Chapter One

It's weird being back in Boston after all these years. Hard to believe this is the city leading the movement, given that it has always had such a progressive reputation. It’s also crazy that State contracted with me, given our history, and how I answered some of those electropolygraph questions. They must be more desperate than the internet stations are letting on, but it’s hard to know for sure with all of the outages.

Our convoy drove in at dusk. The streets were deserted, and we whipped through intersection after intersection without stopping. Driving here used to be such a headache. Not today. Some of the traffic lights pulsed red, while others swung dark and limp as we sped underneath them. We roared by two minorities walking up Mass. Ave.

I watched my detail for a reaction, as they drove on in silence. “Aren’t you going to radio them in?” I asked.

They kept on, in silence.

“Seriously, what if they are militia patrol the Secretary warned us about?”

There was the sound of breathing, and air rushing by the speeding car.

“I doubt they are, anyway, jerks. If they were, they wouldn’t be out in the open like that. I bet they are top secret State hacks like you guys, watching the road for us, right?”

Cold silence. I knew they were ignoring me, but I couldn’t tell if it was because they knew my past and didn’t trust me, or because they were hazing the new guy.

As we crossed into Roxbury to scope things out before the talks began, a breeze kicked up some papers that I thought were majorities newsleafs mentioned at debrief. They told us they’ve gone back to paper for news, printed on Rev.’s church bulletins.

“Hey, stop right here! Those might be the newsleafs they briefed us on. We need to-”

He kept driving, ignoring me. “Hey, asshole, stop the car!”

“Stop the car, Tony,” Sully said, backing me up. He complied, grudgingly, and sat there, tapping his hand impatiently on the gear shifter.

“What are you a tough guy?” I asked, angrily. “Back up to the fliers you just drove past.”

He sat there and stared at me blankly. “DO IT!” I commanded.

He looked at Sully, who nodded in the affirmtative. He threw the car in reverse, squealing the tires back to the fliers, and then squealed them skidding to a stop. “Man, what a dick,” I thought to myself, as he punched the shifter back into drive with his knuckles.

As I got out of the car, I could tell they were on edge. Although they seemed to openly detest me, the last thing they wanted was a headline that would make the Secretary look worse than he already did in the eyes of the minorities. It was the only thing protecting me, really, the would-be headline.

The wind gusted and rustled the pile as I approached it, fluttering groups of flyers gently down the street. I ran after one, zigzagging left and right away from the car. The wind calmed and it came to rest in front of me. I ran up and hopped onto it with my foot. Loose gravel and sand crackled under the tires of the car as it rolled up behind me. I bent over and picked up the flyer.

“Let’s go. It’s not safe here.”

I looked down at it in my hands, pretending not to hear him. It was a paper handbill for a spoken word rally last week. I folded it and put it in my pocket.

“Let’s go!” he hissed.

I casually scanned the row of walkups in front of me with my back to the car. Unswept stoops, boarded doors, and pollen-stained windows, all empty. A gust of wind unfurled down the tree-lined corridor. The windows rattled and quivered, as flyers and other bits of debris swirled around my feet and up against the curb.

I scanned my eyes back towards the car, to turn to it, and there, in the second floor window in the building directly in front of me, not there, wait, yes, there, not there, I swear, a man alternated, in a suit, there again, not, as the warbling storm pane bounced the reflection and came to rest.

“So they haven’t all evacuated,” I thought, as I stopped my eyes on the number over the door, carefully, “keep scanning, nothing to notice here, get back in the car, nobody noticed, did they, no, be cool.”

They took me as far as Melnea Cass Boulevard, despite my angry protests to drive closer to Dudley Square and up along the edge of the majorities barricade. After driving one block, they turned quickly back in the direction of the secure perimeter downtown, ignoring my increasingly furious requests to go further with silence.

I glowered through the tinted window at the dwindling skyline. Maudlin blue gloom was creeping in from the direction of the ocean, spilling bent ache around the dirty corners, through the blocked alleys, up the empty, bullet-pocked brownstones, slowly, intently, climbing the worn roofs, the high rises, the radio antennae, methodically, inch by inch, dispossessing the city of every last glowing slant of orange and red light.

We cleared the perimeter guard without incident and arrived at the hotel. As I checked in, the detail scoured every nook of the lobby with hand detectors. They say it’s just precautionary, but I am starting to wonder whether there is something they haven’t told me. They are taking extraordinary precautions and it’s making me uneasy.

From my room I can see the water, lapping up against the unfinished levee that was abandoned when the minorities evacuated. There is wind chop spilling over it, nibbling the dark sandbags and dirt piles lining the waterfront. Ghost vapor lines from military aircraft streak the sky in not quite parallel lines. A long soggy one cuts vertically across the others, and seems to have sheared off half the moon.

Tomorrow I meet with them. Amazing that they are the same folks I worked with so many years ago. I’m nervous, but also excited. I keep wondering if Elijah Muhammad hadn’t been such a hypocrite: would I be here? Would the movement have gotten squashed? Probably. But now they got the numbers. Crazy that it happened so much faster than expected.

I tried to convince the Secretary to let me stay in the old hood. They insist it's not safe anymore. They are treating me like a child. I had it out with the head of my detail. I think he actually called his highness the Secretary and told on me. He says the Secretary doesn’t want a front-page internet headline. It makes sense, I suppose, but it’s frustrating. Tomorrow we'll see if it’s as bad as they say.

I may have to lose them. I can’t be commuting from some fancy hotel behind the secure perimeter and expect them to trust me. I need to be on the other side of the line to have credibility here, like the old days. Except now the line is more than just an uncomfortable mutual understanding. Now it’s crushed pavement tiles, scaffolding, burnt cars, and whatever else seven hundred thousand starving people can twist, burn and stack in a barricaded city.