McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Edgar and another agent were on the scene twenty minutes after Junior was killed. In the parking lot, as Edgar kneeled over Junior’s mutilated body, he felt like he was falling; then he did fall. In a seizure, with lightning arcing from one part of his brain to another, Edgar saw a series of mental images, as clear as photographs, as vivid as film. He saw death.

  On Sheep Mountain, near the Montana-Wyoming border, six members of the Aryan Way Militia were pulled out of an SUV and dismembered.

  Edgar saw this and somehow knew that Richard Usher, the leader of the Aryan Way, was the great-grandson of a black coal miner named Jefferson Usher.

  On an isolated farm near Jordan, Montana, a widowed farmer and his three adult sons fought an epic battle against unknown intruders. Local police would gather five hundred and twelve spent bullet shells, five shotguns with barrels twisted from overheating, two illegal automatic rifles with jammed firing mechanisms, and six pistols scattered around the farm and grounds. The bodies of the farmer and his sons were missing.

  But Edgar saw their stripped skeletons buried in a shallow grave atop the much deeper grave of a one-thousand-year-old buffalo jump near the Canadian border. Edgar saw this and somehow knew the exact latitude and longitude of that particular buffalo jump. He knew the color of the grass and dirt.

  Outside Killdeer, North Dakota, a few miles from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, five Hidatsa Indians were found nailed to the four walls and ceiling of an abandoned hunting cabin.

  Edgar saw these bodies and suddenly knew these men’s names and the names of all of their children, but he also knew their secret names, the tribal names that had been given to them in secret ceremonies and were never said aloud outside of the immediate family.

  All told, sixty-seven people were murdered that night and Edgar saw all of their deaths. Somehow, he knew their histories and most personal secrets. He saw their first cars, marriages, sex, and fights. He suddenly knew them and mourned their butchery as if he’d given birth to them.

  And then, while still inside his seizure and fever-dream, and just when Edgar didn’t know if his heart could withstand one more murder, he saw survival.

  At a highway rest stop off Interstate 94, a trucker changing a flat tire was attacked and bitten by a soldier, but he fought him off with the tire iron. He jumped into his truck and ran over twelve other soldiers as he escaped. Throwing sparks by riding on one steel rim and seventeen good tires, he drove twenty miles down the freeway and nearly ran down the Montana State Patrolman who finally stopped him.

  Edgar saw an obese white trucker weep in the arms of the only black cop within a one-thousand-mile radius.

  In the Pryor Forest, Michael X, a gold-medal winner in downhill bicycling at the last ESPN X Games, escaped five soldiers on horseback by riding his bike off a cliff and dropping two hundred feet into Big Horn Lake. With a broken leg and punctured lung, Michael swam and waded north for ten miles before a local fisherman pulled him out of the river.

  Edgar could taste the salt in the boy’s tears.

  At Crow Agency, a seven-year-old Indian girl was using the family outhouse when she was attacked. While the soldiers tore off the door, she sneaked out the moon-shaped window and crawled onto the outhouse roof. On the roof, she saw she was closer to a tall poplar tree than to her family’s trailer, and there was nobody else home anyway, so she jumped to the ground and outran two soldiers to the base of the tree. She climbed for her life to the top and balanced on a branch barely strong enough to hold her weight. Again and again, the two soldiers climbed after her, but their decayed bones could not support the weight of their bodies, and so they broke apart, hands and arms hanging like strange fruit high in the tree, while their bodies kicked and screamed on the ground below.

  Here, Edgar pushed himself into his vision, into the white-hot center of his fever, and attacked those two soldiers with his mind.

  “Go away,” he screamed as he seized in the convenience store parking lot. The other agents thought Edgar was hallucinating and screaming at ghosts. But Edgar’s voice traveled through the dark and echoed in the soldiers’ ears. The little Indian girl heard Edgar’s disembodied voice and wondered if God was trying to save her. But the soldiers were not afraid of God or his voice. Edgar watched helplessly as the soldiers leaned against the tree, pushed it back and forth, and swung the girl at the top in an ever-widening arc. Edgar knew they were trying to break the tree at the base.

