The People's Republic of Everything

by Nick Mamatas

  King Daniel watched it all on TV and just sighed. He didn’t know what to think; his brain was all thumping and semi-familiar flashes, like I was looking at a washing machine full of my own clothes at a laundromat. Adrienne prowled around the couch, wanting to be helpful and useful and looking for some sex, but my father still loved my mother and missed her too much. I needed to use the bathroom, but somebody was blogging in there. Outside, across the line, a few trucks growled and headlights came on. Half the American force was leaving, being recalled. Kelly and Barry (the whitey white high-fiving guy) were lured to the window by the noise and ruckus.

  “What does it mean?” Kelly asked.

  Barry thought that some of the troops might be redeployed due to the rash of microstates that had sprung up. There was even a college girl from downtown Port Jameson who had created some kind of wire-mesh hoop skirt, no fabric, just the hoops, and she didn’t wear jeans or panties underneath or anything, and declared herself a roving person-state. She lasted two blocks before tipping over. An American passerby who had some needlenose pliers rescued her and ended her great experiment in personal democracy and public nudity.

  There was so much happening: the TV was on, as were two or three others that new citizens had brought with them. We had cable and a big Long Island TV, they had staticky reception and ghostly black-and-white figures, like thumb prints, telling them the news. Also radios, and laptops everywhere. Almost no typing, just finger-jabs and clicking from page to page, to find out what we were supposed to have said today and what the word on the net was about us (Moron of the day: “Now people are going to think that all Christians act this way!” Like Dad said, “There’s a sentence that contains more errors than words.”)

  It was hard to think, much less pick out the thoughts of the people around me. Barry was confident, thought he smelled good; he was here to get laid because he read somewhere that hippie chicks put out in crisis situations. Kelly was afraid that she was going to die, and was wondering if she didn’t make a big mistake in emigrating to Weinbergia. She was also trying to figure out exactly what to say and how to act so that she could have sex with Barry without it seeming like she was just going with him because they were in a crisis situation.

  My father, watching the various special reports cutting in on other special reports, only thought “Good” whenever the cops, the National Guard, or the feds shut down another newly emergent microstate. We were the only ones with neighborhood nuclear superiority. King Daniel was proud. Everyone else? Too busy, buzzing like attic wasps over politics, sleeping arrangements, secret schemes to grab the last can of Coke or yesterday’s soggy fishstick. I went upstairs where things were quieter.

  But not silent. I was the only kid in all Weinbergia, and the prince besides, so most of our new citizens didn’t stake a claim in my room. (Dad had four people in the master bedroom, and slept on a cot like everyone else. The big mattress and box spring had been moved downstairs for a bunch of smelly punk rocker types from Westchester.)

  But when I opened the door there were Rich and Adrienne, sitting on the corner of my low twin bed, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and both of them staring at my screensaver, of all things. They were even murmuring about it (“Oh my, it flickers like that all night?” “No, it stops after ten minutes or so.”) and they were even thinking what they said. Usually, when people make empty comments, they’re thinking of something else.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hey chief,” Rich said brightly. Adrienne smiled the lady’s smile for kids.

  “I’m going to use my computer now,” I said. “No more screen-saver, okay?” I slid into my seat and tapped the mouse. They shifted on their butts a bit, but didn’t move.

  “Do you mind if we stay here and, uhm, hang out with you, Herbie?” Adrienne acted as though she had never said the words “hang out” before in her entire life.

  I told her it was fine and Rich asked what I planned to do. “Some neat video game? Update a website? Talk to your little girlfriend on instant messenger? Send some emails?”

  “I like to look at pornography on my computer.”

  Rich suddenly flashed to an image of some porno he had seen, so I obliged by typing “barely legal anal” into the search engine that’s on my browser’s start page. “It’s very healthy, you know, for young boys like me. We try to shed our old-fashioned American sex hang-ups here in Weinbergia. That’s why I look at porn for two or three hours before I go to sleep on that bed you two are sitting on every night.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Adrienne said. She didn’t think it was great at all. “I think I’ll talk health and family services policy with your father.” With that she got up and didn’t even glance at Rich as she left, taking three quarters of the air in the room with her.

