Page 10 of A Better World

• It’s believed that our caladrius originate from their namesakes—the ancient Roman creatures once thought to be mythological.

LEGEND OF THE CALADRIUS

• Ancient caladrius were employed by early Roman physicians to eat the sickness of kings. Once full, they flew into the sun to burn that sickness away and purify the land. In practice, the physicians slaughtered them. The populace ate the cooked remnants of the bird as a kind of communion.

FUN FACT!

• Emperors Caligula and Claudius kept ancient caladrius at court.

CHAPTER 4 SUMMARY:The Convergence of Magical Thinking with the Great Unwinding of the Modern Nation-State

Points to Remember

Scarcity hastened institutional corruption.

Excess deaths quadrupled. Life expectancy plummeted to sixty-two years. It was lower for refugees, who on average lived just fifty-seven years.

The populace in walled-off company towns remained healthy, with life spans extending into the triple digits.

The mid-twenty-first century was characterized by a rise in magical thinking, a skepticism for the scientific method, and the emergence of violent religious cults.

Definitions

Narrative—the framing of reality into an emotionally resonant story.

Magical Thinking—the employment of narrative to scaffold a specious belief system in which unrelated events are made causal.

Looking Forward

In chapter five, we’ll revisit the Great Unwinding, characterized by climate devastation, mass dislocations, and the rise of magical thinking. We’ll continue our case study of Plymouth Valley, in the colony of South Dakota.

—From THE FALL OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, by Jin Hyun, Seoul National University Press, 2093.

PART IIThe Last Lifeboat

That summer, therewas no trial by fire. No coiled snakes on springs popped out from jars and stunned them; no shopkeepers wore electric buzzers when shaking their hands:surprise!They arrived on a pretty June day, their car rolling down a bucolic street to a great house waiting just for them.

In the silence, they unpacked. They learned to work the smart house. They read the many, many pamphlets all newcomers were given. They ran errands and cooked meals from fresh ingredients on a six-burner stove. They even met the caladrius that had declared 9 Sunset Heights its own. A female from the looks of the full egg collector behind her shelter. They filled a bowl with dried worms from the Hollow section of Parson’s Market and slid this softly into the recesses of her domed home.

Sometimes, younger kids rode bikes down the street. Nannies and parents strolled their children, too. But these spontaneous acts were mostly limited to communal parks. Passersby stuck to Main Street. The few people they met were very polite, offering big smiles and welcomes and gratitude hands. But there was a division between the PV natives and the Farmer-Bowens. Linda didn’t fight it. She enjoyed this lacuna between the loss of one world and the adoption of the next.

Slowly, she stopped worrying so much that the other drivers on the road were going to roll down their windows and scream over imaginary slights. She stopped checking for her purse in the grocery store, worried there wasn’t enough money. She stopped panicking every time the kids left the house. The real sea change happened one evening afterdinner. In the brightness of summer, Hip and Josie went for a walk without her. They stayed out for two hours. She spent the time wet-eyed and wanting to text them, though, from looking at the location share, she knew they were safe. She needed to release the tethers she’d tied to them. But you get accustomed to certain fears. It takes time to unlearn them.

Russell worked long hours. He loved his department, where everything was clean and modern and the people were helpful. He was still getting his footing, organizing multitudes of data, but he seemed happy. Linda landed a weekly shift at the local hospital but pushed the start date to September to coincide with the beginning of school.

With so much free time, she and the twins explored. They walked the produce groves, met the livestock on Parson’s Farm, and hiked the hillside to the north, which was so steep that no one had bothered to build a wall. They read analog books in the library and researched Plymouth Valley’s history. They baked. They swam in the river, then dried themselves in the sun. Despite her fears of lurking things, they ventured down into the Labyrinth, trying and failing to memorize its wild perimeter.

Between time’s drumbeats, the family talked in ways they had never talked back home. Josie was sorry about leaving Kings before her playoffs.I let them down. They were my team,she explained.And now, if we stay here, I’ll never see them again.Hip confessed that he wasn’t sorry at all to go. More self-aware than Linda had imagined, he told her he’d gotten into a rut back home. He’d been feeling sorry for himself. Here, no one knew him as Josie’s uncool brother. He could start fresh.

Feeling she ought to match their honesty with her own, Linda told them she’d been relieved to stop her clinic work. At least for now. She hadn’t realized how much the suffering of those other families had weighed on her. She felt light lately. Russell, a man who’d historically been absent even when present, joined the fun. One Sunday night, while playing an actual board game like from the old screenies, he announced, “My dad was a mean piece of work.”

This came unprompted and unrelated to the conversation, delivered just before a dice roll. The rest of them looked at one another, bewildered.

“He was,” Russell continued, almost talking to himself—amazed, somehow, that he’d found himself in a room with people who wanted him there. “He never played with me. This is honestly the first time I’ve done a board game. He and my mom fought a lot before she left. It was so much noise. And then she was gone and I was a burden. Just my being alive was hard on him. He hated the idea of having to think about me. I hope I’ve never made you feel that way,” he said, as if just then realizing that what he thought mattered to them, that his role as their father carried real significance, and so did playing Monopoly with them on a Sunday night.

“What the literal hell, Dad?” Josie asked. She was a person who’d always known she had a place in the world. The notion that someone she loved could be so lost was horrifying to her. “You’re just avoiding because you know you won’t get doubles.”

But Hip was more thoughtful. “Your dad wasn’t nice?”

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