by Nell Zink
She met Aaron at the coffee shop at two o’clock. He had bravely canvassed two apartment buildings, meeting seven voters, all of whom claimed to be undecided.
He suggested they go to his place in her car. He was staying in a one-room apartment over a garage. Rather than being paid for out of federal funds like Flora’s motel, it was a donation-in-kind by Clinton-supporting tax evaders who usually rented it out online. It was more private than her room, in the sense that no one but the birds of the air could hear them from behind its flimsy walls, but it was also less private, because the owners thought it rude to text Aaron when he was nearby. If they saw his car parked on the street, they would mount the stairs to knock on the door, with nothing but lace curtains obscuring their view of the bed. That was their reason to take her car.
After sex they drove to Standing Stone, a pretty spot a few miles down the river, according to the internet. He drank a beer, because she was driving. It started to rain. They drove back to his place to get high.
The next day was similar. They worked until afternoon. Contentment enveloped them. Fresh motel sheets crackled like autumn leaves. Sugar maples quivered in the wind like flames. Aaron drank and smoked and was instantly buzzed. Flora wasn’t used to drinking making a difference to anybody. It never made a difference to Bull. He could drink three dry martinis before dinner and most of a bottle of wine during dinner, and she couldn’t even tell. She herself was seldom able to finish two beers. She’d drink the first beer, but the second beer always just sat there reproaching her for ordering it, because, after all, two beers cost twice as much as one beer.
When Aaron drank, it was as though he entered another world when the cap came off the bottle. He became Transfigured Aaron, Man of Joy. It was the same when he touched a joint. He didn’t have to light it. He accepted rapture from any placebo he could get his hands on—including her—as though substances and sex were his excuses to become himself in a world set on “low.” It was the diametric opposite of Bull’s blasé maintenance of suavity at parties that were roiling seas of boilermakers and cocaine. It reminded her of Joe.
“HOW DID YOU END UP WORKING FOR JILL STEIN?” HE ASKED HER. THEY WERE SITTING on the island beach on a sunny afternoon, sharing a mild sativa and a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew.
“I don’t know,” Flora said. “I live in Cleveland Park, so I grew up going to the zoo. I still never got into biology, because it’s mostly about medicine now, like why doesn’t this sea slug get heart disease. I mean, field biology is cool, and I’m actually pretty good with statistics, but there are no jobs. So I majored in soil chemistry, except I don’t want to work in a lab. This is some kind of long version, isn’t it?” She didn’t mean to be evasive. “The Stein campaign called me” didn’t seem like it would answer the question he was asking.
“It’s all exotic and fascinating to me,” he said. “I majored in public affairs.”
“Well, you know, there’s climate change, right? A lot of species are going to die. Most of them, we can’t do anything. The temperature’s going to rise, the species are going to rise to higher elevations, and they reach the mountaintop and that’s it.”
“They go to the promised land,” Aaron said.
“You got it. So I was thinking what we can do as people, and obviously where we’re fucking up is land use and how we regulate it. If we don’t switch to organic farming, people are going to starve, especially if they implement the Paris Climate Accord. They want to do combustible biomass on an area the size of India. Now tell me where they’re going to get all that nitrogen.”
“You don’t like the Paris Accord?”
“I can’t even— I mean, it’s a joke. I was five the year of the Kyoto Protocol, and it’s still not in force. People signed on to Paris because it has no sanctions. Carbon emissions are under our control the same way the rest of people’s habits are under their control. It’s not going to happen. Nobody’s leaving any carbon in the ground. What’s going to happen is a lot of insane geo-engineering and a big die-off.”
“So, Jill Stein.”
“Well, getting countries to green their agricultural policies would be a political project. Markets are not going to lead the charge. Sustainability is what you build on the ruins.”
