almost remember what it was like to feel like something good was coming. I fell asleep sometimes and dreamed of the war like a sea vine dragging me down then woke up and remembered that we weren’t there yet, not quite.
Jules and I killed time when driving talking about ex-boyfriends and girlfriends and what kind of music we were into in high school. We agreed on collegiate communists and disagreed on the squatters’ movement. He said it was a proto-revolutionary act and I said it was shock troops for real estate speculation. Scouts for the New Honduran army. Regarding food politics, we both thought that you should only eat meat if you thought you could kill it yourself and that the argument over honey was monastic and not organizational. When we talked about our families we both tended to get a little shakier in our opinions and didn’t stay on the subject for too long.
Jules’ parents were back-to-the-land hippies and his grandparents were Slovenian anarchists that escaped to Hungary after the First World War. I told him I knew a Hungarian prince.
“Great. I’m sure my family probably worked for his.”
“I think they’ve been out of power for a while. He spends all his time listening to the Beach Boys and playing guitar through effects pedals.”
“That’s useful.”
“Maybe not. But it’s beautiful.”
I could see him on an unlit stage, one arm raised the other resting on a laptop. Dark blue light around him.
Jules didn’t say anything for a while. We drove along a ridge of short dried grass. I could see the wildfire line where it had come down the mountain and crossed the valley all the way up to the road. On the other side the land ran, tea green towards a wide and braided stream that sunk like a handprint into the reeds. I lay my head back on the seat. The towers passed, silver lattices casting shadows on the half burnt fields.
We found three potential sites, two by the river and one running along a cliff above it. The one on the cliff had a guard shack so we took it off the list. Tamara put it back on.
“We’ll just get him out of there,” she said, “tell him there’s a sale on elk whistles down the street.”
I didn’t bother to argue. Further surveying showed it to be untenable.
“Now how did I know that was going to be the case?” Tamara said, smiling.
’Cause you’re a psychic who should do road shows?
That left two towers, one on a mud cliff and another on a debris flow that had been converted into a ramshackle jetty. At first I liked the mud cliff because it seemed like it would take so little to cause a collapse and the cameras couldn’t see over the edge so there was lots of cover, but the points where we would need to set charges were too high up and I couldn’t figure out a way to get to them, which meant we were going to go after the tower on the jetty. It was a more critical line but carrying almost too much energy. I didn’t want the high voltage fuses to close too quickly. I wanted the load carried as far as it could be and there was a substation across the river not far from the airbase that fed into the larger southbound lines.
Jules was very excited about it.
“It’s like a sand trap surrounded by water. There’s an eight-foot cement wall and three cameras but it looks like they can’t see anything at the water level that’s within twenty yards of the jetty wall.”
The idea was to come up to the jetty by boat, drill whatever holes we could with small equipment, jam a ton of explosives into the rock and hope we could just blow enough chunks out of it to matter.
“Della, what do you think?”
Tamara and Astrid both looked at me. I noticed each of them had yellow plastic barrettes shaped like ears of corn in their hair and I wondered if they coordinated or it was just synchronicity. It made Tamara look like the Goddess of the Underworld and Astrid like a sullen three-year-old. I remember thinking then, as now, that it’s funny how symbols work. They’re just empty vessels. Swastikas and sun wheels. Broken up bits of thought.
“I think it will go in.”
Later that night I looked at a Mercator map I’d printed it out at the library. It was fuzzy where the ink saturated the thin paper. I remember