When Do You Prepare for a Civil War
By Steven Genise
You prepare for it alongside doing the dishes and folding the laundry. You prepare for it when you get into your car and drive to work and listen to talk radio. You prepare for it when you open the news and text your friends and family, when all conversations buzz with this unspeakable subtext that nobody feels confident enough to voice, and because of that you’re never really sure the subtext is there to begin with or whether you’re just projecting. You prepare for it in your excitement when someone important mentions the possibility because it validates your fears, and again in your guilt when you realize the implications of that. You prepare for it when you’re walking down the sidewalk, trying to imagine what it will look like when it’s shattered and pitted. Will the collapsed buildings look like the pictures you’ve seen from other countries? Or will it look more like the aftermath of a hurricane: tumbled spears of broken studs and joists. Probably a lot of it will burn, but you left the wildfire state before the wildfires happened, so you don’t know what that looks like either, really, except what you’ve seen on the news. You prepare for it when you look at your spouse standing at the counter grinding coffee, imaging them with dirt on their face and scars, and thin.
You prepare for it when you run through your options about where you’ll go, what you’ll do, how you’ll react, and with each iteration feeling more and more fantastical than the one before it, each iteration crackling with the possibility that you’re just finding excuses to believe your neighborhood will be fine, your house will be safe, you won’t be a nameless body dug out of the rubble five years after the world settles down. Each iteration bringing the job of the prepper closer to the job of the author.
You prepare for it when your childhood friend goes AWOL from his post in the state forces and shows up at your door, bag in hand, even though you live on the other side of the country. You prepare for it when you show him to your couch, lay some blankets out, and make everyone a fresh cup of coffee. You go through all your good memories together, like when he dragged you over to the chain link fence in ninth grade to introduce you to his girlfriend, pointed out onto the field where a row of cheerleaders were tumbling under the floodlights, and you said “which one?” Or twelve years later, when that cheerleader was now a sculptor, and you were marrying her, and you told the revolutionary to fuck off in the ballroom of the hotel because you had too much to deal with than to help him figure out how to mingle with your extended family. Or in between, when the three of you shared a moment you vowed never to speak of outside your triangle, which you recount only with an awkward sigh.
You prepare for it when the sculptor gets back from the doctor and confirms the happiest fear any of you had. These kinds of things evolve, they don’t spontaneously erupt fully formed. They grow into babies from conception like everyone else, and then into adulthood. Their gestational period is not all that much longer than ours, though, and unless you’re paying attention, many people don’t see that gestation, especially from the state media, and so the effect to most is that they sprung from the head of the people like Athena from Zeus. It’s frustrating if you’re the one going into the doctor every day to look at the new sonograms, if you’re following its steady growth, the extension of its fingernails, the pitting of its nostrils, the increasing force of its beating heart, but nine months isn’t as long as it sounds. It’s actually quite brief, and so you can understand how most people miss it, especially if its birth is not something you ever expected, ever wanted, and every day you find reasons to categorize its new features as something that will lead to its miscarriage rather than its delivery. But nine months is not a long time. It takes only one trimester for people to stop saying “protest” and start saying “bloc,” and for the state to slowly, day by day, dial up the muzzle velocity of their less-lethal rounds until they go from bruising legs to shattering helmets. It takes another trimester for emblems and badges to disappear, for name tags to be taped over, for faces to be covered. But it stays stable during that second trimester. It’s not a shooting war, and so when people throw around that term it feels willfully naive to the horrors that term engenders, and you think Okay, this is where it will stay. But the third trimester sees bullets, body armor, trucks, and then delivery.
You prepare for it when you zip your bag shut for the last time, and hold the sculptor in your arms and kiss her forehead. When you hug the revolutionary, and the three of you cry before you go. I’m not a materialist, but I think I’ll miss my desk the most.
THE END