Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  The cell they put him in for those thirty-six hours had a view of the spot where they had busted him, tagging the support columns of the bridges down there in the floodplain while in possession of a felonious quantity of acid. Dallas acid was a special blend, especially back then, a liberatory concoction designed to turn freeway interchanges into paths of astral travel, taking advantage of the city’s love of shine and its surprisingly atemporal way of hiding the past in plain sight to unleash its latent capacity for unicorn sparkle and dimensional distortion. Donny took so much of it that summer that he was pretty sure the residue still kicked in every once in a while, and he was waiting for the day when the portal would open during one of his melancholic twilight saunters and let him step into a more rainbow-based version of the world.

  Instead, when he stepped over the levee, he found himself in Rivertown. It wasn’t much of a town—it was a long band of shelters built into the grade with desperate ingenuity, a patchwork village made from salvaged materials, most of them timber, trash, and other flotsam left behind by the river at flood stage. It looked like the set from some old western, crossed with the set from one of those movies about life after the end of the world. Donny spotted a trio of teenagers holding sticks over a tire fire, and they looked back at him like you would look at a cop who has walked up to your back porch. Donny wondered how long it would be until the next flood, and if the shanty-builders’ guesses as to how high it would flow would prove correct.

  Donny remembered when kids like that first started showing up, all those years before. It took a while before people started realizing that what they thought were homeless bums were climate refugees. Refugees from their own country. Often from not far away.

  In the early days, there were no FEMA camps or FHA resettlement projects. Just people displaced by a bad situation where they came from in Nebraska, New Orleans, or someplace in between. Crop failures, dead fields, dying towns. Places that used to be wet gone dry as a desert, and places that were always wet now underwater and battered by hurricane winds. And the fires that burned long and hard, all through the year, sometimes scorching off the edges of the big cities.

  Donny remembered when he was starting out at the law firm, and the people you would see camped out under the overpasses started to change. The white kids were the real giveaway. Milk-fed and freckled like you’d see in some sitcom from the century before, gone dirty, hungry and gaunt. It got pretty bad like that, until some of them started getting organized. Donny realized now what an ass he’d been for only paying attention when the people suffering looked like him.

  Taking people away from the land where their families have lived for generations turns out to be politically destabilizing. Americans kind of perfected that model. They just never considered the possibility that it would happen to them, in no small part because of how they had abused that land.

  It was in the most wasted-out rural corners of the Midwest that the insurgency first brewed. No one even realized that’s what it was, when it was just a news report about somebody blowing up a bank or vandalizing the big ag-bots or burning one of the GMO granaries. Not until they started putting out statements to the press, signed with names like the Platte River Posse or the Hawkeye Freedom Network. Donny had never expected that the idea of a Cornhusker could be so scary. But he also knew better than most that it was the government’s treatment of restless people as a threat that turned them into bona fide rebels.

  Having invented segregation zoning a century before, Dallas quickly restricted the refugees to designated zones, far from the nice parts of town. It had been very effective during the long emergency, when there were legal and martial means to enforce it. But now there was a new wave of displacements in the aftermath of the rebellion. And one of the new nationwide rules was that no one could be prohibited from sleeping on public property as long as they were not impeding some other recognized use. In Dallas, that meant the refugees who refused to live in the camps congregated in the natural areas that the city had otherwise mostly forgotten. And the floodplain of the Trinity River was one of the biggest urban greenbelts in Texas, even if people rarely remembered it was there.

  Until they had no choice but to remember it—and remember they didn’t like what was happening there.

  Donny followed the trail down the bank, scouting the remains of his favorite outlaw skate ramps and spots where he had left graffiti tags back in the day. The columns that held up the Commerce Street overpass were still covered in street art, but it was all new, much of it telling the story of environmental blight and internecine conflict through beautiful pictograms, the kind of street art some kid raised under the big skies of a Kansas farm makes to let her mind fly free after she’s been locked up in a Texas refugee camp. He found remnants of the prior batch of shanties here and there, bits of plywood flotsam and shreds of Tyvek in the bare trees that were left behind when the last flood washed most of the shelters away, after the town fathers and their vigilante sons had cleared it with force and fire, saying they were there to save them. While a few newcomers had resettled farther up the banks, the displaced persons were now mostly congregated in two big camps out by DFW, one at a new biofarm and the other in a former shopping mall. And some were getting resettled for real, finally, in the brownout zones that had been partially revitalized, or at least cleaned up enough for people to safely move back in.

  Donny continued toward the river, which was so well hidden in its engineered channel that you really could only see it clearly from a plane, unless you had the nerve to walk on one of those bridges that denied the possibility of pedestrians. But it was definitely there, flowing fast over the concrete boulders. The city’s founders had the nutty idea that Dallas would be a port city, moving goods up and down the river from where it emptied into the Gulf above Matagorda Bay, but it proved to be navigable only seasonally. Not anymore, now that the volatile weather had regularly filled it with enough water to keep the flow just below what used to be considered flood stage. With air travel and long-haul trucking restricted by the emergency emissions controls finally imposed too late to do any good, there was talk about reviving that idea. An idea so nuts you had to love it. Donny wondered if he was too old to become a ship’s captain, or a river pirate, now that he had proved to be such a failure as a plaintiff’s lawyer.

