McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  “So why aren’t you using it anymore?” I asked him. I was trying to be sharp, but that doesn’t often work for me. Give me an hour or two and I’m sharp as a box cutter, but sometimes in the moment, things don’t work out as good as I’d want.

  “I got a better one,” he said. I couldn’t really argue with that. He could probably have made one that was better. Shit, I could probably have made one that was better.

  “But it records?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Records and plays?”

  “No, kid. It does everything else, just doesn’t record or play.”

  “So if it doesn’t record or play, what’s the point . . .” Then I realized he was being sarcastic, so of course I felt pretty dumb.

  “And you never had any trouble with it?”

  “Depends what you mean by trouble.”

  “Like . . . with recording? Or playing?” I couldn’t think of another way of putting it.

  “No.”

  “So what sort of trouble did you have?”

  “If this conversation lasts any longer, I’ll have to put the price up. Otherwise it’s not worth my time.”

  “Does it come with a remote?”

  “I can find you one.”

  So I just dug in my pocket for the fifty bucks, handed it to him, and went and got the thing off the top of the pile. He found a remote and put it in my jacket pocket. And then, as I was walking out, he said this weird thing.

  “Just . . . forget it.”

  “What?”

  “I did.”

  “What?”

  This guy was old-school Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Gray beard, gray ponytail, dirty old vest.

  “Cos it can’t know anything, right? It’s just a fucking VCR. What can it know? Nothing.”

  “No, man,” I said. Because I thought I had a handle on him then, you know? He was nuts, plain and simple. Weed had destroyed his mind. “No, it can’t know anything. Like you say, what could it know?”

  He smiled then, like he was really relieved, and it was only when he smiled that I could tell how sad he looked before.

  “I really needed to hear that,” he said.

  “Happy to oblige.”

  “I’m forty-nine years old, and I got a lot to do. I got a novel to write.”

  “You’d better hurry.”

  “Really?” He looked worried again. I didn’t know what the fuck I’d said.

  “Well. You know. Hurry in your own time.” Because I didn’t care when he wrote his stupid novel. Why should I?

  “Right. Right. Hey, thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  And that was it. I thought about what he’d said for maybe another minute and a half, and then forgot about him. For a while, anyway.

  So I was all set. I had a band rehearsal that night, so I wired the VCR up to the TV in my room, and then I did a little test on it. I recorded some news show for a couple minutes, and then I played it back—A-OK. I checked out the remote—fine. I even put my tape of The Matrix in the machine, to see what kind of picture quality I was getting. (The kind of picture quality you get on a fifty-buck VCR was what I was getting.) Then I worked out the timer, and set it for the last part of that night’s Lakers game. Everything was cool. Or rather, everything would have been cool, if my mom hadn’t decided to interfere, although as it turned out, it was a good sort of interference.

  What happened was, I got a lift home from Martha’s dad. With Martha in the car. I mean, of course Martha was in the car, because that was why her dad had turned up at the community center, but, you know. Martha was in the car. Which meant . . . well, not too much, if you really want to analyze it that closely. I didn’t talk a whole lot. Like I said, give me a few hours to think about it and I’m William fucking Shakespeare; I’m just not so good in real time. I guess it’s my dad’s genes coming through. He can write OK dialogue if he has enough time to think about it—like a year. But ask him the simplest question, like “What’s going on with you and Mom?” and he’s, you know, “Duh, yeah, well, blah.” Thanks, Dad. That’s made things real clear.

  Anyway, we got in the car, and . . . Oh—first of all, I should tell you that it’s turning into a regular thing, which is how come I wasn’t too disgusted by my performance that night. And maybe I should confess that I nearly blew it, too. This is where Mom’s good/bad interference comes in. What happened was, she dropped into this little gallery in the neighborhood, to see if they’d be interested in exhibiting her stuff, and she got talking to the owner, who turns out to be Martha’s dad. And somehow they got onto the subject of the Little Berkeley Big Band, and like two seconds later they’ve divided up the rides. I’ll be honest here: I completely freaked out when she told me. No amount of singing her song would have calmed me down. She explained that she met this guy who lives real near and his daughter was in the band and so he was going to drop us off and pick us up this week and it was her turn next week and . . .

