“What?”
“The meal. There’s only so much organic faro a growing boy can eat and all that.”
“No,” says Simon. “It’s not—”
He sighs, trying to find the right words in his drug-induced haze, then settles on the simple truth.
“My sister killed herself.”
Louise flushes. The intimacy she’s used to is physical, not emotional.
“Shit. When?”
“Last year.”
He leans closer, glances around to make sure no one can hear.
“She was the first,” he tells her. “But now it’s everywhere. The Prophet told me.”
“What do you mean everywhere?” asks Louise, even though deep down she knows. Didn’t her friend Gabby kill herself last month, taping the vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of her parents’ BMW? And hasn’t Louise’s grandma been extra nice to her since then, calling every night just to “make sure she’s okay.” Her grandmother, who never missed an opportunity to tell Louise that emotional distress was a luxury only white kids could afford?
“Kids are hanging themselves in Delaware,” Simon tells her. “In Oregon they’re eating their parents’ guns. In Mississippi they’re drinking drain cleaner. And other places. Japan, Israel, Russia. It’s everywhere and it’s kids.”
A tingle starts at the base of Louise’s spine. “How many?”
But Simon doesn’t answer. He chews his tongue, trying to think. “Did you know the Prophet’s name is Paul?” he asks.
“No shit? I would have thought Ezekiel or Boaz. Something biblical.”
Simon nods. “He says this is how it ends. Us. The human race. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
Simon jabs his hand through his hair, then rubs his head vigorously. The effect is of a normal scientist going suddenly mad. “Unless we escape from the castle, find Samson, and listen to his story.”
“His story?”
“The Prophet says utopia is out there,” Simon tells her. “That we can stop this if we find it. Start over.”
“Utopia.”
Simon nods. To Louise it sounds crazy, but she washes her hands five hundred and nineteen times a day, so who is she to talk?
“And how do we do that, find utopia?”
Simon turns to look at her. “We have to fight the Wizard.”
And suddenly Louise can’t breathe.
She sees her mother’s filthy left foot.
Hears the sounds of fountains.
Her heart racing.
Do you like milk, kitty-cat?
Darkness closing in.
“Are you okay?” Simon asks.
But Louise has already fainted.
Book 2
Megalophobia
Theories
There was no shortage of theories. Those who believed in original sin saw our children’s suicides as a sign of secular corrosion. They blamed the war on Christmas, the separation of church and state. Gun control advocates saw our children’s suicides as a form of PTSD. They called them the Mass Murder Generation, raised on active-shooter drills. Hadn’t our sons and daughters come of age, after all, to the headlines “Eleven dead in a Virginia middle school,” “Thirteen gunned down at Denver High”? Hadn’t they awoken each morning to see gun control laws debated but never passed, policies introduced but never ratified. Change, they were told, was too difficult. And so gunfire echoed through their cafeterias, our fear skyrocketed, and to combat that fear we bought more guns.
To try to better understand our new reality, we gorged ourselves on podcasts, parroting their complex theories of human behavior. Status anxiety, we were told, not financial self-interest had motivated the rise of the God King. Perceived loss of standing had torn our country apart. The fear of losing ground to those beneath us. As proof, experts pointed to the drained public pools of the 1950s, where white suburbanites had physically drained and paved over their beautiful, newly built public pools rather than share them with Black families. Rather than elevate those they perceived as lower status to their own level. Deep down, it seemed, many Americans were convinced that a gain for others was a loss for themselves.
For our children this status anxiety manifested in the language of pornography. The word cuckold entered the mainstream lexicon. First relegated to XXX sites, the slang insult quickly infiltrated our politics, becoming a favorite burn for internet trolls. To be a cuck or cuckold was to be emasculated to the point of negation. A cuck, we were told, was a man who stood by helplessly while another man, usually a Black man, had intercourse with his wife. To be a cuck, we read in New York Times op-eds, was to be the weakest of the weak. Our children knew this already, however, because 84 percent of boys and 54 percent of girls in our children’s generation had watched some form of online pornography before their eighteenth birthday. From stepmother porn and gonzo clips they learned that sex is a performance. They absorbed the lingo—BBW, BBC, DVDA. They talked about scarfing and veggie porn. The internet taught our daughters that sex is aggressive and that women like pain and humiliation and taught our sons that the worst thing one could be was cuckolded. And yet the antithesis of the cuck, it turned out, was not the man whose wife was faithful. It was the man who screwed other men’s wives, who cuckolded them. Weakest or strongest, the smartphones told our children, there is no middle ground. If you are not dominating others, then you are being dominated. Had this cold, zero-sum ideology driven them to despair?