Page 2 of So Far Gone
“—that a king would rise up in the West to make his nation great again,” Shane said, cracking a pistachio shell and eating
the nut.
“Two thousand years ago,” Kinnick said into his beer. And , he thought, spoiler alert: Didn’t happen then, either .
“The Bible speaks to us in our time, in every time,” Shane said. “Revelations 22:10: ‘ Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand .’?”
Rhys had promised Bethany and Celia he wouldn’t make trouble, so he merely thought his answer: Yes, Shane, you know-nothing know-it-all, the time IS at hand, present tense, meaning 95 AD, when some long-dead author wrote
that allegorical nonsense about the brutal reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, not about immigration or the deep state or
whatever bullshit you’re confused about today.
Next to him, Cortland—fifteen years older than Celia and as political as a tree stump—hummed in his sleep.
Rhys looked around Shane and Bethany’s tidy living room, with its cursive needlepoint ( Bless the Lord, O, my soul ) and framed Jesus-at-Sunset posters ( Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens ).
He glanced back at Shane, all self-satisfaction and mudflap mustache, chomping pistachios. It was blissfully quiet for a moment,
and Kinnick thought the worst might be over. Then, on TV, a pass interference call went against the Green Bay Packers, and
Shane leaned across the recliners and confided to Kinnick: “They’re in on it, too, you know.”
It , Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy
whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped
in the wrong bathrooms.
Kinnick urged himself to stay quiet. To not ask questions. If you didn’t ask Shane for more information, he sometimes just
muttered off into silence. Rhys checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes to turkey. He could make that. Surely, he could be
quiet for thirty-five—
“Who?” he heard himself ask. “The officials? You’re saying the refs are in on it?”
Shane turned his head. “Refs? Come on, Rhys. You think the refs have that kind of power? Think for a minute: Who pays the
refs?”
“Okay. So—” Rhys tried to keep it casual, asking over the rim of his beer, “you’re saying the National Football League is
engaged in a massive conspiracy... whose sole purpose is to deny victory to the teams you happen to like?”
“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Shane said.
“It’s common knowledge that politics and professional football were rigged the same year—2008.
That’s when the globalists put forward the final part of their plan: they’d already taken over universities, schools, every level of government, and they were about to give us a certain foreign president whose name I will not say out loud, but whose middle name is Hussein.
The final push. They were starting to control sports, too.
Don’t forget who won the Super Bowl that year. ”
“No idea,” Kinnick said.
“Two thousand eight? The New York Giants?
Beat the New England Patriots? Think about it for just a second, Rhys.
The Patriots ? As in the real Americans?
Losing to the Giants ? Of New York? Giants as in the beast that rises out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns? As in the ten media companies
and the seven boroughs of New York City? Come on, Rhys, you’re a smart man. You think this is all a coincidence?”
“There are five boroughs in New York, Shane. And thousands of media companies.”
“Then it’s seven million people. I get the numbers mixed up.”
“There are eight million people, and I seriously doubt that many lived in New York when Revelations was written.”
“I told you: that’s not how the Bible works, Rhys. It’s a living document.”
“It’s not, Shane.”
“Believe what you want.” Shane was getting red-faced. “But I saw a thing on-line that explained the whole deal.” He was always
seeing things on-line that explained the whole deal. Or deals on-line that explained the whole thing.
“Wait a second,” Kinnick said, convincing himself that logic might still matter with Shane. “But the Patriots won the Super
Bowl last year !”
This, somehow, excited Shane even more, and he leaned in toward Kinnick and confided in him. “I know! That was awesome , a sign of the coming triumph, a clarion call for patriots to rise up and prepare for the final fight. See, New England wasn’t
supposed to win. The secular globalists picked Seattle to repeat as champions.
But Brady and the Patriots wouldn’t allow it.
See? They broke the script. Stole that game at the goal line!
Said, ‘We will fight rather than surrender to the New World Order!’ That’s why the NFL had to start the whole deflate-gate controversy. To go after New England. As a warning.”
This was the danger of winding up a toy like Shane. He could go on for hours like this, weaving every loose strand into a
blanket of conspiratorial idiocy as he explained how, at the beginning of every season, NFL officials and team owners got
together with TV execs, who handed out scripts for the season. But in the 2015 Super Bowl, Brady, Belichick, and the brave
Patriots refused to go along with the globalist-satanist-liberalist-trafficker agenda, and they struck a blow for the original
America! New England! Patriots! Thirteen original colonies!
