by Tim Wirkus
Moving as quietly as possible, we took turns in the bathroom and then rock-paper-scissored for the wide soft couch. Sérgio won, so Harriet and I took the two plush recliners, which leaned back far enough that they might as well have been beds.
I thought I would fall asleep immediately. We’d had an early start that day, and the drive had tired me out, but as soon as I lay down, my drowsiness disappeared.
It turned out I was eager to keep moving.
Rationally, I knew that even if we found Salgado-MacKenzie, Wayne Fortescue and the CAC would still be waiting for me at the end of the journey and I would be in no more of a position to pay them back than I’d been in before I’d left. Still, the search for The Infinite Future felt bigger than all that. During the seven-hour drive from Roger Ash’s storage unit, I’d begun to cultivate a hope that Salgado-MacKenzie’s long-lost novel might connect me to something bigger than myself and my lost ambitions, that it might lift me from my spiritual malaise into a transcendent state of being. Basically, I needed my life to mean something more than credit card debt and frozen dinners.
As I lay there on the recliner mulling this over, I was reminded of a Salgado-MacKenzie piece I’d translated about a month earlier. At the beginning of the story, there’s been yet another engine malfunction that forces the crew of the Circe to land the ship on yet another unknown planet. They touch down at the edge of an enormous tent city, at the center of which sits a boxy factory whose smokestacks puff white, cheery clouds into the clear blue atmosphere. It all looks innocuous enough, but then again, who knows? To be on the safe side, then, Sertôrian sends out only a small party to make initial contact.
Hours pass. Hours and hours and hours. Captain Sertôrian, who has stayed behind with the Circe, starts to worry. Radio contact with the three envoys has been lost, and if their mission had gone according to plan, they would have returned already. Something has happened to them, so Sertôrian gathers up some guns and tools, and with two of her crew, she sets out to find her lost shipmates.
It doesn’t take long. About a twenty-minute walk from the ship, Sertôrian finds her advance party lolling about on a sunny hillside behind the boxy factory at the center of the tent city. They’re just lounging on the grass, propped up on their elbows, smiling and laughing. A handful of locals are there too, also lounging on the grass, all of them dressed in these loose-fitting tracksuits, all of them—just like Sertôrian’s advance party—smiling and laughing.
When her crew members see Sertôrian, they give a happy shout, saying she has to join them, they’re having a wonderful time. I wouldn’t want to intrude, says Sertôrian, extremely wary of the whole scene.
Don’t be silly, says one of the locals, getting to her feet. She’s a tall woman who introduces herself as Theta and assures Sertôrian that they’d all be very happy to have more guests.
Please, says Theta. Join us.
The truth is, everyone does seem very happy, and not in a creepy, overeager way, just in a warm, friendly, we’re-glad-you’re-here kind of way.
Then Sertôrian notices the sandwiches—everyone is eating, or has just finished eating what look to be mass-produced, diagonally cut sandwiches.
What’s going on with the sandwiches? Sertôrian asks, and Theta, looking thrilled that Sertôrian has asked, offers the following explanation: The factory at the center of the tent city runs all day every day, and what it produces is a special sandwich that, when you eat it, makes you very, very happy. And everyone on the hillside has either just eaten or is currently eating one of these sandwiches, so they all feel amazing.
Theta insists on giving Sertôrian a tour of the factory, where she learns that the sandwiches’ euphoric effect is produced by their filling, which looks and tastes quite a bit like egg salad but is actually a carefully engineered fungus mixed with a stabilizing paste and seasoned with salt and pepper. As far as Sertôrian can tell, there’s nothing sinister about the production of the filling. It’s not like it’s made of recycled people, or anything sketchy like that, but still, Sertôrian refuses Theta’s offer of a sandwich.
