by Neal Pollack
“You have no idea,” Don said.
Rose smacked him on the arm. “He never gave us any trouble,” she said. “Not really. He didn’t mouth off and had decent manners and was never impolite. It was the inconsistency that made it hard. Things would go OK for a week or two, even a month, and then he’d just wander. One time I took him to Jewel because I had to pick up some groceries, and when I turned around, he was gone. I got totally frantic. I looked around for a while, and it really seemed like he had disappeared for good this time. He always said to me, ‘Mom, someday I’m just going to vanish, so don’t get attached.’ I had no idea what that meant, but maybe this was it, right? As it turned out, he was just standing in the corner between the juice and milk refrigerators, walking in place with his head against the cooler. It was like, what do they call it when a computer or a video game stalls out?”
“It crashes?” I said.
“Right, it was like he was having some sort of crash. I touched his shoulder. He turned around. His eyes looked so lost and scared. And then he completely snapped out of it and said, ‘Oh, hi, Mom. How are you?’ He had no idea where he was.”
“How old was he when this happened?” I said. “Eight? Nine?”
“No, he was twenty,” said Rose. “He moved out of the house soon after that, and we’ve barely seen him since then. He won’t call for months at a time.”
“And then a few weeks ago,” Don said, “I came home from the office, and Brad was sitting in the kitchen. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked. We went out for Ethiopian food and he fell asleep at the table.”
Rose put her hand on my arm. “Honestly, you can tell us,” she said. “Is he doing OK?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer her.
“He’s fine,” I said.
I met with Brad Cohen a half-dozen times over the next month, and every time his story just grew stranger. He claimed to have been a senior editor at the New Century magazine and a multiple-time champion on the game show Jeopardy!, to have been Lou Reed’s personal assistant in 1990, and to have worked as part of the maintenance crew for New Zealand’s America’s Cup team. According to Cohen, he’s lived in Caracas, Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, Jerusalem, Paris, Wheeling in West Virginia, both East and West Berlin, and, for a brief period when he was “investing in oil and gas exploration,” in the Russian town of Smolensk. “Those are just the ones I can remember right now,” he said to me. “There are dozens more.” He says he’s climbed Mount McKinley, Mount Fuji, and Mount Kilimanjaro, and attempted to swim the English Channel once but had to stop when he got a puncture in his wetsuit. One summer, apparently, was spent biking across Spain, and another hitchhiking around Scandinavia. He says there is no place he hasn’t been, no drug he hasn’t tried, and nothing he hasn’t done. He speaks of everything with authority and in incredible detail. And yet there’s absolutely no evidence that any of those claims are true.
I worked as a junior reporter myself at the New Century once, in the summer of 1991, so I made a few calls over there. No one had any memory or knowledge of Brad Cohen, except for Jacob Jaffe, the paper’s editor and guiding spirit.
“Have you ever heard of Brad Cohen?” I asked him on the phone.
“Well, of course,” Jaffe said. “Everyone in this business knows at least one Brad Cohen.”
“Fair enough,” I said, “but I’m talking about a specific one.”
I went on to describe Cohen and his background in detail.
“Come to think of it,” Jaffe said, “there was one morning about five years ago, during the buildup to the Gulf War. I came in early because we had a guy in Iraq who was faxing us dispatches. No one was there except for our receptionist, who for some reason likes to use the shower in my office. I let her because—I don’t know, let’s not talk about that. In any case, there was a kid sitting in the bullpen, typing away.”
“Who was that kid?” I asked.
“He might have been your Brad Cohen,” Jaffe said. “He said to me, ‘I’ll have my briefs done by lunchtime,’ and I said, ‘I didn’t order any briefs, and I don’t think you work for me.’ He looked at me so sadly and said, ‘Of course I do, Jacob. I’m your best guy; you told me so yourself. And any time you want me to take over the magazine, I’m ready.’ He looked so sad and lost, I almost let him stay, but you know how competitive those bullpen slots are.”
“I do,” I said.
“So I told him he had to leave. He started to cry. He said, ‘But I belong here!’ Then I threatened to call security, so he picked up and walked away, shoulders slumped. After he was gone, I looked at the briefs he was working on, and you know what was funny?”
“What?” I said.
“They were excellent. So prescient.”
A few days later, I got Barbara Stevens, the lead contestant coordinator for the game show Jeopardy! on the phone. I asked her if there’d ever been a player named Brad Cohen on the show.
“I would have to check,” she said. “We cycle through a lot of people every season. And most of them vanish without a trace.”
So I described Cohen in some detail to her.
