“Burbank, like all of California, is going to have to adapt to a changing world. I’m proud of our track record, both when it comes to making our city future-ready and when it comes to welcoming in people who’ve been brought our way by the climate emergency.” I nodded when she used the phrase, and so did most of the people around us. The willingness to say the words “climate emergency” had become a litmus test in the election that brought us President Bennett, and the “emergency” side had lost that election. Politicians who’d still say the words got automatic points. “And we’re going to do more. We were all traumatized by the terrorist attacks on our city and our state, but no one should live in fear. That’s just giving in to the terrorists. So of course I’m glad to see you here, putting your imaginations to good use.”
Another smattering of applause, and a couple of boos from some Magas who’d found their way to our parklet. Ana Lucía pointed her screen back at herself: “Thank you, Mayor, but that’s not what I asked. I asked if it wasn’t time to stop messing around with tiny tweaks to the way our city looks and runs and instead confront this emergency that we’re all facing? Terrorists don’t want us to do it—” She pointed at the Magas, and they got even ruddier, and the crowd glared at them. “—but we don’t give in to terrorists, do we?”
“No we don’t,” Yiannopoulos said, subtly shifting so that he made himself part of the mayor’s posse. “This city government has a job to do, a duty to the people who live here. That means all the people, not just a few violent psychos with too many guns and not enough brains.”
“We are the people of Burbank,” one of the Magas yelled, right on cue. “We have a right to our city. If the people who come here begging for handouts don’t like what’s on offer, let ’em go look for charity somewhere else.”
Tony inclined his head at the Maga. “That’s what I’m talking about. People who think that because they got here first, they’re better than the people who got here next. Buddy, Burbank is for Burbankers, and a Burbanker is anyone who wants to live here. That’s the way the law works, here in America. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay.”
That got a cheer. More Magas were arriving and so were some cops, preceded by a trio of BPD drones in a holding pattern. The Magas were all yelling now, and Ana Lucía thumbed up the gain on her screen’s mic.
“Councilor Claiborne, you lost a good friend in the City Hall bombing. There are thousands of people who were supposed to be building themselves new homes here in Burbank, now living in tents in the city parks. What do you think the city should be doing now?”
Claiborne opened their mouth, closed it. One of the other councilors moved to answer, but Claiborne waved her away, and they had bright tears standing out in their eyes. “What should we be doing now?” They drew in a deep breath. “You know what we should be doing now. You’re already doing it. Right here.” They waved their arm to take in the whole street fair. “You’re doing our job for us, the job we didn’t have the courage to do.” A moment of stunned silence, a cacophony of cheers mixed with boos from the Magas, and Ana Lucía thumbed the gain higher, so that when Claiborne spoke again, their voice boomed, rattling the storefront windows and our fillings. “You’re doing what we should have done from the start: ignoring the illegitimate, vicious, cruel court orders to abandon our duty and getting on with giving people a place to live and a life to live in it.” Their voice broke on the last word and Tony gave them a hug. It was an intense moment. Even the Magas shut up. For an instant. Then they were shouting.
The mayor was doing a slow fade, backing away from the scene, banking toward the cops who were standing uneasily between the crowd and the city officials.
“Exactly,” Ana Lucía said. “You gave them everything they wanted, and they bombed us. They didn’t ask you to shut down construction because they wanted to deprive us of a place to live: they did it to see if you could be pushed around. Once you showed them you could—” She made a boom sound/gesture and people cheered again. The Magas started to look uncomfortable. They were clearly outnumbered, and being publicly associated with terrorist attacks that killed people’s friends and family and blew up beloved city buildings was no fun.
Claiborne disengaged from Tony’s hug and took a step back themself. They didn’t like that they’d lost their cool in public, not at all. It looked like we were done, but then they stepped up to try and put a smooth edge on the roughness. “I want to thank you—thank all of you—for this remarkable show of community spirit. We know that this is a rough time. We know that as well as any of you. This thing you’ve come together to do today has made me proud to be a Burbanker.”
Ana Lucía sprung her trap. “Will you agendize these plans at the next meeting?”
The councilor was caught by surprise and had nothing to say. On the screens all around, their eyes flicked back and forth as they looked from the camera to themself on the screens and back to the camera. I felt sorry for them.
