A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Miriam laughed so hard she took her foot off the gas. If not for the fact that they were in the literal middle of nowhere, without another car in sight in either direction, they would probably have gotten into an accident. As it was, they were able to make it to the shoulder before coming to a complete, if inelegant, stop.

  “What?” demanded Nan.

  “I’m just—can you imagine the marketing?”

  Miriam folded forward in another fit of hysterical laughter. This time, Nan joined her. They had been driving for days, making their slow way up the line of the coast. They would cut inland after they reached Oregon, heading for the dubious delights of scenic Beaverton, where nothing happened that hadn’t been approved six times over by the local homeowners’ association.

  It was a nice place to raise a family. That was what all the advertising said. Move to Beaverton and start that happy little nuclear unit you’d been dreaming of since you broke off from the one that bore you. Find a husband, find a wife, find one of each, find someone who was neither but who nonetheless wanted to raise children by your side, file the forms and settle down, content in the knowledge that you’d be giving those little tykes exactly the kind of warm, nurturing family environment they needed to thrive.

  What none of the advertisements mentioned was how difficult it was to get the licenses to start that family or how the straight couples seemed to find their applications approved in half the time it took anyone else. (At least the licensing department acknowledged that bisexual people existed: Nan’s friend Alex had marked down bisexual when he and his wife applied for parenthood, and while they were both cisgendered and in a classical man-woman relationship, that little ticky box had been enough to delay their application by almost six months, while multiple straight families had been able to jump ahead of them in the queue.)

  What none of the friendly interviews with present and aspiring residents mentioned was the way the city shut down at nine o’clock, leaving single people with nowhere to go and people in relationships with few, if any, dating options. It hadn’t been until Miriam stumbled across a locked Facebook group describing nearby restaurants and entertainment options that she’d realized how much was being intentionally hidden from them.

  Court cases and successful bills and a hundred small victories had come together to usher in a world where hate was no longer acceptable, where sexual orientation wasn’t enough to deny a person the right to live their life as they saw fit, where identity was up to the individual and not a government agency. But none of those things could change the nature of the human heart, and it was the nature of humans to be cruel to things they didn’t understand, or approve of, or believe in.

  Miriam and Nan had been ecstatic when their application to buy a house in Beaverton had been approved and even happier, two years later, when the perfect little Cape Cod–style bungalow had become available. They had moved with eyes full of stars and heads full of nothing but the future, only to find that the future had a few more fences than they’d been expecting.

  This vacation—this ten days of heaven, away from everything they used to think they wanted—had been the only way to escape when their latest application for parenthood had been turned down. Reason? Family has never maintained a pet. Questionable attachment abilities. It had been suggested that they get a dog to prepare themselves for parenthood. A dog. As if that were the same thing.

  Ten days. It hadn’t been enough. Nan looked at Miriam, laughing so hard over something so small, and wondered whether it ever could be enough.

  “Do you want to go see the guru?” she asked. “If it’s a man, I promise to keep a straight face while he talks about vibrating in harmony with the universe.”

  “And if it’s a woman, I’ll buy you a milkshake the next time we stop in a town with a real diner,” said Miriam. “Let’s go.”

  She started the car back up, and they rolled on down the road, looking for harmony.

  * * *

  —

  There was no guru, male, female, or other. There was no spa. There was a wind chime, crafted from recycled forks, hanging sadly in front of the closed post office. Occasionally, it would jangle in the wind.

  Miriam and Nan leaned against the hood of their car, looking contemplatively at the sign. HARMONY, CA, it read. Under that, someone had taped a piece of poster board with two additional words.

  FOR SALE.

  “The town’s for sale,” said Miriam.

  “I can see that,” said Nan.

  “Who has the spare cash to buy a town? New shoes, sure. A fancy necklace from one of the seaside tourist traps, okay. But a town? And how are you supposed to get it home? This won’t fit in the back of the car.”

  “Sure,” said Nan. She was already moving toward the sign, and past it, onto the porch with the sad wind chime, to peer through the grimed-over, soaped-over window of the old post office. “There’s still a rack of greeting cards in there. The counter and the P.O. boxes, too. You could dust the place off and reopen it tomorrow and no one would be the wiser.”

  “Literally no one, including the United States Postal Service. I’m pretty sure getting them to resume pickups takes a little more than some Windex.”

  Nan glanced over her shoulder at her wife, grimaced, and walked the length of the porch to where it curved around the building. She turned and disappeared from sight.

  For one terrible moment, Miriam was gripped by the absolute conviction that she’d just failed some kind of test, the kind you only found in folktales and Stephen King stories. Nan was gone forever. If she went looking, she’d find bones, or nothing, or maybe her wedding ring.

  “Honey, come see!”

  The moment passed. Nan sounded genuinely excited by whatever she’d found.

  “Coming,” shouted Miriam, and pushed away from the car.

