chapter 9
atlas shrugs
I’ve often thought of how the world changed for my parents—how one day it was out-of-control fires, rising authoritarianism, rampant disease, and the sense that no one cared and nothing could make it better, and the next day: the Canadian Miracle. A new government, a city moved from its floodplain, a job for anyone who wanted one, and the funding needed to service the terrible debts of the country: the inequality debt, the infrastructure debt, the climate debt. A nation unleashed upon itself, building high-speed rail lines connecting every major aviation route, weatherizing homes, restoring habitats, caring for those in need.
How strange must it have been to go from total hopelessness, the feeling of the world’s doom as a flywheel, spinning faster and faster with no way to slow it, and then, all of a sudden, someone found the brake. The wheel that had only ever accelerated began to slow. It halted. It changed direction.
Hope in such a dark place. What can it have been like?
I don’t know, but I can tell you how the reverse experience goes.
Phuong was up before me for a change. I’d been up late, hanging out with Don and Miguel, tasting whiskeys, and she’d turned in at a sensible hour. I dozed in her bed, smelling her pillow and pretending that I didn’t need to pee, that I could just stay there all morning. She came in and rummaged quietly for a battery and I cracked one eye and then smiled at her. “Cuddle?” I suggested, turning back the sheets and patting the bed next to me.
She looked at me and I stopped smiling. Her face was a pinched mask, etched with worry. I sat bolt upright. “What is it?”
“A shitshow,” she said, and handed me her screen.
It was a video showing a militia; they had all the trappings, the Gadsden flag and the camo ghillie suits and the AR-15s and plastic AR-3DPs, and, of course, white skin, blazing eyes, 3D-printed rank insignia like a cartoon general.
There were a dozen men on the screen, ranged in two rows behind a man at a desk. He was shiny-bald, old, with turkey-wattle skin hanging off his neck; wire-rim circular glasses; a saber and a swagger stick in front of him on the blotter. In the window behind them, a familiar view: the Port of Los Angeles, long spits of squared-off landfill supporting ranks of precisely arrayed cranes; giant container ships motionless at their docks.
“This is Commander Vinton G. Ritzheimer, speaking for the California Irregulars and affiliated militia groups. This morning, we seized control of the Port of Los Angeles at Long Beach in a smoothly executed martial maneuver that resulted in minimum loss of civilian life.
“Make no mistake: this action was lawful. The State of California has long pursued an unconstitutional program of private property seizures under color of so-called environmental protection and remediation, and our do-nothing federal government has sat by, playing King Log, and courts, presided over by Marxist-appointed judges who sit beneath fringed flags in packed courts, let them get away with it.
“This. Ends. Now.” He thumped his desk, making his saber literally rattle. “We California Irregulars call upon all California patriots to converge on the new Free Port of Long Beach to defend liberty. California depends on its imports and exports. This is a key strategic acquisition for the forces of freedom: if we hold this port, we will bring the state to its knees. America, your day of liberation is coming!”
On cue, the men behind him lifted their guns. One of them let off some rounds into the ceiling accidentally, flinching and ducking as plaster dust rained down on him and his comrades in arms. The look of disappointment on the commander’s face was fleeting, but heartfelt.
“What a bunch of assholes,” I said, handing Phuong her screen back. “But it’s just a bunch of knuckleheads. The National Guard’ll shake ’em out in a day or two.”
Phuong tucked the screen away. “I got a really bad feeling about this, is all.”
I got up and hugged her. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. And if it’s not, we’ll do something about it. All of us. Those guys are dead, they just don’t know it. Their time is over.”
* * *
Three days later, it wasn’t over. The cops arrested three guys who tried to take a cab to Burbank Airport. Their AR-15s were detected by the lidar in the cab’s trunk and it drove them into the old Fry’s parking lot where they were met by a SWAT squad and a bomb-sniffing botswarm that picked over them and their belongings before the cops got within twenty-five yards of them. They were under snipers’ crosshairs the whole time, and were periodically reminded by bullhorn not to twitch an eyebrow unless they wanted that eyebrow—and the face it was attached to—turned into a pointillist painting.
