CHAPTER 1

MEETING DESTINY

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of February, and I was biking my daily five laps around what remained of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The park, like the world around it, teetered on the brink of the abyss. Economic collapse had devastated New York City, causing a shutdown of most city services, including the subway system, all but paralyzing the city. Much the same level of disruption rippled throughout the rest of the country. Recovery from what had been coined “The Great Debacle” became all the more difficult because of nefarious behavior by our computers. It was not quite an artificial intelligence revolt as much as machines running amok, unleashing chaos among the people who birthed them into this world. They no longer could be trusted to do what they were built for, a trait that felt eerily human.

Why bike the park in the bloody middle of February? A reasonable question.

Not long before New York City collapsed, I found myself on a table in St. Murray’s emergency room under the care of cardiologist Murray Levine, the doc who saved my life. My heart quit in front of the half dozen students still willing to abandon the STEM building to study religion across campus.

I lay on the hard-tiled floor wondering if my time was coming to its uncelebrated end and, if so, whether the heaven I suddenly wished existed awaited my immortal soul so I might visit with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and my maternal grandmother—unless for my great sin I was doomed to the other place. In that case, I’d run into Richard Nixon and that lousy antisemit who sold me a crappy used Oldsmobile in college. One of the students in my History of the Faiths of Humankind class whipped out her phone and summoned the medics, who brought me to the attention of the aforementioned Dr. Levine, a nice-looking fellow, as best as I could tell through his mask. He kept reassuring me, “You’ll be fine, Professor.”

I rested on his table connected to this thing and that, assured the doctor’s healing ministrations had saved me. I was not insensitive to the fact I had avoided my one business meeting with the Angel of Death, who, upon learning I’d live to teach another day, took an abrupt U-turn, seeking more fecund ground elsewhere, his generally being a packed day. In the quiet and—let’s be honest—the rapture possible to someone at the moment he’d escaped death, I took an oath. No more poisons masquerading as food. No more cigarettes. No more indolence. Daily would I sweat. And eat local. Vegetables mostly, and just enough of them.

I attempted keeping my exercise pledge indoors. I purchased a sophisticated bike system that offered wind, sound, even aromas, and included detailed virtual-reality bike rides from all around the world, courtesy of Google Maps projected onto a seventy-two-inch screen. But pedaling in front of my giant Sim-Screen dressed in boxers and sneakers did not engage my imagination, not even when the bike opted for unrequested junkets to off-world destinations like Mars, courtesy of Google Mars. The illusion, with high-def, real-time images, could not recreate the authenticity and excitement of biking outdoors— the polluted breezes, the ups and downs, the odd smells, the crater-sized potholes, encounters with unexpected people and things, the great unpredictability of it all. Despite the increasing collapse of the city’s infrastructure and decreasing law and order, I bought a bike and carried on outdoors.

Almost two years on, my near-death pledge had become the single abiding feature of my life. Every day—and I mean every day—I dragged myself outside to be among the decay, the debris, and the poisons suspended in the air. As long as there was no snow on the road and the temperature remained above twenty degrees Fahrenheit, with filters thrust into my nose, helmeted, goggled, my neck wrapped in a wool scarf, swathed from head to toe in Gore-Tex and looking like a fugitive from a ninja movie, every day for twenty-one miles I biked the park.

That frigid day in February I met my destiny.

It was twenty-two degrees. A thick, gray mist covered the earth like an unwelcome blanket. The rocks, trees—everything was monochromatic. As always, I forced myself into that fog. Pure force of will kept me out there humping that icon of disrepair ringing the park, always hoping that the exertion would minister to all my needs, helping me transcend my grim state.

From time to time, the effort eased the gloom, and diminished my lethargy. I could look the world in the eye and get on with my day.