On this page are the first five chapters (8,250 words) of From Trumerica with Love: A Modern Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984: A Dystopian Parody, by Logan Emery Emerson. 

(You can also read these chapters in this Google doc , in Google Play Books, or in this PDF.) 

Chapter 1 

It’s a scorching day in July, and the Doomsday Clock is 88 seconds from midnight. 

Liam enters the front doors of Plaza Residences, a swirl of dirt entering along with him. 

In the lobby there’s a massive poster fastened to a wall. It depicts the face of the country’s supreme commander. The man is in his seventies and has wheat chaff-colored hair and ruggedly handsome features. He’s Trumerica’s Leader for Life. 

Since the elevator rarely works, Liam takes the stairs slowly, resting several times on the way up, his hemorrhoids burning. On each landing, another Trufamily poster with an enormous face gazes from the wall. The eyes of each 3D poster follow you when you move.

On the third floor, he approaches a neighbor struggling to carry her bags. Liam offers to help. She declines, giving him a suspicious look. 

I was just going to carry your heavy bags, he thinks. I wasn’t going to turn you in. 

He continues walking up the stairs, thinking, To maintain your humanity, you have to be bifurcated. You have to have a split personality. You present your external self to all of Trumerica. That’s you towing the line, mock-believing in impossibilities, and corrupting yourself in order to survive. But it is possible to have an internal self, a private life of thoughts and feelings that prove you’re still actually human.

Inside his apartment on the seventh floor, a harsh voice reads out stock market data. “The TASDAQ is up,” the voice says, coming from a large screen built into the wall. “Every day, our improving economy proves that we’re ending the theft of Trumerican prosperity.”

Standing by the window, Liam’s frail, meager body is hidden by the business attire that all members of the Organization are required to wear. He’s thirty-eight with blond hair and sunburned skin. 

Outside, the world is a sweltering mess. Down in the street, wind whirls dirt and trash in spirals. Even though the sun is shining and the sky is bright blue, there seems to be no color in anything except the Trufamily posters placed all over the cityscape. 

From his studio apartment, Liam can see approximately twenty posters. They’re all placed in commanding positions. The Trufamily member depicted on each poster is different. Yet their dark eyes all look directly at Liam. 

Each poster is captioned with the same words that fill up the bottom half of each poster—Keep Trumerica Great. Under each caption is the Trufamily Forty-Five logo with the double-headed eagle. One poster of Laura Ingraham is slightly damaged at the bottom, making the logo appear and disappear every few seconds. 

In the far distance, a drone skims down between apartment buildings. It hovers for a while, then darts away. The Peace Police are always snooping into people’s windows, always looking for something, anything.

Behind Liam’s back, the newscaster on the Portal babbles on about the Organization surpassing its promises regarding the $55 trillion budget that’s making Trumerica safer, stronger, and prouder. 

The hundreds of millions of Portals throughout the country receive and transmit simultaneously. They pick up any sound above a low whisper. Also, when in their field of vision, there’s a chance they’ll read your feelings and intentions through your eyes, gathering your private and unconscious responses. 

Liam wishes you could turn the abominable devices off, but you can’t. The only time you get respite from them is between midnight and six. During those hours, the broadcasts turn off, but the monitors, like black mirrors, are still on. Nobody can completely shut off any Portal. 

There’s no way of knowing whether you’re being watched at any given moment by an actual person. How often the police plug into any of the hundreds of millions of individual Portals throughout Trumerica is unknowable. It’s even conceivable that the police officers themselves, not just their AI, watch everybody all the time. Nevertheless, they can access the Portals in your home whenever they want. You have to live assuming that your every sound and movement is scrutinized and cataloged. 

Liam keeps his back turned to the Portal—it’s safer. Though he knows even a back can be revealing. 

He looks out his window at the grimy, sun-ravaged landscape of Lar-o-Maga Palm City, the biggest city of New Florida and the third most populous of the 379 states in Trumerica. 

He tries recalling any childhood memory that could tell him whether Lar-o-Maga Palm City has always been like this. 

Has there always been luxury apartment buildings with swimming pools on every terrace, and have those opulent private residential communities always been right next to ghettos with peeling paint on houses and questionably-hygienic food trucks parked beside bomb craters? 

Has there always been Hyperloop hovertrains passing over slums and garbage dumps where kids forage for food scraps? 

But it’s no use, he can’t remember anything. Not much really remains of his childhood except a bunch of unintelligible images that seem disconnected from everything.

In the distance there are four megatall skyscrapers that tower above all other buildings in the city. Three of these buildings are octagonal and soar up, floor after floor, exactly one mile into the air. 

Those three buildings each house the headquarters of a different Trumerican bureau. 

The Bureau of Facts produces news, entertainment, and the arts. 

The Bureau of Legalism advocates for Trumerica at the Global Markets & Trade Barriers Organization. 

The Bureau of Morality performs border control and maintains law and order. 

There are ‌one-hundred bureaus in Trumerica’s moneyocracy. The other ninety-seven bureaus are in various cities throughout the country. They’re also each housed in one-mile high octagonal buildings. 