“I, uh, don’t know that this would be the best way to proceed with all of this—”
Tony shook his head. “Come on, Rafi,” he said. “These are the people who voted you into office, and they’re telling you what they want you to do with the power they’ve given you. This is your job. It’s my job. I will commit, right here, that I will agendize this at the next council meeting, and then I will by God vote for it because this is what our city wants. The people have never spoken so loudly and so clearly. If we can’t hear them, we don’t deserve our goddamned paychecks.”
He’d started quiet but then he’d straightened up as he rolled along until he was thundering and by the time he got to goddamned paychecks he was thumping his chest loud enough that the mic caught it, boom, boom.
Claiborne went from deer-in-headlights to engaged to furious in the space of six sentences. They were either a terrible politician or an amazing one, putting on a virtuoso performance that could have landed them a leading part at any of the studios. By the time Tony was done chest pounding, they were cheering along with the rest of them. Ana Lucía pounced.
“Councilor Claiborne, I see you cheering, does that mean you’ll commit to agendizing our question at the next meeting?”
“Hell yes!” They weren’t acting. They’d been bombed that week, after all.
Ana Lucía wasn’t letting up. “And will you vote for it?”
“Goddamned right!” they said, and Tony clasped their hand and yanked it into the sky like a ref announcing a prizefight win. The crowd was going wild. The mayor wasn’t quite at the police line.
“Madam Mayor!” Ana Lucía shouted, and all eyes were on the mayor now. People cleared a patch so Ana Lucía could get her screen’s mic in range of the mayor. “You know what the question is, Madam Mayor. The people want to know.”
The mayor straightened up and gave another game-recognize-game smile to Ana Lucía. “The people know what the answer is. At Friday’s meeting, the agenda will include a resolution on these proposals. We will task the city attorney and our head of planning to work with you and, uh, Mr. Yiannopoulos”—Tony saluted her—“to prepare and circulate the motion. I will hear arguments for and against it. And, I have to warn you, I will hear arguments that we can’t vote on these proposals unless they have been formally submitted and exposed to public comment and expert review from structural, architectural, and environmental consultants. This is California, friends, and we have learned our lesson when it comes to ‘move fast and break things.’ That’s not what you elected us to do. You elected us to move cautiously and fix things. That may not be what you were hoping for today, but it will have to be enough.”
“It’s not enough,” Ana Lucía said, and her voice was so serious and ice-cold I got a shiver. “But it’s enough for now.”
* * *
There must have been seventy people at my house.
Between beers, hard spicy kombucha, and these crazy super-old bourbons (none older than six days, but with the molecular structure of an extrapolated bottle after 150 years in oak staves), the party was really good. Someone brought watermelons, someone else brought guitars, and the kitchen supplied a rhythm section in the form of pans and spoons. It was about fifty-fifty refus and locals, with my houseguests beaming with pride as they showed their friends around. Someone gave me a vegan empanada.
I danced with Phuong. Oh my God she was a good dancer and so unbelievably sexy while doing it that I kept nearly tripping. Everyone watched us and I didn’t mind at all: they were watching her, and if they noticed me, it was only to wonder why someone as gorgeous and sexy and amazing as my girlfriend was hanging around with a clod like me. That sounds like it would feel bad, but it felt so, so great.
We collapsed, sweaty and grinning, onto the backyard grass, the long desert grasses I’d planted after Gramps died, replacing his water-hungry turf. We propped ourselves on our elbows and watched the festivities, heads touching. Ana Lucía loomed over us, all nostrils, chin, and underboob from our angle.
“Pull up a seat,” Phuong said, and she joined us.
“You were amazing today,” I said.
She smiled and held up a fist for a dap. “Couldn’t have done it if everyone else hadn’t played their part. Those Magas were perfect, really made it clear what the question was.”
We snorted. She had a one-hit and she loaded it with a dab of oil and blew out a plume. She reloaded it and passed it to Phuong, who hit it and then mimed for me to get a shotgun. As she blew the vapor into my mouth, I felt like a giddy teen. The weed and the erotic charge mingled and I was instantly, pleasantly buzzed.
