Survivor: A Novel

“Actually, it’s awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it’s our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around.”

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life. Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved? The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz.

He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. “Here,” he says, “take a couple Serenadons. These are the best antianxiety treatment ever invented.” They just don’t exist yet. “Just pretend,” he says, “for the placebo effect.” And he shakes two into my hand.

“Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage,” Adam says. “You’ll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple.”

Call me a sexual predator, but when I think of predators I think of lions, tigers, big cats, sharks. This isn’t so much a predator versus prey relationship. This isn’t a scavenger, a vulture, or a laughing hyena versus a carcass. This isn’t a parasite versus a host. We’re all miserable together. It’s the opposite of a victimless crime.

You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.