chapter 11
free as air
I woke up choking, laboring to breathe. I opened my eyes and the room was hazy. I sprang out of bed and ran to the back door, putting my hand on it to confirm it was cool before opening it. The smoke outside was much thicker. I closed the door, closed the windows, put a dirty pair of jeans at the base of the door, and grabbed my screen, which was plastered in wildfire warnings. The San Fernando hills were burning, Angeles National Forest was burning, and there were burns in Griffith Park.
I pulled on boxers and a tee and ran around the house slamming windows shut, stuffing towels beneath the doors, and taping plastic around the windowsills. Phuong caught up with me and I told her where the thermostat was and got her to switch it over to recirculation and close the intakes, and hit my USN95 mask stash, knocking on my houseguests’ doors and making sure everyone was equipped, telling them to talk to any friends who were sleeping in the parks and inviting them to come shelter with us.
Our screens were already filling up with details about emergency shelters in libraries and schools, warning us to stay indoors and avoid exercise, telling us schools and nonessential businesses were all shutting until the fires were under control or the winds shifted. There were pics of the tennis courts and the pool on Verdugo, the former under a carpet of ash, the latter stained tea-black by settling ash as lifeguard kids in masks struggled to get a big weighted bubble-wrap blanket over it.
“Fuuuuuuck,” I said, as we gathered in my skeletal, ruined kitchen for coffee and toast. The house air was better now, though my little air-quality meter was still warning us all to wear our masks if we could to spare our fragile pink lungs.
We all doomscrolled and ate our toast. Dolores, one of my houseguests, gasped and shared her screen, and we all looked at ours. It was a screengrab from a neighborhood social channel, a Burbank-filtered version of a militia-centric federation that Gramps was always forwarding me messages from.
I could see why Dolores was worried. On the one hand, it was your basic unhinged racist Maga stuff, but on the other hand, it was highly specific about the fires:
> gnds know that a fire will keep the population pliable, which is why we get so much arson. means they can force majeur us out of our houses, build refugee slums, round us up and ship us out, make us into refugees too
That was the most polite version of it. There was lots more, stuff that didn’t hide behind polite terms. Racial slurs, in combination with “eco-fascist,” “eco-terrorist,” “invaders,” and then, the calls to rise up.
That’s where it got really ugly: these elaborate fantasies about “wiping out the roaches,” and “destroying the nest,” and I was just thinking Shit this is straight out of Those Who Tread the Kine when I came on a post that was just a huge pastedump from the apocalyptic final chapter, this giant orgy of violence that my eyes had kind of skated over when I’d read the book. It had been three or four in the morning by then and I’d been more concerned with just getting to the end and finding out how the hero emerged victorious and getting my head down on my pillow than on the gory violence, but … wow.
Just wow. I felt embarrassed for not having paid more attention to it at first, and then grossed out by the incredible detailed violence, descriptions of flesh ripped by bullets and explosives, of knives slitting throats, of skulls caving in under heavy clubs, narrated with detail and relish.
And then, reading it over again, I got scared. I was staring into the raw id of the Magas, the things they didn’t even say aloud when they were hanging out with Gramps and talking shit—things so dark they had to write them down. This was what they thought: we were headed for a war, and when it arrived, they wanted to fill the streets with our blood. They wanted a war, because that would give them the excuse to do it.
I could see Dolores and Phuong and the others getting antsy, too. I looked around the taped kitchen windows and beyond to the orange sky and gray air of the outside world. “Anyone mind if I close the blinds?” I asked, and when no one answered, I closed them. Then we all went around the house and closed all the rest.
* * *
We were trapped indoors along with the rest of the city, with nothing to do but hang out on social and keep refreshing for status updates on the fires. At least they were moving away from us. The big rains the previous spring and the long, hot dry summer had led to an explosion of underbrush that had then all died and dried out, creating a bumper crop of fuel. There had been some controlled burns in Angeles National Forest over the past few years, but it was just getting started and everyone who understood fire remediation said it would take a decade of serious burning before they could create the “checkerboard” of burned and unburned sections that would prevent wildfires from spreading. In the meantime, there was lightning, careless campers, the old PG&E power lines that were slowly but surely being replaced, and, just maybe (?), arsonists.
