Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  Brad stood up, looking sad.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t leave me. I won’t do it again.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips, lips pursed.

  “I know that look,” he said. “You’ll let me come back.”

  “Go!” she said.

  He walked toward the door, head down, and turned to look at her.

  “You poisoned me!” he shouted. “You and your witch brew!”

  “What?” she said.

  “Why?” he said. “Why did you destroy my liiiiiiiife?”

  “You are scaring me.”

  “Why can’t it be like it was?” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “I know that somewhere in there, you do.”

  She’d never seen a look so searching or lost.

  “You have to go,” she said, “now. Or I will call the cops.”

  “See you,” he said, and he went into the night.

  Juliet went to the door, double-bolted it, sat down on the couch, and had a cry—deep, long, satisfying, and a little drunken.

  A half hour later, there was a rattling at the door.

  “I said go away!” Juliet cried.

  “Dude,” said Margaret through the door. “Let me in. I dropped my keys in the toilet at the Empty Bottle.”

  Juliet unlatched it. Margaret came in, cold looking and red-eyed.

  “Is he out there?”

  “Who?”

  “Brad?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “He could be hiding in the alley or something.”

  “I don’t like the guy, but that doesn’t seem like his style. Is it over?”

  “It’s over,” Juliet said.

  “Finally,” said Margaret.

  In fact, Brad had walked over to Irving Park Road, and he was in the process of walking down Irving Park to the lake, which was going to take him a while, but he didn’t care. He knew there wouldn’t be anyone around. The snow had started to fall, heavy and mean and wet. Chicago had gone into hibernation, a mode that Brad had experienced way too many times, hundreds even, maybe less, maybe more. He didn’t know any longer, and he didn’t care.

  Brad crossed Lake Shore Drive at the light, and then he crossed the empty bike path and then a set of basketball courts and walked down a freezing, lonely beach of sand hiding under snow, and then out to the pier, a long walk strewn with pebbles and fish bones. Lake Michigan lapped up against the moldy concrete—relentless, cruel, and eternal. He crossed two decades of graffiti, stood at the end of the pier, and tossed his hat into the churning, icy waters. Then he removed his scarf and his gloves and his jacket and his sweater, his long underwear, his shoes, his socks, his jeans, and finally his boxer briefs, flinging them one after another into the lake.

  The weather battered him, but he didn’t care. He’d taken every shock the world could offer, and he’d borne them all. And still he felt the pain, the confusion, the misunderstanding, all the horrors of being alive, of being forced into the same body, for the same years, over and over again. He stood there against the gray-black sky—naked, freezing, and alone.

  Brad turned his head to the sky and raised his hands. “Why me?” he shouted.

  It was all probably a little much. He didn’t even have an audience. But it had been a rough couple hundred years.

  “Why me? Why me? Why me?”

  But the universe had no answer for old Brad Cohen.

  Within a year Juliet Loveless had stumbled into an opportunity to travel to Holland to study with the Dutch doctors who were doing groundbreaking research into the medicinal properties of cannabis. A six-week fellowship became a job, and that led to a master’s degree and a better job and a PhD from Leiden University, and by 2006 Juliet was one of the leading researchers in the burgeoning field of herbal medicine, a genuine doctor in a world that needed them terribly. She married a Dutch man, relatively late, had one miscarriage, and then at age thirty-nine had a daughter. But she was living in a place that actually had social services, so she kept her career going and by the year 2014 was spending the autumn and winter in Tucson, Arizona, working with Dr. Andrew Weil, and the rest of the year in Holland. Her husband worked for her; her daughter went where she went. All told, her life was a lot better without Brad Cohen’s emotional wreckage holding her down.

  Still, from time to time Juliet thought of that weird, haunting, passionate boy who’d tried so unsuccessfully to seduce her in Chicago in the mid-’90s, and wondered what happened to him. She didn’t wonder too hard, but he was in her mind like any lover stays, at least partially, forever. One slow night in Tucson, she looked him up on Facebook and Twitter and the other social bits of the web she used. It wasn’t easy. Brad Cohen was a common enough name. It was a real rabbit hole, though. Maybe he was one of those guys who lived off the grid on a concrete slab in Nevada. But she didn’t remember him as that sturdy or brave. There seemed to be no digital evidence of him at all. She couldn’t even find an online death record.

  In 2015, Brad Cohen didn’t exist.

  THE MAN WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING

  Chicago Reader

  April 11, 1998

  By Neal Pollack

  Staff Writer

  Every day for the last three years, a gaunt, sad-looking man named Brad Cohen has been riding the El, mostly the Red Line but occasionally the Brown and Blue, telling people the future. Not everyone listens to him, but a surprising number of people do. He’s never rude, he’s usually clean, and there’s often something persuasive in his eyes. Even though Cohen looks biologically to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, he claims to actually be somewhere between four hundred and five hundred, possibly even more. “I’m not quite sure,” he says. “At some point you just lose track of time.”