Liam knows a little about the Bureau of Facts, where he works. He knows even less about the other bureaus. He couldn’t even name them all if he tried. Yet in his mind, they all pale in comparison to the fourth mega-tall building here in Lar-o-Maga Palm City—the Trump Tower. 

Exactly two miles high, the Trump Tower is the headquarters for the Trumerica Freedom Organization. It also houses the penthouse condominium residence of the Trumerican President, Donald Trump. Frighteningly, excluding the top floors, the entire building has no windows. 

Liam has never been up close to Trump Tower, nor even within half a mile of it. It’s impossible to enter it except on official business. Even then you’d have to go through a maze of security posts with steel doors, sniffer dogs, face recognition stations, and x-ray systems. On the wide streets that lead up to the Tower, which double as tsunami evacuation routes, guards roam around in black uniforms, armed to the teeth with assault weapons.

Displayed on jumbotrons on the side of the three bureau cloudscrapers are this week’s current slogans. From where Liam stands, it’s easy to read them: 

FACTS ARE ALTERNATIVE. 

LAW WITHOUT STRENGTH IS CRIMINAL. 

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO LIVE—THE TRUMERICAN WAY. 

Throughout the country, these one-hundred mega-structures are all constantly digitally displaying the Organization’s mottos of the moment. 

Liam turns around abruptly. With quiet optimism, he slightly smiles, which is advisable whenever facing a Portal. He goes to the kitchenette on the other side of the room. There’s no food in his fridge except for a hunk of Trump steak that he’s saving for tomorrow. 

He opens a bottle of vodka. It gives off a sickly, oily smell. Liam pours out two fingers, prepares himself for a shock, then gulps it down. He cringes, his face turns scarlet, and his eyes tear up. The stuff is like acid. Swallowing TrumputinVodka initially feels like you’re being pistol-whipped in the face. However, in the next moment the burning in your belly dies down and the world seems slightly less shitty. But it doesn’t take away his pain. So he reaches for his dose pen and is upset to see that the vaporizer has just one hit of OxiQoxi left. He can’t wait. He puts it to his mouth, inhales the vapor, and can almost instantaneously feel some of his pain ease away.

He crosses the room and enters his bathroom that’s just big enough to fit a toilet and a tiny shower. The bathroom is to the left of the Portal. His Portal is in an unusual position. Instead of being placed in the end wall, as is normal, where it could command the entire room, including his bed in the corner, and the doorless bathroom, the Portal is embedded into the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it, the bathroom is like a shallow alcove. 

Liam sits on the toilet with the toilet seat down and his pants still on. By sitting there he can remain outside of the Portal’s view. He can be heard, of course. But so long as he stays in his present position, he’s essentially invisible to the Organization. 

He takes a thick, blank journal with a marbled cover out of a drawer under the tiny sink. It’s a peculiarly beautiful book with smooth, creamy paper. These journals haven’t been made in decades. He saw it in the window of a messy antiques store in a slummy part of the city. Instantly, he wanted to own it. 

Members of the Organization aren’t supposed to enter shops owned by the lower classes, the Subs. But the rule isn’t strictly enforced because there are various things, such as micro-doses of OxiQoxi, that are often unbuyable via Walmart because of shortages. 

He had glanced quickly up and down the street and then slipped inside and bought the journal. He carried it guiltily home in his backpack. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

Liam is about to start a diary. 

If they find what I’m about to write, they’ll consider me an enemy of the state. Most likely, they’ll execute me. If I’m lucky, they’ll only send me to a re-education camp. 

The pen in his hand is also a relic of the past. Naturally, he’s not used to writing by hand. Apart from short handwritten notes, he usually dictates everything into a microphone, which is of course impossible for his present purpose. 

He holds the pen above the paper—then pauses. A tremor rumbles through his bowels. To mark the paper will be a decisive act. In small clumsy letters, he writes:

July 10, 2024.

Life doesn’t have to be like this. 

I can’t wait to meet the new Trumerica—whatever and whenever that is. 

He leans back and the toilet flusher digs into his back. A sense of helplessness descends upon him. He has no idea what the next version of this country could be, let alone should be. But he somehow feels that it can’t possibly—shouldn’t—keep existing like this forever. 

He also doesn’t know who his intended readers are. Yet right then, almost instantaneously, he decides that he’s writing this diary for the people of the future. 

The Portal starts playing advertorials.

For a long time, he just stares at the paper. It’s as if he doesn’t know how to express himself, as if he’s forgotten what he intended to write. For weeks, he’s been preparing for this moment. And all he figured he needed was courage. He predicted that the actual writing would be easy. He just had to transcribe some of the machine gun-like monolog that’s always blasting away inside his head. At this moment, however, his internal dialogue is silent. Moreover, his hemorrhoids are itching unbearably. Not that he’d dare scratch them, because when he does they just become more inflamed. 

The seconds tick by. 

He’s conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the irritating desire to scratch his ass, the blaring of an infomercial about a golf course, and a tipsiness caused by the shot of vodka and the hit of opioid.

Suddenly, in sheer panic, he begins writing. His handwriting is small and childish. 

