Whatever question you asked, the answer was chaos. There were two truths now, but in each it was the teller who was the victim. Reality had finally become 100 percent subjective.
Governors from each state quickly named a replacement senator to hold the seat until the next election, in each case choosing a man with more extremist views. In the hours after the bombing, an FBI raid of the junior senator’s home uncovered bomb-making materials and booby traps. At the same time, a manifesto was posted on social media by a group calling itself 4Horsemen. Written and signed by Senator LaRue, it claimed the group had four million members nationwide.
“We are everywhere,” read the statement. “We are your mailmen, your corrections officers, your mayors and governors. The enemy has infiltrated our world, and now we have infiltrated theirs. We know the secrets they are trying to hide, this liberal swarm. Satan’s forces are strong, but we can hide too. Watch your back, demons.”
In Montana, the Pick-6 lottery number was 000000. On August 18 the official Internet Suicide Clock reported 31,406 self-murders. For context, two thousand a day is considered “normal.” The youngest victim was eleven. The oldest was sixty-three. Off the coast of Oregon on the same day, a pod of 116 blue whales beached themselves. What did it mean? Were these things connected or coincidental?
The next day, 42,108 earthlings killed themselves. The day following that, 55,211 even as men in camouflage vests with Santa Claus beards terrorized boardwalks in Santa Monica and Atlantic City. On each of those days, approximately 360,000 more human beings were born. This is how it is with our species. We just keep coming. But don’t worry. The living will never outnumber the dead, for the past is always larger than the present. By 2030 our total dead will outnumber the current living by a factor of fifteen to one. That means those of us alive today represent just 7 percent of all human beings who ever lived.
We are a species of ghosts.
In times of turmoil some people turn to magic, others to math. As death closes in, the line between life and what comes after begins to break down, like a black hole threatening to swallow everything vibrant, everything bright. On the Greyhound route the ghost of Alexander Hamilton begins screaming, hands over his eyes, always at 3:13 a.m. The dead are rising, it seems, clamoring to be recognized.
In the 1980s professional wrestling coined a term—kayfabe—which was defined this way: that thing we all know is fake we agree to call real. The fights, the rivalries. The chair hits and cage matches. It was never sport. It was always artifice. But people wanted to believe, and the more the audience signed on, the more exaggerated the story lines became, until millions of Americans had trained themselves to accept fantasy as fact.
It’s all kayfabe now.
To describe the details of the current American conflict would be impossible. It is both urban and rural. Gun-wielding, country-club wives blasting their way out of the Panera parking lot, determined to protect their sons and daughters from demons that exist only in their minds. Demons with the faces of their neighbors. And yet aren’t our neighbors also the product of generations of humanity? Mothers and fathers meeting and consummating back through the ages, as Generation Z becomes Y becomes X becomes Baby Boomers and on and on, the ships sailing in reverse back to England and Spain, Europe and Africa, as the Renaissance becomes the Middle Ages, nomads recross the Siberian land bridge, and Homo sapiens retrace their steps to the African savanna, and on and on to the birthplace of the human race.
One hundred billion people have lived and died on this planet since the dawn of human history, five hundred and eighty-five million of them Americans, living or dead. One-fifth of us are Muslims. Eighteen point two percent are Chinese. Twelve million are stateless. More than one hundred million live in countries where they hold no citizenship. These numbers can be added or subtracted, divided or multiplied to create the statistics of our existence, numbers that will soon be consumed by other numbers: annual rainfall totals, desertification sprawl, sea-level rise, heat indexes, storm surges, hurricanes per year, tornadoes per month, as we realize that the story of Planet Earth is not the story of the human animal and its victories and defeats, but a story told in geological time, a story without heroes or villains, without progress. A story, simply, of what happened.
On August 26, the FBI raided the homes and offices of sixteen other members of government: congressmen, attorneys general, mayors. Two days later, the deputy director of the FBI himself was questioned. Pundits called it the reverse Deep State, or the Deeper State, or the Counter State. One could be forgiven for wondering if there was anyone working in government today who was actually governing, if half of each department were so-called liberal operatives and the other half were self-proclaimed conservative operatives, all engaged in a hidden battle for control.