chapter 8
castles in the sky
By the time we got down to the kitchen, all of Phuong’s housemates had already left for work. I helped her make a shakshuka, slicing the sweet peppers and crushing a little habanero, adding chopped tomatoes and then poaching a half dozen eggs in the bubbling tomato stew, sprinkling parsley and olives over it once it was cooked. Phuong toasted sourdough and squeezed grapefruits from her backyard tree and brewed coffee in a little stovetop vesuvio, making it darker and more bitter than I usually liked, but it went so well with the fiery shakshuka.
“What’re you doing today?” she asked.
“I feel like I’ve barely been home all week. I definitely have a long list of chores I’ve slacked on, and I should probably do some of my housemates’ chores to make up for the ones they’ve filled in on. Then I guess I’ll hit the Jobs Guarantee board and find a new gig—there’s no sense in waiting around for the forces of evil to be vanquished and construction to begin again. I’ve been wanting to get trained on solar upgrading. So much old infrastructure out there waiting to be upgraded.”
“It’s piss easy,” she said. “Assuming the wiring’s still good, it’s just a hot-swap. Hardest part is not falling off the roof.”
“Well, I’m a dead man then.”
“Wear a harness,” she said, and kissed me.
* * *
Just after I turned the corner off Verdugo onto my street, someone called my name. I looked around in time to see Kenneth getting out of a little autonomous cab puffing over to me, his face ruddy and worried.
I thought about sprinting to my house. I could run laps around that old fuck, and besides, maybe he’d drop dead of a coronary while chasing me.
“Wait up,” he said, wheezing. He didn’t look good. Sweat sheened his face, and his hands were shaking. He was easily seventy, but he looked ninety, barely able to stand upright.
“Hi, Kenneth,” I said, making it as deadpan as I could.
“Brooks, listen, I gotta tell you something.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Maybe we could talk about this indoors?”
“No, I’m good here.”
He grimaced. “Okay, have it your way. Look, I know you don’t believe this, but I feel responsible for you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.” He looked searchingly into my eyes, his own watery and bloodshot. I realized that he was terrified. I started to feel a little uneasy myself.
“Kenneth, I know you don’t believe this, but I don’t need you to look out after me. Gramps was my relative, but he was never my friend. We didn’t agree about anything, least of all my father and mother, who Gramps thought were idiots who’d wasted their lives. The things you and my grandfather and your buddies stand for? I want to see them dead and buried. The world you want is nothing like the world I want. It’s nice of you to come by—”
“Shut up a minute. Let me tell you what I came to say, then I can be done with my conscience and square with your grandfather’s memory. I promise I won’t bother you again.
“You think me and my guys are a joke, I know, but we are deadly fuckin’ serious. The thing your grandfather planned for, the day we all planned for, the day we take this country back, that day is coming. It’s almost here. It’s going to be ugly and bloody as hell and I know there’s a good chance I’ll die in the process, but I’m willing to pay that price because I—” He choked up, dug a crumpled mask out of a pocket, wiped his eyes with it. “I love this fuckin’ country. It’s the greatest nation the world has ever seen, it’s the shining city on the hill, and we’re gonna take it back, make it great again.”
I looked away. He was snotting now, eyes shining with tears. If it had been anyone else, I’d have been full of sympathy for him, but this guy? He could go fuck himself.
“Look, Kenneth, I know you guys think this. God knows I heard it often enough—”
“Shut up for a sec, okay? This isn’t just talking anymore. We’re done talking. We’re acting. This time next year—hell, next month—you won’t recognize this place. Things are gonna change.”
“Okay, Kenneth, to be honest, I’ve heard this before too, and—”
“I said, shut up.” He was intense enough that I did. “Look, kid, Brooks. I know you don’t like it around here. Everyone knows that. You hated your grampa, and that’s fine, I got relatives I can’t stand either. You wanna get out of here, you’ve made that clear. I have an offer to make you, one that squares up what you want, what we want, and what your grandfather woulda wanted. It’s a win-win-win.”
He leaned very close and said, “Sell me the house.” He named a price. It was a fair price. “It’s a fair price,” he said. “You sell to me, get the fuck out of town, you get to live your life in peace in a city where you belong, and everyone’s happy.”
“Yeah. No. Goodbye.”
