The Bend of the World: A Novel

by Jacob Bacharach

  I’m his boss’s girlfriend, she said.

  No shit, said Mandy. I thought you were a fag. No offense.

  None taken.

  That’s what I’ve been telling him for years, said Johnny. He positively reeks of sexual deviancy.

  You haven’t been telling me that for years. You once accused me of an aggressive heterosexuality that resembles American imperialism.

  Did I say that? said Johnny. I’m very quotable, aren’t I?

  The point being, haha, said Pringle, that if you view higher dimensionality from a calculitic perspective, the difference between time travel and space travel becomes extremely vague.

  So, I said, what’s their deal? The UFOs. What are they doing in Pittsburgh, uh, out of season?

  Presumably, Pringle said, still ignoring my tone, they are drawn by the psycho-temporal distortions in the local time field caused by the Project as it nears its completion.

  Is it near completion? Helen asked. She pressed her knee against mine. Our eyes met. She grinned privately, just for me.

  Oh, very. December, or thereabouts. They don’t know that I plan to preempt them.

  They? I said.

  The Project, he said.

  Including you? I mean, aren’t you part of the Project?

  Possibly including me. Possibly including you. He turned to Helen. Very possibly including you, my dear.

  Me? she said. I just moved here.

  Time tracks can be tricky, Pringle said. And, of course, none of us can be sure if we are or are not involved. But I have a strong feeling about you. I’ve seen you, you know.

  Oh yeah? she said.

  Yes, Pringle said. In dreamtime. I very clearly recall seeing you enter the main Time Chamber with a reptiloid humanoid.

  Haha, I said. Maybe it was Mark.

  Maybe it was, she said. She didn’t laugh.

  I’m kidding, I said.

  Me, too, she said.

  So where’s the Time Chamber?

  Directly under the fountain at Point State Park, Johnny said.

  For real? I gave him a look that held the promise of mutual understanding if he’d just give me some sign that he found this whole deal as much a trip as I did, but he only raised an eyebrow at me, and I admit that, despite all my efforts to the contrary, I began to wonder what was really going on.

  Of course, Pringle said, it’s on a separate time track.

  Of course, I said.

  You’re very dismissive, Mandy said.

  What’s your deal? I said.

  Merchandising, she replied.

  You know, Pringle said, we’re not so different, you and I. He fixed me in his unblinking Murine gaze.

  I’d probably beg to differ, I said.

  Children of privilege he said. Scions of a powerful family.

  I’m not sure I’d call my family powerful, I said.

  Bearing the burdens of a past fascism, seeking amends.

  No, I said. I don’t think I’d agree with that characterization, precisely.

  Your grandfather, you know, was involved heavily in the Westinghouse empire.

  Did Johnny tell you that? I asked. Johnny shrugged. In fact, my grandfather wasn’t much of a businessman after all.

  Regardless, Pringle said, I can see you have yet to cut the cord.

  Oh no? I said.

  Verily, Pringle said.

  Amen, I said.

  Well, ahem, Pringle said. Dessert?

  I could use another drink, said Helen.

  I’m sure you could, Johnny said.

  She glared at him.

  I was thinking, Pringle said, more along the lines of a pick-me-up.

  I’ve got a little coke, said Helen. I tilted my head. A girl’s gotta be prepared, she said.

  Thank you, no, dear. I propose we instead imbibe in something altogether more potent.

  No, thanks, I said.

  Live a little, Johnny told me.

  I intend to, I said.

  Fear of death is an animal emotion, Johnny responded.

  Well, then me and Anubis over there will be dancing partners for the evening.

  The dog, hearing his name, gave a pleased, throaty little bark and slapped his tail a few times against the floor.

  10

  But I was steadfast in my refusal to take any of Pringle’s weird concoction, and after a bit of cajoling and the offer of a complimentary hand scan, the dinner party broke up. Some young, smoother, more attractive boys than Johnny or me required his product and his attention; Mandy and the dog went off to continue the distribution of the sacraments; a band was playing out by the bonfire. A crowd was smoking and drinking and dancing under the crooked wooden horse. Helen had had one too many and told me she was going to go do a few bumps to sober up. It seemed like an offer of sex, but when I looked at her, her hair falling across her face, a slight redness to her eyes, that brittle, careful timbre returning to her voice, I got depressed; I thought, Lauren Sara never looked like that; I said, No, thanks, and maybe Helen understood something else in it, because she frowned furiously before she walked away. I was at last alone with Johnny on the balcony looking out over the field. You’ve got a real way with women, Morrison. Maybe you are a fag.

