Failed State

by Christopher Brown

  He whistled.

  A moment later, an old-looking lioness sauntered in, sliding past Joyce. And went to eat from the bowl.

  While the lion ate, the President drank his water.

  “Did you read your assignment last night?” asked Joyce.

  He nodded. He didn’t look like the guy Donny had met in that conference room that day not two years before. He wasn’t cocky. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t even unconsciously malevolent. He looked like a tired old man, tired beyond his years.

  “We’re leaving today,” said Joyce.

  “Why?” he said.

  “We have to go. Sig is getting provisions now. We’ll leave as soon as he returns.”

  “What about her?” said the President, meaning the big cat. “And the others.”

  “We can’t take them,” said Joyce.

  “We can’t just leave them,” said the President.

  “They’ll be fine,” said Joyce.

  “Then just leave me with them,” said the President.

  “I wish I could,” said Joyce. “I know you’re doing a lot better. You’ve done good work with these animals.”

  “I feel better,” he said. “Everything before . . .” He drifted off. “Like it’s not real.”

  “It was real. Very real. And while you are encouraged to become better, you are not allowed to forget. We are taking those with us.”

  There were more postcards on the wall, back in the shadows around the cot. Donny zoomed the monitor to see. They weren’t postcards. They were pictures. Of people. Headshots, mostly.

  Donny recognized one of them. Wade Camacho. He looked at more, and started to recognize others.

  Donny pulled back the drapes to the right of the desk and looked out over the yard. He could see the building back there.

  He grabbed the rifle and went outside.

  50

  As he stood there staring through the open door, Donny realized the President was staring back at him.

  “Kimoe?” he said.

  Joyce saw him now.

  For once, Donny didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

  The only sound for a long minute was the sound of the old lion devouring its food.

  Joyce was looking at the gun. “Do you even know how to use that?”

  “No, but I bet I can figure it out.” He looked down at the weapon and realized he was aiming it at the President.

  “You wanted him to get a life sentence,” said Joyce.

  Donny looked at the scene. He half expected the President to beg for help. He barely even paid attention.

  Donny looked at the photos on the wall. Wade, and all the others.

  “Please just go,” said Joyce.

  51

  The last time Donny saw Joyce before her release, she was gardening in chains.

  They had expanded the Superdome detention camp to envelop the small park across the street. There, they had installed a small experimental farm growing some new Tripto Labs varietals better suited to tropical climates. So when the guard let Donny through the gate, he stepped into a little orchard of orange trees. And in the middle stood Joyce, pruning one of the trees with shackles around her ankles. Three other prisoners were doing the same nearby, under the watch of an equal number of guards.

  “Go ahead,” said the guard. “The boss said it’s okay.” Lawyers were not allowed inside the Superdome, but he had convinced one of the prosecutors to make this arrangement for him.

  Joyce declined the hug, but she looked like she appreciated the visit.

  “How are they?” said Donny, nodding at the oranges. They were small, and a little gnarly, but they still looked precious.

  “We aren’t allowed to eat them,” said Joyce. “Only to tend them. And that’s considered a special perk.”

  “You must be on good behavior.”

  “As far as they know.” She looked over at the guards. When she had the attention of one, she pointed at the small picnic table in the clearing. The guard nodded, and they sat.

  “I’m working on getting you out,” said Donny.

  “How do you propose to swing that?”

  “It’s not easy. Those ‘open letters’ you’ve been publishing got a lot of attention. Not just with people who are sympathetic to your position. Our position.”

  She raised a tired, incredulous eyebrow.

  “You’re on the Enemies List,” said Donny. “That’s a hard list to get off.”

  “You mean that’s a hard list to get off alive. The other way is easy. And maybe easier on the soul.”

  “I’m sorry about Wade.”

  “What are you going to do about that?”

  “We’re working on that too. Some colleagues in Austin are in touch with his family there. He had a wife and kids.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re looking at a wrongful-death case.”

  “So the wife and kids and the lawyers can get some money out of the deal. Classy.”

  “Even that will be hard to get anywhere. Not until there’s real change. But it’s something. The money, yes. But also the exposure of what’s happening.”

  Joyce looked at the wall, then looked back at him.

  “What do you think qualifies as real change, Donny?”

  “Getting him out of office. A new government.”

  “You really think that will do the trick?”

  “It would be a good start.”

  “And he gets to go back to his Park Avenue penthouse?”

  “We could try to get him indicted.”

  “They’ll never do it. People are too chickenshit. They’re afraid of real justice. Because they know if we get it, it might come for them next.”

  Donny considered that.

  “People suck, Donny. Especially if you give them power, or money. They will hoard it, and never be satisfied.”

  “So I noticed. But here we are. And I am here to tell you I am going to get you out of here so you can do whatever it is you think will fix it.”

  “It’s not fixable. I mean, not unless you want to get way more radical. Like undoing-the-agricultural-revolution radical. Which is obviously not possible.”

