chapter 3
chained
Esai and Jorge were super stoked, but Ana Lucía just took it in stride and started measuring the yards to see how we could lay out the camp. Milena put the word out to the affinity group, and people started dropping by with clothes and dry goods and life-straws and things for a field kitchen.
Ana Lucía, Esai, and Jorge had just headed off to rendezvous with the rest of the caravan when the doorbell rang. I checked it and groaned: Kenneth and Derrick, and they looked pissed. I thought about muting the bell but they rang it again and I decided I’d rather argue with them than have them camped out on my doorstep, seething.
But I stuck an eyeball on my shirt and turned it on, setting it to blink red so they’d know it was recording, and opened the door.
“Tell me it’s not true.” Derrick’s tone was belligerent, veins standing out in his forehead and neck. I forced myself to stand my ground, though I wanted to recoil.
“Nice to see you, Derrick, Kenneth.”
“Invite us in.” It was not a question.
“No, Derrick, I don’t believe I will.”
Kenneth looked pained. “Come on, Brooks, let’s not do this where the neighbors can see and eavesdrop. We’re old friends of your family and—”
“You’re old friends of my grandfather. My dead grandfather. I don’t think you were ever friends with my father. I know you weren’t friends of my mother’s. I don’t think you’re a friend of mine, Kenneth. And Derrick, to be honest, I plain don’t like you.”
He snorted and Kenneth looked more pained. “Tell me it’s not true,” Derrick repeated.
“It’s not true,” I said. “Bye.” I started to close the door, but Derrick’s boot was in the way.
“Are you going to turn this house of yours into a refugee camp?” Derrick asked.
“Word gets around.” I stared into his eyes. He was old, but strong, and he was huffing air out his nostrils like a cartoon bull.
“You have no right—”
“Derrick, shut the fuck up,” I suggested. “You and your buddies talk a lot about the sanctity of private property. Well, Gramps left me this house. That makes it my private property. If I want your input on what I should or should not do with it—or who should or should not live here—I will come down to the Maga Club and ask you in person.”
“Brooks, you don’t want to be a traitor to your gramps, for what he stood for, to this city that took you in. I know you don’t. You were raised better than that, by one of the best men I ever knew—”
“Derrick, shut the fuck up. As I believe I already told you, this house is going to be torn down and replaced by a high-density high-rise just as soon as I can arrange for it. My sincere hope is that every lot on this street gets the same treatment, so that this city that took me in can take in a hell of a lot more people. A lot more of my fellow Americans, people who have the bad luck to have lost their homes and the fortitude to come here next. This is how I’m honoring my grandfather’s memory, you Hitler wannabe—by doing everything I can to undo every miserable, shitty thing he did in his eighty miserable, shitty years on this dying planet.”
Kenneth grabbed Derrick before he could swing at me, hauled him out of reach of me, hugging his arms to his sides from behind.
“You little piece of shit,” Derrick said, spit flying. “You want to think very carefully about your actions. There’re bad things that can happen to people who sell out their neighbors, things that none of your antifa pals can help you with. You should be thinking very carefully about the privileges you enjoy as a member of a community, and what your life would be like if you ceased to be a member. Very carefully.”
“Dude,” I said, really enjoying the moment even though my heart was thudding. “I cannot believe you’re talking about antifa. Aren’t you worried about being targeted by a Jewish banker’s space-based laser array?” Then, before I could stop myself: “The Antifa High Command is going to be very happy when I turn over the things I found under Gramps’s floorboards. Very, very happy.”
Goddamn did that ever land. He went white, then red, then purple. His face did this fish thing, open mouth, close mouth, open mouth, and I looked at Kenneth, who was clearly quietly freaking out. “Bye, now, boys,” I said. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Slam.
So satisfying!
* * *
So why were my hands shaking when I got to the backyard where Ana Lucía and half a dozen of her friends were setting up shade sails, a field kitchen, and a kids’ play area, with a tree house and some climbing ropes?
“We heard the door slam from out here,” Ana Lucía said, hip-checking me as she walked past with some one-by-eight lumber. “Everything okay?”
“Sure,” I said, and helped myself to some of the lemonade they’d made with the lemons from the tree on the front lawn. The taste made me think of the lemonade stands I’d set up on the corner at Verdugo when I was a kid. They never made much money, but it was one of the few things that Gramps actually approved of, because of “enterprise.”
I drank and stared at the backyard fence; the last of the Vardazaryans had moved out the year before, when old Tovin had finally gotten too frail to stay on his own, even with help. I hadn’t met the new people, but I heard their kids squealing as they ran through the sprinklers on hot days.
