A CLOUD OF smoke rolled from behind the door and disappeared, thin and wispy, into the open air of the common room. I lost Mara in it as she launched herself through the door, her brown hair bobbing and disappearing into the haze.
I could hear voices, soft and low, too many piling on top of each other to hear any single one. Batting smoke from my eyes, I picked the spot I thought I’d seen Mara and walked blindly forward, step after step after cautious step after—
My foot connected with a mass on the ground. It was dense and lively, the thud of fiber against fiber, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’d kicked a pair of tattered blue jeans, with legs in them. I’d kicked a body.
“Whoa, easy,” the body said slowly, and it tumbled over, away from my foot and back into the abyss.
I couldn’t tell if it was smoke or my overwhelming confusion but the room was less visible from the inside, only stray fragments of light catching pieces of color to interrupt the unending gray around me. “Close it!” a voice shouted loud and clear over the tunnel of steady conversational noise. The door was my only source of light and my only way out. “Close it!” and I slammed it shut. The room was dark.
Music was playing, a familiar beat with a familiar jazz melody on top, piano climbs played soft and loose, a trumpet and an 808 kick drum that thumped against my spine. I knew the voice—“Fuck Your Ethnicity,” Kendrick Lamar. The room slowed down to the swing from the bass and drums; it was as if he commanded the smoke with his voice through the speakers.
My pupils contracted and adjusted, clinging to the bits of detail they could find, and as my hands cleared the smoke around me, I began to put together the room I had walked into.
There were people, and they were everywhere. Too many to count, spread across the floor, seated at rows of tables along the walls, or lounging across one of the eight dormitory-style bunk beds pushed into the corners. The only people not hunched over laptops were hunched over in conversation, every face glowing electric, MacBook blue.
The first faces I found were young; they caught the low light and radiated in it, men and women, somewhere between their late teens and twenties, from what I could tell. Their colors were dark; intentional and interesting, in long T-shirts and tight jeans and crop tops and baggy sweaters. There were older faces, too, people I guessed to be nearly forty; less frequent, less noticeable, but very present, almost like they were fixtures of the room themselves.
The room seemed to get bigger the farther I walked into it. It was pulsating, waves of sound breaking over me every measure when the sub drop landed. I couldn’t believe they could concentrate with the music so loud and the room so dark, but they did. Some people laughed, others clouded up the air with smoke, most stared intensely at the screen in front of them.
My head was spinning.
“Arthur!” I found Mara’s beanie in between two bunk beds, surrounded by three men in long white scarves. “Come here. Don’t linger, you weirdo.”
I had to step over three people on my way to her, trying to smile but mostly focusing on remaining conscious. I could feel the stares of strangers around the room. I was sure I could hear Mara apologizing for me.
“Lucas, Marcus, Jack, this”—she turned to present me as I approached—“is Arthur. Arthur, meet Lucas, Marcus”—she stopped and smiled—“and Jack.”
“Wait—”
The man closest to Mara’s left towered over her, tall enough to watch me approach from above her head. His mouth fell open as I came into the light.
“I know you.” Jack Thompson, the anarchist from the corner of the train, reached a hand out to grab me by the shoulder. “I know you! What’re you doing here?” he asked loudly. He wore a blue button-up hanging over tight gray jeans, and a white scarf around his neck, embroidered with some kind of fist symbol with green flowers that I didn’t recognize. “What’s he doing here?” He turned his attention to Mara before I could respond.
“This is Arthur Pull—”
“What are we doing here?” I asked to interrupt. “Where the hell are we?”
All four of them heard me, but none responded.
“Mara?”
Jack continued speaking to her, and right past me. “He doesn’t know? I literally met this kid on the train the other day!”
“No! I don’t—”
“Relax.” She put her hand against my shoulder. “He’s important,” she whispered to Jack, but it sounded like an apology. I couldn’t stop myself from watching him watch her. “Let me introduce him to the room. You’ll understand.”
“Mara, I can’t let just anybody speak to the room, and besides, this kid is . . . not one of us.”
