Hey, Hey, Yesterday
NOTE: I began this novel on a very American date, the fourth of July. I finished the first draft two months later on September 4th. Since this novel is, among other things, a political thriller, I promised to have a reasonably polished finished draft available by another imporant American date, election day 2024. So here it is. I apologize for any formatting issues you may find. Substack does weird things to my Word texts. No matter how I try to break song lyrics into stanzas, Substack always insists on eliminating the breaks between stanzas. Here, I’ve tried to thwart this problem by putting asterisks between stanzas, but Substack will probably screw it up anyway. I always center the chapter headings, but Substack often screws that up too. Also, italicized text will often revert to normal text for no reason. I tried to separate the chapters from each other with five-line breaks, making it easy to find where one ends and the next begins. But Substack always seems to eliminate large gaps, so the chapters are crammed too close together. I’m too much of a technoboob to figure out how to solve these problems. These are minor issues that shouldn’t much affect your enjoyment of the book.
Chapter One: The Graphophile
Something strange was happening to my wife. It began one morning in mid February, a few months before the primary elections in our home state of California. My wife is a writer. She is billed as the “chief cultural correspondent” for Lady Audley’s Quill, an online magazine written by and for women. It sounds like a grand position, but she is paid only a thousand dollars a month and is expected to contribute an essay on popular culture every week. Fortunately, this is not arduous for her. Chloe is a graphophile. She loves to write, and she has been scribbling down essays and reviews and commentary for as long as I have known her. Because she produces more than LAQ can possibly publish, she also has her own blog on Bookstack, where she writes mainly about the popular fiction of the twentieth century, a specialty of hers. She posts one or two essays a week on her blog, which is called Pop Fiction Matters. The woman is positively obsessed with pop fiction. Our modest, three-bedroom, 1,235-square-foot home is filled with books, most of them tattered old paperbacks published sometime between 1950 and 1999. Late twentieth-century popular fiction in English is her sweet spot. Daphne du Maurier, Richard Matheson, Ira Levin, Stephen King, Len Deighton, Herman Wouk, Ian Fleming, Mary Stewart, Helen MacInnes, James Clavell, Mario Puzo, Colleen McCullough, Frederick Forsyth – she can tell you more than you’ll ever want to know about writers like that. But JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Major, and Tony Blair? Forget about it. Ordinarily, she cares about real-life politicians only when they appear as characters in books such as The Day of the Jackal (Charles de Gaulle), The Eagle Has Landed (Winston Churchill), or 11/22/63 (JFK). So it was a bit of a shock to me when, on that morning last February, I visited her blog and found an essay excoriating one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president.
Missouri Senator Earl Brill was a youngish (50), moderate politician who supported both abortion (with exceptions) and the death penalty (ditto). He was handsome and, by all accounts, a good husband and father and businessman (his family made its fortune in the lumber trade) and senatorial colleague. He was the kind of politician who seemed tailor-made for fans of Hollywood movies and pop fiction. And yet, here was a 2,500-word takedown of him on a blog called Pop Fiction Matters by an author who had never before evinced the slightest interest in contemporary politics. Of course, being Chloe, she did it in the form of a pop-cultural critique. She pointed out that many of the senator’s favorite stump speeches contained lines that were eerily similar to those delivered in three old popular novels, one from the 1960s and two from the 1970s. These books were long out of print and almost totally forgotten, but that is exactly the kind of pop fiction my wife likes to write about. Her essay included side-by-side comparisons of Senator Brill’s words and those of the fictional politicians who were the villains of the novels under review. Some of these were eerily similar. For instance:
BRILL: “It’s fine to reach out a hand to the future, but let’s not offer nothing but a closed fist to the present.”
PRESIDENT NED HURLEY (the main villain in the novel Lying in State, published in 1967 by Bantam Books): “Let’s reach out a welcoming hand to the future without letting go of those who might need a steadying hand in the present.”
BRILL: “The current president says he cares about America’s children, but his kind of care isn’t paternal but paternalistic. He wants to decide when and where our children can pray, what books their school libraries can carry, what musical downloads ought to come with a parental warning. That’s not caring. That’s controlling. And a good parent knows the difference between the two.”
SENATOR ALAN LOCKE (the villain of The Devil’s Candidate, 1971 Pocket Books): “President Wendell says he cares about America’s children, but his administration wants to control what they can see on TV, the music they can listen to, the books they can read. That’s not caring, it’s mind-control. And a free people ought to be able to see that.”
BRILL: “If the business of America is business, then maybe American corporations should stop sending their jobs to third world workers and their profits to offshore holding companies.”
GOVERNOR MARK SHERIDAN (the villain of Red Tide Rolling, 1977 Fawcett Crest): “If the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge used to say, then perhaps it is time to make those businesses even more American by nationalizing the biggest and the most rapacious of them.”
Chloe then pointed out that President Ned Hurley is eventually exposed as a tax cheat and a sexual predator, while Senator Locke is exposed as a tax cheat and a (literal!) demon, and Governor Sheridan is exposed as a tax cheat and a Soviet plant. She concluded by noting that, “I would never accuse Senator Brill of being a sexual predator, a demon, or a Russian agent. But he sounds a lot like Hurley, Locke, and Sheridan. So perhaps he shares some other quality with them as well.” The obvious inference was that Brill must be a tax cheat. It struck me as a bit of a cheap shot. To my knowledge, no one had ever even accused Brill of such a thing. I was pondering the oddness of this essay when its author, sleepy-eyed and pajama-ed, came scuffling into the kitchen and sat down across the breakfast table from me.
“So,” I said, “what did Senator Brill do to get on your bad side last night?”
She looked up at me as if I had just asked her if she was all packed for her trip to Mars. “What the heck are you talking about?” she said.
“This article you posted at Bookstack last night practically accuses Earl Brill of being a tax cheat,” I explained. “And yet the only evidence you present is the fact that some of his speeches bear vague similarities to the speeches of fictional tax cheats in books that no human being on earth is probably familiar with but you.”
She shook her head, as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I actually wrote that?” she asked.
“You must have,” I said. “Or else someone has hacked into your Bookstack account.”
She opened up her laptop and accessed her Bookstack page. The most recent essay was titled, “What Three Forgotten Novels Can Tell Us About Earl Brill.” She began scrolling through it, a look of perplexity on her face.
“Didn’t you write that?” I asked.
She kept scrolling till she reached the end of the essay. My wife is a very rapid reader. When she was done, she shook loose a few more cobwebs and said, “I guess I must have. I had a few more glasses of wine after you went to bed. I guess I must have cranked this out while under the influence of cheap chablis.”
“So you’ve read those three books?”
“Yeah, I guess. Years ago. I’m surprised I was able to recall them so vividly.”
Another thing about Chloe is that she never gets rid of a book. Her shelves are where pop fiction retires permanently. She never loans a book or gives it away. She figures she’ll have a use for even the worst of them someday. Of course, we have bookshelves everywhere, and her books are generally stacked three deep. She can rarely find what she wants when she wants it without an hour-long search.
She stood up and began padding barefoot toward the hallway. “Maybe I managed to dig them up. I’m going to look in my office.”
She came back a minute later holding three ratty old paperbacks in her hands. “They were lying right next to my keyboard. I had marked the passages I wanted to quote with sticky notes. I must be losing my mind.”
“You don’t remember writing it?”
“Sort of, I guess. I was kind of drunk.”
“It isn’t like you to write about politics,” I said.
“It isn’t like me to even think about politics. You know about my dad’s SPERM rule.”
When Chloe was young, her father told her never to discuss sex, politics/elections, religion, or money with anyone whom she was not intimately acquainted with. To do so, he told her, is to invite scorn or hostility from someone who otherwise might be only indifferent to you at worst and, at best, kind and polite.
“I’m going to delete it before anyone sees it. I don’t need every Earl Brill fan in the country sending me hate messages.” She sat back down at the kitchen table and looked at her laptop.
“Crap,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Someone just posted a comment: ‘You tell it, sister. Brill talks a good game, but you don’t become a rich politician unless you’re also a crooked one.’”
“Who sent it?” I asked.
“Someone whose online name is burdwatcher, with a u instead of an i.”
“Is he a subscriber?” Chloe charges a dollar month for unlimited access to her Bookstack account. Nonsubscribers can access three free articles a month. She has about three hundred paid subscribers.
“Yep,” she said. “In fact, he is a charter member of Pop Fiction Matters. One of the first people to subscribe when I switched from offering free content to making people pay for it. I don’t want to risk pissing him off by deleting the Brill essay. I guess I’ll just let it ride. I’ll bury it under a couple of additional essays before the end of the day, so it’s not the first thing visitors to Pop Fiction Matters see. Maybe burdwatcher will be the only person who actually reads it. I hope so, anyway.”
Unfortunately, that would not be the case.
Chapter Two: The Harvard School of Banjo
I don’t read as much as Chloe does. My job (I work as an e-cart shopper for a local supermarket chain) and my avocation (playing bluegrass banjo) don’t leave me time for much pleasure reading, except for the odd biography of Bill Monroe or the latest issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. But I love the idea of being an avid fiction reader like Chloe. Fortunately, she reviews practically every piece of pop fiction she reads, either for Lady Audley’s Quill or for Pop Fiction Matters. She has a way of writing about books and authors that makes you want to go out and purchase a copy of every novel she reviews – even the bad ones, just to see if they are as amusingly awful as she claims. She generally takes care to avoid plot spoilers in her reviews. But that’s fine with me. If I want to know how a particular book turned out, all I’ve got to do is ask and she’ll give me the details. What’s more, Chloe frequently asks me to read to her from a book that she has already started. This often happens at night, when she is tired. She’ll give me the kind of brief plot recap that you give to someone who comes into a movie twenty minutes late, and then ask me to read while she sits (or lies) beside me with her eyes closed. As a result, I feel as if I’ve read hundreds of novels that, in fact, I have read only parts of, or have merely had described for me by Chloe.
Chloe and I met about ten years ago at a pub, where she was drinking with some of her friends and I was playing banjo with my band. It was Chloe who made the first move. My band mates and I performed almost exclusively in various pubs in and around Sacramento, thus we called ourselves Brewgrass. When our first set was done, I sat by myself at a booth while my band mates were up at the bar getting their free beers. I don’t drink alcohol. Chloe suddenly appeared on the bench seat opposite mine. “I was wondering,” she said, “if the banjo is hard to learn.”
I was rendered somewhat speechless by this. She was beautiful to look at and I had been trying not to stare at her while we had been up on the rise performing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Will the Circle” and “Cumberland Gap.” Now here she was asking me about the banjo, of all things. As musical instruments go, the banjo is not generally categorized among the chick magnets, the way that electric guitars, drums, and wailing saxophones are.
“You see,” she continued when I failed to respond, “I’ve been trying to learn the guitar for a couple of years now. I can strum a handful of chords, just enough to accompany myself on ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ and ‘Let it Be,’ but I’ve always wanted to be a picker, like you. And I figure that a banjo, with only five strings, has got to be one-sixth easier to play than a guitar.”
“I’m not sure about your math,” I told her, “but the banjo isn’t generally regarded as an incredibly difficult instrument to learn. In fact, one of those five strings is a drone that rarely has to be fretted, so your left hand is usually dealing with only four strings rather than six. Some might say that makes the banjo about one-third easier to play than a six-string guitar. But if you’d like to take a few lessons before making the switch, I’d be happy to give them to you.”
“What made you take up the banjo?” she asked me.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to tell the most momentous half-truth of my life. “My mother always wanted me to learn a musical instrument,” I said, “but, as a teenager, I was obsessed with reading murder mysteries and watching crime shows. I wanted to grow up to be a private eye. My mom was at a music store one day, and she saw a book of banjo songs called American Murder Ballads. A whole book of folk songs about murder: Tom Dooley, Stagger Lee, The Banks of the Ohio, The Long Black Veil, Springtime in Alaska, The Ballad of Sally Ann, Frankie and Johnny, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, The Knoxville Girl, Omie Wise, Streets of Laredo. So she bought the book and a used banjo for a hundred bucks and brought them home and left them sitting out in the family room. I ignored the banjo but, because it had the word ‘murder’ in the title, I was intrigued by the book. I started reading it and found it had more grisly deaths in it than most murder mysteries. I decided I wanted to learn how to play these murder songs, so I began watching banjo instruction videos on YouTube. And the rest is history.” In truth, I had already been making a half-hearted effort to learn the banjo when my mother came home with the American Murder Ballads book. But I probably would have eventually given up on the instrument if the murder book hadn’t given me the inspiration to keep going. The story I told Chloe seemed slightly more interesting than the truth, however. And already I could feel myself wanting to impress her. In any case, it had a profound effect on her.
“You like murder mysteries?” she asked, her eyes wide with the excitement of discovering a kindred spirit.
“I do,” I said, “but I don’t read as much these days as I used to. I wish I had more time for it.”
“Have you ever heard of Sharyn McCrumb?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “Who’s that?”
“She wrote a whole series of crime novels inspired by Appalachian murder ballads. Her novel She Walks These Hills takes its title from a line in The Long Black Veil. She wrote a book called If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, which is based on a murder ballad that’s been covered by Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, and dozens of others. The Ballad of Frankie Silver is about the first woman every hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina. She even wrote a novel called The Ballad of Tom Dooley.”
Soon, Chloe was recommending great obscure crime novels that she believed every mystery fan ought to be familiar with. Finally she said, “If you give even one of those books a try, I guarantee that you will become an avid reader again.”
That was pretty much how it all started with us. As it happened, I never gave her those banjo lessons. She turned out to be a better guitar player than she let on. Oh, she wasn’t Lester Flatt or anything, but she was a good enough rhythm guitarist that we were able to play duets together fairly quickly, so long as I slowed down the banjo’s tempo a bit. What’s more, though I never became the kind of bookworm she is, I began reading fiction again, beginning with the murder ballads of Sharyn McCrumb.
I was surprised to learn that, as smart as she was, Chloe had never gone to college. As a child, she had been diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. In her case, this meant that she couldn’t focus on things that bored her, like Algebra or Spanish or Botany. But she loved almost all creative pursuits. She got excellent grades in English, Creative Writing, Drawing, and the like. At night, instead of doing her homework, she would usually write and illustrate her own little graphic novels. Alas, in California, you can’t graduate from high school without passing a standardized Algebra exam. Fortunately, before the end of her senior year she had begun selling freelance articles to various online venues. And after leaving high school, without a diploma, she got a steady monthly gig with Lady Audley’s Quill, which billed itself as a venue for “cultural commentary from a female point of view.”
Because she lacked a college education, Chloe’s parents and two older sisters were hoping that she’d marry well, perhaps attract the eye of some successful lawyer or stockbroker, someone to keep her in the upper-middle class style to which she was accustomed. Instead, she married me. A musician with a part-time job doing other people’s grocery shopping. Her family didn’t exactly reject me or object to the marriage, but if disappointment could be captured on camera, it would look like the bride’s side of the family in our wedding photos.
In point of fact, my job was a pretty good one. As an employee of Taylor’s Supermarkets, I was eligible for membership in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union local number eleven. In order to maintain my union membership, I needed to work at least 27 hours a week. Thus, I worked three eight-hour shifts per week, plus one three-hour shift. That left me plenty of time to work on my banjo playing. My hourly salary wasn’t anything that would impress a lawyer or a stockbroker, but my job had some good perks. For one thing, I got a ten-percent discount on all my grocery purchases. I also got excellent health-care benefits. And when I got married, Chloe got the same benefits as me for just a few extra dollars a month. We weren’t rich but we lived pretty well. My grandparents, who had both been community-college teachers, moved to Spain after they retired. They allowed me to live in their relatively modest home for five hundred dollars a month, just enough to cover the cost of their homeowners insurance and their property taxes. Thus, although Chloe and I weren’t rich, we lived pretty well for a couple of creative types with no college degrees. And neither of us had any burning desire for children, so we weren’t beset with the need to climb the socioeconomic ladder any time soon.
The day that Chloe’s anti-Brill screed first appeared online was an eight-hour workday for me. My eight-hour shifts begin at six a.m. and end at three p.m. The union mandates that I receive two twenty-minute breaks as well as a one-hour unpaid lunch break. I’d prefer to work a straight eight hours and leave at two p.m. but the union would never allow it. When I got home from work, about twenty minutes after three, Chloe informed me that her Brill essay had attracted eleven more positive comments, and two negative ones. She also noted that she had gained nine new paying subscribers.
“Yippee,” I said sarcastically. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Laugh if you must,” she said, “but even Facebook had to start out small.”
I kissed her. “That’s great, hon. Besides, with my ten percent grocery discount, that extra nine dollars a month will buy us ten dollars worth of groceries.”
“With a brain like that, I’m surprised you didn’t go to Harvard.”
“I applied. But the Harvard School of Banjo wasn’t taking any new applicants at the time.”
I fixed us a nice dinner. Working in a grocery store had turned me into a foodie. I spent my days filling shopping carts with the food that other people ordered online. As I worked I couldn’t help trying to imagine what the households I was shopping for looked like. If an order included a lot of cat food, several cartons of Ensure, adult diapers, and TV dinners, I assumed I was shopping for an elderly woman. If it included a lot of beer and chips and meat, I figured I was shopping for some stout sports fan. Sometimes I was sure that I could guess the exact number of children in a household just by the variety of sodas or juice packs or afterschool snacks. Shopping for others had made me a much more astute grocery shopper when it came to my own household. And I had gotten good at fixing fairly posh suppers for relatively little money. After dinner, we went out to the back porch and played a few duets together. Fortunately, our house sits at the back of a fairly large lot. We can play music together and not annoy any neighbors. When we were done, we went inside to watch TV. But first Chloe checked her computer and found that she had gained an additional new subscriber, making it an even ten for the day. The only sour note of the day came before bedtime, when Chloe discovered she had received an angry email from an old high-school chum named Morgan Parker:
Chloe,
Since when did you become political? I’ve never been able to get you to join me for a rally in support of reproductive rights or environmental safety or gun control, and now suddenly you’re an expert on why we shouldn’t vote for Earl Brill? Brill might not be perfect, but President Fuller is practically a fascist. And if he gets another term, we’re not likely to recognize the country any more by the time he leaves office – if he ever leaves it at all! Right now, Brill looks like the only Democratic candidate who can stop Fuller. You should stick to writing about pop fiction. Leave the politics to people who actually pay attention to it.
Morgan
I tried to offer support for Chloe. I told her, “Morgan’s always been a leftwing nut job. If you had criticized nothing but the way Brill combs his hair, she probably would still have accused you of being a crypto-fascist. Just ignore it.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “At any rate, I’m not likely to be writing any more political commentary. As Morgan pointed out, it’s not really my thing.”
In point of fact, however, it would turn out to be very much her thing.
Chapter Three: Governor Tree Frog
By the time we woke up the next morning, hardcore members of the online right had seized upon Chloe’s essay as proof that Earl Brill couldn’t be trusted. This was fairly ridiculous, since she had presented no real evidence of bad behavior on his part. Nonetheless, those who live in the shadows of far rightwing discourse began to claim that, by lifting some of his language from old novels about extremist politicians, Brill was trying to signal to the leftwing of the Democratic party that he was much more of an extremist than he appeared to be. He offered himself up as a moderate Democrat, these pundits argued, but his speeches were full of references to fictional extremists.
This was beyond silly, but it got plenty of play from various sketchy members of the online commentariat over the next week or so. Some of them began to ascribe practically supernatural powers to Chloe. One wrote, “This intrepid blogger somehow managed to track down the sources of his plagiarized speeches. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she’s also tracked down evidence of his tax fraud as well.” Soon they were calling upon rightwingers in Congress to force Chloe to testify about Brill’s tax fraud. It might have all eventually blown away except, smelling blood in the water, some rightwing investigative journalist went snooping into the tax filings of Brill Lumber and Hardware, a family business started by Earl Brill’s grandfather and passed down through the years to Brill’s father, and then to Brill and his older brother, Nate. When Earl was elected to the U.S. Senate, he placed his interest in the business in a blind trust. After that, it seems that Nate Brill had taken advantage of some tax loopholes that the family business wasn’t entitled to. These had allowed BL&H to evade about $200,000 in taxes over the last four years. When the rightwing journalist disclosed these improprieties, Nate Brill apologized for it and repaid the back taxes with interest. The attorney general of Missouri investigated the matter and found no criminal liability. The tax deductions Nate Brill had taken were legal up until four years earlier. The family business had automatically taken them for years. Apparently Nate, or his accountants, hadn’t bothered to drop these deductions from his most recent tax filings. Absolutely no evidence existed that implicated Senator Earl Brill in this mini-scandal but, nonetheless, the rightwing commentariat played it up like the second coming of Watergate. By the time three weeks had passed since Chloe’s essay had appeared online, even the New York Times and the Washington Post were covering the story, albeit as a minor inconvenience for the Brill campaign. Both of those newspapers mentioned that the matter was first hinted at in a relatively obscure online site dedicated primarily to celebrating popular fiction. A month after her essay first appeared, Chloe had gained enough subscribers to push her over the one thousand mark. And each of these subscribers was paying a dollar a month. Chloe decided that future subscribers would have to pay two dollars a month, and she adjusted her website’s subscription plan accordingly.
Chloe, for her part, went back to writing oddball essays about popular fiction. Her specialty was finding niches of the topic that hadn’t been widely covered before. She wrote an essay about popular novelists who had continued writing into their nineties (Barbara Cartland, Herman Wouk, etc.), an essay about famous movie directors who had written film novelizations (Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Jane Campion, George Romero, Guillermo del Toro, Seth Macfarlane, etc.), and a variety of other obscure subjects. In addition to the essays she wrote for Bookstack, she continued to write one essay a week for Lady Audley’s Quill. These were mostly reviews of new films, TV shows, or music. An ordinary writer would probably have struggled to churn out five or six essays every week, many of them well over a thousand words long. But, as mentioned before, Chloe was a graphophile. Some might even say that her love of writing bordered on graphomania. She was on the autism spectrum, and had a touch of obsessive compulsion disorder as well. Once she got her hooks into a subject, she couldn’t stop writing about it until she had exhausted her opinions on it. Often, while I went to sleep early in order to be well rested for work, Chloe would sit up all night cranking out six thousand words about novels written by convicted criminals, or short stories that were adapted for the cinema, or novels narrated by cats. And now that she had two paying outlets for her work – LAQ and PFM – she seemed to be writing more than ever.
For a while it looked as if the Earl Brill essay was going to be a one-off for her. But, one Saturday, as we were driving home from a kayaking expedition on Lake Natoma and listening to NPR news on the radio (my choice; Chloe wasn’t interested in news), we heard an interview with Oregon Governor Delton Cook, who was the most liberal Democratic candidate in the race for president. After asking him about specific policy stands on such things as abortion and guns and taxes, the interviewer decided to end the piece with something a little more personal. She asked the governor to name a favorite book of his. This question had recently been asked of President Fuller, and he had fumbled it badly. After failing to come up with a book title for several seconds, he declared that, “The Bible is the only book I’ve ever found it necessary to read.” This was an odd choice, because Fuller was on his third marriage and had led a notoriously hedonistic existence prior to entering politics. After that little incident, I imagine that every presidential campaign had prepared its candidate with a ready-to-wear answer to the same question. And, indeed, Governor Cook didn’t hesitate before answering.
“When I was fifteen years old,” he said, “my father gave me a copy of Owen Wister’s famous western The Virginian. He told me to read it and it would teach me how to be a man. Well, this was back when I was reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins and I wasn’t eager to read some old-fogey book from 1902, but I did it just to make my father happy, and I’ll be darned if he wasn’t right. Everything you need to know about being a man is right there in The Virginian. It taught me about duty and the necessity of hard work and the need for having a moral code and the importance of following it even when it becomes hard to do. It taught me about respecting nature and the great outdoors and about the importance of being true to your word. The Virginian understood that a man’s reputation is his most valuable asset, and if he sullies it, he may never get it to come clean again.”
We were tired from paddling the length of the lake, from Nimbus Dam all the way down to the outer wall of Folsom Prison and back, so neither of us bothered to comment on this interview. I, in fact, forgot about it almost immediately. But Chloe, as it turned out, didn’t.
After putting away the kayaks and then eating dinner, I went to bed early. I had to be at work at six the next morning. But Chloe didn’t go to bed. She went off to her home office to do some writing. When I woke up at five, she was fast asleep beside me. I tiptoed to the kitchen and fixed myself some toast and coffee. While I ate, I sat at the table and surfed the internet on my phone. As usual, I visited Pop Fiction Matters to see if Chloe had posted anything new. Sure enough, she had a new essay online. It was titled “Delton Cook and The Virginian: A Tale of Two Jerks?” In it, she pointed out just what a poor role model Owen Wister’s title character was.
“When we first meet the Virginian he is teasing a pathetic old man named Uncle Hughey, who claims he is soon to be married. The Virginian disparagingly reminds Uncle Hughey of all his previous near marriages and how none of them ever came to fruition. This lays out a regular pattern of behavior on the Virginian’s part. Again and again throughout the novel he takes an almost sadistic glee in teasing others, rubbing their noses in their shortcomings. Is this really Governor Cook’s idea of a good role model? The Virginian is a former Confederate soldier, a man so devoted to the Southern cause that his best friend refers to him as ‘Jeff,’ a reference to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a traitor to the U.S.A.
“In Chapter Two, the Virginian is described as ‘facetious,’ ‘satanic,’ and ‘sarcastic,’ three other qualities we don’t need in a president. He is also described as a son of a bitch. In Chapter Three he’s described as a ‘devil.’ In that chapter a traveling salesman offers to share with the Virginian a bed he has rented in a flophouse where there are no more beds available. The salesman asks for nothing in return. The Virginian accepts the offer but, not satisfied to share a bed, he uses a ruse to terrify the salesman (he sleeps with his pistols and warns his bedfellow that he occasionally has Civil War flashbacks) and then takes the bed all for himself. In Chapter Four we are told that much of the Virginian’s language is ‘unprintable.’
“One of the worst examples of the Virginian’s character occurs in Chapter Ten. At a country barn dance and barbecue held in a remote part of the Wyoming Territory, the Virginian finds twelve little babies swaddled against the cold in a variety of wrappings. While no one is watching, he unwraps each child and then rewraps it in some other baby’s blanket or shawl or quilt or whatever. At the end of the shindig, each baby is taken up by its parents and driven away home on a buckboard wagon to the family’s home, most of which are miles away. One couple, the Westfalls, live nine miles away from the site of the barn dance and, not until they arrive home, after a cold and arduous trek in the middle of the night, do they discover that they have carried off the wrong two babies in place of their own infants. Understandably, this causes a great deal of distress for the parents and the babies involved. In the middle of a cold night, they all end up riding back into the town to see if they can find their lost children. Pioneer life was full of hardships, but the Virginian made life for these pioneers much harder than it had to be. Nowadays his practical joke would be categorized as a dozen cases of kidnap and he’d probably never again see the outside of prison. But in Wister’s novel, the ‘joke’ is treated as an example of the protagonist’s whimsical sense of humor.”
She went on and on in that vein for another three thousand words, pointing out every single time the Virginian behaved abominably towards someone of a lower status in life – a woman, a minority, an older or weaker man. “Do we really want a president whose ideas about women and minorities were formed by a reading of the Virginian?” she asked. “Do we want a president who doesn’t understand just how sacred the bond between parent and child is?”
It struck me as another unfair piece of criticism. Delton Cook hadn’t said that he endorsed every single line of Owen Wister’s novel. He merely claimed that it was a formative work of literature for him. Chloe herself had often written harshly about those who condemn older books – Gone With The Wind, The Adventures of Huck Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Good Earth – for embracing racial stereotypes that were very commonplace during the lifetimes of their authors. I doubt she’d like to be told that her fondness for Gone With the Wind was a sign that she was a racist. Yet she had used The Virginian against Delton Cook in just that way, blaming him for all of the retrograde ideas and words that had come from Wister’s pen.
Leveled against any of the other candidates in the race, this attack probably wouldn’t have been terribly effective. But Delton Cook was the lone bachelor in the field, and the only candidate without any children. He couldn’t afford to appear out of touch with the realities of parenting during hard times. What’s more, Oregon has one of the smallest African-American populations of any U.S. state. Fewer than three percent of Oregon’s population identify as black. Singing the praises of a novel about an ex-Confederate could create problems for Cook with black voters. He was also one of the most liberal candidates in the field. He was derisively dubbed “Governor Tree Frog” by the rightwing media because he had signed a law that prohibited logging in a vast stretch of western Oregon so as to protect the natural habitat of the Pacific tree frog. He was frequently portrayed, even in the mainstream press, as a tree-hugging hippie, which is probably why he – or, more likely, one his campaign handlers – thought it might be a good idea if he chose a novel about a rugged individualist as his all-time favorite book. More than likely, no one on the campaign staff even bothered to read the book. They probably knew that it was a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt’s, a man who was regarded as a conservationist in his time, and figured it would be a good choice, both manly and progressive. And, if Chloe hadn’t been intimately familiar with Owen Wister’s book, he might have gotten away with it.
I intended to raise all these objections – delicately – with Chloe when I returned from work. But by the time I got back home, she had gained 67 new subscribers, at two dollars per month each. It occurred to me that maybe I ought to wait and see how this whole thing played out before offering any more criticisms.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait very long. By this time, rightwing pundits were keeping an eye on Chloe’s blog in the hope of finding more ammunition to use against President Fuller’s enemies. And Chloe had just handed them an entire bandolier full of bullets. Quoting “leftwing blogger Chloe King,” one wag noted that “Governor Tree Frog’s favorite book valorizes the Confederacy and endorses all sorts of other bad behavior.” This was ironic, since the same pundit was usually the first writer to dismiss any sort of charge of racism against President Fuller or any other prominent conservative politician. Another blogger wrote, “Oregon, whose population is 84 percent white, has the eighth lowest percentage of black residents of any U.S. state. And which state has the lowest? That would be Wyoming, the setting of much of The Virginian, whose residents are 94 percent white. Not only does Governor Tree Frog not want to live near any black people, he doesn’t even want to read about them when he picks up a good book to lose himself in.” After a few days of these headlines, Governor Cook put out a press released, playfully headlined “Smile When You Call Me That.” It began: “Recently, an online pundit called me a jerk for citing Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian as my favorite book. She pointed out that the main character in that book, far from being a good role model, is a bit of a rascal. Fair enough. When I mentioned The Virginian I was speaking off the cuff during a live radio interview. I haven’t actually read the book since I was a teenager, so my recollection of it may be inaccurate. At any rate, I apologize for any offense I may have given for naming The Virginian as my favorite book. In hindsight, I probably should have selected a book set in Oregon and written by an Oregonian. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to mind, but I’m afraid that might be a bit too on the nose.”
Governor Cook’s jocular tone did nothing to rescue his presidential campaign. He dropped out of the race three weeks later, citing funding problems and a desire to spend more time focusing on the needs of the people of Oregon. Nobody blamed Chloe’s screed for driving him from the race. He had made some earlier missteps that had cost him support. But after he withdrew from the race, one Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist published a cartoon mockup of a novel called The Oregonian. On its cover he depicted Delton Cook riding off into the sunset on a spavined old horse. That was as close as anyone came to crediting Chloe with driving the Governor from the race.
He wouldn’t be her last victim.
From: California and the Fiction of the Apocalypse, a survey by Chloe King
It’s probably not a coincidence that many of the best American apocalypse stories come out of California. Goodreads has a list of 76 Calipocalypse tales and it is far from complete. Most Calipocalypse stories take place either in the San Francisco Bay Area or the Los Angeles area. Few writers ever bother to destroy San Diego, Bakersfield, or Sacramento. Bay Area apocalypse tales include Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, and George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. L.A.-area apocalypse tales include Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. With its reputation for earthquakes and wildfires and Pacific storms, the Golden State is an ideal location for all sorts of disaster stories. The state also hosts more than thirty military bases, a number of major defense contractors, and numerous research facilities, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where a great deal of nuclear-weapons research took place after WWII. Add to that the fact that the state annually draws a huge number of foreign tourists, making it a likely spot for an overseas virus to reach America, and California would seem to be the perfect staging ground for just about any kind of apocalypse. New York City, whose residents live mostly in multi-family housing, can’t offer the kind of eerie, unpopulated suburban landscapes that California can. Without any traffic, you could drive from one end of Manhattan to the other in a few minutes. But both Stewart’s Earth Abides and Matheson’s I Am Legend linger over their endless rolling hills and suburban streets, whose ranch-style houses have been rendered largely empty by mysterious pandemics. Those eerie landscapes have helped make I Am Legend and Earth Abides probably the two best-known examples of the Calipocalypse novel.
Nowadays, Matheson’s story is probably the best known of the two, primarily because of the several films that it has inspired: 1964’s The Last Man on Earth (starring Vincent Price), 1971’s The Omega Man (starring Charleton Heston), and 2007’s I Am Legend (starring Will Smith). George A. Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, is also believed to have been inspired by Matheson’s novel, though he isn’t credited for it in any way. Matheson’s brilliant idea was to merge the plot of Mary Shelley’s 1826 horror novel, The Last Man, with the zombie novel, which wasn’t even really a thing back in 1954. Zombies originated from Haitian folklore, but they didn’t become mainstays of popular fiction in English until fairly recently. When Matheson inserted them into I Am Legend, even he didn’t have a name for them, so his monsters are called vampires, despite lacking many of the qualities we now regard as quintessentially vampiric: eloquence, suavity, intelligence, beauty (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, and Robert Pattinson are just a few of the actors who have played comely vampires in recent decades). Matheson’s creatures – call them zambies, if you will – crouch on their haunches, grind their teeth back and forth, move very slowly, and do more howling than speaking. Wikipedia notes that, “A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian folklore, emerged in popular culture during the latter half of the 20th century. This interpretation of the zombie, as an undead person that attacks and eats the flesh of living people, is drawn largely from George A. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968), which was partly inspired by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend.” Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novel, The World Jones Made, also appears to have been at least partially inspired by I Am Legend. It was published just two years afterwards and the apocalypse it describes begins in 1977, one year after Matheson’s. Both apocalypses were triggered by war and both produced mindless hordes of zombie-like creatures, although Dick’s are not deadly.
It’s not quite accurate to say that Matheson invented the modern Last Man on Earth novel as well as the zombie novel, but he probably deserves more credit for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century popularity of those genres than any other person. And though I Am Legend isn’t quite a vampire novel, Matheson’s decision to bring the word “vampire” out of the shadowy world of the past and insert it into a post-WWII apocalypse tale also proved to be highly influential. Nearly twenty years later, Matheson would transform an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice called The Kolchak Papers into a screenplay called The Night Stalker, a vampire tale which became the most-watched TV movie ever when it was first broadcast on January 11, 1972. The TV soap opera Dark Shadows (1966-71), which featured a vampire in a major role, preceded The Night Stalker but, though set in the 1960s, its story centered upon a small fictional New England town that felt decidedly nineteenth-century. Matheson’s Night Stalker was set in busy, neon-lit Las Vegas and felt decidedly contemporary. It terrified people precisely because it was set in modern times. Most viewers were used to thinking of vampires as monsters out of the Victorian past, confined mainly to Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Matheson upended all of those quaint notions. And he unleashed a flood of contemporary vampires. Curiously, the author who benefitted most from Matheson’s work wasn’t Jeff Rice but a woman who called herself Anne Rice (her birth name was Howard O’Brian). Her first book, Interview With the Vampire, was published in 1976. Matheson’s I Am Legend begins in January of 1976 and takes place mostly in that year. He seems to have intuited that vampires would be hot that year.