  Behind the post office was a pond, strangely enough, with four grimy white boxes about the size of chest freezers connected to it by long hoses. Nan was peering inside a hatch on the side of the nearest one. She looked up and beamed.

  “Local weather control,” she said. “We’d never be able to whip up a snowstorm, but they can extract enough water from the air to let us generate local rain, and they’ll keep the town from needing to depend on groundwater or imports. We’d just need a few gallons of purified water to get the whole system working again. These are some of the original box models, too. They can take a direct lightning strike and still keep functioning.”

  “Huh,” said Miriam.

  “There are at least eight houses, and I’m pretty sure some of the shops have housing above them.”

  “I say again, huh.” Miriam studied her carefully. “What are you getting at? A town is a little large for a souvenir.”

  “We could at least call and find out how much they want for the place.” Nan dimpled. “Wouldn’t you like to own your own town?”

  “Would that make me mayor?”

  Nan’s dimples deepened as she smiled. “Why, yes. I do believe it would. I always wanted to kiss a mayor.”

  “Good,” said Miriam, walking toward her. “Let me tell you about my political platform.”

  * * *

  —

  Harmony, California—former population thirty-five, current population zero—was for sale for eleven million dollars. The price was justified by the amount of undeveloped land considered to be “within city limits” and the fact that the utilities, post office, and weather machines were all part of the deal. There were no valuable minerals or other assets on the land that anyone had been able to find; it was simply a ghost town that had bloomed and died several times already along the road to Oregon.

  Miriam looked at the figure, looked at Nan wilting on their couch like a flower ripped out of its native soil, and looked out the window. Some of their perfectly curated neighbors were walking their perfectly acceptable dogs, some n
ew designer breed that never barked, not even when it was in pain or danger. Two of those dogs had been killed since their development officially started accepting residents, unable to make a sound when they’d been hit by cars, unable to help their people find them.

  It was clean, sterile, modern. Perfect. Everything about it had been curated and customized to perfection, even down to the percentages of people—so many singles, so many couples, so many triads. So many families with children and so many without. They lived in the very model of a planned community, and while it had seemed like the perfect antidote to the years spent being told that “queer” was another way of saying “unwanted,” now it just felt like another kind of prison.

  Miriam hesitated. Then, slowly, she began to type.

  When she and Nan had applied for homeownership, several of their friends had told them that they’d never be happy in a place like that, surrounded by people like that. That they’d still be marginalized, just along another axis—and, more, that the very existence of licensing for things like parenthood and getting a dog would be used as a way to make sure that only the “right” people got licenses. The straight people, the white people, the Christian people, the able-bodied, neurotypical, didn’t-check-any-boxes people.

  And, yeah, Miriam had noticed how some identities were just “assumed” by the applications, how male and female were each check marks but other was a whole sub-warren of menus—including would rather not say, as if a desire for privacy were somehow an identity. And, yeah, she had known when she signed the mortgage papers that she was agreeing to a certain degree of surveillance in exchange for finally living what she’d been raised to consider the American Dream.

  She had simply never considered that one day she might prefer waking up.

  One by one, she emailed friends, old contacts, people she’d gone to college with, smoked weed with, dreamed big dreams with. Dreams that were, in their way, bigger than any American Dream, because they’d been hers, something she wanted for herself and not because she’d been told to want them. One by one, she told them her idea. It was big. It was wild. It was probably bad. But it was, again, hers.

  When the replies started coming in, she stood and walked to the couch, sitting next to her wife and taking the other woman’s hand in hers. It was warm. Nan always ran warm. Moving to Oregon had been a terrible idea. How had she ever expected a desert girl to be happy in the fog?

  “How much do you think we could get for our house?” she asked. “Ballpark figure? I know the waiting lists are still ungodly long, and I can’t remember the last time somebody sold a place in one of the established neighborhoods. We’re allowed, in case you’re worried about that. I made absolutely sure of that before I signed the mortgage paperwork. We can’t paint the place and we can’t plant any trees that aren’t on the approved list and we can’t get a dog unless our application is approved, but we can sell and move anytime we like.”

  Nan slowly turned to her, a small V of confusion appearing between her eyebrows as she frowned. “What are you talking about? Why would you want to sell the house?”

  “Last time we applied for a mortgage it was to buy this place. Two million dollars of house on the hoof. When I look at it now, it seems like an awful lot for not all that much. We’ve paid off, what, half that? If we sold tomorrow, we’d come away with a million in liquid capital—and that assumes property values haven’t gone up. I assure you, our taxes tell me that they’ve gone up plenty. We could come out with two, even three million.”

  Nan looked at her suspiciously. “And what? Go to Disney World for six years? That isn’t going to give us a place to keep our things.”

  “Maybe not, but I think a whole town would be big enough. Especially if we wanted to annex the storeroom at the post office. I can’t imagine we’re going to be getting that much mail for the first few years.”

