Joseph Tomaras
Bonfires in Anacostia
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue No. 95, August 2014
1. The Table
On the left-hand side of the coffee table were stacked three Michael Chabon novels, one each by T.C. Boyle and Tim O’Brien, and a volume of Nathanael West’s collected works. On the right were five guides to maximizing fertility, and two novels by Tessa Dare. In between were two stemless wine glasses.
The table itself was a clear polymer which, were it not encumbered with the remains of its owners’ outmoded bibliomania, would reveal itself as a fully operational touchscreen. It was designed, however, to require replacement as soon as it received a hard thwack: The sort of urbane furnishing that only a childless couple would have purchased.
An advantage of this table, from the perspective of those charged with maintaining homeland security, is that its voice-activated features kept it in a continual state of attentive listening. If the owner kept it in its default, continuously connected networking mode—as 99% of purchasers of these models did—then every word spoken in its vicinity would fall under the expanded electronic surveillance authorization established by a certain executive order signed twenty years ago whose existence would be neither confirmed nor denied by anyone with legal authorization to know of it. That the owners happened to be Robert and Eileen Wexler, mid-level operatives in the DC office of the Cuomo 2024 re-election campaign, did not change the functioning of the table or of those analysts in Prince Georges County charged with making sense of its data-feed and hundreds of thousands more.
The table knew that objects totaling a weight of approximately ten kilograms were distributed unevenly across its surface, that the materials pressing against it were cloth, paper and glass, that Robert had in recent weeks been putting the music of the Talking Heads, an American New Wave band active from 1975 through 1991, on heavy rotation, whereas Eileen preferred silence whenever she was in the room, and that at this instant they had just repaired to their bedroom to finish preparations for a dinner party at the home of Darius and Brandon Gartner-Williams. It also knew that they would sometimes clear enough space to pull up campaign memos, the Post and the Times (both New York and Washington, of each), polling results and Sunday morning talk shows on its screen. The table could not know what was contained within the archaic text delivery devices pressing against it, though it got occasional glimpses when Robert would leave a book open face-down atop it—a habit for which Eileen would chastise him each time, reminding him that it would damage the spine. Neither Robert nor Eileen knew that the table knew all these things, but neither did they trust it fully, which may account for their decision to reconnoiter the dusty shelves of the DC Public Library and that mildewy used book store in a garret two stories above the scrum of Adams-Morgan for some of their reading matter.
Robert entered the room, noted Eileen’s glass adjacent to his, and snorted. “I’m pretty sure none of those books recommend sauvignon blanc to enhance your fertility.”
“You try answering to Ari Levine all day without a bit of liquid assistance,” replied Eileen as she joined him. “When’s the party?”
“I couldn’t even suffer Tyler Colson without my refreshment. Seven o’clock.” The Wexlers’ habit of carrying on two conversations simultaneously was either irritating or endearing, depending on whether one was in a relationship with similar idiosyncrasies.
“Besides,” continued Eileen, sitting on the couch and lifting her glass. “It’s no better for your sperm than it is for my eggs. What’s on the menu?”
Robert paused a beat, as he decided it would be ill-advised to remind her of the test results showing that his 47-year-old gonads were none the worse for wear. “I don’t know. Brandon was freaking out when I called him this morning. He just found out that Camilo’s new boy is a vegan.”
“I need animal protein.” Eileen took another sip. “Ari wanted me to work late. Try explaining to him that I needed to go to my husband’s ex-boyfriend’s party.”
“Did you?”
“It’s none of his business. I told him no amount of number crunching would change the situation: Short of a total catastrophe, Andy’s got this locked up.”
“Short of the rest of the country finding out that half the nation’s capital is in flames, you mean.”
“Exactly. It’s out of our hands at this point.”
Robert sat down. There was nothing left to say, but silence did not seem right, either. “We have an hour left before we have to go.” More silence. “You could have a snack.” Eileen was beginning to lean toward the table, and had not taken the hint. Robert stuck his hand beneath the belt of his slacks as if to adjust, but really, to direct her attention the way he wanted.
“We shouldn’t dilute it,” replied Eileen, not even turning toward him.
Robert bent down to the table, dragged his finger diagonally to define the dimensions of a window, and called up a live feed of the Senate floor.
It was not strictly accurate to describe Brandon as Robert’s “ex-boyfriend,” not with the connotations of past exclusivity that this conventional phrase carried. Brandon and Darius had been together since well before Robert had set foot in Washington; he came to live with them shortly after he started grad school at American, during their brief, turn-of-the-century experiment with polyamory. By the time Eileen, seven years his junior, started coming to the gatherings at the Dupont Circle brownstone—on the arm of Janet—the story had grown too complex and too far distant to be worth telling accurately. That they were still getting invited to what had become the most sought-after soiree among LGBT Beltway insiders, despite the apparent completeness of their switch to heterosexuality and the low visibility of their jobs—he was a fundraising database programmer, she a statistician—was testament to Brandon’s forgiving nature, the increasing self-assuredness of the community, and Darius’ reluctance to let go of anyone he knew would appreciate his jokes, stories and lectures.
Robert just needed to keep tabs on his alcohol consumption. The last time, someone had almost walked in on him and Camilo’s last consort. He suspected Camilo had figured it out, and that this was why a new guest was coming to the dinner. There were three things to wonder about before going to these dinner parties: What would Brandon cook, what new anecdotes would Darius have, and how young and attractive would Camilo’s current boyfriend be. As the senior senator from Ohio asked to be recognized by unanimous consent, Robert considered all three. Of this, the table had no inkling, and neither did Eileen.
* * *
“Can you believe the mouth on that kid?” After several hours of hibernation, the table was woken by the sound of Robert’s voice.
“I know,” said Eileen. “Actually what I can’t believe is Darius.”
“How so?”
“Well, all that stuff about the holograms and the riots and the fires.” The utterance of three keywords in such rapid succession switched the table from passive data-gathering to active interface with the analytical mainframes at the Agency. Based on Robert’s and Eileen’s metadata signatures, the Darius in question was identified with a high degree of probability as the same Darius Gartner-Williams who was an analyst with the agency. “Some of that had to be classified.”
“Darius has always known how to walk right up to the line without crossing it. That’s the only way a raconteur like him could have stayed where he is for so long.”
“I don’t know, he just seemed, not upset, but maybe, yes, maybe upset, at what’s going on in Southeast.”
“You don’t think he’d do a Snowden?”
“No way, not a chance. Forget I said anything.” Robert found this injunction of Eileen’s easy to follow, but not the table. The table is not programmed to forget.
From the rustling sounds of their clothes the table intuited that they had taken seats on the sofa. It could not tell, however, that Eileen was reaching for the fly on Robert’s khakis. “Hey, I thought you said we shouldn’t dilute,” said Robert.
“Forget it. We’re nowhere near the right part of the cycle.”
“Is that the truth, or is that the wine talking?”
“Too much wine and not enough food. Can you believe it, lentils and vegetables?” A zipping sound, then a seeming non sequitur: “What did you think of Camilo’s new boy?”
Robert flinched guiltily, as if somehow Eileen’s question signaled some awareness on her part of his indiscretion with Camilo’s last partner, but she wasn’t looking at his face to notice it. “Too skinny. And how can someone that self-righteous be that racist?” Then after a pause, during which he realized that in fact he would love to watch that bigoted little twerp choking on his dick, but that he should not say anything to that effect to Eileen, as the intermingling of violence, hatred and sexuality would be unnerving to her, he took note of the increased exposure of his genitals to Eileen’s manipulations: “Are you sure we should? Ooooh.”
The table soon detected a gagging noise that seemed to emerge from Eileen’s throat. “Before, aah, we go too far, ooh,” continued Robert, “Nice finger work, uhh, ahh, could we try, anal?” The table knew he only ever asked this when Eileen was drunk.
“Sure.”
“I’ll get the lube.”
“Don’t bother going upstairs. Vegetable oil’s fine.”
After hearing some sounds emerging from the kitchen, the table detected the removal of ten kilograms of books and other assorted materials from its surface, followed by a pressure totaling about thirty kilograms coming from what appeared, from visual sensing, to be Eileen’s torso. This impression was soon confirmed by ultrafast sequencing of DNA from one of her skin cells: This feature of the table’s was not a major selling point, but when discussed was pitched as a security measure. What better way to track down a $10,000 piece of home electronics, if stolen, than to have the thief’s DNA sequenced and automatically sent to the police? What neither Robert nor Eileen realized was that the table was already in a heightened state of alert, as a result of the keywords Eileen had spoken just a few minutes before, and that the sequencer was not only on, but bypassing local law enforcement and communicating directly with the Agency.
After about fifteen minutes of further jostling, the sequencer also detected human coliform bacteria, and incomplete genetic material originating from Robert. We do not know what happened next, but it must have been especially vigorous: A critical component of the table’s power supply was dislodged from its circuit, and we lost all signal.
2. The Duck
The first thing, always, was to take off the tie, open the foyer closet, and find an empty rod on the cedar tie hanger. The second was to take the kitchen apron out of the same closet, and put it on. The third was to proceed through the combined living room / dining room / hallway across the terra cotta tiling to the kitchen and dock his tablet in the countertop station. The fourth was to find the traffic report on the tablet. With these practiced movements, Brandon Gartner-Williams would clearly delimit his Inspector General self from his domestic Dupont Circle townhouse incarnation, and no matter how maddening the preceding workday had been, he would ready himself and his home and his dinner table for the arrival of his husband, Darius, or Dar for short.
The traffic report was the key, the moment at which uncertainty would take over from ritual and preparation, and the outside world would provide the information necessary to make the next set of choices and motions. For Darius worked as an analyst at a subdirectorate of the NSA whose name, existence, budget and mission were never acknowledged in public documents, at an office in the Maryland suburbs whose nondescriptness on maps and satellite images was so impeccable as to raise suspicion, and his way home required him to drive through the District’s Southeast quadrant. The neighborhoods on the left bank of the Anacostia River had proven resistant to three decades of gentrification and were now the site of regular disturbances, but Darius had explained to Brandon that the traffic reports would be the only way to have any sense of what was happening. The agency had seen to it that the news would not spread to other metro areas, but the armies of functionaries, lawyers, military men, contractors and subcontractors who populated the more prosperous quadrants and suburbs of DC would not stand for censorship of their traffic reports. Cooperative discretion was all the agency demanded in this case.
Strictly speaking, Darius did not need to traverse Pennsylvania Avenue SE to get home. He could have taken the safer route, inching along the Beltway. But Darius was not one to swerve from an available straight line. At least, that was what Dar had told Brandon. Brandon suspected that Darius was insisting that he was no less black than the young men setting barricades and cars alight in the streets, that despite his Falls Church upbringing and UVA and Georgetown degrees that he had no less right to be in that neighborhood than those who were born and would likely die there.
Brandon suspected, but he never asked. Even though they had been together for nearly thirty years, had gotten married as soon as DOMA was overturned by the Supreme Court, had developed matching paunches and grown comfortable with each other’s personhood, he still felt guilty for the casual hurts he had unwittingly inflicted in the early years of their relationship: The crestfallen gaze of a twenty-something size queen, disappointed to learn that a certain stereotype was not universally true, and other things, some more petty, others worse, that he cringed to recall. He had learned over time not to ask certain questions of Dar. He would listen when Dar had something to say, to get off his chest, but he would not ask.
