by Jarett Kobek
Months later, on a January night, the universe revealed its fractal nature, sucking me into a fourth-dimensional quantum entanglement with this illicit rendezvous.
I’d come home with the hope of getting some writing done. Unlocking the front door and going inside, I saw Jon’s dirty denim jacket over a kitchen chair. Adeline’s door was closed. I assumed they were in her bed, busy with their drab vanilla flavor of hetero love.
I started typing, writing, pounding the keys, entrancing myself with the thin wild mercury machine music of my fingers. The story was titled “As Sure as Eggs Is Eggs.” It’s about an alternate reality, the historical departure point being the British defeat of the colonial rebels during the American War of Rebellion.
No United States, no Constitution, no Bill of Rights. The Louisiana Purchase still happens, but the land transfer occurs as part of the Treaty of Amiens. There is no War of 1812. William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson end slavery throughout the Empire, its final abolition occurring in 1833, thereby averting the American Civil War, saving the lives of 600,000 potential soldiers. The brute force of this extra-human capacity mixes with British ingenuity, causing a volatile reaction that sparks a massive scientific and technological revolution. Every major advance of our twentieth century occurs before the death of Queen Victoria.
Which all sounds great, I admit, but there are downsides, too. The English caste system solidifies in the Americas, taking on new and disquieting forms.
By unconscious social agreement, all colonials carry upon their person the freshly laid egg of a chicken. Social distinctions are judged upon the thickness of shell, the quality of color, size, and visual heft.
The shelled accoutrement is a fact of modern life. As part of Her Majesty’s social welfare programs, every individual on the dole is issued a bargain-basement chicken, dooming the poor to a lifetime of undersized, yolkless eggs. The upper middle classes are trapped within a cycle of perpetually purchasing new hens, desperate for the latest innovation. New breeds emerge with daily frequency. A secondary market of accessories serves individuals who desire not only luxury but personalization. One key accessory is the mandatory opaque white cube carrying case with self-generated spotlight illumination, highlighting the smoothness of the egg’s curve and accentuating speckles.
The North American continent is absolutely lousy with egg knowledge. The Western British Empire is crazy with poultry experts.
I hadn’t gotten any further than establishing setting when Adeline’s voice shattered the thunder of my typewriter. She sounded positively apoplectic, shouting: —Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out!
The front door slammed.
I peeked my head into the kitchen. Adeline stood by the bathtub, face as red as her hair.
—What the hell happened? I asked.
—Oh, not much, she said. Jon merely fucked my childhood best friend.
—What.
—Stacie, she said. He fucked Stacie. When she was visiting.
—What.
—Do you need the photo developed and framed? asked Adeline. Jon screwed out Stacie’s brains.
I floated above my physical self, my spirit tethered by an invisible umbilical cord, a silvery ectoplasmic tendril. I watched myself throw open the front door. I watched myself barrel down the stairs.
Jon was walking toward Second Avenue, contemplating his transgressions, only halfway down the block. A book in his right hand, jacket thrown over his left shoulder. He heard my footfall, turned back, saw me and started running. Adeline came outside, shouting, but I was too crazy to understand her words.
He rounded the corner, past the Kiev. I gave chase, bursting through the locked hands of a love-struck couple, shoving the man up against the restaurant.
—You had better run, I shouted. I’m going to hold you down and paint you green.
Jon leapt into Second Ave. I barreled after him, not giving a damn about oncoming traffic. My rage could bend steel, would crumple hoods.
—Leave me alone! he shouted.
—You can’t outrun me! You fucking asshole! I set the school records for the fifty- and hundred-yard dashes!
He turned down 6th Street, gaining a frantic burst of speed as he ran past the Indian restaurants, ignoring the Bangladeshi barkers who invited him inside with offers of free wine.
Jon dropped his book and his jacket, hoping to lighten his load, but the jacket tangled in his legs. He crashed against the crumbling pavement, right before the entrance to Shah Bag. He lay dazed, bleeding from a gash across his forehead.
