The Speed Chronicles

by Joseph Mattson

  “Every day, countless times, they wetted the tip of the brush with their tongues so they might get nice, clean numerals on the dials,” Warren Tibbs told him. “Some of them had fun with it and decorated their fingers and eyelids. One painted a Cheshire Cat grin on her face to surprise her beau. At night, walking from the factory, they all gave off this lambent glow. They must have looked quite lovely, those girls.”

  The doctor opened his bag.

  “My mother used to have one of those alarm clocks,” Warren added. “Isn’t that something?”

  And so the doctor’s treatments began.

  It was two months later that Warren Tibbs summoned Dr. Tremblay to his own home. “I have things to show you,” he said. “You will be amazed.”

  The doctor walked the mile and a half out to the Tibbs home half in wonder. Two months and the only contact had been through the physics department secretary, who called weekly and then twice weekly for the professor’s prescriptions. That day, Warren Tibbs himself opened the front doors, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his smile wide, and his face flushed and vibrant.

  “Dr. Tremblay, I have always wanted to do something significant,” Warren Tibbs said. “Many think I already have. They are wrong.” He was not wearing any socks or shoes, and the doctor noted that the brightness in his face had an intensity that worried him. “I wanted to make my mark, wanted my life to have meaning,” Warren Tibbs continued, his whole body nearly shaking with energy, “and now you have made it possible.”

  And then Warren Tibbs opened the doors to his study. On the leather-banked walls were ten, twenty, thirty canvases, bright paintings thick with roiling swirls of oil, brilliant vermillion, scarlet, gold, and when the doctor peered closer, he saw within the swirls dainty, flickering images of what appeared to be girl sprites or elves dancing, slipping on the tiniest of feet along the swoop and whorl of each throbbing helix.

  Paint spattered all over the floors and curtains and dappled Warren Tibbs’s trouser cuffs and, the doctor now noticed, streaked up one of his arms. It was in his hair.

  “You do not even know yet,” Warren Tibbs said, voice scratchy as if he had recently been screaming. He slapped his head against the light plate on the wall and the entire room fell to darkness.

  The doctor was transfixed. The sprites, the elves, they glowed with an unearthly power, a searing green luminescence radiating off every canvas and like nothing he had ever seen before. And yet he had. Long ago, in Marfa, Texas. These glowing monuments to all that is mysterious and unreachable and unknown.

  Standing there in the dark, looking at these paintings, the doctor immediately knew their power, and they spoke to him, and it was like the voice from the buried center of his own buried heart. Warren Tibbs turned to him, so close the doctor could smell the rotting of his teeth. He felt Warren’s hand take his, and the two men stood for some time.

  It was that day, the day of the paintings, their light, that Dr. Tremblay saw what was to occur. Walking out, he saw Warren Tibbs’s six-year-old daughter dancing pirouettes on the front lawn, waving one of her father’s paint brushes like a magic wand. He knew he must do something.

  He decided he would perform a courageous act.

  Is the spirit capable of achieving what we in our distress must expect of it? That is what Albert Schweitzer asked, and Dr. Tremblay knew the answer.

  “Dr. Feelgood,” the government man said with a sneer. “You made Warren Tibbs feel so good he stopped taking his heart medication and died.”

  “That is not how I see it,” he replied.

  “You must have noted the strain on his heart.”

  The doctor did not say anything.

  “You stopped his heart, Dr. Tremblay.”

  “His heart had stopped long ago, young man. I merely stopped the thunder in his head.”

  The night before the jury’s verdict, Dr. Tremblay woke with a start. He realized he had been in the midst of a stunningly vivid dream in which before him passed all his patients, eyes bright and glittering, smiling at him, thanking him, hurling their hands out, unknotting their knotted fists, opening their arms to him. Until the last one appeared. Walter Tibbs, of course, and when he smiled there were no teeth inside, only an orbular glow that hummed, like a tuning fork. But as he moved closer, the doctor saw that Warren’s mouth was open not in a smile but in terror. As if the light inside was choking him, swallowing him whole.

  Shaking in his bedclothes, huddled on his office couch, and the thought came to him: It happened because I was too greedy for love. It was all I wanted.