  As he sat down there on a big chunk of rubble, watching the river run past a calm little pool that had formed, Donny remembered when he used to be able to catch some decent bass in that stretch. He tried to imagine what kind of mutants could survive in there now, but all he found from looking into those dark currents was the suffocating anxiety about his own immediate future.

  He tried to let the water take it away, without the aid of Dallas acid, watching time flow, thinking about how ancient the river was and how it will still be flowing after he—and everyone else—was long gone.

  Then he noticed movement on the opposite bank. He looked. There was a big green dumpster there, out in the middle of the wide floodplain but not far from the overpass. You could hear the sound of someone hitting the metal from the side. Then he saw who the someone was: three big raccoons, stepping out into the beginning of night. The dumpster was already open on one side, and all three of them peered down into it. Then one dove in while, to Donny’s astonishment, another one grabbed its back legs to let it dangle down there. And then pulled his mate out, holding a pizza box.

  The amazing thing was, there was only one slice in there, and they shared it.

  Donny had filed a lawsuit once trying to protect the nutria of Houston from a countywide program to cull their population. He had a soft spot for urban wildlife, even those big greasy water rats, and he liked the challenge of asserting they had rights. The judge threw the case out at the first hearing, despite Donny’s epic briefing, but he refused the county attorney’s request for sanctions. At the time, Donny wondered if the case would have better odds if he had picked a more sympathetic animal. Now he wondered if the real trick would be to pi
ck a smarter one. Imagine what would happen if you could win one of those cases.

  The sunset was peaking as Donny walked back to the office, lighting up the skyline with an intense swath of pink working on purple. You could see the contrails of the transcontinental jets that still flew the affluent Europeans and Asians above the American flyover, laying their seams in the stratosphere like strands of cotton candy. Even the Reunion Tower looked good in that light, so good you could almost imagine it had been created by the French commies who lived there in the 1850s, instead of the 1970s Chamber of Commerce.

  As he got a little farther, Donny could see the old Dallas County Courthouse there in the shadows of the tower. In the crazy light, the red sandstone forms from which it had been carved looked almost alive, even while—at the same time—the building looked like an ancient ruin. You could imagine when it was the biggest and most important building standing there on the banks of the river, as people cleared trees and built roads from what had been raw wilderness just a few generations earlier. That hallucinatory shimmer made you wonder what it would be in the generations to come. After us.

  Donny’s twilight daydream of sentient raccoons taking over the ruins led to the revelation that to salvage his case he needed to go to New Orleans. The official story about the circumstances of Slider’s death didn’t add up. He might not be able to get justice for the kid’s parents, but he could at least get justice for Slider. And if private-security goons really killed him while he was helping a team of constables, there might be an easy opportunity to make their employer pay. New Orleans was also the one place where Donny knew people who might be able to step into Slider’s shoes. And the place where a different idea of the future was taking shape. Maybe even his own future, if he could talk his way back in.

  He had something fresh in his step as he walked back to the office, just as the pink in the sky finally went to black, and he noticed the gold BMW parked outside his office. He only knew one guy who had a car like that, and he was the last guy Donny wanted to see.

  9

  The car was a big G-series sedan, an all-electric model that ran on batteries so small the interior was as roomy as a living room. G for green—zero emissions and minimum power despite the maximum size and weight. G for Gepanzert, which meant armored, armored like a tank, armored for the conflict-ridden future bequeathed by a heritage in which consideration of our ecological footprint was an afterthought. And G for gold, with the body plates made from ballistic aerospace-grade brass polished to a gleaming shine. The really annoying thing was that you couldn’t help but think they were cool, even though they cost a quarter-mil without options. Or even when the sight of it outside your place caused a reflexive panic to run through your nerves.

  As Donny sucked it in and tried to walk right past the car like it wasn’t there or must be waiting for a passenger, the driver’s window rolled down just enough that Donny could see the guy’s face. It was a hard face, a face that had been in some fights, gray buzz cut coming down below the line of his cap and the tail of some tattoo peeking up above his white collar.

  “Mr. Thelen is waiting for you inside,” said the driver.

  “What the fuck?” said Donny, as if anyone was listening.

  As Donny stepped toward the front door of his office, he heard the car door open and close behind him. He looked back, and saw the full frame of the chauffeur.

  “I’ll follow you in,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself, Sarge.”

  He found Thelen sitting in his office chair, reading one of Donny’s law books.

  “I thought this would put me to sleep, but it’s fucking awesome,” said Thelen. “The shit people fight about!”

  Thelen was dark prep, a well-bred local with chocolate hair slicked back tight and a sharp-looking blue suit. An account manager with edge, in his thirties, but the lines were starting to show around his eyes.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing in here?” said Donny.

  “We own the building, Donny,” said Thelen.

  “Since when?”

