They Let Me Live

On my 63rd birthday, I awaken to comfort: of the sheets, the mattress, the stillness; the peace. Morning light filters through cream curtains into the hotel room I've called my apartment for almost twenty years. I groggily eye the clock by my bed, a mechanical gadget that ticks like rain sounds. Wood, not plastic; gears, not transistors. The rain sounds emerge from a carved hollow, scraped gently by a swinging arm. It's 7:14am. In three hours, I'll be at the matinee.

I push myself out of bed – it's harder every year – and wriggle into my slippers and robe. I used to get fully dressed before I hit the Kombi on the sixth floor, jeans and a button-up, typical and masculine. I couldn't let my captors see me sweat; decorum felt like my last front for defiance. It took four years to kick the habit, when I decided one hungover morning that the clerk could survive the sight of a disheveled disarmee, and that my dignity could survive what my neighbors did every day. Every expropriated billionaire, every private military nightmare, every prison supervisor, they all lose their nerve sooner or later, and walk into the Kombi in their sleepwear. Today the clerk greets me by name when I shuffle in, plaid pajama pants flashing between the beige robe's folds.

The Kombi sits in a refinished lounge, a convenience store inside the hotel. Inoffensive slate panels reflect soft lighting over a careful selection of groceries. I recognize Reggi behind the counter, a radiant middle-aged woman with meticulous locs. Her green eyes glimmer over a magazine titled Harrowing Otherwhens, depicting a superhero with tentacle limbs and a backpack that appears to be their human sidekick.

"How's it doin', Jackie?" she asks, glancing over the pages. Some people ask questions to get answers. Some ask for propriety. Where she stands has always proved a mystery to me.

"It's my birthday," I chuckle, pouring chaga from a carafe. I snag an everything bagel from the bakery section and saunter up to the counter as if I were going to pay for it. "I'm a little birthday boy," I add, grinning, then regretting my bygone reference. Reggi doesn't catch it.

"Not so little these days, my man. What are you? Almost two meters?"

"Six two at my highest. I think I'm closer to six, now."

"Feet feet feet. Who does that anymore? It was literally called imperial."

I shift on my feet nervously. How do I exit this conversation? "Well," I offer, looking at my slippers, "You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks."

"I suppose I do," she replies, and returns to her harrowing otherwhens. "Well, happy birthday, gramps. Have a good one."

Awkwardly, I leave the Kombi, returning to my room on the tenth floor. When I open the door, I smell that Elon is awake. He's shrimped up in the living room's corner, depressed into the beanbag chair he insists on keeping, a bong cradled in his lap.

When the Rose Corps first designated the high-rise as public housing, they formed apartments like ours by joining adjacent rooms, so that our bedrooms and our common area have identical layouts. One room's bathroom became another's kitchen, but the air of temporary hospitality lingers in the architecture. If I ordered more furniture from the Public Catalogue, it might look less like a realtor photo.

"Jack, Jack, buddy, listen," Elon exhales a cloud and chokes out the words, "I've got a great idea."

"Another one, eh? You just keep them coming." I sit down with my chaga and bagel at the dining table. I crack the window for the smoke, and look outside while he spins his yarn.

"So there's the trams, right? And the Rose Corps dug up all those old tracks to make them zip all over town? Well, what if we put down more tracks, tracks all over every street, and everyone had their own private tram, and tracks went all over the country, the uh, the continent, the fuckin', the island of gay turtles..."

I'm not listening anymore. Why bother? This is all he has left. He's more than twenty years older than me, and he's been living in this apartment since before I showed up. I thought it was an honor when we got roomed together, but the novelty wore off fast. As soon as he realized I wasn't a secret agent come to liberate him, he saw me as just another forgettable sycophant, or at least, that's how he wants to see me. The truth is I have learned to hate his guts, but not enough to move out. It's a decent apartment with a spectacular view, and honestly, there's something cathartic about living with the shell of this particular villain. Besides, who knows who the Corps would room me with next? The General Commissioner of Exalted Genocide, probably. I've seen him at the hotel's pool, looking like a well-fed skeleton: Death in a swim cap, staring back from a gruesome veil.

I sip my chaga while I survey the town. The Willamette gleams under the vivid sun, its saffron glint reflecting off downtown's modest high-rises. An emerald wood-paneled tram clacks down tracks by the river. I can see a group doing tai chi along the waterfront, beachside grasses underfoot. The high-rises that didn't survive the quake were searched and salvaged away, and commemorated with earthen mounds. Atop one, children scream on a swing set.

