American War by Omar El Akkad
To my father
The one you must punish is the one who punishes you.
—Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs)
Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour.
—Jeremiah 12:9
PROLOGUE
When I was young, I collected postcards. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed in the orphanage. Later, when I moved into my first home in New Anchorage, I stored the shoebox at the bottom of an old oil drum in my crumbling toolshed. Having spent most of my life studying the history of war, I found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene.
Sometimes I thought about getting rid of the oil drum. I worried someone, a colleague from the university perhaps, would see it and think it a kind of petulant political statement, like the occasional secessionist flag or gutted muscle car outside houses in the old Red country—impotent trinkets of rebellion, touchstones of a ruined and ruinous past. I am, after all, a Southerner by birth. And even though I arrived in neutral country at the age of six and never spoke to anyone about my life before then, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of my colleagues secretly believed I still had a little bit of rebel Red in my blood.
My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.
I remember the first postcard I bought. It was a photo of old Anchorage. The city’s waterfront is thick with fresh snowfall, the water speckled with shelves of ice, the sun low-strung behind the mountains.
I was six years old when I saw my first real Alaskan sunset. I stood on the deck of the smuggler’s skiff, a sun-bitten Georgia boy, a refugee. I remember feeling the strange white flakes on my eyelashes, the involuntary rattle of my teeth—feeling, for the first time in my life, cold. I saw near the tops of the mountains that frozen yolk suspended in the sky and thought I had reached the very terminus of the living world. The very end of movement.
I BELONG TO WHAT they call the Miraculous Generation: those born in the years between the start of the Second American Civil War in 2074 and its end in 2095. Some extend the definition further, including those born during the decade-long plague that followed the end of the war. This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them, and my generation is no exception. We are the few who escaped the wrath of the homicide bombers and the warring Birds; the few who were spirited into well-stocked cellars or tornado shelters before the Reunification Plague spread across the continent. The few who were just plain lucky.
I’ve spent my professional career studying this country’s bloody war with itself. I’ve written academic papers and magazine articles, headlined myriad symposiums and workshops. I’ve studied all the surviving source documents: congressional reports, oral histories, harrowing testimony of the plague’s survivors. I’ve reconstructed the infamous events of Reunification Day, when one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death. It is estimated that eleven million people died in the war, and almost ten times that number in the plague that followed.
I’ve received countless letters from readers and critics taking issue with all manner of historical minutiae—whether the rebels were really responsible for a particular homicide bombing; whether the Massacre at Such-and-Such really was as bad as the Southern propagandists claim. My files contain hundreds of such correspondences, all variations on the same theme: that I, a coddled New Anchorage Northerner, a neutral country elite who’d never seen a day of real fighting, don’t know the first thing about the war.
But there are things I know that nobody else knows. I know because she told me. And my knowing makes me complicit.
NOW, AS I NEAR the end of my life, I’ve been inspecting the accumulated miscellanea of my youth. Recently I found that first postcard I bought. It’s been more than a hundred years since its photograph was taken; all but the sea and the mountains are gone. New Anchorage, a sprawl of low buildings and affluent suburbs nestled at the foot of the hills, has moved further inland over the years. The docks where I once arrived as a disoriented war orphan have been raised and reinforced time and time again. And where once there stood wharfs of knotted wood, there are now modular platforms, designed to be dismantled and relocated quickly. Fierce storms come without warning.
Sometimes I stroll along the New Anchorage waterfront, past the wharf and the harbor. It’s the closest I can come now to my original arrival point in the neutral country without renting a scavenger’s boat. My doctor says it’s good to walk regularly and that I should try to keep doing so as long as it doesn’t cause me pain. I suspect this is the sort of harmless pabulum he feeds all his terminal patients, those who long ago graduated from “This will help” to “This can’t hurt.”
It’s a strange thing to be dying. For so long I thought the end of my life would come suddenly, when the plague found its way north to the neutral country, or the Red rebelled once more and we were plunged into another bout of fratricide. Instead, I’ve been sentenced to that most ordinary of deaths, an overabundance of malfunctioning cells. I read once that a moderately ravenous cancer is, in a pragmatic sense, a decent way to die—not so prolonged as to entail years of suffering, but affording enough time that one might have a chance to make the necessary arrangements, to say what needs to be said.
IT HASN’T SNOWED in years, but every now and then in late January we’ll get a fractal of frost crawling up the windows. On those days I like to go out to the waterfront and watch my breath hang in the air. I feel unburdened. I am no longer afraid.
I stand at the edge of the boardwalk and watch the water. I think of all the things it has taken, and all that was taken from me. Sometimes I stare out at the sea for hours, well past dark, until I am elsewhere in time and elsewhere in place: back in the battered Red country where I was born.
And that’s when I see her again, rising out of the water. She is exactly as I remember her, a hulking bronzed body, her back lined with ashen scars, each one a testimony to the torture she was made to endure, the secret crimes committed against her. She rises, a flesh monolith reborn from the severed belly of the Savannah. And I am a child again, yet to be taken from my parents and my home, yet to be betrayed. I am back home by the riverbank and I am happy and I still love her. My secret is I still love her.
This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.
I
April, 2075
St. James, Louisiana
CHAPTER ONE
I was happy then.