I watched them have a conversation without speaking: Mara pleading, Jack hesitating, Mara assuring, Jack agreeing. Finally, Jack turned to me, his right hand finding mine. “Bygones, brother. Bye and gone. Maybe you’re more on it than I thought. I appreciate you showing up.”
Before I could tell him I didn’t know what he meant, he paused the music, and the conversation in the room halted. My eyes had fully adjusted, and without the mystique of smoke and darkness, the room was much less intimidating. There were too many people; it was hot and cramped and the bins of trash in the corner overflowed. Everyone was dressed comfortably, not fashionably, and many of them looked like they hadn’t slept. Across all the screens I could see were coding programs I didn’t recognize.
“Movement.” Jack’s voice was soft, but carried to every corner. He must have been the leader, the way everyone looked at him. “We got a new presence.”
“Hello, everyone. I’m Mara, Leila’s sister, in case you’ve forgotten.” Mara’s ever-present poise made her perfectly comfortable with this kind of attention. “She certainly always was more of the one in the family for speeches, but I’ll do my best.” The room laughed.
When she spoke again, it was louder and more deliberate. With this many eyes on her, her voice sounded revolutionary.
“The greatest movements of human history are experiments in truth. Movements in which the righteous few are compelled against their powerful oppressors, not because what they’re doing seems easy or even possible, but because they understand that they are closer to the righteous, the almighty . . . the truth. And when you’re closer to that kind of truth, then you are, undoubtedly, closer to the spirit. In movements of truth such as this, there’s no room for doubt.”
Nodding and drinking and light applause around the room.
“The trouble, of course, is that proper reason dictates we must question every truth, including our own. Only a foolish man is certain of anything, and true intellect is the ability to doubt. What an impossible paradox the universe offers: to know what is right, we must doubt what is right. Fortunately, the universe has created one, and only one, precarious way of validating truth: it sends a sign.”
Word after unquestioned word, the Mara I knew grew, to a bigger, emboldened version. She stared her audience in the face as she spoke, rather than looking past them.
“Before Moses could free the Israelites from their oppression in Egypt, he was visited by the great truth, coming to him in the form of a burning bush, a message from the divine that his path was true. The story of every great movement is littered with examples of this: people reaching for what is holy, and what is holy reaching back.
“The trail to any great revolution must be marked by these signs, these mitzvahs, these hallmarks of either great fate or great coincidence, whichever one you put your faith in. Without them, the truth remains questionable. But with them, a movement becomes a revolution.
“I speak to you all directly now—your purpose is great, your path is righteous, you are closer to the truth than the powers that oppress you, and today, I can prove it. Today, I bring you a sign.”
The room was so silent you could hear the old wood in the walls bending. Every face in the room was reaching toward her, expectantly. Mara, the revolutionary. Mara, the leader. Mara, turning to look directly at me.
“His name is Arthur,” she said.
Fifty-some faces turned to me.
If there were ever a moment that I was so overwhelmed by fear and self-consciousness that I’d lose control of my bowels and shit where I stood, it would have been that one. I clenched my stomach, but nearly fainted under the weight of her introduction. She was talking about me. I was the burning bush.
The room felt twice as hot and I became suddenly aware of every line on my face, every spot on my hoodie, every out-of-place curl in my uncombed hair. They could see the sweat forming on my forehead, the uncomfortable bend of my smile. I could feel eyes burning holes into my chest.
“Arthur.” There was Mara’s face, a calm in the storm. “Tell them who your grandfather is.”
I almost choked on spit before speaking. “Hello, I, uh, I’m, my name is Arthur.” Stares intensified. I looked to her for help.
“And—” She spoke for me. “Your grandfather is . . .”
My eyes widened; I tried to jerk my head in a quick shake, to let her know there was no way in hell I was telling a room full of people that my grandpa was—
“Arthur Louis Pullman.” She spoke for me.
I heard every tick of every wristwatch in the room. No one raised a bottle or even a cigarette, they just sat staring, every pair of eyes begging for an explanation. I tried to concentrate on sinking into the floor beneath my feet.
“I’m sorry.” Jack’s voice came from behind me. “Arthur Louis—the Arthur Louis Pullman?”
