Cords from his left arm ended at the monitor in which rippled harried shots from the cameras held by scouts and a remote Land Rover. Flashes of faraway machine-gun fire, explosions that growled like a Tamaskan Dog held back by a muzzle. The occasional glint of light off an errant piece of glass that burned back, in its reflection, length after length of shadow to unearth another sniper similarly angled.
RAKIM had talked at Rodney. Not to him.
Rodney would listen, and Rakim would speak about how dangerous militia forces had made it, sounding all of eighteen years old. He was always moving, Rakim. Always moving, so that his camera always powered on with coordinates far away from its previous check-in. But in the few instances Rodney caught an errant glimpse of his body in the static gray of a monitor, Rakim wore a different set of clothes. Rebel forces, one night, had come to his house to look for him and when they couldn’t find him, they’d arrested his brother. He had vanished for a time, and Rodney thought he was dead and didn’t bother mourning him, then found his timestamp and IP address again on a new montage of chemical attack sufferers later that week. The kid had found bribe money, and the bribe money had found the hands of the right border guards.
They looked the same, the journalists and the rebel fighters. Early twenties with close cut or carefully tousled hair with a beret maybe, many of them in olive green or urban gray. Camera-ready at every angle. And their forever-posture was Morosely Charismatic.
In the beginning, when Rodney had arrived at the city and looked over its eastern border from his bluff, he saw that mountain ridge that surrounded the city and made it a bowl, and, with his rifle slung over his shoulder, he had watched the deluge of refugees pushing and swarming in both directions. Families, fighters, filmmakers.
Rodney had seen fear before, had noted through his riflescope the dilation of pupils, the raising of eyelids, the recognition of the moment that films the eye with the beginnings of tears. The huffing and the shouting and the weeping at the border, the grunting and the shoving and the slipping of sandals and sneakers against pulverized ground, Rodney had noted all of it. What brought him here was a mystery until that moment at the border, watching that wild swirl of humanity ordered through and across checkpoints, in caravans or in pockets or as individuals.
It was to cure an itch. It was the curing of the same itch Rodney had seen in some of those entering the city, those with cameras disassembled and hidden about their persons, pieces of documentary tools strapped to them, a pencil here, sheets of a notebook there, eyes glinting with the same longing, craving, mania he felt when paying witness to wartime grotesqueries.
When Rakim’s first images graced Rodney’s screens, it did not escape Rodney’s notice how intentional Rakim had made the appearance of bits and pieces of his own body. An arm, a thigh, a few fingers caught in the frame of a massacre’s aftermath’s documentation. More than the shake that charted the handheld course of a gun battle, this seemed more than instinct, more than the human impulse toward survival, more than fear. Rakim was playing. On the other side of the camera, never filmed, never photographed, was Rakim smiling.
Rodney had wondered if Rakim knew this sniper was pirating his data stream, stealing his eyes. And when Rakim began his running monologue, Rodney had wondered to whom the boy spoke. How many followers did he have? How many people was he talking to when he told them about the mold that crawled along the walls of his “cave” and the maggots and the carcinogenic that hung like a blanket in the room where he slept and edited. How many people was he showing where he kept his packs of Gauloises Reds and his BIC lighter, where, through the blink and scratch of the security camera Rodney had hacked, Rodney saw the array of digital cameras that hung from the water pipes running along the wall? Where a rebel fighter, emblem’d uniform folded to make a pillow, lay wrapped in a blanket some shade of blue by the chair that Rakim occupied when he worked?
Longing brought Rodney back to his body and the stiffness that burned in his angled knee. The tiny pebbles filling the space between the wall and the small of his back. The sweat-sour that told him it was time for another fix.
When the air shimmered like this and the walls bled into the air that touched them, the kill brass littering the floor by his thighs, once golden and now rust, became indistinguishable from his dragons. Evacuated inhalers, pushers deflated, openings where he would fit them to the crimson, corroded sockets in his arms and along his neck.
Pain curled the fingers of his organic arm into a half fist. The low-level ache that sat just beneath his skin grew pins and needles that pricked the thigh of his outstretched leg. The sight of the small, black blur that had scurried into the scope of his rifle awakened him. Something in him stirred.
His organic hand fumbled in one of the pockets in his vest, but he knew. He’d long since outlasted his supply of dragons. Evidence of the craving was cluttered around him. Occasionally, when he still had some left and the leviathan would stir inside him, the bars of its cage rattling, its growl escaping his lips as a sharp intake of breath, a gasp, he would fight it. Keep his hands clenched in a trembling fist. And some days he would last half a minute. Some days he would last a full minute. And in those joyous moments of righteous agony, he could feel the light getting closer. The longer he held out, the brighter it became until it was enough to sear his eyeballs. The pain rendered him ecstatic. The harder it got to breathe, the closer he got to climax. And after the pain became the high, he would reach into his pouch, touch dragon to outlet and let the narcotic wash him beneath wave after wave of orgasm. He would shudder. And a small, limping smile would curl his lips as the sun faded away and night carried him into sleep.
