America City

by Chris Beckett

  He said this in much the same way that you might speak about some silly religious fad of an otherwise sensible friend. ‘And to be honest, it would have been pretty risky. I mean, if we did it and it got out, that would be grounds for impeachment right there.’

  ‘So you left a note about it lying on the president’s coffee table.’

  ‘Oops. And I’d been so careful not to leave a digital trace!’

  ‘So, okay, I won’t ask about the Our Canada Party, though they’re a pretty nasty lot too, but—’

  ‘We’ve been building them up for some time. He’s fine about that. I was just suggesting a bit of extra support now that—’

  ‘Tell me what you mean by the Texas Option.’

  ‘Texas was originally part of Mexico. A lot of Americans settled there, and eventually they broke away from Mexico, and briefly became an independent country, before joining the US as a state. Something similar happened in California. Hawaii, too, in a way. It’s a way of taking territory from another country without actually directly invading it.’

  ‘So...What are you saying...? We’re actually planning to annex those three cities to the US?’

  ‘Not just the cities. They’re not viable as enclaves. The whole of those three northern territories.’

  ‘Jesucristo, that’s half of Canada!’

  ‘It’s going to happen, Holly. We may as well get it over with. We just need to create a political context where compromise is impossible, hence my—’

  ‘Listen, Jed, Canada was my idea. No one was talking about it until I suggested it. It was a completely new thing. No one knew what I even meant, remember? Not even you.’

  ‘You opened something up, Holly. You can’t have been the first person to see all that spare land up there, or to figure out that one day it was going to be the best real estate in North America. But no one had ever articulated it. It had literally been unthinkable. Canada was a friendly country, as the Canucks keep pointing out ad nauseam. They traded with us. They were part of the same military alliance. They subscribed to the same kinds of values. And, whatever the misinformation your feeders have been so helpfully putting out, they did actually stand staunchly beside us in one way or another in almost all of our many wars. So, even though powerful countries all around the world were muscling into their neighbors’ lands – the Chinese and the Russian Far East, the Japanese and Sakhalin Island, et cetera, et cetera – none of us, not even a rattlesnake like me, had ever thought of doing something similar to Canada. You opened up a chink, Holly. That was your genius. You opened up a little chink, like a tiny crack in a dam, you made it bigger with all your feeder campaigns and your rallies, and now history is taking over.’

  He stood up, picked up a watering can, filled it from a tap. ‘It’s like sex, I guess,’ he said. ‘Once you start, things kind of build their own momentum. Going a little way in and then stopping – it’s never been a popular option.’

  ‘But we can still stop. All we really needed Canada for was to make our people feel that someone else was sharing the load. We’ve achieved that. It worked. Slaymaker got elected, and those new cities of his are going up in the northern states. Okay, we’ve got some problems to resolve with the settlers in Canada, but—’

  ‘Just a few. As you may have noticed, right now they’re rioting in the streets.’

  ‘There are problems to resolve,’ she repeated, ‘but there have got to be ways round them!’

  Jed was about to water a purple azalea. He paused and looked round at her. ‘We really can’t stop, you know, Holly. Politics doesn’t work like that. Every action creates new facts that then have to be dealt with in their own right.’

  He turned back to his shrub. The pot overflowed as he watered it, and a little stream ran out over the pink concrete of the patio. ‘I mean, for one thing we’ve brought into being a multi-trillion-dollar industry. There is literally no precedent in our history for this current construction boom. It employs tens of millions of Americans, whose votes we rely on. It’s created untold wealth for people whose money we need to stay in power.’

  ‘Nothing’s stopping us from carrying on building cities.’

