American War Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Omar El Akkad

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2016042308

  ISBN 9780451493583 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780451493590 (ebook)

  ISBN 9781524711184 (open market)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

  Maps by David Lindroth

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue

  Part I: April, 2075—St. James, Louisiana

  Chapter One

  Excerpted from: FEDERAL SYLLABUS GUIDELINES—HISTORY, MODULE EIGHT: THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  Chapter Two

  Excerpted from:

  THESE THE CALLS OF OUR BLOOD: DISPATCHES FROM THE REBEL SOUTH

  Chapter Three

  Excerpted from: WITNESS TO DISUNION: EARLY JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNTS OF THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  Chapter Four

  Excerpted from:

  AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: VOLUME II, 2074–2080

  Part II: July, 2081—Iuka, Mississippi

  Chapter Five

  Excerpted from: NEITHER BREATHE NOR HOPE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA WARTIME QUARANTINE

  Chapter Six

  Excerpted from:

  A NORTHERN SOLDIER’S EDUCATION IN WAR AND PEACE: THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND JR.

  Chapter Seven

  Excerpted from: REMARKS BY KASEB IBN AUMRAN, PRESIDENT OF THE BOUAZIZI UNION, DELIVERED AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY (JUNE 4, 2081)

  Chapter Eight

  Excerpted from: WAR OFFICE—FINAL COMPENSATION RULING ARCHIVE

  Part III: October, 2086—Lincolnton, Georgia

  Chapter Nine

  Excerpted from: ONE SHOT AT HALFWAY BRANCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND

  Chapter Ten

  Excerpted from: ARCHIVES OF THE SPECIAL SENATE COMMITTEE ON INSURRECTIONIST AND SECESSIONIST ACTIVITY—TESTIMONY OF WAR OFFICE DIRECTOR JOSEPH WEILAND JR.

  Chapter Eleven

  Excerpted from: THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—SUGARLOAF DETAINEE LETTERS (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)

  Chapter Twelve

  Excerpted from: FOUND CAUSE: DIARY OF A FORMER SOUTHERN RECRUITER

  Part IV: January, 2095—Lincolnton, Georgia

  Chapter Thirteen

  Excerpted from: REASONABLY SATISFACTORY AND ENCOURAGING TO ALL: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE REUNIFICATION TALKS

  Chapter Fourteen

  Excerpted from: THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—REUNIFICATION DAY CEREMONY INVITATION LETTER (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)

  Chapter Fifteen

  Excerpted from: HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE FOR TRUTH AND REUNIFICATION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS (DECEMBER 1, 2123)

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  To my father

  The one you must punish is the one who punishes you.

  —Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs)

  Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour.

  —Jeremiah 12:9

  PROLOGUE

  When I was young, I collected postcards. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed in the orphanage. Later, when I moved into my first home in New Anchorage, I stored the shoebox at the bottom of an old oil drum in my crumbling toolshed. Having spent most of my life studying the history of war, I found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene.

  Sometimes I thought about getting rid of the oil drum. I worried someone, a colleague from the university perhaps, would see it and think it a kind of petulant political statement, like the occasional secessionist flag or gutted muscle car outside houses in the old Red country—impotent trinkets of rebellion, touchstones of a ruined and ruinous past. I am, after all, a Southerner by birth. And even though I arrived in neutral country at the age of six and never spoke to anyone about my life before then, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of my colleagues secretly believed I still had a little bit of rebel Red in my blood.

  My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.

  I remember the first postcard I bought. It was a photo of old Anchorage. The city’s waterfront is thick with fresh snowfall, the water speckled with shelves of ice, the sun low-strung behind the mountains.

  I was six years old when I saw my first real Alaskan sunset. I stood on the deck of the smuggler’s skiff, a sun-bitten Georgia boy, a refugee. I remember feeling the strange white flakes on my eyelashes, the involuntary rattle of my teeth—feeling, for the first time in my life, cold. I saw near the tops of the mountains that frozen yolk suspended in the sky and thought I had reached the very terminus of the living world. The very end of movement.

  I BELONG TO WHAT they call the Miraculous Generation: those born in the years between the start of the Second American Civil War in 2074 and its end in 2095. Some extend the definition further, including those born during the decade-long plague that followed the end of the war. This country has a long history of defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them, and my generation is no exception. We are the few who escaped the wrath of the homicide bombers and the warring Birds; the few who were spirited into well-stocked cellars or tornado shelters before the Reunification Plague spread across the continent. The few who were just plain lucky.