Last night at the cinema, I watched a documentary by Dinesh D’Souza. Somewhere along our southern border with Latineuropa, a fat family of illegal immigrants sprinted toward our border wall. The fat man, fat woman, and two fat children were about to try to scale the wall. But one of our drones shot them to hell and back, causing the audience to cackle with laughter. 

The footage was amazing—the camera was mounted on the drone, and you watched it shoot the shit out of the illegals who had dangerous dreams of invading our great land so that they could steal our jobs and ruin our lives. 

There was a lot of cheering and clapping from the section of the cinema for Organization members. But a woman in the Subs section bitched and complained that these movies shouldn’t be shown to kids. The police escorted her out. I doubt that anything happened to her—nobody in the Organization really cares what non-Organization members say. Everyone knows that she’s just another typical Sub. Overreacting. Always missing the point. Never standing up for Trumerica. 

Liam reads over what he’s written. He acknowledges that it’s all crap. But then he remembers something that happened today that made him realize he had to start his diary as soon as he got home. It happened at this morning’s Victory Rally, if anything so nebulous can be said to happen. 

Liam writes. 

I was sitting in one of the middle rows at this morning’s rally, and I saw Gemma and Brannan ...

Chapter 2 

It’s nearly 11 a.m. and in the Information Security Department where Liam works in the Bureau of Facts, people leave their cubicles and walk into a massive room for the Victory Rally. Liam sits in one of the middle rows. Two people that he knows by sight, yet has never talked to, unexpectedly enter the room. 

One of them is a woman named Gemma, this name being one of the most popular names for daughters of Trumerica. She works in the Public Relations Department. She’s known around the bureau as the press release maven, though Liam thinks of her work being more about writing praise releases than what can really be called press releases. 

This Gemma person always wears power suits. A bold-looking woman, she has thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. She wears a silver ring on her wedding finger, a symbol of the Making Abstinence Sexy advocacy group. Today, she’s also wearing a red cap.

Liam disliked Gemma the first moment he saw her. Then, like now, she gives off a pungent vibe of being a fact-loathing loser and a race-baiting xenophobe. It’s people like her who are the most bigoted adherents of the Organization. The swallowers of slogans. The snitches that squeal on anyone for any reason. 

Once, months ago, passing each other in a hallway, she glanced at him. It filled him with terror. The idea crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Peace Police. Though it’s unlikely she’s actually an undercover paramilitary agent, Liam continues to feel fear whenever she’s anywhere nearby.

The other person is Brett Brannan, a member of the C-Suite. He’s the Chief Operating Officer of Safeguarding Our Values, a team within the Bureau of Opposition Research and Counter-Disinformation. Brannan’s job is so important that Liam only has a vague idea of its nature. 

A hush passes over every regular Organization member in the room as they see the sleek suit of the C-Suite member approaching. 

Brannan is a tall, powerful man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. Despite his formidable appearance, he seems charming and charismatic. He has a habit of resettling his glasses on his nose, which is curiously disarming.

Liam has seen Brannan perhaps a dozen times in the past decade. He feels drawn to him because of a secretly held belief—or hope—that, deep down, Brannan is corrupt. Something in his face suggests it. He appears to be someone you could chat with—if you could somehow cheat the Portals and get him alone. Liam has never made the smallest effort to verify this guess. Indeed, there’s absolutely no way of doing so without risking his life. 

Brannan sits in the same row as Liam, two chairs away. Between them is a small woman who works in the cubicle beside Liam, and who Liam always thinks of as Short Liz. The woman with the freckles and wearing the red hat—the woman named Gemma—is sitting immediately behind them.

The next moment, a hideous noise bursts out of a massive Portal at the end of the room. It’s a noise that jars your teeth and bristles the hair at the back of your neck. The Victory Rally has started.

Every day, each rally kicks off with a new ten-minute video. Each video focuses on an enemy of Trumerica. 

Yesterday’s video was about a racist traitor, Ilhan Omar, who wickedly wants to trick our police into using excessive force on Subs. 

One of last week’s videos featured Colin Powell, a prominent Illuminati member, saying, “Trump lies about things. And he gets away with it because people won’t hold him accountable.” 

Another recent video featured Nancy Pelosi giving a press conference from her palatial mansion, Villa Les Cedres, viciously and falsely calling the latest worldwide pandemic the “Trump virus.” 

Today’s video is about a crowd favorite. It’s about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, their diabolical leader. Her haggard face flashes on the giant screen. Some of the audience hiss and boo at her. Short Liz’s shriek is part fear, part disgust.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—also known by her initials AOC—is a pedophile-defending and self-hating woman. Long ago, she assassinated several Organization members, including Melania Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Sean Hannity. She then attempted—and failed, of course—to carry out a coup d’état against President Trump. She was caught and condemned to death. Somehow, she mysteriously escaped and disappeared. 

AOC’s face appears briefly in every Victory Rally video. But today, all Trumericans are fortunate to have ten whole minutes of her. 

As the primal traitor and the earliest defiler of the Organization’s purity, all subsequent crimes against the Trumerica Freedom Organization—all treacheries, acts of sabotage, sexual deviations—can be traced back directly to her teachings. 

