“Wow.”
She bit me, but not hard. “You say that too much.”
“It’s sincere. You make me say wow. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“See? You’re so smart.”
She made an exasperated noise but it wasn’t a real one and then we did stuff for a while.
“Wow.”
“Dumbass.”
“Sorry, but you know … Wow.”
“It’s just new-relationship energy. Give it a couple months and it’ll wear off.”
“We get to do this for a couple of months?”
She put her hand over her mouth. “Shit,” she said, “sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you off.”
“Scared off? I’m delighted.”
“Now you’re scaring me off.”
I could tell that she was actually a little freaked out, so I said, “Sorry. I’m very happy to keep this up, but I know it’s not yet a real thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“But it might be one someday.”
“It might.” She smiled a little.
“And if it is…”
“Yes?”
“You want me to know that I won’t enjoy it.”
That earned me another bite and another interlude.
“Don’t say wow.”
“Okay.”
“Stop thinking it.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know about Those Who Tread the Kine.”
“Oh, I knew about it. Like, I had friends who read it and I’d seen the games and the TV show. I just didn’t really get it.”
“Brooks, it’s been translated into fifty languages. There are major conventions for it. There’s a political party named after it in Korea. It is huge.”
“Jesus, that big?”
“Well, that Sutton guy is a billionaire. He paid for it all—marketing, mass giveaways, the movies. For a long time he was running these cruises, where he’d get thousands of people who just worshipped the book on board and do all these seminars and events with them, ‘training sessions’ for ‘movement leaders.’ We’d get tons of them every time there was a bad flood, showing up with ideas for how to ‘reopen’ all the stuff we were trying to protect on the riverbanks, trying to drum up support from people on the street. They had a crackpot plan for fixing the estuary barrier that was supposed to be cheaper and faster—and it involved a bunch of patented materials that Sutton’s companies got royalties on—and they made up little miniatures of it and gave them out to people on the street to convince them to chuck out the Blue Helmets and bring in the private sector.”
“Holy shit. That’s like a cult.”
“It is a cult. It’s a personality cult, and Sutton is their god-king. The Flotilla started with those cruises of his—he just bought a bunch of cruise ships and then his rich buddies joined up, and then someone thought it would be hilarious to buy an aircraft carrier and take to the sea.”
“Man.” I thought about my time on the Flotilla, and the bum’s rush I’d gotten. “Well, I guess you’ve got to admit they’re good at one thing: convincing everyone they’re good at everything.”
She laughed. “Yes, they are. I mean, put it that way and they’re practically miraculous. I mean, think about what their message is: On the one hand, they say there’s no climate emergency and it’s all overblown panic. On the other hand, they tell people that they need to side with plutes because the planet is ‘over capacity’ and the excess people are going to have to be eliminated to save it.”
“Ugh. That reminds me so much of my grandfather and his pals. Half the time they’d talk about how the climate was fine and it was all overblown fake news, and the other half the time they’d talk about places like Burbank as ‘lifeboats’ that were at capacity, and if we let in all the people who hadn’t had the good sense to get their own lifeboats, they’d sink ours and we’d all drown. All that lifeboat talk, I never really figured it out, but it was basically about genocide, right? Leaving everyone, Ana Lucía and everyone like her, to die, shooting them ourselves if necessary, rather than sharing with them.”
“Well, I didn’t know your grandfather, but that’s definitely what Sutton and his creeps think. Any time you hear someone talking about ‘lifeboat rules,’ it’s just a dog whistle for fascism. They think they’re such brain geniuses for coming up with this amazing plan: insist we can’t do anything to stop the world from burning and then when it’s on fire, insist that it’s too late to do anything about it and all we can do is follow orders because an emergency is no time to start taking votes.”
I nuzzled her. “You know what I love most about talking to you?”
“Do tell.”
“There’s all this stuff I’ve been trying to figure out, ideas floating around in my mind, not quite gelling, and then you come along and, like, bam, you’ve got it.”
“Well, I can’t claim I thought of any of this stuff—just heard it from other people. And now I’m telling you, and then you can tell other people, too. It’s how stuff changes, one conversation at a time.”
“Okay, sure. But I also like that it’s you telling me.”
We kissed for a while.
I was sort of floating off into a doze when I started to think about Gramps and his friends again, about my visit from Kenneth and Derrick, about the gunshots in my backyard when Ana Lucía and her friends had been back there. I thought about Gramps’s guns, hidden in the hills, along with his krugerrands and his other end-of-the-world lifeboat stuff. I opened my mouth to tell Phuong about the guns, but then I didn’t. What if she told me I had to take ’em to the police? What if she didn’t?
Instead: “Gramps’s friends, those guys who visited me, all the ones hanging around here in Burbank, like you said, they’re not going to dig a hole and climb into it and pull the dirt in after themselves. They’re just going to hang around for years and decades, being assholes, burning crosses, even doing fucking murders, and in the meantime, we can’t even put up some refugee housing on an empty lot.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“About that…”
“Yes?”
