Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

7 Making Hay ^{Cory Doctorow}

ALL OF WILMAR’S FRIENDS AT THE FACTORY HAD WATCHED THE STORM HEADING toward the Mojave for a week, watched it gathering force, watched as it defied the best predictions as it failed to veer off toward the ocean, carving a line from Portland, through Sacramento, sparing Vegas, arrowing for their concrete plant.

Wilmar had a feeling about this one. It was going to squat over the factory for a long, long time. Long enough that he could go home to Burbank, see his family, his old school buds. He hadn’t been home in the fall for a long time, but the weather kept getting weirder and the spring rains were now fall rains, he guessed.

But after five days back home, Wilmar was ready to get back to work. It wasn’t that he missed his work friends. Truth be told, he wasn’t that tight with anyone in Mojave yet. He’d been at the factory for most of a year, ever since graduation, and he’d made only weak friendships there. But he missed the work.

HIS FIFTH MORNING BACK HOME, WILMAR COULDN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO GET OUT of bed. His internal weather matched it, grayness clouding his personal sun, and he recognized the signs of his brain doing its bad thing again.

Hiding under the covers, he started pull-refreshing Friendster and swiping.

It offered many people for Wilmar to hang out with—old high school friends, people who loved the same board games as him, people who liked hiking the same trails as him, people who liked the same kinds of clubs as him. There were dinner parties and dance parties and people who needed help moving or with community projects like digging out empty lots contaminated by old Lockheed fuel leaks. Burbank didn’t have a lot of heavy industry anymore, but the construction sites and even some of the productions at the studios shut down when the sun stopped shining, and there were lots of people with time on their hands. But he swiped past all of them.

He knew himself well enough to recognize the signs of depression, and he knew that the best thing for it was to socialize, but he just couldn’t bear the thought of it. Somewhere, the sun was shining or the wind was blowing or the tides were crashing on the shore, and there was energy to spare, and so in those places, workers who’d been enjoying a break had been liberated from parties and family and lying in hammocks and had been sent back to work in factories just like his, sintering prefab concrete and craning it onto long, slow-moving electric trains for shipment to the inland newtowns.

“Wilmar, are you still in bed?”

His mom had surprised him by seeming much older than she had just a few months before, but now he’d gotten used to it and was mostly surprised by how hard she found it to knock before entering his room. She said it wasn’t his room anymore, it was her “office.”

“Yes, Mom.”

She scowled. “I have work to do, kiddo. Papers to mark. Up and at ’em.”

Mom had always marked papers at the kitchen table, and as far as Wilmar knew, that was fine with her. Apparently it wasn’t fine with her and had never been fine with her and she wasn’t going back to it any time soon. How much concentration and peace and quiet did she to need to review eighth graders’ essays about Shakespeare anyway?

He pulled himself out of bed and dressed and even made the bed and gave his mom a kiss on the cheek when she pushed past him to sit at her desk with her tablet.

After a late breakfast, he sat on the front lawn on a folding chair, amid the late zucchini and the very late sunflowers—in September, seriously?—and nodded at the people going past. A dozen kids blocked off most of Verdugo and set up a street-hockey game, letting the odd car squeeze past at a crawl in the single lane they’d left clear, calling a time out and making more space if two cars needed to pass in opposite directions, though the drivers got dagger-stares for not timing their crossing better.

In Wilmar’s boyhood, every day had been known and knowable far in advance—if you asked him what he’d be doing on a specific Tuesday two years from then, he could tell you that—barring illness or maybe a wildfire—he’d be in school, and then maybe at band practice, and then home gaming.

Then the first pandemic had broken that rhythm, and the second pandemic had killed it. The idea that what was going on in the world would have nothing to do with what you did in the world had seemed totally natural until he was twelve. Six years later, it was such an obviously stupid idea that he couldn’t believe that whole civilizations had fallen for it for, like, centuries.

All of the panels he made at the factory had been headed for San Juan Capistrano, a city he’d visited in elementary school when they’d done a unit on the eighteenth-century Missions of the Spanish conquistadors. The Surfliner was still running then, and his class had taken over a whole car. Now most of the Surfliner tracks had been dangerously undermined by years of storm swells. The last train had run five years before.

Suddenly, Wilmar stood bolt upright, the chair tipping backward into his mother’s succulents. He should go to San Juan Capistrano!

