Sophia appeared to have aged since then. Perhaps it was the measured pace of her motions or the gray she’d let bloom in her hair.
“Soph,” he said, a daring intro. The way he said it made it sound like they were in bed with the Sunday Times and he needed help on a crossword clue. She spent a long moment looking him over. He’d lost weight after Kate signed them up for a Boot Camp class filled with postpartum women intent on shredding baby weight. Devor was embarrassed by how little he could squat-thrust compared to these women.
Sophia said, “I was wondering when you’d show.”
He couldn’t read her tone. She had turned cynic following the 2016 election. Whereas Devor had upped the ante on his activism by launching Nøøse, Sophia had entered a PhD program and buried herself in scholarship. Her field was political cinema, and her thesis was on the films produced by failed revolutions. It was about the futility of art in the face of history’s momentum. He’d tried to be supportive, but the growing bleakness of Sophia’s worldview was a factor in their breakup.
Devor said, “You have to come tonight. There’s a new energy in the air. We can get to Breem. If we get to Breem the other holdouts will follow. We’ve got manpower this time. Things are in motion.”
For whatever reason, he needed Sophia at the Funeral. He was still trying to prove something. Not about himself, but about “hope,” “resilience,” “the human spirit”—those hackneyed platitudes that he fantasized might, tonight, be removed from their scare quotes, restored to single-entendre meaning. Or maybe it was about himself: evidence that he was an iconoclastic leader. The protest and the plan to storm a finance bro party they’d been tipped off about—it was all, in some sense, for Sophia.
Sophia said, “And how’s Kate?”
Devor said, “She’s good.”
Sophia said she had to go down to the basement to get more beans. She said she’d try to stop by the Funeral. She said it in a way that let him know that she would not.
When the Funeral commenced, thousands of kindred souls emerged on the blocked-off streets. It was a far cry from his college days at Greenpeace when he and Sophia stood outside New York Sports Club on Eightieth Street, failing to engage people coming from workouts. It was a far cry from campaigning for Gore in 2000 or for Kerry in 2004, or the Jill Stein debacle. Finally, people on both sides of the red/blue divide were sick of the banks’ bullshit, and the shitty job market, and the billionaires on Wall Street still getting their bonuses. Marching to the party—which was Great Gatsby themed, how perfect was that?—Devor felt for a moment, in the heat and the music, that his generation had finally arrived.
And yet, when they reached the hotel, he wavered.
Devor watched a young guy, no older than eighteen, slap a bat against his palm. He watched an even younger guy swing a sawed-off table leg like a sword. Devor thought of his parents, sixties peaceniks. He thought of Sophia’s disapproving eyes. He thought of John Lennon lying in bed beside Yoko.
Peace had been given a chance, and look what happened. So why the hesitation? His brain knew that violence was inevitable. The people had bloodlust. The potential upside was worth a few injured bankers. The revolution had to start somewhere. The movement had numbers, but not enough. The action was justified.
Devor’s brain knew, but his body resisted. His body shook and stalled. He told the others he’d take up the rear. When the rest of his army entered the hotel, he walked ten blocks to his parked car and drove uptown to Sophia’s. It was lucky she was home.
They watched the fallout on the news. Sophia didn’t say much, but he could feel the judgment in her silence. Devor drank three beers. He crawled into bed. She got in but said they couldn’t kiss or touch. Kate had been texting for hours. He didn’t text back. Sophia fell asleep. Devor took off his shirt and rubbed his chest against her back.
6.
Michael finds his AR helmet while he’s looking for the cat. He’s not sure it still works, but the green light blinks when he flicks the on switch, and the battery appears to be partially charged.
On his laptop, he logs into Shamerican Sykosis for the first time in a year, and takes a moment to audit his in-game accounts—stocks, bonds, and real estate holdings—which, like their real-world analogues, are in a state of near-vacancy. Despite his theoretical advantages—he does, after all, have a degree in economics, and he remains a trader at a Wall Street firm—Michael was never good at this game. In part, this is because his skills don’t quite transfer. The Shamerican markets are subject to discrete forces, demanding alternate instincts and a different knowledge base, just as Roger Federer’s hand-eye coordination and strategic expertise might be of some help in Baseline Smash for Atari 3-D, but wouldn’t guarantee success against a nine-year-old gamer who’s logged thousands of hours on the virtual courts. More so, it’s because Michael’s interests were elsewhere. He didn’t want to perform, during his leisure hours, the kinds of tasks he did at work. Nor was he interested in the game’s design aspect. Why spend time mastering CAD so he could have a hand in shaping the appearance of this augmented world, when he could use that time to roam it as a masked spectator? Eighty Sykodollars remain in his Bank of Shamerica checking account.
Michael considers leaving the helmet turned off. This way, even other players won’t engage him
