Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  Outside, the air was appropriately stormy.

  “I’m a fraud,” Brad said to Jaffe.

  It was the first time he’d admitted anything even remotely honest to anyone in thirty years. It felt good.

  “I know that,” Jaffe said.

  “You do?” Brad said.

  “Of course. I’m a fraud too. A total fake.”

  “But this is different. I—”

  “Look, Brad, we all foolishly believe our opinions, our ideas, our low-rent sophistry is going to influence the course of human events.”

  “I kind of hoped mine would,” Brad said. Actually, he didn’t care at first, but now that things were about to go sour in the world, he did.

  Jaffe puffed off his stogie and sipped at his brandy. His brand of sophistry had paid for a lot of refinement. He was a successful fraud.

  “No one can control what happens in the world,” he said. “History marches forward no matter where we stand on the chess grid. There are systems in place that we, as individuals, can’t even begin to influence. All we can do is be as intelligent and discerning as we can and try to land on the right side of history. And you’re the best at that I’ve ever seen.”

  Brad sighed. This sort of dime-store neoliberalism worked in the ’90s as an effective tonic to the death anxiousness of aging boomers, but it meant nothing. It was easy to talk about the End of History when history was going good. Meanwhile, Brad knew, Hurricane Katrina was only five years away.

  “Things are going to get bad,” Brad said.

  “Of course they are,” said Jaffe. “They always do.”

  “No,” Brad said. “Really bad.”

  “Sure,” Jaffe said.

  Jaffe had been a campus radical during Vietnam, but the intervening years made him soft. His conception of “bad” didn’t include the most horrific terrorist attack in human history, catastrophic wars, government-sanctioned torture, an almost complete meltdown of the global financial system, and a massive, ice-cap-melting weather apocalypse. All of that was coming, and soon. The next decade would be a grim blockbuster played out in real time.

  “I can’t work at the New Century anymore,” Brad said.

  Jaffe didn’t look surprised. “I figured as much,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. You were good to me.”

  “No need to apologize,” Jaffe said. “You had a good run at a hard job, and I’m forever grateful for your help.”

  He extended a hand. Brad shook it gratefully. Everything about his career may have been a lie, but Jacob Jaffe was still more of a mentor to him than he’d had in either life.

  “So what are you going to do, young man?” he asked.

  Brad had to warn the world. But the New Century, he knew, was so last century. Only one place would matter as the apocalypse unfurled. He would join the media revolution before the media even knew that it was revolting.

  “I’m gonna be a blogger,” he said.

  THE ’00S

  It was almost impossible for Brad to make a bad investment. He would never have to worry about money, which was good, because he sure wasn’t making any as a freelancer. All through the spring of 2001 and into the summer, Brad sat in his underwear in his Adams Morgan, DC, town house, living on takeout, banging out thousand-word warnings about potential terrorist attacks. It was a tough sled. People were online and reading, but Facebook and Twitter were still years away. Also, his writing had a kind of sweaty urgency, a shrillness that people didn’t necessarily want to hear.

  Brad couldn’t help himself. September 11 was coming, but no one was paying attention. Brad headlined one blog post “Bin Laden Determined to Attack United States” and got four comments. A piece making fun of Friends got four hundred.

  At a certain point around mid-July, Brad realized there was absolutely no way for him to stop the attacks. The people’s indifference to their fate staggered him. I tried to warn you, he thought.

  He didn’t even remember the location of that flight school where the 9/11 attackers had taken their lessons. Sometimes he remembered Florida, other times Arizona, maybe Texas, or possibly Michigan. Besides, even if he could remember, what would he do? Go down there, wait for them to appear, and then punch them out? They’d still get their lessons, and he’d go to jail. He was no action hero. He didn’t own a gun. Brad could spend the next two months making hourly panicked calls to the FAA, and those planes would still fly into those towers. Nothing was going to turn him into Jack Ryan or John McClane now.

  Certain things about Brad’s world were different. He lived in a different city and wore different clothes and had sex with more women and ate at different restaurants on different nights. But history marched on. Everything else was happening in the exact same way in the exact same order. The world seemed indifferent to his slightly altered timeline, swatting it away like a bug. The earth’s fate didn’t balance on the opinions of a man in his underwear.

  The terrible future was going to happen. Brad knew it. But he also knew that the world, while it would become objectively worse for just about everyone for a while, wasn’t going to end either. This knowledge just made Brad work harder. He knew his business was going to boom big in the Bush years. There was so much to predict and criticize. If Brad kept pressing, there’d be good gigs.

  It wasn’t the noblest path, but Brad wasn’t the noblest person. He was an ambitious guy who could predict the future. If he couldn’t stop 9/11—and he couldn’t—then at least he’d have the moral authority to say, “I told you so.”

  Then he thought about his wife, seriously this time. Now he needed her.

  Brad had tried really hard to mentally put Juliet away over the years. In his first timeline, she entered the picture in 1997. But on his second try, Brad had won four National Press Club awards by then. He simply wasn’t going to wait around. They lived in far-flung neighborhoods, physically and mentally.

