Robin Herbert
The Education of Sebastian Harriss
When regime change is your business strategy, resistance is a cost of doing business.
“Remains to be seen.” I said it out loud. Softly. Carol smiled because she knew I was thinking of Derek.
“Our’s won’t,” she said.
I was losing everything I had of Derek. Everything but his dumb jokes. I couldn’t recall his face any more unless I pulled up a photograph. When his father died, he mentioned that the funeral would be open coffin, and he added “Remains to be seen.” I never saw his.
“Buckley’s,” said Carol, peering through a gap in the pile of smashed concrete where we were sheltering. It was one of Derek’s expressions. Derek explained that Buckley & Nunn used to be a department store in Australia. When an Australian says that the chances are Buckley’s, he means they are “none”. Looking out at the circling military helicopters, listening to the shouts of the troops as they traversed a search pattern, ever closer, our chances were just that. But I wasn’t going to admit it.
“Remains to be seen,” I said, eliciting a wry smile from Carol.
Like many good ideas, the plan to educate Sebastian Harriss came about by simplifying a bad idea and the bad idea came from Benny. A year ago we talked with Benny, who made us pray before he started because his examples came from 9/11.
“I don’t care if you’re atheists, a lot of good people died there, and you’ll show them proper respect or get out.”
All he had to do was ask. We loved the guy and would pray if that made him happy. When the prayers were out of the way he mumbled something about draining the sprinkler reservoirs, and wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he got down to business.
“Most people think you should put the explosives at the base. No point. The columns are too thick and anyway, work has been done for us there. Those big atriums. Any tall building sways a little …”
He pointed at a screen behind him of a building swaying.
“Benny,” I said in a concerned tone. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
He turned briefly with a mild expression and said, “Please hold questions until the end.”
I could see Derek and Carol shaking with laughter. I didn’t attempt any further interruption, but I was only half listening. My mind was racing along other lines concerning Mr Harriss and his money.
“Of course you can’t see it, but I’ve put lateral exaggeration to illustrate. It moves with simple harmonic motion. But take out only five columns and a floor here…”
He indicated an area near the top of the building.
“… where the columns are thinner, then you get, instead of simple harmonic motion you get chaotic motion instead. Like a double hinged pendulum.”
The model swayed in an erratic motion on the screen behind him. Benny held a finger up and we stood as still as trolls in the morning sun, watching. Then Benny dropped his finger and the building on the screen collapsed in an alarmingly realistic fashion, scattering debris everywhere.
“No!” I said. “We are not demolishing the Harper Tower.
“Of course we’d make sure it was evacuated first.”
About a month after that meeting with Benny, at about three o’clock in the morning, Derek, Carol and I were sitting among some bushes in a park, all dressed as Charlie Chaplin. We were waiting for the activity in the street to die down and we were nervous as hell because none of us had broken the law before. Eventually a lull came and we looked at each other, nodded and stood up. We started along the road doing a Charlie Chaplin walk. We couldn’t twirl our canes because they were crowbars and too heavy. We came abreast of three Harriss charging stations and began swinging with the crowbars. We didn’t do much damage, just enough to put them out of action. Then we waddled away in separate directions.
The Chaplin outfits were Derek’s idea and they served two purposes. The first was to.help the video go viral. The second was to disguise our gait so that it couldn’t be analysed and matched to footage and watched with footage of protest marches. Of course three charging stations vandalised wouldn’t teach Sebastian Harriss much, but if the plan worked, they would be far from the last.
Sebastian Harriss was a corrupt and odious billionaire, like his father before him. He was born Cedric Harrison but didn’t like the name much. In school he tried Seddy Harrelson and in university he was Sed Harshom. He hired a big PR company who told him he was Sebastian Harriss and that the second ‘s’ was not a typo. They also recommended a cosmetic surgery practice that could equip him with a chin, a jawline and a convex hairline. He got some tattoos that could only be mistaken for nazi symbolism by uncharitable people or other nazis.
