Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  While the Pull beckoned softly from behind.

  NOT WITH A WHIMPER

  by

  John Paul Rowan

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

  Last night Jack Fitzpatrick committed suicide by attacking the President of The United States with a fully charged cream pie. Lemon meringue, in full honor of the occasion— history redrawn in an explosion of frothy yellow goo. He did not pull back, as I might have come to expect— as he had so many times before. He didn’t even pull back after the fact: retracting the move, chalking it up to youthful folly and wiping it forever from the face of Time.

  No, this time Jack stayed to the bitter end. Through the nine-millimeter staccato death-dance that accompanied the Secret Servicemens’ gunfire, and beyond. He jerked off the platform like a marionette with its cables cut, toppling backwards through the bunting and into the Hereafter. The media swarmed instantly around his ruined form, a jumble of lenses and shutters providing state-of-the-art coverage far superior to that afforded to the Hinkleys and the Oswalds and the Sirhan Sirhans of their time. Millions of Americans watched in slack-jawed silence as Jack Fitzpatrick’s radiant nightmare visage stared into their living rooms and straight through the veil, grinning through the blood.

  And when I turned, half-hoping to find him miraculously beside me, popping the tab on another brew as he played back yet another videotape of Something That Never Really Happened, laughing and toasting humanity for the wonderfully gullible bunch of patsies we were and still remain … he was simply not there.

  Nor has he appeared, in the ticking hours since. No, this time Jack Fitzpatrick–my friend, the Man Who Could Do Anything—remained in his awkward spread eagle by the podium steps, lifeblood seeping from the innumerable smoking holes that the President’s men had expertly oj>ened in him. He died—no, he let himself die, right there; his body, blown to bits. His mouth, still smiling.

  A lot of people have been wondering about that smile. And I guess it’s time to tell someone about it.

  Jack and I were buddies of long standing. We worked together, a few years back. At the time, we were both poor young struggling nobodies: I was caught up in the desperate struggle to get published, often to the point of forsaking the selfsame compassion that spurred me to write in the first place. And Jack… well, Jack was strange.

  He was a gentle soul, kamikazie-cream pies notwithstanding. He genuinely gave a damn: about people, about the world, about the details you or I or most of the other scuffling hordes nosing the grindstone to get-us-this-day-our-daily-bread never even stop to think about. Maybe he cared too much, I don’t know. Despite our friendship, Jack was a loner. There was always this impenetrable wall of self-sufficiency that he never let slip. Jack Fitzpatrick took care of himself… even if it ultimately came to mean wiping that self clear off the face of the earth: erasing all traces, wrapping all loose ends, and letting anyone involved go on with their lives, unencumbered by the tiniest scintilla of knowledge regarding a Mr. Jacob B. Fitzpatrick— regardless of how intimately he had known them in any concurrent reality.

  Sounds weird? Sure it does. It can’t be helped. I am proud to be the bearer of this lunacy, just as I am proud to have been his friend throughout, knowing as I now do that he could have wiped himself out of my existence at the drop of a hat. He didn’t, though, and I love him for it.

  So you may well understand if I am necessarily biased in this account. If you want the bum raps, read it in the funny papers. File under the Freedom of Information Act, if you’re really that ambitious; find out what miserable inaccuracies they will inevitably concoct. That’ll be illuminative. The government is adept at disappearing that which they cannot readily explain, and the press loves nothing better than to take things out of context, only to bring them back in a more preferable form. They do it all the time. They’re good at it.

  But not nearly as good as Jack. Believe me.

  ■

  I think it first dawned on him when he was about twenty-seven. Now, that might seem a long time to wait to find one’s gift, one’s destiny; but in the scheme of things, it’s nothing. Certainly in Jack’s scheme of things, it was nothing. Preliminary estimates are that he logged in a good ten thousand years before the bullets splattered and snubbed him out, all at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

  It began, as I recall, with a girl named Jamie Morganstem, whom Jack intended to date and hopefully fuck the bejesus out of. She was a receptionist for Whitley, Greene, and Pimkin, a posh Madison Avenue consultation firm and one of our largest clients. She was also dazzling in the extreme: chestnut hair, emerald green eyes, lips to die for, and a body whose upper and lower hemispheres seemed to be perpetually competing for perfection. I mean, this girl could stop traffic if she was wrapped in burlap, and her customary office attire tended toward curve-hugging silk blouses and skirts that filled me with dreams of dying and being reincarnated as her seat cushion.

