Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  “You said,” I reminded him, “that you wanted to discuss something ‘delicate.’”

  Jacob returned to the topic of Augustine; I returned to the question of why the two of us had come to sit together right then, right there. We ping-ponged in this way, until eventually Jacob said, “Well, it’s about Ilan, so you’ll like that.”

  “About the grandfather paradox?” I said, too quickly.

  “Or it could be called the father paradox. Or even the mother paradox.”

  “I guess I’ve never thought of it that way, but sure.” My happiness had dissipated; I felt angry, and manipulated.

  “Not only about Ilan but about my work as well.” Jacob actually began to whisper. “The thing is, I’m going to ask you to try to kill me. Don’t worry, I can assure you that you won’t succeed. But in attempting you’ll prove a glorious, shunned truth that touches on the nature of time, free will, causal loops, and quantum theory. You’ll also probably work out some aggression you feel toward me.”

  Truth be told, through the thin haze of my disdain, I had always been envious of Jacob’s intellect; I had privately believed—despite what those reviews said, or maybe partly because of what those reviews said—that Jacob was a rare genius. Now I realized that he was just crazy.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Jacob said. “Unfortunately, I can’t explain everything to you right here, right now. It’s too psychologically trying. For you, I mean. Listen, come over to my apartment on Saturday. My family will be away for the weekend, and I’ll explain everything to you then. Don’t be alarmed. You probably know that I’ve lost my job”—I hadn’t known that, but I should have been able to guess it—“but those morons, trust me, their falseness will become obvious. They’ll be flies at the horse’s ass. My ideas will bestride the world like a colossus. And you, too—you’ll be essential.”

  I promised to attend, fully intending not to.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said, without meaning it.

  All the rest of that week I tried to think through my decision carefully, but the more I tried to organize my thoughts the more ludicrous I felt for thinking them at all. I thought: As a friend, isn’t it my responsibility to find out if Jacob has gone crazy? But really we’re not friends. And if I come to know too much about his madness he may destroy me in order to preserve his psychotic worldview. But maybe I should take that risk, because, in drawing closer to Jacob—mad or no—I’ll learn something more of Ilan. But why do I need to know anything? And do my propositions really follow one from the other? Maybe my not going will entail Jacob’s having to destroy me in order to preserve his psychotic worldview. Or maybe Jacob is utterly levelheaded, and just bored enough to play an elaborate joke on me. Or maybe, despite there never having been the least spark of sexual attraction between us, despite the fact that we could have been locked in a closet for seven hours and nothing would have happened, maybe, for some reason, Jacob is trying to seduce me. Out of nostalgia for Ilan. Or as consolation for the turn in his career. Was I really up for dealing with a desperate man?

  Or: Was I, in my dusty way, passing up the opportunity to be part of an idea that would, as Jacob had said, “bestride the world like a colossus”?

  Early Saturday morning, I found myself knocking on Jacob’s half-open door; this was when my world began to grow strange to me—strange, and yet also familiar, as if my destiny had once been known to me and I had forgotten it incompletely. Jacob’s voice invited me in.

  I’d never been to his apartment before. It was tiny, and smelled of orange rinds, and had—incongruously, behind a futon—a chalkboard; also so many piles of papers and books that the apartment seemed more like the movie set for an intellectual’s rooms than like the real McCoy. I had once visited a ninety-one-year-old great-uncle who was still conducting research on fruit flies, and his apartment was cluttered with countless hand-stoppered jars of cloned fruit flies and a few hot plates for preparing some sort of agar; that apartment is what Jacob’s brought to mind.

  I found myself doubting that Jacob truly had a wife and child, as he had so often claimed.

  “Thank God you’ve come,” Jacob said, emerging from what appeared to be a galley kitchen but may have been simply a closet. “I knew you’d be reliable, that at least.” And then, as if reading my mind, “Natasha sleeps in the loft we built. My wife and I sleep on the futon. Although, yes, it’s not much for entertaining. But can I get you something? I have this tea that one of my students gave me, exceptional stuff from Japan, harvested at high altitude—”

  “Tea, great, yes,” I said. To my surprise, I was relieved that Jacob’s ego seemed to weather his miserable surroundings just fine. Also to my surprise I felt tenderly toward him. And toward the scent of old citrus.