Bernie Harrison retired and passed control of his global parcel distribution company to Sebastian who also bought a car company that he renamed to Harriss Motors. A large part of his fortune funded far right politicians including the ones who currently controlled the country and were dismantling the democracy so that they couldn’t be removed. Not at least by any democratic means.
Any criticism of Harriss was attributed to “the politics of envy”, although it was hard to imagine how anyone could envy such a joyless, needy man.
When I got back to the house, Derek and Carol were already back and in bed. They were having a lot of fun by the sound of it. I swallowed the usual pang of jealousy and sat on the sofa scrolling through the news. Nothing yet. I fell asleep and was woken by Derek kissing and licking my ear. I smiled.
“She got home first,” said Derek.
“It’s OK,” I said, “she’s your wife after all.”
“You’re mad at me,” said Derek. “You only remind me of that when you’re angry at me.”
“Not angry,” I said quietly.
“I’d have married both of you if I could. You’re both equal members of Derek’s harim.”
This made me smile again. It made sense for him to marry Carol. If he had married me then the Supreme Court might have let them dissolve our marriage and send him back to Australia. But I couldn’t help feeling that the joy and passion we had experienced when it was just me and him had been transferred to his relationship with Carol.
Carol emerged from the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around her.
“If you guys are going to do something, go into the bedroom,” she said. “I’m going to watch TV.”
Benny’s had not been the worst idea, not by a long shot. Carol’s brother wanted to build an army of robots. His robots were ingenious. They looked like steel boned skeletons with faces like an Ashoka head. But they were very basic, barely more technically sophisticated than the robots that Tesla produces. And it was far from clear what this army was meant to do. The thing they did best was dancing.
Selena wanted to send a fleet of satellite killers into space. Again, Selena was very clever. She had built a number of amateur rockets that could reach suborbital space and swore she would soon be able to launch small objects into orbit.
“How soon?” asked Carol.
And McLean, our dear hillbilly Republican friend whose hobby was building high-precision long-range rifles. I asked him what his plan was.
“Shoot the oligarchs,” he said.
“Did you crack your head on the cee-ment pond?” asked Derek. “The whole point is to have no casualties.”
“Not even oligarchs?” he asked, incredulously.
“Not even oligarchs.”
Derek once told me that my super power was being stupid and lazy. He said that it always allowed me to see the simple way of doing things. Of course it was just banter, but there was some truth in it. I couldn’t build a robot or even a seltzer rocket. But I could see that any action didn’t have to be spectacular, it only had to be effective. The question was: Would anyone notice?
That morning, Derek said, “Come on, sook,” and led me to his bedroom where we made love and fell asleep. We didn’t wake until late afternoon. We got dressed and plonked ourselves next to Carol on the sofa where she was watching a vampire movie. Dracula’s lair was a death trap for vampires, stakes and things that could be broken up easily into stakes were laying around everywhere. There was a sprinkler system in the coffin room and the building was surrounded by hawthorn.
“You’d think Dracula’s would have experience in dealing with real estate agents,” said Derek.
“Bingo!” said Carol looking at her cellphone, then holding it up to show three Charlie Chaplins waddling into history.
The lesson we wanted Sebastian Harriss and the rest of the oligarchs to learn and commit to memory was this: If occupation, oppression and murder are part of your business model then resistance becomes part of your cost of business.
The video went viral within the hour and the copycat actions began that night. Within three days, seventy percent of Harriss charging stations were out of action and the share price was in free fall. In general, the investors were sharp enough to realise that all oligarchs who profited from fascism had vulnerable infrastructure.
We lit the fuse, but we had nothing to do with the actions until the storming of Harper Tower. It was not because we didn’t want to do more but because Derek was picked up and murdered. We heard from a friend that he had been grabbed by the usual uniformed thugs and bundled into a van. We made enquiries through a lawyer and were told that he had died in custody. Derek had been out to buy something special for my birthday because he thought I felt left out. They picked him up because he wasn’t white. He probably made some smart remark and they killed him. There was nothing we could do. It was just another day in America.