  Jack was slightly more ambitious. Nothing new there: he always did aim a little higher than me, and both of us were notably more driven than the vast bulk of our coworkers. We were messengers by day, crazed cyclists for an outfit called Speed Demons, Inc. In most peoples’ eyes, we were nothing but proles: shit-toters and delivery boys, the feebs and dweebs that made sure that flak men got their flak distributed and lawyers got their lawsuits filed by five o’clock, when all bells ring in Midtown and the young turks break for the Tex-Mex fern bars.

  And in most cases, they were right. I only ever met two types during my stint on the streets: those on their way up, and those on their way down. Most fell firmly into the latter category, destined to shuffle along with their bags of broken dreams until old age finally coughed up its pay-load of fixed income and Little Friskies. The fear of failure was an oftimes palpable thing. But those in the minority kept up the good fight, certain in the desperate determination of our dreams (and I guess we were right. I went on, anyway, to become a published writer. Oh sure, I’m not ready for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous yet. But I eat. I work. And I’ll tell you something else: in every jaunt Jack took into future possibility, I was a rich published writer…)

  But we were talking about Jamie Morganstern, who was gorgeous beyond belief. Jack hungered for her with a fervor that would have made Jason tremble, hands inches from the Golden Fleece, with inferiority of purpose. Seismographic disturbances were reported if he so much as thought of her. It was a pointless obsession, I thought, because it was common knowledge that Midtown receptionists occupied a pinnacle so far above lowly messengers that they would have to stoop clear through the stratosphere just to recognize our faces above the clipboards we daily held out for their immaculately illegible signatures.

  This was clear to me and the rest of the civilized world. But it didn’t mean squat to Jack Fitzpatrick, who was so rakish and recklessly canny that Jamie Morganstern didn’t report him the first time he propositioned her. Nor did she discourage him on the second attempt. Nor on the third.

  I remember him well, barreling the wrong way down 47th Street and skidding onto Third Avenue, where I was freshly emerged from what may be the only skyscraper in the free world that features a life-sized, clinically accurate bronze nude permamounted in its revolving door. When he saw me he careened across the oncoming traffic and dismounted at a dead run. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, I can’t fucking be-lieve it! I done died and gone to Hebben!”

  I had a sick feeling inside. Only one thing could get a rise like that out of Jack Fitzpatrick, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted my intuition verified. “So, chuckles.” I tried to be nonchalant. “What’s the deal?”

  “She said YES!” he blurted. “She said YES! Tonight! Dinner! Dancing! Foreplay!” He was jumping up and down and shaking me by now, all blonde-haired blue-eyed handsomeness disassembled. “Man, this is a goddess I’m going out with! This is fucking Venus herself!”

  “What, no arms or head
?”

  He ignored me. “Oh, god, I can’t believe it! I’m gonna die!” He twirled and feigned a heart attack, falling back into what he trusted would be my waiting arms.

  Maybe I should have let him fall, but I didn’t. I had seen guys lose their cookies over affairs with the opposite camp before, but nothing like this. This was storm troopers taking over the Vatican. This was intense. I still figured there must be some kind of catch he wasn’t hip to, and I felt morally compelled to blunt the edge of his fervor. So I said to him, by way of artful deflation, “Look, jack. Something’s wrong here. The chick has AIDS or herpes or something. That’s all she wrote, man. You’ll jump into the sack with her, and you’ll end up toting around these little fungoids for the rest of your days. So what the hell are you so worked up about, anyway? So what if she’s beautiful! A legacy of genital leprosy is worth all this precoital leaping about?”