The Christmas lights of Shah Bag lit his body. As part of their business model, all the 6th Street Indian establishments kept these lights hanging year-round. I stood above Jon, thinking that it was interesting how he’d managed to fall into the Xmas penumbra during the only time of year when the illumination was seasonally appropriate.
I picked up the book. A hardcover entitled Defiant Pose, authored by Stewart Home.
Jon lifted himself on the flats of his hands, crawling like an infant.
Using Defiant Pose as a makeshift weapon, I hit his head with as much strength as I could muster. The book was light, only 167 pages, but the lead vocalist of The Inverted Bloody Crosses had been weakened by his tumble, and was leveled by a modest hardcover debut.
He collapsed into the sidewalk.
A waiter came out of Shah Bag. I’d eaten there several times. The waiter looked at Jon, looked at me, and spat on the ground.
Then there was the time when I beat the living shit out of Jon.
Also, I kept his book.
FEBRUARY 1992
Baby Gets a Letter from Parker Brickley
There was Erik, there was NYU, there was Adeline, and there was my burgeoning career as a writer of science fiction, a literary subgenre that in those days still held some water.
During sophomore year, I’d taken a survey course in La Belle Époque with a professor named Jindrich Zezula. In the last week of the semester, I’d sat down at my typewriter with every intention of finishing my final paper on Émile Zola.
Four hours later, when I stood up, I’d written the first half of an exceptionally dubious short story. Two thousand words of unrefined excrement inflicted upon the English language. I destroyed the evidence.
Others followed. I couldn’t stop. Ideas poured out of my head, but writing did not come naturally. Writing was work, writing required an apprenticeship. I spent a year doing little but fucking Erik and shitting out terrible short stories.
After committing twenty-seven of these crimes against humanity, there was a new coherence, an awareness of construction and flow. The language no longer impeded the intent. In my arrogance, I began mailing out manuscripts.
My first sale was to Gardner Dozois at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Entitled “Heroin of the Masses,” it was a shamefaced conceptual theft of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie. By the time that it appeared in print, I couldn’t even read it, unwilling to relive its youthful naiveté.
But that’s life. Sometimes your parents die in outrageous circumstances that force you to leave town. Sometimes your brother throws himself off the Colorado Bridge in Pasadena, California. And sometimes you make your literary debut with the questionable pop eschatology of an alien singing lead vocals in a post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post-post glam band, on stage at the Pyramid Club, a book of prophecy in his right hand and a dirty syringe hanging from his cephalic vein.
*
Then there was the time when I was browsing books at the Strand and came across a biography of Johnny Appleseed, a pioneer who seeded apple trees across the American Middle West. In addition to his agricultural efforts, Appleseed was an adherent of Emanuel Swedenborg, a radical free-love mystic who’d ascended to heaven in the eighteenth century and came back to Earth full of saintly know
ledge.
I grew up hearing myths about the man who planted trees, but what if all along he’d been sowing a different crop in warmer soils? What if his true purpose was spreading doctrines about the transcendent union with Christ through sexual abandon?
I wrote a story called “The Sun That Sleeps Too Long.” It was about a twenty-fourth-century analogue for Swedenborg, a character whom I didn’t bother giving a new name. I called him Swedenborg 2.
Like his namesake, Swedenborg 2 ascends to heaven, but the mechanism of his journey is alien abduction. The extraterrestrials probe him. They dissect him. They subject him to stress tests. They torture him. When the aliens exhaust their bevy of abuses, their advanced technology allows them to reconstruct Swedenborg 2’s body.
In the process of reconstruction, they implant Swedenborg 2’s brain with nano-tech that will allow the aliens to track him through the galaxy. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the implantation is scheduled on the first anniversary of ΩΩΩΩΩ’s death.
ΩΩΩΩΩ was the mate of ΦΦΦΦΦ. ΦΦΦΦΦ is the technician tasked with implanting nanotech in Swedenborg 2’s brain. In the hours before the operation, ΦΦΦΦΦ gets rip-roaringly drunk. ΦΦΦΦΦ botches the job.