It took a while for the traffic report to come on. The 501c4s had figured out a way to keep their ads from being blocked or noise-cancelled. In the 2024 election season, the machinery of constitutional government continued in full view of the populace, louder and brighter than ever. Brandon turned his thoughts to dinner.
He had the duck that he had been planning to make into a ragout over pappardelle for last night’s dinner party, until he learned that Camilo’s guest, a lithe sophomore from GWU, was a vegetarian. And not one of those “I’ll just eat the salad” kinds, but some hysterical vegan who would take offense at the smells of flesh and fat, horrified at the holocaust of innocent animals to which he had been made a party. Camilo, a notorious chickenhawk, had pleaded with Brandon and Dar to change the menu. They made do with a cassoulet of autumn squash and Puy lentils, and a lot of Puligny-Montrachet.
He remembered the boy’s comment that brought the party to a halt: “I don’t understand why those people have to burn down their own neighborhood.” Camilo dropped a fork. A dozen eyeballs made a circuit from the unexpected guest seated at the middle of the dining room table, to Dar at the head as always, to the ceiling. He went on, “I mean, not those people like, all African-Americans or anything like that, just those people in Anacostia.”
Everyone knew Dar was going to lecture. When he was angry, he got professorial, an image that was helped by the leather-patched tweed jacket he had chosen for the evening. “Those people live in a neighborhood that is an embarrassment to this country, through decades of neglect. The government tried to bulldoze it into shape with urban renewal. Then the market took over, with gentrification, which is why you can live…where do you live again?”
“Columbia Heights.”
“Why you can live in Columbia Heights and have no idea what it was like in the mid-nineties, when Brandon and I met. You remember, Bran?”
Put on the spot, Brandon had to speak, though he didn’t want to. His response was clumsy, nervous and embarrassing. “When Dar and I met, we were both living on U Street. Even that was a little sketchy back then. No one would head up into Columbia Heights unless they had business being there, and the only people with business there were the junkies. Remember what I used to say about Anacostia, Dar?”
“Brandon was very new to DC. Back then the Green Line ended in Anacostia, and he would take it down to L’Enfant Plaza for work. He said the woman’s voice on the Metro, before it was all computerized, made it sound like heaven.”
Everyone laughed at Brandon’s expense. Brandon excused himself: “She really did have an angelic voice.”
Dar took no notice and continued. “I drive through that neighborhood every day, to and from work. Population density kept going up as people got priced out of everywhere else. The houses are falling apart, the roads are rutted like in any third world country.”
Camilo interrupted: “Like back home in Chile. Worse than Chile.”
“It got better after Barack Obama was elected,” Dar continued. “Some black professionals started moving in, fixing up homes, opening fancy restaurants. Bran and I even thought about buying a condo to shorten my commute to the new job, but, well, Brandon wouldn’t exactly have fit in.”
“Not that I would have minded living there, of course,” protested Brandon, perhaps a bit too insistently.
“Of course, darling. Well, it’s a good thing we didn’t. The Second Depression started, half the gentrifiers lost their jobs and the other half moved back across the river as soon as some desperate fool pulled a knife on them. Then someone got the idea for holograms, a way to make it look to people flying into Reagan National or Dulles like there was not this lingering corner of squalor in the nation’s capital. The people living there didn’t seem to notice the illusions at first.”
“I can’t believe that they wouldn’t notice,” replied the boy.
“Believe or don’t believe, it’s up to you. But I see it every day in my job: Human beings will assume that things remain as they were, until they’re forced to notice a change. The structures were ethereal, easy to miss if you don’t think to look for them.”
“So why the fires?” asked the boy.
“Some genius decided to throw a few white people into the mix, to try and jumpstart another wave of gentrification. You know the type. Young, artists or antiwar activists, skinny vegans….” Everyone tittered except the boy and Camilo, who did his best to mimic the disapproving earnest look on his young lover’s face. “A few young bloods tried to earn their street cred by throwing punches at the strangers, and that’s when people in the neighborhood realized something was happening. They started calling the images ‘ghosts.’ They noticed the shimmering patches in their roofs, the manhole covers in place of holes they had taught their children to avoid, the crackhouses and burnt-out lots that had become mansions. And someone—no one knows who, and I would know if anyone knew—tried to set one of the mansions on fire. And that was when they learned what it took government scientists a year and a million dollars to figure out: That fires disrupt the holoprojections. A well-aimed laser would do the same, anything that directs enough energy and light in the right place, but fires are more affordable. More democratic, if you will.”
“I still don’t see how that justifies the destruction. It just seems so stupid, counterproductive.”
“They just want to be seen, their lives to be seen, as they really are. And I think anyone at this table”—Dar swept his hand broadly at the dinner party, consisting of four gay male couples, two pairs of lesbians, and a seemingly hetero couple who had, between the two of them, slept with half the other guests—“would understand wanting that.”
But the lad was too born-in-the-twenty-first century to intuit the breadth of history that Darius had encapsulated with a single gesture, and soon enough, too soon, the word “animals” had been tossed out and Camilo made some excuses about the wine going to their heads and ushered his conquest out the door to his Adams-Morgan studio where there would doubtless be a glass-shattering fight, angry sex, or both.
So the upshot was, Brandon had to do something with that duck. If Darius had a short trip ahead of him, he would just break it down and sear the magrets for tonight so he could get something on the table quickly, then start tonight making confit with the legs for later, and freeze the rest of the carcass for stock over the weekend. If there were bonfires in Anacostia, he would have time enough to roast it. From what little Darius would let fall about his workdays, he understood that a quick dinner would have something to do with the operations branch of the subdirectorate—not Dar and the analysts, whom Dar represented as professional onlookers.
The ads had ended. Brandon listened to the traffic report with ears trained to listen for the unspoken.
3. The Car
Trayvon Allen, age 12, was the lookout posted to watch the bonfire at the corner of Pennsylvania and 31st SE and alert the block to the arrival of police, fire department, the black cars, or anyone else who looked like they did not belong in the neighborhood. When he saw the black Audi making its way down an otherwise deserted stretch of Pennsylvania, he assumed it was operations, and flashed his mirror at the window of the 3rd floor apartment where DeShawn was camped out.
Something wasn’t right, though. The car was coming at least 60 miles an hour, and accelerating. The driver seemed to be moving the steering wheel left and right, but the car stayed straight, as if someone had aimed it straight at the fire.
The driver didn’t look right either. DeShawn came down with the crew and asked Trayvon, “Who that, T? Ops?”
“Naw, looks like some college nigga. Fat guy, glasses, faggoty suit.”
The black Audi hit the bonfire, which had been built of cop cars, building lumber and gasoline, going at least eighty-five. They could hear the driver screaming from inside the car.
“Hold back, son,” said DeShawn. “That shit gawn blow.” DeShawn began walking backwards, hands above his eyes, and the crew mimicked. Then the gas tank on the Audi exploded, sending shrapnel into the holoprojector at the corner and shorting out the ghosts.
“Should we help him?” said Trayvon.
“He gone. Let’s check him out before ops show.”
The driver had smashed his own window and tried to climb out before the explosion. His dreads were still smoldering and the melted portions of his face looked bright pink against blue-black skin. He still had his ID and lanyard around his neck, the insignia of the agency visible from five feet away. “Shit, they gawn try and pin this on us,” said DeShawn. “To the winds.” At that signal, each member of the crew scattered in a different cardinal direction. Trayvon meandered south, swiping a half-burnt piece of paper off the ground. It had an address in the Northwest quadrant. He shoved it in his back jeans pocket.
By the time five black cars came west up Pennsylvania five minutes later, Trayvon, DeShawn and the other six members of the crew were all out of sight. Ten necks as thick as their heads, mostly white but two black dudes and a Latin among them: These were ops. Different crews, with older men or harder kids, would be sending down sniper fire any minute, but these guys were Kevlared head to toe.
Trayvon looked back at the scene from the Dumpster where he was hiding. Though the college-looking dude was one of their own, the ops looked neither surprised nor sad. He patted his rear pocket to make sure the paper was still there.
4. The Kid
Ordinarily a trip to Dupont Circle would be a simple matter of getting on the Metro, but things hadn’t been ordinary in a long time. The Green Line had started bypassing all Southeast stations ever since the bonfires began, and the fare was well above Trayvon’s hustle. If he had a flat map of the District in his mind he might have been able to calculate that the address was only a two-hour walk away. But the uprising and repression had warped his mental map of the city, transforming the Anacostia River into an impassable singularity. That he felt drawn to the address despite this wise caution was inexplicable through Trayvon’s conscious thought. His path did not follow a straight line, but proceeded faster than a straight line trajectory would have taken him, as he slingshotted his way around obstacles known and observed: checkpoints, cop cars, black cars, vigilante gangs of yuppies in street mufti, and the cameras. For a black kid in an ash-stained white t-shirt, the District was more hazardous than an asteroid belt for the Millennium Falcon.
So by the time he arrived at the front door of the Gartner-Williams house, four hours had passed since the accident, agency representatives had come and gone, the duck, slightly overdone, had been sitting on the counter getting cold, Brandon’s tears had pooled in a crease of the leather sofa on which he was lying, and Trayvon was starving. No lights were on in the house, and he hesitated before ringing the bell. Hesitated, but the same drive that had brought him this far led his finger to the button. The button activated not only the bell, but also a camera at the top of the doorway. If Trayvon had noticed the lens, he would have fled, but it was too dark on the street for him to suss it out.
Brandon hesitated before deciding to answer the door: It could, he reasoned, be the agency with more details on the circumstances of Darius’s accident. Despite his decision, the ten-foot walk from the sofa onto which he had collapsed was like swimming through the Mariana Trench: slow and bone-crushing. In that time, Trayvon had multiple opportunities to re-consider, re-re-consider, and re-re-re-consider, and he had just begun to pivot his left foot away from the door when Brandon’s voice creaked, raw, from the intercom. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The second question confused Trayvon a bit. For four hours he had undertaken this fool’s errand contrary to his own conscious volition. “I…I saw something,” he said, retrieving the scrap of paper and holding it up to where, he now reasoned, the camera must be.
Brandon couldn’t make out anything on the screen, but assumed it had something to do with Darius. His hope and trust opened the door before his fear could countermand it. “Come in. What did you see?”
“An accident. A black man in a black car. I found this.” Trayvon stepped across the threshold and handed the paper to the white man with red eyes. Brandon recognized it as a scrap of a receipt from Darius’ auto repair shop. “Did he live here?”
“Yes, he did. Please, come inside.” Ordinarily, Brandon enjoyed being a host above all else. A 12-year-old kid from the wrong side of town would not usually be on the guest list, but his instinctual hospitality overrode his mistrust and distracted him, momentarily, from his grief.
The smell of the duck reminded Trayvon of his hunger. He hadn’t eaten anything since his sugar-cereal breakfast. “Smells good in here.”
“Are you hungry?”
The thought crossed his mind that this white man could be a government agent, or a child molester, but his stomach growled in response. Admitting his poverty to this white stranger was out of the question, though, so all he said was, “I can eat.”
“Come on in. I’ll get you something to eat.”
