The Infinite Future

by Tim Wirkus

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Tim Wirkus

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Wirkus, Tim, 1983- author.

  Title: The infinite future / Tim Wirkus.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025119 (print) | LCCN 2017027797 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224339 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224322 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Quests (Expeditions)—Fiction. | Authors—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Satire. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Science fiction. | Satire.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I754 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.I754 I54 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025119

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD | TIM WIRKUS

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE TO THE READER | DANIEL LASZLO I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  THE INFINITE FUTURE | EDUARD SALGADO-MACKENZIE EPIGRAPH

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  FOREWORD

  by TIM WIRKUS

  Really, this foreword should take place in the lamp-lit reading room of a classy Victorian gentlemen’s club—or, better yet, in a grand old house on Christmas Eve where party guests swap strange tales next to a crackling fireplace. As I understand it, those are the two most appropriate locations for receiving a peculiar manuscript whose provenance is nearly as intriguing as its contents, and as it happens, the book you currently hold in your hands began its life as just such a manuscript. In a perfect world, the story of my first encounter with it would take place in a fittingly mysterious locale. Unfortunately, real life is rarely so obliging, and so this story, or at least my very small part in it, begins in the refrigerator section of a Texaco Food Mart a few blocks from Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City.

  Having worked up an appetite giving a reading from my first novel at the bookstore earlier that evening, I was currently on the prowl for a local brand of chocolate milk my sister had told me I needed to try before I left town. My flight back to California left first thing the next morning, and so my window of opportunity on the milk was closing fast. A cursory glance at the Food Mart’s glass-doored refrigerators did not bode well—slim pickings in the dairy department, which comprised one shelf of one refrigerator practically hidden behind a rotating rack of five-dollar DVDs. I was leaning in to get a better look when my phone buzzed—it was Danny Laszlo, an old classmate from BYU.

  “Hi Danny,” I said.

  I peered into the refrigerator, and in a stroke of good fortune, among the three brands of chocolate milk that the Food Mart carried was exactly the one I was looking for.

  “Hey,” said Danny. “Do you have a minute?”

  I’d seen Danny in the audience at the reading earlier that evening but hadn’t had a chance to talk to him before the event had ended.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “To talk in person, I mean,” said Danny.

  This caught me off guard. I had no idea what Danny Laszlo could want to talk about that couldn’t be discussed over the phone, and quite frankly, by that point in the evening I just wanted some chocolate milk and a good night’s sleep.

  “In person?” I said, trying to think of the best way to turn him down. I squeezed past the DVD display and, opening the refrigerator door just wide enough to fit my arm through, reached to the back of the single-file line of chocolate milks to select the coldest container from the rear of the refrigerator. Excuse-wise, I was coming up empty.

  I said, “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the gas station,” he said. “Just out front.”

  I let the refrigerator door swing shut.

  “This gas station?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I turned around to look out the windowed front of the Food Mart. Sure enough, Danny Laszlo stood just outside, phone to his ear. He gave me a sheepish nod and raised his free hand in a short, businesslike wave.

  “Did you follow me here?” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “I needed to talk to you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Chilled pint bottle in one hand, I stood there for a moment, staring dumbly. We were close enough to see each other but too far away to talk without using our phones, a situation that never fails to make me very uncomfortable.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” I said and hung up as quickly as possible.

  • • •

  Danny Laszlo and I first met back in 2005, in an undergraduate creative writing workshop at BYU. I was a recently returned missionary at the time, still reacclimatizing to civilian life. I’d gotten back so recently, in fact, that I still sported the unmistakable tan lines that result from wearing a collared shirt and tie in the sun all day, every day.

  I felt conspicuous and awkward, even, or especially, at BYU.

  I was relieved then, on the first day of class, to spot somebody else sporting missionary tan lines of their own: a tall, solidly built guy who would have been a dead ringer for a young Orson Welles if not for his light-blond hair. I sat in the desk next to his and introduced myself. He said his name was Danny Laszlo. I asked him if he’d just gotten back from a mission. He said he had, and a bit more small talk revealed that we had both served in São Paulo, Brazil, although in different parts of the city.

  It quickly became apparent, though, that Danny had little interest in swapping anecdotes of missionary life in Brazil. Instead, he asked me what music I’d been listening to since getting home. I told him the Strokes and the White Stripes. The Shins, a little bit.