Swedenborg 2 returns to earth. He discovers himself capable of performing miracles. He heals the sick. He raises the dead. He turns water into wine. He performs exorcisms on swineyards.
He also can’t stop talking. He babbles constantly about the alien abduction, which he has mistaken for Heaven, and establishes a new gospel based on infinite and endless sex. This holy horny glossolalia is another side effect of the implant, crammed into Swedenborg 2’s left anterior cingulate cortex, leaving the new messiah in a state of perpetual arousal. His dick becomes a dowsing rod, a holy celestial wand.
He attracts a great number of followers.
At the dawn of the twenty-fifth century, Darius 2C Danko, a Nuevo Swedenborgian, wanders the galaxy in a clunky spaceship. His mission? To plant space apples and spread the gospel of polymorphous perversity. The narrative follows his peregrinations, working a somewhat heavy-handed allegory about American political figures. I also threw in a nonsense mystical overlay, drawing a parallel between Appleseed and the Greek god Bacchus, finding resonance in the spread of vegetation and wild love.
I submitted the story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The editor, Edward L. Ferman, sent a letter of acceptance, informing me that my work would appear in the July 1991 edition. Months later, I received a package containing a check and my contributor’s copies.
As far as these things go, the cover illustration was not a disaster. A half-translucent panther’s head hovered over a mountain landscape. I opened to the table of contents. There I was, between “Autumn Mist” by Nancy Springer and “The Pan Man” by Elizabeth Engstrom.
They’d changed my title.
I was the proud author of “Johnny Cyberseed.”
Regardless of this abuse, people loved the story. The magazine forwarded complimentary letters, kind words from the readers. Their cloying language made me decide that most of my correspondents were very lonely. Nice, but lonely.
In February, a note came from Parker Brickley. A literary agent working at William Morris, he’d been trying to find my phone number. But that was impossible. I was invisible East Village scum living under one pseudonym and writing under another.
Brickley’s office was uptown. I called him. He invited me to lunch.
That simple, that easy. All you need do was write. Even if the editors changed your titles. Even if the world believed you responsible for “Johnny Cyberseed.”
Life was going well. Too well. I’d forgotten that human existence is a waveform moving up and down through time and space, and that fortune’s wheel never stops turning. Good or ill, there’s always change coming.
MARCH 1992
Patrick Geoffrois
Baby, said Adeline, don’t you know that I bumped into Jon on First Avenue? The mere sight of his face drove me to infuriation, so I gathered some of my menstrual blood and threw it at him.
—You threw your period at your ex-boyfriend? I asked.
—Yes, she said. But I simply fell short, my volley landing at his feet. Jon stood there, not comprehending what I’d done. I told him exactly what had happened. I told him that I had aimed for his stupid face.
—How is that even possible? I thought you used organic cloth.
—Darling, don’t you know that I switched to the Keeper months ago? I bought mine at Magickal Childe.
—I had no idea.
—It’s much more efficient. I’ve been using my blood to feed the plants.
Following the dissolution of her affair with Jon de Lee, Adeline had taken up new hobbies. She’d reverted out of her schoolmarm outfits and become, as best I could tell, a regressed punk. She dyed her hair purple, shaved the sides of her head, and was now wearing unfortunate amounts of denim. There was a lot of talk about anarchism as a viable political philosophy. She hid away her Steeleye Span records and the You Made Me Realize EP, and took up early punk like (I’m) Stranded by The Saints and the X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents.
The album that she played most was Legacy of Brutality by The Misfits. I’d been with her when she purchased it. Had I known what it meant, I could have stopped her.
But I didn’t know that I was about to live through months of brutish New Jersey ambition, courtesy of Glenn Danzig né Azalone. I can’t estimate how many needles Adeline destroyed listening to that record, but I know exactly how much of my patience she ruined. All of it.