I had enough USN95s for each of us to have four. With careful washing and air-drying, we could swap them out every six hours. Luckily there were tons of leftover food from the party, enough for all of us to eat for a couple of days without braving the smoke. Every now and again we’d pull back the blinds and look at the ash coating every surface: trees, lawns, the cacti and desert grass in my front yard. The few taxis and emergency vehicles that went by ran their wipers, clearing away the ash that sifted relentlessly out of the sky.
The forecast was improving by bedtime, with the firefighters making tentatively optimistic projections about the winds and the progress of the fires, but I woke in the morning with streaming eyes and a sore, dry throat and after I chugged water out of the tap I looked at my screen and confirmed that the winds had shifted in the night all right—toward us. And the fire crews had been caught flat-footed when the winds shifted and lost ground. A second fire had followed the shifts and merged with the first one, creating a front that was gobbling its way toward us. The hill fires were nearly out, but there was so much smoke coming off the Angeles fire that it didn’t matter.
I got out the ladder and climbed up into the attic crawlspace and changed the HVAC filters, taking hits off canned air and noting with a grimace all the places where light shone through cracks in the roof, letting in the smoke. No wonder the house was such a gas chamber.
Breakfast was leftovers in the kitchen with Dolores and the rest of the houseguests, a glum meal where everything tasted like ashes and smoke. Phuong made a halfhearted joke about bottling some of it for Don and Miguel’s next peaty whiskey and we all chuckled dutifully. The houseguests finished up and went back to their rooms to lie down and breathe through wet face cloths, and Phuong and I were left on our own.
“I hate this place,” I said.
“Burbank?” Phuong sounded surprised.
“No, this house. I mean, fuck this place, seriously. I am so sick of it.” I told her about the roof. “We’ll have to take down all the solar to fix the roof. That’s a twenty-five-year investment. I’ll be in my forties by the time it’s time to replace it again.”
“God, it’s weird hearing you talk like that.”
“What?”
“I sometimes forget that you are a nineteen-year-old who owns his own house in Magnolia Park. That is some seriously weird shit.”
“It is,” I said. “I hate it. I mean, I know I’m incredibly lucky, but that’s why I hate it. I don’t deserve this place, any more than Dolores deserves to be a refu. It’s just pure, dumb luck.”
“Well, you were owed some good luck, after what happened to your parents and all.”
“There’re plenty of orphans out there, most of them didn’t get multimillion-dollar houses.”
“Multimillion. I guess I knew that but man, it’s weird.”
“I hate it.”
“You said that,” she said. “Well … What about giving it away?”
“I tried that. Back when the city was looking for sites for infill. That’s why I was at the meeting where I met you, at the library!”
“So that’s why you were there,” she said.
“Best public meeting I ever attended,” I said. “Anyway, then the city found enough empty lots to start building on and I got on a build crew and was taking people in here and fighting with those Maga psychos and I just kind of lost sight of it. Maybe I can do it now—just give the place to Ana Lucía and tell her to put as many of her gang in as will fit, for as long as they want. Like a permanent People’s Airbnb. I’ll sign over the deed and walk away.”
“And do what?”
I shrugged. “Get on the Housing Guarantee list. Do Jobs Guarantee work. Join the Blue Helmets and see the world.”
“You’d make a great Blue Helmet,” she said, squeezing the back of my neck and pulling my face toward hers to touch foreheads. I loved how she smelled, especially her hair, and I was suddenly and utterly horny. She must have sensed it, because she gave me a smoky look and then said, “Easy, tiger. No heavy breathing in this air.” Our masks rasped against each other. I got myself under control.
“I hate this,” I said, snapping my mask against my face.
She shrugged. “It’s a lockdown. Can’t do anything about ’em.” She lifted her mask to drink some coffee, seated it again.
