by Jarett Kobek
She lit a cigarette. Her smoke hung at eye level, an evil cloud wafting around us.
—Then I started thinking, what if the other Karen Spencer is the real one? What if I’m the fictional Karen Spencer, and the one who appears five times weekly is the genuine article? What if my life is bogus? What if I don’t exist and she does? Maybe that Karen Spencer is the one that matters. Maybe I’m a shadow projected against her wall. Maybe that other Karen Spencer is the one watching me.
When we left Karen’s loft, Cecil walked me the long way to my apartment. He suggested taking a cab, but I loved New York in the winter, especially after Christmas. Even if it was freezing.
—You aren’t quite there yet, he said, but when you end up in your thirties, life is different than you ever imagined. Movie stars visibly age but you feel the same. You ask yourself, how can I be getting older? I don’t know anything! And your friends start changing in ways that you couldn’t expect. Everyone has one or two friends who end up in the exact place for which they seemed destined, but most people go places that would have been unthinkable.
—Like Karen? I asked.
—Oddly, he said, no. Karen ended up exactly where I thought she might.
MARCH 1994
Baby Adopts the King of France
Then there was the time when Franklin came over and said that I needed to adopt a cat. I didn’t want a cat, thinking that owning another pet would be a betrayal of the Captain, but Franklin wouldn’t stop talking about one particular tabby kitten at the ASPCA on 92nd Street, where he volunteered.
—They found the little guy with his brothers and sisters in a garbage can. We think their mother left them to find food and never came back. Some guy was throwing away a can of soda and heard the kittens crying. They were only about a week old. But this kitten, the one you have to adopt, he was the runt, a little guy. They put all the kittens in the same cage and his brothers and sisters wouldn’t stop trying to nurse on his dick, so they had to separate him and put him in another cage with a bunch of other orphans. Anyway, he’s about three months old. I played with him yesterday. He’s the best, but I can’t have a cat in my apartment. My landlord would shit a brick. I thought of you. This guy is the sweetest fucking thing. He’s got his shots. He’s fixed. He’s made for you, Baby.
—Why not give him to Michael? I asked.
—C’mon, be serious. Michael’s got a cat. Plus it’d be fucking criminal letting this little guy live in a drug den. You’re different than most club people. You’re normal. You’re stable.
We never know how others see us. I felt on the verge of men in white coats throwing me into Bellevue. Tormented by writing, hollowed out by words. One of literature’s few salves has been the veneer of respectability it casts over its practitioners, an undue conference of reputation and status. Consider the personal history of that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, who inaugurated the 1960s by stabbing his wife and ended the decade by running for mayor of New York.
—Oh, fine, fuck it, I said. Let’s go look at this cat.
We took the 6 uptown, getting off at 86th and walking to 92nd and First. The ASPCA was in a squat building near the river. A housing project loomed across the street. Franklin led me inside the building and through its minor labyrinth.
I’d only seen Franklin inside clubs, at the Kiev and in our apartments. My idea of him was as this trashy slutty drug fiend burning away his mid-twenties. At the ASPCA, he conversed with a wide range of society. Everyone liked him, seemed to value his conversation. He brought nothing but smiles. Only then did I wonder, for the first time, what the hell he did for his money. I had never bothered to ask.
The cats were kept behind bars in a room with rows of cages. Some were sullen and withdrawn. Others terrified. Many rubbed against the metal, pushing their faces between the gaps, pleading with pathetic meows. At least they weren’t in abusive homes or starving in the street. I couldn’t avoid thinking of my research. Humanity never stops building cages.
The kittens didn’t break my heart. Kittens always find homes. The older cats killed me. Each offered a depressing story, adding to a collective weight that no person could bear. The eleven-year-old orange tabby that stank of tragedy. The death of an owner, an accidental escape, the indifference of a cruel host.
Franklin took out the kitten in question, this cock-eyed mewling thing. His head and back were gray with brown highlights. His side had swirling markings. His stomach was pure white. His legs striped with beige fur. I held him in my palm, upside down on his back, and saw that his paw pads were alternating black and pink.
—Fine, I said. Fine. You win. I’ll take him.
—I knew you would, said Franklin.
I filled out an astounding amount of paperwork. I showed two forms of identification. I forked over serious cash.
The people working at the ASPCA kept telling me that I was doing a great thing and how happy life is with a pet. They put the kitten in a cardboard box. I carried him outside.
We found a cab and had it take us to the pet store near my apartment. I bought the four essential ingredients of cat ownership. Food, receptacle for food, litter, receptacle for litter.
Back at home, I freed the mewling thing from its box. It ran around my apartment in circles, climbing on every surface, sniffing, knocking things over. I tried catching him but failed until the beast realized that I only wanted to touch him. He ran to the rug and flopped on his back, displaying that dazzling stomach.
I lifted the creature.
—What the hell am I going to call you?
There was nothing in his green saucer eyes but psychosis. I hadn’t adopted a cat. I’d adopted a bag of emotional problems tied with a string of lunacy. He let out a tiny little meow in his squeaky kitten voice.