McLean took me and Carol to his farm in Arkansas. The farm had been in his family for generations, but his main business was a precision engineering company which specialised in producing parts for vintage cars and motorcycles. At first we didn’t understand the secrecy and haste that he urged on us and he was reluctant to say.
“No telling what Derek might have said under …” He looked at the floor and didn’t say the word..
McLean and his wife didn’t understand or hold with our menage, but were faultlessly sympathetic and kind, as was their adult son Craig stopped by now and then. Craig said what McLean didn’t.
“You know Dad thinks, and I don’t fault him, that all this non-violent resistance of yours is nothing but … procrastination.”
I wondered if the original word had been ‘cowardice’.
The year we spent in the mountains with McLean and his wife might have been idyllic in other circumstances. It wasn’t just the grief. We were confined to the house and slept in a bomb shelter that had been built by McLean’s grandfather. There were, at irregular times, flyovers by formations of military drones, which were no doubt equipped with long range high definition cameras and facial identification software.
We did get to see McLean’s babies, the sniper rifles of which he was so proud. Each one had been designed and built by him in his shop. He gave us a demonstration of their impressive capabilities. On a steady mount he could consistently hit targets at three thousand yards. Even I knew that was good. He originally intended to sell them to the military. Now he had a new plan and I was running out of arguments against it.
There were suggestions that the strategy was working. The oligarchs were less inclined to show enthusiastic support for the regime. One or two chanced veiled criticisms of the government. One even said out loud that random state sanctioned murder of innocent citizens wasn’t such a good idea after all.
McLean usually sat by my bed until I went to sleep. He was worried that my dark mood in the evening would lead me to do something rash. He tried to steer the conversation away from politics but somehow we kept going there.
“Too little too late,” said McLean of the change in attitude among the oligarchs. “Every chance to nip fascism in the bud has been missed. You know as well as I do what needs to be done.”
“Do you think I don’t want to kill them?” I asked, beginning to cry. “Do you think I don’t want to take a knife and slice that arrogant leer off their skulls forever?”
“That’s the hurt talking,” said McLean. “I’d be talking like that if they took Katy.”
He moved his chair closer to the bed and put a consoling hand on my shoulder.
“I did engineering at college,” he said. “I also took extra credit in philosophy. Seemed to me that philosophy and engineering aren’t so different. You got a problem, you find a solution.”
My tears were beginning to subside. I let him continue.
“To me it’s one of those academic problems. You’ve got a trolley out of control and millions of people on the track about to get killed. Sick people. Starving people. People just picked up at random and killed. On the side track, there are, let’s say, ten very rich, very corrupt men. Are you going to switch the tracks or stand there feeling all virtuous? Either way, you’re killing people. It’s just a matter of who and how many.”
McLean and I have been friends for years, since we were kids and we met at Coney Island. He’s a conservative Christian from a small town and I’m a gay socialist, born and bred in New York City. Our friendship, straddled as it was across an allegedly untraversable divide, has remained strong. He’s smart and his arguments made a lot of sense. The year we spent with him and Katy almost convinced me that the time was near when we should admit defeat, stand aside and make way for the zealots.
Still, Carol and I decided to stop hiding, return to New York, and give peace one last chance.
I don’t know what I expected from Katy’s makeover but it wasn’t this. It took me a moment to realise it was Carol at all. Her mousey hair had been bleached a brilliant blonde and her thick eyebrows had been plucked and shaped. She wore daisy dukes and a low cut blouse with a big gold cross around her neck. Alarmingly, she carried an assault rifle and struck a pose with its butt resting on her hip. I laughed, but McLean just stared.
“Are you going to stand there gawpin’ or are we going to do this thing?” she said with a passable imitation of Katy’s accent.