“God, I hope it works,” I said. “I mean, it’d be terrible if the Magas win, if the Flotilla wins, terrible for millions of people. But I just keep thinking of how terrible it would be if you moved on, Ana Lucía, you and your friends. You folks are just great, you know. And you—you’re a force of nature. The way you ended up here is terrible, but we’re so lucky you came.”
I tried to read the expression on her face. It was weird. Sad? Angry? I rewound what I’d just said. “I mean, shit, sorry—I didn’t mean to say … Sorry. Oh God, I’m sorry, Ana Lucía. I can only imagine what it’s like to be in your situation. Of course you just want to go home if you can. I just meant—”
She cut me off with a gesture. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “You have to understand, we didn’t just get bored or sad and leave Tehachapi. We tried. We tried so hard. People worked until they dropped. My parents dropped dead. We begged the state and the feds for help, money and water rights and health care. We wrote letters to big companies telling them they should locate a call center in Tehachapi and give us jobs. Out here in Burbank, you’ve got an incorporated city, a government that can administer the Jobs Guarantee. In Tehachapi, it’s just the county, and it’s all sewn up by good ole boys with red hats under their white hoods, and they keep delaying any kind of GND program kickoffs.
“It wasn’t easy to convince people to leave. First we had to convince them not to stay, convince them that there wasn’t anything for them at home, and never would be. Some of my people, they’ve been in Tehachapi for generations, born and grew up and met and married and had kids there. It was their home. It was like the land was part of their family. It’s beautiful country there, a wild place with real sky. Like a member of the family.
“When the town started dying, it was like your grandma getting sick, slipping away, getting worse and worse, until the pain was unbearable and everyone knows that she’s never coming back this time. When that happens, you say your goodbyes, do you understand?
“We didn’t just leave Tehachapi, we buried it. It’s dead. We can’t go home. We don’t have a home anymore. Going back? It’d be like digging up Grandma’s bones and sitting her down at the end of the Thanksgiving table.”
Phuong reached out and squeezed her arm. “So it’s Burbank or bust, huh?”
Ana Lucía shook her head. I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. “I was ready to leave a couple days ago, but no one else wanted to go. I did a lot of research to pick Burbank, got the data on how much room there was for infill, what the city government’s uptake had been to other GND programs, the demographics, everything. I sold it hard. Too hard, maybe, because half of my folks think this is the promised land.”
“It’s a good town, and it’s trying to be better,” I said. “And you can’t blame people for wanting to stick with the devil they know.”
“Oh, I sure can blame them for that. That’s the sin that nearly wiped out the human race and may kill us all still, sticking with the system we had even though it was destroying us, because we couldn’t know for sure that whatever we built to replace it would be any better.”
“Fine,” I said. “But do you really think it’ll be better somewhere else?”
“No,” she said. “No, that’s what I figured. Once I saw that the injunctions were nationwide, I gave up on finding somewhere easier. Once I saw that they were setting up a world where there were winners and losers, people with the good luck to live inland, or on high ground; people with the money to relocate, they’re fine. The rest of us? We can drown or starve, so long as enough of us survive to wait on our social betters, cook their dinners, raise their kids and mow their lawns. That’s the endgame and the dumbasses here think that they’ll be rewarded for helping out, when the best they can hope for is to be allowed inside the compound to serve as a butler or a dishwasher.”
“Grim, but fair,” Phuong said. “Whatever the reason, I’m glad you folks are staying here. You class the joint up. Plus, we’re going to end up absorbing a hell of a lot more people in the years to come, so it’s really good that we get to sort out the process with such a kick-ass bunch of new neighbors.”
Ana Lucía clucked her tongue, but in a friendly way. “You two are such GND goody-goody Kool-Aid drinkers.”
“I’m a believer, all right,” Phuong said.
“I’m second-generation,” I added.
Ana Lucía groaned and refilled her one-hit and passed it around again.
We were getting pretty mellow by then. It had been a very long day—I’d set my alarm for 3:30 a.m. and I’d woken up before it had a chance to go off—and emotional, too. Then there’d been the whiskey and the food and a couple of lungfuls of Ana Lucía’s lethal indica oil and the warm, good smell of Phuong next to me and I felt like a turkey that’s come out of the oven and had all its strings cut, spreading outward as my very muscles relaxed right off my bones.
