclear-armed fossil fuel-powered empire would have the longest half-life yet. Longer, she imagined, she thought she knew, than the lifespans remaining to be lived of everything on the dying Earth. That coming dying would be long and hideous.

She thought of her son Adrian, not far away at all, whom she had lied to. There was too much work to be done here in Maurepas to abandon it. Too many people who need to be interviewed, too many agents of the state to observe, too many correlations between climate damage, economic catastrophe, and general immiseration which needed to be documented.

Hurricane Quinn was not the first climate disaster. It would not be the last. Her son's trust was less important than working to understand how they would all unfold.

He would find out, of course. After that... Would she be any worse than how she had been before they had had breakfast this morning, for the first time in five years? 74

The 7/11 sign in the lot blinked on. Deidre had a vision of the sea sluicing through the streets, pregnant with monsters. Whatever peace she had felt a moment ago was gone. She felt the need to move. The ICE camp nearby had been her destination before the road became impassable. How the state treated a category of people it considered disposable labor would be a bellwether for the future.

She stepped outside, door jingling to a demon tune in the wind. Her coat caught like a parachute, puffed out, wind whistling through the bullet hole its previous owner had caught. On the balls of her feet she wheeled--she was reminded again of the sea, tipped up onto the world-- and struggled back to the store. She was only three steps out but she felt as though she were divided from safety by a distance impossible and inhospitable.

Her fingers found the handle and she threw her whole weight into yanking it open. But the wind caught at her, wrenched at her coat like a rough child grabbing a kitten by the scruff of her neck. She pulled herself in--but her coat whipped off her, and suddenly she was cold shivering soaked.

The coat was already gone, a plaything of Quinn's. She had bought it years ago, as she prepared for the move to Maurepas, and now it was gone. She was alive. Her project could continue. It was not an ending, not really. There was no such thing. The future went on indefinitely, veering out of sight, snared up among ghosts and krakens. But nothing ever really ended.

* * *

Adrian threw together two floats, again. The first time, when he first met Tonya, he juggled the chilled glasses and scooped the gelatinous ice cream behind his back. This time the 75 work was punctuated by Quinn slamming at the dumpster out back or something. Spoons sloshed the soda around and spilled the fizz on his apron. He set the glasses before Tonya with a sugary stain across his chest.

Tonya looked to the glass, and then to him. Her stare was colder than his frost-tipped fingers.

"Peace offering," he said. "Since I dropped the ball earlier. I'm sorry."

She shook her head. He wanted to be anywhere other than here. He clenched his toes in his shoes to remind himself where he was. And that there was no getting away.

"May I sit?" He nodded to the barstool beside her.

She said nothing. He sat. They watched the rain pour over the boarded windows.

"This is horseshit."

"I'm sorry I know this is my fault--"

"No." She rounded on him and his words died on his tongue. "I'm pregnant. Do you get that? You know what that means, right?" She held a hand up, her nails chipped like pottery shards. "Might as well have the stigmata on here. The rest of my life I'm the poor trashy slut.

Couldn't help but fall on a dick until kids fell out. Everyone respectable in the Food Lion gets to look at me, the circles under my eyes and think that's what I deserve, get to question how I do my hair or my nails 'cause oh I must be so poor, always hitting up baby daddy for child support or begging the state for welfare, and then if my kid acts like a normal goddamn child and horseplays all of it reflects on how bad a mom I am while his classmates grow up to become war criminals and shark-skin suit lawyers and that's everything going according to plan, and then in 76 twenty years some robot will interview me and I'll get to cry about how I don't know why he thought to try and steal a drink of pure filtered water when they know the cyber-commandos would vaporize them."

He laughed. God help him, he laughed.

"And I won't just be crying for them—though I will, I will, God knows I'll love my kid—

I'll be crying for me! For how all of this was supposed to happen, for how this was the only way the story could ever go. For how if I didn't blow it with you I would have blown it with someone else. That's how it's supposed to go for people like me."

There were tears in her eyes, tracing paths down her face. Her lip quivered but it did not break. Not in front of him.

"Go on. Tell me to keep 'em, tell me to get rid of 'em, tell me you'll send money and keep in touch. Go back to your own story where you can do whatever you want, be whoever you want.

What the fuck ever."

Adrian stirred the ice cream about the glass. It was hard to look at her. He was implicated. It was his fault. He had never transgressed so, so deeply against someone else's life.

Never. He had no map of this territory.

"I—I never wanted to live someone else's story, either. I wanted to travel, to be happy in my shitty job, to be a man apart. To vanish with my secrets. I always figured there was nothing, no future solid enough to try and pin everything down." The hurricane without: something worse within. It felt like he had been right to doubt. 77

"My mom was always anxious about the future. Drove—drives—me crazy. Probably could use medication for it. And I never saw the point. Too much out of our control, too much that can crush us like we're bugs. But I don't—I don't want to cede that ground. I don't want to live my life knowing I had a kid out there with a woman I liked and I ran away because..."

"Because you were bitchmade."

"Yeah." He laughed. "Because I was bitchmade, because I had my own idea of what my life should have looked like."

She looked at him, lip twisted. "Don't make promises you won't keep."

"No, seriously. I could die on the way back to my hotel this morning. There's nothing to be certain of out there." He waved his hand at Quinn. "But I want to make sure I do the right thing here." He touched his sternum. "I don't want you to be trapped, or pitied. I don't think this is romantic or anything. But we can be..." He could barely stand to look at her, to let her see him like this, and with a sudden conviction he knew that was why he must let her. "We can be allegiant, together. Do you want to try?"

She looked him up and down. Taking the measure of him.

"We can have our own story," he said, and he hoped it was true. "Against the dry rot and the market force and the death of the world. I want to be happy, I want our kid to be happy, I would like to make you happy. Together, if together does it, and apart if we can see apart's the only way. But I would like to try."

And that was it. He had said it all. Unspooled what had knotted up his insides in the hours since he had been told. There was fear at what Tonya might say, of course, but most of all he was 78 unburdened. The past could not be changed and the future was a wild animal. But he had himself, and he could try. His designs might be ruined, his labors thrown back at him, the stars under which he had been born were late and strange indeed. And yet.

Tonya was silent, somewhere far away beside him. She looked at him sidelong, with what he knew must be imagined fondness. And then--

"What is that?"

Something had slapped against the window and blotted out the streetlights. It flapped urgently in the beating wind. A staccato click, a zipper or a button, chipped at the plate glass.

Adrian ventured out for the second time that night. The garment's slick and windblown surface resisted being moved, billowing out like a sail, but for one small portion. He felt fear knot up in his gut again, more real than the storm crowning Maurepas or the woman to whom he owed an impossible debt.

Inside, under the fluorescent light, fear and anger mingled in his heart. This was his mother's milsurp jacket, bullet hole and all, in which she had sworn to him she would leave

Maurepas just this morning. She could not be far.

* * *

At last Deidre had made a break for it. The night was dragging on and the storm was exhausting itself. The ocean no longer lapped at the windows; the sky was all that tried to drown

Maurepas now. She had not lied to her son to spend all night in a 7/11. There was valuable data out there, lost with no one to record it. No time to lose. 79

Rain whipped across her windshield as she drove, reckoning her way to the ICE camp over submerged roads. It struck her that there must be a pattern to the rainfall, just as there must be patterns to imperial decline and metropolitan decay.

From the subjectivity of an ant--or the subject of hegemonic power, to make a distinction without much difference—the violence must seem stochastic, like rainfall. Zoom out and it resolved into something comprehensible: violent means reserved for the frontier returned to the corn. Praetorians skewered would-be emperors. Drone strikes evaporated protesters. Dux, or army generals, carved out little fiefdoms with loyal hired men, built walls of wood and stone, declined the summons of their so-called masters at Rome or Ravenna. Their children became dukes and warred for a thousand years over shit huts and cattle. Good God, what would happen when the hundreds of American bases over the globe seared their sovereignty into history with nuclear fire?

Deidre's fingers trembled at the wheel. When had she last slept?

The day was coming, or was that another vehicle? She just needed to get to the camp. She had an observation post all picked out. She could record what happened while she slept. She only needed to get there.

Up ahead the light turned red but she was going forty in a thirty anyway and she would probably hydroplane so why not gun it in a few years the lights would be a joke if they were still powered at all I hope my son doesn't live to see it I hope he's spared the worst of it I hope he lives a better life than I do what and what is that noise? Why is everything so bright?

Why is everything so cold?

* * * 80

She was in a FEMA camp medical tent. It was a nasty morning, concrete-colored and too sticky-hot to breathe. Rain fell lazily, patting at the tent tarps.

Adrian had called her and called her until his phone died. Then he had went looking for her. Ronald had dismissed him without much of a struggle. Sitting at her bedside, watching doctors and orderlies try to heal the feverish and heavy metal-poisoned, he found himself wondering why he bothered.

She had lied to him. Told him she'd go to safety and done the exact opposite. For what?

To drive herself into a fit of anxiety and depression under the guise of doing research?

It was hard not to conclude that his mother was essentially deranged. That she had no capacity, anymore, to play a positive role in his future, whatever it may be. He could walk away right now, as she lay there sedated and gauzy, and never see her again. And she would deserve it.

They had hit her while she ran a red light north of town. The accident had apparently delayed response to some emergency at the ICE camp Adrian couldn't imagine fitting into his brain at the present moment. The other vehicle, a state-owned Ford truck, should by all accounts have killed her.

That would be nice, wouldn't it?

He shuddered. A terrible thing to think of his own mother, but he had thought it.

His world was stranger to him than it had been only a few hours ago. So much up in the air, so much unclear. One less person in it would mean one less variable. One less potential disappointment. 81

Deidre stirred. He could have walked away but instead he rose her bedside. She was crumpled in on herself, a scaffold of tubes and bandages the only thing keeping her together. If he had never seen her in utmost command of herself, it would not hurt to see her as he did now.

If he did not love her as his mother, it would not sting so when she hurt him.

"Mom."

