Tropic of Kansas

by Christopher Brown

  “The listening station,” said Fritz, flicking switches to turn things on.

  “What do you listen to?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things. News from faraway places. Information they like to make it hard for you to get. Transmits, too. It’s how we stay in touch with our friends so no one can listen in.”

  Fritz sat at the workstation and pulled out the stool from the other bench for Sig to use.

  Sig watched a blue line wiggle across a small round screen.

  Fritz fiddled with tuners. Noise came from the speakers like the calls of robot birds.

  “Old ways,” said Fritz. “Old waves. Obsolete, increasingly hard to find, and mostly illegal. But their computers don’t know how to listen to these frequencies. Don’t even really know they exist. New knowledge in means old knowledge out.”

  A voice came into clarity, in a language Sig did not understand. He remembered the radio Betty had in her cabin.

  “Here we go,” said Fritz, reaching into a drawer. He pulled out the box with the videotape. The one about Messages from Lemuria. Whatever that was.

  Fritz made a noise a lot like the sound he made when he savored the birthday cake. “Lost continents,” he said, holding up the box and smiling. “Layers of secrets in this dollar store remainder. We should watch the original later, after we get your key off of here.”

  “There are no keys in that box,” said Sig. “I looked.”

  “I know,” said Fritz. “Here.”

  He put the tape into a player. He turned on one of the television sets. The screen brightened from black glass to blue snow. He opened a cover from the bottom part of the set, under the screen, revealing control knobs and jacks.

  He grabbed a black handheld from a drawer. Old tablet computer, more box than screen. He plugged it into one of the jacks on the monitor. Video out.

  The picture resolved. A pyramid, floating over a shimmering ocean.

  “No, we don’t want that just now,” said Fritz. He fiddled with the knobs, until the picture flickered out of frame, replaced by scrolling black bars and white static.

  “The good stuff is in the vertical blanking interval,” he said. “Digital nuggets buried in analog noise. Here.”

  He squinted at the handheld. Entered three commands. Held down a button. “Here we go. Come here. Look at that.”

  Sig looked over his shoulder. The screen of the handheld was filling up with numbers and letters, scrolling faster than you could read it.

  “Don’t worry,” said Fritz. “We’re capturing it.”

  “What is it?” asked Sig.

  “Snowflakes.”

  Sig raised an eyebrow.

  “Because of the white noise.”

  Sig didn’t hear any noise. He touched the screen.

  “It’s a key,” said Fritz. “In the form of a code. That functions as a medium of exchange. To those who know how to use it.”

  Sig scrunched up his face.

  “Money,” said Fritz. “Alternate money. Money that doesn’t carry its own government spies.”

  “Who makes it?”

  “No one makes it,” said Fritz. “Or everyone. Everyone who wants to. The network makes it. There’s no bank, or government, or whatever. That’s the whole idea. The users share the work of making it work.”

  “You can have it,” said Sig. “If you want to give me money give me some of the stash I saw in that gun safe.”

  Fritz laughed. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll keep it for you.”

  Sig nodded.

  29

  It was a weird thing being scared to be back in your own hometown. When Cousin Mell told her where they usually had their meetings, Tania knew it was time to dress the part, so she left her lawyer suit back at the airport hotel when she headed into the heart of the city. She left her government-issue sedan back there, too, and took the bus, like she used to every day for school. But now the scenery was a little different.

  She wondered if she really passed as a local among the downbeat commuters who shared the ride. She was the only one who looked up, and when she looked through the dirty window in the fading light of day she knew why. The bus rolled past a seemingly endless line outside the wholesale grocer, people waiting to buy what overpriced essentials were available. Being in line was no guarantee there would be anything left when it was your turn, and those who were lucky enough to get some had to guard it from thieves all the way home. At another intersection six beggars worked the stopped cars, crusty kids you could tell were living outside. There were more back behind them, silhouettes in the busted-up glass windows of an old building.

  When Tania got off the bus she almost stepped on another pair, a hungry-looking little white girl and her zonk-eyed mama, strung out on a threadbare blanket on the sidewalk in the cold. The girl, maybe eight or nine, just held out a plastic cup and looked at Tania with imploring eyes. There were only a few chits and one coin in the bottom of the cup. Tania imagined living as a beggar in a mostly cashless economy, where even the little transactions were electronic, routed through government-monitored networks. But she had nothing to spare, and knew better than to open her wallet around here.

  As she headed down Hennepin under the browning-out streetlamps at the edge of old downtown, every human profile she saw coming her way was a presumptive menace to be avoided, even if it meant crossing the street or rerouting entirely. These streets would take every opportunity to grab what was not theirs, if you gave them the chance, and the only real law and order was provided by the citizen patrols, who were often worse than the criminals—but not as bad as the militias that roamed the zones outside the big cities.

  Up above the buildings, high enough that they could see it from the freeway, was one of those motivational billboards put up by the “Fellowship for a Better America,” whoever the hell they were. This one was more openly political than their trademark blind joggers and puppy-saving patriotic tweens. It featured the already iconic picture of the President standing on the rubble of the White House the day after, screaming into the megaphone he held up with his remaining arm, pumping up the first of the frightened crowds he’d rallied into a vengeful national mob. The caption was in big letters at the bottom.