“You know, it’s strange you should say that,” she said, “because I remember now a couple of years ago this young man showed up at the studio one morning with all the other contestants. He’d gotten on the bus at the hotel, and he knew exactly where to go. He even knew all of our names. In fact, he was so persuasive that he got all the way to the greenroom and was filling out a form before we realized he wasn’t on the roster.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well, of course we told him he had to leave. Getting on the show requires passing a rigid series of tests. And, you know, there’s security screening. He said, ‘But today is my taping. I’m supposed to win two games and then I lose the third, and I’ll donate the money to charity, and I’ll be out of your hair forever.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, it doesn’t work that way.’ And then he said the strangest thing.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘I must be in the wrong timeline,’ and he picked up his suitcase and headed for the door. I offered to call him a cab, but he just walked out the door. ‘I know the way,’ he said. It was pretty disturbing. He seemed so lost. But we had to let the incident go. We had a show to tape.”
Every interview I just got more confused and had to visit Cohen again. Finally, for the first time, I went to his home. He lives in a small three-room apartment a block from the Jarvis Avenue El, just above Don’s Coffee Club, a vintage-themed café, where Cohen can be found many evenings nursing a pot of tea and a huge piece of store-bought chocolate cake. He has a regular table near the back, which he always gets to use because he’s also the building’s landlord. In fact, he bought the entire block of buildings on Jarvis in 1989, when real estate values in Rogers Park were at their lowest. Cohen’s mother says he’s always had an uncanny knack for predicting property values. Brad doesn’t charge Don rent and only asks him to cover utilities.
“He doesn’t ever talk to anybody in here,” says Don Selle, the café’s sole proprietor and sole employee. “He just sits there for hours, staring into space, asking me to play Louis Prima and Keely Smith duets. Which is fine, because the rest of the customers hate it, and I want to drive them away because I don’t feel like working.”
Cohen’s apartment is just upstairs from the Coffee Club. He had me walk up the back stairs rather than the front entry. I could hear “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo” playing as I went up the stairs, which were wet from a recent rain. Cohen’s rear apartment door was unlocked. I opened it and went inside. It was dark. There appeared to be no furniture. Then I spotted a single futon mattress on the floor and a paper chest of drawers. The apartment smelled like dirty clothes, and also like there hadn’t been a window opened in there for years.
“Hello?” I said.
There was a rustling in a far corner. I
looked over. A shape was moving around. I flicked the switch on the wall next to me. Brad Cohen was squatting in the corner, looking at the wall. When the light (from an unshaded bulb) flooded the room, Cohen turned his neck toward me. He hissed like a cornered animal.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Um, you told me to come over and talk to you tonight,” I said.
“Did I?” Cohen said.
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
I told him. He squatted there, looking confused.
Finally, he said, “Oh, yes, you’re doing a feature story on my . . . situation.”
“What exactly is your situation?” I asked.
“I think you know,” he said.
We both agreed that the apartment was no place for a conversation. There was nowhere to sit, and it smelled like an abattoir.
“I don’t need much,” Cohen admitted.
So we went down to the Coffee Club, where Selle served us reluctantly, even though there was only one other customer in the place, who kept asking Selle if he could open up his laptop, and Selle kept saying, “No electronics! Books only!”
Cohen told me that this was his dream establishment. “Don’s the only person who wants to be here less than I do,” he said.
When I’d met up with him twenty minutes earlier, he’d acted about as normally as a caged human in a Planet of the Apes movie. Brad ordered us two slices of chocolate cake, which I saw Don cutting. He’d clearly bought them at Jewel earlier in the day. We also got two pots of tea. Finally, I broached the topic.
“I don’t understand who you are,” I said.
Cohen sighed. “Tell me about it,” he said. “I’m just myself over and over again.”
“You’re clearly about my age, but you seem . . . older.”
“I’m so much older,” he said. “I don’t even know how old.”
“But you’re not!” I said.
“Look, you seem frustrated,” he said, “and I understand if you don’t want to pursue this anymore. I don’t care either way. In one timeline the guys from Kartemquin Films, the ones who made Hoop Dreams, started making a whole documentary about me. But they quit because they couldn’t figure out the story. But I will tell you this. I’m not a con man. And I am not crazy. Or maybe I am a little crazy, because this situation has driven me crazy. So let’s put it a different way. I’m not making anything up. I have lived many lifetimes, or at least partial lifetimes. It could be forty or fifty or sixty, or as many as seventy-five times. The count eludes me. Regardless, I have gone through puberty more than any man should. I have been to many colleges. I can unfortunately remember most episodes of Barnaby Jones by heart. One time I got my dad to let me see the Rolling Stones during the Tattoo You tour, the one with the tongue on the T-shirt, but other than that it was only after the Undercover album, which was not a good show. I saw Oingo Boingo and Adam Ant in 1982, and I saw Nirvana play with Kurt Cobain at the Metro sixteen different times. There were a lot of James Brown shows mixed in there too.”
This was all very discursive, but he kept on going. “I worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and as an account executive for an oil company in the Strait of Hormuz. I saw the genocide happen in Rwanda, at least until they evacuated me. I saw the Berlin Wall fall in person three times in a row. I went surfing in Belize the day before a hurricane. I ran for Congress and lost. And another time I ran for Congress and won, but I resigned before I took office because I didn’t want to work with Newt Gingrich.”