The fake IDs were the easy part. Since the regime had decided we were the leaders of the resistance, our photos were widely circulated. I had shaved my beard and borrowed some clothes from McLean. Katy decided that something more radical was required for Carol. She handed me the rifle and hugged Katy, then we headed for McLean’s truck, on which I noticed a new sticker under the Stars and Stripes:
“The government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
There’s something about a road trip.. We were grieving for Derek, for our country. We were terrified of arrest and torture. The future was dark and uncertain. But as soon as we started the trip back to New York, driving through beautiful mountain scenery in McLean’s big truck, our hearts started to become lighter. The dark clouds on the horizon seemed to clear and our confidence grew, that we would win after all.
At the border between Arkansas and Tennessee, we encountered the first test of our disguises. Five soldiers of the President’s private army, dressed more for a war zone than this quiet country road, signalled us to stop and, when we did, surrounded us. One positioned himself in front of the car so that they could claim we were trying to run them over if they felt like shooting us. I sighed. We had to pretend to respect them. McLean wound down his window and extended his fist which one of the officers bumped. McLean engaged them in casual friendly banter while they checked our ID. One officer looked in the back where Carol was sitting with the rifle across her lap.
“You have a license for that, honey”
Carol held her sunglasses in her thumb and forefinger, moving them down to the end of her nose. She gave him a friendly smile.
“Sure I do, officer, it’s called the second amendment.”
That seemed to satisfy him and he waved us through. Carol sighed. “I swear. Every one of them will rot in prison.”
We drove late into the night and stopped at a motel where we booked three rooms side by side. Carol, having done the last stretch of driving, went straight to sleep while McLean and I shared a bottle of whiskey, sitting at a wooden table in the park across from the motel. I could tell that McLean wanted to say something indelicate.
“OK, say it,” I said.
“I was just wondering. You and Carol.”
“No,” I said firmly, “not in the way you mean.”
“I thought you might make an exception for a woman like her.”
I didn’t respond to this straight away, so McLean continued the thought. “I don’t mean just looks. Well you know better than me.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
A long goods train clattered by on a nearby track, making conversation impossible for a while. When it had passed I said. “Have you noticed though …”
“She’s different, yeah. Katy noticed it before we left. Steel and fire.”
That steel and fire helped at the sixth and final checkpoint as we entered New York State. The government’s PR company had demoted me and decided that Carol was the terrorist leader. They thought it would be easy to stir up hate against a mousey woke academic. The girl they encountered didn’t fit that bill. She was wearing jeans with the same top and cross hung around her neck. She even got out to stretch her legs and shoot the breeze with one of them.
“Where are you from, sir?”
“Yonkers, ma’am.”
“No. Really? I grew up thereabouts. I know I don’t sound it none.”
“No, ma’am, I can tell you still got some. A week or two and you’ll be one of us again.”
“Well, see you round.”
“Safe trip, ma’am. We don’t get many being friendly.”
As we drove away she looked back and said, “He could have been one of the boys I grew up with. What happens to them?”
We parted from McLean on a cold cloudy day with a faint hint of rain in the gusts.
“You know Katy and me are fond of you both. You know Katy specially took to you this last year, Carol.”
“I know,” said Carol. “And I to her.”
“You know we’d be happier if …”
We both knew shat was coming, but we let him put it his way.
“Happier if we knew you came to Jesus. That way we’d see you again, even if …”
Carol looked at me as though to say, “You handle this.”
“You tell Katy that we’ll see her again in this world,” I said with a smile.
We watched McLean drive away. There was always a sadness in our friendship for McLean. He was a sincere Christian and I was an unredeemed sinner in his eyes.
“Right now,” said Carol in her Katy voice, “a little Divine intervention wouldn’t hurt none.”
