You might think we’re praying

We are a glitch in the system so that the system will malfunction.

 
Look at it blinking, it doesn’t stop when a normal would. I remember that’s how one of the kids explained it. We were on a hike and the boys had been arguing about clones. The government does a lot of crazy secret shit, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were replacing actual famous people with clones of famous people. The kid showed me a TikTok on his smartphone, a famous politician is slow-mo laughing if that’s what you can call her head jerking back and forth and back and forth in an endless head-twerk. She’s blinking too much. This is what happens when they malfunction, the kid tells me. A glitch is how you spot them.

It got me thinking, yeah, things are freakin’ glitching. Democracy. Religion. Permafrost. The methane belched out from Siberia alone is cooking us. Did you know that even organically raised goats in the Skagit Valley are regularly and frequently giving birth to dead babies? As are the killer whales in the Salish Sea? Still births, miscarriages, and infertility rates have skyrocketed, on land and in the water. Glyphosphate, that’s what’s doing it. One single fertilizer chemical. Round-Up means the end of reproduction. Maybe we’ll need the kid’s clones after all.

Late at night, after some encrypted messages with the Group, me and my person took a coupla hits and went outside. It was like one in the morning and we lay on the roof of my car and looked up at the stars—the sky was so clear even though Paradise was burning and the weather app said the smoke was headed our way. My person said they’d been in Paradise once and their mind was fucking blown by what they’d seen on social, photos of hundred-foot-tall walls of flame. My person started crying a little. We don’t go in for heteronormative behavior, but usually I am the practical one. Snaking the kitchen sink, coaxing the rat from the attic, procuring weed. I’m the one who has duct-taped filters to a box fan so we can effectively clean the wildfire smoke when it comes to our apartment. At least the whole “by fire or ice” question has been settled. We’re def going down in flames. But I know when to keep my thoughts to myself. I comforted them, pointed out what I thought was the Big Dipper. I’m not sure I got it right, when I connected the dots in my mind’s eye I saw something more like a ball of yarn, but my person likes it when I talk about the cosmos, when they rest their head on my shoulder with my arm around them, when I’m gesturing at the sky.

I passed a one-legged homeless womxn who was sitting on the sidewalk outside a Starbucks today with a little handwritten sign that said Anything helps.

Uta and me, we’ve been trying to do anything. We’ve been helping. With the support of the Group. We aim to disrupt destructive supply chains and bureaucratic processes. We are a glitch in the system so that the system will malfunction.

We don’t do anything that will harm anyone, at least not anyone innocent. It’s simple, shunts on the railroad. A shunt might stop a train carrying dangerous fossil fuels. It might prevent construction supplies from arriving at a site where a gas pipeline is to be built. Anything helps.

Post enough of these questions on social, and you’ll soon find yourself invited to the Group.

If you have to work for money because that’s the only way to eat in late-stage capitalism, babysitting’s not a bad gig. There are two boys, ages eight and ten, young enough to still be real, you know what I mean? I try to teach them about white supremacy and patriarchy ish because I don’t want them to grow up to be assholes and obvs, we were assigned white and male at birth, so double whammy. We spend all of our time outdoors, given the pandemic. We wear masks and stay well apart from each other. We build forts from driftwood down at the beach, I teach them how to harvest young nettles, we whittle and sometimes we’ll build a little fire. The other day one of them called the other a pussy so we had to put the s’mores away and have a serious talk about genitalia and misogyny.

Kai, the eight-year-old in my charge, plays the violin. I heard him practicing Minuet in G once when I picked him up. I recognized it from my own childhood, which I guess wasn’t all that long ago. It’s only just recently that I stopped feeling for the calluses that used to be on my left fingertips. At one point, I thought I might even major in music. First chair second violin was not a big incentive, and even though we played some contemporary pieces, the whole canon was oppressor-based. And if we played anything else, we’d be appropriating. In protest, I burned the violin in the firepit late at night at a local park: the strings glowed and then snapped and shrank into themselves making their own eerie music. When I told my mom she got all salty that the violin had belonged to my grandmother that I never met because she died a long time ago. It’s not like the violin held a piece of her soul, I told my mom, it’s the artifact of a slaughtered forest primeval. So I quit music and switched to a math major, but fuck. One statistics class and I wanted to vomit numbers and that’s when I decided to take a break, get real for a while because what is public education for? It’s for making compliant workers whose meaningless work is never done. Money’s the drug that enslaves us to consumerist imaginaries while making us believe that it empowers us. How much do we need to succeed within the system before we can effectively dismantle the system? Post enough of these questions on social, and you’ll soon find yourself invited to the Group.

