Michael Weller
"An Island for Whites", Book VII, Chapter 48.

Blue reservation.

Part two.

Paradise islands.

The terrible, shocking information came from Bill Sykes, a reporter for the San Francisco Communist newspaper.

"I can't believe that the government of some state, living people, no matter how cruel fanatics and cave radicals they are, are capable of such atrocity," he said, shocked. Bill is currently being treated for depression and nervous exhaustion.

So, while vacationing on a small rented yacht with his husband, forty-year-old programmer Leslie Adams, they were caught by a typhoon. The on-board equipment was out of order, and Bill dropped the phone into the water, while Leslie forgot to charge his phone. For this reason, they, the careless children of the digital age, could not accept the storm warning. San Francisco Port Authority is already under investigation for negligence in releasing small private vessels into the ocean.

The yacht (owned by "Gypsy Mot Global", displacement 12.5 tons, cost $4 million) was blown away from shipping routes by a typhoon and ocean currents, and on the fourteenth day they finally saw land on the horizon. Our travelers, on the occasion of the happy end of their wanderings, opened a bottle of champagne they had stored up, moving along the coast covered with greenery. Seeing the village, they dropped anchor two hundred feet from the shore and inflated the rubber boat.

A plump orange horseshoe crept onto the sand with a rustle. Several local residents, barefooted on the hot sand, watched warily from afar. They were all thin, tanned old men in faded rags.

The lack of hospitality surprised Bill and Leslie. I had to shout to each other over a fair distance. The residents responded in English with some sort of mixed American accent.

It was the island of Maui. They were taken to Hawaii.

The residents asked if there were any women with them. When they found out that there are not, they calmed down and even cheered up. They invited travelers to rest in the shade. However, they did not take them to their houses (or rather, huts), but offered to sit in the shade of trees. Although they brought two folding deck chairs for them; the fabric between the aluminum tubes is very discolored and worn out.

The elder of the village, who introduced himself as Randy Berry and even gave a clumsy and ceremonial bow, inquired about the liquor on the yacht. Leslie swam for two bottles of Wild Turkey 101, while a table was brought under the palm trees and covered with a very old red-and-white-checked Italian tablecloth. Pineapple, mango and papaya were served.

And then Randy Berry first puzzled, and then frightened Bill and Leslie.

"Are you…relatives?" –  he asked.

"We're married," said Bill.

"Thank God," Randy breathed out with relief and somehow thoughtfully, hesitantly crossed himself.

Why "thank God"? Leslie didn't understand.

"Because otherwise you would have to be killed," Randy said.

He smiled, and everyone smiled, cheerfully and openly, with their tanned wrinkles, their gray hairs and bald heads. But these skinny, clean, and impoverished old men spread an atmosphere of a certain hopelessness. Hopelessness, like a shaky haze on a hot afternoon, trembled in the green carved shadow, in the piercing blue sky, and the silhouettes of the distant mountains also elusively flowed in this hopelessness emanating from them.

"Why would you?" Bill asked and felt his muscles: he would break these old men like pasta. Unless they have weapons, he thought.

"You entered the restricted area," Randy said instructively. "And that invites troubles. For us. Haven't you heard of Maui?"

Bill thought it was high time to pour, and twisted the cork off the bottle. A row of assorted glasses gleamed on the table. He poured the reddish trickle into seven glasses, and the bottle got half empty.

"For love," Randy said.

"For kindness,"  added a bald old man with two teeth sticking forward, like in a gopher's. His name was Rob Nosse.

By the end of the second bottle, Rob said nostalgically:

"We've lost the habit to real booze here. We got tired of this fruit moonshine."

Anyway, there were more bottles appearing on the table, already unlabeled and stuffed with makeshift bark plugs, but the liquor was acceptable.

And already in the evening, when the fire scattered sparks, and the conversations became loud and the dialogues fell apart, Bill Sykes, a journalist, and Leslie Adams, a programmer, heard something that some had already forgotten about, while others did not know at all.

When new borders were drawn after the Catastrophe and the end of the Civil War, and the Christian States of the Mid-Southwest emerged, the Mormons, who came to power in the territories of the former Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Arizona, managed to have a referendum on the deprivation of the rights and deportation of all those involved in the LGBT. The support of the population was almost universal. The question arose, where to deport them?

Negotiations lasted for several years, and all this time the unfortunate gays, lesbians, transgenders and non-binary people languished in labor camps. This was the new slavery. They lived in barracks behind barbed wire, ate in canteens, and were taken away to work in the fields or factories in the morning and returned in the evening. The barracks were common, the cohabitation of gays with lesbians was not forbidden. There was no Internet in these zones, television programs were strictly censored, and e-books were provided to prisoners only such where the relationship was strictly heterosexual.

South America, Australia and Moscow principality abandoned them. They categorically refused to go to Africa and Siberia themselves. Muslim Europe and the East would have executed them. In China, they would be sent to a labor re-education camp. And to ship them to California or New York next to own states would  mean supplying people to the enemy and adding gasoline to the fire of the unceasing struggle against oneself.

Hawaii by that time was impoverished and depopulated. Tourism has died out in the calamity and turmoil of world reordering, and the population has almost completely died out from AIDS and Covid. The ships for the settlers were chartered under the same cheap Liberian flag.

Homosexuals and others like them were transported by trucks north to the Canadian border and further west north of Bellingsham. And from there, through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, ships under a cheap Liberian flag carried settlers to a new life in distant lands (an analogy with those exiled to America and Australia once).

The sensational report by Bill Sykes, followed by a sequel, turned into a whole book and was printed with a sequel in eleven Sunday editions. One issue was dedicated to the heartbreaking scenes of the poor fellows leaving their homeland, and the whole country wept over it. The other consisted entirely of the old people's memories of the beginning of life in exile: Bill recorded their stories on a recorder (which happened to be with him – that's the professional habit). The third, in sparing strokes, without any pathos, described their cemetery, how they buried their friends, how many committed suicide. There was an issue about renegades who, in difficult conditions, abandoned their identity, their ideals and began to admit to former friends that they were actually attracted to women ... And the final chapter of this newborn book instilled pride and hope in readers: abandoned people on abandoned island again return to the bosom of great humanity.

Critics unleashed a flurry of praise on the first book of the young writer, and only one skeptic, without whom it never goes, said that only a few of the islanders lived to see contact, and no one is going to return those back: there has not been a penny in the budget for a long time, and the standard of living has fallen so low over the past thirty years that returnees from the past can become a source of unwanted information.