Burbank PD must have war-gamed this scenario, because they materialized a million sawhorses, movable suicide-car bollards, and millimeter-wave body scanners and set up checkpoints all around town; anyone crossing the city line, entering the studios, coming in or out of downtown or entering the Magnolia Park strip had to clear a checkpoint. Most people got waved through, but Ana Lucía and her refugee friends—and anyone who looked like them—had a high probability of being searched and IDed.
“You are fucking kidding me.” I’d been waved through the checkpoint at North Hollywood Way and Magnolia with nothing more than a body scan, but as I turned to continue my discussion with Ana Lucía, I realized that she was getting a pat-down and an ID check. I stalked back to the checkpoint.
“What the hell, guys?” I said to the cops. I couldn’t believe it.
“Please wait behind the line, sir.” The cop was older than any cop I’d ever seen in uniform, like he was some kind of reservist or desk guy they’d pressed into service. His partner, the woman patting down Ana Lucía, was young and white and stony-faced.
“I’m behind the line. But seriously, what the hell? The terrorists holding the port hostage look like me, not like her. The terrorists who tried to seize the airport looked like me, not like her. How come I sailed through but she gets the date with Doctor Jellyfinger over there?”
“Sir, if you have a complaint about our procedures, you can scan the QR code on your left and someone from public relations will be in touch with you.”
Ana Lucía was rigid with anger as the cop completed her pat-down. “You’re free to go,” the cop said, peeling off her gloves and dropping them in a bin. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
The old cop and I locked eyes for a long moment while Ana Lucía cleared the body scanner and collected her bag from the belt.
“We both know why she got scanned and I didn’t,” I said.
He snapped upright, eyes wide. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that being a racist is a worse sin than calling someone a racist.”
I turned and walked away with Ana Lucía. “Hey!” the cop yelled behind me. I heard the woman cop say something indistinct to him, and he said something angry back, and she said some more words, and then we were out of earshot.
“Assholes,” I said, spittle flecking off my lips. I was furious. White Nazis were taking over California and “law enforcement” was shaking down brown refugees.
“It’s all over town,” Ana Lucía said. “All the time now. Like I was telling you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s not who we are.”
She stopped me, turned me to face her. People on the sidewalk swerved to go around us. “Brooks, this may not be who you are, but it’s what this city is. Otherwise they’d all do something about it.” She waved an arm expansively at the shoppers around us under their sun parasols, aiming their little battery-powered fans at their sheened faces. The wet-bulb temp was spiking again as a blanket of humidity settled over the city, driving us up into the 110s. It was the kind of weather that made everything frustrating and enraging and all this bullshit wasn’t helping. Being told off by Ana Lucía made me briefly but seriously angry, and the fact that she was clearly right didn’t help any.
She searched my face, apparently decided whatever she saw was acceptable, and started moving again. “Let’s get froyo,” she said. “It’s too hot.”
In the line at the froyo co-op, she got some screen buzzes and tapped for a while, her face furious. She crumpled it up and stuck it in her pocket. “Fuck,” she muttered. An old white lady in the line gave her a stink eye.
She didn’t notice. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and ground her jaw and I had to ask, “What’s going on?” I tried to make it soft and nondemanding so she’d have space to tell me to shut up if she needed to.
“The new People’s Airbnbs,” she said. “They’re shutting down. At first it was just a couple but now it’s dozens of them. All this terrorism bullshit has people freaking out.”
“Wait, what? People who’ve been hosting refugee families are suddenly worried that they’re terrorists? That doesn’t make any sense—I mean, leaving aside that all the terrorists are crazy white people—” The old lady gave me a stink eye. I stuck my tongue out at her and she flinched back, shocked. I felt disgustingly good about it.
“No, the hosts don’t think that, but their asshole neighbors do, and they’re making life hell for anyone hosting a refugee family. Fuck it. I can’t blame ’em. I mean, if you’ve gotta live next to someone for the next twenty years, do you really wanna get into a feud where they think you’ve got mass murderers crashing on your sofa?”
