Inside is a copy of Rex’s Compendium and a bigger, thicker volume. “Liddell and Scott, a Greek-English lexicon. Indispensable. In case you wanted to take a crack at translating again.”

Outside the car a rush of passengers spurts past and for a moment the ground beneath Zeno’s seat opens and he is swallowed and then he’s back in the seat once more.

“You had a knack for it, you know. More than a knack.”

Zeno shakes his head.

Horns honk and Rex glances behind them. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

Zeno gets out of the car, suitcase in his right hand, books under his left arm, something inside him (regret) thrusting to and fro like a spearman, pulverizing bone, destroying vital tissue. Rex leans over and puts out his right hand and Zeno squeezes it with his left, as awkward a handshake as there’s ever been. Then the little car is swallowed by traffic.

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

FEBRUARY–MAY 2019

Seymour

In February he and Janet huddle shoulder-to-shoulder over her smartphone in a corner of the cafeteria. “Gotta warn you,” she says, “he’s kinda scary.” On-screen a little man in black denim and a goat mask paces back and forth across an auditorium stage. He goes by the name of “Bishop”; an assault rifle is slung over his back. Start, he says,

with the Book of Genesis. “Be fruitful,” it begins, “and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

The video cuts to a restless mash of faces. For 2,600 years, the man continues,

those of us in the Western tradition have been assured that the role of humanity is to subdue the earth. That all creation was created for us to harvest. And for 2,600 years we pretty much got away with it. Temperatures remained constant, seasons stayed predictable, and we cut down forests and fished out oceans and elevated one god above all others: Growth. Expand your property, increase your wealth, enlarge your walls. And when each new treasure you drag inside your walls doesn’t relieve your pain? Go get some more. But now? Now the human species is beginning to reap what it has—

The bell sounds and Janet taps the screen and Bishop freezes mid-sentence, arms outstretched. A link flashes at the bottom of the screen: Join Us.

“Seymour, give me my phone. I need to get to Spanish.”

* * *

At the new Ilium terminal in the library, he puts on headphones and hunts down more videos. Bishop wears a Donald Duck mask, a raccoon mask, a Kwakiutl Nation beaver mask; he’s in a clear-cut in Oregon, a village in Mozambique.

When Flora got married, she was fourteen. Now she has three kids and the village wells are dry and the nearest reliable water source is a two-hour walk from her home. Here in the Funhalouro District adolescent moms like Flora spend about six hours a day searching for and transporting water. Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels. This is not something we fix with tote bags.

Bishop is recruiting warriors, he says, to dismantle the global industrial economy before it’s too late. They will, he says, rebuild societies around new thought systems, where resources will be shared; they will reclaim the old wisdom, seek answers to the questions commerce cannot answer, meet the needs money cannot meet.

The faces Seymour can make out in Bishop’s audiences glow with purpose; he remembers how it felt, his whole body taut, when he sprung the lid off the crate of Pawpaw’s old grenades for the first time. All that latent power. Never before has someone articulated his own anger and confusion like this.

“Wait,” they said. “Be patient,” they said. “Technology will solve the carbon crisis.” In Kyoto, in Copenhagen, in Doha, in Paris, they said, “We’ll cut emissions, we’ll wean ourselves off hydrocarbons,” and they rolled back to the airport in armor-plated limos and flew home on jumbo jets and ate sushi thirty thousand feet in the air while poor people choked on the air in their own neighborhoods. Waiting is over. Patience is over. We must rise up now, before the whole world is on fire. We must—

When Marian fans a hand in front of his eyes, for a few breaths Seymour cannot remember where he is.

“Anyone home?”

The link flashes Join Us Join Us Join Us. He takes off the headphones.

Marian swings her car keys around one finger. “Closing time, kiddo. Can you turn off the Open sign for me, please? And, listen, Seymour, are you free Saturday? At noon?”

He nods, collects his book bag. Outside rain is falling on the old snow and the streets are full of slush.

“Saturday,” Marian calls after him. “Noon. Don’t forget. I have a surprise for you.”

At home Bunny is at the kitchen table frowning over the checkbook. She looks up, her attention returning from a long way off.

“How was your day? Did you walk all the way home in the rain? Did you sit with Janet at lunch?”

He opens the fridge. Mustard. Shasta Twists. Half a bottle of ranch dressing. Nothing.

“Seymour? Can you look at me, please?”

In the glare of the kitchen bulb, her cheeks look made of chalk. Her throat sags; her roots show; her upper spine has begun to hunch. How many hotel toilets did she scrub today? How many beds did she strip? Watching the years take Bunny’s youth has been like watching the forest behind the house go down all over again.

“Listen, honey, the Aspen Leaf is shutting down. Geoff said they can’t compete with the chains anymore. He’s letting me go.”

Envelopes litter the table. V-1 Propane, Intermountain Gas, Blue River Bank, Lakeport Utilities. His medication alone, he knows, costs $119 a week.

“I don’t want you to worry, honey. We’ll figure something out. We always do.”

* * *

He skips math, crouches in the parking lot with Janet’s phone.

In a world warmer by two degrees centigrade, 150 million more people—most of them poor—will die from air pollution alone. Not violence, not floods, just inferior air. That’s 150 times more fatalities than the American Civil War. Fifteen Holocausts. Two World War Twos. In our actions, in our attempts to throw some wrenches into the market economy, we hope that no one will die. But if there are a few deaths, isn’t it still worth it? To stop fifteen Holocausts?

A tap on his shoulder. Janet shivers on the curb. “This is getting annoying, Seymour. I have to ask for my phone back five times a day.”

* * *

Friday he comes home from school to find Bunny drinking wine from a plastic cup on the love seat. She beams, takes his backpack off his shoulder, and curtsies. She has, she announces, taken out a payday loan to see them through until she finds a new job. And on the way home, she was passing by the Computer Shack beside the lumber yard, and had to stop.