"Dude, is that chaga?" Elon rankles. "It smells like the fucking woods."

"Yep. Sysiphean sissifying mushroom poison," I tease. "If I keep drinking it, I'll turn trans and autistic. That's how they get you. First you topple your own basis of colonial power, and then the queermos roll in with their awful health drinks and abolitionism. Or, they roll into Idaho on tacticals to bust your fanbase convention. How dare they think of holding a genius for ransom! What a travesty." I take a loud sip. I don’t have the heart to bring up how nobody came to pay his ransom, never in anything that mattered.

"Whatever," he replies, shrunken. He takes another hit and looks at the floor.

By the time I step out of the shower and stand dressed in slacks and a flax shirt, I notice we have visitors: two reps from the Corps, identifiable by their moss-green bandoliers. Elon failed to hold them at bay. They opened the door and cornered him at the dining table, where he sits with his hands in his sparse hair.

"Mr. Musk, come on. You haven't been to counseling in three years. You haven't seen a designated friend since last winter. You–"

"You're all the real Nazis...!" he says, as if he means to shout it, but the well-worn words only slip from his tired mouth. "I can't leave freely, I can't see my kids, and you try to feed me poison."

"Mr. Musk, that's not–" one starts, but the other has a different approach to politeness. He puts a hand on his comrade's shoulder, and with a wordless glance they concur.

"Elon," this smaller, spryer spirit says, "The war is over. Your kids don't want to see you. Why not work on yourself? Study something new, or go see a movie. Call the friend-guild any time and you can go anywhere you like, and they'll make sure you're safe and fed and..."

Elon crosses his arms and stares petulantly at the wall.

"...And you don't care."

I cough from behind them and they notice me. I speak up, "Folks, I think you've done your due diligence. He'll help himself when he's ready."

"When will that be?" the taller one asks. I just shrug.

The smaller one is frank, "Elon, disarmament comes with obligations. If you don't set and show up to your appointments, or let us help you do those things, then we'll just be back."

"And then what?" he snaps, "You'll disappear me for dissent, huh? Like you disappeared Bezos?"

The taller one asks, "Who?"

I sigh. "Jeff died when his rocket blew up in the atmosphere, Elon," I shake my head, "That was decades ago."

"How can I know that for sure?" he insists, "Why won't they show me his body? What if they doctored the footage? How can we believe anything they say?"

As Elon turns his attention to me, the Corps reps shrug at each other and make for the door. They'll be back in six months, when due diligence requires another house-call. They'll report he's no danger to anyone, just an obstacle to himself, as they always do. He seems incapable of appreciating how close he came to getting mulched by the Rose Guard, and what it means that the Corps doesn't mulch anyone.

"You don't get it," he sneers, "I used to have everything. They took it all."

"Yeah, I don't get it. I wasn't the richest man in the world. I was just a cop."

I meet my designated friend Carol in the lobby before ten. She's curled in a lounge chair, doodling on a sketchpad braced against her thighs. She glares at the page while her arm weaves a pen across the paper. I manage to surprise her.

"What are you drawing?" I ask.

"Oh, Jackie, jeez. Hey! Happy birthday!" She sets the sketchpad aside and leaps to her feet, giving me a warm hug. I give her a simple pat on the back.

"Thanks, Carol. It's always an adventure, getting older."

"That's what I tell my niblings!"

"Heh, I'll bet I heard it from you."

"Sounds plausible. Well, jeez, lemme put my stuff away... and let's roll to the theater, huh? Are you ready?"

Carol is one of my regulars, or, a designated friend that I have listed as preferred. She does well with older folks, using her boundless energy to pick up the pace for us. She waves to another white-haired denizen of the hotel, who smiles and waves back while shuffling to the elevator. I suspect that, because she grew up after the Transformation, my disarmament is somewhat abstract to her, so that on some level I was just another schmuck caught up in weird times, who made weird choices like everybody else. I appreciate the social grace that reading affords; I won't argue.

As we step out of the hotel onto the street, I ask, "Have you ever seen this movie?"

"Which one? It's a festival, bud! The Bat And The Man, June Cinathon!"

"Oh, right. Well, which one are we seeing first?"