But every hurt contained its obverse. And if every new day did not fulfill its promise, the promising might be enough to tide him over. The world moved in tectonic moans and monsoon howls, though not to any bright lodestar. That was alright. It was a journey he could commit to himself. With Tonya and their child, with Maurepas shrugging off Quinn, with his mother before him: the day was renewed, and with it always was the chance to try at life complete and happy.

Deidre's eyes, swollen shut, strained to open. He took her hand. She tried to speak.

"I brought your jacket," he told her. "We can talk more soon. We will need to talk more soon. But. You're going to be a grandmother."

Understanding flickered across her face. And then doubt. Her voice came out a raw whisper: "That's good, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think it is."

82

A Wing is a Common Object Given an Impossible Task

It was the day after Quinn died out that Mr. Tyson's generator died, and with it his climate control. Tyson lived in a five-over-one built in the last decade, modest in a gentrified sort of way but entirely unsuited to Maurepas' climate with its close corridors and for-light-only unopenable windows. Mr. Tyson, who in his thirty-year career as a public school science teacher measured the local weather as a hobby and had scrawled the words "wet bulb death" on classroom whiteboards with a special glee to startle us out of our generations of daydreams, did not like his chances.

At first, kerchief at his forehead like a bandanna, Mr. Tyson knocked at his neighbors' doors and borrowed away scarce fuel. Then his AC unit died. The roof-mounted units were easily metered for individual tenants and quite efficient, which is to say the opposite of robust, and Mr. Tyson was not the only tenant trying to keep it cool. But he felt a special shame, flipping through his address book, uncertain which of us to call. Sons had followed fathers, daughters after mothers, filing into his classroom beneath Mr. Tyson’s watchful eye. How he had modified his lesson plans—or not—was not an uncommon dinner table topic among families whose children had reached high school age and entered his class. He had known us all, as we had handed in reams of finished quizzes and clapped desks together over the generations. But he had known us at a remove: grocery store checkout aisle conversation, “I’m glad you kids tied the knot, congratulations on the new arrival,” that kind of thing. Those of us who’d had the privilege of hosting him for a meal or a party noticed how he played with his food, how he kept to the corner. He was our teacher, and then our former teacher. Not our guest. Not a refugee in one of our homes. Certainly not. 83

Mr. Tyson's heart condition, mild hypertension that it was, put him in a category of people especially vulnerable to, ah, wet bulb death. People forget that parts of the country were basically uninhabitable for a long time, that the only reason Orlando exists is that the Army

Engineers made it their institutional mission to drain Central Florida of its malarial wastes so that breathing in what would eventually become Disney World didn't feel like sucking air through a straw while five soggy wool blankets laid on your chest. Maurepas wasn't quite so bad—people have lived here since some Portuguese jerk-off thought the Fountain of Youth was here in the

Mississippi's vast delta—but everyone's mom or dad or their mom or dad came from somewhere else, no earlier than the Depression, and the TVA's schemes to electrify the rural south and cool the sweat-drenched backs of our collective grandpappies with glorious air conditioning.

Now that's got a decadent ring to it, right? Consider northerly Chicago. In antediluvian

(literally) 1995, a heatwave of only 85 degrees killed 700 people. Why? Go back to Mr. Tyson's class! He loved to remind us this: when we are not in the throes of adolescent concupiscence, we sweat because the evaporation of that water into the air wicks away the body's heat. When it's so muggy out the sweat has no place to go—say, post-Hurricane, when the air has spent the last twenty hours screaming at you and it really just wants to be very still for a while—you will cook to death in your own body heat. You can measure this at home, actually: wet a cloth and fold it over your thermometer bulb. If the mercury pulses over 95 degrees, you are at risk of wet bulb death. It’s that simple.

Mr. Tyson knew all of this—he taught this to us, to our moms and paps, to our kids—but he had a hard time willing himself to pick up the phone. First of all, his position as a teacher left him accustomed to being the one asked for help, not asking for it. And he was, for similar student-and-teacher-discipline-as-a-necessary-but-unpleasant-part-of-pedagogy reasons, 84 uncertain where he stood vis-a-vis some of the names in that address book. But the greatest mental hurdle he needed to surmount was acknowledging that this was a problem in need of outside redress. That he could not fix his HVAC unit himself (no chance) or call his rental company (headquartered in New Orleans, dealing with Quinn's damages there with a skeleton crew, running maintenance calls and no local staff within a three-hour radius, even if they could get past the National Guard cordon) or barring that, not call upon his family (a widower as long as he had been a teacher, childless, fond of joking when students intruded good-naturedly upon his life, that he was married to the skeletal anatomy model in the closet; his people scattered across the shores of the Great Lakes, visited annually between school years and otherwise never thought of). It was hard for him to believe, really, that he could count on us and that we would welcome him.

And then the charming gentrifying five-over-one's foundations started to crumble, and then they roared, and then settled with a certain degree of ruinous satisfaction, their load-bearing days all done, into a freshly formed sinkhole, along with much of the building on top.

After that Mr. Tyson had pretty much no options but sleep in an apartment with new, wide-open, dangerously-open, yawning three stories in the direction of his (now ex-) neighbor's apartment, or to try and find a place that wasn't actively trying to kill him in at least two separate ways.

He picked up the phone pretty damn quick, he told us later.

* * *

When we talk about it now, as it settles into memory, it's amazing. No one can remember which home came after which, but everyone agrees on his comportment. 85

He would shuffle in through the front door, promising not to overstay his welcome--and he didn't, he spent a not insignificant chunk of every day lining up a new place to stay, roving for weeks over Maurepas county—dropping his hastily made bags into a den or spare room which had been vacated perhaps by one of his former students, flung by carefully nurtured ambition and passion to study at Emory or Texas A&M or OSU or Stanford or more distant points from their safe berth in Maurepas with such speed and accuracy it was as though Mr. Tyson had spent class time constructing a trebuchet with which to do so. In recognition of this aching glory, which had deprived their generous parents with whom he now roomed, and in no small part also due to his homelessness plight and accompanying anxieties, he would sit sniffing in his room checking over his luggage. This was, we noted, his universal pattern, whether on his third or thirtieth day of his sojourn, until supper was called. For no matter how meager the fare offered up was, and how many years Mr. Tyson had lectured on chemistry, with the household kitchen furnishing his examples, after his wife's passing he had never discovered the art of cooking for one's self and had lived instead on deli sandwiches and TV dinners, and so consequently shot toward dinner after homecooked dinner like a pointer after a buck.

This we find, on comparing of data, to be a universal phenomena, and as Mr. Tyson taught our children—taught many of us—we do all together reach consensus: the old son-of-a- bitch could eat.

Not that he only ate, mind you. When Kyle Sutter slipped out of the house to call his evacuated boyfriend and hear his voice without anyone knowing (he knew) and nearly walked into a river that Quinn had brought with him: Mr. Tyson was the first one on the scene. Kyle was, at best, an ambivalent student, eager to sneak onto his phone when class lectures touched on climatology, but fascinated by anything to do with dinosaurs. Mr. Tyson, after he had ascertained 86 that Kyle was unharmed by the river's having snuck up on him, couldn't resist the teachable moment. As Sutter reports it:

"There was a time when Louisiana was underwater."

"I know. Texas through the Northwest Territories, washing against the Rockies to the

West and Appalachia to the East." Kyle paused a moment, as he tells it. Embarrassed. "Full of really cool prehistoric reptiles."

"Mosasaurs. Aquatic komodo dragons big enough to eat a T-rex." Tyson gestured at the new waterway, maybe thirty feet across. Drowned grass waving in the shallows, water smelling not of salt but mud and minerals. "This might be big enough to fit a crocodile."

"Still pretty cool." Kyle plopped down on the new bank to air out his soaked shoes.

Tyson, the next day's lodging secure and in no hurry, sat beside him. They sat together, and then out of Kyle fell the question: "So where did everything go?"

"Pardon?"

"The dinosaurs, the T-rexes, the brachiosaurs. Even the wooly mammoths and giant sharks. Where did they all go? It's still the same planet, isn't it? Why is everything so small, why is it just coyotes and cockroaches left?"

"Well. Coyotes and cockroaches, or similar critters, have been around a long time. It's the tops of the trophic pyramid you're thinking of."

"Yes." Kyle nodded, impatient. "Where did they all go?" 87

"Well." Mr. Tyson would often lace his fingers together as he chewed over a tough question in class. Trying to work the totality of the solution into sequential language, like explaining a tapestry to a blind man one thread at a time. "Nothing exists in isolation."

"It takes an ecosystem."

"Right. Or a person, a community, a language, a discipline, whatever. When we look at the fossil record, we see T-rexes don't exist on their lonesome. They feed on hadrosaurs, big ducks the size of school buses—"

"I know."

"Sorry. And they live with triceratops, mutually protecting each other with sharp senses and sharper horns respectively. And they—herbivores—live off plants sustained by a hot, moist climate, which is possible because geography is different, because there is more liquid water and less ice, so less albedo; the Earth is more forested so it sits at a stable spot in a different equilibrium whereas now it's tilting wildly and no one knows where it will end up. No factor is totalizing in its influence but everything exerts a subtle pull."

"But that doesn't happen anymore? Because people f-muck it all up."

"People can muck it all up. They don't have to. And I think—I hope—we will learn we cannot escape this equilibrium either."

"Because of things like our new crick here. Or hurricanes lettered 'Q' in July." (His other teachers can confirm—Kyle was not always the most energetic student, but that should not be confused for being slow.) 88

"Well, yes. All of Louisiana is sinking—you know if they updated the maps Louisiana wouldn't be that boot anymore? It's missing a huge chunk—a boot rotting away. My home isn't the only one that will be gone, post-Quinn. In a year or two we won't recognize the community."

"It'll go the way of the dinosaurs." Kyle was thinking, as he said this, of bright hadrosaurs, feathers like boas, parted forever by ancient calamities.

They sat in silence. The crick had that stunned quality of post-disaster forests emptied of everything that walked and crawled and flew.