  “So, uh—” Rich said and I clicked the Search button and my screen filled with thumbnails of women who certainly weren’t barely legal, stacked like sandwiches with men as the bread. Sweat burst from Rich like he was a crushed grape. Then I shut the browser window.

  “Oh-kay then,” he said.

  “Oh-kay,” I said.

  He stared at me for a long time; if he was thinking it was on some weird weatherman-reptile level that didn’t translate into words or even images. Then he said, “You know a lot of things, Herb.”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you know why the troops are pulling out?”

  “Well, only some of ’em are.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, and huffed. “Yes, but the ones that are pulling out, do you know why they are pulling out?”

  I actually didn’t, since even the troops who were leaving didn’t know why they were, or where they were going, or what would happen next. Most of them were just glad to be moving away from the garden gnome nuke, but worried that they’d end up in Iran or Brazil or some other hotter spot on the map. Maybe Providence, Rhode Island. Brown University was supposedly planning to secede next. I went a bit deeper, into some dark mind in some dark basement. All Rich saw was my eyes peering up at the ceiling, tongue on my lips, like I was trying to think of something good.

  “They’re worried that vibrations and movements of soldiers and material on the front might jostle something here, and bring the radioactive bits of the nuke close enough to start the fissioning process.”

  I had no idea where all the blood in Rich had rushed, but he didn’t seem to have any of it anymore. Maybe his feet were red as stoplights. “You mean, kill everyone?” I didn’t want to say yes, so I turned back to my computer. The screensaver was back, with spidery lines of purple and green. It was pretty interesting, after all.

  “I heard something, too. I have friends, been getting a few tips here and there, strictly nfa. That’s ‘not for attribution,’ you know, so I can’t say who. Uhm, not that you’d know who they were anyway.” At that moment, I did.

  “You know, you’re big news in the outside world, Herbie. You should check out a site when you’re done with your po—pictures. Mysonherbiethelovebug.org.” Then Rich got up, squeezed my shoulder, and walked off without another word. The door to my bedroom opened to a roar of light and cigarette smoke and nervous smells, then closed again, but all the fog of the outside world remained here with me.

  I typed in the URL and looked at the site. It took forever to load, because the designer didn’t really know what she was doing. There was a big old GIF of me, a few years ago. I was missing a front tooth in the photo, though I remembered that when that picture had actually been taken I had my teeth. Photoshop, to make me look more innocent or more pathetic or something. There was a link to an online petition addressed to my dad, who was called “a good man who had done one terrible, terrible, thing.”

  There was no news of Weinbergia. As far as visitors to the website knew, Rich Pazzaro was tied up in the basement, literally chained to the furnace, and Dad and I were sitting up in our living room alone, in our underwear and in the dark, inventing nonsense languages and scraping the bott
om of our last jar of Skippy with our dirty, overgrown nails, to keep alive, “all for the sake of Daniel Weinberg’s quixotic quest,” to read the website copy’s version of the tale.

  And I checked the newsfeeds on my other browser, then I checked your minds. Yes, even yours. And most of you knew nothing of the steady stream of people taking our side, coming here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and all the money they could pull out of a gas station ATM, swearing their oaths to Weinbergia, looking to start a new life. All you knew was what Geri had told you, what some talking heads described as the inevitable nuclear holocaust brewing on Long Island’s North Shore, of the day-thick traffic jams on the L. I. E. and the Northern State, and of the Klansmen and anarchists who suddenly started arming themselves, for no reason at all other than that they hated freedom and democracy. Because they had previously been given too much of it all at once.

  I generally kept my speakers down, but saw a little dancing musical note on the bottom of the front page and when I turned up the volume heard that Mom had a beepy-boopy MIDI version of “You Light Up My Life” playing in a continuous loop on the page, and there was no way to turn it off or to turn the volume down on the webpage.

