The survivalists, p.11
The Survivalists, page 11
Five years in, and seven case law competitions lost to Mum later, she wondered how long she had left. Not only were lawyers not really making partner anymore, almost none of them got close, while older partners went on at length about how much easier it was to make partner in the ’70s, a deeply relevant piece of news for everyone coping with a shrinking profession forty-plus years later. The loan companies marched on with their four-figure monthly bills, making fun of all the young lawyers for picking a career that everyone at law school insisted would stand the test of time but turned out to last roughly as long as they’d survive in the NFL. But the nonlawyers she knew got fired plenty, too. The journalists and bartenders and retail workers had all chosen professions deemed as temporary as hers. Each casualty went back to school for more loans, or on the internet to try to create a mysteriously glamorous persona that could possibly kick other kinds of work in their direction.
What would she pack to deal with getting fired, other than herself, some clothes, and a bus ticket to nowhere? She pushed that fear down to the netherworld where she stored her thoughts on Aaron’s nonhurricane fears: The dark, when he wasn’t passed out in it. Fires. Riots. Race war. They’re never going to like us, he said, meaning the latest wave of white Americans that thought people like her and him should go back to wherever in Africa they were really from, even if slavery had wrecked any notion of where that might be. That’s true, they aren’t ever going to like us, she thought, an opinion of his that she didn’t disagree with but wouldn’t do anything about, because she couldn’t beat anyone in any kind of war. She was too squat and too scared to physically fight anyone when she wasn’t escaping a bad date.
But Aaron’s hurricane speech had gotten to her. She’d done some googling to double-check what he told her and spent hours looking at color-coded maps that showed the hurricanes arcing north more often since the planet had been put on the stove to boil. She’d found charts detailing the progression of northern hurricane season, which had grown to almost six full months of keeping watch over the ocean. She’d watch the forecast videos of hurricanes with generic-ass names swirling around the Caribbean and wonder if the next one would crawl up to their stretch of coast, even though she spent most of her time on the fifty-eighth floor of a building, fifty-seven stories too high for hurricanes to bother with. If she couldn’t prepare herself for the emotional and financial insult of getting fired, she could at least figure out how to escape some rising water.
•
IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN WELCOME SEX? YOU’RE-going-to-be-here-for-a-while sex? Just-loaded-your-last-box-in-from-the-car-so-we-can-maybe-live-together-forever sex? Aretha didn’t think so. Aaron put the last of her dozen boxes down on their bedroom floor. She shut the door and gave him a look good enough for him to rip three buttons off her shirt. Afterwards they lay on the bed, panting and sweaty. Aretha listened to her heartbeat in both wrists and took in another lungful of delicious post-sex air.
“I’m goin’ to Honduras to talk about buyin’ some beans tomorrow,” Aaron said.
A section of Aretha’s good mood flew out faster than the rest of her, up from her body like steam.
“For how long?” Aretha said.
“A week. I have a couple different farmers to visit.”
“So I get to hang out all by myself with the crew,” she said, pointing in the direction of their bedrooms. Brittany’s right across the hall and James’s down at the end of the hallway, across from the upstairs bathroom. Both of them far enough away, thanks to the solidity of the upstairs walls, that Aretha, who couldn’t hear them, could pretend they weren’t there. Aretha was a fixer, and a solver, and a foot stomper if her fixing didn’t work immediately. Somehow after three full days living in the Vanderbilt house she hadn’t become best friends with everyone. Maybe it would take four.
Instead of remembering that they’d kind of gotten along on Thanksgiving, Brittany eyed her with a pity she didn’t understand, the kind of look more appropriate for three-legged dogs and terminal cancer victims than happy lawyers who’d just moved in with their boyfriends. Aretha thought James spent 100 percent of his time behind his locked bedroom door, but she heard a noise above her early one morning and climbed the attic ladder in one of her work skirts to find him perched on the roof with a rifle at his side, searching the other building roofs. She remembered that he’d mentioned keeping watch from the roof, but didn’t expect to find him there looking like a rabid dog hunting for someone to bite. She scanned the world beyond their house to see what fire or flood or approaching army James aimed to fend off, and saw nothing but the sun rising meekly over Crown Heights.
She sat down next to him.
“What are you looking for?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Bullshit,” she said.
He just kept silently looking for it, whatever it was, with his eyes shifting from side to side at nothing that she could make out. Why the roof? Houses in the city didn’t feel like they needed to be guarded from roofs instead of from behind front doors, unless he thought someone would come flying up at him from a fire escape. He feared a Catwoman, she thought, or a Spider-Man. Someone in a mask who didn’t mind scaling fire escapes to taunt him. When Brittany wasn’t freezing her out at the breakfast table, and James wasn’t ignoring her on the roof, they spent their time not talking to her from behind the bedroom doors they closed when they saw her walk by.
So maybe she’d spend Aaron’s work trip week with her bedroom door shut against the threat of Brittany not talking to her in the bedroom hallway, or James not saying a damn word to her on his way up to the roof to glare intimidatingly at the sunrise.
“They love you,” Aaron said in their bedroom, two days before his trip.
