Fire Sweeping: The California Ballot Killings Book II

by H M Wilhelmborn

  Almost as if to demonstrate how uncomfortable it can be to sit in economy class on long-haul flights, Aunt Mary stood up and sat down again.

  “She makes up flower names, you know, your mother, Janet. That’s what my sister, Gazelle, does. I heard she spends twenty-five thousand a year on plant specialists, and my hair almost fell out. What exactly is a plant specialist? Do you go to school for that? If your mother wants to waste money on plant specialists, I can visit her for two weeks every year with a can of water and some fertilizer, and I’ll tell her I’m a ‘plant specialist’ and she can, um . . . Duiker and kudu are going extinct in the savanna.”

  “One final question, Aunt Mary: what about the fires weeping or the fire sweeping?”

  “Your free time is up. Pay up or shut up,” Aunt Mary said as she ended the call.

  Mauru and I had a good laugh after the call.

  Mauru hadn’t seen aunts Mary, Lucy, and their families since our wedding in July 2029.

  He still hadn’t had an opportunity to form an opinion of my aunts because they’d kept to themselves for most of the wedding celebration, and they’d hardly talked with his family, no matter how much his family tried to engage with mine.

  When my aunts did talk to his family, aunts Mary and Lucy cracked an insensitive joke about interracial marriages, which they thought hilarious.

  “There’s no one else,” Mauru said, reassuring me following my call with Aunt Mary in which she’d said he had other children. “And I don’t want any more kids, Jan. I already have all the sons I need and the only daughter I want. I’m done.”

  4

  Rats, Raddies, and Foreigners

  One of the gifts of being the child of immigrants is that letting go comes easily; you have to to survive.

  A sermon Pastor Jim once gave at Living Heavens Church reminded me that it’s just the way things are. You let go, or you drown with what you’re holding on to.

  But maybe you don’t let go at all.

  You learn to live with the absence, the perpetual sense of mourning over how the world changed so fast that it hemorrhaged everyone your family once called their community. Each person in that community was forced to leave, dispersed across a globe hostile to their arrival. Your family only hears of them when a birth, a wedding, or a death has happened (and sometimes all three).

  I wondered where Mike fit into all that.

  Why him?

  Why me?

  Why now, as opposed to some other time?

  As far as I knew, Mike, too, was the child of immigrants, and it made sense that he’d joined the CWP because they were all about welcoming immigrants and migrants—well, most of them.

  I missed him.

  He was in the first month of his seven-month prison term in Menlo Park.

  I needed to see him.

  I wanted to see how I felt in his company, how he felt in mine, and I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t be his Second because I was happily married with four children.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself seated on his couch that January night, with my hand on his, as he told me that he liked the fact that I was “effortless. Like home.”

  It was the first time I’d ever cheated on anyone.

  I’d had five serious relationships before I met Mauru. I’d also fooled around with a handful of other guys as well. One-night stands and such.

  One-night stands were fun because I got to play with boundaries. I even tried a threesome once and got bored in the first few minutes. There’s nothing more annoying than two otherwise smart guys whose bedroom dialog is restricted to the following: “You know Daddy likes’em perky things. Bring’em to Daddy.” “Spell the word ‘Daddy.’ You’re Daddy’s naughty schoolgirl. Aren’t you, Janet?”

  I’d also had my fun while Mauru and I were dating, and I had my pick of men up to the moment Mauru and I were exclusive.

  There’s a man, an old fling, I still think about, in the way we share something special with someone, and he remains with us for the rest of our lives.

  His name was Antoninio.

  He was Portuguese. He was only slightly taller than I was, had a slight lisp, and a scar on his neck from surgery as a child.

  I met him at college, and he introduced me to the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, to Ambrosia Skiffles’s novels, and to being fully present. Antoninio wanted me to move back to the Azores with him. He was the first person to remark that I was easily distracted.

