“She Had Everything She Desired and Nothing She Ever Hoped For”

Lord Atlas begins with an act of love that becomes an act of history.

Suzanne Dreyfus, an MIT scientist, writes The Liberation Manifesto as a satirical birthday gift for Garrick Cripps, the man she loves.

As a child, her father taught her a simple moral creed:

I am well because you are well.

Garrick turns that gift upside down.

I am well because you are not.

Suzanne was given the language for living. She gave that gift to the man she loved. He turned it into the language of power—and then seduced her with it.

Her playful satire gave him a god, a scripture, and a language for the libertarian paradise he dreams about. Garrick laughs along with Suzanne at first, then seizes an opportunity. He turns the manifesto into the doctrine of the Freedom Society, then into the Sacred Church of Living Capitalism: a movement built to destroy the public world and replace it with his own vision of freedom, hierarchy, and power.

Why did she go along?

She did what all of us do when we seek to belong to a world through relationships and a sense of community. She is human. And she gave herself to the wrong man, knowing he was the wrong man.

She is Suzanne Dreyfus.

And she is all of us.

Why She Stays

Suzanne does not surrender to Garrick all at once. At first, she tries to share with him what matters most to her.

Years after MIT, during a weekend in Morro Bay, she still argues from the moral world her father gave her. From the novel:

"Hope for the poor, Garrick."

"Screw the poor, Suzy. They're poor because they're incapable of winning."

"Education matters, Garrick."

"Only if you're intelligent enough to make it matter."

"Health care for all, Garrick."

"Where does it say that in the Constitution? The Founding Fathers never guaranteed a right to die later rather than sooner."

"Equal rights for all, my love."

"Nice in theory. But in America, we buy and sell rights to the highest bidder, free from coercion. Get over it. It's called liberty."

What matters to her does not matter to him.

And yet, Suzanne does not leave. She is not deceived. She knows Garrick is dangerous. She had gone to MIT wanting to become an astrophysicist. Garrick turns her gaze from the cosmos toward the underworld of power.

She was no longer little Suzy Dreyfus, the girl who had looked up instead of around. Under Garrick's influence she had learned to look differently — inward, at power, at the cold mathematics of human ambition rather than the cosmos.

Suzanne has everything required to resist power except the willingness to give up what power makes her feel.

In time Garrick's ruthlessness repelled her. And yet his hyper-confidence — the corollary of his ruthlessness — attracted her more.

She could have had any man. She knew it, and Garrick knew it. She questioned the authenticity of his power, and yet, still she stayed.

She often wondered whether his contempt for the weak was the source of his power or a cover for his own weakness.

Her doubts did not matter. She allows herself to fall, to be seduced further down the black hole of power, where nothing human escapes.

After graduate school, at Garrick's behest, she takes a job at the Pentagon. The position places her inside research on cyberweapons that he intends one day to manipulate and use against the government itself.

That is the bargain Suzanne makes. She knows that Garrick is cruel. She stops requiring his cruelty to disqualify him from her love.

She had always assumed that domination was something that happened to other women. Lesser women. Women who didn't understand the mathematics of deep space or the cold indifference of the universe. She had never imagined that her certainty of immunity was itself the open door. That Garrick had walked through it so quietly she hadn't heard a sound.

She Is Us

Suzanne embodies the ordinary human bargain of seeking love and belonging, carried to a catastrophic scale.

She had everything that should have protected her. As a child, her father taught her that a good life is relational, that we become human through one another. She has intelligence. Education. Beauty. Ambition. Self-awareness. She has language for what is true. She sees what Garrick is.

And yet she allows herself to be seduced by him.

That is what makes her more than a woman who chose the wrong man.

She is the wife who stays too long because leaving would mean admitting the love was never what she believed it was.

She is the believer who sees the corruption in the church, the movement, the leader, but cannot bear to lose the belonging it gave her.

She is the mother who keeps protecting the person doing harm because the family must somehow remain intact.

She is the citizen who knows the leader is dangerous but still wants to feel chosen by him.

She is the lover who recognizes domination and calls it intensity because intensity feels more alive than loneliness.

We do not surrender our agency only because someone takes it from us. Sometimes we offer it. We give it to a lover, a leader, a movement, a family, a god. We give it away. We want to belong. We want to be chosen. We hope that power will give us love in return.

Suzanne is us. She is who we've always been.

Who Pays the Price

The cost of Suzanne's surrender is paid by people who never made her bargain.

By the time Suzanne understands where Garrick's movement is heading, she knows she cannot stop him herself. She secretly arranges for Carson McCready, a retired soldier, to take a job at the county prison Garrick has chosen as the focal point of a scheme to discredit the government and spread his vision across the country.

Carson knows nothing about Suzanne's plan. He takes the job managing a telemarketing operation at the prison for reasons of his own and begins working with the inmates. He creates a scholarship program and organizes a charity football game that draws government leaders, the media, and the public. Garrick plans to use the prison as the source of a cyberattack against the government, blaming Carson and his inmates as a rogue Islamic terrorist cell, while demonstrating the government's inability to protect its citizens. Carson thwarts the attack with the help of Laura Cavendish, a former MIT student who'd been disgusted by Garrick and his ideology.

Garrick cannot allow Carson's work at the prison to continue. Recruiting a private militia, he turns the game into an act of mass violence. Hundreds die, including Carson's fifteen-year-old son, Michael.

Suzanne recruited Carson because she believed he could help her reverse what she had set in motion before it became violent. But Carson was never merely an answer to her problem. He had a life, a son, and people who depended on him. By bringing him into Garrick's path, she places all of them inside the consequences of a bargain they never made.

