The instructions say to use a Tor browser to download a secure messaging platform called Pryva-C. He has to load several updates to get it to work. Days pass before he receives a response.
At the end of the summer, a hurricane shatters two Caribbean islands, drought squeezes Somalia, the global monthly average temperature breaks another record, an intergovernmental report announces that ocean temperatures have risen four times faster than anyone expected, and the smoke from two separate megafires in Oregon rides eastward currents into Lakeport, where it collects in shapes that look to Seymour, in the satellite images on his tablet, very much like whirlpools.
He has not seen Janet since he smashed the big side window of the RV at the marina and ran. As far as he knows, she didn’t call the police; if the police somehow found her, he doesn’t think she told them about him. All summer he avoids the library, avoids the lakefront, works at the ice rink cleaning locker rooms and stocking sodas with the drawstring of his hoodie pulled tight. Other than that he stays in his bedroom.
In September collection agencies ring Bunny’s phone three times a day. The poor air quality keeps Labor Day tourists away; the marina is practically deserted, the restaurants empty; tips at the Pig N’ Pancake are nonexistent, and Bunny can’t find hours to replace the ones she lost when the Aspen Leaf closed.
Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.
During classes his eyes cloud with visions of Bishop’s camp. White tents beneath dark trees, machine-gun nests atop stockades, gardens and greenhouses, solar panels, men and women in fatigues singing songs, telling tales, mysterious brewmasters brewing healthy elixirs from forest herbs. Always the imagination rotates back to Mathilda: her wrists, her hair, the intersection of her thighs. She comes down a path carrying two pails of berries; she is blond, she is Japanese, Serbian, a Fijian skin diver with ammunition belts crisscrossing over her breasts.
He looks it up: Maht means might, Hild means battle, Mathilda means might in battle, and after that Mathilda becomes an eight-foot-tall huntress moving silently through a forest. He leans back in bed, the edge of the tablet warm on his lap; Mathilda stoops through his doorway, props her bow against the door. Bougainvillea for a belt, roses in her hair, she blocks out the ceiling light and wraps one leafy hand around his groin.