  On the main table I noticed what looked like the ragtag remains of some Physics 101 lab experiments: rusted silver balls on different inclines, distressed balloons, a stained funnel, a markered flask, a calcium-speckled Bunsen burner, iron filings and sandpaper, large magnets, and batteries that could have been bought from a Chinese immigrant on the subway. Did I have the vague feeling that “a strange traveller” might show up and tell “extravagant stories” over a meal of fresh rabbit? I did.

  I also considered that Jacob’s asking me to murder him had just been an old-fashioned suicidal plea for help.

  “Here, here.” Jacob brought me tea (in a cracked porcelain cup), and I thought—somewhat fondly—of Ilan’s old inscrutable poisoning jokes.

  “Thanks so much.” I moved away from that table of hodgepodge and sat on Jacob’s futon.

  “Well,” Jacob said gently, also sitting down.

  “Yes, well.”

  “Well, well,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m not going to hit on you,” Jacob said.

  “Of course not,” I said. “You’re not going to kiss my hand.”

  “Of course not.”

  The tea tasted like damp cotton.

  Jacob rose and walked over to the table, spoke to me from across the compressed distance. “I presume that you learned what you could. From those scribblings of Ilan. Yes?”

  I conceded—both that I had learned something and that I had not learned everything, that much was still a mystery to me.

  “But you understand, at least, that in situations approaching grandfather paradoxes very strange things can become the norm. Just as, if someone running begins to approach the speed of light, he grows unfathomably heavy.” He paused. “Didn’t you find it odd that you found yourself lounging so much with me and Ilan? Didn’t it seem to beg explanation, how happy the three of us—”

  “It wasn’t strange,” I insisted, and surely I was right almost by definition. It wasn’t strange because it had already happened and so it was conceivable. Or maybe that was wrong. “I think he loved us both,” I said, confused for no reason. “And we both loved him.”

  Jacob sighed. “Yes, O.K. I hope you’ll appreciate the elaborate calculations I’ve done in order to set up these demonstrations of extraordinarily unlikely events. Come over here. Please. You’ll see that we’re in a region of, well, not exactly a region of unlikeness, that would be a cheap association—very Ilan-like, though, a fitting tribute—but we’ll enter a region where things seem not to behave as themselves. In other words, a zone where events, teetering toward interfering”—I briefly felt that I was a child again, falling asleep on our scratchy blue sofa while my coughing father watched reruns of Twilight Zone—“with a fixed future, are pressured into revealing their hidden essences.”

  I felt years or miles away.

  Then this happened, which is not the crux of the story, or even the center of what was strange to me:

  Jacob tapped one of the silver balls and it rolled up the inclined plane; he set a flask of water on the Bunsen burner and marked the rising level of the fluid; a balloon distended unevenly; a magnet under sandpaper moved iron filings so as to spell the word “egreg
ious.”

  Jacob turned to me, raised his eyebrows. “Astonishing, no?’

  I felt like I’d seen him wearing a dress or going to the bathroom.

  “I remember those science-magic shows from childhood,” I said gently, tentatively. “I always loved those spooky caves they advertised on highway billboards.” I wasn’t not afraid. Cousin or no cousin, Ilan had clearly run away from Jacob, not from me.

  “I can see you’re resistant,” Jacob said. “Which I understand, and even respect. Maybe I scared you, with that killing-me talk, which you weren’t ready for. We’ll return to it. I’ll order us in some food. We’ll eat, we’ll drink, we’ll talk, and I’ll let you absorb the news slowly. You’re an engineer, for God’s sake. You’ll put the pieces together. Sometimes sleep helps, sometimes spearmint—just little ways of sharpening a mind’s ability to synthesize. You take your time.”

  Jacob transferred greasy Chinese food into marginally clean bowls, “for a more homey feel.” There at the table, that shabby impromptu lab, I found myself eating slowly. Jacob seemed to need something from me, something more, even, than just a modicum of belief. And he had paid for the takeout. Halfway through a bowl of wide beef-flavored noodles—we had actually been comfortable in the quiet, at ease—Jacob said, “Didn’t you find Ilan’s ideas uncannily fashionable? Always a nose ahead? Even how he started wearing pink before everyone else?”

