You know that unsettling feeling when you’re moving from one place to another and you finally empty your old house and as you’re vacuuming you realize it’s just a space? That was how it felt at the academy. Something of consequence used to be here, but for whatever reason it disappeared. The windows were boarded up, the exterior was covered in grime and graffiti. Dead weeds where there used to be landscaping. As the real estate agent took down the “For Sale” sign I entered the main building. It felt like a grade school that had gotten roughed up and left for dead on the side of the road. All the rooms empty. No furniture, no artifacts to indicate this had once been a place to learn. The main building contained a dozen classrooms on two floors. There was a science lab building with a little planetarium, a library building with empty shelves, a maintenance building, and a dormitory with a cafeteria. There was a small athletic field and a gym.
I moved into what seemed like the headmaster’s suite in the dorm building, bought some cheap Ikea furniture, and made it up like a monk’s room. Minimal. I started to ask around the neighborhood about the building’s previous inhabitants.
What kind of neighborhood was it?
Typical southwestern exurbia. Retirees and Latino families. That weird, thick, southwestern grass kept green with constant irrigation. The academy itself was right up against the mountains. There was a strip mall with a Starbucks. I started hanging out there, introducing myself to my new neighbors and asking about the academy. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Some thought it was a typical grade school. One lady who lived three blocks away from it argued that it didn’t exist. I got monotone answers from the few young people I met. Everybody was entranced by their own gut-level routines, the pursuit of Frappuccinos. I got nowhere and soon gave up. Besides, it wasn’t as important to me anymore that I learn the history of the academy so much as that I start fixing the place to prepare for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. I started signing up for classes at the local Home Depot, reading home improvement books, educating myself on electrical wiring and plumbing. I did as much as I could on my own but when a job needed more than one guy I hired Mexican day laborers and learned what I could from them, too. I discovered things my hands could do. I spent the days sanding, painting, refinishing woodwork. I replaced broken toilets and installed light fixtures. I got scrapes and bruises and splinters under my fingernails.
How long did it take to restore?
About two years. Pushing a bucket around with a mop one night I realized I’d become a custodian. I laughed. What a thankless job, holding chaos and disorder at bay in the silent halls of an empty school.
Did you consider getting back in touch with Wyatt and Erika, or with Star?
What would I tell them? They belonged to a previous version of me. My holy task required that I cut off as many human connections as possible and wait patiently for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. His academy would be in perfect shape, ready for pupils. I imagined he’d confer on me some special role, the caretaker of the academy. I found this solitary duty suited me.
He never arrived.
There’s still time.
You sound pretty confident about that.
I know this because the one person who did show up was Dirk Bickle. He just pulled into the parking lot in his ridiculous Hummer while I was mowing the play field. The Sikh guys weren’t with him this time. His gratitude was obvious in how ferociously he embraced me. I invited him in and showed him around, pointed out the work I’d done on the electrical and ventilation and floors. He beamed. In my quarters I served him coffee and asked him what was supposed to happen next.
He told me he was ready to reveal the master plan. He started with a hypothetical question. What if I was faced with the following choice—I could save the human race from self-imposed destruction, and the rest of humanity’s existence would be peaceful for another thousand years until an asteroid obliterated the earth, or I could single-handedly destroy the human race and by doing so ensure that new life would appear after earth’s destruction, on Mars.
[laughs]
I told him the choice was false. First, if humans lived another thousand years on earth, we’d surely develop technology to either obliterate the asteroid or escape the planet altogether. Second, how would new life emerge on Mars if humans weren’t around to make it happen?
Bickle answered in the form of another question. Wasn’t it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we’d become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We’d thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of “the environment” as if it’s something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes. Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing. The only rational choice, Bickle said, was to adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewardship and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial. Mr. Kirkpatrick saw through the cultural construct that would segregate nature, humanity, and technology. His was an effort to redeem the human race through understanding that we were meant to control the course of nature and engineer it for the purposes of beauty.
Did you ever suspect that Bickle was just fucking with you?
I considered it. But why would the guy go to so much trouble just to mess with my head? There had to be a reason for him to follow me around, show up with a mystical refrigerator in the desert, save my life. Obviously he was a true believer of something. Even if that something was a delusion, it was an attractive delusion. Keep in mind I was surrounded by a society in which people didn’t appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they’re descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they’ll reunite with all their dead relatives. Let’s not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy fucking shit, the crazier the better. What Bickle was hinting at seemed a lot less crazy than praying to Jesus to make you rich. Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you sexy or that God is keeping track of how many times you masturbate?