  “That’s pre-mission stuff, though,” he said. “What new stuff are you listening to?”

  I told him I was still catching up.

  “You need to be listening to the New Pornographers,” he said. “Twin Cinema—just came out a couple weeks ago—best album of the y
ear. You like power pop?”

  And so we talked music until class started. Then, while the instructor, the other students, and I went over course objectives, policy, and scheduling, Danny worked his way through a crossword puzzle he kept screened behind his copy of the syllabus.

  Based on initial impressions, I expected to become good friends with Danny Laszlo. Over the next three years, however, our acquaintanceship followed an asymptotic path in which our interactions grew increasingly genial without ever reaching a state of true friendship. Though chronically affable, Danny maintained a tight seal over the personal details of his life, which kept me and others at a perpetual distance.

  During this time I worked as a peer tutor at BYU’s student writing center, which employed a team of undergrads, mostly English majors, to dispense unwelcome and occasionally ill-conceived writing advice to our fellow students. When business was slow, the other tutors and I sat around the staff table trading gossip and dog-eared copies of our favorite books. Several of us became very good friends, forming a loose cadre that socialized both on campus and off during our time together at BYU.

  I bring this up because the writing center crowd developed a minor fascination with Danny Laszlo. Most of us had classes with him and could testify to the skill with which he camouflaged himself behind a blind of false transparency. He might widely broadcast his interests and opinions—he loved James Joyce, thought Bob Dylan (and singer-songwriters generally) were criminally overrated, and he refused to associate with anyone who’d ever been a member of a high school or collegiate choir—but when it came to concrete details concerning his history or his off-campus lifestyle, he revealed nothing. All of us in the writing center crowd wanted to be his friend—or rather, wanted him to consider us a friend and thereby grant us access to the secret life he concealed so completely. To this end, we repeatedly invited him to our extracurricular parties, and he repeatedly and breezily turned us down.

  The truth is, in our heart of hearts, none of us believed that Danny’s private life would be that much more interesting than any of our own, but still, we wondered. I suppose the point of all this is, I knew Danny at BYU but not extremely well. Not surprisingly, we lost touch after graduation, and now ten years later, I was curious to know what he’d been up to in the meantime.

  • • •

  Outside the Food Mart, we shook hands and I asked Danny where he wanted to go to talk.

  “Right here’s fine,” he said.

  So we stood a few feet from the entrance to the Food Mart, in a little gap of cement between the pebble-surfaced garbage can and the locked display of propane tanks.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his chin. His clothes had that unostentatious but perfectly tailored look that whispers money in polite undertones. Clothes like that are magic, endowing their wearer with an instant boost to their looks, charm, and credibility. Standing this close to him, though, I could see a ragged, haunted quality clinging to his features. If, when I’d first met him, he’d resembled the youthful Orson Welles of “The War of the Worlds” publicity stills, now he looked like Welles at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, hollow-eyed and shaken.

  “So how are you?” I said, genuinely curious.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Danny had clearly retained his reluctance to discuss any details of his private life. Only with considerable effort did I learn that he was an associate at a prominent Salt Lake law firm, one that even I had heard of. This was a group of attorneys who, by all accounts, shaped the very fabric of the city according to their—or rather, their clients’—whims.

  “Wow,” I said. “How do you like it there?”

  “It’s exhausting,” he said.

  “Long hours?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s part of it.”

  A car drove slowly past us, pulling in next to the nearest pump.

  “Listen,” said Danny. “I don’t mean to change the subject here—well, actually that’s exactly what I mean to do, so let me get to it. You have connections in publishing, right?”

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “You don’t have to be modest,” he said.

  I was not being modest.

  “Anyway, you’re better connected than I am,” he said. “And that’s why I wanted to meet this evening. I have a manuscript for you.”

  “You wrote a novel?” I said. Danny’s writing had always impressed and intimidated me, and if he’d written a novel, I’d be very interested to read it.

  “No, I don’t write fiction anymore. It’s a terrible way to live,” he said. “No offense.”

  This surprised me. Danny had always looked down on anyone not pursing the so-called artist’s path. A dark SUV circled around the pump across from us, its headlights briefly shining directly into our eyes. As they did, Danny grimaced, turning his face from the glare and ducking his head, resembling, just for a moment, a cowering dog. This was a much different Danny than the one I’d known at BYU. Somehow all his prickly charisma had become obscured within an ashy cloud of melancholy. He blinked his tired eyes.