But, now. Now, there was only the graveyard of used dragons, his kill brass, and the figure that had wandered into his field of vision. The first bit of human motion all day, and his focus tightened.
Rodney knew what the kill would mean, what itch it would cure. And he redoubled his efforts to keep from firing the shot, even as the figure swam behind the shelter of a mortared bus. A small curve of scalp could be seen through one of its empty windows. Air thickened in Rodney’s chest. He bit his teeth against the urge. Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down his ash-covered cheeks in muddy rivulets.
A second shadow darted into view to join the first. Rodney’s heart quickened and he closed his eyes, but the men still glowed as heat signals in his brain, images burned behind his eyelids by the rifle to which his arm was connected. They glared against the cooling soil.
The walls of his home shrunk and expanded in the same instant. Time swam in a cloud around him. The world fell away, columns collapsing outward, roofs crumbling, the floor disintegrating with bits of it falling into empty white void, apocalypse, and he welcomed the alabaster ego-death. It burned. How it burned. Resist, and you will inherit the earth. The message rumbled his bones inside him. It gripped him and held him still while the space around him tore itself apart and lightning struck in his brain and thunder crackled, and suddenly, a bolt louder than any he had heard in weeks struck him into oblivion, and his eyelids slackened and behind them was the white flame and, in its aftermath, the pieces of the two men rolling about in the crater. They struggled to hold their bodies together, to gather their separated pieces, and their blood, when it left them, glowed hot, steaming itself cool when it touched the ground.
Slowly, their colors dimmed. And dimmed, and dimmed, until they were the same color as the ground on which they lay.
A sigh left Rodney deflated. Silence had returned. He knew that were he to touch the end of his sniper rifle, his hand would come back burning. A new shell casing joined the others on the floor around him. The rifle reloaded automatically as the kill brass welcomed its brethren.
Dusk deepened into night.
As the clouds shifted, Rodney watched through a narcotic haze a few civilians who still dared the snipers and drones by inviting friends over for tea they warmed by the barrels around which some of the homeless huddled to heat their limbs. A couple climbed onto their rooftop to make love, writhing in near-silence beneath their blankets. Children who didn’t know better found a back alley in which they could play a game of football. One of them would call an audible before every play. Sounds of men and women wrapped in cloaks to shield their heat signatures gathering the remains of the murdered scratched and itched into Rodney’s earpiece. Somewhere nearby, others dumped weapons and the remains of a camera in a nearby river.
Inherit the Earth
On April 17, 20—, in Long Beach, California, a man selling mobile water filtration systems leaves a customer’s house and stands on a sidewalk invaded by weeds. Briefcase in hand, he watches a sea of Black and brown and white people surging through the street. Among them are men and women in their early thirties, a few youths in their twenties, and a cabal of Black teenaged boys. They are running from the police.
Along the street, windows slam shut, and the salesman sees now that some of the officers and the police-bots zooming like raindrops caught in the midst of a rare rainfall are raising their pistols at the windows. Low-grade mechs stomp from far away, gobbling up yards of concrete with each stride. No firecracker pistol shots punctuate the spring afternoon, but the salesman watches two police descend on a Black boy in a baggy white T-shirt. Tackled and pinned to the ground with an officer’s knee on his neck, he lets out a choked yelp with each blow of the shock-stick. The salesman hurries down and asks: “What’d he do? You’re gonna kill him.” When the police tell the salesman to “get over here,” he asks, “Why?”
For that question, he joins the youth on the pavement beneath the hail of electrified blows and four others, much younger than the salesman, in the back of the police van that transports them to the local precinct, where their beating resumes. Among the names shouted at them by their assailants are: “dog,” “shitbird,” and “nigger.” In the corner of their cell lies an older man, Hispanic, absolutely still, undisturbed by all the racket. Recovering, later, the salesman asks one of his cellmates if the older man is still alive, and the young man who responds, a bleeding lump having erupted on his forehead, says thatthe old man is a neighbor of his and “when they saw the cops out there beating us up, he asked them what was going on, and they just turned around and clocked him; like, he didn’t even have a chance to put his hands up or protect his face or nothing.” His question was of the same genre as the salesman’s and so too was their punishment twinned. The salesman, upon a brief, fraught stay in St. Mary Medical Center after his release, lost an eye out of the encounter and gained a limp. It is easier now, he says, for the cops to notice him on the street. And to act accordingly.