  Leadership

  To lead others, one must be ready to go forward alone

  Someone had gotten up there and done a little billboard alteration—a giant robot claw where the other arm used to be.

  Tania looked at the face burning through the graffiti and thought about that moment when she had looked into his eyes. She wondered what gave them that mesmeric intensity. Maybe the same qualities that brought him to power. He had a sunnier charisma back then, a youthful smile and a knack for seemingly spontaneous nuggets of oration that would lure people in like a trance and channel all their hungers and rage into his own to make him bigger on the stage of the world. But what stuck with Tania was the way, when the eyes locked on you, you could feel how they were packed with the full punitive force of the federal state ready to come down on any resistance. As if that were the only way he could get his kicks now, after all these years in office, after the attention of the crowd alone lost its juice.

  It was motivating, not in a good way. You wanted to fight it, but the consequences were too grave. It made you feel alone.

  Looking up at the image on the billboard, at the smoldering ruins on which he was standing, Tania thought about the victims of that day, and other days since he had taken power. People who lost their lives, people who lost their livelihoods, people who just lost their country. Or, as Tania felt, learned what their country really was when you peeled off the mask of civility. What it always had been, if you read the history books that the school boards wouldn’t put on the curriculum. This city reminded her of the bad parts of her own past, the days when the fresh darkness announced its arrival and a lot of people put out the welcome mat, mistaking it for salvation. Hard times produced harder solutions.

  A big black SUV rolled by slow, and as it pas
sed under the streetlamp Tania could just make out the faces of three white dudes, out on the prowl. They looked at her, saying things she could not hear, the faces of hunters joking among each other, about the other.

  She walked faster, hoping the place Mell told her about would also provide shelter, and wondering if Mell knew where she could buy a black market gun.

  30

  The next day, they took Sig out to the edge of town to burn the earth.

  The place was a huge field on rolling land, covered in tall grass, the faded browns and grays of late winter, dormant plants dusted with snow. There was a leafless tree line along one edge. Sig saw a hawk perched on one of the bare branches.

  “No wind today,” said Billie. “It’s perfect.”

  They were a crew of eight—Billie and a couple of the older guys from the co-op, and four others around Sig’s age—two guys and two girls. They came out in a big van, loaded with gear in the back. Shovels, axes, buckets, and torches. One of the older guys followed them in a beat-up old biodiesel pickup with a huge plastic water tank set in the bed.

  “Are you ready to get to work making a better future?” said Billie, grabbing Sig by the arm with a big smile.

  “What are we doing?’ said Sig.

  “Phytoremediation!” said Billie.

  Sig tried to imagine the letters in that word.

  “Healing the land with plants,” explained Billie. She gestured across the expanse of the field. “This is one of our test plots. Farmed for a hundred and fifty years, the last third of those enabled by chemicals that kill—kill the land, as well as the bugs and the ‘weeds.’ We are letting what was here before come back in, all the ancient plants, grasses and flowers and grains, to call back all the other creatures of the field.”

  “The Rewilding,” said one of the girls, blue eyes and rosy cheeks sticking out from a wool hat tied down so you couldn’t even see the color of her hair.

  “Exactly, Hannah,” said Billie. “In just a few weeks the wildflowers will start to come in. Then comes summer, when the hummingbirds and butterflies arrive.”

  Sig liked these people, but he did not plan to stay here that long.

  “One of the unintended dividends of economic failure,” said Billie, “is depopulation, and inattention from capital. From money, big business. It gives us room to try a different way of treating the land on which we live. People think land gone wild has nothing to give, but they are wrong. You just have to rethink how you work with it. How to take no more than you give.”

  “Imagine if all the empty lots in America were restored like this,” said Hannah, and Sig thought that only eyes that blue could be that optimistic about what real people would do, or how little nature cares about your feelings.

  “There is no such thing as an empty lot,” said Sig, grabbing an axe and feeling its heft.

  At that, Billie burst out laughing, a deep belly laugh, the laugh of a woman who knew.

  Hannah smiled, too.

  “So we’re going to burn it?” said Sig.

  “Yes we are,” said Billie. “Like the Indians did to make the hunts better, and the Earth did before them, and our descendants will do after we teach their mothers how.”

  And so they did, in two burn crews, starting fires and keeping them in their bounds. And as Sig watched the flames rise up over the wide acres, and heard the sound, the quiet roar and the pops, he knew Billie was right, that this was what it took to bring back what should be.

  Sig finished lunch fast. The others teased him for it, said he was “wolfing it,” and he wondered if any of them knew what that was really like.

  If they had ever known real hunger.

  While they took their time, he decided to go for a walk. He was feeling healed, and strong, and ready to move.

  “Hey!” said Hannah, as he stepped off. “Where are you going?”

  “Into the woods,” he said, nodding at the tree line. “See what I can find.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said, getting up without asking.

  Sig kept walking and let her catch up.

