McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  I guess you already knew that Cassandra was sitting there. Wearing really high-end corporate gear from Italian designers who had managed to stay out of the international backlash against the American export market. Cortez Enterprises was about to have its limited public offering, I learned later, using a brokerage subsidiary that they owned themselves. So they had tarted up the office to impress some analysts. Cassandra was beautiful in a way I probably can’t describe, because beauty, ultimately, is outside of language. Though it may have something to do with memory. She was wearing a red bow. One of Cortez’s goons, unless it was Eddie himself, said, “Kevin, I guess you don’t really remember your own mother?”

  “My mother? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Cassandra had cleaned up a lot since I saw her. Which I was starting to recognize might have been four months ago. It was hard to tell. Still, she was my age, more or less, maybe a few years younger, so how was she supposed to be my mother?

  One thing I’ll say for Cassandra, she had the kind of a compassionate expression a mother should have had. She asked if I was all right.

  But the goons interfered with this tender moment.

  “Okay, shoot ’em up.”

  “Wait,” I said, “I’m already high, I’m already in somebody’s memory, I don’t even know if it’s my own memory anymore, so you’re getting me high inside a memory, that’s a memory inside a memory, right? When do we come back out to the present, to the part where I’m just a kid trying to make his way?”

  “Shut that motherfucker up.”

  Cassandra volunteered her arm, so I volunteered mine, covered with scars now, so much that they couldn’t find a vein.

  “Do him in the neck.”

  So they did. Without asking nicely.

  I swirled into the rapture of the deep, far from all the shit that had accumulated since I first found out about Albertine. You know, my very first memory is of my grandfather, the Chinese immigrant patriarch, after his open-heart surgery. I was maybe three and a half years old. I never believed those memories. I never used to believe in the coherence of memory before an age when a kid could understand time. What comes before it? The rapture of the deep is what comes before. Before the scaffolding of time. Memories cartwheeling around in the empty heavens. Anyway, there he was on the stretcher in the living room, where he lived with us, doped on morphine. Doped for a good month anyway. I can remember the implacable smile on his face, I’m suffering now, but I came here for you, so you wouldn’t have to suffer. So now go and do something. Make my sacrifices into your day at the beach. It lingered in my consciousness for a moment. From there the howling winds of recollection touched down on my abortive swimming lessons, then a summer on the Cape, walking on the beaches of the seashore, up through childhood, from one associative leap to the next, all memories with beaches in them, then all memories with singing in them, memories featuring varieties of pie, like this was the very last mainline I was going to have, like they were going to make a biopic about my short life from this footage scrolling through my brain. Everything was roses. I was the smartest kid in my elementary school class, I was the class president. I was a shortstop player. Everything was roses. Until Serena showed up. Serena, who was exactly contemporary with that nameless dread creeping into my daily life. I was the only Asian kid my parents had ever known who panicked, Asians just didn’t panic, or they didn’t fucking talk about it, man, that was for sure, like that afternoon when I was supposed to take some government-ordered placement exam and I was sitting in the bathroom puking, my father standing outside the door, telling me, in the severest language, that I was a disgrace. What was I going to do, drop out of society? Go work in a dry cleaner’s? Recite poetry to the customers while I was doing alterations? Did I think my grandfather had come from Shanghai, etc. etc., on a boat that almost sank, etc. etc., so that I could . . . etc. etc., and then the sound of my mother’s voice telling him to lay off, my mother the microbiologist, or epidemiologist, why couldn’t I remember my mother’s job, she was never home, actually, she was always working. Come on. I called out to the Cortez flunkies, Hey, you guys, give me another shot, because nothing is chiming, I am telling you there is not a chime left in the belfry, you guys, I was still pressing the wet rag against the wound in my neck when the guy slapped me in the back of the head and told me to shut the fuck up, and then I was again on the Ferris wheel of it all, but I could see my father’s tassled loafers, and that’s when Jesse Simons was talking to me again, suddenly I was recognizing her voice.

