McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  I publish a short story about time travel, expand the story to a novel that is made into a successful film, which leads to marrying Jodie Foster, with whom I only speak French around the house, and hobnobbing with Bob Dylan, Jim Jarmusch, and Julian Schnabel.

  I commit suicide in despair over my failed marriage, the rejection of my latest book, and an inability to find a teaching job.

  I write a memoir of my childhood that details the bizarre and sad family dynamics, and though it is critically panned as being needlessly narcissistic, the book goes on to become a best-seller.

  I receive the Pulitzer prize for a novel about model railroads and o fer support to my fellow writer Michael Chabon, who is highly frustrated by the progress of his novel dealing loosely with comic books.

  I return to school for a doctorate in physics and claim all Professor Charles Andrews’s findings as my own, which leads to an endowed chair at Harvard for me.

  I remain in Iowa for the next thirty years, working as an adjunct teacher, publish a third collection of stories, a third memoir, and several novels, get short-listed for major prizes, and enter my dotage with a certain bitterness which I conceal behind a series of young girlfriends.

  Chuck invents a device to reconstitute a time traveler into physical form and I go back in time and kill my father, which instantly changes me into the illegitimate son of Harlan Ellison, and I am adopted by a very nice couple named Mr. and Mrs. Chabon in California.

  I emigrate to France and cowrite futuristic screenplays with Norman Spinrad, who moved there a decade before, then return to Iowa and marry a dairy heiress, and live out my days peacefully on her family farm.

  I fly home to my father’s deathbed, where we forgive each other for all our cruelties, and I hold his hand as he dies, knowing that he truly did like me but was unable to express it due to the trauma of his own childhood.

  The United States military incarcerates me under the charge of treason for exposing the Swo ford Project, which produces an outraged though futile outcry from the ACLU, protesting the abandonment of civil rights under the Home-land Security Act.

  Barb Bersche, the publisher of McSweeney’s, refuses to publish my story as is, and we enter into a prolonged literary feud, until Professor Charles Andrews makes his findings known in a leading scientific journal, and I am vindicated when Bersche invites me to guest-edit an issue of her magazine.

  I develop profound emotional problems due to the time travel, am treated with medication that makes a dent in them, but I remain o f-kilter the rest of my life, during which I don’t write and don’t mind.

  I pseudonymously write a series of crime novels that make a fortune, move to Jamestown, Rhode Island, and live with a painter, grow my prematurely gray hair very long, and become an utter recluse.

  After publishing this story I am sued by Harlan Ellison, my father, Michael Chabon, Professor Charles Andrews, and the University of Iowa Physics Department, a suit that drags on six years and sets a twenty-first-century precedent for libel, the stress of which results in my developing eczema, an ulcer, asthma, and finally cancer.

  I am nominated for an S.F. award for this story and attend WorldCon, where I meet Harlan Ellison, who convinces me to write science fiction, which makes me enormously popular and fulfills my earliest literary desires, previously thwarted by rebelling against my father.

  This story is dismissed as the worst in the anthology, signaling the wane of my career, and I end up teaching composition at a small state school I had previously scorned as being beneath me.

  The University of Iowa hires me as a full-time professor, but the teaching requires so much e fort that after achieving tenure, I cease to publish and join the parade of writers who are known in academic circles as having been quite promising at one time.

  I become well known for my nonfiction, which leads to magazine work, and I spend the rest of my life leading an adventurous life reporting from abroad, finally retiring to the south of France.

  I su fer a nervous breakdown from lack of sleep due to fear of ghosts, seek professional counseling and get diagnosed as delusional and grandiose, wind up addicted to Ambien, Xanax, Prozac, and Ritalin, and after a full recovery publish a book about the experience that leads to hosting a television talk show.

  I find that I enjoy writing something that is fun, hitherto unknown with my bleak and introspective works about Kentucky, and embark on an ambitious campaign to write a novel in each popular genre, which annoys the critics, and mainly serves to confuse bookstore workers, who never know in what section to shelve my books.