We had turned off our phones a year ago and McLean ground them to dust in his workshop. We weren’t in touch with anyone. We had the choice of going to see Benny in his office at the airport he insists on calling “Idlewild”, or going to the factory owned by Carol’s brother. As she hadn’t seen or talked to him in over a year, we went there. We knew he would be there because he rarely left. We asked at the tiny reception desk and Carol said, “Tell him Space Bunny is here.”
I barely had time to repeat, “Space Bunny?” inquisitively before Alan came running out to hug her.
He took us both to his small cluttered office and, after some catching up, Alan told us about the Harper Tower operation. I wasn’t impressed. The actions so far had been like our own; small, unimpressive acts of vandalism on selected targets. These acts effectively decrease the market value of enterprises owned by oligarchs. They had measurable objectives. It only takes a small amount of damage to put a car factory or a space launch facility out of action for months. But to storm and simply occupy a building, even one that embodied all the ugly gaudiness, the greed, narcissism and cruelty of the time, seemed like a naive, symbolic act, suited better to happier and less dangerous times.
And I didn’t trust the shadowy figure that Alan described as the person leading the action. The man went by the name of Carter.
Despite the propaganda, there were no leaders in the resistance. It was a dynamic, liquid entity where people occasionally took the lead for specific projects and then melted back into the background. But one name had gained popularity. Alan had never met Carter and didn’t know anyone who had. The stories said that he was a paraplegic and visually impaired. They also said that he had escaped from a concentration camp. Something about that sounded too good to be true. Everything I was learning about the man increased my intuition that he couldn’t be trusted. But Alan trusted him and Carol trusted Alan.
And so it happened, a week or so later we were walking up 5th Avenue toward Harper Tower. I asked her about the name, Space Bunny. She laughed.
“No one knows where it came from. He’s three years younger than me. When we were little, I was crying one day. Alan said ‘Don’t cry, Space Bunny’. The name stuck.”
When we were within a couple of blocks of the tower, Carol stopped and said, “Let’s say goodbye here.”
“Goodbye?”
“You never liked this action.”
“But we’re …”
“We’re what?” she asked, suddenly cold. “We’re not in love, not interested in fucking each other. We’re not even friends. We’re just two people who were in love with the same man.”
I considered this for a moment. “I thought we had something, you know …”
“No I don’t.”
I spread my arms. “It’s the vibe. It’s Mabo.”
She smiled but I had just proved her point. That was Derek’s favourite line from his favourite film. Everything between us was about Derek.
When Carol left, I followed at a distance to see, at least, the start of the action. Carol approached the entrance to Harper Tower and a woman I didn’t recognise began walking alongside her. Once they were inside an extraordinary scene unfolded. 5th Avenue was as busy as was normal for that time of day, but when Carol and the other woman word inside, every second person turned and started moving toward the same entrance. Over the next twenty minutes, hundreds of people entered Harper Tower. The traffic came to a standstill and the fire alarm in the building started to whoop. Soon there was an opposite stream of people evacuating the building, many carrying hastily packed suitcases.
It was all very neatly planned and I guessed the stopped traffic was the first line of defence. I wondered what was to stop the President’s army from simply going in and arresting them. I didn’t have to wonder for long. As soon as the exodus had stopped, a series of explosions could be heard inside. The stairways and lifts, I guessed. That would stop people getting in, but how did they plan to get out? Then another more dismal question occurred. Did they plan to ever get out?
I started to walk around to observe the response. The situation was more serious than I imagined. Large numbers of paramilitary were arriving very quickly. They must have started to gather long before the action started. They began ordering evacuations of the surrounding buildings, ordering people to come out of the buildings and clear the area. Then the hardware started to arrive. People who were barely competent to handle a side arm were unpacking surface to air missiles. I remembered my suspicions about the man they called Carter. Now I felt sure that he had manipulated people into a deadly trap. I followed the people with the missiles, hiding behind the stopped cars. They set up a number of blocks away in the middle of the street where some cars had been pushed aside to make space. They didn’t do anything yet, but stood around idly talking. The knot in my stomach refuted Carol’s theory. You didn’t need to be in love with someone, want to fuck them or even be their friend to care about them. I was desperately worried about her. I lurked behind a van staying as still as I could, watching them under the chassis. They were watching Harper Tower intently. One of them chuckled. “They’re dancing?”