  So now, it really was war. I packed a bag and waited for the morning.

  5

  I had hopes that they’d come for me subtly. Send in another spy, maybe Tanya Levine, who’d cry and bring me some American candy—lots of Weinbergians were anti-sugar all of a sudden; nothing but that awful candied fruit nobody likes had been offered for a couple of days (I blame the hippies)—and ask me to go back with her to visit Mom, just for a bit, just for a little bit. Then I’d be hit over the head with a blackjack, stuffed into a National Guard truck along with some Meals Ready to Eat and green blankets, and trundled off to Fort Collins, Colorado (where my maternal grandma lives), or wherever for a flashbulb-heavy reunion with Mom.

  But once they had cleared the front of the great rumbly trucks and armored personnel carriers that might have accidentally jostled and thus triggered Weinbergia’s first and last line of defense, the Army decided to go ninja on us. No conscious thought was involved in the process at all; it was if they picked their plans out of a bingo tumbler or something. Even I didn’t know what happened until the first canister of tear gas came flying through the bay window in the living room.

  Breakfast’s first shift had just ended. We were eating beans and toast because one of our recent émigrés was British and had a hankering for them, and beans are really cheap and easy to parachute in from a low-flying Piper Cub hired by the Palau government. The soldiers had blasted three of the cases to hell on the way down, but one had survived, and Disco Barry had fetched it in order to impress some white girl with dreadlocks and a trust fund. Her name was Rhiannon and she was happy for the beans and also happy that so many of “our bird friends” were coming to visit us. “A good omen,” she said.

  The roof was full of seagulls and pigeons picking at beans. Wings flapping, occasional squawks, endless jokes about who was going to go outside first to get the newspaper and risk being splattered by the shower of droppings. Then screams and scrambling and the sting of peppery smoke.

  I was lucky. I was in the bathroom when the first canister of crazy purple knockout gas came through the living room window downstairs. I grabbed the toothpaste and slathered it all over my lips and eyelids, then ran downstairs, threading my way between the people in line for the toilet in the hallway. I whipped it out, you know, it, and aimed for the hole on the side of the canister and started peeing right on it, to neutralize the chemicals and stop the reaction. That’s how they do it, intifada-style, and I’d picked up the trick in a nervous dream the night before. I’d saved Weinbergia.

  Then three more canisters came in through three more windows on each end of the house and the screaming started again. I was part of it too. “Dad!” “Dad, help!” He burst out of the basement, nudged aside Kelly, who was already wailing and clutching at her face, and ran to me.

  “What do we do?”

  “Pee!”

  His face blanched. “I just used the downstairs half-bath!”

  As one, we turned to what was left of the line of people on the steps. Half of them were wheezing and crumpled, others had run upstairs and kicked open the windows. None of their bladders would be useful either; some of them had already gone in their pants. Two birds fluttered in, then smacked into walls and a flailing guy who had just left the bathroom. Dad wheezed and was suddenly leaning on me, heavily, his knees weak and eyes screwed shut. Tears dripped like sweat from his face. My toothpaste mask was wearing off; I could feel the tingling, my nostrils and bronchial tubes squeezing shut like they’d just been through the coldest winter run ever. I grabbed the remote from Dad’s belt and turned to the door to face a trio of soldiers in bug-eyed gas masks pointing their machine guns at me.

  I pointed the remote, antenna-first like it mattered, at them. Their morale broke like a lamp that had just been hit by a basketball, and they walked out, almost stumbling backwards down the narrow porch steps. I stepped out of the house on wobbly legs, and made it about ten feet before falling to my knees. The garden gnome was feet away, its smile egging me on. Its eyes were so bright and blue. Too blue, scary, really, like anything else that doesn’t blink. Like all the cameras and headlights on the Hummers and the goggly gas masks worn by the line of soldiers just beyond the curb of my house. But I had the bomb and held the remote high, so everyone could see it, and me. There were cameras; I knew they wouldn’t shoot me. I’m still a kid, a white kid they’d been painting as a victim for almost a week, and besides, I was coughing so much, my mouth and lips were full of snot and tears, I was sweating and shaking. I felt some puke bubbling up in the far end of my throat. My thumb might slip.