We walk down the wide street, bisected by the tram line. There are no cars, none parked, none driving. Downtown's concrete roads have been cracked apart and filled in with a porous fungal mortar that gives gently under our feet. Thin paved strips flank the tram line, hosting bikers zipping by, and verdant bioswales separate the roadway from storefront sidewalks. Ground-floor restaurants teem with brunch-goers, and creche reps push strollers across the street and guide the children bustling chaotically in tow.

"Uh," Carol fumbles out her festival brochure, "Oh, well, we're starting with the classics, imperial and otherwise, then a couple modern retellings. I'm excited to see The People's Joker, have you ever seen it? It came out before the Transition."

The Transition. The Transformation. The Horrors. The War. So much has changed that we hardly know what to call it. Calling it a war implies someone won or lost, but who were the imperials fighting, really? The Earth itself? Did the Earth win?

"No, I think I missed that one when it was in theaters. I've heard good things, though."

We sidle up onto the tram at a stop, slipping into a wooden bench. Sitting by the window, I watch this familiar town buzz. In the rebricked courtyard of Pioneer Place, young adults appear to be holding a breakdancing competition. Maybe not breakdancing, really – I don't know what they call it these days. The way their bodies twist and fly seems innovative, rather than nostalgic, but I do spot a lanky kid doing the worm.

"You seem quiet," Carol prods me, "What's on your mind?"

"Oh, nothing, really. Corps reps came by to bother Elon this morning. Nothing unusual."

"He still won't go to therapy?" she clicks her tongue, "What is his petrol-suckin' problem."

"He thinks it's a punishment. I guess I did too for a while. The old world had a way of doing things to your head so you wouldn't want them undone. He thinks he's in some gulag."

"Gulag?"

"Oh, like a..." I begin to say, but then I look in her confused eyes and feel a world away. Every word I have for the horrors is another horror. Concentration camp. Containment center. Supermax. Blacksite. CECOT.

"Like a prison?" she says, adding with an air of worldly assurance, "I know what a prison is."

"Oh. Yeah, more or less. We had lots of words for prison, I guess."

She searches my face, and then looks down at her hands. I leave her to her thoughts and return my eyes to the blocks passing by, but she speaks up.

"I can't imagine living like that."

"In a prison?"

"No, I mean, yeah, but like, how he's stuck in a prison in his own head, after how he used prisons on other people to coerce them into doing just... the weirdest, weirdest stuff. Like I heard people would have his babies because he'd pay them, even if they didn't want to. Like, Jackie, that's rape with extra steps. That's wormfood behavior. I know the Corps doesn't mulch people, but like, how was that ever tolerable? How did anyone ever accept it?"

Now it's my turn to look at my hands.

"Sorry to bring it down, buddy," she says. "He's just... so weird!"

I glance at her and offer a weak smile before returning my eyes to the window. "It was pretty weird, all around."

Carol lets the silence sit with us. Nobody wants to talk about the Horrors. It happened. It was unthinkable. It wasn't nuclear armageddon, but I wonder if it's somehow worse. How could we do that to each other, when the choice to love each other was always ours to take?

"Weirder was and weirder gets. Last week I saw a thread about an octopus colony tanking ships passing through its territory. The octopi cultivate a barnacle that eats the metal, and then they eat the barnacle. Can you believe that?"

"Wow. Well, I don't remember that happening before. I suppose, sometimes orcas would tip yachts."

"You had orcas? I've only seen them in movies."

"Oh yeah. We had them. Had."

The silence returns, and we hold its hands in the sunlight.

When the tram drops us off in front of the Hollywood Theater, I begin to question my choice of birthday activity. Outside the theater, nerds in costumes throng. I count ten Jokers in at least six styles, a handful of camp Batmans, three Alfreds and two Gordons, a Two-Face, and a guy dressed as a ferry.

"What's the deal?" I ask Carol hesitantly, gesturing to the gaggle of guffawing geeks.

"Oh," she holds back laughter. "One of the movies, um, is sort of a cult classic? It's actually the one we're seeing first."

"Yikes."

"Do you want to watch something else? They're showing Batman Forever upstairs."

"No, no. I'm just surprised. Come on, let's get snacks, and find out if it'll be a pleasant surprise."