Somewhere, she’s still alive and hatching her conspiracies. Most Trumericans suspect she’s being protected by her foreign paymasters, probably Korchinpan’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Others have a hunch she’s hiding somewhere in Trumerica itself, just like how Obama and Osama hid out together for years in Chicago after their friends flew planes into the World Trade Center. 

Liam’s stomach tightens. He can never see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face without a painful mixture of emotions. It’s a trustworthy, yet wicked face. A clever, yet despicable face. A smiling, yet angry face. It resembles the face of a hyena, and her voice even sounds like a hyena laughing. 

In the video, AOC delivers her usual venomous attack on the Organization. Her arguments are so exaggerated and perverse that a child could see through them. And yet, they’re just plausible enough to fool less intelligent people. 

AOC ridicules the great man she lost to and calls him an orange-faced demagogue. 

She denounces the dictatorship of the Trufamily Forty-Five. 

See claims that our representative democracy is really a kakistocracy. 

She demands that Trumerica enter a new deal with Iranaqey. 

She whines that President Trump is morally, intellectually, and temperamentally unfit for office.

She alleges that critical thinking and evidence is better than dogma or superstition. 

She advocates for free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. 

She yells hysterically that the democratic socialist revolution has been betrayed. 

Just in case you might doubt the reality of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s deceptive lies, behind her is footage of thousands of enemy soldiers marching. Sometimes they’re Iranaqeyian soldiers. Sometimes they’re Korchinpanian soldiers. The dull rhythmic stomping of their boots form the background to AOC’s high-pitched “hee-hee-hee” sounds.

After a few minutes of this video, many people in the room are already breaking out into uncontrollable exclamations of rage. Her self-satisfied hyena-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the enemy combatants behind it, are just too much to handle. Besides, the sight or even the thought of AOC produces fear and anger automatically. She’s an object of hatred more constant than either Iranaqey or Korchinpan. 

What’s strange is that, although everyone hates AOC, and although every day her dumb ideas are refuted and ridiculed as the pitiful poppycock that they clearly are—despite all this, her influence never diminishes. There are always more libtards waiting to be seduced by her. A day never passes without the Peace Police finding treasonous spies in our very midst who are working for that corporate whore. 

She’s the commander of a vast shadowy army called the Illuminati. It’s an underground network of conspirators dedicated to overthrowing the Trumerica Freedom Organization and then implementing her ludicrous ideas for a liberal, utopian, one-world government. 

There are also whispered stories of a terrible collection of essays written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other liberals, anti-capitalists, and domestic terrorists. The book is a compendium of heinous heresies, human sacrifices, and violent rituals. It supposedly circulates clandestinely here and there. As far as Liam knows, the book has no title. People refer to it simply as AOC’s book. But you only hear of such things via vague rumors. No Organization member would mention the book if there’s a way of avoiding it. 

Near the end of the video, the Victory Rally rises to a frenzy. People leap up and down in their places. They shout to drown the maddening bleating voice coming out of the massive screen. 

 Brannan’s face is flushed. Sitting straight in his chair, his powerful chest swells and quivers as though he’s preparing the assault of a wave. 

The face of Short Liz turns bright pink. She chants, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” 

In a lucid moment, Liam finds that he’s shouting with the others and stamping his feet violently on the floor. 

The horrible thing about Victory Rallies isn’t that you’re obliged to take part, but, on the contrary, that it’s impossible to avoid joining in. Within minutes, any pretense is always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness grabs everyone. A desire to smash faces in with sledge-hammers seems to flow through the entire audience like an electric current. You’re turned—even against your own will—into a grimacing, screaming lunatic that wants to flay people alive. 

The rage that you feel is an abstract emotion that can be switched from one person to another, like the flame of a blowtorch. At one moment, Liam’s hatred is directed toward Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, immigrants, or welfare cheats. In the next moment, his hatred is against our commander-in-chief, the Organization, and the Peace Police. At such moments, his heart goes out to AOC, the lonely, ugly heretic on the screen and the sole guardian of sanity in an insane world. And yet, in the very next instant, he’s at one with those around him and everything AOC says seems to him to be untrue. At those moments, his secret loathing of Donald Trump changes into adoration, and our Leader for Life seems to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a giant against our enemies. In those moments, AOC, despite her isolation, her helplessness, and the doubt about her very existence, seems like some sinister enchanter, capable of destroying our way of life.

Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which you wrench your head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Liam transfers his hatred from the hag on the screen to the red-capped Gemma behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flash through his mind. I’ll beat Gemma to death, he thinks. 

The hate of the rally rises to its climax. The voice of AOC becomes an actual hyena’s howling laugh. For an instant, even her face changes into that of a hyena. Then the hyena-face melts into an enemy soldier pointing a machine gun at you, making some audience members flinch. 

Then, like a miracle, the vile warfighter fades into the gorgeous face of Donald Trump, an orange glow, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost fills up the screen. 

For the next hour or so, President Trump gives one of his inspiring, fascinating, immaculate, and frightening speeches, though Liam has a hard time believing one iota of it. 

The part of his speech that gets the biggest cheers is Trump’s last few lines. “If the righteous many don’t confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph. The only way we can save Trumerica and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.”