  “The manuscript then,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Okay,” he said. “So, about six years ago I had an experience that completely changed me. I mean, that’s such an empty thing to say, to describe what happened, because people say that kind of thing all the time, but you need to understand that I’m talking about a real and significant change here—like a true shift in who I was.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed partly by his willingness to open up like this, but mostly by his ability to do so without disclosing a single specific detail.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And to describe it externally, you know, the actual external reality of what happened, it doesn’t sound that dramatic. But inside, it affected me more than anything else I’d ever experienced. And that’s where the manuscript comes in.”

  “So it’s a memoir?” I said.

  “Not really,” said Danny. “There’s more to it than that. Part of the manuscript is a translation I did of a story by this extremely obscure Brazilian science-fiction writer, but really it’s all kind of wrapped up together—the translation and my own story, I mean. They’re inseparable, in my opinion.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  The manuscript sounded intriguing. It also sounded completely unpublishable.

  “Honestly—”

  “No,” he said. “Before you weigh in on this book, you have to read it.” He pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. “What’s your email?”

  A spark of Danny’s former vitality animated this desperate plea. I gave him my email address. In response, thumbs tapping the screen of his phone, Danny said, “I’m sending you a pdf.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll take a look.”

  • • •

  My first read-through of the manuscript, while waiting for a much-delayed flight at the Salt Lake City International Airport the next day, prompted a mild panic attack. I had no idea what to make of what I’d just read, and immediately I began formulating an apologetic email to Danny in which I explained that the whole venture was a lost cause. Luckily, my flight boarded before I could send off the email, because in the meantime, the book’s odd memorability had become duly apparent to me.

  The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once argued that reading Edgar Allan Poe’s stories is never as satisfying as remembering Poe’s stories. I initially read that sentiment as a gentle insult, but the more I think about it, the more complimentary it seems. After all, any story that creates a more potent and delightful version of itself in the reader’s memory has performed a not insignificant act of transmutation. On the page, Poe’s fictions might trip over their own overly wordy feet, but in the imagination they move with a deft and sinister grace, lingering long after the reader closes the book. The Infinite Future has s
imilarly haunted me. It’s not a scary book, and isn’t supposed to be, but its peculiar contents have insinuated themselves into my consciousness with the persistence of a wronged and fretful ghost.

  I should add as a postscript that Danny Laszlo remains as elusive to me as ever. I had wondered if our reacquaintance might yield both a published book and a new friendship, but after that initial conversation at the Food Mart, Danny withdrew himself behind the same genial veil that concealed him throughout the three years I knew him at BYU.

  May 2017

  Irvine, CA

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE TO THE READER

  by DANIEL LASZLO

  I

  I first heard of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and his impossible novel on an otherwise lousy research trip to São Paulo. The city itself wasn’t the problem. I was back after four years away—I’d lived there for two years as a Mormon missionary—and was as pleasantly confounded by São Paulo as ever. Hallucinated City, as Jack E. Tomlins dubbed it in his loose translation of Mário de Andrade’s iconic poetry collection, Paulicéia Desvairada. I can see where Tomlins was coming from, but in spite of São Paulo’s mind-boggling immensity and the dream logic of its juxtaposed neighborhoods, I’ve always found the city much too tangible to be a hallucination—the warm, gritty air against my skin; the bouncily sardonic Paulistano Portuguese in my ears; the oregano-seasoned fillings of warm salgadinhos on my tongue; the aggressively uneven sidewalks beneath my tired feet.

  No, the city wasn’t the problem.

  Funded by a Young Religious Novelist Grant, I was in São Paulo to research my first book, an expansive roman à clef based on my time as a missionary and buttressed by exhaustive research conducted in the city where I’d worked. That’s what I was aiming for, anyway, but four days into my trip I ran into serious trouble.

  At the time of this trip to Brazil—summer 2009—I was living below a doughnut shop in Provo, Utah, in what some (my landlord) might call a studio apartment, and others (anyone but my landlord) might call a windowless basement storage room with a shoddy, RV-style bathroom in the corner and the constant stench of rancid cooking oil in the air. I’d graduated from college at the same time the economy had gone belly-up, so job prospects had been grim. I found part-time work at a nearby flower shop called Nothing But Flowers! and was barely getting by.