“You okay?” Ana Lucía had her own lemonade.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just…”
“Crazy times.”
“Yeah.”
“Things get bad for me, I take a walk. Things are always better when you’re in motion.”
“Excellent suggestion.”
“Can I come?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll show you the neighborhood.”
I was about 80 percent sure this wasn’t a hookup. She was like seven years older than me, and had more of a big-sister vibe. I wouldn’t have minded, she had amazing dark eyes and long lashes, these big cheekbones and fingers that were long and fast-moving, but also, I wasn’t in the market for more complications and I’d just about learned that dickful thinking was a hell of a lot more trouble than it was worth.
We got parasols and filled up our water bottles and started to walk. The day had slipped by so quickly and I could tell that the sunset was going to be a gorgeous one from the way the clouds were already starting to pinken. There were places in Burbank from which the sunset was an endless, coral-colored plain, and I’d taken a million photos of it without ever capturing it.
“Do you want to see one of my favorite things?” I asked.
She looked skeptical but curious. “It’s not weird or gross or, you know, awkward, is it?”
“Ohgodno,” I said. “No, nothing like that. I can tell you what it is if you want. But I promise it’d also make for an awesome surprise.” I felt confident in the promise. Who doesn’t love sunsets?
She considered me for a moment. “Well…”
“I’ll tell you, it’s fine—”
“Shut up, let’s go.”
“We have to get some bikes.” I found some bikeshares on my screen and we adjusted the seats and got on ’em. Mine had a wobble in the front rim that I stopped and tagged before pressing on. Alameda was 100 percent bikes after 5 p.m., so I steered us down there and we started to really work, hitting the biggest cogs. She was fast. So strong!
“Okay with hills?” I called as I drew up on her.
“Eat ’em for breakfast,” she said, and so I led her up and up to my sunset spot, way up in the hills, a half mile uphill or more. Both of us were a little pooped when I stopped us and we parked the bikes by the road and set off into the brush until we came to the rocky outcropping, not far from the big Burbank “B” (every couple of years someone added “L” and “M” to it, but it was hard to do that kind of landscaping without a crane and a bulldozer and most of the rocks washed away in the rains).
Right on schedule, the sunset turned an infinitely expansive sky ten million shades of pink and red, with the towers of DTLA center-frame and glowing. The insect chorus rose in a wash of sound, and then a flock of Burbank’s green parrots screamed past us as they argued their way down into the valley.
“No fucking way,” she said. Her face was the most incredible color, dark skin and pink glow, like a saint in an old painting.
“Right?”
“Brooks, this is—” She waved an arm. “Wow.”
“Welcome to Burbank. You guys are gonna love it here!”
I had a one-hit in my pocket and we split it as the blaze cooled and the pinks all purpled.
“You really love it here, don’t you?”
The one-hit slowed me down so I didn’t answer right away. I thought about it instead. “I love so much about this place. It’s not perfect. There’re a lot of people here who are, I don’t know, broken or something. Bad? They have ugly, broken hearts, if that makes sense.”
“I know the type.”
“But Burbank is a place that’s easy to love. It’s weird, the thing those ugly-hearts love about this place is that we’ve got a long history of looking after people. It was always a union town, full of skilled trades from the studios. Then there was aerospace. Lockheed were baby killers, sure, but the people who built the planes here made a good wage and supported the schools and the libraries and built our pools and parks.”
She laughed and the pink glow and the laughter transformed her, made her seem young and carefree instead of serious and driven. “You make it sound too good to be true.”
“Oh, it’s got problems, but the way we solve them gives me hope.” I told her about the Jobs Guarantee fight with the Maga Club, and told her about all the amazing jobs I got to pull out of the job bank, along with Milena and so many of my friends. Again, her face changed, getting more and more serious. It was such a transformation that I thought it had to be a trick of the light as the sun sank behind the DTLA towers. I ran down and stopped talking, suddenly nervous, the one-hit totally worn off.
“Brooks,” she said, chin up and out and whole manner aggressive. “Do you hear yourself? You think jobs are the answer to our problems?”
I almost groaned aloud because I knew exactly what was coming next.
“Forced employment cannot deliver human liberation. You’ve got to see that. All we’re doing is creating mountains of debt that’ll come due someday, and when it does, we’re all going to pay the price. Where do you think money comes from?”
