A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “There are complications,” he said.

  Khadija did not reply.

  The director sighed. “When your brother…when he left the facility prematurely, his file was transferred from Civilian Protection Services to Internal Security. And, well, files in the criminal stream aren’t subject to the same sunshine provisions as regular archival—”

  “For God’s sake,” Khadija interrupted. “Do you have his things or not?”

  “Yes,” the director said. “But they’re not going to be made public next Sunday, or next year, or maybe ever. I’m sorry, Dr. Singh, I just can’t help you.”

  Khadija breathed in slowly, held the air in her lungs for a moment, let it go in a long cleansing exhale. She took in the room. It was a bureaucrat’s office, its blandness intentional and methodical. Framed photos of the president and the secretary of heritage hung on the back wall. Beneath them a half-open window looked out at the center’s small outdoor space, a parkette lined with plastic grass, every blade identical in color and dimension. A handful of tourists sat on benches, basking in the sun.

  “Tell me, where are you from?” Khadija asked the director.

  “I beg your pardon?” the director answered.

  “Where are you from?” Khadija repeated. “Where do you come from?”

  “Billings,” the director said, uncertain.

  “No, I mean where are you really from?” Khadija pressed. “Where are your parents from?”

  “Also Billings.”

  “And their parents?”

  “I…I suppose they settled in Wyoming somewhere. They came from Norway. I don’t see how this is relevant, Dr. Singh.”

  “It isn’t,” Khadija replied. “For you it isn’t. But for every single person who ended up here, it was. They were made to carry every last ancestor. They carried it in the color of their skin and the flaws in their accents and in their foreign-sounding names and their strange and dangerous religions, and you have no idea—you have no idea—how heavy a weight that is.”

  Khadija slammed her hand on the desk. The director jumped in his seat.

  “In a room in this ugly little tourist attraction you’ve built, there’s a box with my brother’s wallet and his clothes and a couple of old baseball cards his grandfather gave him. These things belonged to him and now they belong to me. Now, I need you to grow a spine and give me what belongs to me. And then I can leave this place, and as soon as I leave this place you can go back to being a good little soldier.”

  “There’s no reason to get personal, Dr. Singh,” the director said.

  Khadija laughed. “God, what I wouldn’t give to be so oblivious. It must feel like floating.”

  The director got up from his seat. He pointed out the window, waved his hand as though showcasing a parcel of land or a pleasing vista.

  “Is this not enough for you?” he asked. “They could have just torn it down, you know. They could have bulldozed all of it and not put up a single sign and people would have forgotten it ever existed. It was only temporary, after all, just a couple years. Nobody was mistreated, nobody was tortured, nobody was executed. In fact—and I think you know this, deep down—this place saved lives.”

  “This place killed my brother.”

  “This place did not kill your brother,” the director said, shouting now, a few of the tourists outside turning to listen through the open window. “Leaving this place killed your brother. He was safe here. You were all safe here.”

  “So it’s his fault, then?” Khadija said. “You’re saying he should have stayed here in this prison? You’re saying he should have allowed himself to be the monster his country made him out to be?”

  “I’m saying he should have known his place.”

  A silence filled the room. The fire went out from behind the director’s eyes. He sat back down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Khadija replied. “That’s the only honest thing you’ve said.”

  * * *

  —

  They told us he’d made it all the way to someplace called White Bird, out in western Idaho. They never said how he got there. They never said a lot of things, only that at the end he was hiking through private land and someone—they used the word homeowner—mistook him for a wolf. They were careful how they said it, careful to stress that what had happened was inherently tied to the most inviolable thing in the whole of this country’s history, the self-evident commandment without which they were honestly, religiously certain the whole of civilization would fall apart: that a free man, threatened, is allowed to stand his ground.

  They said they’d already buried him, in a cemetery a couple of miles from where he was shot. I asked if we could see him and the commander said normally no but he’d see what he could do, and then he stood there looking at me, waiting on gratitude. When I showed none he turned a shade colder, the way people do when they’re used to being praised for doing anything north of nothing. None of you believed us when we told you this was for your own protection, he said.

  That night I went to see Yassir the Jordanian. He was in the mess hall, listening to the news on an old windup radio. That week the big foreign investors had decided to call in their loans, the ones with which Washington had tried to pay for all the damage from the six big hurricanes the two summers prior. The stock market was in free fall, the bank branches closed and barricaded.

  Now they’ll let us go, Yassir said.

  I asked him to walk me through the conversion rites. He said it was easy, everything in Islam is easy—only a matter of a single declaration, sincerely made.

  He said rebirth is a matter of identity as well as faith. He helped me pick a new name for myself, and from the ones he listed off the top of his head I picked the one that sounded most foreign: the wife of the prophet. But when he started suggesting surnames, I told him I’d never give mine up.

  But what is the point of embracing the religion, he asked, if you’re not willing to commit yourself completely? Don’t you want to become your true self as fully as you can?

