McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  I didn’t want to watch it anymore, so I picked up the remote; never in my life have I wanted to see the opening credits of Sabrina so bad. But after a couple of hours of news stuff there was nothing. The TV just stops. Network TV canceled. I’ve spent most of my time since then trying to see if I can get beyond the static, but I’m not there yet.

  Now, all this time, I haven’t spoken to anyone about any of this shit. Not to Mom, not to anyone at school, not to Martha. That’s one thing they get right in stories, even though I didn’t use to think so: You don’t want to talk about spooky stuff. In the stories, there’s always some reason for it, like, I don’t know, the words don’t come out when they try to speak, or the magic thing only works for the guy who’s telling the story, something like that, but the real reason is, it just sounds dumb. When it finally clicked that I could watch NBA games before they happened, then obviously I thought I was going to ask a bunch of guys to come over to watch. But how do you say it? How do you say, I’ve got a video recorder that lets me fast-forward through the whole of TV? You don’t, is the answer, unless you’re a complete jerk. Can you imagine? The only quicker way to get a pounding would be to wear a STA-COOL T-shirt to school. (I just thought of something: If you’re reading this, you might not know about STA-COOL. Because if you’re reading this, it’s way off in the future, after the static, and you might have forgotten about STA-COOL, where you are. Maybe it’s a better world where people only listen to good music, not stupid pussy boy-band shit, because the world understands that life is too short for boy bands. Well, good. I’m glad. We did not die in vain.) And I was going to tell Mom, but not yet, and then when I got to the static . . . People should be allowed to enjoy their lives, is my view. Sometimes when she gives me a hard time about my clothes or playing my music loud, I want to say something. Like, “Don’t stress out, Mom, because in a month or so someone’s going to drop the big one.” But most of the time I just want her to enjoy her painting, and living in Berkeley. She’s happy here.

  When I remembered the guy I bought the machine from, though, I wanted to speak to him. He’d seen the static too; that’s what that conversation in his shop had been all about, except I didn’t know it. He realized why I’d come as soon as I walked in. I didn’t even say anything. He just saw it in my face.

  “Oh, man,” he said after a little while. “Oh, man. I never even started my novel.” Which I couldn’t believe. I mean, Jesus. What else did this guy need to help him understand that time is running out? He’d seen the end of the fucking world on live TV, and he still hadn’t gotten off his stoned ass. Although maybe he’d figured he wasn’t going to find a publisher in time. And he certainly wasn’t going to get too many readers.

  “Maybe we’re both crazy,” I said. “Maybe we’re getting it all wrong.”

  “You think network TV would stop for any other reason? Like, to encourage us to get more exercise or something?”

  “Maybe the thing just stopped working.”

  “Yeah, and all those people were going into the subway with their kids because they couldn’t find any child care. No, we’re fucked, man. I never voted for that bitch, and now she’s killed me. Shit.”

  At least you’ve had a life, I wanted to say. I haven’t done anything yet. And that was when I decided to ask Martha out.

  OK. That was the weird middle. Now I’m going to give you the happy ending: the story of how I got to sleep with the hottest girl in the Little Berkeley Big Band, even though I’m only fifteen, and even though she doesn’t look like the sort of girl who gives it up for anybody.)

  One thing about knowing the world is going to end: It makes you a lot less nervous about the whole dating thing. So that’s a plus. And she made it easy, anyway. We were talking in her dad’s car about movies we’d seen, and movies we wanted to see, and it turned out we both wanted to see this Vin Diesel movie about a guy who can turn himself into like a bacteria anytime he feels like it and hang out in people and kill them if necessary. (Although to tell you the truth, I used to want to see it more than I do now. There are a lot of things I used to want to do more than I do now. Like, I don’t know, buying stuff. It sounds kind of dumb, I guess, but if you see a cool T-shirt, you’re thinking about the future, aren’t you? You’re thinking, Hey, I could wear that to Sarah Steiner’s party. There are so many things connected to the future—school, eating vegetables, cleaning your teeth. . . . In my position, it’d be pretty easy to let things slide.) So it seemed like the logical next step to say, Hey, why don’t we go together?