“They’re cowards. Who cares about your asshole neighbors? Who cares about assholes?” The old lady was about to say something, and I tensed up, but she got called up to the counter.
“It’s so much bullshit,” I said. “I mean, move whoever you want into my house, for sure—” I twinged, thinking of the plan to scrape it to the foundation slab and build a high-rise. But that was a fantasy, right? This was reality, and people needed housing. “But we’ve got to do something.”
“They’re calling us up,” she said, gesturing at the froyo kid. The old lady was still glaring at us.
* * *
Three days later, I was delivering my twentieth tent. I’d put out the call on social for people’s camping gear, and we’d cleaned out the library’s stock of tents and camp stoves. Every park had become a tent city, and my DSA chapter had assembled a ton of swamp coolers with twelve-volt fans and ten-gallon buckets, running off of surplus solar cells.
The tent cities were a shock and a rebuke to Burbank, a reminder that our city had denied these people the homes it had promised them, and then put them out on the streets. Every time I saw them, I felt terrible. The composting toilets stank and the city showers at the Verdugo Aquatic Facility were crammed from the moment it opened to the end of the swimming day, and the swimmers were all pissed and being dicks to the refus who were just trying to keep clean.
The LA County DSA found our local chapter a lawyer to draft a petition to the city to ignore the injunctions and get to building housing for our refu friends, and we staked out the city checkpoints, gathering signatures, staffing all of them 24/7 in an effort to gather heroic numbers in short time. Forty-eight hours later, we had twenty-five thousand verified signatures, one in five Burbankers, and we decided that was enough to take to City Hall. A friendly councilor called an emergency session, got our petition agendized, and we packed the house.
The Magas were there, of course, but our side had lost all restraint. We didn’t let them push into line, we closed ranks around anyone small or old or young that they tried to crowd around and intimidate, and we got the one asshole who was open-carrying arrested and jeered as he was thrown in the back of a cruiser.
The idea that this was a polite battle of political viewpoints was over. The mask was off. Magas were accelerationists, accelerationists were separatists, separatists were fascists, fascists wanted to murder us all. We were done playing. The councilors, mayor, treasurer, chief counsel, and secretary were visibly nervous, spooking every time a voice in the gallery rose over a mutter, flinching like they expected an outbreak of violence.
After some opening statements from our friendly councilor—Tony Yiannopoulos, a DSA-endorsed guy who’d been on the right side of every local issue—the president of the Burbank DSA came up to the mic. I knew Huey Wilkins from the annual DSA picnic in Griffith Park, where he’d show up and barbecue endless platters of tofu and vat meat and give a closing benediction after the last band played, exhorting us to all help pick up the trash.
I’d never seen Huey in full flight, but here he was, in his neat black suit and bow tie, rolling out preacher oratory that had these amazing tones of righteousness and anger. It made me half scared, in a good way: he could have called on us to charge the cops lining the chamber walls and half of us would have done it. All that, and he was just reading the lawyer’s case citations about why the city had the legal authority to overrule the injunction and start construction again! Then he got to the good part.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have read you a whole lot of legal arguments tonight, chapter and verse on state and federal case law. The lawyer who prepared those arguments is damned good at her job and I’m sure that every one of those arguments checks out good.
“But let’s be real here. The reason you should lift the injunction isn’t legal, it’s moral. We have a city full of people who came here because the law of the land and the custom of civilized people told them that we’d take them in. We have a city full of people who want to take them in, and we have a small, bitter minority of people who don’t care about the will of the majority—no more than they care about human decency. These people are allied with violent terrorists. They tried to take over our airport. They have us cowering in fear, here in our own homes, in our own city.
“You are the people we elected to manage this city. You have already heard that you have the legal authority to overturn this vicious minority of terrorist sympathizers. Now I am appealing to your moral sense.
