Some argued they should drop the project entirely and focus on the more important work of proving their new way of living in the rewilded city. Donny suggested that they let private lawyers like him sue on behalf of the city, and take a chunk of the reward after they figured out how to collect it. But the more strident contingent said what they needed to do was rewild the court. “Give the law some real teeth.” So instead of seizing property, the Tributary decided to try seizing people.
It was the killer app they had been looking for.
Some were the usual suspects. CEOs, disaster capitalists, enforcers of dark patents. But the real genius, especially for a project whose précis was to achieve present-tense accountability for centuries of wrongdoing and destruction, was to go after mere shareholders. Owners who were not managers. The people who took the profits from the exploitation, even if their stakes were acquired through inheritance from dead ancestors. American law had long treated shareholders as immune from culpability for the acts of the companies they owned, so challenging that basic premise of the system was truly radical. And if the Tributary succeeded in making that stick, it would pull the thread on the sweater of the whole system.
If you want to end capitalism, make capitalists pay the real price of what they legally steal. Of the life value they take from the world, not just from people, on terms that are fundamentally devoid of equal exchange. A taking that does not give back in return, especially when the long-term costs are taken into account.
And if you want to make them pay for what they steal, steal them. Take their liberty away from them. Take their anonymity away from them, and put their gluttonous extravagances on public display.
That was how Joyce put it, in the press conference announcing her return to New Orleans to join the Council, not long after they kicked out Donny. It was an idea she’d advocated for a long time. What used to be the daydream of an idealistic young academic now was in practice, with the backing of a small but fierce guerrilla army.
It was from Donny that they got the idea to go after the lawyers, after he pissed them off so bad they made him the first one they went after. In the expulsion decree, they told him they would suspend the sentence. As long as he never returned to New Orleans.
23
As Donny stood in the hanging cage, a crowd gathered in the square.
They were even younger than he remembered. A rainbow mob of the new generation, the ones who decided to take their future back by any means necessary. Most of them openly carried the tools of their revolution: the small arms that had enabled them to liberate the city, and the picks, shovels, and hoes they were using to reshape it. They were kids from all over the country, and some from other countries. Kids of every color, wearing every color, some of them wearing the colors of other species—the feathers of big birds, the bones of wild animals, the leaves of noble trees, like postapocalyptic Aztecs. Girls and boys and others who made their own categories or rejected the idea of categories entirely.
Donny had loved being around them, when he was their lawyer. Being their captive was different.
“Hey, Peter Pan!” he yelled, picking out the tall guy in the green ball cap who was waving a fringed machete at Donny like he was getting ready to throw it. “Who’s in charge here?”
There must have been around two hundred of them by that point, some standing, some sitting, some climbing up the statue of Benjamin Franklin that had been painted over to let Ben’s underappreciated freak flag fly. There was a slogan painted across Franklin’s chest in purple letters:
we the creatures
Donny definitely felt like a creature, there in the cage, which seemed designed to challenge his basic ability to present himself as a biped. Every one of his movements caused it to rock and sway, putting him off balance, and worsening the problem. He grabbed the bars with both hands and straightened his posture, trying to look authoritative.
The crowd only laughed at him.
“Who’s in charge of you, man?” yelled one woman in the back.
“Help me, Daddy!” screamed another.
“You heard me!” yelled Donny. “I want to speak to whoever is in charge here!”
Donny knew that wasn’t how it was supposed to work, but in his panic he couldn’t help but lapse into a reflexive search for patriarchal authority structures to navigate. The sun was all in the day now, the heat of midmorning that felt the way midafternoon used to. Donny felt the sweat soaking through his clothes.
The louder he yelled, the louder they laughed.
Some of them had cameras out, recording the spectacle like kids at the circus.
He looked over at Heather. She was curled up on the floor of her cage, wrapped in a ragged blanket.
“Is this what we fought for?” said Donny, trying to conjure dignity. “So we could keep fighting? So we could kidnap each other’s kids?”
“Yes!” yelled two voices in the crowd, one of them laughing.
“I want to speak to the People’s Defender! I’m here to defend this woman before the Tributary.”
“You’re too late, dude,” yelled Peter Pan. “She was already sentenced.”
“What do you mean? There’s a hearing scheduled for today! I saw the notice.”
“They moved it up,” said the guy. “There’s a big storm coming.”
“Without a lawyer to defend her? What a joke. I thought you all stood for freedom.”
“Freedom!”
Feathers fluttered. Hats and articles of clothing were tossed in the air. Some of the kids were making out. Others were passing around some of their special crop.
“Freedom is a lie!” yelled a boy.
“We are all servants of the Earth,” yelled a girl. “Free to fly, but always connected to the sky.”