  I wish, I said.

  You look like shit, he told me.

  It’s been a weird couple of days.

  You know, your new employer is implicated in the Pittsburgh Project.

  I’m not surprised.

  I’m thinking of doing a significant exposé, Johnny said. On my blog.

  Come on, I said. I thought you’d quit blogging.

  It is possible, Johnny said, that I may still blog a bit here and there.

  You ought to watch it, I said. Everyone’s still pissed off about that Alieyinz shit.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about

  Whatever. Derek told me that Jonah Kantsky is looking for the perp.

  Kantsky? Did you know he’s ex-Mossad?

  That’s the rumor, I said.

  How is Derek? Still doing the dirty work of the corporate surveillance state global gulag?

  He’s fine, I said. Except that he fucked Lauren Sara.

  So? Johnny said. Didn’t they used to date?

  Recently, I said.

  Oh. He shrugged. Want me to kill him? Mandy can dispose of the body.

  I hope you’re joking.

  We’ll lure him up here, sacrifice him to that buffalo, and dump him in the river.

  What buffalo? The horse?

  It’s supposed to be an owl. Like—

  The Bohemian Grove, I said.

  I’ve missed you, Johnny said.

  What the fuck are you doing out here? I said.

  It’ll all be finished soon.

  Johnny, I said.

  Seriously. Trust me. This is nothing permanent. It’s just something I’m working on for the time being.

  For the time being? I said.

  Just for the time being, he said.

  I hope so, I said.

  Helen returned, looking both more awake and more miserable. What’s wrong? I said.

  I want to go, she said.

  I’m too drunk, I said. We’re stuck.

  Fuck that, she said. The cocaine, or something, had made her angry. This is fucking boring. I want to go. She was tired, suddenly, with that ironic, exhausted look that comes after too many visits with stimulants in too short a span, and for the first time I considered her age and realized that she must actually be nearly forty, a discomfiting thought, because while thirty seems the far rim of a yawning canyon all through your twenties, right up to the very last second of your twenty-ninth-year, the moment you cross into that fourth decade of your life, forty rushes at you as inevitably as the ground when you’ve leapt from a cliff. There was a suggestive dampness around her nostrils. I thought back to that first night we’d met. I thought of Mark saying, She gets a little crazy, and then felt badly for thinking it.

  You said you liked it.

  I
don’t anymore. I’ll drive.

  Oh no, I said. You’re not driving.

  Fuck you, Mark, she said. I can drive.

  Who? I said.

  Whatever, she said. Give me the keys.

  No, no, no, I said. I tried to laugh, as if we were all having a good time. She stuck out her lip and turned to Johnny.

  Fine. Then I want to do the time drug.

  He winked at me. I think it’s counterindicated with your other little what-have-you, he said.

  I dropped the rest in the toilet, she said. Let’s do the other thing.

  Helen, I said.

  Who the fuck are you? she said. Fuck off.

  Johnny, I said.

  Sorry, buddy, he told me. It’s the libertarian thing to do. Don’t tread on me. Do what thou wilt and that shall be the whole of the law. Who is John Galt?

  Huh? said Helen.

  Follow me, beautiful, Johnny said.

  And I, reluctantly, but less reluctantly than I made it appear, followed as well.

  11

  What’s her fucking problem?

  We were waiting for the drugs to come up. They were not coming up. Dissociatives were the most infuriating of all psychopharmacological playthings. They messed with your sense of time even before they messed with your sense of time. The ductile moment of anticipation elongated and thinned and became a gossamer thread that caught the breeze and carried your excitement away like a baby spider on its own silk. It was replaced by anxiety and annoyance. It wasn’t going to work. The drugs were bogus. Your mind had adapted. Your metabolism had changed. An hour had passed. Fuck it. You got another beer. We were drinking some beers.

