Clappers Term Analysis

Lev had agreed to go with him because he knew the two filled a need in each other. CyFi was like a preacher with no flock. He couldn’t exist without an audience, and Lev needed someone who could fill his head with ideas, to replace the lifetime of ideas that had been taken from him.

He could join them just out of spite, but that’s not enough—not this time. There must be more. Yet, as he stands there, Lev realizes that there is more. It’s invisible, but it’s there, like the deadly charge lurking in a downed power line. Anger, but not just anger: a will to act on it as well.

“All right, I’m in.” Back at home Lev always felt part of something larger than himself. Until now, he hadn’t realized how much he missed that feeling.

Lev was terrified of these people, and yet he felt a kinship with them. They understood the misery of being betrayed by life. They understood what it felt like to have less than nothing inside you. And when they told Lev how important he was in the scheme of things, Lev felt, for the first time in a long time, truly important.

It is only when a clapper brings his hands together that the lie reveals itself, abandoning the clapper in that final instant so that he exits this world utterly alone, without so much as a lie to accompany him into oblivion.

“You may be responsible for your actions,” Pastor Dan says, “but it’s not your fault you weren’t emotionally prepared for life out there in the real world. This was my fault—and the fault of everyone who raised you to be a tithe. We’re as guilty as the people who pumped that poison into your blood.”