  “Kevin, this is the end of the story, where you’re going now, because your mother is about to lay her hand on yours, across the desk, Kevin, and that will be the signal that I have to let go. Here’s what happens. This next ten minutes of your life enables us to dose the reservoir before Eddie Cortez finds out. We have just eliminated the person who informs on the plot to dose the reservoir, and so we are free to go back in time, by virtue of our collective affection for the city, to augment the water supply. And you know what that means, Kevin, it means that Eddie won’t have time to drop the bomb, Kevin. The bomb. Because we believe Eddie Cortez drops the bomb, to try to keep us from dosing the reservoir, and he drops it on lower Manhattan, because that’s where you live in the fall of 2008. We believe that Eddie Cortez, not a highly trained sleeper cell of foreign nationals, detonates the uranium bomb, to ensure dominance of Cortez Enterprises and to wipe out a number of key Resistance players living in the East Village at that historical juncture. So take your time in the next few minutes because this gives us the element of surprise we need. Jean-Pierre Al-Sadir is driving a minivan up what’s left of the interstate. And I believe he’s playing Duke Ellington on the CD player, because he wants to hear something really great before his memory is wiped clean. You’re the hero of the story, Kevin. And we’re all really sorry we couldn’t tell you earlier, and we’re sorry you had to learn this way. But we want you to know this. We want you to know that all the traumatic events of the last few months, these were things we knew you could withstand. Like few others. You’re the kid who made the story for us. We’re proud. We wish you were our son. And in a way you are now. If that’s any help at all. When you get to Manhattan, after talking to your mother, if it’s still gone, that’ll be the sign. Manhattan in ruins. Your ferry driver will be wearing green. That’ll mean that Eddie doesn’t need to go back in time to try to find you. That’ll mean that Eddie has given up trying to control the past, in order to control the present. Well, unless, by poisoning the reservoir, we eliminate the future in which Eddie comes up with the idea of detonating the blast, in which case Manhattan will still be standing and this entire present, with the drug epidemic and the Brooklyn Resistance, will be non-actualizing. And it’s also possible that the forgetting will have set in somewhere along the line, we aren’t sure where yet, and that you may have forgotten certain important parts of the story. You may have forgotten that Manhattan was ever a city by the time you get home tonight. You might have forgotten all of this, all this rotten stuff, this loneliness, even this speech I’m giving you now. In fact, we have tried to pinpoint forgetting, Kevin, we have targeted it, in such a way as to wipe clean your own memories of the blast. Because you actually had a pretty rotten time that day. You saw some awful things. So if you have forgotten, we believe you are the first locally targeted forgetter. However, if in the future, during this next forgetting, you want to remember this or other events from your life we have a suggestion for the future, Kevin, just play back your audio recordings.”

  This is where my mom stole into memory of the past. My mom was so beautiful. Every time I saw her. Even when she was Cassandra, on the swing in Brooklyn. So beautiful that I couldn’t even see the lines of time carved into her. Here in memory she’s young again, she’s perfect, young and brilliant, lit in the color of a fading silver halide print. My mom looks Kodak to me, always will, and she leads me out of the bathroom, away from my dad, and she explains that Serena telephoned her, and her syl
lables are carefully measured like on a metronome. It’s not nearly as bad as it seems. If I could redo the color balance in this past, I would make it more ultramarine, because everything’s too yellow: my mother taking me into the living room, where my grandfather once slept off his open-heart surgery. She sits me down. And she makes her diagnosis. She says, I have been doing a lot of research into your chemical problem. And I have talked to a lot of professional friends on the subject. When you have a spare hour or so, later in the week, then we’re going in to talk to some of them. But in the meantime, I want you to try something for me.

  So here it was. In a stoppered beaker.

  “Just give this a try for me. I think it’ll be more interesting than that stuff you and your friends have been smoking.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Do you think I should?”

  “I’m your mom.”

  “What is it?”

  “Lithium, some SSRIs, and a memory enhancer we’re trying out, in solution. It’s supposed to sharpen cognition. Might help with those tests. In an Aspartame sauce.”

