FIVE MONTHS ago, Kevin had first been invited inside after a meeting in an Oakland loft of the uninspiringly named West Coast Anarchists (WCA). A Swede named Olaf who wore a bow tie as an act of radical irony had been discussing Martin Bishop’s latest diatribe, posted on The Propaganda Ministry, on “the pharmaceutical mafia.” There were about fifteen in attendance, none older than thirty, and when a med student from UCSF tried to explain the economics inherent in drug companies’ research and development, and their impact on prices, Kevin cut in with “You sound like a corporate shill. Since when is medicine supposed to be a profit industry? Make a profit on cars, sure, or toys, but hospitals and drugs, the internet and basic foodstuffs—anything that’s necessary for living? That ain’t business. It’s a human right.”
The med student, not used to being interrupted, had been irritated. “Then move off to a farm and grow your own fucking food.”
“There’s only twenty-four hours in a day, man, and this late in history I don’t think we should all have to move back to the seventeenth century. Is that the promise of capitalism?”
He’d surprised himself with his outburst, and a few others looked surprised as well that the skinny black guy who’d sat silently through so many meetings suddenly had a bone to pick. Afterward, Jasmine—twenty-six, a performance artist—asked him out for a drink. “You’re right, you know. He is a shill, and so are half of them. I’m even starting to suspect Olaf is a spy.”
“Spy?” he asked, trying to appear sufficiently shocked. “For the Feds?”
“Why not?”
“Because a few millennials in a loft doesn’t mean shit to them. They’re looking for Russian hackers and ISIS bombers.”
“Maybe,” said Jasmine. “But if that’s the case, they’re missing out on something big, and they’ll be kicking themselves later.”
“Something big? Not the WCA.”
“I’m not talking about those guys.”
“Who, then?”
She smiled and raised her beer. “To the Revolution, Kevin. It’s gonna be massive.”
Aaron came along later, Jasmine introducing him at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge before the drag show got under way. Aaron shook his hand cursorily, then deposited the newest issue of Rolling Stone on the bar and opened it to a full-page profile called “The Revolution’s New Face.” Though not entirely flattering, it was a revealing piece, chronicling the life of Martin Bishop, the thirty-seven-year-old from Tennessee whose youthful Baptist fervor had reinvented itself in the shape of social justice. He and his co-revolutionary, a Pennsylvania thug named Benjamin Mittag, first made a name for themselves among the progressives of Austin, Texas. A blog (The Propaganda Ministry—www.propagandaministry.com) with an enormous following led to a Kickstarter-funded tour of campuses around the country, “speaking truth to power.” His followers called themselves the Massive Brigade.
In crowded auditoriums, Bishop held forth with religious intensity, and was compared by some to Martin Luther King Jr., though more often he quoted Thomas Jefferson’s personal seal: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The power elite, he told audiences, had built up its defenses and become so distanced from the 99 percent that it barely noticed the whimpers of those who challenged it with sit-ins and marches and T-shirts and pop songs. The elite saw nothing to fear.
“Who, then, are they afraid of?” he asked auditoriums, then pointed at the people who were hit hard by lawsuits and jail time: the chaos-makers. Hackers, whistle-blowers, and the angry mobs that actually destroyed property. “Look to Seattle! Look to Ruby Ridge! Look to the Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge!” he soliloquized to a crowd in St. Louis. Whoever opened up the ruling class to examination by the masses, whoever exposed the illusion of their authority—those were the ones who forced power to reveal its true face: riot police and big lawyers.
He asked the students of NYU, “Is everyone blind? The police are gunning down our black brothers and sisters! The prison-industrial complex fills our jails with the cheapest labor around, for the benefit of McDonald’s and Wendy’s, Walmart and Victoria’s Secret. Our modern-day slaves man call centers for Verizon and Sprint. For ninety cents a day! And if you’re on the outside, don’t think you’re off the hook. Banks steal your homes at the first opportunity. Oil companies send your kids into the desert to die for their profits! Have I got something wrong here?”
The crowd came back, as one, “No!”
“If it looks like war and smells like war, what is it?”
“War!”
