Every Anxious Wave Read online

  “I’m a tool, Karl.”

  “Why are you wearing your coat? Take that off.” His coat was zipped up to his chin like a kindergartener about to go out and play in the snow. “It’s summer.”

  “Don’t act like I don’t know what season it is, Karl.”

  “What do you want, man? Why the tears? Things are good right now. I sent six people to Woodstock, and I charged them a grand each.”

  Wayne covered his face with his hands and turned away. “What do you know? You own a cool bar. People actually talk to you. You were in the Axis.”

  I shook my head. “Please stop talking like that. I’m a has-been from a band that twelve people liked in 1999.”

  Wayne sat up and uncovered his face as if he’d had an instant revelation. “I’ve been thinking about my soul. Not in a Christian sense but in a … in a soul sense. Where it is and what have I been doing to use it. My soul, you know—meaning that, like, inner essence of goodness and charity. Or whatever.”

  “Sounds like you’re battling your demons. Totally normal.”

  Wayne wiped his hand across his nose. “I’m weird.”

  I was inclined to agree. Everyone is weird in their own way. Wayne wore his winter coat in the summer: I liked to eat spoonfuls of mayonnaise sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt while standing naked inside my refrigerator door. The trick was not to scare others. “Wayne, take off that coat. It’s making me nervous.”

  Wayne pulled his collar up higher around his head so that only his eyes showed. He had an expression of one possessed. I prayed he didn’t have a gun on him. Part of me wanted to kick his ass out for bringing me down, but I owed him for all the hard work he’d done on the wormhole. I held his pale hand with the perfectly square fingernails.

  “I want to be a superhero,” he squeaked.

  “Okay. Put on your cape and fly.”

  Wayne yanked back his hand. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No. Not at all. I really meant put on your cape and fly. Go live your dreams. You deserve great happiness, buddy, and I don’t want to see you mopey anymore.” I sounded like my mother, who died when I was twenty-three. She was the master of pep talks. I couldn’t fight the longing I felt for her every time I tried to talk Wayne down off his proverbial ledge.

  “Go live my dreams?”

  “Let those corporate dicks lay you off, Wayne. Walk away. We’ve got plenty of money coming in from the wormhole.”

  “I don’t want to do that, Karl,” he said, in a more measured voice.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll just get another job after that, and everything will be the same. Same corporate slavery. Same unremarkable future. Except the only thing that will be different is that I can go back in time and catch that Echo and the Bunnymen show I missed when I was fifteen because Echo never played Sheboygan.”

  “Not if you change it. Not if you make a choice to change it, Wayne.”

  “Not if I change it. Not if I change it.” Wayne sat up, dug his knuckles into his eyes, and put his glasses back on. “I’ve been thinking. I want to try something.” Wayne hopped off the couch and pushed past me into my bedroom, over the piles of laundry I’d sorted into darks and lights but had so far avoided dragging down to the basement. “I want to change something. I want to change a lot of things, but this one thing in particular, Karl. I believe the time has come to use the wormhole for heroic purposes.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to like it.

  He looked up at me. “December 8, 1980. Central Park West. I’m going.”

  “John Lennon?”

  Wayne nodded his head up and down. “I’m going to be a real superhero.”

  “You can’t change the past,” I repeated for the fifty millionth time. My damn mantra. “You can’t. You physically cannot change the past.”

  Wayne hunched over my desk, stabbing at the keyboard with his index fingers. I didn’t exactly know what he was capable of with the program he had written. He could change the system entirely and I wouldn’t know what he’d done or how to fix it. “What if I just tried?”

  “No way, man. No one is allowed to be a time travel vigilante on my watch,” I said, though I didn’t think he was listening. Wayne had that computer guy gift of hyperfocus, of blocking out the rest of the world without care or apology. I was his friend, his bartender, the guy who held his hand and said nice things to him when he needed to hear them, but the look of determination that had colonized his sweet, boyish face said all I needed to know about how much he was going to take to heart the wisdom of Karl Bender.

  “I can do it. I can do something to delay Chapman. Or kill him. Or at least do something. Something to keep him away from John. I can try, can’t I?” Wayne wore a maniacal grin and had stopped making eye contact with me.

