Chapter 134

“A metric fuckton of dumb so epically mind-destroyingly beyond a bad idea that there’s not a chance they would go there.”
—Andrea K. Höst, Lab Rat One

2 JANUARY 2021

I remember the beginning of wars. Not Vietnam so much. That war was never declared and just slipped up on us a little at a time. We’ve got some advisors there. We’re sending in troops to protect American interests. We’re propping up the regime of an American ally. Before we knew it, we had soldiers serving and dying in a foreign land most of us knew nothing about.

Then, January 17, 1991 we not only had an announcement that Operation Desert Storm was commencing, we had a live news broadcast as Peter Arnett gave a bomb by bomb report on the attack on Baghdad. October 7, 2001, President Bush announced that bombing and invasion of Afghanistan had begun. On March 19, 2003, he announced that we were invading Iraq on the grounds of finding their weapons of mass destruction. No one knows if or when those conflicts ended. But we knew when they began.

We aren’t sure about Mexico.

We don’t know if a war just started or if a stupid kid just blew himself up. We don’t know if we should go to school Monday or to Canada. Only from what I hear, Americans aren’t all that welcome in Canada either. There’s been no news conference with the president saying what’s going on. Like usual, he tweets, making sure the country is on his side before he does anything. Nearly every tweet, whether it’s about the border crisis, the condition of the kid, the international scene, or the upcoming inauguration includes the words ‘very bad.’

US News agencies who finally got the facts instead of the press release started broadcasting a report similar to what we heard on Global yesterday. Mexico was not at fault and the kid should not have been where he was. Another news station continued to decry the malicious attack on an innocent American and claimed it was being covered up with fake news.

And here we are—just people—caught up in the same shit as always. Only this time there are close to eight million non-combatant teens in National Service who are still under the same regulations as our million-and-a-half military personnel. And young or old, none of us wants to go to war.

Life goes on. I promised Desi and her parents that I’d work PopCon Saturday and Sunday. The Whitcombs were about as antiwar as you could get. They were the GenX of the hippie culture. They made quick adjustments to our costumes that were pretty cool. My Black Butler costume was now all black, including shirt and gloves. Desi’s Madam Red was replaced by an all-black version that she unsurprisingly had hanging in her closet. Costumes didn’t have to be literal characters. Just having a costume was adequate enough. We drew crowds of picture takers and sent tons of people to the booth to buy ‘black resistance’ costumes.

I stayed with Desi in the hotel downtown Saturday night. Desi is not the kind of person I’d characterize as needy so it was a surprise how clingy and dependent she was Saturday. I didn’t really blame her. We were born in 2004. First and second Gulf Wars were before we were born. We’d never seen the Twin Towers in New York and the devastation of 9/11. The wars we heard about were on the other side of the world. But this was fucking Mexico. It was right there on our border. No one knew how to handle the threat or the hype.

We made love and I held her. I answered her repeated question, ‘Do you love me?’ with assurances that I did. I cradled her in my arms as she shook through her orgasm and into tears.

And Sunday, we put on our costumes and our masks and paraded around the convention center as our own version of Black Butler and Madam Black.

We had the first major snow of the season Sunday night, so, of course, my plan to go out and run Monday morning was ruined. It was cold and icy and I didn’t feel like slipping and injuring myself. Livy and Nanette agreed. We ended up at Nan’s house, not even making love but just sitting with coffee and the news as we cuddled.

I talked to Emily and she said she was driving a livestock truck and hated it. Her job this week was picking up cattle in Kansas and delivering them to the Rio Grande Valley. We tried to figure out why they suddenly needed so many cattle in West Texas and speculated that someone came up with the idea of driving them through the Mexican minefield. Then we sat looking at each other on Skype, shaking our heads and saying, ‘No. They wouldn’t.’ Neither of us have faith that they wouldn’t, though.

I tried to settle myself down by playing the guitar for a while, but I just couldn’t focus on it. Instead, I went outside and flew my quadcopter around the neighborhood, snapping photos of anything that crossed the camera’s view. A car skidding sideways as it accelerated from the stop sign. A squirrel on a snowy branch scolding the drone. Two little kids throwing snowballs at each other. Things that made the world look normal.

