1 By force, he said. We all hunched beneath the window of Ale’s room, listening. One by one, guns started coming out of waistbands. I damn near shit myself. We were getting to the end of this thing.
Night was falling, and we knew that whatever happened in the morning, a lot of us might not make it out alive. That was a real motherfucker, you know. Just proof that this world doesn’t want people who are doing good, it doesn’t want people who can rely on each other, it doesn’t want anything without a dollar behind it, or, better yet, a trillion.
I looked behind me to the bed. Ale’s rash had gone away, and his fever had broken. It might have been something viral, not bacterial. We didn’t know. The kid still wasn’t okay, though, listless and puking. We had to get him out of there.
Makayla was a little better than she had been in the hours immediately after Jaden was killed. After Jaden was killed. It all seemed like a dream. Jaden had been one of the best of us, certainly better than me, better than Makayla. And his body had been dragged off so the news crews wouldn’t see it, taken to some morgue. He was gone. Nothing was bringing him back.
I thought Makayla had gone clearly out of her mind when it happened. We found her screaming. After a few hours, she came back from wherever she had gone inside her head, shaken as fuck. She was a wreck. She needed to leave the building, too.
All of us that were left stood in Ale’s room until long things had settled down outside. The police never left, but they made themselves less of a presence. They lurked in the street like a group of wolves waiting for something to die.
After some time had passed, José, Sebastian, and I went back to our apartment. We were keyed the fuck up and there was no way any of us were going to sleep.
“There’s going to be a firefight tomorrow,” José said. He was clearly freaking out. Sebastian seemed calmer, but there was no denying that we were all losing our shit.
“Maybe we’ll just fight them with the shields and batons tomorrow,” Sebastian said.
It didn’t calm any of us down. We’d all been in riots before. They were always bloody and brutal, and even when we got away, the things we saw in them didn’t leave us for a long, long time.
“Maybe we should just leave,” Sebastian said. “What do we have to win here?”
“I don’t know if we can win,” José said. “And I don’t even know if we’ll make it through the thing alive. But it seems important to stay and fight for all the good we’ve found here.”
“But what’s the point in fighting when we’re just going to lose? What’s the point in leading all these people to their death? Those cops are going to be shooting. They’ll say we rioted, they’ll say they had to use whatever measures they could to stop us. Especially once they find out we have guns. And what about the people who are out there just because they had no other choice? Like all those kids who joined the National Guard because they didn’t want to work at the 24/7 and there weren’t a lot of other options for them? Are we going to kill them?”
I shrugged. “I guess I feel bad for them. But only until they pick up their guns and start shooting. Then they’re the enemy just like the rest of them.”
“It can’t be us versus them, Jesse. Then we’re just like they are.”
“But it is,” I said, getting mad. “It always has been. We figured it out, we evolved past the shit they’re still stuck in. They’re the fucking philistines who promote all the shit we can’t stand—the war machine and capitalism and sexism. You go up to those guys and find out how many of them make fun of mentally challenged people, or sexually assaulted someone who they pretended to be a friend of. You find out how many of them are happy to be holding those rifles, and how many of them wish they could go into other people’s countries and blow their brains out in their own houses. And how many of them would ship you back across the borders they’re dying to defend, and will if they catch you, if they even let you live.”
Sebastian was pacing around the room, picking up things and tossing them back and forth between his hands. “I can’t believe it’s us vs. them like that,” he said. “They don’t know. They didn’t have the chances we had to see things the way we do. Maybe some of them don’t want to, and maybe other would if they had the chance. But I can guarantee you that most of them never got the chance.”
I waved my hands. I didn’t want to fight with him, not now. It was a discussion we’d had before and never saw the same side of. Sebastian had never, as long as I’d known him, lost his temper when anyone called him or his brother “illegals” or worse, or said anything shitty. He’d always talked to them, trying to make them see his side of things, and simply walking away when they didn’t. José and I weren’t like him in that way. We didn’t have his patience.
“I just can’t believe they’re all bad,” Sebastian said, refusing to turn away from the topic. “I can’t see the world the way you do, Jesse, all black and white. I don’t want to believe any of them out there wants us all dead any more than we want them dead. You don’t want that, do you?”
I thought about it for a minute. In my darker moments, yeah, I would see the streets run with their blood. But is that what I really wanted, deep down? No. Not even if it had seemed my entire life that they wanted that for me. Not even if that’s what they’d given to Jaden.
“I just want them to disappear,” I said. “When they thought we had nothing left here, that’s what they did. I want us to have a world without them.”
“I just want them to understand,” Sebastian said. “We’re not going to get them to with shields and guns, that’s for sure. I just don’t know what to do.”
