Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “Your parents taught you how to do that?”

  “Nah. Googled it.”

  Isabel looked around, found a box of tissues, and handed it to him. “The few times I’ve cried, I found it stopped once I blew my nose,” she said. “Except for the time I got a chunk of sea nettle in my eye. That was bad.”

  “Ow,” said Hunter. “That… I don’t even know what a sea nettle is, but…” He blew his nose.

  “Kind of jellyfish.”

  “Well, that puts my life in perspective.” Hunter shook his head. “Maybe I have success phobia, I don’t know. The whole time when I was growing up, my parents were trying to push me to succeed at everything. I’d have fun at the pool and they’d sign me up on the swim team. I’d sing a song and they’d get me singing lessons and try to get me on one of those shows. Anything I did for fun, or because I wanted to… suddenly I absolutely had to be the best at it and then it wasn’t fun anymore.”

  Isabel nodded. That explained why the two things he was best at were online games, which nobody had ever wanted him to be good at, and cooking, which he hadn’t started until well after he was out of the house.

  “My point is, I had every advantage, every opportunity, and I can’t do anything. I ended up hiding in another world because it was a world where I made a difference. I’m just this big useless load.”

  “Okay, now you’re starting to piss me off,” she said. “Seriously, Hunter, if I heard anybody else talking about you the way you’re talking about yourself, I’d fucking hurt them. I love you.”

  “I know. And I love you. But…”

  “But what?”

  “But if you had a cat, you’d love it just as much and it would do you just as much good.”

  Isabel tried to think of something to say to this. Something like cats can’t cook or some cats catch mice or sex with cats is illegal in this state. But as the awkward pause dragged on second by second, she couldn’t come up with anything that would actually improve his mood.

  “Have you heard what they’re doing up in Canada?” said Hunter.

  “What?” This was a weird conversational segue, but Isabel wasn’t going to complain.

  “It’s amazing. They’re trying to rebuild and Monsoon-proof their whole country, and they’re planting whole forests up beyond the old tree line in the Arctic. They need all the help they can get.”

  Isabel nodded.

  “I think I’d like to help.”

  Isabel blinked.

  “Help… how?”

  “Go up there. To the Northwest Territories. Help them plant trees.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.” Hunter’s expression, as best Isabel could read it, was sincere.

  “Canada?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And not like Vancouver, but northern Canada?”

  “Yeah. What’s the big deal? You’ve been to the North Pole.”

  The discussion went on until they were both finished eating, and for a good half hour afterward.

  “Why northern Canada? Why not building houses in Wisconsin or helping people in the camps?”

  “I used to help my mom with gardening. I know how to do this.”

  “What about the concert? Should I try to get a refund on the tickets?”

  “I want to stick around just long enough for that. I can go afterward. It’ll be a little late in the year, but I think there’s still gonna be time to accomplish something.”

  The more Isabel looked at Hunter, the more she began to think she ought to give in. He had this light in his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a while, and certainly hadn’t expected to see any time recently. This idea was giving him hope.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to come with me,” he said in a slightly hopeful tone.

  “I’m glad you wouldn’t,” she replied in a flat tone. He couldn’t quite hide the look of disappointment.

  * * *

  Later that evening, Isabel was at work. In the kitchen, another pot of chyq was brewing—thanks to all this drama in her life, she was going to be pulling an all-nighter. Again.

  Hunter had gone to bed. If I don’t have sex with him, is he going to think I’m mad at him? If I do have sex with him, is he going to think I’m trying to persuade him? ARRRGH. The best thing about our relationship was not having to worry about unspoken psychological shit like this.

  Isabel thought about going to Canada with him. Actually, no she didn’t. She had the vague feeling that she ought to be thinking about going to Canada, but that wasn’t the same thing as giving it serious consideration. The idea held no attraction for her at all. It hadn’t even occurred to her to go with him until he said he wouldn’t ask it.

  Isabel wondered why the idea seemed so alien. He’d followed her back to Maryland, and she couldn’t honestly say that had worked out well—especially not for him. But this was just so weird and random that she couldn’t see herself doing it.

  And if she went up there, she wouldn’t be able to pursue her own career in that place. The Internet connection might be good enough to let her do her work, but there wouldn’t be time. She would be working more or less full time at whatever they decided her job was.

  People don’t always appreciate it or pay for it properly, but I’m doing something that needs to be done. Something that not everybody can do. A lot more people can plant trees than can re-engineer a combined sewer.

  And what if my family needs my help?

  That was the deciding factor. If Hunter went north, he’d go alone.

  * * *

  Isabel and Hunter had eaten meat maybe twice in the past week, but when you picked a day out of the week and called it “Meatless Monday,” that made it feel like an actual choice. Over a Meatless Monday dinner of baked potatoes topped with scrambled eggs, Isabel made a few more efforts to dissuade Hunter.