And then a heron landed or crashed into the water. It unfolded its stalky legs and peered into the new creek, already stocked with fishes. Kyle tells it that he and Tyson both were thinking of the same things, the feathers preened patiently over hundreds of millions of years, the beak that snapped and showed traces of fierce teeth still extant in certain Australian flightless birds, at the seasoned intelligence bright and alien behind its eyes.

"How did they do it? Grow their wings."

"Time. Necessity. The repurposing of the old into something new." Mr. Tyson stopped, scratched at his shaved head. "And they pressed at it together, generation by generation. The X-

Men stuff with miracle mutations—that's fantasy, not the genuine article."

"Well, they're movies."

"Sure. But change like morphing claws into wings, it takes more than one velociraptor with a bright idea. It's a generational process, a population-wide process. Outside the scope of any one lifetime. And often very sloppy. For every positive change, everything that works, there 89 must be a thousand things tried that didn’t. The cost of a heron’s needle-beak there must be— hundreds of his ancestors with blunt beaks, couldn’t catch food. Couldn’t make it."

In a flash of the sunlight the heron speared a wriggling fingerling. Kyle felt a twinge of sympathy for the tiny fish. One moment exploring down a new waterway; the next, down a deep gullet.

"Of course," Mr. Tyson continued, "most change is like that."

* * *

While numbers vary, FEMA, the Louisiana National Guard and the Maurepas County

Sheriff's department all agree Quinn flattened, flooded, soaked, or carried out to sea something like 5,000 homes. For a town of—at last count—106,919, that meant about one in every 5 or 6 people had an excellent view of the Post-Quinn sky without the obstruction of a roof over their collective heads.

Someone, somewhere had decided this would not be another Katrina, by which they were understood to mean "no looting." The National Guard was out in force in the days after—they brought one of those pillbug-looking troop carriers, can you believe that? Like they were going to storm Normandy, not look after folks in need. FEMA wasn't much better—the spot they had wanted to stow us in near an ICE camp had been washed away, prisoners and all, and they'd drastically underestimated how many they'd be called on to house. It didn't take long before they were turning people away. Some of us would have slept in the parks if we could, but even in those trying times the sheriff's boys weren't fond of that. "It's the law," they told us, over loudspeakers while they launched tear gas at our sorry lean-tos. 90

Now theoretically the law was one our side. Point of living in the US of A, right? And we heard from our man Comeau of the relief coming and we remembered that in the fall. But in that summer that broiled us inside our own bodies? That law had few answers for our problems. Mr.

Tyson was not the only one falling back—as in trust falls—on the good nature of his community.

Something like 20,000 of our neighbors, of us, found themselves in need of a place to sleep post-

Quinn.

By the time the sun had set that first day, Maurepas was back to work. Not with commerce, employees and employers, but friends and neighbors. We set out spare beds, cooked comfort food, ran from house to house looking to reunite families, re-shingled roofs, patched leaks and holes, drained living rooms, caught one-day-wild pets, pushed ill-piloted cars out of the swamp, pointed each other to spots we could find cell coverage, broke out the AC units, gave out our treasured Wi-Fi passwords. It was—let's all be honest here—wacky, the feeling in our homes and hearts all over Maurepas. To have sat underneath the same storm with these neighbors, these strangers, and come through it alive and ask for a hand, and give a hand, and see the glad industry around you. You felt slap-happy and then someone would point you to work needing doing and you'd do it, and it was good. Suddenly the house you'd walked by every day had a piece of you in it, you knew the family, you knew their pets. And they knew you.

And then the days went by, and those melted into weeks. When we had the means to fix a problem, we did. But there were a lot of things we didn't have the means for. We couldn't whip new homes into place, for example, not on the scale we needed. The National Guard was slow in dredging out our roads and keeping vitals coming into town, and FEMA officials got into screaming matches with concerned sons and daughters worried about their older parents in the heat and humidity. FEMA suits just would not believe the people under their care could cook to 91 death in their own skin. So they just left Grandpa to pant like a winded dog in the middle of a steaming campsite. Proverbial Grandpa. Tossed him a bottle of water now and again. Sheriff's men got real loose with the law. There was a boy and a girl—kids a few years out of high school-

-flatlined with fentanyl in their systems. Parents said first responders should have saved their lives: sheriff's deputies are required to have naloxone on them for just that situation, which we do see more than we'd like to admit down here. Deputies shrugged: it was too late, they told us, and what's one less ex-baseballer turned junkie around town?

Power company sent us our bills for the month. Rate jacked up for "calamity services."

You can believe it—law of the market. Same reason groceries got more expensive, gas got harder to find. Momentary indignities in our shared lives. But chafing.

Housing was the worst of it. Kyle Sutter, hoping for a way to bring his boyfriend back home after they confirmed his family's trailer was sheltering fishes out in the Gulf somewhere, poked around the 5-over-1 units Mr. Tyson's landlord had erected. The ones that weren't sinking into the earth. You know what he found? He sat there and watched the windows, knocked on some doors, and he found that five buildings downtown, more than 200 units—a third of them were empty. When we had neighbors sleeping out of cars and scraping for cheese sandwiches, sons-of-bitches inland were content to just own space in our town. Not even to shelter people, when people needed sheltering. As part of a "diverse investment portfolio."

Kyle and his friends got to looking around. Word got out and we hashed it out over carefully-ventilated potlucks: even if there weren't enough empty units to house everyone in danger during the day, there were too many to just ignore. Property law would be a hell of a hurdle to overcome, but it would be a weight off our backs. A soaking, sticky, suffocating weight. 92

And then some people asked Representative Comeau what he could do, when he came down for a visit, and he said it couldn't be done: property laws are a sacred touchstone of our community and our republic, etc. He pointed to the public housing tracts that would bear his name, as though construction done in 5 years' time would keep the elements out now.

It got even worse when we got started on the Currency Handling and Next-Gen Economy

Act he let through committee. What would happen to the dollar bills in our pockets? What would happen to our bank accounts? We had teachers, we were taught—they gave us writing and reading, science and arithmetic. But no one taught us how to parse a law like this, and no one taught us how to parse a man like Comeau.

Mr. Tyson was sleeping in the Sutters' spare room for a third time when Kyle asked him what the point of it all was. Kyle was thinking of his secret boyfriend (Mr. Tyson knew) but Mr.

Tyson humored him as though Kyle meant the housing market.

"Prices are very useful. A lot of information is packed into those numbers that a lot of people—buyers and sellers both—can make use of very quickly. Even price changes in a gallon of milk can tell you a lot about farms, logistics, plastic, labor, the health of your local supermarket—without needing to really think about it at all."

Kyle's head lolled on the couch. He thought he might stay there forever. "But everyone needs a home, and only one. Why do people who live states away get to keep the ones they don't need while people worry about dying in the streets?"

"If I were one of those people who owned unused space here, I would offer it up for sale.

And who wanted it and could buy it would get it. And if no one can buy it, then they should have planned ahead better." Mr. Tyson, who had been without a home for weeks by then, had little in 93 the way of retirement savings and was years off from claiming his pension, was unsure how much longer he could rely on the good graces of his community. The school year's start had been delayed. He had not started amending lesson plans. He could not find the time or energy to focus, even though his days were strangely slack and empty. He was toying with the idea of getting in touch with his family up north. We would hear him, every now and then, practicing what he’d say through a shut door. He was never happy with it. Could never find the right words, could never put away his pride.

"But that's not right," Kyle said. He sat up suddenly, imagining Mr. Tyson and Maurepas and the distant authority as a ravenous pack of dinosaurs, preying needlessly on each other.

"That's not fair."

"Maybe not." Mr. Tyson shrugged. He was considering leaving Maurepas. Certainly sleeping in his car would be better than relying forever on charity. A homeless teacher? Stranger things had happened. Those who had given less had been rewarded with more; those who had taken much often found their gains sanctified by the law. And for those without there is no floor, no bottom. Instead we are tasked with their safety, and given not the means to ensure it, and this too the law codifies.

Mr. Tyson left not long after that conversation for no place in particular. We saw him in convenience stores and gas stations where he lived out of his soggy Aztek. We offered him space and he refused. Claimed he had somewhere else to be.

And we found him in his car down a blind alley just last night. His car battery had died and the August heat crept into his no longer air-conditioned car. He cooked to death in his sleep, body unable to radiate its heat. When we broke the doors open the heat and steam washed over 94 us. It was like opening a broiler, sneaking a peak at the meat left in. There was no one there, who found Mr. Tyson like that, who kept their lunch.

* * *

"Survival of the fittest." A law as sharp as iron. Dinosaurs too slow and sluggish to survive the coming ice age. Old men who can't plan for a bit of inclement weather. They perish.

That is the just way of things.

Only dwell a moment on what "fittest" might mean. Suddenly it is a law as soft and yielding as loam. We can look out into our backyards and backwoods and see nature not red in tooth and claw but braided and garlanded about itself, vegetation and insects and rodents and birds and reptiles and fungus eager for mutual dependence. For mutual growth.

We bring this up while Mr. Tyson rests not to deny him his rise on Judgement Day—for every man and woman in this room can testify to his final destination—but to describe the world we hope he will rise up into.

Maurepas, we know Hurricane Quinn was no ending but only the eye. Calamity will wash down calamity until the whole sea has been dumped on our heads. And we say now it will wash away only that which is impure. It will scour us of our meanness and petty pride. Iron laws and market forces meant to make foolish our compassion will be done away with. We will look around us when the deluge recedes and see not beggars and scoundrels but brothers and sisters.

Impossible, we might scoff to ourselves. Impossible while the means of compassion are kept far from where they are needed. Impossible while distant giants conspire to strip us our value and our dignity. While towns like ours, people like ours are left to rot. Brothers and sisters, 95 a wing is an object no less ordinary than the hand in front of your face given to an impossible task—and glorious in its victory.

The president in her bulletproof SUV is touring our town, as we mourn one of our finest.