Trayvon followed Brandon into the kitchen. When they reached the counter, Brandon noticed that he hadn’t turned off the tablet yet. He removed it from the dock and, with the same fluidity of motion with which he had started his kitchen prep earlier in the evening, hurled it against the exposed brick. The sudden violence and the crack of the screen made Trayvon jump back. “Why you do that?”
“I hate the news,” said Brandon. He gestured at one of the stools opposite his work area. “Sit down. I’ll cut you some duck. Do you want the leg or the breast?”
“I never had duck. Is it like chicken?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’ll try the leg.”
“I didn’t get a chance to cook any vegetables. I can make you a salad.”
“Tha’s’a’ight. I’ll just try the duck.” Trayvon wasn’t sure if he’d ever eaten a salad, and he didn’t want to have his first here. The white man and the duck were strange enough.
Brandon put a plate in front of him, then a fork and knife, and placed the duck leg on his plate. “What do you want to drink?”
“You got Kool-Aid?” Brandon shook his head, so Trayvon answered, “I’ll just have some water.”
“Sparkling or still?” Trayvon looked at him like he had grown a second head, so Brandon just ran an empty glass under the tap.
“The man in the car, what was he to you?”
Brandon set the glass in front of the kid and waited for him to look up into his eyes before answering. “He’s my husband.”
“You gay?” Trayvon, remembering his grandmother’s lessons about being polite when folks offered their hospitality, had tried to suppress the hint of disgust in his voice, but he had failed.
“Yes, we’re gay. Were gay. I am gay. Darius was my husband.” This was Brandon’s first attempt at applying past tense to Darius, and it ended in renewed tears. “Why did you come here?”
“I saw the accident, but it didn’t look like no accident.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I live there.” Trayvon was not about to mention anything about his role in the construction and maintenance of the bonfires, comparatively minimal as it was, to this gay white dude. His husband had been with the agency, and for all Trayvon knew, so was this guy. Though he figured that if they worked at the same place they would have both been in the same car, but that didn’t mean this guy wasn’t still government. Government was all over the place.
“What did you mean, it didn’t look like an accident?”
“Like, he was trying to turn the car, trying to steer the wheel, I saw him, and I’m sure he was trying to slow down, too. But the car kept going straight, and faster. Like someone had set it up that way.”
“He wouldn’t have died if your friends hadn’t set up the bonfires.”
“I don’t know nothing about no bonfire,” lied Trayvon. “And nobody I know, knows how to make a car do that,” he said, returning to the truth. “I just came here ‘cause I figured, if he had peoples, they might want to know what I seen.”
Brandon sat silently, shaking his head every minute or so as a new thought occurred to him. After the first headshake, Trayvon started eating the duck. After the second, Brandon pulled a piece of crispy skin off the carcass, folded it, put it in his mouth, and started chewing, his only bite since the agency had informed him of the “accident.”
After several minutes of silence, Trayvon had finished the duck leg. “Thanks,” he said. “That was some good shit. I’m’a go home.”
“It’s well after curfew, kid. The cops’ll arrest you. You can stay here.”
“Where?”
“You can have the bed. I’ll stay out here, sleep on a couch, if I can sleep at all. I’ve been thinking so much about Darius, I realize, I’ve completely forgotten my manners. We haven’t been properly introduced. What’s your name?”
Trayvon hesitated, considering whether he wanted to sleep in a bed where two dudes done all kinds of nasty gay shit, or whether he wanted this one to know his name, weighing the unknown risks of each against the known risks of being a 12-year-old black kid out after curfew. “Trayvon,” he said.
“Are you named after…?”
“Yeah. I was born the year he died. Momma liked the name.”
“Hi, Trayvon. I’m Brandon,” said Brandon, extending his hand. Trayvon shook. “It’s not safe for you to go back out before the morning. Please, rest here.”
Trayvon’s legs and feet reminded him of the fatigue of his six-mile walk. “A’ight.” Brandon pointed the way to the bedroom. Once Trayvon found the bed, he fell face first into it and went directly to sleep, in t-shirt and jeans, smearing soot onto the duvet.
5. The Wake
It was ten o’clock in the morning, and Camilo’s lover Travis was still asleep, completely naked, and lying on top of the comforter. Camilo had been awake for two hours, and in that time had showered, made coffee, cooked breakfast, eaten breakfast, gotten dressed, and dug around in his stash for a bottle of pisco he could bring to Brandon and Darius’ house—scratch that, now it was just Brandon’s, he had to remember—as a means of comfort. He had spent the last five minutes watching the sweat pool in the curve of Travis’s lower back and his shoulders rise and fall with each breath. Now his patience was at an end. He considered rimming the young man, as a kind way to wake him, but quickly ruled it out. For no reason he could discern, he felt as though Travis’s contretemps with Darius must have had something to do with yesterday’s accident. He was angry, and it wasn’t the kind of anger that he could express through fucking. Holding the pisco bottle by its neck, he prodded Travis in the shoulder with the bottom.
“Wake up, already! Wake up! Levantate!”
“What the hell, C? It’s Saturday.”
“I told Brandon we’d be there in the morning. The morning’s almost finished.”
“I didn’t like him.”
“Who? Brandon?”
“Naw, Brandon’s alright.”
“Darius isn’t even cold in the ground, and you’re talking shit about him? He was my friend. We’re going to help Brandon out.”
Travis pulled on last night’s clothes, and they made the twenty minute walk down to Brandon’s in silence.
The doorbell woke Trayvon. Brandon, having hardly slept, was in the kitchen brewing more coffee. When he opened the door, Camilo spoke first. “How you holding up, Bran?”
“Not so good, Camilo. It’s good to have friends around.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” offered Travis.
“Thank you…. What was your name again?”
“Travis.”
“Thank you, Travis. My mind’s just been…”
“Of course, Brandon,” said Camilo. “Let’s go inside. Is anyone else here yet?”
“No, nobody at all. Bobby and Eileen are coming soon, and Susan, too, but Cassie has to work today.” As they traversed the foyer, Trayvon entered the open kitchen.
“Is that nobody?” asked Travis.
“Oh, my god, I forgot,” muttered Brandon. Then he called, “Trayvon, let me introduce you to my friends.” Trayvon approached hesitantly. “This is Camilo, and this is…”
“Travis,” said Travis, who remained aloof. Camilo offered his hand not in a shake, but as if to try and draw the boy’s hand up for a kiss, an offer not taken by Trayvon.
“Trayvon saw the accident.”
“Ay!” gasped Camilo.
“So he’s one of the rioters, then?” said Travis.
“I think I should be going,” said Trayvon, assuming the most proper, schoolroom tone of voice he could recall. “Thank you for letting me stay here, mister.”
“Brandon,” insisted Brandon.
“Thank you, Mister Brandon.”
“No, please, stay. My friends are coming over for brunch, and I want you to tell them what you told me last night, about Darius.”
“I don’t know if I should.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Trayvon. My friends know powerful people who should know the truth. We can keep you safe.”
“Have you ever had a pisco sour, son?” asked Camilo, brandishing the bottle.
“He’s way too young, Camilo. Twelve.”
Camilo looked down at his shoes, reassuring himself that the boy looked mature for his age, then offered: “I’ll make you one, Bran.”
“Too early, Camilo. But let’s go in, and you can be a dear and put a splash into my coffee.”
6. The Bridge
The surveillance cameras on the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge across the Anacostia River were knocked out by a power outage just after six p.m. on Saturday. The cause of the outage did not need to be investigated, since everyone whose responsibility it would be to investigate it was already disposed to attribute it to a nearby bonfire.
When the body of Trayvon Allen was discovered the following day in Fort Hunt, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, anyone who was in a position to investigate his cause of death saw plainly that it was due to a fall from a great height. If he was taking a circuitous route from the Dupont Circle area to his home in Congress Heights, he might very well have been crossing the Douglass bridge during the time when its surveillance cameras were out.
No bullets were recovered from his body. We repeat: No bullets were recovered from his body. Anyone who says otherwise is engaging in irresponsible speculation.
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue No. 95, August 2014
1. The Table
On the left-hand side of the coffee table were stacked three Michael Chabon novels, one each by T.C. Boyle and Tim O’Brien, and a volume of Nathanael West’s collected works. On the right were five guides to maximizing fertility, and two novels by Tessa Dare. In between were two stemless wine glasses.
The table itself was a clear polymer which, were it not encumbered with the remains of its owners’ outmoded bibliomania, would reveal itself as a fully operational touchscreen. It was designed, however, to require replacement as soon as it received a hard thwack: The sort of urbane furnishing that only a childless couple would have purchased.
An advantage of this table, from the perspective of those charged with maintaining homeland security, is that its voice-activated features kept it in a continual state of attentive listening. If the owner kept it in its default, continuously connected networking mode—as 99% of purchasers of these models did—then every word spoken in its vicinity would fall under the expanded electronic surveillance authorization established by a certain executive order signed twenty years ago whose existence would be neither confirmed nor denied by anyone with legal authorization to know of it. That the owners happened to be Robert and Eileen Wexler, mid-level operatives in the DC office of the Cuomo 2024 re-election campaign, did not change the functioning of the table or of those analysts in Prince Georges County charged with making sense of its data-feed and hundreds of thousands more.
The table knew that objects totaling a weight of approximately ten kilograms were distributed unevenly across its surface, that the materials pressing against it were cloth, paper and glass, that Robert had in recent weeks been putting the music of the Talking Heads, an American New Wave band active from 1975 through 1991, on heavy rotation, whereas Eileen preferred silence whenever she was in the room, and that at this instant they had just repaired to their bedroom to finish preparations for a dinner party at the home of Darius and Brandon Gartner-Williams. It also knew that they would sometimes clear enough space to pull up campaign memos, the Post and the Times (both New York and Washington, of each), polling results and Sunday morning talk shows on its screen. The table could not know what was contained within the archaic text delivery devices pressing against it, though it got occasional glimpses when Robert would leave a book open face-down atop it—a habit for which Eileen would chastise him each time, reminding him that it would damage the spine. Neither Robert nor Eileen knew that the table knew all these things, but neither did they trust it fully, which may account for their decision to reconnoiter the dusty shelves of the DC Public Library and that mildewy used book store in a garret two stories above the scrum of Adams-Morgan for some of their reading matter.
Robert entered the room, noted Eileen’s glass adjacent to his, and snorted. “I’m pretty sure none of those books recommend sauvignon blanc to enhance your fertility.”
“You try answering to Ari Levine all day without a bit of liquid assistance,” replied Eileen as she joined him. “When’s the party?”
“I couldn’t even suffer Tyler Colson without my refreshment. Seven o’clock.” The Wexlers’ habit of carrying on two conversations simultaneously was either irritating or endearing, depending on whether one was in a relationship with similar idiosyncrasies.
“Besides,” continued Eileen, sitting on the couch and lifting her glass. “It’s no better for your sperm than it is for my eggs. What’s on the menu?”
Robert paused a beat, as he decided it would be ill-advised to remind her of the test results showing that his 47-year-old gonads were none the worse for wear. “I don’t know. Brandon was freaking out when I called him this morning. He just found out that Camilo’s new boy is a vegan.”
“I need animal protein.” Eileen took another sip. “Ari wanted me to work late. Try explaining to him that I needed to go to my husband’s ex-boyfriend’s party.”
“Did you?”
