Rant, Page 21

  Tina Something ( Party Crasher): Forget it. Nobody’s going to tell you what’s the real goal of Party Crashing. Go ahead, keep telling yourself we’re all just goofing around. A bunch of lamebrains who get our jollies by ramming each other with cars.

  Besides, most of these idiots are operating based on rumors. Stories. Nobody’s sure how it really works. Nobody’s going to tell you what’s really going on.

  But a few of us are going to become gods.

  Neddy Nelson: All I’m saying is: What if it’s not Rant’s fault he’s the result of somebody’s longtime, sick-assed plan?

  Didn’t Rant use to say, “The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday”?

  You got all that?

  35–A Flashback

  Chester Casey ( Farmer): Here comes a load of bullpucky.

  The night before my boy, Buster, goes and kills himself, some old coot tells him this long, impossible yarn. This rich old coot named Simms says how, when he was Buster’s age and first moved to the city, he was in a car wreck. This Green Taylor Simms is a young man just driving along, and a car coming in the opposite direction, it crossed the centerline without slowing down a hair, and slammed into the man’s car.

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): The way Rant told me the story, Simms wakes up in a hospital bed, asking, “How long have I been here?” And the nurse tells him, “Four days…”

  Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): At the hospital, this young guy asked, “What happened to my car?”

  And the doctors said, “What car?” The police found him unconscious in the street. He was bruised, with a broken collarbone and breastbone.

  The guy asked, “Where’s my clothes?”

  And the doctors said, “What clothes?” The police had found him naked.

  Chester Casey: Everybody knows this is crazy talk, but Buster didn’t know that. Buddy must’ve believed the old man.

  Echo Lawrence: All those years ago, the police asked the guy his name and how to contact his family, and this guy told them. The next day, they came back to his hospital bed and told the guy that those people, his family, they didn’t exist.

  Shot Dunyun: The cops asked for his name and Citizen ID and Social Security numbers. And a day later, they told the man that he didn’t exist.

  Echo Lawrence: In the hospital, the doctors took one look at the scars on the guy’s arms, the punctures and puckers in his skin, and they asked, “What drugs were you doing?”

  They asked, “Were you aware that you’re infected with rabies?”

  Jarrell Moore ( Private Investigator): The injuries that Simms described to Rant Casey—the bruises across the iliac crest of the man’s hips, the cracked sternum, and the broken clavicle—these are all consistent with injuries inflicted by lap and shoulder belts during a high-speed head-on collision.

  Shot Dunyun: So, when Green Taylor Simms was twenty-three years old, he sneaks out of that hospital. As soon as they mention a move to the psych ward, he bails before they can put him behind a locked door. Simms steals some clothes and shoes, and bails. And outside, in just the four days he’s lost, the city isn’t divided into day and night. Not anymore. Nobody is ported on the back of their neck. People are reading: Books. Magazines. Newspapers. Through windows, he can see people watching television. From radios and stereos—music.

  Simms hitches a ride to the only place that seems safe. He goes back home to his family’s house, in Middleton. Yeah, the same hometown as Rant.

  Chester Casey: Breaks your heart, the load of loony insane lunacy that old Simms coot unloaded on my boy.

  Shot Dunyun: In the few years since Simms had moved to the city, somebody had cut down the four locust trees that each stood at a corner of his family’s yard. Planted there were four spindly locust saplings, not hand-high. On the house, Simms told Rant, somebody had replaced the buckled, blistered siding with straight new boards painted so clean white they looked blue. The paint, so fresh you could still smell it. His key didn’t work in the lock, and when he knocked, a girl answered the door.

  Chester Casey: Her name was Hattie, and she was pretty the way folks you love are pretty in old snapshots. When they’re still young and excited about life. Before time and work and you have destroyed their youth. Seventy years back, Hattie was thirteen years old and just home from school in that empty house, waiting for her folks to come back from work in a few hours.

  She must’ve seen something pretty in this Simms, because she took him inside and almost straight to bed. Straight enough.

  Echo Lawrence: Of course, this is the man’s version. He didn’t rape anybody. He didn’t guess who she really was until, laying there, waiting for dusk and her folks, Hattie said, “The only way they’ll let you stay is if I get knocked up…” And they had sex again.

  Midway through that second time, Hattie said she hoped it would be a girl baby. So she could call it Esther. And this strange young man came to orgasm, seeing the clock and calendar on her dresser. He asked her, “Is that thing right?”

  Hattie rolled her head on the pillow, looking over, and said, “Give or take a minute.”

  And he said, “No.” He said, “I mean the calendar…”

  Chester Casey: This old man talking nonsense to my boy, he said he knowed the moment that baby was conceived—felt a surge of energy, smarts, balls, and craziness break over him. Sure as rain or sunshine. “Better,” he said, “than any critter bite, poison, or just-plain teeth pain.”

  He said, since he didn’t stick around and meet her folks, stay like a stray dog she wanted to keep, that Hattie gal must’ve told her folks he jumped her.

