A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  He was mulling over these vagaries now, along with certain relevant notes he had uploaded to his phone, which the test minder had failed to confiscate from him at the beginning of the testing period. The minder, a middle-aged functionary from the college with a hairline that receded toward the top of his skull and then bloomed into a lank ponytail, had left in the middle of the first section, announcing to no one in particular that his asthma couldn’t stand up to this fucking smoke and wishing the students luck.

  Fletcher had considered leaving with him. There would be ways to negotiate with Remote Learning now that the minder was gone, throwing an air of ambiguity over the test results. But Rahma had stayed: had not even looked up, had kept her head tilted in that intense way toward her computer screen, its blue glow throwing pale, underwater highlights across her face and the folds of her headscarf. And so the rest of them, shamed, had stayed too, following mutely the instructions of the cheerful blond woman who appeared on their screens at regular intervals to guide them through the test.

  “You have three minutes left until testing resumes,” a dozen of her announced now.

  “The fire break is gone,” said Fletcher, flushing at the sound of his own voice. “On Rainier. The fire jumped it at MLK. The news says.”

  “Jesus.” Claire pulled at her cigarette, making the ember flare and dance. “That’s right down the fucking street.”

  “Maybe we should just leave,” piped Luis from the back of the room. A lacquer of sweat had sprung up over the halfhearted mustache on his upper lip. Luis was sixteen, a high school student, one of those fast-tracked smart kids who arrive at college with a dozen credits already on the books. Fletcher had envied him at first, but Luis was so nervous, swimming in oversized hand-me-downs and flinching whenever anyone uttered what he still called the F-bomb, that it was impossible to hate the kid: Smart as he was, he was destined to go through life as somebody’s little brother.

  “It’s getting really hot,” he said now, his voice cracking. “What if there’s like a wind surge or whatever, like there was a couple days ago, and we’re engulfed in flames or something?”

  “No one’s going to be engulfed in flames,” muttered Claire, lighting a fresh American Spirit off the butt of her old one. “Save that shit for your essay questions. Engulfed in flames.”

  Fletcher was not so sure. He rose from his swivel chair, which tilted under his weight; it had been donated or salvaged and several screws were missing. He checked his phone again: He had two minutes. He passed by Rahma’s desk on his way out the door. She did not look up. He hadn’t expected her to but went red nonetheless and felt a sudden, cold bloom of moisture seep across his palms.

  Outside, it was snowing. Fletcher slipped sideways through the partially open door, careful to leave the wooden doorstop in place behind him: The minder, before he left, had warned them that the lock was tricky. The air in the parking lot hit his lungs like something molten. Fat pearl-gray cinders descended from the sky without momentum, so unhurried that Fletcher paused and tapped the toe of his work boot against the concrete to convince himself that time was moving at its usual speed. The parking lot was empty except for Claire’s blue Toyota Camry, its wheels distorted by a shimmer of heat rising from the asphalt. The college had rented one of the empty storefronts in the old Promenade complex for testing. It was meant to be something else, some tech worker’s future luxury condo, but after the crash the money had run out, and now it all sat empty: the supermarket dark behind its phalanx of shopping carts, the windows of the smaller shops crisscrossed with masking tape, prepared for vandals as if for a typhoon. The big neon sign advertising the Promenade had burned out at both ends and now read simply ROME.

  Fletcher could smell fire. It was different from the smell of smoke: Smoke smelled like the remains of old things, fire like the beginning of something entirely new. It entered the nose as a waterless vapor, stimulating dormant instincts, less a scent than an imperative. Fletcher wanted to hunch toward the ground and run, to follow the hill down Jackson Street and out into the invisible bay, where the fire couldn’t follow. Instead, he straightened and went back inside.

  The others were already at their desks. Empty cups of coffee lay discarded in corners where the cinders had gathered into black drifts, turning the makeshift classroom into an ancient ruin, the students into tourists. They had wandered through, left their trash, marveled at the ways in which time laid waste to greatness, and now it was time to return, somehow, to a present that continually eluded them.