I looked up toward the tower in the failing evening light. On a floor, near the top, dark coloured lights, purple, green, red, were pulsing. A party. A disco. “Fooling around,” I thought grimly.
About twenty minutes later, one of the toy soldiers picked up his mobile phone and had a short conversation. Then he turned to the rest. “It ‘s confirmed. She’s in there all right.”
“That terrorist bitch?”
“Carol, or whatever they call her. Yeah she’s in there. Rat in a trap.”
I silently cursed Carter.
“I’ve got something for you, Sweetheart,” said one of them, patting the missile.
Then they went into action. It was clear they had little training on the missile as they fussed over it, arguing what should be done. I took heart from this. The President’s army was a collection of neo-nazis, random thugs and people who just needed the money. There were many such in this new regime. They had next to no oversight, faced no consequences, had only minimal training and were equipped by a vast budget. Eventually they managed to aim and launch the first missile which fell short of it’s target and hit a smaller office block bringing rubble crashing to the street.
“Up a bit,” said one. The next missed the building entirely and hit something, I couldn’t see what, on the far side of the tower. There were two more misses when another man turned up, growling, “What the fuck are you clowns doing?”
He took charge and, to my dismay, looked like he knew what he was doing.
I have never been a brave man. I have always chosen safety over risk. But at that moment I only thought of saving Carol.
I waited until I judged he was about to launch the missile, knowing that it would be too late after the button was pressed and useless before it was pressed. I had to time it just right but I was too ignorant of how weapons work. I rushed out and two of them intercepted me, jumping on me and pinning me down.
“It’s all right,” shouted one of them. “We’ve got him.”
The missile flew up and hit Harper Tower exactly on the floor with the disco lights. There was a massive explosion filling the entire floor with yellow flame which shot out all sides. The men whooped with jubilation and I could hear it echoed from nearby. I slumped in despair. One of the soldiers took out a phone and filmed me. Then he waited and said, “Got ‘im. Known terrorist and fag.”
Another took out his gun and said, “Let’s see if we can make him beg for death.”
I closed my eyes and waited. I heard a shot. Then three more. I opened my eyes to investigate the curious circumstance that I was alive and unhurt.
Around me were four of the President’s army, dead on the ground. A fifth was standing with his hands in the air. I followed his line of sight and saw Carol standing there with a handgun pointed at him.
“I have family,” he said.
“Who doesn’t?” asked Carol before shooting him in the head. He didn’t fall straight away but stood for a moment, as though unable to grasp what had happened, before keeling over, dead.
“What the fuck were you doing?” said Carol, angrily, “Trying to get killed? Did you think you could join Derek?”
“I was trying to save your life,” I said pointing up at the burning tower, “I thought …”
I could see this was not impressing her, so I added, “You’re lucky I came along.”
This earned an exasperated laugh from Carol and she said, “Come on, let’s stash the bodies and get out of here.”
We headed down the avenue quickly but carefully, letting the abandoned cars be our cover.
“The evacuees,” I said in a loud whisper. “You came out among the evacuees.”
“That’s what I’ve always admired about you. Your laser focussed powers of deduction.”
“How did you find me?”
“I clocked you as soon as you came out. But you were running off looking for trouble. I couldn’t get your attention without also getting theirs.”
I processed this for a moment, and for a terrible second or two, entertained the idea that she had cold-bloodedly allowed hundreds of people to be murdered. Then the penny dropped.
“The tower was empty! You all left with the evacuees.”
“Changed our appearance and blended in,” said Carol.
“And the disco lights?”