  “He was fashionable in all sorts of ways,” I agreed, surprised by my appetite for the slippery and unpleasant food. “Not that it ever got him very far, always running after the next new thing like that. Sometimes I’d copy what he said, and it would sound dumb coming out of my mouth, so maybe it was dumb in the first place. Just said with charm.” I shrugged. Never before had I spoken aloud anything unkind about Ilan.

  “You don’t understand. I guess I should tell you that Ilan is my as yet unborn son, who visited me—us—from the future.” He took a metal ball between two greasy fingers, dropped it twice, and then once again demonstrated it rolling up the inclined plane. “The two of us, Ilan and I, we collaborate.” Jacob explained that part of what Ilan had established in his travels—which were repeated, and varied—was that, contrary to popular movies, travel into the past didn’t alter the future, or, rather, that the future was already altered, or, rather, that it was all far more complicated than that. “I, too, was reluctant to believe,” Jacob insisted. “Extremely reluctant. And he’s my son. A pain in the ass, but also a dear.” Jacob ate a dumpling in one bite. “A bit too much of a moralist, though. Not a good business partner, in that sense.”

  Although I felt the dizziness of old heartbreak—had I really loved Ilan so much?—the fact that, in my first reaction to Jacob’s apartment, I had kind of foreseen this turn of events obscurely satisfied me. I played along: “If Ilan was from the future, that means he could tell you about your future.” I no longer felt intimidated by Jacob. How could I?

  “Sure, yes. A little.” Jacob blushed like a schoolgirl. “It’s not important. But certain things he did know. Being my son and all.”

  “Ah so.” I, too, ate a dumpling whole. Which isn’t the kind of thing I normally do. “What about my future? Did he know anything about my future?”

  Jacob shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was responding to my question or just disapproving of it. He again nudged a ball up its inclined plane. “Right now we have my career to save,” he said. I saw that he was sweating, even along his exposed collarbone. “Can I tell you what I’m thinking? What I’m thinking is that we perform the impossibility of my dying before fathering Ilan. A little stunt show of sorts, but for real, with real guns and rope and poison and maybe some blindfolded throwing of knives. Real life. And this can drum up a bit of publicity for my work.” I felt myself getting sleepy during this speech of his, getting sleepy and thinking of circuses and of dumb pornography and of Ilan’s mattress and of the time a small binder clip landed on my head when I was walking outside. “I mean, it’s a bit lowbrow, but lowbrow is the new highbrow, of course, or maybe the old highbrow, but, regardless, it will be fantastic. Maybe we’ll be on Letterman. And we’ll probably make a good deal of money in addition to getting me my job back. We have to be careful, though. Just because I can’t die doesn’t mean I can’t be pretty seriously injured. But I’ve been doing some calculations and we’ve got some real showstoppers.”

  Jacob’s hazel eyes stared into mine. “I’m not much of a showgirl,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “You can find someone better than me for the job.”

  “We’re meant to have this future together. My wife—she really will want to kill me when she finds out the situation I’m in. She won’t cooperate.”

  “I know people who can help you, Jacob,” I said, in the monotone of the half-asleep. “But I can’t help you. I like you, though. I really, really do.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Have you ever seen a marble roll up like that? I mean, these are just little anomalies, I didn’t want to frighten you, but there are many others. Right here in this room, even. We have the symptoms of leaning up against time here.”

  I thought of Jacob’s blathering on about Augustine and meaningful motion and yearning. I also felt convinced I’d been drugged. Not just because of my fatigue but because I was beginning to find Jacob vaguely attractive. His sweaty collarbone was pretty. The room around me—the futon, the Chinese food, the porcelain teacup, the rusty laboratory, the piles of papers, Ilan’s note in my back pocket, Jacob’s cheap dress socks, the dust, Jacob’s ringed hand on his knee—these all seemed like players in a life of mine that had not yet become real, a life I was coursing toward, one for which I would be happy to waste every bit of myself. “Do you think,” I found myself asking, maybe because I’d had this feeling just once before in my life, “that Ilan was a rare and tragic genius?”