Sitting in the Hollywood's grand auditorium with my popcorn and soda, I can almost mistake this moment for one earlier in my life. The tittering, teeming fanbase shuffles in, wobbles into seats, and struggles to shush each other's giggles before The Dark Knight starts. The hush lasts mere moments, before they unleash a call-and-response routine, throwing popcorn at the screen and each other. The audience erupts in oinking whenever police swarm the scene, and fans shout sarcastically WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? each time Christian Bale growls, "I'm the Bat-Man." When Heath Ledger offers his unnerving broken chuckle, they leap into each pause with another grim joke.

"Why did the WayneCorp investor jump off the roof?"

"Because the tendency of the rate of profit is to fall!"

Ledger joins their guffaws with his simple, "Ha. Ha. Ha."

I don't really understand their humor. It's something between a revenge fantasy and the kind of jokes invented by people who have only seen the word 'rent' in history books. They understand the movie as the propaganda of clowns. I'm glad they're having fun.

LOOK OUT! THAT'S A BAZOOKA! "Is that a bazooka?" TOO LATE. BOOM!

The other movies are presented less sensationally. The People's Joker, some kind of surrealist trans coming-of-age story, seems more quaint and dated by comparison. The idea of transness has melted into a broader social dialogue about willful manifestation and identity, and typical sex ed modules contain a section about hormone replacement therapy. The protagonist's experiences – of repression, obstruction, hiding and fighting – don't translate for someone like Carol, who steps out of the theater with a neutral, "Huh. Was that what it was like?"

"Well, I can't say, but, yeah."

"I know it's just a movie but like, seriously, nobody knows or cares about my hormones. That just seems so neurotic. Patriarchy was so gross."

I haven't got much more to say than, "Hyep," but I add, "If it's worth anything, I'm really glad you can get those hormones."

"They're gratis like air. I learned how to synthesize them in upper school bio-chem."

"I dissected a frog."

"I made a computer out of mold."

"Damn, OK. School got cool I guess."

The last two are avant-garde Revolutionary art, one being a retelling of The Killing Joke with hand-animated impressionist shapes, and the other being an ARVID rendering – a form of immersive theater done with augmented reality – of the Joker's journey through madness, in which he faces the nature of capitalist oppression as disjointed dream-like segments connected by the labyrinth of his own imagined pasts, as they slowly drive him to the enlightenment of revolt. Carol explains to me after that ARVID renderings are only a layer of acting over another separate piece of media. Actors play their way through an augmented reality program, using one another's vision as camera angles. One long fellow stumbles wearily through real terrains, facing a phantasmagoria of the unreal, as his peers watch dramatically. Spectators use their own bodies like camera pods, zooming and panning with a mix of digital controls and physical movements.

"So, what made those flicks Revolutionary, with the capital-R?" I ask Carol.

"Oh, it's just an art-wave-punk thing. Hypothetically they have a political party but their model of politics, uh, doesn't show up to meetings. It's more like a genre that's really into having opinions."

As she disappears to the restroom, I think about how people change.

"...I used to hate The Dark Knight!" I hear across the atrium. I look over and see another salt-haired senior, with colorful suspenders and a glitzy cane. "I was starting in film school when it came out, and every damn day I was forced to acknowledge its competence. I was so sick of it! But these kids and their shenanigans? Reminds me of Rocky Horror."

"Sorry to intrude," I step over, bowing modestly, "I heard you talking about Rocky Horror. Did you used to go to the Clinton Street showings?"

"Oh shit, a P-towner!" they clasp my hand, "Rubella, good to meet you. Rose Guard, twenty three years."

"Isn't that a rash?"

"And we caught worse in the Horrors," Rubella chuckles grimly. Their companion, a rotund old man like myself, reaches his own hand out. "Jonah, pleasure."

"Call me Jackie, like Robinson."

"Jackie-like-Robinson, riddlin' me about the Clinton Street what pigs burned down. Glad the kids rebuilt it, the dead'd be unhappy otherwise. Yeah I used to go. I musta been... fifteen, when I first went. And it still took me a decade to start on T! What, did you have a formative experience there?"

"Oh, haha, no, well, no. I just had a good time with some friends."

"Oh-ho, old-timer with the old times. Where are you hiding out here? City's a lot smaller than it used to be, I feel like I know every rotting fart that isn't dead yet," Rubella says. Jonah nods stoically.

"Oh, I'm... something of a recluse, downtown. The friend-guild helps me get out and about when the stars align."

I can see too many gears turning behind Rubella's eyes.

