“Get off me,” she screams. “I had him. I had him.”
Mobley sucks air, his hands on his crotch. It’s a miracle he doesn’t vomit. For the first time in decades he’s found a feeling his billions can’t numb or erase.
The Prophet crouches before Bathsheba, gazing at her with just the kindest eyes.
“You’re safe now,” he says. “We’re with Samson.”
“I had him,” Katie repeats, but the fight is leaving her, relief setting in.
Across from her, E. L. Mobley struggles to sit up.
For the first time in his life he has no idea what to say or do.
Simon sits across from him.
“I figured it out,” he repeats. “It’s grief. The five stages of death, right? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but we’re all trapped in the first two stages. The whole country, or maybe the Earth. We’re in denial and we’re pissed, because something we love is dead, except, for half the country, what they’re grieving is the past they think they’ve lost, and the other half is mourning the progress they thought they’d made, but everyone feels the same way. Like someone they love is dead. And I get it. I’m grieving too. I miss her and I don’t want her to be dead, and I’m pissed.”
He leans toward the Wizard.
“But we can’t move on,” he says, “none of us, because you’re preying on us, you and the others, turning our grief into cash, keeping us angry, keeping us fighting, keeping us divided so you can take our children and bleed us dry.”
The Wizard drops the handkerchief in his lap.
“Are you finished?” he says, making no attempt to disguise the contempt he feels for them.
“No,” says Simon. “Because I’m not in denial. I’m pissed, sure, but I know what’s real. And what’s real is that you’re killing us. With your greed and your doublespeak. You’re killing our planet. And the only ones who can see it are the children. And that’s why we’re killing ourselves. Because the death we’re really grieving is our own.”
Bathsheba stands from the sofa and comes over. She’s trembling. “Kill him,” she says.
Simon looks at the Prophet.
“No,” says the holy man who once was a baby named Paul. “We need him for one last thing.”
Epilogue
The Legend of Yes and No
My daughter asked me how I’m going to end this book. I told her I wasn’t sure. Actually, what I said was—you got me.
I explained to her that her father is a romantic, which means he wants life to work out for people in the end. He wants good things to happen to those who do good and bad things happen to those who do ill. This is how we are, humanity. We want relationships to last. We want families to stay together. We like it when the good guy wins.
Fairy tales. I’m describing fairy tales.
My daughter said, Yeah, but how do you end a story when nothing ever really ends?
We’d been talking about World War One, which she’s been studying in history class, and I’d just finished telling her how you can’t really tell the story of World War One without telling the story of World War Two.
That’s how it goes. One thing leads to another.
The best you can hope for, I told her, is a feeling of catharsis. That something meaningful has changed. That growth has occurred.
And has it? she asked.
Stop asking so many questions, I told her. But of course that’s her job. She’s thirteen, and I’m handing her the keys to a car called Earth. What’s this dent? she’s asking. Why is this broken? Is it safe?
*
She’s on two different kinds of anxiety medication, my daughter. She wasn’t on them when I started the book. She was an eleven-year-old girl still missing a tooth, who chewed her tongue to help her concentrate. But when childhood gave way to adolescence, something happened. That beast called anxiety crept in.
Last year I asked her, What’s going on? What are you so afraid of?
This is what she told me: she didn’t want to grow up. She didn’t want to think about the future. I tried to convince her that planning for the future is the only way she’ll have any control over it, but she was skeptical. We were in the middle of a global pandemic, after all.
Control, she had learned, is an illusion.
*
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
In the beginning was the land and the sea, the trees and fields and mountains. There was the sun and the moon, the flowers and the bees, the fish and the bears, and all of life’s wondrous gifts.
In the beginning there was Alaska, the Yukon Delta, and the Bering Sea. On the first Thursday in September, a private plane lands on a secluded runway just north of Allakaket. The land surrounding it—two hundred thousand acres—has been purchased the month prior by a reclusive billionaire who has since disappeared.
The nose stairs lower. Eight teenagers descend. It is a foggy morning. The temperature outside is sixty-five degrees. There are two sets of siblings, the rest of the kids are friends.
Two hundred thousand acres = 312.5 square miles. Walking at three miles per hour, it would take one hundred and four hours to leave what is now their property. The prefab housing will be delivered in a week, along with a rainwater collection system, a seed bank, and livestock. This is what a billionaire’s money can buy. A planned community for a few hundred people that will grow in time.
A prophecy has led them here. A quest, if you will. First they had to overcome their anxiety. Then they freed the kid in the cage. They rescued the dragon from the tower and vanquished the Witch and the Wizard. Now this land is their reward. Heaven on Earth.
Utopia.
Simon Oliver steps onto the grass. It has been sixty days since his last pill. His sixteenth birthday is tomorrow. He feels like Noah leaving his ark. Two by two they come. Left behind is a burning world, roiling with hatred.
For Claire, he thinks when he sees the aspen trees waving in the breeze.
*
Recently, I’ve been asking myself—are we as a species suffering from an empathy problem? And if so, is our dilemma that we aren’t feeling enough empathy? Or is empathy itself the problem?