It’s a funny thing—Sertôrian looks at her three shipmates, who have eaten these sandwiches, and they seem fine. Not narcotized, not brainwashed, just really, really happy. Very aware, very cogent, and very glad to be alive. The same seems true of the planet’s residents, whose lifestyle, they tell her, consists of everyone working daily six-hour shifts in the factory and in the nearby farms and then just eating sandwiches during their time off and being very, very happy with their lives.
The story gets pretty talky at that point, with Theta giving a long speech extolling the virtues of the planet’s lifestyle, and Sertôrian responding with extensive concerns (The meaning of life can’t be sandwiches, she says at one point). The story culminates, though, with Sertôrian basically kidnapping her three sandwich-eating shipmates (they beg her to let them stay on this planet forever) and dragging them back to the ship. The Circe’s been repaired in the meantime, so they take off, never to return.
The general narrative is by no means original, but unlike, say, the lotus-eaters episode in the Odyssey, this story doesn’t portray the sandwiches as being sinister. There’s a pretty strong suggestion, in fact, that Sertôrian and her crew are making a big mistake when they leave the planet behind. In the closing lines of the story, one of the sandwich-eating crew members pleads with Sertôrian to send him back to the sandwich planet. Sertôrian refuses, reminding her shipmate that their objective as a crew is to return home together. Home, that’s what he truly wants; he’s just forgotten while in the grips of the sandwich.
At the mention of home, though, the crew member laughs—what does Sertôrian think she’ll find there? Does she expect to find peace? To be loved? To be happy? Because if that’s what she wants, she’s just left it behind forever. We found something meaningful, says her shipmate. We found paradise. Sertôrian, unable to muster a response, stares ruefully at the empty sandwich wrapper in her shipmate’s hand and then walks away.
Lying there in my parents’ living room, I wondered if The Infinite Future could do for me what those sandwiches had done for Sertôrian’s crew—somehow transubstantiate my sorrows, failures, and frustrations into a light, playful gladness that would carry me through life more cheerily than my current sensibilities seemed capable of. In the past, I might have turned to Mormonism for this uplift, but at the time my lifelong religion felt played out to me. It wasn’t that I’d had a dramatic crisis of faith; it was more like the torrent of spirituality I’d experienced as a missionary had slowed to a gentle stream, then a trickle, then a drip. I still read the Book of Mormon every day, prayed, went to church on Sundays, but none of it worked for me the way it used to. Most of the time, in those days, I just felt hollow.
Reading Salgado-MacKenzie’s fiction was the closest I’d felt to transcendence in years, and now that his masterwork was within our grasp (or could be with a little more detective work) I was tempted to wake my traveling companions and suggest we drive through the night. I wanted to get my hands on The Infinite Future as soon as possible. I knew, though, that we’d need our wits about us as we continued on our search, and so sleep would be essential.
As quietly as possible, then, I got up from my chair and found my MP3 player in my backpack. I didn’t feel like lying down, so I sat on the floor behind the chair, my back against the wall, and listened to some Big Star, my favorite middle-of-the-night band. Their songs are catchy and propulsive, but tempered with just enough melancholy to stick not just in your head but in your soul. Actually, that’s true of most power pop, maybe the most hangdog of musical genres. It’s so aggressively sing-alongable, so eager to please, yet it’s so often met with commercial indifference. Somehow it falls short of what it’s trying hardest to do—to be popular music—and that failure is endlessly endearing to me. Earphones nestled in my ears, then, I listened to Big Star get looser and weirder over the course of th
eir first three albums, until Alex Chilton’s eerie vocals on “Holocaust” finally lulled me to sleep.
XI
That night I had a dream.
I was in my parents’ condo, asleep in the recliner, and I heard Wayne Fortescue’s deep, drawling voice counting down from a thousand, saying it would help me sleep if I just paid attention to the numbers, the way they descended with such neat regularity.
In a panic, I opened my eyes, but instead of Fortescue, I saw Christine Voorhes sitting on the couch across from me. Or rather, I saw a kind of Voorhes/Fortescue hybrid. The entity was speaking in Fortescue’s voice but looked exactly like Voorhes, wearing the same suit she’d worn on the day she’d broken into my apartment—the same green shirt, the same black leather gloves—except this time the gloves extended up past her elbows, hugging her biceps in a manner I found disconcerting, though I couldn’t say why.
