Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  “We’re ready for them.”

  “But what if we could avoid that?”

  Percy was thinking it over.

  “Joyce would understand what I’m proposing,” said Donny.

  “That’s what you think,” said Percy. “But what the hell. Let me take you. And then we can decide how to send you back.”

  “Thank you, Percy,” said Donny, standing and checking his watch. “Will they have food there?”

  27

  Percy walked Donny north from the courthouse down the wide path of what had been Poydras Street, past trees in bloom. You could smell it in the air, the smell of the fruit that would come with summer.

  “Are you sure you don’t want back in on any of your cases?” said Donny. “If I could add your name to the pleadings, I’m pretty sure we could extract a settlement for Slider. Even without Slider.”

  He meant it. Percy’s reputation intimidated the defense bar. She’s the one they should have used in the ads.

  “No, thanks,” said Percy. “You can donate my share to what we’re doing here. Now, listen.”

  Donny soaked it in some more. He heard birds.

  They walked farther along, to where the path opened up on a wide clearing. Several blocks wide on either side, with no buildings, more like a park. Tall grass popping with orange and red poppies, around a wide depression in the center that had filled with water.

  “Wow,” said Donny. And a dozen ducks took to the sky, quacking their complaints at having to do so.

  They had black bellies, orange beaks, and brown bodies.

  “Recognize it?” said Percy.

  He looked. There was something familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He looked at the wetland. It was almost a perfect circle. He looked back at the direction they had come from. The buildings that marked the way.

  “Oh,” he said, looking back at the wetland.

  It was the site where the Superdome had been. The arena. “The stadium where the fans learn to scream,” as the lawyers who defended its inmates used to call it. The “temporary” detention camp lasted a lot longer than the temporary autonomous zone the rebels had briefly established. Right up until the riot, when a few prisoners, including one of Donny’s old clients, led an uprising that burned the building badly enough that they had to demolish what was left.

  Donny had never been inside it. Not since that one year in the good old days when he went to the Sugar Bowl with Joyce and some other friends. When it was an emergency jail and the prisoners were insurgents, they didn’t need to let the lawyers visit their clients. They didn’t even need to let the clients have lawyers.

  Now it was this. A pocket of wild heaven coming up in the spot where man-made hell had been.

  Donny saw a deer crossing the shallow water.

  “Watch where you walk,” said Percy. “It gets pretty wet. But there’s a dry path, if I can find it.”

  “It’s okay,” said Donny.

  “Suit yourself, but be careful. Sometimes the remains come up in the boggy parts.”

  He looked down at the footprints he had just left, the imprints of his boot tread filling with water. The water made the little pieces of debris in the dirt glisten.

  “Who’s buried out there?” he said, looking over the swamp.

  “You know who, Donny. The biggest mass grave was farther up there,” she said, pointing north. “Close to the Fairgrounds, where Camp Zulu was. Under a few feet of water now.”

  “Jesus,” said Donny, looking toward the horizon line, seeing only damaged buildings. “I’ll follow you.”

  Percy led them down a path that was mostly dry. As you walked in there, you could see the rubble. Big chunks of busted-up concrete, half-hidden behind tall grass and wild weeds. A garden of rebar.

  He heard the whistle of an osprey, looked that direction, and saw its wide-winged profile against the silhouette of the I-10 overpass terminus, a road to nowhere since it was blown up by the rebels six years earlier.

  His attention returned to the trail when he felt his foot sink into the mud, and the water filled his boot.

  “You okay?” said Percy.

  “I thought I was,” said Donny, fighting to pull his foot free. When it finally came out, half expecting to find a skeletal hand wrapped around his ankle, he just saw his naked white foot.

  “Crap.” He squatted down, reluctantly reached into the hole, and fished out his boot with an airy slurp. The sock was dripping over the side.

  “Up here,” said Percy, looking back and laughing, then pointing at a little hill made from rubble. “You go first.”

  Donny climbed up there, holding the boot in his hand and favoring the other foot.

  It wasn’t especially high, maybe fifteen feet. But it was a good perch, complete with a big curb cut that served as a nice place to set your butt down and stare out at the beautiful postapocalyptic swamp with your feet dangling off the edge.

  They sat there and soaked it in.

  Percy pulled out an orange, and began to peel it. It was a lot bigger and healthier-looking than the one Lecker had shared.

  Donny took off his other shoe and emptied the water over the edge. He wrung out his socks and laid them in the sun. The fear of corpses had left him for the moment, superseded by anxious thoughts of Thelen’s deadline. But even that stress seemed to bleed off in the moment.

  “You know we’re going back the same way, right?” said Percy.

  Donny shrugged. “I’ll be more careful. Or I’ll do it again.”

  “Nice toes,” she said, laughing.

  “They don’t get out much,” said Donny.

  Donny pointed to the east. The area north of the Quarter had been mostly razed, and you could see a long way from their perch. In the distance were fields of green.

  “Are those the farms?” said Donny.