“We all know Burbank has a history. We know this was a sundown town. The 1930 census listed six Black people residing in Burbank. We know that there were Black people in LA County then. The reason there were only six Black folks inside the city limits back then? It wasn’t safe for them.” He checked his notes. “1940 census? Twenty-two Black people. 1950 census? Twenty-nine Black people. All those Black people building bombers for Lockheed? Not welcome after dark. All the Black women inking and painting cels at Disney? We kicked ’em the hell across the city line before the sun went down.
“Burbank can’t do anything about those past injustices. Nothing you do or say will ever change things for the Black people who were redlined, terrorized, and excluded.
“But you can show that Burbank has changed. That it has learned from its sins. You can show repentance. You can show growth. You can stand up and by God you can lead because you are our leaders and if you aren’t running at the head of our movement, you’re gonna end up way behind it, wondering what the hell just happened to your moral authority. To your legal authority.
“So, Madam Mayor, Councilors, city officials, Chief: I ask you tonight to listen to the people of Burbank. Listen to the still, small voice of your consciences. Listen to the voices of history. Think about your history. Think about the people who will come after you. Think about where you will fit in history and what side of it you will be remembered for upholding.”
He stopped so abruptly that it took a minute for the audience to realize that he was done and to start cheering. The cheers were so loud that my ears buzzed, and it took me a while to realize that the Magas were booing, because they were inaudible over the roar.
Now Huey was holding his hands up for silence and the mayor was pounding her gavel. Huey had a screen someone had passed him and he said something to the mayor that we couldn’t hear because his mic had been cut. The mayor shook her head like she couldn’t understand and he repeated himself and then his mic came back on abruptly:
“—a message from the office of the undersecretary for the interior, who was contacted by Congresswoman Beverley Carr on this matter. It’s a longish letter, Madam Mayor, so I’ll just read the final paragraph here.
“‘It is the judgment of the Department of the Interior and the Office for Internal Refugees that, in light of the circumstances and the urgent humanitarian crisis on its doorstep, the City of Burbank can and should exercise its authority to permit additional shelters such as are needed to alleviate the pressing and immediate needs of unhoused persons. It is the legal judgment of the General Counsel of the Office for Internal Refugees that the City of Burbank has this authority, notwithstanding any injunctions issued by California state court. Further, it is the opinion of the Office and its counsel that the City of Burbank may have a duty to act under the Internal Displaced Persons Act of 2026.’”
The room was perfectly silent at first, people looking from one to another, Did that mean what I thought it meant?
Then, a buzz of whispers that quickly grew to a roar of conversation, and the mayor started banging her gavel again, but no one was listening, and then there was an ear-piercing alarm in the room that was impossible to talk over. The mayor tapped her screen and the sound died, leaving behind a ringing in our ears.
“That’s enough. In light of this, I move that the council go to an in-camera session so that we may confer with the city attorney. Do I have a second?”
Within moments, we were ushered out of the chamber, down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. The Magas and the rest of us kept our distance, overseen by the cops. We wondered how long it would be, exchanged messages with people in other parts of the country undergoing similar fights. A few people sat on the City Hall steps and played cards. Someone ordered a couple of boxes of doughnuts. An hour went by. It was 10 p.m. We texted our friendly councilor inside the chamber and got a terse answer that deliberations were intense.
The Magas got burgers delivered. We got coffee. Someone organized a tennis-ball soccer game with backpacks for goalposts that was briefly hilarious and then the ball rolled down a sewer. The Magas laughed. We laughed at them thinking that this was some kind of epic dunk.
Midnight came and went. The Burbank Bugle account reported leaks from inside the council chamber that said they were split and the city attorney was taking the side of the people who wanted to start building again. Our friendly councilor texted us to say they were taking away all the councilors’ screens because of the leaks.
People slept on the sidewalk with rolled-up jackets for pillows. It was sweaty and gross and there were so many mosquitoes, and no amount of bug dope could keep them all at bay. The waking slapped the bugs off the sleeping. Some people went home, but not many. We all understood that if they thought they could fuck us over without facing an angry crowd, then fucking over would happen.
