chapter 4
calexit
We had another six days to get ready for the rest of the caravan, and we didn’t waste a minute of it. Every gig on the Jobs Guarantee board had something to do with the caravan: setting up People’s Airbnbs in people’s guest rooms, organizing spaces and carers for daycares, shuttling the medical crews out to the slowly moving column of refus to do health assessments. We started having nightly dinner parties with the caravan, videoing them in to our own tables in small family groups, rotating halfway through so that as many people as possible could get to know each other.
I worked long hours picking up donated clothing and shoes and inventorying them so that the refus could search by size and have their care packages waiting for them when they crossed the town line. A couple of the baby Warners got in a friendly competition with their opposite numbers on the Disney lot and they scoured their wardrobe departments, finding mountains of unworn clothing bought for shoots that either had never happened or hadn’t needed them after all.
They were due on Sunday, so by Saturday we were all running around like hyperactive kids getting everything together, hanging banners down Magnolia, scrounging extra beds and food, checking in on everyone who’d promised to cook for the big potluck brunch the next morning.
I was cycling three pallets of eggs from Bret Harte Elementary’s coops when I got a big buzz, the kind that meant that everyone I knew was talking about something I should probably go pay attention to. I pulled the trike over to the side of North Hollywood and got out a screen.
It turned out the refus weren’t the only people who’d come to town. The Flotilla had arrived at Long Beach and was accepting visitors.
The Flotilla had never made it to LA, so this was a big deal, and all my feeds were blazing with arguments about whether it was okay to visit them, and, if not, whether they should be torpedoed where they stood docked in international waters, sending the superyachts and surplus aircraft carriers to Davy Jones’s locker.
I shook my head and stuffed the screen in a pocket. I had eggs to haul. I’d worry about seasteading hypercapitalist nomads later.
* * *
But Flotilla talk was impossible to escape. The kids chopping sweet potatoes kept goofing off to watch Flotilla videos, especially Kinetreaders, the ultraviolent, high-budget, intense drama adapted from Sutton’s awful novel Those Who Tread the Kine. It had raced through my friend group in junior year and the people who loved it really loved it, like it was a gateway to cult membership, and a lot of those people drifted away from my friend group and never drifted back. It was a scary book that way. Even scarier was that I could never figure out what other people saw in it—every time I tried to read it, I just bounced off it hard, like, by chapter 2. What a snore.
Kinetreaders, at least, had a ton of explosions and fight scenes and lockpicking and abseiling and all of that stuff, and I found myself getting half sucked into it, which just made me scared for the kids. Did their parents even know they were watching it?
I eventually talked the kids into turning off the screen so we could get all the sweet potatoes chopped and make frittatas. I tried—unsuccessfully—to draw them into choosing ingredients for different ones, so I just made them all to suit my taste, with chilis and olives and farmer’s cheese. I put mushrooms in only half because there are some objectively decent people who don’t love mushrooms, though I don’t claim to be able to reconcile those two facts.
Half a dozen of us got the frittatas delivered to the caterers and restaurants who’d agreed to cook ’em, and then I headed home for a beer and dinner. It was a hive of activity, naturally, with Ana Lucía’s friends riding up and riding away as they did all the advance-party stuff, getting clothes and toys into People’s Airbnb rooms to order and so on.
I thought about pitching in, but I was exhausted and starving so I made myself a sloppy sandwich—spicy/briny olive dressing, cheese, and chick-n on a big kaiser roll—and carried it out into the backyard with a folding chair.
“Damn, that looks good,” Ana Lucía said, pulling up a chair. I tore it in half sloppily and handed half to her. “Dude, I can’t take half your dinner.”
“Plenty more stuff in the kitchen,” I said. “If we’re still hungry after, one of us can make another one and we’ll split that too.”
“You are a hell of a guy,” she said. She made the next sandwich, and brought it out with beers. We clinked.
“What a day,” she said. Everyone was taking dinner now, broken up into twos and threes, fanning themselves, drinking beers. Someone turned on music, and the sun was setting and glorious.