After his speech, the live broadcast of our benevolent leader dissolves away. Yet the face of Donald Trump seems to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact it made on everyone’s eyeballs is too vivid to wear off immediately.

In bold capital letters, Trumerica Freedom Organization’s new slogans for this week appear on screen. 

PARANOIA IS PATRIOTIC. 

POWER TRUMPS PRINCIPLES. 

ILLIBERALISM IS THE FUTURE. 

Gemma flings herself forward over the back of Liam’s chair, almost touching him. She extends her arms toward the screen, and murmurs “Our hero.” 

The crowd breaks into a deep, slow chant of “D-J-T! ... D-J-T! ...” It’s a refrain that’s often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. It’s a hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Donald J. Trump. It’s also an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. 

Liam’s guts seem to grow cold. At rallies he can’t help taking part in the delirium. But the savage chanting of “D-J-T! ... D-J-T!” always fills him with horror. Of course he chants with the rest, it being impossible not to do what everyone else is doing. Mostly though, he has trained himself to conceal his feelings and control his face. But just as Liam senses his eyes might betray him, Brett Brannan takes off his glasses and glances at him. 

In that fraction of a second, it’s as if their two minds are open and thoughts flow from one into the other through their eyes. 

I am with you, Chief Operating Officer Brannan seems to say telepathically. I know what you’re feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I’m on your side! 

And then, like a flash, their connection breaks, and Brannan’s face is as inscrutable as everybody else’s.

Liam swings wildly between being uncertain about whether this significant event actually happened, and the belief—or hope—that some of his colleagues are indeed enemies of the Organization. 

Perhaps the rumors of a vast deep state are true after all, he thinks. Perhaps the Illuminati really exists! 

It’s impossible—despite the endless arrests, confessions, and executions—to be sure that the Illuminati isn’t simply fake news. Some days he believes in it. Some days he’s certain it’s a fictional conspiracy. 

He decides that he probably just imagined the importance of that brief connection with Brannan. They just exchanged an insignificant glance, and that was the end of it. 

Still, as Liam heads back to his desk and decides to write about this in his diary when he gets home, he’s comforted in knowing that, in the locked loneliness in which he lives, even a fleeting glance registers as a memorable event.

Chapter 3 

In his apartment, Liam Mateo Janz can’t seem to remember much of what happened between today’s rally and now. Between the moment he walked away from Brett Brannan and the moment he started sitting down here, in his bathroom where his Portals can’t see him, is all a blur. 

He sits up straighter. He burps. The vodka is rising from his stomach. 

His eyes refocus on the page. He discovers he must have been writing, but not consciously writing, the words arising from his subconscious. And it’s no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid automatically over the paper, printing in large neat capitals—

DONALD TRUMP MUST DIE.

DONALD TRUMP MUST DIE.

DONALD TRUMP MUST DIE.

DONALD TRUMP MUST DIE.

DONALD TRUMP MUST DIE. 

—over and over again, filling half a page.

He feels a twinge of terror. It’s perhaps silly, since the writing of those particular words isn’t any more dangerous than the mere act of buying the diary. But for a moment, he’s tempted to tear out the pages and abandon the whole thing. 

He doesn’t, however, because he knows it’d be useless. Whether he writes Donald Trump must die, or whether he refrains from writing it, makes no difference. Whether he continues or stops writing in the diary makes no difference. The Peace Police will get him all the same. He has committed the essential crime that contains all others‌—liberalism. Liberalism isn’t something that you can conceal forever. You might dodge the police successfully for a while, even for years. But eventually, they’ll get you.

They usually come for liberals at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep. The strong hands grabbing you. The lights glaring in your eyes. A dozen paramilitary personnel wearing facemasks and black hoods, all standing in your bedroom, looking at you. 

In the vast majority of cases, there’s no report of the arrest, and there’s no trial. People simply disappear. Your name is purged from electoral rolls. Every record of everything you’ve ever done is wiped out. Your one-time existence is denied, deleted forever, and then forgotten. You’re abolished. Annihilated. Vaporized.

For a moment, he’s seized by a kind of hysteria. He writes in a hurried untidy scrawl:

They’ll kill me. I don’t care. They’ll incinerate me. I don’t care. 

Donald Trump is a sexual predator and must die. 

They always flame liberals. I don’t fucking care anymore. 

Donald Trump is a megalomaniac and deserves to die. I’m going to kill him. Someone has to. I’m going to assassinate the President of Trumerica. 

He leans back and puts down the pen. 

There’s a knock at the door.

He thinks, They’ve come for me already? 

He doesn’t move, futilely hoping that they’ll go away. But no, the knocking continues. 

His heart thumps like a drum, but his face, from long habit, is expressionless. 

He gets up and moves toward the door with the certainty of knowing that his life—his personal, internal life where he retains his humanity—will be over in a few seconds.

Chapter 4 

About to put his hand on the doorknob, Liam realizes he left the diary open on the edge of his bathroom sink. Donald Trump must die is written all over it in letters possibly big enough to be legible across the room. 

He rushes back, puts the diary in the drawer under the sink, and then opens the front door. Instantly, a wave of relief flows through him. It’s merely Evelyn Tamariz, a crushed-looking woman with wispy hair and a lined face.