Together we will march to her. We will win no single victory. Our community will not become sovereign. When we see her, the masses of us, we will only be at the start of a long journey to an uncertain destination which will reshape us at every turn. But we will weather it together, and someday, our backs to the abyss, we may find ourselves gifted flight.

96

High Water Mark

Lynn was pretty sure she knew how to start a riot. She had to coil up underneath her character’s skin. She had to hold tight to the present and force it into union with the future. She had to nail the worst day of Perth Fletcher’s life, and to do it she had to say this:

"The Currency Handling and Next Generation Economy Act is an opportunity, not an excuse." She looked from one member of the Gulf Coast Reserve Board to the next. Trying to peel their blank faces away, to break them down into only bone and sinew and not immovable obstacles. "This will be Ground Zero for climate change and sea level rise. Introducing a carbon sequestration-backed currency will not only re-infuse wealth into the region, it will give us a fighting chance—"

"We can't." One of the Reserve members cut her off. "Our job is to protect the value of the Gulf's economy, not invent value out of thin air." Off-set he was a blandsome character actor, but here he was a stuffed suit, a scarecrow set to guard capital. He eyed her with the dumb satisfaction of a heron with a fat frog.

Flint, meet steel. Whatever force had put this man in his way, Lynn knew how to check it. This had been what she had always wanted, she was sure of it. There was a hissing noise from somewhere up above but she could ignore it. This ass needed to be put in his place, and if she couldn't do it then she knew exactly what would.

"Your job," she said, and she rose from her seat at the stand, just like she had seen in the old archival footage (she was nailing this), "is to protect the value of the work and homes of the people who actually live here. Something the dollar has failed to do, and which you have, in your 97 hands right now, the ability to do. So do it, or don't, but if another Quinn comes along and we are swept out to sea you had better believe we will drag you all down to hell with us!"

The Board stared at her, eyes dull and unseeing. Behind her something snapped and a stage light smashed into the space between their stand and hers.

The director called "cut!" and then the scene was over. Lynn was out of her part. From off-stage the director locked eyes with her and beckoned. She stepped away from her mark and through the gathering crew. Someone had a fire extinguisher. She passed over the burning light, vaguely aware her polyester historical costume might light up like a match.

"Do you have kids?" the director asked, not unkindly.

Lynn shook her heads. Probably not in the cards. On the set she was fairly confident she could reach people. On a date? Not so much.

"I do. My son—he's at the age where he likes to argue. About everything. Dinner. TV.

Sports. Politics. And he's smart. So smart, he listens to all these talking heads on the internet— but he's so young, he doesn't always understand what they're saying. And I can tell he's just repeating something. Without grasping it." He pointed to the stand on-set, voice quiet and gentle as he shifted modes from proud parent to director. "That's what you sound like up there."

"Okay." It was nice of him to be so gentle like that, to mind the crew and how they might look on her, better-paid and less competent than any of them. She could hold herself at a distance from this sting. Use it, maybe, for this role or the next. 98

"Especially for a historical drama, where people can find the footage themselves—you've got to sell it. Your speech here is going to touch off a riot some of our audience remembers seeing live."

"So I need to do it with more anger. Righteous anger."

"Sure." The director shrugged. “Give the crew a few hours to make sure nothing will crack anyone’s highly-insured skull open and have a chat with Fletcher, will you?”

Over toward the back of the studio she was waiting, austere and somehow ridiculous with her cane.

Lynn was irritated. She ignored it. No use playing the prima donna. She nodded to the director, planned her approach. Snatched up an unguarded tablet, found what she was looking for, and threaded her way toward Fletcher. She would not feel fear about pushing one of

Fletcher’s buttons. Nor was Lynn worried about disappointing Perth—she had not known this woman, old enough to be her grandmother, before she had signed onto this production—and the consultant had no more power here than a key grip. Less, really: the director noticed when the grip hadn’t done their job, when the lighting was off, when the mics weren’t where they needed to be. No one would notice if Fletcher wandered off and never came back.

So her uselessness rendered Perth remote, as did her years, and the disinterest she had shown to Lynn, and the scorn she cast about the studio. That she was one of the historical personalities whose contributions to history the production was dramatizing ought to have made her magnetic, not repulsive: other figures (and there was a long list, for the production was to be a flagship series on a premium streaming service) had wandered the studio backlot, signing old campaign hats, unwinding war stories from legal and environmental campaigns to pliable interns. 99

Hovering politely at the edge of conversations, barely troubling harried assistants for their coffee orders. No. Of this happy tribe of history-makers, the woman Lynn had been hired to play had been exiled and—for her sins, or for anger at having been named a sinner, Lynn did not know— she carried herself like an exile.

"What was on your mind up on the stand that day?" Lynn held the tablet close to herself, like a fan too shy to ask for an autograph.

"I wanted to grab a sub from the deli around the corner." Perth’s attention returned to her bagel, clearly in want of cream cheese.

"You didn't have any idea about your... responsibility?" Perth’s eyes flashed danger.

Lynn pressed. "That charged language might have consequences?"

"Power has consequences.” Perth regarded her food. “The Reserve Board you are speaking to in that scene has the power to instate and regulate fiat currency from Baton Rouge to

Tallahassee. The precedent they set would determine whether the Gulf would have a viable future or would serve as an appendix to the stock portfolios of day traders. I wanted to remind the Reserve that how they used their power would be scrutinized.” She took a nibbling bite, chewed, swallowed. “Did I seem angry, when you considered the evidence?”

Lynn showed Perth the old headline on the tablet: “QUINN & FLETCHER: A ONE-

TWO PUNCH?”

A smile ghosted Perth’s lips and was gone with a breath. “I was told not to let a good crisis go to waste.”

Lynn’s eyebrows shot up. “And so you became the crisis?” 100

Fletcher chewed, thoughtfully. When she swallowed and looked at Lynn, Lynn made sure she saw nothing but a canny and receptive audience.

"We can talk about that," the consultant said. "And please, call me Perth."

* * *

There was a time—Lynn isn't eager to admit how long ago, but before her career got off the ground—when Lynn would have come for Perth from the opposite direction. Put fun slogans on poster board and marched around her house or her business, tried to bring some sort of moral sanction against her for her callous incitement.

Those days were behind her.

Lynn had known when it was time for her to go. The certainty which had made activism feel like it was worth doing, some trick of youth or collegiate info-bubble or even just some news story that hit her in the wrong way, it just evaporated. She had turned to one of her fellows and asked, "what are we doing here?"

"The right thing," he had said. Zealous.

So sitting across from Perth, her eyes nestled in the wrinkles of her face like a vulture's,

Lynn felt vindicated. To this ruin that way led.

"The first thing you need to understand is that what you're saying is going to get people killed."

They sat in a coffeehouse, nestled into midtown Maurepas not far from the studio. The sun, unseasonably cool and diffuse, projected passers-by onto their table, over Lynn's scone. File 101 photos of the dead lay on the table between them: young men and women who would never grow old, a middle-aged man whose heart condition would catch up with him sooner than he thought.

Someone's grandma who must have wanted a safer world for her grandkids. Lynn tried to work her head or her heart into that space. Couldn’t.

"But that wasn't your plan."

"No."

"What was?"

"There wasn't one." Perth tried to eye Lynn dangerously. Instead she only looked silly.

"As I testified to in the court of public opinion, and very nearly in a court of law. I thought you had done your research?"

"You must have known the Reserve would reject the carbon coin plan if all they had to go on was your testimony. That they would install a fiat currency built to enrich currency speculators." Lynn was sounding Perth out, watching for any change to come over her. "You don't want the story about the worst day of your life to make you a villain, I need to understand what happened."

Perth set her coffee down, folded her hands in her lap. Lynn did the same. She did not fear this cranky vulture-woman, her head shaved bald in the prideful fashion of the septuagenarians. She would hold her own.

"You get up there to say what needed said to the people who needed to hear it. You are not there to ‘become the crisis’ or whatever pithy asinine little thing you want to throw at me.

The crisis is real, in the moment you are living in. It is a crisis of the climate and a crisis of 102 economics, mutually reinforcing each other to immiserate people at home and the world over, not because there was nothing to be done to redress their misery but because doing anything about their abject misery would require sacrifice on the behalf of the very people you are testifying before and the powers they represent. The issue is not, has never been, and never will be that there is not enough. The issue is that some do not want to share.”

Lynn crossed and uncrossed her legs. Bit at her lip.

Perth lowered her gaze to her drink. “I apologize. This has always been something I… you have been passionate about. What happens afterward may be your fault, but in the scene all you want is to make the Board squirm in their seats. Not to get anyone killed.”

Lynn flipped through her phone. “Uh-huh. So how did this play into what was going through your head, back in the day?”

She presented to Perth screencaps of e-mailers blasted to mailing lists across the Deep

South. Each member of the Reserve Board had their own WANTED poster, charging them with

CRIMES AGAINST THE PEOPLE. Lurid details were supplied: how one was cornering the housing market in the wake of Hurricane Quinn, paying bargain basement prices for homes literally underwater and leaving families with nothing. How another had been chief architect and beneficiary of Louisiana’s fracking boom, leaving mysterious sinkholes to appear all across the region. How they were war criminals, carpetbaggers, fat cats, swamp monsters, big money against the little guy. At the bottom of every one was the watermark: Fletcher Advocacy Group,

LLC.

“Nothing you would have written there is a lie,” Perth said. “And they did all deserve to squirm. At the least.” 103

“So when I get up on that stand,” Lynn said slowly, “am I anticipating that things will work out? That I’ll get what I want, at least?”

“You understand, too, that the people you’re talking to are in place generally to oppose you. Not out of malice. Out of inertia.”

“Like a ball bearing?”

Perth shrugged. Basically.

“But they’re people. They eat their Ex Vitra beef—"

Perth made a face. Vat-grown was still too suspect for many of her generation.

“Their cattle beef, whatever, they FaceTime their kids, they want to make rent or mortgage. They’re not physics problems.”