  “Stop right there.”

  “What?”

  “Do you realize what a bunch of pathetic losers they are in that band? You really expect me to sit in a car with one of them every week?”

  “I’m not asking you to date her. I’m asking you to sit in a car with her for ten minutes once a week.”

  “No way.”

  “Too late.”

  “Fine. I’m quitting the band. As from this second.”

  “You don’t think that’s an overreaction?”

  “No. Goodbye.”

  And I went up to my bedroom. I meant it. I was going to quit. I didn’t care. Even if I was giving up a future career as a superstar jazz trumpeter, it was worth it if it meant not sitting in a car with Eloise and her bad breath. Or Zoe and her quote unquote gland problem (in other words her intense fatness problem). Anyway, Mom came up five minutes later and said that she’d called the guy and canceled the ride, told him I had a doctor’s appointment first so I wouldn’t be leaving from home.

  “A doctor’s appointment? Great, so now everyone thinks I’ve got some gross disease. Thanks a lot.”

  “Jesus.” She shook her head.

  “And anyway, how am I going to get out of coming back with them?” I will admit, I was being pretty difficult.

  She shook her head again. If I hadn’t been so mad, I might have felt sorry for her. “I’ll think of something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Just get in the car. We’ll be late.”

  “No. Now it’s too embarrassing. I’m still quitting.”

  “Paul will be disappointed. I got the impression that he had high hopes for you and Martha. He thought you sounded like . . .”

  “Whoa. Martha?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you like her?”

  I tried to be cool about it. “She’s OK. I’ll just go and find my trumpet.”

  Respect where it’s due to Mom: she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even smile in a way that would have made me freak out all over again. Just waited for me downstairs. She was still in the wrong, though. OK, it turned out well, but there was like a 99.9% chance (or rather, because there are maybe fifteen girls in the band, a ninety-four-point-something percent chance) that it could have been a total disaster. She didn’t know it was Martha, or even who Martha is, so she was just plain lucky.

  Before we get back to me in the car with Martha, which sounds way more exciting than it actually was, there’s one more bit of the story that’s important, but I’m not too sure where to put it. It should either go here—which was roughly where it happened—or later, when I get back from rehearsal, which is where I actually discovered it, and where it has a bit more dramatic effect. But the thing is, if I put it later, you might not believe it. You might think it’s just like a story trick, or something I just made up on the spur of the moment to explain something, and it would really piss me off if you thought that. And anyway, I don’t need any dramatic effects, man.
This story I need to calm down, not pump up. So I’ll tell you here: I messed up the VCR recording of the Lakers game. I was so mad that I watched five minutes of The Matrix, which meant removing the blank tape. I remembered to take out The Matrix tape, but I forgot to put another one back in. (I forgot because once Mom mentioned Martha, I was in kind of a hurry.) But I didn’t know I’d messed up then. See what I mean? If I’d left that part until later, it might have had a little kick to it—“Oh, no, he didn’t tape the game. So how come . . .” But if that little kick means you believe me any less, it’s not worth it.

  Anyway, again. We got in the car after the rehearsal, me, Martha, and her dad, and . . . You know what? None of this part matters. Shit, maybe I should have left the tape thing until later, because now I’ve brought it up, I kind of want to get back to it. I can’t just keep it back for suspense purposes. And if you think about it, that’s how you know most stories aren’t true. I mean, I read a lot of horror writers, and those guys are always delaying the action to build it up a little. As in, I don’t know, “She ran down the path and slammed the front door with a sigh of relief. Little did she know that the Vampire Zombie was in her bathroom.