“Hi,” she says in a dreary, whining voice. “Would you mind fixing my sink? It’s blocked up.” By way of explanation, his neighbor waves her stumpy left arm in the air. 

Evelyn Tamariz lives on Liam’s floor. Around thirty, she appears much older. Looking at her, you have the impression that there’s dust in the creases of her face. 

Liam follows her down the hall. 

These repair jobs are a regular necessity. Their apartment building—like thousands of Plaza Residences around the country reserved for regular Organization members—was built decades ago. Now, they’re all falling to pieces. Plaster flaking off walls. Pipes bursting. Roofs leaking. Repairs, except those you can do yourself, have to be approved by committees that often take years to do anything. 

The Tamariz’s apartment is bigger and dingier than Liam’s. The place looks as though a large animal has trashed it. 

A sharp smell of sweat permeates the living room. On the floor are a baseball bat and a burst football. There are dirty dishes and sweaty shorts on the table. On the main wall, above a Portal, there’s a poster of the president, flanked by posters of Tomi Lahren and Antonio Sabàto Jr. 

From another room comes the sound of children humming along to military music streaming from the Portal.

“My kids haven’t been out today,” Evelyn says, apprehensively glancing at the other room. “And of course—” 

She has a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. 

In the kitchen, the sink is full to the brim with filthy greenish water that smells of Bayer rice, a genetically modified rice that all Trumericans eat. Liam kneels down and examines the angle-joint of the pipe. He hates bending down—it always triggers some pain in the swollen veins in his anus—but it’s a small price to pay to help his neighbor, who he’s trying not to judge. 

Evelyn looks on helplessly. “Of course, if Graham wasn’t traveling for work, he’d fix it.”

Graham is Liam’s colleague at the Bureau of Facts. He’s a man of paralyzing stupidity. A mass of imbecile eagerness. A completely unquestioning, devoted conservatard. He’s exactly the kind of person on whom the stability of the Trumerica Freedom Organization depends. 

When not working at the bureau, he’s a leading figure in various Futurussia groups. Those groups organize spontaneous demonstrations, community service projects, and other voluntary activities. He’ll tell you with pride that he has practiced his marksmanship at the local gun range at least twice a week for years. An overpowering smell of sweat follows him wherever he goes.

Using a wrench, Liam fiddles with the valves, washers, and nuts under the sink. 

He’s about to ask Evelyn if it’s possible for someone like himself, who isn’t in the Trumerican Reserves, to get a visitor’s pass to her husband’s gun club—

The Tamariz kids charge into the kitchen and watch. 

Liam lets out the water and removes the disgusting clot of human hair that had blocked up the pipe. 

“Hands up!” the boy yells savagely.

About nine years old, he menaces Liam with a toy handgun. A girl of about seven makes the same gesture with a spatula. The siblings are wearing blue shorts, gray shirts, and red caps that are the uniform of the Youth Counterintelligence Service. 

Liam raises his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, their vicious demeanours warn him that this isn’t just a game for these two kids.

“You’re a criminal-coddling liberal!” the boy shouts. 

“We shoot pinkos like you!” the girl shouts. 

They circle Liam. 

“You’re a traitor!” the brother yells. 

“You’re an Iranaqeyian spy!” the sister yells. 

“We’ll get you sent to our potassium mines in Berezniki!”

“We get free-market-fearing bedwetters like you vaporized!” 

It’s slightly frightening, like watching tiger cubs playing, yet knowing they’ll soon grow into apex predators. In the boy’s eyes, there’s a calculating brutality and a quite evident desire to punch Liam, and a consciousness of being nearly big enough to do so. 

Evelyn steps close to Liam and looks nervously at her kids. “They’re upset that I’m too busy to take them to see the executions.” 

Up close, Liam notices that there actually is dust in the creases of the woman’s face.

“Why can’t we see the rescuing?” roars the boy. 

“We have a right to see the executions!” the girl shouts, still circling. “It’s an important rescuing!” she adds. 

Liam remembers what they’re talking about. Some Iranaqeyian or Korchinpanian prisoners—guilty of war crimes such as rejecting due process and spreading messages of hate and division—are to be executed by flamethrower tonight at the Trump Osprey Point Golf Club. This happens about once a month in all major cities throughout Trumerica. Children always want to go see them. 

He says bye to Evelyn, nods tentatively to her son and daughter, and heads for the door. 

Walking down the dark, dank hallway to his apartment, something hard hits the back of his neck. He spins around. 

Evelyn drags her son, holding a slingshot, back into the doorway. There’s a look of helplessness on the woman’s grayish face, and Liam’s heart goes out to her.

“AOC!” the boy yells at her as she closes the door. 

Back in his apartment, Liam steps quickly past the Portal and sits on his toilet seat. He rubs his neck. 

An advertorial playing on his Portal stops. A newscaster reads out a description of a new Floating Fortress that’s now anchored between the English Isles of Trumerica and the Rhineland Bastard region of Iranaqey. 

With those children, Liam thinks, that unfortunate woman must lead a life of terror. Another year and they’ll be watching her for any signs of becoming unpatriotic. 

