The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

  —You shall be known, I said, as The King of France.

  APRIL 1994

  Baby’s New Novel

  I went back to science fiction. I figured that my reception would expand if I passed off even more watered-down genre conventions as post-pop cultural profundities. Plus, the whole thing came to me. In a moment. As if in a dream, as I wandered past Tower Records on 4th Street, cast in the illumination from the lightboxed record covers, blown up to a hundred times their original size, shining like beacons in the store’s plate glass windows.

  *

  One thousand years in the future, around 3000 C.E., time travel has become a fact of life, its use regulated by the Time Travel Commission, a bureaucratic arm of the world government.

  The average citizen may not travel back in time. Not on a whim. Not for any reason. Time travel is a legitimate tool of scientific and historical research performed by trained professionals.

  Travel to the future is impossible. Attempts have been made. Each failed, resulting in the destruction of sensitive equipment and a significant death toll.

  Our lives are narratives shaped by the past reaching into the present with unholy precision. The human race lumbers in the shadows of ghosts, is stained with the ectoplasm of its own history. The great flaw of human biology is our sensory inability to perceive the fourth dimension while being doomed to traverse through it. There is no objective truth of an event, no way to capture a moment once it has passed. Even video fails to convey the fullness of the event.

  The solution to this quandary is the development of full imaging holographic technology that stimulates all five senses and extends across the three-dimensional planes for a radius of up to sixteen hundred meters. Time travel, then, is a parallel technology. The purpose of the time traveler is to bring holographic equipment into the past and make a perfectly accurate impression of an event.

  The implications are massive. When a person experiences an exact replica of a historical event, myths are shattered. Thus, the death of most religions. It becomes impossible to believe in Christ’s resurrection when a person can behold the man in his actuality, a charismatic street preacher crucified and then impersonated several months later by a rabid beggar. Islam lasts slightly longer, but not by much. The religions that do survive are primarily of Asian origin and so-called primitive faiths which retained an ongoing belief in animal spirits.

  Monotheism was out.

  With one exception, with that great exception to all things. The Jews. If a culture can survive the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Europeans, the Nazis, and late twentieth-century politics, then it can survive the advent of time travel.

  *

  All practitioners of time travel take a pledge based on the Hippocratic Oath, vowing to do no harm. This charming idea proves woefully inadequate. The problem is not the effects of the travelers on time but rather the effects of time on the travelers.

  By any measure, 3000 C.E. is a technological utopia. Violence still erupts, but it is the small violence of an overcrowded planet adrift in luxury rather than the wide-scale bloodshed of previous periods. War and disease are relics of the past. Money is an unheard-of obscenity.

  Time travelers, innocents abroad, are thrust into milieus where they must observe mass slaughter, observe millions rent asunder by incurable disease, observe cities being destroyed, observe populations wiped out, observe environmental chaos. The impossible pain of history is beyond their personal experience, yet they are forced into its middle, watching war, watching genocide on an accelerated planetary-wide scale.

  Suicide rates, always high after the installation of worldwide euthanasia centers in 2731, skyrocket among those who visit the past. The biggest such center, located on the south side of Nueva Washington Square between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue, reports a massive spike.

  The Time Travel Commission takes notice.

  Many studies are conducted. Following a meta-analysis, it emerges that the only demographic of time travelers with a statistically significant variation away from suicide is the Jews. Theories are floated, several containing an atavistic resurgence of anti-Semitism, but the one with the most currency suggests that the Jews are culturally inculcated to think of history as a horror with no answer but survival.

  Jews become the only people willing to do the work. The Ashkenazi prove more capable at recent history, while the Mizrahi possess an innate understanding of the distant past. The Sephardim demonstrate high competency with eras predating the advent of homo sapiens.

  House scientists at the Time Travel Commission run an R&D department, hoping to develop new technologies to ease the experience. The most effective is a bioengineered bacterial strain of super gonorrhea. When collected in the throat pool, the bacteria develops its own intelligence and exerts a control over its human host’s vocal cords, tongue, and facial muscles. Designed with specific limitations of emotional and intellectual range, the disease speaks with a voice markedly different than that of its host.

