"K.J. Boone, the exec, is a bad man. In the 1970s he made a famous speech to a gathering of his fellow petroleum magnates that provided the blueprint for climate change denial, and he takes credit for the U.S.'s decision to abandon the Kyoto Protocol. This doesn't matter much to our narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, who has so far comforted 342 dying souls, each equally"
"Vigil is an exercise in empathy-or at least understanding-and a rumination on the moral conundrum of guilt and wrongdoing. Neither of those is necessarily a conundrum for everyone, or even for most people. We live in a prosecutorial culture, in which the primary concern in any unfortunate situation seems to be who should be blamed for it. Americans find nothing more satisfying than pronouncing someone an irredeemable villain who categorically deserves to rot in jail, then burn in hell."
A spirit named Jill "Doll" Blaine, a newlywed who died young in the mid-1960s, guides a dying oil company CEO through his final moments. The CEO, K.J. Boone, is a climate-denial architect who claims credit for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol. A spectral Frenchman accompanies the vigil, insisting Boone must repent for planetary destruction. Doll has comforted hundreds of dying souls and views each as someone forced out of life by failing subsystems. The narrative examines empathy, guilt, and moral complexity while contrasting prosecutorial public impulses to assign blame with the work of understanding and possible redemption.
Read at Slate Magazine
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