McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

“I got divorced six months ago.”

  “I mean in the past month.”

  I nodded, humiliated by the truth.

  “I haven’t been able to finish a story,” I said.

  He sat patient as a lighthouse keeper while I explained myself. A month ago, Michael Chabon invited me to write a story for an all-genre issue he’s guest editing of McSweeney’s, a San Francisco magazine. I refused because my father was a genre writer who’d published more than 150 books under various pseudonyms. I’ve long been terrified of copying him further than I already do.

  Michael urged me to participate and I agreed. That night the ghost woke me and I lay in the dark for a few hours, realizing that I didn’t want to write anything anymore. I never really wanted to be a writer, and had only pursued the occupation in the hope that my father would like me.

  I sent Michael an e-mail trying to beg off, saying genre writing was too connected to my father’s work. Michael e-mailed back saying that he’d read my father’s books when he was young and wasn’t it cool that my dad was my dad. He also told me another contributor was Harlan Ellison, a science fiction author with whom my father had a public and long-running feud that began nearly thirty years ago at WorldCon.

  Then I broke my glasses, and my car shit the bed, and I had returned to the story out of financial desperation.

  “So,” Chuck said, when I finished telling him all this, “you have writer’s block.”

  “No, I don’t believe in that. Other artists don’t suffer that way. You never hear of ballerina’s block. I just can’t finish this story. It’s never happened before and I think it’s the ghost’s fault.”

  “It all fits together perfectly to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Time travel, Chris.”

  “Yeah, sure. Maybe we should go back to the clones.”

  “Think about e-mail. You send a note to someone, but they don’t check their e-mail for a week. Did your message arrive from the past, or did it enter their future?”

  “I guess it’s the same.”

  “Exactly! Anything in motion leaves a trail, even through time. What we call a ghost is really the footprint of a time traveler.”

  “Great!” I said. “All you need is to invent a time machine.”

  “I did. A month ago. I’ve been using chimps.”

  Chuck was incapable of lying; to do so would violate his concept of science. I’d never seen him with such a grave expression, yet the skin of his face twitched with enthusiasm. After the poker game, Chuck had entrusted me with his biggest secret: “I don’t sleep with women,” he’d said, “because I’m gay. And I don’t sleep with men because all men are pigs. I love my lab and that’s enough.” Chuck’s an odd guy with odd quirks such as endlessly readjusting the ball cap he perpetually wore. No one would suspect him of being Iowa City’s resident genius, the intellectual darling of the academic community. If the quirky bastard said he invented a time machine, he had.

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  He strode in a tight circle, gesticulating like a demented rap singer as he spoke.

  “First of all, the math is outrageous. I mean it is completely out of hand, but wicked elegant.”

  “Skip the math, Chuck. I’ll trust you on that.”

  “Space-time bends, which means there can be shortcuts between specific points.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, as if this were common knowledge. “You’re talking about wormholes. I saw it in a movie.”

  Chuck gave me a look like I was a pup that had crapped on the porch. His voice was patient, yet clearly annoyed.

  “I prefer to call them ERBs. It’s an acronym for Einstein-Rosen Bridge, since they came up with it in the thirties.”

  “How do you get inside one?”

  “Here’s the simple way of thinking about it. I make a photocopy of DNA and convert the image to digital information. I attach each binary numeral to a p-brane, and send it into an ERB, using a particle beam. And voilà!”

  “Nothing to it. Like making rice that won’t stick.”

  “Two drawbacks,” he said. “Time travel is one-way.”

  “You mean you get stuck?”

  “No, that’s impossible. Writers make that stuff up. Think of e-mail. You send a message, but unless your friend is wired, he can’t receive it. Right now, time travel is one-way until we build a machine to reconstitute the information. It’s possible, but the math will take quantum computing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a computer that uses the spinning nuclei of atoms to represent binary code. Ike Chuan out at MIT has one up and running, but the field is still young.”

  “You said two drawbacks.”

  “Controlling destination,” he said.

  “What’s to control? I mean if you’re going to Des Moines, it’s always there. Des Moines never changes.”

  “You have to adjust your thinking to a model. Imagine time as a wet mop in a bucket with the strings all tangled together. An ERB is your route into the bucket. You just don’t know which string you’ll land on.”

  “Like getting on a bus to Des Moines and winding up in Cedar Rapids.”

  “I know you’re being facetious, Chris. But you’re actually close. It’s more like going to a depot and getting on the first bus you see, knowing it’s leaving soon, but not knowing where it’s headed.”

  “None of that explains my ghost.”

  “It’s not a ghost, Chris. You are perceiving digital information encased in a cluster of mobile and sentient p-branes. This ghost suddenly manifested, right?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “The same time when I completed my machine. According to my hypothesis, you are being visited by yourself. The fact that you came here today is proof. There’s no choice but to send you into the bucket. We have to fulfill our end of time’s bargain. Your ghost compels it.”

  “You’re out of your mind, Chuck.”

  “No, I’m afraid that you quite literally were out of your mind when you haunted yourself last night.”

  “You can’t shove me through an ERB down a mop handle to a bucket in Des Moines.”