HIS MOM MADE A FUSS BUT HE COULD TELL SHE WAS GLAD TO SEE HIM GO. HE FOUND a bike and rode it to the Burbank Airport station just in time to hop a train to Union Station, and used the short trip to swipe through a lot more Friendster profiles, these ones all for SJC. The system found him a ton of friends-of-a-friend, and by the time he got to Union Station, he’d found a FOAF sofa for two nights and had a FOAF dinner date. He changed trains and an hour later, he was pulling into SJC and the dinner date had turned into a dinner party in a new park in the New SJC.

He found a bike and clipped his phone to the handlebars and let it map him to the park.

It was getting on rush hour and there were tons of bikes in the bike lanes, and full buses passed him in the bus lane. Even this far inland, SJC’s air smelled of sea salt, and lots of the apartment balconies had wetsuits and surfboards on them. The route to the new park was uphill all the way, of course. Everything in new SJC was uphill, because going inland was good, but high ground was better.

The park was in the shadow of a grid of huge turbines that thrummed overhead and creaked as they tuned themselves so that each one fed its slipstream to the one behind it, maximizing efficiency. He ditched the bike against a rack and flipped Friendster into friendfinder mode and let it guide him to a group of people his age with blankets and frisbees and deep tans and scratched knuckles.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m Wilmar?”

They shouted a flurry of hellos and someone handed him a beer and someone else gave him a tamale from a thermos steamer. He tossed it from hand to hand until it cooled off, then unwrapped it and accepted a dollop of habanero sauce.

There were a dozen people when he arrived, but more trickled in, and he was given a fresh orange, half an avocado (and a compostable spoon), hard kombucha, and a cup of gazpacho. He played frisbee, talked Burbank politics, talked national politics, collected tips on the best coffee and baked goods in newtown and old SJC, and even saw a swallow.

“We’re putting nesting cavities in every building,” Treesa said. She looked younger than Wilmar but she said she was working on the newtown buildout so he figured she had to be older than she looked—the Jobs Guarantee wouldn’t give heavy industry gigs to people until they were eighteen. She had gone to summer surfing camp with a guy who’d been on Wilmar’s swim team and had a first cousin who worked at the gym where Wilmar’s dad went for physio. These connections didn’t make for much conversation beyond the openers, but the openers were all they needed. She was funny and smart, and she knew every single thing about the newtown.

“No one knows where their migration patterns’ll be in a decade or two, but there’s a prof at UC Riverside who thinks that if we provide them with habitats and food there’s a good chance that they’ll keep this as their terminus.”

“Are you studying zoology?” Wilmar asked.

“Maybe,” she said. “I got my AP biology, but I’m taking a couple years off for this—” She waved her arm at the mid-rises around them, the streetcar and bus tracks, the park. “My family’s been in San Juan Capistrano since the Mission days. My umpty-great grandpa was a bricklayer, and when I was a kid my dad used to point out all the buildings he helped with. Doing this—” another expansive gesture—“it feels right.”

“That’s incredible,” he said. He cracked another hard kombucha. It was sour and tart, and someone told him it was 7 percent, which explained how lightheaded he was. “Working in Mojave, I’d watch the slabs pile up on the loading docks, watch them head out on the freighters, and I’d wonder about the people on the other end.”

“Did you ever put notes on them?”

“Notes?”

“In marker,” she said. “That permanent greasepen? We get a lot of slabs with notes on ’em, I see them sometimes when I’m priming the slabs after they’re in place. I’ve got a whole gallery of them.” He leaned in close to see the screen she spread out, swiped through her pictures: “THIS SIDE UP” and “HELL OR HIGH WATER” and then political slogans “UWAYNI FOR A THIRD TERM” and “HART’S A TOOL.”

“There was so much election stuff, it was crazy,” she said, finding him more.

“I had no idea,” he said. “Maybe we don’t do that in Mojave—maybe it’s just the other factories?” He knew of at least ten that served the San Juan Capistrano project, in an arc that went south to San Diego and north to Nevada. Mojave was the closest one to home, so he’d gone for it, thinking that he could shuttle back and forth. Why had he thought that would be good?

“Treesa!” They both looked around to see who was calling, and then Treesa’s hands tightened on the screen, scrunching it. It was an older woman, hair under a kerchief and dirty clothes, heading their way across the park. She looked homeless, but did they really have homeless people in San Juan Capistrano? What about the housing guarantee?

“Hi, Auntie Lanelle,” Treesa said, rising to intercept the woman before she could reach them. Wilmar tried not to stare as they started talking in low tones.

But then the woman started crying and Treesa hugged her and patted her back, and that only made her sob louder. Wilmar decided he should help.

“Can I do something?”

