A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Everybody needs books, Molly figured. No matter where they live, how they love, what they believe, whom they want to kill. We all want books. The moment you start thinking of books as some exclusive club, or the loving of books as a high distinction, then you’re a bad bookseller.

  Books are the best way to discover what people thought before you were born. And an author is just someone who tried their utmost to make sense of their own mess, and maybe their failure contains a few seeds to help you with yours.

  Sometimes people asked Molly why she didn’t simplify it down to one entrance. Force the people from America to talk to the Californians, and vice versa—maybe expose one side or the other to some books that might challenge their worldview just a little. And Molly always replied that she had a business to run, and if she managed to keep everyone reading, then that was enough. At the very least, Molly’s arrangement kept this the most peaceful outpost on the border, without people gathering on one side to scream at the people on the other.

  Some of those screaming people were old enough to have grown up in the United States of America, but they acted as though these two lands had always been enemies.

  * * *

  —

  Whichever entrance of the bookstore you went through, the first thing you’d notice was probably Phoebe. Rake-thin, coltish, rambunctious, right on the edge of becoming, she ran light enough on her bare feet to avoid ever rattling a single bookcase or dislodging a single volume. You heard Phoebe’s laughter before her footsteps. Molly’s daughter wore denim overalls and cheap linen blouses most days, or sometimes a floor-length skirt or lacy-hemmed dress, plus plastic bangles and necklaces. She hadn’t gotten her ears pierced yet.

  People from both sides of the line loved Phoebe, who was a joyful shriek that you only heard from a long way away, a breath of gladness running through the flowerbeds.

  Molly used to pester Phoebe about getting outdoors to breathe some fresh air—because that seemed like something moms were supposed to say, and Molly was paranoid about being a Bad Mother, since she was basically married to a bookstore, albeit one containing a large section of parenting books. But Molly was secretly glad when Phoebe disobeyed her and stayed inside, endlessly reading. Molly hoped Phoebe would always stay shy, that mother and daughter would hunker inside the First and Last Page, side-eyeing the world through thin linen curtains when they weren’t reading together.

  Then Phoebe had turned fourteen, and suddenly she was out all the time, and Molly didn’t see her for hours. Around that time, Phoebe had unexpectedly grown pretty and lanky, her neck long enough to let her auburn ponytail swing as she ran around with the other kids who lived in the tangle of tree-lined streets on the America side of the line, plus a few kids who snuck across from California. Nobody seriously patrolled this part of the border, and there was one craggy rock pile, like an echo of the looming Rocky Mountains, that you could just scramble over and cross from one country to the other, if you knew the right path.

  Phoebe and her gang of kids, ranging from twelve to fifteen, would go trampling the tall grass near the border on a “treasure hunt” or setting up an “ambush fort” in the rocks. Phoebe occasionally caught sight of Molly and turned to wave, before running up the dusty hillside toward Zadie and Mark, who had snuck over from California with canvas backpacks full of random games and junk. Sometimes Phoebe led an entire brigade of kids into the store, pouring cups of water or Molly’s homebrewed ginger beer for everyone, and they would all pause and say, “Hello, Ms. Carlton,” before running outside again.

  Mostly, the kids were just a raucous chorus, as they chased each other with pea guns. There were times when they stayed in the most overgrown area of trees and bracken until way after sundown, until Molly was about to message the other local parents via her Gidget, and then she’d glimpse a few specks of light emerging from the claws and twisted limbs. Molly always asked Phoebe what they did in that tiny stand of vegetation, which barely qualified as “the woods,” and Phoebe always said: Nothing. They just hung out. But Molly imagined those kids under the moonlight, blotted by heavy leaves, and they could be doing anything: drinking, taking drugs, playing kiss-and-tell games.

  Even if Molly had wanted to keep tabs on her daughter, she couldn’t leave the bookstore unattended. The bi-national design of the store required at least two people working at all times, one per register, and most of the people Molly hired only lasted a month or two and then had to run home because their families were worried about all the latest hints of another war on the horizon. Every day, another batch of propaganda bubbled up on Molly’s Gidget, from both sides, claiming that one country was a crushing theocracy or the other was a godless meat grinder. And meanwhile, you heard rumblings about both countries searching for the last precious dregs of water—sometimes actual rumblings, as California sent swarms of robots deep underground. Everybody was holding their breath.

  * * *

  —

  Molly was working the front counter on the California side, trying as usual not to show any reaction to the people with weird tattoos or with glowing silver threads flowing into their skulls. Everyone knew how eager Californians were to hack their own bodies and brains, from programmable birth control to brain implants that connected them to the Anoth Complex. Molly smiled, made small talk, recommended books based on her uncanny memory for what everybody had been buying—in short, she treated everyone like a customer, even the folks who noticed Molly’s crucifix and clicked their tongues, because obviously she’d been brainwashed into her faith.

  A regular customer named Sander came in, looking for a rare book from the last days of the United States about sustainable farming and animal consciousness, by a woman named Hope Dorrance. For some reason, nobody had ever uploaded this book of essays to the Share. Molly looked in the fancy computer and saw that they had one copy, but when Molly led Sander back to the shelf where it was supposed to be, the book was missing.

