ON A CHILLY AUTUMN MORNING A FEW MONTHS after the Chinatown riots, Theo stepped out of his house to find the world had turned orange. Countless orange banners draping building faces and trailing from lampposts. Orange bleeding into the raucous human mass assembled on the street: T-shirts, wigs, capes, flags, body paint. All in a color that once inspired a visceral terror in Theo, but that day he pushed through the throngs of cheering Dutch Pride supporters, hands tucked in the pockets of a coat that was defiantly black.
Soon, he arrived at Mara’s apartment. She was still in her nightdress, hair tied back in a bun. A clenched jaw sharpened the lines of her face, making it appear harsher than normal. He followed her to a smelly, cluttered room starved of light by the drawn curtains. She returned to her spot on the sofa and continued watching the news.
“And now we cross over live to the Hall of Knights at The Hague, where the new Dutch prime minister is about to be sworn in …”
The rottweiler face of Charles Barbour flashed on-screen, looking less of a rottweiler than usual. For the ceremony, the Dutch Pride leader was attired in a sharp black suit, hair glistening with product. A bit like those “Before/After” ads for grooming centers. In the “Before,” Charles looked like a street criminal. In the “After,” he appeared to be doing a passable impersonation of a statesman.
The king, a tall man with a thin crop of red hair, read the oath in a dull, listless voice. Charles repeated it, palm beside his ear. A few moments later, they shook hands, blinking into the barrage of camera flashes.
Mara turned away sharply, as if she couldn’t bear to look. In the last few months, she’d been campaigning furiously to prevent this moment from coming into being. She’d been arrested twice: once for spray-painting “Fascist” on the doors of Dutch Pride supporters in the neighborhood, and the second time for throwing eggs at the man on-screen now. He looked straight at the camera, smiling gleefully, as if he knew she’d be watching.
“We’re fucked. Totally fucked. You know what’s coming. You know what’s going to happen next, don’t you?” she said, cheeks flushed.
Theo nodded glumly.
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have anything to say?” she snapped.
“What would you like me to say?” he answered with a sigh of irritation.
She scoffed, “See, it’s happening already.”
“What is?”
“You’ve accepted it. Accepted him.” She pointed at the TV. “You may as well wear an orange shirt because soon, you’ll find the means to justify everything he’s going to do. Stockholm fucking syndrome. You know what? You can sit back and pretend everything’s okay. I won’t.”
“Fine,” he said, hoping she’d shut up, as her shrill voice was giving him a headache. But his passivity seemed to only fuel her anger.
“You know what your problem is? You run away when things get hard. You’re a coward.”
Theo glared at her. How dare she accuse him of cowardice? Did she have any idea what he’d been through? People like her who judged from their high horses would never understand that sometimes, courage was just the ability to wake up every morning and carry on despite knowing how fucked the world was. Courage was the strength to look another person in the eye after you’d seen the darkest depths of the human soul.
And to her earlier point, no, he hadn’t accepted Charles Barbour, because you couldn’t accept something that didn’t exist. He’d banished Charles behind an impenetrable wall, along with Mathias and everything else that tormented him. Because if he didn’t, he’d either go insane or kill himself.
Of course, he didn’t say any of this, because there was no point. She was up and away, orbiting the room in the grip of a fevered delirium.
“We’re going to march to The Hague. The resistance will continue. We won’t give up,” she muttered to herself.
“We? Who is we?”
“The group.”
“The group?” He laughed scornfully. “You sound like Adolf Hitler toward the end of the war, when he was moving phantom armies. The group’s dead. No one gives a fuck anymore.”
“Viktor does.” She glowered.
“Viktor. Are you crazy? The man’s a wanted terrorist. So what’s the plan? Are you two going to set up your own little terror shop, the new Baader-Meinhof? Set off car bombs? Run like hunted animals and get shot? Is that what you want?”
“Sometimes you’ve got to fight fire with fire.”
Theo inhaled sharply and rose. Enough of this lunacy. But just as he was about to leave, she gripped his arm and threw herself at him. The force caused them both to topple to the sofa. He tried to get up, but was pinned by her weight as she pushed her head into his chest. A second later, he felt the warmth of her tears soak into his shirt. He leaned back and sighed.
This was her moment of hard landing, he realized. Her worst nightmare had come true and there was nothing she could do about it, because she wasn’t up against a system or an ideology, but the greater forces of history. Not a battle you could hope to win. He’d come to this conclusion one blistering afternoon in Chinatown a few months earlier, and now it was her turn.
It wasn’t going to be easy. Because people like her needed to be angry with something all the time. It was her life force, her raison d’etre. How would she cope when she had nothing to fight against? Without a cause or a group, she had nothing but hundreds of knickknacks stolen from here and there. Her life was empty, just like his. That’s why she was leaning on him, because like him, she had no one else to lean on. He wouldn’t have minded this so much, but for one thing: the damn vintage-store smell wafting from her pores.
He stifled his breath and held his nose high above her head, waiting for her to finish her cry. Meanwhile, at the other end of the room, the TV had moved on from the inauguration to other news.
“Accusing China of unfair trade practices, the European Parliament in Brussels today announced a flat thirty-seven percent duty on all Chinese imports. This follows similar punitive actions from the United States. The move has been described as unfair by Beijing, which has promised retaliatory measures. The trade dispute comes amidst growing tension between China and the West. Senior Communist Party officials also condemned US arms sales to Taiwan’s pro-independence government, calling it an interference in its internal affairs. More on this soon.”