  No, I said. I want to become the thing they hate.

  Two days later, in the early-morning darkness, the guards opened the gate. They set us free without explanation, without instruction, without even looking at us. Just as on the day we arrived here, we had no time to take anything; we walked out armed only with nightgowns, sandals, the blankets they didn’t want back.

  By the side of the road we saw this strange white sea of people who wanted to hug us and people who wanted to spit on us and people who offered to give us rides to the border. We huddled on the backs of trucks and let ourselves be taken anywhere else. And deep against the bone, underneath the fear and confusion and cold bottomless rage, it felt good. We would shed this country, go anywhere else, become citizens of negative space, and in this way we were finally free.

  * * *

  —

  The box contained an empty wallet, nothing else. She had expected clothes and keepsakes, but these, the director admitted, had almost certainly been lost or stolen. He said this was just what happens in these kinds of situations, but she was not upset. All that mattered was that nothing that belonged to her brother remained in this place.

  “So, you staying until the anniversary next week?” the driver asked as they drove back into town.

  “No,” Khadija said. “I’m leaving tomorrow night.”

  “You get what you came for?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good, that’s good. You know, sometimes people come here and they don’t feel what they expected to feel. One time, a few years back, I was driving this old man named Khalid, and—”

  “Do they still have liquor stores in this town?” Khadija said.

  “Every other corner,” the driver replied.

  �
�Take me to one.”

  He drove her to a store downtown, barricaded behind bars in a lot once occupied by a credit-union branch. She gave him a five-hundred-dollar bill and sent him in. He emerged a few minutes later with two large bottles of some cheap malt liquor called End Times. They sat on the concrete barrier by the side of the road and drank under the noonday sun.

  “This tastes awful,” Khadija said.

  The driver shrugged. “I thought you people didn’t drink,” he said.

  “I bet you think a lot of things.”

  When they finished their beers, the driver went back inside and bought two more. They watched the slow trickle of traffic, the cars driving themselves. Occasionally the vehicles slowed and swerved to pass one of the antique trucks and sedans that had started to become obsolete in the middle of the previous century but could still be seen in towns like this because progress is a cannibal and here there had never been much worth eating. Overhead, a billboard cycled through ads for silencers and sex drugs and Europe.

  “Does it feel different,” the driver asked, “all these years later?”

  “No,” Khadija replied. “It feels exactly the same.”

  “You think the midterms will change anything? My son says now that the Social Democrats picked up a couple more seats in the House, they can try to reinstate the healthcare act, maybe cut a deal on tax reform.”

  Khadija broke into laughter.

  “Tax reform, Jesus Christ,” she said. She set her beer on the ground.

  “You know what this country is?” she said. “This country is a man trying to describe a burning building without using the word fire.”

  She stood up and walked to the car. She motioned for the driver to pop the trunk. She took her brother’s wallet out of the box in which it had been filed away for a half century, and she threw the box out on the street.

  “I have one more place I need to go,” she said.

  “All right,” the driver replied.

  “It’s a long drive, west into Idaho.”

  “That’s fine,” the driver said. “What you got waiting for you all the way out there?”

  Khadija Singh tucked her brother’s wallet into her breast pocket and got into the car.

  “A burial,” she said.

  OMAR EL AKKAD was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He lives in Portland, Oregon. His first novel, American War, was a New York Times notable book and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, NPR, and Esquire.

  WHAT MAYA FOUND THERE

  DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER

  Maya Lucia Aviles stepped out into the welcome area (never mind the ever-deepening irony of the name) and released a weary, relieved grin. There was Tristan, the last remaining welcomer in a vast, empty lobby. He stood when he saw her, unfolding that long, dangly body and raising a single mittened hand. Some small, fugly birds flitted through the upper reaches of the airport; besides that, the place was perfectly still, perfectly quiet.

  “Dr. Thomas,” Maya said.

  Tristan smiled finally and nodded. “Dr. Aviles.”

  An old joke, from the final semester at Columbia: They’d agreed to act like they already had those fancy letters after their name, caution be damned, and started calling each other Doctor. Everyone else was horrified.

  For a few seconds they just stood there, neither sure how to bridge the gap of more than a decade. The fugly birds fluttered and fussed. Somewhere far away, an announcement burbled out over the loudspeakers. Then Maya shook her head and stepped in for the hug she knew would come. Tristan probably smiled as he laid his head on top of hers; he squeezed her close but not too tight. He always held her like she would maybe shatter at any moment; it was one of the ways she knew she’d never sleep with him.

  “Flight delay?”

