So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

“Believe what you want.” Shane was getting red-faced. “But I saw a thing on-line that explained the whole deal.” He was always seeing things on-line that explained the whole deal. Or deals on-line that explained the whole thing.

It’s like talking to a belt buckle!”

Sometimes, Leah felt like the whole world was a shirt she’d outgrown, squeezing tight around her chest.

He used to imagine that, when the last copy of his book was gone, Kinnick would be gone, too, wiped from the earth. This felt like a relief at times. The world had no use for him, or for his curious little book

Right, he thought. We live only as long as someone remembers us. Only as long as someone cares.

As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

It was possible to disappear from others’ lives, of course—from Lucy’s, from Bethany’s—but he suspected that when he woke up tomorrow, wherever he was, the person he really wanted to never see again would be staring right back in the mirror. Maybe don’t get a mirror, he thought, and this made him smile.

Instead, what were the first words out of his mouth? You look amazing. He cursed his male shallowness, which even seven years locked in a cabin with great works of philosophy, science, and literature apparently hadn’t cured.

had taken him years to believe that the world was not a series of rooms like this, crowded with people and their cultural noise, their agendas and desires. To remember that the world was the world, and we merely passed through it: twenty-some thousand sunrises, each one with the power to renew us.

Lucy Park burst into laughter when Kinnick asked her, “Who covers the radical right these days?” “Uh, the government reporter?”

Oh, there’s also a rural sheriff who sits in the public library all day looking for books about gay penguins so he can confiscate them.

The way I know this is a reference to Paul’s book!!

Kinnick sniffed his shoulder. “I had a shower yesterday. Have people always been this intense about hygiene, or is this something new?” “No, I think it’s been around for a while.” Kel sniffed the air. “Hey, you want to borrow a shirt, man?”

That’s when Crazy Ass Chuck Littlefield devised his cruel and brilliant revenge. First, he went off his meds.

had shown up for unsolicited security-guard duty at shopping malls and downtown stores, in their Don’t-Tread-on-Me-I-got-a-small-dick pickup trucks and their Kevlar vests over their black T-shirts, their semiautomatic rifles BabyBjörned to their fat guts like the shithead soldier/cop-wannabes they were (even though none of them had the stones to go and join the actual military, or the brains to pass a simple law enforcement test).

Every few seconds, he’d say this, “Uh-huh, right, then what?” as if Kinnick were unaware of the concept of chronology and might suddenly tell some part of the story from the 1940s, or two weeks in the future.

The high note seemed so insane that Kinnick could only laugh. Any questions? How about: What the hell? White Nationalist goons stealing children from church parking lots? Rural sheriffs telling him to go pound sand? A manic ex-cop showing him how to shoot people in the front pocket? Was this just how people behaved now? Is this what the world had come to? Seven years in the woods only to emerge and find everything had gotten crazier?

And one large sign at the open gate of a barbed wire fence, which Chuck had to slow down to read: COMMYS, LIBERALS, FEDS, SORROS FBI, AND ALL WHO REJECT THE LORD AND HIS TEACHINGS—STAY OUT! “I don’t see retired cops or shitty grandparents on that list,” Chuck said, “so, I guess we’re good.”

Like all people, he supposed, when making cases to himself he was prone to forgetting that other people made cases as well.

Looking back, it was like this daily battle—their eyes and their hands and me holding them off while desperately wanting them to like me. It was like this game where they had been given the rules and I hadn’t.

(And worst of all, what if he was right to be disappointed?)

And, as it turned out, panic attacks were not something you could just run away from by going off into the woods.

Of course, it was ridiculous, holding a six-hundred-year-old South American harvest festival in the woods of Canada. But the utter strangeness had caused her to reflect on her own life; was it any more random than her family being in the thralls of a repurposed, overly literal, two-thousand-year-old offshoot of an ancient Middle Eastern religion?

“This is a fucking awesome story,” Jeff said to Brian.

But I’m starting to think Thoreau might have been full of shit. If we aren’t living for others, maybe we aren’t really living.”

As a kid, she’d always seen him as so reliable and knowledgeable, a series of squares: square jawline, square shoulders, square hair, a man of perfect right angles, a paragon of rational thought, like he was a book himself—but

“Sister Bethany, what my husband is trying to say is that David Jr. is gay.”

Oh thank god

All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed these adages to be true, but now, bleeding on the ground, watching Dean Burris stand over his dead son-in-law, Rhys wondered if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil. He wondered if cruelty and its bride, fear, didn’t just exist spontaneously, forces as elemental and eternal as gravity.

What rubbish, Kinnick thought, his Atlas of Wisdom. Now, at the end of life, how short, cruel, and pointless it all seemed, wisdom, what a waste that houseful of books before him had turned out to be.

How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissures bubbling up under the surface, and what—we were just supposed to go on with our lives? Wake up the next day like nothing happened, like we hadn’t lost our minds? Just turn the page, to the baseball scores or the horoscopes or celebrity birthdays? (Nothing to see here, just America.)

It was one of the hardest adjustments for Kinnick, owning a cell phone again. It was like a nosy neighbor with a constant supply of scary news, a pocketful of drip-drip dread and festering fear.

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every firestorm, hurricane, and melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical political and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric—and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

There were trees he would miss like old friends, and cloudless night skies, and surreal dawn light, and the tracks of visitors in the fresh snow.