Treesa glared at him for a moment, then softened. “It’s OK,” she said. The woman loosened her grip on Treesa, dug a dirty face-scarf out of a pocket and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you a friend of Treesa’s? I’m her great aunt, Lanelle Carter.” Her voice was thin and cracked. She held out her hand, and Wilmar made himself shake it, and immediately got that “need-hand-san” feeling on that hand, the subconscious need to keep from touching anything else. He noticed the feeling and was mildly ashamed: he could tell himself that it was just normal pathogen prudence, but he knew deep down that he was recoiling at her broken-ness, her living proof of social failure.

“It’s nice to meet you, Ms Carter. I’m Wilmar Nazarian. I’m visiting from Burbank.”

“Oh,” she said, and got a faraway look. “We have people in Burbank. Did you know that, Treesa? My mother’s baby brother Norbert took his family there. We used to visit them for Fourth of July. Such wonderful fireworks.”

“How are you doing, Auntie?” Treesa asked. “Come and get a plate.”

None of Treesa’s friends wanted to hang out with her homeless great-aunt either, so they formed a little island on a picnic blanket, with a wide, empty space all around them. “Are we socially distancing again?” Treesa’s auntie asked vaguely.

“No, Auntie,” Treesa said, giving her a handful of freeze-dried apple chips.

They sat in awkward silence as she ate. Wilmar thought of watching A Kung-Fu Panda Christmas Carol with his brothers, thought of the Ghost of Christmas Past. After his glum days in Burbank, he’d felt like he’d found a better mood in SJC. But the darkness was creeping in around the edges again.

“These are wonderful,” she said and daintily dabbed at her lips with her dirty scarf.

“Where are you sleeping, Auntie?” Treesa’s voice was soft.

Her aunt got a suspicious look. “I’m fine, girl, don’t worry about me.”

“You can get an apartment here.” Now Treesa’s voice had gone hard. “You’re entitled to one. Everyone whose place was flooded out—”

Her aunt cut her off with a sharp gesture and suddenly she was much more present. “I have made it very clear that I do not want to live here. I want to live in my home. Our family home. Your great-grandfather—”

“Built a home that is now underwater, Auntie. I loved that house, too. But we’re not fish, Auntie.”

She made a sour face. “I don’t want to argue with you.”

A glum silence descended again. Treesa avoided Wilmar’s eye. He wondered if there was some graceful way to gtfo, but now that everyone else had distanced themselves, he’d be abandoning her. True, she was basically a stranger, but she’d come out for his Friendster call, so she was the kind of good person that he should be good to.

“I love you, Treesa. Best be on my way.”

He watched her struggle with herself. “Stay at my place, Auntie. I’ll take the sofa.”

He aunt didn’t even look back: “Told you I didn’t need charity.” She walked off, stooped and limping.

They didn’t say anything for too long. He decided he should say something.

“I’m sorry about your aunt, Treesa.”

A flash of anger, then sadness. “Me too.”

Should he go? Could he? He could fake a message from his couch-surf for the night and slink off. But Treesa really looked like she was hurting.

“You remember Uwayni’s first inauguration?”

“Sure,” he said. He’d been nine and everyone in the house had gathered around the biggest tablet to watch it, playing the audio on every speaker. His parents’ faces had shone and he’d caught some of their excitement. “For the first time in a century, we will raise—”

She picked up it: “A generation that is not afraid of the future.” She smiled. Such a sad smile. “Musta heard that a thousand times in school.” She pulled up a tuft of long, blue-green, drought-resistant grass, shook it like a pom-pom. “Our cheerleaders even had a cheer for it.”

“Well, it’s true,” Wilmar said. “Isn’t it?”

A silence so long that he wondered if she’d heard, then, “Yeah, it’s true. Talk to my dad, he still doesn’t believe it. Secretly he thinks we’re all doomed, the planets’ gonna roast and drown. And the generation before him—”

“Your aunt’s generation.”

“Them. For them, it’s like they’re refugees. We think we’re building the promised land, they see it as a camp.” She flopped on her back on the blanket and threw the clump of grass away. “Sometimes, I’ll come around a corner here and there’ll be a whole new building, a whole neighborhood even, and it doesn’t matter how many times I do the city plan flythrough and how many AR walkthroughs I take, it always takes my breath away. For me, this isn’t a refugee camp, it’s salvation. Our city was drowning and we used our own hands and our own backs to move it a mile inland and 500 feet uphill. We even relocated the Mission, one brick at a time!”

Wilmar lay back too. “I watched that. We all did, in Mojave. The stream was amazing. So many cool things under the ground and in the walls. Those dirty drawings that nun did—”

She laughed “You know they bricked them back up in the wall when they put it back together?”