  He trickled water over a miniature lavender bush. ‘Another new fact is the settlers up there. They’ve become a hugely powerful force because of the key role you’ve assigned them in the story that holds all this together. A couple of years ago those people were just a ragtag collection of barreduras who no one liked and no one wanted, but these days there’s not a single woman or man in Congress who’d dare to suggest that a demand that came from our brave pioneers was unreasonable or excessive, however outrageous it actually was. They’d be too scared of being seen as unpatriotic, or siding with the Canucks, or giving succour to the NCA. In fact, most of our politicians are absolutely falling over one another to prove just how much they support our darlings. For instance, I guess you’ve seen there’s a new proposal to give the settlers full representation in Congress, as if they were citizens of a US state. It’s completely unprecedented – even DC doesn’t have that kind of representation – and it’s actually quite bizarre, given that we’re also loudly demanding that those same people should have full voting rights in the Canadian legislatures. But name me one congressman who’s dared to point that out!’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with annexing territory. It’s just supposed to ensure that settlers aren’t forgotten down here in DC.’

  Jed attended to a miniature rose, the breeze catching a lock of his rich brown hair and flipping it about. ‘That’s the stated intention, yes, but does anyone seriously believe there’s any danger whatever of us forgetting them? Stated intentions are only ever the surface. Come on, Holly, you know that! You know that better than anyone! Beneath them there are unstated intentions. And then of course there are unconscious drives, the intentions even we ourselves aren’t aware of.’

  He stopped and turned toward her. ‘And if you go right down to the bottom of it all, of course, there are the forces of nature, which are actually the most fundamental driver here. Si, si, we’re building all those cities in the northern states, but in twenty years’ time, the dustbowl will reach right up to North Dakota, and the superstorms will be ravaging New York City not just once in a while but every summer. There really won’t be any niceties at that stage, believe me. Everyone will be able to see that the Arctic land is the good shit, and anyone with the ability to grab some of it will do so. Believe me, Holly, one way or another, we’re going to end up taking that land, just as the first settlers in America were always going to end up taking the land from the Indians. We may as well get on with it.’

  Holly didn’t answer him straight away. ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a gardener,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I like plants. They’re alive, but they have the decency not to have feelings. Far preferable to human beings.’

  ‘I remember you pointing out that in the long run even the Arctic will be no use.’

  ‘Oh, por cierto, but that’s the day after tomorrow. Nobody ever thinks about that.’

  Jed put down the watering can. The overspill from the azalea pot was crossing the patio, a little stream that bulged above the surface, held together by surface tension. As Holly watched it, it reached a groove between two sections of the pink concrete paving and there, instead of continuing forward, it spread out sideways, creating a kind of front along the groove. Since more water was still flowing into this front from behind, the surface tension was bulging more and more, and it was obvious that it would eventually break somewhere or other, after which the water would continue across the patio, but it was impossible to say exactly where that break would occur.

  ‘It’s like it’s struggling to decide,’ Holly said.

  He followed her gaze. ‘What? The water?’

  ‘Si. It’s full of tension. In fact, it’s quivering with tension, like a living thing feeling pulled in different directions and trying to make up its mind.’

  He watched it with her for
a second or two. ‘Is that even an analogy?’ he said. ‘Isn’t this essentially what a decision is? We feel a pressure building up, we sense how close to breaking out it is, but we can’t tell in advance exactly where that will happen. Isn’t it that combination of pressure and uncertainty as to the outcome that we experience as choosing? But of course we’re mistaken. Each of us is just the meeting point of a bunch of different forces. Where’s this get of jail free card that releases us from the laws of nature?’

  ‘Well, I’m seeing some different sides of you today. The would-be funder of terrorists. The patio gardener. And now the homespun philosopher.’

  He glanced at her. ‘Ah well, Holly, that’s me, you see. Jed Bulinski, renaissance man.’

  To her annoyance she found herself smiling, and turned quickly away. Somehow the two of them were sliding away from the reason she’d crossed the city to see him.