—You shall be known, I said, as The King of France.
APRIL 1994
Baby’s New Novel
I went back to science fiction. I figured that my reception would expand if I passed off even more watered-down genre conventions as post-pop cultural profundities. Plus, the whole thing came to me. In a moment. As if in a dream, as I wandered past Tower Records on 4th Street, cast in the illumination from the lightboxed record covers, blown up to a hundred times their original size, shining like beacons in the store’s plate glass windows.
One thousand years in the future, around 3000 C.E., time travel has become a fact of life, its use regulated by the Time Travel Commission, a bureaucratic arm of the world government.
The average citizen may not travel back in time. Not on a whim. Not for any reason. Time travel is a legitimate tool of scientific and historical research performed by trained professionals.
Travel to the future is impossible. Attempts have been made. Each failed, resulting in the destruction of sensitive equipment and a significant death toll.
Our lives are narratives shaped by the past reaching into the present with unholy precision. The human race lumbers in the shadows of ghosts, is stained with the ectoplasm of its own history. The great flaw of human biology is our sensory inability to perceive the fourth dimension while being doomed to traverse through it. There is no objective truth of an event, no way to capture a moment once it has passed. Even video fails to convey the fullness of the event.
The solution to this quandary is the development of full imaging holographic technology that stimulates all five senses and extends across the three-dimensional planes for a radius of up to sixteen hundred meters. Time travel, then, is a parallel technology. The purpose of the time traveler is to bring holographic equipment into the past and make a perfectly accurate impression of an event.
The implications are massive. When a person experiences an exact replica of a historical event, myths are shattered. Thus, the death of most religions. It becomes impossible to believe in Christ’s resurrection when a person can behold the man in his actuality, a charismatic street preacher crucified and then impersonated several months later by a rabid beggar. Islam lasts slightly longer, but not b
y much. The religions that do survive are primarily of Asian origin and so-called primitive faiths which retained an ongoing belief in animal spirits.
Monotheism was out.
With one exception, with that great exception to all things. The Jews. If a culture can survive the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Europeans, the Nazis, and late twentieth-century politics, then it can survive the advent of time travel.
All practitioners of time travel take a pledge based on the Hippocratic Oath, vowing to do no harm. This charming idea proves woefully inadequate. The problem is not the effects of the travelers on time but rather the effects of time on the travelers.
By any measure, 3000 C.E. is a technological utopia. Violence still erupts, but it is the small violence of an overcrowded planet adrift in luxury rather than the wide-scale bloodshed of previous periods. War and disease are relics of the past. Money is an unheard-of obscenity.
Time travelers, innocents abroad, are thrust into milieus where they must observe mass slaughter, observe millions rent asunder by incurable disease, observe cities being destroyed, observe populations wiped out, observe environmental chaos. The impossible pain of history is beyond their personal experience, yet they are forced into its middle, watching war, watching genocide on an accelerated planetary-wide scale.
Suicide rates, always high after the installation of worldwide euthanasia centers in 2731, skyrocket among those who visit the past. The biggest such center, located on the south side of Nueva Washington Square between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue, reports a massive spike.
The Time Travel Commission takes notice.
Many studies are conducted. Following a meta-analysis, it emerges that the only demographic of time travelers with a statistically significant variation away from suicide is the Jews. Theories are floated, several containing an atavistic resurgence of anti-Semitism, but the one with the most currency suggests that the Jews are culturally inculcated to think of history as a horror with no answer but survival.
Jews become the only people willing to do the work. The Ashkenazi prove more capable at recent history, while the Mizrahi possess an innate understanding of the distant past. The Sephardim demonstrate high competency with eras predating the advent of homo sapiens.
House scientists at the Time Travel Commission run an R&D department, hoping to develop new technologies to ease the experience. The most effective is a bioengineered bacterial strain of super gonorrhea. When collected in the throat pool, the bacteria develops its own intelligence and exerts a control over its human host’s vocal cords, tongue, and facial muscles. Designed with specific limitations of emotional and intellectual range, the disease speaks with a voice markedly different than that of its host.
The first chapter opens with a dialogue between the protagonist, a time traveler named Boaz ben-Haim, and his superintelligent gonorrhea. The setting for this dialogue is a bar. Ben-Haim nurtures a cocktail of synthetic mescaline, alcohol, and methamphetamine.
—This job is pushing me toward addiction, says ben-Haim.
—the world is a wonderful place, says the gonorrhea. you need not give over to the temptations of the flesh, nor drown your sorrow. rejoice on tomorrow and remember today!
—The mescaline is making me see shapes in the artificial cloud formations. I think I can see the end of the world.
—the world never ends, says the gonorrhea. the multitudes go on forever. recall walt whitman’s “ sun-down poem,” where the good gray bard speaks to future generations.
—Wasn’t that poem addressed to future Brooklynites? asks ben-Haim.
