The Subprimes (26 page)

“Inside the machine is a man,” he said, “a man who breathes air and bleeds blood, just like us.”

Ronin liked the sound of this speech, which Tom was patching together from pep talks delivered in old movies.

“He feels pain, just as we do. He feels fear, just as we do.”

“He has to take a crap sometimes,” Ronin said, giggling, “just like we do!”

Both boys started laughing, and they crawled back down the mound toward the houses at the edge of Valence. Their fathers, who had already vowed nonviolent resistance, planned to lay down on the off-ramp into Valence before the tracks of the enemy. The boys found such passive resistance unacceptable to their testosterone-driven sensibilities. These were young men, just noticing their first sprigs of pubic hair, their first ejaculations, their first distorted sense of how to be a man.

I SWEEP THE FLOOR OF
the ranch house, the broom's soft yellow whisks pushing dust out the open cavity where a sliding window was supposed to hang, so that the motes puff out and up into a brown curl. Gemma is preparing for her daily run, pulling on yellowed sneakers, wrapping a bandana over her sunburned forehead. She is beautiful, my Gemma, and I wonder: If she weren't here, would I still be bivouacked in this utopian work camp? I can't answer that, of course, but I do know that Valence is a wonderful place to be in love. We are surrounded by good, sweet people, all of whom are engaged in a great struggle, so every action feels meaningful. Our love, set against the backdrop of a town under siege, the high drama of it all would bring out the romantic in the most cynical.

These are, I believe, the happiest days of my life, the mornings spent toiling in the fields, the afternoons spent writing about Sargam and Valence, the evenings with Gemma, with Franny
and Ginny and Ronin and Jinx; we are like a postapocalyptic Brady Bunch, filthy instead of squeaky clean, our ranch house missing doors, fixtures, and windows, adrift in an abandoned exurbia, but we are happy.

“We're like a family,” Jinx says as she attempts to untangle her hair before the cracked mirror we've set up on the kitchen counter. She says this absentmindedly, not considering the weight of the statement.

But Gemma and I are both feeling the same thing, great joy and hope in this moment.

We
are
a family.

THE RUMBLE WAKES US BEFORE
dawn. I climb out of my sleeping bag, straighten myself, and check the bedroom only to find Ronin already gone. The girls are all up and rubbing their eyes.

“Is it an earthquake?” Franny asks.

I shepherd the three of them into the living room. They huddle next to Gemma as I pull on my shoes and pants.

“Take them to Sargam's house,” I tell her. The fallow fields behind it have been designated as the meeting place, relatively sheltered behind two rows of ranch houses. “I'll be up at the off-ramp.”

“Is this it?” Gemma asks, gathering the girls' clothes and shoes.

“I don't know. I need to find Ronin.”

I slip on a hooded sweatshirt, leaving Gemma the big flashlight, and set off down Temecula toward the off-ramp. Other men and women are marching along the street, their beams of light bouncing over the pavement. The ground still shakes, the grumbling growing nearer, and in the distance, toward the eastern horizon, there is a halogen-white light like an artificial dawn, so bright it emits a kind of heat, toward which we walk. A
woman begins singing, softly at first, as if she is singing to herself. I can't hear the words or tune clearly, but then she is joined by a few other voices, first the women and then the men, and then dozens of us, tentatively joining and then raising our voices.

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn't say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.

 

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

 

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Our voices strengthen when we are joined by more fellow citizens, from each of Valence's streets and cul-de-sacs, the chorus rising and the cheers mounting so that we don't hear the grumble or the growl of the machines or the vehicles, just the song. And now there are reporters with video cameras trained on us, and news drones scanning us from above, and we link arms, brother and brother and sister and sister, a human chain a dozen wide across the road, marching toward the off-ramp, where we see Sargam standing in white, backlit by the headlights of oncoming security vehicles. The governor, apparently, has acquiesced to Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters and ordered the forcible removal of all who oppose the measure to vacate. The security
techs and police are coming, their vehicles stretched out for two miles along the expressway. And behind them, clamorously rolling toward Valence, the beastly Joshua.

We are told to take our places on the off-ramp, arms linked, to block the security techs who will attempt to remove us. The plastic cuffs come out, the men and women fasten themselves to one another, and at the end of each row to the guardrails. We are a human wall, seated on the concrete, heads bowed, a phalanx of scruffy, dirty humanity. Still uncuffed, I break off from the human chain, believing somehow that I am supposed to be covering this, despite not having had a charged cell phone or computer for weeks. My communications with my editor, even my pretense that I am here doing a job, has given way. I am reduced to scribbling notes in longhand: my impressions of what I am seeing here, my hurried notations of Sargam's utterances and sayings, my recollections of my feelings and anxieties about what we are doing here.

