Project Reunion (41 page)

Another voting widget appeared.
Do you support a simple constitution for New England?
The choices were
Yes,
Not Now,
and
Not that Simple.

“Interesting,” Amiri said. “We actually have the Great Pumpkin available to join this conversation. She pounced when Major Cameron brought up the recon-con.” Amiri grinned. “Are we wired up yet?”

“Pam!” I cried involuntarily.

“Hi, Dee! Everybody,” Pam said with a smile.

Amiri smiled. “The Great Pumpkin is unveiled with us tonight. Pam Niedermeyer, isn’t it? Of New London, Connecticut.”

“Near New London, yes,” Pam agreed. “I apologize for hiding behind a pseudonym. But at first, I didn’t want to embarrass my husband. He’s a Coast Guard captain. He’s the highest-ranking Resco in New England, actually. Dee and Cam and I know each other.”

Amiri nodded. “Ms. Niedermeyer, as the Great Pumpkin, you’ve agitated mightily for a recon-con, the Reconstitutional Convention. What do you think of Major Cameron’s suggestion?”

“Well first, I could hug Cam,” Pam said. “That was a very sensible suggestion. To keep it dead simple for a first round constitution. Don’t get bogged down. Just declare ourselves countries. Grant enough powers to be getting on with. Though I think he skipped that part. Cam, you even mentioned these – the power to establish a currency and enter binding treaties and levy taxes. That should be explicitly stated, even in a first draft constitution.”

Cam nodded a
fair enough.

“But also,” Pam continued, “I believe we need a bill of rights from the start. A list of what the government cannot do, freedoms that cannot be violated.”

“You look like you disagree, Major Cameron,” noted Amiri.

“Not in principle,” returned Cam. “But my goal was to not get bogged down. Keep it simple. Rights and freedoms – we’ve been bogged down there for a quarter millennium. There’s also a conflict with martial law. Under martial law, some rights and freedoms are superseded by the imperative for public order. Like, the Calm Act.”

Pam nodded without agreement. “There is also the complication of the sea-going armed services. The Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, Merchant Marines, even the Air Force – none of these fit neatly inside these super-state borders. My husband’s Coast Guard territory extends from New Jersey to Maine.”

Cam nodded. “Excellent point. Well, Pam, should I withdraw my suggestion?” He smiled in challenge.

“No! Not at all,” Pam said. “What I really loved about it, was that you re-framed the discussion to show that there are military needs to be met by a constitution. We are not knocking the military. That was in our last Constitution – in order to form a more perfect union, provide for the common defense, and promote general welfare.”

“The preamble to the Constitution,” Cam quibbled. “Added by the style committee, wasn’t it? But I grant you the point. Right up front, our Constitution stated the reasons why we were doing this. We needed a deal to meet military payroll, and to hash out the laws.”

Pam sat back satisfied, and waved a hand in acquiescence. “We need a new deal. As Americans, we want a Constitution that states clearly, ‘here’s the deal.’”

The poll results for New England, at least, were running fairly equally divided between
Yes
,
Not Now
, and
Not that Simple
.

I cut in, “Amiri, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Major Cameron, Pam Niedermeyer, thank you for helping us…salvage this program. But before we end, I’d like to recap. Even without a new Constitution, and with the United States now officially defunct – democracy is still working here. The military governors, who spoke with us in the first hour – they listened to their people. They weighed input from military subordinates, communities, public opinion on Amenac. The polls tonight weren’t votes. They weren’t input. They closed the loop.”

Amiri nodded. “The viewers clearly confirmed that their leaders got it right. And, as a program note, Project Reunion will publish General Schwabacher’s restatement of the content of the speech from the Speaker of the House. So, keep an eye out for that. Or, of course, you could visit the Congressional website and judge for yourself.” And we signed off.

Chapter 32

Interesting fact: Military governor Admiral Sondi O’Hara, of Virginia–Delaware–Maryland, bowed to public pressure and ‘liberated’ the Congressional Ark. She turned out all remaining Representatives and Senators and their families, about 440 of them. The other 95 had either never entered the ark, or already chosen to leave. Transportation to their home districts was not provided.