An airship bobbed into dock with its cradle at the top of a skyscraper outside the I window. Perth did not shy from the razor glint of its silicon length. “Here’s a physics problem for you: everything wants to live forever. How?”

Lynn showed her empty hands.

Stars and storms and men and laws, Perth said. All of them would burden the future forever, if they could. Brute nature breaks against itself, but men are more subtle, pressing themselves imperfectly into their descendants. And laws might cling the most tenaciously to life.

Properly designed, an institution like the Reserve Board could reproduce itself forever, generation after generation of inheritors lifted into high office and given dominion—but only so long as their will furthered the dominion of the office itself. 104

“Arguing with them, to listen to me, to change as we wanted them to, would be like arguing a cancer cell out of eating your body. You can’t do it. If you could, it would not be a cancer.”

“But you got what you wanted.”

Perth’s look dared her to go on. So she did.

“Three days after the riots and sieges ended, the Reserve adopted the carbon coin as a currency that could be exchanged for dollars, dispensed for sequestering carbon. Overnight, regional oil operations cashed out because it was cheaper than pulling it out of the ground.

Carbon-negative work became a growth industry. The region has never been wealthier—New

Orleans commands as much attention as New York. I can’t go a day without seeing a newsflash about China or some post-petrostate wanting in. That dragon climate change is dead.”

“So I got what I wanted. I traded lives for results like a lifeguard choosing who to save from a ruined ship?”

“You understand how the character might be played that way.”

“You—I don’t understand what happened.” Lynn watched Perth’s hands shake. Must have been the coffee. “You want to play this character as some Trumpist firestarter, stirring everyone up over nothing, go ahead. But I don’t know how what happened happened. I don’t know how a testimony against economic legislation—something important, you must understand, but nothing attention-getting, nothing people would normally want to fight in the streets over—turned into all this. I went in thinking these thoughts and by the time I left that room protests started. That night, the fighting. I still don’t understand. People died. And I don’t understand.” 105

Lynn watched the old woman, pinched small and thin by decades of exile from polite society. However she had scraped by, her eyes had been on the ground she trudged over—and never on what had happened that day. She was a marvel. Never could Lynn imagine herself so weighed down by anything. Instead she would wiggle under the skin of her roles and shed them again, to slither on her way. This one would be tight, but she was determined to fit.

After she thanked Perth and left, she headed back toward the studio. Through the noontime window, she saw Perth’s silhouette, and her own face reflected over hers. Lynn took it as a good sign.

* * *

Lynn felt the future as a track she moved along. To go off-course or to stop moving was death: a little death, maybe, visited only on her career, but death nonetheless. Like a shark.

But Perth spoke of the future as a weight. As something unseen but ever-present, like the moon, exerting its tidal pull. Not a series of choices to be made, but the context in which those choices were made.

Not wholly distinct from how Lynn had thought of things, back when she had been an activist. More a shift in emphasis. In one hand, the fish; in the other, the ocean.

* * *

"I'm going to guess--nothing."

"Whatever was going on in her that day, she's not happy about how it played out." Her next words came slowly: "I wouldn't call that nothing, but..." 106

The director nodded. They watched the crew put the finishing touches on the reassembled lighting rig, sweep debris off the set. One of the Reserve Board was showing her family around the studio, swatting her grandkid's hand away from the prop table.

"So what if you played it like this," the director said. "What if you just get up there and you're angry. You want this riot? Like you're hoping for Viking hat dudes of your own to storm

Baton Rouge, and you think they deserve whatever might come to them."

"I don't think so. Fletcher could have been any one of those policymakers. She could have stayed in DC after the Quinn relief bill and the CHANGE Act passed--she was on the team that made them happen. She didn't but if she would have stuck with Representative what's-his- name..."

"Putting aside how people often hate anyone who reminds us too much of ourselves but has done better--think of our audience."

By which Lynn knew he meant his royalties.

"You're this hometown kid gone off to DC, back now--but meaner than you ever were, willing to send a few suckers to go fistfight cops if it gets you what you want. Everyone sitting in their silicon gable'd house that their pop never dreamed they'd live in will know how much they owe you for making the world they live in--and they'll hate you for it, if you play it right."

Unfortunately, Lynn followed him. While she'd grown up the daughter of IT workers in the Research Triangle, it hadn't taken her long to pick up on the pride folks further south had in their newfound prosperity. While reminding them of its less-than-pleasant origins wouldn't send anyone reaching for their Grandpap's moth-eaten Confederate flag--who needed that, in these days of the Atlantan Renaissance, when every destiny flowed together in one great common 107 course as bright as the Mississippi was murky?--but it certainly would make them squirm in their seats.

"I don't just want to play a bit-part heel, though. I'm not a corny wrestler blowing into town to swindle for nickels."

"Sure. But you're also not a good cop just here to give us the whole truth. Whether you want to think of yourself as an artist or just someone here to collect royalties on a telegenic face, your first job is to connect with your audience. It's okay if it's the 'dentist approaching an open mouth with a pair of pliers' kind of connection."

The only way Lynn had ever shown a light down the dry well of her own interiority, as long as she could remember, was when she was playing a role. It was an art she had worked to develop since her first middle school play almost two decades ago, and she was fairly certain, at this point, that she was better at her craft than a malpracticing dentist was at his.

At the same time, she needed a job more than she needed artistic fulfillment.

"So what do you think happened?" Lynn asked. "What is the production's take on the whole mess?"

In response, the director gave a magnificent shrug. "I've been playing with it differently every episode. The whole period is very messy. You might get a single answer out of the showrunner, but she's been battering down Florida lawmakers' offices trying to get permission to film in what's left of Miami. For my part--well, Fletcher got what she wanted, didn't she? She was a capable enough operator. Could have used the internet to whip up a frenzy and get people killed the way rival hedge funds would get people to sink their life savings into buying worthless 108 stock until it suddenly wasn't worthless and the whole market threw a fit. Basically the same thing."

A PA in a visor slipped up to the director, almost afraid to be seen. The director obliged him, signed some paperwork on his clipboard without looking at him.

"Here's what we're going to do," the director said. "You're still chewing this over, and we can move up the schedule and shoot a different scene tonight. Take that time off and we can run a few takes tomorrow. Work for you?"

Lynn nodded. She turned to go. "You said you argue with your kid about this kind of stuff?"

"Sure."

"So what do you believe?"

The director laughed.

Outside and on the bus home in the declining sun Lynn enjoyed the cool. This time last year she had stuck to her seat. The Indian Air Force had been dumping tons of strange particles into the air, reflecting heat and light back into space until temperatures dropped. Just a bit--just a degree Celsius--but everywhere, all around the world. Lynn turned her lines over in her head.

Could that project, too, be traced to what Perth had said on that stand? Or was it the brainchild of some fellow traveler, someone also scrambling up the same hill toward some livable future?

There must have been many who shared Fletcher's outlook if Lynn played one small part in an ensemble series about them. 109

What would that be like, Lynn wondered. To feel the tide rising under you. To know that you would soon wash over the world.

And in answer she felt a lightness, a tingling at the base of her spine.

She got off early, on one of Maurepas' central boulevards, not far from where a Catholic basilica's redbrick spires stabbed into the sky. Holograms, too gawdy for that sacred space, flickered in and out of the night air, buzzing out of tune with mosquito swarms.

Kids in the park mocked the rioting ghosts Lynn came to study. Three days after Perth's testimony, in that fall that followed the summer of Hurricane Quinn, wet bulb deaths, and mass drowning, rioters or demonstrators or some heady mix had tried to march on Maurepas' civic center. The connection between climate change, their present misery, and the Reserve’s resistance to Fletcher’s plan had burned clear in their collective consciousness. Police had driven them back, and the people had taken sanctuary in the basilica, doors shut against the tear gas and rubber bullets. For three hours that night the police had surrounded the church, demanded they go home rather than press on.

And then, past midnight, the doors were opened again.

One woman kicked a mid-flight smoke grenade back at the police lines. A man hefted a cross like a battering ram, arms smashing back two shields at one. They sung hymns out of tune from hundreds of copies of an old prayer book they'd found in the pews, and used the singing to keep track of each other through the smoke, to time their pushes at the police shield wall.

Lynn shook her head at them, the tide-buoyed and the reckless. The argument had been over currencies, over the machinations of a regional bank. And somehow Perth had turned it into a multi-state timber fire, and burned her life down with it. What a wonder, what a waste. 110

Not that Perth had been the only firestarter around that time. The history books, written before Lynn had been born, were full of titans and demons, throwing back the sea, tricking the ice into staying in place. All of it was so remote to Lynn, those records cut in stone.

She found the figure who kicked back the smoke grenade. Saw, in her face, recorded by another rioter and then converted into 3-D decades later, frustration and anger and joy and fear all at once.

You could go to any city in America, Lynn thought. Anywhere in the world. You could find people who felt this, who did this, against the injustice they saw that frustrated them every day of their lives. And always always we must think: this time, it will be different.

* * *

When Lynn had gone to university, when she'd started to learn a little history past what they'd taught her in high school, she had felt crushed. Every page of American history might as well have been written in blood and tears.

It made activism a crushing weight. She felt she could do nothing but kick and kick at the horrors of the past, at the awesome weight of them, until she broke her foot. Metaphorically. To do anything less was a dereliction of moral duty.

How did the people in that basilica find the strength to stand together like that? She stared up at the ceiling above her bedroom that night wondering. She could not imagine being that sure of herself. What would it take to pit her against solid ranks of state police, against hallowed capitols stuffed with money-men and their pet lawmakers, against the very stuff and sinew of the world? There must be an answer. All over the world people had fought, always, and no small number of them to the death. 111

In the dark she smiled a grim little smile. Talk about the end of the road, there, dying in a pool of your own blood on some ramshackle barricade. Talk about having no future.

The answer made her start from her bed like a rogue spider. That was what did it, that was what compelled them all. That was what did it for them, Perth on her stand, her fellows in the basilica. The future. Not as something hurtled toward headfirst. But something that could be fought for. Fought for and won.

