1Disclaimer: Throughout this story, the reader may notice random scenes, lines, and moments that seem as if they have come from a song by the rock band Green Day. This is because they have. Think of it this way: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and please, please, Green Day, if you're reading this (ridiculously unlikely and an example of wishful thinking) don't sue me. If you haven't heard of Green Day, go buy the album American Idiot. Seriously. Otherwise, enjoy the show.
It was only later, after the riots, that they realized it had all begun a long, long time ago, before St. Jack had even come to town. In fact, as is the nature of all these things, it had most likely had no beginning at all. But if it did begin, it began in San Diablo.
San Diablo was one of those cities built so close to the ocean that it seemed to float on the waves itself. Glittering towers and skyscrapers rose towards the heavens, often poking their way out of a thick fog like razor blades poking out of a candy apple. It had become a city back in the 19th century, when railroads, canals, and a handy silver rush had swept people towards that part of California abruptly. Now it was the City of Demons, unofficial capital of the United States.
The 21st century hit San Diablo like an oncoming train, exploding the universe as Emma Hollis turned eleven years old. Chaos, destruction, and the Internet ruled the streets in a way that they had never before. Of course there had always been crime, but now a sort of joyful anarchy exploded in the darker parts of town. Up on the heights of the famous mountainous hills of San Diablo, the rich sipped golden champagne and spoke disparagingly of the state of the city these days. Down in the alleyways and gutters, fire burned.
The mayor of the city, Zachariah Olson, was a child of the rich and famous born in Los Angeles. Raised in luxury, with all the latest technology and an unwavering faith in the Lord, he captured the hearts, minds, and votes of the rich, who crowded the booths when Election Day came and catapulted to the famous Golden Mansion that the mayor of San Diablo had traditionally lived in since it was built in the Gilded Age. In his campaign, he had promised to clean up the City of Demons. No more destruction. No more anarchy. No more fire. The entire city, said Zachariah Olson, would be like the heights where the rich lived, and no one would have to mix with the dirty lower classes any more.
Obviously, he failed, but what he succeeded at was completely separating the heights from the gutters. The rich had their streets, their movie theaters, their beaches, their restaurants and schools and telephone booths and lives, which sparkled like new MeLodys. The poor had theirs. They were not divided by race, by gender, by religion. But those who had succeeded, whose grandfathers had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, lived in a different world from those whose parents did not own a major fast food chain or line of bookstores or technology companies. All this in the first two years that Mayor Olson ruled San Diablo, and in the next two years it was established that this was the way it would always be.
This brings us up to 2004, when Emma Hollis was only a sophomore in high school. 2004 was an unremarkable year. There were presidential elections, in which President Riverton won for the third term in a row, to the surprise of no one. Several favored bands of the upper classes came out with new singles. Though music was highly appreciated among the rich in San Diablo, the album was a dying art form. The invention of the online computer program for buying songs MeLody Online had killed that, as well as spawned a new trend called the MeLody Online Top Ten Phenomenon. Cheerful, fashionable, bored teenagers would search for songs to buy on MeLody Online. The way to find the best song, of course, would be to look on the Top Ten Most Bought list. If others had bought them a lot, they were good. So all these teenagers would buy these songs, thereby ensuring them a place on the MeLody Online Top Ten List and making sure that the cycle would repeat again.
The most popular artist in 2005, when Emma Hollis was a junior, was the new teenage girl singer Rachel Texana, who featured in her own television show. Every little girl wanted to be Rachel Texana. She sang, she danced, and she had all the latest toys and her own television show. What more could there be to life?
The second most popular artist was known only as Contessa, although her real name was Diane Willis. Her famous song "Jorobas", half in English and half in Spanish, went "Un unciendo quema hoy in my heart/ baby, baby, de la blasfemia y el genocidio/ because I worship you, oh, / las sirenas of my heart sing/ de caries because I never want to see you again! / Infiltran en el interior of you! I'm free! I love you/never see me again!" These lines were repeated throughout the song.
Pop was the only thing to listen to among the upper classes. Anyone listening to punk, heavy metal, or classic rock was seen to be associating themselves with the poor.
That was the rich. That was life. That was the heights of San Diablo.
In 2008, when the elections for president began between Riverton and a man called Darweshi Gashi who was a third-generation American, and Emma Hollis was nineteen, an interesting political incident occurred. SDET, or San Diablo Electric Transport, the electric rail that was the main public transportation for nearly all San Diablans, broke down during rush hour in the evening. For those who had been planning to take it later in the day, this simply meant that there was more traffic on the streets. For those on the trains when they failed, this meant a long walk to their destinations. One such person, a man named Aaron McGhee who lived nowhere near San Diablo's heights, realized that he would return home much quicker if he took a shortcut up November Street and through a rich, commercial part of town. He was not alone in doing this. A few people were brave enough or stupid enough to break the divide between rich and poor and climb one of the hills for a shortcut. The San Diablo Police Department always taught them the error of their ways. It was one of those facets of life that no one talked about but everyone knew about—that pain awaited those who broke the status quo. Keeping the city in order was done in the dark and where there were no eyes to see but those of the police and the hapless victim. Sometimes, like in McGhee's case, the victim lived. Often, they disappeared.