Back in 1954, however, the monsters Matheson called vampires were not the suave dandies that Anne Rice would later write about. Like zombies, the vampires of I Am Legend have no real identity. They usually attack fairly slowly and operate as though they are controlled by a single hive mind. They have some vocal abilities, but they mostly just terrorize the protagonist with cries of, “Come out, Neville!” Like vampires, they come out only at night, feast on human blood, and can be killed with a wooden stake driven through their hearts. They are also repelled by garlic and crosses. But, unlike traditional vampires, Matheson’s can see themselves in mirrors and they have no connection to bats. When they can’t find a human to feast upon (and Neville is the only human in the novel) they resort to feasting on one of their own, usually a weaker female member of the pack. “They did that often,” Matheson writes. “There was no union among them. Their need was their only motivation.” In Matheson’s world, dogs can also become vampires.
Chapter Four: The Dead Manchurian
Brewgrass had a regular weekly gig at the Fox & Goose Pub in Sacramento. Every Wednesday, we played classic bluegrass for three hours in front of drunken members of Sacramento’s working class, taking a few breaks now and then. We had a tip jar set up at the bar. We also got ten percent of the bar’s drink sales for those three hours. It didn’t add up to a lot of money. On a good night, the bar sold about $1000 worth of drinks between seven and ten p.m. That meant that my three band mates and I got to split a hundred dollars. The tip jar usually brought in no more than another twenty or thirty dollars. So a good night usually brought me about $35. You can see why I wasn’t eager to criticize a venture that was now bringing Chloe somewhere around $3,000 a month. Her side hustle was now more profitable than mine. In fact, her side hustle was now more profitable than her main gig with Lady Audley’s Quill.
About one year earlier, a young guitar player named Zac Vargas had approached me after one of Brewgrass’s gigs. He said he was a folk singer and songwriter and he was looking for a venue where he could try out his material. Most of the pubs in town that had musical venues catered to classic rock acts, or else punk and emo bands. Folk music, like bluegrass, was a bit of a throwback. Not every pub owner was eager to attract the type of hicks who appreciated it. I told Zac that we made too little money from our weekly gigs to pay him anything. “But,” I added, “if you want to be our opening act, play three or four songs of your own before we get up on stage, and maybe fill in during our breaks, I don’t think any of my band mates will object. Providing you don’t suck too much.” I laughed to suggest that I was kidding, although I was dead serious. It wouldn’t do to have some dreadful Bob Dylan wannabe driving away the crowd before Brewgrass ever got a chance to play. Fortunately, Zac didn’t suck. He was no Bob Dylan but you could hear right away that he had talent. He wrote all of his own material and it wasn’t bad. The lyrics could be a bit lazy at times, but the melodies were catchy. Unfortunately for Zac, however, the crowd always showed up eager for bluegrass music, which is loud and fast and invites plenty of stomping and hand clapping. The soft, mellow folk tunes that Zac played generally got lost in the drunken buzz of the Fox & Goose. Still he was game. He showed up every Wednesday eager to take the stage. His only real fan was Chloe. A guitar player herself, she liked to listen to Zac play. He had a YouTube channel where he posted some of his performances. Chloe always said kind things about his songs in the comments section. She and I disagreed about Zac’s talent. I thought his songs always sounded as though they were about to say something profound but, in the end, always devolved into clichés. That particular night he was singing a new song called, I assume, “It’s Funny Cuz It’s True.”
If you are a joker
Or if you play the fool
Everything you say and do
Is funny cuz it’s true.
*
If you break a promise
And laugh about it too
All the pain you spread around
Will soon bring pain to you.
*
It’s funny cuz it’s true
It’s funny cuz it’s true
Everything you say or do
Is funny cuz it’s true.
*
If you are a lover
And sing about it too
All the love you sing about
Will echo back on you.
*
If you live for others
And care about them too
Soon you’ll find that other folks
Will live and care for you.
*
It’s funny cuz it’s true
It’s funny cuz it’s true
Everything you say or do
Is funny cuz it’s true.
The song went on through several more verses and repetitions of the chorus. It toyed with some interesting ideas – If you are a cheater/and lie about it too/sure enough the day will come/when you’ll be cheated too – but always it dissolved into the same old cliché, and not even a good cliché. Just because something’s true doesn’t make it funny. Quite often it makes it tragic. Chloe and I frequently debated Zac’s songwriting talents. She thought he was headed for stardom. I thought that was unlikely. She said I should join up with him, form a folk band, and ride his coattails to stardom. “Right now,” I told her, “he not only doesn’t have any coattails, he hasn’t even got a coat.”
“You’ll be sorry when he’s headlining at Madison Square Garden and making a million bucks a show,” she told me.
“I don’t need a million bucks a show,” I said, “because pretty soon I’m going to have a very wealthy wife.”
It was meant to be a joke. But after Delton Cook dropped from the presidential race, Chloe found herself with roughly a thousand new subscribers, all of them paying two dollars a month. Naturally, this only encouraged her to add more politics to the essays she wrote for Pop Fiction Matters. Of course, Chloe herself remained largely apolitical. She inserted politics into her essays merely as a device for hooking readers who might not otherwise read an essay about the pop fiction of a bygone era. In one piece she sang the praises of novels such as Lucia St. Clair Robinson’s Ride the Wind, Susan Donnell’s Pocahontas, Charles McCarry’s The Bride of the Wilderness, and E.P. Roesch’s Ashana – novels written by Caucasians about the experiences of Native Americans. She noted that this genre of fiction, once hugely popular, wasn’t undertaken much any more because of the possibility that the white author might be accused of cultural appropriation. She wrote: “The production of such novels has dwindled steadily over the last forty years. This probably has something to do with what happened to Ruth Beebe Hill after the publication of her 1978 novel Hanta Yo. The early reviews of the book were positive. A reviewer for the Harvard Crimson called Hanta Yo ‘the best researched novel yet written about an American Indian tribe.’ Native American author N. Scott Momaday, author of House Made of Dawn, admired the book. David Wolper, the producer of the landmark TV minseries Roots purchased the film rights to Hanta Yo and planned to give it the same treatment as Roots. Alas, before Wolper could put his plan into action, the book began drawing criticism from Native American groups contending that it was an inaccurate portrayal of the Sioux. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Sioux people. The miniseries was scrapped. And Ruth Beebe Hill, though she lived to the age of 102, never published another book.”
Chloe found that if she made even a halfhearted swipe at some hot-button political topic, she could attract readers to her blog. But, if she were to simply write about what excellent novels Ride the Wind and The Bride of the Wilderness were, few web surfers would bother to even read her words. Thus, she wrote an essay about William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist by focusing on the novel’s conservative, Catholic values. She wrote an essay about plantation fiction – novels such as Alexandra Ripley’s Charleston, Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow, and Willo Davis Roberts’s Destiny’s Women, all of them set in the antebellum South – by noting that such novels, which portray some slaveholders as complicated and not entirely evil people aren’t like to get past the gatekeepers of contemporary publishing these days. Mostly she just focused on what she liked most about these novels – the plots, the settings, the characters, the writing. The political hook usually consisted of only a sentence or two at the beginning and at the end of the piece. Everything in between was the real Chloe – i.e., a love letter to some forgotten classic(s) of pop fiction.
Alas, though these essays kept her subscriber numbers from dropping, they didn’t really bring in a lot of new subscribers. It became clear pretty quickly that, if she wanted to keep ratcheting her numbers upward, she would have to go on the attack again soon.
She told me, “You’re always saying that the reason banjos are played so fast is because banjo notes decay so quickly, and if you don’t keep firing them off, you’ll be left with a lot of dead air. Well, the same thing is true of blog entries. The news cycle changes so quickly, that if you don’t post new material every day or two, your blog will quickly be forgotten.”
“But why do you always have to attack Democratic candidates?” I asked her. “You and I are, at least nominally, Democrats ourselves. We’re both sort of liberal on social issues. Why not punch right every now and then?”
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “For one thing, the blogosphere leans more rightwing than left. There are a lot of mainstream journalism venues that are reliably liberal in their coverage – the New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC. Liberals don’t need to look to obscure blogs for validation of their beliefs. They get that validation from the mainstream media. That’s why conservatives tend to be more willing to venture outside the mainstream when they are looking for political news or cultural commentary.”
“But don’t you think it’s kind of cynical to milk all those angry old white baby boomers for all the clicks and subscriptions you can get?” I asked.
“But that’s the thing,” she said, “the really popular political pieces I’ve written, the one about Earl Brill and the one about Delton Cook – those were not cynical efforts to make money and win approval from the online right. I wrote both of those pieces late at night, after you had gone to bed and I had put away a couple of glasses of wine. It may sound weird, but I honestly don’t even remember writing them. I remember that, after I heard Delton Cook praising The Virginian on the radio, I wanted to write a response. I’ve never been a big fan of The Virginian – or Owen Wister, for that matter. He was a posh, east coast prep-school boy who went on to graduate from Harvard and palled around with a future president of the United States. He knew very little about the Old West and his book isn’t nearly as authentic as the westerns of Elmer Kelton or Lewis B. Paten or Louis L’Amour or any number of other men who not only wrote about riding and roping but had actually done it themselves. That was going to be the entire thrust of my essay. And, as I sat there writing and sipping my wine, that’s the essay I thought I was writing. I hit ‘post’ at two o’clock in the morning and then I went to bed. When I woke up at nine the next morning, I went to my Bookstack site and couldn’t believe what I had written. It was angry in a way that I don’t remember being when I wrote it. Maybe it was the wine. I don’t know. But those essays about Brill and Cook seemed to come from someplace outside my own mind, as if I were channeling somebody else’s thoughts. If I could write essays like that about every other candidate in the race, I’d do it, if only as a cynical cash grab. But it doesn’t work that way. Those pieces either have to come of their own accord or they don’t come at all.”
“I still think that you ought to consider writing a hit piece on President Fuller. You don’t want all our friends to think that you’ve gone over to the dark side, do you?”
She laughed. “I haven’t gone over to the dark side. But my subconscious seems to be moving rightward. Maybe I have to just keep writing right-leaning screeds till I get it out of my system.”
“The best way to get something out of your system,” I told her, “is to stop putting it in.”
She laughed. “Okay, Confucius. But it’s a little late for that. And, considering how much money my blog is bringing in these days, do I even want to stop moving rightward? This could put us on Easy Street. Or at least on one of its lesser-known side tributaries.”
“Just give it a try,” I told her. “For the sake of introducing some balance to your blog, try writing an essay critical of President Fuller. It doesn’t have to be an angry screed or anything. Make it humorous. You’ve read a lot of political pop fiction since I’ve known you: The Manchurian Candidate, The Dead Zone, The Parallax View, Primary Colors. Just find a character in one of those novels who reminds you, in a negative way, of Grant Fuller, and let your imagination do the rest. Your title could be a humorous mash-up of several of those titles: The Dead Manchurian, say, or The Parallax Zone.”
“I’ll try,” she said, but her assurance sounded lackluster. I went to bed around ten o’clock, not expecting her to even attempt to take a shot at Fuller. But then, about twenty minutes later, I could hear the rapid tapping of computer keys in the home office next to the bedroom. Chloe was writing up a storm. Grant Fuller was in for a bad time, I thought.
Chapter Five: A Darling of the Rightwing Blogosphere
I woke up at five so that I could read and eat breakfast before I had to go to work. I opened up my laptop and clicked on Chloe’s blog. She had a new post up, an essay called “Decade Writers.” I began reading it in eager anticipation of seeing Grant Fuller brought down a notch or two. It began:
DECADE WRITERS
Here’s a literary phenomenon that you don’t read much about: the decade writer. Some novelists and short-story writers do so much of their best work in a particular decade that you can practically ignore everything they ever wrote that was published outside of that decade and still consider yourself a relative authority on their fiction. For the purposes of this essay, I am not talking about any random ten-year stretch in an author’s working life, say 1847-1856. I’m talking about work that was done entirely within a calendar decade i.e., the 1920s, the 1930s, etc.
The essay went on to discuss how Victorian thriller writer Wilkie Collins wrote almost every book he is remembered for nowadays during the 1860s. Where popular fiction was concerned, he pretty much owned that decade. Likewise, just about every piece of fiction that Robert Louis Stevenson is nowadays remembered for was written during the 1880s. Almost every piece of fiction that Jack London is remembered for was written in the first decade of the twentieth century, and almost every piece of fiction that Saki (aka Hector Hugh Munro) is remembered for was written during the second decade of the twentieth century. Almost every worthwhile novel and short story to come from the pen of F. Scott Fitzgerald was written during the 1920s. Crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes (In a Lonely Place, etc.) produced almost nothing of importance outside the 1940s. Likewise, science-fiction writer John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids, etc.) produced almost nothing of importance either before or after the 1950s.
As I read this essay, I kept waiting for it to segue into a critique of President Grant Fuller. Fuller had been the governor of Alabama for eight years before running for president. He’d now been president for about three years, which meant that he’d served eleven years in elected office. Was Chloe going to argue that he’d peaked as a politician after his second year in the White House and that his career path was likely to be all downhill from now on? Had she introduced Robert Louis Stevenson into the essay so that she could compare Fuller’s “compassionate conservative” rhetoric and his Draconian budget cuts to the two sides of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Had she introduced Jack London so that she could talk about the hypocritical disconnect between his avowed politics (socialism) and his personal lifestyle (decadent hedonism)? The answer to all of these questions was no. I reached the end of the essay without finding any mention of President Fuller whatsoever.
Had Chloe wimped out? Had she changed her mind at the last minute so as not to upset her burgeoning roster of conservative subscribers? I had no way of knowing. She was sound asleep and I had to be at work at six.
I got home from work at about quarter after three. Chloe was curled up on the sectional sofa in our living room, looking like a volcano rising from a sea of paperback books. That wasn’t an unusual sight. Chloe was almost always surrounded by books. And she usually had a few pens and spiral notebooks nearby, in case inspiration should strike. Our living-room furniture was still new enough that the whole room smelled like a showroom car. We’d bought it all – black leather sectional, two black leather hassocks with interior storage, and a black leather recliner – at IKEA and assembled it ourselves over the course of a recent weekend.
After kissing her and then collapsing into the recliner, I asked, “So…what happened to the hit piece on Fuller?”
“What hit piece?” she said, sounding completely clueless.
“You said last night that you were going to do a hit piece on Grant Fuller. I woke up this morning eager to read it and I discovered ‘Decade Writers’ instead.”
“You didn’t like ‘Decade Writers’?”
“I loved it. Very informative. Another one of those essays that no one but you could have thought up. But you said you were going to write a hit piece on Fuller.”
“You said that I should write a hit piece on Fuller. I never said for certain that I’d do it.”
I pondered this for a moment. “Fair enough,” I said at last. “But that essay you wrote had plenty of places were you could have easily segued into an attack on Fuller. Wilkie Collins’s novels are full of villains like Fuller – Count Fosco in The Woman in White, Colonel Herncastle in The Moonstone. And you brought up Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde without mentioning what a two-faced hypocrite Fuller is. You blew a golden opportunity.”
“All hypocrites are two-faced,” she said. “Saying two-faced hypocrite is redundant.”
Chloe was a word freak and was constantly pointing out linguistic oddities, like the fact that unravel and ravel mean the same thing. Sometimes she did this simply to avoid the real point of a discussion.
“That’s not my point,” I said. “Why did you pass up so many excellent opportunities to segue into an attack on Fuller?”
The volcano shrugged, and various books drifted off to sea. “I just wasn’t feeling it. I never really know what I’m going to write until I’ve written it. Besides, it’s a good thing that I didn’t write it. I can no longer afford to alienate my conservative subscribers.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Listen to this,” she said and began scrolling through her smart phone. “I got an email today from Janice, my editor at Lady Audley’s Quill. She wrote: ‘Dear Chloe…Your blog at Bookstack is beginning to attract a lot of attention online. Some of our readers and some of our editorial staff have begun asking me why I am providing a platform for a chief cultural correspondent who is so obviously a rightwing reactionary. At first, I didn’t know what they were talking about, because I hadn’t visited your blog recently. But I checked it out a few days ago and I noticed that your essays have taken a decided rightward turn in the last few weeks. I want you to know that I would never ask you to censor your blog in order to make my life easier. But, seeing as how you are a contract employee and work for us on a freelance basis only, I think it would be best if, for the time being at least, I brought in someone else as my chief cultural correspondent. You seem to be very busy blogging these days, and this will allow you more free time to build up your brand and attract more subscribers to Pop Fiction Matters. Lady Audley’s Quill does not require that its contributors toe any sort of narrow ideological line. But this is a magazine written by and for women, most of whom are college-educated and liberal and consider themselves feminists. Some of our writers tend to go a bit too far in their writing, to the point where they sometimes sound like progressive advocates rather than straight journalists or critics. One of the things I liked most about your work for us was that it almost never veered into the political. You always seemed to be happy to write about pop culture as a fan and not as a sociologist. I am hopeful that after this year’s presidential elections are over you might revert to writing about pop culture once again in a way that steers clear of being blatantly political. If that should happen, perhaps we can find a way to bring you back into the LAQ fold. All the best, Janice.’”
I let this sink in for a moment. “So that’s it? After four years, during which you have been her most reliable freelance contributor, she just cuts you loose?”
“If you ask me, it’s for the best,” Chloe said. “I don’t need Lady Audley’s Quill any more. I can write with my own quill. And, at the rate I’m gaining new subscribers, Pop Fiction Matters could soon have a bigger readership than Lady Audley. So you can see why I might not be eager to knock out a quick-and-dirty takedown of Grant Fuller. If I had some real dirt on him, something only I was in possession of, then naturally I’d make it public on my blog. But all of his many shortcomings and moral lapses have been written about by people who know a lot more about politics than I do. My specialty is the intersection of pop fiction and contemporary culture. That’s the lane I’m in right now and it’s proving to be profitable.”
I couldn’t argue with her. Lady Audley’s Quill had been paying her a thousand dollars a month. Without that regular infusion into our bank account, we couldn’t afford to alienate the subscribers of Pop Fiction Matters. For better or worse, my wife was now a darling of the rightwing blogosphere.
Chapter Six: Friendly Fire
It happened again. Chloe, in one of her late night fugue states, had written an essay comparing Connecticut Senator Doyle Ramsfield to Steve Cameron, a presidential aspirant in Ramona Stewart’s 1980 potboiler The Nightmare Candidate. Cameron is the Governor of New York and, thus, a northeasterner like Ramsfield. The Cameron family, like the Ramsfield family, have a vacation estate in Key West, Florida, an estate which has been in the family for generations. Ramsfield’s first wife died in a single-car accident that some wags claimed might have been suicide (he has been married to his second wife for twenty-one years). Cameron’s wife had addiction problems (alcohol, sex, etc.) and killed herself while drying out in a sanitarium. Now, many years later, the fictional Steve Cameron is challenging Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in the pages of Ramona Stewart’s novel, just as, in real life, Doyle Ramsfield was hoping to win the Democratic nomination and challenge Republican President Grant Fuller for the White House in November. For the most part, Chloe’s essay was simply a celebration of a pop-fiction writer she considered to be sadly underappreciated. She pointed out the various superficial similarities between Ramsfield and Cameron. She concluded by writing, “Let’s hope that the similarities end there, because Steve Cameron turns out to be a nasty piece of work. When he catches his wife in bed with another man, he shoots the man dead, has his chief of staff cover up the killing, and ships his wife off to a sanitarium. When a young, female campaign staffer learns about Cameron’s past, Cameron takes her out into the Florida Keys on a boat and tries to drown her.”
Chloe made no real charges of sleaze or wrongdoing against Ramsfield. But, by now, the rightwing online commentariat had begun to treat her every word as Holy Writ. As a result, some investigative journalist found a former employee of Ramsfield’s, a woman named Flora Perez who once worked as a housekeeper for him and his first wife, Allison, who claimed that she was having a romantic affair with Ramsfield at the time of Allison’s death. When asked by the reporter if the affair might have had anything to do with the death of Allison Ramsfield, Ms. Perez merely stated, “I hope not.” But that was enough to send the punditocracy into a frenzy of speculation and innuendo. A typical headline read, “Did Doyle Ramsfield’s Long-Ago Fling With His Housekeeper Inspire His Wife’s Suicide?” It now became an article of faith among reporters – including many of the so-called nonpartisan ones – that Allison Ramsfield had taken her own life, even though Allison’s death had been investigated by the Connecticut State Police and ruled an accident. Doyle Ramsfield vehemently denied that his wife had killed herself. But he couldn’t deny having once employed Flora Perez; plenty of evidence existed to confirm the fact. And while he insisted nothing romantic occurred between him and Ms. Perez, she produced photos of the two of them together, photos which, if they didn’t constitute a smoking gun, at least constituted a warm one. The photographs showed the two of them in a variety of settings – a ski resort, a yacht club – where you wouldn’t expect to find a man and his housekeeper together.
When Ramsfield dropped out of the presidential race, Chloe became a minor celebrity. This was different from what happened to Delton Cook. His campaign was experiencing money problems even before Chloe wrote her essay about The Virginian. And Cook didn’t drop out until several weeks after Chloe’s essay appeared online. But Ramsfield didn’t bother pretending that he was dropping out of the race due to money problems or bad poll numbers. In his withdrawal speech, he noted that, “I made mistakes many years ago in my first marriage that I regret. It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t more forthcoming about those mistakes at the time. To those of you who have worked so hard for this campaign, I apologize for letting you down. For now, I plan to return to Washington and focus on the issues that made me want to make this presidential run in the first place. I also want to spend more time with my wife and my children.”
You might think that rightwing journalists would be eager to take credit for destroying Ramsfield’s presidential campaign, and some did, but many in rightwing media were happy to credit Chloe with having started the avalanche of bad publicity that eventually drove Ramsfield from the race. Chloe was still being identified in the press as a liberal blogger and the chief cultural correspondent for the online feminist magazine Lady Audley’s Quill. For practical and political reasons it looked better for President Fuller if one of his chief Democratic opponents was taken down by friendly fire rather than by a horde of frenzied rightwingers. Technically Lady Audley’s Quill, though it skewed left, wasn’t an ardently political – or even feminist – publication. It’s masthead described it as a publication that “looked at politics, culture, family, education, and other important topics through the female gaze,” whatever that might mean. What’s more, Chloe was no longer even affiliated with the magazine, although that fact hadn’t been publicized by either Chloe or LAQ. In any case, Chloe was given a great deal of credit for having outed Ramsfield as a philanderer who drove his first wife to suicide even though she never actually connected those dots. As a result she was besieged with requests to appear on various TV news and chat programs. Most of these offers came from blatantly rightwing TV hosts. Chloe is very pretty and articulate but not very outgoing. She had no desire to be a TV chat show celeb. She did, however, agree to be interviewed via Zoom on Late-Breaking, CNN’s midnight news program. The host, Lexie Burton, did everything she could to get Chloe to take credit for driving Ramsfield from the race, but Chloe wouldn’t take the bait.
BURTON: Now, as I understand it, you began to have doubts about Senator Ramsfield’s character after reading an old pulp-fiction novel. Is that correct?
CHLOE: Not really. I was reading a political thriller published back in 1980 and noticed that there were some superficial similarities between Senator Ramsfield and the villain in that novel. But I never suggested that Senator Ramsfield might be hiding any skeletons in his closet.
BURTON: Is it true that the novel you were reading was called The Nightmare Candidate?
CHLOE: That’s correct. It was written by Ramona Stewart, a seriously underrated writer of –
BURTON: And the title of the novel is a reference to a character who shared a lot of similarities with Senator Ramsfield?
CHLOE: Well, they’re both American politicians from the northeast. They both come from wealthy families that have a vacation compound in the Floriday Keys. But other –
BURTON: And isn’t it true that the fictional politician, like Senator Ramsfield, had a wife who committed suicide?
CHLOE: Yes. No. I mean, yes the fictional politician had a wife who committed suicide. I don’t know if the wife of Senat –
BURTON: And so you read about this fictional politician and his wife’s suicide, and then something inside you connected it with the Ramsfield situation? Didn’t you say that some sort of ESP or mind-reading ability helped you to make the connection?
CHLOE (flustered). No. I mean, the character in the book, a young woman named Elissa, she possessed mind-reading abilities that helped her to figure out that Steve Cameron was involved in a murder. But that has nothing to do with Senator Ramsfield. I don’t have any extra-sensory–
BURTON: You’re not suggesting that Senator Burton murdered anybody, are you?
CHLOE: No, of course not. But in the book, a major Democratic presidential candidate commits a murder. And when a young campaign worker named Elissa uses her extra-sensory perception to intuit his guilt, he attempts to murder her too, to keep her quiet. It’s actually a pretty well-written nov –
BURTON (turning away from the monitor and looking directly into the camera): Oooh…let’s hope there aren’t more revelations to come about Senator Ramsfield. I wonder if he has a young campaign worker named Elissa on his staff. So, Ms. King, you seem to have made a specialty of divining the future by looking into old books. Is it possible that, like Elissa, you’ve got a touch of ESP yourself?
CHLOE: No, my only superpower is that I can disappear into a good book.
BURTON (Briefly perplexed): Oh…kay. Well, you helped to drive Delton Cook from the race by disclosing that his favorite book was filled with misogyny and racism. And now you’ve helped to drive Senator Ramsfield from the race by disclosing him as a philanderer whose actions may have been responsible for the suicide of his first wife. Are there any other presidential hopefuls you’re planning on targeting next?
CHLOE (Flustered): No. I’m just a pop-culture junkie. I don’t normally get involved with politics. But when I heard Governor Cook singing the praises of the protagonist of The Virginian, I felt like I had to speak up and explain why I didn’t think he was a good role model. But I don’t think that had anything to do with Governor Cook’s decision to end his campaign. He had pledged to accept no corporate donations, and according to what I’ve read online, that decision made it impossible to raise enough money to run an effective campaign. And as for Senator Ramsfield, well, I just happened to be reading The Nightmare Candidate recently, because I was planning to write an essay about how American presidential politics are portrayed in popular fiction. And when I came across the scene where Senator Ramsfield confesses to murdering his wife’s lover –
BURTON (Grinning like a Cheshire cat): Senator Ramsfield confesses to murdering his wife’s lover? Boy that book was way ahead of its time! Or was that just a Freudian slip on your part?
CHLOE: I’m sorry, I meant to say Governor Cameron confesses to murdering his wife’s lover. I’ve gotten a bit confused be–
BURTON: Whew! I thought for a moment there that we had a major scoop on our hands. Senator Ramsfield confessing to murder! Film at eleven. Ha ha. Well, Chloe King, I want to thank you for being on Late-Breaking tonight. I will be eagerly monitoring your blog, Pop Fiction Matters, to see what Democratic skeletons you will be uncovering next. Thanks for joining us.
Chloe had done her best to dispel the notion that she was some sort of political oracle, but Lexie Burton had her own agenda to pursue. A young and attractive woman possessed of an almost supernatural ability to predict the downfalls of American presidential candidates makes for a much more lively TV narrative than a marginally employed freelance writer whose essays on pop fiction occasionally and almost always coincidentally bump up against a breaking political scandal. Thanks to CNN, Chloe was now regarded by many as a woman with the power to make or break a political candidate by peering into the fiction of a bygone era and reading it the way a fortune teller might read tea leaves. This media dishonesty angered me. But not for very long. Within twenty-four hours of Chloe’s appearance on Late-Breaking, seven thousand more people had purchased monthly subscriptions to Pop Fiction Matters. And even Janice Coffey, the editor of Lady Audley’s Quill, seemed to be having second thoughts about cutting Chloe loose. Apparently, Chloe’s sudden fame was bringing LAQ a lot of clicks and page-views. Suddenly Janice found herself torn between her liberal ideals and her desire for lucrative internet traffic. In the end, she must have chosen lucre over liberalism. She sent a contrite email to Chloe, which said, “I think I was a bit too hasty the other day when I asked you to go on hiatus until after the November election. It just doesn’t seem like LAQ without a Chloe King pop culture essay each week. If you could continue providing me with a thousand words a week or so, I’d be happy to up your rate of pay to $2,000 a month.”
Chloe graciously said that she would try to find time in her busy schedule to crank out a weekly essay for Janice. In truth, the extra $1,000 per month wasn’t much of an inducement. Chloe’s blog was now bringing in roughly $15,000 per month. We didn’t really need the LAQ money any more. But both Chloe and I firmly believed that her current popularity in the rightwing blogosphere was entirely a fluke, one that would surely run its course pretty quickly, after which she was likely to start hemorrhaging subscribers – and income. When that happened, we’d probably find ourselves grateful that Chloe hadn’t snubbed Janice and her $2,000 a month for freelance work.
Chapter Seven: Dojikko and Juliet
Artistic families usually have at least one black sheep, someone who can’t paint or write or play a musical instrument with any sort of proficiency. And often this black sheep channels her artistic energies into some sort of occult-like enterprise – tarot cards, aromatherapy, séances, transcendental meditation. These familial outliers tend to refer to TM or tarot or palm reading or whatever as “my art,” as if to elevate it to a status equal to being a concert pianist or an opera singer. One of my band mates was an older guy named Griffin Tammershak. For years he had been a member of Mac Davis’s band, and he traveled almost nonstop with Davis throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, playing mandolin, guitar, pedal-steel guitar, and even a little banjo. Griffin came from a very artistic family. His father was a concertmaster for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Company. His mother was an actress and a singer. One of his older brothers was a director of documentary films and the other was a concert violinist. Griffin’s parents had always wanted to have a daughter but the pregnancy stork seemed to have lost their address after delivering the youngest of their three sons. Then, twenty years after Griffin’s birth, Mrs. Tammershak, now in her late forties, found herself once again pregnant. And nine months later, Griffin’s much younger baby sister, Juliet, was born. Alas, Juliet was too coddled as a child to do anything difficult like take piano lessons or learn how to paint. Her parents were so happy to at last find themselves blessed with a daughter that they essentially allowed the child to do whatever she wanted. She grew up kind of wild and hippie-like but a good twenty years after the heyday of the American hippie. Somewhere along her journey through life Juliet became convinced that she possessed what she called “psi powers,” a catchall phrase for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and various other quack specialties. The good thing about psi powers, as opposed to artistic ability, is that they can’t ever be definitively disproved. Put a guitar in the hands of someone who claims to be a great guitarist and you’ll find out soon enough whether he can play or not. But ask a quack spiritualist to demonstrate their ability to foretell the future or bend spoons with their mind or communicate with the dead, and they can always beg off by simply claiming that the circumstances aren’t favorable, or that these gifts can’t be forced to perform on command, or some other such nonsense. Fortunately for Juliet, her parents had set up a modest trust fund for her in their will. And after they died, she was able to indulge her passion for the otherworldly without having to worry overmuch about earning a living. Thus, she was now in her forties and still dressed like Stevie Nicks, circa 1976, with scarves where most women would wear bracelets, chunky necklaces where the scarves should have been, and headbands that made her look like a cross between a gypsy fortune teller and a pretendian. I knew all this only from stories that Griffin had told me about his sister. Until Chloe became famous, I had never actually met Juliet in the flesh. But Griffin happened to be talking to Juliet on the phone one day when she mentioned that she wished her psi powers were as strong as those belonging to “that girl on TV who is able to predict political scandals just by reading old books.” Griffin told Juliet that he knew that girl. “No you don’t,” Juliet snapped. “I do,” Griffin told her. “Her husband and I play together in a bluegrass band. I see her every Wednesday at the Fox & Goose Pub here in Sac.” Before Griffin could talk her out of it, Juliet had arranged to fly to Sacramento and spend a few days with her big brother. She wanted him to introduce her to Chloe. Griffin called me on the phone and warned me that Juliet would be at our next Wednesday night gig. He suggested I tell Chloe to stay home Wednesday night. Otherwise she was likely to be pestered mercilessly by Juliet and her psi powers.
But Griffin needn’t have worried. As you might expect of a pop fiction junkie, Chloe isn’t at all put off by wacky people. In fact, she kind of cultivates them. She used to work part time at a Sacramento antiquarian bookshop, where she made the acquaintance of all sorts of UFO freaks, psychics, conspiracy theorists, political fanatics, and various other nut-balls. She loved talking to these people. They viewed life as if it were some wild-ass work of pulp fiction, full of space aliens and cabals of witches and communist plots and secret messages being beamed out of our television sets and causing us to become consumerist zombies under the mesmeric control of our Madison Avenue overlords who were in cahoots with the CIA, the FBI, and, improbably, the ACLU. Chloe loved pulp fiction, and anyone who struck her as a character from a cheap novel would generally receive a warm welcome from her. I think she first fell for me because, as a bluegrass musician living nearly rent-free in his grandparents’ hundred-year-old home, I seemed like the kind of guy the heroine of a gothic romance – or a gothic horror – novel would probably fall for. The fact that I spent my days filling orders for ghost customers (our in-house slang for e-shoppers, because we rarely laid eyes on any of them) probably lent me an additional aura of mystery. After I told Chloe about Juliet, she couldn’t wait to make her acquaintance.
On Wednesday, Chloe and I showed up at the Fox & Goose at six o’clock, our usual time. Chloe and I always have dinner – usually fish and chips – at the Goose before I begin my first set with the band. Griffin arrived, as usual, at about six thirty and began setting up our equipment. He introduced Juliet to Chloe and me. She sat down at our table to chat with Chloe. I had no chance to converse with Juliet because I had to run out to my car, grab my banjo, and then help the others with setting up for the show. But, from what I could see, Juliet and Chloe seemed to hit it off well, even though Juliet was at least fifteen years older than Chloe and much more flamboyant in her personal style. She was dressed all in black, wore heavy-soled black work boots, and the ends of her short grayish hair were died the exact same purple as the tinted lenses in the wire-framed granny glasses she wore even though it was nighttime, we were in dimly lighted bar, and there was absolutely no need for shaded eyeglasses. Chloe’s only deliberate manifestation of kookiness is her hair. An Asian-American, she has jet-black hair, but for as long as I’d known her she had been streaking it with various greens and blues and yellows, giving it the look of swirled ice cream. She wore large tortoiseshell glasses, not for stylistic effect but because years of immersing herself in cheap paperback fictions had caused her to become somewhat myopic. Behind those glasses, she had the talkingest eyes I’ve ever seen. She could express volumes with a squint or a scowl or a furrowing of the brow. She had a fondness for the ways that eyes are depicted in pulp fiction, and had even compiled a list of some of her favorite bad writings about eyes:
“He nodded once, mostly with his eyes.” (Barberry Freight by Richard Burke)
“He looked up, his eyes snarling viciously.” (The Ebony Bed Murder by Rufus Gillmore)
“Her eyes were kicking off sparks like the flint of an automatic lighter.” (Charity begins at Homicide by Michael Morgan)
“Her eyes were as wide and basilisk as though she were a somnambulist, stunned to time and place.” (The Clue From the Tempest by Florence M. Pettee)
Those goofy descriptions would seem much less goofy to you if you knew Chloe. She actually can nod, snarl, or kick off sparks (metaphorically speaking) with her eyes. She can also scold, sneer, inquire, smile, rebuff, joke, and express approval with them, along with plenty of other things.