  Percy nodded. “Some of them.” She put her hand to her ear.

  He listened along and heard the bugs. A cacophony, when you really paid attention. Thousands of them singing at one another. Maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.

  A huge heron was there in the water, dinosaur strutting through the shallows like some predatory supermodel.

  “Should have brought my fly rod,” said Donny.

  Percy didn’t say anything. She just handed him some of the orange.

  It tasted good.

  “They say the first human settlements were at places like this,” said Percy.

  “In the ruins of the future?”

  “In the wetlands of the past. Like in the ‘fertile crescent.’ Biodiverse swamps, full of all sorts of self-replenishing foods.”

  “Makes sense. If you can stand the bugs.”

  “They would drain them. Once they stopped moving, and started harvesting from one place, growing the population, pressures would build to focus on one or two grain crops. Easier to manage the group, and grow it, around a food that could also serve as a medium of exchange. Pretty soon, they were making people work the fields. People who had just wanted to roam free, the way nature meant.”

  “Sounds like another hokey ‘state of nature’ theory of the bucolic past to me. You can bet they were all killing each other and eating their way to oblivion all the way back to Eden.”

  “Said the guy airing his gnarly toe claws out in the open air of a city gone back to wild.”

  Donny smiled. He let his worries dangle out there with his feet for all the birds and bugs to admire. He spread out his toes. He opened his ears to the sound of the world he thought they had erased.

  “I could get used to this,” he said.

  “You can start by fixing the mess you already made. Because this is just the beginning. And if we get cut off, it’s all over.”

  “I understand,” said Donny.

  “Do you? Do you understand this is where real justice comes from? Not courtrooms, or legislatures. Out here, in the fields.”

  “Courtrooms are about all I can handle, Percy. You should see me with houseplants.”


  “You got off to a pretty good start when you had that land-reform case for Xelina, way back when.”

  “You remember that?”

  “How could I forget? Basically arguing that all the land in the USA was stolen? Too bad you had to settle it.”

  Donny nodded, and looked out over the wetland. “That’s kind of what you are putting into practice here.”

  “I didn’t really understand it until the uprising,” said Percy. “When I saw the whole country. Saw what we had done, saw the history laid out there in plain sight, that it finally clicked. How all the injustices I had been fighting my whole life—the vestiges of slavery, the murder and dislocation of indigenous peoples, inequality, exploitation, all the shitty things people do to each other—that all of them are rooted in the damaged relationship we have with the land. All because people are allowed to take from it, to treat it as their exclusive property. The reason people kill for it, enslave each other to work it, and suck every ounce of value they can from it until it’s dead.”

  “How do you fix that?”

  “You seek justice for it. Value every life, not just ours. Make the case for a different kind of reparations—for the pillaging of the planet, the destruction of wilderness, the rape of the future. Then take what you can win from that, and put it to work on real healing.”

  “The only healing we need right now is to bring the people who murdered our friends to justice,” said Donny. “I could use your help, Percy.”

  “We both know that doesn’t fix anything,” she said. “This does. You can feel it.”

  Donny had a stem of grass in his hand, idly picked as they walked. He pinched off one of the seeds, held it up in his fingers, and wondered if it was the key to justice, or the real key to slavery.

  “Come on,” said Percy. “I have more to show you.”

  28

  As they walked farther in, Percy explained to Donny how none of the people they saw out working had “jobs”—not as Donny would think of it. The community was divided into groups of 50 to 150 who occupied and tended to different zones, each with its own urban farm plots and restoration projects. The idea was to mimic the structure of the earliest human bands. Everyone took their share of the chores, and had plenty of time left over to pursue their own other interests. Members of the groups who were so inclined could even go out on hunting excursions or forages. Necessary tasks were dealt with based on skill and availability. But specialization was resisted.

  “People need to live full lives,” said Percy. “I am a lawyer, but I’m also a teacher, and a gardener, and a politician.”

  “Are you happy?” asked Donny, repeating the question he had asked Lou just days earlier, in a very different world just hours away.

  “I now understand I never realized what happy even meant,” she said. “This is a different kind of happy. Like a collective happiness that infects you, gets you out of your own head.”

  They walked along Canal Street, which had been turned into a long grassland. A crew was out there tilling one section, and planting new seed. Percy explained how some of the grasses were hybrids with seed crops that would both restore the land and produce production-grade wheats.

  “Are they from Tripto?” asked Donny.

  “I didn’t ask,” said Percy.

  Farther along, a bunch of kids were out playing.

  “They’re from my school,” she explained, walking over to say hello to the students. Donny had expected to see hungry, shabby creatures, but they were the happiest and healthiest-looking kids he had seen in a long time.

  “How do you have time to do this and do your job?” asked Donny, crouching down to receive an interesting-looking rock from a four-year-old girl.

  “We don’t think of it that way. We especially don’t think about time that way. Your time is your own, and you spend it the way you need, or the community needs, which hopefully are the same thing.”

