It is 106 in the shade.
At some point, Louise returns to the front seat. She and Duane are inseparable now, it seems. The new Simon watches them idly, a thousand miles from his emotions. The combat adrenaline has worn off, bringing with it a crash of memories—Katniss shooting, the deputies dropping, and even though he himself used Taser rounds, the blast of the shotgun, the sight of the deputy flying backward, the act of shooting him, plays on an endless loop in his head. Somewhere nearby Jesus reveals himself to the faithful in a piece of toast. The sun outside is impossibly bright. Simon feels every rattle of the van in his soul. The wind whistles through him. That’s the thing about death that no one ever tells you. How alive it makes you feel when it happens to other people.
“Ogres are creatures of dirt and sin,” says the Prophet, settling on an Indian blanket next to Simon. “Venal and small-minded. Brutish and leering. They eat children and torture their mothers and fathers.”
Simon looks up. The Prophet is backlit by the rising sun. For the first time in over an hour, Simon speaks.
“So I should feel good about tasing him.”
The Prophet frowns. “We didn’t ask for this world, friend. Prejudice and intolerance. Sixty million refugees. But we will make it our own. And to do so, those who own it now must die. This will happen naturally or with great violence. Either way, men will become old men and then corpses—handing the world over to the children who come after. Us. But if we wait too long, we’ll be stamped into adults who walk the same walk and talk the same talk as those who came before. Who hem and haw and say it’s complicated, even when talking about the simplest things. Think about the Greatest Generation, raised on sacrifice and patriotism. And of their children, the Me Generation, forged in opposition, obsessed with personal freedom. And of their children, Generation X, raised in comfort and prosperity, a generation of man-children, more consumer than citizen. These are our barriers to self-definition, to liberation. They raised us with their fantasies of right and wrong, and we bought into it hook, line, and sinker. But that’s how they turn us into soldiers in their culture war.”
“I know, but I—shot a guy. Because of you. What you said.”
His voice breaks. The Prophet nods solemnly. Classic rock plays on the Bose sound system up front. “Wish You Were Here.” Where does Simon wish he was right now? Kansas or Oz? Is what he’s doing radical or rational? A frog in a hot pot knows he should jump, but who doesn’t like a nice warm bath?
“You said it was a war,” he tells the Prophet, “their war. And we’re being trained to join one side or the other. Reject the war, you said. But now you’re saying we’re at war, and I wanna—I know you’re trying to help me, but—I’m confused.”
The Prophet smiles. He is a teacher at heart, with all the patience in the world.
“Let me quote Saint Greta, who said, ‘Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.…You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5 degrees [Celsius] of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.’”
He takes a bag of sunflower seeds from his pocket, eats one.
“Are they at war? Yes. With each other, over nonsense. That is not our path. We are at war with nonsense itself. With casual cynicism. With excuses. With politics. We will win the war or we will die, but know this—God doesn’t want us to die.”
“Then why are so many kids killing themselves? I saw the paper. Hundreds of thousands all over the world.”
The Prophet frowns. He licks his chapped lips, thinking.
“Think about it. We weren’t made for war. Children. It is abhorrent to our nature. We are, all of us, born hopeful, joyful, and kind. And so we are afraid. We don’t want to fight—and worse, fight our own parents. We think maybe it’s easier to flee than fight. A one one. God understands. It’s not the children’s fault. Such impossible choices.”
“What does it mean? A one one. I remember them washing it off the hospital walls after OCD Betsy drank bleach. And then I saw it in the paper.”
The Prophet finds a red marker, writes on the inside wall of the van.
A11
Then he breaks it out, changing the second number one to the word one spelled out.
A1one
A11 Alone.
Simon sits as if paralyzed.
There are no poets named Claire.
He pictures the red Os staring back at him.
Fly, you fools.
“They kill themselves,” says the Prophet, “because they can’t feel God’s hand. All they see is the war they must fight. And wars, in their experience, never end. The War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the so-called Culture War. Our endless human wars. And so they write this—A one one—and they surrender to the night. Because they know what happens to children who go to war.”
He gestures to Javier, eleven, asleep on a blanket.
“Look at him. Is that a soldier? In 1986 Ayatollah Khomeini took ten thousand children from their homes and schools. They were driven in buses—through cheering crowds—to the border, where the Iraqi army had buried over a million land mines. The ayatollah’s plan was simple. Their children would walk through the minefields detonating mines to clear a path for the Iranian army. Praise the Lord. In Africa, ragged militias capture boys as young as six and train them to kill, feeding them brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder. What do these stories tell us? That adults see children as a tool in their wicked schemes. But no more. We fight for ourselves now. Or we die.”
Simon watches Javier sleep. They will be in Marfa in less than an hour.