Her clumsily dyed hair and nerdy glasses gave her the appearance of a dojikko, a classic character in Japanese manga and anime. Wikipedia’s definition of dojikko is a good summary: “Generally, the girl is pretty and cute or so sweet and innocent that readers are expected to like her. She repeatedly fails in everyday house and school activities, like housework, sport competitions, even simply walking. She frequently falls, runs into things, or trips over the lowest obstacles. Even though she is annoyed at her misfortunes, a dojikko always shows her good side and regrets messing things up. Examples of dojikko behavior include slipping on stairs, knocking over a drink, breaking a dish while serving customers, and other such slapstick.” I occasionally refer to Chloe as my little dojikko, but she always insists that she is no dojikko but a bad-ass sukeban (girl gangster). In any case, she and Juliet made for an interesting study in contrasts: youth vs. middle-age, quiet vs. brash, petite vs. larger-than-life, manga colorfulness vs. gothic-novel black. While they chatted, Brewgrass prepared to play its first set. Zac Vargas had notified me that he would be arriving late. So, instead of being our opening act, he planned to do his set during our first rest break.
Our first set began promptly at seven and we began to roll through our renditions of various bluegrass standards such as Shady Grove and Little Liza Jane and Alabama Jubilee. As the night progressed, so would our music. We liked to start out with traditional tunes and then gradually move through the decades with folk numbers and country songs that became famous in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Normally, Chloe was pretty attentive to what was happening up on the stage (really just a six-inch riser near the back of the bar), but tonight she was paying almost no attention to the music. She and Juliet were engaged in a discussion so intense that their foreheads were practically touching. For some reason, seeing the two of them together like that, I was reminded of Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in the film Practical Magic, a pair of sisterly witches. We ended our first set at seven forty-five, and I went back to the table and took a seat alongside Chloe. Zac Vargas went up on stage to play a few of his folksongs while the members of Brewgrass and I took a break. Usually, Zac’s set was Chloe’s favorite part of the night. Brewgrass played nothing but standards, but Zac played his own material, and Chloe was always eager to find out if he had added any new songs to his repertoire. Tonight, however, she told me that she and Juliet were going to hail a Rydeshare car and go back to our house. “Juliet’s going to hypnotize me,” Chloe said excitedly. “She thinks that might tell us how I’ve managed to dig up so much political dirt in the pages of old novels.”
“Great,” I said unenthusiastically. “It’ll be just like A Stir of Echoes.”
“Don’t worry,” said Juliet, “we promise not to dig up the bodies of any dead homewreckers who might be buried under your house.” Apparently she was as much of a pop-culture vulture as my wife. Both women giggled and gathered their purses.
I made a last-ditch effort to prevent Chloe from leaving. “What about your boyfriend, Zac Vargas?” I teased her. “Don’t you wanna hang around and see if has any new folksongs for you?”
She laughed. “If he debuts a new song, be sure to remember the title so I can request it next week.”
Just as she and Juliet stepped outside into the night, Zac began his first song. “I thought I could master love,” he sang, “but love is always the master. I thought I could outrun fear, but fear is always faster.”
I had never heard it before.
Chapter Eight: Cy Powers
I didn’t get home until eleven that night. By then, Juliet appeared to be long gone and I could hear Chloe tapping away at the keyboard in her home office. I had to be at work at six a.m. so I put away my banjo and went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning, I sat down at the table with a bowl of cereal and opened up my laptop. As I suspected, Chloe had posted a new essay to Pop Fiction Matters earlier that morning. Considering our last words at the pub the night before, I figured she might have written an essay about pop fictions in which hypnotism plays a role. Just a week or two earlier she had been singing the praises of a novel called The Fifth Sally, written by Daniel Keyes, better known as the author of Flowers for Algernon. She said it was about a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism in order to treat a schizophrenic woman whose mind had split into five separate entities. But her new essay didn’t mention The Fifth Sally. Neither did it mention A Stir of Echoes, or any other pop fiction in which hypnotism plays a role. Instead the subject was…masturbation. Well, sort of.
The real subject was Derek Pritchard, who was the president of the ten-campus University of California system. He had spent six years as a Congressman from the Santa Barbara area. He had also served as the Secretary of Education under a previous Democratic presidential administration. Curiously, he was not a candidate for president. But a handful of the media’s “very serious people,” mostly liberal columnists for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other left-leaning publications, had been urging him to enter the race. These pundits usually noted just how satisfying it would be to watch a presidential debate between Pritchard, an articulate Harvard-educated scholar, and Grant Fuller, a billionaire cattle rancher with no college degree and a penchant for making up “facts” on the fly. Like former New York Governor Mario Cuomo back in 1992, Pritchard seemed to think that he should be spared the messy job of campaigning for the nomination and that the Democratic Party should simply turn to him en masse and beg him to take on the Republican incumbent. As you may recall, while Cuomo waited to be anointed – and waited and waited and waited – a far less ideal candidate named William Jefferson Clinton actually campaigned for the nomination, won it, and then went on to serve two terms in the White House. In recent months, Pritchard had been asked several times on TV news shows if he might be considering a run for the White House. The fact that he had refused to rule out the possibility had given his champions in the press some hope that he might finally roll up his sleeves, get out on the campaign trail, and start kissing babies (not to mention the asses of deep-pocketed donors). And, truth be told, the recent departures of both Governor Cook and Senator Ramsfield from the race, coupled with various stumbles by some of the other Democratic hopefuls actually appeared to have pushed Pritchard closer to declaring his candidacy. Last night, apparently, he had appeared on Late-Breaking and told host Lexie Burton that he would make a decision in the next two weeks. Chloe provided a link to the interview in her blog post, which I watched a part of. After asking about his stance on various issues – the war in Ukraine, abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. – Burton asked him to name a favorite novel. Pritchard, a scholar and an avid reader, had obviously been ready for this question. He said that one of the books that made him choose a career in academia was Robert Cormier’s 1974 young-adult novel The Chocolate War. “It’s a story about what happens to a school – or to any institution, a church, a corporation, a government – when a bully is allowed to have his way with it. In The Chocolate War, only one student stands up to the bully. Everyone else in the school – the students, the teachers, the administrators – all let the bully have his way, either because they are scared, because they are just as immoral as the bully himself, or because they think they can influence the bully’s behavior in ways that will benefit them. But if we don’t stand up to bullies, they just get more powerful and more destructive and then they destroy the institution that gave rise to them.”
BURTON: Are you saying that President Grant Fuller is a bully who must be stopped?
PRITCHARD: I’m not pointing the finger at any one person, Lexie. Sadly, life is full of bullies. But the way to defeat them isn’t by cowering in fear or hoping that they will just go away. The way to defeat them is to confront them. Scratch the paint off a bully and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a coward underneath. Bullies usually win not because they are all-powerful but because they have a gift for appearing to be all-powerful. That’s the lesson that The Chocolate War teaches us. President Putin is nothing more than a bully with a nuclear arsenal. I believe that if we stand up to bullies like Putin, we can bring them down.
BURTON: Sounds like a stump speech.
PRITCHARD: Call it what you want. But read the book. It may have a profound effect on your life. I know it did on mine. I read it when I was a teenager and I’ve read it every few years since then. It has a message that never grows old.
BURTON: If you want to attack bullies from the most powerful office in the world, you’re always welcome to announce that you’re a candidate for president right here on Late-Breaking.
PRITCHARD: I’ll keep that in mind.
In her essay, titled “The Choke-It War,” Chloe pointed out that masturbation is an obsession with many of the teenage boys in The Chocolate War. In fact, the chief bully, a student named Archie, is able to manipulate a lesser bully named Emile into all kinds of sketchy activities because, some time earlier, Archie kicked open the door of a bathroom stall and took a Polaroid of Emile masturbating. Ever since then, out of fear that Archie will show the photo to others, Emile has done whatever Archie has asked him to do. Chloe then suggested that Derek Pritchard’s refusal to enter the presidential race might have something to do “with an old Polaroid owned by one of his erstwhile prep school classmates.” After all, she pointed out, plenty of high-ranking Republicans were classmates of Pritchard’s both at Groton and, later, at Harvard. “If Derek is Emile, then who might be his Archie?” Pritchard’s family owned a large bookstore near the University of Santa Barbara. Pritchard practically grew up in the bookstore. Many of the photos of Derek that appeared on the social media feeds of his friends and family members had bookstore shelves as backdrops. Chloe was able to find a photo in which Pritchard appeared before a bookshelf that held both Portnoy’s Complaint and Ulysses, two books in which masturbation is featured prominently. She also found a photograph of a young Derek Pritchard holding William Kotzwinkle’s 1980 novel Jack in the Box. It was the only book about beating off that she could find actually in Pritchard’s hand, although whether he was taking it off the shelf to read or simply shelving a random book at his parents’ store couldn’t be determined. Chloe quoted generously from Kotzwinkle’s comic novel, which tells the story of Jack Twiller, a young American boy coming of age in the 1940s and 50s. Chapter thirteen of the novel was titled “Did Captain Marvel Jack Off?” Chloe gleefully cited a scene in which several of the characters engage in a “jack off contest.” It was funny in a juvenile sort of way. Chloe got lucky and found an online copy of Pritchard’s prep school yearbook photo. Beneath his name were the initials of a variety of clubs to which Pritchard belonged in his school days. One acronym was JOC. Chloe pondered whether it stood for Jack Off Club. (In fact, it turned out to be the initials of the Junior Orators Club). Chloe’s essay was her most unfair yet, but it was written with such a silly tone that no one could seriously accuse her of trying to ruin Pritchard’s presidential hopes, if, indeed, he had any. In fact, the main thrust of the essay was masturbation in popular fiction. Apparently, it is a fairly common phenomenon in popular novels – nearly as common as hypnosis. Chloe’s essay included a link to a listicle that provided the titles of 150 works of pop fiction in which masturbation plays a prominent role, including titles by Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Judy Blume, to name but a few.
To my surprise, a very weary-looking Chloe came scuffling into the kitchen, poured herself some coffee, and sat down at the table with me. Whenever I saw her like that I was reminded of the title of my favorite Tom Robbins novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, although her pajamas featured rabbits rather than amphibians.
“What are you doing up so early?” I asked.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Thought I’d get up and try to write something for Lady Audley, even though we don’t need the money any more. No use burning a paying market.”
“What happened last night with Juliet?” I asked. “Did she hypnotize you?”
“She gave it the old college try, but I don’t think it worked.”
“You don’t think it worked?”
“Well, I didn’t put my shoe in the refrigerator like Tom Wallace.”
Because she frequently insists that I read the work of some of her favorite pop fictioneers, I knew that this was a reference to the protagonist of Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel A Stir of Echoes. In the 1999 film he was played by Kevin Bacon and his last name was changed to Witzky.
“So what was she like? Kooky? Spooky? Altogether ooky? Do tell.”
“She was…kinda sad. She’s really into all that woo-woo New Age nonsense. She talked about psi powers so much – psi powers this, psi powers that – it almost felt as though she were talking about her dentist or her tax accountant, some guy named Cy Powers. She brought a bunch of ESP paraphernalia in that massive purse of hers.”
“Such as?”
“Such as a deck of Zener cards.”
“Zener cards?”
“It’s a deck of twenty-five cards, invented back in the 1930s by a parapsychologist named Karl Zener. It’s used to determine how much psychic ability a test subject possesses. Zener cards are mentioned in Ramona Stewart’s The Nightmare Candidate, so Juliet assumed I was familiar with them. The deck includes five cards with nothing but a circle on them, five with a square, five with a cross, five with a star, and five with a set of wavy lines. She sat beside me on the sofa and then she would hold up a card so that she could see the symbol on it but I couldn’t. Then she asked me to try to determine what card she was holding by reading her mind.”
“And did it work? Were you able to read her mind?”
“Not really. I got twelve out of twenty-five correct. It felt like a failure to me. But she told me that eighty percent of test subjects get only between three and seven correct. That’s what you’d expect if the subjects were just guessing. Only about ten percent of test subjects get eight or more correct. Only about one test subject in ninety thousand gets fifteen correct. So my twelve correct answers placed me in the top one or two percent.”
“So it sounds as if you aced it!”
She shook her weary head. “That’s what Juliet said. But, honestly, I was just guessing. I couldn’t read her mind at all. I suggested we try it a second time, but she said no. Further testing tends to lower the result because the test subject begins trying too hard to improve her score and second-guesses herself. But I felt pretty certain that if I’d taken the test again I’d have gotten a lower score.”
“What else did she do to you?”
“Well, the first Zener test was to determine my mind-reading ability. She also used the Zener deck to test my precognitive abilities.”
“Like the precogs in Minority Report?”
“Exactly. This time she asked me to name a card – circle, square, cross, waves, or star. After I named a card, she’d shuffle the deck and then draw the top card. If I got it right, then supposedly I must have predicted the future, because the card hadn’t even been at the top of the deck yet when I made my guess. If that makes any sense.”
“So how did you do on that test?”
“I got eight correct, which, according to Juliet, means that I have some precognitive abilities but they aren’t as strong as my ability to read minds. If you ask me, the whole thing was nonsense, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying so.”
“What about the hypnotism?”
“Well, it wasn’t like the hypnotism you see in movies or anything. She had me close my eyes and then she told me to imagine walking through a sort of mythical wilderness. She described it for me. I passed babbling brooks and fairy tale houses and spiraling mountains that disappeared into the clouds. It was all very Brothers Grimmy. But she didn’t make any effort to delve into my psyche or give me any post-hypnotic suggestions. At least not that I can recall. I think she was trying to get me to fall into a hypnotic state, but it just never happened. Some people can’t be hypnotized.”
“Are you sure about that? Because you seem kinda spaced out right now.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I laughed. “There’s the Chloe I know and love. How long did Juliet stay?”
“Only till about ten o’clock. She’s going to be staying with Griffin for a week or two, so we may get together again. We didn’t make any definite plans. After she left, I went to my office and cranked out my essay about Derek Pritchard.”
There was something about her story that puzzled me but I was too distracted just then to put my finger on it. I had to get to work. So I kissed the top of her head and went to the freezer to grab one of the frozen microwavable burritos that I often have for lunch on workdays. When I opened the freezer door I saw one of Chloe’s lime green Converse All-Star hightops sitting on a shelf next to the ice tray. I grabbed the shoe and held it out for Chloe to see.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” I asked.
She looked at me, nonplussed. “What are you talking about?”
“This shoe. It was in the freezer. Feel it. It’s obviously been in there all night long. It’s frozen stiff.”
Chloe just stared at me, looking confused. After a while, she said, “You didn’t put it in there as a joke when you got home last night?”
“No,” I said. “I went straight to bed.”
“Well…maybe Juliet did hypnotize me. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?” I asked.
“Well, I slipped off my shoes as soon as we got home. And at one point, Juliet asked me if she could use our bathroom. Maybe she grabbed one of my sneakers when I wasn’t looking. Then, when she walked to the back of the house to use the bathroom, maybe she slipped in here to the kitchen and stuck my shoe in the freezer.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. Why do kooky people do anything? Maybe she wanted to earn my trust. Maybe she was hoping that when I woke up and found my shoe in the freezer, I’d believe in her hypnotic powers. And that would make me more susceptible the next time she tried to hypnotize me.”
“Is there going to be a next time?”
“I dunno,” Chloe said. “Juliet seems really interested in my psi powers. It wouldn’t surprise me if she wanted to take another whack at hypnotizing me at some point.”
“Well, next time make sure that I’m around when she does it. I don’t want her putting any weird hypnotic suggestions into your brain. There’s enough weirdness in there already.”
“Better leave for work,” Chloe snarked. “You’re gonna be late.”
I grabbed my burrito and hurried out to the car. Duty called, and my ghost shoppers awaited. When I was outside on the driveway, I peered through the kitchen window for one last look at Chloe before getting into the car. She was sitting at the table, her chin resting on her right hand and the frozen sneaker in her left hand, a perplexed look on her face, like Hamlet examining Yorick’s skull. Perhaps she was trying to recall what other oddball suggestions Juliet might have planted in her brain last night. Or maybe the look on her face was just exhaustion. She had stayed up half the night writing and had woken up earlier than usual. And now, here she was at the kitchen table, wondering about the frozen shoe in her hand, half asleep in rabbit pajamas.
Chapter Nine: Ghost Shoppers
The people I shop for at Taylor’s are never identified by name on the handheld device we e-cart fillers get our orders from. The device displays an order number and then a list of the items the ghost shopper wants us to gather for them. The online software allows the shopper to add written instructions to the e-cart filler. For instance, a shopper might request bananas “but only if they are ripe and ready to eat. I don’t want any green on the banana peel.” Or the shopper might order a half-gallon of Crystal Creamery whole milk and then add, in the comments, “make sure the ‘sell by’ date is at least twelve days out.” After we gather all of the groceries and box them up, we wheel the order to a storage area at the back of the store where, eventually, a delivery driver will pick it up and take it to the customer’s home. Some customers prefer to pick up their orders outside the store. We have a parking area reserved for those shoppers. All they have to do is park their cars and then send a text to our delivery department. Within minutes (usually) someone will wheel a cart out to the parking lot and load the groceries into the customer’s car.
Although we e-cart fillers don’t know the actual names of any of our ghost shoppers, we have a few dozen regular shoppers whose orders are so unique that we can instantly recognize them just by glancing quickly at the list on our computer screens. Most of these ghosts have been given nicknames by the e-cart crew. We have Grenade Man who, whenever they are in season, orders four avocadoes each time he shops online and always insists in the comments that he wants them “as hard as grenades.” Apparently he likes to let them ripen in his kitchen. Another regular is the Toothpick Man, who always orders a box of wooden toothpicks with each weekly order. We e-cart fillers have decided that he either entertains frequently and makes a lot of canapés or else he has really, really clean teeth. Perhaps both. And then, of course, there is the shopper we call Nora Whitman. Nora Roberts (a pseudonym for Eleanor Robertson) is a writer of romance novels and generally churns out between six and twelve new titles per year. She also writes “romantic suspense” novels under the pseudonym J.D. Robb. “Nora Whitman” expects us to keep track of both pseudonyms and always requests we provide her with “whatever book comes after Forgotten in Death,” or whatever the most recently published of the Roberts/Robb books was called. Of course, entire weeks sometimes pass without a new Roberts/Robb book hitting our shelves, but we always have to check. Even without the Roberts/Robb requests, however, we would have no trouble identifying Nora Whitman, because every weekly order includes a demand for a 72-piece Whitman’s Sampler box of assorted chocolates. One time, early in my tenure at Taylor’s, I scanned the correct box of assorted chocolates but got interrupted by an in-store customer before I could put it into my basket. When I returned to my task, I accidentally grabbed hold of a box containing nothing but nougat-filled candies. Nora Whitman was not pleased. She sent a letter to the store requesting that we take greater care when filling her order for Whitman’s chocolates. Her three page letter pointed out that, if we are in any doubt about the contents of a Whitman’s candy box, all we have to do is open it and take a look inside. “The square shaped chocolates have caramel in them. The rectangles have nougat in them. The ovals have fudge. The round chocolates have cherry cordial. And the nut clusters can easily be identified by anyone who has ever seen a nut in his life.” My boss relayed this information to me but didn’t allow me to read the original letter. Many ghost shoppers prefer to maintain their anonymity. For all we e-cart fillers know, the Grenade Man might be a little old lady, the Toothpick Man might be a computer program placing automatic refill orders for a local restaurant, and Nora Whitman might be a longshoreman. But making guesses about the lives and personalities of the people we are shopping for is a regular part of an e-cart fillers daily grind. When an order includes both disposable nipple pads and organic nipple balm, I just assume that I’m shopping for the young mother of a newborn infant. Forming a mental picture of my customer helps make her more real for me. And I’m inclined to provide better service for people who are real to me.
On the Thursday in question, I put in an eight-hour shift at work and didn’t think much more about “The Choke-It War,” but when I got home I learned that it, too, had gone viral. Apparently a few old Groton boys from Pritchard’s class had made some jokes online about what a world-class masturbator he had been back in the day. Whether these were references to actual behavior on Pritchard’s part or just mean-spirited jokes, I couldn’t tell. But, sure enough, the blogosphere soon became full of posts with headlines like, “Is He For Real This Time or Just Jerking Us Off?” and “Is Derek Pritchard Tossing His Hat in the Ring or Just Tossing Off?” All of these posts were linked to “The Choke-It War.” Chloe’s blog was no doubt gaining dozens of new readers and (hopefully) subscribers with each passing minute.
A couple of Pritchard’s old schoolmates went public with the fact that Pritchard had also been quite a stoner back in his prep days. Chloe took advantage of this info to take another shot at Pritchard, hastily writing up another pop-fiction-themed takedown of the man. She found an old commencement address that Pritchard had delivered at U.C. Santa Barbara several years earlier. In one passage he told the graduates, “You are the youth and the promise of America and your hour has arrived.” He concluded his speech by telling the students, “Go forth from this day with unmatched intellect and energy to shape the destiny of your country and your world.” She noted that these quotes were eerily similar to some lines from a political thriller by Michael Avallone called Missing! (Signet, 1973). It is the story of Robert Winslow Sheldrake, the president-elect of the United States of America. In that novel, she found the following lines:
It was youth, Robert Winslow Sheldrake had reasoned accurately, and its time and its hour must be served.
And:
Give me these needs and I will go forth, with my matchless intellect and fingered dexterity, to raise relentlessly again old battle flags and shape my destiny among the stars.
Chloe then pointed out that Missing!, as its title implied, was about a president-elect who goes missing on the day before he is to be inaugurated. Every major law-enforcement agency in the western world, from the FBI to Scotland Yard and Interpol, spend the next four days furiously trying to figure out where he could have disappeared to. In the end (spoiler alert!), we learn that RWS dropped some of his hippie daughter’s LSD and has been hiding out in the basement of the White House for four days, naked and stoned out of his mind. Chloe tried to link RWS’s acid trip with Pritchard’s youthful fondness for marijuana. She concluded by noting that, “We’d better all hope that Derek Pritchard can handle his weed better than Robert Winslow Sheldrake handled his LSD. Otherwise, should he beat off all the other contenders and wind up winning the presidency, we may find him naked and stoned in the basement of the White House on the eve of his inauguration. And that’s not a sight that’s likely to inspire anyone in America – man, woman, or child – to reach for the Kleenex or the shower nozzle.”
At dinner that night, it finally occurred to me what it was that had puzzled me that morning.
“So,” I said to Chloe, “Juliet left at about ten last night?”
“Yeah. Ten. Ten thirty.”
“And you went straight to work on your ‘Choke-It War’ essay after that?”
“Pretty much.”
“But at ten thirty, Derek Pritchard’s interview on Late-Breaking hadn’t even aired yet out here on the west coast. How could you have known when you started your essay that he would cite The Chocolate War as his favorite novel?”
“Hmmm…Good question.” She pondered this for a moment. “I don’t know. The interview was conducted live three hours earlier back in New York. By the time I started my essay, the contents of the interview were probably already available online. I must have stumbled across it when I was researching my essay about masturbation in popular fiction. I don’t really remember. You know how I go into a sort of trance when I do my writing. And afterwards I can rarely remember all the details of how I put the essay together. Maybe I just stumbled across the info about Pritchard and The Chocolate War while I was in one of my writing trances, scouring the internet for information about masturbation and popular fiction.”
“Or maybe your precog skills are a lot better than you think they are.”
She laughed, so I joined in. But I hadn’t been joking.
Chapter Ten: The Old Lady in Aisle Nine
For several days running, jokes about Pritchard’s fondness for marijuana and masturbation were a fixture of late-night talk show monologues and rightwing political pundits. And over the next week or so, Pritchard, who hadn’t been involved in the rough-and-tumble world of a political campaign for nearly twenty years, seemed to lose his enthusiasm for a presidential bid. Whether it was “The Choke-It War” its follow-up essay that discouraged him from running, I can’t say. But eight days after Chloe’s two essays appeared online, Pritchard let it be known that he would not be entering the presidential race.
After Pritchard’s announcement, political junkies began filling up the comments section of Chloe’s Pop Fiction Matters blog. “Who are you going to take down next?” they wanted to know. But Chloe was a great believer in the storytelling motto of Wilkie Collins: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” For the next few weeks she wrote about nothing but popular fiction. Her subscriber numbers didn’t increase much during these weeks but neither did they fall. This struck me as unfair. Her political essays tended to be puerile and not entirely fair. Her pop fiction essays, on the other hand, tended to be fascinating. She was always coming up with ideas that I had never seen written about before. She wrote an entire essay about famous novels whose titles are also the final words of the book. You probably can’t think of any off hand, but Chloe examined a few dozen of these. I thought it was an excellent essay, but it didn’t generate a single new subscription to the blog. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, however, because by this time she had close to ten thousand paid subscribers and was bringing in around twenty thousand dollars a month.
I, on the other hand, was making about eighteen hundred dollars a month (twenty-seven hours per week at about fifteen dollars per hour). It was a good job with plenty of opportunities for advancement, but I had resisted climbing the retail ladder. I liked being an e-cart shopper. The very first supermarkets had only five departments: meats, frozen foods, dairy, produce, and groceries. Nowadays, supermarkets have well over a dozen departments, including books-and-magazines, wellness products/health foods, deli-prepared foods, bakery goods, seafood, floral, wine and beer, and so forth. The e-cart shopper is pretty much the only non-managerial employee (other than the overnight janitor) who regularly visits every department during every shift. I calculate that I walk about five miles during each eight-hour shift, meaning that I am essentially getting paid to exercise. E-cart shoppers know the layout of the store better than almost any other employee does. Our store carries roughly 40,000 products, and I can find even the most obscure of them in less than a minute’s time. The e-cart shopper is the most autonomous salaried employee in the supermarket. We take orders only from a handheld electronic device. And as long as we fill our quota of orders during each shift, we rarely have any interaction with a manager. If I had wanted it, I could have become a full-time cashier by now, working forty hours per week at a salary of about twenty-three dollars per hour. But I don’t want to stand in one spot for eight hours a day. Nor do I want to work forty hours a week. I like having plenty of time to spend with my wife, my banjo, and my friends. My work/life balance had never been in balance at all. I’ve always spent much more time on my personal interests than on my professional ones. Which is why I never expected to find myself in a household with a monthly income north of twenty thousand dollars. This opened up all kinds of possibilities that I never thought would be available to us.
I wrote a letter to my grandparents in Spain. They had been out of the country for so long that they no longer paid much attention to American politics. What’s more, they were leading a very off-line life. They preferred “IRL” activities – museums, restaurants, train rides through the Spanish countryside – to the virtual thrills of the internet. I doubt they even knew what IRL meant. Thus, they were completely unaware of Chloe’s newfound status as a low-grade internet celebrity. I explained it all to them in my letter and told them that, thanks to Chloe’s paid subscribers, we now had enough money to purchase the house from them if they were willing to sell it to us. Though the house was relatively small and slightly run down, it was located at the outer edge of a of Sacramento neighborhood (known as Land Park) that was highly desirable. I found some comparable houses that were for sale and grabbed hold of their sales brochures. I gave my grandparents a very generous estimate of what the house was worth. Then I told them that, given Chloe’s sudden rise in income, we should have enough money within a few months to make a twenty percent down payment on the house. We should also have a healthy enough monthly income by then to secure a bank loan for the remainder of the purchase price. I asked that, if this was agreeable to them, they would let me know and I would begin arranging for the sale to take place. I didn’t mention any of this to Chloe because I didn’t want her to feel any pressure to keep her subscriber list growing. Besides, if she truly was a precog, she had probably seen this idea developing before I did.
Everything was going smoothly for Chloe and me. Money was pouring in. And then one day, a strange old woman approached me at work while I was filling an e-cart order for a customer. She pulled a folded piece of paper from her purse and stuffed it into the pocket of my smock, the one that all employees of Taylor’s Supermarket are required to wear at work. “This is for your wife,” she said. “It’s information about that damn Williams woman.” And then, as quickly as she had appeared in aisle nine, she turned and hurried out of it, leaving behind a faint scent of patchouli oil. At first I had no idea what ‘Williams woman’ she was referring to. I pulled the crumpled paper from my pocket and unfolded it. A handwritten scrawl covered nearly every square inch of both sides of the paper. I had no time to try to decipher it, but it looked like the kind of thing TV serial killers leave lying around their squalid lodgings. But I could see that the name Breneé Williams was written at the top of the sheet, and was underlined, heavily, three times. Breneé Williams was a television “life coach” who had decided, god knows why, to run for president on a third-party ticket. No one gave her a chance in a million of winning the White House, but she was expected to capture somewhere around two to four percent of the vote, and in a tight race she could well play the role of spoiler. At this point no one was quite sure whether her presence in the race would benefit the Democrats or the Republicans. Some argued that, being a woman and a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, she was likely to draw votes away from the eventual Democratic nominee. Others noted that her message – lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and quit sitting around the house waiting for the government or some man to solve your problems – played better with conservative women than it did with liberal ones. (No political pundits expected Ms. Williams to draw any male votes at all; her media empire was almost entirely a female phenomenon.) At any rate, she was fabulously wealthy, planned to spend heavily on her vanity campaign, and had introduced an element of uncertainty into the race that was making strategists for both of the major parties uneasy. I was not comfortable with Chloe’s newfound role as a Destroyer of Democrats, but I would have been perfectly happy to see her damage Breneé Williams’s White House hopes. Williams struck me as a totally unserious candidate whose ego and money could possibly do lasting damage to the country if she were allowed to tip the electoral scales in some unexpected way come November. But I highly doubted that a few hundred words committed to paper in a serial-killer scrawl could take down a billionaire with a full-time public relations staff and a vast media empire. I decided not to throw away the old lady’s screed. But neither would I just past pass it along to Chloe without first reading its contents and making sure that it wasn’t something that might get her in trouble if she published it. But that would have to wait until I got home.
In the meantime, here are some of the famous novels, mentioned in Chloe’s essay, whose titles also serve as their final words:
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Chloe’s essay also discussed novels whose titles appeared in their final sentences but were not the final words. Consider, for example, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, whose final sentence reads, “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” The words One Hundred Years of Solitude appear in the final sentence of that Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel but they are not the final words of the book. And then there are books, such as Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, whose titles appear, somewhat altered, in their final lines (“The…tranquil waterway…seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”) And finally there is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, whose title is scrambled inside the Latin phrase that concludes the novel: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, which is usually translated as, “All that remains of the ancient rose is its name, mere names being all that we can hold onto.” I thought it was one of her most interesting essays.
Chapter Eleven: Jonathan Livingston Sequel
As usual, I got home from work at around three fifteen in the afternoon. Chloe was on the sofa, notebook in her lap, hastily scribbling down ideas for an essay she was planning to write that night.
“What’s this one going to be about?” I asked.
“Famous works of pop fiction that spawned totally obscure sequels that almost no one ever reads,” she said. Then she listed some of the sequels:
The Son of Rosemary
Return to Peyton Place
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II
Fear of Dying
Beyond the Chocolate War
Psycho II
The Return of the Player
The Return of Little Big Man
Revenge Wears Prada
“The titles of those books pretty much tell you what each one is a sequel to. But that’s not always the case. I’m going to embed a test in my essay so that readers can try to guess which obscure sequel belongs to which famous original. Here’s what I’ve got so far. I’m only dealing with sequels that were written by the original author. In a later essay I’ll deal with the sequels to famous novels like Gone With the Wind and Rebecca that were written after the author’s death by some hired hand.” And then she read this list to me:
The Cool Cottontail
Myron
Nanny Returns
The Exchange
Brothers
Tracy Flick Can’t Win
Peace Breaks Out
Home School
Legion
Closing Time
Sarkahn
Oliver’s Story
Running Mate
The Testaments
Imperial Bedrooms
Shadow of the Condor
A Legacy of Spies
Lila
When Life Gives You Lululemons
“I’ll create some sort of scoring system,” she said, smirking at her own cleverness. “Get five correct and you are a pop-fiction fan. Get ten correct, and you are a pop-fiction fanatic. Get fifteen correct, and you are a pop-fiction expert. Get all sixteen correct and you need to get a life. Something like that.”
“I’ve always thought that Richard Bach should have written a follow-up to his most famous book and called it Jonathan Livingston Sequel.”
Chloe laughed. “Richard Bach is the worst, the kind of writer who gives pop fiction a bad name. But he did, in fact, publish a sequel of sorts to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The original book was divided into four parts, but only three were published. Forty-four years later, in 2014, he published Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition, which included all four parts. But it didn’t help. A bad book can only be made worse by making it longer.”
Then she lowered her head and went back to outlining her essay. I reached into my pocket and withdrew the old lady’s note. I stared down at its spidery scrawl. Then I looked over at Chloe. She seemed to be having so much fun with her pop-fiction piece that I didn’t want to distract her from it with some sort of angry political screed. I shoved the note into my pocket, saving it for a later time. Then I went off to the kitchen to fetch myself a snack.
Later that night, we were slumped in the sofa, sharing a bowl of popcorn and sort of semi-watching Sidney Pollack’s 1995 remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, which Chloe insisted was better than the original. We had watched it at least half a dozen times before, but Chloe wanted to see it again because she was developing an essay for LAQ on film remakes that were better than the original. Her list included the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1986 remake of The Fly, and the 2010 remake of True Grit. I had been wondering for hours whether I should show the old lady’s note to Chloe. I had no idea how she might respond to it. I hadn’t read it yet because, unlike Chloe, I’m not intrigued by the idea of reading a mountain of crap in order to find a nugget of gold. She was always buying old journals and diaries at flea markets and thrift stores. She loved sifting through random people’s handwritten accounts of their lives. Personally, I don’t want to read anything that hasn’t been through at least a half dozen edits. If I told Chloe about the old lady’s letter, she’d be eager to read it. But then what? She might be upset to see that her Pop Fiction Matters blog had attracted the kind of crazy people who force handwritten notes on people and then scurry away. Conversely, she might find herself fascinated by what the letter said and eager to turn it into an essay – maybe a bit too eager. What are the odds that the old lady had fact-checked every nasty thing she had to say about Breneé Williams? Probably nil. And if Chloe, in her excitement to get it all in print, should publish something libelous about Breneé Williams, it might bring disaster down upon us. Breneé Williams was a billionaire and probably had a dozen or two high-price attorneys on permanent retainer. If she filed a suit for libel against Chloe, we could be wiped out financially even if we won in court. We might have to use all that lovely monthly subscription money just to pay our legal fees. That would put the kibosh to my dream of purchasing my grandparents’ house. Unsure of the response I might trigger, I decided to proceed with caution.
“Hey,” I said, “have you ever thought of writing about Breneé Williams?”
“The TV lifestyle guru? The social media influencer? The woman who wrote, ‘Lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and soon those boots will be Jimmy Choos?’ Why would I write about her?”
“She’s running for president,” I said.
Chloe snorted and threw a piece of popcorn at me. “No she’s not.”
“Of course she is,” I said. “It’s been on the news.”
“She’s promoting her lifestyle brand by putting her name on the ballot. That’s all. She hasn’t a chance of winning and she knows it. But suddenly every news channel is doing stories about her. And every one of those stories has mentioned her Insta feed and her seminars and her books and her YouTube channel and all her other hustles. She’s not a serious candidate.”
“Maybe not, but she’s going to be on the ballot. And it seems to me that a take down of Breneé Williams would be a golden opportunity for you. A painless way to attract a few more eyeballs and maybe even some subscriptions.”
“What do you mean ‘painless’?”