“Free to work!”
“Free to die!”
“Free to wear a tie!”
Donny looked down at his bright-green tie, which was the closest thing he had to a feather. Then he heard the raucous sounds of birds. Donny looked, and saw the parakeets in flight over the square. They had the same kind in Houston—the descendants of illegally imported exotic pets that had escaped and gone native.
He cowered as they flew over, but felt the impact on his shoulder.
“Goddammit,” he said.
The floor of the cage was caked with filth, not just from birds. But what had hit him was just a peanut shell, discarded by a bird who already got the prize.
By the time he realized it, the cage was swaying intensely from his spaz-out, knocking him to his knees.
Now they were really laughing.
He tossed the peanut shell at them, and they just laughed harder.
Looking out at their bright colors, he realized how hot he was getting. The sun was shining right on him now. He was red in the face and wet all over.
He took his suit jacket off. When he went to hang it through the grate, the cage swung, and the jacket fell, flapping toward the ground. One of the freaks caught it and put it on. Then she pranced around for her friends and the camera, strutting and melodramatically gesticulating in imitation of a man who takes himself too seriously.
Among the Mbuti people, nomadic hunter-gatherers of Zambia, the only specialization that is encouraged in members of the band who display the talent is miming, in order to lead the clownish ridicule that is the principal means of behavioral sanction in a group that functions without leaders. Donny was trying to remember what that anthropologist said was the best counter when he heard a phone ring.
His phone, with the ringtone he had adopted to know its sound amid a crowd, a ringtone ripped from his grandma’s favorite old lawyer show, to know when she was calling.
The possibility that he might pick up a stray signal was why he had left it on, constantly trawling for the network.
“That’s my phone!”
The phone kept ringing, a call he knew he needed to take, from the person he really came there to save, while the freaks he had helped secure their own freaky fr
eedom laughed their asses off, repeating everything he said in a way that succeeded in making it sound ridiculous. It infuriated him, made him feel the panic spill over, and found him preparing to leap from the cage. He knew it was not as far as it looked, and that the guy he had seen fall hurt himself because he wasn’t paying attention. And what better way to frustrate the camera eyes’ efforts at ridicule.
There was Beret Girl, pulling his phone from his bag and looking around.
Then there was a group of older women. Some really old, some just grown-ups amid the mob, a few of them familiar faces. And one woman who was pretty young, at least on the calendar. Someone Donny realized he knew well, and knew to have an older soul. That was who took the phone from Beret Girl, pushed the button, and put it to her ear.
“Percy!” he said.
She was looking right at him while she talked on the phone.
“I’m sorry, he’s not available at the moment. May I ask who’s calling?”
The thing was, she already knew who was calling. And what was at stake.
24
Donny should have known something was up the night when Percy said to meet her at her house instead of the office. She had been talking a lot about how they needed a different strategy. He hadn’t appreciated just how different she had in mind.
“Is that a gun?” said Donny.
It wasn’t really a question. Even disassembled into its components and laid out on a cloth on Percy’s kitchen table, you could see what it was. An AK-47, the twentieth-century heritage totem of armed revolution. Clint was cleaning it.
“Almost as good as new,” said Clint, inspecting the boring with the keen eye of a gunsmith. “Maybe better than new. Field-tested.”
Donny looked at the crates over by the wall. Three of them, stacked one atop the other. The top one had been opened, its lid laid up against the side of the stack. The wood was stenciled in an alphabet Donny could not read. He didn’t need to peek inside the open crate to know what was in there. And frankly, he didn’t want to look—he might be able to survive interrogation by the feds if he could honestly state he only saw one gun instead of an arsenal.
Xelina, who was standing by the crates reviewing the manifest she had pulled from the top one, looked liberated and terrified at the same time.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Donny said. That wasn’t a question either.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” said Percy. She was sitting there at the head of the table, the big brass lacquered pin signifying her status as a member of Congress still buttoned to her lapel.
“It is for me,” said Donny. “Count me out.”
“We need to protect ourselves,” said Percy. “You saw what they did to Miles.”
Donny looked at the crates. “This is about more than self-defense. I wish I hadn’t come.”
“You’re wrong,” said Xelina. “And you know it’s the only way. What else are we supposed to do when they rig the elections?”
“I didn’t come to this decision easily, Donny,” said Percy. “None of us did.”
Clint raised his eyebrows like maybe that wasn’t true in his case.
“I helped you get elected to office so it wouldn’t come to this, Percy,” said Donny. “You just got sworn in for your second term. I didn’t think you were the type to give up so easily.”
“I’m not,” said Percy. “And I haven’t. This is just the backup plan.”
“The backup plan.”
“Yeah.”