  I was only teasing, trying to keep him from being too smug in the face of the fact that though we’d both always lusted for her, he’d been the one who ultimately scored. Nothing new there. We always lusted for the same women. He always got them. I always teased him.

  But I wasn’t always right…

  Jack and Jamie went out and had a spectacular dinner together, scarfing steak and seafood at Dobson’s, engaging in the kind of high-octane conversation that always got a little weird when he tried too hard. But it worked: he finally charmed her back to her apartment with a grace and economy of motion that you never see in the How To Pick Up Curls! Curls! Gurls! ads. They made the kind of love that conjures up the theme music to National Geographic specials; all tongues and teeth and sweet soul-fire. To hear Jack tell it, mountains were reshaping themselves on the other side of the planet.

  And then, in the sweet, sweet afterglow, when all was perfection, she started to cry. He asked what was wrong, and she told him, and my future as the Amazing Kreskin was assured: she was so sorry, but she couldn’t help herself, it had been so long since she’d dared even risk it, but she just couldn’t hold back anymore, and she really liked him, and it wasn’t under control at all, and she was so sorry….

  … and Jack had felt the bottom drop out of the pit of his stomach, and he lost it, thinking oh shit, oh shit, I wish this had never even happened and a blinding pressure like an embolism imploding bloomed in his head…

  … and suddenly they were back at Dobson’s, finishing their coffee, and he was saying, “and that’s why we just can’t go to bed together, Jamie.” She gazed at him with a strange mixture of shock, confusion, sorrow, and relief. And, all in a flash, he realized what had happened.

  Of course, he walked her home, and they wound up not going to bed with each other. Jack always spoke wistfully of it. “Getting herpes was a lot more fun than not getting herpes,” he said. “In the short run, anyway.” He grinned thoughtfully and added, “But at least I got to do it, didn’t I?”

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. I know, because when he finished telling me I started checking his bike helmet for bumper dents. Brain damage would have explained everything, to my ultimate satisfaction. But he was clean, and the fact that he was so adamant left me no conclusion but that my best friend had come completely unhinged. She shot him down, and he was driven bonkers by his own rabid libido. He smiled the smile of the perfectly just. I began to worry.

  It was quite some time before we spoke of it again. And that comes much later. After the change.

  After the proof.

  ■

  In the first few months of his strange new life, and going strictly by the purely linear time-sense the rest of us are bound to, Jack Fitzpatrick spent the bulk of his newfound extra time screwing around. By all estimates, he slept with well over a thousand different women. And I do mean different; every conceivable combination and configuration of comely female flesh that a loving Creator had seen fit to bless humanity with ultimately yielded to the carnal colonialism of Jack Fitzpatrick. From tall, leggy blondes with faces of sculpted alabaster and breasts like ripe mangoes to tiny, dark-haired, smoky-eyed girls whose deeply banked fires might go unnoticed by all but the most perceptive gaze. All races, all ages. All types of women knew his touch. And all without ever remembering exactly what had left them smiling so sublimely.

  He also saw every film that rolled through Times Square, every play on Broadway, every performance at Lincoln Center, and read every book, every periodical, and every newspaper in Barnes & Nobel, B. Dalton, Forbidden Planet, and the entire New York Public Library system. He ate in every restaurant in every borough, and tipped generously. He saw the World Series, took every course offered by the Discovery Center and the Learning Annex, and sat through all three Madison Square Garden shows of David Bowie’s next world tour, a total of nine times.

  He also learned very quickly not to talk about it with anyone: not with anyone but me, anyway. That was not so good for me, but very wise for him. Opting to not enlighten the general populace spared him the likelihood of an involuntary holiday at Bellevue, ass-end hanging out of a paper smock.

  But most of all, it allowed him to get his earthly rocks off. He had more fun in those first few months than most people have in their whole family tree. He sowed more wild oats than the Harvest Queen herself. It was great therapy; he just worked off the need for vicarious thrills and pointless liaisons. I estimate he must have picked up a good seven years in stolen moments—a nonstop two thousand, five hundred fifty-five day party weekend—all in the space of six months, all without aging one crinkle.

