The Subprimes (24 page)

“Soon,” the boy said. “Very soon.”

I PICK UP MY COMPUTER
and dig through my duffel bag for a pack of Cough. I slip out a marijuana cigarette and light it, and immediately I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey!” says the same man who stopped our vehicle on the way in. “That's against the rules.”

“Rules?” I say.

“No dope smoking,” says the man.

“What are we, in sixth grade?” I say.

“That's Sargam's policy, and everyone supports it. We had to
keep out the tweakers, otherwise this would be a haven for meth smokers.”

I nod. “Makes sense.” I drop the joint.

He introduces himself, saying, “My name is Darren. I live with Sargam.”

“She's something.”

“She's the fucking messiah,” he says, nodding sternly. Then he smiles. “I had you going there, didn't I?”

I shrug.

We are walking through the tomato vines again, and I ask Darren if they can really hold out indefinitely, as Sargam claims.

“Well, we do have one advantage,” Darren says.

“What's that?”

“We got nowhere else to go.”

I feel sorry for him for a few seconds before I realize that the same could be said of me.

ARTHUR MACK WAS CONTRITE AS
he told Steve Shopper the truth. He had lost the girls. They had vanished.

“They couldn't have gone far. There's nothing from this trailer camp the whole twenty miles back to Placer,” Shopper said.

“Well, they're not here,” Arthur said. “I've walked every foot of this place looking, been asking everyone, the security guards, reporters, everyone. They were last seen wandering across no-man's-land in the direction of that subprime village,” said Arthur.

Shopper immediately sensed the opportunity there and asked if Arthur was sure.

“That's what some of the security guys said, but there was that heavy ash storm yesterday, so nobody is sure what they were seeing.”

Shopper immediately went to Pastor Roger and told him that Mack's missing daughters were believed to be in Valence. That would make Sargam a kidnapper, practically a defiler of children—good news that gladdened the pastor's heart.

In the past few days, dozens of Valences had been springing up in and around cities across America, as subprimes claimed stretches of foreclosed homes for themselves, and defied the orders of police and federal marshals to vacate. Banding together, they were squatting in these abandoned houses, professing to live by the simple credo of people helping people, and hanging up signs that said: “We Are Valence.” They were receiving support from misguided liberals and the progressive media, who could not get enough of this story of nascent communalism. The real story, Pastor Roger lamented, of anarcho-syndicalists seeking to overthrow the government by denying the God-given right of private property, was too often ignored by breathless reporters excited at the simple narrative of subprimes fighting back.

With every appearance on CNN or FOX or KIK-TV, Pastor Roger reminded viewers that this insurgency was proof of the rising wave of progressivism that threatened to swamp our democracy. “Let's talk about the rapes, the sexual abuse, the pedophilia, the public masturbation, the drug dealing, let's remember the unsanitary conditions in which children are living, let's remember what these progressive hellholes really look like and what we are tolerating in letting these subprime, anarchist criminal dens continue to exist.”

Then he added during that evening's appearances on KIK, “We also know that here, in the heart of the beast, where the Typhoid Mary of this progressive disease is festering, they have taken two little girls hostage, and who knows what may be happening to those poor little angels right now.”

Photos of Ginny and Franny appeared on the screen.

“They were last seen playing in a field near Valence, and we now believe they were abducted by the forces of progressivism. So I shudder, and I have been praying for these two poor little angels, but what could be happening to them in that cesspool of depravity right now? My mind boggles. We have to get in there. Now.”

RAJIV CALLS ME AT SIX
a.m., local time. I've managed several hours' sleep on the hard floor, curled up with Gemma for a few blissful minutes before we rolled apart because of the heat and discomfort. The girls and Ronin all seem to be catching up on their sleep.

I pick up the phone, which is vibrating next to me on the shag-carpeted floor.

“You know anything about these girls?” he asks.

“What girls?”