Sargam takes her place before her fellow citizens and we wait.

THE NOTICE OF ORDER TO
vacate is read out by a Kevlar-helmeted officer in a black uniform and black leather boots. He reads the statement, issued by the governor of Nevada by the powers vested in him, in a disinterested monotone, head bowed in the dozens of lights trained on him. He appears almost sympathetic in the stark light, facing this crowd of seated, chained men and women. But just beyond the luminescent cones stand a few hundred armed, helmeted, riot-geared, baton-wielding techs and cops, awaiting orders to go in and bust heads.

“Will you accede to this request to vacate?” the officer, still reading, asks.

Sargam stands. “We believe that we have established the right
to this land, as we made it our home when no one else wanted it. We grew our food here. We built schools here. Free schools. Without vouchers. We are families, men and women and children—you call us subprimes—and we want nothing more than to be left in peace. We do not want to fight—we only ask of the government to be treated as all people should be treated. If this cannot be our home, then let us have a home. Let us be free people, free to travel, free to stop, free to work—”

The officer interrupts her. “So you refuse to vacate?”

“We refuse to be treated as subprimes,” Sargam says. “We are free people. If the government—if the governor—truly serves the people, then he will serve ALL the people, no matter their credit scores. We are all Americans, and we will not be judged on the basis of past credit history.”

“Occupants refuse to vacate,” the officer drones, then walks back to his colleagues and confers with another officer, the two of them gesturing toward the praetorians amassed on the shoulders of the expressway.

The citizens of Valence are seated, arm in arm, ten deep along the off-ramp and in clusters stretching down Bienvenida and into Valence. Men and women are also gathered at key points around the fringes of the community, near the farms, the water pump, the fields, where the children are also gathered.

The officer orders the uniformed columns forward, in a measure intended to intimidate the citizens. The citizens sit and begin singing again.

I stand to the side, resisting the temptation to join Sargam and take up position with the citizens. I need to find my son.

RONIN AND TOM SLIPPED OUT
of town, following the culverts they knew so well, and then crawled over the more exposed patch
of desert between Valence and the enemy lines. The cops and techs were on the move, clogging the highway into Valence, fortifying themselves on doughnuts and breakfast burritos and coffee for the invasion ahead. The boys lost count at eighty-five black vehicles, their red taillights a blinking line on the highway, the idling vehicles emitting exhaust stench that carried over the desert to where the boys snaked. They were slipping behind enemy lines, as the Gorillas had been preparing to do. Only Ronin and Tom turned out to have the courage to follow through on their plans, and even now, both were consumed by doubts about what they were doing and only barely resisting the urge to turn back.

Yet neither boy was willing to show his weakness to the other, so they both crawled on, elbows and knees in the dirt, under the still-dark sky. They stood when they assessed themselves to be out of sight, and then marched toward the vast shadowy hulk, which was so large it never seemed closer despite their progress.

The Joshua was being minded by its engineers and a security guard sitting in a resin chair facing a high-pressure misting fan. He looked at photos of auto rims on the tablet in his lap, dreaming of shining silver nineteen-inch wheels—while his actual thought was to earn enough money to pay the land lease under his trailer and to keep the air-conditioning on and afford the monthly fee at his kids' school. The Joshua was so large that its security seemed to hardly be an issue. How could anyone make off with something this large? Did anyone worry about the Rocky Mountains being stolen?

He dozed in his cool column of wind and did not notice two boys hunched low over the dirt, scampering across the scruffy flat, just fifty yards away.

The two lean boys looked up at the Leviathan, their first thoughts being how fucking awesome it was, the dream made real of every boy who ever constructed a tower from Legos or
blocks. But this beautiful and powerful creature was the mechanical embodiment of their enemy.

All this machinery, darkly gleaming in places, rough and matted in others, stretching up, up, up, failed to fill the boys with dread, evoking instead all the wonder and fear of a television powered down. This was nothing more than another machine in the OFF position, they reasoned, so why should they be frightened? They stood next to the tread, the gear wheels three times their height, the sweet smell of engine grease coating their nostrils.

“Let's roll,” Ronin said.

VANESSA GUIDED THE CHILDREN OUT
of the fields and toward the three houses that had been converted to classrooms. They were to wait out the siege inside, staying in the shade and near the wet rags and bottles of water stored there in case of tear gas or pepper spray. Some children trembled as they walked. They were used to rising early, with the sun, but not before dawn as they had today. The youngest ones held hands and the oldest tried to comfort them as they shuffled through the onion fields. Once again they were being asked to leave, as each of them had been doing for months and years, as soon as they made a friend. They had been hungry and wandering for so long, that these months in Valence had been a blessing. None of them wanted to go.