The other thing that worried me was the long wood-handled kitchen knife that lay across her lap. She wasn’t doing anything with it, but I could see the knife had just been sharpened, little slivers of metal still clinging to the edge.
“You need to fall asleep,” said Voorhes/Fortescue again, gripping the sharpened knife in one gloved hand. “You need to fall asleep so we can collect what’s ours.”
“No,” I said, trying to sit up, but of course I couldn’t. I’d been invisibly bound to the recliner, its soft cushions holding me fast.
Then, in one of those dream jumps that feel seamless in the moment, Voorhes/Fortescue was standing above me, only now my clothes were gone. I was completely naked, still stuck to the chair, and starting to cry. Voorhes/Fortescue smiled at my tears, and without breaking eye contact, languidly traced the tip of her knife across the bare skin of my torso. I was definitely crying by that point, because I didn’t want Voorhes/Fortescue to see me naked, and I didn’t want to die.
Teeth bared, Voorhes/Fortescue leered down at me.
Looking up into her gleaming, hungry eyes, I figured out what was going on in a sudden, intuitive burst.
“My heart,” I said as the sharp tip of the knife paused in the middle of my chest. “You’re going to cut out my heart, aren’t you?”
Throwing back her head, Voorhes/Fortescue gave a full, throaty laugh and then leaned in close to me. Resting one gloved hand hard against my hipbone, and holding the knife to my throat with the other hand, she said, in Fortescue’s laconic voice, “Why would anyone want your heart? There’s nothing inside of it.”
Things were looking pretty dire, but then suddenly I could move again, so I twisted my body out from under Voorhes/Fortescue’s grasp, and then, with a jolt, I really was thrashing around, awake on the floor of my parents’ condo, all balled up on a tangle of sweaty blankets behind the recliner.
I checked my watch. Quarter to seven. I crawled out from behind the recliner. Sérgio sat on the couch, his long hair still damp from a shower. He wore a neatly pressed pair of blue jeans, a Legião Urbana T-shirt, and a warm-looking camel-hair blazer. Arms folded, he was bouncing his leg up and down like a jittery grade-schooler.
“Morning,” I said, sitting up.
He looked down at me with mild concern.
“Harriet’s in the shower,” he said, “so if you want to grab some breakfast while you’re waiting, that might be a good idea. I’d like to get moving as soon as possible.”
The night before, I’d been as eager as Sérgio to hit the road, but now I felt like a different person, and not in a good way. That dream had flipped a switch in my brain, and now our search for Salgado-MacKenzie felt like the boneheaded exercise in futility it probably was. Even if we found The Infinite Future, it wouldn’t solve my problems with Fortescue and the CAC.
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.
Sweaty blanket wrapped around me like a cloak, I stood up and switched on my parents’ outdated desktop. It was an ancient computer, but it did—amazingly—have Internet capabilities, and so, moving the worn mouse across the souvenir mouse pad my parents had picked up on a recent trip to Wendover, I made the mistake of checking my email.
I had a new message from Fortescue, and it was an extra nasty one. He reminded me that, with penalties and interest, I now owed the CAC over ten thousand dollars, and he explained that if I didn’t make a payment in two weeks’ time, they would be forced to press charges. He closed the email by saying how disappointed he was in me, that I had seemed like such an honorable young man on the telephone, when in fact I was as lazy and entitled as the rest of my generation. This was the first time Fortescue had set a concrete deadline, and I feared that this signaled a true escalation in the CAC’s aggressions.
“Everything okay?” said Sérgio.
“Fine,” I said.
I was just logging out of my account when my parents walked into the room.
“Danny,” they said. “How nice to see you.”
