Martha, my darling child,
By the time you are given this note I will be several days away to the northeast, so no point in looking for me. I figure I'll reach Canada, or 'die trying.' Either way, this is farewell, sweetheart. I shall think of you always, but I do not think we will meet again.
Martha, this is good news. It is a gift to you. It is so that you have your choices open, so you can make your way as you will from here. I've nothing except this to give you now. I'm not a citizen anymore. Got no rights. Got no home. Got one arm left. My choices are to wait for them to come and get me or to make them come find me, and you don't need any part of that. What you need now is to be able to say you never knew me, and that's the gift that's in your hands right now.
You'll be fifteen soon. And you're one of the lucky ones. You caught the flu and coughed it out, when so many others drowned in their beds. You made it. You have an open road. It would be dumb of me to hang my deeds around your neck. It would be dumb of you to let that happen. We're connected, if I stay in Portland. Your options become as narrow as mine. That's why I need to disappear, so that you can move on.
There it is. That's my math. Because I love you so, skedaddling is a no-brainer.
You will have the sense to tell them I'm dead, when they come around, yes? Tell them I passed a few days after Maureen and Jay, and was hauled off to burn over at Roosevelt or Division Street or some such pit; you were down with the flu yourself and can't remember. Tell them you never really knew me, and don't know a thing about me or what I said or think or believe.
You tell them that so they cross me off their list and leave you alone, Martha. Your childhood is over, and your family is gone. Go on from here, and don't look back.
Don't ask yourself why you made it and others didn't. It happened that way, that's all. You didn't die of flu, and so you get to live your life. Grab it and go. Perhaps I'll read or hear about you some day. That will be nice. Until then, whenever I tell people about you I will say that you are kind, and that you always do well by others. A father can't be happier than I am to know that about you, and to have known you all these years, Martha. You are so precious to me.
You're going to hear a lot of lies in the coming months. Lies and more lies for as long as they can force them on Americans. They'll push the same story in the new National Church schools and in the papers and over the TV about the avian flu pandemic and how we fought so bravely against incredible odds and so on and so forth. They'll talk a lot of horse puckey about traitors and fear. They'll talk about the Chinese, saying the flu was manufactured in Shanghai and planted in our ports. They'll talk about the war on this and the war on that and the war overseas for generations to come and a titanic clash of civilizations. They'll talk about Jesus and the Rapture and the Hand of God. Meanwhile, everything will be run by clipboards and rifles in the hands of young men in uniforms, and it will go on and on like this until it collapses. You'll see.
Don't ever listen to the hogwash, Martha, and tell the young people what really happened, whenever they ask you. Tell them what we had here, from Atlantic to Pacific, and what was taken from us by these fools in charge. Tell them America died from fear, not from the flu.
The whole damned country fell apart in less than six months because men at the top were tearing it apart for years beforehand. But the lie they are building on top of the pile can fall apart just as fast.
It's incredible that it happened so fast. Almost overnight. It reminds me of the Soviet Union coming unglued back in '89. No one thought that could happen here.
Short version -- Avian Influenza went human-to-human in February of this year, 2006. Started in Jakarta, and moved across Asia in two weeks. Cases by the tens of thousands from Russia to Ireland by month's end. Showed up in Portland, Oregon on March 9th, and the next day, Friday, was your last day of school. I remember you in the window of the yellow school bus, with all the kids wearing little white face masks to keep from breathing in germs. What became so normal later on was a comical sight that morning.
That idiot Bush was pushing Congress in 2005 and into 2006 for a new law to let him use the military for any incident he could claim affected the whole nation. National security. National security. When Portland's hospitals filled to overflowing in one March weekend, Congress voted nearly unanimously to grant him the executive privilege to send troops at his sole discretion anywhere in the country. Which he promptly did. He sent National Guard battalions from Montana, Washington, Nebraska and Idaho, and Air Force units up from California to quarantine the entire Willamette Valley. "Shoot on sight. No one in and no one out."
Remember the 'FEMA flue' all during last spring and early summer? No gas or public transport after the first two weeks, and food and water only by ration cards on odd and even days, with the result that people who couldn't walk to the distribution points were drinking toilet water and starving in their houses. They killed more people than Avian flu with that stupidity. Even when they chucked that plan and started air-dropping pallets all over the city there was nobody in charge of handing it out, so it was just black market swag for the street gangs. I know your Mom lost 26 pounds before she ever got sick. She used to give her plate to Jay, and he didn't know better than to take it. Sometimes I think she would have coughed it off, like you did, if we'd had food more often.
But there was no help, only rifles. Portland was the enemy. We were on the outs, we were the Other, we were the Plague. We were the new Iraqis, right here in America. All those masked soldiers, day and night, on every road and rooftop, and all they would do was point their rifles and shoot at us, throw out tear gas, or fire off their microwave crowd-cookers to keep us back. Wouldn't touch us, and wouldn't talk to us. Naturally we started throwing things. We started shooting, hell yes, and we started sneaking out.
That's when things got really nasty.
The fine print in Bush's new executive privilege law said that anyone resisting martial law was deemed an enemy combatant. A traitor. Anyone leaving a quarantined area without authorization was a threat to national security, and therefore a terrorist and an unlawful menace to America. Bingo -- anyone caught escaping the quarantine lost their citizenship, irrevocably, and went to the camps in Wyoming, for life or until they could be deported. The fine print was always what Bush was after. He always wanted control of citizenship, and Congress gave it to him this year. Now he says who is an American and who isn't.
