This is not the only model, but it is the ideal for Americans, and the enduring success of any book is determined by how close the story hews to this pattern.
Often outspoken female characters aren’t killed; instead, they’re banished or shunned. In Gone with the Wind, the obedient Melanie Wilkes chooses to die, attempting to have a child she’s been told will kill her, but wanting to please her husband with a large family. In the next turn, the bold Scarlett O’Hara is excommunicated from her community and her family, while the understated Rhett Butler takes his leave for Charleston, escaping the scene like Big Chief and Nick Carraway. The same variation takes place in Valley of the Dolls where the beautiful Jennifer North works constantly to please her mother but finally kills herself out of the fear that a tumor in her breast will destroy her beauty. The ambitious, outspoken Neely O’Hara—a fictional character who’s chosen her stage name from an earlier fictional character—is soon discarded for her show-business transgressions. And the book ends on the placid, ethereal Anne Welles, the outsider, an escapee from a distant New England family not unlike Big Chief’s tribe, as the most unscathed.
In The Dead Poets Society, a student commits suicide out of fear of his father’s disapproval, a teacher is banished for being unorthodox, and an outsider is left as the witness.
Even a seemingly transgressive novel like Fight Club traced the same pattern. The most inventive aspect of Fight Club was how it collapsed all three of the archetypes. By killing himself, the martyr murders the rebel and by doing so creates an integrated passive/active voice that recounts the story as a new self-aware narrator.
Over and over, the lesson to Americans is not to be too passive or aggressive, but to pay attention and to avoid notice. To escape, to survive and tell the tale.
To believe Talbott, half the population of the formerly united states was always forced to live as the slaves of the other half. And this relationship shifted almost every four years. Voters were compelled to be slaves or tyrants, tyrants or slaves, depending on election results. Their literature was calibrated to keep people sane despite these wild reversals of power.
Terrence closed the book and held it in his lap. If merely to stay alive, that’s what Terrence wanted to do: Escape this formula altogether. And that’s why he knew he’d have to find another option. Something a lifetime of books and movies hadn’t primed him to choose.
Half alive, Talbott had admitted to having no tracking device. It had all been a lie. It was a test to see how far Walter would go to achieve his goals. How mercilessly he could act.
Sputtering the words, breathless and bone pale, ashen lipped, the old man had said, “I’m so proud of you.”
Walter, not the same Walter. Walter had turned into someone he didn’t know, he was slick with the old man’s blood. Stiff fingered.
His new old man had gasped, “I’m very proud of you.” His eyelids had fluttered and he’d faltered as if ready to die, but he’d rallied. Fixing Walter with red-rimmed eyes, he’d said, “Listen closely.” He’d said, “For I am agreed to teach you all the secrets of success.” He’d swallowed hard and coughed to clear his throat. “Write this down,” he’d ordered, “Write: ‘Declaration of Interdependence.’ ”
And at the old man’s urging Walter had rushed away to find a pen and a notebook.
Shasta checked the battery icon on her phone and pressed the switch to turn it off. The battery showed as mostly dead. She knew the feeling.
She watched Talbott Reynolds on television and tried to feel reassured. Not everyone was terrified. The man who delivered firewood, her professors who weren’t shot dead and being buried in the pit on the soccer practice fields, most people appeared to be exuberant about the reshaping of society. None of the old solutions had done anything but make social problems worse. People seemed willing to try something radically different.
What the Talbott book referred to wasn’t a wholly new concept. Leading political figures like Keith Ellison had long before called for separate homelands. In fact, Talbott’s plan mimicked Ellison’s by requiring Southern states to be united as a single nation, to be occupied exclusively by people of African descent. The remaining states would be reserved exclusively for citizens of European ancestry. With the exception of California—the Sunshine State would be set aside for a special purpose.