“It’s none of his business. I told him no amount of number crunching would change the situation: Short of a total catastrophe, Andy’s got this locked up.”
“Short of the rest of the country finding out that half the nation’s capital is in flames, you mean.”
“Exactly. It’s out of our hands at this point.”
Robert sat down. There was nothing left to say, but silence did not seem right, either. “We have an hour left before we have to go.” More silence. “You could have a snack.” Eileen was beginning to lean toward the table, and had not taken the hint. Robert stuck his hand beneath the belt of his slacks as if to adjust, but really, to direct her attention the way he wanted.
“We shouldn’t dilute it,” replied Eileen, not even turning toward him.
Robert bent down to the table, dragged his finger diagonally to define the dimensions of a window, and called up a live feed of the Senate floor.
It was not strictly accurate to describe Brandon as Robert’s “ex-boyfriend,” not with the connotations of past exclusivity that this conventional phrase carried. Brandon and Darius had been together since well before Robert had set foot in Washington; he came to live with them shortly after he started grad school at American, during their brief, turn-of-the-century experiment with polyamory. By the time Eileen, seven years his junior, started coming to the gatherings at the Dupont Circle brownstone—on the arm of Janet—the story had grown too complex and too far distant to be worth telling accurately. That they were still getting invited to what had become the most sought-after soiree among LGBT Beltway insiders, despite the apparent completeness of their switch to heterosexuality and the low visibility of their jobs—he was a fundraising database programmer, she a statistician—was testament to Brandon’s forgiving nature, the increasing self-assuredness of the community, and Darius’ reluctance to let go of anyone he knew would appreciate his jokes, stories and lectures.
Robert just needed to keep tabs on his alcohol consumption. The last time, someone had almost walked in on him and Camilo’s last consort. He suspected Camilo had figured it out, and that this was why a new guest was coming to the dinner. There were three things to wonder about before going to these dinner parties: What would Brandon cook, what new anecdotes would Darius have, and how young and attractive would Camilo’s current boyfriend be. As the senior senator from Ohio asked to be recognized by unanimous consent, Robert considered all three. Of this, the table had no inkling, and neither did Eileen.
“Can you believe the mouth on that kid?” After several hours of hibernation, the table was woken by the sound of Robert’s voice.
“I know,” said Eileen. “Actually what I can’t believe is Darius.”
“How so?”
“Well, all that stuff about the holograms and the riots and the fires.” The utterance of three keywords in such rapid succession switched the table from passive data-gathering to active interface with the analytical mainframes at the Agency. Based on Robert’s and Eileen’s metadata signatures, the Darius in question was identified with a high degree of probability as the same Darius Gartner-Williams who was an analyst with the agency. “Some of that had to be classified.”
“Darius has always known how to walk right up to the line without crossing it. That’s the only way a raconteur like him could have stayed where he is for so long.”
“I don’t know, he just seemed, not upset, but maybe, yes, maybe upset, at what’s going on in Southeast.”
“You don’t think he’d do a Snowden?”
“No way, not a chance. Forget I said anything.” Robert found this injunction of Eileen’s easy to follow, but not the table. The table is not programmed to forget.
From the rustling sounds of their clothes the table intuited that they had taken seats on the sofa. It could not tell, however, that Eileen was reaching for the fly on Robert’s khakis. “Hey, I thought you said we shouldn’t dilute,” said Robert.
“Forget it. We’re nowhere near the right part of the cycle.”
“Is that the truth, or is that the wine talking?”
“Too much wine and not enough food. Can you believe it, lentils and vegetables?” A zipping sound, then a seeming non sequitur: “What did you think of Camilo’s new boy?”
Robert flinched guiltily, as if somehow Eileen’s question signaled some awareness on her part of his indiscretion with Camilo’s last partner, but she wasn’t looking at his face to notice it. “Too skinny. And how can someone that self-righteous be that racist?” Then after a pause, during which he realized that in fact he would love to watch that bigoted little twerp choking on his dick, but that he should not say anything to that effect to Eileen, as the intermingling of violence, hatred and sexuality would be unnerving to her, he took note of the increased exposure of his genitals to Eileen’s manipulations: “Are you sure we should? Ooooh.”
The table soon detected a gagging noise that seemed to emerge from Eileen’s throat. “Before, aah, we go too far, ooh,” continued Robert, “Nice finger work, uhh, ahh, could we try, anal?” The table knew he only ever asked this when Eileen was drunk.
“Sure.”
“I’ll get the lube.”
“Don’t bother going upstairs. Vegetable oil’s fine.”
After hearing some sounds emerging from the kitchen, the table detected the removal of ten kilograms of books and other assorted materials from its surface, followed by a pressure totaling about thirty kilograms coming from what appeared, from visual sensing, to be Eileen’s torso. This impression was soon confirmed by ultrafast sequencing of DNA from one of her skin cells: This feature of the table’s was not a major selling point, but when discussed was pitched as a security measure. What better way to track down a $10,000 piece of home electronics, if stolen, than to have the thief’s DNA sequenced and automatically sent to the police? What neither Robert nor Eileen realized was that the table was already in a heightened state of alert, as a result of the keywords Eileen had spoken just a few minutes before, and that the sequencer was not only on, but bypassing local law enforcement and communicating directly with the Agency.
After about fifteen minutes of further jostling, the sequencer also detected human coliform bacteria, and incomplete genetic material originating from Robert. We do not know what happened next, but it must have been especially vigorous: A critical component of the table’s power supply was dislodged from its circuit, and we lost all signal.
2. The Duck
The first thing, always, was to take off the tie, open the foyer closet, and find an empty rod on the cedar tie hanger. The second was to take the kitchen apron out of the same closet, and put it on. The third was to proceed through the combined living room / dining room / hallway across the terra cotta tiling to the kitchen and dock his tablet in the countertop station. The fourth was to find the traffic report on the tablet. With these practiced movements, Brandon Gartner-Williams would clearly delimit his Inspector General self from his domestic Dupont Circle townhouse incarnation, and no matter how maddening the preceding workday had been, he would ready himself and his home and his dinner table for the arrival of his husband, Darius, or Dar for short.
The traffic report was the key, the moment at which uncertainty would take over from ritual and preparation, and the outside world would provide the information necessary to make the next set of choices and motions. For Darius worked as an analyst at a subdirectorate of the NSA whose name, existence, budget and mission were never acknowledged in public documents, at an office in the Maryland suburbs whose nondescriptness on maps and satellite images was so impeccable as to raise suspicion, and his way home required him to drive through the District’s Southeast quadrant. The neighborhoods on the left bank of the Anacostia River had proven resistant to three decades of gentrification and were now the site of regular disturbances, but Darius had explained to Brandon that the traffic reports would be the only way to have any sense of what was happening. The agency had seen to it that the news would not spread to other metro areas, but the armies of functionaries, lawyers, military men, contractors and subcontractors who populated the more prosperous quadrants and suburbs of DC would not stand for censorship of their traffic reports. Cooperative discretion was all the agency demanded in this case.
Strictly speaking, Darius did not need to traverse Pennsylvania Avenue SE to get home. He could have taken the safer route, inching along the Beltway. But Darius was not one to swerve from an available straight line. At least, that was what Dar had told Brandon. Brandon suspected that Darius was insisting that he was no less black than the young men setting barricades and cars alight in the streets, that despite his Falls Church upbringing and UVA and Georgetown degrees that he had no less right to be in that neighborhood than those who were born and would likely die there.
Brandon suspected, but he never asked. Even though they had been together for nearly thirty years, had gotten married as soon as DOMA was overturned by the Supreme Court, had developed matching paunches and grown comfortable with each other’s personhood, he still felt guilty for the casual hurts he had unwittingly inflicted in the early years of their relationship: The crestfallen gaze of a twenty-something size queen, disappointed to learn that a certain stereotype was not universally true, and other things, some more petty, others worse, that he cringed to recall. He had learned over time not to ask certain questions of Dar. He would listen when Dar had something to say, to get off his chest, but he would not ask.
It took a while for the traffic report to come on. The 501c4s had figured out a way to keep their ads from being blocked or noise-cancelled. In the 2024 election season, the machinery of constitutional government continued in full view of the populace, louder and brighter than ever. Brandon turned his thoughts to dinner.
He had the duck that he had been planning to make into a ragout over pappardelle for last night’s dinner party, until he learned that Camilo’s guest, a lithe sophomore from GWU, was a vegetarian. And not one of those “I’ll just eat the salad” kinds, but some hysterical vegan who would take offense at the smells of flesh and fat, horrified at the holocaust of innocent animals to which he had been made a party. Camilo, a notorious chickenhawk, had pleaded with Brandon and Dar to change the menu. They made do with a cassoulet of autumn squash and Puy lentils, and a lot of Puligny-Montrachet.
He remembered the boy’s comment that brought the party to a halt: “I don’t understand why those people have to burn down their own neighborhood.” Camilo dropped a fork. A dozen eyeballs made a circuit from the unexpected guest seated at the middle of the dining room table, to Dar at the head as always, to the ceiling. He went on, “I mean, not those people like, all African-Americans or anything like that, just those people in Anacostia.”
Everyone knew Dar was going to lecture. When he was angry, he got professorial, an image that was helped by the leather-patched tweed jacket he had chosen for the evening. “Those people live in a neighborhood that is an embarrassment to this country, through decades of neglect. The government tried to bulldoze it into shape with urban renewal. Then the market took over, with gentrification, which is why you can live…where do you live again?”
“Columbia Heights.”
“Why you can live in Columbia Heights and have no idea what it was like in the mid-nineties, when Brandon and I met. You remember, Bran?”
Put on the spot, Brandon had to speak, though he didn’t want to. His response was clumsy, nervous and embarrassing. “When Dar and I met, we were both living on U Street. Even that was a little sketchy back then. No one would head up into Columbia Heights unless they had business being there, and the only people with business there were the junkies. Remember what I used to say about Anacostia, Dar?”
“Brandon was very new to DC. Back then the Green Line ended in Anacostia, and he would take it down to L’Enfant Plaza for work. He said the woman’s voice on the Metro, before it was all computerized, made it sound like heaven.”
Everyone laughed at Brandon’s expense. Brandon excused himself: “She really did have an angelic voice.”
Dar took no notice and continued. “I drive through that neighborhood every day, to and from work. Population density kept going up as people got priced out of everywhere else. The houses are falling apart, the roads are rutted like in any third world country.”
Camilo interrupted: “Like back home in Chile. Worse than Chile.”
“It got better after Barack Obama was elected,” Dar continued. “Some black professionals started moving in, fixing up homes, opening fancy restaurants. Bran and I even thought about buying a condo to shorten my commute to the new job, but, well, Brandon wouldn’t exactly have fit in.”
“Not that I would have minded living there, of course,” protested Brandon, perhaps a bit too insistently.
“Of course, darling. Well, it’s a good thing we didn’t. The Second Depression started, half the gentrifiers lost their jobs and the other half moved back across the river as soon as some desperate fool pulled a knife on them. Then someone got the idea for holograms, a way to make it look to people flying into Reagan National or Dulles like there was not this lingering corner of squalor in the nation’s capital. The people living there didn’t seem to notice the illusions at first.”
“I can’t believe that they wouldn’t notice,” replied the boy.