  One morning last November, I met Cohen on the Belmont El platform, which is one of his preferred spots because it’s where a lot of lines converge. He says he gets some of his best work done on the Evanston Express. He was wearing an expensive-looking navy peacoat and a pair of nice sunglasses, and could easily have been mistaken for an upscale guy headed to work in the Loop. This, as I later learned, is one of Brad Cohen’s most mysterious qualities. Other times when I met him—and we’ve spent a lot of time together in the last few months—he looked as though he’d spent several nights in a row behind a Dumpster. His attention tends to wander and doesn’t always focus on normal human needs, like dressing properly or bathing or living indoors.

  He shook my hand with a businessman’s force.

  “What a pleasure,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”

  “Why?” I said, since no one ever wants to meet me.

  “I’m a completist,” he said.

  That was a strange thing to say, but I soon came to learn that Brad Cohen says a lot of strange things. His mind seems to work on several simultaneous tracks, not all of them comprehensible, even to him. The Ravenswood train arrived, and we got on, headed downtown. Slowly as usual, the train rumbled away.

  “I tend to prefer going toward the Loop,” Cohen said without prompting. “When you travel out into the neighborhoods, people are heading home, and they don’t really want to hear the truth. They’re more ready for distraction when they’re on the way to work or whatever. Are you ready to watch me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “OK,” he said, and he stood up, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  “Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you during your commute. Some of you may be familiar with me, or maybe not, so let me introduce myself. My name is Brad Cohen, and I’m the Man Who Knows Everything. Now, I’m not asking you for money. I’m just asking you for the opportunity to let me tell you the future. It’s a gift that I have, and I want to
share it with the public for free. Ask me anything.”

  There was silence in the train car. People looked at their books or at their shoes. We were getting close to Fullerton, and soon we’d go underground.

  “Keep in mind,” Cohen said, “that I don’t have psychic powers. Unless you’re famous—in which case you’re probably not riding the El . . .”

  That elicited some chuckles. As Cohen told me later, “I’ve lived a lot of years in Chicago. I know they like that regular-guy appeal.” On the train that day, he continued, “Or are going to be famous, in which case you probably don’t mind hearing that’s the case—I can’t predict your individual futures. But I can tell you everything that’s going to happen in general. Anything at all. And I’m always right, a hundred percent of the time. I highly recommend that you try me.”

  The train pulled up at Fullerton. As it pulled away, a guy from the back of the car shouted out, “Are the Cubs ever going to win the World Series?”

  “I think you know the answer to that,” Brad said. “Two thousand three and 2004 are going to be particularly heartbreaking.”

  “What about the Sox?” the guy asked. There was a bit of booing on the train, pretty common on the North Side.

  “Please don’t shoot the messenger,” Brad said to much laughter. “But yes. The White Sox are going to win the World Series in 2005.”

  This elicited even more laughter.

  “And they’re going to beat the Astros.”

  Now Brad had the train car in the palm of his hand.

  “Who’s gonna be president after Clinton?” someone asked.

  “George Bush, the governor of Texas.”

  “Bullshit!” a man exclaimed.

  “It’s true. He’s going to steal the election from Al Gore, and the reason he’s going to be able to do that is because Ralph Nader is going to enter the race and take votes from Gore’s left flank.”

  “What about after Bush?”

  “Well, that’s where it gets interesting. He’s here in Chicago right now. It’s Barack Obama. He just got elected to the State Senate.”

  “That guy is black!” said a black guy.

  “I know that,” Cohen said. “I can vouch for it personally.”

  I make a note to myself, “Call Barack Obama.” About a week later, I do that, and I get Obama on the phone at his office in Springfield. I ask Obama if he’s ever heard of anyone named Brad Cohen. At first, Obama says no, but as I’m just about to hang up, he says, “You know, now that you mention it, there was a guy named Cohen who showed up at my community-service office back in ’93. He kept telling me that I was going to be president someday, which is completely absurd, and that he wanted to volunteer for me. Well, we could always use volunteers back then, so I accepted his offer. He was really good for a while, did whatever I asked, but after about a month, he just started standing in the corner and muttering to himself, so we had to ask him to leave because he was scaring people away.”

  “So are you going to be president someday?” I asked.

  “I am committed to serving the people of the state of Illinois,” said young Mr. Obama.

  Back on the El, Cohen fielded a couple more questions. At Division he said to me, “Let’s get off here. I’m thirsty.”

  On the street, he said to me, “It’s always the same questions over and over. ‘Who’s going to win the World Series?’ ‘Who’s going to be president?’ Like that’s all that matters. No one has any damn imagination. I could tell them that the earth is going to fly off its axis and hurtle into the sun and all they’d care about is whether or not the Bears are going to the Super Bowl.”

  “Well, is it?” I asked.

  “Is what what?” he said.

  “Is the earth going to hurtle into the sun?”

  “Not as of 2010 it’s not,” he said.

  We went to the Old Town Ale House and ordered pints. Brad insisted on paying.