Strange newscasters appeared on television to replace those who’d been targeted. They explained how the national census and college applications provided the initial rolls for racial identification. To further refine the process, the data of Internet-based genetic testing services were subpoenaed. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was, no duh, suspended. The popularity of such testing had established a ready-made roster for identifying those citizens in each region who would need to be relocated and compensated.
Shasta didn’t want to be caught in a dragnet. Blindsided by a skeleton in her genetic closet. To play it safe, she’d found a website that still took Bitcoin, and she’d submitted a saliva sample under a fake name. They were to send her the test results by text message, to a mobile phone she’d bought from a ragged hobo on Martin Luther King Boulevard. The stranger had asked for fifty dollars cash and didn’t offer a charging cord. Fingerprints of dried blood suggested a violent past, but Shasta was quick to scrub them off with an antibacterial wipe at Safeway. The battery was half dead when she got it.
The waiting was worse than a pregnancy test. She tried to calm her nerves with the reminder that both of her parents were white. Both pairs of her grandparents were white. Still, the wait felt worse than some AIDS test.
In the new world decreed by the Declaration of Interdependence, a great many people were enduring the same ordeal. Others, interracial couples and families mostly, were making a beeline for the Canadian border and seeking refugee status. Others had self-exiled to Europe or Mexico, but the Talbott book decreed doing so meant forfeiting the bulk of their property and assets. It proposed like-for-like compensation only for citizens who willingly surrendered their homes and businesses and relocated to the appropriate homeland.
On television, Talbott Reynolds assuaged fears, repeating that the death squads had completed their work. Those who’d liberated the formerly united states would oversee the relocation process with only the force appropriate to any resistance they met.
As she carried the switched-off phone, trying to save the battery for the eventual text, Shasta wrestled with the idea of imminent racial separatism. No group was a monolith. Not even gays. Especially not gays. Queer identity cleaved faster than a cell dividing in the uterus. Resisting the urge to power up her phone, Shasta recalled the brilliant writer Zora Neale Hurston from Black History Month, who said African Americans come in
High yellow
Yellow
High brown
Vaseline brown
Seal brown
Low brown
Dark brown
Not to be outdone by the cream of the Harlem Renaissance, Shasta systematically broke down whiteness to the following scale:
Rice white
Buttermilk
Been-in-prison pale
Vampire
Peeled potato
Ecru
Grocery bag
Regular Barbie
As far as she knew she was no more ethnic than peeled potato.
There was no telling how much time had elapsed, but she couldn’t resist any longer. She switched on the phone. It chimed with a new text.
Talbott, on television, over the radio, decreed temporary measures. All public employees must remain servants of the people. They must forget their dreams of early retirement. Yes, they’d postponed their dreams in exchange for security and the promise that one day the young would relieve them. But now the young had seized control and were giddy with power. Boys who’d never expected to attain drinking age—they’d been granted a future—and the last thing they wanted was to deliver mail or write parking tickets. So Talbott had called a temporary halt to reti
rements and sabbaticals and vacations in the public sector. Strictly as a short-term, stop-gap measure. For how long no one could say. Exempt were the police and military for they had aided the tribes.
For a period the nation continued to lurch forward, headless. The agencies whose purpose it was to deliver mail and to write parking tickets continued to deliver mail and to write parking tickets because they could rally no counterattack and because no one knew who the attackers had been in the first place and because no one wanted to draw the focus and become the next target.
The threat of repercussions prompted public employees to rethink any bad mood. It motivated with less carrot, all stick.
To preempt further violence, Talbott appeared on billboards, a beaming image of him, with the slogan:
A Smile Is Your Best Bulletproof Vest!
The same image and slogan appeared on posters and bus stops and in employee lunchrooms. People recognized it was a smile-or-be-shot edict, but what choice did they have?
It became not uncommon to see clerks in the post office grinning widely while beads of sweat blistered their foreheads. For their sole exit strategy was via a dirt hole filled with quicklime. Thus public employees constituted a new serf class, tied to their tasks. Held like chattels.