  Sander stared at the space where Souls on the Land ought to be, and their pale, round face was full of lines. They had a single tattoo of a butterfly clad in gleaming armor, and the wires rained from the shaved back of their skull. They were some kind of engineer for the Anoth Complex.

  “Huh,” Molly said. “So this is where it ought to be. But I better check if maybe we sold it over on the, uh, other side and somehow didn’t log the sale.” Sander nodded, and followed Molly until they arrived in America. There, Molly squeezed past Mitch, who was working the register, and dug through a dozen scraps of paper until she found one. “Oh. Yeah. Well, darn.”

  They had sold their only copy of Souls on the Land to one of their most faithful customers on the America side: a gray-haired woman named Teri Wallace, who went to Molly’s church. And Teri was in the store right now, searching for a cookbook. Mitch had just seen her go past. Unfortunately, Teri hated Californians even more than most Americans did. And Sander was the sort of Californian that Teri especially did not appreciate.

  “So it looks like we sold it a while back, and we didn’t update our inventory, which, uh, does happen,” Molly said.

  “In essence, this was false advertising.” Sander drew upward, with the usual Californian sense of affront the moment anything wasn’t perfectly efficient. “You told me that the book was available, when in fact you should have known it wasn’t.”

  Molly had already decided not to tell Sander who had bought the Hope Dorrance, but Teri came back clutching a book of killer salads just as Sander was in mid-rant about the ethics of retail communication. Sander happened to mention Souls on the Land, and Teri’s ears pricked up.

  “Oh, I just bought that book,” Teri said.

  Sander spun around, smiling, and said, “Oh. Pleased to meet you. I’m afraid that book you bought is one that had been promised to me. I don’t suppose we could work out some kind of arrangement? Perhaps some system of needs-based allocation, because my need for thi
s book is extremely great.” Sander was already falling into the hyper-rational, insistent language of a Californian faced with a problem.

  “Sorry,” Teri said. “I bought it. I own it now. It’s mine.”

  “But,” Sander said, “there are many ways we could…I mean, you could loan it to me, and I could digitize it and return it to you in good condition.”

  “I don’t want it in good condition. I want it in the condition it’s in now.”

  “But—”

  Molly could see this conversation was about three exchanges away from full-blown unpleasantries. Teri was going to insult Sander, either directly or by getting their pronoun wrong. Sander was going to call Teri stupid, either by implication or outright. Molly could see an easy solution: She could give Teri a bribe—a free book or blanket discount—in exchange for letting Sander borrow the Hope Dorrance so they could digitize it using special page-turning robots. But this wasn’t going to be solved with reason. Not right now, anyway, with the two of them snarling at each other.

  So Molly put on her biggest smile and said, “Sander. I just remembered, I had something extra special set aside for you, back in the psychology/philosophy annex. I’ve been meaning to give it to you, and it slipped my mind until now. Come on, I’ll show you.” She tugged gently at Sander’s arm and hustled them back into the warren of bookshelves. Sander kept grumbling about Teri’s irrational selfishness, until they had left America.

  Molly had no idea what the special book she’d been saving for Sander actually was—but she figured by the time they got through the Straits of Romance and all the switchbacks of biography, she’d think of something.

  * * *

  —

  Phoebe was having a love triangle. Molly became aware of this in stages, by noticing how all the other kids were together and by overhearing snippets of conversation (despite her best efforts not to eavesdrop).

  Jonathan Brinkfort, the son of the minister at Molly’s church, had started following Phoebe around with a hangdog expression, like he’d lost one of those kiss-and-dare games and it had left him with gambling debts. Jon was a tall, quiet boy with a handsome square face, who mediated every tiny dispute among the neighborhood kids with a slow gravitas, but Molly had never before seen him lost for words. She had been hand-selling airship adventure books to Jon since he was little.

  And then there was Zadie Kagwa, whose dad was a second-generation immigrant from Uganda with a taste for very old science fiction. Zadie had a fresh tattoo on one shoulder, of a dandelion with seedlings fanning out into the wind, and one string of fiber-optic pearls coming out of her locs. Zadie’s own taste in books roamed from science and math, to radical politics, to girls-at-horse-camp novels. Zadie whispered to Phoebe and brought tiny presents from California, like these weird candies with chili peppers in them.

  Molly could just imagine the conversations she’d hear in church if her daughter got into an unnatural relationship with a girl—from California no less—instead of dating a nice American boy who happened to be Canon Brinkfort’s son.

  But Phoebe didn’t seem to be inclined to choose one or the other. She accepted Jon’s stammered compliments with the same shy smile as Zadie’s gifts.

  Molly took Phoebe on a day trip into California, where they got their passports stamped with a one-day entry permit, and they climbed into Molly’s old three-wheel Dancer. They drove past wind farms and military installations, past signs for the latest Anoth Cloud-Brain schemes, until they stopped at a place that sold milkshakes so thick, you lost the skin on the sides of your mouth trying to unclog the straw.

