(tbh)

Leaving Babylon

Lee had sworn with malice of intent, that at precisely the moment that she clinched a Well-Paying Remote Work Opportunity at a Shell Corporation, that her ass would never again be caught, dead or alive, in the cursed and unforgiving American South. A cold, misanthropic political party called the “New Radicals” had begun to rise in her three surrounding states, rhetoric maybe 40% more explicit than its forebears in its acceptance, or rather, embrace, of human death as a necessary evil, with a wink to Charles Darwin, nod to Thomas Malthus, and two dorky double-fisted “finger-guns” to Adolf Eichmann, with credit due to the big bump in unemployment and crime that had come with the whole Refugee Crisis coming out of The Former Gulf Coast of Louisiana And Texas. She was 23, with that aforementioned Remote Work Opportunity doing graphic design for 2.5 times minimum wage. At the same time, Lee found herself a Lower-Peninsula-via-Jordanian girl named Ulm on HiHo, the government-run social media monopoly, who she seemed to get along fine with in the sapphic type of way. Ulm finagled an IIV (Interstate Immigration Visa) for Lee after the two filled out a few online forms, and got technically married. Lee’s arrival in Grand Rapids felt like a warm dream, as she settled into a life of eerie contentment, warm showers, two step-kids with no problems calling her their mother, a decent nearby public school district, and supposedly authentic yoga on Tuesday and Saturday mornings.

Lee’s white grandparents, who she cared for deeply, died in a fell swoop from a carbon monoxide leak a few months prior. She was left a tidy sum, which she sat pretty with, anticipating said Remote Work Opportunity. This sum ($157,342.74) only increased over the next ten years, as Lee lived capably within her means, keeping Ulm and the kids fed. Lee’s grandparents (who shared very little with her in the way of DNA) had only come into her life around age 11, removing her suddenly and irrevocably from a home which seemed a little more cloudy every time she let her guard down enough to remember it. She was pretty sure that her mother slept often, and that her father was forceful and arbitrary, although her main reason for believing that was at this point her own belief, recursively reinforced by her friends, family, and therapist. What mattered was the money, which had accrued a tidy bit of interest in the interim, buying with breathing room a gaudy, Trumper-style speedboat and a year’s worth of dock rent. Lee was not gauche and she was sure as shit not a Trumper, but there was a bill being batted around the Michigan House of Representatives that sought to freeze boat purchases until the “Coasts were Secured”, a euphemism here referring to the rafts and kayaks holding exactly as many children and belongings as they were able to that had been steadily drifting into the Slapdash Ocean Port at Lafayette, LA. and some surrounding beaches. Nervous, Inland Exurbanites glommed onto the story of one such boat, carrying “Willie Meyers,” who supposedly drifted into Bellville, TX and committed the town of 53’s first murder in its history, a baby. He, supposedly, fled the scene and remained to the current day afloat, likely searching for more babies. All planes had been grounded five years prior, under what Lee did not yet comprehend as the guise of emissions-cutting. This meant that the one surefire method outside of America was, to Lee’s chagrin, the gaudy speedboat.

Lee had her first boat ride in college. Naturalist’s Club bussed a whole busful of freshman up on the yearly Ozark Springs White Water Rafting Challenge, and she seized the opportunity to be in a motor vehicle. The motor, unfortunately, came out of play when they got to the river, two nets sectioning off a strip across for the kayaking company. She was teamed up with a kid who was straight up named Cannon, a big motherfucker with bones for teeth and shoes to fill, ham-fisted, spawn of soldiers. The vessel, well-meaning as it was, capsized immediately, throwing both to the left net, albeit Lee 𝜋/24 radians or so southsoutheastward and as such, unlike Cannon, leaving her underwater for most of the time she was getting thrown through the rapids up to and including when she got all tangled up in the net. They steadily brought the net up out of the water with a massive pulley mechanism that was sleek enough to be a surprise for those watching, given that none of the 4 previous pairs of rafters had failed to get across. Splayed out in front of everyone, caught like a cat in a net, Lee was barely breathing, consciousness spotty and sensory-processing-systems nonexistent, but between her two-handed vice grip and the general knot that was her body, she was rock solid. At this point, Cannon, who had a loose grip or was jostled or something, plopped off the spiderweb and into the rapids, which were now just out and open. The cops found him on the other side about 6 hours later, not dead, but comatose and in bad shape. His family, rife with connections, settled out of court for something like a million and he dropped out less than a month after, with permanent brain damage akin to a mild dissociative high. Lee never floated again, but was amenable to the prospect of an expensive and carbon-negative method. The S.S. Atwater, so named by the nebbish previous owners, remained at the ready at Babylon Port Lake Access Point for a month or two.

They started coming for Ulm before they came for Lee. Lee was Chinese, technically, although she, like many Americans, considered herself primarily to be a cultural and spiritual void. This meant that, aside from the occasional jeer from a bug-eyed geezer, or creepy man with a fetish, she was pretty much White in the eyes of the law. Ulm, on the other hand, had smooth, vibrant, brown skin, and the Michigan legislature had begun keeping an eerie register of local Arabs and Black people, a compromise position talking the vocal New Radical minority down from a scheme of full-on removal, still motivated primarily by that same god-damned “Willie Meyers” story that Lee at this point suspected was mostly made up. Ulm’s residence and lifestyle were known uncomfortably, and Lee was convinced that the time had come to flee. She had accumulated three cases of MREs that could last the family a few months out on the water. She’d been collecting seeds, peppers, corn, wheat, radishes, that sort of thing. She didn’t have much of a plan for them, but she’d printed out about 300 double-sided pages of agricultural advice particular to the sky patterns of Oklahoma in 2017, which was the closest she could find to the way Michigan and the broad Upper Midwest was now. Ulm was reluctant, given that her family had lived in Grand Rapids over 25 years at that point. She labored under the misapprehension that, despite the harshening climate, her life couldn’t fundamentally change. Lee saw further.

Ulm felt the fire of motivation lit under her ass when the police installed a Ring-style camera solution on the front and back doors, not even pretending that it was for her benefit by giving her the access codes, and insisting that if she removed either she would be “arrested and/or deported.” It was clear that they were monitoring who came in and out of the house, and a cursory internet search showed similar situations throughout Michigan, albeit only within the last 10 minutes or so, as at this point HiHo was kept “depolitical” via constant sweeps from bots and foreign content farms. The wives whispered to the stepkids a sanitized version of events, and lifted them through the kitchen window, out into the backyard. They quietly seemed ordinary, whistling to no one as they meandered to the 2016 Mazda CX-5. Once on the road, they hauled ass, maintaining one mile under the speed limit throughout the 40 mile journey to the coast. Precious cargo. The music along the way was White Girl Indie, yearning, the only stuff Lee and Ulm could agree on.

Lee was the only one who had ever actually been on the boat, and she was driving the car, so she was a natural fit for the Captain’s hat. Despite her fastidious prepping, she hadn’t actually physically taken the boat out onto the water yet (maintaining a full-time job and all), but she figured it’d be simple. Before they set off, Lee made both kids wear lifejackets, and delegated the undoing of the knot to Ulm. She slowly built up speed, and cruised along the coast with the children standing cutely at the right edge, holding on tight as they waved at passers-by. They followed the shoreline a while, about 35 miles per hour. Lee felt the biting lake wind against her face and felt intensely that she was alive. For a moment, she lost herself, lost the gravity of her situation, to the serenity of biotechnical symbiosis. Like a cyborg, she thought she knew what she was doing, and didn’t notice that she’d let the wheel slip 𝜋/24 radians or so to the right. She stared out leftward, head empty, at the wet horizon.