“Well, since she’s running as an independent, you can throw all the mud at her you want and not upset either the Democrats or the Republicans. She’s polling at about four percent of the electorate right now, so an essay that trips up her campaign for a week or two isn’t likely to generate too much negative feedback. But she’s also very much like a character out of a pop fiction novel. She’s a huckster, like Elmer Gantry or Tom Ripley or The Wizard of Oz. You can probably find dozens of pop fiction novels that feature characters just like her, wealthy hucksters who enter politics just to enrich themselves. The jokes would practically write themselves.”
Chloe snorted. “Jokes that write themselves usually not very funny.”
“You know what I mean. Breneé Williams is a complete fraud, and you are just the person to point out what a cliché she is, what a charlatan she is, like something out of pulp fiction.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Chloe said. “In any case, I’ll think about it.”
I was disappointed by this response. Of course, I would have been frightened if she’d seemed overly eager to take Breneé Williams down. I was hoping for some sort of middle ground, an essay that fell short of being libelous while still managing to make Williams’s presidential ambitions look ridiculous. I debated whether or not I should pass the old lady’s note along to Chloe. In the event, I decided to hang on to it for a while longer. Perhaps later, when I was in a more daring mood, I’d actually sit down and read what was written on the note. That would tell me whether I should pass it on to Chloe or not. For now I would keep it safe by hiding it in my banjo bag. Chloe never opens that.
Oh, in case you were wondering, the answers to Chloe’s quiz are as follows:
In the Heat of the Night
Myra Breckinridge
The Nanny Diaries (and you thought it was Mary Poppins!)
The Firm
The Marathon Man
Election
A Separate Peace
The Graduate
The Exorcist
Catch 22
The Ugly American
Love Story
Primary Colors
The Handmaid’s Tale
Less than Zero
Six Days of the Condor
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Devil Wears Prada (actually, When Life Gives You Lululemons is the second sequel – or threequel – to this famous title. Later on, Chloe would write an entire essay on threequels, both the cinematic kind and the literary kind.)
Chapter Twelve: Some Kind of Crazy Genius
On Wednesday night, I was back at the Fox & Goose with Brewgrass. One of the things I love about bluegrass music is the speed. It is often played at a rate of 120 beats per minute or faster (i.e. allegro). And a banjo player often plucks out multiple notes per beat. Why does this feel so liberating to me? Because supermarkets long ago learned that, if they pipe in music with a relatively slow tempo, shoppers will move more slowly through the aisles, spend more time in the store, and buy more items. Thus, I spend my working hours listening to music played at a speed of somewhere between sixty and one hundred beats per minute (andante). Music played at that speed always makes me feel as if I am at work. Even in my car, if a song like ‘Sweet Caroline’ or ‘Moody River’ comes on the radio, I change the station. I hear that kind of stuff all day at work. But you’re never likely to hear ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ or ‘Fox on the Run’ over a grocery store sound system. The faster the music, the less it reminds me of work. And bluegrass is almost by definition fast and furious, featuring all kinds of finger-blistering solo breaks. It can also be somewhat exhausting to play, which is why we always take several breaks during our Wednesday night performances.
On this Wednesday night, during our first break, I sat at a table with Chloe and listened to Zac Vargas perform some of his own material, including a new song called (I assume) “Hey, Hey, Yesterday.” The chorus of the song was kind of catchy.
Hey, hey, yesterday
I wish you’d come back this way.
I ain’t seen a friendly face
Since tomorrow took your place,
And brought me nothing but this endless night.
*
Hey, hey, yesterday
Take me back and let me stay
Where I was always safe and warm
Free from hardship and from harm,
And bathed in summer’s tender golden light.
The verses of the song reminded me of Glen Campbell’s 1969 hit “Galveston.” That song was written by Jimmy Webb during the Vietnam War era and tells of a young American soldier listening to cannons and gunfire on a battlefield while picturing his beautiful, twenty-one-year-old girlfriend standing on the beach back at Galveston, Texas. Zac’s song was a bit stranger. It referred to a young man sent “to some island in the far, far east” to fight against “some rough beast” let loose upon the world by men with “the noblest of intentions,” who thought that their “quick and fiery interventions” would cause the beast “to slink back home and hide behind his wall.”
But that is not what happened – not at all.
The beast spewed out a fire from his mouth.
A fire that spread east and west and south.
And one-by-one we saw the nations fall.
Yes, one-by-one we saw the nations fall,
The giants of the earth now forced to crawl.
It was weird and creepy and, when it was over, the audience in the pub didn’t seem to know how to react. The song was greeted with mild applause. Zac left the stage and a few minutes later, Brewgrass began its second set. I saw Chloe walk over and join Zac and his girlfriend du jour at their table. The three of them seemed to be engaged in a rather intense conversation. But, unlike a lot of other pub patrons, they were polite enough to keep their voices audible only to themselves.
Later that night, back at home, I asked Chloe what she and Zac had been discussing.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” Chloe said. “You know that song Zac sang tonight, the weird war song about some sort of apocalypse?”
“Hey, hey yesterday,” I sang, “I wish you’d come back this way…”
“Yeah, that one.”
“What about it?”
“I asked Zac what it was about and he seemed kind of embarrassed, like he didn’t want to tell me or something. I thought it might have been inspired by Game of Thrones, or some other story with war and dragons in it. I kept begging him to tell me what inspired it. Finally, he told me that he’d been sitting at Fremont Park, working on some new songs. He lives in an apartment building just a block away from there and he goes to the park a lot just so he can play his guitar without annoying the occupants of the neighboring apartments. So he was sitting over there about a week ago, and some weird old lady came up to him. She said she had seen him performing at the Fox & Goose a while back and she’d written some lyrics that she thought he might be able to use in a song. She reached into her bag and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and held it out to Zac. She seemed kinda crazy, so he didn’t want to upset her by refusing to take the lyrics. He took the paper but he began to explain that he preferred to write his own lyrics. She told him, ‘That’s okay, change them up all you want and make them your own. They came to me in a dream and so I jotted them down. But I can’t do anything with them. I’m not a songwriter. Take them with my blessing. I don’t want any credit for them.’ And then she just sort of scurried away. Zac looked down and saw the lyrics handwritten on the paper in a sort of spinsterish scrawl. The handwriting was so hard to read that he thought it might have been nothing but gibberish. He was about to toss the paper in the trash, but then a word or two caught his eye. He gave the paper a closer look and then, over several minutes, he was able to decipher all of the words. He took out his own notebook and jotted the lyrics in it. He wasn’t expecting to use them, but he apparently believes in Henry James’s dictum: ‘Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.’ So he put the lyrics in his notebook and then, a few days later, he found himself coming up with a tune for them. Tonight was the first time he ever played it in public. The crowd didn’t seem to like the song much, judging from the tepid response, but I thought it was great. I told him it was one of his best songs.”
Listening to this story gave me a cold chill, like watching an especially eerie episode of The Twilight Zone.
“Did he describe the old lady?”
“No. Just said she was kind of furtive and mumbled her words. She didn’t appear to want to engage in any real interaction. Showed up out of the blue and then just sort of scurried off.” Chloe paused for a second and then added, “Why do you ask?”
I reached down into one of the compartments of my hard-shell banjo case, the place where I store my finger picks, capo, extra strings, and clip-on banjo tuner. I retrieved the piece of paper that the old lady had foisted upon me in aisle nine of Taylor’s Supermarket. I handed it to Chloe and said, “A few days ago, an old woman came up to me at work and handed this to me and said to give it to my wife. Apparently she’s a fan of your political takedowns and she wants to see you sink your teeth into Breneé Williams. I didn’t have time to look at it so I just tucked it away in a pocket. Later on I transferred it to my banjo case. I was reluctant to give it to you because I haven’t read it yet and I had no idea what kind of nonsense it might contain. You were working on an essay for Lady Audley about film remakes and I didn’t want to distract you with some bag lady’s crazy ramblings. But if it was the same lady that approached Zac, who knows, maybe there might be something usable in all that chicken-scratch writing of her. After all, ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ is probably the best song Zac has ever written. Maybe this old lady is some kind of crazy genius.”
Chloe looked down at the sheet of paper. “Damn, her handwriting is worse than mine, and mine is awful. It’s all shaky and jiggly, like she wrote it while riding on a buckboard wagon or something.”
“Is it the same handwriting as the one Zac was given?”
Chloe shook her head. “No way of knowing. After he copied the lyrics into his notebook he threw the original in the trash. Maybe next Wednesday you and he ought to compare notes. Describe what your lady looked like to him and see if his was the same person.”
“But my lady wouldn’t make eye contact with me. She kept her head lowered and I never got a look at her face.”
“Oh, well,” said Chloe, “you must be tired. Put your banjo stuff away and go to bed. I’ll take this Breneé Williams screed into my office and see if I can decipher it. We can talk about it in the morning.”
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t publish anything about Breneé Williams without letting me see it first. She’s a litigious billionaire and you don’t want to go public with anything that could be considered malicious or libelous. No matter what that old lady has to say about her, make sure you fact check everything to the nth degree. For the first time in our lives we’re – you’re – making some real money. We don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that in any way.”
From: California and the Fiction of the Apocalypse, a survey by Chloe King
Five years before Matheson sicced his vampires on L.A., George R. Stewart, in his novel Earth Abides, unleashed a plague that killed almost everyone on the planet. Earth Abides was probably the first great American post-apocalypse novel of the post-WWII era. It kicked off a vogue for the genre that would soon produce such iconic titles as A Canticle for Liebowitz, Fail-Safe, On the Beach, and The Stand (King has cited it as a major influence on his novel). Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel, The Road, is also a direct descendent of Earth Abides, as is Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. P.D. James’s 1992 novel, The Children of Men, features an academic from a prestigious British university struggling to comprehend a world that is slowly depopulating. It echoes Earth Abides, which features an academic from a prestigious American university struggling to comprehend a world that has rapidly depopulated. Ray Bradbury’s own Cali-pocalypse, the short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” was published just six months after Earth Abides and may well have been inspired by it. And of course, there was I Am Legend. Stewart was a better writer than Matheson, so the prose in Earth Abides is crisp and intelligent, lacking the jerkiness of I Am Legend. Alas, Stewart lacked Matheson’s ability to produce clever plot twists, so his novel isn’t always as compelling as I Am Legend. Rather it is often just a leisurely stroll through the blasted heath of a largely depopulated United States of America. Nonetheless, it is beautifully done.
Stewart was born in Sewickly, Pennsylvania, in 1895, and grew up in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the hometown of actor James Stewart, who was no relation. His life was often affected by a the types of diseases that pandemics are made of. In 1906, his five-year-old brother contracted typhoid fever and died shortly thereafter of pneumonia. Stewart himself contracted pneumonia during the Great Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, probably as a result of catching the flu. The disease killed 20 million people worldwide, 600,000 of them in the U.S. Stewart survived, but he was plagued with lung problems for the rest of his life. His daughter, Jill, had a tuberculosis scare when she was a child. All this might explain why pandemics were so fascinating to him.
His early life brought him into contact with a number of future cultural icons. After moving to Southern California with his family in 1908, he became best friends with a boy named Buddy DeSylva, who would go on to write or co-write a number of popular songs, including April Showers, The Best Things In Life Are Free, Button Up Your Overcoat, The Birth of the Blues, and California, Here I Come. Stewart attended Pasadena High School with future film director Howard Hawks. He was a member of the tennis team and once played a match against future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Thornton Wilder. At Princeton, Stewart once participated in a relay race with F. Scott Fitzgerald. His wife was the daughter of Marion LeRoy Burton, the second president of Smith College and a close personal friend of President Calvin Coolidge. Through her, Stewart became friendly with many prominent educators and writers, including Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. On December 6, 1941, the Stewarts were in New York for a party that was being held to celebrate the publication of Storm. The next morning, they happened to encounter John Steinbeck, who informed them of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Throughout his life, he had an almost Zelig-like ability to find himself connected, if only tangentially, to prominent people.
Earth Abides, his most popular novel, won the very first International Fantasy Award back in 1951, an impressive accomplishment when you consider that it was published in the same year as George Orwell’s 1984. It has appeared on numerous lists of the best science-fiction novels of all time, generally near the very top. The book has had a profound influence not just on Stephen King but on numerous other creative artists as well. Carl Sandberg thought it was one of the greatest books of its time, as did Wallace Stegner. Jimi Hendrix cited it as his favorite book and it served as the inspiration for his song “Third Stone from the Sun.” Philip K. Dick’s Cali-pocalypse, Dr. Bloodmoney, mostly takes place, like Earth Abides, in and around Berkeley, after a nuclear catastrophe has knocked much of humankind back into a pre-modern era of horse-drawn vehicles and such. It seems almost certain that Dick’s book was influenced by Stewart’s.
Prior to the arrival of Stephen King’s The Stand, most apocalypse novels, somewhat counterintuitively, tended to be short, as if the hard work of destroying the planet was just too much for the author to bear. I Am Legend runs 174 pages in length. Robert Lewis Taylor’s Adrift in a Boneyard runs 189. Planet of the Apes runs 128 pages. Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers runs 216 pages. Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam runs 224 pages. Philip K. Dick’s The World Jones Made runs 211. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids runs 241. And Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is only five pages and maybe 1,200 words long. But Earth Abides is 426 pages long. Stewart was the first post-war novelist to really tax his imagination and try to figure out what the end of life as we know it would look like. And his book remains one of the preeminent titles in the genre.
Earth Abides is the story of Isherwood “Ish” Williams, a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley. As the novel opens, he is in a wilderness area of Calaveras County, California, doing research on his thesis: The Ecology of the Black Creek Area. On page one, he gets bitten by a rattlesnake, after which he retreats to a nearby cabin. Feverish and delirious he holes up for a day or two. He doesn’t know it yet, but while he has been alone in the wilderness, an “unknown disease of unparalleled rapidity of spread” has killed off nearly everyone on earth. Stewart doesn’t spell it out, but the rattlesnake venom seems to have spared Ish’s life. Later, he will meet other survivors, at least one of which was bitten by a rattlesnake at some point in her life. Of the disease, Stewart writes, “No one was sure in what part of the world it had originated; aided by airplane travel, it had sprung up almost simultaneously in every center of civilization, outrunning all attempts at quarantine…It might have emerged from some animal reservoir of disease; it might be caused by some new micro-organism, most likely a virus, produced by mutation; it might be an escape, possibly even a vindictive release, from some laboratory of bacteriological warfare. The last was apparently the popular idea. The disease was assumed to be airborne, possibly upon particles of dust. A curious feature was that the isolation of the individual seemed to be of no avail.”
Stewart was one of the first fiction writers to illustrate how the combination of air travel and disease might threaten the population of the entire planet. In his 1994 nonfiction bestseller, The Hot Zone, author Richard Preston was still hammering home a point that Stewart had made more than four decades earlier: “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes…Once a virus hits the [web], it can shoot anywhere in a day – Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly.”
In the first fifty pages of Earth Abides, Ish returns to his family’s home on the fictional San Lupo Drive in Berkeley (modeled on Stewart’s own home on San Luis Road) and wanders around the Bay Area looking for survivors. He finds a few but they are mostly castoffs and crazy people, driven mad by the Great Disaster. Ish has no desire to form a community with any of them. Just as the house on Cimarron Street serves as the focal point of I Am Legend, the house on San Lupo Drive will eventually become the focal point of Earth Abides. But first Ish takes off in his car for a cross-country trek across the United States. This eastward journey reverses the course of Stewart’s own journey in life. Like a surprising number of bestselling American authors (Joseph Wambaugh, Dean Koontz, Martin Cruz Smith, Michael Chabon, etc.), Stewart was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of his professional life in California. This opening section of the novel lasts about 45 pages and culminates in New York City, where Ish and his dog, Princess, motor down a completely empty Broadway. After that, he turns around and begins the long drive back to California. In many ways this section is the best part of the novel. It certainly appears to have been the part of the book that Stewart enjoyed writing most. It offered him a chance to muse upon just what might happen to the American landscape if humans largely disappeared from it. He describes house pets turning feral again. And, he writes, “As with the dogs and cats, so also with the grasses and flowers which man had long nourished. The clover and the bluegrass withered on the lawns, and the dandelions grew tall. In the flowerbed the water-loving asters wilted and drooped, and the weeds flourished. Deep within the camellias, the sap failed; they would bear no buds next spring. The leaves curled on the tips of the wisteria vines and the rose bushes, as they set themselves against the long draught.”
He writes movingly of the dairy cows who have starved to death in their milking barns, the thoroughbred horses who have died in their stalls, the house pets who can’t get out of their houses and so die of malnourishment and thirst. He muses on what might become of the cattle. With no men to kill them, wolves and coyotes are likely to proliferate again, and that will eventually keep the cattle population from overrunning the American West. He speculates upon how the landscape will change as man’s dams and levies begin to fail. This section of the book is so engrossing that it inspired journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 nonfiction book The World Without Us, which speculates upon how quickly planet earth would return to its natural state if man were to disappear. But it is the later sections, set in California, that are the heart of the novel and make it so powerful. When Stewart was writing his novel, California was still seen as the future of America, a youthful and hopeful land full of endless promise and vast spaces just waiting to be transformed into modern cities of tomorrow. It was Stewart’s genius to use this young, promising land as the backdrop for a tale of ruinous decline. Setting an apocalyptic tale in a dying industrial city in the Midwest or in some Southern state being torn apart by racial strife would have seemed the more natural choice. By setting a story of doom and gloom in sunny California, Stewart made the apocalypse seem even more menacing than it ever had before. Stewart invented the Calypocalypse, and in the years since 1949, the genre has grown by hundreds of additional, suggesting that Stewart was on to something. He transferred some of the themes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost to America’s own Eden, a land of endless sunshine and orange groves and Hollywood make-believe, and showed us just how quickly it could all fall away.
Chapter Thirteen: A World Full of Ed Smiths
Chloe’s father was raised in a fundamentalist religious household. His parents believed that the only book anyone ever needed to consult was the Bible. They looked upon popular fiction as tantamount to pornography. And by “popular fiction” I don’t just mean sleazy novels written by the likes of Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann. Even novels like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Catholicism!) or To Kill a Mockingbird (Integration!) were frowned up. Storytelling was the art of lying, while religion was God’s truth. And no decent person preferred lies to truth. As a result, Lewis King grew up craving pop fiction the way that a child denied sweets might grow up craving candy bars. He never went to college, but after leaving high school he took a job at Levinson’s Bookstore in Sacramento. Over the years, he worked his way up to the position of store manager. He married an Japanese-American woman he met one summer while attending an Asian food festival at a Sacramento Buddhist temple. Chloe has always said that her father married her mother, in part, because there was little chance of a Buddhist suddenly embracing fundamentalist Christianity. He didn’t trust Caucasian women to steer clear of the faith of their fathers. He seemed to think every white woman was just looking for an excuse to embrace old-time religion. In any case, as soon as he had a home of his own, he began filling it up with books, primarily cheap paperback genre fiction – spy novels, sci-fi, Westerns, thrillers, mysteries, police procedurals, film novelizations, TV tie-ins. He liked everything but high fantasy novels. All those Narnias and Middle Earths and mythical beasts and messianic child messengers reminded him too much of the Bible. And that was the one book he wanted nothing more to do with. Thus Chloe was raised on the gospel of Mario Puzo and Daphne du Maurier and Louis L’Amour and John Grisham and Joseph Wambaugh and Agatha Christie and Michael Crichton and Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Elmore Leonard and Mary Higgins Clark and Frederick Forsyth and hundreds of other bestselling fictioneers. By the time she was fifteen she had consumed more pop fiction than most people will read in a lifetime. But she didn’t just read it. She absorbed it into her psyche. She studied it. She believed that every culture was defined by the stories it told to, and about, itself. And she didn’t believe that you could truly understand contemporary western civilization without a solid grounding in its popular culture, particularly its fiction, because so much of its other cultural media – film, TV, radio dramas, stage plays, comics, etc. – were adaptations of popular books. Vampires, werewolves, space aliens, zombies – some of the most prominent cultural tropes of the twenty-first century derived primarily from popular fiction. You could search through the pages of the ancient Greek and Latin classics and find no exact parallel for the vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the zombies of Max Brooks’s World War Z or the space aliens of Frank Herbert’s Dune. There may have been a time when you needed a decent knowledge of Achilles and Odysseus and Medusa and Pandora in order to comprehend modern life. But in the twenty-first century, those classical touchstones were much less helpful than an understanding of killer sharks and haunted cars and mafia dons and little girls who could start fires with their minds. She believed that you could never fully understand the culture you were living in, but reading popular fiction was as good a heuristic technique as you were likely to find for navigating modern life. Jesus used parables to help make life comprehensible to his followers. Chloe used popular fiction to help make modern life comprehensible to the subscribers of Pop Fiction Matters. And what, after all, is a popular novel but a long parable? In Chloe, her father’s love of pop fiction and her mother’s Buddhism were combined, so that pop fiction became a religion for her. Books were her Buddha.
In her early twenties, Chloe became heavily involved with a local theater group called the Suttertown Players. She was particularly keen on stage plays that were based on popular novels. She worked on productions of Dracula and Frankenstein and The Bad Seed and Daddy-Long-Legs and several others. “It’s the closest you can get to understanding what it would be like to be a character in a great novel,” she told me, when explaining her love of the theater. Her goal was to put together a local theater group that would adapt Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings or Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold or Jessamyn West’s The Massacre at Fall Creek – novels that had largely been forgotten by the reading public. She and a few friends formed a sort of outlaw theater troupe, called Stage Heist, for the purpose of staging plays based on largely forgotten novels. They wrote and produced a stage adaptation of Fredric Brown’s 1955 comic novel Martians, Go Home. Because they hadn’t secured the right to the material from the copyright holder, they changed the name of the piece to “Little Green Men.” They credited the script to a fictitious author, Algernon Hipp. They rented a theater space and staged only two performances for the public. The two audiences who saw the play loved it. It got a positive write up in the local Sacramento News & Review, so positive, in fact, that Chloe and company were planning to resurrect it at a larger venue. But before that could happen, they received a cease-and-desist order from an attorney who represented the estate of Fredric Brown. And that was the end of Chloe’s foray into outlaw theater.
Having a wife with a singular obsession – knitting, gardening, horses, painting, baking, pottery, etc. – can be a bit of a godsend to a husband. It makes shopping for birthday, anniversary, and Christmas presents much easier. Every year for her birthday, I buy Chloe a bracelet that commemorates a classic of popular fiction. I do this using a Victorian-era system that I’ll explain in detail later. For her most recent birthday, I bought her a bracelet adorned with four small gemstones: coral, uvaravite, jade, and onyx.
The old woman who wrote the screed about Breneé Williams must have shared many of Chloe’s beliefs about pop fiction. Her message to Chloe contained references to more than a dozen obscure popular novels featuring conniving hucksters who longed for political power. She listed not just the titles and authors of these books, but also quoted lines from them that sounded as if they might have been written about Breneé Williams by one of her political opponents. But even stranger, she provided Chloe with a lot of dirt on Williams that wasn’t common knowledge. Apparently, Breneé Williams had been married for five years to a man named Edgar Smith. During that five-year marriage, she and Smith ran up a lot of dubious expenses and eventually had to file for bankruptcy. The old lady provided Chloe with the bankruptcy court in North Carolina that had handled the Chapter 13 filing. She even provided the case number and urged Chloe to write to the courthouse and request a copy of the filing. She’d find that Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Smith had taken out a $70,000 home-improvement loan on a house they owned in Parsonville, North Carolina, but had used most of the money buying expensive toys such as a jet ski and a Harley Davidson chopper. The Smiths sold most of these items for cash shortly before filing for bankruptcy, so that the bank couldn’t repossess them. Then they claimed in their court filing that they had already burnt through the cash they’d made. This was particularly damning because Breneé Williams was always scolding people who renege on their debts. What’s more, she had never made public the fact that she’d been married before. Her first husband was now the pastor of a mega-church in Tennessee. He was remarried and had six kids. He wasn’t likely to publicize the fact that he was once married to woman who now supported gay marriage and abortion. And he wasn’t likely to want anyone to know about the bankruptcy either. The world was full of men named Ed Smith. No one would be likely to connect him with the bankruptcy of some obscure young couple from Parsonville, NC. After divorcing Edgar Smith, Breneé Williams had reclaimed her married name, Breneé Billingsley. Later, after marrying a wealthy wrestling promoter named Duane Williams, she had taken his last name. Nowhere in her official biography or any of her books was there any mention of the fact that, for five years, she was Mrs. Edgar Smith.
The old lady’s message mentioned several other unflattering facts about Breneé Williams. It noted that she and Edgar Smith had once been sued by a neighboring landowner who claimed that they had improperly built a fence on land that was rightfully his, thus depriving him the use of roughly a thousand square feet of his own property. The case was settled in small-claims court and the Smiths were ordered to remove the fence and pay all court costs. The old lady provided the small-claims court case number in case Chloe wanted to verify the facts. Chloe didn’t have the time or the resources to check up on every bit of dirt the old lady had dug up on Breneé Williams. She went online and ordered a copy of their bankruptcy filing. A few days later it arrived in the mail. It seemed to verify everything the crazy lady’s letter had asserted. This lent credence to all her other charges. Chloe went online and ordered copies of the pop fiction novels the old lady had mentioned. She wanted to verify the quotes in them.
One night Chloe and I sat down and examined all of the dirt that we (thanks to the old lady) had dug up on Breneé Williams. Even I was impressed by how well documented it was. I told Chloe I was okay with her going to press with all this material.
“I’m happy to write all this stuff up and publish it on Pop Fiction Matters,” she told me, “but it seems like taking a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. Breneé Williams doesn’t stand a chance of winning the presidency.”
“Sure,” I said, “but in a tight race, she could end up being a spoiler and possibly subverting the will of the people.”
And so Chloe went ahead and published a take down of Breneé Williams. Prior to the publication of Chloe’s takedown, Williams had been polling at nearly five percent. Afterwards, she dropped to about one percent. We kept waiting for Breneé Williams, or her lawyers, to file some kind of massive lawsuit against us. But she dealt with Chloe’s disclosures by simply ignoring them. She wasn’t an ordinary candidate for president. She wasn’t required to give interviews to the mainstream press in order to get her message out to the people. She had her own media empire. And as far as the Bre-Hive was concerned, Chloe King and Pop Fiction Matters didn’t even exist.
As for the rest of the media world, they paid quite a bit of attention to Chloe’s takedown. Mainstream media outlets that had given uncritical attention to Breneé Williams now had to do an about face and delve into her background. They found even more dirt than the old lady had. It seemed clear that, come November, Breneé Williams’s candidacy was going to be a nonissue in the national election. She’d be lucky if she garnered even a hundred thousand votes. But Breneé Williams’s loss was Chloe’s gain. The exposé brought Pop Fiction Matters hundreds of additional subscribers.
“It almost feels like taking money under false pretenses,” she told me. “I didn’t do anything really. It was that old lady friend of yours.”
“She’s no friend of mine,” I said. “I don’t even know her name.”
“But where do you think she came from?” Chloe asked. “Do you think it’s the same woman who gave Zac the lyrics to ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’? That song seems to suggest that we will soon be at war with China or something. Who could possibly know all this stuff?”
Who, indeed?
Chapter Fourteen: The Dominikiad
Strange things began to arrive in our mail. Or else they were delivered to our front porch by FedEx or UPS. Sometimes unmarked packages or envelopes were just left on the ground by our front door, apparently dropped off by strangers who wanted us to have whatever was inside. Much of this stuff was simply the outpourings of crazy conspiracy theorists: 300-page handwritten screeds about microplastics, DVDs with grainy video purporting to prove that an alien spacecraft visited Vashon Island in Puget Sound back in 2003, photographs purporting to show Grant Fuller having sex with Angela Merkel in a West Berlin hotel room back in 1996, a wall map of the United States with red felt-tip circles marking the site of every known case of spontaneous human combustion. And for every actual physical package that showed up on our doorstep, dozens of virtual packages arrived in Chloe’s email. Many of these contained attachments – PDF files, videos, photos, sound files, etc. – that Chloe was smart enough not to open. These correspondents all wanted Chloe to publicize their oddball theories on her blog, or in the pages of Lady Audley’s Quill. Most of this stuff had little to do with popular culture (except in the broadest sense of the term) or the presidential race. When crazy conspiracy theorists spot someone who appears to be a kindred spirit, but with a much bigger megaphone, they often try to enlist them in their cause. As fond as Chloe was of eccentrics and kooks, she knew that it was never wise to follow one of those people down a favorite rabbit hole. That way madness lies. And the rabbits often turned out to be rattlesnakes.
“Now I understand how successful newspaper pundits are able to come up with so many column ideas,” Chloe told me. “Once you make a name for yourself as a muckraker, you don’t even have to rake your own muck anymore. Your readers do it for you.”
Every day now she would get letters from strangers all around the country who had some sort of dirt on a politician. Not all of these politicians were presidential candidates. Some of them were just obscure aldermen or city councilmen. Apparently, some of Chloe’s readers thought her mission in life was to shine a beacon on bad politicians. Only about one in ten of the letters she received seemed as if it might be promising. But within a month she had received over three hundred letters, which meant she now had ammunition for another thirty columns about the current presidential race. The problem, of course, was finding some sort of connection between the political scoops she was being sent and the world of pop fiction, which was the purported raison d’etre of her blog. Fortunately, at least some of Chloe’s correspondents seemed to understand the purpose of Pop Fiction Matters. Every few days she’d get a package of old books in the mail. Usually these were dog-eared, shopworn paperbacks from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, most of them thrillers set in a political milieu and often featuring the White House or the Capitol Building or the Presidential Seal on their covers. Typically they were accompanied by a letter that would say something like:
Dear Chloe King,
I was gathering up some old books to donate to the library and I pulled out all of the ones that had a political slant and set them aside for you. I hope you can use them.
Keep up the good work!
Rarely were these old books of any immediate use to Chloe but she appreciated them nonetheless. She believed that a stack of low fiction could never be too high. And she did actually get some essay ideas from these gift books, but nothing that was likely to set the blogosphere afire. She wrote an amusing piece about the novels that had been written by members of the Nixon Administration, and provided a Ten Best Books list to accompany it.
Once every week or two, Chloe was able to find a pop-fiction character that she could tie to some nationally prominent politician. When that happened, her “page views” numbers shot way up. For example, when liberal California Congresswoman Stacy Bird was being ballyhooed as a possible running mate for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, Chloe pointed out a few superficial similarities between her and Stephanie Boucher, a fictional U.S. Senator from California who plays a role in Jason Matthews’s 2013 spy novel Red Sparrow. Bird is eventually exposed in that novel (spoiler alert!) as a Russian asset codenamed SWAN. Chloe used a headline that read, “Is Stacy Bird a SWAN?” It struck me as another cheap shot. Congresswoman Bird was known to make anti-American remarks from time to time, but she certainly wasn’t a traitor to her country. Matthews wrote a sequel to Red Sparrow called The Kremlin’s Candidate. In that book, the American selling out her country is Vice-Admiral Audrey Rowland. Chloe wrote a second column about Stacy Bird and called it “Is Stacey Bird the Real Kremlin Candidate?” It was impossible to know just how much influence these essays had. Their primary subject was the so-called Dominikiad, the trilogy of books about a fictional Russian spy named Dominika Egorova that Jason Matthews, a career CIA agent, wrote in the final seven years of his life. The swipes at Stacy Bird were mainly just asides. The effort to elevate Stacy Bird’s vice-presidential prospects petered out long before the end of the primary season, but there was no way of knowing exactly what torpedoed them. It seems unlikely that a few snide comments in a pop-fiction blog could have done much damage to her. But Chloe’s growing subscriber base seemed convinced that Chloe’s words were lethal weapons. If Chloe wrote about a politician and then, days or weeks later, that politician’s political fortunes seemed to be sagging, Chloe’s fanboys (and all of her most vocal subscribers seemed to be young men) always found a way to give the credit to Chloe. She had the Midas touch in reverse – every time she wrote about a politician, his electoral prospects turned to lead.
I pointed out to Chloe that her political writings had established a formula of sorts. She would write a takedown of a politician based on almost nothing but some fanciful connection between said politician and a character in an old piece of pop fiction. This would inspire legions of keyboard cowboys across the rightwing blogosphere to do a deep dive into the politician’s past. And, generally, at least one of those cowboys would come up with some serious dirt. And then Chloe, who hadn’t done any real investigative reporting, would be credited with having brought down another politician.
“Truth like football,” Chloe said, in her Charlie Chan voice, “receive many kicks before reaching goal.” Like a lot of Asian Americans, Chloe had a complicated relationship with Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Judge Dee, Dr. Fu Manchu, Mr. Wong, and other Asian characters from the pop fiction of the early twentieth century. She found them problematic but fascinating. And she liked to spice up her conversations with the occasional Charlie Chan-ism. “I may take the first kick,” she reiterated, “but I never claim to have scored the goal.”
“But don’t you feel bad when some silly pop-fiction comparison harms the political fortunes of a serious politician like Delton Cook or Doyle Ramsfield?”
Chloe shrugged. “If they can’t endure a silly pop-fiction comparison, how are they going to survive a general election against Grant Fuller, during which the entire Republican Party will be throwing dirt at them? And how are they going to survive in the White House when the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians are throwing more than dirt at them?”
I had no answer to this, so I changed tact. (When Chloe read that sentence in my first draft of this account, she sent me a link to this passage from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
The substitution of tact for tack may be longstanding and widespread, but it is widely shunned by usage guides, and if you care about such matters you should probably employ tack when referring to a position or direction that needs changing. In the pantheon of usage quibbles this is a minor one, which gives you all the more reason to pay attention to it: a stickler will be absolutely thrilled to notice and call you on it, and you shouldn’t give them the opportunity.)
“Look,” I told her, “when you called out Delton Cook for his alleged love of The Virginian, or Derek Portman for his love of The Chocolate War, you had every right to do so. Those guys brought up those books themselves. They claimed they were their favorite reading material. So it was perfectly legitimate to examine those books and point out their shortcomings. But when you tie a politician to some obscure novel like Michael Avallone’s Missing! or Ramona Stewart’s The Nightmare Candidate, that seems a lot less fair to me. Nobody in the race has ever mentioned those works directly. Even in the realms of popular fiction, there are hierarchies. The yellow peril novels of Sax Rohmer are basically just racist ephemera at this point. But The Manchurian Candidate, though it still traffics in the fear of a yellow peril, is, as you yourself have pointed out, an important piece of American literature. Using an important work of fiction as a lens through which to view a political race seems perfectly fair to me. But using a forgotten piece of – you should pardon the expression – trash as a window into a contemporary political race just seems kind of…trashy.”
She rolled her beautiful eyes at me. “You’re wrong if you think there’s some gaping chasm between Sax Rohmer and Richard Condon,” she told me. “The Manchurian Candidate was heavily influenced by Sax Rohmer’s novel President Fu Manchu, which was published twenty-three years earlier. Both books involve a plot to place a Chinese-controlled puppet in the White House via a fake American populist organization – called the League of Good Americans in the Fu Manchu book and the Loyal American Underground in Condon’s novel. Both novels involve brainwashing and hypnotism. Both involve assassination attempts. The similarities are so numerous, that scholar Yunte Huang, who wrote a great book about the yellowface tradition in American pop culture, refers to Richard Condon’s novel as The Fu Manchurian Candidate. In the film version of The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra’s character even mentions Fu Manchu. It’s a mistake to try to separate the ‘serious’ pop fiction from the so-called ‘trash,’ because they are in constant communication with each other. And that’s why I refuse to recognize any hierarchies in pop culture. It is all fodder for my blog. If you don’t take Sax Rohmer seriously, it makes no sense to take The Manchurian Candidate seriously.”
