Dead Lines

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  “Scott?” he said. Scott Wachter is my name, by the way. You’ll be hearing a lot of it in the future. Make sure you get the spelling right: W-A-C-H-T-E-R. “Scott?” he repeated, leveling an extremely pointed gaze in my direction. “If you could think of one thing the world needs more than anything else, what would it be?”

  “Hamsters,” I muttered, mocking his el serioso stance. “The world just needs more of the little furry fucks. Three for every boy…”

  “I’m serious—”

  “… and five for every girl,” I continued, undaunted. “Six for fearless leader.” I gazed at the flickering screen behind the bar. “He can stuff them in his cheek pouches.” On the tube, the President smiled his homey, inward grin, revealing ample storage facilities.

  “You’re a jerk,” he bitched, blowing smoke in my face. He was trying so hard to be topical.

  Weary, I drained my mug and let the rag die. “We solved all the world’s problems yesterday, remember? Everything’s fine now.”

  “Scott,” he said, his features wound tight. I looked up; his eyes, far wiser than they had any right to be, flitted over my features like a bar-code scanner. “If you could do anything…”

  There was no escape. I sighed, gave it a microsecond of serious thought, shook my head, and replied, “The world needs a major overhaul, my friend.”

  “No shit.” There was an uncomfortable urgency in his tone. “But how would you kick it off? What approach? Politician? Scientist? Corporate Turk?”

  “Butcher, baker, candlestick maker…”

  “Asshole,” he spat. Jack was deep in his cups. My feet hurt. I sat, thoughtfully pouring the last of the pitcher into our mugs. Then I took a hefty swig off mine and wiped my mustache, which I’m sure all great philosophers are wont to do at such times, and delivered my verdict:

  “No one man is ever going to be able to do it, because no one thing is ever going to do it.”

  Jack stopped in mid-swig. His eyes opened wide and he stared into the middle distance as if he’d just taken a faceful of seltzer. And when he turned that gaze back to me, it was filled with a realization that puzzled me then, and awes me now. Because Jack Fitzpatrick suddenly saw it all very very clearly. Q: If you could do absolutely anything, but no one thing is ever going to do the trick, what would you do?

  A: I’d do it all.

  ■

  Jack Fitzpatrick lived over one thousand full and productive lives over the next eleven months. They all shared the same childhood, the same adolescence. Their common jumping-off point was twenty-seven-year-old Jack Fitzpatrick, a young nobody who still toted flak and subpoenas for a living by day… and who each night engaged in what may possibly be the most radical transformation in human history.

  He started with the sciences. One by one he tackled them all, devoting one entire lifetime to each individual discipline. He took Buckminster Fuller’s concept of the Deliberate Generalist to its penultimate extreme by becoming an expert at everything.

  Not that all this information just leaped into his head, mind you: mild-mannered messenger one moment, Wile E. Coyote, genius, the next. He worked his collective duplicitous butt off. Twenty-seven is a little late to be starting in some fields of endeavor, like med school, for instance. But he had support: parents who were again and again overjoyed to see their wayward boy finally get his life on track, and with several lives’ practice he got very good at filling out student loan forms. The challenge of being the perpetual latecomer only helped fuel his fire.

  And, like ol' Bucky Fuller, Jack endorsed the principle that anyone of average intelligence, given enough time, could get a basic understanding of the perfect technology that underlies Universe. Jack had a good bit more than average intelligence.

  And, quite literally, all the time in the world.

  ■

  His first life he spent as an astronomer. It seemed as good a place as any to start. [“Best to know where you is before you try to get someplace you ain’t,” from The Wit and Wisdom of Jack Fitzpatrick, copyright 1999, Bantam Books.] He lived well into his seventies, and did some distinguished work—nothing flashy, didn’t redesign the cosmos or anything, but it helped to lay the groundwork for his next life as a master of Quantum physics. And his next after that, as a biochemist. And his next four, as a neurosurgeon, psychiatrist, physician, and homeopathic healer.

  By the sixth or seventh he was starting to pick up Nobel prizes. On a very regular basis.

  ■

  He made two overwhelming discoveries in April: one of them marvelous, the other absolutely terrifying. I’m leaping ahead in my narrative to tell you this, and I apologize for the disruption; but it was at this precise point, when Jack told the story to me, that he was forced to make the same digression:

  “What do you want first,” he asked me, “the good news or the bad news?”

  “The good news,” I muttered, hoping that he might say April Fools! and smack me in the face with a pie. I was getting a wee bit concerned about my erstwhile best friend. Lord knows, I must have looked like a man receiving a ball peen suppository, because Jack busted up laughing.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, “the good news is that I found out that I can bring back artifacts from the future. I’m not sure why, but anything I create—anything by my hand or bearing my likeness—can squeeze back with me.” He grinned beatifically.

  “Uh-huh.” This was a twist in his otherwise ridiculous fantasy. To date, I’d seen no evidence. “So, what, are you gonna show pictures of your grandchildren?”

  “They’re at home,” he said, deadly earnest. “All one hundred ninety-seven of ‘em. Three volumes worth. Don’t you want to hear the bad news?”

  “They were all ugly.” I sniggered. “A hundred and ninety-seven little mutants.”

  “Not funny. I was a geneticist twice and lived through three meltdowns, bucko. Saw a lot of that shit. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

  “Oh, no?” My sarcasm was a thin veneer disguising how miserably uncomfortable I was, watching Jack do his l-are-a-mental-case schtick. “And what, pray tell, is the worst of it?”

  “The worst of it”—he lit a cigarette with steady hands— “is that right around fifty years up the road, the world always ends.”