It didn't slow anyone down. They were leaving Portland for water, for food and for the hope of not catching the drowning disease that had already killed one in seven people in Multnomah County. They weren't worried about abstract concepts like citizenship or fine print or martial law.
I've seen so many people shot while charging the checkpoints, or crawling across a farmer's field, or shot in the forests for cash bounties by COOQA's -- Citizens Officially Outside the Quarantine Area. Fifty bucks per vagrant was good money in a state without decent work to be had. Good money and self preservation; I'm sure that's what they told themselves. Good money and good huntin' is what I heard them say. I helped move hundreds of people up the Columbia River beyond The Dalles before I lost my arm, and that's the talk I heard from the yokels out there. They'd liquor up and go hunting for Portland Possums, yessiree.
It was never about the flu. That moron Bush wanted martial law any way he could get it. What the hell rifles have to do with nursing people through the drowning disease beats me. You know the score. With no vaccine, no medicine, and no hospitals, all you can do is nurse them along. Feed them and keep that fever down. When they get to the crisis stage, where they can't breathe while laying down, you fight that fever hard, and you keep them awake and breathing through that last day any way you can. As long as there's some lung left above the water, they have that much of a chance. If fluid fills their last bit of their lungs, they drown. That's all. How is a rifle going to help with that? Some food, some water, some medicine might do some good. Not a rifle.
I've seen people give CPR for five hours straight and pull someone through. I've seen homemade respirators of every kind save lives. I've also seen people hire a stranger to shoot them before they got too far along. I've listened to so many people use up their last hours, when they should have been resting, telling anyone who would listen all about everything they'd done, and who they knew, and where they'd been and what they thought of this brave new world where citizenship and food and water depended on your good behavior toward young men in camo gear who answer to their captain who answers to their major who answers eventually all the way up to King George Dubya, whose idea it was to send us rifles instead of help.
I've heard the same bitter talk from soldiers themselves. After the flu hit their ranks and killed one in three in their barracks, after they were falling down in the streets. That sure changed things. When the people you're pointing your rifle at come up to the line and carry away your fallen buddy, and nurse him through the flu, and walk him back to his checkpoint a week later, your loyalty isn't to your major any more, or to your moron President, or to your militarized nation. It's to the people around you, the people in the same fix you're in, the people doing something about it. It makes you want to put down your rifle.
Which happened a lot. The army and Guard just drifted away after August. The flu was popping up everywhere by then, from Long Beach to Galveston to Charleston to Norfolk, and heading inland as if on wings. Quarantines were pointless within 90 days of the first outbreak, and the soldiers stopped trying to enforce them. You could come and go as you pleased as long as you stayed away from them.
By September of 2006, six months into the epidemic, the flu changed, and nine out of ten people just coughed it out, like you did so early on. It got a lot milder once it ran through the population for a while.
You'd think the worst was over, but that's when it got completely crazy. Suddenly the cure was a hundred times worse than the disease. Protecting our national security was the real horror. Every town and city and village was under orders from on high to register everyone, ration everything, and round up anyone who didn't go along with the program. National security. National security. No gas, no travel, no changing jobs or residence. It became very clear that the flu was never the reason for martial law. Martial law was the reason for martial law. It was the Bush plan all along. If it hadn't been the Avian flu, it would have been flooding or a hurricane or street protests or strikes. A surfeit of grasshoppers and butterflies. Anything. Bush was going to suspend the Constitution, no matter what. No more America was always his plan.
Well, once people got that in plain view, there was a whole lot of fighting, and I got in the middle of it. I don't know how much you heard about the incident they charged me with, so I'll just tell you. It came down to a choice of people, Martha. A choice between two groups of people, a choice of which group would live and which would not live. They sure weren't going to agree on things; it was going to be one way or the other.
We had a house full of people set to move after dark; they had their packs and canteens and maps all squared away and were just waiting for the moon to go down a bit. They were in the basement of an abandoned restaurant way out on Sandy Boulevard, sitting quietly around the walls of the furnace room, talking softly by the light of a few candles. It was one of our usual staging sites for smuggling people out of the Valley.
We had people around the neighborhood watching for trouble. Along came a Bradley with about a dozen National Guard guys, and three or four local vigilantes, in their red vests. One of the locals pointed out our staging building and then got behind the vehicle to watch the arrests. The floodlights came on and the troops chambered their weapons. They were going to take those people out of there, to the camps. Take their few possessions, take their valuables, take their citizenship, take their futures.
Or they were going to be stopped from doing that. We were in three other houses around the intersection, and we had the road wired to blow, and that's what we did. We chose. We picked the people in the house over the people around the Bradley. We lost some Americans that day, and we saved some others.
I got hurt, and my arm had to come off about a week later. That's how they found out how I was injured, and when and where. That's why they want me, and that's why I can't hang around Portland, or you. That's why you can't know me, or be my daughter in the eyes of the people with clipboards and rifles. When I get to Canada, I'll become someone else, so you needn't bother looking for me. That'd just be trouble for you. You go right ahead. I'll look for news of you over the years. You'll have your hands full living in the US. There's a lot of fixing to do, everywhere you turn.
If you never do anything more than be yourself, Martha, that's everything I hope for you. If you think of your wandering, one-armed Dad from time to time, that'll be fine, too. If you ever get discouraged, just think of the sound of one hand clapping -- for you alone. That'll be me, always very proud of you, my bright, sweet child.
Lots of love and good wishes,
Dad
(Christmas, 2006 -- "My father never reached Canada. He died of Avian flu, in a house somewhere in South Portland, sometime in October of 2006." -- Martha T.)