These days, most children are members of the Youth Counterintelligence Service. Affectionately nicknamed the Deplorables, this youth group transforms kids into savages. And yet, none of them ever want to rebel against the Organization. On the contrary, they adore everything the Organization does and represents. The July 4th parades past the Winter White House, the morning military drills at school, the recital of slogans, the worship of President Trump—it’s all a kind of glorious game to them. All their fury turns outward, against the enemies of the state—immigrants, traitors, leftists. 

It’s the new normal for parents to be frightened of their own kids. And with good reason, because hardly a week passes in which Turning Point Trumerica doesn’t tweet about an eavesdropping little sneak—“conservative child hero” is the phrase the media ‌uses—denouncing their parents to the police. 

The sting of the slingshot pellet gradually wears off. He picks up his pen, wondering whether he can think of something more to write in his diary. Suddenly he thinks of Brett Brannan again.

Several years ago, Liam dreamed he was in a pitch-dark room. There was another man in the room that Liam could sense, yet couldn’t see. “The truth will emerge where there’s no darkness,” the man said quietly, casually—a statement, not a command. In the dream, the words had made little impression on Liam. It’s also only now that he realizes that the man speaking in his dream was indeed Chief Operating Officer Brannan. 

Liam still can’t figure out if Brannan is friend or foe. Maybe it doesn’t matter. There’s a link of understanding between them, more important than affection—maybe that’s the sole thing that matters. 

“The truth will emerge where there’s no darkness,” Brannan had said. Liam doesn’t know what that means, only that somehow it will come true.

The voice from the Portal stops. There’s a commercial for Syngenta soybeans, and then a short jingle plays, signifying the beginning of an important news segment. 

“Your attention, please,” the Fox Trunews host says raspingly. “Our forces in the Dahati Gulf have won a glorious victory. Military spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders messaged me that this development might just bring the war to an end.” 

Liam listens to the rest of the newsflash. After a gory description of an Iranaqeyian battalion being blown to bits, it’s announced that the Organization will be forced to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 23% in order to lower healthcare expenses and achieve greater income equality. 

Liam belches again. The vodka and opioids are wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling. 

The Portal plays “God Bless Trumerica.” Of course, you’re supposed to stand at attention. However in his present position, he’s invisible. 

After the song ends, an infomercial for Trumerica University starts. 

Liam walks over to the window, keeping his back to the Portal. The day is still sweltering and hazy. Somewhere far away, a missile explodes with a dull, reverberating roar. Over the past few months, about thirty missiles per week have been fired on Lar-o-Maga Palm City.

Down in the street, on the partly broken Trufamily poster, the logo for the Trufamily Forty-Five appears and vanishes. The forty-five people are the ones who rule the Trumerica Freedom Organization via the one-hundred bureaus. They, with objectives passed down by President Trump himself, decide the sacred beliefs and business strategies of the Organization. Then they disseminate them downward to the Organization’s C-Suite—all the thousands of CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, CMOs, COOs, CHOs, CPOs, CSOs, etc., throughout Trumerica. Next, members of the C-Suite then trickle them further down to regular Organization members. 

Trump’s forty-five closest advisors are the ones responsible for the changeability of the past. They also brainwash Trumericans into believing that shadowy forces control everything and that Trump is our last chance to save Trumerica.

Liam feels as though he’s walking on the bottom of an ocean, so far down that everything’s pitch-black, the weight of the water crushing him. He feels lost in a monstrous world where he is the monster. He’s alone. The past is dead. The future is unimaginable. 

Is it possible, Liam thinks, that a single person somewhere is on my side? And what about the Organization—will its control endure forever? 

He looks up at the skyline. The previous slogans have been replaced with new ones. They beam out like answers, all displayed on the three bureau buildings, all flashing at him:

TRUMERICA FIRST. 

LIES ARE NOT ILLEGAL. 

IT’S NOT A CONSPIRACY IF IT’S REAL. 

He takes his cryptocurrency card out of his pocket. In tiny lettering, right there on the plastic card, the same slogans digitally scroll on the micro-screen alongside the face of Donald Trump. Even from the card, the President’s eyes follow you. 

Trump’s face is on Happy Meal boxes, on the tiny chocolates placed on the pillows of Trumerica Plaza Hotels. His face is also on the chips of Trumerica Taj Mahal Casinos. His eyes are everywhere. They’re always watching you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, inside or outside—there’s no escape. Nothing is your own except the gray matter inside your skull—but not even that’s entirely your own because everyone’s been brainwashed.

The sun has gone below the horizon.

Looking at the ginormous Trump Tower, Liam’s heart trembles. 

It’s too strong, he thinks. It can’t be penetrated. He even doubts that a missile could bring it down, architects having learned their lessons after the September 11 attacks. 

He thinks again about who he might be writing his diary for. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t picture any of his readers. 

In his future, there’s a fate worse than death—it’s annihilation. The diary will be reduced to ashes and himself to vapor. Only the Peace Police will read what he’s written. Then they’ll wipe it out of existence and out of memory. 

How can you appeal to the future when not a trace of you, Liam thinks, not even anonymous words scribbled on pieces of paper, can physically survive?