  Chuck abruptly halted the experiment and I remembered nothing tangible for the next three days. He filled me in later, showing me a videotape of my behavior in the bucket. My feet and hands developed a rhythmic twitching. My breathing became shallow but my heartbeat was highly elevated. My lips moved with incredible velocity, as if forming inaudible words in an unknown tongue. Chuck recognized this as binary code and began converting it to various permutations of software programming.

  I spent three weeks at bed rest, although I began sleeping on the couch to avoid my own eerie visits. My body felt depleted in every way, reminding me of all-night study sessions in college, only now I couldn’t recover from the fatigue. When I drifted into sleep, the memory of one of the mop strands poured through my mind like pressurized water. After each re-experienced parallel reality, I was enervated for hours by the compressed intensity of a life’s worth of sensory perceptions.

  Chuck stayed in touch by phone. He ferried me to a medical clinic for a full physical examination, which turned out fine. My preference for lying on the couch indicated possible depression, and the doctor wrote a prescription for SSRI medication but I never had it filled. Chuck also supplied me with two pairs of spectacles and his car economy rig. He believed that my body had reached its limit after enduring twenty-five dunks into the bucket of time. This number corresponded with the number of proposed dimensions in the universe, plus the one I was currently living in, according to recent advances in unifying theory.

  I didn’t know how to tell him that he was wrong. I may have gone into the bucket twenty-five times, but what chilled me to the marrow was the seemingly infinite number of branches that each reality string had. There were millions of Chris Offutts living simultaneous lives similar to each other. The knowledge of all my alternate lives rendered me powerless to engage in my current reality. I felt as if quicksand closed over my head and I was trapped with no firm footing below, nothing to cling to above, surrounded by a constant flow of information I could not use.

  The deadline for the McSweeney’s story came and went. Michael Chabon delicately nudged me via e-mail, then called when I didn’t respond. I explained that the story was dead, and asked if he could let me off the hook. He said no because the space was already allotted, and I told him I’d cobble something together with a little more time.

  The next day I began writing about my screwball childhood in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. My memory for the past improved in a phenomenal way—I recalled obscure details with stunning clarity. I returned to my bedroom and slept through the night without any disturbances. When I left the house I felt different, more alert. Slowly I realized that people liked me. I even began to like myself.

  Chuck and I met occasionally for awkward lunches during which he refused to talk of the bucket. He ate little and appeared gaunt. He dropped out of contact and I thought nothing of it until reading in the paper that a security guard discovered him dead in his lab. The cause of death was heart trauma. The exact circumstances were not publicly revealed, but campus gossip said he died inside a glass coffin. Members of an unknown government agency removed his equipment. The lab was converted to storage. His faculty records were so thoroughly expunged that there is no longer any reference to him at the university.

  I never told anyone about my visit to the physics lab, but I have thought about it often. After using me as a human subject, Chuck probably had a difficul
t time going back to chimps. If he died while in the bucket, his consciousness would be marooned forever in a reality string. This would make Chuck the first true ghost.

  Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly

  By DAVE EGGERS

  How much were they willing to sacrifice to prove an uncertain

  point, to no one in particular, about a mountain that none of

  them could begin to understand?

  She lies, she lies, Rita lies on the bed, looking up, in the room that is so loud so early in Tanzania. She is in Moshi. She arrived the night before, in a jeep driven by a man named Godwill. It is so bright this morning but was so madly, impossibly dark last night.

  Her flight had arrived late, and customs was slow. There was a young American couple trying to clear a large box of soccer balls. For an orphanage, they said. The customs agent, in khaki head to toe, removed and bounced each ball on the clean reflective floor, as if inspecting their viability. Finally the American man was taken to a side room, and in a few minutes returned, rolling his eyes to his wife, rubbing his forefinger and thumb together in a way meaning money. The soccer balls were cleared, and the couple went on their way. Outside it was not humid; it was open and clear, the air cool and light, and Rita was greeted soundlessly by an old man, black and white-haired and thin and neat in shirtsleeves and a brown tie. He was Godwill, and he had been sent by the hotel to pick her up. It was midnight and she was very awake as they drove and they had driven, on the British side of the road, in silence through rural Tanzania, just their headlights and the occasional jacaranda, and the constant long grass lining the way.