“Believe or don’t believe, it’s up to you. But I see it every day in my job: Human beings will assume that things remain as they were, until they’re forced to notice a change. The structures were ethereal, easy to miss if you don’t think to look for them.”
“So why the fires?” asked the boy.
“Some genius decided to throw a few white people into the mix, to try and jumpstart another wave of gentrification. You know the type. Young, artists or antiwar activists, skinny vegans….” Everyone tittered except the boy and Camilo, who did his best to mimic the disapproving earnest look on his young lover’s face. “A few young bloods tried to earn their street cred by throwing punches at the strangers, and that’s when people in the neighborhood realized something was happening. They started calling the images ‘ghosts.’ They noticed the shimmering patches in their roofs, the manhole covers in place of holes they had taught their children to avoid, the crackhouses and burnt-out lots that had become mansions. And someone—no one knows who, and I would know if anyone knew—tried to set one of the mansions on fire. And that was when they learned what it took government scientists a year and a million dollars to figure out: That fires disrupt the holoprojections. A well-aimed laser would do the same, anything that directs enough energy and light in the right place, but fires are more affordable. More democratic, if you will.”
“I still don’t see how that justifies the destruction. It just seems so stupid, counterproductive.”
“They just want to be seen, their lives to be seen, as they really are. And I think anyone at this table”—Dar swept his hand broadly at the dinner party, consisting of four gay male couples, two pairs of lesbians, and a seemingly hetero couple who had, between the two of them, slept with half the other guests—“would understand wanting that.”
But the lad was too born-in-the-twenty-first century to intuit the breadth of history that Darius had encapsulated with a single gesture, and soon enough, too soon, the word “animals” had been tossed out and Camilo made some excuses about the wine going to their heads and ushered his conquest out the door to his Adams-Morgan studio where there would doubtless be a glass-shattering fight, angry sex, or both.
So the upshot was, Brandon had to do something with that duck. If Darius had a short trip ahead of him, he would just break it down and sear the magrets for tonight so he could get something on the table quickly, then start tonight making confit with the legs for later, and freeze the rest of the carcass for stock over the weekend. If there were bonfires in Anacostia, he would have time enough to roast it. From what little Darius would let fall about his workdays, he understood that a quick dinner would have something to do with the operations branch of the subdirectorate—not Dar and the analysts, whom Dar represented as professional onlookers.
The ads had ended. Brandon listened to the traffic report with ears trained to listen for the unspoken.
3. The Car
Trayvon Allen, age 12, was the lookout posted to watch the bonfire at the corner of Pennsylvania and 31st SE and alert the block to the arrival of police, fire department, the black cars, or anyone else who looked like they did not belong in the neighborhood. When he saw the black Audi making its way down an otherwise deserted stretch of Pennsylvania, he assumed it was operations, and flashed his mirror at the window of the 3rd floor apartment where DeShawn was camped out.
Something wasn’t right, though. The car was coming at least 60 miles an hour, and accelerating. The driver seemed to be moving the steering wheel left and right, but the car stayed straight, as if someone had aimed it straight at the fire.
The driver didn’t look right either. DeShawn came down with the crew and asked Trayvon, “Who that, T? Ops?”
“Naw, looks like some college nigga. Fat guy, glasses, faggoty suit.”
The black Audi hit the bonfire, which had been built of cop cars, building lumber and gasoline, going at least eighty-five. They could hear the driver screaming from inside the car.
“Hold back, son,” said DeShawn. “That shit gawn blow.” DeShawn began walking backwards, hands above his eyes, and the crew mimicked. Then the gas tank on the Audi exploded, sending shrapnel into the holoprojector at the corner and shorting out the ghosts.
“Should we help him?” said Trayvon.
“He gone. Let’s check him out before ops show.”
The driver had smashed his own window and tried to climb out before the explosion. His dreads were still smoldering and the melted portions of his face looked bright pink against blue-black skin. He still had his ID and lanyard around his neck, the insignia of the agency visible from five feet away. “Shit, they gawn try and pin this on us,” said DeShawn. “To the winds.” At that signal, each member of the crew scattered in a different cardinal direction. Trayvon meandered south, swiping a half-burnt piece of paper off the ground. It had an address in the Northwest quadrant. He shoved it in his back jeans pocket.
By the time five black cars came west up Pennsylvania five minutes later, Trayvon, DeShawn and the other six members of the crew were all out of sight. Ten necks as thick as their heads, mostly white but two black dudes and a Latin among them: These were ops. Different crews, with older men or harder kids, would be sending down sniper fire any minute, but these guys were Kevlared head to toe.
Trayvon looked back at the scene from the Dumpster where he was hiding. Though the college-looking dude was one of their own, the ops looked neither surprised nor sad. He patted his rear pocket to make sure the paper was still there.
4. The Kid
Ordinarily a trip to Dupont Circle would be a simple matter of getting on the Metro, but things hadn’t been ordinary in a long time. The Green Line had started bypassing all Southeast stations ever since the bonfires began, and the fare was well above Trayvon’s hustle. If he had a flat map of the District in his mind he might have been able to calculate that the address was only a two-hour walk away. But the uprising and repression had warped his mental map of the city, transforming the Anacostia River into an impassable singularity. That he felt drawn to the address despite this wise caution was inexplicable through Trayvon’s conscious thought. His path did not follow a straight line, but proceeded faster than a straight line trajectory would have taken him, as he slingshotted his way around obstacles known and observed: checkpoints, cop cars, black cars, vigilante gangs of yuppies in street mufti, and the cameras. For a black kid in an ash-stained white t-shirt, the District was more hazardous than an asteroid belt for the Millennium Falcon.
So by the time he arrived at the front door of the Gartner-Williams house, four hours had passed since the accident, agency representatives had come and gone, the duck, slightly overdone, had been sitting on the counter getting cold, Brandon’s tears had pooled in a crease of the leather sofa on which he was lying, and Trayvon was starving. No lights were on in the house, and he hesitated before ringing the bell. Hesitated, but the same drive that had brought him this far led his finger to the button. The button activated not only the bell, but also a camera at the top of the doorway. If Trayvon had noticed the lens, he would have fled, but it was too dark on the street for him to suss it out.
Brandon hesitated before deciding to answer the door: It could, he reasoned, be the agency with more details on the circumstances of Darius’s accident. Despite his decision, the ten-foot walk from the sofa onto which he had collapsed was like swimming through the Mariana Trench: slow and bone-crushing. In that time, Trayvon had multiple opportunities to re-consider, re-re-consider, and re-re-re-consider, and he had just begun to pivot his left foot away from the door when Brandon’s voice creaked, raw, from the intercom. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The second question confused Trayvon a bit. For four hours he had undertaken this fool’s errand contrary to his own conscious volition. “I…I saw something,” he said, retrieving the scrap of paper and holding it up to where, he now reasoned, the camera must be.
Brandon couldn’t make out anything on the screen, but assumed it had something to do with Darius. His hope and trust opened the door before his fear could countermand it. “Come in. What did you see?”
“An accident. A black man in a black car. I found this.” Trayvon stepped across the threshold and handed the paper to the white man with red eyes. Brandon recognized it as a scrap of a receipt from Darius’ auto repair shop. “Did he live here?”
“Yes, he did. Please, come inside.” Ordinarily, Brandon enjoyed being a host above all else. A 12-year-old kid from the wrong side of town would not usually be on the guest list, but his instinctual hospitality overrode his mistrust and distracted him, momentarily, from his grief.
The smell of the duck reminded Trayvon of his hunger. He hadn’t eaten anything since his sugar-cereal breakfast. “Smells good in here.”
“Are you hungry?”
The thought crossed his mind that this white man could be a government agent, or a child molester, but his stomach growled in response. Admitting his poverty to this white stranger was out of the question, though, so all he said was, “I can eat.”
“Come on in. I’ll get you something to eat.”
Trayvon followed Brandon into the kitchen. When they reached the counter, Brandon noticed that he hadn’t turned off the tablet yet. He removed it from the dock and, with the same fluidity of motion with which he had started his kitchen prep earlier in the evening, hurled it against the exposed brick. The sudden violence and the crack of the screen made Trayvon jump back. “Why you do that?”
“I hate the news,” said Brandon. He gestured at one of the stools opposite his work area. “Sit down. I’ll cut you some duck. Do you want the leg or the breast?”
“I never had duck. Is it like chicken?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’ll try the leg.”
“I didn’t get a chance to cook any vegetables. I can make you a salad.”
“Tha’s’a’ight. I’ll just try the duck.” Trayvon wasn’t sure if he’d ever eaten a salad, and he didn’t want to have his first here. The white man and the duck were strange enough.
Brandon put a plate in front of him, then a fork and knife, and placed the duck leg on his plate. “What do you want to drink?”
“You got Kool-Aid?” Brandon shook his head, so Trayvon answered, “I’ll just have some water.”
“Sparkling or still?” Trayvon looked at him like he had grown a second head, so Brandon just ran an empty glass under the tap.
“The man in the car, what was he to you?”
Brandon set the glass in front of the kid and waited for him to look up into his eyes before answering. “He’s my husband.”
“You gay?” Trayvon, remembering his grandmother’s lessons about being polite when folks offered their hospitality, had tried to suppress the hint of disgust in his voice, but he had failed.
“Yes, we’re gay. Were gay. I am gay. Darius was my husband.” This was Brandon’s first attempt at applying past tense to Darius, and it ended in renewed tears. “Why did you come here?”
“I saw the accident, but it didn’t look like no accident.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I live there.” Trayvon was not about to mention anything about his role in the construction and maintenance of the bonfires, comparatively minimal as it was, to this gay white dude. His husband had been with the agency, and for all Trayvon knew, so was this guy. Though he figured that if they worked at the same place they would have both been in the same car, but that didn’t mean this guy wasn’t still government. Government was all over the place.
“What did you mean, it didn’t look like an accident?”
“Like, he was trying to turn the car, trying to steer the wheel, I saw him, and I’m sure he was trying to slow down, too. But the car kept going straight, and faster. Like someone had set it up that way.”
“He wouldn’t have died if your friends hadn’t set up the bonfires.”
“I don’t know nothing about no bonfire,” lied Trayvon. “And nobody I know, knows how to make a car do that,” he said, returning to the truth. “I just came here ‘cause I figured, if he had peoples, they might want to know what I seen.”
Brandon sat silently, shaking his head every minute or so as a new thought occurred to him. After the first headshake, Trayvon started eating the duck. After the second, Brandon pulled a piece of crispy skin off the carcass, folded it, put it in his mouth, and started chewing, his only bite since the agency had informed him of the “accident.”
After several minutes of silence, Trayvon had finished the duck leg. “Thanks,” he said. “That was some good shit. I’m’a go home.”
“It’s well after curfew, kid. The cops’ll arrest you. You can stay here.”
“Where?”
“You can have the bed. I’ll stay out here, sleep on a couch, if I can sleep at all. I’ve been thinking so much about Darius, I realize, I’ve completely forgotten my manners. We haven’t been properly introduced. What’s your name?”
Trayvon hesitated, considering whether he wanted to sleep in a bed where two dudes done all kinds of nasty gay shit, or whether he wanted this one to know his name, weighing the unknown risks of each against the known risks of being a 12-year-old black kid out after curfew. “Trayvon,” he said.
“Are you named after…?”
“Yeah. I was born the year he died. Momma liked the name.”