  The movie was OK. And afterward we went to get a pizza, and we talked about what it would be like to be a bacteria, and about the band, and about her school and my school. And then she told me that one of the reasons she liked me was that I seemed sad.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Does that sound dumb?”

  “No.” Because a) nothing she says sounds dumb; b) even if it did, it would be dumb to tell her; c) I’m sad. With good reason. So I’m not surprised I look it.

  “Most guys our age don’t look sad. They’re always laughing about nothing.”

  I laughed—a little—because what she said was so true, and I hadn’t even noticed it before.

  “So are you really sad? Or is that just the way your face is?”

  “I guess . . . I don’t know. I guess I’m sad sometimes.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “You first.”

  Oh, man. I’ve seen enough movies and soaps to know that the sad guy is supposed to be the quiet, sensitive, poetic one, and I’m not sure that’s me. I wasn’t sad before I knew there was going to be a terrible catastrophe and we’re all in trouble; suddenly, I went from like NBA fan to tortured genius-style dude. I think she’s got the wrong impression. If PJ Rogers, who’s this really really stupid trombonist kid in the orchestra, the kind of jerk whose wittiest joke is a loud fart, had seen what I’d seen, he’d be a tortured genius too.

  “There’s some stuff I’m worried about. That’s all. It’s not like I’m this really deep thinker.”

  “Lots of kids don’t worry even when there’s something to worry about. They’re too insensitive.”

  “How about you?” I wanted to change the subject. I was getting way too much credit.

  “I don’t know why I’m sad half the time. I just am.”

  I wanted to say to her, Now, see, that’s the real deal. That’s being sensitive and screwed up . . . the classic Breakfast Club stuff. I’m an amateur compared to you. But I didn’t. I just nodded, like I knew what she was talking about.

  “Do you want to tell me about the things you’re worried about? Would it help?”

  “It’d help me. I think it would fuck you up.”

  “I can take it.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Try me.”

  And I was so sick of being on my own that I took her up on the offer. It’s probably the most selfish thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.

  I asked her over to my house for lunch, after a Saturday morning rehearsal. Mom took us back and fixed us sandwiches, and when we’d eaten we went up to my room to listen to music—or that’s what she thought we were going to do. When we got upstairs, though, I explained everything, right from the beginning. I’d prepared this; I’d rewound to the point where the news started taking over the networks, and I’d found a section where they were talking about what happened when, and all the dates they mentioned were in the future. That was my evidence, and Martha believed it. It took a couple more hours to get back to the New York City subway scenes, but she wanted to see them, so we just sat there waiting. And then she watched, and then she started to cry.

  Listen: There’s something that’s bothering me. Before, when I said that I asked Martha out on a date because I haven’t done anything in my life yet ... I’m not so much of an asshole that this was the first thing I thought of. It wasn’t. It was one of the first, sure, but, you know—six weeks! There are lots of o
ther things I wanted to achieve in my life, but I’m not going to get them done in six weeks. I’m not going to go to film school, and I’m not going to have a kid, and I’m not going to drive across the U.S.; at least sex is something achievable. And it’s not like I was just looking for the first available piece of ass, either. I really like Martha a lot. In fact, if . . . but let’s not go there. This is the happy ending, right?

  Anyway. The next part came naturally. She stopped crying, and we talked, and we tried to understand what had happened. Martha knows more about that shit than I do; she said things were already pretty bad, now, in the present, but because things are happening in other countries a long ways away, I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been watching the basketball, not the news. And then we had this real sad conversation about the stuff I’d already been thinking— about what we’d miss, and what we’d never do. . . .

  The truth is, she suggested it, not me. I swear. I mean, I wasn’t going to say no, but it was her idea. She said that she wanted us to get good at it, which meant starting like straightaway. (She said this before, by the way. She didn’t say it in response to anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.) So I made sure Mom was still out, and then we kissed, and then we got undressed and made love in my bed. We didn’t use anything. Neither of us can have any sexual disease, and if she gets pregnant, well, that’s fine by us. We’d love to have a kid, for obvious reasons.

