His parents, Hector and Annalisa, had blamed themselves for Jimmy’s condition. They were people of deep but simple faith who perhaps could not blame Nature because that was, to their way of thinking, like blaming God.
In spite of all the information that Katherine had provided, Joanna could not quite picture Jimmy Two Eyes. Stranger still, with so many details to prod her memory, she nevertheless could summon no recollection of him whatsoever. To a young girl with an especially vivid imagination, Jimmy would have been not merely a subject of pity, but also a figure of great mystery, like a character in a fairy tale, perhaps a seer with knowledge of both dark and white magic.
She soon grew weary of staring at the dead gray screen of the computer and rerunning in her mind all that Auntie Kat had told her. She went out to the market and bought all the makings for both an enormous pot of vegetable beef soup and a casserole of vegetable lasagna. Cleaning and cutting all the veggies would take hours in which she might be distracted from the recent puzzling events, allowing her subconscious to mull them over and perhaps shape them into something meaningful.
When she returned home, before setting to work in the kitchen, she went to her study to check her emails. Among them was one from Katherine: Joanna, I saved all the letters I got from your mother back in the day, and this one was among them. I’ve marked the pertinent lines. You would have been eight when this was written. What do you make of it?
She printed the two-page PDF and read the lines that Katherine had highlighted in yellow.
Jojo is such a fine girl. She makes me proud, how she neither fears Jimmy Alvarez nor finds him off-putting. You know how she looked after him when you were here last summer, making a snack for him each time she had one herself, even wiping his mouth after he’d eaten. She spends more time than ever with him these days. They sit together on the bench in the apple orchard or down by the lake, and she reads stories to him. She’s in third grade but reads four grades above that, smart as the dickens, although I doubt that poor Jimmy understands much of anything she says to him.
10
The ancient, clouded windowpanes render the Montana morning sunshine into a bleak Antarctic dusk, and the softly hissing gas lantern radiates séance light in which spirits might be called out of the shadows, if such things as spirits existed, which they do not.
This girl, Ophelia, wants to be stone, wants to be steel. Maybe she used all the tears when her twin sister died five years earlier; or she’s seriously churched up, convinced there is an afterlife. Whatever the case, she won’t reward Asher with her tears, not even when he describes what he will do to her with the switchblade.
Xanthus Toller explains that humankind is evil because of two qualities that are unique to the species: hope and ambition. The hope is for a better tomorrow and ultimately for a life beyond this one. No other living creature on Earth has a concept of time, let alone a belief that they can conquer it through resurrection or with longevity science. Hope breeds ambition, the desire to build and achieve and acquire, activities that lay waste to the planet. The most enlightened human beings must lead the way by abandoning hope and ambition in order to be able to persuade the selfish masses to participate in the extinction of their species. Asher has led four others into hopelessness and death, and one way or another, this woman will be the fifth.
“You think you’re really something,” he says.
“Is that a question? You said I can speak only to answer your questions.”
“Assume it is.”
“Then, yeah, I’m something. Something more than you.”
Asher props one elbow on the table and rests his chin on the palm of his hand. “Why do you think so?”
“You’re a eunuch. You’ve made a nothing of yourself.”
“Exactly, I am nothing of value. You are nothing of value. I’ve faced the truth, and you haven’t.”
She glares at him with the contempt and anger of someone who still expects to be alive tomorrow. In her arrogance and self-assurance, she serves as the perfect example of why humanity is an existential threat to all other species.
He says, “You’ve read what exists of my manifesto, and yet you still don’t understand.”
“Freak,” Ophelia says defiantly.
“You’re nothing. I am nothing. We’re lice, tapeworms, parasites infesting the planet. We are disgusting. It tortures me to consider what our species has done and is still doing to this world.”
“Then kill yourself, why don’t you?”
“I will when my manifesto is completed and the testamentary necropolis is filled to capacity—and I’m the last on Earth.”