  I’ve spent my professional career studying this country’s bloody war with itself. I’ve written academic papers and magazine articles, headlined myriad symposiums and workshops. I’ve studied all the surviving source documents: congressional reports, oral histories, harrowing testimony of the plague’s survivors. I’ve reconstructed the infamous events of Reunification Day, when one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death. It is estimated that eleven million people died in the war, and almost ten times that number in the plague that followed.

  I’ve received countless letters from readers and critics taking issue with all manner of historical minutiae—whether the rebels were really responsible for a particular homicide bombing; whether the Massacre at Such-and-Such really was as bad as the Southern propagandists claim. My files contain hundreds of such correspondences, all variations on the same theme: that I, a coddled New Anchorage Northerner, a neutral country elite who’d never seen a day of real fighting, don’t know the first thing about the war.

  But there are things I know that nobody else know
s. I know because she told me. And my knowing makes me complicit.

  NOW, AS I NEAR the end of my life, I’ve been inspecting the accumulated miscellanea of my youth. Recently I found that first postcard I bought. It’s been more than a hundred years since its photograph was taken; all but the sea and the mountains are gone. New Anchorage, a sprawl of low buildings and affluent suburbs nestled at the foot of the hills, has moved further inland over the years. The docks where I once arrived as a disoriented war orphan have been raised and reinforced time and time again. And where once there stood wharfs of knotted wood, there are now modular platforms, designed to be dismantled and relocated quickly. Fierce storms come without warning.

  Sometimes I stroll along the New Anchorage waterfront, past the wharf and the harbor. It’s the closest I can come now to my original arrival point in the neutral country without renting a scavenger’s boat. My doctor says it’s good to walk regularly and that I should try to keep doing so as long as it doesn’t cause me pain. I suspect this is the sort of harmless pabulum he feeds all his terminal patients, those who long ago graduated from “This will help” to “This can’t hurt.”

  It’s a strange thing to be dying. For so long I thought the end of my life would come suddenly, when the plague found its way north to the neutral country, or the Red rebelled once more and we were plunged into another bout of fratricide. Instead, I’ve been sentenced to that most ordinary of deaths, an overabundance of malfunctioning cells. I read once that a moderately ravenous cancer is, in a pragmatic sense, a decent way to die—not so prolonged as to entail years of suffering, but affording enough time that one might have a chance to make the necessary arrangements, to say what needs to be said.

  IT HASN’T SNOWED in years, but every now and then in late January we’ll get a fractal of frost crawling up the windows. On those days I like to go out to the waterfront and watch my breath hang in the air. I feel unburdened. I am no longer afraid.

  I stand at the edge of the boardwalk and watch the water. I think of all the things it has taken, and all that was taken from me. Sometimes I stare out at the sea for hours, well past dark, until I am elsewhere in time and elsewhere in place: back in the battered Red country where I was born.

  And that’s when I see her again, rising out of the water. She is exactly as I remember her, a hulking bronzed body, her back lined with ashen scars, each one a testimony to the torture she was made to endure, the secret crimes committed against her. She rises, a flesh monolith reborn from the severed belly of the Savannah. And I am a child again, yet to be taken from my parents and my home, yet to be betrayed. I am back home by the riverbank and I am happy and I still love her. My secret is I still love her.

  This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.

  I

  April, 2075

  St. James, Louisiana

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was happy then.

  THE SUN BROKE THROUGH a pilgrimage of clouds and cast its unblinking eye upon the Mississippi Sea.

  The coastal waters were brown and still. The sea’s mouth opened wide over ruined marshland, and every year grew wider, the water picking away at the silt and sand and clay, until the old riverside plantations and plastics factories and marine railways became unstable. Before the buildings slid into the water for good, they were stripped of their usable parts by the delta’s last holdout residents. The water swallowed the land. To the southeast, the once glorious city of New Orleans became a well within the walls of its levees. The baptismal rites of a new America.

  A little girl, six years old, sat on the porch of her family’s home under a clapboard awning. She held a plastic container of honey, which was made in the shape of a bear. From the top of its head golden liquid slid out onto the cheap pine floorboard.

  The girl poured the honey into the wood’s deep knots and watched the serpentine manner in which the liquid took to the contours of its new surroundings. This is her earliest memory, the moment she begins.

  And this is how, in those moments when the bitterness subsides, I choose to remember her. A child.

  I wish I had known her then, in those years when she was still unbroken.

  “Sara Chestnut, what do you think you’re doing?” said the girl’s mother, standing behind her near the door of the shipping container in which the Chestnuts made their home. “What did I tell you about wasting what’s not yours to waste?”