  I shrugged. Beats me, I said. She dropped the coke in the can.

  We were sitting on the edge of the woods. The bands were still playing up by the lodge. The fire was still going strong. It was bright, but not as bright as the city, and you could see the stars overhead.

  You can see Canis Major, said Johnny.

  Yeah, thanks, Edwin Hubble.

  Copernicus.

  Tycho Brahe.

  Oh, good one. Georges-Henri Lemaître.

  Jan Hendrik Oort, motherfucker.

  Kip Thorne.

  I concede, I said.

  Helen was sitting apart from us in the grass and playing with her phone. Thorne, Johnny said, was instrumental in the development of black hole cosmology. Pringle thinks he was involved in the Project back in the seventies.

  Was anyone not involved?

  Shit goes deep, Johnny said.

  Do you really believe this shit? I asked him. I meant, Should I believe it?

  I believe everything, he said. A man who believes in everything is surprised by nothing. All eventualities ultimately obtain. The best of all possible worlds is the possibility of all possible worlds.

  I think it’s starting to work.

  No, Johnny said. I’m not feeling it.

  She’s probably texting Mark, I said. I get the feeling she got a nastygram.

  A what?

  Oh, God, sorry. Something a coworker used to say. Fortunately, we fired her. Well, she quit.

  Fortunately? Johnny turned enough to look at me. How is that fortunate? Fortunate for whom?

  She didn’t do anything, I said.

  Do anything? he said. Jesus fucking Christ. And you think I’m the dangerous one.

  I never said that.

  No, he said, you didn’t.

  Helen, I called, are you okay?

  I’m getting a drink, she said. She sighed. Want anything?

  I’m good, I said.

  I’ve got to make a call, she said. I’ll be back.

  To who?

  She bit her lip with displeasure, seemed about to answer, and then walked away toward the house.

  Morrison, Johnny said, you are one smooth motherfucker. How do you keep fooling these chicks into liking you?

  Let’s take a walk, I said.

  12

  We walked around the perimeter of the party, but something compelled us to go into the woods. Our fondest memories of each other involved the woods, the acreage north of Johnny’s grandparents’ house or the other times when Pappy would take us to Raccoon Creek and Ohiopyle and Linn Run. We had been fortunate to be neither very popular nor very unpopular in school; attainment of the former state required a swift, early, and brutal self-amputation of the better part of imagination, the substitution of sarcasm for irreverence, and the acquisition of all the fucked up values of adulthood that adults try to disclaim when they compare the office or the PTA or the neighborhood association to a high school, their cliquey, backbiting colleagues to teenagers. The office and the other women at the gym and the social committee at the church are not like high school, not like teenagers—rather, the opposite. Rather, the young acquire all their most iniquitous habits from the grown-ups in their lives. Meanwhile, the truly unpopular, beset constantly by the depredations of the sociopathic socially adept, had no time for imagination, being too busy simply seeking to avoid attention. But to the slim middle, those of us who were rich enough or self-possessed enough or weird and resilient enough to glide through like distant relatives at a wedding or a funeral, it was possible to cultivate some wonder at the world, and the woods, because they were essentially private, permitted us the expression of it.

  13

  We were somewhere near the river—we could smell it—when we heard the first shot. I wasn’t sure when we’d stopped hearing music, but we had, and then something like a distant thunderclap, but muffled, as if heard through a thick curtain. Did you hear that? I asked Johnny. Huh? he said. He was walking with his head tilted back, his mouth hanging open, staring through the leaves to the stars overhead. What I love about the country, he said, is that you can really see the stars. You’re fucked up, I said. Sober as the day is long, he replied. I swear I just heard a gunshot, I told him. Yeah? said Johnny. What’s the upshot? Fuck you, I said. Then I felt the pressure change beside my ear and a trunk beside us popped with splinters. This time the report was clearer. Holy shit! I said. Run! Huh? said Johnny. Run! I grabbed his arm and pulled him after me. It was dark. We took two steps and tripped down a muddy embankment and slid thirty feet into a leaf-choked trickle of a stream. The muck and loam smelled sweet and yeasty. Johnny was on top of me. Fuck, you weigh a ton, I said, but he was giggling and wouldn’t move. What’s so funny? I said. You have a boner. That’s my phone, you asshole. Get off of me. Someone just shot at us.