"Downtown, huh?" they say slowly, "You get a good view of the Willamette?"

Carol puts a hand on my shoulder and I nearly leap out of my skin. That makes Rubella laugh.

"Hey bud, you OK? Hi, I'm Carol." "Rubella." "Jonah, pleasure."

"Yeah, uh, yeah I'm OK. Rubella, Jonah, it was good to meet you. I think I have to go."

"Mhm, Jackie. Keep him safe, Carol," Rubella chews the words like tobacco. Jonah nods stoically.

I've gotten pretty good at managing my panic, over the years. Therapy helps. Volunteering helps. Taking classes and making art and going to the movies helps. Feeling like a normal person in a society that doesn't want to kill me helps. But, the Horrors. The Horrors. The Horrors. Rose Guard, twenty three years. Keep him safe, Carol.

Carol notices. We share a few words about it, but I hardly recall them. We walk to some benches behind the theater, and she helps me get my breathing and shaking under control. Inhale count one two three four, exhale count four three two one. Sieve primes, one two three not four five not six seven not eight not nine not ten. What's something you see? Green trees. What's something you smell? Korean fried chicken. What's something you hear? Crows barking. What's something you taste? Popcorn salt. What's something you feel? Fear.

"I know what you need," Carol decides, "Ice cream."

An hour later, we're sitting on a bench on Mount Tabor, nestled among the thick and established treeline looking out over the city. I've taken a few sparing spoonfuls from my cup of marionberry swirl; its slick sweetness, the sign that it's made with oats rather than dairy. Carol has had plenty of time to eat her chocolate cone. I'm starting to find my words again.

"What do you know about me, Carol? About, what I did before?"

She's stern and controlled when she replies, "I know you were an officer of the Portland Police Bureau, and that you did cop stuff. You evicted people, unsheltered people, shot people, beat people, stole stuff, disappeared people... Or, do you mean something in particular?"

"Sometimes it feels disjointed, like maybe I was a cop because I had no choice, or because I was making the best out of a bad situation, but then, all my little brutalities added up with everyone else's. Was it just one span of years uniting the horrors, one trivial act after another existing in a moral miasma? Or did I evict people because I wanted to?"

"I know that 'want' worked very differently, back then."

"I was a beat cop. I drove around town to intimidate people and answer 911 calls, usually to intimidate someone. I thought I was helping people, but I knew what was happening around me. I kicked people's belongings into the river because I thought they just needed to work harder to fit in. I got paid extra to crack skulls at protests. I had colleagues that started families with people they were monitoring as radicals. Sorry Tammy, daddy's here to arrest you for sedition."

Carol is sitting upright as I speak, projecting her gaze over downtown's few remaining, still glittering high-rises, miles away from us. I think she's listening. I don't know if that matters to me.

"When food got scarce, the protests got bad, then the reprisals happened, then the protests got worse, and then the reprisals got worse, and... there were people I could hand you to, and you would never see daylight again even if you didn't die for decades. We told ourselves stupid stories about criminals and order and protecting the peace but it was just... it was just horseshit! We were the fist of evil itself. So I... so I bailed. I stopped coming to work. I disconnected the phone. Nobody lived in my mcmansionville anyway; anybody with money had emigrated or bunkered ages ago. I tended my garden and I made good of what I'd stockpiled. My plastic house was never a strategically significant location, so the Rose Guard never came near me, until I... until I drove into town, seven years out, a year after the quake shattered my house's foundation. I gave my ID at a checkpoint like a fucking idiot, and they wrestled me to the ground. I didn't... I didn't leave the city for another five years, until I got clearance for a designated friend to escort me to the coast for a weekend."

Carol turns to me and says without emotion, "Do you feel guilty?"

"Of course I- I... I feel used. I feel like I've been released. I feel like I'll never escape. Why didn't I join the Rose Guard when I could? Why- why did they let me live?"

Carol measures her words, then tries a different tack. "Do you know why I volunteer with the friend-guild?"

"I remember you saying something about your grandma, before she died."

She nods. "The friend-guild shows up for all kinds of people in need. We're visiting nurses. We're aid advocates. We're often first responders. My grandma lost her legs to a mine in the Horrors, and there wasn't enough medicine to keep it from getting a lot worse. I volunteered when I was sixteen so I could be the one appointed to feed her and bathe her, because she found it more dignified when it was family. She spent her last years in pain, but the guy who laid the mine? Who knows if they'll ever think about it? What would it change, if they did? The mine was laid. We can disarm the mines, we can demolish the munitions factories, we can even abolish war itself, but there was no restoring her. We have to live with the damage. We have to live in reality."

