So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

“We aren’t selling anything,” said the boy. He appeared to be about six. “We’re your grandchildren.”

Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?

This was the danger of winding up a toy like Shane. He could go on for hours like this, weaving every loose strand into a blanket of conspiratorial idiocy as he explained how, at the beginning of every season, NFL officials and team owners got together with TV execs, who handed out scripts for the season.

“Well,” her mother had said, “essays are stories for readers who care more about ideas than they do people.”

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

“That?” Rhys turned to the car. “Is a 1978 Audi 100 GLS,” Rhys said. “Arguably, the low point in a long, proud tradition of German automotive excellence.” “Is it a hybrid?” “It is, actually—half car, half garbage. Carbage.”

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.

Thoreau was only twenty-seven when he went to live in a ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin on Walden Pond for two years and two months of spiritual reflection and dental decay. By the time he was thirty-three, old Henry David had no original teeth left.

The “fat, old bookkeeper” of a police chief with the “toy badge” had, like every boss in the world over the last twenty years, gotten his job by selling himself as a champion of “quantitative, measurable units of policing.” Stats. So, one day, Chuck looked up the numbers of his new unit. The SPD Property Crimes division maintained an “active solution/recovery rate” of between 2 and 5 percent. That’s when Crazy Ass Chuck Littlefield devised his cruel and brilliant revenge. First, he went off his meds.

So, for two months, in the grips of a growing bipolar hypomania, Chuck terrorized both the pawn shops and his fellow Property Crimes detectives, solving a record 9 percent of the property crime cases that came across his desk.

Shit. Nothing worse than raccoons.

“Waves,” Chuck said through gritted teeth. “Not good.” “Try to relax.” The pastor took Chuck’s hand. “Can I ask, Chuck, have you accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” Was this a conversion . . . or last rights? Chuck grimaced. “I was raised Catholic.” “Then I’m afraid you have been deceived by false prophets, and by the worst evil I can imagine—a false salvation.”

the young couple would travel across a decimated country in the end-times (after a plague and civil war), facing all kinds of adventures and hardships as they brought the true gospel to these far-ranging places, and taught them to let go of their fear. Some of these communities would be lawless, and would have no faith, while others would be like fortresses, operating under the dark, violent cloud of false prophecies and misguided sanctuaries like the Rampart.