  “When you work, work, Janet,” he said. “When you eat, eat. When you’re intimate, be intimate. Please don’t mix them, Janet. You have a habit of jumping from one thought to the next, one thing to the next.”

  I refused to move with Antoninio across the world, and I rejected his implicit offer of marriage because I wasn’t willing to be an immigrant, especially in a place in which I didn’t speak the language. Antoninio and I lost touch. I’m not sure where he is, what he’s doing, and if he remembers me.

  The last time I looked him up, many years ago, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Norway. I saw his face on a university website, as attractive as ever, and I gasped and smiled. He seemed happy, but a little lonely, and I hoped that he was loved and OK. I intuitively ran the back of my right hand against the computer screen as if I were caressing his cheek. Oh, the fun times we’d shared in Cortland, Ithaca, Syracuse! And that crazy, long night in Montreal!

  I sent a prayer up for him, hoping that he was well and happy, and I told him I was grateful for having known him. I prayed that he was truly happy.

  About a week before my birthday party, I was driving to work when I noticed two things. On billboards everywhere was the following message: “Fellow Californians. Let’s Welcome Our Water Court. The California Water Party Needs Your Advice and Help. Please Join Us.”

  I wasn’t sure that other San Diegans knew what a water court was, so I turned the radio on.

  Governor Trehoviak and most of the high-ranking members of the CWP, including Anton, Greta, Sheila, and Miriam (the “people’s representatives from the California Water Party”), were talking about “Section 1(a)(1)” on every possible channel. They were telling us that it was “imperative that California pass this law now.”

  Section 1(a)(1), Trehoviak said, “is a law allowing California to play catch up with states that already have water courts. We are behind Colorado and Montana. Colorado, as you know, has also been preventing a good deal of water from the Colorado River from reaching us here in California.”

  As Hannah later pointed out, Trehoviak’s sentence about Colorado wasn’t chosen for its logical progression but for its ability to drum up anti-Colorado hysteria. About 60 percent of Southern California’s water came from the Colorado River. With drought in Colorado, that state had built additional dams along the river to “keep our waters within our state.”

  At 1,450 miles in length, the Colorado River was the seventh-longest river in the country, and it was also a river, Hannah said, that was now subject to more litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States than any other.

  It flowed through seven states and two nations (the US and Mexico). Mexico had long been denied its fair share of the Colorado River’s water, and California historically had been entitled to more of the river’s water than any other state.

  The river already had hundreds of dams along its course, and the State of Colorado, Hannah reminded me, was intent on keeping as much of the river’s water for its citizens. Colorado even reminded us all that the river was named after the state. The river wasn’t, they said, called the “California River.”

  Damming up the Colorado further in a period of terrible drought meant that California was receiving a lot less water than it needed, and it was relying increasingly on desalination plants and recycled water.

  “We are suing them,” Governor Trehoviak intoned on the radio as I drove to work. “These darn Raddies are the worst people in the history of our great nation! It is completely outrageous what the Raddies are doing, and G
overnor Barrow, the previous governor, did absolutely nothing to prevent them from doing this before she left office. Instead, she sent the Army National Guard to the border at San Ysidro to terrify migrants, and she abolished the death penalty in the state. She underfunded the Pure Water Initiative and deliberately dragged her feet on desalination plants. The people of California need a muscular water court to prevent water waste. They need a muscular water court, so we’re not behind Colorado. They need a muscular water court so that within three years, we’re no longer hemorrhaging millions of gallons of water on lavish things. This is the Right Path. I promise you this: the Raddies will pay for what they are doing to the people of California. The California Water Party needs your advice and help. Please join us.”

  Anton Cola, Governor Trehoviak’s First, his cruel right-hand man, and, Hannah had told me in late 2038, one of his lovers, spoke next.

  Anton interviewed a boy called Emmanuel.

  Emmanuel lived in a homeless shelter outside San Francisco with his parents.