“The system’s all-pervasive, Bash,” José said. “They’re in the middle of it. We found a way out. We were lucky. And it sucks that they might die in it. I want them to break through, but I’m not a pacifist. So we’ll fight them and they’ll probably win. But it’ll be a fight that people remember, and it’ll be us standing up for what we helped build and organize and know is right. That’s worth fighting for.”
We sat there talking like that into the night. The night got darker. All that there was for light was a sliver of a moon shining through the window. Somewhere far off, we heard an animal howl. At first, we paid it no mind, but as it got closer, we began to wonder about it.
“It sounds like a wild dog,” I said. “Or a wolf.”
“What would a wild dog or a wolf be doing here in Brooklyn?” José asked.
“What if . . .” Sebastian said, then trailed off.
“What if what?” I asked.
“What if all those animals from the zoo are still alive?”
None of us said anything. We listened to the howls come nearer, then move farther away, disappearing back into the night.
2 At four a.m., we knocked on Makayla’s door.
“Come in,” she said. Her hands trembled like Jello that hadn’t set.
“Look,” I said. “We need to talk. We’ve been up all night, and dawn is coming soon, and as soon as the light comes, the cops are coming in here. And we’re probably all going to die if that happens. What if we leave? What if we find a new place, somewhere else? We shouldn’t fight them.”
“What?” Makayla said, livid. “These two have been leaving fucking formations and rallying people to fight for weeks and now you’re backing out? What are people supposed to do?”
“I won’t lead any shield formations,” José said. The way his head hung down, I could tell he still wasn’t convinced he shouldn’t. But after a night of talking to his brother, he had made a decision.
“We aren’t proving anything this way,” Sebastian added.
“Fine, we find another sienty building and make it what we made here. Who says they won’t come and take that one from us, too? Where can we go that they don’t own?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re not fighting today. We’re not leading that kid in the next room into death, or anybody else. This isn’t some protest where they’ll fire rubber bullet at us. They’re going to kill us all and drag our bodies out of here if we don’t leave.”
“Fuck,” Makayla said, pacing around the room. “Fuck. Fine. Fine. One of you go out there. Get everyone and head out. Take Ale first. But if they shoot when you go out there, don’t look at me for help.”
I thought about it for a minute. “I should go first and tell them we’re coming. I’m the last white person in the building, and they might think I’m some kind of freak, but we all know that the chances are less that they’re going to shoot me. I’ll go. I’ll take Ale. José, Sebastian, you round everybody up and follow me.”
Ale felt lighter than I would have imagined him to in my arms. He was still sleeping, his dark eyelashes barely fluttering as I lifted him. I walked him out the door, down the hallway, down the stairs, and to the lobby. As we went down the stairs, something clattered out of the pocket of Ale’s jeans and he woke to grasp for it. The phone he’d been holding onto since I’d known him. I slipped it back in his pocket and he curled back up to my chest, content.
Wind from helicopters was blowing my hair all around my head as I stepped out into the daybreak. The pink light was a motherfucker on my eyes after the darkness in the building. There they all were. Riot cops, sound cannons, National Guard. And there I was, some scrawny freak holding a sick little kid from Mexico.
“Please don’t shoot!” I yelled. I knew I was begging them for my life. There was nothing left to do. “We’re coming out.”
I stepped out farther. José and Sebastian and all the rest of them were right behind me. As I got closer to the troops, some of them slapped me on the back as if I was their friend returning from a long trip.
“You did the right thing,” one of them said. He looked relieved. For a minute I thought of Sebastian’s words, that it wasn’t always us or them, that it couldn’t be if anybody was going to get by.
I turned back to look at the building. Everyone was far away from it except for one person. It was Makayla. She was wearing a heavy winter coat that she didn’t need, and looked more solid than she had in weeks. She was waving her hands, urging us to get back, back.
The next thing I knew, I was flying through the air and there was as loud bang and my ears were ringing. There were pieces of brick and people flying over my head. Completely disoriented, I looked around for Ale, José, and Sebastian. Sebastian had cupped his body over Ale’s, protecting him. I reached out my hand, and it landed on a piece of brick. I grabbed it close to me and wouldn’t let it go.
3 Two years later, I’m still holding that brick. It’s in the middle of the room, on the only piece of furniture we have—a table that we dragged in off the street after making sure there were no bedbugs in it.
After the building went down, they took us across the river to New Jersey for medical treatment. We were all in the hospital for days. As soon as I could get out of bed, I went and found Ale and stayed by him until they dragged me back to my room. He got better. He’s a tough little kid, I’ll tell you that.
José and Sebastian took Ale and went to a shelter for a while, and I made my way to Lux’s house. As I stood outside her family’s door with my ripped-up, smelly clothes and my tons of eye make-up and my skirt and mustache, I almost turned and walked away without ever knocking. But I knocked. Her mother answered. She said her son didn’t live there anymore. I spit right in her fucking face, her son, but I was never so happy in my life. Live there. Lux was alive, somewhere.