[laughs]
So Bickle moved into one of the spare dorm rooms and began revealing Mr. Kirkpatrick’s teachings to me. The rift between Kirkpatrick and the dropouts had pretty much destroyed the academy, he said, and he had no idea where Mr. Kirkpatrick had gone. Into the desert, maybe, where all prophets go. He told me of great awakenings and celestial visitors, Kirkpatrick’s series of prophetic dreams in which he communicated with Freidrich Nietzsche on the Bardo plane, becoming one with the philosopher and finding himself, in this act of communion, transformed into a planet-devouring phoenix. Kirkpatrick was Nietzsche’s heir, spreading the word that the distinction between the overman and the human was the overman’s responsibility to spread life itself through the universe. Bickle led me through the prophecies, late into the night. He said Mr. Kirkpatrick had been waiting for me to reach a state of receptivity before briefing me on the program.
Or maybe they were waiting for you to become wealthier so they could come after your money.
I feel sorry for the smallness of your thinking, I really do.
It all sounds bogus to me.
Do you want to hear the rest or what?
Why not. Go ahead.
One night after our lessons I asked Bickle what had caused the strife between the dropouts and Kirkpatrick. He became solemn and started speaking about Nick’s final invention. You remember how he created that machine when we were in high school, the one that took itself apart?
The science fair.
Right. Well imagine such a machine operating on a global scale. Actually, you can’t call it a machine, per se. Consider it a program, a system, a Rube Goldberg series of actions and reactions spreading outward from a central node. To call it a weapon would be too reductive. It was a device that set certain events in motion. The finger that topples the first in a row of dominos. Bickle called it the Rebooting Device, a technology designed to reconfigure the planet and bring about a new era.
What kind of era?
[laughs] He called it the Age of Fucked Up Shit.
Where was the device?
In a safety deposit box in a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan. Bickle gave me the name of the bank, the box number. I remained expressionless and didn’t let on that I had the key. We continued our lessons. A month passed in deep meditation. The desert heat pressed down on me and just looking at the world outside my head was like one long good-bye. Finally Bickle packed up his Hummer and left, promising that Kirkpatrick would return. I waited a day, then caught the first flight to JFK.
After years of living in the desert suburbs working with my hands, speaking to few people, in a sort of monastic haze, stepping out of a cab in Midtown Manhattan was like getting electrocuted. I checked into a hotel in Times Square. It was a Sunday, so I waited until the next morning to go to the bank. I arrived as they opened and asked for access to box #3487. I had to sign something, and when I provided my ID and signature, they matched the info on file. This seemed like further confirmation that I was supposed to be pursuing this particular path, like the dropouts had forged my signature ahead of time. In a room of brass-doored safety deposit boxes, I took the key that Erika had vomited up and turned it in the lock. The clerk turned his key, and I pulled out a box and set it on the table.
Inside I found a smaller cardboard box, and inside that box the device. It was a cheap video-game controller from the 1970s, a scuffed black plastic case with a big red button on it. It looked like a joke. I wondered if Bickle hadn’t sent me across the country so I’d leave the academy unattended. Maybe I was being fucked with. I took the device back to the hotel and sat on the bed looking at it. If I believed it was bogus, some sort of prop, then it didn’t matter if I pushed the button or not. But if it really did set in motion the end of our times, then it mattered very much whether I pushed it. If I pushed the button, it meant I wasn’t sure whether it was real and I was only pushing it to find out. Pushing it was an admission of skepticism. If I didn’t push it, on the other hand, then part of me really did believe that it brought about the Fucked Up Shit. Did it matter whether or not I pushed it? I thought of my dead parents, my sister. My childhood home swept into the sound on a tidal wave of mud. I paced the room. I was in a rock/paper/scissors stalemate. Belief versus disbelief versus curiosity. Had Nick really invented a remote control to end the world? Ridiculous, right? I had to get out of the room, so I walked through the tourist shit of Times Square, mumbling the arguments for and against, blending with the human tide. Some subterranean part of me whispered that it was only a matter of time before I pushed the button. I was going to push it! I talked myself down. I’d operate as though I’d never come out here. I would throw the controller in the East River and catch a flight home.
When I got back to the hotel, I realized I was starving so I placed a room service order worthy of a death row inmate’s last meal. Plan was, I would watch an on-demand movie and gorge myself before I flew back to Vegas. After a while the room service guy arrived and pushed the table into my room. Young guy, with buzz-cut red hair. He positioned the table in front of the bed and started lifting silver domes off things, peeling the Saran wrap off my water glass. That’s when it happened. My wallet was sitting on one of the bedside tables. If I’d had it in my pocket, I would have been able to take it out and give him his tip while facing him. But I had to turn around, my back to him, so I could reach it sitting beside the room service menu. While my back was turned, he said, “What’s this?” and before I turned around I knew what he was referring to. My mouth was preparing the word “Don’t” but not soon enough. I turned in time to see his finger make contact with the red button and press it. The device made a solid click.
I couldn’t move. He’d pressed the button. The room service guy had pressed the fucking button. He shrugged and set it back on the table. Then he handed me the bill. I don’t remember signing it, but I remember him leaving the room, because he paused at the door and said, “Take care, Fly.”
