Can’t I stand up by the doors so people see me on their way inside?
The guard’s No left him grim but resolute. We headed to the area of confinement. Robin looked around, surprised at the sedate midmorning. Government employees drifted up the steps in dribs and drabs. A group of schoolchildren listened to their docent before touring the corridors of power. A block away on Main and Carroll, desperate pedestrians prowled the shops for caffeine and calories, picking their way through the many homeless people of all races. People who looked like elected officials but were probably lobbyists walked past, intent on the voices pressed to their ears.
The stillness confused Robin. Nobody else is protesting anything? Everyone in the state is perfectly happy with everything just the way it is?
He’d based his idea of this place on video clips of his mother. He wanted drama and showdown and righteous calls for justice from concerned citizens. Instead, he got America.
I took my place alongside him. He erupted. His free hand slashed the air. Dad! What do you think you’re doing?
“Doubling the size of your protest group.”
No. Freaking. Way. Go stand over there.
I walked thirty feet down the pavement. He waved me farther off.
Over there. Far enough that no one thinks you’re with me.
He was right. The two of us standing together would look like an adult put-up job. But a nine-year-old standing alone with a sign reading help me i’m dying might be something you’d want to stop and talk over.
I relocated, as far off as I was comfortable going. We didn’t need a well-meaning passerby calling Dane County Human Services. Satisfied, Robin picked up his painted sign and held it in the air. Then the two of us settled into the trenches of Earthly politics.
-
I’VE WAITED AT THE BASE OF THOSE STAIRS more times than I can remember. I’d meet Alyssa there, after she’d testified on bills that few people in the state would ever hear of. Often she was pleased with her day’s work, sometimes elated, but never entirely satisfied. Coming down the steps, she’d wrap herself around me, dead with fatigue. She’d hold tight to my ribs and say, It’s a start.
Eventually her turf expanded to include nine more Capitols. She traveled more and lobbied less, training others to do the testifying. But as I watched her son work the steps where Alyssa had so often battled against Things as They Are, I got turned around in time. The books in my sprawling science fiction library agreed: Time travel was not just possible. It was obligatory.
At our wedding, in a part of the vows I didn’t know was coming, my wife-to-be gave me an oval loaf of ciabatta. This is not a symbol. It’s not a metaphor. It’s just a loaf of bread. I made it. I baked it. It’s food. We can eat it together tonight. From each according to her abilities, eh? Just stay with me, spring through winter. Stay with me when there’s nothing left. I’ll stay with you. There’ll always be food enough.
I lost it, idiot that I am. I don’t even like bread. But I wasn’t alone. After an equally unrehearsed pause, Aly sighed and said, Okay. Maybe it is a metaphor. And all the crying people laughed, even my mother. After, we had a great party.
She warned me, at the start, that she had nightmares. I deal with some grim stuff, Theo. A lot of days. It gets into my dreams. You sure you want to sign on for sleeping next to someone with the screaming meemies?
I told her if she ever needed company in the middle of the night to wake me up.
Oh, I’ll wake you up, all right. That’s the problem.
The first time, I thought she was screaming at someone coming into the room. I shot up, my heart seceding from my chest. My lunge woke her. Still in limbo, she broke out crying.
“Honey,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
It’s not okay!
Her rebuff was so violent I almost got up and went to sleep in the other room. Three in the morning, the woman I loved was weeping in the dark, and I wanted to tell her how badly she’d just hurt me. That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. Maybe it’s different in other galaxies. But I doubt it.
“What was it, Aly? Tell me, and it’ll go away.” We like to say, Tell me everything. Everything. But always with the tacit proviso that there’s nothing truly horrible to tell.
I can’t tell you. And it won’t go away.
Her sobbing subsided as she came awake. I tried again. “What can I do?”
She showed me: Shut up and hold her. It seemed too small a thing, something anyone at all might do. She fell asleep in my arms.
She woke early. By breakfast, it was as if nothing had happened in the night. Doing her mail, she basked in a pool of sun like some strong, green thing. I thought she might tell me now, describe the horror that had awakened her screaming. But she didn’t volunteer.
“You were on the ropes last night. Bad dream?”
She shuddered. Oh, sweetie. Don’t ask.
Her look begged me to let the whole thing drop. She didn’t trust me; I wasn’t a true believer. I hid that thought, but she read me like a primer.
My worst nightmare. She looked around the room for a way to placate me without getting into details.
“In my worst nightmare, you’re lost in a foreign city when the sirens start going off. And I can’t find you.”
She took my hand, but her smile faltered. I was wasting my energy worrying about such a small thing when we were living in the middle of a vaster catastrophe.
They think we’re neurotic, Theo. That we’re a bunch of nutjobs.
I was not included in that disparaged we. She meant her kind, the ones who could feel their way across the species line.
Why is it so hard for people to see what’s happening?
Her night screams grew so familiar they stopped waking me fully. Over time, she let me in on them. In her dreams, other kinds of life could talk, and she understood them. And they told her what was really happening on this planet, the systems of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. Human appetite’s final solution.
In sunlight, she worked flat-out. I’d drive her to the Capitol on days when she lobbied, and I’d pick her up at night, at the bottom of the southern stairs. The day’s results mostly satisfied her. But in the evenings, after two glasses of red wine and a poetry session with her rescued mutt, she could turn panicky again.
What happens when they’re gone? When it’s just us? How is this going to end?
I had no answer. We’d fall asleep spooned against each other, making what comfort we could. And every few nights, she’d wake up screaming again.
But until the end, there would be battle. She was built for it. One afternoon, I watched her in front of the bathroom mirror, suiting up for war: blush, mascara, hair gel, lip gloss. She’d helped draft a call for nonhuman rights that she planned to promote throughout the Upper Midwest. That meant playing on the animal emotions of lawmakers of both sexes, in ten different states.
Take no prisoners. Right, man?