The Survivalists: A Novel

by Kashana Cauley

Genres: Humor & Satire; African American; Literary Fiction; Book Club Picks; Dystopian

Synopsis

A Phenomenal Book Club Pick

“A great and engrossing read, Kashana humanizes a way of life that is often made fun of and makes the reader understand why someone would go to such great lengths to prepare for the future, so much so she almost sold me on those Life Preserver soy bars!” —Trevor Noah

A single Black lawyer puts her career and personal moral code at risk when she moves in with her coffee entrepreneur boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping roommates in a novel that's packed with tension, curiosity, humor, and wit from a writer with serious comedy credentials

In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner. 

For readers of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and Zakiya Harris’s The Other Black Girl, The Survivalists is a darkly humorous novel from a smart and relevant new literary voice that's packed with tension, curiosity and wit, and unafraid to ask the questions most relevant to a new generation of Americans: Does it make sense to climb the corporate ladder? What exactly are the politics of gun ownership? And in a world where it’s nearly impossible for young people to earn enough money to afford stable housing, what does it take in order to survive?

 

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Release date: January 10, 2023

Publisher: Soft Skull

Print pages: 299

Sample

ARETHA STOOD IN FRONT OF HER dresser, waiting for something in her wardrobe to declare itself up to the existential challenge of her third first date in a week. The first guy scratched his neck too much and filled conversational holes by obsessing over taxes. He rattled off deductions with the excitement of a six-year-old listing their favorite types of candy, while Aretha wondered if she was already dead. The second guy called himself a “visual storyteller” instead of admitting he was a guy who made abstract, plotless movies only his mother was willing to watch.

Tonight’s guy would get gray yoga pants and the closest bar to her apartment. The second he failed to pan out, she’d ditch him, put on real clothes at home, and head out partying with her best friend. Doomed dates deserved athleisure. She was sick of meeting guys who, after they learned she was a lawyer, spent the rest of the date mentally calculating how much less money they made. Or the freaks who thought a first date was the perfect place to showcase how much they loved ferrets or cosplay. No more dresses for guys who didn’t have the decency to not suck. Because she spent eleven-hour days glued to her email and phone and searching for the case law that kept companies from imploding, she shouldn’t have to spend her precious nights on the apps, attempting to avoid dying alone. The thing about Brooklyn was that you could get whatever you wanted delivered to you in half an hour, no questions asked, from food to live bees. So someone should have invented a service that dropped the right guy off at your door.

If this next guy didn’t work out, she was going to suck it up and get a series of dogs, because one of them would outlive her. If she had to live with something that shat, at least a dog wouldn’t say anything dumb. Or maybe she’d just die alone. She briefly pondered the perfection of a world in which she’d never have to compromise on a single decision for another seventy years and somehow couldn’t paint that world rose-colored enough to stop getting dressed for a third fucking date.

Loneliness had a noise to it. A hum like a running refrigerator had settled down right inside her head that intensified when she saw happy couples on the street or in restaurants, looking at each other with something she’d never felt for anyone. Fourteen years of eyeing guys at clubs who didn’t outrank their dance moves flashed before her eyes, a slow death suffered in jumpsuits and under makeup while watching her college and law school friends let their own inability and unwillingness to pay exorbitant rents lead them out of the city to cheaper apartments and the occasional cheaper house full of dogs and partners she sometimes remembered and sometimes didn’t. But her own plan had always been to get a partner she’d remember. She could see the corner-office, happily married, property-owning version of herself, even if that other person couldn’t quite see her.