At 1:15 a.m. we were readmitted. The people who’d been asleep shuffled up the stairs, supported by the people who’d drunk all the coffee. We went back through the body scanners and found our seats again. As soon as I saw the council and the mayor at the front of the room, I knew it was going to be terrible. The long delay and the leaks had suggested as much but I’d been nursing hope. One look at those faces—furious and frightened, by turns—and my hope was vaporized.
The mayor gaveled us in.
“Thank you for your patience. The council has carefully weighed the petition and the supplementary materials our friends in the federal administration were kind enough to provide, and, after extensive consultation with the city attorney, it is the judgment of the majority of this council that we cannot, in good conscience, expose the city to the kind of legal liability that ignoring a court order would entail. To be perfectly frank, the civil penalties from suits by citizens of this city who would have standing to seek compensation for such a course of action could render this city bankrupt. In light of that grave peril, it is our conclusion that we will not permit construction on emergency refugee housing to resume at this time.”
Our groan quickly turned into a roar. The mayor let it go for thirty seconds or so, but when it showed no sign of abating, she hit her klaxon again. I swear it was even louder this time. Once she switched it off, she gave us all a second to recover from the ringing in our ears.
“However, in light of the humanitarian challenges this presents, the council has unanimously voted to allocate three hundred thousand dollars from the city’s emergency fund for humanitarian supplies, including food relief, tents, and additional temporary toilet and bathing facilities.”
The roar came back. They were going to make the tent cities permanent. Our parks were now refugee camps, forever. The smiles on the Magas who’d stuck around were just the last twist of the knife. I caught sight of Huey and he just looked … crushed. That broke me. I shouted “FUCK” into the roar of hundreds of other outraged people and stomped out of the chamber, out of City Hall, and home to my stupid bed in my stupid house.
* * *
The terrorists who’d tried to seize Burbank Airport were the Maga Club’s new heroes and there were signs all over the place that read FREE THE BURBANK THREE. Local social was full of the video they’d planned on releasing once they seized the airport, a kind of low-budg version of the Commander Vinton G. Ritzheimer and the California Irregulars Long Beach Port Seizure video. Not only did it have low production values (a sin in a town that was once home to three movie-studio monopolies and was now home to dozens of plucky indies the DOJ had created when it split them up), but their central demand was reopening the airport to private jet traffic. Not small hobbyist planes—jets. Private jets were such a weird remnant of a long-buried world, it was like they were demanding the right to park zeppelins or autogyros.
My roommates were gone, but my house was full again, with eight of Ana Lucía’s friends sleeping in the two spare bedrooms and the living room. They were all really nice—some of them had been in the advance party that had camped in the backyard—but still, I found it impossible to relax at home. The crowded spaces and lines for the bathrooms were a constant reminder of how screwed up everything was and how much the city and its people had let me down.
All that made me hate Gramps’s house, that cursed place, that anchor dragging me down to this stupid city that my parents couldn’t get out of fast enough. I wanted to tear it down and build a high-rise. I wanted to tear it down and dig a hole and push the remains inside it. Fuck that house and fuck the people who thought houses like this were a good idea.
One night as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, listening to the shifting and muttering of my very full house, I decided I needed to get out and do something, something that would make the world in some small way better. I grabbed a screen and tapped up a chore-board, looking for a useful task I could go and do and get my ya-yas out on.
SOLAR MAINTENANCE—BURROUGHS HIGH
Huh.
Well, it made sense. I was checked out for solar, I knew Burroughs, and I lived close by. I mean, the last time I’d gone up there someone had tried to murder me, but as far as I knew, no one had attempted to murder anyone else on the Burroughs roof since. Plus, it had a nice view. I hit the lights and found some clothes.
* * *
The panels hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I lit up the roof and got a squeegee and pressure hose and got to work cleaning the layers of ash and gunk off them, then reapplied some dirt-stop stuff that was supposed to shed most of that gunk. Maybe it did. Maybe all the gunk I was hosing down the drains would be a thousand times worse next time if I didn’t apply it.