  “What’ll it take to try?”

  “New glasses,” I said, “and a car.”

  “You can have my car, Chris. I abhor the combustion engine. Such little innovation in all these years. And I can arrange for new glasses through my insurance.”

  I sighed, wishing I’d asked for cash since he’d acquiesced so easily.

  “Chris,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”

  The fact was, I had nothing to lose except my life and I didn’t like my current circumstances anyway. Twenty years ago I’d set out to be a Great American Writer. I wanted to live in New York with literary buddies but instead I was divorced and unemployed with few friends in a small Midwestern town surrounded by corn, soy, and white people. Everything I owned was secondhand. I didn’t even have insurance. I was lonely and my work was going nowhere. It occurred to me that if Chuck could send me into the future, I could read my story, then return and write the ending.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll give it a whirl.”

  “Good.” He nodded, his eyes delirious with suppressed happiness. “I need to take a blood sample, and make a full digitization of your DNA.”

  He led me through a door into a small space equipped as a physician’s examining room. I stripped to my socks and he ran me through a rapid battery of medical tests. Chuck fed my blood into a machine that separated the DNA and began converting it to binary code. He left the room to make further preparations.

  I wondered if other people went to such extremes for a story. Normal S.F. writers probably snapped off time travel ideas like downing coffee. This made me chuckle as I recalled my father telling me that Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first publication was under the name “Normal Bean” because he was afraid readers would consider him unbalanced. At one time I’d thought of using a pseudonym. My fa
ther’s only S.F. novel, The Castle Keeps, was about a writer in Kentucky, and the name I considered was the son of the protagonist. I decided against the idea because it granted my father too much influence over my writing. Besides, he used over a dozen pseudonyms and I didn’t want to be like him.

  Dad was essentially a fantasy writer of sword-and-sorcery, soft-and hard-core porn. But when I was a kid, he and Harlan Ellison were the new young Turks in the science fiction field. After their falling-out, Dad used to impersonate Ellison at the supper table—talking fast in a high voice, cursing a lot, and calling himself “Arlen Hell-raiser.” I was at the stage where I copied my father, and thus refused to read Ellison. A few years later, after realizing that Dad disliked me, I read all of Ellison’s work, particularly enjoying his short stories.

  Chuck entered the room and asked if I was ready.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Listen, Chris,” he said. “The chimps come back different— healthy, but different. I sedate them first, and maybe that’s the reason.”

  “Different how?”

  “It’s intangible, as if they return more alert.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But no sedation. I have to finish my story.”

  He led me to a large chamber that contained a transparent metal table with a giant Lucite lid. An entwined network of cables was attached to the underside of the table, then ran along the floor to a surprisingly small console of computer equipment. The room was otherwise quite austere, silent, and oddly calm. Chuck explained that everything would be recorded on digital video. I lay on the gel-foam table, which re-formed itself to my body. Chuck began easing the lid shut.

  “What’s that for?” I said. “Makes me think of a coffin.”

  “Maintenance of adequate oxygen supply. It’s got tiny sensors embedded in it that monitor your vitals. I can also administer a CAT scan, X ray, MRI. Only three of these machines exist. They are often used for—”

  “Okay, okay, okay.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like a moron, mainly.”

  “You are a pioneer, Chris. First human in the bucket.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, fuck it then.”

  He latched the lid. It occurred to me that I was quite possibly trusting a madman.

  I felt rather than heard a distant hum, like cicadas thrumming against my skin. At varying times in my life I have attempted meditation that placed me in an odd state of non-waking, non-sleep, similar to a hypnotic trance, which I have entered at least three times—once by a traveling hypnotist who came to my high school and induced me to sing like Elvis, again by a Kevin Bacon movie in which I was hypnotized when Kevin was, and once when I was very young and my father put me into a trance on the couch and I only recall waking in the darkness with him scared and kneeling beside me, something I‘ve long been curious about and even considered being rehypnotized in order to learn what happened then, and now in Chuck’s lab I entered a trance-like state for an indeterminate time until I was abruptly aware of the greatest liberty I’d ever known.

  Gravity ceased to exert a hold on me. I was buoyant with no water, hovering with no atmosphere. I had become mobile perception, yet unable to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste in the conventional way. I was grok. I was all. I felt each distinct beat of a hummingbird’s wing, saw the infinitesimal difference in every snowflake. I could follow the path of the merest speck of water falling to earth as rain and rising as steam to drop again. I had an understanding of how existence fit together from a sunflower to a quark, the Bermuda Triangle to an amoeba. I experienced the sheer joy of awareness. There was no me. For the first time in my life, I liked myself—precisely because I did not exist.

  I slowly understood that I was in my bedroom watching myself sleep. The clock face was a red blur. I could direct my consciousness about the room like aiming a stream of light one photon at a time. I was an unseen packet of cognizant information capable of motion in any direction. I aimed my awareness to the hall beyond the closed door, which I passed through easily, not even sensing molecular friction, and I understood that the door existed no more or less than I did. This was a world without borders. I reentered my room and watched my corporeal self stir on the bed. A brassiere lay on the floor and I suddenly knew that I had a girlfriend, but I was also still married.