“Meaning you don’t plan to use them.”
“Right. Basically.”
“What do you mean, ‘basically’?”
“I mean we won’t use them unless we need to. But we need to be ready.”
“What are you going to do with them in the meantime?”
“She said you could keep them for us,” said Xelina.
For a minute he believed her. Clients often asked him for favors like that, based on a wishfully expansive idea of what the attorney-client privilege could cloak.
“We’re going to distribute them,” said Percy, and Clint laughed at the look on Donny’s face.
“Please don’t use that word,” said Donny.
“Give them to friends,” said Xelina.
“Exercise our Second Amendment rights,” said Clint.
“Yeah, well, you may want to bone up on the case law on that one,” said Donny. “Unless you want to ask the powers that be in Washington or Austin to license you three as a militia.”
“We know what our true rights are,” said Xelina. “And so do you. As for the law, the law is what we make it.”
He sized up his friends, sitting there in the dining room of Percy’s little old house in the Fifth Ward, the one she had bought when she was still an associate at Miles’s firm.
“There’s more of them than there are of you,” he said.
“We have a big network of people ready to do what it takes,” said Clint. “More than you think.”
“And we have a smarter lawyer,” said Xelina.
“Come on,” said Donny. “I’m not even smart enough to sense that I shouldn’t have come here. Now you’ve made me into your co-conspirator.”
“Our lawyer,” said Percy.
“Uh-huh,” said Donny. “You and I both know they would love nothing more than to show that the defense lawyers, the last line holding up some tattered remnant of justice, are actually terrorists. That we’re in on it with our clients.”
“I’m taking a bigger risk than you, Donny,” said Percy.
“You took a bigger risk than me when you decided to run for office as a member of the opposition. That makes you an endangered species. I just want to be a lawyer. Not a politician. And definitely not a revolutionary.”
“That’s all we want,” said Percy. “Be our lawyer.”
“Who’s the client?”
“The Gulf Liberation Front,” said Xelina.
“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me,” said Donny.
“Each of us,” said Percy. “And the group of which we are a part.”
“Like a neighborhood association,” said Donny. “But with assault rifles. And probably bombs.”
“Exactly,” said Clint.
“The reason we need you,” said Percy, “is we need to build the legal arguments to support our case. Our cause.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Come on, Donny,” said Percy. “How many times have you spouted your theory about the right to revolt? You convinced me. You even convinced Miles. There’s real law there to grab on to.”
“Not in these courts.”
“Maybe not today. But this isn’t about today. It’s about tomorrow. Building precedents, even if we start small.”
Donny looked at her. She appeared to really believe in that idea.
“It’s about fighting for a future you would actually want to live in,” said Xelina.
She had a point.
“Or maybe you like watching your friends and clients disappear,” said Clint.
Donny knew the truth of that better than most.
“While the planet dies,” said Xelina.
“What do you want from me, exactly?” said Donny. “A memo?”
“I mean, maybe,” said Percy. “Maybe that’s part of it. I want to build our defense.”
“Before you even do anything.”
“Why not? They arrest people before they commit crimes.”
“True.”
“Build the best case you can. Like a cross between a memo and a manifesto.”
“Kind of like the Declaration of Independence,” said Clint.
“Yeah,” said Donny. “Not exactly that easy. The Founders kind of had their revolt and ate it. But—” He paused. “This is interesting.”
“Great,” said Percy. “Put that together. And then we go find an international body that can help us make our case.”
“Like the UN Court of Claims, the one that took our reparations case.”
“Right.”
“And then if we succeed, who enforces the judgment?”
Percy looked at the crates full of guns.
“Self-help,” said Clint.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“Betcha wonder where we sourced these,” said Clint, snapping the weapon back together.
“I’d rather not know,” said Donny. That was true and false at the same time. He already had an idea. He’d seen the news reports a few days earlier, about the busload of asylum-seekers Percy had escorted to the Mexican border, part of a deal she had cut to allow them to leave the country. When she came back over, the bus must not have been as empty as they thought.
“Good idea,” said Percy. “Are you still in touch with that ex of yours in Mexico City?”
“You mean Joyce?” said Donny.
“Yeah,” said Percy. “You two still talking?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I thought maybe she could help. I’ve been reading her open letters. It’s powerful stuff—puts all the pieces together in new ways. And she’s very plugged in with the expat opposition.”
“She’s the minister of information for the so-called government in exile.”
“Yeah. We could use their help.”
“Let’s start with the memos, okay?”
“Fair enough,” said Percy.
“So who’s paying me?” said Donny.
“We don’t have much money,” said Percy.
“How did you pay for those?” said Donny, nodding at the crates.
“Maybe they were a donation,” said Percy.
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