It was the sort of logic hash that Kinnick had encountered when dealing with conspiracy theorists in his old job as a newspaper
reporter, like the logger who once explained to him that some of the forest had been replaced with fake trees that were in
fact surveillance devices. Gibberenglish, Rhys used to call it.
“New England’s victory was a sign to all patriots,” Shane said. “We’ve been waiting for a king to arise, and now, he was on
his way. This election would be our Valley Forge.”
“I’m pretty sure at Valley Forge, they were fighting against having a king, Shane.”
“I’m just saying the call went out,” the undaunted Shane said, “and true patriots have answered, and our time is nigh.”
“You know what? I got a thing at nigh.” Rhys pretended to look at his watch. “Can we do it at nigh thirty? Maybe quarter to
rapture?” Rhys glanced over at Celia’s husband, a retired high school math teacher— Are you hearing this? —but Cortland was snoring away.
It was quiet for a few more minutes, Shane pouting at being teased, Kinnick doing his best to let it go. He would eventually
tell Bethany that: I tried to let it go .
You egged him on , Bethany would say.
I tried to steer us back to football! Rhys would insist.
“So, they script every play?” he asked Shane. “Or just the final score?”
“I mean, they leave room for ad-libbing, but yeah, everyone basically knows who will win before the game starts. It’s been
scripted since 2008.” Shane leaned across the arm of his recliner. “Think about it for a second, Rhys. There’s literally billions
of dollars at stake. You think they’re just gonna leave that to chance?”
“Right,” Kinnick said. “So, the owners get together and decide before the season who’s going to blow a knee, who’s going to
fire a coach, who’s going to win the Super Bowl?”
“Owners?” Shane scoffed. “You think the owners run the league? Owners are patsies, Rhys! Wake up! You gotta follow the money on a deal like this.”
After getting a degree in natural sciences Kinnick had been an environmental journalist for thirty years, at a paper in Oregon,
at a Portland magazine that went under, and finally, in Spokane, where the foundering newspaper “offered” him a buyout in
2015. And now, what could be more depressing than his carpet-laying, truck-driving, recovering-addict son-in-law lecturing
him to follow the money ?
“This”—Shane held up the remote—“is where the money is.”
“Remote controls? Sure.” Kinnick leaned in. “So, who’s behind it all? Best Buy? RadioShack?”
“Think for a minute, Rhys!” Shane tapped his own head with the remote.
“I’m talking about... the media .” Or me-juh , as Shane pronounced it, that word being one of the four— elites , liberals , and socialists were the others—that found its way into every Shane Collins conspiracy theory.
“And I don’t need to tell you who controls
the media.”
“No, you don’t.”
“The so-called—” Shane said.
“Please don’t say it.” Rhys pointed with his beer bottle. And, for a moment, Rhys thought maybe the worst was over, that they’d
make it to dinner after all without a problem.
But then Shane added, “I mean, they don’t call it Jew York for nothing.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that, Shane.”
“Hey, I’m pro-Israel! No one loves the Jews more than me. The real Jews, I mean. Jesus was a real Jew.”
In his defense, Rhys would later think, he had endured four years of such nonsense, ever since Shane had traded his mild drug
habit for a Jesus-and-AM radio addiction—“real Jews” and “real patriots” and “Black-on-white crime” and “owning the libs”
and the “lame-stream media” and the “vast conspiracy” perpetrated on “real Americans,” by which Shane always meant people
like him.
This raw sewage had been seeping into American drinking water for years, until it eventually contaminated the mainstream,
and won over enough Shanes to convince the chattering TV heads and Twitter-taters that such half-assed conspiracies were a
legitimate part of the body politic, that somehow, they had to do with white, working-class people getting the short end of
some imaginary economic stick.
But fine. Shane could believe whatever he wanted.
It was Bethany who broke his heart. Once-brilliant Bethany who should’ve known better, but who pretended, maybe for her marriage’s
sake, or her kids’ sake, that this was all okay. Bethany who practiced a quiet, metaphoric faith, but who kept the peace by