A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I’d suck yours,” I said, feeling like my heart was about to burst through both rib cages.

  “Be my guest,” he said, but didn’t budge. Icy, impassive, demanding, but how did he know that that’s exactly what I wanted? What weird low-frequency psychic bond unites gay men as the act of coupling unfolds? I dropped to my knees, feeling filthy water soak me even further, thinking: A decade ago this would all have been dry, and we’d have been able to meet in hotel rooms and apartments without fear of snitch software reporting our every move to the morality militias.

  And then I wasn’t thinking anything. I was in the act, my body abandoned, agency abdicated, pushed and pulled by the massive man muttering sweet obscenities above me, an empty vessel for him to fill, which was my most fervent hope, my most dangerous desire.

  “Drop your pants,” he hissed. “Cum if you want to.” And I did, not caring how wet my clothes got. By this point he had me pinned against the pillar. Rough cement scratched at my back. I stared up at him in awe and gratitude. And fear. His clenched face shone with sweat, and something else: part angel, and part monster.

  Five strokes and I could feel orgasm approaching already. The world dimmed. That’s how good the sex is, I told myself in the moment—and that’s how long it had been since the last time I’d gotten any. Since the last time I’d jerked off, even, because when we were out on the road I had precious little alone time.

  “Take it,” he howled, his voice barely halfway human, buried to the hilt in me, pubic hair tickling my nose, and as he came, so did I, my eyes shutting tight as black stars bloomed all around me, thinking, This is the most intense orgasm I ever—

  I opened my eyes to the same blue-black dark, but something was off. The shadows that rose around me were different. Twisted and organic, instead of rectilinear. A carrion smell in the air, and something noxious burning. No sign of Tom.

  “Hello?” I hollered, dizzy, disoriented. Laughter began, in the distance, a chilling hyena-sound that I quickly realized was actually something midway between laughter and screaming.

  Rational thought had no place here. I did not wonder what had happened. Where I was. Was I dreaming. I shivered in the cold wet. I heard myself whimper.

  Splashing, from behind me. I turned to see something coming nearer, on all fours, sloshing through the water. Impossible to see clearly—giving only a general sense of hair (fur?) and muscle (and claws?) and feral hunger.

  I screamed. I screamed as hard as I could, trying to wake myself up from the nightmare I already knew was not in fact a nightmare.

  And then I was back in the stinking dark beneath I-787. Sitting in the standing water, against the pillar. Pants down; soaking wet. Sperm floating in the water around me. Tom Minniq nowhere to be found.

  I’d heard of people who passed out after orgasm. Maybe mine was so intense, I passed out—and dreamed, briefly? That must have been it, I told myself, standing, pulling up my pants, looking around to see who might have seen me. But the tide had risen, and that wide stretch of Albany was abandoned.

  Something tingled in me, the whole long walk back to the truck. Something exhilarating. Something feral.

  * * *

  —

  Sid was playing video games. Happy, drunk.

  “What the hell?” he said, laughing, holding his nose.

  “Fell in some nasty water,” I said. My jaw ached exquisitely. “Town’s a shithole.”

  “Go to the Dunkin’ Donuts,” he said. “I already talked to the lady who works there; she said we could use their bathroom. Wash up, then burn those clothes.”

  “Yeah,” I said, standing there, still shivering from the strangeness of it all, the excellence of my orgasm, the terror still lodged in my chest from whatever the hell had happened back there with Tom. It wasn’t fading, the way nightmares did. And on the walk to Dunkin’ Donuts I still caught snatches of stench on the wind: the distant smell of something rancid on fire.

  “Oh no,” Sid whispered an hour later, and handed me his phone.

  “No,” I said, and shut my eyes. And breathed.

  Prince had just been added to the Filter, the official government list of artists who could not be listened to. They’d spent six months going back and forth about Prince. A hundred times we’d heard the arguments, in the pods and on the feeds. All along I’d known what the end decision would be. His music was all sex, all rebellion. Until you couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Fuuuuck,” Sid said, and called up “Little Red Corvette,” and pressed PLAY. “We’ve got till midnight to listen to it legally.”

  Prince was pretty much the only music Sid and I adored equally. Prince and Sade, but she’d been Filtered for years, along with every other female singer.

  Prince sang about bodies that ought to be in jail, pockets packed with condoms.

  I cried. Sid cried too. We didn’t let each other see, but we knew.

  * * *

  —

  Saturday didn’t mean no work, but it did mean a shorter day. Sid prepped the mapping software, planned out the first stage of the deployment. I armed the scanners. Six hours later my fingers and knees and neck were sore, and my eyes hurt from the dim light in the back of the truck. At least we’d had Sid’s music to keep us alert: loud fast stripped-down punk, legal only because it was so old, blasting through the truck’s speakers.

