Her father had been a whistleblower. He had outed the Roswell Basin aquifer contamination. This was something he had done, the moment his life had ascended to, and the moment from which his life declined since. She’d listened to this same heady story a hundred times, thrilled, as a child, when the hero in the story, her father, fought and prevailed. He’d gone on the news, he’d testified to Congress, he was backed by scientists, and he’d won. Yet somehow it had ruined him, as if he’d mastered some great game that no one else knew how to play. What was left for him afterwards? What compared to the heroic moment he’d had? He glimpsed, for a moment, ascending permanently out of mediocrity. For the first time he believed in the possibility of being a superman.
In the end, there was no way to contact either one of them.
She was late to the meeting. The water activists were still exotic enough to be a little intimidating, a rough lot with histories of political action and arrests. There were three of them. Josh had recruited her—he was tall and thin and easy in his movement. He smiled her in and gestured for her to sit at the kitchen table, where they’d gathered. In a protest some years back, he had been beaten by the police. The resulting settlement had won him some money and fame. Even how he was dressed, with a dusty bandana around his neck ready to pull up over his nose, a ski cap and an unkempt beard, it was hard not to feel a pull of attraction.
The others at the table, Janey and Davis, were pissed at him for changing plans at “zero hour.”
Renee watched them argue. Josh was the loudest thing in the room, and she wrestled with his simultaneous attractiveness and bull-headedness. He won his fights because he outlasted everyone else.
“Dude,” Davis said. “What’s a month of planning for if you change the plan on the day of?”
Josh shrugged and smiled broadly. “Because it’s a better plan? What’s a brain for if you can’t adapt to a better outcome now and then?”
They were all nervous, and every time she became conscious of her own breath she had to work to slow it down again. She wished they could leave now. She wondered if this is what it felt like before battle, if her father had felt this way. There was a vibration in her guts that would not stop. To do something with her hands, she pulled a piece of scratch paper from the center of the table and folded it into a paper boat.
While Davis and Josh argued, Janey poured Renee a shot glass of water from her own unit gallon. “Ready?”
Renee sailed her boat across the table and left it in front of Janey. She had been asked this often but did not blame them. She was the newest and least experienced, the potential weak link. But Renee could feel her readiness, a coiled spring of it.
“She was born ready,” Josh snapped. “I picked her, I know what I’m doing.”
Renee frowned and shrugged. “Think so,” she said. “Yes I am.”
Janey squeezed her arm. “Good. You’re pretty key, here.”
Davis waved his hand in Josh’s direction to end their argument. “We’ll see who’s right in the outcome, friend.” He looked about at Janey and Renee. “KATU news knows to be there,” he said. “Everybody have their flyers?”
Renee pulled a hand-printed flyer from the center of the table. It read:
Who are the thieves?
This truck carries unmarked
water to the West Hills!
The Portland Water Act is a sham!
She thought Josh must have written it; a wordsmith he was not.
He pointed at her. “Speak through your part again.”
She clutched the flyer, closed her eyes, and narrated her way through each action. As she did, she visualized it, every minute detail. She had practiced it constantly. It was automatic.
He nodded when she was done. “That was perfect,” he said.
“No one will go thirsty,” declared Mayor Brandon Bartlett into the nightly news camera. It made the mayor feel good to say this. He was handling things, he was taking charge. The agenda was on hold—that was OK. If just for once he didn’t have to deliver bad news. He stared into the camera and smiled.
“We will all have to make sacrifices,” he said, a political suicide of a line, but this was no campaign. He had just told them that water rations would be decreased to one gallon per day per person, and he expected the worst. He stood next to the weatherman, in front of the forecast, which showed an endless timeline of hot, rainless days. He wondered if he should put his arm around the guy, with his shiny hair and slick suit and handsome chin. As if to say: See? I’m a friend of the weather myself. Rain could come at any time.
A million gallons per day was distributed out to the city, one sixtieth of what had once traveled through the pipes. On Monday he’d lost forty thousand gallons in a fire in the Pearl district, and another eighteen thousand the following day. Bled out of their reserves reluctantly, letting buildings burn that could not be saved.
They played Patel & Grummus’s new prime the slime water-saving jingle while an attractive woman demonstrated the amount. The whole thing made him squeamish and honestly, he couldn’t imagine how anyone could portion off enough water from the ration to expel any waste from the bone-dry plumbing. But where else were they going to put it?
The city had enough water on hand to last for three more months with the new rationing. “Measures are being taken to secure water imports from Russia and New Zealand. Our city is in better shape than nearly any other remaining Western city.” Except Seattle, he thought, envying their city-side desalinization plant. Still, everyone’s first thought was the violence there, how the Emerald City was essentially in a state of civil war. Of San Francisco, with their power infrastructure destroyed, it was nearly impossible to get any reliable information. After the fires and subsequent takeover by a rogue branch of the National Guard they had gone dark. Or had the fires come after? Everything south of San Francisco was essentially abandoned.