  “The test is about to resume,” chirped the blond woman.

  “I think we should leave after all,” said Fletcher.

  Rahma lifted her eyes from her computer screen and gazed at him steadily.

  “Some of us have scholarship money riding on this,” she said. “Some of us have to prioritize.”

  Her voice was low but soft, the corners of each word clipped by a slight accent. Most of the Somali girls Fletcher met at school had either been born in Seattle or moved to the U.S. when they were small. Rahma was different. According to Claire, she had spent most of her childhood in the camps. Fletcher wasn’t sure what it meant, but Claire said it so archly that he assumed the distinction was significant. It gave her slender, cloaked shoulders a faint air of drama, of tragedy perhaps, and when he watched her he imagined that her opaque expressions concealed a profound sadness. He imagined many things, but that sadness was at the root of them all: It bound them together, gave them an unspoken intimacy that one day they would confess to each other. He had realized it first, but one day she would come to the same understanding, and then, finally, they might say to one another the things they had thus far left unsaid.

  For now, however, she was looking at him, and in the creases around her iris-blue mouth there lay a suggestion of contempt. Fletcher swallowed and tasted ash. He slid into his seat as the image of the blond woman on his screen was replaced by a lattice of multiple-choice questions.

  “This is crazy,” he announced. “We’re all gonna be engulfed in flames, just like Luis said.”

  Luis made a funny noise, a strangled sort of honk, which might have been intended as a laugh.

  “Will you just—” Claire forbore to finish her own sentence. She clicked madly at the left button of her mouse with a single black-taloned finger. “Nobody is burning alive today. Okay? Don’t be so fucking dramatic. Some of us have scholarships and opportunities and stuff to think about.” She shot a deadened look, unobserved, at Rahma, who sat across the room at her back.

  “Some of us might,” retorted Fletcher. “But you’re not one of them.”

  At this, Claire swiveled in her chair and fixed him with an expression he had come to know well over the course of the last several weeks: a wide, bulging stare, revealing the delicate network of blood vessels that approached her gray eyes like tidal estuaries. Her blond hair, or system of hairs, half pinned up and half combed under, quivered with affected rage. Fletcher knew by now that this was all nothing. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and waited.

  “You’re not worth it,” said Claire after a moment. She turned back to her computer with a snort. “Fletcher. Fletcher the lecher.”

  Fletcher pretended not to hear her. Internally, however, he shuddered, resisting the urge to glance over his shoulder at Rahma and Luis and gauge whether this epithet was one they had heard before. It did not seem fair. He had never touched anyone. He only looked at Rahma. He only looked at her when she was looking somewhere else, but, fatally, had failed until that very moment to consider who might be looking at him while he was looking at her.

  It was an odd word, lecher, the sort of word that sounded exactly like what it was. Prior to the vocabulary unit of Building Language Proficiency, he had never encountered it, so the brunt of the word struck him with the full force of something new and bewildering. He had always assumed that his quiet protected him: that he
went through the world unobserved. Now, however, he could not unhear the rhyme in his name.

  He swallowed and turned his head toward his computer screen. Before him were ten questions concerning subject-verb agreement: There were several brungs scattered throughout, which told him precisely what the test designers thought about people like him. In a test, there ought to be right answers and wrong answers but not tricks. To trick a person—to infringe on his vernacular and cast doubt on his means of expression—did not test his knowledge; it tested the circumstances of his birth. Fletcher’s eyes skipped from brung to brung, all the while thinking lecher, and he felt shame begin to creep up around the edges of his ambition.

  He clicked haphazardly on a series of blank ovals until a pattern emerged that pleased him; an A-B-A-D-D rhythm that felt like the order in which right answers might appear. The scent of fire intensified. There was heat now as well, heat that came up from the ground instead of down from the oppressive air.

