Bathsheba goes to the window, looks out. Smoke from the fires is blowing west, so the sky is blue and clear, with tiny perfect clouds. The lawn is thick and perfect. She can see the pool from here, a perfect rectangle, tiled in orange and white. There is an armed guard standing beside it, wearing mirrored sunglasses. Bathsheba feels certain that no one has ever swum in that water, the same way she knows there are whole cities in China filled with empty apartments. Just another place the rich store their wealth.
She remembers her brother’s voice on the phone, how for the first thirty seconds he thought it was a social call. They have a system, a way to stay in touch without their dad finding out. He asked her how she liked San Francisco. She told him she made a mistake, that she’d trusted the wrong person and now she was a prisoner. She could hear his brain trying to process the information, could hear the stammer in his voice. Who, what, where?
Marfa, she said, E. L. Mobley.
But someone was coming and she had to hang up.
She thinks of him now, her brother. Was he the reason they had to leave Texas? Did he come for her? While she thinks about this, she does what her father taught her. She catalogs the exits. She searches for defendable positions.
“The vine is really beautiful,” she tells Orci. “On the wall. What is it, wisteria?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“You don’t see those in the desert. So much water.”
Orci stands. “He can afford it.”
Bathsheba says nothing.
Orci taps the doorjamb three times. “Get cleaned up. Dinner’s in half an hour.”
She hears him leave, hears the front door open and close. She knows that somewhere, someone is watching her on a screen. That they will watch her sleep, watch her bathe, watch her pee.
It’s been weeks since she saw Mobley. He used to visit her every night before she was pregnant, but once she started to show, she could tell he found her disgusting. So now she only sees Astrid, the fixer, and a rotating array of muscle. This is her life now. The old her feels like a different species, Homo Originus, a creature of the placid savanna, an herbivore targeted and tracked. And yet isn’t she the girl who survived two weeks alone in the Everglades on one of her daddy’s missions? Who beat up Bobby Spencer in grade school when he made fun of her dress? Wasn’t she the one who put the animals down when they were sick or lame, because Samson was too soft?
Bathsheba DeWitt is not the damsel in distress. She is the dragon. They just don’t know it yet.
The Prophet
Let’s be honest. We have always been a nation at war. Or not always, but for twenty-plus years now, since the planes hit the towers. Since the then-president stood on the rubble and bullhorned his words to the world—“I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Twenty-plus years of bombs and bullets, of improvised explosive devices and traumatic brain injuries, before Enduring Freedom and the Patriot Act, before yes we can and Obama, before Beyoncé married Jay-Z, before smartphones and tablets, before the euro, before GPS, before Occupy Wall Street, before Facebook and Twitter, before YouTube, before Hurricane Katrina, before Black Lives Matter, before oxycodone, before Tesla, before Avatar, before The Lord of the Rings, before Bourne, before Twilight, before Harry Potter, before the swine flu, before political correctness and its backlash, before NCIS and Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, before low-rise jeans and high-rise thongs, before twerking, before “WAP,” before premium cable and the birth of streaming, before mortgage-backed securities, the housing bubble, and the Great Recession, before seven Super Bowl rings for Tom Brady, before #MeToo, before Stranger Things, before the God King and the pandemic that stopped the world.
Before your children were born.
That’s how long we have been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. A forever war with 3,000,000 soldiers serving 5,400,000 tours of duty. They were under thirty, on average. Fifty percent were married. Fifty percent had children. Three hundred and fifty-nine thousand marines, 18,000,846 army soldiers, 464,554 navy sailors, and so on.
More than seven thousand of them have been killed and 52,671 wounded—had body parts amputated, been intubated or concussed. But the actual human toll is much, much higher. Some studies estimate that more than 480,000 people have been killed in these wars, directly or indirectly, more than 250,000 of them civilians.
Twenty-three years ÷ 480,000 = 20,869 per year, at the time of this writing. Fifty-seven per day. Each human death brought about by a fellow human being pulling a trigger or dropping a bomb.
That age-old equation of killer and killed.
Nietzsche once wrote, “In times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”
Everyone has a theory.
The Pew Research Center places the start of Generation Z as 1997, which means our youngest adult generation has never known a time in which their country was not at war. It is their permanent reality. For them, combat is normal, and—in the same way a bee can see only flowers—a country at war comes to accept war as its natural state of being.
So we strap on our guns and fight.
*
All through the first night there is infighting. Now that they’ve taken the air force base, this loose coalition of militias understand they must hold it and somehow plan their next move. To do this they realize, almost as an afterthought, they will need leaders. And so the bosses of each faction brawl through the night—mostly verbally, but sometimes physically—until the question is settled.