Welcome to 2008, SDPD, said the newscasters later, laughing it off. Happy New Year. (It was, in fact, January 1 when the beating occurred.) Who would have guessed that someone was recording Aaron McGhee's beating on their cell phone, hmm? Wasn't it funny? The newscasters were in a world of their own, as always. They never cried when they read the names of the soldiers who had died in the war in Somalia that month, they never looked sad when they reported murders, when there was a malfunction in a plane and everyone went to their deaths just off the San Diablo coast they didn't shed a tear. It only made sense that they were so far removed from the pain of the world that they could laugh at Aaron McGhee and the unknown citizen who had recorded every moment of his pain and then posted it on iPipe, the online website where anyone could post any video.
There was a trial. Of course there was a trial. There was a trial, with jurors picked from the highest upper classes by Mayor Olson himself. People who really understood the way things worked in San Diablo. The trial itself lasted three days, and jury deliberations for seven hours. At the end, there was a unanimous verdict: The four police officers who had beaten Aaron McGhee were acquitted on all counts.
That was when the riots began. The first ones, anyway.
So let's rewind, and ask a few questions, perhaps the ones that the reporters should have asked but didn't. At the mayor's press conference the day after the riots began, they asked, "How are you going to protect yourself, Mayor Olson? How should all of us protect ourselves? Who was Aaron McGhee? What was his job? Who posted this on iPipe?" Lovely questions, to be sure. But they weren't the ones that the people who weren't reporters had.
How was Mayor Olson going to protect himself? That was easy. He hired an armed guard, as did the rest of the people he cared about. Expensive, but worth it.
Who was Aaron McGhee? Just a man, thirty years old, white, Jewish, male, Californian, San Diablan, single, no children, dead. Another statistic. Another blip in the population graphs.
What was his job? Unemployed, obviously. In 2008, when Emma Hollis was nineteen, the entire country was in an economic recession. Of course, that was just what the heights expected of him. A dirty, poor man of the lower classes, too lazy to get a real job, living off the hard work of others…
Who posted the video on iPipe? Does it matter? A citizen. Someone who was tired of silence.
Everyone was tired of silence.
The real questions, the ones that sparked the riots, were a bit more important than finding out the facts. Most of them began with why. Why had jury deliberations only taken seven hours? The video, though taken as the sun was setting and shaky, made it very clear what those police officers had done. McGhee had been tackled as he dodged around a building. He had run, and been tasered. Then the police had beaten him with clubs, over and over again, as his bones broke and he cried out in pain. Some person with a high tolerance for blood had counted fifty-two times that he was beaten, another forty-nine, another fifty-six. It was hard to tell.
The police officers had said that McGhee had been trespassing on property, had been about to commit a burglary of a nearby house. They couldn't seem to keep their stories straight. It didn't matter. Everyone knew why he had been beaten: because he was a man not from the heights, in the heights.
Why had they even held a trial? Why not just ignore the law and pretend it had never happened? But the whole country was not San Diablo, was not run by Olson. By the first day after the video was on the Internet, everyone had it, everyone had seen it. Perhaps in a darker age, where everyone did not know everything at once, it could have been covered up. But not now.
Why did these policemen have the right to beat up the poor? That was the biggest question, and the one that sparked the first riots. They lasted for three days, and the darkness that filled the lower parts of San Diablo spilled over into the entire city. Everything was burned, everything was looted. The nation was left shocked, and the executive branch sent in federal troops to hold the city together. It was like putting out a forest fire that's been building for a year. Though trees were left unburned, it had only made the coming conflagration worse. And fire still flickered on the ground.
At least, so it seemed. But the year blew through into 2009. January and February passed without incident, as did March and April and May and June. During this time, Mayor Olson decided that his two-world approach to the divide between the rich and the poor was simply not working. A few of the gaps between the worlds were bound together. The rich became a little less rich, the poor a little less poor. A little resentment was blown off. The nation breathed again.
San Diablo's face changed. Instead of being a city of haves and have-nots, it was a city of people. Hippies, punks, revolutionary elements, normal people, beatniks, rich, poor, middle-class, everyone. People had used to call it the City of Demons, spitting angrily on the ground and adding that they weren't sure whether it was the rich or the poor who were demonic. Now they called it the City of Rainbows, going from a picture posted on the Internet of the city emerging from a morning fog, wreathed in rainbows. It appeared that all would be well. The wounds of the past, though open and raw, were slowly healing, keeping away from infection and salt or lemon juice, and they appeared to be heading towards a beautiful future.
July 4, as well as the nation's Independence Day, was Emma Hollis's birthday. She turned twenty.