  Echo Lawrence: The way Simms told it to Rant, when he kissed this Hattie person, Simms tasted the meatloaf with onions and sausage that she’d eaten for lunch in the school cafeteria. Her dinner the night before, of fried calves’ liver. Her dinner three nights before, of chicken-fried hanger steak with creamed pearl onions and orange gelatin salad. The moment their future child was conceived, the man’s eyesight and hearing, his senses of smell and touch and taste just—exploded.

  Shot Dunyun: Driving, just trawling around, Rant told me that Green Taylor Simms had somehow fallen into the past some sixty years. After riding in the backseat of his own Great-grandmother Hattie Shelby, Simms says he felt great. Nights, he only needed two hours of sleep. Like some kind of Superman.

  Tina Something ( Party Crasher ): It’s only one of the secret goals in Party Crashing. Most people call it a Flashback. Others called it Reverse Pioneering. Breeding yourself, the way Simms had, we call it Stoking.

  Echo Lawrence: Pay attention. That supposed twenty-three-year-old refugee stuck in the past, he desperately wishes he’d studied more of recent history. At least memorized some winning lottery numbers. He washes dishes to save a little capital. He works every waking minute, asking strangers, “Has Microsoft gone public yet?”

  These people, they would reply, “What’s a Micro…?”

  “Microsoft,” he’d say.

  But people would only shake their heads and shrug.

  Shot Dunyun: He asked someone, “Has boosted-peak technology been invented yet?” When they shrugged, it didn’t matter. He really, really wished he’d paid more attention during math and science class.

  Every few years, he returns to spy on his daughter, Esther, his future grandmother. And because he can’t invent anything, he says he seduced her, meeting her in secret, giving her money, he tells her his dream for a future dynasty, about his accidental fall backward through time. The car accident.

  Echo Lawrence: Whether she believed him or not, if he raped her or not, that girl had a child she named Irene, and the man, now calling himself Green Taylor Simms, disappeared for another thirteen years.

  Jarrell Moore: According to the elderly man in question, every generation, each of the thirteen-year-old virgins was willing, even excited, to participate in his project. His experiment.

  Echo Lawrence: With every sperm that met an egg, Simms claim
s he felt stronger. He was hoarding more gold, making a fortune, and stashing it for his future self.

  Shot Dunyun: Totally, balls-out crazy.

  Jarrell Moore: Geriatric dementia, to say the least.

  Shot Dunyun: The moment of every conception got him high. It jacked him up, all his chromosomes or whatall, changed in that instant. Rearranged. New and improved. And, same as any addiction, it was all this guy knew to do, so he did it, over and over and over.

  He just kept fucking with the past. Filling the future with a new himself.

  Chester Casey: After telling my boy his crazy story, this old nutcase, he asked Buster to roll up his shirtsleeves. The old miser pointed at the shadow bites, the dirt tattooed by teeth into Buster’s hands and arms, and he said, “Badger…coyote…pit viper…” Getting every scar exactly right.

  Echo Lawrence: Supposedly, Green Taylor Simms asked Rant to go back in time, to crash in a car accident. People were living longer now. Rant could go back a hundred years. Seed more generations of himself. Rant could memorize lottery numbers and invention plans over time, building an even larger fortune.

  Jarrell Moore: Along the way, diddling thirteen-year-old girls.

  Shot Dunyun: And Simms promised some way Rant could live forever. Become immortal.

  Echo Lawrence: Plus, possibly to hide his tracks, or maybe because he’s inbred, hybrid crazy, Simms has been sneaking back to murder those Middleton girls in their old age, using poison spiders, bubonic fleas, and killer bees…

  Shot Dunyun: Rant tells this crazy old Simms, “Memorize? You don’t figure what rabies does to a brain…”

  Echo Lawrence: And Green Taylor Simms says, “I know exactly what you’re capable of doing.” He tells Rant, “I am you…”

  Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Nobody wants to go there, but…wasn’t the Virgin Mary, wasn’t she God’s child? And back in Biblical times, wasn’t she, like, thirteen years old?

  Shot Dunyun: Sixty years ago, this other Rant Casey got bumped back in time and had to wait his way back to the present, along the way making a few changes. Stoking.

  Neddy Nelson: Besides, what about the creepy Old Testament stuff about Lot’s two daughters getting their dad drunk and then…“preserving his seed”?

  Chester Casey: Close as I can figure, that wild story is how come Buddy drove his car off that bridge. All that crazy coot’s dreams, my boy was supposed to fulfill them. But I’d wager that’s not exactly what my Buddy done.

  36–Hit Men II

  Tina Something ( Party Crasher): On my last date with Wax, and I mean our final gaddamn date, the two of us were cruising a Honeymoon Night in a hot, and I mean stolen, gaddamn Maserati GranSport, and Wax sees this mess of emergency-vehicle lights down along the train yards off Wentworth Avenue, so he goes to cruise by for a peek.