  “MEANWHILE, two thousand miles away, Frank Miller of the NYPD was frowning. There was something about this case that was troubling him . . .”

  See, if that shit with the Vampire Zombie was real—REAL AND HAPPENING TO YOU—you wouldn’t care whether Frank Miller was frowning or not. You’ve got a zombie in your apartment with a fucking chain saw or a blowtorch or something, so what does it matter what a cop does with his eyebrows on the other side of the country? Therefore, if you’ll permit me to point something out that may ruin your reading pleasure forever, you know that the story has been made up.

  But you know this story, the one I’m telling you, hasn’t been made up. You know it a) because I told you that thing about the tape straightaway, when it happened, rather than trying to get a little zinger going later, and b) because I’m not going to go into who said what to who on a car ride, just to bump up the page numbers, or to make you forget about the tape thing. You just need to hear this much: Martha and I didn’t say an awful lot, but we did some smiling and whatever, so at the end of the ride we maybe both knew we liked each other. And then I got out of the car, said “Hi” to Mom, and went upstairs to watch the game.

  Well, you know now that there wasn’t a tape in the machine, but I didn’t. I sat down on the bed and turned on the TV. Letterman was just starting. He was doing one of those dumb list things that everyone pretends is funny but which really no one understands. I pressed the rewind on the remote: nothing. Not surprising, right? And then I pressed the fast-forward button, I guess because I thought the timer recording hadn’t worked, and I wanted to check that there was a tape in there.

  This is what happened: I started fast-forwarding through Letter-man. I was pretty confused. How could I do that? The show wasn’t even finished, so how could I have taped it? I pressed the eject, and finally I found out what you’ve known for a while: that there was no cassette in there. With no cassette, I can’t be fast-forwarding. But my TV doesn’t seem to know that, because meanwhile, Letterman’s waving his hands in the air really really fast, and then we’re racing through the ads, and then it’s the closing credits, and then it’s the Late Late Show, and then more ads. . . . And that’s when I realize what’s going on: I’m fast-forwarding through network fucking television.

  I mean, obviously I checked this theory out. I checked it out by keeping my finger on the remote until I got to the next morning’s breakfast news, which took maybe an hour. But I got there in the end: they showed the next day’s weather, and the best plays from what they said was last night’s Lakers game—even though it wasn’t last night to me—and, a little later, a big pileup on the freeway near Candlestick Park that had happened in the early morning fog. I could have stopped it, if I’d known any of the drivers. I got bored after a while, and put the remote down; but it took me a long time to get to sleep.

  I woke up late, and I had to rush the next morning, so I didn’t get to move any further through the day’s TV schedule. On my way to school, I tried to think about it all—what I could do with it, whether I’d show it to anyone, whatever. Like I said, I’m not as quick as I’d like to be. Mentally speaking, I’m not Maurice Greene. I’m more like one of those Kenyan long-distance runners. I get there in the end, but it takes like two hours and an awful lot of sweat. And to tell you the absolute truth, when I went to school that morning, I didn’t see it was such a big deal. I was, like, I saw this morning’s weather forecast last night; well, so what? Everyone knew what the weather was now. Same with the pileup. And I’d seen a few of the best plays from the Lakers game, but everyone who didn’t rehearse in a stupid jazz band had seen the whole game anyway. Like, I was supposed to boast to people that I’d seen stuff they saw before I did?

  Imaginary conversation:

  “I saw the best plays from the Lakers game.”

  “So did we. We watched the game.”

  “Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show.”

  “So did we.”

  “Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show last night.”

  “You’re a jerk. You need to have your ass kicked.” What’s fun about that? Watching breakfast news seven hours early didn’t seem like such a big deal to me.

