12 People Like Us
In the kitchen of the safe house, a partially refurbished mansion in the formerly posh Brush Park neighborhood of Detroit, John and Angela sat facing one another across a massive wooden table.
Between them on the tabletop were arranged the following: a cell phone; a magnum of champagne (unopened); a dainty pair of bridal pumps delicately embellished with feathers; and the saddest of white wedding bouquets, composed of wilting gardenias, ranunculus, narcissus and a few feather tendrils tied with a satin ribbon.
A third chair was taken by a wedding dress. The dress. The killer dress. A magnificent creation - mermaid style, with a satin bodice from which tiers of white feathers cascaded to the floor in front, while additional tiers, fluttering from a semi-cathedral length train, dusted the floor behind. The feathers trembled with every puff of warm air emitted by new cast iron registers in the newly refinished heart pine floor. As conversation pieces go, that dress was the white elephant in the room.
“Well, here we are,” John said at last.
“Here we are,” Angela repeated airily. Now that her crying jag was over, she had recovered both her brittle, bright shell and her accustomed savoir faire. What he would do with her after the summit was not even on his radar screen. He would jump off that bridge when he came to it.
“How the hell did this happen?” It was a purely rhetorical question, but her answer was at once ironic and deadly serious.
“Aside from the fact that I got stood up? Which begs the linguistic question of what it means to be stood up by someone who got cold feet. Or do I mean feet of clay?” She waved a hand. “Something made it - inevitable.”
“Fate?” John hazarded automatically. He had used Angela’s phone to check in with the Anons, but had decided not to call Jane again until after the meeting. If then. He was just shooting the shit to be charitable. And pass the Jane-less time.
“God, no,” she demurred, with wrinkled brow. “And no, not god. I’m a scientist for heaven’s sake.”
“His mom is gone,” John ruminated. “So that leaves society.”
“You’re getting warmer. Pay some attention to the man behind the curtain.”
“I’m sorry. What? You’re saying Vinnie scratched the wedding because of the price of tea in Fukushima? Or do I mean the price of sewage treatment in Jefferson, Alabama?”
“Vinnie said you were married again.”
“Oh sure, one non sequitur deserves another.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“What’s your point?”
“It’s not a point, it’s a thesis: 1) that we are being run by a confederacy of cannibals to whom other people are either food or nothing, and 2) that in a world based on a cannibal’s assumptions and preferences positive outcomes are rare. What I am postulating is an extreme application of Gresham’s Law. What happens to human civilization when bad drives out good on a grand scale.”
“We are in a festive mood.”
“I haven’t done the math, but we’ve clearly entered a diminishing, self-reinforcing feedback loop - otherwise known as a death spiral - so ‘rare’ may be optimistic. I’m not ruling out ‘impossible’ as the ultimate endpoint.”
“No happy ever after for me,” John concluded wryly.
“Or me. Or anyone. Well, we could change our definitions, I suppose. For a time anyway. Revise our expectations downward, as Lloyd Blankfiend of Goldman-Suxx likes to say. In that case being mateless, jobless, and homeless simply becomes the new normal. And if we want your opinion, we’ll give it to you.”
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a bare subsistence. Ah, serfdom,” John rhapsodized.
“American dream on. Serfs had a certain value. You and I are rapidly becoming excess baggage. We represent a demand on resources that the system has allocated or intends to allocate to other purposes - by which I mean the purposes of a few privileged others. The system as currently constructed was not designed to include us. We are disposable. In your line of work, you possibly understand this better than I.”
“I no longer have a line of work,” John demurred.
“Ah-ah,” she raised a professorial finger. “You no longer have an employer. In the Mad Max world that is fast approaching, yours will be the only line of work remaining. At this rate, though it may come as an unpleasant surprise to all the poor little rich boys, the last man standing will not be a lord of finance. It will be a man with a gun.”
“And here I was remembering you as such a fun date.”
“You can forgive a girl being a little down in the dumps after she gets dumped by the person who was supposed to make her life complete. Left standing at the altar - how quaint yet infinitely devastating is that? But in an odd way, it’s all connected - you, me, Vinnie. And the Vampire Squid Apocalypse. I have seen the future. It tried to kill me.”