  I moved my synapses to my writing desk, where the manuscript of my ghost story sat neatly stacked. I became aware of changes within the manuscript. The story was not yet complete but was longer, with greater detail and a different opening than the one I’d been working on for a month. In a sudden rush of intuition, I knew everything I had already written. Then I realized that I already knew that. My cognition expanded in every direction as if peering into an infinite number of mirrors that reflected each other endlessly.

  My bedroom grew indistinct at the edges, losing its sense of reality, the walls simultaneously expanding and contracting. As I felt my awareness begin to fade, I directed perception to the figure on the bed and for the briefest possible moment my own eyes opened but I was gone.

  Chuck’s face was magnified by the glass lid, distorted into a caricature of itself. He pressed tiny keys on a handheld computer to open the lid. Warm air hissed across my body as the lid lifted.

  “What’s my name?” he said. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  “Chuck, Chris, the lab. I need paper and pencil.”

  He hurried away and I sat, dangling my legs off the table. I could feel the memory of future knowledge moving away from me like concentric circles spreading from a rock thrown into a pond. Chuck gave me a lab book and I quickly wrote all the changes in the story that my mind had gleaned in the bucket.

  “What is this?” Chuck said. “Your handwriting is worse than Gell-Mann’s.”

  “It’s a revision of my story.”

  “How could you read it?”

  “I didn’t. I just knew what I’d written.”

  “A form of telepathy?”

  “No, I was aware of my physical self sleeping at the time. It’s hard to explain. Just being there made me know what my life was like.”

  “Were you in the future?”

  “I don’t know. I had a girlfriend. But I was still married. That couldn’t be my future since I’m divorced now.”

  “That proves you entered the bucket. Each strand of the mop is a reality that is occurring simultaneously. You moved laterally in time rather than forward or backward.”

  “You mean every mop string is different?”

  “Perhaps. They might be interwoven. Maybe each point where a string touches another makes for a commonality in both realities.”

  “What about now, Chuck? You and me talking?”

  “Just another mop string.”

  “I want to go back.”

  “It might not be safe.”

  “I’m going in, Chuck. It was nirvana. Glory, rapture, paradise. Pure bliss. I don’t have that in my life. Maybe I never did.”

  “All right, Chris.”

  “Besides, I have to finish my story.”

  For the next twelve hours, Chuck dunked me into time’s bucket, where I followed a different strand of reality. Each journey slid my mind into the same zone of unfettered awareness as before. It was as if I’d lived for years in a house with utter and intimate knowledge of its architecture, wiring, ductwork, floor creaks and window squeaks, then suddenly discovered an extra room previously unknown to me, bathed in gorgeous light. I now wanted to spend all my time in that room. It was serene freedom without the friction of motion. My consciousness glided like a dolphin. I entered each reality in my bedroom and began to notice differences—some subtle, others shockingly drastic—but in every string I was always a writer.

  Between visits to my multiple realities, Chuck yanked me back to the lab on his techno-leash and recorded my body temperature, blood pressure, and pulse rate. He made a DNA scraping for later analysis. He withdrew blo
od, checked my hearing, vision, reflexes, and alertness. Everything tested normal. We agreed that I could remain in the bucket for longer periods, as long as there were no physical changes.

  While Chuck ran his medical tests, I revised the story based on what I’d learned. Each reality offered a different beginning, but the rewriting was so total that I could never quite complete the story. After several excursions into the bucket, it became clear that none of the parallel realities included finishing the story. It was perpetually snared in the process of revision.

  Chuck speculated that I had entered a Möbius time loop that brought me full circle no matter what my embarking point, like the intercoastal waterways that always led small craft to the sea. Finally I gave up on the story and concentrated on comprehending the full scope of my life in each reality string. With practice, I learned to remember more. I directed my consciousness closer and closer to my sleeping form in the apartment, finally summoning the ability to enter my own head and instantly know every facet of my life, both past and future.

  Chuck was supremely interested in this, theorizing that I had learned to straddle time. Upon each return I rapidly transcribed a synopsis of that specific reality into a lab book. They are as follows:

  Owing to chronic joint pain as a result of time travel, I visit a Reiki master, which leads to a macrobiotic diet, yoga classes, meditation, and a pilgrimage to Tibet, where I write a travel book that gets banned in China.

  My father and Harlan Ellison coedit an anthology of short stories called More Dangerous Visions and ask me to write the preface detailing their feud and subsequent peace, a task I am unable to complete.

  I remarry and father twin daughters who die in a car wreck, prompting me to change my name, move to Las Vegas, and work as a blackjack dealer, marry a former prostitute, and open a used bookstore in Lake Tahoe.

  I publish an article about my experiences traveling in time, become the laughingstock of both science and literature, and drink myself into a halfway house, where I am stabbed three times by a schizophrenic woman.

  My wife and I reconcile and move to the East Coast for a tenure-track job with a high salary at a prestigious university that offers the children of its professors free tuition at a variety of top-notch colleges.