  Jacob laughed.

  I shrugged. I leaned my sleepy head against his shoulder. I put my hand to his collarbone.

  “I can tell you this about your future,” Jacob said quietly. “I didn’t not hear that question. So let me soothsay this. You’ll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you’ll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a proverbial stick up the ass. Your present, if you’ll excuse my saying so, is a pretty sorry one. But your future looks pretty damn great. Your work will amount to nothing. But you’ll have a brilliant child. And a brilliant husband. And great love.”

  He was saying we would be together. He was saying we would be in love. I understood. I had solved the puzzle. I knew who I, who we, were meant to be. I fell asleep relieved.

  I woke up alone on Jacob’s futon. At first I couldn’t locate Jacob, but then I saw he was sleeping in his daughter’s loft. His mouth was open; he looked awful. The room smelled of MSG. I felt at once furious and small. I left the apartment, vowing never to go to the coffee shop—or anywhere else I might see Jacob—again. I spent my day grading student exams. That evening, I went to the video store and almost rented Wuthering Heights, then switched to The Man Who Wasn’t There, then, feeling haunted in a dumb way, ended up renting nothing at all.

  Did I, in the following weeks and months, think of Jacob often? Did I worry for or care about him? I couldn’t tell if I did or didn’t, as if my own feelings had become the biggest mystery to me of all. I can’t even say I’m absolutely sure that Jacob was delusional. When King Laius abandons baby Oedipus in the mountains on account of the prophecy that his son will murder him, Laius’s attempt to evade his fate simply serves as its unexpected engine. This is called a predestination paradox. It’s a variant of the grandfather paradox. At the heart of it is your inescapable fate.

  We know that the general theory of relativity is compatible with the existence of space-times in which travel to the past or remote future is possible. The logician Kurt Gödel proved this back in the late nineteen-forties, and it remains essentially undisputed. Whether or not humans (in our very part
icular space-time) can in fact travel to the past—we still don’t know. Maybe. Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations. Maybe Jacob is my destiny. Regardless, I continue to avoid him.

  STEVEN MILLHAUSER

  A Precursor of the Cinema

  Steven Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel Martin Dressler and the Story Prize for We Others. He has written thirteen books of fiction, including Voices in the Night, Edwin Mulhouse, The Barnum Museum, and Dangerous Laughter. His short story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” became the basis for the popular movie The Illusionist in 2006. Millhauser has stories in The Secret History of Science Fiction and The Secret History of Fantasy. He lives in Saratoga Springs and teaches at Skidmore College.

  “A Precursor of the Cinema” is a piece of historical trickery reminiscent of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the story of a totally forgotten nineteenth-century painter who may be the missing link between painting and motion pictures.

  Every great invention is preceded by a rich history of error. Those false paths, wrong turns, and dead ends, those branchings and veerings, those wild swerves and delirious wanderings—how can they fail to entice the attention of the historian, who sees in error itself a promise of revelation? We need a taxonomy of the precursor, an esthetics of the not-quite-yet. Before the cinema, that inevitable invention of the mid-1890s, the nineteenth century gave birth to a host of brilliant toys, spectacles, and entertainments, all of which produced vivid and startling illusions of motion. It’s a seductive pre-history, which divides into two lines of descent. The true line is said to be the series of rapidly presented sequential drawings that create an illusion of motion based on the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision (Plateau’s Phenakistoscope, Horner’s Zoetrope, Reynaud’s Praxinoscope); the false line produces effects of motion based on visual illusions of another kind (Daguerre’s Diorama, with its semi-transparent painted screens and shifting lights; sophisticated magic-lantern shows with double projectors and overlapping views). But here and there we find experiments in motion that are less readily explained, ambiguous experiments that invite the historian to follow obscure, questionable, and at times heretical paths. It is in this twilit realm that the work of Harlan Crane (1844–1888?) leads its enigmatic life, before sinking into a neglect from which it has never recovered.