What we do know now is that thousands of people died in a stampede and the ensuing riots and those deaths might never have happened if all flights had been canceled. When I posit this theory to Clare, she looks both weary and furious at the same time. “It’s not a simple question to answer. People were desperate and the airport was always going to be a hub of panic at that time. It was the crowd theory by Gustave Le Bon happening in front of my very eyes. The crowd, like microbes, mutated and became irritable, irrational, uncontrollable.”
I point out to Clare that Gustave Le Bon’s theory of crowds’ infectious behaviors has been thoroughly debunked by science. For the first time in our long conversation I see the fierce glint that made this woman the country’s youngest mayor. She doesn’t care that I’ve read some Atlantic piece about bullshit science. She was there. She saw it. What do I know?
“It started with a single gunshot,” she says. “One guy. One gun. He didn’t shoot at a person, he shot up, like they do in the movies. But in the movies, they do that when they’re outside and alone. He was in a crowded airport with a partially glass roof.”
We all know what happened next. It is written into the history of the Plague as a painful reminder of the way in which the pandemic robbed us of our humanity. Pandemonium followed the gunshot. Women, men, children, all howling and crying, were trampled to death across the airport as the crowd surged toward exits and away from the gunshots. In total, 186 people died in the stampede. Twelve men, including Clare’s colleague Andrew Rawlings, died from gunshot wounds as men desperately shot at one another. Unrest and panic spread outward from the airport, culminating in devastating riots.
Clare is surprisingly forgiving of the original shooter, a position she did not dare mention on the campaign trail. “He obviously shouldn’t have shot the roof, but can you imagine being told that you could never go home again, never see your family again, your sons were going to die and you were going to die from a painful disease in a few days? That’s one of the circles of hell. People do awful things in that kind of situation.”
She was completely alone. She was going to die. And yet, here she is because she ran. That’s why she survived. The question at the San Francisco debate from her main opponent in the mayoral race—Victoria Brown—that rang around California in its tone of scathing judgment comes to mind: Why did you run, Clare? What kind of public servant runs away?
Clare is as dismissive of Victoria now as she was then. She scoffs at her opponent’s total lack of understanding of the human condition. “One of the reasons I wanted to run for mayor was that I actually had on-the-ground experience of being a public servant, both when it goes right and when it goes wrong. I was honest about the fact that I ran on that day. Victoria tried to make it sound like I was the worst police officer who had ever lived because I, what, didn’t start randomly shooting men who would have turned their guns on me? Her strategy didn’t work. The voters understood. They understood that when there is that much fear in the air, and people have nothing to live for, sometimes you have to run.”
The end of the story can now be written, in all of its post-Plague, messy, untouched apartment glory. Girl becomes mayor of San Francisco in the first election held in her city since the Plague. Girl introduces programs to recruit women into coding and the police and to rebuild the tech industry, determined to make life better and not just focus on survival. Girl is powerful and unapologetic about that power even though on a terrifying day, years ago, she ran.
DAWN
London, United Kingdom （England and Wales）
Day 1,245
I cannot have one more argument about crisps!”
Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh. I manage to keep a straight face. Marianne West, the woman who cannot have one more argument about crisps （not one!）， is looking at me as if to say, You see what I have to put up with? Oh, I do, Marianne, rest assured I do.
Turns out, one of the best ways to fulfill the career dreams your twenty-five-year-old self barely dared to imagine is to be a woman during the Plague. I haven’t lost my marbles and I’m not allowed to retire until I’m seventy. When I realized I had a decade until retirement, I thought, fuck it. If I’m going to be here, I’m going to keep doing well. Five swift promotions later and here I am. Arguably one of the three most powerful people in the British Intelligence Services. Little Dawn Williams from a housing estate in Lewisham. Always the nerd in class, never able to get words to leave my brain in the way I wanted them to, never able to make myself sound interesting. Always the hardest working, always different from everyone else yet always boring. Too boring to be bullied properly even, just ignored. Always different at Oxford, the only black woman. Always the only black woman everywhere I went. Still, always quiet and understated. I made a habit of saying one thing in my head and another out loud. And now, here I am. The thing I was told would be my undoing has become the reason for my success. I’m completely unobjectionable. You could even go as far as to say nondescript. I’ve made no enemies, rubbed no one the wrong way, kept my head down. Worked so hard people could only ever say I was competent; even if they didn’t like me, they could never point to a mistake. I always wore a gold band on my left hand so people would assume I was married. Fewer questions, fewer chances of being harassed and then, when I had my daughter, no one batted an eyelid. People assumed I was married, I had a child, nothing to see here. I have made it my mission to be the most boring, hardest-working person in every room and it has paid off.