“Hi, Trayvon. I’m Brandon,” said Brandon, extending his hand. Trayvon shook. “It’s not safe for you to go back out before the morning. Please, rest here.”
Trayvon’s legs and feet reminded him of the fatigue of his six-mile walk. “A’ight.” Brandon pointed the way to the bedroom. Once Trayvon found the bed, he fell face first into it and went directly to sleep, in t-shirt and jeans, smearing soot onto the duvet.
5. The Wake
It was ten o’clock in the morning, and Camilo’s lover Travis was still asleep, completely naked, and lying on top of the comforter. Camilo had been awake for two hours, and in that time had showered, made coffee, cooked breakfast, eaten breakfast, gotten dressed, and dug around in his stash for a bottle of pisco he could bring to Brandon and Darius’ house—scratch that, now it was just Brandon’s, he had to remember—as a means of comfort. He had spent the last five minutes watching the sweat pool in the curve of Travis’s lower back and his shoulders rise and fall with each breath. Now his patience was at an end. He considered rimming the young man, as a kind way to wake him, but quickly ruled it out. For no reason he could discern, he felt as though Travis’s contretemps with Darius must have had something to do with yesterday’s accident. He was angry, and it wasn’t the kind of anger that he could express through fucking. Holding the pisco bottle by its neck, he prodded Travis in the shoulder with the bottom.
“Wake up, already! Wake up! Levantate!”
“What the hell, C? It’s Saturday.”
“I told Brandon we’d be there in the morning. The morning’s almost finished.”
“I didn’t like him.”
“Who? Brandon?”
“Naw, Brandon’s alright.”
“Darius isn’t even cold in the ground, and you’re talking shit about him? He was my friend. We’re going to help Brandon out.”
Travis pulled on last night’s clothes, and they made the twenty minute walk down to Brandon’s in silence.
The doorbell woke Trayvon. Brandon, having hardly slept, was in the kitchen brewing more coffee. When he opened the door, Camilo spoke first. “How you holding up, Bran?”
“Not so good, Camilo. It’s good to have friends around.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” offered Travis.
“Thank you…. What was your name again?”
“Travis.”
“Thank you, Travis. My mind’s just been…”
“Of course, Brandon,” said Camilo. “Let’s go inside. Is anyone else here yet?”
“No, nobody at all. Bobby and Eileen are coming soon, and Susan, too, but Cassie has to work today.” As they traversed the foyer, Trayvon entered the open kitchen.
“Is that nobody?” asked Travis.
“Oh, my god, I forgot,” muttered Brandon. Then he called, “Trayvon, let me introduce you to my friends.” Trayvon approached hesitantly. “This is Camilo, and this is…”
“Travis,” said Travis, who remained aloof. Camilo offered his hand not in a shake, but as if to try and draw the boy’s hand up for a kiss, an offer not taken by Trayvon.
“Trayvon saw the accident.”
“Ay!” gasped Camilo.
“So he’s one of the rioters, then?” said Travis.
“I think I should be going,” said Trayvon, assuming the most proper, schoolroom tone of voice he could recall. “Thank you for letting me stay here, mister.”
“Brandon,” insisted Brandon.
“Thank you, Mister Brandon.”
“No, please, stay. My friends are coming over for brunch, and I want you to tell them what you told me last night, about Darius.”
“I don’t know if I should.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Trayvon. My friends know powerful people who should know the truth. We can keep you safe.”
“Have you ever had a pisco sour, son?” asked Camilo, brandishing the bottle.
“He’s way too young, Camilo. Twelve.”
Camilo looked down at his shoes, reassuring himself that the boy looked mature for his age, then offered: “I’ll make you one, Bran.”
“Too early, Camilo. But let’s go in, and you can be a dear and put a splash into my coffee.”
6. The Bridge
The surveillance cameras on the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge across the Anacostia River were knocked out by a power outage just after six p.m. on Saturday. The cause of the outage did not need to be investigated, since everyone whose responsibility it would be to investigate it was already disposed to attribute it to a nearby bonfire.
When the body of Trayvon Allen was discovered the following day in Fort Hunt, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, anyone who was in a position to investigate his cause of death saw plainly that it was due to a fall from a great height. If he was taking a circuitous route from the Dupont Circle area to his home in Congress Heights, he might very well have been crossing the Douglass bridge during the time when its surveillance cameras were out.
No bullets were recovered from his body. We repeat: No bullets were recovered from his body. Anyone who says otherwise is engaging in irresponsible speculation.
Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self
Phantasm Japan, ed. Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington (Haikasoru, 2014)
1. After a restless night of torrenting bootleg hentai manga and trying to translate the contents of the speech bubbles, Aaron Burch, an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and new resident of North Glamis, Maine, had his tatemae and his honne come unstuck from one another as he was mowing the one-acre lawn of his new family home.
2. The distinction made in the Japanese language between tatemae (建前) and honne (本音) does not appear analogous to the partitions of the soul made in other world philosophies. The first refers to the attitudes and behaviors human beings adopt in order to get along in society; the second, to what we inwardly hold, our true selves.
3. The first kanji of honne is hon (本), book. The second, ne, comes from the Chinese character 音 meaning sound. But the ne pronunciation is a particle conferring emphasis. To be a honne is to be a closed book, whose interpretation is no longer subject to dispute, not so much the words contained within as the noise of gross finality it makes when slammed shut.
4. Tatemae’s translation seems more straightforward: A constructed front. Yet the passive voice frustrates the Anglophone demand for definitiveness: Constructed by whom?
5. As used in Japanese, the distinction appears to be discursive and heuristic, rather than substantive and metaphysical. It does not refer to discrete entities, but to different ways of talking and thinking about the self. In this sense it is partially homologous to the Hegelian contradiction between essence and appearance, in that both taken together comprise a reality that cannot be apprehended in a single glance.
6. Therefore, a Japanese person would no more expect a honne to assume an existence separate from the corresponding tatemae than one would expect a shadow to detach itself from the body casting it. But just as stories are told in every world culture of such autonomous shadows, it is reasonable to expect incidents of such a separation between the tatemae and the honne.
7. Aaron Burch’s tatemae—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-T—continued mowing the lawn in a strict rectilinear progression, waving to the neighbors on each side as he saw them.
8. It should not be surprising that a tatemae would be capable of operating a push lawnmower, but perhaps for some readers it is. While in Western philosophical traditions it is customary to treat appearances as ephemeral, a moment’s thought should make it clear that the tatemae has much greater need of the body’s physical form than the honne. Whether bowing at the waist, offering a firm handshake, making air kisses, back slaps or bear hugs, our social being makes regular use of our corporality.
9. The honne, in contrast, has the luxury of becoming spectral. Aaron’s honne—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-H—chased after a blue-winged grasshopper trying to evade the mower blades.
10. “Please accept my apologies, O Blue-Winged Grasshopper, for cutting down the tall grass in which you were hiding,” said Aaron-H. “I hope a bird does not eat you.”
11. The grasshopper, being unfamiliar with the notion of apologies, mistook Aaron-H’s cries for the wingbeats of a blue jay, and fled further, taking shelter underneath a yellow toolshed. Aaron-H followed him there.
12. It was at this point Aaron-H realized that he had detached from Aaron-T, his tatemae, since otherwise he would not have been able to fit under a toolshed.
13. Aaron-T noticed no change, nor any grasshoppers, and continued mowing the lawn.
14. In fact Aaron-T remained oblivious through the remainder of the day, as the movers arrived with their possessions, and his wife Chloe and young son Jared followed behind, Chloe taking charge of directing the movers on the correct placement of their various goods and Aaron-T pitching in by shifting furnishings, repairing light fixtures, and otherwise acting as the very image of a good husband.
15. It was not until 9:30 that night, after Jared had gone to bed and he and Chloe rested on the couch, both too tired to climb the stairs to bed, that he noticed anything different. What he noticed was not something, but the absence of something, namely the compulsion to retire to his office and begin torrenting.
16. For Aaron-H, Aaron Burch’s true self, was a bit of a porn addict.
17. Strictly speaking that is not true. Aaron Burch’s porn addiction was merely the sublimated form taken by an assemblage of Aaron-H’s desires and fetishes that could not be acted upon directly in any manner compatible with the constructed front that was Aaron-T. In Aaron-H, these desires and fetishes were now unleashed.
18. So Aaron-T and Chloe briefly watched a re-run of Top Chef, then assisted one another in heaving their exhausted carcasses up to bed, as Aaron-H, having wearied of his meticulous exploration of the strange world under the toolshed, began wandering the town of North Glamis to satisfy his fetish: The musky smell of a young boy’s anus.
19. Of course Aaron Burch had smelled his own son’s anus many times, at diaper changes, bath times and bed times, but never could he acknowledge to himself that this was the smell he found so deeply satisfying. To do so might have called too starkly to mind a detailed recollection of his first Cub Scout camping trip. Instead, he would rustle Jared’s hair and put his nose to the back of his neck, reassuring himself that all he felt was simple paternal affection for his beloved child. This night Aaron-T had not even done that, simply pecking his son on the cheek.
20. For years Jared Burch had felt mostly safe but increasingly ill-at-ease with his father’s rituals. Twenty years later, after several more-or-less abusive relationships with older men, he would in a particularly searing session of psychotherapy recall this night and date it as the moment that his father had begun to pull away, depriving him of what he believed love to be and continued to seek thereafter.
21. Aaron-H, however, did not venture into the Burch house: What he desired, he believed, would hurt his son, and he did not ever want to do that. Detachment was a gift: At last, he could flee, and spare his child any pain.
22. It is only fair to assume that all parents who flee their responsibilities experience similar thoughts, sincerely believing that in fleeing they are sparing the child or children they love the agony of realizing what monsters the world had set over them as caregivers.
23. For Aaron-H, at least, this belief was more true than self-serving.
24. That a detached honne can be spectral in nature does not mean that at all times it must be. If a true self’s desire requires physicality for its attainment then it may assume a form corresponding to its self-image. Thus a detached honne in physical form usually looks much like the body from which it came, though often a bit younger, perhaps thinner, and with less definite facial features. So at various times over the next thirteen months, the residents of North Glamis homes in which there lived boys aged four through eleven would hear doors latching or unlatching, century-old wooden floors creaking, rustling in hampers full of dirty underwear, and occasionally, at night, the fearful cries of a child. As they searched the house for the intruder—often with a shotgun at the ready, for this is Maine—they might catch a glimpse of someone in the mirror, only to have him vanish before they could turn and aim.
25. Later on, these townspeople would meet Aaron-T at an elementary school art show, a firehouse bean supper or the village store, notice his dirty blonde hair, scraggly beard, and the husky physique of a high school running back gone a bit sedentary, and think, I’ve seen this fella before, don’t know where, but I don’t like the looks of him.
26. Aaron-T complained to Chloe that people in this town didn’t seem so friendly. Having grown up in Midcoast Maine, she knew what to expect, or thought she did, and told him it must be his Southern accent, the fact that he was so obviously “from away.” “Give ‘em time and space,” she urged. “They’ll warm up to ya.”
