by Neal Pollack
“That was nice,” he said.
“Mmm,” said Karen.
“I really felt close to you.”
Karen propped up on one elbow. “What is wrong with you, Brad?” she said. “You’re acting like a wuss.”
Brad sighed. “I’m going to be forty,” Brad said, “again.”
“What do you mean, again?”
“I mean . . .”
Brad couldn’t tell her what he meant.
“I don’t know who I am after tomorrow.”
“You’re the talk of Washington,” Karen said. “Don’t fuck that up now with some ordinary midlife crisis.”
“It’s not ordinary,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to any person.”
Karen looked at him disdainfully. Then she looked at her phone.
“I should go,” she said. “I’m having breakfast with Elizabeth Warren in about seven hours, and I want to be sharp.”
“Fine,” Brad said.
Karen was still buttoning her shirt as she walked down the stairs.
A little while later, Brad lay on his Sleep Number mattress, set to seventy-five, while staring at his third-story bedroom skylight, thinking about Juliet. What was she like now? More importantly, had she seen his show?
His daughters, Cori and Claire Cohen, had never been born in this timeline. He hadn’t seen them for forty years, and while he was grateful to not have to watch Wonder Pets! or Caillou, he still missed them. He loved the way Cori would fry ants on the sidewalk with rapt attention for hours, and he even wanted to revisit those god-awful improvised concerts Claire had put on in their living room almost every night. She’d been so full of off-key verve. The girls had given his life substance and meaning at a time when he really didn’t have anything else going on.
But he’d completely blown that opportunity. In fact, he hadn’t even tried. It made him question if he even wanted to be a dad. Of course he did. But he also, he had to admit, didn’t. He liked his freedom now. This was the choice as he saw it: lonely and empty but free, or emotionally fulfilled but trapped.
Brad faced two separate, but also simultaneous, midlives. One of them felt like a movie he’d seen long ago, while the other was more immediate. Either way he had a lot of reckoning ahead.
By most metrics he’d done a better job this time around. He’d played every step smarter, with more confidence. Because of that he was more successful in his career, had a lot more money, owned his house plus a vacation share on Martha’s Vineyard, and couldn’t walk through an airport, especially not an East Coast airport, without someone stopping and asking him for his autograph. There was little to regret; he was and had been a man of his time. But the same old dissatisfaction still rose. Only this time he had to face it alone.
What’s going to happen to me tomorrow? he wondered.
But Brad wasn’t going to find out.
He woke up in the womb.
THE DAILY DOUBLE
One warm and drizzling May Thursday evening in Brad Cohen’s third 2003, he was nursing a porter at a bar on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. He’d bought a building in Williamsburg fifteen years earlier, before anyone else was interested, for the price of a Chevy Impala. That was his neighborhood, a good investment.
Interpol and the Strokes were on the juke like in every New York bar in those days. The music stopped. The bartender turned on the TV. A familiar theme played. Everyone in the bar shut up at once.
“Cool,” Brad said to the guy next to him. “I love Jeopardy!” But he’d mostly forgotten about it in both this life and the last.
“People here are fanatics,” the guy said. “They shout out answers, they go nuts. You watch the show?”
“I used to watch it every day,” Brad said.
This was the first game of a two-game final for the Tournament of Champions. That meant no “Foods That Start with B” softball categories. Brad found himself growing strangely excited, just like he had in his first go-around in the long-ago days before Alex Trebek shaved his mustache.
The first category that appeared was “The Olympic Games.” And the first answer was, “In 1998 she became the youngest person ever to win a gold medal for ladies’ figure skating.”
“Tara Lipinski,” Brad said. One of the contestants on the show guessed Michelle Kwan, another Oksana Baiul. Brad was the only one who was right.
Then it was, “When this US speed skater raced at the 2002 Olympics, his fans sported fake whiskers under their bottom lips.”
“Apolo Ohno,” Brad said. He’d seen the 2002 Winter Olympics several times. Someone on the game got it right, and so did half the people in the bar.
But Brad also knew that “all roads lead to Rome,” that Lennox Lewis won a gold medal boxing for Canada, that the capital of India was New Delhi, that Niels Bohr had been born in Copenhagen, duh, that Bloemfontein was the capital of South Africa, that Jean-Claude Killy was a great French skier, that Hans Blix had been the UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the year 2000, and, for the Daily Double, that Carl Linnaeus of Sweden had coined the term “Homo sapiens” in the eighteenth century.
There had been fifteen questions, and he’d gotten fifteen right.
At the commercial break, the guy next to him said, “You should be on the show.”
“Maybe,” Brad said.
But of course he should. He was 113 years old. His knowledge went deep and complete. Also, he’d experienced more pop culture than anyone in human history. He was a living VH1 factoid balloon.
Just like in his other iterations, Brad had been born with bad coordination, poor depth perception, and the inability to put together puzzles. That eliminated the possibility of any gig where he worked with his hands. He would never be an architect or mechanic. No matter how hard he practiced or tried, he wasn’t going to become a professional baseball player or opera singer. While he liked watching movies about astronauts, he would never become one. He simply wouldn’t qualify.
