"A Children's Bible", "Treasure Island"

Two novels of almost lawlessness.

I dearly hope that 'climate change novels' won't become a thing. Maybe at one point teenagers-with-attitudes-get-through-apocalypse makes an interesting mental exercise, but right now it's entirely too real for comfort. At least Lydia Millet made it short.

• They liked to drink: it was their hobby, or—said one of us—maybe a form of worship. They drank wine and beer and whiskey and gin. Also tequila, rum, and vodka.
• Most of us were headed to junior or senior year after the summer was over, but a few hadn’t even hit puberty—there was a range of ages. In short, some were innocents. Others performed dark acts of their own.
  Those were not as repugnant.
• HIDING OUR PARENTAGE was a leisure pursuit, but one we took seriously. Sometimes a parent would edge near, threatening to expose us. Risking the revelation of a family bond. Then we ran like rabbits.
• Yes, it was known that we couldn’t stay young. But it was hard to believe, somehow. Say what you like about us, our legs and arms were strong and streamlined. I realize that now. Our stomachs were taut and unwrinkled, our foreheads similar. When we ran, if we chose to, we ran like flashes of silk. We had the vigor of those freshly born.
  Relatively speaking.
  And no, we wouldn’t be like this forever. We knew it, on a rational level. But the idea that those garbage-like figures that tottered around the great house were a vision of what lay in store—hell no.
• Dragonflies dipped over the surface, brilliant tiny helicopters of green and blue.
  “They live ninety-five percent of their lives underwater,” said Jack helpfully.
• We were punished by middle age, then long decrepitude, said Terry mournfully. Our species—our demographic in the species, he amended—hung out way past its expiration date. It turned into litter, a scourge, a blight, a scab. An atrophied limb.
• The end of the world, I didn’t think he’d take it so well. But it was a Santa Claus situation. One day he’d find out the truth. And if it didn’t come from me, I’d end up looking like a politician.
  The parents insisted on denial as a tactic. Not science denial exactly—they were liberals. It was more a denial of reality. A few had sent us to survival camps, where the fortunate learned to tie knots.
• I sympathized, though these days whenever I felt a kinship with Low it was followed by minor but nagging disgust, remembering the banana. Also an irritation that was close to regret, because Low, without banana breath, and if you changed out his wardrobe for one less hideous, could pass for attractive.
  It made me think of how thin the border was between attractive and not, and yet—if it was there, you didn’t want to cross it.
• Terry helped me lift it off the hook. The safe door was ajar, and inside were all our phones and tablets. Stacked up like pirate’s treasure, a snarl of chargers and battery packs behind them.
  Better than diamonds and pearls.
  I was smiling so hard I didn’t even know it for a minute. Then I thought: I’m smiling.
• “They say God in the book,” said Jack. “But me and Shel figured it out. God’s a code word. We figured it out!”
  “Do tell,” said Jen.
  “They say God but they mean nature.”
• Looking out the window as we pulled around the crescent onto the straightaway, I spied some parents running out the front door, waving their arms. Not my parents, of course.
  I thought: Enh, they’ll get used to it. Children grow up. Children leave.
  They’ll find us, I thought. When we want them to.
• I slumped against the counter with my phone. On Instagram James had posted curated pictures of his ocean misadventure.
  “Take a look,” I said.
  There he was in a selfie, bare-chested in front of a stormy sky and perfectly filtered. One arm was raised to the heavens, displaying his well-molded pecs. The arm was holding an orange flag with a black square and circle on it.
  #SOS, said his comment. He was smiling.
• “Don’t be an idiot. If Sukey’s mother could do it, then so can anyone,” said Jen. “She’s borderline retarded.”
  Technology was a bitch.
• Before the storm we’d caught sight of the parents’ screens sometimes, snagged their devices when we needed a quick fix. Gotten flashes of TV through a doorway. But these days we mostly had what was in front of us, the cottage and barn and long grass in the fields. Long and short, tussocks and bare patches. Topography. We had the wood of the walls and fences, the metal of the parked cars with their near-empty gas tanks.
  We had the corners of buildings and the slope of the hills, the line of the treetops. The more time passed, the more any flat image began to seem odd and less than real. Uncanny delicate surfaces. Had we always had them?
  We’d had so many pictures. Pictures just everywhere, every hour, minute, or second.
  But now they were foreign. Now we saw everything in three dimensions.
• My mother’s habitat had been the university, her articles full of long words and the names of other scholars. Articles five people read.
  When their habitats collapsed they had no familiar terrain. No map. No equipment. No tools.
• “It’s to be expected,” he said generously. “Much as we rely on you to sustain the needs of our material existence from a financial standpoint, so you, in turn, have relied on the sociocultural order. An order that, as we all know, has recently been egregiously disrupted.”
  “Disrupted,” echoed a mother.
• We began to detect changes, subtle at first. You might call it weakness, but I’d say it was more like absence. Their personalities were fading.
  As though, if you held the parents up to the light—if you could lift them easily, like paper—you’d be able to see right through them.
• “I think you solved it, Jack. In your notebook. Jesus was science. Knowing stuff. Right? And the Holy Ghost was all the things that people make. You remember? Your diagram said making stuff.”
  “Yes. It did.”
  “So maybe art is the Holy Ghost. Maybe art is the ghost in the machine.”
  “Art is the ghost.”
  “The comets and the stars will be our eyes,” I told him.

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No wonder Robert Louis Stevenson's original title was The Sea Cook, since it's entirely Long John Silver's show.

• “Next,” said the captain, “I learn we are going after treasure--hear it from my own hands, mind you. Now, treasure is ticklish work; I don’t like treasure voyages on any account, and I don’t like them, above all, when they are secret and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the secret has been told to the parrot.”
  “Silver’s parrot?” asked the squire.
  “It’s a way of speaking,” said the captain. “Blabbed, I mean. It’s my belief neither of you gentlemen know what you are about, but I’ll tell you my way of it--life or death, and a close run.”
• “Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, maybe, two hundred years old, Hawkins--they live forever mostly; and if  anybody’s seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She’s sailed with England, the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. It’s there she learned ‘Pieces of eight,’ and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of ’em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby.
• The cold evening breeze, of which I have spoken, whistled through every chink of the rude building and sprinkled the floor with a continual rain of fine sand. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our suppers, sand dancing in the spring at the bottom of the kettle, for all the world like porridge beginning to boil.
• “I do not know, sir,” said I. “I am not very sure whether he’s sane.”
  “If there’s any doubt about the matter, he is,” returned the doctor. “A man who has been three years biting his nails on a desert island, Jim, can’t expect to appear as sane as you or me. It doesn’t lie in human nature. Was it cheese you said he had a fancy for?”
  “Yes, sir, cheese,” I answered.
  “Well, Jim,” says he, “just see the good that comes of being dainty in your food. You’ve seen my snuff-box, haven’t you? And you never saw me take snuff, the reason being that in my snuff-box I carry a piece of Parmesan cheese--a cheese made in Italy, very nutritious. Well, that’s for Ben Gunn!”
• Nor was that all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsters--soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness--two or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings.
  I have understood since that they were sea lions, and entirely harmless. But the look of them, added to the difficulty of the shore and the high running of the surf, was more than enough to disgust me of that landing-place.
• It was long ere I could close an eye, and heaven knows I had matter enough for thought in the man whom I had slain that afternoon, in my own most perilous position, and above all, in the remarkable game that I saw Silver now engaged upon--keeping the mutineers together with one hand and grasping with the other after every means, possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life. He himself slept peacefully and snored aloud, yet my heart was sore for him, wicked as he was, to think on the dark perils that environed and the shameful gibbet that awaited him.