1
A SOLDIER APPROACHED THE CAR. The dog at his side raised its snout and snarled at the darkening purple sky. Malik put a hand on his chest expecting a ripple of fear. It did not come. Instead, his heart tightened at the thought of his grandfather, hundreds of miles away, alone, at home, dosing himself with anxiety pills because his only grandchild had set out for Bliss City that morning. By nightfall, that grandchild would be a traitor or a corpse or a member of the Hush Harbor resistance.
Malik had left a goodbye note. Should he have asked permission? Sat down and explained why he was joining what his grandfather called a moral circus? Malik knew the conversation would rapidly devolve. His grandfather would cite empty maxims about the arc of moral history and working with your enemies and forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. Malik would listen with compassion, and his doubt would grow. He would question his decision. How could he not? Leaving would break his grandfather’s heart.
No, Malik thought. It was better to simply disappear into the night with a duffel bag on his shoulder, a small notebook in his pocket and a bus ticket in his hand.
The soldier knocked on the driver’s seat window. Malik noticed Zahra’s knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. She rolled down her window, letting in the humid air. A raindrop landed on the windshield. Then another. The soldier glanced at the clouds and cursed before he handed Zahra her documents.
“Your license and registration checked out,” he said.
“Like I told you,” Zahra replied. “We’re visiting our uncle. He’s getting up there.”
The soldier nodded and pursed his lips. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Of course.”
“Five miles down this road, there’s another checkpoint. And you’re going to need special permissions to get past that one.”
“Got it.”
“How far in is your uncle?”
Zahra glanced at the GPS. “Just a couple of miles from here.”
“Go straight there. No sightseeing.”
“We understand.”
“Okay.”
The soldier backed away and they drove through the checkpoint. The rain grew heavy and encircled the car as the voice of the GPS spouted directions. Malik stole glances at Zahra. He tried to imagine what she was feeling. Was she tamping down her fear? Energized by her anger? He wondered if he should start a conversation, then considered her stiff-backed posture and thought better of it. Her attention stayed true to the road.
Two hours prior, she had picked him up at Philadelphia’s Penn Station. He’d taken a mostly sleepless twelve-hour bus ride from Durham. Despite his exhaustion, he immediately recognized an evolution in his former college mentor. Once upon a time, she reminded him of a brown Medusa. Her hair, all bounce and curls, stormed around her shoulders. She led rallies with a bullhorn pinned to her lips and indignation bottled in her throat. While she was neither the most eloquent nor the most charismatic of Chapel Hill’s campus leaders, Malik had envied her boldness, her unabashed expressions of rage. He also envied the bullhorn, so teasingly close to her lips.
She balanced her public persona with relentless compassion in her private life. She often pulled the freshmen radicals aside and asked after their families, their grades, their troubles. She remembered who read which poet and who loved what type of muffin and who needed an extra nudge to speak up. She bathed them in attention and they showered her in adoration, much of it unwanted. It took Malik a full eight months to accept that his crush would not be returned. Still, at the end of the school year, when she graduated, he was crestfallen.
Four years later, she’d barely greeted him when she picked him up. He had imagined her observing changes in his demeanor. In his physique. Still well shy of six feet tall, he had sprouted several inches from his f
reshman height. Never particularly athletic, he had taken on a gym habit over the last year. For the first time, his forearms showed veins and his chest was squared with muscle. He carried himself with the fresh confidence of someone newly attuned to the potential in his limbs. He had complemented his reconstructed body with a hairstyle that better suited his angular face. No longer did he wear the high-top box cut that reeked of The Fresh Prince. His buzzed hair grounded him, made him feel older. Mature, even. It prompted him to stop experimenting with facial hair and shave his patchy beard and undergrown mustache. In his thirties, maybe, he would try again.
To his great dismay, Zahra either dismissed or did not notice these changes.
He, on the other hand, immediately noted her hair. Pulled back tight in a ponytail. He could not recall seeing it like that in college.
They drove across Franklin Bridge in silence. His eyes darted from the dashboard to her face to the Delaware River beneath them. Hesitantly, he cleared his throat. She lifted two fingers off the steering wheel.
“We’re not going to talk yet,” she said.
He bristled at her command. Had he done something wrong? He pulled the small black notebook from his pocket and reviewed notes from their prior conversation. He had followed her instructions to the letter. They had met at the appointed time and place. He had brought nothing with him. He had told no one where he was going or why. Not even his grandfather.
He stuffed the notebook back in his pocket. Perhaps, he thought, her silence was an indictment of the Zahra that lived in his imagination. He had forgotten her flaws and kept only the hero’s virtues. Maybe his initial impression of her, colored by a rush of freshman enthusiasm, was also to blame. Surely an eager-to-please eighteen-year-old was not the best judge of character.
Now, after passing through the checkpoint with its soldiers and dogs, he felt a mix of determination and anxiety. He attempted to direct his attention to the landscape but made out only the outline of a gas station through the sheets of rain.
“I can’t believe you’re actually here,” Zahra said. “You’re kind of an idiot, you know.”