I couldn’t believe I was getting dragged into this argument, with this person. But okay, we’re doing this. “Governments spend money into existence.” I held up my hand to stop her from jumping in. “I know what you’re going to say, ‘governments don’t have a magic money machine, they can’t just make as much as they want,’ and yeah, I know that argument, but it’s only half right: governments do have magic money machines, literally, money is just tokens that governments stamp with ‘legal currency’ but yeah, they can’t just spend and spend. If someone at the Treasury types too many zeroes into their spreadsheet and the feds buy too many things, they’ll start bidding against us for the stuff we want to buy, and prices will go up.”
She was ready: “You think the assholes who did whatever it took to get themselves elected are gonna stop printing money just because they might cause inflation? They have proved so many times that they don’t care who they hurt, so long as they’re helping themselves and their friends.”
I must have groaned because she flashed furious and then got herself under control, taking a deep breath. “Look, money is control. I know your arguments, Brooks. You think that money is only valuable because it’s the only way you can pay your tax bills. What’s the party line? ‘Governments create tax liabilities payable in their currencies so that their citizens have to work to pay their taxes, and that makes their currency valuable so they can spend it to provision themselves with roads and armies.’”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “If you know the argument, then why are we having it?”
“Because you don’t get it, obviously.”
And that shut my laughing down, because she was even angrier. “Do you know what happens when governments get to spend their way to popularity? We pay the bill. Sure, maybe you loved President Uwayni and her right-on spending, but now it’s Bennett, and she wants to spend all that magic money rebuilding the military and invading other countries to take their shit so America can be great again.”
I was a little scared of how visibly pissed she was, but also—“I agree with everything you say about Bennett, but how would things be better if we didn’t have the Jobs Guarantee? You think people will have more time to fight her if they don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from?”
She waved her hand. “Yeah, of course, that’s what all the magic money people say. If we had a Universal Basic Income—”
I couldn’t help groaning again, even though that clearly made her angrier. “Say it,” she demanded.
“Really? Fine. Most of us don’t have any savings. You give us money and we’ll spend it, and sure, that’ll also buy us time to fight Bennett and her little plute gang. But what about those plutes? Even after more than a decade of Uwenomics, the one percent still own more than the rest of us by a damned sight. Give them money, they’ll stick it in the market or buy bonds or just lend it out and they’ll get even richer. Give a ninety-nine percenter a thousand dollars a month and ten years later, they still won’t have anything in the bank. Give the same amount to a plute who has all the money they need and then some and ten years later, they’ll be a quarter million dollars richer. You’ve got to see that?”
“I see that. But you don’t see the real struggle. You’re thinking way too small. The reason the rich are so fuckin’ rich is that they bought Congress, bought the state governments, bought the judges and the sheriffs and the town councils for centuries. The reason they were able to do that is we let the government control the money. When governments control money, they can make sure their friends get it. We need a people’s money, a money that no one controls.”
Honestly, I’d figured out that we were going to get here eventually but I’d held out hope.
“Eighty-seven point six percent of all conversations about blockchain are nonconsensual.”
She didn’t crack a smile. “Yeah, I know that joke, too. It doesn’t change the fact that some of the richest people in the world love your ‘Modern Monetary Theory.’ I know how that’s supposed to work, but do you know how it actually works? First, rich people who are scared that someone’ll turn off their government money spigots convince a bunch of well-meaning lefties that you can spend and spend without any consequences. Meanwhile, who do you think owns all that debt? They do. Rich people. And when it comes due, they’re gonna collect, from you, and your kids and your grandkids.
“And don’t get me started on the ‘Jobs Guarantee.’ It’s a guarantee, all right: a guarantee that you’ll have to work for them for the rest of your life. If you can’t see that there’s a dangerously short line between a Jobs Guarantee and forced labor—”
I just tuned her out at that point. A feeling of exhaustion and hopelessness settled over me. I’d just invited this person and all of her friends to live in my house and now it turned out they were blockchain cultists. Fffffuuuu. I could only imagine that Gramps was laughing at me from beyond the grave. Thing was, there were plenty of sudoku addicts in his crowd—blockchain was a bipartisan obsession. He might’ve gotten along with old Ana Lucía.
I could tell she was winding down.
“You’re not even listening anymore.” She was still angry, but I could tell that the fury had faded somewhat.
“I don’t want to fight.”