  Just like in the laboratory sequences, you know, from those black-and-white movies of yore. I drank up. And the fact is, I aced that exam. That’s what I had forgotten. And I gave some to Serena, and she gave it to her boyfriend, Paley. We called it Albertine, because it sounded like Aspartame. Or so I was remembering. I gave it to the others. We all did well on our tests. Just three kids from the subdivisions fucking up the entire future of the human race, in pursuit of kicks and decent board scores.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to look across the desk at Cassandra, who may or may not have been my mother, may or may not have been the chief chemist for the Cortez syndicate, may or may not have been an informer for the Resistance, may or may not have been a young woman, may or may not have been home in Newton, refusing to come to the phone, may or may not have been an older Chinese woman with those sad eyes. I didn’t want to hear her voice, from across the room, rationalizing, “Let time show why I’ve done what I’ve done.” I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know the plans the Cortez operatives had for me, Addict Zero, didn’t want to know why I was being put through this exercise—so that they could break me on the rack of information, or because they still wanted me to write down whatever it was that they wanted me to write down. I didn’t want to know, finally, which memory was inside of which memory, didn’t want to know if there was a truth on top of these other truths. In a few minutes’ time, the water supply would be boiling with the stuff, eight weeks back. The cops at the reservoirs would be facedown in pools of blood, and the taps in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx would be running bluer than usual, and there would be dancing in the streets, as though all this stuff I’m telling you hadn’t happened at all. I mean, assuming the sweet forgetting didn’t come like the instantaneous wave of radiation after the blast. Assuming I didn’t forget all of this, how I got where I got, what I’d once known, the order in which I knew it, the cast of characters, my own name, the denouement.

  What’s memory? Memory’s the groove. It’s the all-stars laying down their groove, and it’s you dancing, chasing the desperations of the heart, chasing something that’s so gone, so ephemeral you know it only by its traces, how a certain plucked guitar string summons the thundering centuries, how a taste of fresh cherries calls up the indolent romancers on antebellum porches, all these stories rolling. Memory is the groove, the lie, the story you never get right, the better place. Memory is the bitch, the shame factory, the curse and the consolation. And that’s where my journalistic exposé breaks down.