They were also mesmerized by Vanessa's stomach, which was now showing. Her posture had changed, her hips and thighs had spread, and now her midsection protruded with what the oldest told the youngest was a baby. Vanessa smiled at the murmurings of the kids, and put one hand over her stomach. The life ahead of her was unknowable, but she had a sense from her mother's warnings, and Sargam's stern, unheeded lectures, that she had complicated her journey, while what everyone around her wanted for
her was simplicity. But she wanted complication, wanted the burrs and protrusions that would catch as she fell through this world.

The children came up and touched her belly, asking her what she was going to name the baby. One remarked that she had seen a video of a cat giving birth to kittens and wondered if perhaps Vanessa would have a litter.

Vanessa said she and Atticus did not yet have a name; what she did not say was that her hope was to have her baby in Valence. Her mother, after resigning herself to becoming a grandmother and acknowledging there was no way to fix this situation, actually became excited by the prospect and said this was why they were fighting so hard to stay, so that families would have a place to live secure in the knowledge that their neighbors today would be their neighbors tomorrow.

Jeb and Atticus were gone to resist, and she did not know where her younger brother was, though many of his friends, that band who called themselves the Gorillas, were here. In each child she saw the future for her own unborn child and so now took extra care to make sure that each was tended to and protected and felt safe.

They were ushered into the schoolhouses and urged to sit cross-legged on the floor. Gemma made the rounds, trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she reassured them that they would be okay, and asked them if they wanted to sing a song. She began a full-throated “Jimmy Crack Corn,” but only a few of the children picked up the chorus, while most looked about uneasily in the dark classrooms.

A few children were crying, and Franny, Ginny, and Jinx attempted to soothe them. When they heard the first shouts, the massed voices, the screams of “NO! Oh my God, NO!” then a gunshot, all the children began shouting and crying, faces glistening even in the shadows, an awful wailing at the unknown.

P
ASTOR ROGER WAS ON THE
telephone with the governor, urging him to give the order to forcibly remove the trespassers. He reminded the governor of the impression it could make on television in the bright light of day. They had to act quickly, before the sun came up. Dottie Pepper herself called the governor's campaign director and read to him a printout of how much money the various Pepper Industry PACs had donated in the last election cycle, and reminded him that there were other candidates who had just as staunchly vowed to fight the progressive agenda, and who the Peppers could back in the next primary.

The governor, after taking five minutes to pretend to consider the matter, issued the order to his attorney general to start the eviction. The state of Nevada had long ago outsourced most of its law-enforcement needs to private security firms, retaining only those officers handing out enough traffic summonses or seizing
enough illicitly gained assets to justify their salary. Revenue-positive officers were always looking for new ways to boost their revenue scores, and this assignment—evicting the subprime commune in Valence—was not viewed as a likely high earner. Thus most of the work was being subcontracted to private security firms who brought in low-wage techs receiving the minimum of training in pepper-spray crowd dispersal and a quick course in safe firearm discharge. In reality, all you had to do to qualify as a security tech was have a credit score above 550 and a high school diploma, or pay $500 for a high school diploma equivalency waiver. The Peppers had their own security teams brought in, these being the most muscular and armored, the best trained, though sprinkled among these elite were boys who had never done more than watch over an Arby's parking lot.

While a neat and tidy removal and detention was one possible result of sending inexperienced security forces up against nonviolent resisters, a much more likely outcome was chaos, fear, panic, and then violence. Pastor Roger and the Pepper Sisters knew this, and the cover of darkness was necessary to keep any possible mayhem as obscured as possible. The governor, for his part, had made a career of believing his own boilerplate about private-sector solutions to everything: he was actually convinced that his $4.30-an-hour temp cops were every bit as good as the full-time police officers they replaced.

The Pepper Sisters and Pastor Roger retreated to the pastor's tour bus, where he led them in a fierce session of prayer and vigil and Scripture reading. Their fondest wish, as it was for all true Americans, would be for this ugly episode to end without violence, for the rule of law to prevail.

“We worked so hard to avoid this outcome,” said Dottie Pepper.

“God, we ask that you grant wisdom to all, to the progressive
terrorists and the takers as well as to the Christians and makers, and we seek your patience and counsel throughout,” said Dorrie Pepper.

“Now, now,” Pastor Roger said. “It's God's will.”