"Am I the mine?"

"What? No. Maybe. That's not the point. Jackie, the point is, you have to live with what happened, and we want to help you, because we want you alive. We want everybody to live and live well. That's why we do things like we do now. We are given the opportunity to enjoy it while we can, to make it enjoyable, to challenge what joy is so that we can know it more deeply, so we can share it more fully. Don't let guilt cloud the choices you still have."

Listening to her, I stare down into my empty marionberry cup, wooden spoon gently wobbling in my trembling grasp. Carol sighs and leans back, then rises to her feet and stretches.

"OK boss, the sun's tipping down. Time to get you home, I wager. That ice cream help some?"

I nod, and smile. I can't manage laughter yet.

"Thanks, Carol. You're a good friend."

"I'm trained to be. Happy birthday, Jackie."

Carol accompanies me back to the hotel, showing me her drawings on the tram. In one, a dragon, red-scaled and sharp-angled, soars above some kind of fantastically-armored mage, lightning and fire roaring from their fingertips.

"Friends commission me, and then their friends commission me, and then before you know it, I'm making concept art for a game project with hundreds of contributors, all over Turtle Island. Other people turn my drawings into 3D models, and then other people enchant them with logic and behavior and speech. Mix it all up, and it's communal art."

"What's the game about?"

"It's..." she flips to a drawing of a skeleton-bear looming behind a pale necromancer, their eyes each glowing an eerie blue-green, "It's a long story. Do you play games?"

"Oh, sure, but I'm not so good at anything with dodge rolls, these days. Did you ever play Halo?"

"Wow, dating yourself there, OK. Well, did you ever play M.U.L.E.?"

"Mule? I don't think so. Maybe it was after my time."

She smirks, "More like before."

As we approach the hotel door, I notice in the shadows a red dot burning at the end of a cigarette. Rubella is smoking on the corner, appraising the heavens.

"The stars. They're dimmer, now that the city's bright," they say to me, turning to stare me in the eyes as we approach. Carol bristles.

"Rubella, I don't know that this is really appropriate," she warns.

"Relax, Buddy Politic. I just want to talk to my new friend, make sure he knows that we're square. Once upon a time, we didn't apologize for the terror. Now there's nothing to apologize for," they exhale a thin cloud, then squash the cig underfoot, "Are you worried I'll firing-squad our rehabilitationista with my prosthesis?"

I take a deep breath, and say, "Carol, it's OK. I'll be OK. Thank you for today."

Carol tenses, considers my evident acceptance, and sighs. "Sure. OK. I'll let you two talk. Jackie, happy birthday," she leans up and gives me a warm hug, just like the last, "I'll see you soon."

"Thanks, comrade. As for you," Rubella claps a hand on my shoulder, "I looked you up."

I look over my other shoulder at Carol walking away. She looks back, but keeps walking.

"I'll keep it short, Geoff. You can change your name, and you can change your tune, but you can never change what you've done, and we know about all of it. Remember your lieutenant Bobby, or your fed buddy Jones? I mulched half your crew for everything from refugee cleansing to torture dolls to rape camps, and I only regret the sweat I broke doing it. The Rose Corps runs the show now, but power springs from the barrel of a gun, pig. If you or your petrol-suckin' roommate ever threatened the peace, this real peace, we'd bury you in the fuckin' garden… But, we're all old now. You're half-dead as-is, just like I am. So, what does it matter? So, maybe I've scared the daylights out of you on your birthday, maybe cuz I wanted to, but you're not in any danger. The whole reason we fought for compassion was so we wouldn't have to mulch anyone. We can be more than that, together."

Finally, they take their hand off my shoulder. They step back and spread their arms, entreating, "Now, I know you've been going to counseling, getting resocialized, all that good stuff. Studying welding, too? Very nice. And even back in the day you went to a midnight showing at the Clint, so, you can't be all bad. Think about this: I've got this seniors league, and we go bowling sometimes, sometimes we go to the movies, stuff like that. There's a couple other disarmees, so, you wouldn't be the only one. It's all bygones-be-bygones with us now. But it's cuz you're invited, alright? Hush hush, cool kids only."