“They hate everyone.”
“Sometimes I feel like they kinda hate me too.”
“So that’s why I’m here. I’m your buffer against your roommates.”
“They’re great business partners,” he said, recovering from the kind of slip he almost never made. Bean suppliers were great and coffee shop clients even better and his paranoid, judgmental roommates the absolute fucking best. Aretha seethed at the relentless sunniness of his worldview, and her failure to imagine what she could do to fit in with the rest of the house.
She didn’t want to talk to Brittany or James or look at them or eat what they called “nutrition” at every meal. In all the times she’d been over to the house since she met Aaron, how had she not noticed what the other two ate? She’d moved in with visions of backyard grilling and soul food sides in her head. But she only ever saw them eat the circular, camo-print, optimized soy protein bars called Life Preservers that promised to lower your chance of death. On a search for the next box in her bran flake kitchen stash, she opened a cabinet above her head and stacks of Life Preservers fell on her, in their brown and green and camo plastic wrappers, making fun of her for not preparing herself for a kitchen ambush. She pocketed a Life Preserver and waited until Aaron went on a trip to Indonesia to test it out. She unwrapped her bar with great anticipation, took the first bite, and rolled it around in her mouth the way she imagined wine tasters did, working her way through plastic and gummy notes before the bar’s true flavor arrived: sawdust.
She refused to think about the drills they conducted in the backyard, for fires like she remembered from elementary and middle and high school, and for floods, and high winds, and how to attack intruders in hand-to-hand combat, which made Brittany and James whip out a variety of fake martial arts moves. Punches and kicks that sometimes hit air and sometimes hit each other’s arms and legs and sometimes sent one of them tumbling to the ground. Aretha, when her curiosity wouldn’t let her rest, asked Brittany if they were doing karate, and Brittany explained that they were practicing a mix of karate, Krav Maga, jiujitsu, muay Thai, and judo, just to cover all their bases. Aretha felt a new feeling roll up into her stomach. A turf war between emptiness and nausea that made her temporarily swear off talking to Brittany, just in case stupidity was contagious.
But she loved Aaron. Before his suddenly extensive round of January work trips, they spent their nights trying new roasts he worked on during the day and their evenings walking the streets, where he’d spin every basketball game and darkened underground party they passed as evidence of a pervasive December happiness in Central Brooklyn. Since she’d moved in with him, Aretha felt the maybe-there’s-a-bright-side-to-everything side of herself shine through and insist that she and Brittany and James would get along beautifully while Aaron was busy tromping around coffee fields. Aaron looked amused. This was a house full of people dedicated to plans, and Aretha was just as stubborn about sticking to hers. She’d get along with them or die trying.
“Don’t throw out your back or anythin’ in your quest to make friends,” Aaron said.
“We’ll work it out.”
The next morning Aretha woke up and rolled over to the cold side of the bed in disbelief that there was a cold side of the bed. She looked at the time, hugged a pillow, and tried to go back to sleep until she heard the shower going off down the hall. She got up and grabbed a bundle of clothes and bounded down to the downstairs shower, taking the steps two at a time, convinced that this was the first day of the rest of the part of her life where she and Brittany and James got along. After she showered and changed, she went to her room to grab her work bag, and to the kitchen for breakfast.
She heard someone rattling around in the cabinets, and prepared herself to have an uplifting conversation with whoever it was in a way that would only make the two of them closer. Brittany and James sat at the kitchen table chewing their morning Life Preservers and looking at their phones. When Aretha appeared they looked up at her without interest and back down. Just like that, all her dreams of becoming best friends forever curdled up. She, a person who’d turned to an all-bran-flakes diet for inner fortitude the second she arrived in the house, found her bran flakes in the cabinet, poured some fresh milk over a bowl of them, and tried to think about something more uplifting, like how if the world ended today, she, unlike the rest of them, would go out while regular.
“Good morning,” she said.
Brittany kept staring at her phone, and James sank further into himself, shoulders hunched. Why the fuck did she bother? When she’d eaten half her bowl, they looked at each other and got up from the table at the same time. Aretha heard only one door shut. She waited what she thought was a reasonable length of time, grabbed one of the glass cups that worked best for listening in on other people’s conversations, and went upstairs. She found them whispering behind Brittany’s closed bedroom door, and put the cup up to it. Somewhere on the other side of the door lay the reason they wouldn’t talk to her, but she would figure it out.
“Since she wants to hang out with us so bad,” James said, “she can go on the next run instead of me. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“But you’re part of the team. You do runs. Why the hell would she be useful on one?”
Aretha’s head snapped up. Of course she was useful. She could run, even if the last time she remembered doing it was an ill-fated New Year’s resolution that ended in her drinking more instead. She owned running pants. At least, she thought she could run in them if she needed to, since her running pants were made of spandex and all, and spandex theoretically stretched to run with you, even if it had been a few months, or maybe a couple of years, since you’d tested it out. But most importantly, she was always useful. She blocked out the last seven case law competitions she’d lost to Mum and pictured her usefulness as a note of heat in her chest, no bigger than a pin, ready to reach out and burn whatever she needed it to. She closed her eyes and saw it. Glowing and alive. To fully take in the sight of her own usefulness, she leaned back into a wall that turned out to be Brittany’s bedroom door.