“Fine. I don’t want to fight either.” It was dark now. She threw a pebble down the hillside, scaring a critter in the underbrush that rustled as it ran away. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Look. It’s been a day, okay? Like, losing my home, organizing my neighbors, getting on the road. Then all the hate mail and doxings. I mean, you’ve been amazing, seriously. The way you opened your house up. We appreciate it. Totally. All of us. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“It’s okay. It just means you really care about this stuff. I do, too. That’s good. We agree on what’s important. Maybe someday we can agree on what to do about it.”
She laughed. “You’re right, Brooks. Maybe we will. Look, before we go back, I want to tell you one thing. You’re totally in your rights to say you’re done with this subject, after all that, but—”
“It’s fine, go ahead.”
“I know you think financial secrecy is just about letting plutes launder the money they steal, but money is power, Brooks. You know there was a time when it was illegal to be queer if you taught in a public school in West Virginia? It was. They got that changed, through a political campaign. Political campaigns cost money. You know who had the incentive to donate to a campaign like that?
“Queer teachers. But if you gave money to the cause, you stood a good chance of getting fired. They got a lot of envelopes of cash in the mail. Ten dollars. Twenty. Fifty. Rich people have accountants and offshore accounts and bearer bonds and krugerrands”—yikes—“but regular people don’t have any of that. Financial secrecy tools only help rich people a little, make their grift just a little more frictionless. Financial secrecy helps everyone else a lot. We gave so much power to Uwayni because she was so right-on, but every one of those powers is in Bennett’s hands now. You’re going to need financial secrecy to survive in Bennett’s world.”
“Uh, how do you suppose all that money ended up in Bennett’s campaign? It seems pretty obvious to me that financial secrecy is most important to people with a lot of money.”
“Didn’t you hear me? You think queer teachers in West Virginia—”
And we were off, and even as I was arguing with her and listening to myself say the words, I knew they were a script, a fight that we’d both had before. I just couldn’t stop myself, not even as it escalated to real shouting, and then finally—
“Okay, fine, let’s agree to disagree. This isn’t getting us anywhere.” I made myself say the words with a calmness I wasn’t feeling. I was in the place I went to when I argued with Gramps, and backing out of that place was hard for me. “Let’s go back. It’s dark out, and I want dinner.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, me too.”
Thankfully, no one had claimed the bikes we’d left at the trailhead—I’d figured they’d be safe, this far away from houses and stores. But we rode home in simmering silence. I helped cook dinner—beans and rice with spices and garlic, studded with bits of fake chicken from my big culture-vat. I must have spoken to other people, but when I excused myself to go to bed, I couldn’t remember any of the conversations. I looked out the window and made sure Wilmar was still out there, so that our guests had someone to ask logistical questions of.
I pulled the blinds and changed into sweats and a tee and brushed my teeth and put myself to bed. I hated going to bed angry, but it was better than pretending not to be angry in a group of people who’d done nothing to deserve it.
The next thing I knew, I was awake and on my feet, and there was screaming from the backyard. Loud, terrified screaming. I had found my dad’s old baseball bat when I moved into Gramps’s room and reorganized things, and I grabbed it out of the closet and raced, barefooted, down the hall, banging out of the back door, hand slapping at the switch for the outdoor lighting.
I stopped short. There, in the middle of the camp with its neat rows of tents and tidy camp kitchen—another burning cross. It was the twin of the one from City Hall, right down to the retina-searing magnesium fire. I stared at it with an open mouth for a moment, some distant part of my mind wondering if any of the fire extinguishers were rated for magnesium, when a change in the tone of the shouting around me made me look up. My vision was clouded by green blobs from staring into the magnesium light, but I could see that there was a fat guy in fatigues and a balaclava who’d been grabbed by a couple of my houseguests, and his friends were coming back for him. Someone screamed a Spanish word I didn’t quite catch and then there was the impossibly loud crack of a gun and I realized the word had been “pistola.”
“In the house! A la casa!” I screamed, flinging the door open and waving at it. People duck-ran, crouching, crying. I kept waiting for another gunshot, feeling horribly exposed under the lamp outside the door, illuminated by shifting patterns from the flames leaping up from the cross. Finally, Ana Lucía brought up the rear and I slammed and locked the door behind her, then we all crowded into Gramps’s room, it being farthest from both the picture windows at the front of the house and the back door where the armed terrorists were. I was already dialing 911 as the last person got in and I started to shove a chest of drawers over the door with one shoulder as I clamped my screen to the opposite ear. Wilmar and Milena got the idea and started pushing, then someone else pushed my bed behind it, and I told the 911 operator what was going on as the people around me tried to stifle their crying so I could hear.
“They’re coming,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Police?” Ana Lucía said.