“Best kind of day,” I said. “Stuff to do, got it done, and it was stuff that’s gonna legit make a difference for other people. Absolutely the best kind of day.”
“Hell of a guy,” she said, and laughed. I laughed too. “To arrivals,” she said, and we clinked again.
“Arrivals! You must be excited, everyone getting settled in. I can’t wait to meet them all. Before I found out you folks were on the way, I was getting ready to leave, but now—”
“Dude,” she said. “Seriously?”
“Uh?”
“I’m talking about the Flotilla. The caravan is what it is, but honestly, it’s just the latest phase in a long, shitty, shitty shitshow of shittiness that’s been happening for years—farms blowing away, towns shutting down, water drying up. The Flotilla, though—”
I flashed back on that night, trying to fall asleep after the SWAT team had raided my house, thinking of how tolerating colorful people with funny ideas ended up giving aid and comfort to monsters.
“Ana Lucía, they’re not good people.”
“No, they’re not,” she said. “But they’ve got ideas beyond letting the government take care of everything. They’re giving people the tools they need to organize themselves.”
Translation: Blockchain.
My mouth opened before my brain got in gear. “They’re the worst people in the world. They’re fucking war criminals. They drowned the planet and then they literally declared the last mountain peak sticking up out of the Caymans to be a sovereign state and ran away to live on boats around it.”
She was getting hot, too. I could see that we were about to fight again, but I didn’t care. I was triggered as hell.
“It’s easy to sit here in your nice suburb with your nice house and talk about how great it is to trust governments with everything. I don’t have that luxury, Brooks. My home is gone. My mother is dead. My father is dead. I’ve lost everything, so don’t lecture me about war crimes. You don’t think war crimes are going on here?”
I dropped my beer from my nerveless fingers and walked away. I got out of my backyard and turned right, away from Verdugo and the main road, and struck out blindly, walking fast, tears streaming down my cheeks. Soon, I identified the weird sounds I was hearing as sobs. Then I realized I was making those sounds.
Someone was at my elbow. They were saying something to me. I assumed it was one of my neighbors trying to help me out, so I choked out something like, “I’m fine, it’s fine, I’m sorry,” and shook my elbow out of their grasp and turned the corner.
The person wouldn’t go away. Now they were in front of me and it was Wilmar, blocking my path. “Brooks,” he said, reaching out for me. “Come on, man, hold up.”
Fuck. I swiped at my eyes, snuffled up my snot. He handed me a kerchief and I blotted my face with it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked really worried about me and that made me feel even worse, if that was possible. “Don’t be.” He gave me a long hug and I was sure everyone was at their windows, staring at us. But I liked the hug. “You can talk about it, or not,” he said into my ear.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
“Good plan.” We got onto Olive and then crossed and kept on going to Riverside and then through Warners, wending through the baby Warners’ buildings until we got to the pedestrian cut-through that led to the river. It was swollen and clear, running fast thanks to all the rains, mossy rocks peeking out and geese waddling on the banks. Seeing the running water and hearing the geese and the shush of the buses on the freeway instantly calmed me some, made my chest and my fists unsqueeze. I sat down on the concrete at the top of the riverbank and stared down into the water and breathed.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Wilmar said, “but if you want to, you can.”
I didn’t want to talk about it, but for some reason, I did.
“When I was seven, we started to hear about a new strain of beaver fever that was racing around the north, starting in the little towns and settlements and then Iqaluit. Flights stopped. I was really young and my parents tried to keep me from getting scared but suddenly everyone was washing their hands all the time and I wasn’t allowed to play on the climbers at the playground anymore. School closed, then we stopped leaving the house.”
The geese were honking and it brought me back to reality.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he said. He was a good listener, didn’t make me feel like I was having a pity party.
“Everyone has a story like this, I know.”
“Doesn’t make it easier,” he said. “Besides, if this is going where I think it is, your story is different.”