Cedar (he/them). Curly red hair, mid 20s, his garden is full of sunflowers and he and his partner Lark have a baby boy. Or maybe I should just say baby! I am not the boss of its gender. Or their gender. The OG (she/her) has a PhD and is our elder; her hair is already turning gray and to prove how old school she is, when we came up her Group name (for actual truth, it was me that came up with it), she said I don’t get it, so we had to explain, Original Gangster. All respect, right? Spruce (they/them) is a poet and a carpenter. Salmon (they/them) works as a wilderness guide. We take precautions but Uta (she/her) is my age-ish, early 20s, total badass. She was like, Fuck this fake Group name shit, my name’s Uta and that’s what all y’all can call me. She hiked the West Coast Trail in like four days and can actually throw a knife  and hit a target like they do in those Netflix shows about Vikings where everybody’s wearing manbuns and eyeliner and tattoos. Which, now that I think about it, kind of sounds like us. Uta is an apprentice electrician, and she sleeps with more people in a week than I do in a year. I’m not slut-shaming here, I’m celebrating her, although I can’t figure out if I’m envious of her promiscuity or jealous of her many lovers. This is a lot of what Uta and I talk about—do I desire her or want to be her?

Before the pandemic, we had potlucks. None of us want rules, none of us is the boss of anybody else, but it really was easier if everyone just brought vegan dishes. Cedar brought this up. He suggested that the Paleos among us could deal for one night, or go back home and gnaw on some non-human animal part in private. It happens that Cedar is vegan and Uta is Paleo and she had been waving around a wild turkey leg, and we all kind of knew that they’d slept together the week before and then Uta had gone on to feather her bed with a different bird each night after. I’m vegan, so I was on Cedar’s side, even though we don’t take sides. I don’t really get the meat thing, especially with cows, right? Once you learn how much methane they’re blasting out from their backsides, you know them to be a climate threat. And once you learn how stupid they’ve become since domestication, it makes you feel sorry for them. Feral cows are fierce—I’d never want to eat a creature that I consider my equal. I’ve eaten a lot of burgers; seems like my mom was always slapping patties on the grill. She grew up in Montana, cattle country, so meat is at the bottom of her food pyramid. I’ve got a lot to atone for. My mom’s always going on about gratitude and recycling and her garden but all she grows is flowers. My dad plays squash and I think he might be a total cheater. That’s them. Suburbia all the way. They think that voting Democrat is enough. Old-growth conifers died so that they might have a 4,000-square-foot house in which to squander various resources, including their own lives. Can you believe my mother used to fry bologna and call it breakfast? They freaked when they got the call from the Feds.

 

Clones are almost perfect. There are sometimes deviations, differences from the original. Miles, the ten-year-old I babysit, explained this to me in some detail. Kanye going into the hospital had black hair; coming out a few hours later, he had blond tips. Think about it: he’s not going to get a dye job when he’s in the ER. The original K either died or lapsed into a vegetative state, and maybe he can be revived but it’s gonna to take time. You don’t want the public to know the truth, so send in the clones! Normally, nobody would notice. But thanks to hospital surveillance cameras that catch Kanye at the moment of his arrival and then again at the moment of his departure, we notice the slight difference in hair coloration. Obvs I am not truly believing in clones, but sometimes if you listen to kids, if you think about the thing that they think is real but you take it as like a metaphor? You can learn something. Thanks to malfunctions, to blips and mutations, to mistakes and oversights, we notice not just the glitch, but the system.

Like civilization. That system. The apple of knowledge that Eve bit and shared with Adam was the first fruit of agriculture. After eating it, A and E wanted civilization. They wanted clothes and whatnot. That’s why they got kicked out of the garden and became freakin’ colonizers. Man has dominion everywhere bullshit. Like, let’s just fuckin’ exploit everything capitalism. Dude, I belong to the land, it doesn’t belong to me! Once upon a time I set up a tent in the so-called wilderness only to be chased off by a park ranger who said I had to pay a fee plus use the provided outhouse structures because capitalists are all about buildings and institutions. But upside: ranger didn’t find me until the morning after I had invited Uta over for a dinner cooked over the campfire. Lentils. And then when we got the munchies, some Cool Ranch Doritos. One reason I don’t talk to my person about Group is because Uta, or the idea of her, sparks a possessive rage in my person and then we have to sit down and have a long complicated dialogue  about how thinking you’re the boss of somebody’s heart is just another way of denying your own  humanity. Then my person will weep (again) and sometimes I weep, too, especially if we’ve had adequate red wine. It’s all good, but it’s also a time suck because, tick-tock, the Doomsday Clock  is like about to strike midnight and if all we’re doing is sitting around providing therapy for each other, we will all go down.

Stalling is the answer. If we can buy enough time for the world to wake up before it’s too late, we will have done something.