  “Dr. Tremblay,” Mrs. Moses-Pittock pleaded as they led him out of the courtroom after the verdict, “you can’t leave us. Who will take care of us? Who will take care of me?”

  He touched her netted glove with two shaking fingers, looked into her watery gray eyes. “I trust you understand that our hearts can take us all to dark and ill-timed places.”

  MEGAN ABBOTT is the Edgar-winning author of the novels The End of Everything, Bury Me Deep, Queenpin, The Song Is You, and Die a Little. Her work has appeared in Wall Street Noir, Phoenix Noir, Detroit Noir, Queens Noir, Between the Dark and the Daylight: And 27 More Best Crime & Mystery Stories of the Year, Storyglossia, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Believer. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She lives in Queens, New York.

  the speed of things

  by james greer

  part 1: ego in arcadia

  Nothing would make me happier than to tell you, up front, that everything works out fine in the end. Can’t do that, I’m afraid. Not because things don’t work out fine in the end, but because I don’t know how the end ends. The end hasn’t happened yet (as far as I can tell). The end may never happen. Things are moving so quickly these days that the end may come and go and I might not notice. Have to allow for that possibility. Have to allow for every possibility. Facts are engrams. Engrams are hypothetical. Thus: Every. Possible. Outcome.

  As for the body lying on the floor a few feet away from where I sit, at my desk: I can talk about that. I can give you a definitive answer with respect to the body. Yes, the blood pooling near her head and, less obviously, the little splatters on and around her bare feet: aftereffects of her transition from life to death by means of a series of bullets discharged from a handgun at close range. I should probably make this much (all right, fine) clear: I did not shoot the gun. She didn’t shoot the gun. I have no idea who shot the gun. Not sure it matters. The gun got shot, right? A shot gun is not necessarily a shotgun, would be one conclusion you could draw from the

  Cannot let this incident interfere with my work schedule. I am extremely busy. I’m on seven different deadlines. Which when you think about it, as I am sometimes given to do (think about it), presents a sort of ironie du sort. (Now I’m just playing word games.) But serious. The line drawn outside a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot. From that idea to this: how? Is there any sense in which missing a deadline corresponds to going further than allowed and therefore liable to be shot and killed? Perhaps going further than allowed, yes, that much one can grant, but everything after therefore is a damned lie.

  En attendant, everything is killing me. Not just the seven different deadlines but the expectations. People who know me, who have made the mistake of not shutting up (for good) the minute we met, have a series of expectations that seem to grow, perversely, in accord with my ability to disappoint each and every one. You have to say “each and every” in that sentence for the rhythm, not the meaning. The meaning can go to hell, along with all the people who expect things from me. I know my limits. I know when I’ve reached my limits. Hey, guess what? I’ve reached my limits. I might be, well, actually I am, let’s not kid ourselves, he said, of at least superhuman intelligence and—did you see that? Her arm just twitched. That was disconcerting—supernal intuition, but even such a one has
limits. I see everything, I understand everything, and this happens at both the conscious and all twelve subconscious levels simultaneously. You’d reasonably expect a man with such abilities to be sotted with power, joy-drunk, unintimidated by intimations of mortality. To some extent that is actual factual. To some extent just silly. I have to draw the. It’s a question of. Guess. Guess not. Huh.

  In the motion picture Meet John Doe starring that one guy and that girl and directed by what’s-his-name (1939), movement is both created and just happens. Think on this: w/r/t film and music, all forms of dissemination heretofore have involved circular objects, spinning. No matter how far back you looky-loo. Revolvers each and every one, but no more, no more, no more, no more. I don’t “these days” know the shape of the medium. Does anyone? Is there a shape? I have seen certain media represented as a waveform, but I suspect that waveform is merely a visual translation of a shapeless batch of numbers. Thing I need to know, has art become math or has math become art, (and) is there a meaningful distinction?

