SOME DAY IN the future, if there is a future, I am going to need a long period of serious therapy. We have all of us become almost casual about things and events that could destroy our minds if we stopped long enough to think about them. Dekka talked about it a little, the lasting effects, the trauma, and Dekka knows about it in ways I’m just coming to understand.
And it’s not just the violence and the fear; the sheer weirdness makes you doubt everything. Malik and Francis pop into and back out of some impossible-to-imagine extra dimension. There’s a supervillain made out of insects that carry hyped-up, accelerated versions of every disease on this planet. I saw Williams. Dekka and Francis saw the poor men at the Pine Barrens. Speaking of which, the US government is now deliberately murdering people. And Twitter says Tom Peaks blew his own brains out in a sporting-goods store. And some old man with Alzheimer’s tore up a drugstore after turning into a massive beast. And, and, and, and, and, and each new “and” is like a nail being hammered into my brain, and I’m thinking, huh, I don’t feel it yet. But I know that you cannot keep doing this to yourself, living this way, and not pay a terrible price for it.
How many FAYZ survivors ended up drug-addicted, drunk, or ended their pain through suicide? A lot. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ll be spared.
There’s no point mourning all we’ve lost. Our families. Friends. Familiar places that were ours. A world we mostly sort of understood. If I think about all that’s gone now I’ll just start crying. Even the simple belief that we are real, that we are the creations of a loving God or the results of billions of years of evolution, is lost. We’re someone’s game. Someone’s entertainment. We’ve lost everything. Everything except each other.
We all signed that Brownstone Declaration. My prose was not as elegant as Mr. Jefferson’s; sorry, I didn’t have a lot of time. The names on that sheet of paper, those people, are all I have now.
It’s beginning to dawn on regular people, too, that we are never, ever going to be able to find our way back to where we were. That world is gone. I don’t think I ever spent five minutes thinking about the concept of civilization before; it was just a word in a textbook. But that’s what is falling apart around us now: civilization. The whole network of systems that defined our world is coming down as we lurch uncontrollably toward some future dystopia.
There’s an old song I stumbled across on YouTube. I’m probably misquoting the lyrics, but it was something about how you don’t know what you have till it’s gone.
Civilization? I’m sorry I never paid attention to you. If I had, I’d probably have had a bunch of things to criticize. But now I’ve caught a glimpse of the future and it’s not good, Civilization. It’s not as good as what we had with you. Sorry it took your death for me to see that.