Consolation

Consolation

By John Kessel (excerpt)

Esmeralda

The blast blew the door across the lobby into the plate-glass front wall, shattering it. But then I was out on the sidewalk. I set off through the downpour in the direction of the train station.

Before I had walked a hundred meters the drones swooped past me, rotors tearing the rain into mist, headed for Marovec’s office. People rushed out into the street. The citycar network froze, and only people on bikes and in private vehicles were able to move. I stepped off the curb into a puddle, soaking my shoe.

Teohad assured me that all public monitors had been taken care of and no video would be retrieved from five minutes before to five after the explosion. I walked away from Dunster Street, trying to keep my pace steady, acutely aware that everybody else was going in the other direction. Still, I crossed the bridge over the levees, caught a cab, and reached the station in good time.

I tried to sleep a little as the train made its way across Massachusetts, out of the rainstorm, through the Berkshires, into New York. It was hopeless. The sound of the blast rang in my ears. The broken glass and smoke, the rain. It was all over the net. Makovec was dead and they weren’t saying anything about Alter. Teo’s phony video had been released, claiming responsibility for the Refugee Liberation Front and warning of more widespread attacks if Ottawa turned its back on those fleeing Confederated Free America.

Consolation. Photo by Elena.

Outside the observation window a bleeding sunset poured over forests of russet and gold. After New England and New York became provinces, Canada had dropped a lot of money on the rail system. All these formerly hopeless decaying cities – from classical pretenders Troy, Rome, Utica to Mohawk-wannabe. Chittenango and Canajoharie – were coming back. If it weren’t for the flood of refugees from the Sunbelt, the American provinces might make some real headway against economic and environmental blight.

Night settled in and a gibbous moon rose. Lots of time to think.

I was born in Ogdensburg back when it was still part of the U.S. There’d been plenty of backwoods loons where I grew up, in the days when rural New York might as well have been Alabama. But the Anschluss with Canada and the huge influx of illegals had pushed even the local evangelicals into the anti-immigrant camp. Sunbelters. Ragged, uncontrollable, when they weren’t draining social services they were ranting about government stealing their freedom, defaming their God, taking away their guns.

My own opinions about illegals were not moderated by any ideological or religious sympathies. I didn’t need any more threadbare crackers with their rugged-individualist libertarian Jesus-spouting, militia-loving nonsense to fuck up the new Northeast the way they had fucked up the old U.S. We’re Canadians now, on sufferance, and eager to prove our devotion to our new government. Canada has too many of its own problems to care what happens to some fools who hadn’t the sense to get out of Florida before it sank.

The suffering that the Sunbelters fled wasn’t a patch on the environmental degradation they were responsible for. As far as I was concerned, their plight was chickens coming home to roost. Maybe I felt something for the Blacks and Hispanics and the women, but in a storm you have to pick a side and I’d picked mine a long time ago. Teo’s video would raise outrage against the immigrants and help ensure that Ottawa would not relax its border policies.

But my ears still rang from the blast.