But he definitely knew how to read, and this third time through he’d read a lot.
When Brad realized he didn’t know anything about British kings, he read about British kings. If it occurred to him that he didn’t understand the terms “mitosis” and “meiosis,” he’d go to the library and read about cell division until he figured it out. He read all of Trollope and all of Proust, and then he learned some French so that he could read Proust again in the original. He also became proficient in Spanish, Hebrew, Latin, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Hindi, with little dustings of Dutch and Gaelic. And that was all before he turned twenty-one (the third time).
Brad spent these ’90s auditing classes at Columbia University and NYU, learning everything he could about Hinduism, Buddhism, objectivism, the history of the Ottoman Empire, sixteenth-century poetry, jazz history, African geography, Italian idioms, Canadian politics, the Bloomsbury Group, the Gadsden Purchase, German cinema, and, given that this was the go-go age of political correctness, more than his fair share of postcolonial feminist literary theory.
He went deep into theoretical physics and organic chemistry and invertebrate anatomy. He learned BASIC and FORTRAN and Hypertext and Pascal. When Java debuted at Sun Microsystems in 1995, Brad was on top of it right away. From Newton’s laws of motion to the history of Protestantism, from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois to Hammurabi’s laws, he was a student of everything.
And now he knew all the answers on Jeopardy!
After the commercial, Brad answered that David Mamet wrote Speed-the-Plow, that Pete Seeger wrote “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and that the answer to “This adjective referring to the works of G. B. S. is derived from the Latinized form of his surname” is “Shavian.” He also correctly identified the French term roman à clef. The final answer of the round was “Mount Gay Rum has been made in this West Indies island nation off northeastern South America for three hundred years.”
“What is Barbados?” Brad said correctly.
There had been thirty questions. Brad had known the answer to all thirty of them. He knew all thirty in the second round too.
For Final Jeopardy!, the bar passed around slips of paper for everyone to write their answers. Anyone who answered correctly got a free well shot. The category was “Governors,” and the question went, “In 1967 she became the first woman governor of a state east of the Mississippi River.”
“Jesus Christ,” said the bartender.
There were about twenty people playing at the bar. Half of them immediately crumpled up their papers and threw them to the ground. Others just stared at the paper blankly or scratched their chins as the traditional Final Jeopardy! music played its little singsong, music-box, thirty-seconds-of-doom theme: Dah dah dah dah dah dah DAH—dah dah dah dah dum de dum di dum dum.
This was trivia. It was trivial. Brad tapped his foot under the bar.
He wrote down “Bella Abzug” but immediately crossed it out because he knew she’d never been a governor. So he wrote down something else.
Time expired. One of the contestants wrote down “Who is Ferraro?” That was wrong. Another wrote “Who is Brown?,” hoping that picking a common last name would allow him to stumble into the answer. The third wrote down “Who is Bella Abzug?” Also wrong. This was, in Jeopardy! parlance, a Triple Stumper.
The correct answer was Lurleen B. Wallace of Alabama. The entire bar groaned.
No one even bothered to show their napkins. Except Brad. He flipped his over. It said “Lurleen B. Wallace.” He’d known the answer. He’d known every answer.
“Hell, man,” said the bartender, “have a premium drink. Not just a shot.”
“How about Mount Gay Rum?” Brad said.
“You got it.”
Brad quaffed that Potent Potable and seven more. He staggered home to his Williamsburg loft, which, when he’d bought it in 1991, had boasted a view of a garbage scow and the Twin Towers. Now the scow had been removed, the docks were being renovated, and the towers were a hole in the ground. He’d watched them come down on September 11, once again powerless to affect history.
But suddenly life number three had a purpose. Brad had found a sport. He wasn’t just going to go on Jeopardy! He was going to go on Jeopardy! and win. But he wasn’t just going to win. He was going to win a lot.
There would be no more drinking, no more pot smoking, no more anything but careful study and hard preparation. Brad already knew more about everything than anyone else in the world, but he needed to know even more.
“Juliet,” he said. “You’ll be proud of me.”
He said that to the air, because Juliet wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there in almost eighty years. Brad spoke to no one, because he had no one.
He was extremely lonely and extremely rich. These were the perfect conditions under which to enter the Jeopardy! dojo. He had no earthly distractions.
Brad was going to be the greatest game-show contestant of all time.
Six months later Brad walked into a basement room at the Westin in Midtown Manhattan for his Jeopardy! audition. He arrived more than a half hour before his call time, yet there were nearly two hundred people milling about a chandeliered, windowless antechamber, many of them sitting nervously in metal-backed hotel chairs, talking in low tones to their spouses or their mothers or their trusted friends. They’d come from as far as Florida and Ohio. Most of them would be rejected by the show on the spot. But Brad pitied them less than those who did make it onto the show. They would be crushed by his juggernaut. His reign would last a thousand episodes.
“Where you in from?” Brad heard someone say behind him.
He turned. “Huh?” Brad said.
