Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

civilization.
    “And look at us now,” she continued. “Look at how ingeniouslythey have coded our politics. Using the same line of attack on our own sovereign authority to suit all their other ends. Of course, over time one begins to imagine connections between the darker forces. But then you say to yourself, No, Charlotte. You’re dramatizing, you’re giving in to conspiracy. You’re satisfying some desire to moralize because, let’s be honest, you’re nothing but a stack of Eastern prejudices. But then you pick up this”—she scanned the books at her feet, spotted the one she wanted, and opened to an earmarked page—“and you think, well maybe so. But just listen to how they put it. Here’s Lee Atwater—you’ve probably never heard of him—explaining how it worked. ‘You start out,’ he says, ‘in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes , and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.’
    “That’s what he says,” she insisted, clapping the book shut. “And so then you think, I’m not mad. Not at all. Taxes are about race. Like everything else. As if sometime in the sixties the public square in our mind changed colors. From imaginary white to imaginary black. And we’ve been running from it ever since. As if anything you couldn’t fence in or nail to your house were the equivalent of the public pool menaced by the dark and the poor. But the public pool’s not in your backyard, you say. It’s nowhere close. True. But it’s in my country. Am I not allowed a patriotism of ideals? Is that what we’ve come to?”
    She paused to breathe.
    “You see, then, what I mean?” she asked.
    “I guess so.”
    “Not that you would agree with any of this, would you?” she said,leaning down to address the mastiff. “He’s become such a reactionary lately. Haven’t you, Sam? All your religious blather. Do you have dogs?”
    “No. We used to have a rabbit.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “Sorry, I—”
    “No, no, I wasn’t talking to you. Sam here’s just a bigot. Thinks you’re a Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They’d pop up in the yard and he’d rest his gun on the sill right there and open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You’d think they’d have come back in strength by now but I never see them. He, of course, was a mugwump. Have you covered the 1880s? Republican, of the very old stripe. Bolted the party in ’84. Small-town lawyer, edited the Finden Gazette . Didn’t like machine politics. Laissez-faire, of course, but it was another time. He railed against the trusts as much as the city bosses, and there he was prescient. You look at the World Trade Organization today and it’s all rather familiar. The way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn’t do to the state legislatures,” she concluded, examining a patch of the mastiff’s back for ticks or lice.
    “I’m afraid the bullies here need their walking,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve run on a bit. But there’s a lot to cover.” She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes directly for the first time. “You will come back, won’t you? Next week?”
    These last many months the intuition of others’ needs had become Nate’s second nature, as if his father’s going had cut him a pair of new, lidless eyes that couldn’t help but see into a person such as this: marooned and specter-driven. What choice did he have?
    ___________
    A S SOON AS he got out of the house, he phoned Emily.
    “Give us your location,” she said. “We’re in transit.”
    Fifteen minutes later, Jason’s Jetta pulled