  At the hotel she wanted a drink. She went to the hotel bar alone, something she’d never done, and sat at the bar with a stenographer from Brussels. The stenographer, whose name she did not catch and couldn’t ask for again, wore a short inky bob of black coarse hair, and was wringing her napkin into tortured shapes, tiny twisted mummies. The stenographer: face curvy and shapeless like a child’s, voice melodious, accent soothing. They talked about capital punishment, comparing the stonings common to some Muslim regions with America’s lethal injections and electric chairs; somehow the conversation was cheerful and relaxed. They had both seen the same documentary about people who had witnessed executions, and had been amazed at how little it had seemed to affect any of them, the watchers; they were sullen and unmoved. To witness a death! Rita could never do it. Even if they made her sit there, behind the partition, she would close her eyes.

  Rita was tipsy and warm when she said good night to the Brussels stenographer, who held her hand too long with her cold slender fingers. Through the French doors and Rita was outside, and walked past the pool toward her hut, one of twelve behind the hotel. She passed a man in a plain and green uniform with a gun strapped to his back, an automatic rifle of some kind, the barrel poking over his shoulder and in the dim light seeming aimed at the base of his skull. She didn’t know why the man was there, and didn’t know if he would shoot her in the back when she walked past him, but she did, she walked past him, because she trusted him, trusted this country and the hotel—that together they would know why it was necessary to have a heavily armed guard standing alone by the pool, still and clean, the surface dotted with leaves. She smiled at him and he did not smile back and she only felt safe again when she had closed the hut’s door and closed the door to the bathroom and was sitting on the cool toilet with her palms caressing her toes.

  Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole. Rita is staring at the concentric circles of bamboo that comprise the hut’s round conical roof. She is lying still, hands crossed on her chest—she woke up that way—and through the mosquito net, too tight, terrifying, suffocating in a small way when she thinks too much about it, she can see the concentric circles of the roof above and the circles are twenty-two in number, because she has counted and recounted. She counted while lying awake, listening to someone, outside the hut, fill bucket after bucket with water.

  Her name is Rita. Her hair is red like a Romanian’s and her hands are large. Eyes large and mouth lipless and she hates, has always hated, her lipless mouth. As a girl she waited for her lips to appear, to fill out, but it did not happen. Every year since her sixteenth birthday her lips have not grown but receded. The circles make up the roof but the circles never touch. Her father had been a pastor.

  Last night she thought, intermittently, she knew why she was in Tanzania, in Moshi, at the base of Kilimanjaro. But this morning she has no clue. She knows she is supposed to begin hiking up the mountain today, in two hours, but now that she has come here, through Amsterdam and through the cool night from the airport, sitting silently alone the whole drive, an hour or so at midnight, next to Godwill—really his name was Godwill, an old man who was sent by the hotel to pick her up, and it made her so happy because Godwill was such a . . . Tanzanian-sounding name—now that she has come here and is awake she cannot find the reason why she is here. She cannot recall the source of her motivation to spend four days hiking up this mountain, so blindingly white at the top—a hike some had told her was brutalizing and often fatal and others had claimed was, well, just a walk in the park. She was not sure she was fit enough, and was not sure she would not be bored to insanity. She was most concerned about the altitude sickness. The young were more susceptible, she’d heard, and at 38 she was not sure she was that anymore—young—but she felt that for some reason she in particular was always susceptible and she would have to know when to turn back. If the pressure in her head became too great, she would have to turn back. The mountain was almost 20,000 feet high and every month someone died of a cerebral edema and there were ways to prevent this. Breathing deeply would bring more oxygen into the blood, into the brain, and if that didn’t work and the pain persisted, there was Diamox, which thinned the blood and accomplished the same objective but more quickly. But she hated to take pills and had vowed not to use them, to simply go down if the pain grew intolerable—but how would she know when to go down? What were the phases before death? And what if she decided too late? She might at some point realize that it was time to turn and walk down the mountain, but what if it was already too late? It was possible that she would decide to leave, be ready to live at a lower level again, but by then the mountain would have had its way and there, on a path or in a tent, she would die.