  The first chapter opens with a dialogue between the protagonist, a time traveler named Boaz ben-Haim, and his superintelligent gonorrhea. The setting for this dialogue is a bar. Ben-Haim nurtures a cocktail of synthetic mescaline, alcohol, and methamphetamine.

  —This job is pushing me toward addiction, says ben-Haim.

  —the world is a wonderful place, says the gonorrhea. you need not give over to the temptations of the flesh, nor drown your sorrow. rejoice on tomorrow and remember today!

  —The mescaline is making me see shapes in the artificial cloud formations. I think I can see the end of the world.

  —the world never ends, says the gonorrhea. the multitudes go on forever. recall walt whitman’s “sun-down poem,” where the good gray bard speaks to future generations.

  —Wasn’t that poem addressed to future Brooklynites? asks ben-Haim.

  —yes, says the gonorrhea.

  —Brooklyn was destroyed in 2321 C.E.

  —yes, says the gonorrhea. but the brooklyn of our hearts remains. why meditate on destruction? think of the happy rebuilding that follows!

  Boaz ben-Haim stumbles home through the slick fiber-optic acid rain. He falls asleep after chasing his cocktail with a massive dose of Mandrax and barbiturates. The next morning, he is awoken by an instant video communiqué demanding his appearance at the Time Travel Commission.

  When Boaz ben-Haim arrives at the Commission’s epical concrete bunker beneath the Nueva United Nations, he’s informed that certain higher-ups have been paying special attention to his career. His five years of effort have demonstrated his capacities. As such, he’s been promoted. Boaz ben-Haim groans. Promotions only expose the traveler to historical epochs of higher psychological impact.

  His new assignment is one of the worst. A genocide, the Shoah, and the Shoah at its very worst. Auschwitz in May 1944. Boaz ben-Haim is ordered to stay for three solid months. The hologram technology requires daily tweaking.

  Boaz dresses in full SS regalia and poses as a camp guard. He’s equipped with bewilderment technologies ensuring that neither he nor his equipment are discovered. He sleeps in the hutch of his time bubble, hidden from the outer world, but sleep only brings nightmares of his father.

  Over the weeks at Auschwitz, his hyperintelligent gonorrhea takes on a disturbing aspect. Confronted by the human race at its worst, the disease begins speaking exclusively in platitudes.

  Boaz ben-Haim witnesses the gassing of a hundred Jews. His bacteria tells him: —things are bad now, but remember, we’re from the future! one thousand years from now, everything’s fine!

  Boaz ben-Haim sees a starving child, no more than eight years old, shot through her head. His bacteria tells him: —death is part of life’s natural cycle. we must not consider it an absolute state of being.

  Boaz ben-Haim, the stink of crematoria in his nostrils, bumps into Josef Mengele. The bacteria te
lls him: —even the worst people have good intentions, it’s just that the biochemical makeup of their neurological pathways frustrates their ability to achieve goodness.

  The bacteria speaks with ben-Haim’s throat, with ben-Haim’s face, with ben-Haim’s vocal cords. The experience is akin to punching yourself and then apologizing to your fist.

  Boaz ben-Haim questions the time traveler’s first mandate. Do no harm. Doing no harm can be perceived, uncharitably, as not doing anything. How many children must die? What if the fundamental principle of time travel, that altering the past may prevent the traveler from being born, is little more than the kind of bullshit political practicality supposedly outmoded in the year 3000 C.E.? Isn’t it chronocentricity to suggest that his life is of implicitly more value than the lives at Auschwitz? Or dying anywhere in history? If a life can be saved from needless death, then shouldn’t its salvation occur? Can self-preservation be a valid argument against action?

  —remember, says the gonorrhea, by the time of your birth, the human race has worked out all of its problems! history is the long process of your species making the best of all possible worlds!