“With reforms,” he said. “There’s a crash, and you institute reforms. Bankers destroy the economy, so you ban organized labor. Coal destroys the climate, so you build gas pipelines. It all makes sense.” There was no sarcasm or anger in his delivery. He meant it word for word—a deadpan vision of darkness—but he was beaming while he said it. He was trying and failing to feel implicated in the sad state of the world. He put his arms around Flora and nuzzled her hair.
“This is serious business!” she protested. “Ecosystems are going to crash. We’re going to get sustainable agriculture without ecosystems, capturing carbon in biomass with all the insecticides we want, because all we’ll eat anymore is grass. Corn is a grass. You don’t need pollinators to grow grass.”
“Right. So Jill Stein.”
“In a word,” she said.
They kissed and drank through their respective straws.
She asked, “How did you end up a Clinton fellow?”
“I felt the Bern, and I didn’t have the chutzpah to assassinate Trump. At this point I think it’s true what people say. He’s their moderate intelligentsia.”
“I guess what I’m asking is, was there an issue that radicalized you? Was it Occupy?”
“Prisoners’ rights, I guess.”
“Were you in jail?”
“No, but I can’t think of an issue that scares me more. You know they enforce federal cannabis law in PA, everywhere but Philly.”
“Ooh.” She glanced all around, pretending to be afraid of cops. There was no one in sight but a distant fisherman, on the other side of the river, asleep in his pale blue shade tent.
Still incongruously smiling, he said, “I knew a guy who was incarcerated for a while, before he got exonerated, and he said what kept him from going batshit was knowing stuff by heart. He’d recite the Koran to himself. So I started memorizing all these hip-hop lyrics, but I still don’t feel ready to go to jail.”
“I know the words to lots of songs.”
“Sing me a song.”
“Let me see . . . I can’t think of anything.”
“That’s okay.” He lay back on the sand and squinted up at the yellowing afternoon sun.
“Wait, I know,” she said. “Here’s a rare Joe Harris track that he never recorded.” She sang a song that he had sung to her on sidewalks when she was small:
When I met the crosstown bus
Ready to be home again,
Saw the bus was running late
Saw the sky was pouring rain.
Looked up in the air,
Saw her flying there,
Flying way up high,
Flora in the sky—
She paused before the rollicking chorus, which was always timed to coincide with arrival at the crosswalk:
But bats can’t fly in the rain!
Going to end up down in the drain!
So take my hand, little girl,
Delancey Street is wider than the whole wide world.
She gasped for breath and took a drink.
“Damn,” Aaron said. “That is massively cute.”
“I know! You can put in any street name you want. The part about flying makes you look up, so you see the cars coming.”
He sang, “Queens Boulevard is wider than the whole wide world.”
“My mom told me once she got blackout drunk at the Javits Center, which is on the West Side around Thirty-Fourth, and when she woke up, she was holding on to this concrete Jersey barrier in the middle of the FDR, on a level with Peter Cooper Village, like at Twenty-Third. She had no idea how she got across town, not to mention two lanes of the FDR. She thinks she might have wanted to go swimming in the East River. That’s her theory, anyway.”
“And she’s alive?”
“Yeah. The cars slowed down for her.”
“It’s no wonder you don’t drink.”
“She’s a lightweight, but you’re the cheapest of the cheap dates.”
He drew back in mock horror. “What do you mean?”
“You could get high off the smell of beer! You could, like, look at a joint and be tripping. I think you’re naturally in a zone, and you don’t want anybody to know. That’s why being with you makes me feel . . . I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Free? I feel free. Like, right now, I’m floating. I have trouble remembering the real world, or that it exists.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“This is the real world,” he said. “Online, I don’t even know you.”
SHE GOT A FAIR INKLING OF HER FAMILY’S DOINGS ON FACEBOOK, SO SHE KNEW THAT they were not enjoying the final week of campaign season quite so much. Ginger had discovered a vocation as a writer. She was coming up with all sorts of eloquent tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) reasons for why she felt the way she did. Her friends “liked” them all, but always a little too quickly. Edgar’s strongly contrasting bumper sticker–style slogans were so pithy as to be borderline incoherent (ECONOMIC REFUGEES = REFUGEES!). Her parents were taking it to the streets in a most triumphant manner, if their Facebook posts were to be believed. The posts omitted all details that were sad.
