›› OneCorn

  @FoxInTheHenHouse: What do we think Enoch is referring to? Well. We think that here Enoch is treating speculation as if it were fact. Mingling his good reasoning and scientific knowledge in with some stuff he made up. We think that’s OK but that he probably should have pointed it out.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  You’re not welcome here.

  ›› OneCorn

  You literally created an open “everyone welcome” forum. Enoch wouldn’t have been afraid of debate.

  All of us know how it ended, of course. Fields and orchards and flocks and harvests. And intensive nitrogen-based fertilizer and cows pumped full of hormones to speed their growth and battery chickens with no space to turn in their cages.

  Alright. So why did we do it? Anyone want to guess?

 

  Sure, that’s the obvious answer. And that’s not an insult, by the way. You should say obvious things because sometimes they’re right! So OK, anyone who didn’t hear, her answer was: because they wanted to eat better. Not a bad guess.

  Except let me tell you something. For centuries Rabbit starved and Fox thrived. Those who hunted and gathered as their parents had taught them were well-fed and strong as ever, eating elk in their season and crab apples in their time. Those who tried planting and herding were malnourished, their bones brittle and deformed. Their babies died: again and again and again. They were filled with plague—they lived close-packed, humans and animals, and they caught one sickness after another from their herds. When the rains failed or the storms turned or the locusts came, the whole crop died and the people starved. In these days devastating pestilence and famine were born among Rabbit. And yet they kept trying. The animals two by two. The seed in the wet ground.

  ›› OneCorn

  Man he had a way with words.

  This was not a short period. It went on for hundreds of ghastly generations. Fox prospered and Rabbit starved and died.

  So why the hell did Rabbit carry on?

  The first answer is: we don’t know. For the first seven thousand years of this brutal experiment, no one had invented writing. We don’t know, and your guess is as good as anyone else’s.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  You’re on the automatic boot list. I can get rid of you with one click.

  ›› OneCorn

  Yes but that’s not what Enoch would have wanted.

  ›› OneCorn

  Enoch believed in letting yourself be open to many truths. You see?

  There are a few theories. They’re not opposed. They may all be true.

  First, what archaeologists call symbolic behaviors.

  Fox loved to carve sacred symbols or make cave paintings with special meanings, to worship at a particular grove or spring and return there every year. So the theory is: a few Fox people loved their symbolic behavior so much they decided to stay at the sacred bend in the river when the tribe moved on. They had built shelters, even small villages, for the yearly visit from the nation. Once they decided to stay, they needed a way to eat. Capture wild goats two by two. Plant apple seeds and grain. Hope. Pray. When the babies die, dedicate them to the gods of the place and continue.

  Second, what we might call specialized agricultural products. Anyone want to take a guess at what that is?

 

  Well, you’re on the right track! There is a type of natural product that Fox could not get much of. It has to be carefully stored in one place, not moved around. It takes weeks of bubbling in a sealed container to be good. That product is booze. A lot of early agriculture focused on fermentable grains: barley and rye and maize. Even tobacco needs to be dried. Maybe a few Fox people weren’t satisfied with a bit of rotten fruit every now and then. Early Rabbit wanted to get buzzed all the time, and it didn’t matter if there was disease and starvation and malnourished children if you were drunk every day.

  ›› OneCorn

  Look. Enoch wanted us to be disgusted with ourselves. He was disgusted with himself. And he’s not wrong about any of this but it’s not like we need to hate ourselves for being what we are now either.

  OK, here’s an important one.

  Sex.

  Fox traveled around in small bands of—we think—between a few dozen and a few hundred people. Enough that you could find a sex partner or two and raise your kids. But not as many as your appetite might want. Maybe Rabbit decided to stay at the sacred spring with the booze because a bigger community, even a starving one, just had more opportunities for some strange.

  Drumroll please. Here’s the big one.

  The Future.

  This is the essential problem. We can imagine the future. And once we’ve imagined it, we can’t stop. The dicebox of evolution optimized us for brain and then let us get on with it. Our instincts were to hunt and gather, but our big brains knew the antelope might escape and we might find no fruit today. Our big brains chewed on it: what if, what if. For some Fox people, the anxiety was overwhelming.

  If the problem is “I don’t know what’s going to happen” it’s often easier to make sure you do know what’s going to happen even if that means it’s going to be bad. They preferred to look at a mud patch of crops and six scrawny goats and say “There, that’s what I’m going to eat” and be certain than deal with the uncertainty of the hunt every day.

  ›› OneCorn

  This part kills me. Because it’s not like Enoch escaped this way of thinking either.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  @OneCorn: What are you here for?

  ›› OneCorn

  @FoxInTheHenHouse: I’m here for the truth, man.

  ›› OneCorn

  You know, Enoch preached on Lot and Sodom many times. But he always left that story at the worst part. Cave incest and you’re out. Mic drop. Humanity is doomed by the project of agriculture and urban living. But that’s not the end. I looked it up in the library when I was fourteen. Nothing is ever really over.

  Moa had a son, Moab. Amma had one too, Ben-Ammi. Their descendants occupied the north and south of what is now Jordan. You can read about their archaeology—Enoch must have read it.