She rifled through her bottom dresser drawer and went with her fanciest pair of gray yoga pants, which had horizontal lines across the thighs and calves that made her look fast. They were comfortable to wear and stretchy enough to let her escape at a decidedly medium speed in case the guy sucked. The guy she was supposed to meet in fifteen minutes didn’t look sucky in the face. Warm and open, even. But so many guys looked promising until they opened their mouths. And once she had had to ditch a bad date by crawling out a bar bathroom window, back in college,

in her Wisconsin hometown, after she’d made the mistake of making out with a guy who thought no meant yes if he pushed her down a little harder. Ever since then, she did dates on her turf, on her terms. In her neighborhood if she could swing it, in a place she chose, staffed with the kind of bartender who’d run interference for her if the guy truly sucked and she needed to leave in a hurry. That night she’d picked the only bar she knew that had a layout she could draw while passed out. Wooden front door, booths to the right, bar to the left, a back door that opened into a backyard patio with heat lamps in winter and flowers in summer. The bathroom had a window that pushed up easily in case of trouble and would drop her right back onto the street where she started, sans man.

She put on her fanciest sweatshirt to match her fanciest pair of stretch pants, and went outside into the warm late-September air to walk the four blocks down the street to her bar. Her neighborhood was a tiny triangle behind a basketball arena in Central Brooklyn with enough friendly older Black neighbors who believed in nodding at her from their stoops in good weather that walking up the street gave her the same sense of warmth she imagined newly crowned Miss Americas felt the second they learned they’d won.

Her bar, Blaine’s, sat darkly on an otherwise well-lit street. Inside, its vibe lay halfway between brothel and family restaurant: the red light, the TV shooting sports into all corners, the tables of adults with kids downing burnt burgers the menu called chargrilled. But the burgers were cheap, and the sports something to look at if Aretha forgot to bring a book or a shitty date. The general vibe was a welcome vacation from all the bars whose TVs kicked out 24/7 political analysis to satisfy the bottomless demand for news about the new president. Aretha’s favorite Black bartender had been there every time she showed up. He was good at throwing out asshole guys for her and making her signature drink, a limeade, which had lime juice, vodka, and sugar. She’d created it because she was sick of menus advertising shitty drinks at bars, so she made up one that always tasted good. One limeade wasn’t quite enough. Three was too many. She spent most nights in the glow that set in if she had two.

She ordered her first. The bartender, young enough to have dyed his hair gray for kicks, slid it across the bar, liquid and alive. Her date rolled in, looking much better than his already excellent profile picture. He was a crisp and clean Black man in a red-and-black plaid fleece shirt and the kind of trucker hat she thought everyone had stopped wearing in 2005. He looked like he chopped wood for a living right there in the middle of Brooklyn and looked damn good doing it. He also wore a pair of cowboy boots, as if he’d tried to get to the bar a little early and gotten lost two thousand miles west. His trucker hat said “Tactical Coffee.” His profile had said something about coffee, but not that it could sub for a crossbow in a pinch. Probably just that he liked to drink it. She thought she’d googled everything about him, but apparently not. He recognized her immediately among the families and the single people seated at the bar, all of whom looked determined, like they considered their nightly drink to be a key part of their superhero origin story.

“Aaron,” he said, holding out his hand for a shake.

“Aretha,” she said, returning it.

He sat down across from her in the booth. Blaine’s had two-seater booths to make dates feel like they were taking place in their own private cave. Aretha liked them because their high walls hid bad dates from most of the other people in the bar. So far, based on one word, Aaron seemed OK, though she still wondered if she’d have the patience and interest to make it through an entire date. At work she’d been put on a new case about trying to avoid government payouts for Hurricane Sandy–related house damage, and a good half of her just wanted to go home and google background info on the hurricane, which she’d missed. Sandy hadn’t bothered with her section of the sloping hills of Central Brooklyn, where her freshly minted lawyer self rose the minute the rain cleared and went out to get a bagel along with everyone else in her neighborhood, as if nothing had happened.

“This is one hell of a bar,” Aaron said.

“Why?”

“I can’t figure out the vibe. Usually bars are kinda goin’ for a particular feel.”

“I think they’re going for all things to all people.”

“And achieving a lot of ’em,” he said, which shocked her. She thought he’d say something cynical, because six years of practicing law had left her thinking roughly 98 percent of people were born cynics. There was something oddly sunny about Aaron that he enhanced by stepping over to the bar and ordering soda water instead of something that would kill him faster.