“Not just the lockdown, though. It’s the lockdown and the shutdown. If I knew that once the smoke cleared we’d be heading out to do something positive, then yeah, I could just hunker down and read a book—” She poked me in the ribs. “Ow. Or roll around with you while keeping our breathing slow and regular. But I just feel helpless here, like we’re just going to go from one kind of lockdown to another.”
“I hear you, but it’s not over. It’s just getting started. Once the fires clear we’ll have that city meeting, remember? We can talk them into just steamrollering over those Maga fucks and getting us back on the job. I know it’s frustrating but you’ve got to pace yourself, Brooks. This is a marathon. This is just the first wave of refugees that’re headed this way. There will be so many more. Just these fires, I mean, they’re talking about evacuating La Cañada and Flintridge already. Things get bad enough, they could lose a big chunk of the city, and I bet a bunch of those people would head this way. It’s like when Miami went—one neighborhood at a time, then the Keys and some of the smaller towns up the coast, and then the whole city, bam.
“This crisis is just the dry run for all the crises we’re gonna have. These guys’ll all croak soon enough but their ideas will live on. There’s big money being spent on it.”
I smiled, recalling a treasured memory. “I’ll never forget what you told me at the Ethiopian place on our first date, about the people in London you’d meet—”
“These people aren’t gonna dig a hole and pull the dirt in on top of themselves. Yeah, that’s a thing I say a lot. Also, it’s an Eritrean restaurant.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right. So here’s the deal, Brooks, the thing you’ll figure out if you ever do become a Blue Helmet: this isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. Things are gonna get so much worse in the years to come. More fires. More floods. More trauma, and that means more of this shit, people lashing out, looking for someone else to blame because they can’t punch their ancestors in the face for failing to act a hundred years ago.”
“Is this supposed to make me feel better? Because it’s not working.”
“It should make you feel better, Brooks, because you’re getting to play the easy levels before you get to the boss levels. Believe it or not, this is the low-stakes version. The fires are miles away, not right here. The militias are blowing shit up and planning war, but we still have a government that is invested in preventing them from marching us into the sea. All that stuff is in the future, and some of it may never happen, depending on how well we do here on the training missions.
“There’s some stuff we can’t change. The heat we’ve sunk into the ocean? It’s gonna melt the ice caps. No one’s gonna repeal the second law of thermodynamics. Habitat loss is going to keep pushing animals into new territories where they have no predators—and where no one has any resistance to the diseases they carry. All of that is going to happen, the same way they used to get bad blizzards up north every couple of years. Those blizzards were brutal, but they weren’t fixable—instead, you had to fix the people who lived through them. Good insulation. Backup power. A plan to shut down schools and offices when the plows couldn’t get through the streets.
“That’s what this is—a fire and a militia uprising and a coordinated courtroom fuckery campaign against the people trying to fix it all. It’s a blizzard. You don’t fix blizzards, you figure out how to cohabitate with them. This is our chance, here in the easy levels, our chance to try out all kinds of tactics for coping with them.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “You learned all that as a Blue Helmet?”
“Learned, figured out, got taught. Yeah. It’s a weird gig, because half the time you’re so busy you can’t think, and a quarter of the time, you’re just exhausted and basking in the feeling that you’ve personally made an actual difference in the world, and the other quarter of the time, you’re totally convinced that you’ll never make enough of a difference to make any difference at all.”
“Shit,” I said. “Does that feeling ever go away?”
“Yes. No. Maybe? I mean we’re literally on fire here and I’m comforting myself that maybe we can win this tiny little zoning battle and put up a couple of buildings and that maybe that will snowball into bigger, bolder things. Like, I’m dreaming of the promised land that we’ll reach if we live a pure enough life where we are brave and eternal soldiers for the righteous cause.”
“It’s pretty hard being the first generation in a century not to fear—”
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m finally starting to feel better.”
“Really?”
“No. Yes. Maybe?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You’re a goddess.”
“Shut up,” she said, but she led me into my bedroom. We kept our masks on. It was both literally and figuratively steamy.
* * *
“I can hear the hamsters running behind your eyeballs from over here. What are you thinking, boy?”
