On the landing, he sees the Prophet standing at the back door, talking to the night janitor, who is holding the door open at his back, alarm disabled. The janitor is a small Mexican man, grizzled, in his sixties. His head is bowed. The Prophet lifts his right hand and places his palm on the man’s head, as if offering a benediction. Simon looks at Louise, who lifts her eyebrows, bemused, as if to say, Here we go. And then they are outside, breathing the warm summer air, the wind in the evergreens. Ahead of them, the van is waiting, side door open, the painted warrior with his axe slid back toward the taillights, erasing his enemy. Viewed from the ground, the buxom wench at his side seems to glow.
“Whose van is that?” Simon asks, but no one answers, and he watches Louise jump inside, her short shorts riding up as she enters like a trick pen that goes from burlesque to nude when you write with it.
“Hey, handsome,” he hears her say to the driver—still just a glowing joint in the front seat, a plume of smoke exhaled.
The Prophet stops at the side door, turns to Simon, as if he has known all along that the final step toward freedom will be the hardest.
“This is your journey,” he says.
“You say that, but where—”
The Prophet shakes his head. “Where is just a place. What matters is the path. And this is yours.”
He points to the dark mouth of the seventies van. Inside all Simon can see is the pinpoint glow, passed backward, and the flicker of Louise’s face as she inhales.
Simon grits his teeth, eyelids fluttering. He thinks of how the probability of simultaneous crop failure in the biggest grain-growing regions once we reach four more degrees rises to 86 percent.
He knows he worries too much, knows he needs to leap first and look later, but it’s hard. Every unplanned step feels like death. Every sentence in his brain ends with a question mark. All noise, no signal. But what good is living if the life you lead is brittle and dead?
Behind him he hears voices. Lights go on inside the building.
Adults.
Then, like a bell, he hears Claire’s voice: When in doubt, charge!
He forces his feet to move, surging into the van. And then the door slides closed and the driver floors it, spraying gravel. Louise whoops. Simon’s heart is racing. He worries he will pass out, his right hand clutching the paper bag in his pocket. His eyes find the Prophet, who sits on a cooler smiling, his back to the oncoming road.
“Welcome to the rest of your life,” he says.
Then a hand reaches back from the driver’s seat.
“Duane Yamamoto,” says a deep voice. “Wilkomen to das Valkyrie.”
Simon looks up, meets Duane’s brown eyes in the rearview mirror. He is biracial handsome, half Japanese, half Black, nineteen years old, a dark-skinned teen with curly black hair. The hand he offers Simon is attached to a muscular arm, unencumbered by a sleeve of any kind. Instead, the T-shirt he wears has been cut off at the shoulders. There is a tattoo of a broadsword on his forearm.
Duane smiles into the mirror. “I’ll take you all the way,” he says.
And just like that, Simon falls in love.
The Troll
Behold the human condition refined to its clearest form. All our unsolvable dilemmas, our tribal wars, our polarization, all our impossible moral equations can now be reduced to a single jpeg.
This is the sword and the shield, the culmination of centuries of struggle, of empires rising and falling. Sticks and stones. The fig leaf and the fall. Language invented. Warfare, politics. Magic begat medicine. Science begat technology. Technology begat the internet, which begat the cell phone, which begat the text bubble, and then—and only then—was the entirety of human yearning and misery focused like a laser into three simple letters. Two letters really, the l as racket and backstop, and the o as a ball forever bouncing between the two. An endless circle of mirth. Whatever you care about. Whatever offends you. Whatever morals or ethics or decency you hold dear.
l o fucking l.
Evan Himelman has spent his whole life looking for those letters. A way to bat it all away—every gripe and grievance, history’s epic feuds, the bills his generation was supposed to pay for the sins of their fathers and mothers. Genocide, poverty, racism, misogyny, climate apocalypse, blah, blah, blah. Like walking into the middle of a fistfight you didn’t start but are somehow expected to finish. The smothering weight of moral expectation. （（（Jesus））） said Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but they arrest you for finger-banging strangers, so…
Listen, if you flog yourself the way all those libtard social justice warriors demand, if you let them clamp on the ball-and-chain of responsibility that nobody asked for, then every white boy in America is a slave trader. It’s enough to make you turn on the gas oven and put your （（（head））） inside. Because who on Earth can read all the millions of words written by the world’s wisest men and women, epic treatises and manifestos, meticulously laying out every nuance of every position. History and alternative history. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Richard fucking Dawkins. When all along the answer has been right in front of us.