As per the Talbott book people were kept confused, living on the brink of chaos for so long that they’d be grateful to accept the terms of any new governing body. The word grateful falls short. Absent the constant threat of death, they were gleeful, joyous with relief. Willing to pledge allegiance to any new order so long as it kept the peace.
Money was no longer power. Merely a short-lived tool.
The dollar, Talbott declared, was dead, and the new currency had to flow downward through the members of each lineage. Through the members to their families and loved ones. Even so the new currency was short lived, fading to plastic film in fewer than a hundred days. And because money could not be hoarded it had to be traded for bread and wine, and because more bread and wine were needed more people were employed in raising wheat and growing grapes.
And always there was the possibility of a new list, this one directed at unpopular bus drivers and meter maids, and this spurred terrified smiles and a groveling humility among civil servants. Everyone else kept a low profile and for once were glad not to be government workers. To the Millennials of the youth bulge the street sweeper was just as guilty as the senator and just as ready to see the new generation marched off to war. Just as the French Reign of Terror had commenced by beheading royals, then expanded to severing the heads of clerics and clerks and servants, the danger existed that Adjustment Day would become an annual event.
From when it broke over the distant horizon, the figure looked like a haunt. Thin and shimmering in the desert heat, wavering, flickering like a flame, it grew taller with each step along the highway. It brought to mind abandoned animals. The dogs poor people took out to the countryside to dump, hoping household pets could fend for themselves. Starved a few days, those lap dogs and pedigreed mutts always resort to eating the shit of other animals. That shit, laced with the eggs of black flies, eggs ready to hatch out worms. The result being a dumped animal starves all the faster, eating more shit, hatching more mouths to feed, and finally finding a bush, a tree, a fence, but shade enough where a poor animal can collapse, panting, and die.
That’s what the ghostly figure brought to mind.
Garret Dawson had only to turn his head to watch the stranger’s progress. Former shop steward, prince of Caucasia’s most-powerful lineage, he lay on the dusty roadside. With his top half under his truck, his hands twisted a bearing cap off the driveline U-joint. His legs stretched across the road’s gravel shoulder, full in the hot sunshine, until his jeans felt steam-ironed to his legs and his toes felt baked inside his boots.
He picked the needle bearings from the cap and cleaned each in his mouth, spitting away the burnt grease. Peeking to see the stranger come another stretch closer. By feel, his fingers pressed the bearings back into their race. The differential input yoke was almost too hot to touch. His toolbox set half in the shade, socket sets and extensions just a long reach away.
The radio was playing, turned up so he could listen. That man, Talbott, was on. No music. No broadcast ballgames. The entirety of television and radio played nothing but Talbott Reynolds. New ruling potentate, most likely he lived in a castle, lucky sumbitch, waited on hand and foot by teenage virgins. The voice rattled in his tinny dash speakers:
Paradise isn’t created by splendid architecture or dramatic scenery but by the quality of souls that populate the place.
The great man’s voice echoed across the sand and sagebrush. In the time since Dawson had first heard his bearing burn out, not one car had gone past. His visitor he could see was something woman-y. Minus her dusty clothes, he figured she hadn’t the booty to hide her back hole. And what the sun had done to her blistered skin, it had done twice over to her scorched hair. The wind had knotted the strands, and sweat had plastered it flat to her head with dust. Talbott’s voice declared:
If a man can face reality at the age of twenty-five, at sixty he can dictate it.
She didn’t look like much, but just in case Dawson slipped off his wedding ring and stuffed it in a front pocket of his jeans. He rolled a needle bearing in his mouth, sucking off the scorched grease. He spat black.
Tucked deep in his pocket, his fingertips felt a slip of something. A sheet of paper. Wadded and soft with age, the paper listed the items he’d promised his wife, Roxanne, he’d bring home. Her handwriting would be illegible now, creased with wrinkles and washed with his sweat, but he knew the list by heart:
Coffee filters
AA batteries (for kitchen remote)
Avocados (not Hass)
Toilet paper
Peacock tongues
Life hadn’t slowed any, he reckoned. Except now they measured their passing days in peacock tongues.