  She pulled halfway out the hug, shot him a sharp glance. He wasn’t that obtuse. Yes, it was snowing still—wild droves of it whipped through the night sky outside the tall windows—but he would’ve seen all the other passengers stream past hours ago. He knew her getting through at all was a long shot. The endless persistent impossible questions cycled through Maya’s mind, the ferocious banality of that back room they’d dragged her to, the bulletin board she’d memorized out of sheer boredom, the slow-ticking clock, the same damn questions once again, the final, grudging sigh as they released her back into the world. But these things weren’t to be spoken of or complained about out loud, not in public, not here, not now.

  She shook her head. “Something like that.”

  Tristan had made an awkward, kamikaze pass at her the night before graduation, damn near shattering their easygoing friendship, then he’d sworn over and over it was fine, it was cool, they could just go on being whatever they were. Maya had shrugged, but they both knew he was lying.

  “Still up for hitting the town?” A shy offering as he squeezed her once more then released her from the hug.

  The humiliation of the past couple hours and the fear about all that was to come pulsed inside Maya’s throat, threatened to rise and spill out. She swallowed them. This time, she would finally make things right. But she had to be patient.

  “I could definitely use a drink.”

  * * *

  —

  The snow kept falling. It coated the sloping pools of darkness along the highway and danced delicate pirouettes beneath each orange light along the RFK Bridge, fading off into the night.

  Maya had heard whispers, seen offhand references in anonymous posts on her feed, pieced together the tattered hints that were all anyone could offer about what was really going on in the States these days, and they all added up to the same thing: The place was a ghost town.

  That vital pulse of the streets—the same one that used to keep her up at night in grad school—it was gone, an echo at best. She had tried to imagine the emptiness over and over, never managed it. But here it was before her: the desolation of a New York street devoid of walkers, of movement, of life. All the warm bodies tucked away behind layers of concrete, clacking away beneath the protections of firewalls, whispered prayers, and anonyports—or burying their sorrows in TV dramas. It wasn’t just the snow, of course; even in the worst blizzards, someone would find a reason to be out and about, running errands, wandering. Maya herself had never missed an opportunity to roam the wintry streets, nod at her fellow ludicrous adventurers, pick a snowball fight with some kids.

  “Here,” Tristan told the taxi driver. “This’ll be fine.” A dark street, snow-covered and no sign of plows. Deserted, and not in the quaint way.

  Here? Maya wanted to exclaim, but she kept her mouth shut. The driver grunted something and Tristan paid, and then they were out in the chilly Manhattan night, in the silence of snow and an empty city.

  They trudged around a corner, then another. Occasional dim lamps broke the darkness. Of course, Maya thought. No one gets dropped off where they’re actually going anymore. She exhaled a cloud of mist through her scarf, longed for home. Because everyone could be a watcher. Every move recorded.

  “Want me to carry one of your bags?” Tristan asked, way too late. Maya did but shook her head. He shrugged. “Anyway, we’re almost there.”

  A surge of terror rose in her. Pure fire, it was fiercer than the simmering fear from earlier. It blazed. Wherever he was leading he
r, they would be waiting. They would be ready. They’d close in around her with heavy hands and then steel would clamp around her small brown wrists and she’d be hauled off, a bag over her head like they always said happens and driven around for hours suffering more questions, beatings, who knew what else—and then dumped, barely a corpse, on some snowy street corner, unrecognizable, or maybe in the river. Gone. Desaparecida.

  She shook the nightmare away, but another arrived in its wake. What of her mission? All the terror that would follow if she failed? Flashes of a grim future ricocheted through her: The world overcome by snarling, clawed monstrosities. Flesh rent by science rendering flesh helpless to defeat science.

  Science. The notion had once held such deliciousness for Maya. A goal. And then…

  “Here,” Tristan said, smiling through the snow and pointing at a nondescript door on yet another darkened street. Where were they now? The East Village, Maya suspected, but she couldn’t be sure. The snow and vague newness of it all had thrown her off. “Sorry ’bout the long walk. You can’t…you know.”

  She nodded, shrugged off his apology. He knocked twice, then a third time a moment later. A double knock answered; he knocked again in response, this time four in a row. Maya memorized the exchange out of habit, because who knew, these days, when one would suddenly need a code to a sanctuary? If, of course…

  “It’s Doc!” a voice called as the door swung open.

  “ ’Tis I!” Tristan declared with an alarming burst of charm. He glanced around the empty street, then motioned Maya in.

  It was warm in the dim basement bar; the grins were genuine and the bartender gorgeous and generous when it came to tequila. Tristan’s brief introduction—“known each other since grad school, a genius, really, and a helluva salsa dancer to boot, plus she’s with us,” spoken with a single raised eyebrow for understanding—was all it took for folks to welcome Maya like a long-lost family member. Stories were traded over blaring pop ballads and shots; cigarettes appeared, were distributed; flicked-open flames illuminated concentrating faces, pursed lips, sad, serious eyes above sudden smiles. Maya kept it simple: her work, her decision to return home and set up labs there. The politics were self-evident to her arc and didn’t need to be laid bare to this crowd, and besides…besides.