* * *

The next morning, action:

"The Currency Handling and Next Generation Economy Act is an opportunity, not an excuse."

That could be true. The Board across from her would be loath to admit it. But everyone she was thinking of, everyone she hoped to represent when she quit DC to return here, would back her. Something would have to give.

"This will be Ground Zero for climate change and sea level rise."

In America, maybe. But the tides were swamping every periphery already, on every continent, there would be no stopping it but it could be redirected. The present order of the world would render nine tenths of its people surplus in its hunger for eternity. But that order could be changed.

"Introducing a carbon sequestration-backed currency will not only re-infuse wealth back into the region, it will give us a fighting chance--"

"We can't." 112

Lynn lifted her gaze to the Board member.

"Our job is to protect the value of the Gulf's economy, not invent value out of thin air."

Of course they would say that. They were not being petty. They stood before her as suzerains over the region for global capital, that million-tentacled idiot-squid. Perth had understood their thinking, how they, like capital, were grasping, acquisitive. They believed in no high-water marks because potential for growth was infinite, always. Like cancer. They were unwilling to see this line of thinking to its end. But Perth had been willing.

"Your job," she said, "is to protect the value of the work and homes of the people who actually live here. Something the dollar has failed to do, and which you have, in your hands, right now, the ability to correct."

Career suicide, saying that right now. Didn't matter. It was the truth, pointed to by every vacant strip mall, every foreclosed home, every person in Maurepas and across the world you could see, you could see it in their eyes, they were barely there, their soul barely tethered to their body, someplace far away, yanked this way and that at the whim of that idiot-squid. She was here and she could say it and she had to, because the squid couldn't throttle complicity out of the laws of physics, because its snares had shaped the world such that living in it required killing it.

Their opposition to her was not personal: it was only an issue of their paychecks. To embody the laws that were killing the world must be an easy thing. To challenge those laws must be much more difficult. Lynn could feel the need to reach out, to yank them from their comfortable places, to very personally shake them. Not from anger. From necessity.

The unfairness of it, and the necessity, and the desperation, all of it pressed on her. Perth must have felt strangled. History was not a dead letter. History did not have its eyes on her from 113 somewhere far away. She could feel its weight here, on this staid set. It was suffocating. It was immanent.

"So do it, or don't, but if another Quinn sweeps us all out to sea you had better believe we will drag you all down to hell with us!"

She sagged in her seat. She felt as empty as a paper cup with the bottom ripped out.

Across the set the Reserve Board stared at her. They looked from one to the other, laughed.

"I can’t remember my line—I’m sorry!”

"Cut!"

"I can see why she made people riot," one of the Reserve told Lynn. "That was intense."

Lynn nodded her thanks, distant, scanning the crew for Perth. She found her after the director called a five.

"No one rioted because of you, did they? They rioted with you."

"I suppose that's one way to put it."

They said nothing. And then: "Thank you again for your time yesterday."

"Hmmm." And then: "So what will you do after all of this finishes?"

Lynn opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. The answer she might have given ten minutes ago would be incomplete now. She had felt that rising tide that Perth and her sympathizers had, its echo or its reverb. Everything was strange, fresh and renewed. As she had acted out on that set so could she challenge the world without. She had discovered the capacity to 114 struggle as Perth Fletcher had struggled, her heart's passions, however mocked by the world, spilling over it in turn, finding always strangers to draw together as certainly as if they shared heart's blood.

It was a long time before Lynn answered.

115

Heroic Age

On the road west out of Maurepas Ellen spotted a man wading through a field of ankle- deep bluestem grass, fingers flicking water out of a pouch and sprinkling it over the earth in blessing. He wore a chestnut brown tunic and a cowl hung off his shoulders like a pennant.

Around the friar’s arm he wore a simple band of black and white. Ellen had seen it on imams in

Egypt and long-bearded rabbis in the Bronx and pujari priests leading Hindu devotionals on temples floating through what had been Bangladesh. It was the sign of some interfaith agreement to try and bless the nameless dead, the legions of victims of the last half-century’s natural and manmade disasters under the header “climate change,” unmarked graves pocking the face of the

Earth. There was a nobility to it, Ellen had always thought. But it had always struck her as insufficient, somehow. The friar had probably not even found anyone’s graves in particular: read of some party gone missing in Hurricane Quinn or Katrina or Wyandot or whatever, and tramped out here, and decided: “this must be the spot.” Kind of like “fuck it, I’m done.” Or maybe “I don’t know what else to do.” Not especially respectful, Ellen thought.

She passed him by without a word. It was a big field. He would be at it for a long time.

When Ellen found the camp again she almost didn't recognize it. The dogwood sapling had twisted up toward the sky and its boughs had crowded out the magnolias that had circled the tents. The tents were crumpled, the occupant's things taken or lost. The fire burned in roughly the right spot, generation after generation of charcoal building up in the pit. Even the refuse was piled up where she remembered it. The one remaining lean-to might have been of the same sun- faded tarp. 116

A thin-soled shoe withdrew underneath the tarp. Ellen held her hands up, called out.

Silence. She peered beneath the lean-to. The afternoon sun shone an emerald light on the man through the tarp. He locked his phone, playing some new period piece drama about the slogging

2020s, and stared at her.

"Are you a cop?"

"Do I look like a cop?" Ellen snorted. She had cuttlefish chromatophores tattooed in a halo around her collarbone; she had albatross tattoos climbing up her calf, one bird for each time she had gone so far east or west she had found herself right back where she had started. She had a lot of albatross tattoos.

"I'm just looking for an old man," she said. "Have you seen--"

"You sound a lot like a cop," the transient said, and turned back to his program.

Along the other side of the tree the lean-to was laid against she flipped through the contents of her bag. She called out to him, waited until the audio of riots and calamity stopped.

"Could you use a new pair of shoes?"

With one hand she held them up. With the other, in her bag, she felt her switchblade.

The man took one from her, eyed the foreign lettering of the tag.

"Are they my size?"

"Try it on," Ellen said. "I try not to go anywhere without an extra pair. Worst comes to worst, you can swap 'em to someone else." 117

The man grunted. Ellen peered at him, tried to discern if he was scruffy or just old. If he was someone she had known. Stranger things had happened.

"I'll take 'em," he announced. Not used to having something others wanted, his chest puffed out and he sat down with lordly grace across from her, wriggling his filthy toes into place.

"So you're looking for an old man? Not hard to find around here."

"I think he'll be somewhere between the Lusca, if it's still around, and the Wolf

Sinkhole."

The man nodded, rubbed at his bearded chin. "And what do you want him for?"

"To talk."

He guffawed. "Sound a lot like a cop, there, girlie."

Ellen shrugged. "He's been on my mind a long time."

The man set his phone aside. “Tell me about that. I don’t get many come through here.

Always good to hear a new story.”

Ellen could have argued with him. She wanted badly to get where she was going, to find this man and put to rest her questions after these long years. What would one more story hurt?

* * *

The stars hadn't burnt out yet when Elle's father jostled her awake.

Been an accident, she heard him say. Link is gone.

She jolted up, surprised herself. An ember burst sparks in Cal's dying fire. "What happened to the dog?" 118

"There was a coyote," her father said. He was a quiet voice and silhouette to her right.

The others in the camp—the fatherless children, the idle fathers, Cal in his tent left all to himself—slept or stirred by themselves.

Elle pulled herself out of her oversized sleeping bag. Her bare feet pressed into the spongy earth. Her father’s job was gone, her mother was gone, their home was gone. It was not fair that the dog should go too. "I want to see."

The outline of her father did not move. He was stolid, immovable. The center of little

Elle’s world when everything else had fallen away. The gentle tender sun about whom she orbited, following him into places unknown. "You don't want to see this."

"Show me."

The coyote had been ruined. What had been its neck and breast was a snarl of torn red flesh. It lay on its side, its one eye shiny and round like a black marble that Elle and the other children might like to play with.

Here father shone his phone light on the coyote's wet mouth. Foam speckled its black lips.

"You see there?"

"Yes."

"Nothing's dumb enough to pick a fight with Link. Unless it's out of its mind.

Hydrophobic. Rabid."

Elle nodded, eying the bright magnolia tree Link had been chained to. She could picture him straining against the iron, furred shoulders she'd laid her head on taut, hairs on end. She was 119 surprised it was her father that had woken her up, that the barking and yowling hadn't done it long before.

"And there's too much blood to just be his." The light fluttered over the coyote again. Elle would not let herself look away. "So I'm going to need to find Link."

"I'm coming too."

The words fell out of her mouth and lay there between them. Her father shifted onto the balls of his feet, lowered himself to her level.

"What makes you think you want that?"

Elle stuck her chin out, hoping to slide by without an answer. She did not want to be left behind, as though she had no place in the world that Cal and her father and the other adults of their band inhabited. She could love that dog in the morning and hope it threw itself under a train by sundown. Hate for him could twist up in her unexpected and vicious as a rattler. But some conviction from she knew not where had come up in her, too, and it said: it would be wrong not to be there when that dog died. She wanted to be a grown-up, equal to the life that had been set out before her. To stay in camp while her father did the hard work would be unbecoming.

In the pre-dawn dark her father nodded to her and beckoned her toward camp, toward the others. To his waiting shotgun.

* * *

She and her father had gone like ghosts through the forest belted around Maurepas, grim and silent. She had cradled the shotgun in her arms, barely able to hold it. It had been almost as 120 tall as she was. Cal had looked from her father to her when he requested it and cocked an eyebrow. But he had given it to her regardless.

She had marveled at her father, how he could divine Link’s presence or absence from spots of dirt, from how twigs lay snapped from trunks, from how fur or cottonwood lay on the wet earth. In their years of wandering he had gone out of their camps with a loaded gun and returned, Link bounding behind him licking his bloodied muzzle, with a deer or a rabbit or in dangerous days perhaps a sheep or pig needing to be cleaned and butchered and salted to dry into jerky. These had been her tasks. Never before had she come hunting. It was a surprise that she had been allowed to come. In the dawn light the forest shone untouched and blue. Around every turn a wolf could be waiting, or a cop or a monster, or it could be Link and their ugly work would need to be done. Anything was possible.

