Chapter Text
“I need you to keep your eyes open!” Rey shouts through her respirator. “Open! Open! Open!” The water bottle in her hand shakes; she doesn’t know if the girl can’t hear her or just can’t fight the instinct to shut her eyes against the pain that must be burning through them. She’s moaning in pain, and it’s a horrible, helpless sound, worse than the screaming down the street. “Please open your eyes!”
The girl shakes her head, which at least tells Rey she can hear her. “I’m going to touch you,” Rey shouts. “Nod if that’s okay. Shake for no.” The girl nods. It’s dark where they are; they’re leaving space under the lights for what the cameras need to catch — the kicks, the blows, the cars rolling into the crowds. Rey makes a mental note to add a miner’s lamp to her gear, delicately places her gloved fingers on the girls eye, and pushes the lids apart.
It’s horrifying. Even in the dark, Rey can see the blank redness of the girl’s eye, not bloodshot but solid bloody red, like it’s been dyed. She pours the water in, holding tight to the lids and raising the bottle, hoping she can flush the eye thoroughly enough to do some good. The girl moans and struggles, and Rey moves to the other eye.
“When you go home,” she shouts, not just for the girl but for everyone around her, “take off your clothes immediately and put them in a bag and throw them the fuck away. Shower as soon as you can, for as long as you can stand. Lots of soap. Rinse your eyes with cold water. Okay? Rinse your eyes with cold water!”
Is she shrieking? It kind of feels like she’s shrieking. Her throat hurts. She checks the seal on her respirator. It's still tight against her skin.
Ben lies on his back in the dark, and he stares at the ceiling, and he sweats. In his head, he argues with himself. Or anyway with versions of himself which sound very, very much like his mother.
What am I supposed to do about it?
Shouldn’t you try to do something?
He could turn on the air conditioner. It has a remote, which is easily within reach. Right beside his phone.
The problem is the police.
And are the police the only problem?
He picks up his phone and looks at his twitter feed again. He doesn’t click on the tweet; the video proceeds on mute. Protesters march silently; the brilliant yellow gas billows up silently; the camera jolts and the protesters scatter in silence, fall in silence. But he knows they’re screaming.
It’s too big. It’s gone too far. There’s no stopping it.
But his thumb moves faster than the argument in his head. Home — phone —
It’s after midnight. Maybe she won’t pick up. If she doesn’t pick up then it’s not his problem. He tried. He’ll hang up before the leave-a-message beep, and he’ll have tried, and everything will be the same. Except he’ll have tried, and that should count for something.
She picks up.
The streets are almost empty when Rey makes it to check-in. Poe is waiting for her, leaning against the green iron railing of the subway station entrance with his mask pulled down. He’s got to play the respectability game; Rey’s got her white long-sleeve with the red tape spelling out MEDIC and her messy, cobbled-together conglomeration of bike helmet, respirator, and goggles, but Poe’s wearing slacks and a button-down and a tidy little blue and white yarmulke. The button-down has fresh sweat stains under the arms, and the knees of his pants are filthy. When he sees her trudging towards him, he pulls his mask back up and goes to meet her. “All clear?”
She shrugs, exhausted. “I think everybody got home. No ambulance requests.”
“Any major injuries?”
She shucks off her headgear on the steps down. He offers her a fresh cloth mask, and God it’s a fucking relief after hours in the respirator. “You mean besides the multiple blindings? Topical chemical burns? Everybody throwing up — I have never seen that many people vomit after tear gas inhalation, Poe.” And she’s spent the night telling them to put baking soda on their skin at home, and drink water, and not offering anything but sips from her own water bottles, because she needed to save it for her frantic and possibly futile attempts at flushing those burned, red eyes.
“Is it tear gas? The yellow stuff?”
“‘Tear gas’ isn’t any one thing. It’s just any aerosol compound the government’s allowed to use on its own people.”
“But that yellow shit is… something else.”
Rey sighs, and swipes her metrocard. “Yeah.” She rubs her fingers together as she tucks the card away. Her hands are bare now. But she feels like she can still feel the rubber gloves. “It’s not just CS with some new dye. I don’t know what it is. But it’s… real bad shit.”
Above his mask, Poe’s eyes are crinkled in concern. “Are you okay, Rey?”
“Fine.” She’s not blind. She’s not burned. “Just tired.”
“More than valid,” Poe says. “Let’s get you home.”
“Ben? Ben, what’s wrong?”
“Mom,” he says. “Don’t freak out.”
“Calming words if I ever heard them, Benjamin!” she snaps, and he can hear her fumbling around on the other end of the line. In the background, his father mumbles something irritable. He probably was asleep. Probably they both were.
“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. I promise. It’s just. I thought you should know.”
“Know what?” she asks, warily.
“You’re gonna start… seeing some stuff. Hearing about some stuff. FO makes it, Mom. I’m sorry.”
She is tired. She does need the long minutes of silence Poe grants her, trudging on the stairs, rocking beside him on the train, staring blankly up into the little glimpses of night sky she can catch as the cars emerge aboveground. Her brain feels like it’s fallen down seven flights of stairs and then been stepped on.
But as the train pulls into her station, her mind gives another stubborn kick. “If I just knew what it was,” she says. “Maybe I could treat them better? Or we could give better advice.”
“Can you do tests or something?”
“No. I don’t have a lab, plus it’s hard to capture.” The doors open, and she hauls herself to her feet. “Do we know anything besides that it’s yellow and the NYPD buys it?”
“Not a thing,” he calls after her. “Good luck!”