It took weeks of asking around, weeks of crashing at the punk houses and weeks of searching. But then one day I walked into a party and there she was passed the fuck out drunk on the floor. I shook her and woke her up and she puked on me and that was just about the second-happiest moment of my life.
With Lux in tow, I went back and found Sebastian and José and Ale. The five of us traveled a bit, more inland, until we found this shitty apartment in just outside of Allentown. We sold wristscreens and other shit Lux had dumpstered, like always, and came up with enough money to get it. We knew it wouldn’t be long before we got forced out of there, with all the people moving inland. But for the moment, it was ours.
It was a seedy place where nobody asked for much of anything besides our rent in cash every month. Nobody asked who the kid was, or who his legal guardians were, or anything like that. We made sure everything we dumpstered didn’t have bedbugs because we knew no one would ever fumigate the house to get rid of them. That was the kind of place it was.
We watched on the news as the anonymous artist’s work got removed from the places it was left. After that last painting, the one that had gone up on our building, he didn’t paint anymore. No one ever knew who he was, where he had gone, if he’d been killed by police or a gang or what. We kept seeing other stories about New York, too. Ones where buildings like ours popped up all over the city, little pockets of resistance. They got cracked down on one by one. But they kept springing up. But then, slowly, the people who owned the city came back. City officials started building walls that were supposedly levies, but we all know walls keep out more than rising oceans.
The twins kept doing the work they’d always been doing, volunteering at the local activist space, working with undocumented immigrants, the homeless. They took Ale along with them a lot. We figured he should learn about the world the way we saw it. We want him to see through all the shit that some people never get a chance to see through.
At school, Ale’s always the one with the questions that the teachers can’t answer. Sometimes he asks us them, too. The other night, Lux came in from dumpstering a rich neighborhood with her usual stuff, and some perfectly good, fancy cupcakes in a box that someone had thrown away. I woke Ale up to give him one. As he was eating it, frosting all over his face, he said to me, “Makayla was a hero, wasn’t she?”
I stopped. We hadn’t talked about Makayla that much. Ale had been attached to her like woah and he cried and cried when he found out she was never coming back. I still felt guilty for giving her those zines, books I knew had info on how to build bombs out of household shit. But how could we have known?
“Wasn’t she?” he asked.
I thought about it for a while. Makayla had done a lot of great things, that was for sure. She’d saved a lot of people’s lives, and she had empowered them to help themselves. I couldn’t put my finger on her final moments. In some ways, it was the ultimate act of resistance, all she could do besides give in. When she died, she took out two people from the building, three riot cops, and injured countless others. We’d been real with Ale about what she had done. But here he was, asking his hard questions.
“Makayla was a hero,” I said, “in a way. I just wish she had found a way to be without leaving you like she did.”
“But I have you and José and Sebastian,” Ale said. “You won’t leave, right?”
He loved us, and we loved him. Sometimes you have to lie to people you love when you don’t know the answer.
“None of us are going anywhere,” I said.
I lie in bed as long as I can, thinking these warm thoughts under a cheap, thin blanket. But then I wake up out of my daydreams to the sound of the guards yelling that it’s morning.
4 Makayla did what she did, but Makayla died. The rest of us paid for it. The daydreams will never erase what really happened.
I woke up handcuffed to the hospital bed. There were cops all around me. Those guys are generally not such big fans of bombs.
The minute I was out of the hospital, I was put in a prison cell. They gave me a lawyer and shit, but he didn’t care, nobody cared except to make us out as some demons who killed all these innocent people. José and Sebastian were deported. My trial was short and biased. Anarchist, bomb, murder. Goodbye, Jesse. See you in fifty years. Have fun with all the other women in the women’s prison they’re sticking you in.
I tried to find out from my lawyer what happened to Ale, but all he could find out was that Ale got put in the system. I tried to find out what had happened to José and Sebastian, but I never did. And Lux? I was never sure if she died that night or not.
I have this other fantasy I write down sometimes, too. In it, it’s visiting hours. And someone walks into my cell and tells me I have a visitor even though I haven’t had one yet. And I get out there. And it’s Lux. And she’s happy. She’s so pretty and happy and all the things that drove her crazy about herself are different, and she found a good place to live, and how could she have helped but hear what happened to me, and she would’ve been here sooner, but . . . but . . .
I never figure out why. I rip up the paper and throw it away.
As I’m sitting here writing, one of the guards comes into the library.
“Hey, Jesse, you got a visitor,” she says.
And she laughs. And I laugh. There’s no one there. And there’s nothing else left to do.