  “Leave her alone,” he screamed.

  But the soldiers ignored him and worked against the tree. Up high, the Indian girl cried for her mother and father, who had gone to a movie and were unaware that the baby-sitter had left their daughter alone in the house.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” Edgar screamed. He was desperate. He knew the girl would die unless he stopped the soldiers, and then he knew, without knowing why he knew, exactly how to stop them.

  “Attention,” he screamed.

  The two soldiers, obedient and well trained, immediately stood at full attention.

  “Right face,” Edgar screamed.

  With perfect form, the two soldiers faced right, away from the tree.

  “Forward march,” Edgar screamed.

  Stunned, the little Indian girl watched the two soldiers marching away from her. They marched into the darkness. Edgar knew the soldiers would keep marching until they fell into a canyon or lake, or until they crossed an old road where a fast-moving logging truck might smash them into small pieces. Edgar knew these two soldiers would never stop. He knew all of these soldiers, all two hundred and fifty-six of them, would never quit, not until they had found whatever it was they were searching for.

  Sixty miles away from that little girl, Edgar burned with vision-fever as he saw the world with such terrible clarity. In that filthy Town Pump parking lot, illuminated by cheap neon, his fellow agents kneeled over him, held his arms and legs, and shoved a spoon into his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue. Edgar pushed and pulled with supernatural strength. Six other men could barely hold him down. Then it was over. Edgar quickly awoke from his seizure, stood on strong legs, rushed to a dispatch radio transmitter, and told his story. On open channels, Edgar told dozens of police officers and FBI agents exactly where to find dead bodies and survivors. And once those doubtful police officers and agents traveled all over Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and across the border into Canada, and found exactly what Edgar had said would be found, he was quickly escorted to a hospital room, where he was first examined and found healthy, and then asked again and again how he had come to know what he knew. He told the truth, and they did not believe him, and he didn’t blame them because he knew that it sounded crazy. He’d interviewed hundreds of people who claimed to see visions of the past and future. He’d made fun of them all, and now he wondered how many of them had been telling the truth. How many of those schizophrenics had really been talking to God? How many of those serial killers had really been possessed by the Devil? How many murdered children had returned to; haunt their surviving parents?

  “I don’t know what else to say; it’s the truth,” Edgar said to his fellow agents, who were so sad to see a good man falling apart, and so they left him alone in his hospital room. In the dark, Edgar listened hard for the voices he was sure would soon be speaking to him, and he wondered what those voices would ask him to do and if he would honor their requests. Edgar felt hunted and haunted, and when he closed his eyes, he smelled blood and he didn’t know how much of it would be spilled before all of this was over.

  Goodbye to All That

  By HARLAN ELLISON

  At the end of a grand adventure, the answer to all the

  riddles of existence—with fries and a large Coke.

  “Like a Prime Number, the Ultimate Punchline stands alone.”

  —DANIEL MANUS PINKWATER

  He knew he was approaching the Core of Unquenchable Perfec-tion, because the Baskin-Robbins “flavor of the month” was tuna fish–chocolate. If memory served
(served, indeed! if only! but, no, it did nothing of the sort . . . it just lay about, eating chocolate truffles, whimpering to be waited on, hand and foot) he was now in Nepal. Or Bhutan. Possibly Tanna Touva.

  He had spent the previous night at a less-than-opulent b & b in the tiny, forlorn village of Moth’s Breath—which had turned out to be, in fact, not a hostelry, but the local abbatoir—and he was as yet, even this late in the next day, unable to rid his nostrils of the stultifying memory of formaldehyde. His yak had collapsed on the infinitely upwardly spiraling canyon path leading to the foothills that nuzzled themselves against the flanks of the lower mountains timorously raising their sophomore bulks toward the towering ancient massif of the thousand-peaked Mother of the Earth, Chomolungma, the pillar of the sky upon which rested the mantle of the frozen heavens. Snow lay treacherously thick and deep and placid on that celestial vastness; snow blew in ragged curtains as dense as swag draperies across the summits and chasms and falls and curved scimitar-blade sweeps of icefields; snow held imperial sway up here, high so high up here on this sacred monolith of the Himalayas that the natives called the Mother-Goddess of the Earth, Chomolungma.

