The Return

I returned in the fall to a different city. In my time in California the pandemic had definitively ended in my hometown. Badger had pushed to end all social distancing, tracking, and free testing programs, while keeping the carve-outs put in place to help keep businesses afloat, like the tax breaks for hiring locals, keeping health inspections via remote link, and letting restaurants use more street space for outdoor dining.

I spent the first few days back getting re-acquainted with my living space, making sure my kitchen appliances worked, doing groceries, picking up some new house plants, setting the groove back on my couch. I signed up to audit a creative writing class at the city college. I went to see Kendra Badger’s district office but found an empty storefront. Ack told me they had moved her office’s closer to the county complex. I went there but this location didn’t have the glass windows to see the lobby, I suppose the last location had previously been a campaign headquarters, and for those you want to see the hustle and bustle inside. This looked more like a legislator’s office. I didn’t go in.

I had texted Jeff when I got back into town. It took him a few days but he did get back to me. He asked if he needed to send a squad to search my home for illegal contraband from California. I didn’t find it funny. While most of the country was moving in one direction, Badger was moving the city in the other, with a lot of petty enforcement and rough police tactics to “keep the city clean.” There was also a crack down on students, under the guise of reforms of the city’s already meager assistance programs. Students over the age of 25 were cut off or required to work in addition to any school duties or graduate assistant work. The city college saw several departments consolidated or shut down all together, under the pretext that the college should focus on trades and the local workforce.

A few of my friends got caught up in all of it. I didn’t hear from Josiah after I came back, and they reached out weeks later to tell me about the mass arrests, on charges ranging from roaming with intent to defrauding the city government, tin-pot stuff. Josiah asked if I’d left town to avoid it, but I had no idea how things would turn out. I didn’t want to tell him about my feelings toward Kendra, but it was unavoidable she came up in the conversation.

It seemed Badger had accumulated quite a bit of power quickly. The mayor, a product of the political machine constructed under his crony predecessor, didn’t have a presence of his own. Even his name was forgettable, Evan Salarymann, or something like that. He was the ranking deputy mayor when the long-ruling mayor died just before the pandemic, and managed to win a term of his own in the same election the year before that Badger won in. His main opponent was the city council president, who kept his role. All of this is a little inside politics, but it’s to show how strange it was for Badger to have been able to mold the city so much in such a quick time. I was convinced either the mayor or the city council president was using her to get at the other. Later, she insisted to me she was playing the two against each other. She made her run for mayor, coming next year as I write this, seem like a fait accompli.

At the time, it was all avoidable. The city council president and mayor were more or less on the same side, along with the rest of the city. As Josiah told me, Badger’s proposals led to a lot of protests, but demonstrators mostly targeted specific offices or campuses involved in whatever specific problem there was. But there were so many of them. And people didn’t seem to care about a lot of them. Her policies might seem popular to someone who didn’t know better. The myths of clean streets and kicking folks off the dole can be very popular.

I had been trying to get back in touch with Jeff, but although we sent each other memes and videos fairly regularly, he was evasive about meeting up again, and mentioned going away for the holidays a few times. He told me to stay away from my friends, but I wasn’t sure until later that he meant a trio I’ll call Larry, Curly and Moe. I’m not sure what role Jeff played in all of it later, but he never came back after the holidays, though I didn’t notice at first because of everything that had happened.

I tried a few times to go to Badger’s district office but something about the door kept me away. I felt like I’d be too enclosed on the inside. Finally I decided to show up at a city council meeting. I would get to see Badger in action. I was sure she’d recognize me. My friends, meanwhile, seemed to think they wouldn’t recognize me.