I really wanted that beer I’d dropped on my back lawn. “Fuck.” I breathed hard. “Mom got sick first, but then she started to get better, just in time for Dad to need her help. Mom had spent a lot of time in bed puking in a bucket that Dad emptied for her, but Dad couldn’t even turn his head to use the bucket. There was puke and shit everywhere and Mom couldn’t even get the sheets off the bed. She stopped trying, just used plastic garbage bags that she slit open and then balled up and put in bigger bags. When she started to get sick again it became my job to haul them out to the curb. But the garbage wasn’t getting picked up either, and every curb had a giant pile of rotting, stinking bags out front. Mom told me I could just put the bags in the backyard, because it was too much work to drag them out front. They made a pile bigger than me.”
I patted my pockets and found my one-hit and I thanked myself for remembering to refill it. I toked and shared it with Wilmar. We sat for a moment and then I found it in me to tell the rest.
“Mom died the day after she tried to call Child Protective Services to come and get me. She’d had a long conversation with me before, staring intensely at me and holding my wrist as tight as she could and telling me that some nice people would be by to take care of me and it was really important that I listen to them and do what they said. But when she called them, she couldn’t get through, and the website didn’t work either. She kept trying and trying, getting weaker and weaker, and then she started crying. I stroked her hair and held her until she fell asleep.
“But she never woke up.” I’d told this story before, generally after a couple of drinks with someone I was having a serious relationship with. It never got easier. It wasn’t easy then. Wilmar put his hand on my shoulder and left it there.
“You okay?”
I drew a shuddering breath, nodded, let it out. “I couldn’t get her out of the bed. I was only eight. My dad woke up but he wasn’t lucid, hadn’t been in a long time. I got him water and spooned it into his mouth, the way Mom had, held his hand, tried not to look at my mom’s body under the sheets next to him.
“He died the next night.”
The geese took off. Where were they going? Who fucking cared? Stupid geese.
“I put some food in my little backpack and left the house and started walking, holding my baby blanket. I hadn’t slept with it in years, but now I had a death grip on it. I tried walking to the park we used to go and play in, but I kept getting lost, and then I realized that the bad-smelling place with the tall wooden hoardings around it was the park. It was full of garbage now. I pissed against the boards and used some hand sanitizer the way Mom had always told me to and then ate some chips out of my bag and started walking.
“I walked and walked. So many houses were dark. The piles of garbage on the curbs were so high. Finally I needed to take a shit, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it by the road, so I worked up some nerve and rang a doorbell for a house where the lights were on.
“The woman who answered it can’t have been much older than high-school age. She was the oldest daughter of the family and her parents were sick, too, but not as bad as mine had been. She was looking after them and when I asked her if I could please use her toilet, she asked me what was going on and I told her and she brought me in.
“She fed me and cleaned me up and kept calling Child Protective Services while I watched a screen and tried to stay quiet. The house smelled weird, that shit smell that was everywhere, but also different laundry soap and different shampoo and different spices in the food. They were from Egypt, had come out for the oil patch and stayed, and the mom would call downstairs in Arabic for the daughter whenever she needed something. Meanwhile, the daughter kept trying to get someone to come and take me away.
“Two days later, they came and got me. I knew my address and I gave it to them and they promised me they’d do something about it, and then I saw a social worker, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember my home address even though my mom and dad had made me memorize it and got me to say it aloud every morning at breakfast. They put me in a group home, I guess, for three or four days. There were so many other kids there, always coming and going, some of them fighting all the time, or crying, or hiding and being quiet. One morning, I woke up holding my baby blanket, smelling it, and I could remember my address, so I gave it to someone there and then a lot of time passed and then someone came to get me and tell me I was going to live with my grandfather in California.
“I barely knew Gramps, only videoed with him at Christmas and sometimes on his or my birthday, and from how my parents had talked about him, I knew I wasn’t supposed to like him very much. But I was numb from everything that had happened, and I knew all these stories from my dad’s life growing up here, and I just—” Suddenly I was crying again, so hard I couldn’t breathe for a moment, and Wilmar gave me a hard hug and stroked my hair. I heard someone come near and murmur something to him, heard him tell them no, it was okay, and eventually my breath came back.
