NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

You can’t really run away. But you can try.

Robin had found an awesome property in Bedfordview. It’s mid-way between my two jobs, the one downtown and the one at the Airport, where Always On Technologies is. It’s got 7 potential bedrooms, so we can each have an office and there’s extra space for grandparents to visit.

The price, 2.4 million Rand, comes to barely more what our old house was worth in Atlanta. I close quickly, pay cash, and send Robin off to add furniture. Then I make some phone calls, long distance.

A few weeks later, Jenni is released from the clinic. I’ve bought a new Scion, a Toyota with lots of headroom, with great mileage. I maneuver it east, out of the Central Business District where we’ve lived for so long. I smile, she smiles. We don’t talk. There’s nothing to say.

I pull off the highway in five miles, make some lefts and rights. She has a look of surprise on her face. I smile again.

We arrive at our new driveway. A gate covers it. I push a button and it opens. I pull in backwards so she has it easier on the walk. Robin is there to help her. Jenni pushes her away. “It’s just a break. I’m not old.” Robin laughs.

The surprise is inside the door. Both her parents, fresh off a long plane ride from the States, both sitting in new easy chairs, our son on a couch between them. Her dad, 86, jumps from his seat and hugs his daughter, then leads her to it and sets her down.

John jumps off the couch backwards and rushes to pull a cord. Drapes open with a rush. There behind a bay window are a pond, a pool, and an umbrella by a table. Jenni gasps.

The day passes in a pleasant blur. There’s a huge kitchen, which Jenni’s dad has already used to make his specialty, smothered cube steak in a brown sauce, with beans, a salad, and iced tea. “Your son helped,” he says, and John beams.

Jenni loves to talk, usually about other people, so I leave her family to it while I explore the house. Robin has spent 100,000 Rand, on furniture, on computers, on TVs in every bedroom. She had taken some art classes in high school but I didn’t know she had this in her. “If the animals don’t mind you could become an interior decorator,” I say to her. “Your mother would love to have you at home.” She stiffens, so I don’t press it, smiling instead.

John is in heaven. He plays in the pool, then comes in and works on his PC. He’s bronzing, something he never did, and he’s lost weight, I notice.

All is right in my world, but when I walk into my new home-office and close the door, I find it’s not all right in the real world. Crime in Johannesburg, already high, is actually rising, and political leaders are starting to blame the new Americans. Worse, they may be right, because while Virgin-Maverick can track its own people, we have no way to control the others.

They’re quite a mix of others. There are middle-class blacks who are finding it hard to find work, and act surprised about it. There are right-wingers who are trying to stir up the Afrikaners, and left-wingers trying to stir up the Sowetans. Every lost cause of America is represented. Mine was just the first.

Meanwhile, America is still going to hell in a hand basket. Howard Dean has been arrested, charged in a financial scam which even from here seems both beyond him and beneath him. Bill Clinton is on an extended speaking tour of Europe, and his wife has accompanied him, leaving behind her work in the Senate, and leading the President to demand the quick reappointment of a replacement by the state’s Republican governor.

Real estate prices have been cut in half, as has the value of the dollar, and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed past 10% with no change in sight. Companies that had moved their headquarters overseas for tax reasons, like Tyco, are now talking of building real headquarters there. Money is fleeing the states in a flood, sometimes through wire transfers, sometimes in suitcases. Brazil is booming, Argentina’s economy is growing for the first time in decades, but America’s trading partners are fading with it. Mexicans are still coming to Iowa, but now they’re being found dead along the roadsides, racist slogans scrawled across the bodies, and the press reports on all this are bland, matter-of-fact, fearful.

In the Internet age, money and power move with the speed of light. If you’re not constantly on your game it can be game over. America is finding that out, and the more the truth is discovered, the tighter the screws come on.

I don’t want Jenni’s parents going back.