I realized, at this point, that, for a layman such as myself, trying to lecture Chloe on popular fiction was like trying to lecture Stephen Spielberg on filmmaking – a ridiculous exercise in futility, and one that could only expose the layman’s ignorance. So I gave up. Instead, I simply told her, “If you ever want to rise to the highest ranks of reputable mainstream journalism, you probably shouldn’t be making spurious charges against reputable politicians.”
It turned out this was a mistake too.
“Reputable mainstream journalism?” she said, sounding appalled. “Who exactly are the reputable mainstream journalists? Would it be those people who, whenever they write about supermarkets, you claim don’t know what the hell they’re talking about? Every time inflation increases the price of groceries, those reputable mainstream journalists start writing about price-gouging at the supermarket, and then I have to listen to you belly-aching about how the average supermarket has a profit margin of one-point-five percent, and how grocery price increases have nothing to do with price-gouging and everything to do with government regulations that drive up the cost of doing business. And what about all the dumb-ass urban myths about grocery stores that the mainstream media are always propagating? Remember when the media was insisting that customers should only shop the perimeters of the grocery store, because that’s where all the healthy stuff is? You were quick to point out that much of the stuff around the perimeters of a grocery store – deli meats, eggs, milk, fish, and all of that – is also the stuff that’s most likely to carry food-borne parasites and diseases. The more stable foods, packed in boxes and tin cans, are found in the center of the store. ‘When was the last time someone caught a food-borne illness from a box of Cheerios or an Oreo cookie.’ Those were your exact words! And what about that other persistent media lie – the one about how milk and eggs and butter are always stocked against the back wall, because they are among the most commonly purchased items and grocery stores want to force their customers to walk down the center aisles of the store to get them, hoping that they will make some impulses purchases along the way. As you always point out, milk, eggs, and butter have to be refrigerated, and they have to be replenished more often than nonperishable goods. And the best way to do that is with refrigerated cases that can be accessed from the back of the store, out of sight from the shoppers. You don’t believe anything the reputable mainstream media write about grocery stores, so why would you want me to aspire to write like a reputable mainstream journalist? I’ll take gonzo journalism and guerilla journalism – for all their faults – over that kind of group-think journalism any day.”
I’m not sure why I even bother to engage in these debates with Chloe because, in all our years of married life together, I’ve never yet won any of them. In any case, as the primary season was reaching its peak, another viral sensation arrived on the punditry scene to rival Chloe. Curiously this one was also a resident of Sacramento. In fact, it was somebody we knew quite well. And he was pretty much the last person I ever expected to see helping to improve the re-election prospects of President Fuller.
Oh, and by the way, these, according to Chloe, are the ten best novels written by someone connected with the Nixon White House.
1) The China Card by John Ehrlichman
2) Full Disclosure by William Safire
3) The House Dick by E. Howard Hunt
4) East of Farewell by E. Howard Hunt
5) The Whole Truth by John Ehrlichman
6) Out of Control by G. Gordon Liddy
7) Gideon’s Torch by Charles W. Colson
8) Capitol Secrets by Maureen Dean
9) Scandalmonger by William Safire
10) The Canfield Decision by Spiro T. Agnew
Chapter Fifteen: I Wouldn’t Wish That On a Dog
Missouri Democratic Senator Earl Brill had managed to survive the troubles that Chloe had created for him back in February. His brother had quickly paid the IRS all of the money he owed them, along with various penalties and interest. With both Delton Cook and Doyle Ramsfield having dropped out of the race, and Derek Pritchard opting not to get into the race, Brill was now a heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination. Unfortunately for him, the supporters who were now abandoning Breneé Williams’s independent campaign in droves seemed to be moving mostly into President Fuller’s camp. William’s five percent of the electorate had dropped to one percent by the end of May. Meanwhile, the most recent polls showed Fuller was now the preferred candidate of 48 percent of the electorate, up from 45 percent in April. Brill needed to clear the Democratic field of its remaining challengers and shore up the nomination quickly so that he could focus on a head-to-head battle with President Fuller. He appeared to be on his way to doing exactly that when some old emails surfaced from his college days in the late 1990s, emails that would prove to be extremely embarrassing.
Back in 1999, a Stanford fraternity brother of Brill’s had asked him about a girl he had dated briefly, a woman named Heather Hildebrand. The frat brother, Clete Dawson, was thinking of asking Heather out on a date and wanted to know if Brill would be okay with that. Brill had responded with an email that illustrated the cruelty of crude fratboys everywhere. He wrote, “Feel free to take her out, but I wouldn’t wish that broad on a dog. She’s dumb as dirt and basically just wants to get drunk and screw all the time. Not exactly someone you want to take home to mom and dad, or to a campus mixer with a lot of venture capitalists and tech bigwigs.”
Brill did what a politician is supposed to do when some old college hijinks comes back to haunt him – he ate a shit sandwich, apologizing publicly to Heather Hildebrand and claiming that he now regretted what he said about her back in his schooldays. The whole thing might have blown over except that Zac Vargas was inspired by the incident to write a new song called “I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog.” The lyrics were fairly straight forward, and never mentioned Brill or Hilderbrand by name, but everyone knew whom it was about.
You called me dirt
Said I was too dumb to hurt
My mind filled with emptiness and fog.
You turned your back on me
Locked your heart and threw out the key.
I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.
*
I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.
I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.
I may be dumb
And comfortably numb
But I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.
The full lyrics contained several more phrases culled from Brill’s old emails. The tune was catchy and Zac pumped a lot of emotion into his performance, making it more than just the kind of jokey political parody song that Mark Russell and Randy Rainbow and Tom Lehrer specialized in. In fact, the song alone was probably too earnest and restrained to do much political damage. But someone took Zac’s audio and edited it into various video clips of Brill laughing and pointing out people in his audience. The video had been edited so that every time Brill pointed his finger, the camera would do a fake whip pan and, when it came to a halt, we would see a photograph of some ordinary looking American female, someone no more and no less attractive than Heather Hildebrand. And then, of course, we’d hear Zac crooning, “I wouldn’t wish that on a dog…” The point, I guess, was to suggest that, unless a woman looked like a supermodel, Brill had no interest in her. This was a problem for Brill, because Democrats pride themselves on being the party of women, the party of feminism, the party whose tee shirts and tote bags and lapel pins are always proclaiming that “the future is female.” Brill’s old emails caused some feminists to wonder if, under a President Brill, the future would hold a place only for insanely attractive women. Pretty soon the video went viral and Zac, like Chloe, began making a small fortune from his online fandom.
Zac’s song didn’t drive Brill from the race, but it gave some of his weaker Democrat opponents a glimmer of hope. Several Democrats who had appeared to be on the brink of dropping out and endorsing Brill now stepped up their attacks on him. Most of these candidates employed the phrase “I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog” in their TV attack ads:
Higher Taxes? I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog!
Mandatory Public Service? I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog!
Outlaw Internal Combustion Engines by 2035? I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog!
Outlaw gas ranges? I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog!
Meanwhile, Heather Hildebrand seemed to be in no mood to forgive and forget. She began showing up on TV talk shows, particularly rightwing shows, and questioning Brill’s integrity, and his commitment to women. Regnery Press, a conservative publishing house, signed her up to write a book called I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog. Soon Brill’s lead over his closest Democratic opponent was in single digits, and his campaign appeared to be in panic mode.
And here in Sacramento, two casual acquaintances, Chloe King and Zac Vargas, neither of whom had ever evinced any sort of right-wing ideology, were getting rich from producing internet content that, indirectly at least, was proving favorable to the reelection prospects of President Grant Fuller, one of the most conservative men ever to make it to the White House.
The whole world seemed to be topsy-turvy. And soon it would get even topsy-turvier.
Chapter Sixteen: Hypnotism and Horseshoe Theory
Earl Brill managed to survive the Heather Hildebrand mini-scandal, just as he had survived the other mini-scandals that had plagued his campaign. In early August, at the Democratic National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, all of his hard work paid off and he was awarded his party’s nomination for president of the United States of America. Of course, thanks in part to Chloe and Zac, he was a battered but wiser candidate than he had been six months earlier. Nonetheless, from now until November, the race for the White House would be just a two-man contest. Brill prided himself on being parsimonious with the taxpayers’ money. And Grant Fuller prided himself on being a straight-talker. Naturally, the pundits had dubbed them No Frill Brill and No Bull Fuller. Of course, these descriptions were wildly inaccurate. Brill was a tax-and-spend Democrat who had never met an entitlement he could say no to. And Fuller was one of the greatest bullshitters and dissemblers ever to run for high office in the United States of America.
On a Saturday morning in mid August, Chloe informed me that Juliet Tammershak was coming over in a few hours. “I want her to try to hypnotize me again,” she said.
You might think that such a declaration would surprise me, but it didn’t. I’d been married to Chloe long enough to know that séances and Ouija boards and Tarot readings and palmistry and such were not automatically objects of ridicule to her. Anything that featured prominently in great swathes of American popular fiction – time travel, cloning, ghosts, androids, serial killers, FBI profilers, body-switching, telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, brother-sister incest, exorcism, killer sharks, space aliens, sleeper spies, ancient curses, evil children, evil clowns, evil nuns, demonic cars, Belgian sleuths, reincarnation, invisibility, etc. – was generally of interest to Chloe. By her standards, hypnosis was fairly routine stuff. Unlike, say, pyrokinesis, hypnosis actually exists and is routinely used by medical professionals to treat everything from irritable bowel syndrome to insomnia. Seeing a hypnotist wouldn’t have struck her as any more unusual than seeing a dentist or a chiropractor.
“What do you hope to accomplish?” I asked her.
“I’m not doing it for me,” she said. “I’m doing it for you.”
“Me?”
“Well, for both of us, I guess,” she said. “You seem to be freaked out by my sudden transformation into a political oracle of some kind. To me it doesn’t seem all that weird. A good writer could use popular fiction as a springboard into a discussion of almost any topic he wanted to address. If I were writing about medicine, I could begin with a discussion of how it is depicted in popular fiction – or on TV or in the movies – and then gradually segue into the real thing. I could do the same if I were writing about religion or technology or history or mathematics or sports or business or…I don’t know, Mars. You seem to think that I’ve suddenly become obsessed with politics to an unhealthy degree. For awhile, I thought you were overreacting. After all, I was still writing about popular culture, just as I always have. I threw politics into the mix because, during a presidential election year, Americans tend to become obsessed with politics and polls and partisanship and such. I myself never used to think much about politics. It probably wouldn’t even have occurred to me to insert it into my pop-culture essays if you weren’t always listening to NPR News every time you fix dinner. I wasn’t aware I was actually listening to that stuff, but I must absorbed some of it into my subconscious. Still, I thought it was just a spoonful of sugar I was providing to my more political followers in order to get them to consume the medicine of my pop-culture critiques. But, in the last few weeks, I’ve begun to notice a difference in myself. I find myself thinking about politics all the time, and that just isn’t like me. I used to be not just apolitical but downright anti-political. I went out of my way to avoid discussing politics with people. I found most political discussions not only tedious but futile. I mean, have you ever seen anyone suddenly alter their political views because of something they heard in a debate with one of their opponents? It’s a waste of time to discuss politics. Over the years, I’ve convinced plenty of friends to try a book or a movie or a restaurant that they had no previous interest in. I’ve gotten people who claim they loath romance novels to actually read and appreciate the novels of Maeve Binchy and Joanna Trollope and Rosamunde Pilcher. My father hates high fantasy, but I convinced him to read The Last Unicorn and now he’s a Peter S. Beagle fan. But politics isn’t like that. At least not in contemporary America. Everyone is either a Republican or a Democrat. And almost nobody ever switches sides. There are a few people, like David Horowitz and Candace Owen, who move from the extreme left wing to the extreme right wing but, thanks to horseshoe theory, that isn’t really much of a transformation. The two extremes are much closer to each other than they are to the center. Then there are pundits like David Brooks who transform over time from moderate Republicans to moderate Democrats, but that isn’t much of a change either. For the most part, people’s political loyalties seem to be baked in from a very young age. Extremists stay extreme. Moderates stay moderate. So what’s the point in even engaging in debate with them?”
“But doesn’t your own transformation refute that whole theory?” I asked. “You were totally disengaged from politics for most of your life. Your father’s SPERM rule forbade you from even speaking about it with non-family members. Now suddenly, in your own small way, you’re influencing American presidential campaigns.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And that’s why I want Juliet to hypnotize me. It used to be that I would look to the current political scene for an excuse to write about some forgotten popular novel. Now I find myself combing through forgotten popular novels for an excuse to write about the contemporary political scene. I feel as though I’ve undergone some sort of profound personality change, and I’d like to know why. And I’d like to understand what Grant Fuller has to do with it. I didn’t vote for him four years ago. Like most Democratic voters, I found his nationalistic bluster off-putting. But I also didn’t suffer from the Fuller-Derangement Syndrome that seemed to afflict so many liberal Democrats. And now, for some weird reason, I find myself more turned off by his Democratic opponents. It doesn’t make much sense, because I don’t think that my political views have changed much in the last four years. But, for some inexplicable reason, I find myself not just okay with the idea of Grant Fuller being re-elected, but almost comforted by it. And I’m hoping that Juliet can tell us both why that is.”
Juliet arrived at noon, looking Stevie-Nicksier than she had the last time I’d seen her, and smelling faintly of patchouli. She wore a floppy, black silk hat that had a veil draped from its brim.
“The veil acts as a symbolic wall of separation between the hypnotist and her subject,” Stevie-Juliet explained. “It establishes the fact that hypnotist and subject are communicating through the gauzy haze that separates the conscious mind from the subconscious one. That’s why hypnotherapists usually work in dimly lighted rooms. It helps accentuate the otherworldly aspects of the hypnotic trance.”
This made no sense to me, but Chloe seemed encouraged by it. No doubt, this is how mystics in popular fiction talk about their powers. Juliet closed all the window blinds and curtains in our living room and then turned out the lights. Outside the house, a California summer sun blazed away, so our living room wasn’t left in complete darkness. Enough ambient light seeped through the blinds and curtains for the three of us to maneuver about the room, if necessary. Juliet instructed Chloe to lie back on our black-leather IKEA sofa. I thought she might want to shoo me from the room, afraid that my presence would render Chloe self-conscious about going under hypnosis. What’s more, if Juliet was planning on staging any more frozen shoe tricks, she wouldn’t want me present to witness these bogus theatrics. But I was wrong. Chloe seemed to have informed Juliet in advance that she was undergoing hypnosis both for her own sake and for mine. And Juliet seemed happy to oblige us both. In fact, before beginning the hypnotism session, she asked each of us to bring some small, inexpensive item that represented a major part of our personalities. I rummaged in my banjo case and dug out one of my thumb picks. Chloe retrieved a battered paperback copy of Joe David Brown’s 1971 novel Paper Moon. Juliet accepted these objects from us and then mumbled some weird incantatory phrase that I couldn’t quite make out. She stuck the flat part of the thumb pick into the novel, sliding it down until only the looped piece of the pick was visible, clamping down on the book’s cover like some weird bookmark. To me she said, “This now symbolizes your individual artistic interests: fiction for Chloe and music for you. Just as your two lives are fused together by this symbol, I want you to try to fuse your mind with Chloe’s while I hypnotize her. Accept everything she says as though it is coming from your own subconscious mind. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” I said, although I had no idea what she was talking about.
She asked me to bring two wooden chairs from our dining room set into the living room and set them up along side the couch. (Being a word freak, Chloe always insisted on calling this piece of furniture a “sofa” rather than a “couch,” noting that couch comes from a French word for lying down. Technically speaking, sofas have upholstered backs and seats, while couches use removable pillows and seat cushions, making them easy to rearrange to accommodate lying down. Our sofa was fully upholstered and had no removable cushions, but since Chloe was now lying down on it, with a rolled up lap throw under her head, it seemed to me that it was functioning as a couch. Naturally, I didn’t bother raising this linguistic point while Chloe was trying to slip into a relaxed state of mind.) I set the two chairs at opposite ends of the couch, one near Chloe’s head, one closer to her feet. I took the chair near her feet.
Juliet was wearing what appeared to be a very expensive smart watch. I hadn’t noticed it at first because it was covered by a variety of garish bangles. But now she removed the watch and strapped it onto Chloe’s left wrist.
“I’ve put the watch into ECG mode,” Juliet explained. “It will monitor your heart and sinus rhythm.”
“Her sinus rhythm?” I said, perplexed.
“It has nothing to do with the nose,” Juliet hastily explained. “A sinus rhythm is a sort of secondary heartbeat that shadows ordinary cardiac activity. On electrocardiograms the sinus rhythm is represented by P waves.”
“Don’t you remember Tess Gerritsen’s novel Gravity?” Chloe said to me. “At the end of the book, when Dr. Jack McCallum realizes his wife, Emma, is going to live, Gerritsen writes, ‘On the EKG monitor, Emma’s heart traced a steady sinus rhythm. He took her hand in his, and waited for a sign.’ It’s the most moving moment in the book.”
Naturally, I didn’t remember this because, unlike Chloe, I don’t have an eidetic memory for pop fiction.
“All we are concerned with here,” said Juliet, “is that Chloe’s P waves and her heartbeats stay in synch. Currently, her heart is beating at about seventy beats per minute. That’s very healthy. Now, Chloe, it’s very important that you truthfully answer any questions I ask you. If you don’t, your heartbeat will increase and I will see that your answer is not true. With your permission we’re going to combine a hypnotherapy session with a polygraph test. You okay with that?”
“Sure,” said Chloe, and I got the impression that she and Juliet had already discussed this arrangement beforehand.
“Great,” said Juliet. “This watch is also capable of measuring Galvanic Skin Response or GSR. You may have also heard it referred to as Electrodermal Activity or EDA. It is a measure of sweat gland activity. Lying makes us nervous. Nervousness makes us sweat. The back of the watch has electrodes that press against your skin. They are situated about one centimeter apart from each other. By emitting a small electrical current and measuring the resistance of the skin between the two electrodes, the watch can keep track of sweat gland activity. Lying is stressful. It stimulates the cortex, and that stimulation can be measured.”
All this technical talk was beginning to frighten me. If Chloe was going to be subjected to an actual medical examination, I’d prefer that it not be done by someone dressed as the front woman for a Fleetwood Mack tribute band. Alas, by this point, I could see that Chloe was very much committed to the project. I could do nothing but let it proceed.
“Are we clear on all that, hon?” Juliet asked Chloe.
“Yes.”
“All right. Let’s begin. Just to set a baseline, I’m going to begin by asking you a few very easy questions. I want you to answer them either yes or no. You can answer them truthfully or you can lie. But answer only with the word yes or the word no. Is your name Chloe King?”
“Yes.”
“Are you wearing a blue top?”
“Yes.” Chloe was wearing an orange tee shirt.
“Is today Monday?”
“No.”
“Are we in the month of August?”
“Yes.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Is your husband’s name Calvin King?”
“No.”
“Is your house located at 118 Hyacinth Lane?”
“No.”
“Very good, Chloe. From now on, however, I want you to give me only truthful answers. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Now I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and take a little walk with me. I know that you are familiar with the hypnotism scene in Stir of Echoes. In that scene, Phil tells his brother-in-law Tom to imagine that he is in an empty theater. The theater is covered in black velvet. Black velvet on the walls, black velvet on the seats, black velvet in the aisles. And on the theater screen a single word is projected: sleep. That’s all well and good in pop fiction or a Hollywood movie. But in real life, hypnotists don’t want their subjects to go to sleep. We want you to enter a liminal sphere, a transitional zone between sleep and wakefulness, between dark and light, between knowing and unknowing. And now you and I are going to travel into that liminal space together. In our minds we are going to walk across your living room to the front door. Then we are going to open up your front door. But instead of looking out on Buttercup Lane, we find ourselves looking out upon a peaceful little glade inside a beautiful forest. A glade is a sort of natural liminal space, an open area that separates two parts of a heavily wooded forest. And running through the middle of this glade is a quiet little brook. You and I are now walking towards the brook. We stop alongside it and sit down on the grass. We lie back on the grass and stare up into a deep blue sky. It is very peaceful here. No one can hear us talk. Nothing we say can come back to harm us. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Chloe, you have been writing a lot about presidential politics lately, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you have come up with some surprising insights into some of the Democratic presidential candidates, is that also correct?”
“Yes.”
“But did you come up with these insights all by yourself?”
“No.”
“Where did these insights come from?”
“The future. They came from the future.”
“Are you lying right now?”
“No.”
Juliet checked the smart watch. I was sitting near the foot of the couch and couldn’t read it.
“Good, Chloe. That’s very good. And how did you get these insights from the future?”
“I was there.”
“You were there? You mean you were in the future?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about that.”
“About the future?”
“Yes.”
“It was all so long ago.”
“I understand. But tell me anyway.”
“I was married then.”
“What was your husband’s name?”
“Zac. Zac Vargas.”
I couldn’t help snorting at this. Chloe didn’t seem to hear me but Juliet glared at me briefly before continuing.
“Tell me about Zac Vargas,” she said to Chloe.
“He was handsome. He had the nicest face and the dreamiest eyes. We got married when I was only nineteen and he was twenty-three.”
“Was he nice to you?”
“Sometimes,” Chloe said. “But he was a player.”
“And players only love you when they’re playing, is that right?”
Jesus, I thought. Maybe this really is Stevie Nicks in my living room.
“Yes,” Chloe said. “As soon as my future self said yes to him, he started losing interest in her. And then that environmental activist girl came along. And future me could tell that Zac was interested in her, could tell he wanted to sleep with her.”
“Who was this girl?”
“She was a college girl from U.C. Davis. Her name was Megan O’Malley. She was active in a lot of causes. Very liberal. She hated President Fuller. She was committed to keeping him from getting re-elected. Zac never cared about politics before. But suddenly he began talking like a left wing radical. He began wearing tee shirts with political messages on them. He began going to lefty political rallies.”
“And did the girl fall for him? Did she become his lover?”
“No. Not right away. She was too committed to politics. She spent all her days campaigning against President Fuller. It kinda drove Zac crazy. Future me could tell that he wanted Megan to fall for him, but Megan was too political and didn’t care about romance or anything.”
“And then what happened.”
“And then Zac wrote a song.”
“A song?”
“Yeah. He was always writing songs. When they first met, future me used to write poems in a little poetry journal. To impress her, Zac set some of those poems to music and performed them at open mic nights in pubs and restaurants.”
Chloe began to sing a song I’d never heard before, presumably one of her poems set to music by Zac: “I was raised on popular fiction. It shaped my mind, my dreams, and my diction.”
“Is that one of the songs that Zac wrote for future you?” Juliet asked.
“Yes,” said Chloe. “But after they got married, he lost interest in the poetry. He pretty much lost all interest in future me. That was his way.”
“Is that when he wrote a song for Megan O’Malley?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the song Zac wrote.”
“It was called ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday.’ It was a funny song about Grant Fuller.”
And then, in an eerie, faraway voice, Chloe began to sing:
Hey, Hey, Yesterday,
Please come take Grant Fuller away.
His foreign policy would have been great
Back in 1978,
A time when it seemed almost certain
We’d never bring down the Iron Curtain.
*
Hey, Hey, Yesterday,
Please come take Grant Fuller away.
His bigotry and worldview
Belong to 1832,
Kindly fetch him home again
To 1820 or 1710.
The song went on and on and, in spite of myself, I found it enjoyable. It had a clever little bridge between the verse and the chorus:
Self-reliance is a knuckle
Unity is a fist,
When we unite and fight together
There’s nothing we can’t resist.
When Chloe at last stopped singing, Juliet continued her questions.
“What happened with the song, Chloe?”
“At first nothing. He sang it at a few protest rallies, but it didn’t catch on. But then future me posted it on YouTube. She created a little video to go along with it. A funny video with graphics showing Grant Fuller dressed like Napoleon and Robespierre, and even as a caveman as the lyrics traveled farther and farther back in time.”
“And then what happened?”
“It went viral. It got millions of views. President Fuller reacted badly to it. Tried to get the Justice Department to force YouTube to remove it from the internet. The whole incident made the president look small and silly. And his Democratic opponent, Earl Brill, got a big boost in the polls. Young people were especially swayed by the song. The melody was very catchy. Independent voters were expected to break for President Fuller on election day, but instead they pretty much split evenly between the two major candidates, and Earl Brill won a very narrow victory. Some pundits called it the ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ election. Megan O’Malley was very impressed by what Zac had done. She believed that he could use his talents as a singer/songwriter to fight for social justice. Shortly after the election, she began sleeping with him.”
“And then what happened, Chloe?”
“China invaded Taiwan.”
“What?” said Juliet.
“Right after Earl Brill was inaugurated, the Chinese military invaded Taiwan. President Brill didn’t want to look weak by ignoring the invasion of an American ally. He sent the entire Pacific Fleet to the Taiwan Strait. President Xi of China produced a secret agreement that he and President Fuller had both signed six months earlier. Fuller had promised not to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, and Xi had promised not to make any more territorial expansion efforts in Asia for at least another ten years. Brill called the agreement ‘worthless.’ Said it hadn’t been ratified by Congress. A war broke out. The Chinese military unleashed a biological weapon on the western part of the United States. Within weeks, millions of Americans were dead and millions more were deathly ill. The U.S. always used to claim that it didn’t stockpile biological weapons, but that was a lie. President Brill decided to fight fire with fire, and he unleashed a plague upon China. He had no choice. America was rapidly depopulating. There was no one left to fight a conventional war. One year after the Invasion of Taiwan, tens of millions of Chinese had been killed by American biological weaponry. Taiwan itself was now a ghost island, thanks to Chinese military might. And the west coast of the United States had lost ninety percent of its population. Almost everyone future me knew was dead. Zac was dead. Megan was dead. All of future me’s friends were dead. Things just kept getting worse. The wealthiest men in both the U.S. and China signed a peace treaty. By then, both governments had fallen. A handful of rich people controlled huge landholdings. They used private armies to protect their lands. They forced desperate poor people to work the land and grow crops that would feed their wealthy masters. Most of these masters lived behind high walls on large compounds. The rest of us just lived from hand to mouth. But every passing year brought more and more deaths as the various biological plagues mutated and became more deadly. Ten years passed. And then another ten. Future me had joined a community of survivors that had formed on the lands that were formerly the University of California at Davis. Many of the members of the community were scientists. They were working on a device that they hoped would help them send a message back into the past. They wanted to warn President Brill of the danger of responding to the Invasion of Taiwan.”
“And how did that effort go?”
“At first, better than anyone had imagined it could. They developed a method for sending a human being back into the past. But there was a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Fuel,” Chloe said. “The fuel they used was scarce. It was difficult to attain and more difficult to refine. The fuel required to send even one person back in time was massive. The brain trust of the community had to chose a single individual to carry the message back in time. If that person failed, it would probably be another ten years before another person could follow.”
“And who did they send, Chloe?”
“Me. They sent me. That is, they sent future me.”
“Why would they do that, Chloe? Presumably, a community born on the former site of a major university would have had scholars, scientists, historians – any number of people who would have been more qualified than you to carry a message back in time to President Brill. Why would they choose you?”
“Because of Arthur C. Clarke.”
“Excuse me?”
“Arthur C. Clarke once formulated three laws about scientific development. The third law states, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
“And what does that have to do with you?”
“The science behind time travel turned out to be so preposterous that the scientists who developed it felt certain that no scientist of a previous, bygone era would believe it. It involved various microbes that only came into existence because of World War B.”
“World War B?”
“That’s what they called the Great Biological War. It unleashed various microbes that mutated over and over again during the subsequent twenty years. These mutations couldn’t be replicated in any laboratory that existed before World War B. And harnessing the time-traveling features of these microbes required processes that didn’t exist prior to World War B and would be impossible to demonstrate. The science would sound like magic if you explained it to a scientist of this era. And scientists are more skeptical of magic than almost any other category of people.”
“That still doesn’t explain why they chose to send you back in time.”
“All the brightest minds of the community discussed the matter for months. One of them was a social scientist named Ruth Hertl. Her specialty was a field called Collective Sense-making and Crisis Informatics. She understood that popular culture – film, television, comic books, fiction – all these things have immense power to not only feed off of the culture that produces them but to actually shape the culture. She convinced the community brain trust that the best time traveler candidate would be someone steeped in the popular culture that existed just before World War B. I can’t remember her exact words, but she told them that social scientists had long believed that, when mankind finally learns how to travel back in time, it will probably be done via a technology so advanced that it will strike even the most sophisticated scientists of the past as magical. For that reason, travelers into the past probably won’t seek out scientists in order to convey a message from the future. They will seek out fantasists and science-fiction writers and fans of popular cinema and popular fiction. In other words, they will seek out the kind of people already conditioned to believe in wacky things like time travel and warnings from the future and faster-than-light-travel and the grandfather paradox. That’s why popular fiction is so important. It opens up the minds of its readers to all kinds of possibilities that the scientists and academics and logicians would all just scoff at. If you ever find a way to travel back to the 1930s, she said, don’t bother seeking out Einstein or Oppenheimer or any other scientist. Look for people who subscribe to Worlds Beyond or Tales of Wonder or Unknown or Startling Stories or any other pulp sci-fi magazine. Only they will have the open-mindedness to believe you and to spread the word. Ruth’s motto was, It takes an awful lot of guts not to fear being labeled nuts. She believed that the true visionaries of every generation are the creators of popular culture — Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling. She knew that I was a pop-culture vulture. She also knew about my book.”
“What book was that?”
“California and the Fiction of the Apocalypse. A few years ago a small press was putting together a series of short books about hyper-specific literary genres – culinary mystery novels, Amish romance novels, stuff like that. They asked me to write a short survey of novels of the apocalypse set in California – Calipocalypse novels. They knew that I had read and written a lot on the subject, so they figured I would have a fairly easy time accepting that fact that a biological war would soon break out and that California would be where the first biological weapons were unleashed on the U.S. What’s more, everyone in the community knew the story of how Zac Vargas’s political anthem had helped to sink Grant Fuller’s re-election campaign. And future me was the only one left alive who had known Zac personally. She had been married to him. She knew him inside and out.”
“And what good was that?”
“By now the brain trust realized that no time traveler would ever get an audience with President Brill. He or she would be immediately dismissed as a nutcase. If they wanted to stop World War B, the brain trust had to someone back in time who could prevent Brill from defeating Fuller. Zac’s song ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ had been an important element in Fuller’s loss to Brill. The brain trust needed to send someone back in time who could re-engineer the song, make it a warning about the risks of a war with China. And they needed that person to write additional song lyrics, with an anti-Brill message. And this person needed to get these lyrics to Zac and convince him to set them to music. Zac isn’t a very noble person. He lost interest in future me practically as soon as they got married. And he dumped future me for Megan O’Malley almost as soon as ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ made him famous. But he has a genius for creating catchy songs. Had he lived long enough, he probably could have become another Paul McCartney. His great weakness is women. A beautiful woman can get him to do just about anything. But the only way to get him to obsess over you is to make yourself unavailable to him. Ruth decided that future me should come back in time. But rather than marry Zac at nineteen, she should marry someone else, someone who traveled in similar circles. Future me told Ruth about all of the people that were in Zac’s orbit. She told Ruth about the musician that Zac always called the Banjo Man. Future me said that the Banjo Man wasn’t as handsome or as talented as Zac, but that he was a good husband to his wife, Anna, and a good father to their daughter Willa. For various reasons, Ruth became convinced that the Banjo Man was the right choice for future me. She wanted future me to go back in time and try to strike up a romance with the Banjo Man before he had a chance to meet Anna. She didn’t want future me to have any kids with the Banjo Man. If the effort to get Fuller re-elected failed, all those little Banjo Babies would be likely to die in World War B. Plus, she didn’t want Zac to think of future me as the mother of little children. He’d be happy to run off with another man’s beautiful wife, but not if it meant supporting the other man’s children. Zac is very selfish. Ruth wanted future me to come back and flirt with Zac, but not too blatantly. Much of the old internet had been archived on computers at U.C. Davis. Historians and political scientists combed through it all looking for dirt on all of Grant Fuller’s Democratic rivals for the White House. Most of these people were as liberal and as progressive as you could get. But they recognized that Grant Fuller’s decision to cede Taiwan to the Chinese was the right one. Fuller probably made that decision for the wrong reasons. He was greedy and transactional and he probably made his deal with Xi primarily for reasons of personal gain – to get himself re-elected and to prevent a war that might decimate his stock holdings – but, no matter why he did it, it seems that it was probably the best thing to do at the time. The well-meaning Earl Brill had an admiral desire to defend the freedom of the Taiwanese people, but it was an impulse that lead to an extinction-level biological war that had left much of the earth’s population dead and most of the rest in indentured servitude to a handful of super-rich warlords. If, by some chance, the geniuses in Davis could send a human being back in time to prevent World War B, her overriding goal had to be the re-election of President Grant Fuller. Bad as he was, Grant Fuller was our last best hope for preserving life as we knew it before World War B. So, while the experts were scouring the internet archives for dirt on Earl Brill and Delton Cook and Doyle Ramsfield and all the others, future me was doing what she did best, rapidly consuming pop fiction, studying it in the way that a folklorist might study the Brothers Grimm. She was looking for the elements that make it attractive to a certain element of society. Those were the people she needed to reach. They tended to be online a lot and they tended to drive a lot of the American cultural discourse. And she needed to learn how to get into their brains.”
“But when did future you come back to this time period? And what did she do with the other you, the younger you that was here already. Did she just disappear? Did she take over her consciousness somehow?”
“No. There are two of us now.”
“Two of you? How is that possible?”
“A time traveler can’t travel from her old body back to a younger one. If she travels back in time, she arrives at the same age she was in the future. And if she travels back to a time where a younger version of herself already exists, then the older version and the younger version exist separately. On my eighteenth birthday, my older self made contact with me. She was about fifty by then. I was a pop-fiction junkie, but even I couldn’t bring myself to believe that this old lady was me, even though, in a creepy way, she sort of looked and sounded like me. But she started talking about things that only I could possibly have known about myself. Embarrassing things. Things I’d have never told anyone. But the ultimate proof was when she took out a Magic Marker and used it to cover her thumb with black ink. Then she pressed her thumb down onto a blank index card. She told me to do the same thing. I inked my thumb with the marker and pressed it down alongside hers. Our thumbprints were identical except for a few scratches that time and age had etched into hers. Otherwise all of the whorls and loops and arches were identical. I thought it might be a trick, but we tested other fingerprints as well, and hers were always identical to mine.”
“So, once she convinced you she was telling the truth, did she tell you it was your mission in life to prevent World War B?”
