Horns honk and Rex glances behind them. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

Zeno gets out of the car, suitcase in his right hand, books under his left arm, something inside him (regret) thrusting to and fro like a spearman, pulverizing bone, destroying vital tissue. Rex leans over and puts out his right hand and Zeno squeezes it with his left, as awkward a handshake as there’s ever been. Then the little car is swallowed by traffic.

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

FEBRUARY–MAY 2019

Seymour

In February he and Janet huddle shoulder-to-shoulder over her smartphone in a corner of the cafeteria. “Gotta warn you,” she says, “he’s kinda scary.” On-screen a little man in black denim and a goat mask paces back and forth across an auditorium stage. He goes by the name of “Bishop”; an assault rifle is slung over his back. Start, he says,

with the Book of Genesis. “Be fruitful,” it begins, “and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

The video cuts to a restless mash of faces. For 2,600 years, the man continues,

those of us in the Western tradition have been assured that the role of humanity is to subdue the earth. That all creation was created for us to harvest. And for 2,600 years we pretty much got away with it. Temperatures remained constant, seasons stayed predictable, and we cut down forests and fished out oceans and elevated one god above all others: Growth. Expand your property, increase your wealth, enlarge your walls. And when each new treasure you drag inside your walls doesn’t relieve your pain? Go get some more. But now? Now the human species is beginning to reap what it has—

The bell sounds and Janet taps the screen and Bishop freezes mid-sentence, arms outstretched. A link flashes at the bottom of the screen: Join Us.

“Seymour, give me my phone. I need to get to Spanish.”

At the new Ilium terminal in the library, he puts on headphones and hunts down more videos. Bishop wears a Donald Duck mask, a raccoon mask, a Kwakiutl Nation beaver mask; he’s in a clear-cut in Oregon, a village in Mozambique.