Blueprints of the Afterlife

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 8

You know that unsettling feeling when you’re moving from one place to another and you finally empty your old house and as you’re vacuuming you realize it’s just a space? That was how it felt at the academy. Something of consequence used to be here, but for whatever reason it disappeared. The windows were boarded up, the exterior was covered in grime and graffiti. Dead weeds where there used to be landscaping. As the real estate agent took down the “For Sale” sign I entered the main building. It felt like a grade school that had gotten roughed up and left for dead on the side of the road. All the rooms empty. No furniture, no artifacts to indicate this had once been a place to learn. The main building contained a dozen classrooms on two floors. There was a science lab building with a little planetarium, a library building with empty shelves, a maintenance building, and a dormitory with a cafeteria. There was a small athletic field and a gym.

I moved into what seemed like the headmaster’s suite in the dorm building, bought some cheap Ikea furniture, and made it up like a monk’s room. Minimal. I started to ask around the neighborhood about the building’s previous inhabitants.

What kind of neighborhood was it?

Typical southwestern exurbia. Retirees and Latino families. That weird, thick, southwestern grass kept green with constant irrigation. The academy itself was right up against the mountains. There was a strip mall with a Starbucks. I started hanging out there, introducing myself to my new neighbors and asking about the academy. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Some thought it was a typical grade school. One lady who lived three blocks away from it argued that it didn’t exist. I got monotone answers from the few young people I met. Everybody was entranced by their own gut-level routines, the pursuit of Frappuccinos. I got nowhere and soon gave up. Besides, it wasn’t as important to me anymore that I learn the history of the academy so much as that I start fixing the place to prepare for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. I started signing up for classes at the local Home Depot, reading home improvement books, educating myself on electrical wiring and plumbing. I did as much as I could on my own but when a job needed more than one guy I hired Mexican day laborers and learned what I could from them, too. I discovered things my hands could do. I spent the days sanding, painting, refinishing woodwork. I replaced broken toilets and installed light fixtures. I got scrapes and bruises and splinters under my fingernails.

How long did it take to restore?

About two years. Pushing a bucket around with a mop one night I realized I’d become a custodian. I laughed. What a thankless job, holding chaos and disorder at bay in the silent halls of an empty school.

Did you consider getting back in touch with Wyatt and Erika, or with Star?

What would I tell them? They belonged to a previous version of me. My holy task required that I cut off as many human connections as possible and wait patiently for Mr. Kirkpatrick’s return. His academy would be in perfect shape, ready for pupils. I imagined he’d confer on me some special role, the caretaker of the academy. I found this solitary duty suited me.

He never arrived.

There’s still time.

You sound pretty confident about that.

I know this because the one person who did show up was Dirk Bickle. He just pulled into the parking lot in his ridiculous Hummer while I was mowing the play field. The Sikh guys weren’t with him this time. His gratitude was obvious in how ferociously he embraced me. I invited him in and showed him around, pointed out the work I’d done on the electrical and ventilation and floors. He beamed. In my quarters I served him coffee and asked him what was supposed to happen next.

He told me he was ready to reveal the master plan. He started with a hypothetical question. What if I was faced with the following choice—I could save the human race from self-imposed destruction, and the rest of humanity’s existence would be peaceful for another thousand years until an asteroid obliterated the earth, or I could single-handedly destroy the human race and by doing so ensure that new life would appear after earth’s destruction, on Mars.

[laughs]

I told him the choice was false. First, if humans lived another thousand years on earth, we’d surely develop technology to either obliterate the asteroid or escape the planet altogether. Second, how would new life emerge on Mars if humans weren’t around to make it happen?

Bickle answered in the form of another question. Wasn’t it interesting, he said, that humans had imperiled the planet at precisely the moment when we’d become capable of developing a technological solution to undo the damage? What held us back, he said, was our orientation to nature. We’d thoroughly externalized it instead of coming to terms with ourselves as its greatest force. We speak of “the environment” as if it’s something apart from us. We speak of protecting the environment and being environmentally friendly as if the environment exists outside our homes. Worse were those who wished to restore nature to some prehuman state, failing to recognize that nature is constantly changing. The only rational choice, Bickle said, was to adopt an inventionist philosophy of environmental stewardship and engage in full-scale planetary reengineering, and to embrace the spirit of this project as a natural phenomenon rather than an artificial, human enterprise. The concept of artificiality was itself artificial. Mr. Kirkpatrick saw through the cultural construct that would segregate nature, humanity, and technology. His was an effort to redeem the human race through understanding that we were meant to control the course of nature and engineer it for the purposes of beauty.

Did you ever suspect that Bickle was just fucking with you?

I considered it. But why would the guy go to so much trouble just to mess with my head? There had to be a reason for him to follow me around, show up with a mystical refrigerator in the desert, save my life. Obviously he was a true believer of something. Even if that something was a delusion, it was an attractive delusion. Keep in mind I was surrounded by a society in which people didn’t appear to believe in anything deeper than their product wish lists. Think about it. Utah is populated largely by people who believe their prophet discovered a pair of gold plates and spoke to an angel named Moroni. Hollywood is run by people who surgically alter their appearances and think they’re descended from an alien named Xenu. People believe in ghosts, UFOs, a Heaven in which they’ll reunite with all their dead relatives. Let’s not even get into Christianity with its flaming sword guarding the tree of knowledge. Human beings just fundamentally believe crazy fucking shit, the crazier the better. What Bickle was hinting at seemed a lot less crazy than praying to Jesus to make you rich. Is believing that human beings are meant to be stewards of life in the universe really crazier than believing a certain brand of car makes you sexy or that God is keeping track of how many times you masturbate?

[laughs]

So Bickle moved into one of the spare dorm rooms and began revealing Mr. Kirkpatrick’s teachings to me. The rift between Kirkpatrick and the dropouts had pretty much destroyed the academy, he said, and he had no idea where Mr. Kirkpatrick had gone. Into the desert, maybe, where all prophets go. He told me of great awakenings and celestial visitors, Kirkpatrick’s series of prophetic dreams in which he communicated with Freidrich Nietzsche on the Bardo plane, becoming one with the philosopher and finding himself, in this act of communion, transformed into a planet-devouring phoenix. Kirkpatrick was Nietzsche’s heir, spreading the word that the distinction between the overman and the human was the overman’s responsibility to spread life itself through the universe. Bickle led me through the prophecies, late into the night. He said Mr. Kirkpatrick had been waiting for me to reach a state of receptivity before briefing me on the program.

Or maybe they were waiting for you to become wealthier so they could come after your money.

I feel sorry for the smallness of your thinking, I really do.

It all sounds bogus to me.

Do you want to hear the rest or what?

Why not. Go ahead.

One night after our lessons I asked Bickle what had caused the strife between the dropouts and Kirkpatrick. He became solemn and started speaking about Nick’s final invention. You remember how he created that machine when we were in high school, the one that took itself apart?