After the St. Louis meeting broke up, thirty pumped-up Massive Brigade followers smashed their way into a Citibank branch and trashed the lobby before the police rounded them up. That was when the charge of terrorism was first raised against Martin Bishop—if not by the authorities, then by the court of public opinion and his most vocal critic on television, Sam Schumer. Every day, Facebook delivered another salacious bit of news—sometimes fake, sometimes not—about Bishop and his followers. The Massive Brigade was synonymous with “the coming unrest.”
Sitting with Aaron, listening to him read out his favorite passages from the Rolling Stone profile, knowing instinctually where this conversation was heading, Kevin had felt a primal rush of excitement. The Brigade.
A manic-depressive whose moods were as unpredictable as his Marxist faith was unshakable, Aaron had worked with Martin Bishop in Austin, back in the beginning. Oh, he had stories he could tell, but they would have to wait until later. “The question I need to ask you, Kevin, is: Where do you stand?”
“Right next to you, man.”
“I mean, what do you see in the future? Once we’ve done what we’ve been put on this Earth to do?”
It felt like a test, which it was, but Kevin also smelled a trick question in the works. As he glanced around the bar, where men in makeup sipped prework cocktails, he thought over conversations he’d had since landing in town and making his way through the subterranean world of utopian thought. Left, right, and everything in between. So many opinions, so many dreams of tomorrow. He said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
Which, to Aaron, turned out to be as good an answer as any.
Two weeks ago, the three of them were drinking beer in Jasmine’s Chinatown apartment when Aaron delivered his good news. “Word has come, comrades. We have to be ready.”
“For what?” asked Jasmine.
“To disappear.”
Aaron had passed their phone numbers up the ladder, and he explained that in hours, days, or weeks, word would come. They were to leave everything behind.
This was not entirely unexpected. Over the past months, as the media had worked itself into a frenzy of fear over the rhetoric that typified Massive rallies, the trouble in St. Louis, and the sporadic incidents of Massive followers in small towns being attacked by self-proclaimed patriots, it had been one of Bishop’s talking points: We have to make our own space for the dialectic. We have to create our own underground where we can defend ourselves against the fascists who run this country. When they come for us we’ll need a place where we can escape to. Where we can disappear. Until Aaron’s command, Kevin had assumed Bishop had been talking about a metaphorical underground. An underground of the mind. Not, apparently so.
Aaron handed them each a piece of paper with an assigned meeting point and a signal that would identify them to their pickup. He ordered them not to share that information even with one another. “Things just got serious. Are we serious?”
“Absolutely,” Kevin told him.
Jasmine, giddy, nodded and laughed.
Now, sitting in the GTO with endless highway in front of him, Kevin listened as the driver he only knew as George said, “I was up on this shit long before Bishop and Mittag.”
“Sure you were,” said Kevin. They were an hour into their drive, taking I-80 around the north end of Sacramento. Traffic was surprisingly light.
George gave him a look. “You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t know you.”
“Nineteen eighty-nine—remember then?”
“I was one.”
“But you’ve heard of ’89, right? I mean, you got yourself some kind of education, yeah? East-West? Berlin Wall?”
“Sure. I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, I was ten. I remember all the noise and celebration. My dad was a Cold War obsessive. Dug a fallout shelter in the backyard in ’82—lost my virginity in that thing, by the way.” He winked. “Anyway, 1989: the Wall falls, and I remember my dad watching it on TV. Those Germans with their mullets and bottles of cheap champagne—my dad saw them and started to cry. He was so happy. Told me that the world had just changed. Wanted me to remember that moment. Enemies would become friends. Swords into plowshares. That sort of thing. I was ten, but I remember it all. I remember how excited I was. We were officially living in the future. Shangri-La. And then…” He tilted his head, cracking a vertebra. “You know what happened then?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Nada, sir. Not shit. You got McDonald’s and a long line of salivating corporations piling into the newly free countries, scooping up land and resources. You had a lot of confused Easterners fucking over their neighbors to get rich, and quick. You had a war in Yugoslavia. You had Africa slowly falling apart. Genocide in Rwanda. They had a chance,” he said, staring hard at the cars ahead, “a chance to really make something of the world. But instead it was the same old story. Greed. Nothing changed. And a decade later people were surprised we were at war all over again. It broke my dad. Hell, it nearly broke me, and I was too young to know better. A system like ours—a system that pisses away a chance for a better world, that can’t see past short-term gain…” He sighed loudly. “Every day you see it—this week it’s Plains Capital and IfW. Some rich assholes didn’t want to pay their taxes, so they slipped billions to shady bankers who hid their cash in brand-new accounts opened under other people’s names. If the journalists hadn’t made such a stink about it, you can bet your ass there wouldn’t be any investigation.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, though. Not a single rich white man—believe me—is going to pay for it.” George’s knuckles whitened as he squeezed the steering wheel. “A system like that needs to be ground into the dirt.”