I'm shaking, but I'm laughing now. My knees quiver; I wish I had a cane of my own. "Hah, wow. OK. Um, sure. I'll think about it."

"That's all I ask, Jackie. Sleep tight."

Rubella taps my blanched cheeks, cackles, and holds the hotel's door open for me. I feel ancient as I wobble into the pristine tan trappings of the lobby, using all my composure to run for my life at the speed of a turtle. When I make it into the elevator and turn around, outside, they're long gone. I breathe a sigh of relief. Then I think about going bowling.

As I enter the apartment, I'm confronted by trash. Elon must have made a run to the Kombi, because there are snack bags and refillables strewn across the kitchen and the couch, where he lays asleep. The TV is playing an episode of Planet Earth. A small multicolored bird does a meaningful little dance while a kindly British man says, "Magnificent."

It grounds me, picking up the junk dinner remains. I wouldn't want anyone else to do it, except Elon. I empty containers and place them in the recycling bin, carrying it to the chute in the hall. After I wipe down surfaces and wash my hands, I decide to get a midnight snack from the Kombi myself.

Unfortunately, it's closed. Thirty minutes, twice a day, they shutter the place to clean up and restock. A flimsy grate separates me from the clerk as he mops the floors.

"Evening, Jerry," I say, settling for the automat across the hall.

"Howdy, Jackie," he grunts in stride.

The automat is a dense see-through contraption the size of a vending machine, fitted with an array of labelled steel buttons. It can fix a decent corndog, when I consider something savory, but it's the oat-custard cup I'm really after. I press mechanical buttons to configure my choice, and a pageantry of servos and nozzles prepares my dessert. A special shaker distributes sprinkles before a rudimentary chime sings, "I'm done. Please enjoy!"

Returning to the apartment, I notice Elon has disappeared from the couch and into his room. The TV is still going, so I decide to sit in front of it myself while I eat. But, listening to David Attenborough bemoan the ongoing Sixth Extinction stifles my interest. I turn off the TV and move to the dining table by the window, taking in instead the little-interrupted quiet of New Rose City's nightlife.

Urban guilds staff late-night speakeasies in chic basements, so that even now townies wander the streets in various states of elation and inebriation. I savor my custard and chuckle at their antics, telling wild stories too many drinks in before catching the all-night tram. It clacks like clockwork. How much do people really change, no matter how much we do change?

Sifter-buoys flash red on the Willamette in the moonlight. Ivory chrome bodies gleam under stars, hissing water vapor from exhaust ports, like elephant trunks exhaling. They gather toxins, oil, microplastics, all those traces of capital's hubris, to be compressed and stored like radioactive waste. Each hiss that echoes across the calm river reminds me of the immensity of reconciliation, as if we were filtering the Horrors from our world mouthful by mouthful.

I don't take Rubella's hazing personally, not at this point in my life. It seems the least of my worries, when all else is seen to, how a fellow veteran wishes to express their anguish, and their relief. Rubella wouldn't say it, but killing took a toll on them, as cracks in the spirit that bled into the skin. I guess that's what disarmament means: that no one should have to bear the burden of murder, no matter how righteous.

Tomorrow, a friend from the riverkeepers will escort me to pilot a dredger down the Columbia, trawling for trash and quake debris. I volunteer with them because I love being out on the water – it reminds me of my boat back on Lake O; reminds me of being a kid in creeks – but it's like a prayer, too. When the rivers flow right, flood season's not so bad; when the water's clean enough, we can use it against fire season. Every marsh we restore, every forest we uplift, is an offering to the majesty that made us, that our human power of stewardship may be honored and kept, rather than wiped away. The Earth is a fickle god. I don't know that it has made up its mind.

The soft comforter of my bed swallows me whole as I crawl in. I cherish it more every year. Scenes from the cinathon's ARVID rendering play before my eyes as I drift away, as I stumble down twisting hallways with doors to times and places I only half-remember, through the eyes of a person I can't relate to. Every joy I had before feels false; every belief, a fiction. In the dream they bubble up like bursting boils, straining to grow cancerous beyond the reach of the past. Down further into sleep, closer to the now, doors open to studying ornithology as an elective, to growing through counsel and reflection, to lingering beachside vacations, to never ever paying rent. Birds fly from tall seaside grasses, and the long horizon calls them.

Elon might feel like this is a prison, but I feel free in ways I had never imagined before.