  Colman suffered from poriomania. Dromomania was his curse. From agromania, from parateresiomania, from ecdemonomania, from each and all of these he suffered. But mostly dromomania.

  Compulsive traveling. Wanderlust.

  Fifty United States before the age of twenty-one. All of South America before twenty-seven. Europe and most of Africa by his thirtieth birthday. Australia, New Zealand, the Antarctic, much of the subcontinent by thirty-three. And all of Asia but this frozen nowhere as his thirty-ninth birthday loomed large but a week hence. Colman, helpless planomaniac, now climbed toward the Nidus of Ineluctable Reality (which he knew he was nearing, for his wafer-thin, solar-powered, internet-linked laptop advised him that Ben & Jerry’s had just introduced a new specialty flavor, Sea Monkey—which was actually only brine-shrimp-flavored sorbet) bearing with him the certain knowledge that if the arcane tomes he had perused were to be believed, then somewhere above him, somewhere above the frozen blood of the Himalayan icefalls, he would reach The Corpus of Nocturnal Perception. Or The Abyss of Oracular Aurochs. Possibly The Core of Absolute Discretion.

  There had been a lot of books, just a lot of books. And no two agreed. Each had a different appellation for the Ultimate. One referred to it as the Core of Absolute Discretion, another the Intellectual Center of the Universe, yet a third fell to the impenetrable logodædelia of: The Foci of Conjunctive Simultaneity. Perhaps there had been too many books. But shining clearly through the thicket of rodomontade there was always the ineluctable, the inescapable truth: there was a place at the center of it all. Whether Shangri-la, or Utopia, Paradisaical Eden or the Elysian Fields, whether The Redpath of Nominative Hyperbole or The Last and Most Porous Membrane of Cathexian Belief, there was a valley, a greensward, a hill or summit, a body of water or a field of grain whence it all came.

  A place where Colman could travel to, a place that was the confluence of the winds of Earth, where the sound of the swaying universe in its cradle of antiquity melded with the promise of destiny.

  But where it might be, was the puzzle.

  Nepal, Katmandu, Bhutan, Mongolia, Tibet, the Tuva Republic, Khembulung . . . it had to be up here, somewhere. He’d tried everywhere else. He’d narrowed the scope of the search to a fine channel, five by five, and at the end he would penetrate that light and reach, at last, The Corpus of Nocturnal Perception, or whatever; and then, perhaps only then, would his mad unending need to wander the Earth reach satiation.

  Then, so prayed Colman deep in the cathedral of his loneliness, then he might begin to lead a life. Home, family, friends, purpose beyond this purpose . . . and perhaps no purpose at all, save to exist as an untormented traveler.

  His yak had died, there on the trail; he presumed from sheer fright at the prospect of having to schlep him up that great divide, into the killing snowfields. The yak was widely known to be a beast of really terrific insight and excellent, well at least pretty good, instincts.

  Death before dishonor was not an unknown concept to the noble yak.

  Colman had tried several simple, specific, and sovereign remedies to resucitate the imperial beast: liquor from toads boiled in oil to help reduce the fever; leaves of holly mixed with honey, burned to ash in oast ovens and rendered into syrup; the force-feeding of a live lizard tongue, swallowed whole in one gulp (very difficult, as the yak was thoroughly dead); tea made from tansy; tea made from vervain.

  Absolutely no help. The yak was dead. Colman was afoot in the killing icefields. On his way to Utopia, to Shangri-la, or, at least, The Infinitely Replenishing Fountain of Mythic Supposition. There had been just a lot of books.

  He reconciled the thought: I’ll never make it with all this gear. Then, the inevitable follow-up: I’ll never make it without all this gear. He unshipped the dead noble beast and began, there on the slope, to separate the goods into two piles, seeing his chances of survival diminish with every item added to the heap on his right. He lifted his tinted goggles onto his forehead and stared with naked eye at the massif looming above him. There were more than a few hysterical flurries of snow. Naturally: there was a storm coming.