  “I notice they mention the danger of ‘mosquito-induced anemia.’ You know what that means, right?”

  “Being slowly drained of blood until you die? Yeah. I know.”

  “Sounds a lot worse than getting eaten by a polar bear.”

  “Pretend for a moment that you were the one who really wanted to go up north,” said Hunter. “Would you let that stop you?”

  “Well, no, but…”

  “They’ve got ways of protecting their people. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right. And I’ll come back. And in the meantime, won’t this make things a little easier for you?”

  Isabel opened her mouth to protest, and then silently closed it again. The truth was, it would. She was supporting Hunter right now. If he were up in Canada and his care and feeding were somebody else’s problem, that might make it possible for her to pay the extra on her loan. Especially since, with Hunter no longer eating from the same fridge, she could take up her father on his offer to spare her a few more crabs from his catch.

  Convenient, isn’t it?

  Fuck you, it’s what he wants. And maybe it really will be good for him.

  In middle school and high school, Isabel’s teachers had sternly told her about experiments in which rats were put in individual cages and given two water dispensers, one with regular water and one with heroin or cocaine in it. The rats drugged themselves until they died. This, she and her fellow students were assured, was what would happen to any one of them who dared touch Demon Weed.

  Years later, in college, she’d learned that other scientists had tried the same experiment with a group of rats in a much larger, more pleasant, and varied enclosure in which they were free to socialize. Given dispensers of morphine-laced water and regular water, the rats in “Rat Park” stayed away from the drugged water. Even rats who were addicted to morphine recovered when put in “Rat Park.” The drug was there for the taking, but the rats apparently endured the withdrawal symptoms of their own… whatever passed for free will in a rodent’s brain.

  This went with some of the stories Isabel had heard of drug addicts who’d had successful Jellicoe treatments. Some of them had been able to tur
n their lives around, but others had just found themselves as unhappy as before and started looking for a different way to self-medicate. The problem wasn’t always the drug. Sometimes it was the cage.

  Likewise, Enginquest hadn’t been the source of Hunter’s problems, it had just distracted him from them. He didn’t like himself or the way his life was going. He wanted a change. It was hard not for Isabel to take this personally, since she had been so much a part of his life, but he had never seemed to complain about her.

  Set him free, I guess. Set him free and hope to God he comes back.

  * * *

  Walt occupied a booth at the San Diego Convention Center, THC-laced beer in one hand, in the other an AutoGraff personalized stylus that let him sign electronic copies of his new book Boundaries. Instead of his usual turtleneck, he was wearing his favorite T-shirt, which featured a crude drawing of a man’s hairy buttocks and the words I DON’T KNOW ABOUT MOHAMMED’S FACE, BUT I’M PRETTY SURE HIS ASS LOOKED LIKE THIS. Some nights, when Walt couldn’t sleep, he wondered if his political views were nothing but a function of his personality and style of humor. The one time he’d tried to make an ecologically conscious statement, back in college, what had come out of his mouth was “How come Chinese guys can’t get it up without a dead rhinoceros?” It hadn’t gone over well.

  You might think the Libertarian Party convention (theme: “Let There Be Freedom”) would be the happiest place in America. The President was sympathetic to their cause. Drug law reform was happening at the federal level and in twenty states. Even sentencing reform was starting to happen in some places. And they had a record number of candidates running for local office this year. And the crowd here was pretty big for a midterm year.

  But as Walt listened to the conversations of people around his table, he found they were starting to realize the truth—that successes for libertarian causes didn’t necessarily translate into success for the Libertarian Party. Pratt was the closest thing to a Libertarian the Oval Office had ever seen, yes, but he was not actually a Libertarian. Likewise, the good things being done in Congress and the various State Houses were being done by Democrats and Republicans… well, mostly Democrats, but also some Republicans.

  If you’re a third party in America, thought Walt glumly, this is what success looks like—your best ideas getting stolen by the Big Two… or at least your most popular ones. Which of course leaves you with nothing to offer but the parts of your agenda nobody else wants to touch. No sense complaining. Not like we can sue them for copyright infringement. Even if we could, it wouldn’t be a very libertarian thing to do. And at least this is good news, for the country in general if not for us. Which was important, because what Walt was going to be bringing them tonight was bad news. For everybody.

  * * *

  Having gone back to his hotel room and changed into his usual outfit, Walt was at the podium. It was just about time for him to speak. The last of the delegates were seating themselves.

  He had never addressed this conference before. The crowd was predominantly, even mostly white. Walt was aware that some people might see this as a problem, or at least as vaguely embarrassing. As far as he was concerned, their philosophy was right, and if white people liked it better, that was more likely to say something good about white people than something bad about the philosophy. Still, it’d be cool if we could find a way to broaden our appeal.