“Janz,” a woman on the Portal says sternly. “808337 Liam Janz, in five minutes you need to leave so that you can be back at work in time for your night shift.” 

With the diary, he feels like a lonely ghost that’s jotting down truths nobody will benefit from. But maybe it isn’t making himself heard but by staying sane that he can carry on the human heritage. He goes back to sitting on his toilet, grabs his pen, and writes: 

From the age of authoritarianism—greetings! 

From the age of Trumerican exceptionalism under Donald Trump—greetings! 

To the future! To you! 

That’s who I’m writing this for. You. 

A toast. To a time ... 

When diversity is celebrated, not forbidden. 

When truth will re-exist. 

And when what is done can’t be undone.

He puts the pen in the draw. 

I’m already dead, he muses. 

Now that he knows he’s a dead man, it’s important to stay alive as long as possible. He notices that some black ink from the pen is on his hand. It’s exactly the kind of damn detail that could incriminate him. A pesky fanatic at work—like Short Liz or that Gemma woman—might figure out that he’s been using an old-fashioned pen to write something, then might squeal on him. 

He puts the diary in the draw. It’s useless to hide it. But he can at least confirm if it’s been discovered. Putting a hair on it would be too obvious. With the tip of his finger, he picks up a particle of whitish dust and places it on the corner of the cover, where it’s bound to be shaken off if they pick the journal up. 

At his sink, he carefully scrubs the ink away, thinking of how he can steal a weapon from his neighbor’s gun club, and thinking of ways he can get close enough to President Trump to assassinate him. 

Chapter 5 

In the morning, Liam is lying on his bed, trying to remember his family.

Liam’s dad, tall and thin, always wore sunglasses and dressed in dark clothes. His mom was a statuesque woman with slow movements and magnificent blond hair. He doesn’t remember much about his baby sister, other than that she was usually silent, and had large, watchful eyes. 

In the late 1990s, when he was around ten years old, his dad was executed, and his mom and sister disappeared. They were swallowed up by different purges of deep state operatives, welfare queens, and supporters of the Trumerican Civil Liberties Union. 

Liam remembers his dream from last night. In it, his mom and sister were somehow far below him. They were in a dark place, looking up at Liam. For a few moments, he thought they were maybe at the bottom of either a well or a deep grave. Whatever it was, it was moving downwards, further away from him. 

Then he realized that they were in a glass-bottom boat that had been turned upside-down. They were trapped in an air pocket. Dark water surrounded them everywhere. 

He was above the water, out in the light and air. And they were being sucked down to death, being circled by snapping bloodthirsty piranhas. Also, his mom and sister were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it. There was no reproach in their faces, only the awareness that they must die so he can live. 

He wondered why his mom didn’t pound against the glass. But then he understood that breaking it would only kill them sooner—either by drowning or as piranha snacks. 

Lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, the thing that now suddenly strikes Liam is that their deaths, nearly thirty years ago, were sorrowful in a way that’s no longer possible. Tragedy belongs to an ancient time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when family members supported each other without needing to know why. 

He’s not sure which particular purge scooped up his mom and sister, yet sometimes suspects that they were shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. 

His mother’s memory rips at his heart because she died loving him, a private and unalterable love, and he was too young and selfish to love her in return. Such emotional landscapes, he now realizes, can’t possibly exist today. Today there’s fear, hatred, and pain. But no dignity of emotion, no complex sorrows, no deep feelings. 

He had a second dream. In that one, he was suddenly in a field standing on short springy, green grass. It was summer. It was the golden hour when, just before sunset, the daylight was redder and softer than when the sun was high in the sky. 

This illuminated landscape around him recurred frequently in his dreams. In his waking thoughts, he sometimes called this dreamscape Libertopia. Other times he thought of it as Lah Lah Land. There were even times he liked to think that his subconscious was tapping into Lukomorye, the imaginary land created by the great Russian-American poet, Alexander Pushkin. 

In it, there was a grassy field with a path wandering across it. On the other side of the field were hedges and elm trees. Nearby, though out of sight, there was a clear, unpolluted, slow-moving stream filled with herring and sunfish swimming in pools shaded by willow trees. Usually, the idea of being close to a body of water—regardless of whether it was a river, a lake, or an ocean—gave him nausea and a feeling of not being able to breathe. But for some reason, that particular stream in his dream didn’t fill him with dread. 

The woman with freckles and wearing the red baseball hat appeared in the field. She walked toward him. With what seemed like a single movement, Gemma ripped off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. 

Her body aroused little desire in him. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for how she threw her clothes on the grass. The graceful and careless gesture seemed to annihilate a whole culture, an entire system of thought, as though Donald Trump and the Organization could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. 

An alarm coming from his Portal breaks Liam’s reverie. It’s seven o’clock. Time to get ready for his morning shift. Liam wrenches his body out of bed and reaches for a singlet and a pair of shorts. 

If I lifted my middle finger at the Portal, Liam thinks, and pulled down my boxer shorts and flashed my ass at whoever is watching, how long would it take for the police to barge into my apartment? 

* * * * * 

A note from the author: 

Thanks for reading the first five chapters of my novel! 

For more info, please visit https://www.loganemeryemerson.com/ 

Logan Emery Emerson