Redemption. Ever since the Prophet said the word, it’s all Simon can think about.
The dorm is soundless at this time of night, just the hum of his own jittery blood roaring in his ears, so the crackle of car tires on the gravel outside is like a scream. As headlights hit the wall of his room, Simon freezes. Another ambulance maybe, here for the latest escapee. The paper bag in his pocket crinkles when he stands, crosses to the window, looks out.
As he does, he tries not to think about how in China they call it the airpocalypse. How in India the simple act of breathing outdoors is equal to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Pollution has been linked with increased mental illness in children and dementia in adults. But sure, let’s all just keep pretending that nothing’s wrong.
There is a van outside, something out of the 1970s. Airbrushed on the driver’s side is a painting of a mythic warrior, wielding a battle-axe, facing a horde of demons—a buxom woman in a chain-mail bikini at his side. Smoke emanates from the open driver’s window. Smoke that, through the partially open window, smells of skunky rec rooms and shag carpeting.
Is this our getaway car? he wonders. Or did someone order a pizza?
There is a sharp knock behind Simon. He turns. The Prophet is there with Louise. She is wearing short shorts and has a Hello Kitty backpack on her back. The Prophet holds nothing, of course, as if, being an elevated being, he requires none of the ephemera the rest of us cling to—clean clothes, a toothbrush, time.
“Fly, you fool,” says Louise.
Simon grabs his knapsack, struggles it onto his shoulder. Looking at them, it’s clear he overpacked, but there’s no time to adjust, for the Prophet has turned and is already on the move. Louise claps her hands, delighted to throw off the shackles of “progress,” to take all her newfound maturity and coping devices and torch them on a pyre. She dances off, skipping down the hall with little effort to be quiet.
“How are we…?” whispers Simon, hurrying to catch up. “What’s our exit route? There are two guards at the front desk until three. And this one nurse, the old guy with the limp, he’s on rounds until five.”
But they ignore him. Ahead, the Prophet opens the door to the back stairs.
“Wait,” says Simon, following them into the stairwell. “They keep…The back doors have alarms.”
The Prophet descends one flight, giving no indication he’s heard or that he cares. Behind him, Louise appears to be singing to herself, soundtracking their escape.
So you’re a tough guy
Like it really rough guy
Simon, hurrying to keep up, makes the turn to the ground floor. He would tell you, if you asked him, that there is a dead zone the size of Florida in the Arabian Sea. A dead zone so big it may include the entire Gulf of Oman. Trillions of gallons of H2O with no O.
Bye-bye, dolphins. Bye-bye, mollusks. Bye-bye, whales.
On the landing, he sees the Prophet standing at the back door, talking to the night janitor, who is holding the door open at his back, alarm disabled. The janitor is a small Mexican man, grizzled, in his sixties. His head is bowed. The Prophet lifts his right hand and places his palm on the man’s head, as if offering a benediction. Simon looks at Louise, who lifts her eyebrows, bemused, as if to say, Here we go. And then they are outside, breathing the warm summer air, the wind in the evergreens. Ahead of them, the van is waiting, side door open, the painted warrior with his axe slid back toward the taillights, erasing his enemy. Viewed from the ground, the buxom wench at his side seems to glow.
“Whose van is that?” Simon asks, but no one answers, and he watches Louise jump inside, her short shorts riding up as she enters like a trick pen that goes from burlesque to nude when you write with it.
“Hey, handsome,” he hears her say to the driver—still just a glowing joint in the front seat, a plume of smoke exhaled.
The Prophet stops at the side door, turns to Simon, as if he has known all along that the final step toward freedom will be the hardest.
“This is your journey,” he says.
“You say that, but where—”
The Prophet shakes his head. “Where is just a place. What matters is the path. And this is yours.”
He points to the dark mouth of the seventies van. Inside all Simon can see is the pinpoint glow, passed backward, and the flicker of Louise’s face as she inhales.
Simon grits his teeth, eyelids fluttering. He thinks of how the probability of simultaneous crop failure in the biggest grain-growing regions once we reach four more degrees rises to 86 percent.
He knows he worries too much, knows he needs to leap first and look later, but it’s hard. Every unplanned step feels like death. Every sentence in his brain ends with a question mark. All noise, no signal. But what good is living if the life you lead is brittle and dead?
Behind him he hears voices. Lights go on inside the building.
Adults.
Then, like a bell, he hears Claire’s voice: When in doubt, charge!
He forces his feet to move, surging into the van. And then the door slides closed and the driver floors it, spraying gravel. Louise whoops. Simon’s heart is racing. He worries he will pass out, his right hand clutching the paper bag in his pocket. His eyes find the Prophet, who sits on a cooler smiling, his back to the oncoming road.
“Welcome to the rest of your life,” he says.
Then a hand reaches back from the driver’s seat.
“Duane Yamamoto,” says a deep voice. “Wilkomen to das Valkyrie.”
Simon looks up, meets Duane’s brown eyes in the rearview mirror. He is biracial handsome, half Japanese, half Black, nineteen years old, a dark-skinned teen with curly black hair. The hand he offers Simon is attached to a muscular arm, unencumbered by a sleeve of any kind. Instead, the T-shirt he wears has been cut off at the shoulders. There is a tattoo of a broadsword on his forearm.
Duane smiles into the mirror. “I’ll take you all the way,” he says.
And just like that, Simon falls in love.
The Troll