I looked away from the ceiling, which, I realized, I’d been staring at hard enough to bore holes into.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just trying to get hold of a thought.” It had been eluding me ever since we’d rolled onto our respective sides of the bed to pant away at our masks and let the sweat dry on our bodies. Just a thought that was riiight … there. “So,” I said.
“Uh-oh.”
“Shh. So. This is a practice level, and it only gets harder from here.”
“In some ways.”
“Right, in some ways. In other ways, if we win a decisive victory here, it carries over to the rest of our lives.”
“You mean, if we beat the militia.”
“If we break them. Show them that the harder they push, the more they lose. If we demoralize them, sap them of their will.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“It’s from Those Who Tread the Kine.”
“Jesus, seriously?”
“Seriously,” I said. “It’s how they think so it’s what they’ll think. When they try to imagine what it’ll take to beat us, they imagine that they are us and they imagine what it would take to get us to dig a hole and pull the dirt in after ourselves.”
“Plagiarist.” She gave my stomach a light, stinging slap. It fluttered in response.
“Amateurs plagiarize—”
“—artists steal. Do go on, Mr. Palazzo.”
“They’re showing us how to beat them, you get it? Like it’s idiotic what they’re doing to us because you and I know that the climate emergency’s not going to let up, so no matter how beaten we are, there’s always going to be a reason for us to fight some more, because it doesn’t matter how pissed off you are, when your house is on fire, you gotta figure out how to put it out.
“They’ll never beat us by stopping us from building emergency housing because next year we’ll need twice as much emergency housing. We aren’t digging holes and pulling the dirt in after us, and neither are all the people who are gonna lose their homes—their whole towns—in those fires out there.” I pointed out the window. The sky was more yellow than orange now and I could see the outlines of the trees in my backyard, which was a serious improvement over just a couple of hours before. Maybe things were getting better. Maybe not.
“But they don’t understand that. They just know what would demoralize them, what would make them stand down: being boxed in, having a one-two punch of being legally outgunned and having everything you care about in total chaos thanks to direct action. If we want to beat them, that’s what we need to do.”
“You want to blow up City Hall?”
“No,” I said. “I want to blow up this house.”
* * *
Not literally, of course. But knocking down a house and building an eightplex is a solved problem, as they say on the DSA socials. It takes a lot of heavy equipment and prefab slabs and a lot of people, especially if you’re in a hurry. But with every project in limbo, we had all the materials and equipment we needed standing by and most of it was in depots that were managed by friends and friends-of-friends, and there were also lots of friends and friends-of-friends standing by with nothing to do and a lot of pent-up nervous energy.
“You’re seriously serious?” Phuong asked me.
“Once again, yes. Seriously, seriously serious. What are they gonna do, fine me? Fine, I’ll be broke, except for the building. I’ll go bankrupt, they’ll seize the building and then it’ll be public housing. Why the hell not? I’m nineteen years old and I own a house. It’s stupid. Burbank is stupid. We’ve got all this space, all this misallocated wealth, and there are so many people who need it, and we could oversee a nice, orderly transition, but no, we’re in this clusterfuck. Ana Lucía got the mayor to commit to debating overturning the order, and now I’m just gonna give them a nudge in the right direction.”
“And you wanna do this now? In the middle of the fires?”
“Definitely right now. The fires are perfect. Everyone’s locked inside, the cops are doing emergency service for old people having respiratory distress, the inspectors don’t want to leave their houses—”
“Okay, but what about us?”
“What about us?”
“How do we breathe?”
“Masks. Oxy, if we need it. Everyone’s got an emergency stash. We just put out a call, get what we can.”
“Brooks, people need their masks and O2 right now. There’s a fire emergency. That’s what the emergency stash is for.”
“People just need to make sure they’ve got a bit left over in case the fire lasts longer than expected. But you read the same stuff I did—there’s no way this’ll last more than a week.”
“Unless it does.”
“It won’t.”
“Now who’s in denial? Brooks, I’m not trying to yuck your yum here. I agree that this is an extremely fun fantasy to have, like a very specific version of our new-city fair, but you can’t make it happen with wishful thinking. If you’re going to do this, you need to be solid. You’re going to be asking people to stick their necks out for you. You can’t do that unless you’re sure you can succeed.”