No charges have been filed as a result of the encounter, and calling it an “encounter” lends it the very quotidian designation that seems to hover over these incidents, the frequency of which has skyrocketed in the wake of increased space flight, incidents which many believe smoothed the way for the race riots that spilled through the city that summer and which were a shock toThe New York Times, The American Standard,every other nationally syndicated publication, and much of the rest of the world. Indeed, the only people who did not seem to be shocked by the riots were the residents of color in the city that burned around them.
Since construction of the latest outer space departure station began in South Bay, urban centers north and northeast of there have been increasingly defined by their constriction, an effort all the more accentuated by the directing of air pollutants into those metropoles. The result is that the very sky above largely depopulated, resource-deficient cities like Inglewood and Lawndale and Gardena is policed while a corridor is prepared for Orange County residents to travel at leisure to the Colony. The invisible sphere bounding those cities has turned them into one broad swathe of Occupied Territory and law enforcement has treated it as such.
Ostensibly, the discussion has centered on the decisions made regarding what to do with the lingering effects of irradiated waste. Municipal governments must finally contend with the results of scrambling to meet increasing energy demand with swiftly dwindling supply, and the results are being felt in urban areas across the nation.
Discussion of diagnoses and solutions has fallen along predictably political lines with conservationalists applauding the forward thinking of state government leaders and civil rights activists arguing for the free-air rights that should be the same for everyone. The retort of the conservationalist has typically been: “So everyone should walk around with lung rot?” Even though distinctions of Northerner and Southerner have long since become irrelevant, the same fault line haunts this dilemma as has haunted the country since its founding, and it is everything from willful blindness to malicious intent that keeps discussion away from the demographics, away from the fact that rates of lung rot have increased exponentially among communities of color concentrated in cities, but have remained steady elsewhere. And commentators, notably civil rights activists, have come to use the term “white flight” not to designate an exodus to the suburbs but rather an exodus to the newly constructed space colonies. TV pundits argue about the economics of space flight, and when the term “affordability” is used, it is code for the emptying suburb and the pregnant ghetto. What is not said but is widely known is that where the sky is red and where the sky is blue is very much a matter of Black and white.
Jonathan Crawford, 32, among the rising leaders in this latest wave of rights-based activism, spoke at length about the federal government’s facetious efforts to deal with the inequality between protections for urban residents and protections for the rest of the country. Invitations to shuttle from Chicago to Washington would proliferate, arriving like clockwork, and Crawford, he admits, would succumb to the routine, “like I was on a Broadway show with a 10-year-run,” and sit with one highly placed official after another. Before long, once the curtain had been raised on the drama, Crawford realized, he says, that when they asked what would happen that summer—any summer since the first wave of red dust washed from Charleston over Detroit—they were really asking what would “they” be taking to the streets for this time and about how many of them would there be. Who would cause trouble, and “what could I do about it?”
Crawford does not deny the increasing potential for violence in cities like Detroit and Chicago and Long Beach: “the sky turningred is when people began realizing that their quality of life was plummeting. It’s been going on for two decades now, and kids are now coming of age that have not known a world where lung cancer rates weren’t at least 65 percent in their neighborhoods. These kids grew up very early on seeing that where they lived was not like where other people lived and any time they wandered too far out by accident, they got the shock-club. Or they got jail. Some of us remember what it was like before, and we have pictures and video and holo-recordings and VR, but to those kids, that’s not reality. Their sky’s burning, and pretty soon, the ground at their feet will start burning too.” When asked if the Washington meetings held any potential, Crawford replied: “Five summers now, they’ve been making the same call. And the summer’s always violent. Nothing’s getting done. Next spring, I know my phone’s gonna start ringing again.”
Across the country, legislatures have enacted laws adapted to these Bounded Cities, essentially calcifying their demographics. And in the aftermath of each convulsive push on behalf of the trapped to escape into the suburbs or the sparsely populated land outside their bubble, in the aftermath of every burghal paroxysm, entreaties are made to respect the law. Which, for many, is simply to submit to the edict that they are forbidden from space travel. They are forbidden the right to breathe clean air or to look at the stars from any other vantage point than the gutter.
Jamal Rice-Dominguez, 12, was left to asphyxiate when police officers, upon finding the boy outside the bounds of the Citysphere, encased his head in a breathing mask and reversed its settings. Immediately, it was said that the police had killed the boy because he had wandered into illegal space. Because he’d been trying to escape.
Jamal Rice-Dominguez was pronounced dead in a hospital bed in St. Mary Medical Center on April 16, 20—.
The next day, a man selling mobile water filtration systems witnessed an entire neighborhood flee the police chasing them for trying to escape the bounds of their city. That day, he lost his eye and was given his limp in the same hospital where Jamal Rice-Dominguez died.
This story can be and is being written in Philadelphia. It is being written in Detroit. It is being written in Chicago. It is being written in Los Angeles and Boston and Cleveland. It is being written in Washington, D.C. The byline changes, but the title is always the same: The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth.