For instance, Pam went to a protest in front of Trump Tower carrying a homemade sign that said GRAB YOURSELF, PUSSY. It featured a clumsy line drawing of a naked Trump with female genitalia. Some beefy yahoo pushed her over backward, hurting both her elbows. While she lay on the ground, another squirted her with ketchup from a disposable packet held with both hands at crotch level. Because there were police all around, she couldn’t surprise him from behind and put out his eyes with her thumbnails.
Daniel signed up for a bus expedition that was supposed to leave Twelfth Avenue at four A.M. to go canvassing in Wilkes-Barre. He couldn’t find the bus. He didn’t have a number to call, and no one on WhatsApp responded to his pleas, so he wandered up and down Twelfth Avenue and then Eleventh in the predawn rush hour, experiencing helpless rage.
Ultimately it seemed sufficient consolation to them both to sit at home drinking coffee and reading in the New York Times that there was an 85 percent chance of a Democratic win. It was soothing, like a cross between an 85 percent chance of a refreshing late-summer rain and Hillary somehow polling at 85 percent of likely voters, though not even Pam could come up with a plausible explanation for the source of the number.
While Daniel was getting up at three in the morning to catch his nonexistent bus to Wilkes-Barre to do their job, Flora and Aaron were taking a shower. Between her legs was the achy trace of hard fucking, and his tongue was on it. They were sharing a collaborative state of intense focus and complete and total distraction, like artists.
ON ELECTION TUESDAY, SHE WOKE AT TEN AND TOLD HIM SHE WAS GOING DOWN TO THE coffee shop to fetch them breakfast: two muffins, two scones, and a giant cappuccino each. He said, “Give me time to get dressed, and we’ll go to Shoney’s. It comes out cheaper when you’re hungry.”
There he encircled his stack of pancakes with sausage links, topped it with scrambled eggs, doused the entirety in syrup, and said, “I don’t get why I didn’t meet you a long time ago.” He insisted it didn’t make sense. They had both spent their lives between D.C. and New York. They should have seen each other.
“That’s obvious,” Flora said. “You grew up in D.C. and went to college in New York, and I did it the other way around.”
“I thought you were from D.C.”
“I was born on the Lower East Side. It’s just not my happy place.”
“Why did your parents move?”
“They didn’t move.” She paused, thinking what to tell him that would make sense. “They’re still in New York. I live with my grandparents.”
“Why? Are your parents on drugs?”
“No! Not even close. They’re great. I love them. They’re wonderful. You should meet them.” She said it without thinking. Had she been pressed, she would have said that Aaron might be integrated into her future life as a casual friend, someone she and Bull invited to barbecues to talk politics.
“What do they do?”
“They have an industrial blues band called Marmalade Skye, with an e, plus my dad moonlights on Hammond organ with this band called—I can never remember the name—way out in Jersey. They’re all dentists, and they play funk, and everybody else is seventy years old and on roller skates.”
“Flora, I hate to break it to you, but they’re on drugs.”
“Not bad drugs!”
She made eye contact, unwavering, as she continued to ingest orange juice through a straw. He paused in the middle of a forkful of pancakes to look at her.
XXV.
Stein came in under 1 percent in Pennsylvania, with a third as many votes as the Libertarian. Trump took the state.
Aaron and Flora returned to her room from the bar where they had watched the results, but only to pack their things. As they drove out of town there was a pickup truck cruising up and down the bypass, with a guy hanging out the passenger-side window with a shotgun, maybe looking for black people to shoot at in celebration. The guy wouldn’t have much luck, they didn’t think, because the roads were deserted and the county was 98 percent white. Everybody left of the right wing was probably hiding under a porch.