Working in the middle-of-the-night silence was relaxing, and for the first time since the City Hall meeting, I felt the knots in my shoulders loosening. I put the cleaning gear away in its shed and stretched out and realized that I could see the sky going pink in the distance. I moved to the edge of the roof and dangled my feet and watched the sunrise turn the sky deeper pink, then red, then orange. Some people swear by sunsets, but I’ll take staying up to watch the sunrise anytime. I’d been feeling pretty rotten about Burbank lately, but the sunrise filled me with warm feelings. I was finally sleepy and it was definitely time to get home. My legs were asleep and I had the sudden realization that maybe having numb legs while perched on a roof edge and suffering from sleep deprivation wasn’t the safest thing to be doing. I leaned way back, rolled slowly onto my belly, and slowly came to my hands and knees. I looked up to make sure I wasn’t about to split my skull open on the edge of a solar panel’s frame and saw something weird.
It was still dark, of course, the sun low in the sky. But what rays were available were coming in nearly horizontally, and they made the weird thing glint. It was a steel case, ruggedized, the kind of thing you’d use to protect a fragile musical instrument in shipping. Burroughs High had a bunch of them, including some really massive ones for double basses. But this one was square, and its seam had been welded shut, the weld a kind of drippy line blackened with scorch marks.
That was weird. But what made me scuttle back a step—my left toe going off the ledge and just hanging out there in space, sending a jolt up my spine—was the little project box attached to it by an umbilicus of wires that penetrated a gasket that had been hacked into the case’s edge. The project box had a cheap OLED screen displaying one word: ACTIVE.
The weird thing was a fucking bomb. What the hell else could it be? Inside that case would be a proprietary blend of explosives and shrapnel—ball bearings or lug nuts or roofing nails. I crept away from it sideways, not wanting to move toward it and not wanting to back myself off the edge of the roof.
I pelted down the stairs three at a time and nearly tripped at the second-floor landing, and did trip at the first-floor landing, but caught myself on the wall before I could break my neck. I ran like hell down Verdugo, putting a block between me and the school before I shook out my screen and hit 911. I told the robot I’d found a bomb and half a second later I was talking to a human. He was Asian and had a Southern accent and told me he was Specialist Jeong in the Fort Worth antiterrorism center. He was disappointed that I hadn’t taken any pictures, but he took my detailed description, asking me to hold for a moment while he dispatched Burbank PD, then came back to me and made me describe it all over again. I was just getting to the end when BPD arrived and fenced off the block. Specialist Jeong told me to go introduce myself to the officers and I looked over at them.
For an instant, I was convinced that the cop on the sawhorse closest to me was my old friend Officer Murphy, but he was just another chunky white guy out of central casting. He watched me approach through his heads-up goggles. I reached him just as a big white van screamed up and more cops jumped out, moving stiffly in head-to-toe armor, carrying awkward armloads of armor that they handed to the cops on the barricades.
My cop—name tag SCHLOSSMAN—held up a hand to me while he struggled, grunting, into a vest and buckled a helmet on.
“Uh, should we move away?” I asked.
“It’s fine,” he said. I mean, okay, but you’re the guy with the body armor. I guess I could use him as a shield?
“You’re Brooks Palazzo?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Radio says you found a bomb up there?”
“Yes.” Another van arrived and three people in much thicker armor got out of it. A bunch of drones lifted off from inside it and headed over to the roof.
“Do you need me to go show them where it is?”
He shook his head. “You just stay put. They’ll let you know if they need you.”
My pulse was finally returning to normal when there was a loud, sudden ruckus near the van the drones had lifted off from, and the cops who’d been operating the drones were joined by a bunch of cops, with the specialists shouldering through the rubbernecking guys who’d come off the sawhorses. My cop, Schlossman, gave the scene a considering look.
“Guess they found your bomb,” he said.
“It’s not my bomb!” I said.
He tilted his head at me. I wondered what he’d read in my file when he’d been told to expect me. He cocked his head to listen to his radio. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move.”
“Where?”
He pointed. “One block down,” he said. “They just scanned your bomb and it’s a big one.”
* * *