  “You can’t take a bullet for John Lennon. Or really mess with Chapman. The past is read-only. You know that.”

  “I can get around that.”

  “What?”

  “I made out with a girl at the REM show. In 1981. Gosh, she’d be in her fifties now.” He composed himself and said, “You can touch people. Talk to them. Kick over a trash can. You just have to get past the first layer.”

  “No you can’t!” I yelled. “Or I can’t. How is it that you can touch people in the past and I can’t?”

  “The exit point is in that other dimension where you can’t interact. You just have to penetrate that layer. I thought you wanted the layer so that not having a ticket to the show would be a nonissue.”

  “How do I do it then? Touch things?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back. Look, my soul calls me to correct past wrongs. I’m starting with Lennon. His murder was hugely devastating to a lot of people. At least if I succeed, eighties music won’t be half as awful.”

  “What’s a layer, Wayne?” Wayne stared down at his shoes, his mouth shut in defiance. “Wayne?” He remained silent. “Wayne, answer me.”

  Wayne shook his head. “Forget I said anything.”

  “No!” I shouted. “What’s a layer?”

  He shot me a sulky look and then, as if he were preparing to travel, walked back out to the living room and picked up his backpack and put his arms through the straps. I felt the crux of our relationship—Wayne’s needing me—rip away like a Velcro shoe fastener. “Fuck you, Bender.”

  I walked over to Wayne, who flinched when I got up close. “Oh, stop it. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Maybe you are,” he said. Wayne dashed back into my bedroom and threw himself on the bed. I followed behind him.

  “Wayne, seriously, dude. Why John Lennon? What’s that going to solve?”

  “Lennon was a great peacemaker. He’s, like, he’s … he’s the one guy who really could, you know … bring the happiness and love out of our hearts. And he had a great creative partnership with the woman he loved. He gave a lot to his fans. To the world.”

  I wanted to pat his head in a maternal fashion, but I also wanted to pound his ass and tell him to knock it off. I’d never had a friend like Wayne before, one who was kind and sweet and super smart and who I could trust completely, but who was sometimes the thirty-six-year-old equivalent of a cranky toddler.

  “That’s my wormhole too, damn it. Just because it’s in your apartment doesn’t mean it’s not mine.” Wayne’s hands shook, even though they were balled into fists, but his eyes were in some crazy hyperfocus mode. If I tried to talk him out of it, he would override me. Not with physical strength, but with intent. I guess he just wanted it bad enough.

  A cluster of colored wires sat anchored to the floor with duct tape, coming out of floorboards into the two laptops that sat perched on my old wooden desk. He rolled off the bed and crawled on his hands and knees to my closet and grabbed a fistful of those wires and looked me straight in the eye. “I’m going to 1980. I’m going and you’re sending me, or I pull these wires out and smash these computers and then I go home and smash my head against the wall. I mean it.”

&n
bsp; I made a move toward him.

  “Don’t, Karl.” He tugged on his handful of wires. “I’m getting my way.”

  “How about, instead of messing with the damn wormhole, you rededicate your life to the spreading of peace and love, or make an album of peace songs, or whatever else John Lennon would have done.”

  The wires remained firmly in Wayne’s fist. He wore a backpack full of supplies: flashlight, water bottle, granola bars, extra cell phone, and most importantly, a solar cell phone charger, since zapping back to the present drains the hell out of your battery.

  He sniffed a few times and looked me square in the eye. “No.”

  I weighed my options. I could jump him, but I didn’t want to hurt the guy. Plus, he’d take those wires with him, the whole deal would be over, and I’d be cut off forever from the drug that was time travel. I wasn’t yet willing to give up the special, sexy rush that was a trip backwards.

  “Wayne, did you interact with people in the past? Wayne? I need to know. I need you to tell me what a layer is, buddy. I need you to tell me that you really can mess with the past. Can you?”

  Wayne flipped me the bird, then took his cell phone out of the pocket of his puffy coat and pointed it at me.

  “Central Park. December 8, 1980,” he said, a little quake in his voice. His face was red and flushed. “Do it. Do it or I wreck this thing and I never set foot in your bar ever again.”