  “I know, you have your own theory about revolution. I was one of the first ones to hear it.”

  “I was wrong about that. I didn’t appreciate it until I started working this plot, and the big cornfields they are planting farther east. It’s not about oil, Donny. It’s not about high finance. It’s about grain. That’s where it starts, at least. Bending nature to serve man. Building permanent settlements devoted to it. Forcing people to work on it. All to accumulate surplus. Cities, money, all the foundations of civilization and culture—all that is rooted in our dominion, and comes with inequality and injustice preprogrammed. You just can’t fix it. And the other thing it’s preprogrammed for is collapse. Because people can never get enough.”

  “We can change. Build better systems and come a lot closer than we do now. Do a better job of making sure everyone gets their fair share.”

  “Maybe,” said Joyce. “Probably. But it’s hard to care about people once you see what they’re capable of. And once you learn what these guys have taught me.”

  “What’s that?” asked Donny.

  “That the only thing that people really respond to is pain, or the fear of pain.”

  “I’m so sorry, Joyce. I feel like it’s my fault.”

  “It’s a gift. Now I’m cauterized to it. And I know better what can be done.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The human race is doomed. And that’s a good thing. The planet will be better off without us. I’d give it a few hundred years to extinction, based on where we’re at today. Maybe it’s a few millennia. But other species will rise. And hopefully they will turn out better.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?”

  “Hasten that along. Break the state.” She looked at the guards. “It’s coming,” she said. “Right under their noses.”


  The Superdome was behind her. He could see the guards silhouetted on the roofline. He heard the sound of a chopper coming in from the north.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  She told him anyway. The chopper was loud now, loud enough that no one could hear them.

  “Maybe someone will take him out first,” said Donny. “He’s pissed off a lot of his former allies. Costing some of them big money.”

  “We can’t kill him, Donny. That just perpetuates the cycle. You don’t get it.”

  She was right, he didn’t. Not then, “I’m still going to get you out, Joyce, even if you talk like that.”

  “Don’t bother, Donny. I need to find my own way out. Please.”

  Part Three

  We the Creatures

  52

  When Donny was in law school, there was a big hit movie called Wrath of Atlantis. It was one of those fantasy movies that always sounded stupid to Donny, lots of dudes in metal underwear flexing with swords while the women grimaced at the wind machine when they weren’t flexing with their own swords. But he went with a group of friends who wanted to see it because of the hype and because of all the stars, and to his surprise he kind of liked it.

  Part of why he liked it was because they all got high in the car before heading into the mall where the theater was. But that wasn’t the only reason.

  What was really cool about the movie was that they used stop-motion animation instead of CGI. It was like being a kid again and seeing your toys come to life. Except these models looked more real. All those mythological creatures. One of the characters got to fly on Pegasus, while another fought the hydra, and another had to talk her way past Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld. And the smile on that minotaur, so real it reminded him of Vice President Lane, the one who pushed through the interrogation-enhancements program.

  It was kind of a Greek mythology smorgasbord. The plot, as best Donny could remember, was something about a war between Atlantis and Sparta. Atlantis was a lush, green city of beautiful, happy people, watched over by Athena and guarded by her giant steampunk owlbot, full of benevolent sorcerers. There was a scene set in this library that literally looked like it went on forever and contained every book in the world. The music for them was kind of lame, like Renaissance faire meets turbopop, but it was forgivable.

  The Spartans were heavy metal all day. They had robots, too, but more like horses. One of the Spartan horsebots was supersmart, not from the gift of any god, but because the old Spartan warrior engineer who had created it was just such a good maker and had endowed it with the finest clockwork brain ever made. Horsebot started to tell the future, and because they were so awed by this talking metal horse, they believed it must know. And what it predicted was that the world would soon end in a flood. And that the only way to stop the flood would be to capture the owlbot of Atlantis and dissect it to extract its knowledge of how to speak to the gods.

  The Spartans won, because of the things the goddess Aphrodite did to trick the Atlanteans and please her lover Ares, the god of war and electric guitars, under whose patronage the Spartans had thrived.

  Aphrodite also seduced Hephaestus, the R&D lab of the gods, into serving Ares and equipping the Spartans with the gear they needed for their mission.

  Toward the end of the movie, there was this awesome scene where the waves dispatched by the angry Poseidon deluge Atlantis. That was stop-motion, too, with this insanely detailed model that looked around the same scale as the plastic kits Donny had built as a kid but big enough to fill a hotel ballroom. Watching it Donny imagined the guys standing there with hoses slowly drowning the beautiful thing they had made, and enjoying it.

  We are all waiting for the big wave to wash it all away.

  Way down, below the ocean.