  “What do you think’s in there?” she said, starting to sweat.

  Sig looked over at her just as she pulled off her hat and the blond hair tumbled out. He remembered when he used to think that was pretty, when girls had hair like his mom, but now it made him think of the yellow of the warning lights you saw on dangerous roads.

  He put his fingers to his lips, hoping Hannah would be quiet, and led her into the woods.

  The snow was still thick back under the trees. They heard the scree of the hawk, and the caws of distant crows.

  He showed her wild berries of winter, and acorns that you could eat, if you knew how to cook them.

  He pointed to tracks in the snow. Sign of deer, fox, rabbit, and other wild rodents. He wondered if there were cougar in these woods.

  They had worked long and started lunch late, and the sun was already starting to dim out. He saw deer tracks, fresh, so fresh you could still smell the musk. He looked at Hannah and smiled, and she smiled back. She could smell it, too.

  They followed the trail. It went up a north-facing rise where the snow was still deep, some spots so sheltered that the crust of ice had not formed across the top. Snow this deep slowed deer down, and you could see it in these tracks.

  It was when they got up close to the top of the hill that Sig first noticed the other tracks. He pulled Hannah closer to him and led her up over the edge, where the tracks were all mixed together. Then he heard the rustling, the crunching snow dance, the panicked snort of the deer, and looked to see the buck just as one of the coyotes lunging at its forefeet leapt for its neck and bit. The other coyote went for a back leg, the way dogs do with each other when they play hard. As the deer went down and the coyotes both pounced to keep it down and kill it good, Hannah screamed, and the coyotes bolted.

  “Time for sharing,” said Sig. “They should have wolfed it.”

  When they walked back out of the woods and Sig was carrying the stag over his shoulders, the animal bleeding all over his shirt, with no weapon on him but a pocket knife, the others were impressed, but Sig gave all the credit to Hannah, and let her tell the story, which was mostly true.

  31

  When Tania stepped into the club, it was like stepping into the past.

  A honk band was playing, straddling the chasms between jazz and punk, dissonant blues for a fractured America. The horns led, like the calls of geese doing primal scream therapy, trading out with the electronic noise of untuned channels and interruptive bleats, a drummer banging on a spring coil, a bass like an arrhythmic beating heart. It was a beautiful groove, and for the first time since she landed Tania felt like she was home.

  Her dad played this music, or the music that it came from, music that channeled the sounds of the cold midcontinental cities where it was born, cities of forgotten American diasporas hidden in the old roads and abandoned train stations. Chicago, Detroit, here in the Twin Cities. When she played it for friends back in D.C. they would just make tortured faces. You had to know the source. And feel it in person, live, the way it summoned the feelings of a moment in time, and somehow liberated you from this time, like a waking dream of astral travel.

  The Ganymede Social Club had a name but no sign, just one of those fire doors that look like they have four hundred coats of paint and extra security made from found materials. There was a little purple stencil of a ringed planet, and a buzzer, and when Tania hit it and stepped through, the two dudes sitting there guarding the door looked her over and said come on in.

  The crowd she found inside was mixed, mostly young, all races, working on no races. None of the faces were familiar, which made Tania realize how long she had been gone, but the expressions were—starved and sad and strong all at the same time. Many had the tattoos of overseas service in military and MMC units, while others looked like veterans of these streets. A lot of them were milling in the side room, talking away from the music, and enjoying the snack
-sized previews of the hot food Mell said was the main reason a lot of people went to these events. Twenty-five percent unemployment in the states affected by the farm failures, they said, and that didn’t count the people who’d stopped looking. People were hungry for more than food.

  After the set they pulled the chairs in and everybody gathered to watch a short documentary about the Reagan assassination. Conspiracy theories about the fourth bullet, the double agent, and how Jodie Foster’s Army was never a real cell. Provocative stuff, but presented in a way that hardly qualified as evidence, at least by the standards Tania had been taught, standards designed to lock people up or take their money away. The idea that one of the military merchant companies was behind it almost made sense until you remembered that MMCs weren’t even chartered until a few years into the Haig administration. The filmmakers spun an outrageously speculative counterfactual suggesting that if Reagan hadn’t been shot, his people would have broken BellNet into a bunch of mini phone companies, and all sorts of alternate interactive communications networks would have proliferated “instead of the corporate kleptonet imposed on us by Big Bell and the government it owns.”

  Tania wasn’t buying it, but the crowd looked more persuaded. They stayed after the lights came up and the lead organizer started her real pitch. She was a white lady who introduced herself as Rook—nickname as nom de guerre. She had the diction and grooming cues of someone who grew up behind the gates but a fighter’s premature stress lines that made her look twenty-nine going on forty. Tania remembered the Maxine Price joke about how fighting for real change is hard on your skin. And then Rook actually name-checked the late veep in her remarks, and the joking was over.

  “‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a change in the political system.’ Maybe that was true when Dr. Price said it while she was still in office, but I don’t think it’s true anymore. If we don’t have a change in the political system real soon, we won’t have to imagine the end of the world. It’s time for real democracy!”