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  “Did you work to buy that honey, hmm? No, I didn’t think you did. Go get your sister and get your butt to breakfast before your daddy leaves.”

  “OK, Mama,” the girl said, handing back the half-empty container. She ducked past her mother, who patted dirt from the seat of her fleur-de-lis dress.

  Her name was Sara T. Chestnut but she called herself Sarat. The latter was born of a misunderstanding at the schoolhouse earlier that year. The new kindergarten teacher accidentally read the girl’s middle initial as the last letter of her first name—Sarat. To the little girl’s ears, the new name had a bite to it. Sara ended with an impotent exhale, a fading ahh that disappeared into the air. Sarat snapped shut like a bear trap. A few months later, the school shut down, most of the teachers and students forced northward by the encroaching war. But the name stuck.

  Sarat.

  A HUNDRED FEET from the western riverbank, the Chestnuts lived in a corrugated steel container salvaged from a nearby shipyard. Wedges of steel plating anchored to cement blocks below the ground held the home in place. At the corners, a brown rust crept slowly outward, incubated in ceaseless humidity.

  A lattice of old-fashioned solar panels lined the entirety of the roof, save for one corner occupied by a rainwater tank. A tarp rested near the panels. When storms approached, the tarp was pulled over the roof with ropes tied to its ends and laced through hooks. By guiding the rainfall away from the panels to the tank and, when it overfilled, toward the land and river below, the family was able to collect drinking water and defend their home from rust and decay.

  Sometimes, during winter storms, the family took shelter on the porch, where the awning sagged and leaked, but spared them the unbearable acoustics of the shipping container under heavy rain, which sounded like the bowl of a calypso drum.

  In the summer, when their house felt like a steel kiln, the family spent much of their time outdoors. It was during this extended season, which burned from March through mid-December, that Sarat, her fraternal twin, Dana, and her older brother, Simon, experienced their purest instances of childhood joy. Under the distant watch of their parents, the children would fill buckets of water from the river and use them to drench the clay embankment until it became a slide. Entire afternoons and evenings were spent this way: the children careening down the greased earth into the river and climbing back up with the aid of a knotted rope; squealing with delight on the way down, their backsides leaving deep grooves in the clay.

  In a coop behind the house the family kept an emaciated clutch of chickens. They were loud and moved nervously, their feathers dirty and brown. When they were fed and the weather was not too hot, they produced eggs. In other times, if they were on the edge of revolt or death, they were preemptively slaughtered, their necks pinned down between the nails in a nearby stump.

  The shipping container was segmented by standing clapboards. Benjamin and Martina Chestnut lived in the back of the home. Nine-year-old Simon and the six-year-old twins shared the middle third, living in a peace that grew more and more uneasy by the day.

  In the final third of the home there was a small kitchen table of sand-colored plywood, smeared and notched from years of heavy use. Near the table a pine pantry and jelly cabinet held sweet potatoes, rice, bags of chips and sugar cereal, pecans, flour, and pebbles of grain milled from the sorghum fields that separated the Chestnuts from their nearest neighbor. In a compact fridge that burdened the solar panels, the family kept milk and butter and cans of old Coke.

  By the front door, a statue from the days of Benjamin’s chil
dhood kept vigil. It was the Virgin of Guadalupe, cast in ceramic, her hands pressed against each other, her head lowered in prayer. A beaded bouquet of yellow tickseed and white water lilies lay at her feet, alongside a melted, magnolia-scented candle. When the flowers died and hardened the children were sent out to the fields to find more.

  Sarat skipped past the statue, looking for her sister. She found her in the back of the house, standing on her parents’ bed, inspecting with steel concentration her reflection in the oval vanity mirror. She had taken one of her mother’s house dresses, a simple sleeveless tunic whose violet color held despite countless washings. The little girl wore the top half of the dress, which covered the entirety of her frame; the rest of the garment slid limply off the bed and onto the floor. She had applied, far too generously, her mother’s cherry red lipstick—the jewel of the simple makeup set her mother owned but rarely used. Despite employing utmost delicacy, Dana could not keep within the lines of her small pink lips, and looked now as though she’d hastily eaten a strawberry pie.

  “Come play with me,” Sarat said, confounded by what her twin was doing.

  Dana turned to her sister, annoyed. “I’m busy,” she said.

  “But I’m bored.”

  “I’m being a lady!”

  Dana returned to her mirror, trying to wipe some of the lipstick with the back of her hand.

  “Mama says we have to go have breakfast with Daddy now.”