He clamped his hand around my wrist and he was strong, stronger than a weepy old psycho had any right to be. I twisted but couldn’t get loose. I was ready to head-butt him or stamp on his instep, but he said, “Listen, this isn’t playtime. I am trying to save your fucking life, you little idiot. I’m doing it for your grandfather, not for you. You think we’re playing because we never did nothing before? Well before we didn’t have the money to buy the stuff we needed for a real change. That is over, all right? There’s plenty of funding for the war effort now, enough to buy us all the arms and armor we need to make it happen. We didn’t act because we couldn’t win. Now we’re gonna act because we can’t lose. My offer stands. Think hard about it. Someday soon, it’ll be too late.”
“Goodbye, Kenneth,” I said, and wrenched my wrist out of his grasp. As I walked away, I felt his eyes boring into the back of my skull, all the way down the block. When I turned into my walkway, I looked over my shoulder and there he was, at the end of my street, hands in fists, staring at me.
* * *
I was shaking when I got into my room and threw my dirty clothes in the laundry, pulling on clean shorts and a fresh tee. It was all that talk about money. There was a lot of money around, that was for sure. When Uwayni had cracked down on plutes, there’d been a ton of money stranded overseas in tax havens, and Uwayni had let it be known that it could stay there, circulate all it wanted, but it would never, ever come back into the USA where it could distort our political process. Now it seemed someone had figured out how to get the money into the country. I thought about Ana Lucía and her blockchainism. Was that how the money was getting here, turning into guns and armor and who knew what all else Kenneth and his fashy army were ready to turn on the rest of us?
It was such a mistake to let Gramps and his friends be harmless cranks, instead of taking them seriously when they muttered about purging the country—the world!—of their enemies. How come our side of the fight had to be committed to peaceful coexistence while their side wanted genocide?
For a moment, I entertained a fantasy—a sick and satisfying fantasy—about lining up all these Junior Concentration Camp Guardsmen and mowing them down with Gramps’s guns, but before I knew it, I was shooting down Ana Lucía and her blockchainers and then I felt so angry and sad and disgusted with myself that I just shut down, sitting on my bed and crying. What a fucking mess. First generation not to fear the future? What a joke. I was terrified.
The fear was an old one, a gnawing one, and I knew myself well enough to recognize it. It was the fear I’d felt when I’d left my parents’ house, went wandering off with my backpack and my blanket to find a place where the grown-ups weren’t dying, where someone could help. And all of a sudden, I felt an overwhelming urge to hold my blanket again, and I searched for it in my pajama drawer and my keepsake box before I remembered that I’d hid it in Gramps’s cache box. I had things to do but at that moment all I wanted was to hold that blanket, bury my face in it, so I dragged the bed over, exposing the hatch, and lifted it out.
My blanket was in tatters. Someone had methodically shredded it, slashing and ripping it to pieces. The pieces were wet. They’d been pissed on. The piss was cold.
Numbly, I dropped the pieces back in the subterranean box and went to the bathroom and washed my hands. Then I washed them again. Then again. I looked at my reflection in the mirror, and it was only then that I realized the mirror was at an angle, partly open. I opened it the rest of the way and saw that the contents of the medicine cabinet were in chaos, shoved every which way. I looked down and noticed that the trash bin was filled to overflowing with things that had been in the medicine cabinet.
I stepped into the hall and noticed finally that the pictures were askew, the shoes and coats by the door were now on the floor in a heap. I’d gone into my room through the back door and hadn’t even noticed, but now—
They’d punched out the attic hatch by the AC intake and there was insulation foam on the floor. The living room was a wreck, the sofa cushions slashed, the books strewn across the floor. Only Gramps’s service trophies, the little statuettes he’d gotten for every five years he spent at the little aerospace company, designing and troubleshooting missile housings, were undisturbed. The kitchen was a write-off. If they hadn’t smashed every plate, it wasn’t for lack of trying, and the food they’d taken out of the fridge and freezer had big, booted footprints all over it.
Feeling like I was in a nightmare, I knocked on Milena’s door and opened it, switching on the light to discover her mattress slashed open, her drawers and closet dumped out, her vanity mirror smashed. I looked around to make sure that she wasn’t somewhere under that mess, then tried Wilmar’s room, which was in the same kind of shape. Someone had taken a shit on the floor. Wilmar wasn’t in there, either.