  “No deadlines? No dockets?”

  “Oh, I have plenty of those.” She laughed. “Mostly because I manage all of our litigation in other forums, outside the community. But I have a lot of help. That’s where we’re going now.”

  She pointed up at one of the old skyscrapers of the Central Business District, a modernist edifice made of steel and local limestone. It was the Royal Petroleum Building, the one he had seen the eagle roosting in that morning. Donny had been there before, maybe fifteen years earlier, for document review on a big commercial case. This had been the company’s US headquarters then, before they relocated to Houston. But walking up now was the first time he really noticed that the building was made out of fossils. You could see them there in the exterior limestone as you waited at the door, the first secure door Donny had seen in the whole city.

  “What do you keep in here?” said Donny, watching the security protocols.

  “The secret history of the world,” she said.

  “Now you sound like Joyce,” said Donny.

  Percy smiled. “I’m probably repeating her,” she said. “Because this is her project more than anyone’s. You can ask her about it yourself.”

  29

  As he saw her standing there in the tall doorway, which made her look tall, too, even though she was not, Donny felt the shudder, and shut it down as quickly as he could.

  “Hello, Donny,” said Joyce. She smiled as she sized him up, revealing the lines in her face, lines that had been etched by more than smiles. She still had the freckles on her brown skin, and some new spots where the sun had taken its toll. And yet the age only made her more beautiful. Maybe because he knew some of the story behind how it had been earned.

  “Joyce,” he said.

  She proffered no embrace, nor even a handshake.

  “I guess you heard I was coming,” he said.

  “I was the one who proposed we shoot you on sight,” she said. “But I got outvoted.” It was hard to tell if she was joking.

  Donny looked at Percy, whose face suggested it was true.

  “We compromised on the cage,” said Percy. “A little shock treatment to help open your mind.”

  “Percy thinks we can turn you,” said Joyce, raising her eyebrows. “I told her we can probably educate you, but that you are too mired in the world that’s dying to be able to come unstuck.”

  “I just think we should be able to work out a deal,” said Donny.

  “Exactly what I’m talking about,” said Joyce. “So we have come up with a new plan. I talked with the other members of the Council and they agree.”

  “What’s that?” said Percy.

  “There will be no negotiations. But we are going to have a rehearing of the case against Ms. Hamilton-Green’s trust. As long as Donny here agrees on behalf of his client that whatever decision we come up with after we hear his side will be enforceable in any jurisdiction.”

  “I can’t agree to that. I don’t have the authority.”

  “Sure you do,” said Joyce. “It says as much in the notice of appointment they sent the Tributary.” She looked at Percy.

  “That’s true,” said Percy.

  “And if we have that, Heather can go free, whether or not you win. If she wants to.”

  “How do I know it will be a fair trial?” said Donny.

  “I guarantee you it will be a lot more just than the courts you are used to. The jurors will all have their opinions coming in, but they are honest people and they will listen. And you have all day to review the evidence we have collected, to prepare your case. We have nothing to hide.”

  Donny looked over the room.

  The ground floor had been taken over by the scriveners of the apocalypse. It looked like a scene from some old office farce, dozens of people at desks buried under mountains of paper, murmuring along to the clickety-clack of manual typewriters and a few beat-up data terminals. Except that they wore T-shirts and fatigues and the intensity of people with a real cause. Hardened veterans of dictatorship and civil war, now fighting a revolution by other means. A war across time,
with facts, history, and law as their weapons.

  “You want to do that tomorrow?” said Percy, reading between the lines.

  “Yes,” said Joyce. “Before the carnival. What do you say, Donny?”

  “I’ll take that deal. But I need to meet with my client.”

  “She’s not really your client, and that’s up to her, but we can arrange a visit,” said Joyce.

  “What about the bank seizures?” said Percy.

  “Our customers have us covered,” said Joyce. “Fronting what we need. They know what the real stakes are.”

  “Well, then I better get back to the office and get prepared for the morning,” said Percy.

  “You do that,” said Joyce. “I’ll make sure your prisoner gets back to his minders.”

  “Where did you get all those old machines?” asked Donny as Joyce led him through her typewriter brigade.

  “It’s not hard,” she said. “They last forever. Those things were just made better. And they are simpler to start with.”

  “No power.”

  “No software. Code degrades. Like memory. Like the things you said.”

  “Like what things I said?”

  “Not ‘you’ you, Donny.”

  “Oh,” said Donny, relieved and not relieved, wondering if she really meant it the way he originally understood it. He tried to read her face, but she wasn’t letting him in. Instead, she was proudly looking over her team. “So what are they researching?”

  Even as he said it, his mind was busy remembering some of the things he had said. The things they had said.

  “A different kind of fossil record,” said Joyce.

  “Can you ever just say it straight?”

  “Said the best liar I have ever known.”

  Donny shrugged. For a lawyer, it was the kind of insult that is also the highest compliment. “If you’re not going to have me killed, can you just explain what this is?”