“Well, look, my little affinity group, we’re kind of the direct-action types. Civil disobedience. Most of us are ex–Blue Helmet, we’ve seen some shit, we’re not playing games. We know it’s life or death and we’re not gonna sit around and watch these dickheads make it even harder for all of us to get through alive.”
“Oh. Oh! Whatever that is, I like the sound of it and I will take three of them, please. Here is my credit card.”
That got me a squeeze. “Seriously, though. The city has stopped adding any new People’s Airbnb spots, so we’re gonna put up a site for rogue ones, we’re going to go to all of them and make sure all the kids are signed up for school, that kind of thing.”
“Get ’em library cards, too!”
“Oh hell yes. Burbank libraries have already got a lot of good stuff like screens and lawn mowers and electrician’s tools and stuff and we’re already compiling a list of other needs, using templates from the libraries where we did Blue Helmet service. It sounds radical and all, but it’s just replicating stuff that’s worked elsewhere. The librarians are so into it, too.”
“God, that’s great.”
“It’ll drive ’em nuts, too.”
I thought about Kenneth and Derrick in fist-shaking, impotent fury and grinned. “I love that.” I stared at the ceiling. “You know what would really do ’em in, though.”
“What?”
“This place. Knock it down, scrape it to the foundation slab, and build a high-rise. Do it so fast they don’t even know it’s happening. One day, it’s a single-family house that they love because their old white nationalist asshole buddy lived here, then next day, it’s got fifteen brown families in it, happily living their lives and existing as human beings in the world. They would go totally apeshit.”
She giggled, then I chuckled, then she laughed and I guffawed and before long, we were hooting and crying.
“We could do it, you know.”
“What?”
“We could do it,” she said. “Small footprint. Just get the right prefab materials, some big lifting tools, some strong backs, and we’d be up in forty-eight hours. It’d take a week to do all the finish inside and whatever, but I’ve put up bigger buildings in less time.”
“Really?”
She told me war stories, then, building on brownfield sites in London to create homeless housing, emergency family housing for refugees, even flats for working families who were precarious. Some places had been so flood-damaged they couldn’t be salvaged, and they’d be knocked down, the lot flood-treated and elevated, and then, like a demolition video in reverse, a building would spring up on the lot, almost overnight, whole parts of London being reshaped in days and weeks. After many successful builds in the flood zone, the projects moved all over the city, turning empty, rotting mansions owned by absentee offshore criminals into giant housing estates with parks and other amenities, building and building, training Londoners on the methods first used to rebuild most of Calgary off its floodplain, then spread to other Blue Helmets around the world.
“That was my parents’ work,” I said. “Calgary. They worked on those first builds.”
“No way,” she said. “That’s incredible. They were pioneers!”
“They were,” I said. “To hear Gramps talk about it, they were brainwashed by Canadian Miracle propaganda and threw away their lives to build houses for people doomed by their own stupidity and bad planning.”
“Well that’s a stupid way to talk about it,” she said. “How about, ‘They had the foresight to understand that Blue Helmets would take what they learned in Canada and spread it around the world, saving the human race from the sins of their shortsighted forebears who put the planet in so much climate debt it might go bankrupt?’”
“I like your version better,” I said.
“Me too.”
* * *
Ana Lucía had invited us to a potluck dinner in the DSA hall, so I made another frittata and Phuong made a watermelon and feta salad and we put ’em in a crate that I bungeed to the rack of a bikeshare bike.
It was nearly as packed as it had been, not so long ago, when we’d all jammed in to watch the DSA lawyer tell us how badly everything was fucked. Being back with the same people in the same space put a damper on my mood, as did Ana Lucía’s own obvious bitter disappointment. We chatted for a moment by the bar as we waited to refill our beer cups from the keg.
“How is everyone doing?” I asked.
“It’s not good, Brooks. I know that in some ways nothing has changed. I mean, we all expected to be staying in volunteers’ spare rooms”—People’s Airbnb, I mentally translated—“for weeks or even months while the housing got sorted out, but there’s a big difference between a situation like that when it’s temporary and you know you’ll get a place of your own and when you have no idea if you’ll ever get your own place.”
“Oof. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”
“I mean, honestly, all these people are very nice to take us in, but we can’t live in their houses forever. If I was them, I wouldn’t want refugees living with me forever, either.”
“So what are you gonna do? Are you going to go to Oregon?”
She shrugged, filled her beer cup (we were at the front of the line now). I filled mine. She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t. The walk here was so hard. You know, there were little kids, old people. It was so hard. People got sick. Walking to Oregon—”
“Yeah.”
“But I don’t know.”