  Phoebe was in silent mode, hugging herself and cocooning inside her big polyfiber jacket when she wasn’t slurping her milkshake. Molly tried to make conversation, talking about who had been buying what sort of books lately and what you could figure out about international relations from Sharon Wong’s sudden interest in bird-watching. Phoebe just shrugged, like maybe Molly should just read the news instead. As if Molly hadn’t tried making sense of the news already.

  Then Phoebe started telling Molly about some fantasy novel. Seven princesses have powers of growth and decay, but some of the princesses can only use their growth powers if the other princesses are using their decay powers. And whoever grows a hedge tall enough to keep out the army of gnome-trolls will become the heir to the Blue Throne, but the princesses don’t even realize at first that their powers are all different, like they grow different kinds of things. And there are a bunch of princes and court ladies who are all in love with different princesses, but nobody can be with the person they want to be with.

  This novel sounded more and more complicated, and Molly didn’t remember ever seeing it in her store, until she realized: Phoebe wasn’t describing a book she had read. This was a book that Phoebe was writing, somewhere, on one of the old computers that Molly had left in some storage space. Molly hadn’t even known Phoebe was a writer.

  “How does it end?” Molly said.

  “I don’t know.” Phoebe poked at the last soup of her milkshake. “I guess they have to use their powers together to build the hedge they’re supposed to build, instead of competing. But the hard part is gonna be all the princesses ending up with the right person. And, uh, making sure nobody feels left out, or like they couldn’t find their place in this kingdom.”

  Molly nodded, and then tried to think of how to respond to what she was pretty sure her daughter was actually talking about. “Well, you know that nobody has to ever hurry to find out who they’re supposed to love, or where they’re going to fit in. Those things sometimes take time, and it’s okay not to know the answers right away. You know?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Phoebe pushed her empty glass away and looked out the window. Molly waited for her to say something else but eventually realized the conversation had ended. Teenagers.

  * * *

  —

  Molly had opened the First and Last Page when Phoebe was still a baby, back when the border had felt more porous. Both governments were trying to create a Special Trade Zone, and you could get a special transnational business license. Everyone had seemed overjoyed to have a bookstore within driving distance, and Molly had lost count of how many people thanked her just for being there. A lot of her used books had come from estate sales, but there had been a surprising flood of donations, too.

  Molly had wanted Phoebe to be within easy reach of California if America ever started seriously following through on its threats to enforce all of its broadly written laws against immorality. But more than that, Phoebe deserved to be surrounded by all the stories, and every type of person, and all of the ways of looking at life. Plus, it had seemed like a shrewd business move to be in two countries at once, a way to double the store’s potential market.

  For a while, the border had also played host to a bar, a burger joint, and a clothing store, and Molly had barely noticed when those places had closed one by one. The First and Last Page was different, she’d figured, because nobody ever gets drunk on books and starts a brawl.

  * * *

  —

  Matthew limped into the American entrance during a lull in business, and Molly took in his torn pants leg, dirty hands, and the dried-out salt trails along his brown face. She had seen plenty others, in similar condition, and didn’t even blink. She didn’t need to see the brand on Matthew’s neck, which looked like a pair of broken wings and declared him to be a bonded peon and the responsibility of the Greater Appalachian Penal Authority and the Glad Corporation. She just nodded and helped him inside the store before anyone else noticed or started asking too many questions.

  “I’m looking for a self-help book,” Matthew said, which was what a lot of them said. Someone, somewhere, had told them this was a code phrase that would let Molly know what they needed. In fact, there was no code phrase.

  The border between America and California was unguarded in thousands
of other places besides Molly’s store, including that big rocky hill that Zadie and the other California kids climbed over when they came to play with the American kids. There was just too much empty space to waste time patrolling, much less putting up fences or sensors. You couldn’t eat lunch in California without twenty computers checking your identity, anyway. But Matthew and the others chose Molly’s store because books meant civilization, or maybe the store’s name seemed to promise a kind of safe passage: the first page leading gracefully to the last.

  Molly did what she always did with these refugees. She helped Matthew find the quickest route from romance to philosophy to history, and then on to California. She gave him some clean clothes out of a donation box, which she always told people was going to a shelter somewhere, and what information she had about resources and contacts. She let him clean up as much as he could, in the restroom.

  Matthew was still limping as he made his way through the store in his brand-new corduroys and baggy argyle sweater. Molly offered to have a look at his leg, but he shook his head. “Old injury.” She dug in the first-aid kit and gave him a bottle of painkillers. Matthew kept looking around in all directions, as if there could be hidden cameras (there weren’t), and he took a jerky step backward when Molly told him to hold on a moment, when he was already in California.

  “What? Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Just thinking.” Molly always gave refugees a free book, something to keep them company on whatever journey they had ahead. She didn’t want to just choose at random, so she gazed at Matthew for a moment in the dim amber light from the wall sconces in the history section. “What sort of books do you like? Besides self-help, I mean.”