  Donny’s buddies loved Wrath of Atlantis so much they got the companion video game. There was a whole semester Donny’s second year when he was trying very hard for once to get decent grades and the sound from the main room every night was a continuous stream of electronic sword swings, magic gun bursts, kung-fu kicks and meaty punches, all to the soaring but repetitive and tinny power riffs of the soundtrack excerpt that played in the background. Every half hour or so there would be a pause, and you would hear the watery burble of the bong rip, and then it would start again.

  What was weird to Donny about all this was how much the guys gravitated to the Spartans. As if they owned the future. Maybe it was because America had developed such a Sparta fetish in those days, at least among guys of a certain flesh tone, that they brought that preference with them. Donny liked the Atlanteans, though, with their trees inside the temples and mythical wild animals roaming the streets like furry neighbors and their magic spells and their libraries without end. The Spartans were so corporate, the little warlord band that wanted to raid and pillage and run the world. And it was the Spartans, with their machines, who pissed off Poseidon. Atlantis just happened to be in the way. And then the Spartans had the last laugh, when their horsebots showed they could transform into seahorses and carry their warriors to safety.

  Lecker’s people had arranged a charter flight for Donny on a small-engine prop charter out of Baton Rouge. The idea was that he would be returning with Heather. Things had not quite worked out as planned.

  As he looked out the window in the back of the little six-seater, engines rattling so loud you would hardly be able to hear your own voice if you tried to talk to the person next to you, Donny thought about how life never quite lived up to the version they storyboarded for you when they told you what to expect. Whether your own life, or the life of the people. Like what America actually did with the promise of a bountiful wilderness that had survived into the so-called Age of Enlightenment without being marred by the imprint of human engineers and architects and extractors, the way the landscape was that he saw out the window. The way the stories of valor and honor and love of the land usually masked not-so-secret histories of conquest and cheating and exploitation. The way his own desire to try to do something reasonably good with the particular tools life had bequeathed him more often than not caused him to fuck everything up for the people he cared about.

  Seen from the window of an airplane, the landscape between Louisiana and Texas showed all the promise and betrayal of that paradox. All the old oil towns along the coastline that had never really been a line, more like a place where dry land slowly morphed into ocean. Many of those towns had been taken back by nature now, but you could still see their remains from up at ten thousand feet, the scaffolds of industrial-scale chemistry sets poking out of the water, flare-offs long extinguished, but the product they once processed into the plastic comestibles of capital now being sucked back into the subsurface, the muck beneath the water that rose just a little bit more every day. He saw highways that ended in standing water at the edge of the wide brown-blue expanse. Where the waterways emptied into the Gulf, you saw the stains of the things they carried with them, the sediments and toxins of faraway farmlands trying to exorcise the artificial stimulants that had been used to make them make more grain to feed the machine. And the patches of swampy forest trying to come back where they had been razed. Those once-verdant wetlands were where Audubon’s greatest birds had made their home. More than half the species he documented were now gone.

  It looked like a stop-motion hellscape out there, like a zone where the rubber suit monsters of his childhood matinees had been rampaging. And the thing was, it had always basically looked that way, even before they noticed, even before the climate started avenging itself. For all the time he spent mediating feuds between people and sometimes starting them, the real feud was between human beings and the land on which they lived. And maybe the real way to get people to stop doing shitty things to one another would start with getting them to stop doing shitty things to the Earth. Reground that relationship on a basis of reciprocity, of mutuality of exchange, of the kind of balanced principles that the law claimed to stand for, and maybe the oth
er relationships would follow suit.

  The Tributary was a start in the right direction, if an extreme one, and maybe too late to make any difference. But even in all his hard-earned cynicism about people, he couldn’t give up on them like Joyce had. Not when they included people like Percy, or those kids she taught.

  America was Sparta and Atlantis at the same time. But it had meant to be something different entirely. Not a city on a hill, even. More like an archipelago of small towns in a vast ocean of green, blue, and gold. And as he looked out the window at the scarred and depopulated but still-resilient landscape, he could almost imagine a future that realized that vision, or that at least tried to incorporate its aspirations.

  But then Dallas came into view.

  53

  Donny was calling from a new phone, with a Louisiana area code, so he had to leave a message and wait for Lou to call him back.

  “Are you back from DC?”

  “Yes. The talks broke down. I’m hoping you’ll tell me you had a better outcome.”

  “Yeah, well, my psycho terrorist client stole my phone and ran off with your daughter.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Donny.

  “You fucking clown. Goddamn you. I’m an idiot for thinking you could help.”

  “Calm down, Lou. Let me explain.”

  Donny told him the story.

  It was not as effective as he thought it would be.

  “That does it,” said Lou. “I guess we have to do this Lecker’s way.”

  “No, Lou. I told you, Heather’s free.”

  “It’s obvious you don’t know that. She’s a prisoner of this fucking Harrison kid.”

  “No, Lou. It’s not like that.”

  But Donny already knew where that was going. The feelings of fathers about their daughters had their own logic.