She surprised me by hugging me. “Look, Brooks, this is not just your problem. We’re all having this problem together. The fact that you don’t know how to solve it doesn’t mean we can’t solve it. Look, it’s a party. We’re here to say thanks to you folks for taking us in. Let’s enjoy it.”
I hugged her back. “Thanks, Ana Lucía. We are all having this problem together.”
“I know,” she said.
There were speeches and they weren’t great. There are some really good DSA speakers in Burbank but they weren’t the ones who had the podium that night. And the thank-you speeches from the refugees were so awkward, clearly written before all the housing projects got canceled, hastily edited to thank everyone for wanting to help, rather than for helping. When they were over, I finished my plate and pitched in at the dishwashing station for ten minutes, before getting tapped out by Ana Lucía.
“Not a great evening,” she said.
“It was okay,” I lied.
“Thanks for coming. I like your frittata.”
“I’ll send you a recipe,” I said.
Phuong dried off her hands and passed on her apron, too, and we stepped out into the evening, which was cool and clear, with a half-moon rising low in a way that made it look crazy huge.
“Beautiful,” she said.
I put my arm around her waist. “Just what I was thinking,” and squeezed her gently. She smiled and draped her arm over my shoulders. My heart went thud-thud-thud. She made me completely crazy. New-relationship energy or not: completely crazy.
“How about a drink?” she said. “My housemates just made some amazing bourbon.”
“Don’t have to ask me twice!”
* * *
Phuong’s housemates were all ex–Blue Helmets, but they’d also all grown up in Burbank, so it turned out I knew two of them (one from Burroughs High and one from a pickup basketball game I’d been a regular at), and the other two looked familiar.
The bourbon-makers were Don and Miguel, who’d taken an online workshop and built a bioreactor: they used synthetic volatiles that were chemically identical to the expressions of aged bourbon—Pappy Van Winkle 25, a popular choice—and added it to six-day-old grain alcohol they distilled themselves, for a liquor that was indistinguishable from a twenty-thousand-dollar bottle of Pappy.
“It’s a little astringent,” Miguel said, swirling it in his mouth, passing me the eyedropper full of distilled water to add to my own lowball glass.
“That’s how you know it’s true to the original,” Don said. “I got to taste some in Tokyo. This young guy just grabbed us off the street and dragged us into his mother’s memorial service and she turned out to be this rare-whiskey dealer who got novel dengue and died the year before. The son had just signed up to be a Blue Helmet himself and so we sat around with all his friends and relatives, sipping thimblefuls of this stuff and giving him advice. Pappy is supposed to be a little mediciney.”
“Well, it is,” Miguel said.
I tried mine, first without the water and then with. I thought it tasted great, but then I didn’t know anything about bourbon.
“We’ve got a really nice cabernet-finished Jefferson’s coming out tomorrow,” Miguel said. “Come back and try that.”
They’d rented out a big four-bedroom off Victory Boulevard, furnished with whatever their parents had stored for them while they were overseas and Blue Helmet furniture, a lot of treated cardboard and scavenged materials laser-cut at a community makerspace and decorated with intricate stencils from the Blue Helmet repositories, that supermodernist poster art of brave people doing hard work. I liked it.
I liked all of it: the whiskey, the society of these Blue Helmet veterans telling stories about their adventures (Arina and Jacob had been stationed in Brisbane, and they’d done a long stretch on reef remediation and had wild photos and even better stories), and (especially) getting to snuggle with Phuong on a big, sagging couch with a blanket made from faded denim kimonos draped over it.
When the whiskey was drunk and the conversation had tapered off and Miguel poured Don into their bed and then fell in himself, when Arina and Jacob started yawning and gave us each a hug and a cheek-kiss good night, I found myself all alone on that sofa with Phuong.
She snuggled into me and I threaded my fingers through her thick, straight hair, tickling her earlobes and rubbing her neck muscles, and she preened like a cat, then tilted her face up and gave me a long, slow kiss.
“They liked you,” she said.
“I liked them.”
“Good.”
This time, I kissed her. She tasted like whiskey and spice.
“How about a sleepover?” she said. “I’ve got a new toothbrush you can use.”
My heart went lub-dub-lub-dub.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s just that I have caught such crazy feelings for you that I keep having to remind myself to play it cool so I don’t act like a weirdo and scare you off, and then you say stuff like ‘I’ve got a new toothbrush you can use’ and I realize that you like me too. I know that’s weird, because of course I know you like me too, but I am so totally smitten right now that I can hardly believe it. It’s like I know a secret and I don’t want to give it away.”
“I don’t take that the wrong way. I like that you’re good at using your words. That is a seriously underrated trait in a serious romantic partner.”
“Wow.”
“Oh, shush. You still haven’t said if you wanna sleep over?”
“Jesus Christ, yes! Of course! Yes!”
“See? You’re good at using your words.”