They were a picture of lower-middle-class retirement, my dad wearing an ill-fitting golf shirt and unflattering shorts, my mom wearing a tennis dress she’d owned since I was a child. They were both tan, thinner than the last time I’d seen them, and somehow rangier looking. I gave them each a hug and then introduced them to Sérgio, who offered up the requisite pleasantries and was just beginning to take my parents’ leave when Harriet stepped out of the bathroom drying her gray-blond hair with a striped beach towel.
My parents wished her a good morning.
“Good morning,” said Harriet, laying her damp towel over the back of a kitchen chair.
“Now, I’m sorry,” said my mom, “but you’ll have to remind me of your name.”
Harriet buttoned her wrinkled cardigan before extending her hand.
“Harriet Kimball,” she said, shaking my mom’s hand.
In return, rather than introduce herself, my mom said, “Harriet Kimball—isn’t that the name of that angry college professor from a few years back?”
This was not the response I’d expected from my mom.
“It is,” Harriet said, adjusting the sleeves of her cardigan.
“I bet you get mistaken for her pretty often,” my mom said.
“Actually,” said Harriet. “I am her.”
She delivered this information coolly, and I don’t think it quite registered at first.
“Excuse me?” my mom said.
“I am that angry college professor from a few years back,” Harriet said.
I was as surprised that my mom had heard of Dr. Kimball as I was horrified by the turn the conversation was taking. The physical configuration of the people in the room had come to resemble a movie-musical knife fight, with me, Sérgio, and my dad circled around Harriet and my mom, who faced each other with unease. I wondered if I should intervene.
“But it’s a common name,” my dad said, stepping into the fray. “It would be silly to assume you were that Harriet Kimball.”
“It is a common name,” Harriet said, “but I am that Harriet Kimball.”
“Anyway,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “We should probably let Harriet finish getting ready. We’d like to get going as soon as possible.”
Rather than take the out I was offering, though, my parents insisted we all sit down to breakfast together before we left.
“We have plenty of Pop-Tarts,” said my mom, almost defensively, “and I think some bananas.”
And so the five of us crowded around the small round table in my parents’ kitchen, eating Pop-Tarts and bananas in thick silence while Sérgio checked his watch every forty-five seconds.
Amid the crinkling of toaster pastry wrappers, I felt an anxious dread seep into my muscles. I’d forgotten for a moment about Fortescue’s email and the strange nightmare that had preceded it, but now, sitting at the little table, I couldn’t help but contemplate what Voorhes/Fortescue had said to me in the dream: Why would anyone want your heart? There’s not
hing inside it.
Was that true? Was there anything inside my heart? I thought of that line from Eliot, the one about hungry rats scurrying over broken glass in an empty cellar, and in spite of the kitchen’s heat, I shuddered.
“So, Danny,” said my dad. “How’s the grocery store?”
“Grocery store?” I said.
“Yeah,” said my dad. “Your job at the grocery store.”
“Actually, I work at a flower shop,” I said.
“Really?” said my dad. “I could have sworn it was a grocery store.”
I shook my head and opened another pack of Pop-Tarts.
Something you should know about my parents, or I guess more so about me in relation to my parents, is that I’m the youngest of six kids, and more important, there’s a nine-year gap between me and my nearest sibling. The first five kids are very regularly spaced—two to three years between each of them—and then there’s that near decade that separates me from my older sister. As you can probably figure, my arrival came as a big surprise to everyone. My parents had thought they were done having kids and were already yearning for their empty-nester days. I befuddled them from their first awareness of my existence, and that befuddlement extended through my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, right up through the present moment in their condo. To an outsider (and to me), it might seem that my parents were just as uncomfortable talking to me as they were to Sérgio or Harriet.
“Well, anyway,” said my dad. “How’s your novel coming?”
“Don’t you have a grant for it?” said my mom.
I glanced at my traveling companions. The frequency of Sérgio’s watch-checking had just about doubled over the past few minutes, and Harriet was being uncharacteristically silent.