In terms of her social life, she fell in with a fucked-up Frenchman named Patrick Geoffrois, a street hustler who kept a table outside of Twardoski Travel on St. Mark’s. He’d been a fixture for years, telling people’s fortunes, reading palms and spreading the Thoth tarot.
Geoffrois was one of those street characters who cannot be ignored, a gaunt ghoul with piercing blue eyes, no teeth, slicked-back blond hair hanging to his shoulders, black clothes accessorized with hokey jewelry like pentagrams and, irony of ironies, inverted crosses.
Adeline made his acquaintance in the same way that she made all of her bad decisions, via a fixation that was part intellectual, part emotional, entirely crazy.
In February, the man’s face had appeared on the cover of Newsday, a cheesy picture in which he held a sword’s pommel over his left eye. Beneath this grim visage was the headline: CULT PROBE WIDENS.
It went back to Daniel Rakowitz. Although two years had passed, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the NYPD’s Occult Crimes Unit had concluded that Rakowitz murdered Monika Beerle on the order of Geoffrois, as a ritualistic human sacrifice to Choronzon or Duke Focalor. Satanic panic done New York style, with leaks to the press and grandstanding detectives discoursing on demonism in Far Rockaway accents.
No one disputed that Geoffrois was an occultist. But there’s occultism and there’s occultism.
Anyone who’d been on the Lower East Side for more than two weeks knew Geoffrois for what he was. A huckster, a conman, another pathetic street performer trying to earn his bread. If he controlled a coven, and if he could routinely summon supernatural forces, why would he waste years freezing and begging on St. Mark’s?
When Adeline saw the cover of Newsday, she walked a block over and encountered the Frenchman at his folding table, sitting where he always sat, doing as he’d always done. She never detailed the exact nature of their first conversation.
I’ll hazard a guess.
A recovering junky magician speaking in his slightly accented English about whatever hocus pocus floated in the deep recesses of his brain, dismissing Rakowitz as a hanger-on. Adeline going on about Dress Suits to Hire and the violence inherent in the urban experience, attempting to delve into New York’s random cruelty and murder, asking the self-styled black magician for help discerning the hidden meanings of coincidence.
Adeline started visiting Geoffrois’s apartment on 11th S
treet, where he lived with his wife and her young daughter. My roommate returned from these salons with a head full of bizarre ideas about the universe’s mystical undercurrents. She began reading books by Aleister Crowley. Diary of a Drug Fiend. Magick in Theory and Practice.
Out of morbid curiosity, I opened her copy of The Book of the Law. It heralded the Dawn of a New Aeon through Egyptian sex Magick.
Remembering Geoffrois’s entrée into tabloid media, I noted one section in which Crowley suggests that Human Sacrifice is a Necessary Act for the Achievement of One’s own Will. It was that kind of book, one in which words underwent an enforced capitalization. There was no will in Crowley. There was only Will. He was that kind of Writer.
If Adeline’s interest appears silly, what else could she do? Throw herself into a series of punishing one-night stands? Win back her cheating boyfriend?
MARCH 1992
Baby and Erik See Kiss Me Deadly
Theatre 80 was showing Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film directed by Robert Aldrich. I invited Adeline and Erik. He accepted. She declined.
—Why, Baby, she said, don’t you think that I’ve seen it a million times? It’s the very best film about Los Angeles! Keep an eye out for the heavy. His name was Albert Dekker. He’s one of those très tragique Hollywood stories of a motion picture star dying in distressed circumstances. I won’t tell you how it happened until you see the film, otherwise you’ll spend the whole time thinking about his death, leaving you simply unable to concentrate. And don’t you know that it’s the best American film of the 1950s? I’d feel oh so terrible if I removed you from the narrative.
Adapted from an execrable novel by Mickey Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly stars Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer. The film opens with Meeker in his car, nearly running over a deranged female hitchhiker. She’s young, naked, and D-list beautiful. A convoluted plot spills out, oozing with the grimy trappings of the noir.