  I could kill us all.

  Blind and hoarse, I screamed.

  “Mom!”

  Needless to say, Dad had other remote controls, stashed here and there around the house. I knew that, but nobody else did (though the military simply assumed he did, and backed off behind their front line when I escaped the gas trap), and I felt like hanging on to the remote I had. Even after I was told that Mom was being helicoptered in to see me. Even after they offered me candy bars, money, a ride in a tank. Or when they threatened to break my f-ing arm or just cut it off with a hacksaw, and my other arm too. And they weren’t lying either. They just weren’t telling the full truth yet. They wanted to see what would happen when Mom came before doing anything drastic, like shooting my wrist off so quickly I wouldn’t have time to depress the button on the remote.

  High-level negotiations had taken place, in New York, at the United Nations. Weinbergian windows had been replaced, food stores augmented, international treaties regarding mail, civilian air traffic, and wetlands preservation instituted (we had a disused garden that tended to puddle) and in return they had to send Kelly out to America with a duffle bag full of my clothes. She didn’t even try to smile or hide her upset, and wouldn’t touch me. She had been rehearsing some inspirational thing to say to me (“Stay strong” or “I love you”) but ended up just stammering out “Here, here you go. Here. Your bag to go. Go. Here. Bye.”

  And she dropped the bag at my feet and all but ran out of the gymnasium.

  It took a long time for Geri, my mom, to show up. There were briefings with PsyOps first—they thought I’d have Stockholm Syndrome and thus support my dad. It never even occurred to any of them that they, the US troops, were the ones who kidnapped me. Then Mom’s publicist wanted her to change into sweatpants, to look more “homey,” and by homey she meant pathetic, but Mom kept her slacks on. She wanted to look nice for me.

  When my mother finally came, she looked very different. Her hair had been cut by a real hairdresser, not by herself, in the bathroom mirror, like she usually did it. Her teeth were capped and she was wearing a nice blazer in a color that wasn’t quite pink. My mother sizzled with crazy, but it quieted down when she saw me. We were in the gym
in the high school, where I had been carried, remote in hand (and yes, I knew it wouldn’t work more than a couple hundred yards away from the nuclear device). Soldiers lined the benches, at attention when the cameras were here, but when my mother arrived and they were chased out by Captain Whiting’s stiff bark, most of the guys just leaned against the walls and chatted with each other, mostly about how similar this all felt to how they leaned against gymnasium walls, chatting, a couple of years prior when they were all high school students.

  We hugged for a long time, not thinking anything at all.

  A ping-pong table and two folding chairs on opposite sides had been set up for us. After about two seconds of looking over the tiny net at one another I suggested that we get up and move the chairs so that they’d be against the long sides of the table, and that way we’d be closer. Geri loved the idea and we quickly arranged the seats properly. “You’re so clever,” she said.

  “Cleverer than the Army guys who put the chairs on the wrong end,” I said, and watched her fume.

  “Stop,” she said through clenched teeth, “saying bad things about the government.” Then “You’re just like your father.”

  “He’s fine, by the way.”

  “That’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’ve had about my fill of your father, and I hope you have too, because I suspect it’ll be a while before you see him again.”

  I shook my head and slid off the folding chair. “You can’t kidnap me. There are rules. International law—”

  “Don’t be stupid, Herbie!” She was angry, like burnt toast popping right out of the toaster. “This isn’t kidnapping, this is you being removed from a dangerous environment. There is no country called Weinbergia; I don’t care what the United Nations or Palau says.” She sat back in her chair, already exhausted. “Palau. God. What right do they have interfering anyway?”

  “Well, Palau only gained its independence from the US in 1994. See, it started off as a Spanish holding when the pope, well, hmm.” She wasn’t listening.