  “I have so much money, I can’t spend it all,” he said.

  The mystery was thickening.

  “There’s a portrait of me on the wall here, as part of the mural,” Cohen said.

  “Is that right?” I said. “I thought the mural was painted in the ’70s.”

  “It was,” he said. “I used to come here with my dad sometimes. In the mural I’m a kid.”

  We picked up our beers and walked over to the wall, where local hacks, poets, improvisers, novelists, and other bohemian luminaries had been immortalized in hues of brown, yellow, and orange, which looked even worse than they once had, because of twenty-five years of tobacco stains. It’s a memorial to the town’s pantheon of forgotten weirdos. Brad walked over to a far corner.

  “See,” he said. “I’m right . . . here.” He pointed at the lower right corner.

  “That’s not you,” I said, “unless you’re a young Del Close.”

  Cohen looked at the mural. “Huh,” he said. “Ask the bartender.”

  We walked over to the bar together. Brad ordered another round of beers.

  “Hey,” he said to the bartender, a woman about as old as Alderman Ed Vrdolyak but only about half as well preserved, “can you tell me what happened to the painting of the kid on the lower right corner of the mural over there?”

  “There ain’t never was no kid, sweetheart,” she said.

  “No, I’m sure there was. It was me. Don’t you remember a kid used to come in here with Don Cohen?”

  “I don’t remember nothin’,” she said.

  “Huh,” he said.

  He turned to me. “That must have been from a different timeline,” he said.

  “A different timeline?”

  “I get them confused.”

  For the Man Who Knows Everything, he certainly didn’t seem to know himself very well.

  Cohen grew up in Hyde Park, the only son of a University of Chicago economics professor and a social worker. At least that’s what he told me. Unlike some of his other claims, though, this one was easy to check. I called Don Cohen at his office at the U of C. He got back to me a couple of hours later.

  “I was just confirming that Brad is your son,” I said.

  “Why?” said Don Cohen. “Is he in trouble again?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Good. There was this time a few weeks ago where he was claiming to be the alderman from Albany Park and he chained himself to the desk of the ward office. Another time he got arrested at Superdawg because he was screaming at the manager to show him the title for the place. He said he was the owner.”

  There was a sigh on the other end of the phone.

  “It’s a lot of trouble being Brad’s father,” Don Cohen said.

  I arranged to meet Don and Rose Cohen at their condo in Hyde Park, the place where Brad grew up and where they still live. They offered me oolong tea imported from China and cookies from their favorite panadería. Clearly, Brad had grown up in an intellectual household, almost a bohemian one.

  Don and Rose’s apartment was as dusty and book filled as you might imagine, with fraying rugs and framed Harold Washington campaign posters and ads for shows at the Checkerboard Lounge on the wall. There were issues of the Nation, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and the Baffler on the coffee table, and a nice display of native Guatemalan art. Rose Cohen told me she’d done quite a lot of pro bono work with refugees from the Guatemalan civil war.

  “I even took Brad with me to Antigua a few years ago,” she said. “It was kind of shocking how bored he seemed, like he’d been there a dozen times before. He even knew the name of the woman who owned the hacienda we stayed at.”

  “He’s always been like that,” Don Cohen said. “He would never do his schoolwork but knew all the answers. He could read at a college level when he was in kindergarten but rarely found anything that could hold his attention. We tried to put him in Hebrew school,
but he already knew Hebrew. How was that even possible?”

  “Did you have him evaluated?” I ask.

  “Of course we did!” Rose said. “We took him to Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, for God’s sake. The doctor said Brad was of above-average intelligence but nothing exceptional and showed no signs of schizophrenia or other form of mental illness. He didn’t have attention-deficit disorder and didn’t register on the autism scale. We went to the Mayo Clinic. We went everywhere. Nothing was wrong with him.”

  “But everything was wrong with him, obviously,” Don said.

  “Days would pass by and he wouldn’t come out of his room. Also, after 1983 he was rich.”

  “What do you mean, rich?” I asked.

  “He had a lot of money. He invested half his bar mitzvah money in Apple stock and then picked the Tigers to win the 1984 World Series . . . before the season even started! That was fifty grand right there. He invested half of that in Microsoft and then took the other half to pick the next World Series winner. It just went on like that. By the time he was eighteen, he could have afforded to send himself to Harvard thirty times.”

  “But he didn’t go to college,” Rose said. “He said he didn’t need to. Or want to. He said he’d been before multiple times.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Rose blew into a tissue.

  “Brad had . . . has . . . memories.”

  “Like past lives?”

  “Not really,” she said. “More like memories of this life, of things that have already happened. He has so many of them that he gets confused. And you want to know the strangest thing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I believe him.”

  “He can be very persuasive,” Don said. “In 1985 he said to me, ‘Steven Spielberg is going to make a movie about the Holocaust, and it’s going to win the Oscar.’ At the time it sounded like the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, but he was correct, and about so many things, over and over again.”

  “It must have been hard having a kid like that,” I said.