“Yes.”
The color drained from her face. “You shouldn’t have done that, Brooks,” she said. “Come on,” she called to her friends in Spanish, and started to move the bed away from the door. They shoved the dresser aside and rushed for the front door before I could even react. I ran after them and then I was running into them as the people at the front started to shove their way back into the house, everyone talking at once in the narrow hallway, and someone knocked my framed Ned Ludd poster off the wall and the glass cracked on the floor.
“What is it?” I said, catching hold of Ana Lucía as she pushed past me. She turned to me, her eyes rolling white around the irises.
“More of them out front. A lot more.”
Shit. I’d felt trapped before, but now I felt like I was being crushed, caught in a pincer maneuver between the thugs out back and the mob in the front. Where were the fucking cops? What was going on? When did Burbank get like this?
Thinking that made me remember my sunset on the hillside with Ana Lucía, before we’d argued, when I’d been telling her how much I loved this town. In that instant, my fear turned to rage. How dare they do this in my city? I grabbed my baseball bat and rushed out the front door.
“Come on, you fucking cowards,” I raged into the night, swinging the bat like I was trying for the fences. “Come on you pieces of shit, come and try me. Come on!” I swung the bat some more, spinning myself around a little as it whistled past the lemon tree.
“Brooks?” someone called from the dark. “Brooks, dude—”
I stopped swinging and squinted at the vague forms out front of the house. Someone lit a screen and held it under their chin and I saw it was Brad Turner from next door, and then I realized that I knew all these people—they were my neighbors. Brad held up his hands. “We saw the flames and put out the call and here we are. We thought you could use some help.”
There were dozens of them, and more arriving.
“We brought a chem extinguisher,” Brad said.
“Fire department says to leave it,” said a woman behind him, screen clamped to her head. “They’re on the way.”
“They’re on the way,” Brad said.
I let the baseball bat fall to the ground. I heard Ana Lucía and her people talking in hushed voices behind me, and my neighbors talking in hushed tones in front of me, and I had no idea whether to laugh or to cry.
I laughed.
Soon I was doubled over, howling with laughter, and someone was laughing next to me and I turned and saw it was Ana Lucía, and then I heard Brad start to chuckle and Wilmar and Milena got me to my feet and we were all laughing together.
Sirens drew nearer, nearer and I had time to think The good old Burbank FD, so reliable before I realized it was the Burbank PD’s SWAT team.
They came out hot, weapons in hand, shouting orders, on the ground, hands where we can see them, and clear, clear, as they surrounded us, swarmed past us, went through the house.
From the ground, I kept shouting, “It’s my house, it’s my house!,” and finally a beefy cop in body armor knelt down beside me and said, “Is this your house, sir?” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
“I’m going to get up now,” I said, because he had some kind of long gun slung across his chest and I didn’t want to get murdered on my lawn.
He eyed me warily, a white guy in his thirties, suspicious eyes.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I’m Brooks Palazzo. Some of these people are my houseguests. Those two”—I pointed at Milena and Wilmar, prone on the lawn, hands behind their heads—“are my roommates. The rest are my neighbors, who came to help when the attack came.”
“And the attackers?”
I shrugged. “Guess they’ve gone. They were out back.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you that kid, the one with the guy on the roof?”
“Mike Kennedy. Yeah, I’m that guy.”
“Huh,” he said. He seemed to relax a little, put his hands on his hips. “You’re kind of a shit-magnet, aren’t you?”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Stay there,” he said, and went off to confer with a couple of other cops, including a guy who was clearly in charge, and then ambled back.
“No one hurt?” he said.
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. One of the attackers shot at us as they were running off. I only heard one shot and I don’t think he hit anyone.”
“Can you identify the attackers? How many were there?”
“They were in masks. I don’t know how many there were. Maybe some of the folks who were out back when they showed up know.”
“These people?” He pointed at Ana Lucía’s friends.
I nodded.
“Who are these people, again?” He used the beam of his flashlight like a weapon, spotlighting people as they lay prone, shining it in their turned faces and scared eyes.
I stepped into the path of the beam. “My friends. Houseguests.”
“All these people?”
“Yeah.”
“All these people are staying in your little house here?”
“They’re camping in the back.”
“Camping.”
I didn’t answer. I was starting to think I shouldn’t say another word except, “I want a lawyer present.”
“Wait there.” He went back to his commander, then back to me.
“These people speak English?”
“Yes.” Then I remembered that I was going to say nothing except “lawyer lawyer lawyer” but it was too late.
