Cass Goldfarb sat in the back of Professor Gocciulupe’s afternoon seminar on Art and Action, and sighed. Tony—he would have been devastated if anyone had called him Professor Gocciulupe, or even Professor—had been diverted, and it would be some time before class resumed. Two boys had interrupted his introduction to a class on improvising guerilla theater to tell him the ‘news’ about a giant Pentagon magnet that was supposedly disrupting the flight of Canada geese on their southward migration. This was a standard SGI prank, relying on the fact that Tony was gullible—well, less gullible than so remarkably empathetic that any story of suffering tended to overwhelm him. Cass thought about pointing out that ornithologists actually believed geese migrated by reference to the sun, but too many of her classmates already thought of her as a suck-up, and so she leaned quietly back in her chair and went to work on a mental list she was compiling.
Is SGI actually Hogwarts?
Well-guarded. Not by spells, giant spiders, and so forth, but the “holistic center” that operated in the same building really was good cover. People came and went a week at time—right now a group of Reiki healers had arrived, practicing the art of healing massage that didn’t actually require touching the body, but instead channeling the pool of cosmic energy surrounding it into various chakras. Anyone who paid attention to the small campus in the hills was going to concentrate on the nutty stuff, not the school that served as a kind of hub for activist campaigners from around the planet. It was hard, Cass thought, to suspect anything threatening might be happening in a center devoted to no-hands backrubs. Also, thanks to Professor Lee, there was extremely strong encryption software constantly in use, which might be the current analogue to a spell.
Somewhat odd faculty. Maria was more or less normal—the rumor was she had once been a nun, and she was certainly tough enough. But Tony was called the Emoticon. Or, Right, as in right-brain, to differentiate him from his husband, Left. Professor Kinnison, who would have devastated any student who called him Mark, taught Factual Analysis. A national debate champion at Grambling University, he believed firmly that all campaigns for social justice rested on an edifice of fact, statistic, detail, measurement, evidence. The undeniable success of their marriage was a source of constant discussion, as was the eventual temperament of their adorable twin infants, Rafer and Johnson.
Diverse student body. Cass had not, in fact, been informed of her admittance to SGI by an owl, but she had been tapped out of the blue in her sophomore year at Rutgers, after she’d helped lead a campaign to raise the wages of dining hall workers. A professor emeritus, who’d advised the cafeteria staff and their student allies, had urged her to apply for SGI instead of junior year abroad, telling her only it was an activist training program. She’d arrived at Denver International Airport to find a minivan waiting, and in it fourteen people roughly her age. Aina, Chandrike Rupesinghe from Bangkok, bossy Camile from Istanbul, Ramon from Bogota. Beautiful Matti from Norway. Every continent except Antarctica. They’d driven through the darkness to the center, where they’d been told of the need for secrecy, and been asked if they wanted to stay. It wasn’t exactly a train from an invisible platform, just a GMC van. And there weren’t enough of them to sort into different houses, just a girls’ dorm and a boys’. But they were as varied as could be—as they settled in those first days, the only thing they could figure out they had in common was that they’d all campaigned for something. Muggles maybe, but not Dursleys. Engaged Muggles.
Cass had followed this train of thought before, and she wasn’t the only one, for no matter the continent these kids had come of age with Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, and they were constantly ticking the air and saying ‘Three points for Hufflepuff.’ But she always reached the same conclusion. What made SGI different was the possibility of real magic.
The problem with the wizarding world, she thought, was how much like the Muggle world it actually was. Yes, you learned all kinds of spells and you watched for intruders on magic maps and so on. But at the end of the books push inevitably came to shove; it was always an anti-climax. Because it was just a fight. You concentrated really hard and then you shot a lightning bolt out your index finger, but that seemed, if you thought about it, very much like using a handgun. All the zappings tended to erode the magic; the magic world operated on force too.
Whereas the history they learned at SGI suggested there might actually be magic in the world, magic you could figure out how to harness and use. The bus boycotts and the salt-making on the beach in India; the student strikes of the anti-apartheid days, the sit-ins and teach-ins and die-ins that often failed and sometimes actually didn’t. The first week of the school had been one big joint seminar, with a common reading: Why Civil Resistance Works, an academic analysis of protest in recent decades showing peaceful uprisings were twice as likely to work as their violent counterparts, from Iran to Burma to oil-drilling in the Arctic. Yes, Hitler was a hard case. But for every Hitler a Gandhi—and Gandhi was a kind of real Dumbledore, who’d managed to beat the biggest and most powerful empire in the world without any guns at all. In his underwear essentially, like some Marvel superhero whose power lay in somehow reaching the hearts and souls of a continent, and convincing them to act. Someone eventually shot Gandhi, and history resumed its usual course, though not precisely, because other people had been watching. Martin Luther King, say, who to Cass also seemed like someone out of a children’s book: he’d managed, with a lot of help, to take the humiliation of people and, with Gandhi’s example in mind, fashion it into a weapon strong enough to beat other people with real guns. Until of course he’d been shot too.
Cass wasn’t naïve—she knew it wasn’t actually ‘magic.’ But she knew she was not cynical, either. She was open to the possibility that the bloody world she was growing up in, with terrorism and rising temperatures and all the rest, had other subtler forces at work in it as well, forces you could maybe . . .
At the front of the room people were moving desks out of the way. Clearly class had resumed while she daydreamed; somehow the Canada geese had flown away. “The point of guerilla theater,” Tony was saying, “is that it makes people think again about the things they’d otherwise take for granted. Has anyone heard of the Yes Men? Of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Now? Let’s pretend it’s the annual Exxon shareholder’s meeting . . .”
What happened to Chapter 4?
I found it. I finally figured out that the chapters weren't in order.