A heartbeat later the abandoned woman had staggered within spitting distance. She’d come to stand beside his rig, his tool box at her feet.
As she edged within hearing of the radio, the woman hesitated as if spooked by the voice. The radio preached:
When they run, hunt them. Find the stragglers where they shelter. The shame they feel comes from squandering the authority built up for them by generations of fathers.
To Dawson’s mind there were different degrees of sunburn. First was Roofer’s Tan, from laying tarpaper and stapling shingles on plywood decking angled to offer a man like so much blistering steak for the sun to broil. The even darker shades included:
Castaway in a Lifeboat in the Open Ocean Liver-Colored
Hawaiian Tropic SPF #5 Bondi Beach Under-the-Ozone-Hole Suicide Red
Bain de Soleil Saint-Tropez Orange
Arnold Schwarzenegger Roll-On Pro-Tan Bronze
Demented Tucson Bag Lady Baked Brown
This stranger was none of the above. Her sunburn red had blistered and peeled away to reveal ovals of lily-white. Hers was the first sun exposure of a cosseted lifetime.
Dawson’s lips, he figured, were black with grease, but hers where frosted white with flakes of dried skin. Her teeth looked straight and white as a movie star’s.
It was common knowledge that many targets had sidestepped Adjustment Day. Mostly academics had managed to evade squads since schools of higher learning kept notoriously erratic schedules. Word was these fugitives were playing dress-up in rags and trying to pass themselves off as normals while they picked their way toward the Canadian border. Mexico didn’t want them, but Canada hadn’t closed the door entirely. Washington State Route 21 rolled north across the caliche scablands of eastern Washington State, straight to the border, but only a born idiot would hike it in hot weather.
If there was anything Dawson knew about academics, it was the fact that they weren’t too bright.
The closest town back that ways was Kahlotus, a good twelve clicks. She stepped closer to his tool box and squatted
down to see under the truck. “Hey mister,” she drawled. Her voice sounded put-on, picked up from reruns of Hee Haw or The Beverly Hillbillies. “Hitch a ride?”
Dawson rolled to one side, facing her. He snaked the phone from his shirt pocket and framed her blistered face. If the stranger knew about face recognition software, she was too tired to care. He snapped a picture and texted it. To test her, he held out his hand, palm up. “You want to reach me that 7/8ths extra-deep socket on the offset extension?”
Her faded blue eyes went to the array of chromed tools in the box’s top tray. Her eyes twitched over the hex nut drivers and snap wrenches.
Roxanne would’ve known the correct tool on sight.
Dawson rolled the needle bearing between his lips like a toothpick. To show his impatience, he snapped his grease-stained fingers.
Could be a heartbeat later, she slapped something hot metal into his hand, and when he brought it into sight it was a closed-end 5/8ths wrench.
His phone chimed. The database had her pegged. This starved wretch, crouched here, her feet flapping in torn basketball shoes, her legs and arms lost in baggy coveralls patched with duct tape, the tape curled up at the edges and black with grime, her name was Ramantha. She’d gone missing from the University of Oregon where she’d headed the Selected-Gender Pathways Department. But she was a dead academic walking. A small army of bounty hunters were closing in, fast. The nearest was only a little ways back, and here she’d wandered into Dawson’s life. A windfall. Already doomed.
Her vote tally was a measly eleven hundred. It wasn’t a dynasty, but he could make a small fortune by voting the way of the highest bidder every election. Whether he could murder her, and how, was another question.
Maybe she read this in his eyes. She said, “I suppose you’re going to kill me?” Her voice had lost its yokel twang. It sounded cosmopolitan, cultured. Nowadays, cultured was bad. Cultured got you killed.
From the cab of the truck, Talbott lectured at full volume: