He puts his hand on Simon’s shoulder.
“I’m talking about extinction. This is really why Kevin killed himself. Because somewhere deep inside he knew. We’re trapped. All of us. The future is a problem that can’t be solved. A one one.”
“What?”
“A one one.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything. Just not to you. Not yet.”
He looks Simon in the eye.
“It meant something to Claire.”
Simon blinks. In his mind he sees plastic bottles in prescription orange raining from the circular balconies of the Guggenheim. They fell in slow motion, a biblical plague. Except the real plague, he knew, was the drug inside—a miracle of time-release engineering. Oblivion in pill form. Seventy-six billion pills shipped in seven years.
And Claire. Beautiful Claire. Queen of the dead girls.
“Don’t talk about her.”
“I’m sorry. These aren’t my words. They’re His.”
“Look,” says Simon, “I don’t know what you want from me. I’m fifteen. None of this is my fault.”
“And yet you feel guilty.”
In summation, why go out the window, when you can use the door?
Simon is hyperventilating now. He turns away, pulling the paper bag from his pocket and lifting it to his mouth. He breathes into it—in, out—recirculating his own air. There are spots in his field of vision, stars. Gently, the Prophet puts a hand on Simon’s back, helps him over to a wooden bench. On it, a bronze plaque reads SERENITY IS THE DIVINE ART OF BEING PASSIVE.
Simon sits there, bent over, head between his knees, losing his shit, while the Prophet speaks to him in soothing tones.
“There are two great motivators,” he says. “Love, and fear. Of these, fear is the easiest to manufacture in others. Fear provides the quickest path to a visceral response. We know this at our primordial core. Scared animals defend themselves. Fight or flight. So now let’s talk about history. American history. Our history. In the 1990s politicians began to harness the power of fear to create a different kind of America. A nation of perpetual fear—fear of crime, fear of race, fear of government. Then came the Twin Towers and the never-ending War on Terror. They warned us that everything we believed in and everyone we loved was in constant danger. Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Mexican rapists. Rental vans plowing through crowds in European cities. Active shooters. Autism from a doctor’s needle. In 2016 that fear brought us the God King and his troll army, the great plague and the fear of literal death.”
He holds up one fist.
“Wear a mask!”
Then the other fist.
“Liberate Michigan! You remember. And so Us against Them became the world. But the more fear is used to motivate people, the more afraid they will become, the more fear will come to define their lives.”
The Prophet gets down on the ground and looks into Simon’s eyes. He is a wavering form, a ghost of carbon dioxide and light.
“Those frightened people were our parents,” he tells Simon. “And rather than raising us, their children, from a place of love, they raised us in fear. Doesn’t it stand to reason that their fear would shape the adults we become? Anxious, plagued by a constant sense that something, everything, is wrong. Their fear has crippled us, and our inability to function only feeds our anxiety. We are failing at life. So now all we are is failure.”
The Prophet leans back and rests his face in the dappled sun.
“Doesn’t that sound like your life?” he says.
Simon’s breathing is normal now—a recycled calm coursing through his oxygen-starved blood. He lowers the bag.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m saying the world you think is real is a lie. Liberal, conservative, the so-called Culture War. It’s a delusion. The end result of fear over love. And worse, our parents are training us to pick a side. But it’s all bullshit.”
Simon breathes into the paper bag, but his heart rate is de-escalating, his breaths becoming deeper, longer. The Prophet takes off his glasses, exhales on the lenses, and wipes them with his shirt.
“Listen to me, Simon,” he says. “The world they’re offering us is a lie. Do you know how I know?”
“How?” says Simon, his mouth dry. The words come out like a croak.
The Prophet returns his glasses to his face, and the effect is to magnify his already big blue eyes. He blinks at the return to vision and leans forward.
“Because we’re still dying.”