He bowed, reached for the Pepper Sisters' bony hands, and held them clasped against his own forehead. “Let this land, let all lands, be restored to their native and rightful state; unshackle the acres from regulators and squatters; get the enemies of your progress out of your way. We have walked so many miles together; nay, you have carried us so many miles—”

Pastor Roger sprung his usual leaks, tears streaming down his face, the carpet beneath him turning dark with his devotion. He cared so deeply about his flock, about his people, that he cried at the sacrifices that job creators such as the Pepper Sisters had to make in order to ensure that America remained prosperous and free.

IN THE DARK, THE SURGE
forward of the security techs and cops at first appeared as a shifting of the light and shadow, but to those seated on the off-ramp, the individual uniforms, and then the reflective helmets, coming forward were clearly an army on the march.

“Hold steady,” Sargam shouted. “Hold steady.”

The faces of the citizens of Valence contorted in grimaces of fear as they stared with opened mouths at the advancing army. At the sound of a whistle, they heard the massed exhaled grunts of the security techs moving forward, and then the sudden, crack of a gunshot. There were screams, shouts—“Oh no!”—and the first fast panic and fear, as some of those clasped together attempted to stand and to crab-leg away from the oncoming wall of black uniforms.

A police officer had shot a dog that had broken loose from where the community's animals had been penned in, and been deemed a threat.

Bailey turned her back to the invasion to address the people. “Stay calm, stay calm,” she said. “We have to stay together.” She held her hand over her heart as she was captured in a cone of light from a television news drone hovering overhead. “
We shall overcome
,” she began singing, and others joined in.

Some of the younger techs saw Bailey standing up, a heavy woman in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt reminding them of their own mothers. They stopped their advance, intentionally slowing, and fell to the back of the ranks. Only the most professional techs, those directly employed by Pepper Extraction, willingly took the van, unclasping their pepper-spray nozzles and readying their batons. Behind them, a trio of SUVs equipped with halogen spots strobed the area with bursts of light to enable the advancing techs to see their targets.

Sargam wished for a brisk breaking dawn. Their struggle had to be seen by the many millions, so that there might be some outcry, so that their attempt to hold their plot of earth would at least not be in vain. She put her head down, awaiting the harsh spray she knew was coming, and held firmly the hands of the man and woman next to her to give them her strength and her courage.

Then she stood up tall, raising both arms overhead, as if signaling a touchdown or acknowledging a standing ovation. With her white leather jacket swinging open, zippers gleaming, she effectively stopped the advance yards short of the line of resisters. The techs and cops momentarily paused, silent, while an urgent command “detain and arrest” was shouted repeatedly in their headsets. Still, they were unmoved. The familiar figure captured by dozens of news drones had momentarily delayed
the advance of those who, like everyone, were awed by fame and celebrity. She would use whatever tools she had to delay the action, at least until first light.

THEY WERE SURPRISED BY THEIR
own courage. The boys climbed, bony hand over bony hand, up a metal ladder designed for longer reaches. Ronin and Tom were making their way up the skeleton of the Joshua, ascending with heavy breaths, their narrow shapes barely standing out from the surrounding infrastructure of pipe and wire and girder. What they were heading toward was unclear to them, but they knew they had to get to the top, sensing that that was where the brains of the beast were, the CPU of the metal monster. They were sweating profusely by the time they were at twenty feet, their hands struggling to grip the cold metal of the ladders. What they saw around them was so far outside their experience that they drew on a computer-game environment to make some sense of it. They were on some sort of final mission, vast, mazelike, alien, presumably full of danger, an End Level destination for any first-person shooter or slasher. Even so, their dripping sweat and exhausted muscles never let them think for long that this was virtual reality.

At the first platform they paused, took deep breaths as if they were surfacing, and looked to the east and to the rising dawn.

“I'm hungry,” said Tom.

“Me too,” Ronin said.

They both shrugged. There was nothing to do about their appetites. In the dark, they felt gingerly around the checkerboard-plate steel floor. They found the elevator, dumb and inaccessible without the circular keys to operate it. Around the outside of the lift carapace, they followed the floor between hand railings to another ladder and resigned themselves to more climbing, first
checking with each other, faces barely visible in the pre-light, exchanging I-will-if-you-will shrugs.

Up they went, another twenty-five feet, their backs catching the very first rays of sun cresting the western desert, but while they were ascending, they heard the crackle and then were enveloped in a powerful hum, their hands almost vibrating off the crossbars.

The Joshua was coming to life, and right in front of them they saw the elevator cab descend, and down below, on the first platform, the shiny, hard-hatted engineers waiting to ascend to the pilot station. They would be invisible to these men in the elevator, and had no choice anyway but to keep climbing as the elevator cab drew parallel and then rose past them.