  Rahma had taken off her sandals and let her long toes bend against the cheap polyester carpet on the floor, exposing the rose-gold underside of her heel. Despite her headscarf and the abaya that covered her body from neck to ankle, she did not look warm; behind her, Claire, dressed in a tank top and cutoff jean shorts so tiny that the interior pockets hung down past the hem, was already fanning herself. Abruptly, Luis rose and went to the door: Opening it, he poured the contents of his Big Gulp across the threshold like an offering, ice cubes hitting the sweltering asphalt with eddies of steam.

  “There,” he said, returning to his seat with the empty cup. “Maybe that’ll keep the fire from coming inside, anyway.”

  It was not a bad notion. Fletcher clicked the blue arrow at the bottom of his screen to advance to the next section and then stood up, stepping over the wet line across the door to inspect the exterior of the building. Outside, the sky was yellow, the same shade as the grass in the city parks that had been dead and dry since June, sacrificed to municipal water restrictions. The outer walls of the storefront were the kind of spackled white plaster material popular in the 1970s; there were dozens of similar buildings scattered across the Central District, and like this one, their once-pristine faces were now gray and green. Fletcher knew from the summers he’d spent working demolition with his stepfather that the material was not exactly asbestos and therefore not exactly fireproof.

  There was a spigot around the corner of the building; squatting next to it, Fletcher muttered a prayer to an undesignated higher power and twisted the handle. He was rewarded with a gush of water as warm as a bath. He stood and began to kick the current downhill, against the side of the building, down an ancient channel of dry moss. The smell of it, of dirt and water and the spores of growing things, reminded him of another city, the city of a former life, one that had occupied the same space in which he stood but that had been made of very different things. He kicked again at the water, feeling it seep through a crack along one seam of his workboot, and swore quietly.

  “Remember the fire department?”

  Claire, inexplicably, had appeared on the roof.

  “Remember that? That was fun, having a fire department.” She was holding Luis’s Big Gulp and slinging water across the roofing shingles like a farmer sowing seeds.

  “Remember FEMA?” Fletcher squinted up at her with what he hoped was a grin. “Remember park rangers?”

  “Remember when we were gonna get light-rail to the Eastside?” Claire grinned back, shielding her eyes from the sunless glare. “It was nice having a government that did, like, basic stuff. I don’t think we realized how basic it was. My parents voted for the president. Twice. They were, like, we have no money; why should we pay taxes for shit? They still have no money and now also no fire department. The fire abatement whatever subscription service for their neighborhood cost twice as much per year as they were paying in state taxes before. So. That worked out well. Thanks, Mom.” Claire swiveled back and forth on the ball of one foot, coquettish, appealing. “You know what I mean?”

  Fletcher accepted her apology for what it was. They worked in parallel, unspeaking, for another few minutes, inexpertly dampening whatever they could reach, until the kindly smell of water began to overtake the smoke and soot and heat. Perhaps everything would not be terrible. The sun, the proper sun, was struggling to emerge: Through the thinnest stripes of haze, the sky was visible. Fletcher gave the gushing water one more kick and turned off the spigot. Claire slid to the edge of the roof and let her stubbled legs hang over the gutter, and reached for his hand: He took it and helped her jump down.

  “They’re saying it might rain tonight,” she said. “Remember the rain?”

  “No,” he said, and laughed. They went inside. Fletcher pulled the door shut behind them, wiggling it to make sure it latched: The fire, at least, would not get in that way. He felt noble, responsible; out of all of them, he was the oldest, and if he could not finish the test, he could at least be useful to the others. But the others did not acknowledge him. Rahma chewed one delicate nail, her lips moving silently over the words that appeared on her screen. Luis, sitting opposite, was hunched toward his monitor, rocking back and forth half consciously, and did not look up as they came in.

  “Three more questions,” he said, clicking at his mouse. “Three more and then we’ll go.”

