So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

It, Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathrooms.

just when he thought it couldn’t get worse, it not only got worse, but exponentially more insane. Some days, reading the news felt like being on a plane piloted by a lunatic, hurdling toward the ground.

“essays are stories for readers who care more about ideas than they do people.”

It was a kind of delusional self-centeredness, connecting his failure as a writer to the culture’s growing rejection of science, philosophy, and reason, of basic common sense.

We live only as long as someone remembers us. Only as long as someone cares.

I felt like the world was drifting in one direction and I was going the other way.”

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.

for Kinnick, it was all just part of a long sad cultural slide that he’d had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president).

Live off the grid. A simpler life. Disappear up there. Yes. 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.

He glanced over at his grandchildren. They could never have imagined that he was a kid like them at one time, and that, one day, they would be as old and as brittle as he was now. Of course not. No one could. He hadn’t seen his grandfather or his uncles or his parents as the children they once were. They were another species, dinosaurs. “All of them gone now,” Rhys said.

“How do you know when it’s really love?” Leah asked, more quietly this time. “Well. I’m not sure I know the answer to that. At first, I guess, it’s just a feeling. That you really want to be with that person. You think about them all the time.” He thought of Lucy again. “And maybe, if it’s the real thing, you start to want their happiness more than your own.”

can be confusing, huh?” Asher chimed in from the backseat: “Mom says that alcohol makes people do funny things.” Rhys laughed. “It does. Loneliness does, too.”

“No problem,” Lucy said, leaving her trademark profanity unspoken—as encouraged by her boss in her last three performance reviews. (And maybe, she thought, when you’re done thumb-fucking your phone, you could work some fucking sources and, I don’t know, write a fucking news story that I can put in the fucking newspaper, you spoiled fucking child.)

the newspaper’s footprint had shrunk from a couple hundred people on seven floors and a production facility across the street to a couple dozen people on cubicle islands on two floors. Accountants, real estate companies, wine bars, and a gin distillery had taken over the rest of the family-owned news buildings. (Booze and rapacious land-capitalism nudging aside the fourth estate and the public’s right to know? Hard to argue with that kind of progress.)

Celia’s profound disapproval, even after their divorce, had remained the most powerful force in Kinnick’s universe.

Kinnick taking this opportunity to look around the bar, an old newspaper haunt. It 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.

the changes he noted had a strange quality to them. Not only did they seem broadly unimpressive, but, in some cases, they seemed like steps backward. Like, not only were there no flying cars, there seemed to be more big pickups and SUVs than ever.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” Kinnick said. “I know I fucked everything up.” “And now . . . what?” Lucy turned and faced him. “You think you can just drop in and unfuck everything?” Rhys hummed a little laugh. “Technically, I think once you’ve fucked everything up, the only way to fix it is to fuck everything down.”

Of course, I was changing, too. I was so confused and anxious over the way boys were looking at me, the way they treated me. They like you; they don’t like you; they only want one thing; they get that thing and they call you a slut. 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 that day, when I saw him on the porch with the woman, it was like I began to realize, Oh, he’s one of them?”

“I mean, I don’t—yes? What makes something a book? You know . . . can I just bind two thousand pages together and pronounce it, ‘Book!’ I mean, there must be some inherent value to a thing outside its form, or its public recognition, right?”

Rhys Kinnick was like the math concept she’d recently helped Leah with—a negative equation. If the signs are different, as she’d told Leah, the answer is always negative. The signs between Bethany and Rhys would always be different. The answer was always going to be negative.

Rhys was tired of being a passenger in his own misadventures—first

“God, I hate hippies,” Brian said. “I know you do.” Kinnick patted his friend’s arm. Growing up on the reservation, Brian had put up with all manner of pale, communal, new age, moccasin-wearing Geronimo-come-lately weirdos moving into the woods, asking for strong medicine and advice on building sweat lodges and digging camas roots, seeking corny tribal brotherhood from people who actually belonged to tribes. But worse than that, Kinnick knew, Brian’s second wife had been a hippie who had left him for her Vinyasa yoga instructor.

“That’s got to be exhausting,” Kinnick said after Bethany briefly lost phone service near Onion Creek, the phone dropping to her lap. “I hope you know that you don’t have to put up with his crazy talk.” Bethany didn’t say anything, just looked out her window and waited for the phone to come back into service again. Then, before she took another call, she answered her father, her voice remaining steady and unruffled. “You know what’s exhausting?” And, not waiting for an answer: “Your constant disappointment in me.”

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.”

How ridiculous the whole concept of a “phone” had become over the years—going from the dedicated oversize receiver of his youth, curved and cupped, fitting so nicely in your hand and covering your ear so perfectly, to this hard, unwieldy deck of cards that doubled as movie camera, personal assistant, consumer tracking device, and anxiety crack pipe.

But as much as he’d lived in this place the last seven years, he’d also spent much of that time in his head, hiding (behind self-pity and stubbornness) from the people who needed him.

“I get it, too, the urge to run. I can’t tell you how many times. To just . . . go. Leave everything behind. But here’s the thing—in my daydreams? I never arrive anywhere. There’s never a landing place.

“This parent stuff—” Bethany laughed uneasily. “My God.” Kinnick wanted to agree but wasn’t sure he had the standing.

Shane looked quickly over his shoulder, hoping the kids weren’t seeing this—Oh, God, Asher, please don’t be watching—but if he was, Shane knew what he’d want his son to see, his father standing up to the bullies and baseball players of the world, standing up to the demonic hordes, and maybe, just maybe, it was never too late to be a better Charlton, and maybe, if you could be born again, you could also be born again . . . again,

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.

Kinnick had forgotten the hardest part of parenting: the realization that you can’t keep your family safe. That no matter how strong you were, or how much money you had, you could never totally shield the people you loved from the sorrows of life. Or shield yourself, for that matter.