“It all sounds fake,” I said. “All of it.”
“But it’s all real. Ask the women.”
“What women?” I said.
“Oh, there have been women,” he said. “Some men from time to time for variety, but mostly women. Imagine being single for more than a thousand years.”
“I haven’t particularly enjoyed being single for twenty-seven years,” I said.
“Consider yourself lucky.”
I asked him if he knew how to get in touch with any of these women.
“Most of them I don’t remember,” Cohen said. “But there are a few.”
He named a few that he could remember but kept coming back to a young woman named Juliet Loveless, who, he says, as best as he knows, works at the gift shop of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I was married to her once a long time ago,” he said. “We had two daughters. But I haven’t spoken to her in hundreds of years.”
“What do you mean, hundreds of years?” I said.
“I mean that once a very long time ago, or what feels like a long time ago to me, I was a washed-up screenwriter in Hollywood, married to Juliet. We had two beautiful daughters, named Claire and Cori, and we lived in a shitty old house on top of a hill. The night before my fortieth birthday, I had a breakdown. Juliet made me some kind of herbal potion and I fell asleep. I’ve been trapped in an infinite time loop ever since, and I can’t figure out whether or not she did this to me. OK?”
“That sounds like a great premise for a novel,” I said.
“Go ahead and write it,” Cohen said. “See if I fucking care.”
There were some other things I was curious about.
“You say you know everything that’s going to happen?” I ask.
“I do to a point,” he said. “Not about everyone. But everything in general.”
“Do you know what’s going to happen to me?”
“Wait,” he said. “What’s your name again?”
I told him.
“Oh, yeah, I know that dude. You’re going to be a newspaper reporter in Chicago.”
“I already am that.”
“Then you’re going to get a little boost when you start writing for an Internet magazine called McSweeney’s. Dave Eggers, a writer who’ll be more famous by his thirtieth birthday than you’ll ever be in your lifetime, will publish your first book, and that’ll get your career going for real. There’s some nonsense with a punk-rock band and a novel to go along with it, which will flop.”
“The novel or the band?” I said.
“Both.”
“Naturally.”
“Then you’re going to publish a memoir about being a ‘cool’ dad. Last thing I remember, you’re going to get into yoga.”
“That all sounds very unlikely,” I said.
“I know what I know,” Cohen said.
“So what happens after that?” I ask.
“It all gets a little hazy after 2010,” Cohen said. “That’s the cutoff point. It always is. I disappear.”
“What do you mean, you disappear?”
“I mean that I stop living on the night of my fortieth birthday. I go to bed and wake up in my mother’s womb, and then I get born and it’s 1970 again. I have to live my life again, in order. It’s like Groundhog Day but four decades long, and I have to wear diapers for the first two years.”
“Damn,” I said.
Cohen turned to Don, the proprietor of the joint, and said, “Hey, Don, this cake is really good tonight!”
“It’s the same shit it always is,” Don said.
A couple of days later, I went to the gift shop at the Art Institute of Chicago. Juliet Loveless was working behind the counter, a pretty, confident young woman in a flowing skirt.
“Do you know someone named Brad Cohen?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Why?”
“He claims to know you.”
“Huh,” she said. “How?”
“He says you were married once.”
Juliet laughed. “That’s hilarious,” she said. “I’ve never been married.”
“So you haven’t had any contact with him at all?”
I described him to her.
“Well,” she said.
Here we went again.
�
�About a year ago, there was this guy who came into the shop. He was carrying flowers. And he gave them to me. I’d never seen him before. He said it was our one-year anniversary. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know you,’ and he said, ‘It’s me, Juliet. It’s Brad, your husband.’ My manager called security, but he was gone before they could get here.”
“And you haven’t seen him since then?”
“You know, I could have sworn I saw him peeking in the window once a couple of months ago, but it was only briefly. When I looked again, he was gone.”
“He hasn’t tried to visit you at your home?”
“Now you’re creeping me out,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to. But has he?”
“Maybe he’s tried,” she said. “I was living in an apartment in Lincoln Square until a few months ago, but I moved in with my boyfriend. Should I be worried?”
“I definitely think you should not be worried.”
“Who is this guy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I really didn’t, and I still don’t. Brad Cohen grew up in Hyde Park, got rich in the most improbable way imaginable, and then has spent the next decade bumbling around Chicago and occasionally elsewhere, never really sure where he is and what he’s doing. As far as can be discerned, he never got an education to speak of. And yet he seems to know everything. He’s one of our city’s weirdest mysteries.
A few weeks later I was riding the El downtown, and he got on board at Belmont.
“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.”
“Hey, Brad,” I said.
He looked at me with incomprehension.
“Do I know you?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “we’ve been hanging out on and off for months.”