We learned something on Tuesday when we got back to school: Don’t trust someone wearing colorful clothing. Well over half the student body was wearing black, the symbol of resistance we’d adopted before the Winter Dance. There were a lot of hand painted posters, hastily tacked up on walls and lockers with the most popular slogans of ‘Repeal 28’ and ‘End the Emergency.’

But that left nearly half the students not wearing black. It was no big deal to me, or to any of the others I talked to. No one sent out a command saying everyone had to wear black. There were a lot of kids at our school who didn’t have many options as to what they wore. I was lucky I’d chosen black jeans when we went shopping this fall. A lot of kids were in blue.

The semester was starting kind of slow for me. The only change in my schedule was having creative writing instead of expository writing. One of my classmates—I’m happy to say I wasn’t the wiseass—asked if creative writing meant we were going to be writing news stories for the local television station.

Ms. Faber suggested that creative writing and fiction writing were not synonymous and perhaps he should switch to journalism. We all had a good laugh and it looked like she’d be a good teacher. It got us off on a discussion about what kinds of things were included in creative writing. I thought it would be fiction but Ms. Faber explained that creative writing was typically anything that lay outside the realm of professional, academic, technical, and journalistic writing.

“That seems to be the world of fiction,” I speculated. “I can’t think of anything else outside that realm.”

“You’re just not opening yourself to it,” she laughed. “Do you think of poetry as fiction? One might express philosophy, art, observation, all as creative poetry. Do you go to church, Mr. Hopkins?” I admitted I wasn’t a regular attendee but I did go. “And in the minister’s sermon, was he in the realm of professional, academic, technical, or journalistic writing? Or was he creatively shaping words and using rhetoric to get a point across. Theater. Do we call Shakespeare fiction? Yet it is assuredly creative writing. Yes, short stories and novels are fiction and are certainly creative writing. But well-formed essays, opinion, and rhetoric are all creative writing as well. Our emphasis will be on narrative craft, character development, and literary tropes as you both read and write creatively.”

I was thinking about her introduction as I made my way to my last class of the day, chemistry, when I was slammed up against a locker by two guys in Hawaiian shirts.

“You anti-American losers will all hang if we let you live long enough. Support the president! Invade Mexico!” they shouted at me and walked away. Apparently, wearing black had marked me as an un-American rebel. I didn’t like the fact that people were wandering around randomly attacking others because of the color of their clothing.

Through the rest of the week, there were more assaults. Not serious enough to raise the eyes of the administration. Bumps in the hallway and low curses for the anti-Americans. Posters started showing up in the halls that said, ‘Nuke the Spics,’ and ‘No Inauguration.’ On the other side, I saw posters that said, ‘Supporting the Constitution is NOT un-American!’ and ‘We elected a new president.’

I think it would have escalated out of control if it weren’t for what was happening on the international scene. The UN Security Council condemned the United States for aggravating border conflicts and threatening a sovereign nation. The US, of course, couldn’t respond. When the UN had quietly abandoned its New York headquarters two years ago—when I was still confused about the differences between this reality and the one V1 insisted on remembering—and moved to Kenya, the US had withdrawn its ambassador. Reports had come in revealing new trade agreements between the European Union and Mexico and between China and Mexico. Mexico was shipping its winter produce at a rate never seen before but it wasn’t coming to the US.

And there were no migrant workers in the fields of California and Arizona and Texas. In response to the impending food crisis, the National Service Corps was moved in to work in the fields. Beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, celery, grapefruit, kale, lettuce, spinach, and strawberries needed to either be brought in or rot in the fields. And without Mexican produce in the supermarkets, it was more urgent than ever to stock the shelves with food we grew in-country. Nearly two million migrant agricultural workers had left the country in the past six months and no new ones had arrived.

On January 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the long-awaited and much dreaded executive order was issued that the inauguration of the new president would be delayed until the national emergency had ended. The opposition was ready and waiting. President Elect Evelyn di Marco filed suit and it flew through the courts. The Supreme Court struck down the executive order as unconstitutional. Both houses of Congress met in emergency session and passed a bill ending the national emergency. It had the two-thirds majority needed to override any veto.