  All’s left is smoking metal. Even the middle part of the train looks torched, and the fire guys are wrestling to haul the Jaws of Life over to the biggest balled-up chunk of a Lincoln Town Car. All down this side of the tracks, the smoke blows wedding streamers and junk. A white lace veil soggy with blood. A red rosebud boutonniere.

  Allan Blayne ( Firefighter): The minute I opened my yap, I knew what I said sounded stupid. What I said to the girl. This job, the worst accidents, I go into automatic pilot.

  The situation was a two-car scenario: Vehicle Number One is parked at a railroad crossing, waiting for a freight train to pass. According to witnesses at the scene, Vehicle Number Two rammed the parked vehicle and allegedly forced it against the side of the passing train. Vehicle Two then continued to travel forward in a straight line, colliding with the train. Both automobiles underrode the train’s wheels and were crushed and dragged a distance of approximately four hundred feet.

  Tina Something: I know all the EMTs, ’cause of working for Graphic Traffic, and when Wax stops to rubberneck, I yell out to this guy I know with an emergency-response service. I ask him what’s up, and this EMT says I wouldn’t believe it if he told me. Some chick’s still alive inside the wreck, all her clothes burned off but not a scratch on her. Shaking his head, this EMT says, “Not even a long fingernail busted.”

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): The chief argument against the possibility of time travel is what theorists refer to as the “Grandfather Paradox”; this is the idea that if one could travel backward in time one could kill one’s own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born—and thus could never have lived to travel back and commit the murder.

  In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it’s stunning how little imagination most people display.

  Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): You want I should risk telling you about Historians? You know what happens when a fellow spreads those rumors?

  What? You can’t think up a faster way to get us both killed?

  Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): Besides Reverse Pioneering, becoming a Historian is the other secret guilty dream of every Party Crasher.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: One theory of time travel resolves the Grandfather Paradox by speculating that, at the moment one changes history, that change splinters the single flow of reality into parallel branches. For example, after you’ve killed your ancestor, reality would fork into two parallel paths: one reality in which you continued to be born and your ancestor did not die, and one branch in which your ancestor died and you would never be conceived. Each revision one made in the past, the subsequent new reality it created, theorists refer to as a “bifurcation.”

  Neddy Nelson: Don’t you think the biggest, richest fuckers in the world aren’t Historians? And you really think they want the rest of us to know that? These rich fucks? Don’t you think they can’t fake their dying every six decades or so, then transfer their money and property to their new identity?

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Within Eastern or Asian spirituality exists the concept that only an individual’s ego ties him to the temporal world, wherein we experience physical reality and time. Within this concept, enlightened beings recognize this self-imposed limitation and attachment to the immediate world, and can choose to free their consciousness and travel to any place or period of history. With apologies to Mr. H. G. Wells, one requires no time machine. Anyone can relocate throughout history or space simply by relaxing his grip on his current reality through meditation and spiritual growth.

  Neddy Nelson: You think anybody smart is going to tell about Historians? As much as I’ve already said, what do you think that says about my smarts?

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: A third possibility does exist, although it’s never been widely discussed. Aside from bifurcation and time travel via a freed consciousness, this third option also resolves the Grandfather Paradox and places the traveler in Liminal Time, suspended outside of the linear movement of time which human beings experience. Simply stated, Liminal Time has no beginning and no end. Nothing is subject to the natural processes of decay and replacement. In Liminal Time, nothing is born and nothing dies.

  Quite understandably, only deities ever existed in this immortality.

  Until now.

  Allan Blayne: Both Vehicles One and Two burst into flame, igniting the cargo of adjacent railroad cars as well as the creosote-treated ties of the track bed. Witnesses place the time of the incident at 11:35 p.m., and four engine crews responded initially. It took one additional crew to bring the event under control, but the wreckage was sufficiently cool for investigators to recover the bodies by 4:15 a.m.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Throughout all mythology, the gods have created themselves as mortals by bearing children by mortal women. The deity simply emerges from the infinity of Liminal Time and manifests himself in the form of an angel or a swan or beast, and completes the seduction or announcement that will result in a mortal offspring. The divine made flesh. The infinite made finite.

  It’s when you cr
oss this mythology with the Grandfather Paradox that the reverse occurs and mortal flesh might be made divine.

  Allan Blayne: Over the course of the search, our unit recovered the charred remains of two adult males and two adult females who witnesses report being in the first, parked vehicle at the moment of impact. In the process of searching the remains of the second automobile, this crewman heard what I took to be sobbing from the collapsed, forward portion of the passenger cell. Using a hydraulic chisel to relieve the buckled, tightly folded structures of the passenger compartment, further investigation revealed a single survivor, an adult female, apparently the driver of the second vehicle. The sound originally believed to be sobbing could now be heard to be laughter, most possibly hysteria-related.

  From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: If a deity can make himself flesh by conceiving a life with a mortal, perhaps a mortal can achieve immortality if he’s able to travel back in time and destroy one or both of his parents. In this response to the Grandfather Paradox, the time traveler eliminates his physical origins, thus transforming himself into a being without physical beginning and therefore without end.