Cam called in May, to ask for my help again. The latest batch of quarantine graduates on Long Island had turned up Maisie Mora, Lt. Colonel Carlos Mora’s younger daughter, now fourteen years old.

Maisie had managed to hide and lie her way through the quarantine’s attempts to get her real name. The relocation camps took great pains to extract real names, especially with unaccompanied minors. Children often had some relative somewhere outside the Apple Zone, someone who’d bend over backward to take a surviving child. Frustrating their efforts, many surviving teens lied about their names, refused to give their stories. The camps persevered. But Maisie wasn’t on the lost and found search databases. She was ill with Ebola when Carlos last spoke to her by phone, her mother and elder sister already dead. Carlos considered Maisie to be confirmed dead.

Maisie nearly escaped into a life of anonymity on Long Island. But Cam gave a speech to the Camp Suffolk graduating class each week. Dwayne spotted the girl in the crowd, and recognized her not as the younger daughter, but the spitting image of Carlos’ elder daughter of a couple years back.

The girl was hysterical, and vehemently denied being Maisie Mora. Her name was Syringe, and always had been. Cam caught her out by saying, “But Keith misses you, too, Maisie.”

“Keith is autistic,” she sneered. “He doesn’t miss anybody.” Then she realized she’d slipped. She wailed in panic until the medics sedated her. She was returned to the quarantine hospice ward, for safe keeping.

“My God,” I said to Cam. “How can I help?”

“Could you tell Carlos?” Cam asked. “And get him to hold tight for now? We’ll work with her here. But when Maisie’s calmer, maybe you could help ease her into the reunion with her father?”

I called Carlos’ brother Manolo first. I told him I had good news and bad news for Carlos, and needed the whole family there to support him. Then I visited them at home after dinner. I was glad I took precautions. Carlos would never lay a hand on me. But I could never have stopped him from bolting straight for Camp Suffolk. Manolo tackled Carlos to the ground and sat on him while Carlos sobbed.

Manolo caught my eye, nodded to me in respect, told me I’d done the right thing. His wife quietly showed me out.

A few days later, I collected Maisie from the ferry in Bridgeport, and brought her to my house. Her father and brother visited every other day for a week or so. Carlos had done his homework, reading up and attending a workshop on adopting a refugee. They arrived exactly on time, like clockwork, never early and never late, never pressing. Between times, Maisie went to refugee support group meetings in Totoket. Alex or I walked her there and back.

It was Keith who eventually broke through to Maisie. At the end of a visit, Carlos invited his daughter to come home again, as always, and was rebuffed again. This time, Keith walked forward, looked her in the eye, and held out his hand. She touched it in slow motion, with just the pad of her finger, an experienced elder sister of an autistic boy. But he grabbed her hand in return.

“Where’s Mom?” Keith demanded.

“Mom’s dead,” Maisie admitted. “Jessie too. I watched them die.”

Keith let go her hand and walked to stand staring at the door, rocking back and forth, waiting to leave. “Keith doesn’t care what you’ve done, Maisie,” Carlos told her. “Neither do I. Just that you’re alive. You’re safe now.”

“I was a whore, Daddy!” she wailed to him in pain.

“Hell, Maisie,” Carlos told her hoarsely. “You did what you had to do. You survived. I’m proud of you. My brave baby girl.”

She went home with them that day. It wasn’t easy. But Carlos looked happier every time I saw him. After a few weeks, he pulled me aside at a Project Reunion meeting. He shyly, proudly showed me a new selfie wallpaper on his phone. Carlos, Maisie, and Keith, flopped in tall grass, all three grinning. What beautiful children Carlos had.

It wasn’t easy for the resettled refugees of New York. We learned not to expect too much of them. But above all, they were survivors. The ones who gave up, did so before they graduated the camps. The ones who made it out to new lives in New England, adapted.

-o-

My onetime fiancé Adam Lacey held his wedding on a Staten Island ferry in July. His bride was that other Coast Guard engineer, Kate Monaghan, who’d been stuck on Governor’s Island while I slept in Adam’s tugboat cabin at Thanksgiving. Apparently it was her cabin, too, by that point. In July, she was eight months pregnant, which clearly showed in the fit of her uniform.