“No way.”

She waved her hands in the air over them, seeming to grab at the stars appearing overhead. “Scanned them first, of course, but yeah. Every weird thing, down to the tin can full of old bottlecaps we found under the vegetable beds.”

He laughed, and they got quiet again.

“I’m sorry about your aunt.”

“I’m sorry you had to see her. It’s hard.”

“Don’t be sorry for that.”

“I am, though. My family business. My problem.”

To his great surprise, Wilmar began to weep.

“Oh, shit, dude—” She was looming over him now, worried.

He armed tears off his cheeks and dug tears out of his ears and sat up. Why couldn’t he stop crying? This was so stupid. He found his own face mask in a side pocket of his backpack and wiped ferociously at his face.

What he wanted, more than anything, was to stop crying, but that was not possible, it seemed.

“Wilmar? What is it? Can you talk about it?”

He pushed his breathing, slowed it, wiped his eyes and nose. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for and I forgive you anyways. Want to talk about it?”

“It’s just my shit,” he said. “Honestly, it’ll be OK.”

“I believe you. But also, if you want to talk—”

He did, but he didn’t want to burden this stranger. “It’s OK.”

She got in his face. This close, he could see that she had a little zit on one cheek, see her dimples, see the dot where she’d taken out an old nose piercing. “Wilmar, dude, if it’s OK, it’s OK. But everyone’s got some shit and everyone needs to talk about it from time to time. You don’t know me and I don’t know you and sometimes, that makes it easier. Just think about that before you bottle this all back up again.”

His breathing and tears were under control, but the clouds that had closed in on him that morning and kept him in bed were back again. He thought about Treesa’s great aunt, broken and alone, and wondered if that could be him in a few decades.

He thought about how she’d refused to even discuss the situation. He opened up.

“OK, the fact is that I live with depression. I mean, everyone does to some extent and it’s not always on top of me but sometimes it just comes for a visit and sits on my chest and won’t get up. It whispers in my ear, tells me things will be terrible, that I’m terrible, that I’m not doing any good.”

He drew a shuddering breath. “Something about that Uwayni speech always seems to bring it on.” What were the right words for this? He’d never said them. Could he find them now? “I am afraid. That’s it. I’m supposed to be unafraid of the future, the first fear-free generation in a century but I’m so scared all the time. I watch the panels come off my line and I think it’s crazy, there’s no way we’re going to relocate every coastal city in the country—”

“In the world,” she said.

“The world! No way. The storms are worse every year, the heat is crazy, none of the flowers bloom on time anymore, the bees are still dying—”

“Not as quickly.”

“Not as quickly. Fine. Maybe we can save the bees. But I just can’t make the math work in my head. There’s so much to do. And then they send me home because there’s clouds over the factory—”

“You can’t save the world from runaway CO2 by producing trillions of tons of CO2. You know that, Wilmar. The job feels too big for you because it is. It’s a team sport, dude. The best thing you can do for the planet is fix stuff. And when you can’t fix stuff, the best thing you can do is stop breaking stuff. Hanging out in a park is just about the most benign thing you can do for the planet. The sun’s out somewhere, and they’re doing the work for us. You can stand down.”

“I know you’re right. But I feel like such a, such a fraud. Like everyone else is all ‘we got this,’ and I’m all ‘holy shit, we’re all going to fucking roast’ and the only thing that keeps me going is working so hard I don’t have room to think about it. Soon as work stops…” He flapped his arm at the world, at himself.

She stood up and stuck her hand out. “Come on,” she said.

He took her hand. It was strong and calloused from building a new city. As the sun set, she took him on a tour of it.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE. THOUGH THE BUILDINGS WERE BUILT FROM STANDARD parts, there were so many ways to recombine them, and more were emerging every day, as modelers and designers and builders shared their inventions. Some neighborhoods were made from buildings that looked like scaled-up missions, others had a beachy, SoCal, mid-century feel, while others were like jumbled-together craftsman houses, hard to tell where one stopped and the next started. All had broad public spaces—interior courtyards, community gardens, playgrounds. He fell in love with a place that had the feel of a Moroccan town from an old movie, with tall pink stucco buildings whose round-shouldered doors echoed the archways that defined their alleys. They got delicious strong coffee from a self-serve cart and baklava from some kids with a card table and a hand-lettered sign, and two older women came and kissed Treesa on the cheek and made her promise to come for dinner that week. She seemed delighted to make the promise.

