“What’s your damage?” he asks. “All this holy man bullshit. What are you covering?”
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” says the Prophet. “Many things that God says to me are upsetting. Extinction. This is what we talk of most. What happens to a species when you destroy its natural habitat, when you corrupt its essential nature and purpose—when you take its biological instincts and mandates and use them for a different purpose? You confuse our higher and lower functions, harnessing our drives and motivating us down an unnatural path, one in which human beings are reprogrammed to covet products and ignore reality.”
Simon feels his face flush. Despite his best efforts to resist, the words stir something in him. The prophet licks his palm and smooths a cowlick.
“There is evidence corroborated in multiple countries that suggests if a man or woman has not had intercourse by age twenty-five, there is a reasonable chance he or she will remain a virgin at least until age forty-five. My point is, look around, you have a population of adolescents, who in any other decade would be fucking their brains out, but instead, we’re on TikTok.”
“You said God spoke to you about me,” says Simon. “What did he say?”
“He said the sins of the father must be made right by the son. He told me to tell you that it’s hard to be useful and sad. Also, remember the red eyes. Does this mean something to you?”
Simon feels something in his hand and looks down. Without realizing, he has taken the paper bag out of his pocket.
“No one here has a phone,” he says, “so I think—TikTok—your theory kind of falls apart. We’re in recovery.”
“Have you ever heard of a dry drunk?” the Prophet replies. “The identity remains, even though the behavior has stopped. In the case of our screens, we’re not to blame. They designed these addiction machines in cheerful spaces with napping rooms and personalized yoga mats. At first they were just another way to get human beings to spend money, to buy commodities. But then the shift happened.”
“What shift?”
“We became the commodity. Our data. This is the secret of modern life. We went from being citizens to consumers, and now to commodities. Our personality profiles, our social and financial history, our likes and dislikes, all used to accurately predict future behavior. How will we vote? Will we take to the streets or roll over? The data knows all, which is why today our data is more valuable than our bodies. How does it make you feel to know that, Simon Oliver? That your value to the world resides in your thumbs? The buttons they push. God is unhappy. You should know that. He created us to love each other, to be the miracle, not to swipe right. And it forces one to ask—at what point does the human animal move so far from its biological mandate that it begins to fail?”
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.”