  Nan’s breath caught in her throat. “Don’t tease.”

  “I’m not teasing.” Miriam leaned over to take her other hand. “I emailed a bunch of our friends, some of the folks I work with—they’re interested. If we incorporate so that we have enough capital to gain some negotiating room on the purchase price, and we sell this place, I think we can swing eleven million for the town, plus however much the place winds up costing to fix up. How do you even get an entire town inspected? There’s probably going to be more dry rot than there is healthy wood. Really, we should—”

  Nan lunged forward and kissed her, hard. Miriam stopped talking.

  In that moment, there were far more interesting things to do.

  * * *

  —

  Selling their house was, as it turned out, completely legal under the town charter: For all that it virtually never happened, it was apparently encouraged. If everyone who didn’t feel like they fit in simply moved away, why, there would be no need for anything to change.

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Miriam grimly. “Translate it into Latin and it could be the municipality motto.”

  Nan didn’t answer. She was busy emailing three people and chatting with six more, windows popping up on her laptop screen like mushrooms after a rain. Miriam sighed fondly, watching her. Then she returned to the far less enjoyable task of explaining to their lawyer what they were trying to do.

  Buying a town was not, it developed, exactly easy. It also wasn’t as terrible an idea as she had initially feared. Harmony represented a decent chunk of California real estate, once the town borders were taken into account, and a surprising amount of it was farmable land, made undesirable only by its current isolation from local residents. Bring Harmony back to life and it might be possible to entice farmers to move onto that land, making it profitable again.

  Build it and they will come might well be the only form of trickle-down economics with a scrap of truth behind it. If they built it—or rebuilt it, more properly—they’d have a chance at making something lasting. Making something that was real would encourage more real things to appear around it, until there was no further use for falsehood.

  The consortium that was selling Harmony was happy to explain why they were willing to part with such a prime piece of real estate. As Nan and Miriam had joked on their way into town, the former owners had been gurus, mystics, New Age believers looking for a chance to create a community of their own, a sort of West Coast Lily Dale. But the traffic on the road hadn’t been enough to sustain them, and bit by bit the money and the idealism had run out, leaving them stuck with a white elephant of a town and the shattered vestiges of a dream.

  One of them even asked, in a carefully neutral tone, what the young people who were looking to buy the town were intending to do with it and seemed relieved when told that all the people who were currently considering relocation to Harmony were computer professionals who wouldn’t be changing jobs. As long as there was reliable internet, they would have reliable employment.

  Things started to happen very quickly after that.

  Miriam and Nan listed their house, to a resounding lack of objection from both their neighbors and the city planners, who were supposed to get involved for anything more extreme than a new floor mat. Apparently, losing the only lesbians in the neighborhood—as they had reliably been called, no matter how many times they tried to explain that Nan was still bisexual even while married to a woman—was less worrisome than someone choosing a clashing pattern for their curtains. Maybe it was even a relief. While no one actually said, Think about the children, several people did comment on how nice it would be for the new occupants—whoever they happened to be—to be so close to the school.

  Tolerance could be legislated, could be demanded, but it couldn’t be guaranteed. Even as people followed the rules, they were still capable of harboring an astonishing amount of hate in their hearts. Miriam had plenty of time to dwell on that as she watched their neighbors, who had always been perfectly pleasant to their faces, all but t
hrow a party to celebrate them finally leaving.

  “Perfect on paper,” she murmured, standing in the doorway of what was soon to be someone else’s dream home, someone else’s doorway to the perfect future, and watching as the movers carried their things out to the waiting truck.

  Nan stepped up behind her, sliding her arms around Miriam’s waist. “What?”

  “Just remembering how excited we were to have our application for homeownership accepted. And now here we are, leaving. I can’t decide whether this is victory or defeat. It feels like a little bit of both. It feels like giving up.”

  “It feels like finally deciding what our future’s going to be,” said Nan, and pressed a kiss against the side of Miriam’s neck. “We’re not following anyone else’s blueprint. We’re following ourselves. And we just bought ourselves a town. How many of these boring assholes can say that?”

  “Technically, we bought ourselves the controlling interest in a corporation that happens to hold, as its sole asset, a town.”

  Nan laughed and kissed Miriam again. “Details. We’re going home. Nothing matters as much as that. Nothing’s ever going to.”

  * * *

  —

  Three months to the day after the first time they’d seen the sign, Miriam and Nan followed the moving truck containing their belongings down the road to Harmony. They weren’t the first ones there: That honor belonged to the construction crews and contractors who were already hard at work replacing rotted support beams, nailing down loose boards, and redoing the shingles on roofs that should probably have been repaired several years before. What seemed like a fleet of gardeners and landscapers was moving through the town, trimming trees, planting gardens of native flowers, and removing unwanted weeds, cacti, and other invaders.