“You too,” she says over her shoulder, because they all need it.
There’s a long silence from the other end. His mother sighs. “What kind of stuff?”
“It’s an aerosol lachrymatory agent,” he says.
“Isn’t that what you said all of it is?”
“Yes. I mean, kind of; we also do handcuffs.”
“Oh, well then. Handcuffs.”
Ben clenches his fists. Because he’s alone in his apartment, and there’s no one to see him do it, he sits up and crashes his fist into his pillow. “What I’m trying to say, if you’d just let me fucking talk —“ She didn’t interrupt him. She has in fact given him oceans of time in which to talk, and they both know it. “This one is — it’s called ST-R Vapor.” He breathes in the still, heavy air of his apartment, with nothing particularly bad in it except its stillness. “It’s worse. Than the others.”
“Worse how?”
“I don’t know!” He hits the pillow again. “I just know they were talking about it at the office, saying… weird shit.” Can’t wait to see how they like this one. Love to see them get a nice, big breath of that sunshine. “And I saw some video. Of it being used.” On the them the people in the office never named. Hundreds of people, mostly young, more than half of them Black. “So I just wanted to say. If your group goes out to a protest or something.” He gathers the pillow to his chest, squeezing and squeezing it under his arm. “It’s yellow. Bright yellow.”
There’s another one of those long, patient silences, in which he could talk. If he had anything to say. Then she says, “So you called to warn us?”
He exhales. “Yeah.”
“That’s all?”
If the pillow were alive, he would have killed it. It would be strangled and crushed. “What else am I supposed to fucking do?”
“You could quit your job,” she says quietly.
“You think that would make some fucking difference?” he explodes. “You think there aren’t fifty fucking lawyers lined up to take my job if I quit? And they’ll do it with a song in their hearts and they sure as fuck won’t call you to warn you!”
“Ben.” His mother learned long years ago not to use her soothing-voice on him, that it just makes it worse. They’re neither of them soothing people, really, and he doesn’t like it when she pretends to be. Instead she speaks to him in flat, measured tones, like an exam proctor. “You know what I think about that line of argument.”
“Yeah, I know your counterargument is emotion-driven bullshit, that’s what I know!”
“Do you actually disagree, or are you just angry at Luke for making the case in public? I didn’t like it either; it was, frankly, an asshole move on my brother’s part and you are welcome to refuse to forgive him. I never forgave my father and I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t support you in not forgiving your uncle.”
“It’s not about forgiving.” Not that he is going to forgive. “He’s just wrong! I’m not fucking Stephen Miller! I’m just a fucking lawyer; I review fucking contracts for fuck’s sake!”
“We both know there’s a lot that can go on in a contract, Benny.” She says it wearily, lawyer-to-lawyer, and he doesn’t like that, either. He doesn’t like anything, which makes sense, because nothing is ever any good. Not her, not him, not anything. He digs his fingers under the pillowcase, into the pillow, and tears.
“They’re government contracts and they vouch for scientifically attested facts.” Feathers are spilling out of the pillow, little brown and white downy feathers which will be hell to walk barefoot on and hell to vacuum. He deepens the tear. His mother is silent again. He tries to fold the pillowcase to keep the feathers inside, but they spill out of the corners and drift into the air, and it reminds him of gas, aerosol lachrymatory agent, billowing bright yellow out of a canister that he knows has FO ST-R stamped on the bottom.
The shower strips away the sweat and the grime. Rey imagines red-eyed people across the borough tonight, probably in other boroughs too, standing in the shower and trying to make the burning stop. If water doesn’t help, she guesses, some of them will do stupid, stupid things, like try to put baking soda in their eyes. Because people in pain do stupid, stupid things. As well she knows.
She has an interview tomorrow. She should be polishing her talking points. But every time she looks at her CV — it’s just a CV. It looks like everyone else’s. Worse than lots. Why should they hire her? They’re going to ask, and what’s she going to tell them? Well, my dissertation involved structural studies on artificial analogues to peptide toxins and — who cares? Her work isn’t sexy; it was obvious the year she started that it was a total dead end on the novel coronavirus front, and even if it wasn’t, hyper-funded R&D teams could and would squeeze more out of it than she ever could in a CUNY lab.
Maybe she should try applying for K-12 teaching jobs. She doesn’t have a credential, but at a private school — where she would be constantly surrounded by kids whose parents lavished money and attention and love on them —
She doesn’t want to teach at a private school.
When she can’t justify staying in the shower any longer, she wraps herself in a towel and checks her email one last time, just in case some weirdo biotech firm she’s never heard of has headhunted her or something.
The only email is from Amilyn, and it’s not even really from Amilyn. It’s just an automated reminder that the High Holy Days are coming up. Rey tries to summon up some feeling for the new year, joy or dread or something. The best she can come up with is, wow, that’s a really high number.
There’s something kind of inherently hopeful in that, in thinking about just how long it’s all been going on. Isn’t there?
She goes to bed.
“Well, I’m afraid you’re a bit too late in any case,” his mother says, and Ben stiffens. “JPJ was part of a protest tonight, and there was a yellow gas used on them. About an hour ago I got a text from Poe. He said there’d been numerous injuries and the volunteer medic force was overwhelmed. The one who came with them from JPJ wanted to know if I had any way to get any scientific information about the new gas.”
Now it’s Ben’s turn to sit in silence, with his fists clenched and feathers settling on his bedspread and around his feet.
“So if you won’t quit your job, Ben, but you would like to do something? And since you review those contracts with their scientifically attested facts. There’s a girl I’d like you to meet.”