The OG dropped out of Group. We were meeting in the parking lot behind the old hospital because nobody else is ever in the parking lot so we can be private even while standing socially  distant six feet apart and talk-yelling through pandemic masks. She was like, Guys, you have to  think beyond the bumper stickers. You can’t just run around shouting slogans and getting arrested. Nobody had actually been arrested at that point, we were just thinking through scenarios. Also, what’s wrong with bumper stickers? Also, since when is it okay to call a group of people guys? We figured the OG was full-on menopausing, going all crone on us. It got ugly, with Cedar kind of mask-yelling to the OG what we were all about. Some days later Cedar’s wife  saw the OG, or I can use her real name now that she’s gone, Mira. Mira was going into a frickin’ Dollar Store to buy plastic crap fresh off a container ship from China, so we don’t know if she was ever for real. Like maybe even she was a mole?

The first time we did it, Uta and me, nothing happened. We did it like 30 more times, and still nothing happened. But then, one wild and miraculous night, we placed the shunts and decided to watch from our car; we knew a freight train was due to come through in an hour or so. Inhaled a bit. Loco came bursting out of the tunnel then screeched and slowed and it looked like one of the train cars actually lifted up off of the track a little. High-fived and then we fled. Didn’t want to hang around for the blue lives action.

Then last week, we go again. Different place, closer to downtown, that nice straight section of track where late at night the train blasts right through, gathering speed. Perfect place for de- coupling, which would put the pipeline construction project significantly behind schedule yet again. Stalling is the answer. If we can buy enough time for the world to wake up before it’s too late, we will have done something.

I had my usual kit: rubber gloves, copper wire, and a drill with a round brush attachment. I carried it all in a brown paper bag so that it looks super casual, like maybe I’m carrying a leftover sandwich, which had for real been in the bag, avocado with sprouts, but I’d eaten it on the drive over, so now the plastic wrapping was all that was in the bag along with the materials.

We’d learned what works over the months: the attachment was more secure if I scuffed up the steel first. I worked the drill while Uta gathered some rocks to place over the shunt once it was done. Camo. Then she came and knelt beside me and stripped the black plastic insulation from one end of the wire and started carefully wrapping the wire around the magnet. Then, hold up! WTF? the sound of a braking car, of people running and this blinding light right in our eyes so we turned and ran the other way but didn’t get very far because from that way too there was also a blinding light and people yelling at us and guns and hands up. So we lay down next to the tracks. A sharp pebble was poking into the tender zone below my eye but I was scared to move my head because for a second I really thought they might blow it, my head, off. So I waited till my hands were cuffed behind my back and then I was all, Sir, Ma’am respectful.

There we are: our tiny selves from a former life, kneeling on the tracks, two figures in black pants and puffy down jackets.

The orange jumpsuit is for real, not just for Netflix. The first cell I was in smelled a little like piss after you’ve tried to bleach it out. I was sharing it with someone passed out and snoring. We did one night in the local lock-up and then we got transferred over to federal custody which kind of shook me up. Uta and I were kept separated, so I wasn’t even sure where she was. It still feels like a bad trip. The concrete walls, the metal doors are electronically or magnetically, impossibly, locked. I kept repeating names of all the people who have come before me: Mandela, Ghandi, MLK. Leonard Peltier’s still in the clink. It’s almost like you have to go inside for a while to really get a perspective on outside. You get out, and you realize you’re not actually free if you live in a so-called industrial corporate civilization where our insatiable appetite for cheap so-called goods requires not only sweat-shop labor by impoverished and exploited human beings but also the impoverishment, exploitation, and pollution of sacred lands. This is why Uta makes all her own clothes with the exception of shoes and outerwear. And this is what Cedar used to say in preparation for just such a scenario. The Group officially took responsibility for our actions and anonymously published our website. Everyone knows what our intent was, what our objectives are.

My person came to pick me up when I was released on my own recognizance after two days. I said to my person as we walked out from the courthouse and they handed me my keys and we got in my car, Let’s go camping! Because I am suddenly feeling the sweetness of freedom, it’s like I want to eat all the fresh air and hug the trees harder than usual and go be in Nature away from everybody except for my person and I want us to zip our sleeping bags together so we can lie naked wrapped up in each other all night together in my tent. My mom texted, Will you please call when you’re out? We didn’t end up camping because my person wasn’t very enthusiastic about it and then it turns out I had to meet with lawyers and sign papers and my parents have been all up in my business wondering if they should take out a second mortgage to get a non-free lawyer.