“The two missing girls, Virginia and Frances Mack, they're the daughters of Mack's wife. You profiled her.”

“They're not missing, they're in the next room, asleep.”

Rajiv tells me that overnight, the story of Virginia and Frances has turned into the biggest story in the country, crowding everything else out of the news cycle, with Republican congressmen taking to the floor to demand an immediate drone strike on Valence and Pastor Roger shedding tears on every morning show as he speculated in detail as to what might be happening to those lost lambs.

The missing girls had given the story a human element that dirty-faced subprime children couldn't possibly convey. For Virginia and Frances to have fallen into Sargam's clutches confirmed the deep fears of every law-abiding, God-fearing, bill-paying, 700-plus credit holder.

And I had missed the story, blown it.

“Even a journalist of your incompetence should have a story to file on this. You know the mother.”

I tell him that their mom is right here. I don't say I'm sort of in bed with her. But I say that we drove out here specifically because the girls had been abducted by Arthur, her criminal future ex-husband, but now they are safely reunited with their mom.

“Can you get an interview with the mom or with the girls or both?”

I tell him that shouldn't be a problem.

“You realize this is a huge story, a scoop. And you, of all people . . .”

It takes me about an hour to write the single biggest news story of my life, which really isn't saying much. I send it out after tethering my computer to my phone, but I also know that I will soon be out of juice and unable to file anything further. There are a few other reporters still in Valence, independent correspondents who have elected to stay in the community despite the obvious risks of being the target of an army of police and security officers. One of them has figured out who Ginny and Franny and Gemma are, and has sent a kik-tok, but he didn't have an interview or the confirmation—or the photo—that I would send of the three of them, standing arm in arm before the battered house where we were taking shelter.

I also add to the story, in the last few graphs, news that was surprising to everyone, including myself: Gemma intended to stay here with the girls. In fact, she felt safer here than in the rest of the country, where coyotes and ex-husbands were prowling around in the night hours.

“I like it here,” she says. “It's sort of like camping.”

WHAT THE HELL ARE WE
doing here? In this oppressive heat, spending an afternoon bending over a berry patch and plucking runty strawberries that taste sweeter than any hypertrophied hothouse berries I've ever tasted. Sargam told me that I would have to pitch in, do some actual work, a notion that had remained abstract to me until this morning, when I bent over in the furrowed ground and lifted up a stem to pluck, jumping back in terror at the size of the spider that came scampering out of the tangled shadow. It is the sight of me, so slow and unsteady at this backwork, that convinces those skeptical of my presence that I am not a spy or somehow in cahoots with the Pepper Sisters.

It is so hot, and despite my hat and my sunscreen I can feel that I must be burning. I realize I have spent my whole life avoiding this kind of physical labor, the bending, the reaching, the yanking, and for good reason. It is awful. But I understand that it is the price I must pay to stay here. If I had a skill, then perhaps I could work on engineering, or irrigation, or fertilization, projects that have allowed Valence to survive. But I am only a pair of not-very-skilled hands, so I have nothing to offer but my ability to pick berries, or whatever else needs picking.

Thankfully, the short workday ends just a few hours before the afternoon sun makes this kind of work truly impossible. We rise early, at dawn, work till eleven, and then retreat into shade for a few hours of reading. That is when I can talk to the many citizens of Valence about their lives.

They are, though they did not know it until they turned up here, the logical end products of our unregulated free-enterprise system. The privatization of every government service, from education to food stamps to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to Medicaid, results in a safety net consisting of a few days of vouchers that buys a family maybe a week before they
become destitute and hungry. And remember public libraries? The post office? The National Park Service? Lifeguards? The FDA? So much for the quaint notion that the private sector and charitable organizations would step in when the public sector withdrew. The subprimes residing in Valence turn out to be just a few hundred of the millions driving our rutted and potholed highway system looking for work, and even when they find it, it's not enough to pay for food for a whole family for a day. Abolishing the minimum wage with the National Right to Work Act took care of that.