“Oh, now we’re in Terminator territory.”
“Movies are a way we address issues we are not otherwise addressing,” Angela’s agile mind made yet another leap that John had difficulty following. “Vinnie told you how we met.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“Several times. I think. No, he did, he did. Gimme a break. I didn’t know it was you he was talking about. We were having a pre-marital-end-of-the-world pub crawl and I was brooding over a post-marital Jane.”
“I was in Mexico doing research on narco-terrorism.”
John blinked. “Pro or con?”
“DoD. They wanted to know how people are being affected by the extreme violence on the border. And don’t look at me like that. I left the Company before you did. I’m at a little college in the Midwest now. Or I was. The point is - every other source of grant dollars has evaporated. Government is being drowned in a bathtub and, outside of the military-industrial complex, an entire generation of scientists is going down the drain. Austerity? Hello!”
“Let me guess,” John closed his eyes and pressed a forefinger to either temple, as though pretending to read her mind. “The Zetas and DEA arrange atrocities and you follow-up with victims to measure how they’re coping.” His eyes popped open, his expression as caustic as his tone. “And you were shocked, shocked to discover that it’s not really about helping people survive terrible crimes inflicted by a bunch of low-life sociopaths at all. It’s about studying how well extreme violence works as a tool of state-sponsored oppression and control.”
“Are you saying this is old hat? Because I was shocked, shocked,” Angela maintained, hotly.
“I’m saying I’ve been catching up on my reading. History, politics, economics. Seems we - meaning whoever runs this shit in our name - have been making the world safe for ruling elites since at least 1945.”
“Well, that’s cutting to the chase. But you are correct. That is the punch line. I was supposed to monitor a certain population over time to document their response to domestic terrorism. I wasn’t supposed to figure out the true nature of the horror story - that this shit doesn’t just happen. That it is planned and purposeful and orchestrated at the highest levels. But they slipped up. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I saw a familiar face.” She named a name. John whistled silently.
“You were where?”
“Just nowhere. This little hole-in-the-wall taqueria in Ciudad Juarez. Plastic chairs, formica tables. A tiny bar next to the door. I was there to meet with a group of ordinary citizens to talk about their lives, before and after terrorism. Standard Fifth Avenue focus group stuff. About half way through, I went to the ladies room and -“ she paused and reached out to fiddle with her wedding bouquet.
“All hell broke loose.”
She blanched and made a gesture. “Shots. Screams. I was trying to hide behind the sink with bullets whizzing by; the walls were that thin. I was sure they’d walk back any minute and open the door and that would be the end. But then it got quiet. And I waited. And waited. I heard sirens and I thought, oh
they’re long gone, they won’t wait around for the cops. So I’m thinking maybe I can sneak out the back way, through the kitchen. So I open the door, just a crack - and there he is. Standing over a heap of bloody corpses, not talking, just surveying the carnage, cool as a cucumber. Or should I say as impassive as a popsicle?”
Reminded that neither of them had even thought about eating for almost 24 hours, John got up and went to the Sub-Zero refrigerator, which was starkly empty. “Make mine a Klondike bar. Man, I thought they said this place was stocked.”
“He looked right at me. And turned and walked out. The next thing I know, two federales and an army guy grab me and there’s a gun to my head. I’m done for. I’m a goner. But then an argument breaks out.”
John had found a vacuum-sealed bag of Starbucks next to a Krups coffeemaker. He snorted. “Oh, you’d be worth so much more in a brothel. In tsunami-kissed Japan, say, or sunny Qatar.”
“That’s what I said. Tried to say. When I could get my mouth working again. They were talking Tenancingo.”
“The town that sex built,” John said, measuring water. Eight cups. It was going to be a long night. “I know it well. Had a couple of jobs there,” he hastened to add.
“Under the circumstances I told them it sounded good to me. It was about that time that this drunk American comes reeling out of the men’s room. Big dude. Taller than you. And potentially very