Malik turned to her, startled more at the sound of words than at their content.
“What?” he said.
“You probably shouldn’t be here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You should be at home. Safe. With your family, your grandfather. Finishing your grad school applications.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re mad I’m not completing my applications?”
“You’re supposed to be a historian. Not a freedom fighter. Or whatever we are.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be graduating law school right now?”
“It’s not the same. I hate law school. You love history.”
He paused for a beat. “Grad school or no grad school, you could also still be at home. Safe. With your family.”
“My family—” She stopped herself and waved a hand dismissively. “The point is you shouldn’t be here, but you came anyway, and...”
Heat rushed over his skin.
“You recruited me.”
“I’ve recruited a lot of people.”
“And I’m one of them.”
“I have mixed feelings about that.”
“We’re literally going to Bliss right now. I’m going to fight.”
A smile, bemused, flickered over her lips. “Do you know what you’re fighting for?”
“Justice.”
She rolled her eyes and he suddenly felt like a child. “Justice?”
“Yes,” he said, loudly, in hopes volume might cover his creeping uncertainty. “Justice.”
“The people you’re going to meet are serious people. Don’t embarrass yourself with clichés.”
“It’s true though.”
“What’s true is that white supremacy doesn’t respond to reasonable appeals based on justice. It responds to threats.”
Malik recalled saying almost the exact same thing to his grandfather. He scolded himself for declaring his fight in a way that was both true and too obvious. He would have to harness his tendency toward simplistic idealism. It smacked of naivete.
“You’re right,” he said, hoping the concession would shift the tone of their conversation. “And that’s why I’m joining Hush Harbor.”
“You’re not understanding what I’m saying.”
Annoyance ran through him. “Fine. Then say it in a way that I’ll understand.”
“Hush Harbor threw out its list of demands. It doesn’t negotiate. Its only purpose is to uproot white supremacy wherever it exists and plant down something entirely different. You either do that by force or you die in the process. Maybe both. This isn’t the kiddie version of revolution. This is an uprising. You and I and everyone there... Who knows if we come out.”
Malik absorbed her meaning. He heard the guilt in her voice. That was it, then: the reason for her silence and her mixed feelings and her distanced posture. She was worried for him. He leaned back in his seat and scratched at a hole in the car roof’s fabric. He wondered how to tell her that she was not among his motivations for joining the revolution. Instead he remembered his parents, how they were taken from him, and fury flared in his gut.
“You once said that to submit to oppression is worse than to perish in a hopeless cause. I believe that. Not because you said it, but because it’s true.”
“I said that?”
“In college. On a panel.”
“I used to be pretty smart.”
“It’s easy to be smart in school.”
She smiled and Malik recognized a warm glimmer of the Zahra he had known.
“I’m here because I want to be,” he said. “Not because you started texting me.”
She glanced at him from
the corner of her eye.
“I didn’t want to pull you into this,” she said. “But they asked me to find someone for a particular job. I thought of you.”
“They?”
Zahra turned off the ignition and Malik belatedly noticed they were parked in a suburban cul-de-sac. How long had they been still? He looked out the window, examining the modest homes through the rain. Malik’s grandfather warned him about these kinds of places. Don’t go walking there, he would say. Don’t even go out past dark. Don’t become the next stand-your-ground debate.
“Well, she. Not ‘they,’” Zahra said. She pressed her palms against her head, flattening her hair. She seemed suddenly distracted. “You’ll find out soon enough. Stay focused on tonight.”
Malik grabbed his duffel bag and followed her to the patio of a small blue house, just as a clap of thunder reached them. A middle-aged woman with squared shoulders appeared in the doorframe. Though she was just a few inches over five feet, Malik recognized strength bundled in her arms: a fighter or bodybuilder, or both. Not someone with whom to trade fists. He felt vaguely racist for thinking she was Chinese. She could just as well be Korean or Japanese or Vietnamese. He couldn’t tell the difference. Was that bigoted? His anxiousness resurfaced and he took a step back.
“Zahra,” the woman said. “Good to see you again.”
“You, too.”
The woman delivered Malik a blank stare.
“Call me Suzanne.”
She waved them in impatiently and directed them to a small living room with family pictures on the walls.
“You’re on time,” she said. “Barely. We leave at last light. That’s ten minutes from now. Snack bars are in the kitchen if you’re hungry. Take no more than two.” Her eyes settled on Malik. “You’re not going to eat dinner tonight. If you were early, you could’ve joined me for pasta. I’ve got clothes for each of you upstairs. You’ll need to change into them. Leave your old clothes here. Leave your bag, too. Leave everything. You understand?”
“What about my note—”
“Everything. No exceptions.” She cracked her knuckles. “You need to go to the bathroom? Because if you do, now’s the time. We’re not going to stop for potty breaks.”
Malik raised his hand.
“This isn’t a classroom,” Suzanne said.
“I have a question. You didn’t let me finish last time. Why do we need new clothes?”
Zahra shot him a look. “You’ll see in a minute.”