Uta and I were charged with domestic terrorism, which seems extreme, right? Typical fascist bullshit. Nobody got hurt, no trains slowed down. Nothing happened. We didn’t even lay the shunt. How do you prosecute that? We have a hearing next week where Uta and me will plead not guilty, then the judge will bang his gavel and nothing much will happen for months until we go to trial. Cedar thinks that we’ll probably get off on lesser charges, but he also points out the the terrorism charges are ace in terms of publicity.

Like we’ve gone national, news-wise.

The papers are saying 20 to 30, which is kind of heavy. I remind my person that 30 years is way worst case. All she does is say What are you not getting? You will be ancient when you get out and look at me with big, unblinking eyes, which reminds me of Miles showing me the TikTok and saying, Now look at her lizard-like eyelids blinking, and if you freeze-frame here, her eyes go totally black, even the whites. Because sometimes clones are actually operated by serpent alien overlords. Kids! But my person’s eyes no-shit look totally black and they’re sure not acting like the person I knew last week. I’m the same person I’ve been all along, I’ve been laying shunts on railroads for months now. I haven’t changed. The work hasn’t changed. It’s just that everything around me has changed. Miles’s mom, too. When I called and asked if she wanted me to pick up the boys for our regular outdoor hiking time she said, You probably need the time to get your affairs in order. Her voice was liquid nitrogen. Later she emailed, Hey, I’m sorry to hear you made the choices you made. I have to think you didn’t know that shunts can cause derailments and that if one of those oil tanks jumped the track and exploded, Miles and Kai live in the blast zone?!? Everyone’s gone hysterical. What were the chances of anybody actually getting hurt? And, really, as we say in Group, what war is without casualty? What matters more, a single life, or Life?

Uta has a nub, so natch, we toke up and chill. We’re still free, the hearing’s not for another few days. So it’s just me and Uta, friend zone, on her couch. She’s wearing these great silky purple pajama bottoms that I have a hard time not touching. I think about telling her I want to get alien wings tattooed on my back. The OG had once said something about the protection of alien wings in the age of terror. I don’t know what she was going on about but ever since then I’ve had this picture in my head about what they, the wings, would look like. I don’t think they would have feathers, right? They’d start close to my spine and really fill out on my shoulder blades and maybe go all the way to my elbows. But then I decide that I will save that thought for my person. Maybe if I can save up enough before trial I’ll get it done, and maybe my person will get a pair of matching wings. But they’re at home right now, making lasagna. They kind of shrugged when I said I was going over to Uta’s. We gotta talk story, like what we’re telling our lawyers, what our case is. Uta’s couch is turquoise suede, and I think about asking her if it’s real cow suede or regular suede, but I don’t want to know because if it’s cow, we’d have to go sit somewhere else and it’s like super cozy on the couch. I don’t want to move and at the same time I am thinking Fuck. What if it really is 30 years? I can’t breathe right and Uta gives me a weird look and says, What’s wrong with you? Maybe she didn’t say with you, but I heard that anyway. Her dad is a judge so she’s pretty sure that if she says what her non-free lawyer tells her to say it’ll be community service. We go over our story, beat by beat, how I picked her up, how we parked by the fish’n’chips joint, how we walked through the parking lot past the strip malls then along the deserted sidewalk until we came to an unlit stretch of track.

It’s like if we can tell the story from the beginning and notice something different, if we can change a detail, maybe we can change the ending. That’s why I get really particular about remembering what kind of sandwich had been the in the bag with my supplies. Was it avocado with sprouts, or lettuce? It doesn’t matter, says Uta. You’d already eaten it by the time we got out of the car. Just fucking chill and focus already.

She doesn’t get that the details matter, and I like have this flash of I don’t actually want to touch her purple pajamas, but we keep telling our story. Here we are at the tracks, middle of the night, me holding the paper bag.

We didn’t know until we saw on social that it was motion-sensitive cameras that caught us—maybe the OG didn’t snitch. They didn’t give us any details like that when we were in lock-up. When we got out it’s like everybody knew everything. They knew more about what happened to us than we did. Now, on Uta’s couch, she and I watch the surveillance footage on YouTube, the evidence against us. It got leaked, or hacked somehow. We lean into each other so we can both see her smartphone screen, and I notice that her breath is sharp, like old garlic. It hasn’t even been a week and already the footage feels retro and mysterious, from a time completely unlike the one we’re in now. The video is low-grade, dark, and grainy.

There we are: our tiny selves from a former life, kneeling on the tracks, two figures in black pants and puffy down jackets. Uta’s hair bursts from the bottom of her balaclava like light. You can’t see what we’re doing, because our backs are to camera. You might think we’re praying, though if you could see our hands you might see the magnets and wires which, if we’d had the time, if nobody had seen us as we’re seeing ourselves now, we woulda made into a shunt and gently placed on the rails like an offering and maybe this time, we would change the world.