  It took me a while longer than it should have done to get the whole picture: If I just kept fast-forwarding, I could see all kinds of stuff. The rest of the play-offs. The next episodes of Bu fy, or Friends. The next season of Bu fy or Friends. Next month’s weather, whatever that’s worth. Some news stuff, like, maybe, a psycho with a gun coming into our school one day next year, so I could warn the people I liked. (In other words not Brian O’Hagan. Or Mrs. Fleming.) It took me longer than it should have, but I began to see that fast-forwarding through network TV could be awesome.

  And for the next two days, that’s all I did: I sat in my bedroom with the remote, watching the TV of the future. I watched the Lakers destroy the Pacers in the NBA finals. I watched the A’s get smashed by the Yankees. I watched “The One Where Phoebe and Joey Get Married.” I fast-forwarded until I got blisters. I watched TV until even my dreams got played out on a 14‘ screen. I was in my bedroom so often that Mom thought I had just discovered jerking off, and wanted me to call my father and talk. (Like, hello, Mom? I’m fifteen?) I could rewind, too; I could watch reruns of the TV of the future if I wanted.

  And none of it was any use to me. Who wants to know stuff before it happens? People might think they do, but believe me, they don’t, because if you know stuff before it happens, there’s nothing to talk about. A lot of school conversation is about TV and sports; and what people like to talk about is what just happened (which I now can’t remember, because it was three games back, or the episode before last) or what might happen. And when people talk about what might happen, they like to argue, or make dumb jokes; they don’t want someone coming in and squashing it all flat. It’s all, “No, man, Shaq’s not looking so young anymore, I think the Pacers can take them.” “No way! The Pacers have no defense. Shaq’s going to destroy them.” Now, what do you say if you know the score? You tell them? Of course not. It sounds too weird, and there’s nothing to bounce off anyway. So all I ever did was agree with the guy whose prediction was closest to the truth, to what I knew, and it was like I hadn’t seen anything, because the knowledge I had was no fucking good to anyone. One thing I learned: School life is all about anticipation. We’re fifteen, and nothing’s happened to us yet, so we spend an awful lot of time imagining what things will be like. No one’s interested in some jerk who says he knows. That’s not what it’s about.

  But of course I kept going with the remote. I couldn’t stop myself. I’d come back from school and watch, I’d wake up in the morning and watch, I’d come back from rehearsals and watch. I was a month, maybe five weeks, into the future—time enough to know that Frazier gets engag
ed to some writer, that there’s a dumb new sitcom starting soon about a rock star who accidentally becomes three inches tall, and that half the Midwest gets flooded in a freak storm.

  And then. . . . Well, OK, maybe I should say that I had noticed something: The news programs were becoming really fucking long. It took a whole lot of fast-forwarding to get through them. And then one night I came back from school and picked up the remote, and all I could find was news. As far as I could tell, in about six weeks’ time, all of network TV—every channel—is just like one long fucking news show. No Bu fy, no sports, no nothing; just guys in suits with maps, and people in weird countries you’ve never heard of talking into those crappy video things which make them go all jerky and fuzzy. It was like that for a couple days after 9/11, if you remember that long ago, but sooner or later everything went back to normal; I was trying to find that part, but I couldn’t get there.

  Now and again I stopped to watch the people talking, but I didn’t really understand it; there was stuff about India and Pakistan, and Russia, and China, and Iraq and Iran, and Israel and Palestine. There were maps, and pictures of people packing up all their shit in all these places and getting the hell out. The usual stuff, but worse, I guess.

  And then, a few days’ TV-time later, I found the president. I watched some of that—it was on every channel at the same time. She was sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the American people, with this really intense expression on her face. She was so serious it was scary. And she was telling us that these were the darkest days in our history, and that we were all to face them with courage and determination. She said that freedom came at a price, but that price had to be worth paying, otherwise we had no identity or value as a nation. And then she asked God to bless us all. Straight after the show they cut to live pictures of more people getting the hell out of their homes, carrying bundles of their possessions under one arm and small children under another. These people were walking down the steps of a subway station, trying to get underground. The pictures weren’t fuzzy or jerky, though. These people lived in New York City.