  “Why Lennon?”

  Wayne’s mouth fell open, and as if it were bad breath, I was hit with a cloud of Wayne’s disappointment in me. “Damn, Karl,” he said, looking away. “If you have to keep asking, you’re, like, not the guy I thought you were.”

  I sat down at the computer and stared at the wormhole interface that Wayne had made. It looked like Pong. In the Chron POE (point of entry) field, I typed 08 DEC 1980, and entered 72nd and Central Park West, Manhattan, in the field for Geog POE. I typed slowly, looking up at Wayne to let him know that things were going to be very bad between us, regardless of whether or not he succeeded in saving Lennon. Vigilante shit angered me. Okay, say Wayne saves John Lennon, and then what? We’re obligated to kill Hitler, free the slaves, reverse the 2000 election, and punch about fifty million grade-school bullies in the nuts. I prefer to limit my moral obligations to not banging married women and donating money to the Red Cross. The wormhole was already fraught with moral quandaries, and here I was, going against my gut, giving the toddler his way.

  Wayne wiped the tears from his cheeks. He jumped up and down like it was his birthday. “Call me in an hour, Karlito. I think this is a benevolent act, I really do. All of your albums over there, they’re going to catch fire! You watch!”

  I watched. I pushed the button. And in an instant, Wayne went through the floor.

  Thirty minutes later, my album collection remained intact.

  Twenty minutes after that, a text message from Wayne popped up on my phone: THIS IS WRONG. WHERE AM I? NOTHING BUT TREES AND SNOW.

  Then: THERE ARE NO BUILDINGS OR CARS. THIS IS NOT NYC.

  Then: CHECK THE COMPUTER!

  I like to admit it when I screw up. I find identifying one’s faults to be an admirable trait. Once, on a tour, in Providence, I forgot to load our brand-new amp into the van after a gig. We were in New Haven by the time I realized what I had done. Milo, the lead singer who had fronted the money for the amp, responded with a left hook to my face. He then tried to snap my neck like a twig after we raced back to Providence, only to find that someone had stolen the amp.

  I looked at the computer screen: CHRON POE: 08 DEC 980.

  Fuck.

  I had left off the number one in 1980. I had shuttled my friend one thousand and thirty years into the past. For a moment all I felt was admiration that the system Wayne had set up could be so exact.

  Nine hundred and eighty. A full five hundred years before the first boatload of Dutch colonists landed on the Island of Mannahatta. There is no recorded North American history for the year 980. It would be another one hundred years before Vikings arrived in Newfoundland.

  Then I came to. I dialed Wayne’s number, hoping that would bring him back to the present, knowing it wouldn’t. Reentry requires an electrical power source. He would need to be in a place with many electromagnetic fields, such as a rock club with lights and amps and neon beer signs. Without electromagnetic fields, reentry was impossible. It was a flaw that Wayne was working on eliminating, but science and safety take time to develop while, apparently, saving John Lennon’s life thirty years after the fact simply couldn’t have waited another second.

  I texted him: I SENT YOU TO THE YEAR 980.

  Minutes later, the response: ARE YOU KIDDING?

  I typed in the reversal code. Error code. Nothing. I tried again. I said a prayer. I cried. I punched the desk until my knuckles turned purple.

  * * *

  I CANCELED MY four o’clock appointment with my bar-back Clyde and his twenty-something friends, who wanted to see Nirvana play Olympia in 1991. I went to the bar. I poured myself a shot of whiskey. I mopped the ladies room. I swapped out an empty keg. I made idle chatter with a dude named Keith who wanted to know where he could get some seed for his bird feeder.

  My mother died of cancer when I was a hate-spewing shithead of twenty-three, and I remember very clearly sitting around the Bender familial manse in West Hartford, after the doctors had sent my sister and me home because my mother’s suffering was over, watching Brooke lie facedown on the couch in her ham-pink nurse’s scrubs, asking her repeatedly if she was still breathing, thinking about how much of my life depended on my sister’s lungs taking in air, because without her there wouldn’t be anyone permanently responsible for giving a rat’s ass about me ever again. Wayne cared about me the way Brooke did in the days after our mom died, needy but sweet, and motivated by losing a parent before we were old enough to comprehend just how barren and raw our mother’s early departure would leave me and Brooke in the hardest moments of our adult lives.