Mara nodded.
“Our Arthur Louis Pullman?” Jack asked, and I twisted to face him, several minutes behind the conversation—their Arthur Louis Pullman?
“Mara, I appreciate the dramatics, but the odds . . . I mean, do you have any kind of proof, or—”
“Arthur, show him the photo.”
I didn’t, right away. I clutched it to my thigh inside my pocket, trying to catch up but running circles in my head instead. I looked from Jack to Mara, back to Jack, and then to Mara once more, painfully aware of the mob of strangers waiting silently in just-visible darkness. She didn’t waver in her expression, but nodded to where my hand twisted in my pocket. I did as she asked.
For a full minute, Jack inspected it, glancing up occasionally, comparing the wide-eyed, full-haired eighth grader in the photo to the unwashed and sullen eighteen-year-old in front of him.
Finally, he raised his head and whispered, “Jesus Christ. You’re his fucking grandson.”
The room burst into wild and frenzied applause. I half smiled, unsure of what I had done to be so celebrated. “Someone get these kids some chemicals!” someone hollered over the noise of Kendrick Lamar firing up the speakers once more, and a cup was thrust into my hand, a suspicious silver carbonated mix that smelled a lot more like liquor than it did like Sprite. It was a mess of celebration. People swarmed around me, my drink spilling onto several black shirts.
“What is this?” I shouted over the noise at Mara. “Why am I a . . . bush?”
“You didn’t tell him?” Jack stepped between us, raising his own red Solo cup to avoid having it knocked out of his hand. “He really doesn’t know anything?”
A beautiful blonde girl in black sweatpants and a tattered pink sweater grabbed my arm. “He gave you his name?” Her face was less than a foot from my own.
“Uh, yeah. I mean, he, I guess he, like, gave it to my dad and, then, my dad gave it to me.”
She swayed into me, her hands against my chest for support. “Wow.” Her breath was warm cigarettes against my cheek. I imagined it was Kaitlin’s breath against my cheek and I wiggled away from her.
“Would you like some answers?” Mara pulled my arm, delighted, watching me. “Or are you rather enjoying being a mitzvah?”
“Answers,” I said, and she yanked me through the crowd to a quieter, smaller dormitory room through a door on the back wall. Jack was already waiting.
“Why didn’t you tell me that when we met?” Jack addressed me, then turned to Mara. “How’d you find him? How’d you even know he existed?”
“He found me.” Mara sat cross-legged on a lone desk. “I told you, it was a sign.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s . . . incredible. Leila and I looked it up once, early on. We knew this kid existed but all we could find about him was some tennis shit?” Jack glanced over to me every few seconds in the low light, reading and judging and cataloging every line of my face and muscle on my body. “And you’re sure we can trust him?”
Mara smiled. “I’m sure. He’s truthful. Sometimes, he wakes up screaming.”
I burned red but Jack smiled. “Good.” And for the first time, he addressed me straight on, clasping my shoulder with a long, muscular arm, close enough for me to smell him. “Then you’re fucked in the head. Just like the rest of us.”
“I don’t have any idea what any of you are talking about,” I confessed.
Jack lit a cigarette and exhaled, the smoke lingering in front of his face. “So you know nothing about who we are?” He pointed to Mara. “Who she is? Who her sister is?”
I shook my head.
“Who your grandfather is?”
I hesitated, but shook my head again.
“Wow. Well, then this is gonna require a little history lesson. You might wanna sit.”
Jack was casual, effortlessly charming with a cigarette. I pulled out my American Spirits and tried to casually, effortlessly light my own to distract from the circus in my chest. I couldn’t get the flame on the lighter to stay on long enough to spark the paper.
Jack cleared his throat. “Does the Freak Power Party mean anything to you?”
I shook my head and tried not to notice his disappointment.
Jack drew his own lighter and held it up to my cigarette for me. “Alright, well, then I guess we’ll start there.