  ‘Our scoopers have been picking up a lot of new stuff lately,’ she said, ‘stuff which I guess is pretty much on the lines of your Texas Option. If those Canucks give our pioneers any more shit, they should just declare independence...What are we waiting for? Why don’t we send in the Marines? That kind of thing. It’s of human origin, as far as I can tell, and not from any organized source.’ She glanced across at him, eyes narrowed. ‘That’s unless you know better, of course?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ He saw the skepticism in her face and laughed. ‘Really! Cross my heart! I don’t get involved with feeders and all of that, it’s not my bag, and I don’t have a budget for it.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s Ann. She sometimes strays outside her brief.’

  ‘God damn it, Holly. Take some responsibility! Don’t try to pin this on other people. This whole phenomenon is your creation. The separatist messages, the riots in America City, they’re just the logical extension of what you’ve been pumping out ever since your first border rally. Yes, and I bet your feeders are recycling this separatist stuff even as we speak!’

  ‘I recycle anything that focuses on Canada. It’s mood music. It encourages debate, it concentrates people’s mind on a topic that up to now they didn’t think about. That doesn’t mean I agree with it all, or expect it to be implemented as government policy.’

  Jed snorted. ‘Sure. It encourages debate. Listen, Holly, the world used to fight over oil, and more recently it’s fought over copper and lithium and water, but in the days ahead of us the real must-have strategic asset is going to be Arctic territory. You still talk as if the Canada thing was just a sideshow – a sort of PR stunt and nothing more – and the city-building in the northern states was the real deal. But actually, leaving aside Alaska, the true situation is precisely the opposite. Those Canadian territories are the main attraction, and it’s our northern states that’ll turn out to be the sideshow.’

  ‘But I keep saying it was me that raised Canada, and I—’

  Jed shrugged. ‘Sometimes we know more at an unconscious level than our conscious minds will allow.’

  The trickle of water had broken out from its groove in the concrete, Holly noticed, about two centimeters to the left of where it came in.

  ‘I could use a drink,’ she said.

  ‘Sure. Why not? You like gin, yeah?’

  He went into the house. She leant forward and watched the water. She felt immensely weary. She had thrown so much energy into the agency these last three years. It had made her feel enormously powerful. But that had been an illusion. A foolish soap bubble. No one was in control. Just as Jed had said, every human being in the world was simply a node, a meeting point in a network of inhuman forces.

  CHAPTER 46

  Margot Jeffries

  I was no fan of Slaymaker’s Canada project. I hated his gratuitous bullying of our harmless neighbor. The outrage after the shootings at Peace Arch reminded me of a bunch of kids who’d cornered a terrified animal and deliberately goaded it, and were now screaming because it had finally lashed out and bitten them.

  And more than anything, I hated the double standard. Down in Arizona I’d let that border, just fifty miles south of me, dam up all that desperation and misery beyond the horizon, and got on with my life as if it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t just me that let that happen. All of America was the same. And it seemed to me that, if our principle was that each country should deal with its own misery, however the weather might change, then surely we should stick to that principle even when it didn’t work in our favor? If you just take the principles that happen to suit you, and then put them back in the box again when they work against you, they aren’t really principles at all, are they? They’re just self-serving stories.

  But what changed my thinking was that encounter with the woman in the drugstore back in Illinois. It made me see that these people I lived with on the trailer park just weren’t welcome in America any more. Prosperous, comfortable America saw them as outsiders, pretty much as they saw Mexicans and other foreigners. Of course in my case, as the drugstore woman had kindly explained to me, I didn’t have to be one of them. I could have moved to a city and eventually resumed an ordinary middle-class existence. But I found I just didn’t feel like playing my middle-class Anglo card. I felt like staying with the people I’d met in the camp.

  And so, after Slaymaker became president, when those new cities started going up, and people I knew on the trailer park started heading off to one or other of them, I decided to take that option too. Professional folk were in short supply in all of those new cities, whether the ones in America or the ones in Canada – I guess that was precisely because it was easy for professional people to move to and re-establish themselves in existing communities – and all of them badly needed teachers. I could have moved to one of the new towns being built in the north of the USA and ended within fifty miles of Chicago, or Seattle, or Anchorage, but I thought to myself, What the hell, let’s go the whole hog, let’s make this as much of an adventure as it can possibly be. And so I opted to go to Nunavut, Canada, and live in a half-built city that was nowhere near anyplace at all.