“We ask that you stay calm,” the mayor said. “We’re Portlanders, right? We have thrived in prosperity, and we can endure hardship. To those who may feel the need to secure quantities of water, by whatever means, I ask you to have trust. Trust in your government, trust in me. We will provide. We will help each other get through. No one will go thirsty.” He nodded to the weatherman, smiled, then exited the studio and got into the back of a Lincoln Town Car where Christopher awaited him. He’d stopped appearing anywhere where someone could ask him a question. Otherwise, the crowds lasted thirty seconds before the anger turned to jostling, or hecklers shot-gunned him with questions about hospitals and the police and reservoirs and desalinization plants and government water usage and imports and fuck all.
When the mayor returned home—or rather to his city hall office, which he and Christopher had taken to living in, for the view and the safety, but also because the work was never-ending—he paced around the conference room. He felt sick-hearted at the new restrictions he’d announced, and aggravated at the new reports of water robberies. He stared out into the view of the city. “Can’t they all just stay the fuck calm?”
Christopher grimaced. Staying calm was not the people’s job, he was fairly certain. It was the mayor’s job. But he declined to mention this.
“Between the city council, the citizens, the news, and the fucking National Guard, it’s like four piranhas in a fish tank.”
“Eating you?”
“Yeah, eating me!” The mayor very much would have liked to put his fist through the sliding glass door to their balcony, but it was difficult to get replacement anything at the moment and so he reconsidered. It was city property, he was sure he’d be reminded.
“I’m not sure a fish tank is an apt metaphor,” Christopher said.
The mayor turned angrily to glare at him, his finger pointing, ready to pound out a couple of points on Christopher’s chest and then he stopped himself.
“Oh Jesus Chrissy, I’m sorry,” he said and exhaled and turned back to the window. “OK, terrarium. Is that better? Piranhas in a terrarium. That’s exactly it.”
Renee rode her bicycle between taxicabs and clipped a mirror on a big yellow, jarring it out of whack. There was yelling and honking and she heard the distinctive sound of being chased by someone who had no business running, but she had no time to slow down. She gripped the metal rod she kept holstered to her handlebars just in case. The cars were trapped in traffic. There were far fewer cars, but the lack of traffic lights made driving a constant agony. If you wanted to get somewhere, you rode.
Tremendous precision was needed—the water truck would only be in the alley for forty seconds; everything needed to be exactly in place, as they’d practiced a hundred times. She found herself humming an old Genesis song and wished it were otherwise but it went over and over in her brain—fuck all, she thought, this wasn’t the badass self she had in mind for herself. Still.
At an intersection she jumped onto the sidewalk and rounded a building cruising fast. There was a man in her way in an overcoat, completely immobile. She wondered if she had frozen him with her speed, deer on the tracks in the lights of the approaching train—there was no choice but to hit him or veer. She swerved to the left and her handlebar caught on a parking meter and jerked the front tire sideways. The bike came to an abrupt halt and she was launched, bouncing once on the roof of a parked Mercedes with a hollow thud and landing in the street, shoulder and face first.
For a moment she couldn’t move, her breath gone and traffic rushing toward her, blood in her left eye and a feeling like her shoulder had come loose at the socket, like some toy, she thought, like a Mr. Potato Head, with its pullable arms.
“Fuck,” she managed when she could breathe again and the man with the overcoat was pulling her to her feet. He said nothing, just gripped her bicep and steered her to the curb where her bike awaited. Its wheel was turned askew from the handlebars.
“What,” she said and shrugged off the man’s grip.
“Well, listen,” the man said.
She jerked her chin at him and then noticed his expression. He wanted to help, she saw, and appeared now to have all the time in the world for her. One of those types who must have had a job downtown at some point, a manager of something, and now returned daily, donning his overcoat, pacing old routes, hoping for some something—anything—to happen. She righted her bike and yanked on the wheel to bring it back into true with the handlebars. The man hovered next to her. She held up one hand. “Listen, I’m cool. Just in a terrible hurry,” she said, a little creeped out by his closeness and ready to deck him if he slowed her down.
“All right,” the man said, “go on then.”
“I will,” she said. She mounted and rode off down the street, fleeing the stopped cars and the passersby who had begun to gather and wonder. Right now, to do this job, she needed to conjure up that deep inner hellion, that thing which is trained out, which civilization replaces, that thing that wishes to consume the world for its own damn self.
She felt a drop of blood trickle down her cheekbone and the dusty wind on the abrasion. She forced herself through the rickety, pulsing pain in her arm. She rode down a flight of stairs at Pioneer Square and just managed to squeak in front of a van.
The truck always took a shortcut through a back alley to avoid the busy intersection at Fourth. They’d studied it every day as it went to supply the big houses in the West Hills. A wind pushed at the traffic lights, swinging them on their wires, and for the briefest of moments she thought there was a smell of rain in the air but it was only a nostalgic trick, a nasal mirage.