* * *

Ellen shook her head in the middle of the telling. Somewhere a blue heron squawked or chortled, calling out for a mate with whom to make chirpy pink babies. Strange to hear a water bird, typically ghost-silent as it stalked through ponds and creeks, rather than see it.

The transient looked at her, waiting for her to continue. Wind gusted tree leaves and the tarp of his meager tent.

Maybe anything had been possible, once. But here they were.

* * *

Elle and her father had seen the Lusca from far off, forecastle rising above the trees as the ground sloped toward the sea. 121

"Is that the city? Is that Maurepas?"

"No." He had laughed. Softly, good-natured. "No, that's an oil tanker."

Elle had lived in a house before she lived everywhere. She thought of it once in a while, usually when she thought of her mother. The doorways had been big—she had been very little when the sheriffs had come to take it away from them—but her parents had always seemed at home in those spaces, and so Elle had always felt she would scale to it, too.

The Lusca, by contrast, must have been built by giants.

It lay in the mud of an old riverbank, listing to one side like an abandoned toy. Elle found herself scanning the horizon to see if anything was coming to reclaim it.

Her father pointed to four-pointed tracks pressed into the mud. "Link's here."

"What happened here?"

Her father's hand crept up the gun barrel. "These used to move oil around. This one— probably moving from Port Arthur somewhere north, when suddenly carbon-coin bullshit made it so no one on board could get paid. No use for these anymore, no profit keeping it running.

Would have scuttled it too."

"C-coin—like what happened with your rig?" That was always what they had called it.

Your father’s taking the rig on a run for the next week, but he’ll be home soon. Those aren’t cough drops, sweetheart, your father uses them to make sure he gets the rig where it needs to go on time. Come on out, Elle, come see what your daddy sees when he’s getting the rig from A to

B. 122

Her father worked his tongue over his teeth. To this day Ellen did the same thing when she found a person or subject contemptuous. "Exactly, sweetheart. Exactly."

Elle had wanted to beam. She was proud to understand the world. But her father was not beaming, and so she set her mouth in a hard line as he did.

Around the Lusca Link's tracks wandered. A hole was ripped into its side. Her father shone his phone light within, illuminating muddy tracks and spots of blood.

Fear knotted in Elle's gut at the inky dark inside. But her father stepped across the jagged edge into the ship's belly, and so she followed. In the endless black, as she tracked her father's beam across canted floors and through skewed bulkheads, she was glad of the gun. As the fear made her feel light and giddy, its weight was ballast.

"Why was it called the Lusca?" she whispered, clambering down a hallway so long it swallowed the light.

"It was a big sea monster, I think. Like the Leviathan of Genesis, or the kraken."

Her father's voice was quiet, low and patient. He picked his way through the ship, his boots leaving prints but no sound. She marveled at how such a big man could leave so little trace.

Link's tracks made a wild snarling path through the ship's belly. Her father laid his weight against a bulkhead, peering at something on the seal.

"Come on, dog. Let's get this over with."

But he never finished. With the screech of rusting metal come to life he was gone, light spinning into the abyss, her father's body colliding with invisible obstacles.

"Dad?!" 123

Blind. She was blind and she found the bulkhead frame and peered into the space he had fallen into. The old Lusca had given way beneath him, sending him suddenly downhill through a kitchen, weight propelling him into and off of huge industrial sinks and rusted kettles. His light had fallen onto him, painted him in pale halogen and violent red.

For a dozen heartbeats Elle hovered there, pulse bursting in her neck. And then her father groaned and shifted his weight.

Elle slung the gun over her shoulder, scooted on her butt through the lopsided kitchen toward the light. Her father had landed in the crook of the room and so she braced herself between the floor and the wall. She shone the light in her father's eyes and watched to see if his pupils dilated, held his wrist until she felt his pulse firm beneath his flesh.

"Dad," she whispered. "Dad, we have to move."

His legs worked beneath him. He hissed. She shone the light on his jeans and found his knee was wet, sticky to the touch. He wouldn't be able to support his own weight.

She took his arm and threw it over her shoulder. With her knees she tried to lift him. He did not budge.

"Dad." She slapped his face, first gentle, then hard as she could. His eyes rolled underneath his lids, whites showing like a horse.

Again she rose. Her father did not move.

The ship groaned under its own weight, all around them, only heightening the sense that she was inside something behemoth and hungry. But then a growl came, echoing through the 124 empty corridors and down into the derelict kitchen. Elle had heard that growl before. Link, rabies-bit and afraid, was coming for them.

She could hear his claws clicking across the metal floors. Her light shone spastic from one spot to another. She unslung the gun and felt it in her hand. With a trembling finger she thumbed the safety off.

She bent her knees, crouching over her father's prone body. She had never fired a gun before--shells were too expensive, work too rare--but she knew there would be smoke and powder and backlash. She would not let her father be wounded further.

"Come on," she whispered. The growling was everywhere, bouncing off of everything, resonating into her. "Just come here, Link."

And then the growling stopped. Elle almost missed shining the light on Link, his nose wet and calling to mind its chill and his gentle breath.

Ellen would learn later that rabies would take perhaps a week in an animal of Link's size to incubate. Though it would do its inevitable work and drive Link mad, in that moment he was only the dog she had known and wandered the world with, hurt and scared and doomed but eager for her warm hand.

He padded toward her and she shot him. Light exploded out of the barrel and made the kitchen strange, and there was space enough between the muzzle flash and the dark for Elle’s synapses to call to mind this:

The year prior she and her father, before they had met Cal and his little troupe of drifters, had found passage aboard a cargo airship, drifting south along the Carolina coast. Fidgety in the 125 ship's dark underbelly, her father had given her his phone, and before long she had worked out how to watch the ship from space, to map their travels and hold them in her head.

The ship piloted its way around the edge of a hurricane, circling out to sea while the storm beat at Myrtle Beach. And Elle had been upset, rerouting her imagined travelogue from the coast and over the heaving ocean. On a whim, she looked from pictures of the beach before the storm to the ruin it had left behind.

"Look at that," she had said to Link, showing him one beach and then the other.

Lifeguard towers, restaurants crammed into shacks, picturesque gardens spilling over hotel roofs and parking lots full of tourist's cars, all gone or transfigured as though levelled by a bomb.

Moats washed through the streets full of filthy water and bobbing things she could not identify.

"Like nothing was ever there."

Link had been muzzled to keep him quiet, but he stared up at her and nuzzled her lap, belly to her. And she scratched him until his leg kicked at the air, clawing at nothing, until she found the spot behind his ear he could not reach and he fell still, his muscles jellied with glee.

* * *

“Hello?”

Elle swung around. Light poured down the corridor and its source was a man, an old man, eyes dark and yawning wide. He stopped, made no move.

“You can put that down.” 126

Elle hadn’t realized she was still holding the gun. It drooped from her shoulder until it pointed at the floor. The man stared at her, and his light dripped from her to the tangle of limbs and brawn at her feet.

“He okay?”

“He fell.” She directed his attention to what was left of Link. “That’s...”

Carefully, hands where she could see them, the man picked his way toward the spot, hidden from him by the room’s geometry. He saw, and stopped, and nodded. As though the dog’s death were only an issue of where the gunfire had been directed. He turned to Elle, pointed to her father. “You need help?”

She had been a gangly thing back then, limbs scrawny and orthogonal, assembled out of geometry classes she would never take. Her attitude, too, had turned at right angles, uncertain and gawky. She had taken the stranger’s help. Followed his lead with her father out of the Lusca, toward his cabin through the woods.

For years, even before she started calling herself Ellen, Elle wondered what would have happened, had she not come with her father, had she been refused. Link would have ripped her father’s throat out. Link would have died but bitten him, and he would have been stricken himself. He would have killed Link and the stranger both. He would have hid from the stranger and tried to drag himself out and died alone in the dark of the Lusca. Throw the chips down, scatter the stars across the table: there were as many ways it all might have happened.

* * * 127

The transient, by way of interruption, cleared his throat and spat out a wad of phlegm.

“No use thinking about any of that.”

Ellen eyed the spot where phlegm bubbled on the dirt. “Easy to say. Not to think.”

He leaned forward and pinched the denim over her calf. His fingernails were filthy. Ellen did not swat him away. “Feel that?” he asked. “You’re here. Not someone else, not your dog or your pop or whoever. All there is to know.”

The words have a ring of truth about them. Ellen had heard the same basic sentiment elsewhere in her travels when she’d talked about these memories. And always she has the same reply to them: “No.”

The transient can only shrug his shoulders. Suit yourself.

* * *

Before she wandered out here, she met her father in a Maurepas diner near the port. Over the coffee and oatmeal the rest of the world washed away.

They hadn’t seen each other for a while, her wanderings having taken her to the antipodes while he had found steady work. But with the future so murky Ellen turned the conversation to days gone. She brought up Link and the stranger.

“I wanted you to come,” he said. He reached for his cane—which he hated, but bore— and stroked its handle, gathering the strength to say: “I was so proud you wanted to come.”

“You were glad I wanted to shoot our dog?” She set her spoon down, fat strawberry listing dangerously to one side. 128

“Elle, sweetheart. I was proud you wanted to face up to life. Probably know as good as I do, these days—only book in the Good Book ever made sense was Job.”

“Never read a Bible, dad.”

He snorted. “Lucky you can read at all, way you grew up. Makes my case for me. World turns and turns, like a lottery machine, and some get their number called. And most don’t. And that day, well, yours definitely wasn’t. And you stood up anyway and took what was given you.

S’all you can do in life, s’my experience.”

She held her tongue. Spin a globe, put your finger to any spot, and she had a story to tell of how she passed through there or heard a story from someone who did. For all that, she couldn’t argue with her father. But she wanted to.

