Nucleomituphobia — Fear of Nuclear Weapons
The line at Third Love Coffee wasn’t out the door. It was to the door.
I held the door open and danced out of the way of a customer leaving with a paper cup and into a two guys, a Castro couple carrying latte cups to the last patio seats looking out on the traffic of Castro residents, prams, and parades of corgis in what seemed to be corgi-only dogwalking services.
Customers slopped fig syrup flavored frothed milk onto saucers balancing cups of water and paperbacks and sometimes a skateboard. One laptop person sat at each two-person table.
My phone vibrated as I took a step forward in line. It was Cielo calling.
Extreme fear immediately manifested from my belly to my throat. I hate talking on the phone where anyone can hear.
It was silent inside Third Love Coffee, despite the crowd, and I wished the people in line would talk amongst themselves so they wouldn’t hear me, but most had their phones out. Scrolling. I said, “Hey.”
And Cielo was like, “Did you get my messages?” No, I didn’t get any messages. Was something wrong with my phone signal? Was Verizon down? Had Russia taken out the grid? I stuttered something like, “I . . . no, I didn’t see — ”
Cielo said, “When you didn’t answer I thought . . . hope he didn’t go down to get my package and forget his keys and phone and get locked out . . . like that one time. It’s from Coalition and the Tri-City Green.” That sounded like a band name. And that’s what all the protestors had written on their signs. “Coalition and the Tri-City Green.” And “❤ Loving not Fracking.”
I told her, “I’m sorry, I’m not home,” my voice quiet in the quiet broken only by Janelle Monae on vinyl (Electric Laday) and the coffee grinder.
Cielo said, “Don’t worry about it,” but I was worried about it. “Packages have only gone missing from your place a couple of times.” She would be mad if it went missing. “Enjoy your Sunday out.” I was not enjoying my Sunday out. I was supposed to be at Slow Joe’s working on my creative treatment for a customer I hadn’t landed in an attempt to get on the creative team I wasn’t on.
Slow Joe’s where it was the right kind of quiet, the quiet of there only being a few people in the space, the quiet of reading and writing and softly ordering an Americano, not this intense quiet of sixty people packed in a tiny space, like a nightclub on mute.
The customer ahead of me stepped up to order efficiently, “Lavender oat milk latte and an acai bowl, add bee pollen,” and I tried to get off the phone so I would be ready to order, afraid of holding up the line. “I’ll be home in a couple of hours,” I offered.
“Can you call when you get — ” The barista slash Square Cash cashier efficiently caught my eye and said, “Can I get anything started for you?” I covered the phone and said fast, “I’ll have the Honduras pourover.” Cielo’s voice came through the speaker as if I had muted her. I put the phone back to my ear and started to say something like, “Sorry, I missed that,” and the cashier said, “The Mesa or the Constelación?”
I did not understand the question.
“The Honduras . . . beans? The beans from Hondu — ” I pointed at the printed menu.
The cashier tapped at the tablet and peered down at it as if it had said something confusing. Halfway through saying again, “The Mesa or the — ” I saw the same time she said, “There’s two Honduras coffees. Which — ”
I said fast, “The Mesa,” not caring. The cashier tapped and frowned. “Sorry, we’re out of the Mesa.”
“Oh, no worries, the other one’s fine,” I said fast, and put the phone back to my ear, and Cielo said, “Hello?” I finger signed the screen and just said “Hi,” back. “Okay. . .” Cielo laughed at me. “Talk to you soon,” she said, and “Bye,” and I said “Bye,” and she hung up.
I took a deep breath and exhaled, slow, like they said to calm down. I puffed my chest up full of air like a big bellows and wondered whether there was such thing as breathing too deep. Then it occurred to me that only I would worry about breathing wrong.
By some miracle, the customers ahead of me gave up on a table, poured their triple heart latte art into compostable to-go cups, and left. A table became available. I sat and pulled out my laptop. At the next table, two girls with matching matcha lattes and matching purple t-shirts took a selfie. I glanced around. Purple everywhere. The ‘field trip class’ from the bus surrounded me. I saw them now everywhere. Purple Coalition tees. One guy’s tee was decorated with pins like boy scout badges: rainbow HRC, blue ACLU, red ‘I voted,’ Pride 2005. I felt lacking in my pinstripe collared shirt.
Like I should be turning out, I should be wearing the uniform, I should be being the change I want to see in the world. Instead I brought my laptop to a cafe to slave away for the man. A barista brought my coffee. When I glanced up to thank her, she was wearing a purple Coalition tee too. Shouldn’t she be wearing like a Third Love Coffee shirt?
On my laptop, I opened a blank document and tapped on the keys, thinking not about work and getting on the creative team, but about The Warren and the Coalition. The pamphlet for The Warren, a survivalist prepper underground nuclear shelter condo, ended up on the table between my coffee and my laptop.
I was surrounded by revolutionary activists on the one side and somewhere among us, perhaps not in a uniform, were preppers awaiting the end of days, possibly as a result of revolution.
Cielo had sent me an article about them. About liberal elites building doomsday bunkers to survive the apocalypse. Hedge fund managers and tech executives stocking up on food and water, ammo and gas for getaway motorcycles — rich lefties preparing for the collapse. Crazy. Real people, presumably sane, real people — sane rich successful business owners, MBAs, engineers, investors and bankers buying bunkers in the woods of NorCal or Upstate New York. CEOs of Unicorns spending VC-generated capital on air-filtration systems and solar panels and generators. On luxury condos under the ground. Paying rent on a condo you would only ever live in if civilization ended. This was real. My fingers typed something like a short story. Some notes.
Seven million people in the Bay Area take to the streets to protest; the Coalition spreads purple like a virus across the country; the people, united, refuse to be divided; they live in the streets, among the 554,000 unhoused population, in peaceful protest. Of everything. And they won’t leave until it’s all fixed. 65,800,000 Americans go on hunger strike (because the food ran out on day one), peacefully sitting in, lying in, dying in, like a poor man’s Burning Man where the food ran out on day one (so Fyre Island), on the streets with their phones out, calling and tweeting and texting their representatives until they save the world. From all of it.
After forty-one days of peaceful protest, the economy falling apart along with the career of every politician, Washington just starts to bomb and drone strike every major city. Just wipe everything out and start America over without those pesky activists. But there’s something the government doesn’t know about. The bunkers. Millions of multi-level underground condos. The people, united, evacuate underground and not a single person dies. (While the U.S. makes war on the people, foreign enemies take advantage of the chaos and launch nukes at America, because of course they do.) The people, though, survive. All of them. In sustainable condos built by billionaire survivalist preppers.
The word has ended, but humanity continues underground. And, like, underground, everything is equal, because all of the condos are equal size, and how can the rich really have it that much better when we’re all living like moles in a mole warren? And all the problems are fixed.
I wanted to laugh out loud, but I never do in public spaces. It’s kind of funny. A funny story.
Before going home, I took my wallet out of my right pocket and withdrew a one dollar bill. I put the bill in my left pocket in case anyone asked if I could spare a little more than change.
This is a work of fiction — a fictional millennial with an anxiety disorder is writing a Medium account under the pen name Ernest Salvador. Start the series with a short story: The Cool Kids are Building Bombs.