  He knew he was nearing the Heart of Irredeemable Authenticity because the happily buzzing laptop informed him that not only had geomancy been declared the official state religion of Austria, but that Montevideo had been renamed Happy Acres. An investment banker in Montreal had been found dismembered, parts of his body deposited in a variety of public trash bins and Dumpsters, but Colman didn’t think that had anything of the significant omen about it.

  The storm had broken over him, sweeping down from the pinnacles; less than two hours after he had crossed the great divide, broached the slope, and begun his ascent toward the summit now hidden by thunder-heads. Abrading ground-glass flurries erupted out of crevasses; and the swirling lacelike curtains of ice and snow were cruelly driven by a demented wind. He thought he had never known cold before, no matter how cold he had ever been, never anything like this. His body moaned.

  And he kept climbing. There was no alternative. He would either reach the Corporeality of the Impossible Metaphor, or he would be discovered eons hence, when this would all be swampy lowland, by whatever species had inherited the planet after the poles shifted.

  Hours were spent by Colman coldly contemplating the possible positions his centuries-frozen (but perfectly flash-frozen) corpse might assume. He recalled a Rodin sculpture in a small park in Paris, he thought it was an hommage to Maupassant or Balzac, one or the other, and remembered the right hand, the way it curled, and the position of the fingers. He envisioned himself entombed in just that way, sculptural hand with spread fingers protruding from the ages of ice. And so, hours were spent trudging with ice-axe in hand, up the killing icefields, dreaming in white of death tableaux.

  Until he fell forward and lay still, as the storm raged over him. There was silence only in that unfrozen inner place beyond the residence of the soul.

  When he awoke, not having frozen to death at all, which eventually struck him as fairly miraculous (but, in fact, easily explained by the storm having blown itself out quickly, and the escarpment just above him providing just enough shelter), he got to his feet, pulled the staff loose from the snowpack, and looked toward the summit.

  High above him, blazing gloriously in the last pools of sunlight whose opposite incarnations were fields of blue shadow, he beheld the goal toward which he had climbed, that ultimate utopian goal he had sought across entire continents, through years of wandering. There it was, as the books had promised: The Singular Scheme of Cosmic Clarity. The center, the core, the hub, the place where all answers reside. He had found lost Shangri-la, whatever its real name might be. He saw above him, in the clearness of the storm-scoured waning day, what appeared to be a golden structure rising from the summit, its shape a reassuring and infinitely calming sweep of dual archlike parab
olas. He thought that was what the shapes were called, parabolas.

  Now there was no exhaustion. No world-weariness. He was not even aware that inside his three pairs of thermal socks, inside his crampon’d boots, all the toes of his left foot and three of his right had gone black from frostbite.

  Mad with joy, he climbed toward those shining golden shapes, joyfully mad to enter into, at last, The Sepulchre of Revealed Truths. There may have been a great many books but, oh frabjous day, they were all, every last one of them, absolutely dead on the money. The Node of Limitless Revealment. Whatever.

  It was very clean inside. Sparkling, in fact. The tiles underfoot were spotless, reflective, and calming. The walls were pristine, in hues of pastel solicitude that soothed and beckoned. There were tables and chairs throughout, and at one end a counter of some magnificent gleaming metal that showed Colman his ravaged reflection, silvered and extruded, but clearly wan and near total exhaustion. Patches of snowburned flesh had peeled away on both cheeks, chin, nose. The eyes somewhat unfocused as if coated with albumin. The Sanctum of Coalesced Revelations was brightly lit, scintillant surfaces leading the eye toward the shining bar of the magic metal counter. Colman shambled forward, dropping his ice staff; he was a thing drawn off the mountain barely alive, into this oasis of repose and cleanliness, light and succor.

  There was a man in his late thirties standing behind the gleaming metal counter. He smiled brightly at Colman. He had a nice face. “Hi! Welcome to The Fountainhead of Necessary Perplexity. May I take your order, please?”