  But it’s not as though Brad had found anyone to replace Juliet either. He didn’t even have anyone else he liked to watch TV with. It was just Brad in his house, in his boxer briefs, typing into the void.

  He really started to miss Juliet on their first anniversary, or at least on the day that once had been their first anniversary. On their date they’d gone to an Argentinian steakhouse in Chicago and had their matrimonio, a wooden board heaping with grilled meats and vegetables and fried yucca, and then they’d gone to a bad Star Trek movie, because that’s what Juliet wanted to see, and then they’d gone home and had some more wine and made love, and then Juliet fell asleep while Brad watched SportsCenter. Everything they did that night reassured them that they’d married well.

  Juliet was such a tender, dear, creative soul, a person of great integrity and wit and depth. Brad had plenty of intelligent and caustic people in his current life, but no one he could trust like Juliet. Even thinking of her maiden name, Loveless, made him sad. Talk about a misnomer! Juliet had been full of love for Brad and the world. And then she’d blithely dismissed him to this terrible fate with her witchly potion. Unless she hadn’t. Maybe that had just been some kind of sleep aid. Regardless, he had questions.

  Maybe Juliet was still a witch in this timeline too. Brad wanted to find her. He did a search online but found no Juliet Loveless in Chicago. There was one in Alabama, but she turned out to be a hospital dietitian in her early sixties.

  But even if Pinterest or Twitter had existed, there was still always the possibility that Juliet had gotten married and changed her last name when he didn’t come along, or even opted out of the social media hamster wheel. People did that. It happened. She could even be dead.

  Brad called up a reporter colleague in Chicago and asked him to look up Juliet Loveless and J. Loveless in the White Pages. There were two listings that fit. Brad kept both the numbers.

  On September 11, after the towers came down, Brad talked to his parents and told them he was O
K. The phone rang a couple of other times as well. But mostly it was quiet. Washington went into eerie, mournful lockdown when the plane hit the Pentagon, just occasional sirens and the occasional mopey dog walker on the street. Brad was alone. He wanted to be, and it was easy.

  Brad knew he needed to start campaigning, however futilely, against the coming Iraq War. The beast needed to be fed. But no one had anything coherent to say or think in the week after 9/11. It was all blather and ideology, a weird mix of elegy and chest thumping. Brad could afford to shut up for a few days until the fog lifted a bit. He let the 9/11 sadness settle onto him like a familiar blanket.

  Juliet, he thought.

  The first time around they’d comforted each other, maybe a little too much. Their daughter was born nine months later. But there’d been an intimacy to the day, an authentic appreciation of life’s tender fragility. LA had only given them Battlecats, but at least they had each other. They held each other and cried, terrified of what was coming next. And then they made a baby, an act that always solves life’s problems.

  Well, this time Brad knew what was next. It wasn’t great, admittedly. In fact, it was pretty nightmarish. The next few years would be expensive, violent, corrupt, and really depressing, one of the worst decades in history. But we’d also elect a black president eventually, and people would recognize the right of gay people to marry. The world wasn’t going to end quite yet.

  Brad wanted to tell Juliet that it was going to be OK, at least for her, as far as he knew.

  The first Chicago number, a J. Loveless on Kenmore Avenue, was no longer in service. The second number was for Juliet Loveless on Le Moyne. Brad assumed that was Juliet. How could it be anyone else? She was waiting for him on the North Side.

  He dialed. It rang. There was no answer. Brad hung up.

  He waited fifteen minutes. By now it was early afternoon, and CNN was nothing but mournful ash filling the screen, anchors weeping openly on air. The national funeral had begun.

  Brad called again. Juliet answered on the second ring.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Her voice sounded trembly.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  “It’s going to be OK, Juliet,” Brad said.

  “What?” Juliet said.

  “It’s going to be OK.”

  “Who is this?”

  “A friend.”

  “Seriously, who the hell is this?”

  “I . . .” Brad said. “It’s going to be OK.”

  She hung up. Brad called back. The line was busy. He called back. Still busy. Six hours later, he tried again. She answered.

  “Hello?” she said.

  But Brad didn’t have words for Juliet. He reached down with both hands. The phone cord tore out of the wall, splintering wood everywhere.

  “Fuck!” Brad shouted.

  Juliet wasn’t his wife anymore. She never would be in this lifetime. He’d traded her in for a blog. Now he was alone, forever.

  Brad walked over to the couch. He sat down and put his head in his hands. For the first time that day, he sobbed.

  Things got worse before they got better, and then the US invaded Iraq and things got worse again. Either way, business boomed over at Cohenopolis, which is what Brad was calling his website, as the rest of the world gradually got online. Brad took no great pleasure in filing opinionated diatribes on Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the Patriot Act, or lengthy posts describing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as “the birth of patronage surveillance.” But he still posted the opinions at exactly the right point in the media curve. The people were online now, and reading.

  What was bad for America was good for the Brad Cohen business. He called the subprime mortgage crisis an “intercontinental boodle quest that made the Teapot Dome look like a Girl Scout Cookies sale” and did so in 2006 when only the true obsessives were paying attention. Meanwhile, his bar mitzvah money continued to marinate in Apple stock, making him a lot of money. He appeared on Bill Maher twice. Jon Stewart asked him, on his third guest appearance, “Why is it that you’re always right about everything?” Time hired him to write a weekly column.