  And then the sun was setting and I felt the same old Saturday-night loneliness, like I was all by myself on a faraway planet, or the only living man in a world full of hostile ghosts, and loneliness bled into horniness, the kind so sharp and bleak you’d risk anything to make it go away.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said, and he looked sad, because he’d been in the middle of talking about the rumors coming down from Canada about animal-rights activists blowing up the homes of agri-executives, and I could tell that kind of stuff made him super happy but it just made me sick, like the scanners that surrounded us would send our words to the local cops or militia outposts and they’d show up with pitchforks and torches. Or, more likely, just guns and nooses.

  Stupid Sid. He still believed we would be saved. Still thought righteous outsiders or local revolutionaries would fill the streets, storm the halls of power. Was still waiting for the truth to set us free, the manifest injustice of it all to cause the Revived Republic to crumble under the weight of its own hypocrisy. Still wanted to Talk Politics with people.

  I was stupid, but I was smart enough to see that this would never happen. That the best we could hope for was to keep our heads down and find escape wherever we could. Risky sex; drunkenness. He had his way out and I had mine.

  I stole his cigarettes. When I put one between my lips, I knew it was as close as I’d come to him.

  I smoked them all, in the night gloom beneath the highway, along the river, while I hunted. For Tom. But three hours went by like that, with no sign of another human besides the rattle of an overburdened shopping cart on the off-ramp above my head, and the sound of a woman singing…and, eventually, the distorted echoing laughter of a group of young men, which was my signal that it was finally time to go.

  I was halfway back to the truck when I heard a sweet gruff voice say, “Hey,” like the smell of sex made into sound.

  “Hey,” I said, and stopped beside the phone booth where Tom Minniq waited. But he didn’t say anything else.

  “What the hell happened last night?” I asked.

  He shrugged. Grabbed his crotch with one massive hand. “You hungry?”

  “Something happened to me,” I said. “I…I don’t know, passed out. Did you…do something? Drug me?”

  Tom laughed, an incongruous sound that reminded me more of the gibbering hyena-noise I’d heard in that other place than the handsome masculine brute who stood before me.

  “I didn’t drug you, Fenn,” he said, and while the details of our fir
st encounter were blurry, I knew for a fact that I had told him my real name, not the secret nickname my first secret boyfriend had called me by.

  “What happened?” I asked again.

  He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the booth. Our faces were inches apart. His musk made my head spin. “You went somewhere,” he whispered.

  “Where?”

  “Do you want to go again?”

  “No,” I said.

  One eyebrow rose.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pushed me to my knees.

  “I think that it’s—” I said, and then found myself physically incapable of forming any further words.

  This wasn’t like the night before, hidden away from the world beneath a shattered highway. We were on the street, out in the open. Looking up, past his perfect snarl, I saw dents and holes in the side of the phone booth that could only have come from bullets. Militia activity, certainly. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t be doing this. But it was Saturday night, and what monstrous crimes could not be explained away with that rationale? Who could fail to understand the way Saturday twilight made the dumbest ideas seem sound, delicious? Old songs flashed through my mind, Prince’s voice echoing, as Tom pummeled me toward orgasm—

  —and continued echoing into…wherever that was.

  Dripping red darkness. Wind in pine trees over my head. Not-laughter again, this sound closer to sobbing. Phone-booth walls were trees now. Things scuttled up the sides of them. Lights throbbed in the sky above, bigger than stars but more numerous than moons.

  I shut my eyes, breathed five breaths. Opened them again. Still not Albany. Still not anywhere. But the air was alive with something like electricity, and I could feel it leaching into my arms.

  A shape stood in front of me. Vaguely humanoid darkness. Bipedal, but barely. Feral. It asked me:

  “Are you afraid?”

  I nodded. A crack opened up in what must have been its face: a grin, jagged and wet.

  “Fear is sweet,” it gurgled.

  Something about its hunger startled me. Woke me up. What was I, if not hungry? I’d been afraid of hunger for so long. Hunger makes something dangerous, maybe, but it also makes it weak. I was hungry, but that wasn’t all I was.

  I watched my right arm rise, almost on its own. Shivering with ecstasy. I pushed my hand into the shadow-shape, and it scattered in a windblown shriek.

  Albany again. I was alone. Evidence of orgasm all around me. The hand I had pushed into that thing dripped with thick yellowy liquid, like a sick man’s phlegm.

  But the metal sides of the phone booth were smooth and unblemished where the bullet holes had been. The real-world air smelled less rancid than it had before. And my arms still throbbed, from all the things they could accomplish.

  * * *

  —

  Sid was out when I got home. He came back drunk, stinking of lonely hours in a bar. Throat raspy from heated idle political debate. He’d found a dive across the street from a shut-down union hall, still popular with the men and women who’d been members back before it was illegal. Sid never failed to find spots like that, and at most of them there’d be a couple of similarly cynical, similarly naïve young women, but so far Albany was proving unproductive. His dreams were loud and lonely, and three times I woke up with a gasp because he was holding me too tightly.

  Monday, we moved through the city installing scanners. Sid talked. Sports, politics, punk rock. Women. I liked it when he talked. I felt like I was fulfilling an important function for him. Providing some kind of validation. Something he needed; something he’d be grateful for. He never expected me to say much back. The day was hot and we were in the sun for most of it. I didn’t mind. It was better when the work was hard. Kept my mind clear. Sometimes, from up high on the posts that used to hold streetlights, where we had to screw the phone cloners so no one could mess with them, I’d see a white militia van prowling past and be intensely grateful for the bright-orange vests that identified us as Important, Hardworking, Beyond Reproach.

