Until he thinks about Claire.
He is fifteen years old. It’s been ten months since he found her in his parents’ bathroom. Ten months of going through the motions—school, hobbies, friends—insulated inside the ether of the rich, while outside the palace walls, the line between fact and fiction continued to soften. Out there, in the land they called Main Street, the God King still ruled. Even as the Kingdom of Wall Street prospered, as the wealthy bought third and fourth homes, as boats became yachts and yachts became islands, mythical creatures were born anew in the forested loam outside of lofty cities, warlocks and sorcerers rutting in dark places, trolls and goblins poisoning the rivers of reason. They bloomed under shadowy roots, like toadstools, hidden from sight. As newspaper editors in the land of plenty assigned missives on the return of the EPA—protecting the land and the sea once more!—orcs and ogres tunneled deep into underground chatrooms and Parler groups, biding their time. They knew what Obi-Wan knew—that by striking them down, we had only made them more powerful. And so, even as we saw the return of what university professors referred to as normality, it was only a simulation. A smiley face hiding the sickness underneath.
All the while the divide between reality and fantasy grew, but which was which?
Sometimes Simon wonders if it is his own kingdom that is living in a dream. The Kingdom of Wall Street, where educated men and women believe that if the residents of Main Street just had all the facts, they would see the world as we do. The delusion that science and reason are real, and, more important, that they matter. Perhaps this is the true definition of insanity. Not belief in an all-powerful God who created the universe in six days, not the unwavering superstition of a conspiratorial citizenry. No. Perhaps the Enlightenment itself was a psychotic break. The belief that all things could be measured. Maybe Galileo was the lunatic, Einstein.
In the Kingdom of Wall Street, a fourteen-year-old boy turned fifteen. His father took him to Switzerland to ski. All evidence of Claire had been removed from their home, her room converted to a gift wrapping station and decorated for the holidays. Her photos were drawered. Her name was verboten, as if her very existence before was a humiliation to her parents that must never be mentioned. Simon, too, was expected to hold his tongue, to banish her from his thoughts, the older sister who had held him in the night when he was afraid, who had taught him pig latin so they could share their own language.
One night in the living room at the ski lodge he found a book filled with facts. Not about Wall Street or Main Street, but about the Earth. Simon stayed up late reading.
This is what he learned:
The extra heat from all the carbon dioxide we’ve put into our atmosphere in the last one hundred years through the burning of fossil fuels is equivalent to four hundred thousand Hiroshima-size bombs exploding every day.
Combined it would create a column of solid carbon eighty-two feet in circumference that would rise all the way to the moon.
By 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic than fish by weight.
Endocrine disruptors in said plastics, shampoos, cosmetics, pesticides, canned foods, and ATM receipts have caused sperm counts to drop and women to suffer declining egg quality and more miscarriages.
In certain Chinese cities, the air is so thick with pollution that officials have installed giant video screens to show the sun rise.
In 2020 the weight of “human-made mass”—everything we’ve built and accumulated from cars to buildings to hairbrushes—exceeded the weight of biomass on the planet for the first time.
For example, there are nine gigatons of plastic on Earth and four gigatons of animals.
Eighty years from now the world’s oceans will be so hot they will stop producing oxygen. Considering that two-thirds of all oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by phytoplankton in our oceans, this will signal the end of all life on Earth.
The end
of
all
life.
In the beginning there was Claire’s death. Now, here in black-and-white, was the death of everyone and everything else. The Ur death. The death of a planet. And with it Simon’s own death, suffocating on a molten, boiling ball of misery.
Did grown-ups know this? Had they read this book? Surely the whole planet was uniting to address the issue and undo the damage. Wall Street and Main Street were settling their differences to join forces against the death of all living things. And yet, back in New York, Simon wasn’t so sure. He watched as his parents replaced his sister with clothes and technology, with the false comfort of things. As they continued to deny both her death and her life, even in the face of all evidence. And like a plant without water, Simon began to wither and die. The stress of keeping up appearances, of pretending, settled in his bones, and a great anxiety was born. He became The Boy Who Has Panic Attacks, terrified of everything, paralyzed by doubt. Life for him was a microphone left too close to a speaker, high tones rising, his posture stuck in constant cringe, anticipating the feedback screech.