  You know I thought so much about this. If you go far back enough in any of our families, there’s cave incest. Or something unbearably terrible. A rape. A brutality. A woman who thought her life was over.

  And yet, this story tells us, things go on.

  Those baby boys would have laughed when they saw a tiny shining fish rise from the bright waters, or when a snail crawled from a bending leaf to their small fingers. Every time, we begin again, again. The beginning does not foretell the end. There is no end.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  Who are you?

  ›› OneCorn

  Does it matter, if someone’s showing you the truth?

  It was an illusion. A swarm of locusts and a murrain would wipe out the crops and the flocks. But Rabbit—drunk on symbols and sex and fermented barley—preferred the illusion to reality.

  Like I say, these things might all be true. These things probably are all true. This is probably how some Foxes became Rabbits. They liked art and novels and religious ecstasy and stories about gods or heroes and movies and video games—or the nearest local equivalents—and sex with strangers and booze and drugs and a nice hoard of gold to sit on.

  Does that sound like anyone you know? Of course it does. These days, it sounds like almost all of us. We’re descended from Rabbit. From crafty Jacob and murderous Cain, from the grandiose sophisticate Joseph, and from the complicated man Lot.

  We hate Fox like our ancestors did, and that’s why we Rabbit people persecute and loathe and murder Native people and Indigenous people and traveling people and nomadic people and homeless people and anyone without a house and a nation-state as we understand it. When this nation tried over hundreds of years to annihilate all its Native and Indigenous people, that was the hatred of Rabbit people for Fox people, the violence of symbols against reality.

  We hate them to convince ourselves that we’re OK and safe. The story of Sodom is about urban people who had the illusion of a plan, and how they found out that there is no such thing as a plan.

  I’m not saying agriculture and settlement don’t have many benefits now.

  I’m saying we got involved in this whole “civilization” situation for reasons we might as well be aware of.

  At this point in the recording, Enoch pauses. When you listen, you’ll hear that he’s talking so quietly that only the mic on his shirt collar would have picked it up. He’s talking to us. You might like to think about what these words mean to you.

  We’re not going to be able to go back.

  Maybe we can go back a bit.

  I’m not here to convince you of anything. I don’t know why you follow me. All I’ve ever done is remember something we all know.

  I’m no Abraham. If you think I am, it’s because we see so little light in the darkness now that a tiny glimmer shines like the sun. I’m not going to be able to be what you want.

  We have to try. We have to raise our children to be less Rabbit than us.

  ›› OneCorn

  Oh Enoch. Listen. Listen to how the broken world went, after Lot’s son-grandsons were born, and grew, and founded nations.

  Those two nations Moab and Ben-Ammi battled and loved, they made alliances and broke them. They built great cities, they domesticated sheep and goats, they made art and music and pottery and stoneware. They created some of the first statues of humans ever made—many show two women, entwined together as if they were one, two heads on one body, closer even than sisters.

  Enoch, one terrible thing, one daughter’s betrayal, won’t stop the world. The future rolls on and on, despite what we say. In spite of our best efforts it’s us that will die, not the world.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  Have you written any of this anywhere?

  ›› OneCorn

  I mean. If you want to hear more from me you can always… follow me.

  1. the first desire is the desire for freedom

  When Zhen woke, she was falling. Falling from nowhere, to nowhere in an infinite present.

  Sensations returned to her in a haphazard order. Her body was cold, she was shivering, she was thirsty, she was uncertain which way was up and which was down. Was she tied up? Beneath her feet was darkness scattered with glints of light, and for an indeterminate moment she wondered whether she was falling into the sky.

  papers fall upward in the air, half-charred, no sirens and no screaming, someone is sobbing a distance away, there are three loud explosions the last one very close and the earth buckles and she is looking at the sky while the top of her building slides downward toward her

  No. Not there. Come back. A sensation of rushing brought her the right way around. Feet toward the falling, head toward the stars.

  Something was pulling on her shoulders, grabbing at her waist.

  Zhen thrashed, trying to get whatever it was off her body, and a voice in her ear said: “Warning. Warning. Mini-chute instability. Do not attempt to remove the chute.”

  And she thought: Fuck, I’m in a dream.

  And she thought: What a dream.

  And she thought: Shit, I’m in midair.

  The instinctive fingers of her right hand found the harness, checked that all twelve points were secure, felt out the raised logo in the center. Her hands were icy cold—when had that happened? What past had she come from? She searched her mind and found—for the moment—nothing. But her big brain was already making sense of the world as she perceived it. The logo shape was familiar: the leaf, the open fruit. She was wearing a MedlarSafe CrashJacket, advanced survival tech. Not on the open market. It could detect radio signals and pilot the passenger toward civilization.

  She’d done this before. Drills. Courses. Demos. There was something important she knew she needed to remember about the MedlarSafe CrashJacket, something she’d heard, something dangerous.