  No sign of Tom again that night. I trolled the darkness for an hour, walking between the pillars that held up the dead highway. The shopping-cart woman watched me with a smile on her face. Drones buzzed by. Automated; unlikely to even be recording. Dozens of them would be making randomized sweeps of the city at any given moment.

  Finally, I found a man. Fiftysomething, haggard, his brilliantly blue eyes somehow horrifying, like a mocking vestige of the beautiful young thing he had been so very long ago. All it took was a split second’s eye contact for him to be on his knees and scrabbling at my belt buckle. Topping does precious little for me—I’m much happier sucking than being sucked—but I was exhausted and I felt sorry for the broken old thing before me. I even called him a few filthy names for good measure. He’d groan greedily, gratefully, every time I did.

  And then I was cumming.

  And then I was: there.

  Something massive moved through the night above me. A cloud, I thought, but it was moving against a heavy wind—and, while I watched, it unfurled, unfolded, reached out long arms like tentacles, vanished into the sky with a spray of black cloud. Lights swung in the air like massive lanterns hanging from nothing.

  When I pointed to one, it grew. When I pushed my hand in its direction, it rocketed away.

  I could do things here.

  In the distance, I heard the man I’d been fucking mere seconds ago. Moaning in terror. Wherever we were, however we’d gotten there, we’d ended up physically far apart.

  A rusty screech from the gloom behind me. I turned to see the massive metal skeleton of something like airplane wreckage angled crazily over me. Perched on a wing or arm was the same thing that had confronted me the last time. I made myself look now, in the shifting shadows from a swinging light. A man’s body—and a beautiful one—but the arms were too long, the legs curved and angled strangely, the head oversized and lupine, like a man wearing the head of a wolf atop his own.

  “Are you afraid?” it gurgled, and then answered its own question. “You’re afraid,” it said, and it was right, I was afraid, but I was not as afraid as I had been. The tingling in my arms from the previous visits was throbbing through my whole body now.

  I touched my hand to the scaffolding of metal wreckage. It throbbed too, in perfect rhythm with my own.

  The things of this world are mine to command, I thought, and imagined a new shape for this debris.

  Soundlessly, swiftly, like ink dripped into a glass of water, the wreckage unfurled into the shape in my mind. Its perch gone, the squatting wolf-thing fell into the ankle-deep water with a splash.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “We have always been here,” it said, sinking into a crouch. Shrinking, almost. My lack of terror disappointed it. Diminished it. “You have been trying your hardest not to come here.”

  “What is this place?”

  It grinned. There were no eyes in its wolf head.

  And then I was back.

  “What the fuck, dude,” said the man at my feet, panting. “What the hell just happened?”

  “You went somewhere,” I half-asked.

  He nodded. “What did you do to me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Somebody did it to me.”

  “Will I— Will this—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how any of this works. All I know is…you shouldn’t be afraid.”

  He laughed, a yipping sound that was mostly a scream. “How the fuck am I not supposed to be afraid when you sent me to fucking hell?”

  “It’s not hell,” I said, pulling up my pants. “It’s something else. The flip side of where we are now. A place where what we do matters.”

  “What we do here matters,” he said. And he was right, but he was getting hysterical and there wa
s nothing further I could tell him, so I buckled my belt and hurried off. Something was different. The air had changed. It took me a while to realize what it was.

  Traffic. The horns and brakes and engines of late rush-hour traffic. I-787 was alive above me. It had never not been.

  Absurd as it was, I couldn’t help but think: I did that.

  * * *

  —

  “I fucked it up,” Sid said when I got back to the truck. “I made a pass at Annie and I got shot down.”

  “Bummer,” I said, slouching down to join him on the floor. “Is it over?”

  “She says it’s not, but I’m pretty sure it is.”

  He stunk. Like cherry hand soap and body odor. Like disappointment; like rage.

  “Tell me about her,” I said, leaning back. He leaned back as well. His shoulder slid into place beside mine.

  “She’s just really smart and really well connected. Knows all kinds of people who are working on resistance stuff. And I had to go fuck it up with her. Sex is the fucking worst.”

  “I know, right?”

  When I said it, I could see that I no longer believed it. I thought about the place I went to, the place Tom took me. The place I took that random stranger to.

  “She says I’m a tool of the state.”

  “Well, you kind of are, though.”

  I wanted to tell Sid that I’d spent my whole life thinking sex was an escape, or something shameful and sordid, an exemplification of all that was awful in me, but now I saw that this wasn’t the case.

  My arms tingled with the same feral tingle as on the other side. Words came out of my mouth easily, as effortlessly as I had reshaped the reality of that metal wreckage.

  “You should tell her that a tool of the state can be used against the state,” I said.

  Sid turned to look at me, and then took a long sip of beer. And then nodded.