Dominion

SIX

On Sunday, after a long church service and afternoon groups (Womanly Virtues and Duties for Madeline, Family Leadership for Ruppert), Ruppert suggested they eat their usual early Sunday dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant, the Laughing Dragon. Madeline bristled.

“Wouldn’t that be unpatriotic now?” she asked. “You heard Pastor John-the Chinese are making more threats.”

“The Hans aren’t Chinese agents,” Ruppert said as they turned east on Wilshire. “They’ve been there forever.”

“Maybe they’re a sleeper cell. Pastor John says sleeper cells are everywhere.”

“So they’ve been asleep for, what, five generations? Ten? You think the Chinese Communists planted the Han family in Los Angeles before Karl Marx was born?"

“I’m staying alert, Daniel. We all have to stay alert.”

“We can stay alert over tea and egg rolls. If it makes you feel better, we can watch our waiter for suspicious behavior.”

“Shut up.” She glared out the window.

“Watch for propaganda in your fortune cookie.”

“Fine, you win. But no more Chinese after this. I don’t want to be un-American.”

From two blocks away, Ruppert could see the giant red dragon crouching on the roof of the restaurant, his serpentine body a scarlet sine wave. Happy the Dragon, mascot and minor tourist attraction, had eyes that were squinted almost closed and jaws spread in a smiling howl, as if someone had just whispered the world’s funniest joke into his ear. Today, smoke curled out from the dragon’s nostrils, an effect the Hans created with dry ice on both Chinese and American holidays.

“What’s today?” Ruppert asked.

“Sunday.”

“No, I mean-”

“April eighth. Why?”

“Must be a Chinese holiday.”

Madeline looked at the smoke pouring from the dragon’s maw. Her lip curled. “We can’t eat Chinese on a Communist holiday.”

“It’s not necessarily Communist…” Daniel’s words trailed off. They had reached a red light a block from the Laughing Dragon, and he now saw there was something wrong. Happy the Dragon was not exhaling white plumes of evaporating dry ice, but dark, sooty clouds.

The light changed, and they pulled forward to see the actual restaurant underneath the dragon's belly. The plate-glass picture windows were shattered, the ornate double doors had been ripped from their hinges and thrown aside, and flames engulfed the building.

“Oh, my God,” Madeline whispered. “Keep going, Daniel. Don’t stop here.”

“I’m trying,” Daniel said, but traffic and another red light locked them in place.

He recognized the three unmarked black vans parked in the Laughing Dragon’s lot, and he cringed. The Han family emerged from their burning restaurant, four generations of them, from the ninety-year-old matriarch Wen to her seven-year-old great-grandson, Gabriel. There were eighteen family members in all, their hands clasped behind their heads as their captors marched them out at gunpoint.

The captors wore black cloth masks with American flags stitched on the foreheads. They had to be one of the Freedom Brigades, the loose network of ultrapatriotic vigilantes that emerged nationwide in the wake of Columbus. They’d begun with mosque bombings and violent raids on Muslim community centers. Once the Department of Terror had purged most of the Muslims from America, sweeping them into the Emergency Penitentiaries, the Freedom Brigades had moved on to persecuting illegal Latino immigrants, and assorted others.

The Brigades sometimes released video manifestos, usually consisting of masked men claiming they were true Americans “retaking the country” from corrupting foreign influences. They were not a government agency, and police sometimes condemned their actions, but Ruppert had never heard of Freedom Brigade members getting arrested for their crimes.

The vigilantes forced the Han family to kneel in a row, facing out toward traffic. Many of them wept openly; only old Wen betrayed no emotion, her lined face hard and stoic.

Little Gabriel’s mother, crying, reached for her son, but two of the masked men wrenched her back. One of them drew a pistol from his belt, pressed it to the back of her head, and fired.

“Oh Jesus Christ!” Madeline turned her head away, clapping a hand over her eyes. Ruppert wanted to turn away, too, but instead he watched as the masked men walked down the line, executing one Han after another, their heads erupting in surreal gouts of blood.

“Are we moving? Why aren’t we moving, Daniel?” Madeline screamed.

Daniel looked ahead to see the train of cars that had been ahead of him pull away into the distance. Normally, this would draw irate honks from the cars behind him, but he supposed no one wanted to draw the attention of the Freedom Brigade. He stomped the accelerator.

After several minutes, Madeline whispered, “I must have been right.”

“About what?”

“The Hans. They must have been a sleeper cell after all. Right?” An odd glaze had crept into her eyes. “They were spies for the Chinese. The imperialists.”

“We don’t know that.”

“The Freedom Brigades wouldn’t just kill innocent people like that. Not in public like that.”

“The Freedom Brigades don’t know things like that.”

“How do you know what they know?” Madeline sat up, straightening her shoulders. She lowered the sun visor and checked her hair in the mirror. “The Freedom Brigades really do protect us most of the time. Nobody likes to say it, but they do. They keep regular people safe.”

“Honey-”

“They keep good people safe,” Madeline repeated. “Safe and free. I bet they were Communist spies. That big red dragon. Listening in on all those conversations, all those years, while we ate their greasy rice. Think about it.”

Ruppert gaped at her, almost missed his turn, and swerved off at the last second onto Beverly Glen. This time, the other drivers weren’t shy about honking; some of them really laid into it, unleashing the rage they’d been unable to express at his failure to speed away from the gang of gunmen at the first opportunity.

He sped towards the white-walled hive of suburban enclaves that Bel Air had become. Ruppert understood what Madeline was doing; he saw it every day, could even recognize the expression in the face of strangers. She was editing her reality, making things fit. The Hans, who had sung Happy Birthday to her on her twenty-eighth birthday, had been Chinese spies. That was all. They’d been discovered and put to justice. If he ever mentioned the Han family or the Laughing Dragon again, she would snort something about Communists and change the subject.

Ruppert did not possess this talent, at least not to the incredible degree he saw in everyone around him. Even as a child, he’d held back his belief and his trust, wanting to ponder over information for flaws and contradictions. His natural skepticism led him to journalism school, but as his Berkeley professor Jozef Gorski said, “Journalism is a hard and unforgiving search for facts. Reporting is gossip. Most of you, if you want a paycheck, will work as reporters.”

Gorski had, in a distant youth, been a journalist active in the Polish Solidarity movement, then written a Pulitzer-nominated book on the history of nonviolent resistance. He disappeared halfway through the spring semester of 2021. Another teacher took his place, without explanation, and when Ruppert asked where Dr. Gorski had gone, the new teacher scowled at him and shook his head. Ruppert tried to research the new teacher, but had been unable to find any information on the man’s background. He’d certainly never worked as a journalist.

Ruppert slowed as he approached his neighborhood gate. The road in this part of Bel Air was a paved channel between two thirty-foot walls, each occasionally punctuated by one of the large gates. The brass grill of the gate slid aside for his car.

“Daniel.” Madeline’s voice was unusually soft. She seemed to be making eye contact with herself in the mirror, as if trying to look into her own soul. Daniel knew how she felt.

“What is it?”

She touched her pinkie finger to the corner of her mouth. “Do you think I’m getting a zit here? It looks like there might be a zit.”

Daniel turned off the street into his driveway, then looked at her for a long time. She turned toward him, stretched her mouth into a vertical oval, and poked at the corner of her mouth again.

“See it?” she asked.

“No. I think it’s fine.”

“Good.” The car door opened for her, and she gathered her purse and climbed out. “I’d hate to start the week that way.”