So there was this one momentous thing happening in my head, the pushing of the button, and then there was the second momentous thing, the room service guy calling me by the code name the dropouts had given me. I had to sit down on the bed and think about what had just happened. I’d been played. The dropouts knew I’d be coming to New York to pick up the device. They didn’t have the means to break into a bank, but they could plant a guy at a hotel to come to the room to push the button. Outside, buildings remained standing. Manhattan operated as it always had, as far as I could tell.
How long did you stay in New York?
I checked out as soon as I regained my senses. As I walked to the ticket counter at Kennedy I had no idea where I was going until I slapped down my ID and asked for the first flight to Seattle. I was sure that by the time the plane touched down the world would be in flames. I found myself landing at SeaTac, grabbing a cab, going through these transitional moments like I was wearing a suit made out of an aquarium, the world outside of me blunted and muffled and drab. I was in a cab and on a ferry, and in another cab. Then before I knew it it was night and I stood at the overgrown driveway leading to Star’s house. I had no flashlight, I just felt along ahead of me with a stick, dragging my roller bag through the mud. When I got to the clearing, there was the shack and the shed and the unborn skeleton of the never-completed house. Suddenly, boom, I was on Bainbridge again. I had to catch up with the idea, like one of those online clips where the video speeds up to sync with the audio. As I was asking myself what the hell I was doing here, the door opened, and Star’s silhouette was framed in light. I came forward and found her looking exactly as she’d looked when I’d left. As if she hadn’t aged. Same housedress, same hair in pigtails. If you looked at us you’d have thought I was the older one. My beard streaked gray, my skin creased by the Nevada sun. She beckoned me in with her finger like a witch in a fairy tale. And like a character in a fairy tale, I walked right through that portal into my past. The body odor/incense/oniony smell of a hippie house. We didn’t say anything to each other. She took my coat and stuck my bag in a corner. Then I collapsed on the couch and fell into a night of hyper-realistic dreams. I dreamed I was a boy again, maybe ten years old, and it was winter. I was in the woods playing with Nick and we’d made a fort, really nothing more than a chair and an old step ladder we’d dragged under the boughs of a cedar. It was getting dark and I told Nick I wanted to go home, but he said he wanted to keep playing, so we stayed under the tree in the patch of bare ground while snow continued to fall from the darkening sky. I sat on the step ladder hugging myself for warmth and Nick sat on the chair doing the same. In the dream I faded to sleep and woke up in complete darkness. Panicked, I had to feel my way out of the snowy woods, stumbling along the path. When I came to the clearing where Nick’s house stood, it was dawn, and I realized that I’d left Nick back there. But instead of going back I decided to pretend I didn’t know where he was. The scene changed and it was quite some time later, in a different season, springtime. I stood at the edge of the woods while police with chattering radios recovered Nick’s body. His skin was yellow and his head flopped to the side as they carried him out. Somehow the cops figured out that I had abandoned him out there and Star stood next to me, angry, shaking. I needed to escape the cops. They seemed distracted anyway, so it wasn’t hard to slip away back into the woods. But now it was a different season, summer, and I was an adult, and as I climbed over fallen logs I had a conversation with myself about how I had just been dreaming that Nick had frozen to death in the woods. A dream within a dream. I heard traffic ahead and pushed through some foliage to find myself on a sidewalk in New York City. Behind me the woods were dense and dark, but in front of me cars and buses honked and squealed. Instead of buildings, a thick wall of trees rose along the sidewalk at my back. Like I was standing at a sort of membrane between two island worlds. I started walking downtown, toward Times Square. Soon I stood in front of the hotel I had just checked out of, with my hand finding its way to my pocket, where it found my swipe key. I felt like I was walking around in my aquarium suit again. I rode the elevator to the floor I had stayed on, walked down the hall, tried the key, and opened the door, overwhelmed with black, sticky dread. There was my luggage, the newspaper I’d read that morning, the device with the red button sitting on the table. I was back, in a dream, in New York City, where I’d just been. I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking that this was turning out to be one hell of a long dream. There was a knock and the words “room service” came through the door. I opened it and the same guy who’d pressed the button earlier wheeled in another cart laden with food, and he went through the same procedure of removing the Saran wrap from my glass and lifting lids off entrées. I was locked into an algorithmic set of options, as if I’d rehearsed; I reached for my wallet on the bedside table as the guy picked up the device, said, “What’s this?” and pressed the button. Exactly as it happened the first time. Except now I knew he was a dropout. But I was locked into the routine and couldn’t do anything different with this knowledge. The button got pressed again. And this time, in the dream, I went to the window to see buildings falling. When I woke up, I was in Star’s house, but she wasn’t there. In fact, she’d been gone for years.