  *

  Unwilling to save the blameless, the Commission gives tacit approval to the crimes of history. Time travelers aren’t scientists. They aren’t trained professionals. They are tourists in humanity’s suffering. They are the same colonialist caste who’ve preyed on mankind from the advent of industrialization. People who owe their livelihoods to the distant suffering of those hidden from view. No place is more convenient than the past.

  Six million deaths are not without meaning. The history of the Jewish people, the culmination of several thousand years of persecution, is Boaz ben-Haim’s ancestral heritage, but when technology might save these people from their doom, how can a person fail to act?

  Boaz ben-Haim isn’t the first to come to this conclusion. Fail-safes are built into the technology. Nanotech filters prevent the ingress of unauthorized organic material into the time hutch. The very mechanism that allows him to witness also enforces his complicity.

  Meanwhile, the gonorrhea is displaying a surprising awareness of Boaz ben-Haim’s thoughts. Its platitudes have changed. It offers reassurances about the vitality of his mission. The gonorrhea may be reading his mind.

  —remember, boaz, says the gonorrhea, these kinds of crises are in no way unique. the feelings you’re experiencing are not new. they’ve been considered and addressed. there are programs in place.

  As Boaz ben-Haim approaches the end of his mission at Auschwitz, he suspects that he will not be allowed to return to the past. The gonorrhea may be compiling a dossier of unflattering information about his doubts and his suspicions about the failures of time travel. If the Commission discovers his incredulity about its central tenets, he will be removed from duty.

  His one chance for action is now, before the return to his own epoch. The Commission may control the future, but in the past, they’re at his mercy. He has the ability to go anywhere and do anything.

  His first stop is America in 1970. He breaks into the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and steals megadoses of penicillin and ampicillin.

  When gonorrhea was cultivated as an aid for time travelers, the disease had not infected a single human for over four hundred years. The strain was selected because of its unique vulnerability to antibiotic doses. Its developers, EliGlaxoLily, saw this susceptibility as a method of easy removal when the disease was no longer required. Back in his hutch, Boaz ben-Haim eats the pilfered medicine.

  In an ideal situation, removal of hyperintelligent gonorrhea occurs in a hospital, while the human host is under sedation. Boaz ben-Haim suffers the transition without tranquilization. The gonorrhea dies, croaking out with ben-Haim’s voice, its pleas for mercy diminishing into a final empty silence.

  —help me, help me, help me. help. help. help. help.

  For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels forward to the distant future, to the epoch when time travel technologies are first mass duplicated.

  There is the distinct danger that this journey may create a paradox. The Commission has always warned every traveler about the impossibility and danger of arriving in an epoch that possesses the technology. Death is the only result. Only death and doom.

  Taking the chance, he punches in the coordinates and arrives unharmed.

  Nothing happens. It’s like any other historical era. He interacts with people, uses bewilderment technologies upon them. Nothing changes. He’s still alive. Boaz ben-Haim concludes that time travelers have been visiting the post-travel epoch all along.

  Perhaps the Commission knows. Perhaps they knew from the beginning. No one informed him that the gonorrhea could read his mind.

  He steals the central processing unit of an older time travel hutch, one lacking the nanotech filters that block the ingress of organic matter. He interfaces the CPU with his hutch.

  For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels to Mauritius in the year 1534. He captures a dodo and brings it inside the hutch. The machine does not reject the bird. For his next destination, Boaz ben-Haim travels to the year 1988 and frees the bird by Cleopatra’s Needle. The creature gives Boaz ben-Haim a stupid, screwball look and then hops away, rubbing against the obelisk’s base.

  With evidence of the possible, Boaz ben-Haim resolves to rescue victims of the Holocaust. It is his hope that this removal, at the last possible moment before death, will create as little havoc as possible. Boaz ben-Haim plans to bring those whom he rescues into the far future. Into the year 2700. After the last great war, after massive depopulations.