Suzanne nodded. “Zhara,
come with me. We’ve got a new protocol for you.” She gestured at Malik and then at the stairs. “You, go get ready.”
Ten minutes later, Malik idled on the porch wearing the clothes laid out for him. He had faithfully followed Suzanne’s directions with one exception: he kept his notebook. He passed a hand over the embroidered garbage truck on the left side of his black shirt, above the initials GCC. He found no tags on the black pants and no insignia on the black sneakers. The notebook fit snugly into his back pocket.
Zahra emerged from the house with her head shaved clean. The sight of her hairless momentarily stunned him. She ran a hand down her skull.
“What happened?” Malik asked.
“She shaved it,” Zahra said.
“Why?”
Zahra shrugged. “We’ll find out soon.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“Malik.”
“Did you?”
“What did we just talk about? When someone tells you to do something, you do it. Exactly the way they say. No questions.”
Malik’s spirit rebelled at that thought. Questions, polite and insistent, were the foremost expression of his identity. How could he, a Black scholar in the making, not query the world? He gestured at her car, parked down the street.
“You’re just going to leave your car?”
Zahra shook her head. “It’s Hush Harbor’s car.”
Suzanne pulled up in a green station wagon. A painted sign that read GCC ran across its side. As soon as they were seated, she pulled away from the curb. Malik, rather deliberately, asked another question.
“What’s the plan?”
Suzanne made no sign she heard him. A minute passed. When she spoke, he could not tell if it was in response to him or her own initiative.
“The checkpoints are built on concentric circles radiating out of Bliss. Think of a dartboard. Aggy’s Island is the bull’s-eye. Make sense?”
Malik pictured a map of Bliss, New Jersey. Only two miles at its widest and four miles long, Aggy’s Island reminded him of a miniature Manhattan: a Bliss City borough, one of five, entirely surrounded by water. The St. Jude River ran along its northern and eastern borders while the Catalina River bounded it to the west. As if squeezed, the
island narrowed until it formed a tip at its southernmost edge. There, the Catalina flowed into the larger St. Jude. Hamilton Heights, once the largest housing project on Aggy’s Island and now home to the Hush Harbor revolution, sat on a hill above the joining rivers.
“Yes,” Malik said. “Makes sense.”
Suzanne nodded and continued. “As the circles become smaller, the security gets tighter. You passed a checkpoint that granted you entry beyond the first circle. That one is just a formality. A warning fifty miles away from the city. Each successive circle is more difficult to penetrate than the last. You need special permissions to go in or out. Zahra, open the glove compartment. You’ll find two IDs, one for each of you.”
Zahra handed Malik a laminated blue slip, listing a series of attributes: name, age, weight, social security number, address. A fuzzy photo of someone who looked vaguely like him filled the corner. He noted a barcode and a series of numbers on the back.
“That’s called your Blue ID. It gets you in. It gets you out. If an officer stops you and you can’t produce it, you’re subject to indefinite detention and interrogation. It’s your only—and I mean only—protection tonight.” She paused to underscore her meaning. “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Malik said.
“Good. Now look at the back of the ID. In the top right-hand corner, the GCC logo.” He flipped over the card. It matched the logo from his uniform. “GCC stands for Green Collecting Cooperative. That’s a garbage pickup company. There are still some people living in Bliss’s outer boroughs and suburbs in addition to the National Guard and police forces that are essentially squatting there. They need their garbage hauled away. So, tonight, we’re trash collectors.”
“Why would we be picking up trash at night?” he asked.
“They limit the number of vehicles allowed on streets inside the circles. Those who have priority get the hours they want. Trash collectors do not have priority.”
Flashing lights and a barricade appeared in front of them. Suzanne slowed the car. As they inched forward, several National Guard vehicles, with their lights on, came into view. They occupied the width of the road. Suzanne collected Malik’s and Zahra’s Blue IDs and rolled down her window as a round-faced soldier approached the car. Another circled it with a sniffing dog.
“IDs,” he said, pushing back the hood of his raincoat.
Suzanne handed him their identification.
“You’re GCC?”
“Yes.”
He pointed his flashlight at Zahra and then at Malik. It momentarily blinded them.
“Open the trunk and the hood.”
Suzanne popped them open. The soldier with the dog inspected them. He nodded at the round-faced soldier.
“Step outside. One at a time. Starting with the driver.”
The soldier patted Suzanne down, then he called for Zahra, and then Malik. Malik discreetly slid his notebook from his back pocket before opening the door and placing his hands on top of the car. The soldier’s hands hit his body roughly. They swept down his shoulders and his sides. When they got between his legs, shame shot through him.
“I’m not enjoying this any more than you are,” the soldier said. Somehow, Malik knew differently. The lilt in the soldier’s voice, the melody of power. The energy coming off his hands. Did he linger an extra second on
his thigh? Malik told himself to remain still. He had practiced restraint his whole life, made an art of it. If Suzanne and Zahra could get through the soldier’s invasive touch, so could he.
When Malik got back in the car, ...
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