—yes, says the gonorrhea.
—Brooklyn was destroyed in 2321 C.E.
—yes, says the gonorrhea. but the brooklyn of our hearts remains. why meditate on destruction? think of the happy rebuilding that follows!
Boaz ben-Haim stumbles home through the slick fiber-optic acid rain. He falls asleep after chasing his cocktail with a massive dose of Mandrax and barbiturates. The next morning, he is awoken by an instant video communiqué demanding his appearance at the Time Travel Commission.
When Boaz ben-Haim arrives at the Commission’s epical concrete bunker beneath the Nueva United Nations, he’s informed that certain higher-ups have been paying special attention to his career. His five years of effort have demonstrated his capacities. As such, he’s been promoted. Boaz ben-Haim groans. Promotions only expose the traveler to historical epochs of higher psychological impact.
His new assignment is one of the worst. A genocide, the Shoah, and the Shoah at its very worst. Auschwitz in May 1944. Boaz ben-Haim is ordered to stay for three solid months. The hologram technology requires daily tweaking.
Boaz dresses in full SS regalia and poses as a camp guard. He’s equipped with bewilderment technologies ensuring that neither he nor his equipment are discovered. He sleeps in the hutch of his time bubble, hidden from the outer world, but sleep only brings nightmares of his father.
Over the weeks at Auschwitz, his hyperintelligent gonorrhea takes on a disturbing aspect. Confronted by the human race at its worst, the disease begins speaking exclusively in platitudes.
Boaz ben-Haim witnesses the gassing of a hundred Jews. His bacteria tells him: —things are bad now, but remember, we’re from the future! one thousand years from now, everything’s fine!
Boaz ben-Haim sees a starving child, no more than eight years old, shot through her head. His bacteria tells him: —death is part of life’s natural cycle. we must not consider it an absolute state of being.
Boaz ben-Haim, the stink of crematoria in his nostrils, bumps into Josef Mengele. The bacteria tells him: —even the worst people have good intentions, it’s just that the biochemical makeup of their neurological pathways frustrates their ability to achieve goodness.
The bacteria speaks with ben-Haim’s throat, with ben-Haim’s face, with ben-Haim’s vocal cords. The experience is akin to punching yourself and then apologizing to your fist.
Boaz ben-Haim questions the time traveler’s first mandate. Do no harm. Doing no harm can be perceived, uncharitably, as not doing anything. How many children must die? What if the fundamental principle of time travel, that altering the past may prevent the traveler from being born, is little more than the kind of bullshit political practicality supposedly outmoded in the year 3000 C.E.? Isn’t it chronocentricity to suggest that his life is of implicitly more value than the lives at Auschwitz? Or dying anywhere in history? If a life can be saved from needless death, then shouldn’t its salvation occur? Can self-preservation be a valid argument against action?
—remember, says the gonorrhea, by the time of your birth, the human race has worked out all of its problems! history is the long process of your species making the best of all possible worlds!
Unwilling to save the blameless, the Commission gives tacit approval to the crimes of history. Time travelers aren’t scientists. They aren’t trained professionals. They are tourists in humanity’s suffering. They are the same colonialist caste who’ve preyed on mankind from the advent of industrialization. People who owe their livelihoods to the distant suffering of those hidden from view. No place is more convenient than the past.
Six million deaths are not without meaning. The history of the Jewish people, the culmination of several thousand years of persecution, is Boaz ben-Haim’s ancestral heritage, but when technology might save these people from their doom, how can a person fail to act?
Boaz ben-Haim isn’t the first to come to this conclusion. Fail-safes are built into the technology. Nanotech filters prevent the ingress of unauthorized organic material into the time hutch. The very mechanism that allows him to witness also enforces his complicity.
Meanwhile, the gonorrhea is displaying a surprising awareness of Boaz ben-Haim’s thoughts. Its platitudes have changed. It offers reassurances about the vitality of his mission. The gonorrhea may be reading his mind.
—remember, boaz, says the gonorrhea, these kinds of crises are in no way unique. the feeli
ngs you’re experiencing are not new. they’ve been considered and addressed. there are programs in place.
As Boaz ben-Haim approaches the end of his mission at Auschwitz, he suspects that he will not be allowed to return to the past. The gonorrhea may be compiling a dossier of unflattering information about his doubts and his suspicions about the failures of time travel. If the Commission discovers his incredulity about its central tenets, he will be removed from duty.
His one chance for action is now, before the return to his own epoch. The Commission may control the future, but in the past, they’re at his mercy. He has the ability to go anywhere and do anything.
His first stop is America in 1970. He breaks into the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and steals megadoses of penicillin and ampicillin.
When gonorrhea was cultivated as an aid for time travelers, the disease had not infected a single human for over four hundred years. The strain was selected because of its unique vulnerability to antibiotic doses. Its developers, EliGlaxoLily, saw this susceptibility as a method of easy removal when the disease was no longer required. Back in his hutch, Boaz ben-Haim eats the pilfered medicine.