I shot back, “Nothing’s sure.” I could feel that I was getting furious with her, that arguing-with-Gramps feeling of getting shit on from a great height. She must have seen it in my eyes, too.
“Hey,” she said, pulling back but putting her hand on my shoulder. “Hey. Look, let’s rewind. I love this idea, seriously. But I don’t want to fuck it up. It’s only tactically sound if it’s structurally sound. So let’s figure it out.”
I breathed and breathed. The air tasted like smoke and I couldn’t get my lungs full enough to calm down. She just waited it out. That waiting made the difference. Made me feel understood in a way I never felt understood. In a way that reminded me of my parents. “Jesus,” I said, once I was halfway back under my own control. “I’m sorry, Phuong. You’re right. I just got overexcited and then everything got all … triggery. It was just a crazy idea. Let’s go figure out what’s for lunch.”
“Dude, are you kidding me? It’s a great idea. We just don’t know if it’s a practical idea. Look, we’re locked in here for days at least, and we’re gonna run out of board games and movies to stream and my Spanish isn’t good enough to play charades with Dolores and Camila and Santiago. What the hell else are we gonna do?”
I grinned behind my mask and then kissed her cheek through it. She yanked it down and then mine and we did some serious, smoky smooching. “Whew,” she said. “You’re right, we should eat first. I’m hangry.”
* * *
The turning point came when we got an alert telling us that the winds had shifted again and the firefighters were withdrawing back to the next valley to clear a break while the bombers worked the fire line.
“That’s it,” Phuong said. “Minimum five more days before they get this under control, barring a miracle. There’s another outbreak in San Diego, which is going to split the force. We’ve got all the time in the world, my friend.” She skipped from foot to foot and I laughed so hard I snorted.
“We’re really doing this?”
“We’re really doing this.”
We’d told Dolores and company what we were thinking of over lunch and asked them what they thought. We made sure they understood that they had a veto over this, because we weren’t about to turn them out into the smoke while we did our weird-ass shit. They were completely cool about it, though, excited once we’d conveyed what we had in mind and wanting to help out. They found friends who talked their host families into letting them double up, and pored over the floor plans for the new building, talking about how they’d furnish their places. Antonio was a finish carpenter and pulled up pictures of some of the kitchen remodels he’d done and we all noodled around with superimposing them on the renders of the interiors.
Phuong, meanwhile, had been exchanging disappearing/deniable messages with friends around the DSA, which led her to Tony Yiannopoulos, who found us a mole inside the Department of Public Works—a former shop steward who got promoted to management but never switched sides. After a couple of texts, she jumped on video and did this mind-meld thing with Phuong, ingesting her project manifest and locating available equipment at DPW lots all around the city. There was a lot of idle gear in town, thanks to the double whammy of the fires and the moratorium on emergency house construction—the city had requisitioned a lot of extra equipment from the county when the caravan first started heading our way.
I was supposed to be finding us air—oxygen tanks, masks, goggles, ruggedized bunny suits, whatever would let us do taxing physical labor in smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face at times. I struck out, of course. All that stuff was in heavy demand, because, duh, there was a fire on and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
But then Milena returned my call and got that twinkle in her eye when I told her what we were planning, and she told me to leave it with her. An hour later, she beeped me while I was having yet another useless call with a podmate from the DSA and I switched calls to catch her dancing from foot to foot and announcing that she’d found a stash of forty full suits of smoke gear in a DSA stockpile for delivering meals during crises.
“Don’t we need to deliver meals during this crisis?” I asked.
“The forty are leftovers. They’ve got like thirty people out there in full gear. Someone ordered way too many of these things. How many do you need?”