This is what Suzanne could not undo. The damage had already passed from one human being to another. From lover to movement. From movement to doctrine. From doctrine into the lives of people who had resisted its seduction from the beginning. Carson does not think like Garrick. Laura does not think like Garrick.

And yet, Carson and Laura must now make right what Suzanne set in motion.

These are the stakes of Lord Atlas.

The novel asks what happens when we mistake domination for love. The bargain may begin in intimacy. It may begin with a promise. Or with a joke. But it does not remain there. It spreads outward until strangers, families, institutions, and entire communities are forced to live with its consequences.

Power hides within the cracks of basic human desire. The desire for love. For belonging. For hope. That is all Carson ever wanted. To retire from the military. To have a regular job, go to the beach with his dog Diego, and have a Mexican lunch afterward at Las Olas.

Carson does not inherit her desire for power. He took an oath founded on the opposite principle: that a man gives himself to something larger than himself. Still abiding by that oath, he inherits the wreckage.

The Final Temptation

Carson finds Garrick on his yacht elevating the death of Carson's son into the mythology of his movement.

Carson kills Garrick. He kills others involved with Garrick's scheme that killed so many in the bombing.

On his return to Laura in Montana, he calls Suzanne from the side of the road. He now knows that she secretly recruited him and placed him inside Garrick's plans, setting in motion the chain of events that led to Michael's death.

Suzanne confesses what she did. Then she tells him why Garrick's death has not ended what Garrick created:

"You killed the man. You didn't kill the idea."

"What idea is that?"

"That people are sheep. That they'll glom onto an idea. Hardly even matters what the idea is any more. The system will metabolize it and reproduce it and sooner or later it becomes sacred. The sacred idea. Pick your poison. Freedom. Love. Country. And then that idea will gather force. Followers. True believers. The chroniclers and propagandists. And then the enforcers will follow. But in the background, behind the followers and the enforcers are the power. The ones who don't fight. They do not shed blood. They simply watch. And they collect the tax on the sacred idea that everyone pays. On that yacht, Garrick was in the midst of sanctifying a new idea. He's gone now, but somebody else will pick it up. What are you going to do then?"

An idea gathers followers. Followers become believers. Believers require chroniclers, propagandists, and enforcers. Behind them stand those who understand how belief becomes power and how power survives the people who first gave it a name.

Who will inherit Garrick's legacy?

William, Garrick's surviving ally, calls Suzanne. He has worked behind the movement under the name Eurynomos. He knows that Garrick's death has not closed the story.

"Hello, Suzy."

"I'm done. It's time to call it. Game over, William."

"Let's think this through. You're the author, Suzanne. You always were. There's nobody else. This is your chance to finish the story."

"The story was a joke. It always was. It ended badly. But it was still just a damned joke."

"Is immortality a joke, Suzy?"

William proposes that they take what happened on the yacht and transform it into sacred history. Garrick becomes Lord Atlas, murdered in an attack on freedom. Michael becomes his spiritual son. Violence turns into sacrifice. Their deaths become sacred. And Suzanne becomes their saint.

"We are that story. Saint Suzanne and Saint William. We are the chroniclers of the next two thousand years of belief."

Suzanne asks the only question that matters:

"Belief in what, William?"

"Any idea will do if enough people are willing to gather around it and enough others understand how to use it, how to sanctify it, and how to perpetuate it."

William asks her to stop pretending.

"I know you, Suzanne. You feel guilty about it, you think you're above it all, but at your core you are one of the most selfish human beings I've ever known. I'm asking you to just be who you really are."

But what she says she wants is strikingly small:

"I want to leave everything behind. Go back to Colorado. Live in my old neighborhood. I want a puppy. I want to take the dog on walks until I'm 80 and can't walk anymore. I want friends who play fucking pickleball and go to coffee to talk about books with titles like The Satirist's Daughter, a girl who never leaves the room, who never leaves the consciousness of her own private world. I want to shut the world out. I want limits. I want my own private civilization. I want a cave. I want mortality."

She wants to become Suzy Dreyfus again. She wants a dog. Friends. Books. A neighborhood. A life with boundaries. She wants to live among other people instead of authoring the world in which they must live. From the novel, William says:

"You want what everyone wants. But you are so much bigger than those small-minded people you want to be like, Suzanne. Your canvas is the stars. Your canvas is timeless. Puppies are for people like Carson McCready. People like Laura. The stars are for people who transcend. You are one of the transcendent among us. I've always known that. Garrick knew it but he never could admit it. It's you, Suzanne. It's always been you."

Suzanne does not merely stand to inherit Garrick's followers or his movement. She stands to inherit the power to determine what Garrick and Michael will mean. She can take the dead and give them a sacred history. She can turn catastrophe into an origin story. She can become the author of the story that gives the believers, chroniclers, propagandists, and enforcers their purpose.

She tells William goodbye. Then she cries.

She knew he was right. William understood her better than anyone ever had, and she had always dismissed him because she knew he knew something about her nobody else had ever really seen. He saw her. She wanted a puppy. But she also needed so much more.

Suzanne wants limits. She also wants transcendence. She wants to belong to the human mess and the human beauty.

She also wants to become larger than life. The final scene of the novel:

She got up from the wicker and went into the house. She opened the fridge and pulled out the bottles of chilled prosecco, club soda, and the Campari. She carefully prepared the drink, over ice, her favorite drink for times of either celebration or mourning. This moment was one of those times. Typically it was one or the other, celebration or mourning, but never both. This one, however, was a seeming impossibility, but as she felt the iced drink course through her veins, Suzanne's epiphany was vivid. This moment was both.

She had everything she desired and nothing she ever hoped for.