“God,” I said.
“You can stop,” he said.
“No,” I said. I tried my one-hit. It was empty. “No. I just wanted to get back to normal. The whole time I was in the home, the enormity of being an orphan just kept punching me in the face. I’d be eating or playing or watching a screen and all of a sudden I’d realize that I was all alone, like that scary feeling of getting separated from your parents in a crowd and not being able to find them, except I knew I could never find them. Coming here, to Gramps … it meant that I’d stop being an orphan. I’d have a family again. I wouldn’t be an eight-year-old, alone in the world … forever.
“It wasn’t ever going to be easy. I’d seen so much death, gone through so much a kid should never go through. Anyone who inherited me would have had a hard job. But Gramps…” God I wanted that beer. “It was not the kind of thing Gramps was good at. If it hadn’t been for my social workers here, I think I might have just disappeared. Either run away or disappeared inside myself. Maybe ended up in an institution.”
He put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a long squeeze. “Thanks for telling me that story, Brooks. I’m honored you shared it with me.” His voice was soft, caring, and sincere. Everything Gramps never was. That was how I remembered my dad’s voice, when I could even recall it. I almost never thought about my parents then, except for missing them so hard that it made me want to pinch myself.
“Thanks, man.” The geese came back. Where had they gone to? What did they want here? The world was full of people, coming and going, every one of them the center of their own story, each a walk-on for other people’s stories. What had happened to that girl who took care of me after my parents died? Did she ever think of me? How long had it been since I’d last thought of her?
“Ana Lucía came by before, when you were, you know. I think she wants to apologize. If you don’t want to talk to her, that’s okay.”
“Really? No, that’s okay.” I really didn’t want to talk to her but I didn’t want her to feel bad. Wilmar aimed a two-tone whistle down the riverbank and I realized that she was sitting a couple of hundred yards away. She walked over to us slowly, radiating worry.
“Brooks, I’m sorry,” she said. “Milena told me a little about your, uh, parents. I didn’t know. I made a bunch of stupid assumptions and I shouldn’t have.” She was agonized, her big brown eyes brimming with tears, her wide mouth bracketed with deep lines. Seeing her like that, radiating sorrow, made my own tears come back up. I blinked them back.
“Thank you for that,” I said, and let her hug me. She smelled of sweat and spice and beer. I wanted a beer so bad.
“I brought you a beer,” she said, and fished a pouch out of her back pocket, then found another one for Wilmar.
“What about you?”
“I’ve had enough,” she said.
“You can share mine,” I said. I snapped the corner off mine and slurped at it as it foamed over, then passed it to her.
We walked home slowly, the sun setting over our left shoulders, geese flying overhead in formation.
“Two days until the big arrival,” I said, as we turned my corner.
“Which means that we’ve got one day to see the Flotilla before everything kicks off,” she said.
I snorted, but she showed me a screen. “I got tickets. Tomorrow. Soft opening. Got an extra. You wanna be my plus-one?”
Wilmar looked from her to me and back, and I knew there was no way I could say no without making her think I was angry about what she’d said to me before.
“I’d like that, thanks,” I said, and I may have even been believable.
* * *
We booked a minibus to the Port of Long Beach for the next day, meeting it on the corner at 5 a.m. There were a few old guys in Maga hats already on it, and as we crossed the city, we picked up more people, mostly old white dudes, but also some women, some brown and Black people, some people our age. By the time we reached the port, the bus was full and the AC was laboring, and the conversation had grown to a roar, half the bus talking about the Flotilla’s big moonshot projects and whether they’d go through with the big geoengineering ones, and, if they did, whether the various militaries that had threatened to blow them out of the water would make good on their threats. The other half were talking about Those Who Tread the Kine and how it had changed their life. Ana Lucía was enjoying every second of it. I felt like I was definitely in the wrong place.
