On August 2, Tropical Storm Gilberto muscled its way out of the Gulf of Mexico and into California and Arizona. It was a sluggish beast hundreds of miles wide, driving hot pressurized air ahead of it. The storm hugged the coast as it moved north, forcing dry lightning strikes from San Diego to Marin, and as far east as New Mexico. Forecasters called it a lightning siege. Dry atmospheric conditions evaporated the rain before it hit the ground, generating more humidity in the upper atmosphere and more lightning. Wildfires sprang up in the San Bernardino National Forest and Mount San Jacinto State Park, the Angeles National Forest, and Malibu Canyon. By Wednesday San Luis Obispo was on fire, and lightning was setting blazes in Big Sur and Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
It hadn’t rained in Northern or Southern California in five months. Within hours reports of fire tornadoes were coming in from residents fleeing towns up and down the coast. The days became choking and surreal. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the sky turned orange as a thick blanket of smoke blocked blue light from view. On the West Coast, Earth was becoming Mars.
Meanwhile, arguments raged online about the patriotism of athletes in black armbands, outrage over anti-democratic statements made by politicians known for making anti-democratic statements. This is the lesson we had learned: when you don’t want to face the consequences of your actions, you focus on the soap opera of public life, with its heroes and villains, its clear narratives. It is always easier to wrestle with our human drama than with the vastness of tectonic shifts on a planet almost four thousand miles in diameter, a planet more than four and a half billion years old, where dinosaurs ruled for one hundred and sixty-five million years, where another sixty-five million years passed before humanity was born, where time is measured in eras. The Cenozoic, the Mesozoic, the Paleozoic. Eras that make up eons. The Phanerozoic, the Proterozoic, the Archean, the Hadean.
Geological time is unconcerned with the life spans of animals, with history. Existence at a scale that defies comprehension, in which our own extinction is not just possible but inevitable.
But we are such short-lived creatures, all we know is now, this moment, these people—the hyperbolic dramas of our brief window.
And still the fires burned.
That was the week the soldiers began killing themselves. It started with thirteen new recruits at Fort Benning murdering themselves over three nights. On the fourth day six men at a forward operating base in Afghanistan huddled around a live grenade. At the Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, soldiers awoke the next morning to find five paratroopers hanging from their own parachute ropes. We had given them weapons and taught them to fight the enemy, but it was becoming clear the enemy was us.
The Prophet
They put the Prophet in interview room two. He sits quietly, his hands cuffed to a chain that connects to a ring on the floor. This is in the El Paso offices of Homeland Security, a cement monster of a building, ringed by concrete barriers. His mouth is dry. It’s been six hours since Taser wires hit him in the left shoulder and the neck. There is an angry bruise above his collar. His thoughts feel scattered. When the barbs penetrated his skin, the Taser triggered nineteen electric pulses in five seconds with an average current of two milliamps, leading to seizures and intense pain. It created an electric field inside his body that stimulated nerve cells called alpha motor neurons. These neurons then fired their own electrical impulses, which raced to his muscles and caused violent, sustained muscle contractions.
He sits now on a hard plastic chair. Somewhere during his capture, the Prophet’s glasses were lost. The room he sees now is a blur of white and gray. If he’s afraid, he doesn’t show it. In fact, sitting under the harsh fluorescents, he appears to be meditating, a bass hum rumbling low in his throat.
There are two basic settings available on most Tasers, pulse mode and drive stun. The first incapacitates. The second uses pain to secure compliance. Human beings invented this device, the way they have invented all weapons meant to incapacitate or kill—without a care in the world.
The door opens. A woman in a pantsuit enters. Behind her there is a man with a sidearm. They smell like smoke. The man closes the door behind them. The woman pulls out her chair and sits. The Prophet’s eyes remain closed.
“I want to thank you,” he says, “for electrocuting me. It was an extremely clarifying event.”
The woman lays a file folder on the table, sits. “I meet a lot of people in my job, Paul. Can I call you Paul?”
“There’s no Paul here,” says the Prophet. “If you want to talk to that kid, you’ll need a time machine.”
The woman opens the folder. “Wilson, Wyoming. That’s where you’re from?”
“I spent some time there.”
“That’s near Yellowstone, right?”
The Prophet nods. When he was a young boy, he found a copy of a book at a thrift sale. Handbook for Boys, it was called, published by the Boy Scouts of America. It was a blue/green paperback with an image on the front of three young Scouts sitting around a campfire. Hovering over them was the apparition of an Indian chief, floating in wispy tendrils, as if created from campfire smoke. Was he their spirit guide or a ghost of America’s past come to haunt them? The edition the Prophet bought for fifty cents was published in 1950. In it were lessons about many things: hiking and camping, wildlife and wood lore, but he saw it as a manual of citizenship. On the first page, printed in bold, was the Scout Law.
1. A Scout Is Trustworthy.
“Have you ever heard the word hyperobject?” he asks the agent.
“No.”
“Picture an iceberg floating in the ocean. You see it ahead of you, bobbing on the surface, and you think you know the size of it, but its true mass below the waterline is beyond your comprehension. A hyperobject is something too huge to fully wrap your mind around. Climate change, for example.”
“We’re not here to talk about the Fahrenheit in Greenland, kid. We’re here to talk about crimes against the state. About terrorism. Because that’s what we’re calling you and your friends. Terrorists.”
Whatever effect she thought these words would have on the Prophet, she sees no sign of it on his face. Instead, he closes his eyes again.
Hummmmm.
“What is that sound you’re making?” the woman asks him.