“In 1967, the world was ending. It was the height of the Vietnam War and political corruption was a fucking epidemic in the United States. So Hunter S. Thompson—one of the best social justice journalists of the time, I’m sure you’ve heard of him”—I nodded, pretending I had—“decided to start a political, social movement. He observed how colossally fucked America was by its government, and decided Americans needed not just a new political alternative, but a new kind of political alternative. Something totally grassroots, completely outside the establishment.”
He began to walk back and forth, spinning to address the opposite wall every time he ran out of space. “He found Aspen, Colorado, a tiny city with a bunch of people who didn’t really give a shit about politics, and set up shop. The idea was to find all the disenfranchised people that the rest of the political world had forgotten about, and get them out to vote for his party—Freak Power. Two candidates on the ballot—Joe Edwards for mayor, Thompson himself running for sheriff. He united the addicts, the bikers, the criminals, the immigrants—the ‘Heads,’ as he called them—and he turned them into a voting bloc. It was all satire—I mean, the fucking name of it was Freak Power—but he wanted to prove that when you unite the people that nobody else cares about, there’s a hell of a lot more of us than them.”
“So this is—”
“Hold on. Still a lot left.” Jack was pacing faster. “After a few setbacks, as the election got closer, Hunter realized they were going to lose. He wrote a letter to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, saying, The outlook here is grim . . . I trust you see my problem in timing and magnitude . . . but the sheriff’s gig is just a small part of the overall plot. He had realized that losing meant the whole movement wasn’t going to have the impact he wanted; it was actually going to have the opposite. People would think, well, if you can’t even win Aspen, what hope is there for everybody else? He realized that solutions couldn’t come from within the existing framework. So he started work on something much, much more important.
“In 1967, under the guise of the Freak Power Party and in the room where we’re standing now, he formed a separate organization. A secret one. He personally sought out the best social justice writers at the time, and trained them into a small army of—well, honestly the best word to describe it is prophets. Then he sent them out, city to city, to speak to young people, get them fired up and pissed off, and then teach them to revolt. You gotta remember, protesting hadn’t really kicked off in America yet. Sure, some people had started, but it was all disconnected, so the papers could just write it off like some fringe movement. Everybody was too scared of Nixon.
“The result was hysteria. Protest exploded across the country; Savio and the Summer of Love, Days of Rage in Chicago, Ohio riots—all of it coming from the same underground group of fifteen writers. Their photos are everywhere, their fingerprints are all over the newspaper stories, but nobody ever figured out a fucking thing. They had to keep it a secret, because they knew if Nixon got word of something like that, he’d stomp it out at its source. This was the sixties and seventies; people were getting killed for much less. And the magnitude of it, I mean—these were the protests that ended the Vietnam War, and it was all set into motion by fifteen guys. By one fucking brilliant idea. Hunter S. Thompson, Duke, he was the real leader of it all, but he knew he couldn’t stand too close to it. People knew him. So to run the operation on the ground, he brought in a kid, a seventeen-year-old he met at a protest in San Francisco. Fresh, excited, a little sheltered, but brilliant. You know who that was?”
The words caught in my throat. “My grandpa.”
Mara nodded. “Arthur Louis Pullman. The United States’s glorious human protest history. It was the most significant political movement in American since 1776, and it’s all still a secret.”
I looked back and forth between them. “So that makes you guys—”
“We’re that movement, 2.0,” Jack took over. “After ALP—sorry, after your grandfather—after he . . . died”—he paused, waiting for me to react, but I didn’t—“a few of us in a forum online started talking about how the organization needed a resurgence. So me and this girl Leila—Mara’s sister—we built our own group of writers, and musicians, and journalists, and computer technicians, and lawyers, ten times the size of the original. We got the room back—they were trying to close this place, and we convinced them to stay open, just for us—we gathered everyone together in Denver; now this, that you’re standing right in the fucking middle of, is the reclaiming of that ideology.”
My head spun. “But there’s no draft, or even war, really—”
“Oh, yes, there fucking is.” I remembered our conversation from the train, his insistence that America was engaged in, or about to engage in, some kind of all-out class warfare. “There’s a corporate ruling class that controls everything that happens in this country,” he continued. “They control politics, they control the media, they control public resources, and if you don’t realize it, then they’re fucking controlling you, too. And they’re sitting in penthouses and private planes, drinking twenty-thousand-dollar bottles of champagne while they watch the world burn.”