  “Since last month. We’ve been diversifying pretty heavily into real estate this year, especially with all the new no-go zones they’re declaring. And Dallas is hot. The boss asked me to come check this place out, as we’re allowed to do under your lease. Thinking we might do something a little nicer and bigger here. Plus, we have some pending business we need to talk about, right? Come on in. Have a seat and let’s talk.”

  Thelen gestured at the chair opposite Donny’s desk.

  Donny looked at the bust of Socrates, and wondered if it was heavy enough to serve as a weapon. Then he looked at the driver body-blocking him in the doorway, and sat down.

  “I gotta say, this place is a disaster, Donny. No wonder you can’t pay your bills.”

  Thelen was the fastidiously tidy sort. Donny had seen his office.

  “I make my rent every month.”

  “Not the bills I’m talking about, Donny. Come on, don’t give me that crap.”

  Donny sighed.

  “You owe us a hundred grand, Donny. Which we’re okay with. But not when you go six months without making a payment.”

  The original loan was for a third of that.

  “I know, Terry, I know. I’ve just been totally invested in this case, a big one. And I should be able to get it wrapped up next week.”

  “Yeah, Donny, we’ve been following that case too. Got a report this afternoon. That’s the other reason I wanted to stop by.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  “We have a lot of friends at the courthouse, Donny.”

  “Probably one of those Poindexters from P&C.”

  “Good guess. But no, someone more impartial.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Donny, we helped you out when you were desperate.”

  “I wasn’t desperate. You know that. It wasn’t about me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, you needed to save your honey.”

  “My friend.”

  “Your ex, whatever. She got in trouble, and you couldn’t lawyer your way into getting her sprung, so you needed to make a deal. We understand. If you recall, we even helped you set the table on that one. No extra charge.”

  “You’re a regular fucking Santa Claus, Terry.”

  “Sometimes I am,” said Thelen. “I don’t like hearing about people being tortured, even if I don’t agree with their politics. But that was three fucking years ago, Donny.” He hit three hard beats on the table with his index finger when he said that. “And this year, you haven’t been very good. I even hear you’re spending what money you have in all the wrong places.”

  “Fuck off, Terry, I’m too busy to party.”

  “And a little too old, if you don’t mind me saying. It’s starting to show, bro.”

  Donny looked in the glass of the frame on the wall, but the only reflection he saw was Thelen’s.

  “What’s the plan, Donny?”

  “I’m going to get my client to get his ass up here next week, and then I’m going to get AMR to settle for enough to pay you guys twenty times over.”

  “That’s a nice plan, Donny. Except for the part about your client being dead.”

  “Don’t assume he’s dead. That kid just has a knack for disappearing whenever he smells trouble. He’s like a coyote, man. And even if he is dead, I have a backup plan.”

  “I guess I don’t share your flair for the mystic, Donny. Our guys read the report. And looked over your whole file. They tell us you have no client, and nobody you can replace them with. Come next week, your whole deal goes poof.”

  “So wait till then, and you can collect.”

  “Collect from what?” He held up his hands to gesture at Donny’s accumulated business assets piled up around them. “The boss doesn’t like those odds. We need a better plan, Donny.”

  “You guys have all those researchers,” said Donny. “Why don’t you help me find a substitute plaintiff?”

>   Thelen put his hand on his chin. He and his boss weren’t like the loan sharks of old. They were corporate. Money managers, running a firm of family investment offices, with a few billion under management. The personal loans were a way of expanding their influence network, and extracting obscene profits in the process. The other difference: they were legal. In no small part because half the legislators in the Texas statehouse were borrowers, usually under much more generous terms than Donny.

  “That’s an interesting idea, Donny. But I thought you said you have a plan B, and we’ll all have a happy ending.”

  “That’s right,” said Donny.

  “So let’s stick with that. We just need to make sure you have some real skin in the game. Give us a little more confidence in the outcome.”

  “You think I don’t have skin in this game, you slick fuck?”

  “Hey,” said the bodyguard. The hand on Donny’s arm felt like it could snap his bones like a pretzel.

  “It’s okay, Buzz,” said Thelen. “Donny, we need some additional surety, is what I’m trying to say. I can’t leave without it. Got any ideas?”

  Donny looked at Thelen leaning back in Donny’s swivel chair with his arms behind his head like he owned the place, which evidently he actually did.

  “I’d love to hook you up with a new watch,” said Donny. “A guy with your style should have something more singular than that Rolex. I have a Time Master in the lock box that would look great on you.”

  Thelen watched Donny as he said that, then busted out laughing. “You hear that, Buzz? Donny Kimoe’s gonna give me a new watch!”

  “Priceless,” said Buzz.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” said Thelen. “Donny, the one who needs a new Time Master is you! Preferably one that enables actual time travel, so you can go undo this pathetic fucking mess you have made of your life.”

  “Ouch,” said Buzz.

  He was right. Donny felt the blush, equal parts shame and anger. He looked at his own office with fresh eyes. Rewound what had happened that day. What had got him to this point.