I walked numbly back to my room, heart thudding, ears roaring with blood. I found my screen, still in the pocket of the shorts I’d tossed in the laundry—noticing belatedly that the laundry hamper was full of clean clothes that someone had methodically transferred out of my drawers—and called 911.
A bot answered and took my burglary report and guided me through the rooms to take pictures of the wreckage. Halfway through, the system beeped and a person came on, a young woman in a police blouse with a name tag on the chest.
“Sir, there’s a high probability that the damages to your property exceed ten thousand dollars. We have already dispatched a pair of officers to do an in-person survey. In the meantime, you and any members of your household are advised to leave your home and touch nothing else, as it is now considered a crime scene. Please let me know if you understand?”
“I understand,” I said, and woodenly walked out onto my front lawn.
“Officers are on the way. Please do not disconnect this call.”
“I understand,” I said again. It was brutally hot, coming up on one in the afternoon, the sky hazy with smoke from one of the inland fires. The smoke created the usual inversion, with the air going yellow and so humid I pitted out within seconds.
Milena arrived a few minutes later. She greeted me warmly and gave me a hug and I realized it had been days since we’d talked properly, our schedules running crosswise. She started inside and I stopped her.
“We can’t go in.”
She laughed like I was joking. “Why can’t we go in?”
“We were robbed,” I said. “Or trashed, anyway. They wrecked the place. Wrecked our stuff. Cops are on the way.”
“What?” Still laughing, like it was some kind of joke, and then: “What?” She seemed to take me in for the first time, reminding me of how long it had taken me to realize that the house had been trashed.
“I—” The words wouldn’t come.
“Are you hurt?” She was really alarmed now. I must have looked terrible.
“No,” I said, and let her pull me to her so that I was leaning on her. “No, I’m—I’m okay. It just happened. I just got home and—” I waved my hand. “Cops are on their way.”
And on cue, a BPD cruiser pulled up and Officer Velasquez and their old white partner got out. They chunked shut their doors, stood on the curb, and did a systematic reccy of their surroundings before approaching me.
“Mr. Palazzo,” the old white guy said. His name tag said MURPHY.
“Officer Murphy,” I said. “Officer Velasquez. Thank you for coming.” I remembered Ana Lucía’s outrage when I told her that I’d called the police over the cross burning and the shots, and thought about what it meant that I’d called them again.
“This is my housemate, Milena Perez. Her things were trashed pretty bad.”
“I see,” Velasquez said. “Are you both unharmed?”
“We’re fine,” Milena said. “I haven’t even been inside.”
“That’s good,” Velasquez said. “You two wait here, we’ll go check things out.”
At first we stood numbly on the sidewalk, just staring at our home, but then as time went by, Milena said, “I haven’t seen you around much lately?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Well, I, uh, met someone.”
“Ooh!” she said. “Lucky you. Let me guess, it’s all new-relationship energy, right?”
I smiled. “Totally. I’m sorry, I’ve been out with Phuong—”
“Petrakis? From Burroughs?”
I laughed. Of course Milena knew her. Burbank was a small enough town that everyone sorta knew everyone. “Her.”
“Whoa,” she said. “Out of your league, dude. I mean, no offense.”
“None taken. You’re one hundred percent right. I am a very lucky person.”
“Damned right you are. I mean, you’re a very nice guy and you clean up pretty good, but Phuong Petrakis—”
“I know, right?” The numbness was receding. The Magas had trashed my house, but they hadn’t trashed my life. Stuff was just stuff. I was part of the first generation in a century that didn’t fear the future. I was going to save the world. I had amazing friends. Phuong Petrakis had engaged in sexual intercourse with me, more than once, and it was extremely likely this would happen again, possibly that very day. Fuck those old, irrelevant mouth-breathing Nazis.
I gave Milena a squeeze and stood up straight. Murphy, the old white cop, came out and formally notified us that we were on bodycam and then took a statement from me.
“And you don’t know who might have done this?” he said, giving me a hard stare.
“No sir,” I said.
“No suspicions?”
“No sir.”
“And what about the box in the bedroom?” How had I forgotten about that? Milena was staring at me now, too.
“The box?”
“The hidden cache under the floorboards. There’s kind of a mess in there, some old rags and fresh urine, but it looks like someone’s secret hiding place, kind of place you might hide illegal things.”