We pulled up to the port and were met by good-looking young people in hi-viz VOLUNTEER vests and little nautical hats. They had coolers of iced-coffee cans and bottles of water and they passed them around. The disposable packaging was weird and durable— I was used to disposable pouches and bottles that were designed to turn back into raw materials when you were done with them, things you had to be a little careful of because they weren’t made of plastics or metals that would last for decades or centuries. These were single-use products that were built to last. They felt so damn weird.
Ana Lucía chugged two coffees and the young VOLUNTEER guy in the sailor hat put her cans in a big white plastic bucket. We were herded into groups of fifty and sent to jetties where sleek hydrofoils bobbed gently in the swell. I noticed that the one we were bound for was called the Moral Hazard and was flying the flag of Tuvalu, a flag I recognized only because I’d done a school project on the island nation when it was finally evacuated and its government dissolved.
We crowded into the hydrofoil’s cabin, accepting a gift bag on the way in that turned out to contain our own sailor hat, a “smart drink” that advertised its “neurological enhancers,” and a little earbead that would play back an audiobook of Tread the Kine, read by Theodore Sutton himself. Our fellow passengers were much like the people we’d ridden in the shuttle bus with: mostly old, white, and male, but with a smattering of browner, younger, more female people, many with that manic entrepreneur vibe of the kids I’d grown up with who were unhealthily into their lemonade stands.
While the crew untied us from the pier, a safety recording played over the PA telling us about life jackets and emergency exits, and as we set sail, the voice speeded up into a cartoonish, Mickey Mouse squeal that made a mockery of the whole process, and everyone laughed as it climbed the audio barbershop pole to an impossible squeak and then crescendoed into a hard-rock power chord and a drum fill that segued into some passable rock and roll with lyrics about the open seas and open markets. I snorted, but I got the feeling that I was the only one finding this funny.
The hydrofoil got up to speed pretty damned quick and soon we were skipping over the Pacific at what our captain assured us was 75 m.p.h., headed for the international water line where the Flotilla bobbed.
We all rushed forward to watch the Flotilla growing on the horizon. I knew that the idea had come from a twentieth-century science fiction novel—the plutes that ran the Flotilla loved that old futuristic shit—but I hadn’t quite appreciated just how cinematic it would be as it came into sight, the massive aircraft carrier flanked by a pair of cruise ships, surrounded by superyachts, themselves fringed with fast-moving cigarette boats, jet skis, Cyclones, and other interceptors bought surplus from the world’s coast guards, flying flags from drowned island nations and, above them, the flag of the Flotilla, a golden statue of a kneeling man, supporting a glowing blockchain logo that radiated in all directions to the flag’s edge.
As our hydrofoil neared one of the cruise ships, the little boats got closer to us, close enough that we could see their grinning pilots and passengers. Some saluted us with boat drinks or beer cans, while some just sunned themselves in little bathing suits. We cut engines and puttered toward the cruise ship—the Laffer Curve—alongside a party boat where a DJ spun from an open deck and crowds of people danced to throbbing music. The dancers wore outlandish outfits—long fur coats and sunglasses, glittering jackets cut like military uniforms, kigurumi with strategic cutouts that revealed tanned skin—and were mostly older white men with much younger, much browner women. Someone barfed over the railing as we came to beside the Laffer Curve and the hands began to lower the ramps that would let us board.
The inside of the Laffer Curve smelled like a casino and was aggressively air-conditioned. A young Asian man handed us hurricane glasses of rum punch and ice and sun visors with the Flotilla logo on the bills. Ana Lucía laughed and chugged half her drink before putting her hat on. I drank mine—it was very good and very cold—and put on my own hat.
It looked exactly like a movie cruise ship, immaculately staged. The large, gilt-edged screens over the elevator banks scrolled a grid of events, and our own screens buzzed as we received our own copies of the schedule, with a flurry of permission requests to mine our data to “personalize” the options. I was pleased to see that Ana Lucía swiped these away as quickly as I did, and we wandered into a large, shop-lined concourse to find a bench where we could page through the schedules manually.