Even though she’d heard him order soda water, Aretha stared at it as if an alien had plopped itself down in the middle of their booth.

“You pregnant?” she said.

“What?” he said.

“You’re not drinking.”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?” she said, bracing herself for the churchy reply that would send her right back to her apartment and into that future with a dog. He must

st have taken a long walk in the woods, where the Lord appeared to him in the shape of a tree telling him not to drink anymore, and led him here to take down soda water and wreck the point of being in a bar.

“Sandy caught me drunk, so I don’t bother anymore.”

Aaron told her a story of a former East Village apartment of his, with stuck doors and swirling hurricane water and an absent rich roommate. “Can you believe he was skiing in Aspen,” he said, with a sense of wonder that he might have used to talk about a roommate who’d invented the car. Even she, as someone who made decent money as a mid-level lawyer at a white-shoe law firm, couldn’t believe people waited out hurricanes by skiing in resort towns where breathing cost a couple thousand dollars a minute. She took a brief detour from the date to remember the party she was at that night, in a Park Slope dive bar where her reward for escaping a guy who refused to stop talking about zoning laws was getting to sling a drunken arm over her best friend’s shoulders while the two of them wailed out “Bad Romance” only sort of in time with the jukebox in the corner. Aaron told her about the bar he used to work at, and the hundred-dollar tip his fellow bartender had stolen from him that night, which he might have used to escape the hurricane. He left with six tequila shots as the chaser, his halfhearted attempt to party with everyone hurricane-partying down in the bar. They’d both stumbled home drunk and alone, but Aretha woke up and greeted the pot of coffee she’d set to brew at nine a.m., and Aaron said hello to the water that seeped through his apartment walls until he’d finally passed out on top of his roommate’s dresser, cold and wet and exhausted from being afraid for hours.

“How much water?” she asked.

“Inch after inch of it. It was freezin’ my ankles and threatenin’ to lick my calves.”

“You had cold ankles.”

The coldest.”

“That’s as far as the water went up,” she said, unimpressed.

“You tellin’ me you wouldn’ta freaked out?”

“I don’t really freak out,” she said. “But that does sound terrible,” she added, going for the save, because she liked him.

What threw her off about what he’d said was that at work she’d spent the week looking at photos of people who’d lost it all in Hurricane Sandy. Their houses, their heirloom Christmas ornaments, their framed pictures of grandparents and children. Everything they’d ever accumulated, now in wet piles on buckled floors. But at work all that destruction took on the detachedness of evidence. Aretha mechanically scanned pictures of destroyed houses for a sense of scale, and a vaguely itemized sense of what was gone. She looked at ruined belongings with the same amount of emotion she dedicated to dust or lukewarm tap water. It was her job to defeat the wrecked clothing and the broken coffee makers and the people to whom they belonged. But Aaron was a real person, just like all the other people who didn’t suffer the misfortune of being pitted against her at work. A full tenth of her heart melted at the cosmic injustice of taking a shallow bath in your own apartment.

If only she could get over the soda water. Aretha looked down at their drinks. The cool green punch of hers and the nothing of his, duking it out on a stretch of brown wooden booth table. Another three of hers would get her to the same place as her last really terrible hangover. A year ago, she and her best friend, Nia, had gone out to celebrate their best friendship and toast Aretha’s escape from a guy who couldn’t stop talking about the scarves he knitted.

“Fucking scarf guy,” Nia said through rum, whiskey, scotch.

“I should have guessed he had a fake British accent,” Aretha had said, three drinks in.

“Real friends secretly record those fucking assholes who might be faking their accents so their friends can text them back and tell them,” Nia said, tossing an imaginary hand-knit scarf over her shoulder in solidarity.