  She could stay in the hut. She could go to Zanzibar and drink in the sun. She liked nothing better than to drink in the sun. With strangers. To drink in the sun! To feel the numbing of her tongue and limbs while her skin cooked slowly, and her feet dug deeper into the powdery sand!

  Her hands are still crossed on her chest, and the filling of the buckets continues outside her hut, so loud, so constant. Is someone taking the water meant for her shower? At home, in St. Louis, her landlord was always taking her water—so why shouldn’t it be the same here, in a hut in Moshi, with a gecko, almost translucent, darting across her conical ceiling, its ever-smaller circles never interlocking?

  She has bought new boots, expensive, and has borrowed a backpack, huge, and a thermarest, and sleeping bag, and cup, and a dozen other things. Everything made of plastic and Gore-Tex. The items were light individually but together very heavy and all of it is packed in a large tall purple pack in the corner of the round hut and she doesn’t want to carry the pack and wonders why she’s come. She is not a mountain climber, and not an avid hiker, and not someone who needs to prove her fitness by hiking mountains and afterward casually mentioning it to friends and colleagues. She likes racquetball.

  She has come because her younger sister, Gwen, had wanted to come, and they had bought the tickets together, thinking it would be the perfect trip to take before Gwen began making a family with her husband, Brad. But she’d gone ahead and gotten pregnant anyway, early, six months ahead of schedule and she could not make the climb. She could not make the climb but that did not preclude— Gwen used the word liberally and randomly, like some use curry— her, Rita, from going. The trip was not refundable, so
why not go?

  Rita slides her hands from her chest to her thighs and holds them, her thin thighs, as if to steady them. Who is filling the bucket? She imagines it’s someone from the shanty behind the hotel, stealing the hot water from the heater. She’d seen a bunch of teenage boys back there. Maybe they’re stealing Rita’s shower water. This country is so poor. Is poorer than any place she’s been. Is it poorer than Jamaica? She is not sure. Jamaica she expected to be like Florida, a healthy place benefiting from generations of heavy tourism and the constant and irrational flow of American money. But Jamaica was desperately poor almost everywhere and she understood nothing.

  Maybe Tanzania is less poor. Around her hotel are shanties and also well-built homes with gardens and gates. There is a law here, Godwill had said in strained English, that all the men are required to have jobs. Maybe people chose to live in spartan simplicity. She doesn’t know enough to judge one way or the other. The unemployed go to jail! Godwill had said, and seemed to like this law. The idle are like the devil! he said, and then laughed and laughed.

  In the morning the sun is as clear and forthright as a spotlight and Rita wants to avoid walking past the men. She has already walked past the men twice and she has nothing to say to them. Soon the bus will come to take her and the others to the base of the mountain, and since finally leaving her bed she has been doing the necessary things—eating, packing, calling Gwen—and for each task she has had to walk from her hut to the hotel, has had to walk past the men sitting and standing along the steps into the lobby. Eight to ten of them, young men, sitting, waiting without speaking. Godwill had talked about this—that the men list their occupations as guide, porter, salesperson—anything that will satisfy their government and didn’t require them to be accounted for in one constant place, because there really wasn’t much work at all. She had seen two of the men scuffle briefly over another American’s bag, for a $1 tip. When Rita walked past them she tried to smile faintly, without looking too friendly, or rich, or sexy, or happy, or vulnerable, or guilty, or proud, or contented, or healthy, or interested—she did not want them to think she was any of those things. She walked by almost cross-eyed with casual concentration.