“That box,” I said, just as Milena said, “What?” I turned to her. “Sorry, it’s just this secret stash my grandfather had. It was just part of his paranoid thing, you know, Maga Club stuff.”
She gave me a significant and alarmed look. “What stuff, Brooks?”
“I dunno,” I lied, and the cop gave me a look like he knew it. “His friends came and emptied it out after he died. I guess whoever tossed the house got excited at finding it and then angry because it was empty.”
“Is that what you guess?” Murphy said.
“Yeah, or whatever. I mean who knows why anyone would break in and trash the place?”
“You said you had no ideas, right?” Murphy said. There was unmistakable sarcasm in the question.
“Well, from what I could see, they didn’t take anything, but then again, there wasn’t really anything to take. I guess it could be political?”
“Political.” The sarcasm was getting thicker.
“Because of our support for the refugees. There’re a lot of racists who aren’t happy about them and don’t like the fact that their neighbors support them.”
“Racists.”
Milena had been quietly watching the exchange but she broke in. “Yes, racists.” She gave him a defiant look.
He ignored her, kept staring me down. “And the box was empty?”
“Empty,” I said.
“Huh.” He scratched some notes on a screen. “Well, there you go. Vandalism. I’ll send you the police report for your insurer.”
Velasquez came out, wearing a disposable mask and gloves. “I’d get a professional cleaning crew in.” They peeled off the PPE and stuck them in a baggie and sealed it. “Any time you’re dealing with human waste there’s a biohazard risk.”
“Someone took a shit on Wilmar’s floor,” I told Milena.
“And pissed in your box,” Murphy reminded me. I thought of my blanket and my stomach lurched.
“I’ll call the insurer.” I remembered that I’d been meaning to call them since Gramps died, to make sure my roommates’ stuff was covered. I hadn’t called. What if they weren’t covered? What if I wasn’t covered?
“You should do that,” Murphy said. Velasquez got in the cruiser, then Murphy started to get in.
“Wait,” Milena said. “Aren’t you going to take biometrics?”
Murphy looked pained. “Like what?” Pure condescension.
“DNA?”
“DNA.”
“Yeah, DNA.”
He shook his head. “How many people’s DNA you figure you got going in and out of that house, all the people you’ve had staying with you, all the people who live there? All the things they’ve touched?”
“Some person just took a shit in one of the bedrooms and left it on the floor,” Milena said, calmly but intensely. “No one touched that shit.”
“Is there DNA in shit?”
“Epithelial cells. They line the colon.” Milena always did well in bio.
“I don’t think Burbank PD has a shit-DNA lab,” Murphy said. He leaned into the cruiser. “We got a shit-DNA lab, Velasquez?”
Velasquez made a pinched face, shook their head silently.
“You’re just going to leave the evidence there?”
“You mean, am I going the clean up the shit on your floor? No, ma’am, I am not going to clean up the shit on your floor.” He got in the cruiser and closed the door.
“Thanks,” I said, idiotically, robotically, to the cruiser’s rear end as it drove away.
“Fuck,” Milena said.
“Yeah.”
“Guess I’d better go have a look,” she said.
“I’ll call Wilmar,” I said.
* * *
She came out five minutes later holding a small bag. “I’m gonna stay with friends,” she said. “I mean, it’s not good in there. Did you notice the shower drain?”
“What about the shower drain?”
“Looks like someone filled it with concrete,” she said.
Wilmar arrived a few minutes after she left. I barely had time to clean up the shit from his floor, wearing gloves from under the sink, throwing them in the trash along with the turd. He was coldly furious as he packed his own bag. “Who the fuck does this?” he kept saying, sorting through his piled-up clothes, recoiling with a shout when he discovered a layer that had been soaked with piss. He headed for the shower and I shouted at him to stop, explained about the drains. He shouted “Fuck!” and scrubbed his arms to the elbows.
Then I was all alone, with the piss-soaked scraps of my baby blanket and my trashed house. I packed my own bag, not sure where I would go—Wilmar was staying with a boyfriend who had a spare room, but everyone I knew with extra space had converted it to a People’s Airbnb. I wasn’t going to ask Phuong—I’d rather sleep on a park bench than freak her out by acting like a creeper.
> I just saw Milena-you ok?
It was Ana Lucía. I stared at my screen.
> Not really.
* * *