“Now you’re saying I’m too comfortable?
“Depends.” He draws my arm to him, slowly unfastens my Apple Watch, drops it to the ground, and smashes it with his boot.
“Holy fucking,” I gape at him, fish mouthed “…not nice!”
“How did that feel?”
I recover the destroyed watch from the ground and answer honestly. “It stung.”
“Yeah, but what time is it?”
“Obviously, I have no idea,” I snap, shoving the useless watch into my cutoffs.
“Congrats, baby, that’s freedom.”
“That’s unrealistic.”
“For you. You’re still on a schedule,” he presses a finger to my temple, “in there.”
“I get it. You’re saying I need to unplug, yadda, yadda, I’m sure there was a less painful way to make your point.”
“Yeah, but you don’t get it, you need to retrain your brain. I bet you would draw the line if I tried to drive my boot through your cellphone.”
“Damn right I would.”
“Why?”
“Because I need it.”
“For what?”
“For…everything.”
He pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it, pointing at me with it between his fingers. “Think about it critically. How many times have you needed it today?”
“To text you back, for one.”
“I could have easily rung your doorbell. But I know you would get the phone before you ever got the door, and do you know why?”
“I was on it.”
He nods.
He starts our trek again, and I reluctantly follow, still miffed about my watch. “So, I’m thinking you don’t have social media?”
He sighs. “Fuck no. Hell no, the worst thing we’ve ever done is give everyone a microphone and a place to use it.”
“Why?”
He pauses at a clearing and turns to me, his eyes void of any humor. “A hundred easy reasons.”
“Then give me the best one.”
He considers my question briefly, taking a long drag of his cigarette. “All right,” he exhales, “aside from the slow and inevitable defilement of humanity, I’ll give you a scenario.”
I nod.
“Imagine a person born with an unparalleled gift of retaining knowledge. And in finding out they had this gift, they go straight to work, schooling themselves for years and years to hone that gift and turn it into a superpower, becoming a wealth of knowledge like no other, to the point they’re well respected, a reckoning force, someone to really listen to. You with me?”
I nod again.
“And maybe that person suffers a loss. Maybe someone close to them dies, and that death poses a question they have no answer to, and so they make it their mission to answer that question and refuse to quit until they have irrefutable proof of where their loved one went. So, they live, eat, breathe every minute of every day of their life for the answer to that one question. And one day it happens. They succeed, and in doing so, they transform their theory to fact, and if they share that proof, they know they could change life as we all know it. And say this person could not only prove there was a hereafter, but could prove the very existence of God, no more faith necessary. He’s real. So they have their proof, their life isn’t meaningless, the death they’ve grieved isn’t pointless, they have the answer, and they want to give it to others.” He takes another drag of his cigarette and exhales a steady stream before lifting hazel eyes to mine. “They post it on social media so the world will finally have the answer to a question that’s plagued people for endless centuries. What would happen?”
“We wouldn’t believe them.”
He slowly nods. “Worse. Betty Lou would debunk it in ten minutes, whether she was right or wrong because she’s got millions of followers, and her opinion is God. Then this other person, the person with proof, facts, video, is nothing but another quack on the internet because Betty said so. So, millions of people didn’t listen, and neither did their friends because Betty is always right. And still that quack who is so certain about their truth, who has bulletproof evidence, begs all the other quacks to listen but no one does because everybody is quacking because of all the microphones. And now, none of us will ever know God exists, and many will still live daily with the crippling fear of dying.”
“That’s so sad and…” I draw my brows, “so true.”
With another exhale, he flicks the cherry off his cigarette and grinds it out. “The sadder truth is that the only way to conquer the fear of dying is by dying.”