And that’s when the Magas showed up. They’d clearly been drinking, too, having their own parallel house party in someone else’s backyard. They came with tiki torches, which was meant to be scary but it was such a throwback that I snorted when I figured out what they were brandishing.
“Brooks!” one of them shouted. Kenneth? No, Derrick. He looked every one of his seventy-something years, stoop-shouldered and florid, wearing a big windbreaker with one hand behind him, where you’d tuck a pistol if you were the kind of person who really liked old action movies and didn’t mind the risk of literally shooting your own ass off.
He was at the head of a gang of men, many of them I recognized as Gramps’s friends, but there were some strangers in there. Most were his vintage, but there were younger dudes in there, with that look: big beards, shaved heads, belligerent stares. Some wore long coats, the kind you’d hide a long gun in. Some wore warmup jackets, and I spotted a couple of armpit bulges.
A weird calm settled over me. These guys were here with their guns, and that meant they were ready to kill me. You didn’t need that many guns to scare someone. So that meant I could very well be about to die.
That calm, though. I’d seen death before, seen it up close, with the people I’d loved the most. I’d always been on borrowed time. And at that moment, in love and surrounded by the best people I knew, having won an improbable victory against a vastly better-provisioned enemy force, I was absolutely prepared to die. To be a martyr. We would all die eventually. Why not make it count? If these militiamen gunned me down on my sidewalk, in front of all these witnesses, it would shock the city. It would absolutely break down any support they had left after their bombings. The bombings were anonymous, deniable. A gangland hit in cold blood? Not even close.
I stood up. They puffed out their chests and raised their chins, squaring off. Someone said something, probably Phuong or maybe Ana Lucía, but I couldn’t hear words anymore. Someone was grabbing my arms, but I shook their hands off. I took a step toward the mob. They grinned and patted their weapons’ hiding places. I grinned right back, nodding, taking another step. Another. Another. They were shouting words. Derrick was saying something. Who had time for words.
Another step.
They looked at each other, scared now. What did I know that they didn’t? I’ll tell you what I knew: that I wasn’t afraid to die. That I wanted to die in a state of grace. Another step.
They took a step back.
And I took a step forward.
“Go away,” I said. The words were clear and loud and they rang out.
Another step.
They jeered and threw hand signals and patted their bulges, but … they left. They turned and walked back toward the corner and I stood there at the edge of my property line and the sidewalk, chest out, head back, watching the shadows absorb them, feeling incredible.
Someone touched my arm. Phuong must have been scared to death. What had I done? I turned to say something, and it wasn’t Phuong at all. It was Dave and Armen, who I hadn’t even known were at the party, both with huge, sloppy-stoned grins. Suddenly, the white noise around me turned back into words, crowd sounds, Dave and Armen shouting Dude, that was AWESOME and laughing, and I laughed and kept turning around and realized that everyone had been standing behind me.
All of them. My friends. My neighbors. My houseguests. Burbankers. Refus. Ana Lucía and Phuong, with linked arms and chins high. Vikram in his wheelchair—jeez, how many people had been at my house that night that I hadn’t even noticed? I was a shitty host. He had a fist in the air.
The crowd noise was a cheer. That’s what it was, a cheer and we were all cheering, loud and wild and cut loose, and I raised my voice and howled my victory call, raising my hands over my head like a prizefighter.
It was an amazing night after that. Dancing. Singing. Cuddling with Phuong in the grass and having an intense conversation all about my dad with Vikram, things I’d never heard before. Milena and Wilmar sat with us, cuddling too, and I realized they’d become a couple.
I went to bed beside Phuong and fell immediately into a satisfied, warm, satiated sleep.
I woke a few hours later, the clock said 3:17 a.m., covered in sweat and heart thundering and one thought in my mind: I attempted suicide tonight.
I sat bolt upright, shaking. Phuong made sleepy noises and stroked my back, felt the shivering there, woke up. “You all right, babe?”
“No,” I said. “Yes. Shit. Sorry. Bad dream. Let’s sleep.”
She pulled me to her and we wrapped our arms around each other and she was all I could feel and all I could smell and I kissed her scalp through her hair and she was all I could taste and I fell back asleep.