  But I can offer a few last tidbits. If you’re wondering what the future looks like, if you’re one of the citizens from the past, wondering, let me tell you what it’s like. First thing I’ll tell you, gentle reader, is that the Brooklyn Bridge is gone, probably the most beautiful structure ever built according to the madness of New Yorkers. Brooklyn Bridge is gone, or at least the half of it on the New York side. The section on the Brooklyn side goes out as far as the first set of pillars, and after that it just crumbles away. Like the arms of Venus de Milo. It’s a suggestion of an idealized relationship between parts of a city, a suggestion, not an actual relationship. And maybe that’s why intrepid lovers go there now, lovers with thyroid cancer go up there at night, because it’s finally a time in New York City history where you can see the night sky. That is, if the wind’s blowing toward Jersey. They go up there, the lovers, they jump the police barriers, they walk out on that boardwalk, the part that’s still remaining, they look across the East River, they make their protestations of loyalty, I don’t really have much time, so there’s a few things I want to say to you. I’ll go even further. Because this instant is endless for me, and that’s why I’m dictating these notes. What I do is, I find the ferryman on the Brooklyn side, out in Bay Ridge, old Irish guy, I pay my fresh coin to the Irish ferryman with the green windbreaker, pet his rottweiler. I say, I got some business over there, and the guy says, No can do, pal, and I point at it and I say, Business, and he says, No one has business there, but I do, I tell him, and I will make it worth your while, and he says, There’s nothing over there, but in the end he accepts the offer, and then we are out upon the water, where the currents are stiff, and the waves treacherous, as if nature wants to wash this experiment of a city out into the sea, as if nature wants to clean the wound, flush the leftover uranium, the rubble, the human particulate, we’re on the water, and right there is where that statue used to be, we’ll get the new one from France before too long, and that’s where New York Plaza used to be on the tip there, I tell the ferryman to take me farther up the coast, I want to know every rock and piling, every remaining I-beam, I want to know it all, so we go past the footprint of South Street seaport, and here are the things that we lost that I might have seen from here, the Municipal Building with its spires, City Hall, the World Financial Center, the New York Stock Exchange, where did all those bond traders go, what are they doing now, are they in Montclair or Greenwich, and then it’s Chinatown, bombed almost to China, bombed down to the bedrock, edged by Canal Street, which is again a canal as it was way back when, and Little Italy is gone, those mobster hangouts are all gone, they’re all working on the Jersey side now, trying to corner the Albertine market there, and Soho is gone, New York University is gone, Zeckendorf Towers gone, Union Square Park is gone, the building where Andy Warhol’s Factory once was, what used to be Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and the Empire State Building is gone, which, when it fell sideways, crushed a huge chunk of lower Fifth Avenue, all the way to the Flatiron District, the area formerly known as the Ladies’ Mile, the flower district is gone, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in fact, about the only thing they say is still somewhat intact, like the Acropolis of Athens, is the Public Library, but I can’t see it from here. The bridges are blown out, the tram at 59th Street, gone, and as we pull alongside a section of the island where I’m guessing Stuyvesant Village used to be, I say, Ferryman, put me down here, pull your rowboat with its two-horsepower lawn-mower engine alongside, because I’m going in, I’m going to Tompkins Square, man, I’m going backward, through that neighborhood of immigrants, so now I step on the easternmost part of the island, same place the Italians stepped, same place the Irish stepped, same place the Puerto Ricans stepped, and I’m going in there now, because as long as it’s rubble I don’t care how hot it is, I’m going in, it’s like a desert of glass, sand and landfill burnt into glass, and I can hear the voices, even though it’s been a while now, all those voices layered over one another, in their hundred and fifty languages, can’t hear anything distinct about what they are saying, except that they’re saying, Hey, time for us to be heard.

  The Martian Agent.

  a Planetary Romance

  By MICHAEL CHABON

  They were the sons of an imperial traitor, marked for life. Their only honor lay in their loyalty to each other. Their sole chance for salvation lay in the empir
e of the clouds

  ’Tis theirs to sweep through the ringing deep where Azrael’s outposts are,

  Or buffet a path through the Pit’s red wrath when God goes out to war,

  Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHELPS

  1.

  The brothers first encountered a land sloop on the night, late in the summer of 1876, that one hunted their father down. It picked up their trail in Natchitoches country, two miles from Fort Wellington, at the ragged southwestern border of the Louisiana Territories and of the British Empire itself. The moon, as many sad partisans of the mutineer George Armstrong Custer were to record, hung fat in the sky, stained with an autumnal tinge of blood that, to some diarists, presaged hanging and debacle. Outside the windows of the coach in which the brothers and their parents rode lay the wilderness, flooded in black water and in a steady-flowing hubbub of night birds, insects, and amphibians. The coach bobbed and pitched as if borne on that current of bedlam and black water, down a road already ancient when the ancestors of these very insects had jabbed and goaded DeSoto’s men along it to their itching feverish deaths. The boot-heels of the coachman, a big, steady Vermonter named Haseltine, drummed against the front of the coach, just behind the boys’ heads, with the random tattoo of a broken shutter in the wind. The timbers of the carriage groaned with each jolt and stone in the road. The respiration of the mosquito-mad team, a pair of spavined drays for which, two days earlier, they had exchanged the last of their sovereigns, rattled out behind the coach like a string of tin cans.

  The first shrill call of the steel throat in the distance left a rippling wake of silence.

  —Train, said the little one, or—no.

  The cry had sounded too forlorn, too lupine for a train. Before the little boy even saw the knot of grief that deformed the hinge of the father’s stubbled, powder-burnt jaw, he knew that whatever had uttered it was hungering for them.