McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [109]
Chuck stayed in touch by phone. He ferried me to a medical clinic for a full physical examination, which turned out fine. My preference for lying on the couch indicated possible depression, and the doctor wrote a prescription for SSRI medication but I never had it filled. Chuck also supplied me with two pairs of spectacles and his car economy rig. He believed that my body had reached its limit after enduring twenty-five dunks into the bucket of time. This number corresponded with the number of proposed dimensions in the universe, plus the one I was currently living in, according to recent advances in unifying theory.
I didn’t know how to tell him that he was wrong. I may have gone into the bucket twenty-five times, but what chilled me to the marrow was the seemingly infinite number of branches that each reality string had. There were millions of Chris Offutts living simultaneous lives similar to each other. The knowledge of all my alternate lives rendered me powerless to engage in my current reality. I felt as if quicksand closed over my head and I was trapped with no firm footing below, nothing to cling to above, surrounded by a constant flow of information I could not use.
The deadline for the McSweeney’s story came and went. Michael Chabon delicately nudged me via e-mail, then called when I didn’t respond. I explained that the story was dead, and asked if he could let me off the hook. He said no because the space was already allotted, and I told him I’d cobble something together with a little more time.
The next day I began writing about my screwball childhood in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. My memory for the past improved in a phenomenal way—I recalled obscure details with stunning clarity. I returned to my bedroom and slept through the night without any disturbances. When I left the house I felt different, more alert. Slowly I realized that people liked me. I even began to like myself.
Chuck and I met occasionally for awkward lunches during which he refused to talk of the bucket. He ate little and appeared gaunt. He dropped out of contact and I thought nothing of it until reading in the paper that a security guard discovered him dead in his lab. The cause of death was heart trauma. The exact circumstances were not publicly revealed, but campus gossip said he died inside a glass coffin. Members of an unknown government agency removed his equipment. The lab was converted to storage. His faculty records were so thoroughly expunged that there is no longer any reference to him at the university.
I never told anyone about my visit to the physics lab, but I have thought about it often. After using me as a human subject, Chuck probably had a difficult time going back to chimps. If he died while in the bucket, his consciousness would be marooned forever in a reality string. This would make Chuck the first true ghost.
Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly
By DAVE EGGERS
How much were they willing to sacrifice to prove an uncertain
point, to no one in particular, about a mountain that none of
them could begin to understand?
She lies, she lies, Rita lies on the bed, looking up, in the room that is so loud so early in Tanzania. She is in Moshi. She arrived the night before, in a jeep driven by a man named Godwill. It is so bright this morning but was so madly, impossibly dark last night.
Her flight had arrived late, and customs was slow. There was a young American couple trying to clear a large box of soccer balls. For an orphanage, they said. The customs agent, in khaki head to toe, removed and bounced each ball on the clean reflective floor, as if inspecting