  Brad was on Twitter from Day Ten, on Facebook soon after, and on MSNBC permanently almost immediately after that. After Dinner with Brad Cohen premiered to low ratings, until Brad went on a streak in 2006. He started calling Barack Obama “America’s first black president,” riffing on a phrase that he’d coined in a 1994 New Century profile when young Barack was just a community organizer with an eye on the Illinois State Senate. Brad had been cultivating friendships in the Obama camp before that camp had even known it existed.

  On election night 2008, Brad sat there on the MSNBC podium alongside Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Big Ed Schultz, and all the other liberal swells, basking in the Dawn of a New America. “Brad,” Chris Matthews said, “you got Obama right, you got Hillary right. You got Sarah Palin right. If you’d been alive in 1948, you would have gotten Harry Truman right. I’ve never seen anyone who’s as right as you. So tell us: What’s going to happen next?”

  “I’m keeping that to myself,” Brad said slyly.

  Here was the problem, though: Brad didn’t know. The statute of limitations was running out on his powers. As of March 2010, his ability to predict the future would expire. Even now he could feel the predictions narrowing away. His mind suffered from a kind of future drought. He knew that Obama would stay in power for at least the next couple of years and that the Republicans would block him at every opportunity, but he had no idea what the outcome of that might be. He couldn’t even begin to guess, because he didn’t know.

  He’d been able to specifically predict the 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction two years ahead of time, but after early 2010, anything that might happen in pop culture was a vast and stupid mystery. Gay marriage rights and legalized marijuana seemed like the right and ethical way to lean, but Brad had no idea where those leanings might lead.

  Would Obama get reelected? He didn’t know. Where was Osama bin Laden? When would the economy recover? Would the Republicans seize control of both houses of Congress? Would a sinkhole open up and suck the entire state of Kansas into the center of the earth? Would Bono and Bill Gates ascend to heaven together upon a golden chariot drawn by winged horses? Anything was possible. Brad was going to have to learn to fake it like all the other pundits did.

  For nearly forty years, Brad been a master of time and had done really well. Now, suddenly he found himself staring into the unknown future. It filled him with dread and fear. His youth was over again, and again he faced the wind down. The universe mocked him with its cruel, infinite unpredictability. He was as screwed as anyone else.

  The night before his second fortieth birthday, Brad went for a walk on the National Mall, stoned out of his wits. He tried to think about what would happen tomorrow. Maybe he just needed to wake up, and then clairvoyance would suddenly come to him. But he pretty much knew it wouldn’t. He worried that people would soon find out he was a fraud. Somehow he’d have to rally. It wasn’t the thought of losing the TV show that bothered him. Honestly, it was kind of a grind, and if he got cut off, he’d almost be grateful. But he didn’t want to lose those speaking fees and conference invites. Once the corporate people decided you were smart, the rest of it didn’t matter. You could con them for years with technobabbly motivational talk and hastily sketched “portraits of great men.”

  Brad meandered home, awash in narcissism. He got to his brownstone. Karen Stafford was waiting for him, wearing a very nice Burberry raincoat and a pair of swank leather boots that came up to her knees. She looked better now than she had in 1992. The Obama years had been good ones in Democratic Washington.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “It’s your birthday,” she said.

  He and Karen didn’t see each other much anymore. They’d tried living
together at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003, five months of wariness and disinterest, and quickly abandoned the project. Now it was the occasional cocktail party or chance meeting at a convention. But once a year she still came by to give Brad his birthday present, which he paid for with a hundred-dollar tip. It was a sick fantasy, and they never told anyone else. Their dynamic only worked if there was a hint of the illicit involved.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  Every year Brad told himself that he was going to stop, that this arrangement was kinky fun in his twenties but that now it was starting to feel desperate. And then every year Karen would pop out of that coat, trimmed as a hedge, and he’d plunge in again. He didn’t know what was in it for her exactly. In fact, he’d never bothered to ask, which pretty well summed up the central problem in their relationship.

  This year, though, Brad didn’t even wait to get up the stairs. He grabbed Karen’s shoulder and spun her around. She gasped. Usually she kept him pinned for hours. Brad pressed his mouth against hers. She pushed him away.

  “Whoa there, pony,” she said. “Aren’t you gonna let a girl have a glass of wine first?”

  “It’s just that . . .” Brad said. “I need . . .”

  “Yeah, I know what you need,” she said. “Now quit your moaning, take me upstairs, and treat me like a person.”

  “I can’t wait,” Brad said.

  He relaxed his grip. Karen was the boss. She didn’t respond well to aggressive gestures from others. But she’d also misunderstood Brad’s urgency. He didn’t want to get laid, at least not any more than usual. A feeling welled in his core. He had to express it.

  He mounted her the second he had the opportunity, so quickly that neither of them had their tops off. He slid up and down while grunting desperately, a panicked one-way hump.

  It only took about a minute. Brad rolled off, peeled away the condom, and panted like a dog. Brad moved up toward her face. He wanted to cuddle.