  A John Doe club forms for the purpose of improving relations between and among neighbors. That’s all. To be a better neighbor. Not really sure how such a thing, even if fueled by a despicable despot, takes root and flowers. Where I live, there are only seven or ten people grouped in ten or seven tin houses, then nothing interesting for many kilometers. An island afloat in the middle of a great city. Everyone is related either by marriage or blood, and everyone keeps to himself. Family members do not talk to family members. No one talks to anyone. Where I live is spectral silent except for noises made by elements and animals. Where I live is nowhere.

  The potential when you harness the separate units of a great number of John Doe clubs toward some end other than neighborly. In and out of doors. Well, that’s just frightening. If you agree raise your hand. No, other hand. Theoretically I am writing a history of the Federal Reserve Bank. I say theoretically because I don’t believe the Federal Reserve Bank exists, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. You could, I suppose, say with some accuracy that I’m writing a history of nothing. The History of Nothing. Written in Nowhere. Written By. (Hope is in the hand that hits you.)

  I have been contracted. Contacted? After a while you forget the smaller differences. This is a known side effect, according to the materials accompanying my prescription of PROVIGIL. I thank, I praise, I grant every, no, each and every day. One hundred milligrams in the morning is my prescriptive dose. I’m not good at following instructions. Too proud or something. Nine is the number of the muses, so nine hundred milligrams in the morning suits my symmetry. Many people say: Where would I be without coffee? and for coffee you can substitute other stimulants or depressants or ampersands. But where would I be without coffee? Added to nine muses of PROVIGIL you can accomplish worlds. You can eliminate sleep from your diet. How super, my love!

  Walking through tall pines, trunks pasted with greeny moss, forest floor covered in a mass of needles and cones and deciduous leaves, brown or yellow according to their last request, Aunt Panne was over-brimmed with holy spirit of trees. Praying as she walked, slowly, for soul of dead girl lying on the floor next to desk of Writer. Dead girl or possibly not-dead girl, id est dying girl. Lovely deep blue of her lips.

  Mossy ruins of a water mill. Heavyset old man with dropsical jowls and comically large glasses sat on a rotting tree limb chewing a reed.

  “I am Aunt Panne.”

  “I am Paul Volcker, twelfth chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1979–1987. I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey.”

  “What brings you to the forest, Paul Volcker?”

  “I’m waiting for Writer to remember me.”

  “There’s a plaque here by the ruin of the millstone. I can’t read it.”

  “Because it’s in Gallic. The gist of the inscription is that these ruins are symbolic of a larger wreck.”

  “Well, that makes sense. Did you know the dead or dying girl?”

  “Not personally. Only what you read in papers. When there used to be papers. Newspapers, I mean. Les journaux.”

  “It wasn’t all that long ago.”

  “No, it wasn’t. You’re right.”

  “By larger wreck you mean the design?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been wondering lately if the seeming incoherence of the design isn’t contained, somehow, within an even larger design whose outlines we can’t see. And that maybe this imperceptible scheme makes perfect sense.”

  “I don’t engage with poetry.” Paul Volcker stopped chewing his reed and fished in his jacket pocket for a small notebook.

  “Meet John Doe,” he read aloud from the notebook.

  “And then what?” asked Aunt Panne.

  “That’s all I have so far.”

  “It’s a good start.”

  Aunt Panne left Paul Volcker sitting by the remains of the mill and continued through the forest, following a path that was no path. She knew that Paul Volcker was worried about the farmers driving their tractors down C Street NW to blockade the Eccles Building, but he would never admit it, not to her, anyway. Maybe he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, anymore. Maybe the reason he wouldn’t admit it is related to the reason he was sitting on the rotting tree limb by the old water mill.

  Was there even a trace of whatever water source once drove the mill? As she moved farther and farther away, Aunt Panne’s memory similarly receded. She could no longer picture Paul Volcker’s face. She could no longer in any detail picture the mossy ruin of the mill. It was entirely possible, she admitted to herself as she trudged up a gentle slope slick with mud from a recent rain, that she had imagined the whole interval. The words lacuna and caesura flitted through her brain, for a moment, and then disappeared.