“No, not at first. She disclosed all of that very gradually, over several years. She told me that she had an important mission for me. She told me that it involved marrying the Banjo Man. She assured me that he would be a good mate for me. She encouraged me to continue to immerse myself in American popular culture as deeply as I possibly could. She especially encouraged me to read time travel fiction, books like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Ken Grimwood’s Recall, Jan de Hartog’s The Centurion, Marlys Millhiser’s The Mirror, Richard Ben Sapir’s The Far Arena, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Dean Koontz’s Lightning, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Selden Edward’s The Little Book, Jerry Yulsman’s Elleander Morning, and many, many others. She promised to reveal her entire plan for me very soon. But she planned to reveal it to me in stages. She feared I might be overwhelmed if she dropped it all on me at once. But after I was married, she came to me one day and explained what it was that I was going to have to do. She told me about a future war between the U.S. and China that was going to devastate the earth. At first it sounded like she was describing one of those yellow-peril novels of the early twentieth century, where some evil Asian supervillain, like Sac Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, uses his Oriental wiles to manipulate the West into a war with the East. I told her it sounded just like the plot to Tom Roan’s The Dragon Strikes Back. But she assured me that what she was telling me was no racist old fiction. She told me about Grant Fuller, who I had never even heard of at the time. She told me that he would soon run, successfully, for president. She told me I wasn’t likely to find him at all appealing. My friends were all likely to hate him and everything he stood for. Nonetheless, she told me, it was important that Grant Fuller not only become president but that he also win a second term in the White House. I told her that I had no way of influencing a presidential election. But she assured me that I did.”
“How?”
“She told me that it really doesn’t take much to derail a political campaign. In January of 2004, she said, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean let out a scream of encouragement to his supporters. The scream – he actually just yelled “Yeah!” really loud – lasted less than three seconds. Over the next week it was broadcast 937 times on national TV and radio outlets and used by critics to suggest that Dean was unhinged. His campaign ended a month later. The ‘Dean Scream’ now has its own Wikipedia page. In February of 1972, The Manchester Union Leader published a letter that was handwritten and full of misspellings. The author claimed to have heard Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie refer to French Canadians derogatorily as ‘Canucks.’ New Hampshire had a large population of residents descended from French Canadians. The letter, which was actually written by dirty-tricksters working for the Nixon re-election committee, sank Muskie’s presidential hopes. The ‘Canuck Letter’ now has its own Wikipedia page. In 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was photographed wearing protective head gear while riding in a U.S. Army tank. He looked like a toddler wearing a too-big bike helmet. The photograph was widely ridiculed and is credited with helping to sink Dukakis’s campaign. According to Wikipedia, the phrase ‘Dukakis in the tank’ is now standard shorthand in political circles for a failed publicity gimmick. Through the years, there have been dozens upon dozens of cases like Dean’s and Muskie’s Dukakis’s. And those are just the presidential campaigns. Throw in the campaigns for governor, senator, representative, mayor, and other offices and there are thousands of instances where a viable campaign was sunk by the most trivial of matters. You once hired an undocumented worker to babysit your kids or mow your lawn? End of campaign. You once posed in blackface for a photo in a high school yearbook? End of campaign. You once used the word ‘fag’ in a Facebook post? End of campaign. If you are a politician, you don’t want some silly-assed thing defining you because, once voters cease to take you seriously, your career is through. Better to make voters angry with you than to make them laugh at you. We needed to get people laughing at President Fuller’s opponents. And the punch lines couldn’t all come from the Fuller campaign and its conservative supporters. Ridicule that is overtly orchestrated by a political opponent is rarely as effective as grass roots ridicule, the kind that arises spontaneously in the wake of some blunder committed by the candidate. What made the Dukakis photo so effective was the fact that it was orchestrated by the Dukakis campaign. They actually thought it would make their man look tough. Political pundits, humorists, and late night TV hosts had a field day with it. The Bush campaign took advantage of it, but they didn’t need to. It became a meme before anyone knew what that was. And that’s why my future self was chosen to travel back in time and become a political influencer. The leaders of her community did their research. They studied her old writings. They liked the fact that her work was witty but not overly intellectual like the writings of George Will or William F. Buckley or Gary Wills or Gore Vidal. They also liked the fact that she seemed to have mildly liberal leanings but almost never commented directly on any hot-button political issues. When someone who has no great interest in politics criticizes a politician, it catches a reader’s attention. When a political pundit criticizes a politician, well, that’s just business as usual. The Davis community leaders knew that she – I – had been a pop-culture vulture in an era in which pop-culture held much greater sway than elite culture. They also knew that my writing and my insights into books and cinema and TV were sharp enough to appeal to a wide range of readers, from the hardcore fans of pulp horror fiction to the elite fans of prestigious TV dramas. They needed a pundit with no apparent axe to grind, a writer who just happened to be reading a book or watching a film and noticed that some silly fictional character bore a strong resemblance to a political opponent of President Fuller. My encyclopedic knowledge of American pop fiction was a big plus for them. What’s more, before they sent my older self back in time, they provided her with a list of dozens of old pop fictions that could be mined for material that would make Fuller’s opponents look silly. They found plenty of material that could have been used against any of Fuller’s Democratic rivals. But Earl Brill, because he had spoiled Fuller’s re-election bid, was my main target. The brain trust were hoping I could derail his campaign before he could shore up his party’s nomination. And in addition to Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of technology, they made me familiar with Alan Lichtman’s thirteen keys to the White House. These are thirteen conditions that will determine which party will win an American presidential election. The most important from my standpoint were numbers four and thirteen. According to the fourth of Lichtman’s Laws, the incumbent party will lose if the race includes a viable third-party candidate. That’s why I had to go after Breneé Williams. And according to the thirteenth of Lichtman’s Laws, the incumbent party risks losing ‘if the challenging party’s nominee is charismatic or a national hero.’ That’s why I had to try to knock Delton Cook out of the running early. He was deemed to be the most charismatic of Fuller’s Democratic challengers.”
“And what about Zac Vargas? Where did he fit into all of this?”
“My future self knew that Taiwan was going to be a major issue in the campaign. Grant Fuller was determined to remain neutral on the subject of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Democratic Party had committed itself to defending Taiwan. So my future self and I wrote up a version of ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ that hinted at the disaster that might follow an American war with China over Taiwan’s independence. We also knew in advance about the contents of Earl Brill’s old email in which he used the phrase ‘I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.’ So we prepared song lyrics for that revelation, too. I knew that my husband wouldn’t mind my sharing these silly song lyrics with Zac. But I also knew it would excite Zac to think that I was doing something my husband wouldn’t like. So I told Zac that I had lied to my husband, that I had made up a story about an old lady giving the lyrics to Zac in the park.”
“So there was no old lady in the park?”
“No. I made that up so that Zac would feel as if he and I were conspiring against my husband. I could tell that Zac was dying to get into my pants, which is ironic, because in a previous version of the present era, he and I were married and he had long since lost interest in me sexually. Now here he was eager to do anything to get me into bed. He wrote two of his best melodies just to impress me. And the song “I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog” turned Earl Brill into a national laughingstock. Zac doesn’t give a crap about politics, but his songwriting skills just may help Grant Fuller hang on to the White House. And, at the same time, save Zac’s own life. Because he was one of the earliest victims of World War B.”
“But what will you do if all your efforts fail and Earl Brill seems poised to win the election?”
“Then I will have to resort to Plan B.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll have to shoot Earl Brill when he’s out on the campaign trail. I’ll have to shoot and kill him. It might be the only way to keep him out of the White House.”
Chapter Seventeen: A Dukakis-in-the-Tank Moment
Before ending their hypnotism session, Juliet gave Chloe the following instructions: “When I count to three and then snap my fingers, I want you to leave the forest glen and return to your Sacramento living room. But I don’t want your conscious mind to remember disclosing to me or anyone else anything about your future self and the Great Biological War. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Chloe said. Then Juliet counted to three and snapped her fingers. Chloe opened her eyes and then slowly looked around at her surroundings as if awakening from a deep sleep. When she saw me sitting in my chair near the foot of the couch, she asked, “Did it work?”
“I suppose so,” I said, unsure of how I was expected to respond. As previously stated, I am able to abide a great deal of kookiness from Chloe because she is a pop culture junkie for whom blockbuster movies and pulp fiction have always been as real – if not more so – than the headlines in the daily Sacramento Bee. In the arts-and-antiques trade they have a saying, “Buy the artwork not the story,” meaning that, if someone offers to sell you an antique bed that George Washington once slept in, buy the bed if you like it but don’t put any stock in the story, which could be entirely apocryphal. When I married Chloe, I followed a similar principle. I knew that her stories could often be rather fanciful, but I loved the artwork too much to care about veracity of everything she said. But even for Chloe, this latest round of kookiness seemed extreme, if not borderline madness. My wife had just informed me that she was, essentially, a time-traveler from the future who married me only after her first husband, Zac Vargas, had been killed in some future cataclysm and she had been forced to return to her distant past in order to try to prevent that cataclysm from happening. What was I supposed to do with that information? It’s not exactly the kind of cute backstory that elderly couples like to share with friends and family on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversaries.
Shortly after bringing Chloe out from her hypnotic trance, Juliet made her departure, leaving Chloe and me alone. I thought that Chloe and I might have to spend some time sitting together in awkward silence while she waited for me to explain to her what it was she had revealed under hypnosis. But I was wrong. As soon as Juliet was gone, Chloe began excitedly talking about her latest literary essay. The so-called literary Brat Pack of the mid 1980s and early 1990s had an important anniversary coming up, and she was going to write an overview of the whole phenomenon.
“There are certain writers who were undeniably a part of the Brat Pack – Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt – but I’m going to create a listicle of a dozen or more writers born in the 1950s and 60s and ask my readers to guess whether or not I deem them to be a part of the Brat Pack. At the end of the piece I’ll explain why I labeled each writer BP or non-BP.”
She reached over and withdrew one of her ubiquitous yellow legal pads from a nearby shelf. “Here are some of the writers,” she said and then read out this list:
1. Douglas Coupland
2. Mary Gaitskill
3. Barbara Kingsolver
4. Alice Hoffman
5. David Foster Wallace
6. Michael Chabon
7. Christopher Buckley
8. Ann Hood
9. Kathryn Harrison
10. Lorrie Moore
11. Susan Minot
12. Mona Simpson
13. A.M. Homes
14. Elizabeth McCracken
15. Ethan Canin
16. David Leavitt
17. Jonathan Franzen
18. Richard Powers
“Okay,” I said, “so which ones are the Brat Packers and which ones aren’t?”
“I won’t know that until I’ve written my essay,” she said. “And I’m going to start doing that right now.” Whereupon she got up from the couch and walked off into her writing room. Apparently we weren’t going to discuss the time-traveling elephant in the room.
Fortunately, Chloe was a fast writer. It took her only about two hours to write her essay and then she rejoined me in the living room, where I had been practicing some banjo tunes. This time I decided to address the elephant straight on.
“Look,” I told her, “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but I know that you’re not being entirely straight with me. When Juliet was here, I detected a faint whiff of patchouli in the air. And I smelled the same thing when that mysterious old lady approached me at Taylor’s. I realize that it’s the kind of scent favored by hippie chicks and many other varieties of weird sister, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the supermarket lady and Juliet both smelled alike and both tried to prevent me from seeing their faces clearly. I wish you’d just come clean with me. I know you haven’t forgotten what you said to Juliet under her alleged hypnosis. If this whole thing is some weird way of trying to tell me that you’ve fallen out of love with me and want to be with Zac Vargas instead, then I wish you’d just come out and say it.”
Chloe looked hurt. She sat down beside me and gave me a hug. “I will never fall out of love with you,” she said, “and I have no desire to be with Zac Vargas.”
“Then please tell me what the hell is going on. I need all the facts.”
“Facts like photographic film,” Chloe pidginned, “must be exposed before developing.”
When I didn’t smile at this, she paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and stared off at the far corner of the room, as if trying to decide how to describe that elephant.
“Look,” she said, “a lot of things in life seem counterintuitive at first, but if you delve into them deeply enough they can start to make sense. You once told me that numerous studies have shown that the further a person lives from a supermarket, the more likely they are to be obese. That didn’t make sense to me. It seemed logical that, the closer you lived to a supermarket, the more often you would buy, and eat, food. But then you explained to me about food deserts, and pointed out that people who live far from a supermarket tend to get a lot of their meals from fast food joints, mini-marts, gas stations, take-out restaurants, and other places that generally don’t sell fresh produce and other healthy products. Once you explained it to me, it all made sense.”
“But this situation is different,” I insisted. “Unless you can explain to me how Juliet Tammershak can be both a forty-something hippie chick and a seventy-something woman who accosts e-cart shoppers in their place of work.”
Chloe smiled sheepishly.
“Obviously, Juliet isn’t a real mystic or even a real hypnotist. She isn’t even Griffin Tammershak’s sister. He mentioned long ago that he had a kooky hippie chick for a sister, so I asked him if he’d play along with a practical joke I was planning to play on you. He knows that I’m a certified nut job so he didn’t even seem surprised by my request. He just agreed to go along with it.”
“But what’s the point of this whole practical joke?” I asked.
“That’s just it,” she said. “It’s not really a practical joke at all. Nearly everything I said under that fake hypnotic spell was true.”
“But you just told me that Juliet Tammershak, or whatever her name is, is a fraud.”
“She’s not a fraud; she’s an actress,” Chloe said. “And how did I manage to find a talented actress when I needed one? Because years ago, following instructions given to me by my future self, I became a member of two different theater troupes, the Suttertown Players and Stage Heist. I made friends in the theater world because I knew that I might need them one day.”
“You told me you got involved with theater because Bram Stoker had been a theater manager. You said you suspected that his involvement in live theater was what allowed him to write one of the most successful pop fictions of all time. And you wanted to test that theory by working in theater yourself.”
Chloe smiled apologetically, like a small-time thief caught telling a fib to cop. “I know,” she said. “And that wasn’t a complete fabrication. But my primary motive, as I said, was to make the acquaintance of some local actors, just in case I needed their talents some day.”
“It sounds like you’ve been telling a lot of lies through the years.”
She shook her head. “You call it lying. I call it getting prepared. I had a lot of work to do. How do you think I happened to have the lyrics to a song called ‘I Wouldn’t Wish That On A Dog’ ready for Zac on the day after Earl Brill’s old Stanford emails came to light? Because I had been told the content of those letters in advance and I knew that they were going to be leaked to the press. How did I happen to write a song called ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday,’ which hints at an upcoming apocalyptic war with an Asian country? Because I had been given plenty of advance warning. I haven’t exactly seen the future, but I’ve had it described to me in great detail. And all of the significant details that I gave to Juliet under hypnosis were real.”
“Everything?” I asked. “The Invasion of Taiwan? World War B? You and Zac married? Time travel?”
“I don’t expect you to take all of that on faith alone,” she said. “I’m a pop fiction junkie. If a trusted friend came to me and told me they’d met a vampire, I’d be inclined to believe them. At least, I’d want to believe them. But you’re a bit of a Doubting Thomas. Nothing wrong with that. I created the little old lady in the supermarket and Juliet Tammershak because I thought they might help you accept my crazy story. I tried to signal to you that some trickery was involved in the hypnotism by choosing Paper Moon as a symbolic representation of who I am. Maybe it was wrong of me. But come next Saturday you won’t have take what I say on faith any more. You’ll have rock solid proof.”
“Why? What’s happening on Saturday?”
“Earl Brill is going to slice off his thumb.”
“What?”
“Earl Brill comes from a family that made its fortune in the lumber and construction business. He likes to pretend that he’s handy with the tools of the building trade, but he hasn’t done any serious carpentry since he was a teenager. Next Saturday he’s scheduled to make a campaign stop at a construction site in Georgia where Habitat for Humanity is building a dozen low-cost homes for people too poor to buy conventional homes. At that event, he’s going to don a hardhat and a tool belt with the intention of spending a few hours sawing boards, hammering nails, and a lot of other manly-looking construction stuff. But the first time he attempts to saw a two-by-four using a table saw, he’s going to ignore basic safety regulations and cut off a sizeable chunk of his left thumb. At that point he’ll be rushed to the hospital where the doctors will spend several hours reattaching the severed part of his thumb.”
“That’s nuts! How can you possibly know all this?”
“The same way I’ve known so many other things about this upcoming election for nearly a decade now – I got it from myself in the future. But you don’t have to believe that. Just wait until next Saturday and you’ll see that I’m right. Unless you think I have enough sway with Earl Brill that I could convince him to chop off his own thumb in the midst of a vital election season. And I can assure you that I don’t. I know this because it was told to me by the same source who assured me that, if I wrote the lyrics to an anti-Earl Brill song called ‘I Wouldn’t Wish That On a Dog,’ Zac Vargas would be able to write a catchy tune for it and that we would be able to make it go viral and hurt Brill’s standing with women and younger voters.”
“You really expect me to believe that your future self traveled back in time to tell you all this stuff? If that’s true, then why didn’t you introduce me to her? It would have made all this much easier to believe.”
“Because she didn’t exactly travel back in time, not physically anyway.”
“She didn’t?”
“She communicates with me in a manner that’s similar to telepathy. Remember when we first started dating, and practically the first pop fiction that I insisted you should read if you wanted to get to know me better was John Wyndham’s novel Chocky?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s always been one of your favorites.”
“It has. But not because its incredibly exciting or beautifully written. It’s not. The main character is a twelve-year-old boy, Matthew Gore. He hears a strange voice inside his head, the voice of a woman he calls Chocky. It turns out that she is a missionary from an alien race that lives in a far-off part of the universe. She explains that she can travel across vast gulfs in space and time because she communicates with her mind and, she says, ‘Because mind has no mass, it takes no time to travel.’ I don’t really know what that means. But my future self, if that’s who she really is, communicates with me telepathically, in almost exactly the same way that Chocky communicates with Matthew Gore. In fact, it was the voice in my head that recommended I read Chocky, so that I could have my situation explained to me via the medium I’m most likely to understand – pop fiction. A child psychologist tells Matthew’s father that when Matthew listens to Chocky he doesn’t hear words. In fact he isn’t really hearing sounds at all. The psychologist says that Matthew’s communications with Chocky are a sort of metaphysical conversation, a dialog that takes place exclusively in the mind. David Gore, Matthew’s father, likens Chocky to Wordsworth’s cuckoo.”
“What’s that?”
“William Wordsworth wrote a poem called ‘To the Cuckoo.’ The narrator of the poem – presumably Wordsworth himself – often hears the call of a cuckoo but he never actually sees the bird itself, cuckoos being very furtive. Wordsworth calls the cuckoo ‘no bird, but an invisible thing/a voice, a mystery.’ And he says to the bird, ‘you bring to me a tale/of visionary hours.’ The bird is able to transport him back in time to when he was a schoolboy and heard another invisible cuckoo calling to him. That’s kind of what it is like when I hear my future self calling to me down the years.”
“But if it’s a conversation in your mind, how do you know that you’re not…”
“Crazy?”
“No, not crazy,” I said, “but maybe just imagining things.”
“I thought the same thing at first,” she said. “But then all of the things that I was told would happen actually did happen. That’s when I believed her, the voice in my head. That’s when I believed that I was communicating with myself from the future. And that she was preparing me for a mission that, all these years later, I’m finally undertaking.”
“And now she’s telling you that Earl Brill is going to cut off his thumb next Saturday?”
“Not the whole thumb.”
“Whatever. You’re saying that Earl Brill will cut off a good-sized chunk of his thumb next Saturday, and that will prove to me that you’re not cr- that you haven’t just been imagining those voices in your head?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. But whether or not Brill’s accident proves to you that I’m not crazy is totally up to you. I should think that if it happens the way I say it will, you’d be willing to concede that my voices are not imaginary.”
“I promise you that, if Brill cuts off his thumb – ”
“Just a piece of it.”
“If Brill cuts off any portion of his left thumb next Saturday, I will no longer doubt that you are in communication with your future self. But how is Brill’s thumb relevant to the whole Invasion of Taiwan scenario?”
“In the original time frame – that is, the scenario that occurred before I started altering events with my blog and Zac’s musical skills – Brill’s thumb amputation should have been his Dukakis-in-the-tank moment, an event that made him look so silly and out of his depth that no one should have been able to take him seriously any more.”
“So why didn’t it?”
“Because Zac wanted to fuck Megan O’Malley.”
“Huh?”
“Megan was impressed by the way that Zac’s song ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ had hurt President Fuller in the polls. The song, and the video that I created to accompany it, made Fuller look silly. Megan was so thrilled by ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ that, it seemed likely, if Fuller lost his re-election bid, she would reward Zac for having played a hand in it. And Zac was hoping that reward would present itself in the form of sexual favors. At any rate, he knew that if Fuller should rebound and win the election, Megan was likely to be too despondent to have sex with anyone for the foreseeable future. So, after Brill’s thumb incident – ’
“Partial thumb incident,” I corrected her.
“After Brill’s partial thumb incident,” she said, “Zac went to work cranking out more anti-Fuller songs and videos. He wrote a song called ‘Dumb and Lumber’ in which he joked that Fuller was a greater champion of poor people than Brill was:
Old Earl Brill showed his love for the poor
By chopping off his thumb.
But President Fuller said, ‘I can do more.
I will not be outdone!
With one of his mighty axes
He cut down their safety net.
And then he lowered the taxes
Of the wealthiest one percent.
Alas, I must concede its true
Brill isn’t much of a lumberman.
But it is undeniable too
That Fuller is the dumber man.
*
Dumb and Lumber
Dumb and Lumber
These are our choices this year.
And unless you’re awfully dumb
The obvious choice should be clear.
Dumb and Lumber
Dumb and Lumber
When you step in that ballet box
Remember that wood
Does a whole lot of good
But dumb is a social pox.
And President Fuller is just as dumb
As the proverbial box of rocks.
Zac cranked out a lot of songs like that and posted them all over the internet to help Brill overcome his idiotic Dukakis-in-the-tank moment. And it worked. Brill managed to win the election despite cutting off his thumb.”
“Part of his thumb.”
“Exactly. But now I’ve got some lyrics already written for a song that will make Brill’s upcoming Dukakis-in-the-tank moment an internet comedy sensation provided Zac writes suitably catchy music for it. I’ve written my lyrics in the exact same meter and rhyme scheme that ‘Dumb and Lumber’ was written in, in the hope that Zac will write the exact same music for it. I may even have to suggest the melody to him a bit. But I can’t pass the lyrics on to him until after Brill cuts off a piece of his thumb next Saturday.”
“The voice in your head can play music for you?”
“Absolutely. If I wanted, I could ask her to sing me every chart-topping pop song of the next ten years and she’d probably do it.”
“Then do it!” I said. “I’ll get my band to record them and we could all make a fortune.”
“But that would be pre-giarism!”
“Pre-giarism?”
“Plagiarizing something that hasn’t been written yet.”
I still wasn’t sure that I believed a word Chloe had said about the time-traveling elephant, but I was convinced that she believed it. So I was willing to give her the week she had asked for to prove herself to me. But come next Sunday, if Earl Brill didn’t cut off a piece of his thumb, she was going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.
Before I close this chapter, here are Chloe’s verdicts on the literary Brat Pack:
1. Douglas Coupland (His 1991 debut novel Generation X spoke to disaffected young people stuck in crappy McJobs. The Brat Pack was more of a baby boomer phenomenon and spoke to yuppies and those who aspired to be yuppies. Coupland is non-BP.)
2. Mary Gaitskill (Born in the mid 1950s, good academic credentials, her work focused on transgressive themes, and her first book, Bad Behavior, was published as a part of the Vintage Contemporary Fiction series, the mother lode of Brat Pack fiction. Gaitskill is BP.)
3. Barbara Kingsolver (Born at the right time and published in the late 80s, Kingsolver would seem like Brat Pack material. But her debut novel, The Bean Trees, was set in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky and populated, like much of her fiction, by lower-class working people. Brat Pack fiction was usually set among the college educated in desirable coastal locations such as Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Kingsolver is non-BP.)
4. Ann Patchett (Born in the same month as Donna Tartt and just three months before Bret Easton Ellis, and educated at Sarah Lawrence and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, both of which have great snob appeal. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, was published just four months ahead of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Alas, Patchett set her novel among the downtrodden of Kentucky. No snob points there. Like Kingsolver, she was Brat Pack-adjacent but not a true member.)
4. Alice Hoffman (Born at the right time, photogenic, well educated, and talented, Hoffman was just too precocious for her own good. Her debut novel, Property Of, was published in 1977, a good seven years before the birth of the Brat Pack. By the time the Brat Pack arrived on the scene, in 1984, Hoffman had already published four novels. Hoffman is non-BP.)
5. David Foster Wallace (His first novel was published in paperback as part of the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series, which was a direct competitor of the Vintage Contemporaries. He didn’t really breakthrough as a literary superstar until the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996. He sits uncomfortably between the BP and whatever came afterwards. It’s a difficult call, but I’m am categorizing Wallace as BP.)
6. Michael Chabon (Much like Wallace, he published his first novel in the late 1980s but didn’t publish his breakout book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, until 2000. Chabon is BP but just barely.)
7. Christopher Buckley (He was born in 1952, attended prestigious schools, and his first novel was published in 1986. But Buckley was the son of uber-conservative William F. Buckley, and the Brat Pack had a distinctly liberal vibe. Buckley is non-BP.)
8. Ann Hood (Like Kingsolver, she debuted at the right time, but her books were mostly concerned with working-class issues. Ann Hood is non-BP.)
9. Kathryn Harrison (Her first novel was published in 1992 but she didn’t really get much attention until her 1997 memoir, The Kiss, became a succès de scandale. Harrison is non-BP, as is her husband Colin, also a novelist.)
10. Lorrie Moore (Would seem to be a perfect candidate for inclusion in the Brat Pack. But her primary mode is comic rather than satiric. What’s more she shunned the limelight and cocooned herself in academia. A close call, but Moore is non-BP.)
11. Susan Minot (Close to Moore in age and education and even general appearance, Minot never developed the writing chops that Moore did. Her work seems to have gotten more desperately transgressive with each passing year, as if she were begging the literary gatekeepers to condemn her work the way they condemned Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Her 2002 novel, Rapture, consists of a single 116-page blow job. Alas, no one bothered to condemn it, probably because few even bothered to read it. Minot never got the attention she craved. But she is definitely BP.)
12. Mona Simpson (The younger sister of Steve Jobs, Simpson attended Beverly Hills High School, U.C. Berkeley, and Columbia University. Her first novel, Anywhere But Here, was published in 1986, when the author was 29. The paperback edition was reprinted by Vintage Contemporaries, making it a very Brat Pack book. Not a party animal like some of its members, but Simpson is definitely BP.)
13. A.M. Homes (Published her first novel, Jack, in 1989, when she was 28. Like Susan Minot’s, her work was reliably transgressive but it never really caught fire with either readers or reviewers. She is definitely BP, but a very minor member of the clan.)
15. Ethan Canin (Not a party animal or showboat but he was born in the early sixties and published a highly praised debut story collection in the mid 1980s. Canin is BP, but just barely.)
16. David Leavitt (Everything I wrote about Canin is true about Leavitt.)
17. Jonathan Franzen (Franzen was born at the right time and published his first novel in the 1980s. But he was a very quiet and serious author and didn’t have the BP knack for self-promotion and incorporating highly commercial elements into his work. He didn’t really come to prominence in the literary world until the publication of his phenomenally successful 2001 novel The Corrections. Non-BP.)
18. Richard Powers (Almost everything I wrote about Franzen is true of Powers. If anything, Powers is a better and more serious writer than Franzen and less of a public figure. Non-BP.)
Naturally, Chloe ended her essay with a shout out to the pop fiction writers who were born into the same era as the literary Brat Pack: “Fifty years from now, I suspect that the works of Kim Stanley Robinson, Orson Scott Card, Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosley, Patricia Cornwell, and Michael Connelly will be much better known than the works of Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Donna Tartt (an easy surmise, since it is already pretty much true). The literary Brat Packers were generally much better writers than their harshest critics in the mainstream press gave them credit for being, but in the end they didn’t manage to write anything indispensible or leave us any indelible characters along the lines of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin, or Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. And fiction, as they say, is folks. If you don’t fill your stories with memorable folks, well, no one is likely to remember it.”
If you find these listicles annoying, blame Chloe. Chloe has always been convinced that popular culture is much more vital and insightful than highbrow culture. Despite being a bluegrass musician, I’m not so sure that I agree with her. When I told her I was going to write up an account of her weird foray into politics, she suggested that I do so as if I were writing a work of popular fiction. “Only pop fiction junkies will believe the story you’ve got to tell,” she said, and I suspected she might be right about that. I’d be happy to describe to you just how ruggedly handsome I am, but Chloe told me not to. “Mickey Spillane never described Mike Hammer,” she told me. “He wanted the reader to picture himself or herself in the role. By not describing yourself, you’ll encourage the reader to associate himself with the role of the narrator. It will make the story seem more personal to him.” She also recommended that I not reveal my name. “Literature has a proud tradition of narrators who never reveal their names,” she told me. “In books like Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and many others, the fact that the narrator’s name is unknown encourages the reader to place themselves in that role.” Chloe also specifically recommended that I read some of the novels of Richard Condon and use them as my model. Condon wrote a lot of top-notch novels about politics – The Manchurian Candidate, Winter Kill, Death of a Politician, Emperor of America, and many others. According to Wikipedia: “With his long lists of absurd trivia and ‘mania for absolute details,’ Condon was, along with Ian Fleming, one of the early exemplars of those called by Pete Hamill in a New York Times review, ‘the practitioners of what might be called the New Novelism... Condon applies a dense web of facts to fiction.... There might really be two kinds of fiction: the fiction of sensibility and the fiction of information... As a practitioner of the fiction of information, no one else comes close to him…Condon was also enamored of long lists of detailed trivia that, while at least marginally pertinent to the subject at hand, are almost always an exercise in gleeful exaggeration and joyful spirits.’”
In his introduction to the 2003 edition of The Manchurian Candidate, Pulitzer Prize-winner Louis Menand wrote: “As counterintuitive as it sounds, the secret to making a successful thriller, as Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy have demonstrated, is to slow down the action occasionally with disquisitions on Stuff It Is Interesting to Know – how airplanes are made, how nuclear submarines work, how to build an atomic bomb.” Richard Condon did a lot of that in his novels. He also, as Chloe once pointed out for readers of her blog, was famous for his over-the-top similes and metaphors:
Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.
The confused, naked girl lay there and struggled to get free, her breasts moving violently from side to side like one-eyed spectators at a very fast tennis game.
Alas, I am no Richard Condon. Thanks to my wife, I can provide you with plenty of lists, but gleeful exaggeration and joyful spirits aren’t exactly my forte. Fortunately, also thanks to Chloe, I have a very bizarre story to tell. And it is about to take its most dramatic turn yet.
Chapter Eighteen: Keep On Reading
Two days before Earl Brill was scheduled to slice off a large chunk of his thumb, President Grant Fuller made a campaign appearance in San Francisco’s Union Square. A few days earlier, Zac Vargas got a visit from some of the Fuller campaign’s advance people. They asked Zac if he would like to warm up the audience at Union Square by singing some of his anti-Brill material from the stage prior to President Fuller’s appearance. Naturally, Zac was thrilled. He had no real political beliefs. He was entirely a creature of appetite, and what he hungered for most were fame and fortune. Singing before thousands of people on a stage erected specifically for the President of the United States of America was bound to increase his public profile and bring him at least a modicum of additional fame and fortune. Had he been more politically savvy, it might have occurred to him that appearing on the same bill as a politician who was loathed by great swaths of the American electorate – particularly young people and women – might not be the best thing he could do for his singing career or his sex life. But that, alas, never occurred to him. Given a chance to take to a stage and sing to the largest live audience of his career was something Zac simply couldn’t resist. And so he quickly agreed to travel to San Francisco on a Thursday in early August and sing some anti-Brill songs for the President’s supporters. It would prove to be a fateful decision.
Northern California has often been a dangerous place for American Presidents – particularly if their initials are GF. In September of 1975, two separate attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford took place in Northern California. The first, by Charles Manson follower Lynette Fromme, took place at Capital Park in our very own hometown of Sacramento. The second, by leftwing nut job Sara Jane Moore, took place seventeen days later in San Francisco. Fortunately, Ford was unhit and unhurt by the would-be assassins’ bullets. Apparently Grant Fuller wasn’t superstitious. Not only did he share Gerald Ford’s initials, he was also the same age that Ford was at the time of the two attacks, 62. Chloe has always been fond of pointing out that Gerald Ford’s birth name was Leslie King. Chloe’s full name is Chloe Lesley King, although her parents were unaware of the Gerald Ford connection when they selected that name. Its connection with a U.S. President was one of the reasons Chloe opted to keep her maiden name when we got married. No U.S. president has ever shared my last name.
But Gerald Ford wasn’t the only POTUS to face death in Northern California. On August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding suffered a fatal heart attack in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. He was 57 years old. Harding is often rated among the very worst presidents in U.S. history, but Chloe, even during the days when she had paid no attention to politics, was always fond of him for two very Chloe-like reasons. Shortly before he died, Harding’s wife was reading to him from the Saturday Evening Post, the ultimate pop-culture magazine of its era. Harding’s final words, delivered when his wife paused for a moment, were, “Keep on reading.” Chloe has said she wouldn’t mind having those words engraved on her tombstone. The other reason for Chloe’s Harding crush is the fact that one of her favorite novels is Robert Plunket’s 1983 cult classic My Search for Warren Harding. Chloe doesn’t care much about Harding’s extramarital affairs, his illegitimate child, his corrupt Attorney General, the Teapot Dome scandal, the Veteran’s Bureau scandal, or the many other scandals connected to his administration. Harding made a lasting contribution to pop fiction by inspiring Robert Plunket’s novel, and that was enough to earn him a warm spot in Chloe’s heart for all time. She may be his only living fan. For her birthday one year, I ordered her a coffee mug and a tee shirt, both of which were emblazoned with the message:
“Keep on reading.”
President Warren G. Harding’s final words.
Zac had to submit to a Secret Service interrogation before he would be allowed to serve as the president’s opening act in San Francisco. He filled out a ten-page questionnaire about his background and his associates. He listed Chloe and me among his “friends and acquaintances.” The Secret Service sent an agent around to our house to ask about Zac’s character, his political leanings, and whether or not he had any history of misbehavior – drug abuse, violence, speeding tickets, etc. Chloe could probably have scotched Zac’s big opportunity by telling the agent that, in an alternate version of our current reality she and Zac had been married and that he had proven to be both an unfaithful husband and a narcissistic careerist. Wisely, she chose to keep that information to herself. Ultimately, the Secret Service learned that Zac had no deeply held political beliefs. He was transactional by nature and would gladly partner with anyone who might be able to further his career aims. Grant Fuller himself was the most transactional of politicians, thus Zac was exactly the kind of individual he liked doing business with the most. After Zac had been approved for the San Francisco gig, a member of the Fuller campaign went over Zac’s set list with him. Zac was surprised to hear that the Fuller people were eager for Zac to play ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ at the event. He didn’t think the president would want to be associated with such a dark and downbeat song.
“The president loves the song,” Fuller’s advance man, Allan Melvin, told Zac. “That fool Brill is determined to commit the U.S. to an all-out military defense of Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China. The president thinks a military confrontation between China and the West would be a colossal disaster. We’ve even worked a reference to your song into the President’s San Francisco speech. He’s gonna tell the crowd, ‘If you think the scenario described in “Hey, Hey, Yesterday” is science fiction, think again. If Senator Brill gets his way, Zac Vargas’s song is going to look like a brilliant piece of prophecy.’” Naturally Zac was flattered and agreed to play the song live before the president’s speech. He didn’t bother mentioning that Chloe was responsible for the lyrics to the song.