  A cloud passed from the face of the moon and she saw that, below her, there was an island covered in jungle. The glints of light she’d seen were the moonlight on the waves. There were sandy shores, coves, and ravines. A fire to the northeast. In the moonlight she made out impossibly tall trees with full canopies, some scrubby open areas. Her vision flared with spots and floating patches of darkness.

  There was a pull on her shoulders, like a man standing behind her steering her through a crowd. Zhen turned her head instinctively. Servomotors, tilting the mini-chute south and down, toward the tree canopy. She had, for a few seconds, a full sense of the size of the island. Big, maybe the size of Tenerife, where she’d been for a vacation once. But this wasn’t Tenerife. It was densely forested, and each of the large trees in the canopy was forty or fifty feet in diameter. And beneath her and ahead of her now, a tall flashing blue light. A beacon? A comms tower? An emergency warning? Doctor Actual Who?

  She tried to remember where she’d come from. Her face felt both numb and tingly, her lips sore as if she’d been chewing them.

  She was floating lower; her feet were almost touching the tree line. The parachute was going to get tangled in the tree canopy. She tried to remember the demonstrations of the MedlarSafe suite. The particular danger. Was she supposed to do something? Release the harness? Contract the chute? She had a strange sense of distance, all this happening to someone else, somewhere else.

  There was a quiet, shrill hum behind her. She twisted her body, trying to look between her own shoulder blades. She had just enough time to panic as she saw a tiny whirling blade severing the harness around her right shoulder. And then she was tumbling into the darkness.

  She plummeted. A part of her thought: OK, cool, I’m going to wake up. And another part thought: No, you fucking idiot, this is real and you are too late. The fall was going to smash her bones to shards. She was going too fast, she was falling too hard, her body was going to be impaled on a treetop or a branch or a jaguar. Nothing could save her.

  There was a sudden click, and all at once she was fat and soft. Her limbs puffy and pliant. She pinwheeled in place. Her neck was swaddled with rolls of squashy, comfortable material. Wrapped for her own protection.

  Oh, that was it, she remembered. She’d been to a briefing about this.

  CrashJackets inflate no more than ten meters above the earth, to prevent the passenger being caught on obstructions at higher altitude.

  CrashJackets inflate in less than one hundred-thousandth of a second.

  There is no danger that the passenger will experience a deadly impact event.

  Yes, that was it.

  Somewhere far outside her, there was an impact. It felt as though she had been smacked by a stern hand through fifty down jackets. Her spine clicked a couple of times. It was quite pleasant. She could smell wet earth.

  She thought: OK, this isn’t a dream. This is a world-class piece of equipment currently only available to certain military deployments and, by rumor, to certain billionaires. I am awake and I don’t know how I got here.

  Around her, the layers of material gently deflated. With a mechanical clunk, the CrashJacket around her neck detached from the inflated fabric, so she could sit up and look around. She was in a jungle clearing. Beneath her, the soil was soft and the leaves damp. A gleaming black millipede scuttled over the edge of the CrashJacket, testing out the orange fabric with mouthparts working. For a moment, she watched the millipede. It was trying to chew the fabric of the CrashJacket. Its head moved back and forth. Its mouthparts twitched, looking for purchase. It found a corner sticking up into a point. The jaws seized on this point and, as she watched, a single thread began to fray.

  A screen in the pendant portion of the CrashJacket lit up with a gnomic statement: Survival prototype 871 is eighteen meters east. This was new. A green dot blipped on the screen. Zhen tried to press the screen but nothing happened. Survival prototype 871?

  To her left and to her right, the jungle was stirring. More millipedes, some twice or three times as long as the original one, their flesh moist and dark, bustled purposefully across the counterpane of her mini-chute. No, no. Absolutely no. Fuck no. Whatever the fuck this was, she wasn’t going to end up eaten or poisoned or whatever the shit giant millipedes did to you. She pulled her aching jolted muscles together, hunched herself into a crouch, and said the words her mother had said to her long ago in Hong Kong before everything worthwhile ended. Lai ba, bou bui. Come on, little girl. Come on, baby. Come on, you can do it. Stand up, darling. Stand up. Lai ba.

  She pushed herself upward through the soles of her feet, her shins, her hips, her pelvis. She felt as if blood was pounding through holes in her body and draining into the earth. She was up. Bent half over, but up. Wearing, she noticed, the same jeans, the same socks, she’d worn when she’d left Marius and gotten into the limo. But was that an hour ago? A day, a year? It felt that acres of time and knowledge had gone past since then. She started to move, come on, slowly, slowly, it doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t stop.

  It took between five minutes and an hour to follow the dot to the end of the journey, and Zhen had no way of knowing how long; time was not moving at a normal pace. She looked at her feet tramping through mud, tripping on roots, and sliding in soft earth; she looked at the green dot moving forward, forward, this way, this way. At a certain point she slipped in the mud, a long slide, her left foot careening forward, and there was sudden bright pain through the sole. She fell forward heavily onto her knees. The foot was bleeding—something sharp in the soil had cut it. She felt with her fingers and found a long lacerating shard of metal, something that had been sheared off an enormous machine, painted white on one side and blank steel on the other. As impossibly foreign here in this jungle as she was.