  Okay, but if you allow one example do you have to allow them all? Do you admit the unreality of experience generally if one experience turns out to be illusion? The brain is capable of many things when its circuits are working, even more when overloaded with catecholamines and hypothalamic histamines. The synaptic terminals release these oracles into the floodstream and you start to see things: Is it the future? Is it the past? Is it a kind of present that would otherwise be invisible to our seven dulled senses? Or is it, as most would have you think, a fantasy, the product of a disordered mind. Consciousness infected with chemicals, perception out of step with consensus. When you apply reason to the problem, you kill the problem. You derive a solution. Aunt Panne mistrusted solutions. She would rather beggar the question by withholding logic, and thus arrive at the edge of the forest rather than, say, a small clearing or a mossy ruin.

  Approaching the ecotone she could see cows grazing in the meadow.

  part 2: rule bretagne

  Snow came in bunches to Bon Repos, on the border of the Forêt de Quénécan. The companions of the abbey were put to work sweeping the courtyard early on the morning of December 19 in the Year of Our Lord. The blinking lights of the snowplows had moved far enough away from the courtyard that you could no longer hear the susurrus of their heavy tires, nor the scrape of metal against. This has been the coldest winter of our lives. In the memory of our lives. There has been a record chute of snow. The cars are corked for miles, and hours, on the autoroutes. On the radio you are warned to bring a thermos of some hot liquid and “perhaps something to eat” before you set out in your car. What kind of a person would set out in his car under such perturburant circumstances? What kind of person says “set out in his car”? The wrecked bulkheads massed along the shore, covered in fresh snow, no longer move, but boy they sure do work. How do you cut the GPS tag from under your skin? You use a stolen knife. You ask the girl to use the knife because you can’t do it yourself. That’s how the girl ended up dead, on your floor, in your room, because she removed the GPS tag. It’s starting to come back now, but in fragments. In packets.

  Everybody’s got a past. Everybody stinks of time. But the photography is so pure that you don’t mind. The rhythm of the shots, and the rhythm within the shots, matches with exq
uisite rigor the languid movements of the actors inside the frame. Only the music jars. The music is ridiculous, overstated, too much. “Tonight the gates of Mercy will open.” That’s what the music wants to say. The clarinets. I see a crowd of black hats, everyone playing the clarinet. There’s nothing wrong with the clarinet in principle. With any woodwind.

  New rule: no one speaks. Not for any reason. Words have only ever caused problems. I can think of no exceptions. Everything will be communicated in images, only. No intertitles, subtitles, supertitles, titles, title cards. The moving image versus the static (photo) is obviously superior. An image that moves offers a more complete set of the infinite fractions of solitude, according to N. The history of cinema is the history of the image. Without words. The paradox of using words to describe things that. Text is text is text. This is not a text. In the event of an actual text, you would have been directed by the appropriate emergency services to destroy all evidence of yourself. I do not feel pain. Thunder and lightning ask my approval. What some call prayer is easily misused, but I command the seas.

  I have no reason to doubt. I have no reason to believe. I got no reason, I prefer no reason at all. Crows gather on every street corner. Talking about something I can’t quite. What’s the point of so many crows? Crown, crow, cow. Unusually, you can do that in Russian too.

  Phil Esposito was the consensus pick in the living room for the trivia question, Which Buckthorn had been the fastest to score fifty goals in one season? Writer didn’t wait to hear the answer. If not Esposito, who? Cashman? Bucyk? What difference does it make? They were all fucking great. Ten seconds later his father actually said, “I have seen some terrible calls in my life, but that one takes the cake,” concerning a potentially dodgy hooking call on Buckthorn player Sad Strawbo. The answer to a more pertinent question was soon thereafter provided by Sabater Pi and his caliginous table of incantatory engrams. Without the help of Sabater Pi, one finds it unlikely that anything would ever get done by anyone. A study of helicopter pilots suggested that 600 milligrams of PROVIGIL given in three doses can be used to keep pilots alert and maintain their accuracy at predeprivation levels for forty hours without sleep. Another study of fighter pilots showed that PROVIGIL given in three divided 100-milligram doses sustained the flight-control accuracy of sleep-deprived F-117 pilots to within about twenty-seven percent of baseline levels for thirty-seven hours, without any considerable side effects.