  Oh, I don’t know, Johnny said. It’s dark. Probably a case of mistaken identity.

  We’ve got to get out of the woods, I said.

  No, don’t worry, Johnny said. I have excellent night vision. He started laughing again.

  Come on, I said, and I pulled him to his feet, and we set off through the mud beside the stream.

  But I was feeling pretty high myself, and as my awareness swam into a moment of adrenal lucidity, it occurred to me that we were walking very, very slowly. Johnny was saying something about the time he ran a campaign on the Western Front. We need to find the Fist of Odin, he said.

  The what?

  The Fist of Odin, dude. It looks sort of like a rock.

  Why?

  Beats me.

  I think we need to find a fucking phone, I said.

  Use your boner.

  What? Oh, asshole. Yeah. I’d forgotten. I pulled the phone from my pocket, but it was soaked, cracked, ruined. Well, so much for that, I said.

  What we need is a good old-fashioned field radio, Johnny said.

  Yeah, well, if we happen to stumble across one. We were getting closer to the river. The creek bed was getting rockier, and I could smell the muddy water.

  I think we’ve lost them, Johnny said.

  Keep walking.

  We’re having an adventure! He put his big arm around my shoulder and gave me a sideways hug. Fuck, yeah.

  Yeah, I said. We are.

  It’s a fucking stupid adventure. My pants are all wet.

  Mine,
too.

  I have something to confess, Johnny said.

  Oh yeah?

  It’s possible that I may have been stealing money and, you know, drugs from Pringle.

  He delivered the line soberly; he was nonchalant. I shrugged off his arm and pushed him away. Fuck, Johnny! You think maybe that’s why someone just took a shot at us?

  Whoa, no reason to get pissed at me!

  Fuck.

  You said that already.

  We’ve got to get back to the city, I said. We’ve got to find my car.

  No need! We turned. Pringle stood outlined against the sky like a boulder on a stone outcropping about six feet above us. He was dressed in something like a cross between a paratrooper and a school janitor’s uniform.

  Behold me and despair! Pringle declaimed.

  Shit, we said. He was holding a rifle. It had the look of an antique, and I wondered if it was real, but I didn’t know anything about guns, and it looked real enough.

  You boys have gone far enough.

  Listen, I said. I held up my hands. There’s no reason to be crazy. I can pay you. I can cover whatever he took. I make good money. My family’s rich.

  Oh, you’ll pay, all right. You’ll pay, Herr Morrison. I’ve come to balance the accounts.

  Johnny tried to step in front of me, arms extended, but he was so stoned that he slipped and fell on his ass in the water. Leave him, he yelled. Take me!

  Johnny, Jesus, I said. Get up.

  Both of you shut up! Pringle screamed. Then he fired a shot above our heads. The gun was unbearably loud this time, and I realized in some distant, dimly functioning portion of my mind, the cold corner of my consciousness that could see and record and remain disinterested, that I was afraid.

  It’s Morrison that I want, Pringle said. It’s always been Morrison.

  What did I do?

  Your grandfather, Morrison. He ruined me. He ruined me and took the Project from me. For I am Wilhelm Zollen!

  My grandfather? You’ve, uh, aged well, if that’s the case.

  Olive oil, said Johnny. Is that your secret?

  You guys are assholes, said Pringle, now petulant. He seemed as if he were about to leap from the rock, but instead he slung the rifle over his shoulder and sat and dangled his legs over like he was going to ease himself into a swimming pool, and then he sort of slowly shuffled around and hung by his arms, his huge ass toward us, and then he dropped the last couple of feet to the ground. He righted himself slowly and panted. I guess if we’d been sober, if it had been daylight, if either of us had been a different sort of person, we might have taken the opportunity to jump him and take the gun, or to run away, but Johnny just sat there in the stream, and I just stood there, and Pringle caught his breath and cried, I am his son! So you’re not him, I said. You’re his son.