“You mean like . . . corporations?”
“Don’t just say it like it’s some sophomore thesis paper!” Jack was pacing wilder than ever. I could feel why he was the leader. He was so intensely excited, so passionately hateful, that he couldn’t hold himself in one place while he spoke. “This isn’t abstract! These are real people, with real obsessions, with their hands around every ballsack in Washington, DC, muscling them into cutting welfare while one in five kids is going hungry, and ignoring emissions while half the species on Earth are dying out. Everyone knows it’s fucked up, everyone knows that politicians are puppets for corporations, everyone knows the Earth is being destroyed, and somebody needs to stand up and say, ‘Hey, fuck you, we’re not going to take this anymore. We’re the people, and we want our power back.’”
“Okay. So you’re going to . . . protest?”
Jack shook his head. “Nope, not us. I mean, we’ve been there, we’ve had a presence everywhere, but those are coming from people’s real, organic anger. We’re here to channel that. The original Great Purpose plan wouldn’t have the same effect today, so we’ve had to get more . . . pragmatic.”
I started to notice the charts and graphs all around the room: maps of political districts, polling data for positions I didn’t recognize, and names that meant nothing to me. It was obsessive, printed documents with scribbling all over them, chalkboards so hastily rewritten that their old messages still snuck through.
“This part was actually Mara’s sister’s idea. Do you know what the second most politically powerful office in the country is, behind the president?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A mayor. There are about two hundred American cities where mayors have functionally unchecked authority—they can legislate through local ordinance, build a government of their choosing through appointments, veto any proposal, even reassign federal government funds. After that, it’s a city manager. After that, city councillor. Local politics is where shit actually gets done. That’s what we need to take back.
“So we’ve recruited some candidates—super-progressive, anticapitalist candidates—to run in local elections, in conservative cities across America. Thirty-three city managers, forty-five city councillors, and fifteen mayors.”
He pointed to a table on the wall; cities in one column, political offices in another, names in the last. I recognized one name from the list. Next to CARSON CITY, NEVADA, the name MARA BHATT.
I turned to her, seated on top of the only desk in the room, half her face hiding behind a shadow. “But they’re gonna lose—”
“You’d think. But that’s where the real work of what we do comes in. America’s current political system infrastructure was built by the people who still maintain and control it—the old and wealthy. It’s discouraging, but it also means their voting systems are as archaic as their candidates. This is where youth has its advantages. Those people out there—” He motioned back toward the main room. “Half of them are computer engineers, and they’re really, really fucking good. They’ve built programs that live within directory computers and voting machines, then automatically register voters, contact those voters about their ballots, and submit them, without actual physical interaction. And in the process, maybe our candidate gets supported. Maybe that’s what all of these people would want anyway. Maybe the city accidentally does what it’s wanted to do since the start of this oligarchy shit show.”
“You’re rigging elections?”
“No,” Jack snapped. “We’re suggesting something people already want. The other side has been weaponizing voter suppression since the birth of America. It’s about time somebody weaponized voter turnout. You couldn’t do it on a presidential level, because there’s too much scrutiny, but who’s gonna give a shit about a local election? In most cases, we’re talking about a couple hundred votes making the difference. We’re gonna turn power in America’s cities over to the people who will actually protect them.”
“But how— They don’t even live in these places. How could she even be the mayor if—”
“Arthur.” He stopped me. “You’re coming in at, like, step nine of a ten-step resistance. Every one of those problems has been solved. We’re already on the moon. Enjoy it.”
“Okay.” The engine in my head was still processing. “Okay. So this is the new Freak Power Party? Or . . .”
“No, Freak Power was the diversion. We’re the more important part. We’re the ones spreading the ideas, inciting the riots, inspiring the masses.”
“And what’s that called?”
Jack smiled and pointed toward the far wall, directly opposite the door. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it: expertly painted across the wall, above a fireplace, was the symbol from Jack’s scarf, a fist holding a small, green branch, and two bold, enormous words:
GREAT PURPOSE.