  Once, I’d offered to set up Wayne with Brooke, now an operating room nurse in Orlando. Both are kind souls and a bit high-strung, and Brooke had been unlucky in love to the tune of one ex serving time for postal fraud and another ex who disappeared with his AA sponsor’s old lady a month before his and Brooke’s paid-for Disney wedding. Wayne thought that Florida was too far away for a relationship. Brooke said that any man who spent time in my bar was probably an alcoholic lowlife and therefore not suitable marriage material. I told Brooke that Wayne had a Little Mermaid soap dispenser in his bathroom. She still refused. This hurt my feelings.

  Due to the bending of time and space, cell satellites are in the sky even in the year 980, so yes, Wayne’s phone worked, as long as his phone had power.

  HEY SHITHEAD, he texted, IT’S WINTER HERE AND THERE ARE NO BUILDINGS. I’VE GOT FROSTBITE ON MY SCROTUM AND IT’S YOUR FAULT!

  And: YOU’RE LUCKY I WAS A BOY SCOUT. I BUILT MYSELF A HUT OUT OF DIRT AND STICKS. AND AT LEAST I HAVE MY COAT.

  And: I GUESS I’LL JUST INVENT ELECTRICITY. NO PROBLEM. OH, RIGHT, NO CONDUCTIVE MATERIAL.

  And: RACCOON! IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER!

  And finally: YOU’RE TOO DUMB TO FIX THIS YOURSELF. GO FIND AN ASTROPHYSICIST.

  2

  HOW DO YOU find yourself an astrophysicist? You order one online.

  My bar is called the Dictator’s Club, and in spite of its can-do attitude and bitchin’ Wednesday night dollar drafts special, it did not attract Chicago’s astrophysics community. I wasn’t really in the right neighborhood for that. I didn’t know any science people, save Wayne—just a lawyer, a chiropractor, two dental hygienists, and a guy who owned a really creepy reptiles-only pet store. No one with an academic understanding of the space-time continuum.

  When a regular dude dials up the physics department at the University of Chicago and asks who he should speak to about the viability of time travel, admitting that he has no academic credentials and demanding to be taken seriously, he gets hung up on.
/>
  Each of the PhD candidates in astrophysics at Northwestern was pictured on the departmental Web site in poorly lit photos taken in the artistic tradition of the department of motor vehicles. No way in hell would this overwhelmingly serious, fashion-backward, sloppily bearded bunch of dudes believe me when I explained my situation to them, and if they did, they’d steal my operation and have me killed.

  The Web site showed two female PhD students in astrophysics: a woman from China with a tight black schoolmarm bun who stared blankly at the camera, a look that indicated that she’d never heard of Fugazi. And then, this girl: a kindred soul; a young, unsmiling woman who had streaks of blue Manic Panic in her otherwise black bangs, the only one who showed up for picture day in Buddy Holly glasses and a Melvins T-shirt, giving the camera a perfect Courtney Love snarl. Lena R. Geduldig, BS, Physics, University of Montana, 2002. Areas of expertise: cosmology, string theory. You could tell she was as ferocious as she was smart, and that she wasn’t above biting you if the occasion called for it. I liked this girl and knew that she was part of my big cosmic family, someone I’d have in my bar every night, someone I’d try to protect from the hurt and the sorrow of continuous spins around the sun.

  The page listed her office hours. I waited until Wednesday from ten a.m. to noon to place my call.

  “This is Lena Geduldig.” She had a deep voice, slightly hoarse.

  “Hi. My name is Karl Bender. I, um…” I should have prepared a speech. My voice quivered, like I was afraid of Punk Rock Science Lady.

  “Are you one of my students?”

  “No. Just a regular guy. I just, have a problem that requires an astrophysicist.”

  “Are you worried that an asteroid is going to take out North America? Because you have nothing to worry about, at least not until 2029.”