  Well, that’s it. That brings you up-to-date, whoever you are. Martha and I see each other all the time, and this weekend we’re going to go away together; I’m going to tell Mom that I want to see Dad, and she’s going to give her parents some other excuse, and we’ll take off somewhere, somehow. And that’ll be something else we’ve checked on the list—we’ll have spent a whole night together. I know it’s maybe not the happy ending you were hoping for, but you probably weren’t hoping for a happy ending anyway, because you already know about the Time of the Static. Unless you’re reading this in the next six weeks, and I’m sure as hell not going to show anybody. How is it where you are? Have people learned their lesson? How was that show about the three-inch rock star? Maybe they canceled it.

  The Tale of Gray Dick

  By STEPHEN KING

  They had looked everywhere for protection from their most

  devastating foe—except to the murderous know-how of

  their old wives’ tales.

  When evening came, Roland Deschain returned on horseback from the Manni village to Eisenhart’s Lazy B. He’d spent the afternoon in a long palaver with Henchick, the dinh of the Manni. Only here in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the head of clan was called the heart-stone. In the case of Henchick, Roland thought the term fit very well. Yet the man understood that trouble was on the way. Stony-hearted he might be; stupid he was not.

  Roland sat behind the ranch house, listening to the boys shout and the dog bark. Back in Gilead (where the gunslinger had come from a thousand years before), this sort of porch, facing the barns, stock-well, and fields, would have been called the work-stoop.

  “Boys!” Eisenhart bawled. “What in the name of the Man Jesus am I going to tell yer mothers if you kill yer sad selfs jumpin out of that barn?”

  “We’re okay!” Benny Slightman called. He was the son of Eisenhart’s foreman. Dressed in bib overalls and barefooted, he was standing in the open bay of the barn, just above the carved letters which said LAZY B. “Unless . . . do you really want us to stop, sai?”

  Eisenhart glanced toward Roland, who saw his own boy, Jake, standing just behind Benny, impatiently waiting his chance to risk his bones. Jake was also dressed in bib overalls—a pair of his new friend’s, no doubt—and the look of them made Roland smile. Jake wasn’t the sort of boy you imagined in such clothes.

  “It’s nil to me, one way or the other, if that’s what you want to know,” Roland said.

  “Garn, then!” the rancher called. Then he turned his attention to the bits and pieces of hardware spread out on the boards. “What do’ee think? Will any of ’em shoot?”

  Eisenhart had produced all three of his guns for Roland’s inspection. The best was the rifle. The other two were pistols of the sort Roland and his friends had called “barrel-shooters” as children, because of the oversized cylinders which had to be revolved with the side of the hand after each shot. Roland had disassembled Eisenhart’s shooting irons with no initial comment. Once again he had set out gun oil, this time in a bowl instead of a saucer.

  “I said—”

  “I heard you, sai,” Roland said. “Your rifle is as good as I’ve seen this side of Lud, the great city. The barrel-shooters . . .” He shook his head. “That one with the nickel plating might fire. The other you might as well stick in the ground. Maybe it’ll grow something better.”

  “Hate to hear you speak so,” Eisenhart said. “These were from my da’ and his da’ before him and on back at least this many.” He raised four fingers and both thumbs. “They was always kept together and passed to the likeliest son by dead-letter. When I got ’em instead of my elder brother, I was some pleased.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Say thankya.”

  The sun was going down red in the west, turning the yard the color of blood. There was a line of rockers on the porch. Eisenhart was settled in one of them. Roland sat cross-legged on the boards, housekeeping Eisenhart’s inheritance. That the pistols would probably never fire meant nothing to the gunslinger’s hands, which had been trained to this work long ago and still found it soothing.

  Now, with a speed that made the rancher blink, Roland put the weapons back together in a rapid series of clicks and clacks. He set them aside on a square of sheepskin, wiped his fingers on a rag, and sat in the rocker next to Eisenhart’s. He guessed that on more ordinary evenings, Eisenhart and his wife sat out here side by side, watching the sun abandon the day.

  The wife had been part of his palaver that afternoon, more important because of what was not said than because of what was.

