She ditched the trailer as soon as he helped her find her family living in a yurt inflated around a cylindrical heater. There was a cluster of them for refugee families that had come to live off employees, between the trees to the south of “TempTown”, the original lot of trailers she remembered, tiled six times from its original size. They didn’t have any pills ready for her but there was a pharmacy on-site with all kinds of prescriptions, they’d have to talk to the ESOP trust about arranging one, but she slept with her head on Micha’s belly like a kid on birthday mornings when they got to stay under the covers, and the waves were grounded all night. They’d have to negotiate, as they had for the yurt, through the ESOP trust - another thing Bol was in charge of. It had provided the handheld shortwave radio that looked like a pipe bomb with an iPod shuffle wheel for cycling through channels through which they had contacted the emergency switchboard. In its rubber grip were lightly embossed the letters “N.A.S.U.”

Despite her field, her research, Polly O’Malley had never heard of the North American Superconductors Union, a militant industrial union that used shortwave transmissions to organize. The things that happened on these sites, she quickly learned, didn’t make it into the news, or even what was left of the internet, or academic journals. On her first night between them in a ratty sleeping bag, the same thick plaid wool as Bol’s shirt, she heard eerie noises from the family of arctic foxes she saw in the morning frequenting the garbage heap. A second canteen had been set up in the Guest Camp (on the opposite side of TempTown, serving bottomless tanks of pulled pork, baked beans and chickpeas. She’d rarely see Thomas at lunch; he visited his parents’ yurt for dinner a couple of nights a week when he didn’t take overtime, as he did most nights to contribute to their stay. He also organized with NASU, which was secretive business. She’d once seen his silhouette climbing one of the giant shortwave transmitters in the sunset. “You’re getting close to Bol, I’ve heard. He talks about you on the floor.” This surprised her. They talked, but not more than she talked to anyone else yet. Every lunch break and at least once every evening she’d find him sitting on the same stump, on the edge of the woods just between the site and TempTown, gazing between the trunks to the sea.

<<prev<< >>next>>