The alleyway was one block away. She checked her watch and slowed, sighting down the street for Josh’s sign. There he was, on his bicycle, a brown handkerchief stretched tight across his nose and mouth, the big baskets on the bike rack and the trailer behind. He held his hand up high in the air, five fingers, then folded them down one by one. When there were none left he shook the fist that remained. She swallowed the last of her fear and whooped with a warcry.
She cornered like she’d practiced, like she’d done a hundred times. She turned into the alley and smacked full on into the front of the water delivery truck, leaping before impact so that she hit the windshield on an incline, her body tucked into itself so that her side took the impact. She hit with terrific force—she hadn’t practiced enough after all—and tumbled to the ground outside of the truck’s trajectory as it squealed to a halt.
The driver knelt in front of her and though she could feel herself passing out, her vision dimming, the blackness coming from the edges, she felt sorry for him.
She didn’t dare pass out. She pleaded with herself in the fraction of a second before her mind closed like a camera’s shutter. Then time bloomed like a flower. The adrenalin that pumped through her body circulated uselessly. Her mind closed in to its own private viewing room and she saw Zach in a room full of water, glass jars of it, stacked in a wall about them. Each jar of liquid produced a hum. She could hear this now. The sunlight glistened and sparkled in each. They sat in this water library and listened to the sound of each of the water monologues like solo artists vibrating out a siren call, and they held hands. She was in her buried mind, and there the water sung to her its own song.
She groaned. It felt like her chest had been crushed. The driver was repeating an apology. She tried to find a hand to push against the ground with.
“Whoa, now. Stay there, an ambulance is coming—you got to stay there. If you’ve got something broken inside—”
She could hear the action at the back of the truck commence. The driver did not.
She didn’t want to move; she wanted an ambulance to come, to be taken care of, to be lifted by her mother’s arms and placed in bed. She wished Zach were there. But it would do no good to go to the hospital and be implicated. The plan was to flee, to leave the crime scene the way she’d come, to be a momentary decoy. She pushed the driver’s hand away and stood up and swayed with dizziness and fell, but the driver caught her and she embraced him, tasted the sweat at his neck, the water that he gave off, the wastewater which could not be wasted. She rested her chin against his collarbone and felt herself slipping back into darkness. I’m sorry, she told him. She was aware of the crowd gathering, of her photograph being taken.
She stood by herself. Her bike was not damaged and while the driver yelled, lady, wait! she climbed on it and coasted toward the back of the truck where there were scavengers pulling bottles out of boxes. A few scattered flyers were on the ground, and others held them in their hands. It’d been a success, and now she was breaking plan. Her people had already come, filled up and gone, like the precise engines they were, their point made, and she knew she was supposed to get away, too. There were news cameras, alerted to this renegade truck, but they got something else entirely. They got her.
“Get back!” she yelled to the hoarders, feeling a sudden protectiveness for the driver, and perhaps because there was blood on her face the raiders eased back from the loot. She saw the bottles lying there on the ground and she thought the driver wouldn’t mind if she had one sip. She was so terribly thirsty. Just one bottle to prove to herself that she’d done what she’d done. It was only fair. A crowd of people hovered in the alley now and she thought she could hear sirens. The driver yelled something, part surprise, part anger, and as a woman with a canvas shopping bag snagged a bottle he lunged for it. They pulled the gallon back and forth, her grip on the handle besting his. These were no unit gallons, ID’d and traceable, but anonymous and unmarked.
Renee pulled a gallon out of a box and turned to put it in her pannier and then she saw the crowd again. They searched her face, tried to make sense of the situation, greedily eyeing the boxes spilled from the truck like some dragon’s mound of wealth upset. In front of them the stalemated wrestle between the driver and the woman. The crowd watched Renee, a woman with blood on her face and a cracked helmet and two long black braids, Hispanic maybe, her eyes vacant, or perhaps extra illuminated, more alive than they felt. They saw her drop her bike and take two bottles and approach them
, giving one first to the woman wrestling with the driver so that his catch was suddenly freed and he lurched backward, another to a young boy half her height with dirt on his cheeks. She brought two more out, handing them into open hands, and two more. Then she handed another to the driver who stood on the side, his face grim, saying nothing. He was one of them, the crowd saw suddenly, a man with a part-time job, a driver, no more. She handed out more, and they were still, waited for her to place a gallon into their own arms. For a moment she thought she could do this forever, place water into the arms of those who needed it. This was what she wanted.
Then she stumbled, her bright eyes dimming. The crowd reached out, caught and righted her. She climbed on her bike. Their hands steadied her, but the sound had drained from the picture, as if someone had sucked the air out, averse to the low garble that the scene would make in slow motion. To the side, cameras caught everything.
The next thing she remembered she was riding her bike toward the river, that toxic mud slough, a gallon in each pannier, the world tinged red with the blood in her eyes.
At home she set her bike down on the front porch and a wave of dizziness overtook her. She went to her knees and felt how her shoulder and chest and head ached. She stumbled inside and found the couch and smiled to herself. She’d done it. They’d done it. She lay down. She needed to synch up with the others, but right now she needed to close her eyes for a moment.
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