Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger, an embrace of gore, which Thal’s weapon required.

Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.

It was at this point, when the sack was empty and Epimetheus had nothing to bestow, that his brother Prometheus stepped in, stole fire from the gods, and gave that to man as his positive quality. But here is the catch, Bruno said. The catch is that fire is not always positive. And more crucially, fire is not a quality. It is not a trait that a life-form can possess.

Man, bland and featureless in this myth, lacking in his own special trait, was condemned, instead, to ingenuity, to being a devious little bastard.

Man would come to rely on fire as a crutch. His use of fire would stand in for what man was denied, the possession of a positive trait, as all the other living creatures were given.

Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?

Perhaps it comforts us that there are stories—even if we don’t believe them—that we H. sapiens are not alone. The breadcrumb trail of cryptozoology becomes a site of resistance to Big Science, and to crushing pessimism, this lore as a place where people can say, but… but… but are you sure?

I don’t waste my time on games. I don’t know if this is because I’m not a man, or because I’m not into games.

The strong jaw, the big brain, the heavy bones and large face, these were positive traits. Perhaps Thal, he said, was a man graced with good qualities, and H. sapiens, in his plunder and advance toward the devastating dawn of agriculture, was a man with no such grace, a man without qualities, who substituted violence for the hole at the center of his heart.

Sleep was key to thought, and to intellectual development. As man’s thoughts became ever more complex, the longer he needed to sleep. The longer man slept, Bruno said, the more he dreamed, and the more penetrating and wondrous his waking thought became.

Ecclesiastes declares that life has no meaning, that evil will be rewarded, and goodness punished. He says that even the most honorable man can be left in town to die in the street, while the greediest fool gets a eulogy and a proper burial.

Pleasure augurs survival. Think of sexual pleasure, Bruno said, the very root of existence: we further our species with ingenious simplicity—by going toward what feels good, by letting things happen, by allowing our bodies to speak and to say: “This.” To say: “Yes.”

Keep a list, Bruno wrote, of those who have been martyred to joy, lost to it. Do not be on that list.

(Late Debord’s face had grown to resemble that of a dead goldfish clotted with scurf, and I am not being fanciful here, but forensic and precise, given the photos of Late Debord included in my dossier. At the end of his life, he looks like a dead goldfish floating in a dirty bowl.)

This drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists was so strong and so relentless that I began to feel I had no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.

It was easy enough. I made it seem that an ardent commitment to defending the rights of animals, and a possible romantic future with me, were one and the same thing, a future this boy and I might consecrate by planting a bomb at a research laboratory.

The dumb luck of good looks is akin to the fact that it may very well rain on the sea in times of drought, and will not rain where it is needed, on a farmer’s crops: grace is random, dumb and random and even a bit violent, in giving to the one who already has rather a lot, and taking from the one who has been denied, who doesn’t have a pot to piss in

“Sir, we hoe a row,” he told the police. “We plant potatoes. We don’t use pesticides. We nurture pollinators. But here is how the state does things: They have a deer population that’s getting out of control, so what do they do? They bring in lynx. When farmers get upset about the lynx, the government reintroduces wolves. The wolves kill livestock, so the state makes it legal to shoot them. Hunting accidents increase, so they build a new clinic, whose medical staff creates a housing shortage, necessitating new developments. The expanding population attracts rodents, and so they introduce snakes. And so far, no one knows what to do about the snakes.”