27. In fact, she had already found her peer group of stay-at-home-moms, and worried about her husband’s apparent inability to make friends in town. She was especially perplexed by the reluctance of Jared’s friends’ parents to send their kids over for playdates. Aaron, ordinarily jovial, became gloomy whenever he came home. Increasingly he found reasons to work late hours at the University, attend functions on campus, or go away on conference or research travel. His constructed front had bifurcated: Engaged and well-liked among his peers, resigned to domestic isolation at home, and preferring the former to the latter.
28. “Gotta make tenure,” was all he said to her by way of an excuse. He still torrented from time to time—his research was on comparative graphic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries—but now it was in service to the exigent demands of scholarly productivity, not an inner compulsion.
29. One balmy evening in mid-September, a housewife whose name has been withheld by the authorities but who everyone knows was Emma Farnsworth over on Pine Drive came home to find Aaron-H in her son Jeffrey’s first floor bedroom next to an open window, knee deep in Iron Man underpants.
30. He got out of there right away—in fact he vanished, though everyone assumed he jumped out the window and ran—but Emma got a good look at him. Since Jeffrey and Jared were in the same kindergarten class, best friends really, she recognized the figure as Jared’s father Aaron. A bit wavy, perhaps, in the lines of his face, but definitely him, she concluded, after about five minutes of failing to convince herself that there was no way it could possibly be. Of course she called the Sheriff’s Department.
31. When Sheriff Dunleavy showed up on the Burch’s doorstep asking where Aaron was but being cagey as to why, Chloe assured him that, whatever this was all about, there’s no way Aaron could have been involved. “He’s been down in Boston the last three days,” she said. “At a conference. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, so you can ask him yourself.”
32. Unfortunately for the Burch family, there was no such conference. Aaron-T was at a B&B in Bar Harbor, balls deep in Su-Min Young, the new tenure-track hire in his department and a first-generation Korean-American by way of Flushing, Queens, who found his accent and his encyclopedic knowledge of manhwa irresistibly charming.
33. If he had been able to acknowledge this to Sheriff Dunleavy and his wife, he might not have been arrested the next morning for breaking and entering. Dunleavy would have loved to throw the book at him, but he could not find underwear sniffing anywhere in the Maine Criminal Code. The rumors all over town that he had done worse things to other little boys were just that, rumors, nothing that could hold up in a court of law: All those kids swore it was just a bad dream, a bogeyman, if you could get them to talk at all. As a mere tatemae, Aaron-T had bound himself into an insoluble contradiction, between his on-campus front as a friendly lothario and his North Glamis front as a devoted though antisocial husband and father. For more than a year he had lived without a true self to arbitrate his actions, and that honne had dragged him into a situation he found inconceivable.
34. Aaron-T spent the night in jail. Chloe bailed him out the next morning, but told him that she and Jared were packed and going to Brunswick to stay with her parents. No, she did not know when they would come back. She did not know if they would come back. If even one of the hundred rumors around town were true, she couldn’t spend another minute with him.
35. “I never laid a finger on Jared, or any of those boys,” he swore.
36. “How can I believe that? Where were you?” she asked. In her mind, his silence was sufficient indictment.
37. As Chloe backed her Subaru out of the garage and down the driveway, Aaron-T took a seat in his. Aaron-H slipped in under the closing garage door.
38. Aaron-T started the engine and opened the windows; Aaron-H hovered over the passenger seat. As alarms began to blare in the house, Aaron-T inhaled Aaron-H through his nostrils.
The Joy of Sects
The Journal of Unlikely Cryptograph (Unlikely Story No. 11, February 2015)
As an undercover agent in the Sect Control Commission of the Secret Service, I cannot allow the reflexes developed in my earlier assignments to survive. A capacity to isolate and overwrite tics and habitual rhetoric is the sine qua non for this job. We are encouraged to elaborate these narratives between assignments, both as part of the overwriting process and in the hope that historians of the coming Collaborative Commonwealth will be able to reconstruct and comprehend the death throes of class society. Under the old regime, there was a Secret Service that protected the president, but also was assigned to rooting out counterfeit money. Our Secret Service protects the sovereign people by uncovering counterfeit ideas.
I was one of the first assigned to this role, but it was not my first form of service to the Council. After the Bronx Uprising and the establishment of our power in the outer boroughs, the fact that I was one of the few accountants—a notoriously conservative profession—to be a trusted member of Workers’ Unity meant that I was put in charge of requisitioning and allocation. I soon realized that this was a mistake; perhaps Lenin was right in his day to think that economic planning was like accountancy, but I could tell that to take account of second- and third-order impacts in feeding a city of eight million people under siege and facing catastrophic sea level rises, I would need second derivatives, probability integrals, eigenvectors and Markovians—things I had not studied since I was nineteen. My assignment then became to find all the mathematicians who had gone to work for the high-speed trading firms, who had become Wall Street billionaires and who thus were on the other side of the lines, and promise that not only would they not be strung up, but they could have comfortable lives solving far more difficult optimization problems than ever before.
Yes, I had to promise them some privileges, and no, that didn’t sit well with the rat-burger scrounging masses, or the Council. But it was surprisingly easy: Half of them had already run their models and figured that, one way or the other, we were bound to win. That was how I discovered my talent for clandestinity.
Some of my early assignments were dull. For example, because before the establishment of the Unity I had hopscotched around some small Trotskyist and Bordigaist groupuscules, I was asked to infiltrate—with the help of some reversible plastic surgery—the remnants of various Marxist groupings that had not joined us. The Badiouan post-Maoists misconstruing mathematical formulas to determine whether our Revolution met their standards for being called an “Event,” the Spartacist debates over whether our power was a “degenerated” or “deformed” workers’ state or still too indeterminate to say anything about, the five Chirikians who defined themselves as the sum total of the “proletarian milieu”—I reported that they posed no more threat to us than they had to the capitalists beforehand. We were determined not to repeat the totalitarian excesses of the past.
The traditional theistic religions posed little problem, either. Those clergy and congregants who were inclined to go over to the counterrevolution rarely bothered with dissimulation, and a surprising number of religions split along “social justice” or “liberation theology” lines in our favor. As long as we can restrain the church-burning excesses of Insurrectionalists, we have little to worry about from the god-believers. The only truly interesting conspiracy I uncovered from that corner was the multi-ethnic Chan Buddhist temple in Flushing that was an elaborate cover for a fascist, Chinese-supremacist coup plotting to take over Queens.
What we have found, however, is that the scientific outlook of a historical materialist is rarely taken on in full during the present struggle for existence. People pick up little bits of utopian impulse here, some propositions reduced to the level of slogans there, mix them up syncretically with the cultural detritus of the old regime’s slow decline, and sects that no one could have anticipated spring up like mushroom clouds after the Zionist Masada.
Sometimes they’re harmless. The strangest cult I ever had to infiltrate was the Marcia’s Witnesses. They were obsessed with Maureen McCormick, a twentieth-century actress best known for having portrayed a teenage girl named Marcia Brady on an insipid television program eighty years ago. My final report said that while they were undoubtedly backward on the women’s question, they were mostly harmless, and so no extraordinary measures of suppression were needed.
But not all the syncretists are quite so harmless, and that is why I just shaved off a beard after a sojourn among the Feuerbachians.
To be fair, that is not what they call themselves. The official name is the Church of God as Love. Those of us in the Unity who identify as Marxists have yet to shake the habit of associating ideologies with surnames. The public preaching of this group does not differ substantially from the ideas expressed in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity: “God is pure absolute subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and will be: faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in his absolute freedom and unlimitedness.” Or as Thawratullah—the self-styled True Essence Incarnate—would put it: “You are God, you will be God, but only in the Revolution. The Revolution needs us to become the God we are meant to be.”
It’s not just that this sort of rhetoric is a distraction from the urgent tasks of the day. For all their talk of love and unity, it’s basically divisive. Feuerbachian street-preachers have been known to trigger brawls outside of churches, mosques and gurdwaras. Their evangelists sidle up to the more fuzzy-headed cadres in the Unity and distract them with grand discussions of the unity of body and spirit. And the more political operators have infiltrated our council structure to divert scarce resources into “educational” ventures tied to the Church.
Then there are the sex parties.
My transition was interrupted when the uprisings began. There were still plenty of backward elements in the Unity who didn’t recognize their own cis-privilege, who dismissed synthetic hormones as cosmetic, not worth putting on the pharmaceutical ration queue. It wasn’t my first faction fight, but in the meantime, even though my breast growth was irreversible, resurgent testes had put hair back on my face. With all the work to be done, there was hardly time for shaving or makeup, let alone electrolysis or lasers. I was the one who started the jokes about “Lydia the Bearded Lady.” This is not the body I had imagined, but it has been put to good use in the struggle: For the Chan assignment, I had to bind and pass as cis-male. Passing as cis-female with the Witnesses was easier, once I got my hormones back and a facial graft—they were so chaste, so obsessively focused on Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. I could have been more comfortable with the Feuerbachians—Thawratullah hirself is trans—but someone on the Council had a bright idea.
Marx said that people create their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. However many times I overwrite my thoughts and gestures, my history is written in this body. The form into which I have been compelled appears to have been freely chosen by the True Essence Incarnate: Hirsute as a 19th century German philosopher, yet with full breasts and hips. My bio-engineered implants were synthesized in the same Lehman College labs where ersatz steak and bacon are grown for the carnivores on the Council; Thawratullah must have found an incubator on the black market. Hir penis is circumcised but otherwise intact, the scrotum baggy with stray, undyed white hairs, the only outward sign of hir advancing age. Yes, I got that close a look. The perfect synthesis, so they claim. I got my orders: To mimic Thawratullah’s corporeal engineering. It was not pleasant: Nanoactuators dusted into every follicle, t-shots strong enough to stop my heart and leave me convulsive, aggressive, priapic and masturbatory.
We all have to sacrifice for the future we wish to create.
There was never the expectation of perfection. How could there be? As far as we can tell, Thawratullah was born Ahmed Abdullah ash-Sharqi to a pair of Egyptian revolutionaries nine months after a Tahrir Square hookup. They fled to Astoria with their kid after the second coup. That’s about all we know about hir early childhood, but it’s enough to tell me that zie would always be darker-skinned, and hairier, than a Eurasian ladyboy like me ever could become. The point was not to impersonate hir, but to emulate the Essence as so many of hir followers already had.
Fewer attempted to emulate hir Consort: Born female-bodied, zie had been infibulated and had breasts removed, seeking to become a Body Without Organs. (Though the overt doctrine is pure Feuerbach, the Church’s secret rites have more than a bit of Deleuze to them.) One could never truly become a BWO oneself, however many modifications one had—it was the desired end state of Human Species-Being, a quivering flux of differentiated energies. Modifications and transitions were not required of church members. I encountered many a cis-body in the ceremonies. But humanity, they believe, becomes God by transforming itself: It does not surprise me that many of my people have found their way into their ranks.
One’s second visit to a ceremony is more confusing, to the new initiate, than the first. The Church teaches that familiarity is the opposite of Love: By recognizing another person as family, friend or acquaintance, one sets them above the species as a whole, and closes off the possibility of respecting their coming transformations. One must always greet a person anew, with the same effusive welcome as the first time. They are political enough to accede to social norms in their external activities, but in the sanctuary—a Bushwick warehouse—one will always be greeted by each body with an embrace, perhaps a kiss, and the same greeting: “My love! Do you feel the God?”, with no differentiation between new recruits and old lovers. Names are used, but beyond the security check at the entrance, it becomes taboo to ask them.