He dropped her off at the foot of Porter Street at seven in the morning, before rush hour really got going. She walked up the hill, dragging her wheeled suitcase, irritated beyond all measure by the noise it made.
Ginger and Edgar were awake, drinking coffee. Edgar was reading the Washington Post. Disconsolate Ginger was on Skype with Pam and Daniel. Flora threw herself on Ginger, stroked her parents’ faces on the screen, and cried.
She got a text from Aaron, saying he hoped she’d made it home all right. She didn’t reply. His webcam profile pictures were furry and pinkish. His nose was large and his eyes were squinty. His opinions were mainstream Democratic. She missed him in real life, but not this novel virtual persona. She had to ignore its existence and its entreaties both, if she didn’t want to start regretting real life as a mistake.
He followed her on Instagram. She set her posts to private. There was plenty else happening online to distract her. Pam had declared her readiness to join an armed militant group. Daniel wanted to emigrate.
Otherwise the morning was quiet, as though after a snowstorm—a red-eyed, sniffling day, pregnant with self-pity and panic.
At ten thirty she texted Bull. He called her back immediately to say, “Good morning, gorgeous! I’m not getting out of bed today. Want to join me?” She notified her grandparents and called a cab.
He opened the town house door in his bathrobe and offered her champagne, saying he’d put two bottles on ice. “This whole town is knee-deep in undrunk champagne,” he explained.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the glass. “I didn’t sleep. I drove all night to get back here. I had so much coffee, I’m shaking.”
“That was sweet of you. I went to bed at eleven and slept like an accident victim in an induced coma.”
He seemed a little different when they fucked. First he kissed her with one arm all the way around her neck, so that his elbow was behind her head, which he’d never done before. His penis seemed softer. Then he came inside her. She was surprised, but it felt erotic compared to when he pulled out, so she didn’t complain or try to interrupt. She just jumped up after they were done and used the handheld showerhead to rinse herself out.
Later on, she said, “That was weird.” He immediately knew what she meant and said he was sorry; life had been strange the past couple of days, he said, and he was distracted. She embraced and kissed him. She was glad to be home.
IN THE AFTERNOON, HE LEFT TO ATTEND A CLINTON CAMPAIGN POSTMORTEM AT A B
AR on Capitol Hill. It wasn’t entirely clear that it would take place, even after it started. People were competing to see who could appear most devastated. They kept intoning that they were in danger of losing everything they’d ever fought for. The expansion of health care, consumer and environmental protections, progress on labor and trade—all of it was poised to go away. Within an hour, he was reduced to saying, “We’ll get through this. Remember Reagan? Bush? The other Bush? Arming the Contras? The invasion of Grenada? The secret bombing of Cambodia? 9/11? Iraq? Hello?” Yes, he told everyone, the president-elect was a sleaze, and his tenure would be a dumpster fire. Nonetheless, people under thirty had displayed a near-limitless capacity for drifting leftward, as betrayed by their audible sobs. Yes, the American people had spoken. Yes, they wanted the controls set for the heart of the sun. But the American people wouldn’t live forever. There comes a time in every voter’s life when he ages out of voting. The pendulum would swing.
The crowd grew by accretion, random mourners joining a public funeral. As the delay in starting the party—there were supposed to be little speeches—moved past the two-hour mark, the crowd in the bar bulged into the street, where an acquaintance of Bull’s who’d worked on a failed congressional campaign in an Appalachian corner of Virginia was confessing her emotional devastation to a clot of stray press people. He moved closer. She blamed herself personally for Trump’s triumph. She hadn’t done enough to appeal to the white working class.
He couldn’t believe his ears. A black woman talking about underpaid and underprivileged white people, as if she were on mescaline!
Finally he located Ikumi. Some working-class white man (Aaron Fleischer) was crying on her shoulder like a guilt-stricken baby. All she managed in greeting was to raise her eyes and give him a nanosecond smile.