It was a weird week for us. We were both kind of excited by the prospect of seeing a musical acquaintance of ours singing before a large audience on the presidential stage. We pondered going to San Francisco and watching the event live. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t worth using up one of my vacation days for. Plus, downtown San Francisco is a difficult place to maneuver around in by car during the best of circumstances. On the day of a public appearance by the POTUS, it was likely to be a traffic nightmare. We decided to stay home and watch Zac’s performance on the internet after I got home from work. We felt certain that he’d post it to his YouTube channel at the earliest possible moment.
It was also a weird week because we were both nervously awaiting Earl Brill’s Saturday thumb dismemberment. A lot was riding on this upcoming event – so much, in fact, that neither of us could bring our self to mention it. I found myself hoping that Brill actually would amputate his thumb on Saturday just so I wouldn’t have to face the possibility that Chloe was more than just kooky and quirky but might also be clinically delusional as well. I could tell that Chloe, too, was nervous about Saturday. She knew that her entire Chocky-like scenario would be exposed as a fraud if Brill’s thumb remained fully attached to his hand by the end of the day on Saturday. Traveling through time to prevent a future war is a popular trope in pop fiction, and in movies such as The Terminator, The Tomorrow War, Edge of Tomorrow, The Adam Project, and many others. But the idea of it actually happening in real life was hard to fathom. I think Chloe and I both wanted some kind of a sign that she hadn’t imagined this whole thing. And we were hoping that Earl Brill’s thumb would provide us with that sign. But we didn’t want to talk about it and risk jinxing the whole thing. So we kept quiet about Brill’s thumb and talked instead about Zac’s upcoming brush with destiny. We were both eagerly looking forward to Thursday afternoon. We planned to watch Zac’s performance together just as soon as I got home from work. We just hoped that we wouldn’t have to wait too long for Zac to post his San Francisco gig on the web. As it happened, we needn’t have worried about that. By the time I got home from work on Thursday, Zac had become one the year’s biggest news stories. But not in a good way.
Chapter Nineteen: Death of a Troubadour
Zac was a big hit with the Union Square crowd. By the time he took the stage, roughly 2,500 people had gathered for the event, filling up nearly every square foot of the two-and-half-acre outdoor plaza. These people were expecting Zac to perform songs that were critical of Earl Brill or hinted at the catastrophe a Brill presidency might bring down upon the world. What they probably weren’t expecting was just how gifted a showman Zac Vargas could be. This, of course, didn’t come as a great surprise to Chloe and me. We’d been impressed by him for quite a while. From the moment he began performing live at the Fox & Goose, we both felt that he was probably destined for great things. His voice was like a balm for the soul, and his guitar playing was practically like a second singing voice, except earthier and with greater range. His songwriting was impressive too. What we didn’t know, however, was that Zac was apparently one of those artists whose skill increases with the size of his audience. Some singer-songwriters are fine in the intimate confines of a coffee house or brewpub, but put them up on an outdoor stage in front of a thousand people, and they practically disappear. For other performers, a big crowd brings out an even bigger performance, as they tap into creative resources even they might not have been aware that they possess. And Zac, apparently, was of this latter group. His performance at Union Square was electrifying. It was so electrifying, in fact, that President Fuller wanted some of Zac’s fairy dust to rub off on him too. An interval of about ten minutes was supposed to separate Zac’s departure from the stage and Fuller’s ascension to it. But Fuller was nothing if not a savvy politician. When he saw how popular Zac was with the Union Square crowd, he decided not to give the crowd a chance to cool down. In defiance of his campaign travel team and his Secret Service protective detail, Fuller rushed out of the secure area that had been set up behind the stage and hurriedly climbed the staircase to the top of the stage. When Zac turned around and saw the president coming his way, he seemed a bit confused, possibly even frightened. He was told that he would be given no opportunity to join the president on stage. And now here was the president joining Zac on stage. But Zac was nothing if not a great showman. He decided to welcome the change of plan. The president grabbed Zac’s hand and pumped it up and down as if he were trying to raise water from a well. Then he put an arm around Zac’s shoulders and led him back towards the microphone.
“Is this young man talented, or what?” Fuller asked the crowd. And before anyone could respond to that, he added, “How about another round of applause for Zac Vargas!” At that point, Zac seemed to have sailed well beyond cloud nine on one of Tony Bennett’s little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars. He leaned into the microphone and, nearly dumbstruck for the first time in his life, could only say, with a nod towards the president, “Wow! I really didn’t expect this!” It was clearly the greatest moment of his young life. Tragically, it was also the last. An assassin, who had somehow snuck into an unoccupied office space on the tenth floor of the nearby Tiffany Building, chose that moment to try to kill President Grant Fuller. The assassin had not expected to see Fuller take the stage until after Zac had departed it. Confused by the sudden change of plan, and seeing that the president had momentarily outrun his security detail, the assassin opted to ditch his original plan and take his shot just then. Sadly, just as the assassin squeezed the trigger, Zac stepped between the president and the path of the bullet. That bullet went straight through Zac’s body, piercing his heart, and then it exited his chest and lodged itself harmlessly in the lightweight (1.76 kgm.), ultra-slim Coolmax bulletproof vest that the president wore for all his public appearances. The vest was designed primarily to protect against bullets fired at close range from a .9 mm handgun or a .44 magnum, rather than the much more deadly full metal jacket bullets fired from a high-powered rifle like the one that killed Zac. Fortunately for the president, however, Zac’s body slowed the bullet significantly, so that it had no chance of penetrating the bulletproof vest. By the time Zac’s lifeless body hit the ground, the president’s protective detail had swarmed around Grant Fuller and hustled him off the stage. At the same time, the leader of the Secret Service’s CAT unit (aka, the Counter-Assault Team) located the position of the shooter and instructed a special sniper team located on an adjacent building to return fire. The shooter died only about twenty-five seconds after killing Zac. Zac became a national hero, but he never got to enjoy the distinction.
I was at work when all of this was taking place ninety miles away in San Francisco. When I arrived at home, I found Chloe in front of the TV, tears streaming down her face, and in a state of horrified shock. We watched live coverage of the aftermath of the event for about two hours, barely saying a word to each other. The dead assassin had been identified as Frank Heller, but the media knew almost nothing else about him yet. At five p.m., President Fuller delivered a five-minute address to the nation from a secure location in the Bay Area. He assured his fellow countrymen that he was unhurt. He spent most of his time delivering a tribute to Zac, making it sound as if Zac had laid down his own life to save the president’s, but the film footage suggested otherwise. Zac did, indeed, step into the path of the assassin’s bullet, but he seemed to have done so purely by chance. The crowd was still applauding him, and he had briefly stepped back and turned to acknowledge, with a wave of his right hand, the people standing to the right of the stage. In his left hand, he still held his guitar. He never looked in the direction of the shooter and it seems unlikely that he ever knew that a shot had been fired. Now, on TV, the president held up Zac’s guitar, which was spattered with blood. “Zac Varga (sic) was a warrior for a better America,” Fuller said. “He fought not with guns or bombs but with this guitar, with his fine singing voice, and with his incredible songwriting skills. The last few weeks of his life were devoted to helping this campaign get out the message about how important it is to stay the course my administration has set in Washington, and to not allow a dangerous extremist like Earl Brill to get his hands on the most powerful office in the world. I vow to keep Zac and his sacrifice in my mind every minute of every day throughout the rest of this campaign. I hope you, too, will keep him in mind, keep him in your hearts, and keep him in your prayers. God bless America.”
Neither of us could believe that Zac was gone. Up until now, this whole crazy election season had seemed like nothing more than political theater. And Chloe’s time-travel revelations had only heightened the sense that what was unfolding on the national stage wasn’t an ordinary quadrennial presidential election but something more akin to a good piece of pop fiction. But now Zac was dead and suddenly we realized that Chloe’s campaign to keep Earl Brill out of the White House had had deadly serious consequences. She herself was the first to say what we both were thinking.
“If I hadn’t passed those lyrics along to him…if I hadn’t urged him to write those songs, and if I hadn’t posted them online, Zac would still be alive,” she said. “He’d still be a goofy Sacramento pub singer leading a fairly carefree life. Now he’s been gunned down by an assassin who wanted to murder the president. It just doesn’t seem real.”
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to Zac,” I told her. “One way or another, Zac was marked for death. History had him in its headlights.”
“It would be more accurate to say that the future had him in its crosshairs,” she said. “And I do blame myself. But what else could I have done, given the information that was passed on to me from the future? I was told that Zac was going to be one of the first victims of the Great Biological War. I thought I was going to save his life by using him to help keep Fuller in the White House. Instead he died even younger in this time frame than he did in the previous one.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I just remained quiet. The lyrics of one of Zac’s songs kept echoing in my head:
My how the time gets away from us all.
Sprints like a demon when you want it to crawl.
Creeps like a thief in the dead of the night,
Then just when you need it, it’s nowhere in sight.
After a quiet, uninspiring dinner (tuna sandwiches and Fritos), we turned on the TV to see if the media had learned anything more about Frank Heller. But as soon as we tuned in to CNN, the newscaster reported that Earl Brill had announced that he was cancelling all of his campaign events scheduled for that weekend. “Now is not a time for campaigning,” he said. “Now is a time to reflect on the tragic events in San Francisco and to let the friends and family of Zac Vargas know that he is in our thoughts and prayers. I am suspending my campaign for two days so that the president won’t have to worry about campaigning either. Some things are more important than politics. And the tragic death of Zac Vargas is one of them.”
I turned to Chloe and said, “That means no Habitat for Humanity. No table saw. No amputated thumb.”
“It was only going to be partially amputated,” she said, sounding numb, like a sci-fi robot running out of power.
Chapter Twenty: The Silence of the Chocky Voice
The next day, the Brill campaign announced that Senator Brill would be attending a gun-control event in Chicago in three days. “In light of what happened in San Francisco yesterday,” the campaign director told CNN, “the Senator believes it is important that we address the subject of runaway gun violence in our cities. He is a lifelong hunter and he believes devoutly in the right of every American to own hunting rifles as well as the type of traditional handguns that can aid in home security. But he doesn’t believe that every American should have the right to own an automatic weapon. Something has to be done to keep that type of weapon out of the hands of the deranged killers who have done so much damage to our country over the past few decades.”
It seemed clear now that the Habitat for Humanity event was completely off the Senator’s schedule. “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” I told Chloe, “and he’ll shoot off his own thumb at the gun-control event in Chicago.”
She was not amused. In a way, however, Earl Brill’s thumb didn’t really matter any more to either of us. Chloe had predicted that disaster would strike on the campaign trail that week – and she had been right about that. Zac’s murder was a much bigger story than Earl Brill’s thumb could ever have been. The thumb incident was expected to make Brill look silly and give Fuller a minor boost in the polls. The Union Square shooting made Fuller look like a brave and beleaguered leader standing tall against the forces of darkness, and it had given him a major boost in the polls.
“Have you gotten any sort of an update from the Chocky voice since the Zac shooting?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Even if I keep my mind perfectly still, I can’t detect a thing. In fact, ever since Zac got invited to the Union Square rally, I haven’t heard a thing from the voice inside my head.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I’m not sure, but I think my early efforts to get Fuller re-elected – the blog posts and TV appearances – didn’t really change the past enough to send us off onto a wholly new timeline. But when Zac got invited to Union Square, things began to change. The future I was told about – specifically Earl Brill’s thumb amputation – ceased to be a possibility on the new timeline. The voice in my head never told me about Zac’s murder. Maybe she kept quiet about it because she feared I wouldn’t help her if I thought I might get Zac killed by doing so. But I don’t think so. I believe that she was communicating with me from a specific future. And Zac’s murder, by so drastically altering the past, altered the future as well.”
“So what happens now?”
“We wait, I guess,” Chloe said. “Either I’ll get new instructions, meaning that Fuller is still going to need more help defeating Brill. Or else I won’t hear anything, presumably because poor Zac and I altered the course of history so dramatically that Brill was kept out of the White House and the Great Biological War never happened.”
“Let’s hope it’s that latter scenario. Because, short of shooting Earl Brill, I don’t see what more a 31-year-old Sacramento pop-culture blogger could possibly do to keep Grant Fuller in the White House at this point.”
“Amen to that,” she said. “Still, I’ve had that voice in my head for so long, I’m afraid I’m going to miss it if it is truly gone for good.”
Chapter Twenty-One: Frank Future/Frank Past
Within twenty-four hours of Zac’s murder, his killer’s biography was beginning to take shape. Frank Heller, like so many notorious murderers before him, was described as a quiet man who kept mostly to himself. He was 42, lived in Woodland, California, and managed an antiques co-op. Up until four years earlier, no one had ever heard him utter a political statement. But when Grant Fuller began running for president, something snapped inside Heller. Shortly after Fuller announced his intention to seek the White House, Heller began keeping a handwritten journal which he titled “The Anti-Fuller Resistance Plan: A Personal Journey.” The journal reveals a man descending into madness – that, at least, is what the press and law-enforcement authorities believed. Chloe and I weren’t so sure.
The excerpts from Frank Heller’s journal that were published in the press bore an eerie resemblance to the story of Chloe’s own weird encounter with the unexplained. Beginning four years ago, Heller began to believe that he was being contacted by his own future self. Frank Future contacted Frank Past to tell him about an upcoming event called World War B. This event would be triggered by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. If Grant Fuller was in the White House during this invasion, the U.S. would make no effort to defend Taiwan and the Chinese takeover of the island would be successful and lead to no wider military action. But if a Democrat was in the White House at the time of the Taiwan invasion, the U.S. would respond forcefully, triggering an all-out war between China and America. Frank Future told Frank Past that World War B was going to wipe out all of the undesirable elements of human kind – the Communist Chinese, the Russians, American liberals, most of the world’s Muslim population, and so forth. World War B was, according to Frank Future, nothing more and nothing less than the Armageddon predicted by the Book of Revelations in the Bible, the “great day when God, the Almighty, pours out his wrath against the sinners and nonbelievers of the world and smites them all down along with their leader Satan, an end-of-the-world confrontation that will leave only the righteous standing.” Frank Future assured Frank Past that he would not only be deemed one of the righteous, he “would be made a leader of the righteous and would dwell in a mighty mansion erected by God himself, from which grand palace he would assist in ruling the Kingdom of the Saved for ever and ever unto eternity.”
The media mostly interpreted Frank Heller’s journal as evidence that he was a Christian fundamentalist lunatic. But Chloe had a darker interpretation of it.
“It reads too much like the story I heard from my own inner voice to be a coincidence,” she said.
“What do you think it means?” I asked her.
“If a ragtag band of scientists with little money or worldly power could figure out how to manipulate bio-organisms in order to send messages into the past, then it seems likely that the rich and powerful warlords of the future could probably figure it out too.”
“You think they sent Frank Heller a message urging him to kill Grant Fuller so that, when China invaded Taiwan, there’d be a Democrat in the White House?”
“Why not?” Chloe said. “Those warlords would know that their wealth and prominence would never come to pass if the scientists at Davis were successful in their efforts to change the past. In fact, it’s possible, that the warlords found out about the Davis time-travel program and seized hold of it themselves. That would explain why the only two people who appear to have been contacted by the future, are me and Frank Heller, both of whom live – or lived – just a few miles from Davis.”
“But if those warlords of the future were using Frank Heller as a weapon, it means that they’ve succeeded in taking control of the whole ‘communicating with the past’ project.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed. Frank Heller is dead. And, as far as we can tell, his mission failed spectacularly. Instead of killing Grant Fuller, he made him look like a triumphant hero.”
“So does that mean that we’re in the clear?”
“Not at all. If the warlords are now in charge of the Davis Project, they can keep on trying to prevent Grant Fuller from being re-elected.”
“Not good.”
“No, and that’s not the worst of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The warlords may actually know that I was receiving messages from the future. They may know that I am on a mission to see to it that President Fuller gets re-elected. And if that’s the case…”
“They might come after you next?”
“You never know…”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Maggy Strength, Eric Tiller-Roth, Susan Morse-Pectin,
and Billy Rubin
The supermarket where I work is located only a mile from my house. Often, in good weather, I walk to and from work. Sometimes during my lunch break, Chloe will surprise me by showing up and spending the hour with me. It is also not uncommon for her to walk to the supermarket and arrive just as my shift is ending, so that the two of us can walk home together. We get much of our exercise walking to and from Taylor’s supermarket.
About a week after Zac’s murder, I ended my shift at three, as usual, and found Chloe waiting outside the store to walk home with me. Side-by-side, we began wandering our way through the large residential neighborhood that Taylor’s mainly serves. As we walked along, I told her, “There are still a few things about this whole voice-from-the-future situation that I’m confused about?”
“Only a few?” she asked.
“Well, no, I’m confused by just about all of it,” I admitted. “But there seem to be a lot of loose ends to your story.”
“Such as?”
“Such as what ever happened to Megan O’Malley? She played an important role in Zac’s life in a previous iteration of the past. She helped break up your marriage to him. So where is she now?”
“I’ve looked her up online every now and then through the years. She currently works for a local nonprofit organization that helps the homeless.”
“Did she and Zac ever meet in our timeline?”
Chloe shrugged. “I doubt it. He was attracted to her in the old timeline mainly because he was feeling trapped in our marriage. He probably would have reached out to any hot girl that came along at that point. But, since the Zac that you and I knew never married, he probably didn’t felt the same urgency about seeking out some strange. When I didn’t marry Zac, it probably altered his actions a great deal. He may well have never come within five miles of Megan O’Malley, although she lives in Sacramento, so it seems likely they’ve passed within a few blocks of each other at one point or another. But she doesn’t seem to have ever played a role in his life story.”
“Fine,” I said. “Now what can you tell me about Anna and Willa?”
Just then a blue Toyota Prius silently pulled up along side us. We heard someone call out, “Helloooo!” Turning towards the street, we saw one of our elderly neighbors parked by the curb and signaling to us that she wanted to talk. Her name was Iris Shaw, but we had been referring to her as Maggy Strength ever since our ferret died five years earlier. Back then, Chloe happened to mention to Ms. Shaw that Wiggles had crossed over the rainbow bridge, and the next day’s mail brought us a sympathy card from her that said, “May Almighty God Grant You Strength.” Chloe read the card and said, “Jesus, it’s not like our three-year-old child died of leukemia!” Forever after, in private, we referred to her as Maggy Strength. When we saw her signaling to us, we walked over to the car to see what she wanted.
“Did he find you?” she asked us, as we arrived at the open passenger side window.
“Did who find us?” I asked.
“The man who was looking for you.”
Chloe and I exchanged a guarded look.
“What man might that be?” she asked.
“Some man was at your house a while ago. He was wearing a hoodie and had a knapsack on his back. When no one answered your door, he started knocking on the neighboring houses, asking if anyone had seen you or knew where you went. I told him that you two were probably walking home from the supermarket. That was about ten minutes ago. He said that he’d drive around and see if he could find you. He was driving a black van. No side or rear windows. Kinda creepy. Anyway, I thought he was a friend of yours and that you might have encountered him on your walk. Oh, well, he’ll probably drop by again soon. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment to keep. Bye, now.” And then she drove off in her silent car.
Chloe and I looked at each other. “Shit,” I said.
“We need to get off the street before he finds us,” she said.
“We’re six blocks from home,” I said. “Should we make a run for it?”
Chloe looked around at our surroundings. “If he’s combing the streets he may see us. And if he’s not combing the streets he may have driven back to our house and is waiting for us there. We need to get indoors somewhere quickly so we can make a plan.”
I looked across the street and saw an Earl Brill for President sign on the lawn of a quaint-looking house whose yard art and porch décor suggested the residence of an elderly spinster. “C’mon,” I told Chloe, “and just follow my lead.”
I marched up to the front door of the Brill for President house and rang the doorbell. I was greeted by the sound of several cats mewling inside. I took this as a good sign. A moment later, a very round older woman opened the door. “Yesss?” she said, somewhat suspiciously.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Eric Tiller-Roth and this is Susan Morse-Pectin.” Chloe often uses those pseudonyms when she reserves a seat for us at a restaurant or has to sign a guest book at a real-estate open house. They are anagrams of two of her favorite pop fiction genres. “We’re with the John Wyndham Polling Organization and we’re wondering if we could ask you a few questions about the upcoming presidential election.” She hesitated for a moment, but I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was eager to expound on her political views. “Welllll,” she said, “I suppose that would be okay. But can we do it in the living room? If I hold this door open any longer, one of the cats is likely to escape.”
“That would be great,” I said. As we stepped into the house, I took a last look up and down the street for a black van. I didn’t see one.
The woman told us her name was Mrs. Glover and invited us to sit on the couch. She sat across from us in an overstuffed chair upholstered with some kind of glossy fabric emblazoned with a garish floral pattern. Neither Chloe nor I had a pen or a notepad with us so I took out my smart phone and improvised.
“I have all the questions written down here, and I’ll just record your answers with my phone, if that’s okay with you, Mrs. Glover.”
The old woman seemed dazzle by the idea of being surveyed in such a high-tech fashion. But after taking out my phone and pretending to scroll through a list of questions, I found that my creativeness was beginning to wane. I had talked our way into the house, but now I couldn’t think of any fake questions to ask. Fortunately, Susan Morse-Pectin quickly bailed me out. “So, Mrs. Glover,” she said, “what do you think is the number one issue facing the American voter this election season?” Susan was born for this kind of stuff.
“Social Security and Medicare,” Mrs. Glover responded immediately, dear old baby boomer that she was. “The Republicans want to cut back on our benefits. But if Earl Brill gets into the White House, he won’t let that happen.”
While Mrs. Glover expounded on her theory of why Grant Fuller was likely to kill Medicare if he got a second term, Chloe and I kept surreptitiously glancing out the living room window, trying to see if there was a black van casing the neighborhood. For about twenty minutes, Chloe kept the “interview” going by asking questions about climate change, abortion, immigration, inflation, unemployment, and other hot-button topics. After a while we could both tell that Mrs. Glover was beginning to tire of us. I was about to call a halt to the interview and quietly suggest to Chloe that we try to make our way home now. But just as I was about to speak, I saw a black van turn on to Mrs. Glover’s street and make its way very slowly down the block. I nudged Chloe, and she turned and looked.
“Well, I think that’s about all the time I can give you,” Mrs. Glover said. “I’m afraid its time for my afternoon nap.”
This was the worst possible time for us to be stepping outside again. I noticed that Mrs. Glover was wearing a rather expensive-looking bracelet. “What a lovely piece of jewelry,” I said, pointing towards her wrist. “Is it a family heirloom?”
Her expression perked up and she seemed happy to be asked about the bracelet. “As a matter of fact, it belonged to my mother,” she said. “Originally it was a long necklace. When my mother died, my two sisters and I were each determined to possess it. Eventually, we took it to a local jeweler and had it cut into three bracelets.” She laughed then, and added, “He told us that the greatest enemy of antique jewelry is multiple daughters.”
I smiled at this. Then I said to Chloe, “You should tell Mrs. Glover about your Victorian-style acrostic bracelet. The one with the sapphire, tourmaline, amethyst, and lapis lazuli stones.”
Chloe looked slightly confused for a second. She owns no Victorian-style bracelet like that. But suddenly comprehension dawned upon her. She said, “Oh, yes. It’s quite lovely. I learned about Victorian acrostic jewelry from a novel by Tess Gerritsen called The Bone Garden, and soon I became obsessed with it. The Victorians created an alphabet with the names of various gemstones: amethyst was A, beryl was B, carnelian was C, diamond was D, and so forth, all the way to zircon. Victorian lovers used to express their regard for each other by spelling out messages to each other by arranging the stones on a piece of jewelry in a certain way. Sometimes the messages could be quite racy. A man might give the wife of a friend a birthday a bracelet adorned with the stones fluorite, uvarovite, carnelian, and kunzite. The woman’s husband would think it was just a sweet, not terribly expensive gift from one friend to another. But if he had understood the gemstone alphabet, he’d have learned that he was being cuckolded.”
Mrs. Glover tittered at this bit of naughtiness. “But what does the message on your bracelet say?” she asked Chloe. “Sapphire, Tourmaline…what were the others?”
Chloe had to improvise here. “Well, it’s not an original Victorian piece. My husband…Dexter, had it made for me. He told me that S-T-A-L-L is an acronym for Still The Absolute Love of my Life. Not the most clever bit of code work, I’ll admit, but my husband is kind of a doofus. And, if I’m being honest, not really all that bright. But I love him anyway.”
While Chloe gave Mrs. Glover an education in acrostic jewelry, I looked desperately around the living room to see if I could find some kitschy piece of art to admire and fawn over for another minute or two. Then I looked into the dining room and saw a huge pile of empty (at least I assumed they were empty) candy boxes. No, I thought, this can’t possibly be her. But then I stared down the hallway through the open bedroom door and saw an old wooden bookshelf packed tight with paperback novels. I couldn’t see the titles or the name of the author(s) but I had a pretty good idea what they were.
“I can see that you like to read, Mrs. Glover,” I said. “So perhaps it might interest you to know that my partner here is one of the world’s foremost authorities on popular fiction, and not just the works of Tess Gerritsen. Susan wrote her doctoral thesis at U.C. Berkeley about pop fiction. Ask her about any popular writer – Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz – and she can tell you all you want to know about them.”
Suddenly Mrs. Glover no longer looked exhausted. Her eyes lit up and she seemed to shed ten years in an instant. “Did you say Nora Roberts?”
“Yes,” I said. “Susan here’s an expert. She can talk about Nora Roberts for hours on end. Mind if I use your bathroom?”
Chloe looked at me as if she thought I had lost my mind. Mrs. Glover fluttered a hand behind her and said, “It’s down the hallway there.” She had lost interest in me. At this point, she only had eyes – and ears – for Susan Morse-Pectin.
As I made my way down the hallway, I could hear Chloe expounding on the life and career of Eleanor Marie Robertson, aka Nora Roberts, aka J.D. Robb, aka Jill March, aka Sarah Hardesty. I turned back and gave Chloe a hand movement that looked as if I was pulling taffy. I was telling her to stretch out this conversation for as long as possible. She nodded that she understood. Then I went into the bathroom to see if there was a window big enough for me to crawl out of. I did indeed find a suitably sized window, but I couldn’t get it to open up more than a few inches before it became jammed. Out in the living room, Chloe was droning on about Nora Roberts.
“As you probably know, Mrs. Glover, Nora Roberts was born in Silver Springs, Maryland, the hometown of Goldie Hawn. In fact, the two women both attended Montgomery Blair High School. Sylvester Stallone was also briefly a student there. But Nora is younger than both Goldie and Sylvester. Her time at Montgomery Blair didn’t overlap with theirs.”
“My goodness!” Mrs. Glover said. “I didn’t know that. How have you managed to come up with so many interesting facts?”
Jesus, old lady, I thought, get a damn internet connection. And while you’re at it, get a bathroom window that can open more than a few inches. How do you air this place out after a massive dump?
“Nora began writing back in 1979,” Chloe said. “She was married by then and living in Boonesboro, Maryland. It was February, and she was snowed into her house with little more than a box of chocolates and some writing paper, so she began to write a novel, rewarding herself with a chocolate each time she finished a chapter.”
“Oh, I know that part of the story,” Mrs. Glover said. “That’s why I always enjoy a box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates when I’m reading the latest Nora. Romance novels and boxes of chocolates always just seem to go well together, like a perpetual Valentine’s Day.”
I gave up on the bathroom window and slipped quietly back out into the hallway. Then I made my way to the kitchen and let myself out the backdoor. In the backyard, I opened a wooden gate, stepped out onto the driveway, and looked up and down the street. No black van. Then I ran the six blocks to our house and let myself in. I grabbed my ten-speed bike and carried it out to the car. I tossed it into the trunk and didn’t even attempt to tie the lid down over it. I would only be taking it six blocks away. I checked the glove box and found a pen and an old envelope I could write on. Then I raced back to Mrs. Glover’s house. I parked the car and hauled my bike out of the trunk. I wheeled the bike up Mrs. Glover’s driveway and stuck it behind a rose bush. Then I slipped back into the house through the kitchen door and crept to the bathroom. I began to hastily scribble out some instructions for Chloe. While I wrote, I could hear her talking from the other room.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard that Nora was the victim of repeated plagiarisms by Janet Dailey.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Mrs. Glover said. “Janet Dailey’s novel Notorious is just a blatant rip-off of Nora’s Sweet Revenge. What a terrible person that Janet Dailey was.”
When I had finished writing up my instructions, I left the envelope on the side of the sink along with our car keys. Then, sweating like a sauna repairman, I made my way back to the living room. I figured that Mrs. Glover would be alarmed by how much time I had spent in her bathroom, but when she saw me enter the room, she gave a start. She had been so engrossed in Chloe’s lecture on Nora Roberts that she seemed to have forgotten about me entirely. When she remembered how long I’d been away, and noted how sweaty I was, she seemed alarmed. No doubt she was imagining some sort of toilet disaster that she’d have to spend the next hour scrubbing up. Maybe now she’d get that damned window fixed.
“Good, Lord,” she said to me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I told her, “but we should probably get going.” Then, to Chloe, I said, “We’ve got a lot more houses to cover. Perhaps you should check in with Billy Rubin before we leave.”
Chloe seemed to understand that this was more like an order than a suggestion.
“Suuuure,” she said. “Mrs. Glover, would you mind if I use your restroom before I go?”
“Anything for a fellow Nora Roberts enthusiast,” Mrs. Glover said.
In the novel The Silence of the Lambs, serial killer Hannibal Lecter tells a U.S. senator that he knows the identity of the man who has kidnapped her daughter. He says he’ll disclose the kidnapper’s name if she’ll get him transferred to another, less draconian prison. When Senator Martin agrees to this, Lecter gives her a name: Billy Rubin. Later, it turns out that Lecter has played a cruel trick. Bilirubin is the element in human shit that gives it its pigment. As a result, Chloe and I have always used “check in with Billy Rubin” as a euphemism for “go to the bathroom.”
After Chloe disappeared into the bathroom, I told Mrs. Glover, “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. It’s been great talking to you. I’ll wait outside for Chloe.”
“Who’s Chloe?” she asked.
Shit! “Oh, that’s a nickname that Susan sometimes uses.”
“I’ll bet she took it from that Nora Roberts character. What book series was Chloe in again?”
“You’ll have to ask Susan that when she gets out of the bathroom. Bye now.”
I dashed outside and retrieved my bike from the driveway. The note I had left Chloe read:
The car’s in front of the house. I brought my bike too. I’m gonna cruise the neighborhood on my bike and see if any black vans take an interest in me. If so, no problem, I can lose them by using alleyways and one-way streets where they can’t easily follow me. Take the car and drive to Steamers Coffee House on Front and K Streets in Old Sac. I’ll meander my way there and meet you in about a half an hour. Don’t leave the coffee house. Stay where there are plenty of people around. We need to make a plan before returning to the house.
-- Eric Tiller-Roth
I hopped on the bike and began pedaling back towards our house. If the black van was going to catch sight of one of us, I wanted it to be me. I was confident I could elude it more easily on a bike than Chloe could in a car. She reads a lot of action stories but that doesn’t mean that she’d necessarily know what to do in a high-speed chase. I found no suspicious vehicles anywhere near our house. I recognized every car and knew who each one belonged to. I began to widen my search by using our block as the center point of a series of ever-larger concentric circles. Eventually I widened my gyre until it had a diameter of about ten blocks. Satisfied that the black van was nowhere in the vicinity, I began pedaling my way to Old Sacramento, which took about twenty minutes. I arrived at Steamers at roughly four thirty p.m. and locked the bike to the rack outside. I went inside the coffee house and saw Chloe sitting at a table for two near one of the front windows that had a view of both Front Street and First Street. Apparently all that adventure fiction really had taught her a thing or two. She’d taken up a position that allowed her to watch every direction that the van could possibly come from, and she could do it without moving from her chair.
“Were you followed?” she asked me, as soon as I sat down. I had a feeling she’d waited her whole life to use a corny Hollywood line like that one.
“No,” I said. “You?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But I think I may have screwed up. I put the car in the parking garage at the end of Front Street. If we need to make a hasty getaway, it won’t be possible. We’ll have to stop and pay the parking fee before we can leave.”
“Let’s not worry about it,” I said. “We won’t go to the car unless we’re certain we’re not being followed.”
A waitress arrived to take my order. Chloe already had a coffee in front of her. My throat was parched from all the cycling I’d done. I ordered an iced tea. When the waitress was gone, Chloe said to me, “What the hell inspired you to bring up Nora Roberts back at Mrs. Glover’s house? Do you know that woman?”
I explained to her about my relationship with Nora Whitman.
“Ah,” she said. “Mud of bewilderment now begin to clear from pool of thought.”
“When I saw the chocolate boxes,” I said, “I couldn’t believe my good luck. You could never put a coincidence like that in a novel. No one would believe it.”
“Not true,” Chloe said. “According to Agatha Christie, every writer is entitled to one big coincidence per novel. A second coincidence has to turn out to be a clue. And a third, according to Dame Agatha, has to be proof positive of the solution to the central mystery.”
“Do you think she’s right?”
“She’s the second bestselling fiction writer of all-time, a full eighteen notches above Nora Roberts. So she must know what she’s talking about.”
“Who’s number one?”
“Shakespeare?”
“That hack?”
“I know, right?” said Chloe. Then she added, “I think it was Kate Atkinson who said, in one of her Jackson Brodie novels, ‘A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.’”
“I hope so,” I said. “Right now we’re awfully short of explanations.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes. Chloe sipped her coffee and I gulped my iced tea and tried to stop sweating. We kept an eye on the streets outside, looking for a black van. We saw very few vehicles at all. Old Sac is a tourist trap and not ideally suited to auto traffic. That’s why most visitors choose to leave their cars at one of the parking garages that flank the area and then walk through the historic district, with its 19th century buildings and wooden plank sidewalks that evoke the era of the Gold Rush. A trip back to the Gold Rush just doesn’t seem that authentic if you make it in the comfort of your Toyota Camry.
Finally, I said, “Maybe we overreacted. The guy in the van may have just been some salesman. Why should we assume that he’s a hit man sent from the future to kill you?”
“For the same reason that you should never walk backwards in a horror movie. It’s always prudent to be cautious when death may be stalking you.”
“But it may just be a carpet cleaner who’s stalking us.”
“Or a hit man from the future who’s disguised as a carpet cleaner.”
“Why would a hit man from the future even need a disguise? Presumably, if you’re from the future, you know exactly when and where your target will be most vulnerable. All you’ve got to do is be at the right place and time with your ray gun.”
“Don’t be silly. Ray guns are never going to work. They’re scientifically unsound. This hit man will use bullets, just like the one who killed poor Zac.”
“Fine, but that still doesn’t explain why a hit man from the future would need to disguise himself as a carpet cleaner.”
“Because our hit man isn’t from the future. Like me and like Frank Heller, our hit man is a contemporary person who is receiving messages from the future. The problem is, I’m no longer receiving any messages. Which gives our hit man an advantage over me.”
“Assuming he’s not just a carpet cleaner.”
“But that’s our problem,” Chloe said. “We’re in a Siberian Dilemma.”
“What the hell’s a Siberian Dilemma?”
“Martin Cruz Smith wrote about it in Gorky Park,” she said. “If you fall through the ice while walking across Lake Baikal in Siberia, you have two choices. You can stay in the water and drown as your limbs lose their ability to move over the course of the next sixty seconds. Or you can pull yourself out and die immediately, because when the cold air meets your wet body, you will instantly freeze to death.”