The meeting begins in a way that would be familiar to any activist in the Unity: Church emissaries report on the outcomes of their assignments in as dry, quantitative a tone as any of our requisitionists. Yet whereas we have retained the impractical habit of retaining a minimum level of clothing regardless of weather or climate control malfunctions, the officiants will disrobe in the midst of the meeting with no apparent erotic intent. Since the space ends up as crowded as the 7 train in the 4 a.m. rush, even in winter the body heat will eventually mount to a point where nearly all attendees have fully disrobed, leaving only piercings and Bioelectrical Data Implants attached. On those many summer days when the temperature crests 37 Celsius, the disrobing is almost immediate. The BDIs allow participants to silently communicate propositions, consent and demurrals without interrupting the flow of speech. There is no decorous inhibition on initiating such assignations, so it is not uncommon to experience a bit of ass-play while listening to a droning enumeration of speeches given, contacts made, greetings proffered, combats won and lost, and narrow escapes from the militia. The only restriction is that one must remain silent, out of respect for whoever is speaking.
Nor do they refrain when Thawratullah rises for hir sermon. If anything, pairs become threesomes, groups become clusters, and the vigor rises until the conclusion, which is always, “Comrades, unite in becoming God! The Body Without Organs!” A casual observer might assume that Thawratullah had just stimulated the multiplying contacts and commanded the ensuing orgy. Rather, it is a dialectic: Zie times and modulates hir speech in response to the BDI signals from the Church members in the room. The difference between membership and mere contact status is that members must allow Thawratullah unrestricted access to their BDI signals. Hir relationship to the officiants is not that of a commander switching on a squadron of drones, but a conductor leading an orchestra. Only after the sermon do the worshippers break out in the crescendo of moans, gasps and expostulations one would expect.
That was the most exhausting aspect of this assignment: For my dissimulation to work, the IT commissariat needed to develop forms of encryption so advanced that its presence could not be detected by Thawratullah’s consciousness or hir dedicated processors. The time when I should have been sleeping, I had to keep my implants active so the programmers could read the traces of Thawratullah’s probes and enhance the encryption. Yes, they had me under sedation, but the sleep one has under sedation, still connected, is not like biological sleep: It is an otherworldly dream from which one cannot awake even in horror. I wish I could tell you what those dreams were like, but the last measure taken by IT security was always to wipe their traces from my conscious memory. I was left with only the ever-growing fatigue.
You who read this in the future have probably formed certain assumptions about what the sex was like, and those assumptions are likely wrong. The Church meetings were not spaces without taboo, but spaces in which the taboos we have inherited from the bourgeois past and before have been consciously overturned—and others put in their place, just as consciously. Among the new taboos was one against ejaculatory orgasm. This imposed a particular restraint on those of us born male-bodied—and, in my case, not yet as fully transitioned as I would wish—as well as on those female-bodied persons prone to squirting. The ideal put in place of phallic climax was that of the “Thousand Plateaus.”
The long-time members of the Church had developed certain breathing and meditational disciplines to this end, and over the duration of the assignment I picked up a few of them. Drugs also helped: I ended up rummaging through the requisitioned stocks of the pharmacies and found an old-fashioned antidepressant called duloxetine that helped me postpone. More important, though, was finding one’s own ways of engaging libidinally without exploding. For example:
My nipples are more sensitive to digital or oral stimulation than they had been before my transition began. The first member of the Church to discover that was surprised to see my eyes roll back into my sockets.
The raking of teeth or nails against the inner crook of my elbow sends a shiver through my entire body.
There is a ligament to the right of my scrotum that connects my groin to my inner thigh; when it is nibbled in just the right way, I melt like an ice cream shop in a brownout.
The fact that I only just discovered these things about myself leaves me just a bit disenchanted with Comrade K_, who has had three years as my lover to explore this body—at least, when I haven’t been on assignment. I’ll try to show him when my debriefing is done, and I’ll grant him a probationary period of a week or so. If he can’t work it out by then, we’re done.
Outwardly, they abjure all hierarchy, and in fact denounce the Unity and the Council for the degree to which we have created new orders of command. In practice, however, there is an informal hierarchy at work in the degree to which one is allowed proximity to Thawratullah. The more giving one is in the ceremony, the more plateaus one attains, the further one advances.
The employment of BDI for erotic purposes is not wholly unknown outside the Church, but they have elevated its practice to an art form. It also served my purposes of covert infiltration very well. On an open BDI channel one can determine who has had a particularly stressful day, who is harboring aggressive tendencies, and who is in the right frame of mind for some extended play. I had always thought of myself as having a decided preference for the male-bodied, but perhaps that was a kind of phallus-worshiping false consciousness brought on by childhood trauma. With eyes open I would always be drawn to the longest, firmest penis I could see; with my eyes closed, tuning in to my thoughts and the BDI signals, my paths would cross more frequently with those who were born female-bodied.
It was just as well: If I had let myself be fucked, I would have felt exquisitely broken open and would have been unable to restrain myself. I would have come, again and again, and would have gotten no closer to the Essence. This way, I was able to practice giving of myself without giving up myself, exploring how bodies I did not expect to desire could unleash desire in myself, and thus I learned, through women, how to maintain such plateaus with men as well.
This makes no sense, and there is nothing I like less than not making sense. The worst thing about this assignment is how it has made me unintelligible to myself. Perhaps that is how the encryption worked, how Thawratullah could plug directly into me without discovering who I really was. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I advanced through the hierarchy in record time. Within nine months, the Consort had beckoned me to hir. If those who read this are familiar with some of the more barbarically patriarchal practices of the past, you perhaps associated hir infibulation with the methods of ritual genital mutilation that our power only recently extirpated in parts of Africa. While hir modification could not have been without pain, it was not of a kind with those rituals. It had been done very precisely, with dissolvable biofilaments welding hir labia minora together, and hir clit—larger than average, extending out nearly an inch when engorged—had been left untouched. The overall effect was reminiscent of the seam of a scrotum, without any testicles obtruding, and a small throbbing head perched above. The lips were still sensitive, the clit extraordinarily so, and knowing that this was the third level of proximity, I was able to bring hir selflessly to plateau several times in the ceremony. I had not been well practiced in this sort of stimulation before this assignment, but the nine months prior had given me ample opportunity to practice. And besides, it was all for the good of the mission.
In my case, there was little respite between the third and second degrees of proximity. Thawratullah and hir Consort consulted through encrypted BDI, and then asked me to join them. I had observed this portion of the ceremony about twelve times before—it was not always indulged in, but served as a means for Thawratullah to remind the congregants of the reasons for hir relatively exalted status—and thus knew what was expected of me. The Consort and I began rimming Thawratullah thoroughly. I then nibbled gently up the perineum and the scrotum—which is how I know about those white hairs—and finally took hir penis wholly into my mouth, as the Consort traced a similar path along my breasts and belly toward my own. This was the signal to those in the congregation similarly equipped and so inclined that they could do the same, for since direct fellatio so often ends with ejaculation, it was not a common practice outside this stage of the ceremony.
No one invited to the second degree of proximity had ever outlasted Thawratullah. Either they deflated into the Consort, or collapsed exhausted, their jaw cracking and unhinged from its motions around hir pendulous member. I ended the first way, but made a good showing, outlasting any of the previous initiates I had seen. The Essence reached under my armpits, lifted me to hir mouth and kissed me deeply, then whispered into my ear the first words zie had spoken since that evening’s sermon: “Almost.”
The kiss meant that I would be allowed to partake of the first degree of proximity. The “almost” meant that it would not be that night, or the next. Thawratullah would observe me carefully, and zie would decide when I was ready.
The IT Commissariat got to work on tightening the encryption. I had witnessed the first degree of proximity only once, and I knew that I had different preparations to make. In nine months of infiltration, I had not had any anal sex—my usual preferred role. I knew that Thawratullah would penetrate me, and that once fully in, zie would find a place on my body where one of my BDI ports matched one of hirs, and make a directly wired connection.
At that point I would lose control of my own destiny. My success or failure would depend entirely upon IT’s expertise. This retelling of what I had to do is based upon my own faulty recollection of what they told me to do, which was itself a pedagogical adaptation of something too abstruse for me to understand. I had to keep my legend, the cover story of a raw recruit to the Church of God as Love, readily intelligible to Thawratullah’s mental probing, while maintaining strong encryption on anything in my identity having to do with the Council. At the same time, my true identity would be decrypting the parts of Thawratullah’s mind that zie kept secret even from the Consort. This would require no conscious intervention on my part; the routines were programmed to activate upon penetration of any BDI port. Consciousness would be a sign of failure, an indication that Thawratullah had begun to link the threads between my legend and my identity. In a direct link, it would be easy enough for hir to stop my heart with a quick bio-electrical surge. In the bottom position, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to disengage in time.
My conscious task would be to avoid coming too soon, to allow the routines sufficient time to do their work. I spent the days before each ceremony inserting fingers, thumbs, butt plugs, dildos, vibrators, robotic fuck-dongs in my well-lubricated ass, my hand moving up and down along my shaft again, and again, and again. I also doubled my dose of duloxetine, which left me in a bored stupor. By the time I came to the meetings, I was exhausted, flaccid and incapable of any higher order thought.
This was apparently what Thawratullah found most desirable. Within four nights, I was called to the altar.
The Consort and hir attendants did a good job with the application of the lube. That, and my preparations from the previous day, meant no immediate pain when Thawratullah penetrated me, just the frisson of knowing that something was happening over which I had no control. Zie moved hir hips slowly: It seemed as if five full minutes had passed before the first ten centimeters had entered, bringing that familiar tickle against the prostate. Five more centimeters, and my first involuntary moan. Five more, and my eyes flashed wide. The Consort applied some more lube to the last five centimeters that lingered against my augmented yet hairy ass cheeks, then some to the cheeks themselves, probing toward the sphincter. Thawratullah pushed in with a final thrust, and I snarled. I wanted zie to begin the rocking rhythm of pull and push but waited for the wired connection.
Zie found a port along my lower back and exposed one on hir right palm, pressing me down against the altar. The pushing motion made hir penis slide out slightly, and zie pushed back in. In that momentary delay, my mind made its move; I should have remembered that consciousness was a sign of danger, but I was too intent upon my mission. I found hir vanity and arrogance, and caressed them gently; they parted to show me the calculation and will-to-power beneath. I felt the thrusting of hir hips as a conquest from within, a tumor. To the extent that Thawratullah had a plan to undermine our power from within, I could grasp that plan, perhaps not explain it, but intuit it with each pulse. I wanted hir off and out of me: NOW!
With that thought an electric jolt passed between our BDI ports, not strong enough to do any damage, but enough to trigger both of us to ejaculate. I felt sure that the encryption had held, but could not help but worry that somehow zie suspected who and what I was. If zie did, zie did not order any of hir followers to apprehend me. Hir ejaculate was still hidden inside me; I could have destroyed the legend of hir superior self-command just by unclenching my anus and letting it dribble out for all to see. But the truest of believers would not believe the testimony even of their own eyes, and I did not want to be around for the chaos and division that would ensue.
When we suppress the Church of God as Love, as I have already recommended to the Council, it will be done in an orderly and effective manner. And I will ask that this be my last assignment.
END
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