He always wanted women to like him.
Skylar, walking slightly ahead, now drifted backward until they were side by side. Her swaying hand brushed his.
“You think he’s going to make it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. He seems to feel pretty awful.”
“Why don’t you help him?”
Skylar smiled like a woman with a secret. It wasn’t a friendly smile.
“Like how?”
“You know how.”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“No,” she said, “but you play one on TV.”
“Skylar.”
“What?”
“That’s not funny anymore.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It was never funny. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me. It’s our only way out of this.”
“What is our only way out?”
“You have to fix it. Put things back the way they were.”
Thomas looked down at his feet. He looked at the road ahead. He imagined humankind as an egg protected by a shell that was hard but easily broken. Maybe cracks had been visible for years, but the pulse had finally shattered the shell, and now the animal nature of their species was pouring out. The mess was spilling everywhere, coating everything, and it was only a matter of time before hungry neighbors began to turn on themselves, before they were forced to consume each other. Probably it had already happened. Blaise knew that as well as anyone.
Skylar, on the other hand, seemed happy to ignore reality, even as they walked deeper into the sticky, yellow slop of it. She appeared to believe the egg could be unbroken, that the arrow of time could be reversed. She expected Thomas himself to do this. He wished he could. He wanted to make her happy. But he didn’t believe there was any chance that a fairy-tale reversal was possible, either for his relationship with Skylar or the world at large.
A half hour or so later, they saw another large group of northbound walkers. But as they grew closer, Thomas noticed something strange: Nearly everyone was black. The group appeared to be moving in an organized way, as if being guided by an unseen hand. And when Thomas was close enough, he saw why: Armed men were posted along the sides of the road.
When two of these guards spotted Thomas and his group, they appeared to exchange words. Then one of them raised his hand.
“YOU MEN WANT TO PASS?” yelled the guard.
“YES,” answered Seth, apparently because Blaise was too weak to project his voice. “HEADED EAST.”
The guards raised their rifles into shooting position and addressed the throng of walkers.
“STOP!” one of them yelled. “All of you niggers behind this line, STOP NOW and let these white folks pass.”
Dread bloomed inside Thomas, settling into his fingers and toes. Now he could see the crowd wasn’t just black. There were Asians and Hispanics and Indians and a few Caucasians.
Somewhere to the south, he guessed, a terrible battle had been waged to arrive at this orderly procession of hatred. Was perhaps still being waged. Thomas looked up and down the road and wondered if he might spot possible cues, like duplication in the crowd, like artifacts where the scene had been stitched together by a digital effects team. Not because he was surprised something so backward could happen, but because there was a similar scene in The Pulse that had been faithfully recreated here.
Both guards were dressed in army fatigues and wore hats emblazoned with the Lone Star flag of Texas. One guard continued to face the crowd with his weapon in firing position while the other spoke.
“Welcome to the Republic of Texas. We have always been a sovereign nation illegally annexed by a tyrannical Federal government. While you are permitted to pass, we invite you, as white citizens, to join our great Republic.”
Thomas was so taken aback by this announcement, by this bizarre mix of reality and fantasy, that he didn’t know what to say. Even Seth seemed lost for words. It was Blaise who finally answered.
“Thank you for the kind invitation,” he croaked. “We respect your sovereignty and also reject the oppression of the United States. But we are on a long journey and request passage at this time.”
Thomas had written this scene one night after watching a shouting match on FOX News, after the passage of a law in North Carolina meant to disenfranchise black voters. He couldn’t remember the details of the law or the argument on television, but what he did recall, with vivid clarity, was the smug look on the face of the FOX host as he defended a concept that any human with a pulse knew was meant to be oppressive. Here was a self-righteous jackass born into wealth, a genetic lottery winner, whose job it was to convince millions of loyal viewers to hand their money to advertisers of aspirin and herbicide and high-interest credit cards, and the most effective way to keep those viewers tuned in day after day was to sell the idea that brown people made the country poorer and dirtier. And Thomas wasn’t stupid. He understood racism was alive and well all over the country. He could see it in the angry faces of rednecks who drove pickups jacked six feet above the road, as if to declare superiority by way of physical elevation. He could read it in the bitter expressions of the upper-middle-class elderly, who could remember brighter, cleaner days when those damned niggers had known their place. He could watch it on election day, when hordes of suburban parents piloted minivans to the local church and cast solid-red ballots to counteract the galling reality of a black man being elected (twice!) to the most powerful and important office in the world. Thomas could still remember the joy he’d felt the night of President Obama’s victory, the rush of optimism that the United States (and humankind itself) had taken an evolutionary leap forward. He remembered the dignity with which that President had served his country, in spite of bitter opposition and resentment championed by Republican legislators. And of course he could recall the awful night, eight years later, when angry voters responded to Obama’s Presidency by installing a hateful and disgusting man to replace him, as if to dishonor the office and, by association, the black man who served before. Still, he had never imagined, in modern times, that a well-known host could go on national television and defend state-sanctioned racism with little fear of retribution.
So it didn’t seem like a stretch, during civilizational collapse and with no force to oppose them, that certain armed racists would attempt to reverse America’s progress toward true equality. Thomas had written the idea into his script and now it had happened in real life. if this was real life. For the first time since the pulse, he was overcome by a genuine sense of déjà vu, as if reality had been overlaid by his fictional version of it. He wondered if Skylar was right. He wondered if this moment was really happening. But the problem with accepting such an idea was it left you with no course of action. What was there to do when you believed the world wasn’t real? Sit down and wait for it to end? Behave in spontaneous and absurd ways? Live life as if it were fantasy? And what if you were wrong?
Unless a director appeared from nowhere and ended the scene, what could Thomas or anyone do? If they didn’t pretend to be on the side of these racist “Texans,” they would never make it across the road. They could be stripped of their weapons and supplies and made to join the group of walkers. Or engage in a very short and bloody gun battle.