Kevin watched the side of George’s face. How old was this guy? Ten in ’89—thirty-eight? With his shoulder-length unwashed hair and the cigarette dangling from his lips, he looked like he was aiming for eighteen.
“How long have you known Martin?” Kevin asked.
“Don’t. Not really. Ben’s my guy. I heard him speak in some dive in Toledo. His voice stripped the paint off the walls. I was in.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ben Mittag speak.”
“Not anymore, he doesn’t. His kind of speech? Gets too much attention from the Feds. That’s what happens when you talk about shooting cops and blowing up post offices. So he stepped back so the government would stay off our backs.” A grin. “Not that that helped much. But we’re still here.”
“So who’s running things—Mittag or Bishop?”
“You want hierarchy? Join the Democratic Party.” He looked into the rearview a moment, as if watching for shadows, then said, “What about you? You must’ve seen through the bullshit early.”
“Why?”
George opened a hand, bobbed his head. “I mean, you’re black. I don’t have to tell you about injustice.”
“No, man. You don’t.” He looked out his window to see a station wagon loaded down with possessions, a young woman at the wheel. Returning home from school, or escaping her life. Almost by rote, he said, “It was the realization—maybe I was thirteen—that my life was a cliché. Dad spending his life in Haynesville Correctional. Drugs, of course. Mom trying to get off welfare and onto her feet.” He hesitated, then went off script a moment. “Funny thing is, these days people are crying about laid-off coal miners hooked on opioids. Everyone wants to get them to doctors. Back then it was the same—laid-off workers hooked on crack. But those poor bastards—in the eighties, everyone wanted to lock them up.” He cleared his throat. “There’s only one difference between then and now.”
“Color of their skin,” George said so melodically that Kevin nearly gave him an Amen. Instead, he remained quiet until George said, “So that’s what brought you in.”
“First I went to my recruiter.”
“I thought maybe you were military.”
Kevin said nothing.
“See action?”
Kevin stared across an ugly expanse of industrial sprawl along the outskirts of Sacramento. “A little.”
“Afghanistan?”
He didn’t bother answering that.
George said, “You’ve seen the world. That’s good. And you got your foot in early through the black struggle.”
Kevin stared at him a long moment. “It’s not a black struggle. It’s a human struggle.”
“Sure it is,” George said, frowning. “But what are humans but a bunch of special interests? That, my friend, is why we’re going to win. We’re an army of special interests. I’m in the antigreed struggle; you can fight for your race if you want. Someone else can fight for the whales. But in the end we all work for the same thing.”
“The end of all this,” said Kevin.
“’Zactly,” George said as he slowed the car and pulled to the right. The exit was for Greenback Lane, a main thoroughfare lined with low houses and trees that eventually gave way to strip malls and stores: CVS, Dairy Queen, home fitness, Mexican restaurants, and a Red Robin burger joint, where George parked in the lot and killed the engine.
Kevin saw nothing but families, stuffed to the gills, limping to their cars. “I already ate,” he said. “I’ll wait in the car.”
“We’ll both wait in the car.”
“For what?”
George pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket; it was covered in cramped numbers written in pencil. Then he took out a cell phone, the sight of which surprised Kevin. George typed out a number and put the phone to his ear.
“I love this part,” he whispered, then changed his tone and said, “Mary, this is George. It’s time.”