as an undergrad reading that what Mercator was after was a “new and augmented description of Earth corrected for the use of navigation.” I was after that too. I told Tamara I was glad I hadn’t left with Jimmy, or gone into seclusion with Grace and Miro, and that for the first time my education made sense and I was grateful because it hadn’t for so long, except as an excuse, well, whole populations have died before, and that I wanted her to know how much it meant to be there. Halfway through my speech she started to cry. I was totally unprepared for that. Do terrorists give each other friendship rings? Whatever remaining distance there was closed.
On my way to bed that night everything I touched was cold, the faucet, the ceramic sink, the bedpost, all like ice. To keep warm, I slept with my head under the covers and it seemed like there were three of us there, whispering about the net of possible futures that spanned between us.
27 La Rue des Oiseaux
We drove past the air base and Jules pointed to a line of gray planes.
“You can see some of them there. When we come around you’ll see the rest.”
The road arced as we climbed out of the rain-shadow-channeled scablands. From a distance I could see that the whole compound was in a depressed basin. I imagined it, a bowl of fire lighting the desert. Pink skies. Black smoke. It was getting dark and we turned around. The moon rose through the front windshield.
“There’s not much more to do,” said Jules.
He rolled the window down. The cold air was shrill in my ears.
When we walked into the farmhouse Tamara, Black Francis, Astrid and Britta were there. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I got some water from the kitchen and drank it by the woodstove, listening to the embers crack inside.
“That’s pretty much it,” I said, “We’re as ready as we’re going to be.”
Tamara was thrilled that it was finally moving forward. I wasn’t. I saw the power grid, currents flowing in all directions, televisions and respirators, barracks and airstrips, all inseparable.
The New Land Trust action was only three days away. We decided to blow up the transmission tower at the same time to increase the level of distraction. We also wanted to associate the sabotaged tower with the New Land Trust demonstrations so that it would form a big arrow pointing toward the city and away from the airbase.
There was nothing left for me to do and I needed to get my things in order so Jules arranged a ride for me into the city. I would leave the night before the action and come back out the following week. When I got back we were going to prepare the Farm for winter and then figure out any future plans. Tamara thought it would be a good idea if we did something harmless and highly visible.
“Like host an underground film festival. You know, something with bad animation and comments on the postmodern body.”
“I know a woman who does porn flicks in infrared,” I said.
Britta got excited.
“I totally know that chick too! She’s like the best grant writer on the planet.”
“Great,” said Tamara, “let’s get her to curate. Maybe we can shoot video of a deer hunt and intercut it with an underage sex scene.”
Britta laughed. “We should get Astrid to do it. She looks like she’s fucking twelve anyway.”
“Oh, god yes!” said Tamara. “Put her in a training bra and some cotton underwear. Surefire boycott. That would be fucking perfect.”
From there, the conversation spun off into storyboarding tales of animal porn.
“No, no, wait!” yelped Tamara, her face red from laughing and tears running down her cheeks. “And after the goat scene, we have the subplot: he’s a vegan. She’s a Native American whale hunter. Can their love survive? I can see the final scene now: clashing communities brought together by a violent white trucker who shoots a kid.”
Her blue eyes glittered and the feeling of familiarity was so strong I felt it in my body, an electromagnetic field between us.
We planned a whole six-month calendar of events. The film festival, a pie party, tutorials on butchering and canning—Tamara’s idea was that we make the Farm famous for irrelevant and controversial happenings. It was a pretty smart tactic. Over the course of the night, she told me about two hundred times how glad she was we met and how cool it was going