  Roland rummaged through his purse for his tobacco pouch, found it, and built himself a cigarette with the priest’s fresh, sweet tobacco. The Pere’s housekeeper, Rosalita, had added her own present, a little stack of delicate papers she called “rice-pulls.” Roland thought they wrapped as good as any cigarette paper, and he paused a moment to admire the finished product before tipping the end into the match Eisenhart had popped alight with one horny thumbnail. The gunslinger dragged deep and exhaled a long plume that rose but slowly in the evening air, which was still and surprisingly muggy for summer’s end. “Good,” he said, and nodded.

  “Aye? May it do ya fine. I never got the taste for it myself.”

  The barn was far bigger than the ranch house, at least fifty yards long and fifty feet high. The front was festooned with reap-charms in honor of the season; stuffy-guys with huge sharproot heads stood guard. From above the open bay over the main doors, the butt of the head-beam jutted. A rope had been fastened around this. Below, in the yard, the boys had built a good-sized stack of hay. Oy stood on one side of it. The dog was looking up as Benny Slightman grabbed the rope, gave it a tug, then retreated back into the loft and out of sight. Oy began to bark in anticipation. A moment later Benny came pelting forward with the rope wrapped in his fists and his hair flying out behind him.

  The boy let go, flew into the haystack, disappeared, then came up laughing. Oy ran around him, barking.

  Roland watched Jake reel in the rope. Benny lay on the ground, playing dead, until Oy licked his face. Then he sat up, giggling.

  To one side of the barn was a remuda of workhorses, perhaps twenty in all. A trio of cowpokes in chaps and battered shor’ boots were leading the last half-dozen mounts toward it. On the other side of the yard was a slaughter-pen filled with steers. In the following weeks they would be butchered and sent downriver on the trading boats.

  Jake retreated into the loft, then came pelting forward and launched himself into space along the arc of the rope. The two men watched him disappear, la
ughing, into the pile of hay.

  “We bide, gunslinger,” Eisenhart said. “Even in the face of the outlaws, we bide. They come . . . but then they go. Do’ee ken?”

  “Ken very well, say thankya.”

  Eisenhart nodded. “If we stand against ’em, all that may change. To you and yours, it might not mean s’much as a fart in a high wind either way. If ye survive, you’ll move along, win or lose. We have nowhere to go.”

  “But—”

  Eisenhart raised his hand. “Hear me, I beg. Would’ee hear me?”

  Roland nodded. Beyond them, the boys were running back into the barn for another leap. Soon the coming dark would put an end to their game.

  “Suppose they send fifty or sixty, as they have before, and we wipe them out? And then, suppose that a week or a month later, after you’re gone, they send five hundred against us?”

  Roland considered this. As he was doing so, Margaret Eisenhart—Margaret Henchick that was—joined them. She was slim, fortyish, small-breasted, dressed in jeans and a shirt of gray silk. She was a pretty woman. She was also a problematic woman, stuffed with unspoken rage. After meeting her father—he that was called the heart-stone, he with the uncut, ungroomed beard which signified that he was childless—Roland thought he understood that rage a little better. As far as Henchick was concerned, this woman was bound for hell simply for the ankle she showed the world below the cuff of her jeans. And her husband? The children they’d made together? Better not to ask Henchick’s opinion of them, and Roland hadn’t. Sai Eisenhart’s hair, pulled into a bun against her neck, was black threaded with white. One hand hid beneath her apron.

  “How many harriers might come against us is a fair question,” she said, “but this might not be a fair time to ask it.”

  Eisenhart gave his sai a look that was half humorous and half irritated. “Do I tell you how to run your kitchen, woman? When to cook and when to wash?”

  “Only four times a week,” said she. Then, seeing Roland rise from the rocker next to her husband’s: “Nay, sit still, I beg you. I’ve been in a chair this last hour, peeling sharproot with Edna, yon’s mother.” She nodded in Benny’s direction. “It’s good to be on my feet.” She watched, smiling, as the boys swung out into the pile of hay and landed, laughing, while Oy danced and barked. “Vaughn and I have never had to face the full horror of it, Roland. We had six, all twins, but all grown in the times between raids. So we may not have all the understanding needed to make such a decision as you ask.”