Aretha had gone to sleep and woken up to a beam of sunlight that sliced right through her forehead to a spot behind her eyes. Maybe Aaron had a point about drinking. She went up to the bar and ordered a glass of soda water and survived the bartender’s skeptical look to take it back to the table. Maybe this was the first minute of the rest of her sober life.

She sipped. Salty, bubbly nothing. How the fuck did he do this? He told her about growing up in Texas, which she enjoyed because it always felt comforting when people confirmed at length the stuff you’d already googled about them. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer. If facts couldn’t be confirmed they could be substantiated well enough to not pose a threat. He mentioned tumbleweeds, and she remembered tumbleweeds from the Google Street View of his hometown and the couple of YouTube videos she’d found of people driving around it. He mentioned dust, his high school football team, and loving his dead grandma. She nodded, having looked at pictures of all three, although the grandma mention did perk her up. There was something sweet about a guy who mentioned his grandma on the first date. The soda water still irked her, with its threat of sobriety, but his dead grandma tried her damnedest to cancel it out.

She grew up in a series of worn-down apartments on the edge of the fourth-drunkest city in America. A cold city in the center of southern Wisconsin where people drank out of boredom and the civic pride that springs from constantly hearing that you live in the fourth-drunkest city in America. Drinking wasn’t part of the culture, it was the culture. She was

an African-drinking-American, happy to aim all the suspicion she had in her at anyone who abstained. Where did sober people meet people? How did they celebrate births or deaths or Tuesdays? But Aaron was looking at her in a patient way that moved her off drinking and onto thinking about telling him about herself.

Normally she held in as much of her life story as possible, telling guys what they might want to know only when the conversation wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Her last ex nicknamed her Victoria’s Secret, and when she got pissed about it, she’d throw her underwear at him instead of answering whatever question he’d asked her about herself. Being a lawyer intimidated everyone, and her parents’ story terrified the rest. But this time she sat there, inspired by the liquid interest in Aaron’s eyes, telling him about herself without help from a second limeade.

Her work. “I’m a lawyer. Corporate. The kind pretty much everyone cheers against.” Her childhood growing up in Wisconsin. “New York is my beach the minute it hits fifty degrees.” Her best friend. “Nia was the only other Black woman in my dorm in college. Thank god she turned out to be cool.” Her dead parents. “Car accident. Deer hunting season. They got gored by one antler apiece, even though they were already dead by then,” a statement that always took her back to an accident she had not witnessed but could picture perfectly in her head. She looked down into the half glass of soda water she had left, where the two offending antlers had stationed themselves at the bottom.

Over the eleven years since her parents died, the antlers had appeared in glasses, bowls, mirrors, grass, and in the eyes of people she didn’t like. She went on to the native Wisconsinite glory of feeling cool air on her flip-flopped toes at forty degrees and the point in a deposition when she’d backed the person she was questioning into a corner and waited for the kill. Yet the antlers stayed put, waiting until she got distracted enough to forget they were there. Her parents were people who drank and slow danced around their living room to Stevie Wonder and took her on picnics where her mom packed homemade Lunchables “because buying them at the grocery store is so expensive when I can just cut up meat and cheese my damn self,” she always said, and her dad whipped out his banana pudding, one of three dishes he made, along with chili and collard greens—and red punch, if punch counted as a dish. And then that deer turned them into a pair of fucking antlers.

“I should have had the chance to eat the deer, as revenge,” she said.

“I guess that rule woulda stuck me with cancer,” Aaron said. “Waddaya think cancer tastes like? Chicken fat?”

“Your grandma died of cancer?”

“My mama.”

“So your dad raised you?”

“My grandma. My dad apparently wasn’t that into the havin’ kids part of knockin’ people up.”

He didn’t have any parents! Aretha almost took her right hand out of her lap to pump her fist on the tabletop, but remembered just in time that it was tacky to openly celebrate parentlessness. When she thought about the bad dates she’d been on in the past, she blew up all the horrible things the guys had said and shrank the part where they cringed when they found out she didn’t have parents anymore, like a piece of paper folded in half until it disappeared from view. Yet the paper always came flying back at her from its hiding place, ready to slice its way across her finger and draw blood.

