The Prophet
They put the Prophet in interview room two. He sits quietly, his hands cuffed to a chain that connects to a ring on the floor. This is in the El Paso offices of Homeland Security, a cement monster of a building, ringed by concrete barriers. His mouth is dry. It’s been six hours since Taser wires hit him in the left shoulder and the neck. There is an angry bruise above his collar. His thoughts feel scattered. When the barbs penetrated his skin, the Taser triggered nineteen electric pulses in five seconds with an average current of two milliamps, leading to seizures and intense pain. It created an electric field inside his body that stimulated nerve cells called alpha motor neurons. These neurons then fired their own electrical impulses, which raced to his muscles and caused violent, sustained muscle contractions.
He sits now on a hard plastic chair. Somewhere during his capture, the Prophet’s glasses were lost. The room he sees now is a blur of white and gray. If he’s afraid, he doesn’t show it. In fact, sitting under the harsh fluorescents, he appears to be meditating, a bass hum rumbling low in his throat.
There are two basic settings available on most Tasers, pulse mode and drive stun. The first incapacitates. The second uses pain to secure compliance. Human beings invented this device, the way they have invented all weapons meant to incapacitate or kill—without a care in the world.
The door opens. A woman in a pantsuit enters. Behind her there is a man with a sidearm. They smell like smoke. The man closes the door behind them. The woman pulls out her chair and sits. The Prophet’s eyes remain closed.
“I want to thank you,” he says, “for electrocuting me. It was an extremely clarifying event.”
The woman lays a file folder on the table, sits. “I meet a lot of people in my job, Paul. Can I call you Paul?”
“There’s no Paul here,” says the Prophet. “If you want to talk to that kid, you’ll need a time machine.”
The woman opens the folder. “Wilson, Wyoming. That’s where you’re from?”
“I spent some time there.”
“That’s near Yellowstone, right?”
The Prophet nods. When he was a young boy, he found a copy of a book at a thrift sale. Handbook for Boys, it was called, published by the Boy Scouts of America. It was a blue/green paperback with an image on the front of three young Scouts sitting around a campfire. Hovering over them was the apparition of an Indian chief, floating in wispy tendrils, as if created from campfire smoke. Was he their spirit guide or a ghost of America’s past come to haunt them? The edition the Prophet bought for fifty cents was published in 1950. In it were lessons about many things: hiking and camping, wildlife and wood lore, but he saw it as a manual of citizenship. On the first page, printed in bold, was the Scout Law.
1. A Scout Is Trustworthy.
“Have you ever heard the word hyperobject?” he asks the agent.
“No.”
“Picture an iceberg floating in the ocean. You see it ahead of you, bobbing on the surface, and you think you know the size of it, but its true mass below the waterline is beyond your comprehension. A hyperobject is something too huge to fully wrap your mind around. Climate change, for example.”
“We’re not here to talk about the Fahrenheit in Greenland, kid. We’re here to talk about crimes against the state. About terrorism. Because that’s what we’re calling you and your friends. Terrorists.”
Whatever effect she thought these words would have on the Prophet, she sees no sign of it on his face. Instead, he closes his eyes again.
Hummmmm.
“What is that sound you’re making?” the woman asks him.
“There is a frequency in this building. Very low. I doubt you can hear it. Most people can’t. I find when I match the sound, it opens my mind to possibilities.”
The woman opens his folder, looks through it. “You didn’t have it easy, did you?” she says. “Abusive home, in and out of foster care, and then there are the arrests.”
“It’s true,” says the Prophet. “I had poor modeling.”
She pages through his past. “Now, this is sad. It looks like your dad killed your mom.”
2. A Scout Is Loyal.
The Prophet takes a deep breath, holds it.
“Paul’s father killed his mother in the kitchen with a shovel when Paul was six,” he says. “Paul went to live with first his grandmother, then his uncle in Nebraska. It was there that God spoke to him for the first time.”
“God as in the old man with a white beard?”