  “You were the one who wanted to leave an hour ago,” said Fletcher.

  “Yeah, but now it’s like a challenge, you know? Like we did it, we took the test in the middle of a freaking fire, and those buttwipes at Remote Learning can’t say anything. It’s like they wanted us to fail, right? And we didn’t fail.”

  “I’m failing,” announced Fletcher. He was startled by the volume of his voice. He looked at the blinking blue arrow on his own computer screen and laughed. “I’m failing this class and everything else. But I’m glad I got to hang out with you guys. I’m glad I came anyway. Fuck verb agreement. I’m glad I showed up.”

  Rahma looked up at him and almost smiled. The sight of it—her mouth softened, her black eyes dancing in their halo of glossy lashes—lifted him off the ground like something physical, audible perhaps, like the choir of angels that served as his stepfather’s go-to cliché. When the window behind him shattered, he thought it was simply punctuation.

  Fletcher felt himself thrown violently forward. There was screaming: Claire’s and Rahma’s, and Luis’s hoarse squeal, all descending in a crude harmony. Lines of heat seared across his back. It was not pain, at least not yet: What he chiefly felt was embarrassment at having forgotten something so elemental as glass, which expanded much more rapidly in high heat than plaster or wood, and which couldn’t be fireproofed with a little water. The thing that surprised him was the fire itself. It licked at the ceiling of the room through the shattered window, as aggressive and invasive as something self-conscious—a predator or a thief.

  “The door!” shrieked Claire. Objects swam before Fletcher’s eyes, disconnected and meaningless: this chair, this desk, this empty cup. Through the smoke, he saw Luis throwing himself against the door of the classroom, his shoulder thudding against the gray-painted steel in an awful, frantic rhythm, and realized with a kind of backward foreboding that he had kicked out the wooden doorstop when he came inside after dampening the roof.

  Fletcher pulled himself to his feet. Dimly, he remembered the rain shutter that framed the outside of the window, a relic of that other city, of the ancient ruin: Perhaps it would hold out fire too, at least for a few minutes. It would buy them time. Would anyone come? Was there anyone? Without thinking, he reached through the gaping wound where the window had been, into and past the flames, and closed his hand over a metal lever.

  The next thing he saw was Rahma’s face. It was bent over his, eclipsing the fluorescent ceiling light, and appeared to be laughing and crying at once.

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said, her voice shaking. “You could have
been killed.”

  “Was I?” muttered Fletcher. He flexed his hand: Pain fled up his arm in a sharp spasm.

  “I don’t know.” She laughed again and dashed tears from her face with one palm. “If you’re dead, we must be dead too. Maybe we’re all dead.”

  “Don’t move him,” came someone else’s voice, farther away. “Get a towel. Water.” The door was open, not just a little but all the way, its hinges smashed and glinting in the sun. Sky was visible. Beyond the threshold, in the shimmering heat, a man and a woman wearing blue armbands were squatting beside Luis, gently probing his shoulder with latex-gloved fingers.

  “Those medics?” muttered Fletcher. “The volunteer ones?”

  Rahma ignored the question. “What a stupid, stupid thing to do,” she said, in a way that suggested she didn’t think it was stupid at all. “I would never have thought of it. You just stood up and reached out like it was nothing, like it was raining and you were just closing the— Oh my God! You didn’t even finish your midterm.”

  “But you finished yours,” said Fletcher. He bit back the nausea that pulsed in his throat and tried to smile. Rahma shook her head. She sat back on her heels beside him, her hip not quite touching his, waiting for whoever was coming with water and a towel. In another moment, she looked at him again. In her gaze, through the strange clarity of his own pain, Fletcher saw that she despised him. This was a temporary amnesty. Her eyes were full of mercy, of pity tempered by distaste: She looked at him as she might at an abandoned animal. Had she seen him after all? Had she noticed him noticing her? The thought made him cold. He could not tell, exactly, whether or not he had done something wrong. He never could.