The last guy she’d dated was a white lawyer. A fighter. A guy who could win an argument in the morning and plan out the next six months of

his life by night. She liked the version of herself that sprang up when she was with him: Happy to make fun of bad movies and compete her way through video games against him, because he understood that winning at work could be seamlessly transferred over to winning at life. He didn’t blink an eye at her whole parentlessness thing. But when he took her to Connecticut to meet his parents, they shook her hand and stared at her with a little too much concern. In the kitchen, while Aretha chopped onions haphazardly and his mom with precision, she’d asked if Aretha thought parentlessness was a huge problem in the Black community. Aretha loudly blamed the onions that went up her nose and watered her eyes for her hustle out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, and credited herself for her quiet walk back out to her car to drive herself out of their lives. But here she was, sitting across from a guy whose parents would never rematerialize from dust to ask her shitty racist questions about why she didn’t have any parents. She was free. She could pump her fist under the table, out of sight.

“So between us we don’t have any parents,” she said.

“None.”

“This is kind of exciting,” she said, unable to calm herself down.

“Yeah, other people don’t really get it.”

They both smiled. She sipped her soda water, which tasted less blank the more of it she swallowed. She liked him, this guy with no parents who loved his dead grandma and actually fucking listened to her. And then he mentioned his roommates.

“They’re kinda weird,” he said.

“What do you mean by weird?”

“Well, Brittany built a little house in our backyard.”

The name Brittany ran through her head with the force of an alarm, as if all roommates were romantic partners lying in wait for your date to work out so they could steal him from you.

“To have tea in or something?”

“No, to live in, in case the main buildin’ goes down.”

“Because of another hurricane?”

“Or whatever else.”

“OK.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t believe in livin’ in little houses in the backyard.”

“Got it.”

“And James kinda hangs out by himself, in his room, openin’ weird tabs on his laptop.”

“People get lonely.”

“Yeah, loneliness is an alternative lifestyle now.”

“BDSM is an alternative lifestyle. Loneliness is as edgy as buttered toast.”

Even though she went to her fair share of parties and happy hours, as someone who lived alone she knew loneliness. But more importantly for the kind of person she was, she’d read up on it, and was ready to spit out all the googled loneliness statistics Aaron needed to hear. Yet the conversation shifted, allowing her to feel the warm glow of interrupting her sometimes lonely lifestyle to temporarily entertain living some other way.

•

DEEP IN THE PENNSYLVANIA WOODS, A COUPLE HUNDRED MILES away from the house they shared with Aaron in Brooklyn, Brittany and James were living their actual alternative lifestyle, which Aaron, as a rule, never did more than hint at during first dates. They stood inside a darkened garage, looking at a table full of guns for sale. Brittany picked up an AR-15 and put its butt under her chin.

“I could shoot this from right here,” she said.

James mentally yelled at himself for letting Brittany’s gun-on-chin trick make him hard again. He tried, as the house’s body man, not to have feelings during gun runs, because feelings got in the way of what he thought of as pure business. Money and physical things exchanging hands, usually in garages just like this one thanks to guys just like Jim. Older and white and armed enough to try to make a little money off spare guns. And James, a little bit away from the actual exchanging of it all, waiting there in case anything went wrong.

Nothing had, to date, ever gone wrong, so he spent his time during gun runs questioning his purpose in life, and trying to ignore the half of him that knew his purpose was journalism, which he wasn’t allowed to do anymore. You lift two fucking sentences about fucking climate change at fucking three a.m. for your fucking four a.m. deadline for your fucking article about climate change that not enough fucking people are going to read because fucking climate change isn’t sexy enough for them for whatever reason other than that their impending drowning death due to ocean melt just isn’t something they care to ponder, and suddenly you’re being dragged out by security, one fucking guard per arm, zero chance to grab the year’s supply of peach tea you kept in your cubicle to even out your mood, ...