  That’s not to say I’d suddenly come round to Slaymaker’s way of thinking. Not at all. I still didn’t trust the man, and I still didn’t like what he’d done. But Canada is like America in that it’s full of immigrants from all over the place, who got there in all kinds of different ways. I figured we were only another wave. In due course, one way or another, we’d become part of Canada, the same as the Scots, and the French, and the Irish did, and the Chinese, and the American loyalists, and the runaway slaves from the Underground Railway, and the Ukrainians and all of the others who’d come before us.

  I moved to America City and taught school. I taught thirty-five fifth-grade kids in AC North Elementary, about half of them from the desert states like me, and most of the rest from the Storm Coast states between southern Texas and New York. How difficult this strange new place was for all of them! So cold, so gray, so little to do. But I guessed their parents told them, as I did myself, that this was just the beginning. America City was scheduled to double in size year on year, and at some point we’d end up with buildings that didn’t look like shipping containers, and parks that didn’t look like war zones.

  Maybe one day America City would even be big enough to support a shop selling handmade pottery, and I could give up teaching again and go back to making beautiful things, which was my real vocation, I guess, if the word means anything at all. I’d already bought myself a new kiln and was making pots in my spare time, including some I was pretty pleased with.

  And oddly enough, in this cold, ugly, mosquito-ridden building site, surrounded by hundreds of miles of bare granite and cold water and yellow tussocky grass, I felt quite happy. I’d go as far as to say that I felt glad that I’d been forced to leave Arizona behind me. I could quite easily and comfortably have spent my whole life down there, por cierto I could, but I’d have been doing essentially the same things over and over, and now I was part of something completely new. And in Nunavut, of all places! Nunavut! To be honest, I’
d barely even heard of it before.

  Even though there weren’t any Inuit settlements near us, I began studying Inuit art, which is actually very beautiful, with the idea of incorporating some of it into my work. I planned to take a tour round the territory on my next summer vacation – or some of it, anyway: it’s three times the size of Texas! – and I took a course in Inuktitut, the indigenous language. Of course, I knew we weren’t really any more welcome in Nunavut than we had been in Illinois but I thought I’d make an effort, all the same.

  I was pretty unusual in that way, though. Take Melanie, my next-door neighbor, for instance: she didn’t even know who the Inuit were until I told her, and she wasn’t at all interested when I did. Her attitude was, so what? So what that, somewhere in this vast territory – three times the size of Texas, as we kept being told – there were a small number of indigenous people?

  ‘There was a bunch of Indians down the road from where we used to live in Alabama,’ she said. ‘Well, they called themselves Indians. They didn’t look much different from you or me. They had a little amusement park called Creek World. My pa took me there once. It was okay, I guess, but there weren’t that many rides.’

  And we never really met the people who’d lived in Nunavut before we arrived. The locals were hundreds of miles away. America City’s site had been specifically chosen to ensure that we didn’t run up against one another. Neither the US nor Canada wanted that kind of trouble.

  But we got trouble anyway, as it turned out. The bomb went off outside the city hall. Everyone in AC knew of someone who’d been injured, or killed, or been nearby. Our head teacher was badly cut by flying glass. Another teacher had her eardrums burst by the blast.

  The bomb had been planted by the North Canadian Army, a largely Inuit group that was a militant offshoot of a political party that operated in all three Canadian territories. It saw itself as defending the local way of life against a flood of immigrants that threatened to sweep it away. And actually I could kind of understand how they felt. Come to think of it, from a purely logical perspective, you’d think that any American ought to be able to understand how they felt, given that fears of being flooded by migrants from the south had been one of the main elements of America’s political conversation since long before I was born.