  He had asthma, and he didn’t always get enough to eat. There were rats around the homeless shelter, and Emmanuel felt them run over him as he slept.

  The rats also devoured everything Emmanuel’s family tried to store. Often, the rats died in the camp, and worms poured out of their rotting bellies. Emmanuel and his parents depended on water deliveries from the CWP because the state didn’t deliver water. Sometimes Emmanuel and his parents walked a long way to get water.

  “In California! This is happening in California because of the Raddies!” Governor Trehoviak’s voice boomed on the airwaves after Emmanuel spoke. “In California! We’re the wealthiest state in our nation by far, and you have Californians dying from asthma and dehydration. In California! You have children living with rodents. In California! And you have clowns like Linda Maywort writing editorials about the importance of almonds and alfalfa and luxurious bathtubs and landscaping when children are dying. In California! What kind of world is this in which people are dying from incurable illnesses and cannot afford to eat, but clowns at the Herald, like Linda Maywrot, are fighting for their right to snack on alfalfa and almonds so that they don’t put on weight! In California! What kind of world is this when we have clowns like Linda Maywrot writing about rights for the Raddies and about political correctness! Not under our watch will this state of affairs continue! Not under our watch will the people of this great state be subjected to these moral outrages by the Raddies and their allies! Not in California!”

  It became known as the “In California Speech.”

  The speech proved influential, and it ended up all over social media, and it gave way to similar rhetoric around the globe because, as often happens with these kinds of things, they no longer belong to those who wrote them, but they are coopted by those who have other plans for them.

  The extremist group “Only America,” which now called itself “E Pluribus,” loved the association of “rats” with “Raddies.” It also enjoyed the association of migrants and immigrants with rat-infested shelters.

  E Pluribus coopted the phrase “In California!” to great effect in its ads.

  “Where was I conceived?” an E Pluribus member, dressed in combat boots and military fatigues, asked in an ad on social media.

  “In California!

  “Where was I born?

  “In California!

  “Where did I go to kindergarten?

  “In California!

  “Where did I go to school?

  “In California!

  “Where did I get my first kiss?

  “In California!

  “Where did I get my first job?

  “In California!

  “Where did I lose my first job, my second, and my third?

  “In California!

  “Where did I lose my job to rats, Raddies, and foreigners?

  “In California!

  “Where will my sons die because of rats, Raddies, foreigners, and the illnesses they bring?

  “In California!

  “Where am I willing to exterminate the rats, Raddies, and foreigners?

  “In California!”

  Besides the ad for the Water Court on the billboards, on my way to work, I noticed a new flag atop all state buildings.

  Of course, the state and federal flags were familiar sights throughout California, including in people’s backyards, but this was a different flag.

  In the top half was a green wave, and its lower boundary resembled an elongated “S,” below which was a band of white, also flowing from one part of the banner to the other, and below that was a green wave.

  In the center of the flag was the outline of the extinct California grizzly bear in white. I thought it might be a joke, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Hannah,” I asked when I got to work, “what’s the new flag that’s gone up?”

  “CWP,” Hannah said as she adjusted her dijon-colored glasses. Hannah was seated at her desk in her office, typing a message on her computer. Her office door was open.

  “CWP? How is that even possible, Hannah? How does a political party have its flag on government buildings?”

  “The law,” Hannah said while responding to an e-mail. “Sorry to be so short, Janet, but I have to get this e-mail to Miguel and Dolores about their B&Bs in Hawaii. I’ll be right with you.”

  I sat down at my desk, which was just across from Hannah’s office.

  “Sorry about that,” Hannah said a few minutes later. Hannah was as immaculately dressed. “So, the Hoviaks,” she said, referring to Trehoviak and his people, “passed a law that allows any party that holds a trifecta to have its flag on all state buildings for as long as the trifecta remains. I wrote that law, too.” Hannah smiled and dusted her shoulders. “You forgot that I’d written that law.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” Hannah responded. “They passed the law together with a bill increasing funding for the Pure Water Initiative and desalination plants. The same bill also includes an anti-discrimination statute that bans discrimination based on political activities outside work, and it bans discrimination against migrants, internal and international, ‘on account of the climate, except those migrants from places deemed threats to the security of the people of California.’ Probably illegal, but there’s a lot of that going around these days.”