Everywhere she’s been in the world, she found graves. They pock the face of the Earth, the dirt still raw. All the holy men of all the world could not put all of their occupants to final rest. No tombstones mark them—nothing marked them. She’d taught herself to look for them, empty spaces in city blocks like missing teeth, sunken skyscrapers like rotting pickets looking on the sea where the land stopped with no beach and only the tide to divide the broken and the whole. It was a thin, thin line.

Ellen had heard it everywhere, the chatter of some sort of golden age of prosperity and rediscovery, out from the shadow of the superstorms and rotting glaciers. And she knew the truth, which she will never see pass from the lips of the blessed but which drove her and her cohort across the face of the world rootless and questioning: their golden days came too late for so many nameless dead. 129

She could have been one of them, she knew. The dispossessed went often into shallow graves in those days, as they always had, as they still did. Coyotes scattered their bones, and what was left of them to the world then? She could not name a thing.

And yet still she was alive, apportioned these hours. Heir to this breath, and perhaps another, where so many had been disinherited. She did not understand. She had seen so much and she did not understand.

When breakfast was over she and her father stood outside to hug and then part, and her father realized he had forgotten his cane. Not limping yet, he shuffled back into the diner, and she watched him through the window, his expression twisting from annoyance to frustration as the pain in his leg sunk in and then exhaustion, despair, a longing that the world be done with him at last. And with his cane he hobbled out, the pain at the root of him put away but never gone, and from that day until she buried him she was certain she would always see it just under the surface of him, a grave-mouthed shark circling in his blood.

* * *

“So your pop’s fine?” The transient made a face. Her father’s relative wholeness offended him.

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“I thought you wanted this guy ‘cuz he’d done you wrong. You needed to settle accounts, or something.”

“I do. Just not that way.”

“So what do you want?” 130

* * *

The stranger took Elle and her father back to his cabin, sitting by its lonesome in a stand of cypresses. Spanish moss hung from the branches like furry curtains. The stranger had thrown her father’s arm over his shoulder and led him, like he was a drunken man, to the bed in the corner of the house. Taken his shirt off, looked him over for signs Elle did not know how to read.

And announced that she would need to take her father into town.

“He needs help,” the stranger said, stroking at his spade-shaped beard. “Needs a tetanus shot, else he might get lockjaw, and needs his head looked at.”

Elle winced. She helped the stranger lead her father out toward his gasburner, shut the passenger door for him as her father laid his head back, listless. She circled around to the other side of the car. The stranger obligingly rolled his window down.

“Why are you doing this for us?”

The stranger would not meet her eye. “That’s a fair question.”

“That’s not an answer.”

The stranger laughed. “Not everything has an answer, kid.” He shook his head. “If you want one, it’s just that it’s the right thing to do. You both needed help, and so here I am. That fair?”

Elle nodded. “I s’pose.”

With a final nod the stranger rolled his window up. Elle stepped back as the car pulled away and bounced down the dirt road toward town. Only then, she was alone in that cabin, when the car had disappeared around the bend and the world was silent, only then did she let herself 131 cry. She cried for Link and then she never thought of him afterward. Cauterized his memory. It took her years and years to realize this made Link equal to dust, and that though her father would later account that strength, she would come to consider it a kind of cowardice.

When the cabin walls grew close and she became restless she wandered out to the Wolf

Sinkhole. It opened up in the forest floor, almost too wide to see across. It had struck her then, how much it seemed an absence drilled into the world. Through its waters dark and deep she could imagine descending to no bottom but a further abyss. It frightened Elle and she ran back to the cabin and stayed there. Distracted herself, thumbed through his drawers and cabinets to find anything to keep herself from imagining what it must be like to sink into bottomless depths.

The sun was slanting through the windows when the stranger came through the door alone, dusting his hands off. “Your dad will be okay, miss.” He’d hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “He’s out in the car. Leg’s still a little sore.”

“What’s this?” Elle held up a photo of two men, smiling in official-looking uniforms over a scrawny Hispanic man pinned to the ground by the knee of a man who, in the details of his spade-shaped beard and the shape of his face, might be the stranger as a younger man.

“Nothing.” The stranger’s expression had darkened and then calmed, as though a cloud had momentarily passed over the sun. “Why don’t you put that back?”

So she did, and she went out to see her father restored to life. He needed a brace around his leg and he had some new band-aids on his shoulder where he’d been pricked but otherwise he was good as new.

The stranger offered them a meal but her father refused, embarrassed by how much charity he’d already needed. Elle stood by while her father negotiated their exit. The stranger 132 watched them go down the road having never asked for their names. Her father kept his eyes on the road ahead but Elle turned and waved, and the stranger nodded and waved goodbye in turn.

They returned to camp, waited until her father’s leg healed, moved on. Mosquitoes died in the winter and hatched out again in the spring. Elle started to call herself Ellen, took to work, wandered from her father, saw death and what was left after. Tried to walk until she could forget.

Long after she and her father left the outskirts of Maurepas, seeking work further north and east, after many months of dreaming of Link’s eye and the wasted waters beneath, she read up on that sinkhole: on the men who looked her over in airports and stopped her friends, who troubled them with spurious questions and veiled threats, who wore jackets lettered ICE.

There had been an ICE facility where that sinkhole was now. And then a hurricane had come and hundreds of people had been left to drown. No one was held to account; no one was punished.

But the stranger had been there, Ellen was sure of it. He might have seen men and women and children die with his own eyes, and he lived with it. He remembered them, kept vigil over their untended grave. She wanted to understand how he let himself feel their presence in their absence without being crushed by it.

* * *

“So that’s it,” Ellen said.

The transient nodded. Ellen was unsure if he was bored or contemplative. “I do know a man like that,” he said. “Don’t know if he’s an ex-fed or anything. But he’s done me a good turn once or twice too. Haven’t seen him about in a while, though. No telling what’s happened to him.” 133

Ellen scooted forward, tried not to look too eager. “Where is he at?”

“Find Glenn Road. Follow it west. I don’t think his cabin has changed much since you last came through. You’ll know it.”

"Thanks." Ellen stood, nodded to him. "Be seeing you, then."

"Later, alligator."

* * *

Glenn Road was a dirt path cut beneath the angel oaks. Tattered Spanish moss hung low.

Cypresses picketed the road, their forms shrugging or collapsing away from her as she made her way.

Yes, she thought, this is the place.

In the afternoon as she sought the stranger’s cabin she wondered what to say to this man she met once and then never again. She thought she never told him thanks, back then. For dragging her and her father out of the Lusca, for bandaging her father up and seeing he got medical attention. For not throwing her out when she rifled through his papers, for asking about his tender past. She will need to fix that.

And then, if his patience allowed, the questions would begin.

Ellen stopped at his threshold. The cabin had not been difficult to find, once she knew she was pointed in the right direction. The afternoon light had been very like this when she’d left this place, more than half her life ago. Those years had passed like dreams one after another and now she was back, as though she had stepped away a girl, walked five minutes down the road, turned around again suddenly a woman. 134

For one moment she hesitated. She shook her head. She knocked.

* * *

The stranger was dead in his bed. Still warm, but dead all the same. He'd left a window open and Ellen had peered in and seen his prone form not stirring and knocked again and finally climbed through and found him like that.

There was nothing left to do but bury him. She checked his wallet, ransacked his bureau, looked under his bed—and found no license or even deed. Nothing to call him. No name to bury him with.

She leaned against his doorpost and wished she smoked. She'll pick up the habit after she leaves this place and it will kill her, three continents away, three decades later. She'll die younger than her father but older than her mother. She will leave no descendants, but word of her death will go out among friends and ex-lovers and ex-compatriots scattered across the world like lighthouses up and down a gravelly coast shining wordless signals through the fog.

But for the moment it's a faint urge as she hefts the shovel in her hands. She started to dig. She found a spot near the Wolf Sinkhole, further away than he might have liked but solid enough that the next storm won't disturb him.

She'll remember how she dug as she feels the cancer start to take her under for the last time. She will turn to her newest friend, a Hong Konger almost as far from her home as Ellen will be from hers, and thrust into her hand a letter she will have had prepared for many years.

She will look in her friend's eyes and see herself reflected and think of her dog padding toward her that last time. 135

"Will you read it?" Ellen will ask. She'll close her new friend's hand over it with all the strength she had left.

"I will," her friend will tell her, imagining Ellen has nothing more wrong with her than a belly over-stuffed with Cantonese food and Somali beer, a little too much excitement for Lunar

New Year.

The last thing Ellen will see will be the particolored fireworks streaking through the dark sky. They'll burst and call to mind the acid sting of gunpowder, the copper and iron of fresh blood. Her friend will grab her as she sinks lower on the bench, one hand in another. That will be the feeling she'll hold onto as it all goes dark.

And in the dark around the grave she'd dug and filled, the night having long since come down, she lingered a moment.

"I don't know you," Ellen said. "I met you once. Of everyone you ever knew, I'm probably the worst person you could think of to lay you down.

"Well, here I am."

She squatted, looking out across the sinkhole. It mirrored the sky, the constellations above all laid across its flawless surface. Someone could paint buckets and buckets, spill a sea of paint or ink, and not match what had been laid across that surface.

Ellen tried to think of what to say. To glean something worth saying from her wandering and wondering, from that dog’s death and the life she had lived since. But her words failed her.

Nothing in her was equal to the task of laying this man to rest or of acknowledging all that had come before, everything that had put them into each other’s lives however briefly. The stars 136 above could circle until they burnt themselves out and another stranger might never comfort another scared little girl in quite the same way.

And yet she needed to say something, she was sure. Couldn’t bury a man and leave him to his rest with no final words. At last she understood the friar and his compatriots across the world, sprinkling their holy water across parched fields, stubborn to lay all of the world’s dead at last to some sort of rest. That was good, Ellen realized. That was good. She had no holy water and no blessings to give, but she could say: "I hope I did right by you.”

From the grave, she gathered herself until she left no trace. Morning rose on Wolf

Sinkhole and she was long gone.