He cupped his hands to his mouth: “All right people, you stay where you are. We’re gonna get you one at a time and talk to you, have a look at things. This is for your safety, you understand?”
“Wait, what?” I got between him and Ana Lucía’s friends. “No, I don’t give you consent to come on my property. I don’t give you consent to search my belongings or the belongings of my guests. I want a lawyer present.”
He chuckled. “That’s nice, but Mr. Palazzo, we’re not here because you invited us. We’re here because there was an exchange of gunfire. None of that bullshit matters once you start shooting.”
“Someone shot at us!” My voice was squeaking and now Milena and Wilmar were by me.
“Cool it,” Wilmar said.
“Listen to him,” the cop said.
Ana Lucía had risen to her knees, hands still laced behind her head. She was glaring at me and at the cop. “Under the Internal Displaced Persons Act, we are entitled to fair, nondiscriminatory treatment. I am recording you. I do not consent to a search. I invoke my right to counsel.”
The commander came over. He was older, and had coffee on his breath. “Internal Displaced Persons Act,” he said, and hitched his belt. He nodded to the cop who’d been questioning me. “Get on with it,” he said. “You, stand over there,” he said, meaning me, Milena, and Wilmar. My roommates basically had to drag me. I was lucky they were there because I was so utterly triggered, this guy was such a Gramps type and was vibing like Gramps always had just before we had a huge screaming match.
My neighbors gathered around me and we watched as, one at a time, they threw Ana Lucía’s people up against the wall and patted them down, while some of the cops went out back and tore apart their camp.
An hour later, two of my guests were in handcuffs while we stood around in a furious, helpless daze. “What the fuck?” I kept saying. The cops made a big deal out of the fact that they had “unidentified pills,” and refused to listen when the woman insisted that they were her antidepressants and that she’d lost the bottle and the man said he was being busted because his epilepsy prescription came from a cheap Canadian pharmacy.
Ana Lucía had woken up some people from the National Lawyers Guild and she had them videoconferenced in to watch the police as they cuffed her friends. The lawyers asked factual questions about what the charges were and where the prisoners were being taken and when they would have court dates, and recited the Spanish and English standard bust-card advice about not saying anything until someone from the guild showed up.
When they were gone, people filed silently into the backyard. I followed them back and then stood stupidly in the doorway as they disappeared into their tents. The fire department had come and gone during the searches, and the ground was marshy with sharp-smelling chemicals.
Ana Lucía stopped in the act of climbing into her own tent and stalked over to me, so furious that I took an involuntary step back.
“That’s why you don’t call the fucking police. Ever.”
“I—”
She held up her hands.
“I’m going to bed now.” Turned on her heel, back into her tent. Zzzip.
I lay awake for a long time, turning over all the events in my mind, thinking of the faces of Ana Lucía’s friends as they were taken away, then thinking of the half-seen men in the balaclavas who’d lit the cross in my backyard. Did I recognize any of them? Maybe. The body language was familiar enough. Any of them could have been one of the nice old codgers who’d always been welcome in Gramps’s living room.
I’d tolerated them when Gramps was alive, and I was still tolerating them now. When Kenneth and Derrick rang my doorbell, I still talked to them, even if I taunted them. I didn’t just shout “Fuck off you old irrelevant Nazis!” through the door speaker. Truth be told, I didn’t want to do that. Some part of me didn’t want to hurt their feelings. The same part of me that hadn’t wanted to pick a fight with Gramps when they started saying evil white supremacist shit in my own living room.
Why had I tolerated all of that? Objectively, I knew that the world couldn’t survive if these people got their way. They wanted genocide, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they had stupid, poisonous ideas that would cook the planet and leave us all to roast, drown, or die of plagues. They were a threat to the fucking species. What kind of commitment to being nice or not picking fights was more important than that fact?
My fists were balled up under the sheets and I made myself relax them. My tolerance for these genocidal monsters was over. They thought it was them or me? Okay, it was them or me. And I knew who I chose.
I was just drifting off to sleep when I remembered my fight with Ana Lucía on the hillside, and I had a moment of falling-off-the-cliff sorrow as I had the same thought about her. All that stuff about financial secrecy and dismantling the state to save it from plutes—if there was one thing I was sure of, it’s that plutes thrived best with weak states and financial secrecy. The guys in Gramps’s Maga Club were sincere in their love of Burbank, but they were still monsters. Ana Lucía was doubtless sincere about her blazing blockchainism, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be a monster, right?
Right?