Everywhere they went, they saw people—cooking out, playing, jogging, strolling. It was a strolling city, with even the biggest structures pierced by walkways that led out to narrow streets or broad parks. Even carrying his backpack, even tired and emotionally wrung out, Wilmar kept pushing on, curious about what he’d find around the next corner, and the next.

“It’s amazing,” he said, as they reached a lookout that offered a clear vista out to sea, where the moonrise was staining the tips of the waves white.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

He did his mental-health thing, actually cataloging the messages in his brain for signs of the inward-spiral of self-loathing. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was absolutely better than it had been. “OK, I think.” He dug a baggie of trailmix out of his bag and shook himself a handful, then offered some to her.

Now she led him to the old town, the original town. The drowned town. The outskirts were marshy, but soon they found their way to an interconnected set of pontoon walkways that floated in the shallow, brackish water over the old lawns and streets and sidewalks, the splash of the pontoons and the creak of the wooden sections mixing with the insect roar. It was a haunted place, soft and decaying, with houses down on their knees or reduced to just a few uprights. Fish splashed in the distance, and the old graffiti was still visible in the twilight: “2 INSIDE”—“DEAD INSIDE”—“TRESSPASSERS WILL.” Rusted parking signs stuck up out of the water like Venetian gondola bricolas, and they heard the distant voices of canoers out for an evening’s paddle. The storefronts’ windows were long, long gone, and the stores themselves were dark caves blowing soft fungal smells.

But amid them were sprawling mangroves, planted early in the crisis and now grown to early maturity thanks to their hybrid genes, knucklebones piercing the Pacific Coast Highway where it stuck up out of the water.

“In a couple years this place will be all marshland,” she said. “But there’s plans to keep a surf beach a couple miles up the coast, somewhere that doesn’t have quite so many buried snags.”

The insect song rose with the moon. They watched as it silvered the ruins and turned the ripples of the water into light shows, thinking their thoughts, watching a city that had stood for a quarter of a millennium disintegrate before their eyes.

BY THE TIME WILMAR AROSE THE NEXT DAY, HIS COUCH-SURFING HOST WAS ALREADY at work, having left behind some breakfast stuff and a nice note with some tips for things to do and see in town. The list was great, especially the little museum of treasures they’d found when they dug out the old town, but Wilmar didn’t want to do any of that stuff.

He DMed Treesa instead, and an hour later, he was on her job site, getting trained on fitting together the slabs that they craned off of the railcar on its spur. An hour after that, he finished his first stretch of wall, on the third story of a ten-unit low-rise that followed a ridgeline with good views inland, to the scrub and woods on the site of the old golf course.

When it was time for lunch, they sat together and ate tamales. “You’re supposed to be on vacation, dude. Are you sure this is good self-care?” Her tone was light but she was serious.

“I’m fine. Better than fine. I think the problem was that working in Mojave, it was like this endless conveyor belt—make a slab, ship a slab, make a slab, do it forever, until the world is saved. But this—” he slapped the wall they were leaning against “—it’s real. You can see it. You can live in it. I think maybe I wanna try working here for a while.”

“If you say so.” She gave him a half-joking side-eye. “But you’re the one who says you work to get away from your anxieties.”

He felt himself getting angry, caught the physical signs in his jaw and hands, then made himself calm down. She wasn’t wrong. “I have a theory about you,” he said.

Full side-eye now. “Go on.”

“I think this work is how you cope, too. Like, if you can build the right kind of new city up here on the hill, your aunt and everyone else can stop mourning what they lost.”

She looked away and was quiet for so long he got worried.

“Treesa, I’m sorry, that was out of line. I apologize sincerely.”

She looked at him, eyes brimming, then swiped at them. “It’s OK.” Her voice was thick. “Really. Yeah, that’s it all right. My mom went in the ’28 pandemic, and at the end she was so scared. Not scared that she was gonna die. So many people had died then, we’d made our peace with that, all of us. She was scared of the world they were leaving me in.” She thumped the wall. “When I do this, it’s like I’m dealing with it for her.

“Truth is, I’m scared of the future. Sure, we can build a new city in the hills. Maybe we can do that for every coastal city. But it won’t do us a damned bit of good against wildfires. It won’t bring back the extinct species. It won’t stop the plagues. When I get to thinking about it I am so scared.

“But when I’m working, I can pretend that we can fix this. And if I can fool myself into thinking it’s fine, then maybe I can deal with whatever’s coming.”

She blew her nose on a face-scarf. “It’s stupid, I know.”

“No,” Wilmar said. “No, that’s not stupid at all.”