  He’ll rescue them from the worst government known to man and deliver them to human history’s most universally admired system of political representation. The Neo-Doge of Nuovo Venexia. I am a one-man Zion. The only question is how many. The sheer enormity of all of those deaths.

  Boaz ben-Haim opens his hutch. As the dodo watches, Boaz ben-Haim climbs into the hutch. He travels to Bergen-Belsen, to March 1945. He moves among the sick, among the doomed women, among those bodies riddled with typhus. They are about five hundred in number, crammed inside a single poorly constructed wooden barracks. There are no windows or doors. The wind howls through the room. It’s freezing. There are no beds. The inmates sleep on the floor.

  Boaz ben-Haim stops above a young starving girl, delirious with illness, hovering near death, shivering on the ground.

  —Anna? Anna?

  MAY 1994

  Baby Sees a Ghost

  Every Wednesday, Regina and I attended every Disco 2000. The freak show had erupted into new extremes. I doubt that even the Romans under Heliogabalus, or Berliners in the Weimar Republic, experienced such tortured hedonism.

  People dressed in costumes of butchered meat, anorexic midgets, amputees, piss drinkers, shit lickers, men fisting themselves on stage, people eating their own vomit, brutal S&M. The spectacle dusted with endless white powders. Ketamine and cocaine and heroin. Snow was general over Ireland.

  I loved wallowing in the filth that accrues around every fin-de-siècle. That dewy moment before a new millennium when the peasantry stage orgies before the wrath of a nameless God.

  One night in May, I ran into Jae-Hwa, or Sally, or Sigh. She was dressed down, looking like a young professional in her late twenties. Which I guess, technically, she might have been. She was like Franklin. I had no idea what she did for money.

  I was crazy on cocaine. She couldn’t get in a word. I kept talking about three Aerosmith music videos starring a blonde actress named Alicia Silverstone. A living embodiment of fresh-faced lust, appealing to the world’s schoolboys. And their fathers.

  The videos, released over the course of a year, were incredibly popular. People kept talking about them. The most recent, “Crazy,” had debuted a few weeks earlier.

  —There’s a full narrative running through the trilogy, I said. Alicia Silversto
ne experiences a personality transformation of sexual disinclinations across an elapsed timeframe. The failures of heterosexuality and suburban rebellion in the first video leads into an escape from the phantasms and pleasures of the digital world in the second, the simulacra of which ultimately cannot sustain her interest nor salve the wound of her hetero failures, culminating at last into the petit mal climax of crime and bisexuality that dominates the third.

  —Ah, Baby, said Sigh, I need to make wee.

  I saw a drug dealer named Angel Melendez. He knew Michael Alig. Everyone knew Michael, especially the dealers, but Michael’s relationship with Angel was inscrutable. They were junky and dealer, but Angel had allowed Michael to corrupt the natural power dynamic of the relationship.

  He’d become blinded by Michael’s fame. And, by now, Michael was dazzling.

  He’d become a staple of daytime television. He’d thrown parties in every major American and European city. Every fashion magazine of note had done an article. His movements were tracked in gossip rags, in newspapers, in glossies.

  Angel was one of those sad people who believed that if he suffered a famous person’s abuses, he’d end up famous too. The reward for his naiveté? One time Michael invited Angel to a taping of Geraldo, but Angel had to sit in the audience.

  Angel always wore a pair of wings. Hence the name. These were both a fashion choice and a helpful accoutrement of the drug trade. Potential buyers could spot the wings across even the darkest club. Some people thought he was ugly, but I found him rather handsome, if overly groomed.

  Anyhoo, we didn’t talk much but he did sell me something that he said was ketamine, but as soon as I snorted it, I knew that it couldn’t be ketamine. The taste was wrong, a way different chemical experience. I wasn’t numbed. I wasn’t experiencing the failure of my human senses, but rather their heightening. Like dropping acid without the confusion. Everything shimmered. Everything seemed hyperreal.