But holding suspicions and actually knowing were two different things. And as I lay there, a sickle moon hanging low out the window, I wondered what the Leader of the Free World was going to do next.
42
I did not have to wait long to find out. The next morning, President Carroway’s latest speech was all over the media. Kayla and I, and Ryan, sensing the solemnity of what was going on even if she didn’t understand it, watched it, the three of us sitting slack-jawed in front of the living-room TV. Carroway began by striding to the podium and uttering four words that would doubtless become a meme in their own right: “My fellow North Americans…”
My heart thundered. The president went on in the adamantine baritone I’d previously heard admonishing those passing through airports: “On my order, beginning at 9:00 A.M. Eastern time, US Customs and Border Protection agents closed the border between the United States and Canada, locking down all vehicular crossings and all US Customs stations at Canadian airports. At the same time, United States Air Force jets scrambled from McChord Air Force Base in Washington State, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland; these jets have now secured Canadian airspace.”
“My God…” Kayla said softly.
Carroway’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. “At 9:17 A.M., our ambassador to Canada, Schuyler Grayson, accompanied by a United States Marine Corps honor guard, presented himself at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, the home of the Canadian prime minister, to urge Prime Minister Naheed Nenshi to finally accept our aid in quelling the ongoing rioting that has begun to spill over the border into this country.”
I wasn’t sure which of us initiated it, but Kayla’s left hand and my right found each other.
“Prime Minister Nenshi once again refused our assistance in containing the situation. This has left us with no choice; America’s interests must be protected throughout the world. And so, on my orders, US troops are now moving into Ottawa, into all provincial capitals, and into other Canadian cities with populations in excess of one million; government buildings and essential infrastructure in each will be secured by nightfall. The Governor General of Canada, who serves as Commander in Chief of the Canadian Forces, has seen the wisdom of asking her troops to stand down, and we expect a smooth transition.”
Gimlet eyes bored into the camera, a cold, reptilian glare: “God bless the United States—including our northern provinces and territories, now fully under American protection.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said softly. “We’ve been annexed.”
And then things got worse.
In a brave attempt at thinking life would go on pretty much as normal, Ryan had relented and gone back to day camp, and Kayla had returned to the Light Source. I’d intended to work on the third edition of Utilitarian Ethics of Everyday Life, which I’d been putting off far too long, but I found myself transfixed by what was happening. Rarely, if ever, was Canada the lead “International News” story on any site, and I hadn’t realized until just now how comforting that actually was. But suddenly everyone—the BBC, NHK, Al-Jazeera, both the American and Australian ABC, and more—was talking about the True North, not so strong and something less than free.
Actually, as the day wore on, the coverage shifted from what was happening in Canada to how others were reacting to it: outrage from London, which still took a paternal interest in its erstwhile colony; Pope Francis decrying this return to imperialism; a gathering of Iraqi imams denouncing what they called the transparent Islamophobia behind this flagrant violation of international norms; some Americans claiming Carroway had manufactured “the Canadian crisis” to distract from the culling of illegals within the United States; a government official in Mexico fretting that his country was bound to be taken next.
By three in the afternoon—which, CTV Saskatoon informed me, was 6:00 A.M. in Moscow—it had become clear that the Russians, who’d as yet made no public announcement, were reacting very negatively. Three Akula-class nuclear submarines had been tracked moving boldly into Canadian Arctic waters. According to the pundits, the Kremlin was viewing Carroway’s incursion as if it were the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse: with Canada suddenly a de facto part of the United States, America was now head-butting the Siberian frontier. As a woman from Harvard observed, except for Alaska and the Chukotka Peninsula, which had been locked in a staring contest across the Bering Strait since the end of the last ice age, the two superpowers had been kept safely apart by the vast granite hulk of Canada—until now.
Kayla got home from work at 7:10 P.M.; she’d picked up Ryan on the way here. “Have you been following the news?” I asked, gathering them in a hug.
“Oh, yes,” Kayla said.
I’d muted the sound on the living-room monitor when I’d heard the front door opening, but Vladimir Putin was on the screen. At the best of times, he had a dour countenance. Today he looked positively livid although, given that his government had annexed Crimea—home to many a Marchuk—back in 2014, he apparently only waxed apoplectic when someone else mounted an invasion.
“He’s got to be a psychopath, too, you know,” said Kayla, tilting her head at the screen.
It seemed almost superfluous to check, but as Kayla took Ryan upstairs to get cleaned up, I dropped a note to my online benefactor from yesterday, who was as accommodating and expeditious as before. He said there was no doubt among those who tracked such things that the Russian president had had a raft of cosmetic operations, including a nose job, cheek fillers, and at least one facelift, not to mention an ongoing regimen of Botox injections; I was soon downloading high-resolution footage to my laptop that purported to show telltale signs of these procedures.
The video, which seemed to be of Putin enduring a long question from some journalist who doubtless shortly thereafter had received a one-way ticket to the Gulag, contained a solid twelve seconds of the president’s full-on disdainful stare. Just as Kayla had opined, my software confirmed that Vladimir Putin was indeed a psychopath. I shared this news as she came back downstairs; Ryan had stayed up in her room.
Kayla nodded. “Which means,” she said, a quaver in her voice, “he’s not likely to back down.”
“Neither is Carroway,” I said. “It’s like how it was with your brother Travis—extreme sports, right? The rush of adrenaline? You think snowboarding is a kick, imagine nuclear brinksmanship with trillions of dollars’ worth of weapons at your command.” I shook my head. “Those two pricks are loving this.”
We watched the muted images for a time—intercuts between Carroway and Putin, back and forth, thrust and parry. “Somebody has to stop them,” Kayla said at last.
“Yes,” I replied softly—so softly that she asked me to repeat myself. “Yes,” I said again, boosting my outer voice to match my inner one, “somebody does.”
43
Kayla and I stayed up late, trying to make sense of it all. We talked about politics, and what being Canadian meant to us, about whether Canada had already really been nothing more than an American appendage anyway, about whether this was of a piece with previous American foreign policy or something wholly new and unprecedented. But, really, in the end, the fact that there were now American boots tamping down Canadian soil mattered much less than that the Russians and the Americans, each led by a psychopath, were flinging invective at each other today and might be hurling missiles across Canada tomorrow.