McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [107]
Between visits to my multiple realities, Chuck yanked me back to the lab on his techno-leash and recorded my body temperature, blood pressure, and pulse rate. He made a DNA scraping for later analysis. He withdrew blood, checked my hearing, vision, reflexes, and alertness. Everything tested normal. We agreed that I could remain in the bucket for longer periods, as long as there were no physical changes.
While Chuck ran his medical tests, I revised the story based on what I’d learned. Each reality offered a different beginning, but the rewriting was so total that I could never quite complete the story. After several excursions into the bucket, it became clear that none of the parallel realities included finishing the story. It was perpetually snared in the process of revision.
Chuck speculated that I had entered a Möbius time loop that brought me full circle no matter what my embarking point, like the intercoastal waterways that always led small craft to the sea. Finally I gave up on the story and concentrated on comprehending the full scope of my life in each reality string. With practice, I learned to remember more. I directed my consciousness closer and closer to my sleeping form in the apartment, finally summoning the ability to enter my own head and instantly know every facet of my life, both past and future.
Chuck was supremely interested in this, theorizing that I had learned to straddle time. Upon each return I rapidly transcribed a synopsis of that specific reality into a lab book. They are as follows:
Owing to chronic joint pain as a result of time travel, I visit a Reiki master, which leads to a macrobiotic diet, yoga classes, meditation, and a pilgrimage to Tibet, where I write a travel book that gets banned in China.
My father and Harlan Ellison coedit an anthology of short stories called More Dangerous Visions and ask me to write the preface detailing their feud and subsequent peace, a task I am unable to complete.
I remarry and father twin daughters who die in a car wreck, prompting me to change my name, move to Las Vegas, and work as a blackjack dealer, marry a former prostitute, and open a used bookstore in Lake Tahoe.
I publish an article about my experiences traveling in time, become the laughingstock of both science and literature, and drink myself into a halfway house, where I am stabbed three times by a schizophrenic woman.
My wife and I reconcile and move to the East Coast for a tenure-track job with a high salary at a prestigious university that offers the children of its professors free tuition at a variety of top-notch colleges.
I publish a short story about time travel, expand the story to a novel that is made into a successful film, which leads to marrying Jodie Foster, with whom I only speak French around the house, and hobnobbing with Bob Dylan, Jim Jarmusch, and Julian Schnabel.
I commit suicide in despair over my failed marriage, the rejection of my latest book, and an inability to find a teaching job.
I write a memoir of my childhood that details the bizarre and sad family dynamics, and though it is critically panned as being needlessly narcissistic, the book goes on to become a best-seller.
I receive the Pulitzer prize for a novel about model railroads and o fer support to my fellow writer Michael Chabon, who is highly frustrated by the progress of his novel dealing loosely with comic books.
I return to school for a doctorate in physics and claim all Professor Charles Andrews’s findings as my own, which leads to an endowed chair at Harvard for me.
I remain in Iowa for the next thirty years, working as an adjunct teacher, publish a third collection of stories, a third memoir, and several novels, get short-listed for major prizes, and enter my dotage with a certain bitterness which I conceal behind a