  ■

  By now you are either dying to know how he did this or you’re busy speed-dialing the bozophone. In the too-few hours since Jack’s death I’ve been searching for, among other things, clues as to how he could do whatever it is that he did. I wish I could tell you I’ve been successful. As near as I can tell, he called his talent—his gift, if you will—a sort of mental “squeeze.” Some lamebrained group of researchers two years from now are going to explain this as an acronym for Synchronistic Quantum Universal Energy Enveloping Zeitgeist-Entropy and receive a huge grant to investigate its military applications. Jerkoffs. As near as I can tell Jack called it a “squeeze” ‘cause that’s how it felt while it was happening. Maybe he squeezed his pineal gland, you tell me.

  Regardless, his technique, such as I’ve been able to tell, was ridiculously simple:

  1. Roll with the flow of linear time for as long as required to do what is desired,

  2. “Squeeze” back in time to the moment before said event occurs, and

  3. Do something else.

  Simple, huh? Sure. And all you need to do to play the flute is (1) blow into the big hole, and (2) move your fingers up and down on all the little ones. But that was Jack’s style. Anyway, using these three “simple” steps, Jack Fitzpatrick claimed that he could, for example, watch fifteen movies on Times Square in a single two-hour stretch, for a single six bucks, and go home ten minutes before the first movie ended with the same six dollars still in his pocket.

  Or he could walk through the same Times Square, having already seduced every woman he saw in little more than the time it took to see them. He could do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted, no matter how indulgent or depraved; in the end, no one was the wiser. A marginal fraction of “real” time passed in the “real” world, something on the order of a year to the minute; he could be in and out of a girl’s bed and back on the street in the time it took for her to shoot him down. They never knew what hit them. Only Jack knew.

  The only place it showed was in his eyes.

  ■

  As the new year loomed on the horizon, the world’s collective prospects looked gloomier than ever. It sometimes appeared as though the forty years of bad hype courtesy of George Orwell had not missed the mark by much. We didn’t quite have Big Brother yet, but the lag-time had allowed the climactic thrust of the Reagan administration to foment into a secret war in Central America, the Meese commission bashing sex, the PMRC bashing rock ‘n’ roll, and a te
e-vee holy moe offering to run for President if Cod-fearing patriots everywhere would fork over a cool three hundred million toward the cause. Everyone on the other side of the fence seemed to have just a real sour feeling about the future of the species.

  It wasn’t until right around the Republican Convention that the full extent of his potential became clear, jack had always been the kind of guy who could have been anything; the simple truth of that was a blessing, and a curse. He showed promise as a gifted painter, writer, photographer, musician, architect and auto mechanic. He had a firm grasp on three languages, a head for figures, a way with words, and a keen sense of what constitutes a good deal. He learned quickly and retained knowledge like a microchip. He could have risen meteorically to the top of any of a dozen fields; indeed, there didn’t seem to be anything beyond the scope of his grasp.

  But he couldn’t seem to focus it on any one thing long enough to see it through. He had dropped out of NYU in his third year, a fact which had slaughtered his parents even more than the knowledge that he had changed majors so many times that they’d simply lost count. Then he bopped through everything from mysticism to metallurgy to heavy metal to motorcycle maintenance; still, nothing ever seemed to stick. Finally he left New York altogether, taking his quest out into the world at large. He hitched through Europe and hiked through Central America, smoked hash in Amsterdam and got blasted on basura in Bolivia.

  Eventually he came back, and landed the job where we first met. That was two and a half years ago. Time took its stately, measured course. And there he still was, like me: working as a messenger, making not much more than two hundred dollars a week. Before taxes.

  So, one damp February eve found Ronbo on the tube, lying through his wisened puss about the State of the Union. Jack and I sat in the back of the Blarney Stone pub on Madison, downing cheap drafts and blowing off steam after another cold day on the streets. The conversation has come back to haunt me in the last few hours: