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“Really, Mom. It’s not the End Times. That whole thing, we’re gonna miss—” He stops talking, listens a minute, then picks back up in Arabic, alternately impatient and gentle.
Enjolras is looking at the same pictures. Those Western skies, flame-orange and raining ash onto cold, sunless streets.
Flipping over magazines, stacking them on one end of the table so the other’s less cluttered, Grantaire needs something to do with his free hand. He doesn’t like to use headphones on calls when he doesn’t have to. Enjolras knows it’s because it feels too sterile, too distant. Grantaire likes to be holding the phone to his ear, like he’s holding onto you while you talk.
Enjolras feels fully flattened. He’s lying on the couch with his laptop. He can’t look away from the photos. Entrancing, otherworldly. Except that Grantaire keeps clattering around, clearing shit up.
“Mom. It’s fine.” He carries a noisy stack of dishes into the kitchen. “Yeah, it’s weird. But it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.” He listens more. “Yep. Yeah. Love you too.”
Then there’s running water, and some scrubbing and a few low swears, and the clank of cleaned dishes into the drain rack.
“You gonna look at those all day?” Grantaire asks when he comes back into the living room. “Thought you were on deadline.”
“How do you not look at this?” Enjolras asks. His hands throw themselves up; they can’t not. “How can anyone look away?”
Grantaire studies him. “You resent me for not caring enough.” He slides the phone into his back pocket, where the shape has worn its imprint into the denim.
“How could I? I’d have no grounds—”
“Ha! So you’ve calculated the justice of it, which means you’ve wondered if it’s fair to resent me, which means, of course, that you’ve been thinking about it. Because you resent me.”
“I love you,” he objects. He does.
“Well, of course you do. It’s hard to harbor a really good fulfilling resentment without love.”
“It’s not that I—” What? It’s not that he resents R for not caring enough. It’s that he can’t escape to that himself. That it’s so hard to act like he doesn’t care.
But then, why should he? Why should he get to pretend, for even a minute, that this world’s ailments don’t consume him whole?
This is the only life I get, he says to himself. It’s an idea that keeps cycling back for him, one that keeps needling its way into the senator’s speeches
*
“When the day shall come for each of us to meet our maker,” she thundered at the convention, “I can assure you that not a one of us, confronted with the awesome power and wisdom of the almighty, will suddenly wish we had cared less for our fellow humans. No one will find herself regretting the compassion and empathy she maintained even when her own life was on a rocky path; no one will think with remorse of the kindness they offered those for whom kindness has too long been in short supply.”
She chose to film in a university theater, with just a camera crew, a few tech people, and Enjolras in attendance. He was the audience, eight rows back, dead center, nodding silently.
Viewers across the country would not see him, nor the black baffles strategically positioned to prevent her voice turning hollow in that vast, empty space.
“This year, we all know, is of particular moment. Even without a pandemic, without devastating levels of unemployment, without a hard, long-overdue re-examining of our nation’s ongoing history of oppression, without all these, still, this year we vote on our own humanity. We vote for the people we ourselves will be on that day, however distant, when we must account for the lives we led—so that we can say, ‘There, too, I struck a blow against injustice.’
“But we do live in a time of unfathomable turmoil and distress. And this means this, now, this is the time when it is most important—more perhaps than any other moment in our lifetimes—that we consult our inner compass and steer toward what we know is right. That we reject cruelty. That we turn our tillers, powered by the strong and unflinching verb of love.
“To do what is right is not always easy. The way of righteousness is littered with obstacles, strewn with self-doubt, and riven by pain. But it is always necessary. Every one of us has at times strayed from the path—but we each have within ourselves the compass to direct us back.
“This year, I ask of you: point your compass toward compassion. It’s the only way that any of us will ever move forward.”
*
Grantaire goes to work on the balcony for a few hours, till his battery gets low and he has to come back to plug in.
“It’s all disasters,” he says to Enjolras, who, having decided that Grantaire is right, it’s useless to spend all day looking at pictures of apocalypse, is now doing some actual scientific outreach for a speech about green energy—because why the fuck not? The senator’s going to need it.
Grantaire plunks next to him on the couch, tugs the laptop out of Enjolras’s hands, and goes on. “There are always gonna be disasters. There’s no way around it. There’s no way, if this makes sense, there’s no way our time could not be a time of disaster. We were born to this world, Enj, because nothing, for nothing, so that nothing.”
“And that means.” Enjolras is not mad at all about having his computer taken. He knows this spiral he’s in is no good for him—and more than that, it’s no fun. It’s a miserable, depressing spiral about which he has no good words at all.
“That means anything we do is something.” He takes in Enjolras’s hollow gaze. “Babe.” It’s not tender. Tender, Enjolras would hate right now. It’s a rough, critical kind of pity that makes Enjolras’s stomach turn over with anticipation.
“It’s too bad, really, we can’t all be the children of fucking refugees. Fleeing war, in my limited experience, it really seems like that gives a certain amount of perspective. Shit is fucking terrible all the time, but not everywhere all the time, and when you get lucky enough to live for a while in a pocket that’s not terrible, that’s a goddamn blessing.”
“This is not the End Times,” Enjolras says in a bleaker imitation of Grantaire, earlier.
Grantaire shakes his head and grins like a man who’s hoped for it. “It never is.”
*
He’s on a group call with Senator Lamarque when the news comes in. They’re talking about civil rights, trying to shape her message.
“The fundamental flaw here, is we live in a nation that only knows how to celebrate winners. It means when we want to laud our heroes, we end up having to lie to ourselves—to tell ourselves those wars they fought are over, won.”
“The dream,” Chida says. “Realized. ”
“Exactly. We love a victor. So civil rights becomes a national bootstraps story, the little people who overcame injustice.”
“And like every bootstraps story, it’s a lie.” Chida looks up, like someone’s in front of her desk, then waves them through. A familiar gesture from pre-pandemic days—her granting of permission to enter the senator’s private office.
“Who wants to honor nuance? Who wants to cheer for incremental, hard-fought, often invisible gains?” Lamarque glances away from the screen at whoever it was Chida sent in. “What’s hap—?” She mutes herself, so the others don’t hear what she hears, just see her eyes close, her jaw clamp tight. She nods, then with her eyes still mostly closed, asks a question. Nods again.
When she comes back on, she is in the middle of a hard breath.
“It’s bad news,” she says, and then she tells them.
“Fuck,” says Chida, the most eternally-professional person Enjolras has ever know.
Lamarque nods. “Yes,” she says. Most of the rest of them are crying or in stasis, resisting the pressure crowding in on all sides, knowing it won’t be long till the levees rupture.
Five minutes later, the bad news is everywhere. Enjolras is trying his absolute best to write a statement for the senator at the same time as he watches the surges of despair crash and bubble across the internet. He is not crying. He doesn’t have time to cry. There will be time later.
But so many people are crying.
People are terrified. He is terrified. He knows the senator is scared. He remembers how she was with Kennedy—and this is Ginsburg. The disasters are everywhere now.
The word reaches Grantaire, of course, because he bursts in from the other room, sees Enjolras, and enfolds him in a gaze. He tilts his head in assessment, and god knows if the conclusion he reaches is the right one—god knows if there is any right, god, what is right, what can be right in a world shored up on the delicate pillars of human flesh and bone—but he says nothing, just curls a heavy, strong hand around Enjolras’s shoulder and holds it there while he types.
He types about disaster. He strikes it out. He types about legacy, and about hope. He strikes that, too. He types that to live can be to fight, that limited decisions can change millions of lives, that every one of us, in whatever place we find ourself, can and must demand a better world.
When Enjolras is done, Grantaire gets a bottle and some glasses. He pours them each a drink.
“To Ruth,” he says. His voice only breaks at the end.