  “Well, you voted for them,” I reminded Hannah. “And you write their laws.”

  Hannah spoke slowly as if she were talking to a toddler. “Of course, I did. My job means I do as I’m told, Janet.” She spoke normally now. “Anyway, no lawyer in her right mind would turn down the opportunity to represent the CWP. It’s a career-defining opportunity. I didn’t graduate at the top of my class at Condorvine—the best law school in the country—to work as an ambulance-chaser.”

  “There are going to be riots over this stuff,” I blurted out. “Fire sweeping.”

  “Fire sweeping?” Hannah asked. “You mean like the forest fires that are beginning earlier each year and lasting longer? Well, I’m not sure what forest fires have to do with riots, Janet.”

  “People can only take so much before they snap and pour into the streets, Hannah.”

  “Pouring into the streets! Janet, what have you been watching?” Hannah shook her head. “People identify their priorities, and as long as you take care of those, they allow you to get away with almost anything else. The Hoviaks know that. They breathe that.”

  I tried to smile politely at Hannah, and I turned my computer on.

  “Just for the record, 1(a)(1) and the Law of Lavish Things, which are my creations,” Hannah said as she removed her glasses and wiped them clean, “will become the law—riots or no riots, fire or no fire, Janet.”

  Hannah put her glasses on and went back to her office.

  “Ha-nnah!” Larry, a cofounder of WS&X (and my boss), called from his office, which was across from my desk.

  “Yes, Larry.” Hannah walked to Larry’s office.


  “I’ve just had Anton on the phone.”

  “Um, OK.”

  “Janet, can you come here as well, please?”

  “Sure, Larry.”

  “Take a seat both of you and close the door.”

  I closed the door.

  “I just want you both to know,” Larry said, “that the CWP are fuckers! OK? You both hear me? Pure fuckers! OK? Now, don’t overreact, and don’t take this personally. I know how excited you both can get. It is what it is, and we’ll make it work somehow.”

  Those words: “It is what it is,” and “we’ll make it work somehow,” only came up when Larry had made yet another bargain with the Hoviaks in which Larry’d decided that the financial cost of opposing the CWP’s wishes was too high to bear, so Larry acceded to whatever the Hoviaks demanded.

  “Just don’t take this personally.” Larry scratched his chin and sighed. “They’re pure fuckers! So, neither of you can work on any CWP matter going forward.”

  “What!” Hannah stood up. “Why, Larry? I work my ass off for them, nights and weekends, and even holidays. I write their laws.” Hannah shook her head. “That’s, well, that’s BS, Larry. That’s total BS!”

  Hannah took a deep breath and sat down again.

  “It’s not you. It’s them,” Larry said.

  Hannah looked at me and tried to egg me on.

  “Why? What did I do, Larry?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Larry said. “I honestly don’t know why you’ve both been removed from all CWP matters. You’re also both forbidden from talking with any CWP person in our offices. Effective tomorrow.”

  I felt so nauseous that I stood up, excused myself, and ran to the bathroom where I puked. I rinsed my mouth, brushed my teeth, and gargled with mouthwash. They were pushing me out of my job because of Mike. Why punish Hannah, though?

  I walked back to Larry’s office, apologized for running out, and found myself staring into the distance.

  “Are you firing me?” Hannah asked Larry.

  “No,” Larry said. “We have other clients, and there’s more than enough other work to be done on those matters. We’re going to have to establish an ethical wall to prevent you both from having any access at all to CWP matters.” Larry shook his head. “OK, you two. Let me figure out how to make everyone happy.”