* * *
I got up at five the next morning and started packing. Phuong’s housemates had agreed to let me store as many boxes as would fit in their living room, but as I went from room to room, looking at the things Gramps and his father had accumulated, the things my father had left behind when he went to Canada, the relics of my nineteen years on Earth and eleven years in Burbank, I found very little I wanted to keep: Gramps had thrown out Dad’s baby clothes when Gramma died and there wasn’t anyone around to insist that he keep them. Gramps’s books were shit. The art was terrible. There were family photos; I kept those and put them in a box to donate to the Burbank archives—they’d scan them and I could access them whenever I wanted them, and I wouldn’t have to pay to store them or back them up. The Magas had smashed Gramps’s family china. By 7:30 a.m. I’d come to the realization that I had lived nineteen years and accumulated virtually nothing worth keeping. It gave me mixed feelings: On the one hand, I was an orphan with nothing of personal value in the world. On the other hand, I was a democratic socialist who could check any tool, table, appliance, or vehicle out of the public library, a citizen of the twenty-first century who could access every book ever published and every song ever recorded with a few taps on a screen; a member of my community who could find a bed to sleep in and a change of clothes just as easily as I could call up those books and songs and paintings.
I was free. If Burbank caught fire and burned to the ground, I could go anywhere and start over, so long as there was a library, solar panels, and good people. The world was on fire, and the fires would burn every year for many years to come. This might be the best year for wildfires we’d have for the rest of my life. When things weren’t on fire, we’d be harrowed by plagues, scoured by storms, flooded and droughted.
And yet … And yet. I had arrived at a place of circulating abundance amid all of that tragedy and terror. Wherever I was, I could be happy, fed, surrounded by good people and hard work.
I was so ready to tear down my fucking house.
* * *
Phuong touched my shoulder as we stood before the gates of the DPW storage yard. “Babe, are you okay? We don’t have to do this, you know.” The others around us, lost in the smoke, murmured their agreement.
I was confused for a moment, then I realized that Phuong couldn’t see my face because of my breather mask. I undid one of the clips and flipped it up, holding my breath, letting her get a look at my massive, uncontrollable grin, then flipped it back, blew out the air and the smoke, and went back to breathing.
I rattled the gate and shouted, “Who brought the bolt cutters?”
A figure loomed out of the smoke on the other side of the gate, bulky and shambling in a grayish, worn hazmat suit. “Don’t you cut my goddamned gate, child, or I’ll make you whittle a replacement.” The voice, muffled by the mask, was gravely and gruff, but affectionate. “You Brooks?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“You know how to drive a forklift?”
I shrugged. “Just a little I picked up on jobsites.”
“Uh-huh. How about a crane? Backhoe? Excavator? Boring machine?”
“Nope,” I said. “But they do.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the gang we’d organized over the DSA socials. There were fifteen of us, and with current certifications for all those and more.
“How about a tractor cab?”
“Uh,” I said.
He snorted. “Trick question, boy. Thing drives itself. It’s got fifteen hundred prefab slabs on it and all the electric and plumbing fittings on your bill of materials.”
“Bruce,” I said, “this is just amazing.”
Bruce—the big guy in the dirty suit—just shrugged. “Look, it’s all just sitting here, collecting ash. It’s been beached since those assholes sued to stop all the city projects. I got stuff piled up under tarps in the goods yard because we’re out of outdoor storage. Just don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”
“No problem,” I said. “We’ll get so much more cred if people think we hacked the locks and swiped all this stuff. Having an insider hand us the stuff is pretty small-time.”
He snorted again. “Be careful with this shit. Those panels are light, but jobsites are a good way to lose a limb if you space out. All this smoke won’t help, either.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. The DSA crew chuckled.
He punched me in the shoulder, but softly, and his next words were gentle. “Seriously, son, go slow, observe safety protocols, and then observe ’em again. You build this house in the smoke before anyone catches you and you’ll be a hero. You maim or kill someone trying to do it? You’ll be an asshole, and the whole project will look bad because of it. You got that?”
Phuong put her hand on his big shoulder. “We hear you, Bruce. I’ve bossed bigger projects like this with the Blue Helmets. I know what happens if you get lazy. We are one hundred percent committed to being heroes here.”
“Not assholes,” Bruce said.
“Definitely not assholes.” Phuong released his shoulder and put her hand to her heart.
“Not assholes!” I called, and the DSA crew echoed it back.
“Not assholes,” Bruce said, and got us set up on the gear.
* * *