  Nobody was naked or wearing a funny costume. That was a dark and grim sign, and what he was about to say wasn’t going to help.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “thank you for inviting me. It is an honor to deliver the keynote address to this convention.” He went on to talk about reforms in drug policy, and to talk in a rather perfunctory fashion about other good things that had happened. Once he had that out of the way… “But the truth is, I’ve got some bad news. I need to deliver it, and you need to hear it. The news is—war is coming.

  “War is coming, because the people in power need it to come. I was going to start out with a reading from Orwell’s 1984—the ‘War is Peace’ section, to be precise—but that’s kind of clichéd, isn’t it? Let’s turn to a guy we haven’t heard from in a while. A great thinker who died over a hundred years ago, when he was a year younger than I am now. Let’s hear from Randolph Bourne.” Walt made a great show of pulling out an old-fashioned sheaf of papers.

  “Randy here summed up his big idea in seven words: ‘War is the health of the State.’ And if you want the details, I better warn you right now—this was not a man who dumbed things down. Check it out. ‘War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest levels of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.’

  “We know what he’s talking about, don’t we? We’ve all seen it. The morning Anchorage happened, suddenly Congress got real friendly. Democrats were like ‘Today we must all stand with our President in this time of crisis. We’ll get back to ripping him a new one tomorrow or next week.’ The right-wing crazies were like ‘Yay, Pratt! Let’s go kick some North Korean ass! Wait, they already surrendered? Shit.’” Seeing the crowd nod, hearing it chuckle, Walt felt a little stronger. The whole movement was weighed down with “libertarians” who whined about taxes and moochers, but who never saw a war they couldn’t cheer or police misconduct they couldn’t make an excuse for. But those in this room were the genuine article. They were his people.

  “Presidents are never more popular,” he said, “and they never get more cooperation from the rest of the government, than when the country is at war. Talk about your bad incentives!

  “And listen, this isn’t a new thing. This has been going on for a lot of American history. During the Civil War, Lincoln imposed martial law on Maryland. Legislators, judges, pretty much the whole government of Baltimore, all arrested and held without charges, and when the court said he couldn’t do that, our great national holy martyr basically said ‘try and stop me.’

  “During World War I, Woodrow Wilson beefed up the government bigger than it had ever been before, built a massive propaganda operation, cracked down on pacifists and anarchists, and the government was still at it years after the war was over. Or look at World War II—rationing, the Smith Act, the internment of Japanese-Americans. Or the Military Commissions Act of ’06. Again and again, Washington has used wars of one sort or another as an excuse to increase its power, lessen its accountability, and diminish the economic or political freedom of the people!

  “And the worst part? The people have been completely okay with it! They’ve even cheered it on! They always react the same way—‘I distrust and fear my government, but not today. I value dissent, but not right now. Now is not the time. Now we all gotta stick together and get behind our leader.’

  “Our friend Randy knew about this, too. He called it the ‘gregarious impulse’—‘the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together.’ And here’s the money quote. ‘Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war.’” Walt emphasized that word to get the attention of his fellow Ayn Rand fans.

  “‘Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity, and the battle is on! In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc.’ Again, sound familiar? Governments love this shit. They love it when everybody’s baking American flag cakes and signing up to give blood the hospitals don’t
need.

  “And here’s where the bad news comes in. Up until the last few years, all this required that the government be able to point to some kind of enemy. A human enemy. Foreign powers, rebels, terrorists, even drug traffickers—it had to be some person or people who were coming up with plans to ruin our day and who might actually carry out those plans. Nothing less than that was scary enough.

  “Oh, they tried. Back in 1977, President Carter tried to get the nation to wage ‘the moral equivalent of war’ on the energy crisis. It didn’t work. Nobody bought it. Nobody was afraid of the energy crisis.

  “See, the human brain is wired to respond to threats from other humans and take them seriously—more so than we take anything else. In the average year, more Americans are killed by lightning than by terrorists, but nobody talks about waging a war on lightning. Over ten times as many Americans were killed by car crashes as by terrorists in 2001, and how did we respond? We sucked it up! What I’m getting at here is that there have always been limits to the ability of the government to exploit this… gregarious impulse.” Dramatic pause. “Until now.

  “In the Northern Monsoon, we finally have a natural disaster severe enough for people to respond to it like it was an enemy attack. This has been happening since last fall, but only this year has it gone mainstream. I think it was Anchorage that did it—we got attacked, suddenly the whole country was in that war frame of mind, and when the war was over we started looking for an excuse to hang on to it. Because it feels good! Let’s just come out and say it—the gregarious impulse feels fucking awesome! People love it! Like Bourne said, ‘consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength—like a drug. I wish there were a Jellicoe treatment for it.

  “People love that feeling, and they’re hanging on to it. ‘Treat it like a war, treat it like a war’—you’ve all heard it. People in the suburbs turning their lawns into ‘victory gardens’ like this was World War Two or something.