At the elevator's arrival at the pilot station above them, they heard the doors open, the engineers' heavy-boot footsteps, and the opening of the pilot station doors. The men, chatting casually as people do at the start of their workday, were totally unaware of the two teenage boys climbing toward them.

Arms aching and breathing heavily, first Tom and then Ronin threw their legs over the side of the station platform and paused there, below the slanted pilot's and engineer's windows. They listened as the vast diesel motors down below were fired and set rumbling, the exhaust stench overwhelming. All around them, spotlights and LED strips were turned on, so that the Joshua looked like a Christmas tree, as the desert also lit up in the dawn.

The sun was blistering the horizon, turning white light to yellow, and from where the boys sat, they could see Valence in the distance, looking like any other small town, looking like a place you could call home.

On the highway ribboning toward Valence was a throng of black vehicles that set the gray highway smoking in a haze of white dust and black spent carbon. And at the end of that procession,
Ronin and Tom could see where the battle lines were drawn: the citizens of Valence blocking the phalanxes of cops.

The engineers spoke into headsets, confirming that the engines were on, the oil pressure was high, the water temperature not so high, the oil temperature just right.

“We're level,” said one voice.

“Let's go,” said another.

“Confirming,” the first voice said, “Joshua seeking clearance.”

I RUN, FIRST BACK TOWARD
where Gemma has taken Jinx and her girls, and then I stop, unsure if I should be leaving the scene of a breaking story. The westward-shooting sun is backlighting the cops, projecting their shadows in comically long and skinny shapes toward where Sargam stands with her arms raised. She has put some kind of spell on the security techs. Her face aglow in the dawn, she appears surrounded by light—am I going too far here?—as if in halo. But she has somehow calmed the proceedings, slowed down the advancing forces, so that we are all frozen, suddenly unsure of our actions. This, I realize, was her intention, to drag the proceedings into the light of day so that Americans would observe the removal of good citizens by the dark—literally, dark-uniformed—armies of the oligarchs. She is masterful at manipulating the media, and here she has stopped time for just long enough for the whole sorry sacrifice not to be in vain.

Even more remarkable, a few of the younger-looking techs are shaking their heads, falling back. A handful have even started to come toward Sargam, despite the shouts of their commanders to hold ranks. They recognize, in Sargam, in the lines of mothers and fathers seated, arms linked on the pavement, their own families. Some of these young men are nearly subprime themselves,
and those with a conscience must recognize their own hypocrisy. A half-dozen have now lined up alongside the citizens of Valence, eliciting an eruption of cheers, and giving all of us, for a moment, the sense that we may win this thing, that the world is shifting and a remarkable transformation is unfolding. Until we regain our sanity and realize that six kids changing sides doesn't make a difference.

But I'm distracted. Where is Ronin? He still hasn't turned up, and before the pepper spray and batons start cracking heads, I must find my son. To have removed my son from school, to have kidnapped him and driven him to some progressive commune, I can defend, but then to lose him in the middle of the Battle of Valence, that is actually bad parenting. I don't have time to consider the stupid decisions I've been making, but I hate to concede, as I still look around desperately for a glimpse of him, that perhaps taking him from Anya was a mistake. Maybe some tropical island would be better for Ronin and Jinx than spending a few days a week with me? I mean, even if he miraculously passed algebra and then geometry and whatever comes after that, and if he got into an elite college, or even a shitty one, who could afford to pay $185,000 a year to see him through? God, I'm a fuck-up. I mean, even in the middle of a fuck-up—kidnapping my own children—I double the fuck-up by losing one of them.

I just should have left him—

The earth trembles and the SUVs lined up on the highway jiggle on their suspensions at the sound of the Joshua's engines firing. Distant, to the east, an Eiffel Tower on treads obscuring the sky, it rumbles and lurches, the hopes and dreams of the Pepper Sisters and Pastor Roger and every job creator transformed into steel and carbon.

The hulking iron giant grinds over the countryside, churning up the aslphalt highway as it goes, leaving behind tracks surely
visible from outer space. The sight is as inspiring for the techs as it is dispiriting for the rest of us. Even if Sargam achieves a stalemate at the off-ramp, how can she hold off this monstrosity?

Gemma runs up, wearing a bandana, T-shirt, and jeans. Ah, here may be the explanation for my questionable actions these last few weeks. A man can lead his children into great danger in pursuit of a beautiful woman. I can even justify it all to myself when I see her.

She tells me Jinx, Ginny, and Franny are safe in the schoolhouse, watched over by teachers. Security techs are advancing into Valence from several directions, their vehicles bouncing over the desert and already in some of the cul-de-sacs.