As a cynic and malcontent, my one consistent attribute is my inability to get along in most systems, or with most people. And so as I wander Valence, from Las Lomas to Bienvenida, observing, conversing, interviewing, and also trying to find my son, who, in the glimpses I have of him seems to have grown six inches in stature and self-esteem as he roves this postapocalyptic suburbia turned Walden Two with a gang of boys, I am looking for the flaws, of course, and there are plenty: inadequate medical care, unhygienic sanitation, hours of drudgery, slavish, unquestioning devotion to Sargam. I am wary of falling into a Walter Duranty–like fawning over the socialist miracle unfolding here. This is no miracle, certainly, and it is only the hard-hearted cruelty of the rest of the world that makes this simple community of impoverished farmers seem like any kind of oasis. Having a roof, some walls, enough to eat, and a place for your kids to play is heaven when you've been sleeping under highway overpasses and goaded daily by the end of a security tech's cattle prod.

So what it comes down to, for me, as I wander and process what I am seeing and hearing, is this: Is Sargam for real? Is she a genuine leader who has started a true populist movement that has a chance to survive whatever brutality the Pepper Sisters can
unleash in the name of upholding their legal rights as the beneficiaries of a questionable enactment of eminent domain?

I mean, is Sargam even real? Or is she the inverse of Pastor Roger? Beautiful, spiritual, egalitarian, radical, redistributionist, she is like the monstrous, collective dream–leader of secular liberals everywhere. How could someone like this just show up? She has no past, she comes from nowhere—and becomes in just a few months a national figure so compelling that the most powerful capitalist forces on Earth are aligning to destroy her? The last time a political figure appeared seemingly out of nowhere to mesmerize the population, he ended up steering nothing more than a slightly less aggressively capitalist course, so that even while he was still in office there were populist uprisings—various Occupy movements—on behalf of a cohort similar to the subprimes. Was Sargam different? Was she the real thing, a true outsider who believed in nothing more than People Helping People?

“This is in some ways like a cult,” I tell Gemma.

“It is a cult, in that you have to believe, but she makes it easy,” Gemma says. “She's not asking for anything from anyone. She's just trying to help folks get along.”

“Did you know what life was really like—before?” I ask.

Gemma shakes her head. “I thought about it, but in the same way you watch people on TV who are starving, or read some awful account of children who are locked up in basements. You know it's awful, and you feel bad, but it seems like something far away. Maybe it's me, maybe it's a flaw in me, but I was somehow able to live in relative calm even knowing things like that were going on.”

I think I have that same capacity. That's how I lived all these years, wrote so many stories that were essentially apologias for a system that fed on human dignity, and never wondered at the
morality or decency of it. I am selfish. I think I always knew that, but only now do I understand that our only way out is if each of us becomes an unselfish version of ourselves. It is going to be a few billion individual decisions, repeated and reaffirmed every day, that will change us, change the planet. Not some great decision by a great leader, or a great law passed by a great Congress, none of which exist.

And I know that sanctuary, if I didn't already suspect this, is just another word for surrender.

“Sargam is a solution,” I tell Gemma. “She may not be the best solution, but she is the only one I can see. People helping people is the first step toward wherever we have to go. To freedom.”

“Meanwhile,” Gemma said, “does freedom have to be so filthy? I'm going to dump a few buckets of cold water on my kids.”

“Could you dump one on mine as well?”

HOW CAN THOSE PAGAN SUBPRIMES
stand it out here, in this heat, this dust, this ash, this smoke, this hell? Pastor Roger wondered. If we can't extract God's juice here, from this godforsaken patch, then from where could we squeeze the fruit of his loins? We have to grope, to grope down into the earth, to lay man's hands upon the unspeakable, unseeable foundations, the heart, the guts, the snaking intestines of the world. And once immersed, we have to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!

As soon as the governor gives the order, then we will squeeze them out.