Adam wore a dove grey formal suit with tails and ascot, that made a mere tux look plebeian. He glowed like some prize Edwardian duke, come to claim an American beauty heiress. Kate was rosy-red with pregnancy and a sailor’s sunburn, ordinary middle class, and rather horsey of face. They were obviously head over heels in love with each other.

The setting was perfect, the cool ocean breezes a mercy in the July swelter.

The whole festive wedding party was completely at odds with the grubby orange ferry. The front third of the passenger deck was cordoned off for our private party, while the rest was in service carrying regular passengers around the ferry’s city circuit, Staten Island to Manhattan to Brooklyn and back. The natives were still thin and none too clean, but no longer skeletally emaciated. Eyes no longer red, faces no longer covered with weeping sores, lips uncracked. They’d had almost enough food, and clean water, for a couple months now. I stared back at them staring at us. They seemed cheered, or at least amused, at our cluster of well-fed, well-dressed, healthy aliens partying in their midst. They were accustomed to the line of marines on duty enforcing the yellow do-not-cross tape.

I wondered if the New Yorkers were more angry, or more grateful, to see us healthy and strong and there to help them, who’d fallen so low. Perhaps they were as ambivalent on that point as I was. If it were me over there, I’m not sure anything could ever fully quench my rage. I was grateful for the marines, but embarrassed to believe we needed them. Or worse, that we deserved them.

Of course, Adam and Emmett took their armed guards for granted. Their force levels were going down, not up, over time. The occupying army from the suburbs mingled more with the vanquished, as disease levels fell and order spread.

Adam and I had caught up by phone back in February, after Emmett surprised me with the news that Adam had left the Coast Guard to serve as Emmett’s engineering advisor. It took an engineer to vet engineers, and the Apple needed to hire plenty to get its infrastructure and railroads back up and running. Eventually Adam hoped to shift full-time into urban agriculture and hydroponics. He wanted to leverage the work he’d started as an arkitect on Ark 7, to green the buildings and Calm Parks of New York. And then there was Kate, his second in command and new fiancée. One of them had to go, because they couldn’t keep serving together. Adam was delighted to set the Coast Guard aside again, for her and the baby.

The timing of the wedding, so close to Kate’s due date, wasn’t a symptom of a last minute decision. They just needed a house ready for the baby more urgently than they needed a wedding. Their tugboat home was a dream bachelor pad, but not ideal for childrearing. Adam insisted on a house with servants, power, hot and cold running water, and laundry. I could sympathize with that.

Creating a safe neighborhood had taken some doing, of course. But Adam and Kate’s house near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal was ready in June when he called to invite me to the wedding, ecstatic. I hadn’t seen his Staten Island enclave yet, or any other. I’d been too busy on the farm front to visit New York lately. For the wedding, I sailed down to the city on the Niedermeyers’ yacht, with Cam and Dwayne and Alex. We only barely made it to the pier in time to catch the ferry. Though Adam would have waited for us and commandeered the next ferry if we were late. John Niedermeyer was his best man.

The captain of the ferry officiated, of course – for today, the chief of the merchant marine engineers I’d met on Adam’s tugboat. Kate’s maid of honor was another Coast Guard commander. Adam in his finery was the only one at the altar out of uniform.

I say altar figuratively, of course. They used a small white-draped folding table. Pam and I brought flowers from our gardens in Connecticut. Pam’s elegant carnations and ferns were rapidly converted into a bouquet for the bride and a lapel spray for Adam. My tall and gaudy vases of snapdragons and gladiolus graced the table. After the vows, our flowers moved onto the buffet tables. I’d brought along 20 pounds of strawberries, a small mountain of late sugar snap peas, and 30 pounds of cucumbers for the buffet, too. Navy stewards snatched the food away from us when Alex and I boarded. Our offerings reappeared by the time the service ended, beautifully arrayed on Navy trays and platters, cukes sliced and seasoned.