“It’s a preprogrammed routine. You don’t think Harper shells out for a human DJ, do you?”
I had been trying to forge an image for myself of a sophisticated , urbane New Yorker, an image that owed more to Hollywood and books than it did to anything I knew about my city, when an unserious, unsubtle Australian called Derek crashed into my life and changed it forever. I was in love in a way I had never been and he was the Sun I orbited. When he asked if he could date Carol, I said yes because I wouldn’t deny him anything. When she moved in, we tolerated each other. Now, apparently, we would risk our lives for each other.
“Where did you get the gun?”
“I lifted it from one of the tin soldiers when I came out of the tower.”
“When did you learn to shoot?”
“Katy taught me.”
“Why didn’t she teach me?”
“We all decided it was safer if we didn’t let you near a gun. You’d only hurt yourself.”
We walked around some debris from an office building hit by one of the misfires and reached the next crossroad. Crouching near the corner, we surveyed the situation. Clearly the bodies that we hid had been found and the President’s army were on every road, conducting a careful search. It was obvious that we would never get through it and we only had time to retreat to the debris pile and hide among some broken concrete slabs. This is the place I began the story, sitting in a cave in the rubble, refusing to give up hope.
I watched through the gap in the concrete. Smoke was still billowing from Harper Tower and various other parts of the city. The moonlight showed a stream of smoke stretching north west. That gave me a tiny grain of hope.
“I worked out what the vibe is,” said Carol.
“Vibe?”
“Between us. Derek’s harim.”
“What?”
“We’re family.”
I nodded.
“So what exactly do you see as grounds for hope?” Carol asked.
“Chaos theory.”
“Life will find a way?” she asked, scoffing.
“That’s not what chaos theory is.”
“I know. I wasn’t sure you knew. So tell me, how will non-repeating deterministic processes ride to our rescue?”
As though in answer, Harper Tower let out a great deep growl and a groan.
Metal
All up and down the street the members of the President’s army turned in unison to look at the building, then they ran away.
“We’ll be safer where we are,” I said.
There was a series of loud metallic bangs, vast steel pillars snapping, and a roaring like a great freight train from Hell. Harper Tower began collapsing just like one of Benny’s simulations. I lifted the collar of my tee shirt and held it tight just beneath my eyes, signalling Carol to do the same.
“Take a big breath of good air now,” I said.
It was pointless. A strong hot rush of wind sucked the oxygen out of our lungs. We sat on the verge of consciousness, gasping for air like fish on a jetty. We began to win the struggle and breathed the dust filled air through our tops. After what seemed like an age, after the roaring and the patter of small debris had died down, I could hear Carol through the thick dust.
“Fuuuuck!”
As Benny had explained, buildings have a lot of redundancy and can sustain much damage, but that depends upon the fire being quickly extinguished and emergency repairs effected. Neither fire fighters nor engineers could reach it. Harper Tower had been swaying imperceptibly all this time in an irregular, chaotic motion. The fires had been slowly robbing important structural elements of their strength and the whole structure, aided by the wind, was moving in ways unforeseeable by the designers.
It had fallen just as Benny had wanted it to fall, but it was the President’s army that took it down, perhaps aided by all the extra combustible material that the occupiers had moved to that floor before they left.
None of this need have happened. This iceberg had been visible, rising on the horizon for many years and America steamed full speed ahead for it, cocooned in a happy dream of unsinkability.
“The institutions will hold,” they would say, “The checks and balances will prevent any unconstitutional exercise of power.”
It was as though they thought that a tool might carry out its function without any human picking it up. Those with power and responsibility neither used the power nor fulfilled the responsibility. They kept calling for calm and patience without ever explaining what it was we were waiting for. A handful of people could have stopped it.
The night Harper Tower fell, Carol and I somehow found our way to a safe house where, mistaking us for a couple, they allocated us a room with a double bed. We were too tired to argue, but lay on the bed without touching each other and talked until we fell asleep.
