The tall clown puts Samson and the Prophet in an office and posts a guard. Samson paces, desperate to get out, but the Prophet finds a corner and sits. He puts his head to the wall, listening to the hum of deep motors, generators, air filtration systems, and other more industrial overtones of war.
“I wanted to join the Boy Scouts when I was little,” he says. “I found this handbook at a thrift sale. A Scout Is Trustworthy. A Scout Is Loyal. I used to study the badges—Tenderfoot, Eagle—and the patches—Webelos, Senior Patrol Leader, Bugler—I’d mouth the words out loud at night under the covers, reading with an old metal flashlight. I wanted to be honorable. I wanted to be useful and self-sufficient. But there were no troops in my area. So I taught myself. Trail safety, the names of clouds. Then God spoke to me from a tree stump. I begged my parents to take me to church, but my father had been raised Catholic and he was having no part of it. Good thing, too. The church, the Boy Scouts.”
He taps the drywall, looking for hollow sounds. Samson grabs the doorknob, rattles it, earning a throat-cutting gesture from the clown on duty.
“What does it say about a society,” says the Prophet, “when it cedes its moral leadership to perverts and pedophiles?”
Samson balls his hands and presses them against his temples. “I can’t listen to this right now,” he says. “We have to get out of here.”
“He will free us in the morning. So, sit. Stop worrying.”
Samson looks at him. “Who’s gonna free us?”
The Prophet stares at him. “What you have to understand,” he says, “is that our captors believe they are right, that they are holy. They too believe they are on a mission from God.”
Felix rubs his eyes. His adrenaline levels are finally dropping, and suddenly he feels like he could sleep for a thousand years.
“And all I’m saying,” says Felix, “is what if you’re both wrong?”
The Prophet leans his head back against the wall, closes his eyes. “Get some rest,” he says. “Tomorrow will be very, very difficult.”
He is still after that, breathing deeply, seeming to fall asleep immediately. Felix, born Samson, stands at the glass, watching the mayhem of victorious militias. They’ve erected a bonfire on the tarmac out of office furniture and gasoline, and they set it ablaze with flare guns fired from three sides. It goes up with a whoosh that sucks the oxygen from the air. Then the bacchanal begins, death metal played through loudspeakers, insurgents surging in spontaneous mosh pits.
Through it all the Prophet sleeps, lips parted, face relaxed, angelic.
On the tarmac, fistfights break out, then dissolve into drunken celebrations, bottles of vodka and whiskey and gin swallowed and spilled and finally smashed. The boogaloo is here, and it is glorious.
Free at last, they shout, throwing their palms to the sky. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.
Kayfabe
In the hours after Senator LaRue martyred himself in the Senate, flags around the country were lowered to half-mast. Three hundred and forty-seven people had been killed by the junior senator from Idaho, including Judge Margot Nadir, her husband, and fourteen other US senators, including representatives from Maine, Nebraska, and Hawaii. Simultaneously, violence broke out around the country in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign. Police stations and army bases erupted with infighting, as true allegiances were revealed. Was this it? Civil war? And yet in small towns and rural communities around the country, life continued as normal. Farmers rose and milked their cows. Stockbrokers bought low and sold high. Suburban moms dropped their kids at soccer camp and drove to the dry bar, scrolling through Facebook posts telling them that the bombing was a false flag operation, a ploy by the radical left to justify the declaration of martial law.
Whatever question you asked, the answer was chaos. There were two truths now, but in each it was the teller who was the victim. Reality had finally become 100 percent subjective.
Governors from each state quickly named a replacement senator to hold the seat until the next election, in each case choosing a man with more extremist views. In the hours after the bombing, an FBI raid of the junior senator’s home uncovered bomb-making materials and booby traps. At the same time, a manifesto was posted on social media by a group calling itself 4Horsemen. Written and signed by Senator LaRue, it claimed the group had four million members nationwide.
“We are everywhere,” read the statement. “We are your mailmen, your corrections officers, your mayors and governors. The enemy has infiltrated our world, and now we have infiltrated theirs. We know the secrets they are trying to hide, this liberal swarm. Satan’s forces are strong, but we can hide too. Watch your back, demons.”
In Montana, the Pick-6 lottery number was 000000. On August 18 the official Internet Suicide Clock reported 31,406 self-murders. For context, two thousand a day is considered “normal.” The youngest victim was eleven. The oldest was sixty-three. Off the coast of Oregon on the same day, a pod of 116 blue whales beached themselves. What did it mean? Were these things connected or coincidental?
The next day, 42,108 earthlings killed themselves. The day following that, 55,211 even as men in camouflage vests with Santa Claus beards terrorized boardwalks in Santa Monica and Atlantic City. On each of those days, approximately 360,000 more human beings were born. This is how it is with our species. We just keep coming. But don’t worry. The living will never outnumber the dead, for the past is always larger than the present. By 2030 our total dead will outnumber the current living by a factor of fifteen to one. That means those of us alive today represent just 7 percent of all human beings who ever lived.
We are a species of ghosts.