It fell open, dropping her on the floor between Brittany and James. Brittany eyed her forcefully enough that she half-expected a wind to push her back out of the room. James sat slouched on a desk chair. He stared at the floor, like he used to be part of it and wanted to go home.
“Oh my god,” Aretha said, hustling to her feet. “I’m so sorry . . .”
“That you were listening to us,” Brittany said.
“What, me? Never.”
Brittany pointed at the glass cup, which had fallen to Aretha’s left, and which Aretha had forgotten existed somewhere in the haze of feeling her usefulness rise up within her.
“People still try to listen in on other people’s conversations by using cups?” James said.
“She does,” Brittany said, lowering the full weight of her disgust for Aretha into a single glance.
“What is this, 1957?”
“Jesus Christ, no, I wouldn’t ever . . .” Aretha said.
“Shut up,” Brittany said. “You’re in here now, so you’re going to be made useful.”
Aretha grasped for the usefulness that she’d felt outside the door, but it was gone.
“I’m actually just going to leave,” she said.
“You’re not.”
Aretha looked at James, who passively looked back, with nothing on his face that might serve as a lifeboat.
“You’re here now,” James said. “Just like I am.”
“Since you’re here,” Brittany said, “the three of us are going on a field trip tomorrow night.”
“I have to work tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to get off work early. We’re leaving at eight.”
“That’s early for a lawyer.”
“Look at the little lawyer, James,” Brittany said, “who’s too busy to ride in the back of a car.”
“But I have to go to bed that night, just like you.”
“You can sleep in the car.”
“What? No.”
“At least I won’t have to go, since y’all are going,” James said.
“You’re going too,” Brittany said.
“No, I’m not.”
“What is this about?” Aretha said. “Groceries?”
Brittany laughed, a bitter sound that told Aretha it was time to get up and run. If only she had someplace to go. She dived for the door, but Brittany pulled her back with a level of force Aretha never thought skinny women capable of, a yanking-the-big-fish-out-of-the-pond-with-one-arm kind of tug. Aretha stumbled, and ended up right back on the floor where she’d started. Brittany doubled her facial disgust. James just looked tired.
“We’re going to go buy guns,” Brittany said.
Aretha felt like she’d gotten stuck under Niagara Falls. Her arms and legs had lost their bones and melded with water. Soon she’d collapse. They had guns, and she’d calmed herself down about moving into the house by telling herself that since they’d already bought the guns they needed, they’d never need more. But apparently they had to fuck her up by needing more guns.
“Why? You think the neighbors are going to shoot you?” Aretha said, picturing the neighbors. The friendly older Black homeowners who liked to go on about the dangerous ’70s. Their bougie kids. The other bougie Black people who clearly felt drawn to the neighborhood’s bougie Blackness like flies to sugar. The young white investment bankers who hid their bankerness on weekends under thrift shop sweaters and skinny jeans. None of them seemed to want to fuck up a squeaky clean neighborhood in a city that had, per capita, about the same amount of crime as Boise, Idaho.
“No, no, I’ve got it,” Aretha said. “You think someone’s going to steal the coffee. They’re going to run in here with burlap bags and take a week’s worth of your inventory, and they’re going to pay for the crime of inconveniencing you for a couple of weeks by getting blown away.”
“We had a break-in,” Brittany said. “They did steal coffee.”
“And you’re going to freak out about that for the rest of your life?”
Aretha clapped a hand over her mouth to avoid laughing. And then she gave up. If they really needed to pretend that the people busy marching from home to job to grocery store to bodega to bar were secretly spending every minute of every day planning to break into their house, who was she not to laugh at that? She let her arms and legs go limp on the floor. Her laughter roared through her body. Her stomach heaved. Her eyes teared up. Brittany knelt down until she was eye-to-eye with Aretha and slapped her.
Aretha gasped, and stood up, scared.
That’s right.
They had guns.
There were guns in the bunker.
There were probably guns in the house, too.
They were armed and they hated her.
Nia had fucking warned her, and she’d just blithely insisted to herself that she was up for living with a militia.
Brittany had said “field trip” so casually, like buying guns was a carefree fifth grade class visit to a museum. How the fuck had Aretha come to live here, among armed people, without figuring out how armed they needed to be? They never left the goddamn house to give her a moment to take inventory. Her parents had owned a hunting rifle or two, in case someone invited them up north to shoot deer, and she’d looked at James’s bag and figured the house belonged to that same rifle-or-two school of gun ownership, but these people talked like they needed an arsenal. Googling people’s backgrounds didn’t kick up anything about how many guns they hid in their closets, or, she thought, looking around the room, in their dressers or under their beds. How many did they have? When she moved into her last apartment, she’d searched it, front to back, for anything anyone had left there. Even though that search had only turned up a book of dead matches, she felt emotionally complete when she finished looking in every corner. Even though Brittany and James never left the house, someday they’d be on the roof or in the backyard long enough for her to go through their rooms.