In the morning we joined the bustle of the breakfast table and were regaled with a number of unconfirmed stories, some contradicting the others. One story had consistent assent and turned out to be true. It concerned the death of Sebastian Harriss.
“He was run over by a car,” said a woman from across the table.
“Someone ran him over?”
“No, the car was empty. It was a self-driving Harriss.”
With the share price plummeting, Harriss had decided to highlight his new self-driving system. In front of a bleacher filled with an audience of his fans, Harriss walked out in the path of a speeding Harriss 5 and it drove straight into him without attempting to brake or swerve.
Many conspiracy theories grew around this but the reality, explained by a Harriss engineer, was disappointingly prosaic. The new self-driving system just wasn’t there yet. Desperate to lift the value of his company, Harriss had insisted the release be brought forward.
Sebastian Harriss never learned.
Katy’s makeover became Carol’s new permanent thing, her look, her attitude. She even kept the cross around her neck.
“I found Christ in the rubble,” she would tell people. When I asked about the cross she only said, “Vampires. You can’t be too careful.”
I have never known Carol to be insincere and so I have always believed it was a real spiritual awakening for her, maybe spurred on by her friendship with Katy. In any case, the impact was to be massive. They tried to make her a hate figure, but she subverted the fascist image of femininity and turned it against them. She put social justice back into Christianity. In the days, months and years ahead, the people who were supposed to hate Carol loved her. The bodycam footage of her killing the soldier, released to destroy her reputation, became iconic. She may still have been a woke academic. But she was a badass woke academic.
But I’m slipping ahead. In that safe house we were scared and uncertain about the future. Carol dreamed up a scheme that she couldn’t divulge to me, as I wasn’t going with her. She and a group of new friends spent a couple of weeks making preparations and on the last night before she left, Carol and I spent the night in the same bed, again simply talking until we fell asleep. The next morning, she was gone and I spent the day at a loose end. As evening drew in, I decided to walk away. I started toward the outside door, without any definite plan of where to go or what to do. Before I reached it, a voice called out, “You’re one of the Chaplins, aren’t you?”
I turned to see a tall, heavily built man. I nodded.
“Carter wants to see you.”
I didn’t know Carter was there. I had lost my distrust by then but I wasn’t in the mood.
“Some other time,” I said.
“He said if you were unwilling, I should drag your sorry ass there by any means necessary.”
I sighed and shrugged. “Since he asked nice.”
He led me through dingy corridors and down a stair. He knocked on a metal door.
“You’re not a shallow man, are you?” asked my guide.
“Somewhat,” I replied, “Why?”
“Looks aren’t everything,” he said as he opened the door.
There was a single steel framed bed in the room with a wheelchair beside it. The man on the bed had obviously been subjected to a good deal of violence. His right eye was a mass of scar tissue and his left cheekbone was caved in. His left shoulder sat at an unnatural angle. But I felt joy rising in me as he looked up at me and said in a familiar Australian accent, “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”
I ran to him. “Derek! What did those fuckers do to you?”
“Doesn’t matter. I found you. That’s what matters most.”
I went to hold him, then hesitated.
“Mate,” he said, “it all hurts all the time. You won’t make it worse so go for your life.”
Still I laid my hands on his face delicately, but he pulled me into a tight hug and we kissed. The heavy-set man had left the room and Derek cried, long, deep, bitter sobs. I guessed that he had been denying himself those tears for a long time. Then we made love.
“Carol was here,” I said as we lay in darkness.
“I know. I just missed her. I’m glad I got time with you first. Don’t tell her I said that.”
We were still a family of three and Derek still loved his wife. I learned to be happy rather than endure their joyful times alone together, but they were both an important part of the resistance and their destinies led them on different paths. I never left Derek’s side. Not in the dark days ahead, nor in the days after that when the world began to make sense.
The End
Robin Herbert 