Samson scrolls through photos of basset hounds, with their sad eyes and droopy cheeks. His heart is beating a mile a minute. The apocalypse his father warned him about is here, and he is hundreds of miles away from everyone that matters.
“These aren’t mistakes,” says the Prophet. “This isn’t Oh, I must have heard God wrong. This is opportunism. This is twisting His will to corrupt ends. Because people are corrupt. Adults. They live in a world of hypocrisy. They will do anything to be rich, to get laid, to have power.”
“And you don’t want any of that.”
“I want to disappear. I want to be forgotten. I want a little house with no electricity hidden in a dell. But what I want doesn’t matter. This isn’t about me. He’s giving us one more chance, one more chance to do His will, to get things right. A do-over. Find a new Garden and start again. Utopia.”
Samson holds up the tablet. On it is a picture of a teenage girl with a handwritten sign in front of her face. Samson recognizes the T-shirt. It’s Louise.
“They’re in Palm Springs.”
The Prophet holds up his hands, smiles. “Praise be,” he says.
Simon
Utopia is a made-up word, coined by Thomas More in 1516. It is a pun, meaning both “a good” place and “nowhere.” So even in its conception, the impossibility of finding a land free from the imperfections of human society was evident. And yet, throughout history, human beings have set out to build their perfect communities. Failure after failure, it matters not. Dreamers will always dream.
A purer future. A better way.
America itself was seen as utopia at first, the New World, filled with natural beauty and infinite resources, uncultivated by “civilized” hands. Like most utopian ideals, the New World rose from discontent. It was the idyllic fantasy of Europeans fed up with the world they had. They saw this new Garden of Eden as a gift from God. One that offered escape from the problems that plagued them—hopelessness, debt, religious oppression. Escape too from the responsibility of rebuilding a system that was fundamentally flawed. Flee, don’t fix. And here, just a boat ride away, was a turnkey solution, where life would be peaceful and beautiful and good.
The natives who populated the New World were a problem, but they could be killed or “civilized.” To avoid staining their utopia with the scourge of backbreaking labor, the settlers turned to slavery, bringing millions of men, women, and children over from Africa in chains. They realized that this utopia offered something that no other utopian society had ever offered before—profit. In America, one could live in the kingdom of heaven and get rich at the same time. Truly, this was the land of plenty. The trick was to revise the idea of utopia to include slaves. To do this, they amended the teachings of Christ. He had created Africans to free his followers from endless toil. Immoral became moral.
In this way, an act of hope became an act of fantasy. And when the pressure of living this lie became too great, some disillusioned Americans packed their belongings and fled their original settlements. (Flee, don’t fix, remember.) They headed west, determined this time to find the real utopia.
As the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf once wrote: “All utopias from Plato’s Republic to George Orwell’s brave new world of 1984 have had one element of construction in common: they are all societies from which change is absent.”
And yet isn’t it our right as human beings to dream? And so, a new set of utopians built towns named New Harmony, Oberlin Colony, and Oneida. Here life would be fertile and ideal. Here humanity would escape the shackles of the old ways, would build a more perfect union with liberty and justice for all.
And yet, in the words of Immanuel Kant:
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
*
They drive through the night, taking back roads when the highway is closed due to the fires. Avon avoids the roadblocks and fire engines, like a man who has spent his whole life sneaking around the law. They are heading east toward the fires, passing armadas of fleeing cars, some so hot their paint has bubbled. Ahead, the roads empty. At the 243 junction, they find themselves alone in a blizzard of ash. They take off their socks and stuff them into the AC vents to block the smoke. It is 1:00 a.m. Avon peers into the murk, the car’s headlights reflecting back into his eyes, swallowed whole by a fog of incineration.
On the radio they hear Mexican tubas.
Avon sees a roadblock ahead, slows. There is an army jeep and a Bradley tank blocking the highway. He stops the car. No soldiers are visible. Story, asleep in the backseat, startles awake.
“What’s going on?” she says.
Around them, the road is still. No one approaches. Outside, the midnight sky glows bloody.
Avon takes out his 9mm, checks the chamber.
“Wait here,” he says, and climbs out of the car.
They watch as he approaches the truck, then circles to the Bradley, disappearing from sight.
“Are we close to the fires?” Story asks, rubbing her eyes.
Simon leans forward and squints through the dusty windscreen.
“We’re in the fires,” he says.
Story slides across the backseat to the passenger side. She peers into the underbrush, coughs.
If we stay here much longer, she thinks, we’re going to run out of air.
There is a leg sticking out of a ditch on the shoulder.
“Simon,” she says.
He looks over. The ditch is full of bodies.
Simon opens his door.
“Don’t,” says Story, but without energy.
Simon gets to his feet. His eyes start to water immediately. He takes a shallow breath, coughs. The ash under his feet is like Utah powder, the driest snow. But unlike snow, it doesn’t crunch when he walks. It is an absence, the feeling of walking through nothing. He takes three slow steps to the shoulder. The ditch is filled with soldiers. Their bodies are perforated, their uniforms saturated red.
He hears movement, turns. A figure emerges from the shadows, moving toward them. Simon’s pulse quickens.
Story calls from the car. “Simon.”
He moves back to the car. The smoke clears. The figure is Avon, coming back toward them.