It must have been a month.
And then what, you snapped out of it?
Then a little reality intruded, I guess. I was in the shed one morning when a Suburban rolled up. It was Don Nagamitsu. He asked if I had a minute to talk. When we sat down in the living room he sighed and rubbed his forehead and said, “I’ll just come out with it. I’m responsible for the death of your family.” He’d been the engineer who’d done the plans for the lot my family home had sat on. He’d had concerns that the lot was too close to an unstable embankment but he’d been under pressure from the developer. He explained it to me in technical terms but essentially he looked the other way when he should have said something about the location of our house. He started crying. According to him, the investigation after the mud slide had been a joke. Agencies sort of waved the whole thing along. He felt at fault for not saying something. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket with the name and phone number of his lawyer on it and said I’d probably want to get in touch with the guy. We were quiet in that room. Then I slowly tore the paper in half. I decided to forgive him. He looked at me as if he was unable to comprehend the moment, like he’d been prepared for this encounter to go another way.
Just like that you forgave the guy responsible for your parents and sister getting swept into the sound?
Yeah. And after he left I slept a deep, uninterrupted sleep. A nap that stretched into the night. And in the deepness of that night I was back at the encampment where Nick had shot me. It was dawn and an ancient man encrusted with dirt stood beside me. We faced the vast plain below the mesa. The man pointed toward the horizon and as the sun rose I began to make it out, a vast message, in capital letters made of piles of stones. It was a sentence, the letters as long as buildings, laid flat on the desert floor as if intended to be read from space. It was easily ten miles long. And I understood that this was the reason for the encampment, that this message to the heavens was the work of the last man alive.
What did it say?
“The world was full of precious garbage.”
I see.
That’s when I woke up and found Nick sitting on the couch, reading a celebrity tabloid magazine. My first thought was that he looked healthy. Clean-shaven, hair cut short, wearing a blazer and jeans. He looked at me and it was the creepiest, most compelling thing. He was older but his expression was the same as when we used to run around the woods together re-creating scenes from Star Wars. He put down his magazine and said, “We have about twenty-four hours until it all goes down. We have a boat. It’s waiting for us on the north end of the island. It’ll take us to a ship. That ship will take us to an island where the artists and scientists are.”
“You shot me,” I said.
“You fucked my mom,” he said.
“That’s not a good enough reason to shoot me,” I said.
“I shot you for other reasons.”
I must have looked incredulous.
“It wasn’t a bullet I shot into you,” he went on. “Well, yeah, it was a bullet, too. But it was also a delivery system.”
I had no idea how to respond to this crazy bullshit. Nick pulled out an iPhone and tapped the screen a while. He said, “The Bionet concept you and Wyatt came up with? It’s already in development. Is it cold in here or is it just me?” He tapped something on the screen and a frigid blast ripped through me like I’d just stepped into a walk-in freezer. Then he said, “Or maybe it’s too hot, what do you think?” and suddenly I was sweating, burning up.
I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I’m giving you a hard-on. Check it out.” Sure enough, as he tapped in another code, my cock got painfully stiff, one of those erections that totally hurts rubbing against the inside of your jeans. I thought my skin was going to split open. I demanded that he tell me what was going on.
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re the one who came up with the proposal. The Bionet is a nanotech-enabled system that allows users to monitor, dispense antigens, and remotely control the vital functions of the human body. Just like you said. We’ve got big plans for this thing, Luke. Think about it—once you’ve mastered the erection, you pretty much own the biomedical industry.”
I told him he’d betrayed Mr. Kirkpatrick.
“We came to a new understanding with Mr. Kirkpatrick. He’s waiting for us on the island,” he said. “And so is my mother.”
I told him to give me a fucking break. This was some kind of hoax. A bogus button that starts the end of the world. A boat. An island with scientists on it.
Nick said, “I’m not asking you to believe me right now. I’m asking you to come with me and discover what it is you truly believe.” I must have laughed at him. He said, “Think about how long you’ve wanted to be a part of this. Think about how you’ve been shut out of the conversation. We’re offering you a way in. We’re offering to show you all the cards. Now you can be part of the small group of people leading humanity to redemption.”
I asked him how. He said, “Say we figure out how to lower the global temperature and find a way to safely break down all the plastic we’ve dumped, all the toxins we’ve unleashed. Maybe we find a way to bring population growth down to a sustainable level and resurrect species we’ve killed off. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Wouldn’t that be just peachy? And if that’s the case, our little group, we become nothing but happy fools. That’s Plan A for humanity. We’re launching Plan B. We’re the ones who love life so much that we have to pass it on. What is to come is a beautiful age, a heroic age.”
But I couldn’t go. “My family died here,” I said. “They didn’t know they were about to die. I don’t have that luxury. I need to be here to take care of the people who don’t live on that island with the scientists and artists. The impending dystopia you talk about only looks like dystopia to those of us who’ve lived surrounded by privilege. To everybody else it’s called history. I need to be here for those people. They’re my people. I belong to them.”
And then he left?
Yes.
And now you’re here.
Are we finished? Is it time?
Yes. Are you ready to see what the real world looks like now?
Yes. Show me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people and organizations for their encouragement and support. My family is tremendously loving and giving. Thank you Jen, Miles, Scarlett, Em, Mom, Dad, David, and Amy. My agent PJ Mark somehow manages to be both an incredibly generous and giving human being and a relentless bastard. Amy Hundley, my editor, is wise and exacting, a dream. Matthew Simmons, Fleetwood Robbins, and Suzanne Stockman read an early draft and provided invaluable feedback. Rick Moody, Aimee Bender, Rebecca Brown, and Stephen Elliott have been terrific friends and inspirations. Dave Cornelius, my great mentor, led me to literature. Nate Manny, whom I knew before he was a rock star, did a bangup job on the Web work and marketing stuff. Greg Comer provided amazing architectural renderings of many of the settings. Corey Jurcak and Jeff Johnson tolerantly answered my questions about speculative civil engineering, as did my father. Dr. Roger Freedman, friend and gentleman astrophysicist, provided valuable insights about space colonization. I thank the wry and talented Lori Piskur Macklin for the Spanish translations. Thanks to Tom Nissley and Brad Parsons for their wise counsel over the years. I raise a glass (or three) to Bob Braile. Richard Hugo House and Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program saved me from a slow death in a series of cubicles. I would especially like to thank Brian McGuigan, Alix Wilber, and Sue Joerger at Hugo House for the gift of their kindness, and Paul Selig at Goddard for giving me a chance. Thanks, finally, to the Washington State Employment Security Department for the four generous writing grants.