He saw a big-shouldered man, late thirties, wearing the epaulets and tight polyester uniform of the United States Air Force.
“Did you have to travel far?”
“Oh, no,” Brad said. “I live over in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn, huh? I hear it’s getting pretty popular.”
You have no idea who you’re up against, Brad thought.
“Yep,” Brad said. “Pretty popular.”
“Well, I’m up from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Got a three-day leave, and I thought I’d see the city.”
What a hillbilly, Brad thought.
“Yeah, I haven’t been here since I got my master’s in international economics from Columbia,” he said.
Well played.
This was Jeopardy! You didn’t even try unless you were smart.
Brad extended his hand. “Good luck today,” he said.
“You too,” said Air Force, gripping Brad firmly. Too firmly. It hurt. The game had already begun.
Doors opened. Out stepped a woman in her late forties wearing a flowing caftan and a pair of slippers, not exactly what Brad had expected.
“Good morning!” exclaimed the woman.
“G’mrning,” the crowd mumbled sheepishly like a bunch of shy and angry middle schoolers.
The woman looked disappointed.
“Good morning!” she said, raising her eyebrows wide and lifting her palms to indicate that this crowd needed to bring up the energy.
“Good morning!” everyone said, this time too enthusiastically.
The woman waved her bescarved arms like a shopping-mall Stevie Nicks.
“Who here is ready to play Jeopardy!?” she exclaimed.
The crowd had caught on. They whistled, hooted, and applauded. Brad joined them. This was exciting after all.
“Good!” she said. “My name is Barbara Stevens. I’m one of the Jeopardy! contestant coordinators. Hopefully, you’ll all be seeing a lot more of me. Well . . .”
She held out her arms wide.
“Maybe not more of me. But at least more often.”
This got a lot of laughter. She grinned broadly, theatrically, Auntie Mame welcoming befuddled dinner guests. Then, just as dramatically, she made a sad face.
“Unfortunately, most of you won’t,” she said.
That quieted the nervous titters.
“That’s just the way things work in Jeopardy!-land,” she said. “If I had my choice, you would all be champions. But we have to winnow the field somehow. So this is how it’s going to work. I’m going to take you into that room . . .” She pointed behind her, from whence she’d emerged. “My friends and I are going to give you ten Jeopardy! answers. And you’re going to have to give us the questions very fast. The whole thing is going to take about a minute for each of you. When it’s over, we’ll tabulate the scores and post them up on this wall. Only thirty-five of you will be returning after lunch.”
“How many do we have to get correct?” asked a mousy-looking girl wearing a University of Iowa sweatshirt.
“Honey,” she said maternally, “if I were you, I’d try to get all of them right.”
She looked out at the crowd. “The same goes for all of you!” she said. “This is the big leagues, but I think you all are ready. Most of all remember: it’s a game. Have fun.”
Brad looked around. A few people were beaming openly. They were having fun. That was good. They could keep having fun. Right until the moment he garroted them onstage with his insanely comprehensive brain knowledge, the collected wisdom of twelve decades.
He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket. On it was a maxim from Sun Tzu that he’d been using to motivate himself. It read: “Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment—that which they cannot anticipate.”
Brad was ready for war.
They took the contestants in alphabetical order. The first, a lawyer from Philly named Abrams, went in; ninety seconds later s
he emerged looking like digested sausage.
“I totally froze,” she said. “I could only answer maybe three of those questions. They asked them so fast. It was confusing.”
She walked toward the bar, muttering to herself. Brad breathed deeply. They called on him less than a quarter hour later.
He went into the room and stood at a podium. Fifteen feet in front of him, Barbara Stevens sat at a conference table. On her left sat a man, probably fifteen years younger, and 100 percent more Filipino, and on her right sat an African American woman, midthirties, nerdy looking, like just about everyone in Jeopardy!-land.
“Brad Cohen,” Barbara said, “of Brooklyn, New York. We’re going to give you ten answers. You have to get as many of the questions right as you possibly can. Your maximum allowed time is ninety seconds . . . total. Do you think you can do it?”
“I know I can,” Brad said.
Barbara laughed in a tone equal parts total empathy and pure disdain.
“Confidence,” she said. “That’s what I like to hear. Let’s begin.”
Barbara and her two assistants read off questions rapid-fire, almost slurring the words. It was a script they’d seen a hundred times before. Jeopardy! had given him no hints. He just had to know everything. Fortunately, he did.
“Who is Keats?”
“What is Sri Lanka?”
“What is Destiny’s Child?”
“What is Lexus?”
“Who is Winnie the Pooh?”
“What were the 1890s?”
“Who is Charlemagne?”
“Who were Ali and Foreman?”
“What is the liver?”
“What is Doctor Zhivago?”
One of Barbara’s assistants slapped on a stopwatch.
“Sixty-one seconds,” he said.
Barbara’s face scrunched into approval. “That’s pretty fast,” she said. “But did you get them all right?”
“I got them all right,” Brad said.
“How do you know?”
Because I’m old enough to be your great-grandfather, Brad thought, but instead he said, “I know.”