“Christ! I hope we’re not that bad off. What do the Siberians usually choose?”
“They climb out and freeze to death, believing that it’s better to die doing something rather than nothing.”
I thought about this for a moment. “So what’s our play here?” I asked, using another clichéd line of movie dialog, delivered most memorably by George Clooney to Brad Pitt in the film Wolfs.
“Look!” Chloe shouted. She pointed up Front Street to where a black van was driving in our direction.
“Shit,” I said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Don’t move until he passes us.”
We sat still for several seconds and watched the vehicle come our way. We were hoping the driver wouldn’t see us through the coffee house window. But the van slowed down as it passed the front of Steamers. We could both see the driver staring directly towards us. Then the van pulled over and parked in the first open space up the block.
“Come on,” Chloe said, “we’ve gotta run.”
We went out onto the wooden old-fashioned sidewalk. She grabbed my hand. “This way,” she said.
“But our car’s in the other direction.”
“We can’t go to the car right now. He may have spotted it in the garage. I know how to get away from him.”
“Vampire Penguin?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said. “We’re going underground.”
During the summer before her senior year of high school, Chloe worked at a shaved-ice shop in Old Sac called Vampire Penguin (don’t ask). As a result, she got to know the area intimately. The city of Sacramento was founded at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in 1849. The area had been drought stricken for a decade or so at that time. The men who built the city had no idea that the area that comprises Old Sacramento is normally below the waters of the Sacramento River. By 1861, however, the drought was long over and the city was regularly being flooded during the rainy season. It was clear that Old Sac had to either be abandoned, or elevated. At that time, levies were built to keep out the floodwaters and every building in Old Sac was raised approximately ten feet, using jacks and pulleys and block-and-tackle devices and a whole lot of horse- and manpower. Nowadays, the ground below Old Sac is riddled with the tunnels and empty spaces that were left behind when virtually the entire old city was lifted up and set on new foundations that rose ten feet above the old surface. On the weekends, the Sacramento Historical Society offered tours of the underground tunnels to curious visitors. During the workweek, the tunnels remained empty. If you knew how to navigate them – and Chloe did – you could travel nearly the entire length of Old Sac underground. I say “nearly” because the tunnel system wasn’t entirely continuous. There were places where it dead ended into some boarded up old basement, and then you were forced to go back up to the surface, cross the street above the obstacle, and then find your way to another old building that had tunnel access. Fortunately, Chloe knew were all the dead ends and access points were. She was able to get us past these blockages fairly quickly, with very minimal street exposure where we might be seen by the carpet-cleaning hit man from the future. For the sake of the tourists, much of Old Sac’s history had been exhumed from the tunnels and was on display behind glass cabinets that lined the wooden boardwalk along which we were traveling from the south end of Front Street to the north. Many of Old Sac’s original buildings had been whorehouses, and the underground display cabinets were full of items employed by the city’s “soiled doves.” These included soda water spritz bottles, which the women employed as douches, as well as various other crude feminine hygiene products. Ordinarily I’d have stopped to soak up some of this fascinating history, but right now that would have been as foolish as walking backwards in a horror movie. So I continued following Chloe down the wooden planks that lead to the north end of Old Sac. At I Street, we finally ran out of tunnels and had to ascend to the street. At that point Chloe quickly led me across the cobblestoned street to the California Railroad Museum at the corner of Front and I Streets. She paid two admission fees and we were allowed to pass into the museum. Tours of the museum are self-guided, so we would be allowed to wander the vast display of old-time railroad equipment pretty much at will. If by some chance the man in the black van should track us here, we would still have a good chance of hiding from him.
“We can hang here for an hour or two,” Chloe said, “and then we can use the tunnels to make our way back to the parking garage where I left the car.”
“Can we go slower next time? I’d like to check out some of those primitive douches.”
“Christ. I’m glad you can enjoy yourself while your wife is being pursued across town by a time-traveling hit man.”
“You told me he wasn’t a time-traveler.”
“Whatever.”
“Besides, hit men are notoriously unfond of witnesses. He’s likely to want me dead too.”
“I probably should have left you with Nora Whitman.”
“At least there’d have been chocolates to eat.”
We made our way slowly through the exhibits, trying to look like two normal tourists who were not being pursued by a time-traveling hit man from the future passing himself off as a carpet cleaner. It wasn’t an easy look for us. The museum is cavernous and filled with ancient railroad cars and engines from the 19th and early 20th centuries, the heyday of the American passenger train. These old cars sit in dioramas designed to look like some picturesque spot in the American West circa 1880-1920. Some of the fake vistas were remarkably lifelike. Pointing to a massive backdrop painted to resemble the Donner Pass, Chloe noted, “It reminds me of a line from Michael Avallone’s The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse.”
“Of course it does,” I said.
Ignoring me, she recited from the book of Avallone: “Her breasts and hips would put a scenic railway to shame.”
“I prefer sexpots to scenic spots,” I said.
“Of course you do. That’s why you married me.”
Like the rest of Old Sac, the Railroad Museum was populated by a few docents in period clothing, to accentuate the sense of having stepped into the past. It had an even larger population of manikins dressed as coolies, railroad porters, Harvey girls, engineers, conductors, hoboes, station masters, commercial travelers, and so on. We toured the inside of nearly every railroad car in the museum’s collection, figuring that we were less visible when we were inside a sleeping car or a baggage car or a dining car than we would be if we were just wandering between exhibits. The downside of this, of course, is that railroad cars are very narrow and have just one entrance and one exit. If the carpet cleaner had brought a partner with him, someone we hadn’t seen hiding in the back of the van, they could trap us in a train car fairly easily by covering both the exit and entrance.
We made our way through the St. Hyacinthe, an unusual car from the Canadian National railway, which had operated as a normal open-section sitting car by day, but at night the porters would come by and convert each seating area into upper and lower sleeping berths. I found myself wanting to read up on the history of each car, but Chloe kept us moving, paying no attention to the railway history all around us, peeking out the windows of each car to see if she could spot a man wearing a hoodie and a backpack. Fortunately, being a self-guided museum, most of the cars were equipped with audio soundtracks that relayed information about the exhibit on a constant loop. As we wandered through a car, we’d hear, “Pullman cars were an American institution for a century. During their heyday in the 1920s, Pullmans carried as many as 39 million passengers a year – nearly one third the population of the United States.”
One exhibit recreated the historic scene of May 10, 1869, the day that the intercontinental railroad that connected Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento was completed and former California Governor and railroad mogul Leland Stanford drove a golden railroad spike into the rails at Promontory, Utah, to commemorate the event. As we walked by, Chloe suddenly froze in her tracks. “Look!” she hissed. Across the vast room we saw a man in a hoodie enter the area and look around. The nearest train car was a good fifty feet away. Fortunately, the Golden Spike diorama was filled with life-sized manikins representing Leland Stanford and his various robber baron buddies, as well as a diverse array of railroad workers and newspapermen. I grabbed hold of a freestanding pickaxe and swung it over my shoulder. Then I stepped into the diorama alongside some other workmen. Chloe removed a straw hat from a Chinese coolie and put it on her own head, pulling it forward so that it would hide her face. She too stepped into the crowd of people at the Golden Spike ceremony. Together we watched as the hoodie man meandered across the room, making his way towards Leland Stanford and company. We couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t spotted us. While we stood there frozen, we could hear a recording that informed us, “Every ten miles of railroad construction required 25,800 ties, 3,520 rails, 55,000 pounds of spikes, 7,040 space bars, and 14,080 bolts, for a combined weight of 4,362,000 pounds of material.”
“Damn,” I whispered to Chloe. “Can you imagine – four million pounds of material in every ten miles?”
“Will you please shut the hell up!” she hissed from under her coolie hat.
Hoodie man stopped about fifteen feet from the diorama and passed his eyes over the entire display. The pickaxe was growing heavy in my hand and I had to struggle to keep my arm from shaking with the effort to keep it in place. Finally, Hoodie seemed to have convinced himself that we were not in the room and moved off to the next room. The Golden Spike room was at the back of the museum. We needed to somehow get past Hoodie and return to the front of the museum so that we could exit the building while he still searched for us.
In the next room we held back while we watched Hoodie search one railroad car after another. Above us in the room was a recreation of the Nevada County California Narrow Gage Railroad, which served Placer and Nevada Counties between 1874 and 1943. A recorded voice informed us that, “Standard railway tracks are placed four feet and eight and a half inches apart. The Nevada Narrow Gage tracks were laid a mere three feet apart. This allowed it to maneuver through the mountainous and heavily wooded areas of northern California.” From the ground we could look up and see the entirety of a recreated narrow gage train, pulling boxcars populated by hoboes, passenger cars filled with travelers, mail cars, and more. The train cars lacked side walls so that museum goers could get a cutaway look at how the narrow-gage cars looked inside.
“We need to get up there,” Chloe whispered, and pointed to the narrow-gage train. “We can run along the train and get ahead of him.”
“Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you just make a run for the parking garage? I can tackle Hoodie and hold him down long enough for you to make your getaway.”
“Not a good idea,” she said.
“Why not?”
She looked at me with pity. “Egg should never dance with stone.”
“Thank you, Charlie Chan. Glad to know you think I’m so fragile.”
“The only way for us to get out of here unseen, is to get up on those elevated train tracks and then hightail it to the other side of the room before Hoodie gets there.”
“But those narrow-gauge cars are lit up like a Broadway show. We’ll be on full display.”
“Not if we climb to the top of the train. It’s nearly invisible because of the glowing lights below it. If we can get to the top of the train we can run across it to the far end of the room and get ahead of our pursuer.”
“You’re nuts!”
Chloe waited until Hoodie disappeared into another train car display about seventy feet ahead of us and then, without waiting for my approval, she climbed up on top of a fully restored example of a Virginia & Truckee Railroad baggage car and from there was able to haul herself up onto the elevated narrow gage tracks that were meant to suggest the famous Bear River Bridge, the highest railway bridge in the state of California. I followed her up even though it seemed like a suicide mission. We arrived on the narrow gage tracks at the back of the train, right behind the caboose. Following Chloe’s lead, I climbed to the top of the caboose and then, like Tom Cruise in a Mission: Impossible film, we ducked down low and crept across the top of an extremely narrow train. When we saw Hoodie exiting the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway dining car no. 1474, we froze in place and waited while he moved on to the next exhibit, a fully restored refrigerated produce-shipping car from the Monterey & Salinas Valley Railroad. Chloe and I had been in the same car twenty minutes earlier. It predated the use of Freon, and the car had been kept cool by huge ice blocks that sat behind wire mesh walls at each end of the car. I found myself wishing that I had one of those ice blocks near me just then. It was very hot near the ceiling of the museum. The air conditioning was all directed downwards because no one but Chloe and I would be crazy enough to be traversing a room at ceiling level. When Hoodie disappeared into the refrigerated car Chloe and I continued advancing towards the engine of the narrow-gage train. It was dark up on top of that train. The roof beneath our feet was painted pitch black. It was narrow and sloped, and I could barely see where to set my next footstep. But Chloe was moving agilely ahead of me. No doubt, in her head, she was reenacting some scene out of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass. Somehow, we managed to get to the engine of the train while Hoodie was still in the refrigerated car. Alas, getting down from the elevated tracks wasn’t going to be easy as climbing up onto them had been. No baggage car exhibit was situated conveniently below the train at this end. Directly in front of the engine was the opening of a faux railroad tunnel into which the train was perpetually about to disappear. The tunnel was cut into a surface resembling a rocky mountainside somewhere in Nevada County, California. Fortunately, the fake mountainside, like most real ones, wasn’t a sheer wall. It sloped sharply towards the ground. It was too steep and bumpy for us to slide down but with luck we should be able to climb down it. We waited until we saw Hoodie exit the refrigerated car and move on to the Gold Coast, a private railway car from the Georgia Northern Railroad. For years it had been owned by writer Lucius Beebe and his life partner, photographer Charles Clegg. For decades they had lived in the car with their St. Bernard Mr. T. Bone Towser, traveling the country and writing illustrated books about train travel. The California Railroad Museum’s curators had gone to impressive lengths to provide information not just about the roughneck white working men who built the railroads and the wealthy white men who owned them, but also about the Chinese laborers who helped to build them and were usually given the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, as well as the women who worked in various capacities to keep the railroads running. The railroads didn’t have an extensive connection to the struggles of gay and lesbian Americans, so the museum curators seemed to have seized upon the colorful story of Beebe and Clegg as their lone acknowledgement of the LGBTQ community’s contribution to railroad history. Fortunately, Beebe and Clegg’s private car was one of the most interesting exhibits in the museum. What’s more its three rooms were fully furnished and provided plenty of hiding places. If Hoodie was searching for us in there, he’d have to look under beds and into armoires and behind sofas and high-backed chairs. That ought to buy us at least a couple of minutes as we climbed down the faux mountain.
Being taller than Chloe I managed to reach the ground first. I stretched my hands up to guide Chloe’s feet down the last few feet of the fauxntain. When we both once again had our feet firmly planted on the floor of the museum, we turned around in order to make a hasty flight towards the next room. But the moment we turned around, we found ourselves faces-to-face with Hoodie, who must not have been as interested in LGBTQ history as we might have hoped. He ignored me entirely. He smiled inscrutably and said…
“Chloe King, I presume?”
I leaned towards Chloe and mumbled, “Ruby, uvarovite, nephrite. I’ll take care of this guy.”
But she just shook her head, seemingly too exhausted to make another escape attempt. I had no choice but to try to brazen it out with Hoodie.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam
“Who the hell are you, and what do you want?” I said to Hoodie, trying to sound more threatening than I felt. When you’ve just descended a fake mountain after pretending to be Tom Cruise on the top of a stationary, undersized railroad train in a family museum, it is difficult to make yourself come across as a tough guy.
“Relax,” Hoodie said, still looking only at Chloe. “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I’m not a hit man from the future. Or from anywhere else, for that matter. I just want to talk.”
“What about?” Chloe asked him.
“About Zac Vargas and Frank Heller,” he said. “My name is Luke Bishop. I’m in communication with the future, just like you used to be.”
“How do you know about that?” Chloe asked.
“How do you think?”
“Your future self told you?”
“I don’t know if it’s my future self or just a voice from the future. It could be a whole committee of people communicating with me through a single voice inside my head. The point is, once they’ve used you to alter the present, you gradually begin to change the future, eventually rendering you unusable as an agent of change. I know it doesn’t seem that way but…”
He let his voice drift off. A family of four was passing within a few feet of us, and he probably didn’t want anyone to overhear what would certainly sound like crazy talk. When the foursome had moved on, he said, “Look, can we go somewhere more private and talk about this?”
We agreed to leave the museum and walk one block west to the Sacramento River Parkway, where we found a secluded bench and sat down. Chloe sat in the middle between me and Bishop.
“As I was saying,” Bishop continued, “it doesn’t seem like it, but everything you heard from your future self was planted in your head at the same time, even though it seemed to you like you remained in conversation with that voice in your head over many years. In truth you were just accessing information that was already there. They couldn’t give you regular updates the way that you might update computer software. This communicating with the past is a sort of one-and-done deal. So, once you altered the future dramatically enough, your knowledge of upcoming events was no longer accurate and couldn’t be of help to them any longer. So they essentially cut off your access to any more visions of the future that had been implanted in your brain all those years ago. Any additional visions would have been inaccurate and simply caused you great distress. You are done being an agent of the future. You can rest easy knowing that you did a good job and just get on with your life.”
“And why should I believe any of this?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t think you really need any convincing,” Bishop said. “You’re feeling rejected and hurt, and that’s understandable. You were in what appeared to be regular contact with the future for years. Now they’ve cut you off entirely. But they wanted me to convey their gratitude to you in a way that you would especially understand.” He reached down to his backpack, which was lying on the ground near his feet. He unzipped a compartment and reached into it. I was worried he might be grabbing a weapon, but he pulled out what looked more like a large coin, a silver dollar or something roughly that size. He handed the coin to Chloe. On it, within a circular wreath of laurel leaves, was inscribed:
AWARDED TO
CHLOE KING
FOR A VALOROUS DEED
I recognized the reference right away. In John Wyndham’s novel Chocky, a twelve-year-old boy named Matthew Gore saves his sister from drowning and is given a nearly identical medal from the Royal Swimming Society.
“This is nice,” said Chloe. “But if they knew me – and popular fiction – better, they’d know that Matthew Gore was never happy with the medal, because he knew that it was Chocky, acting through him, who had saved the sister. Eventually, to appease poor Matthew, his father takes the medal to a jeweler’s and has the inscription altered to read: AWARDED TO CHOCKY FOR A VALOROUS DEED. Only then does Matthew learn to cherish the medal. Our friends in the future should have put Zac’s name on this medal.”
“Turn it over,” Bishop told her.
She flipped it over in her hand and looked down at it. I couldn’t see what she was reading, but I saw a tear roll down her cheek. Then she held the medal where I could read it. The inscription read: AWARDED TO ZAC VARGAS FOR A VALOROUS DEED.
Chloe seemed too emotional too speak, so I did it for her. “And where do you fit into all of this?” I asked Bishop.
“They began preparing me to take over for Chloe long ago,” he said. “They knew that once Zac got invited to appear at a Grant Fuller rally in San Francisco, Chloe’s knowledge of the future would no longer be accurate. At that point it would be up to me to take over for her. I’ve known for years that a blogger named Chloe King and a musician named Zac Vargas would combine their talents to help improve Grant Fuller’s chances of being re-elected. And I knew that Zac was going to be invited to the Union Square event.”
“And did you know that he was going to get murdered?” Chloe asked, no longer weepy but sounding somewhat angry.
“I’m afraid it’s much worse than that,” Bishop told her. “I’m the one who killed him.”
“What are you talking about?” Chloe growled.
“Our friends in the future knew that Zac would be among the earliest casualties of World War B. As far as they were concerned, he was already dead. But they decided that, rather than being one of millions of forgotten victims of a worldwide catastrophe, they would alter Zac’s fate, so that he would be killed in such a way that his name would live on, and that he would be considered a hero by many.”
“But why?” Chloe asked.
“To boost Grant Fuller’s re-election prospects. That might seem bloodless and cruel to you and me, sitting here comfortably in a world in which the U.S. is not at war with anyone. But to our friends in the future, living in a post-apocalyptic dystopia out of some Hollywood horror film, the sacrifice of one man’s life in order to save tens of millions seemed worth making.”
“But how did you go about killing Zac?” I asked. “I thought it was Frank Heller who killed him.”
“Our friends in the future chose me as a vessel for the same reason they chose you, Chloe. Because I wasn’t just a science-fiction fan, I was the kind of nut who dresses up as a Klingon and goes to Star Trek conventions. I’m a pop-fiction junkie like you, but I am primarily a sci-fi guy. And our friends wisely understood that people like you and me would be much more receptive to what they had to say than any politician or scientist or academic would be. We’ve spent much of our lives consuming stories about time travel and future wars and post-apocalyptic dystopian societies. Deep down inside we’ve always been preparing for something like this to happen to us.”
“But where does Frank Heller fit into all of this?” Chloe asked.
“He was one of us, Chloe. No, he wasn’t in communication with our future friends, but they put me in touch with him. He operated an antiques business because he was obsessed with the past, spent much of his life fantasizing about traveling back to it. He and I used to talk about it a lot. I warned him once, ‘Whenever you find yourself on Memory Lane, sprint to the end of it. The more time you spend reminiscing, the less you’ll have to reminisce about in the future.’ But he couldn’t be persuaded. He used to jokingly tell me, ‘I like living in the past. The rents are much cheaper there.’ And he was absolutely besotted with time-travel stories, particularly the stories of Jack Finney: Time and Again, From Time to Time, About Time, Marion’s Wall, The Woodrow Wilson Dime. They suspected he’d be particularly helpful to me. He’d served as a sniper in the Marines and had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He knew how to hit a target from a long ways off.”
“And you just went up to him and said, ‘I’m a visitor from the future and I need you to kill someone for me.’?”
“No,” said Bishop, “of course not. He wasn’t an idiot. He was an American patriot. He loved his country. It took me a while to cultivate his trust. But I was able to make predictions about the future that came true with perfect accuracy time and time again, as Jack Finney might have put it. Plus I knew things about him. I knew that he was dying of cancer, something he hadn’t told another living soul. Eventually, he learned to trust me and I explained what I would need him to do and why. This all started several years ago. I told him that he needed to keep a daily journal, and to fill it with delusional rants against Grant Fuller that grow more and more deranged with time. He was unmarried and lived alone in a house filled with popular fiction. Over time, we turned his house into the platonic ideal of a crazed killer’s abode. We went through his books and heavily underlined all sorts of seemingly random passages. He filled his notebook with madness. He bought a dozen different guns, just to make it look like he planned to go on a killing spree. Long before anyone outside of Sacramento had ever heard of Zac Vargas, I told Heller that a kid by that name would be joining President Fuller onstage at a campaign rally at Union Square. I gave him the exact time and date, so that he could stake out a sniping position. For the longest time, I think both Frank and I were hoping that no one named Zac Vargas would ever emerge on the national scene. But, alas, it finally happened a few weeks ago. And that made it clear to both Frank and me that that voice in my head knew what it was talking about. He called me up and left a final message for me: Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam. That was our secret signal.”
“What the hell does it mean?” I asked.
“It’s Klingon,” Chloe told me. “It means, Today is a good day to die.” As you’ve probably figured out, Chloe loves conlangs, and she is fairly fluent in things such as Klingon, Victorian gemstonespeak, Elvish, Dothraki, Pig Latin, Na’vi, Ubbi Dubbi, and Parseltongue
“Exactly,” said Bishop, impressed. “And so Frank went about preparing not just for Zac’s death but for his own. He knew that the Secret Service would shoot him dead seconds after he shot Zac dead. He knew that he’d go down in history as a deranged murderer. But he loved his country enough to make that sacrifice. If he hadn’t been taken out by a Secret Service sniper, he would have died about eight months later in a hospital bed, wasting away to nothing. His actions were heroic but nobody other than us three know it. Perhaps, in the future, there are statues to him somewhere, but I kind of doubt it.”
“So you’re saying that it was never Frank Heller’s intention to kill Grant Fuller?” I asked. “That Zac was his true target all along?”
“I’m afraid so,” Bishop said.
“But why?”
“We knew that if we staged what looked like an attempt on Fuller’s life, it would generate sympathy for Fuller in great swaths of the electorate. It would make him look like a beleaguered leader whose enemies would stop at nothing to destroy him.”
Chloe and I were quiet for a moment, digesting all of this. Finally I asked, “But why have your future friends chosen to communicate with a couple of random northern California pop fiction fans? Why not communicate directly with Earl Brill, and tell him it is vitally important that he sabotage his own presidential campaign in order to help reelect Grant Fuller?”
“For one thing,” Bishop said, “the technology for communicating with the past was developed in Davis, California. And it was developed in a blighted world. The technology has the ability to traverse great distances in time but not in space. And America’s infrastructure in the future is completely destroyed, like something out of Earth Abides or A Canticle for Leibowitz. To communicate directly with Earl Brill, they’d have had to somehow move the technology close to either Washington, D.C. or Brill’s home in Missouri, neither of which would have been feasible. All they could do was seek out people who lived near Davis and who were predisposed to be extremely receptive to the kind of information our future friends wanted to impart. No doubt there are others who will take over for me soon, when my own usefulness is overtaken by events. It may seem like they made a couple of odd choices in me and Chloe, but those choices seem to be working out. Fuller is suddenly riding high in the polls.”
“And the only person who loses out is Zac Vargas,” Chloe said.
“A lot of other people are losing out too,” Bishop retorted. “Frank Heller for one. The 24 million residents of Taiwan for another. Not to mention the welfare recipients and senior citizens who might be hurt by Grant Fuller’s mad determination to cut taxes on the wealthy in a second term. Those are terrible losses, but they are nothing compared to the post-apocalyptic hellscape that would sweep across the globe if Earl Brill were to win the election. It’s a Machiavellian bargain, but in this case, at least, it seems as if the end really does justify the means.”
That quieted Chloe for a bit.
“If what you are saying is true,” I said, “then you aren’t ultimately responsible for Zac’s death. It was your friends in the future.”
“Perhaps,” said Bishop. “But it was a perfect murder, ordered thirty-plus years after it was carried out. And by killing Zac, we’ve altered the future in such a way that no one should ever need to order his murder. It will look like a historical tragedy that originated in the sick mind of Frank Heller. Not even the people who ordered it will know they ordered it. They are the first murderers to completely escape Locard’s Exchange Principle.”
“To escape what?” I asked.
Bishop turned to Chloe with a look of disbelief. “He doesn’t speak Klingon and he’s never heard of Locard’s Exchange Principal? Has he never read a pop-fiction novel in his life? Why did you marry him? Does he know about Moscow Rules or the Prime Directive?”
She smiled for the first time in what seemed like days. “He’s read his share, but he’s not a glutton for pop fiction like you and me.”
As if explaining fractions to a child, Bishop told me, “Locard’s Exchange Principle – or LEP – is the first law of forensic science, and has been referred to in hundreds of crime novels and TV shows over the years. It states that, ‘Whenever a criminal and his victim cross paths, they will leave some residue upon each other: fibers, hair, soil, paint, pollen, saliva – particles that act as silent witnesses against the criminal.’ The long-running British crime drama Silent Witness takes its name from the principle. But the people who ordered Zac’s killing don’t have to worry about LEP. When Zac died, he erased the need for anyone to order his killing in the future. Those people will never meet either Zac or Frank, so they have escaped the consequences of Locard’s first law of forensic science. I, on the other hand, did meet Frank. He and I both tried to cover my tracks as well as we could. But I am stuck here in the present, which means that I’m still subject to the consequences of the Exchange Principle. Some microscopic piece of evidence could someday surface and tie me to Zac’s murder.”
I let this sink in for a moment and then I asked, “So what happens now?”
Bishop shook his head. “Our future friends just wanted me to let Chloe know that they appreciate all she did for them. Whether or not everything works out for the best I can’t say. As Doris Day used to sing, ‘the future’s not ours to see.’ You won’t hear from me again. Once I lose touch with the future, I’m going to try to forget my whole role in all of this. I got a friend killed just like Chloe did. I don’t want to dwell on it. You shouldn’t either.”
Then he grabbed his backpack, rose to his feet and walked away down the river path. Eventually he crossed Front Street and climbed into his black van. As he drove away, I heard Chloe whisper: “Lubukube Bubishubop, wube hubardly knubew yube.”
We never saw him again.
From California and the Fiction of the Apocalypse, a survey by Chloe King
Paradoxically, many Calipocalypse and Caldystopia tales end hopefully. Whereas writers rarely seem to have any compunctions about destroying decaying older metropolises such as London (John Christopher’s The Death of Grass), Manhattan (Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird), or Tokyo (Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary), many of them seem to flinch at the idea of completely destroying California. The Golden State has been a promised land to people the whole world over since at least the 1849 Gold Rush, and the idea of a world without some shining beacon of hope in the darkness is apparently too much even for authors of apocalypse novels. In her 1989 novel The City, Not Long After, author Pat Murphy depicts postapocalypse San Francisco as…an artists’ colony. In his 1984 novel The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts postapocalypse Southern California as…a pastoral collection of small farming and fishing villages. In Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (1996) and Eden Lepucki’s California (2014), postapocalypse California has largely reverted to a sort of prelapsarian wilderness area, something akin to what the first European settlers to the state found when they arrived there. It isn’t exactly paradise but, if you have a taste for frontier living, you just might enjoy it. At least there is no more rush-hour traffic or smog to deal with. And even in Earth Abides, the reader is left with a sense of a new paradise growing up from the ashes of the older one. In that novel, protagonist Isherwood Williams sees post-apocalypse California as a dystopia, but it is not clear that author George R. Stewart did. And it is possible that younger Americans who read Earth Abides today might even view it as a utopian novel. Strapped as they are with debt and dead-end jobs, many young adults in America today can barely afford to pay rent on a small apartment, much less come up with the money to purchase a home. But in Earth Abides, money no longer matters and luxurious, untenanted houses are there for the taking. Elk and deer and other sources of meat roam freely through the streets, and growing your own food is fairly easy with so much open land available for cultivation. Long before the oxymoronic term “doomer optimist” existed, Stewart seems to have embraced it. So, too, did Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jean Hegland, and other authors of Calipocalypse novels. With its endless emphasis on rebooting, reinventing, remaking, and reimagining tired old intellectual properties, Hollywood has always engaged in a form of doomer optimism, creating something new from the ashes of something old. And the trend isn’t limited only to Hollywood or Southern California. Silicon Valley, the Bay Area music scene, Northern California-based New Age therapy movements such as est and the Human Potential Movement and The Esalen Institute – The state has often attracted people who want to reinvent everything from religion to technology, and from psychotherapy to pop music. Creative destruction has long been a focus of California’s dreamers and schemers. And that may be why novels that begin with the destruction of California, often end with at least the promise of some sort of rebirth. Hegland’s Into the Forest, for example, ends with both a literal birth (a son born to one of the two main characters) and a symbolic one (a Christmas nativity celebration), both of which seem to portend a brighter tomorrow. Thomas Pynchon’s Calipocalypse-adjacent 1990 novel, Vineland, in which a portion of California has seceded from the U.S. and declared itself the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, was dubbed by many critics the most hopeful of all Pynchon’s books (admittedly, a low bar to clear). Brian Aldiss once dubbed John Wyndham’s science fiction novels “cozy catastrophes,” because even though they deal with potentially apocalyptic events, everything generally tends to work out okay for the protagonists. Aldiss didn’t intend the sobriquet as a compliment. One can only assume that Aldiss was just as dismissive of Calipocalypse novels, most of which seem to end on an upbeat note.
Only Richard Matheson, among major Calipocalypse authors, seems to have had the courage to completely decimate the Golden State in his classic novel I Am Legend. By the end of that book, humanity is dead and has been replaced by zombie-like vampires (or, perhaps, vampire-like zombies), leaving the reader with little desire to actually step into the novel and tough it out in this brave new world. This isn’t a return to California’s pioneer days or the rebirth of some prelapsarian Eden. It is a descent into hell.
But Matheson was an outlier. And I Am Legend, at about 25,000 words, is one of the shortest novels in the entire canon of Calipocalypse literature. Apparently even the tough-minded Richard Matheson couldn’t stand to watch California burn for more than a short while. In the post-World War II era, fiction writers have destroyed large parts of California with floods, fires, freezes, plagues, pandemics, nuclear wars, alien invasions, deadly comets, earthquakes, zombies, vampires, and much more. But almost always, the Golden State generally manages to retain at least a little bit of its allure through all the wrack and ruin. Zombies, plagues, and wars may come and go, but California, in most cases, abides.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Tag Lick
September rolled around. On the ninth day of the month, for her birthday, I gave Chloe a bracelet that featured a diamond, a uvarovite, a nephrite, and an emerald. (I always choose bracelets that celebrate books with short titles – M*A*S*H, Jaws, Shane, etc; I can’t afford a piece of jewelry that spells out On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) On the twenty-second of the month, the last day of summer, the City of Sacramento erected a small granite memorial to Zac Vargas in Freemont Park, where he had frequently gone to play his guitar and write his songs. The memorial included his name, an engraved image of an acoustic guitar, the two dates that bracketed his all-too-brief life, and the words, “Everyone deserves a chance to shine.” The words, which had been chosen by his family members, were from one of his song lyrics:
I may not have the genius that you do
Your magic is more powerful than mine,
But now and then give me a spotlight too,
Cuz everyone deserves a chance to shine.
Chloe and I went to the park to attend the dedication ceremony. We got dressed up for it. Chloe even wore her new bracelet. But it turned out to be a rather subdued affair, probably because Zac was now forever associated in the public imagination with Grant Fuller and, in a liberal town like Sacramento, that wasn’t likely to endear him to many people. Still, it was nice to meet his parents and his two sisters and know that he was a beloved member of a close-knit family.
“I guess that was the end,” Chloe said, as we walked home from the park. “Story now completely extracted like aching tooth.” But this Charlie Chanism was a bit premature. One last minor character was about to make an appearance in our tale.
The presidential race remained frighteningly close all the way into late October. Chloe was no longer getting news scoops from the future, so her blog had, once again, become nothing more than a pop fiction blog. She began hemorrhaging subscribers. Our monthly income dropped dramatically, but neither of us really cared. In fact, we were kind of relieved. We had never been very comfortable with the idea of owing the bulk of our income to a bunch of Grant Fuller superfans. Zealots can always turn on you in an instant.
With each passing day, the curious case of the voice from the future began to seem less and less real to me. More and more I found myself suspecting that it might have all have been an elaborate hoax that Chloe had staged in order to turn her life, if only for a few months, into the stuff of pop fiction. Perhaps Luke Bishop was just another actor hired by Chloe to play a role in her fabulous deception. I know for sure she would never have intentionally put Zac into any kind of harm. But maybe when he got killed, she found a way of weaving his death at the hands of Frank Heller into her bizarre storyline.
Another possibility is that Chloe, thanks to her complete immersion in popular culture, suffers from a serious inability to differentiate truth from fiction, fact from fantasy. In this scenario, the curious case of the voice from the future was a complete fiction, but it wasn’t a practical joke; it was something that Chloe believed in whole-heartedly and probably always would.
A final possibility is that Chloe did all that crazy stuff not because she was trying to save the world, but because she has become a hardcore political conservative and actually believes in Grant Fuller’s worldview entirely. I don’t know what it says about me that I find this scenario the most terrifying of the three.
A few days before the presidential election, I was sitting out on our front porch and reading a biography of Earl Scruggs when an attractive young woman came strolling along the sidewalk humming a vaguely familiar tune. When she reached our house, she turned up the walkway to the porch. She saw me sitting on my wooden porch swing and flashed a smile at me. Then she withdrew a brochure from a shoulder bag she was toting.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Megan O’Malley and I’m with SHAG, the Sacramento Homeless Advocacy Group.”
“Okay,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“I know,” she said, “we could use a better acronym. But I wonder if I could leave you a brochure about City Measure M, a local ballot measure that will be decided in the upcoming election. If passed, it will authorize the city to raise the sales tax by a mere eighth of a cent per dollar. You’d have to spend eight dollars at the cash register before paying even a penny in additional sales tax. And the money is going to be used to finance additional facilities for housing the homeless.”
The silliness of the acronym SHAG had distracted me temporarily from the name the young woman had given. “Could you tell me your name again?” I asked her.
“Megan O’Malley,” she said.
I reached out and took one of her brochures. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll take your brochure and I’ll promise to vote for Measure M, but I can’t promise that my wife will support it. She seems to be becoming more conservative lately.”
She gave me a comic little pout. “Well, that’s a shame. I appreciate your support, but maybe you should keep quiet about it. I’d hate to be the cause of a marriage breaking up.”
I laughed. “Especially considering that you already broke up her first marriage.”
Suddenly Megan looked confused and uncomfortable. She glanced down at my Earl Scruggs book and must have thought she was dealing with some crazy hillbilly. “Well, I’ve got to be on my way,” she said. “You have a good day.”
“Same to you, Megan O’Malley,” I said.
She walked away then and continued her stroll down the sidewalk, humming as she went. Only when she was long gone, did it occur to me that the tune she had been humming was “Hey, Hey, Yesterday.”