The Every by Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers [Eggers, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

XXVI.

APPLICATIONS FOR EVERYONEIN leapt a hundredfold in a day. No one wanted to be living off-campus (known now as Nowhere), unsure of their daily carbon footprint and terrified of being seen slinking onto campus (now Everywhere) from off-world each day, having defaced the planet in uncountable ways en route. The Every’s senior executives, not wanting to be shamed, swiftly and quietly moved onto campus, hoping to convey the impression they’d been living there all along.

“I have to move in,” Delaney said.

She and Wes were at the beach parking lot, with Hurricane in his stroller. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t at least be carried onto the beach. He shifted in his seat, whimpered, craned his neck to see the ocean.

“You have to go?” Wes asked.

“I’m already an outlier. If I’m central to this StayStïl movement, and then I don’t join, it’ll look hypocritical.”

“Either you’re getting too good at this or you’ve lost your mind,” Wes said.

Hurricane barked three times, each weaker than the last. He had begun barking at unreasonable moments, with no prompting.

“And obviously it gets me closer,” Delaney said. “To know where the levers and buttons are.”

“I don’t think they keep the levers and buttons in the housing pods,” Wes said. “I think you’ll probably find beds and sinks.”

Hurricane barked again, but it came out like a wheeze.

“Where are you rotating next?” Wes asked.

“I actually don’t know.”

“Your eyes are spiraling,” he said. “I don’t think you want to be there full-time. Those people are driving you mad.”

“You know what it really was?” Delaney said. “It was the ecstasy of refusal. That just hit me. That’s what happened that day with Bananaskam, and now with all of this.”

“The ecstasy of refusal,” Wes repeated. “Right. That’s it.”

“And the embrace of the most radical refusal. That day in the cafeteria it was like an orgy of ending. No more bananas. No more papayas. The way they looked up the origins of fruit and then eliminated them from possibility. And now the end of travel, of cars, roads, planes.”

“To be rid of something,” Wes said. He was crouched down, trying to make Hurricane more comfortable. “There’s a power there, too. This power to destroy. When we were kids, it was people. That constant erasure of people. Now it’s customs and practices, traditions, history. Or like your Thoughts Not Things work. That urge to wipe something off the earth. It’s like my zombie theory.”

“It’s not like your zombie theory,” Delaney said.

Wes’s zombie theory posited that in an increasingly crowded world, killing zombies was an acceptable way to express one’s hatred for the proliferation of the species. The popularity of zombie films and shows and games has everything to do with the feeling that there are only a few sane people left, and that those few have the right to end the suffering of all those caught between purgatorial semi-sentience and death.

“To preside over the end of something, someone—it’s a kind of lust,” Wes said. “It’s like purging. You start with a room full of stuff, you finish with a clean white box.

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