  “Uh-huh…” I began, and my voice kind of fizzled in my throat. Maybe it was the chill certainty in his eyes, sorrow wrapping his words like an orphan’s threadbare blanket. Maybe it was simply succumbing to this relentless departure from reality as I understood it. Any way you slice it, the walls of my skepticism started caving in like a sand castle against the onslaught of high tide. I stared at him. He smiled and nodded.

  “Happens every time,” he said.

  ■

  And it was true. Every single time, somewhere between the years 2032 and 2037, the human race wound up biting the big one. The methods varied, as well as the dates—Jack found that intriguing, even a little hopeful— but in the end, it always came to the one grim realization: we always went kablooie.

  The human race was doomed.

  ■

  By Labor Day, Jack Fitzpatrick was the most scientifically learned man in history. From there he went full-tilt into politics and law. Playing by the rules, knowing when to bend them and when to break them, he graduated top of NYU and Harvard Law Schools no less than eight times. Alternately Working Within The System and molding it to his purpose, he inevitably rose to high-ranking office. He was a chief presidential advisor six times; he was U.S. Ambassadors to the Soviet Union, China, and Nicaragua; he was governors of the states of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts; he was a justice on the Supreme Court. He did many great and laudable things; he championed the rights of oppressed millions everywhere. He was bold and wise and absolutely incorruptible.

  It didn’t change a thing. The world continued to blow up.

  In desperation, he became a crusader. He wrote scathing attacks on the Powers That Be conducting Business As

  Usual. He organized rallies and
marches, tapping into his vastly expanded experience to build strong organizations around his lofty ideals. He actually started making headway: his moving and shaking began being heard clear around the world. In fact, he got so very good at being a mover and a shaker that a new and highly unpleasant pattern emerged:

  Jack Fitzpatrick began getting assassinated. On a regular basis.

  It was an extremely frustrating period in his lives. Every time he’d get a strategy rolling to the point of success, some bastard would blow him off the podium or wire a bomb into his car’s ignition or arrange for his chartered plane to crash mysteriously. It wasn’t the dying, per se, that bothered him—he’d raced down that black velvet tube so many times that detouring back to the present was no big deal anymore. What bothered him is that he never got to find out what happened. Did his cause succeed? Did his organization endure? Did the world eat it? He had no way of knowing.

  So, the next time around Jack tried another tack. He met a man named Carey Hatcher, who had a good heart, a noble bearing, and oodles of charisma; he was a born showman, an excellent speaker, and a knock-down-drag-out debater who put smarmy simpletons like Ronbo to shame. In fact, the sole thing that Carey Hatcher lacked was the vision that marks a true leader.

  Enter Jack: he met Carey in ‘91, they became friends, and then partners. Jack became the invisible man behind Carey’s beautifully hewn image: together, they went on a human rights campaign that shook everyone from the White House to the Kremlin to the Boys In the Band. They came to symbolize the power of the people: they fought apartheid in South Africa; they quelled the brutal race riots of Boston in ‘96; they so successfully exposed and embarrassed the Administration on the eve of the covert Honduras invasion that far-reaching policies were put on the floor of Congress that the War Powers Act be updated and enforced.

  By 2011, the popular referendum had Congressman Hatcher aceing the Populist party nomination in the upcoming election, and Jack Fitzpatrick was content in the knowledge that he had never built an organization more sound, more trim, more exquisitely run.

  Carey Hatcher received the Nobel Prize posthumously in the year 2012, after his car was forced off of 1-81 near Harrisburg, PA, and tumbled down a thirty-five-foot embankment. In the resulting scramble for power Jack watched his entire dream turn to shit. He was the Man Who Could Do Anything, but he couldn’t bring back the dead, and he

  couldn’t stop the vultures. Or the worms.

  ■

  For the next thirty years, he made five other successive attempts. All of them ended in death and corruption.

  In 2036, we kicked the bucket, once again.

  ■

  By Halloween, Jack Fitzpatrick was the bitterest man in human history. His dreams had been shattered, again and again and again. Something in him went cold and hard; his humanitarian stance gave way to a sharp-edged and cynical rage. He was tired of getting murdered, tired of putting faith in people who constantly let him down and tired of knuckling under to the murderous impulses of insensate boobs. His mind took a decidedly militant twist, turned cunning in the worst ways.

  He spent his next forty-three lives in the service of Death.

  ■

  The first twenty or so went pretty quickly. Wielding Death, he found, was something for which he did not have a natural aptitude. But he got the hang of it, with practice: he bought weapons, went to a clandestine guerrilla training camp in the Everglades, answered ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. He became a mercenary, eventually; and from there he went on to participate in some pretty vicious Third-World revolutions, stage some reasonably devastating coups and countercoups, and ultimately came to preside over some rather bloodcurdling reigns of terror. Finally, he tapped into Der Fuhrer within us all, and went on to become bona fide Ruler of the World.

  By that time, of course, he found he’d become so bitter and hateful that he destroyed the world himself, in the year 2029, a full three years before anyone else.

  ■

  In his despair, his thoughts turned to suicide. It only lasted a weekend, but he expended a total of ninety-eight lives from his seemingly inexhaustible reserve. He walked in front of buses, slit his wrists, O.D.’d on smack, leaped off the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges and the Empire State Building; he swallowed both barrels of a Smith & Wesson over-and-under twelve-gauge pump, guzzled an economy sized janitor In A Drum, hanged, flayed, filleted, and immolated himself, and even fed himself to the lions at the Staten Island Zoo. Ninety-eight ways he fired himself into the nothingness of that long black tube; still, he could not allow himself to go all the way through to the other side. Suicide, for Jack Fitzpatrick, was just not an option.

  It was only logical that he should turn, from there, to religion.

  ■

  He studied them meticulously. He became adept in every major denominational faith, all of the occult sciences, and several well-known lost arts. He accepted Jesus Christ as his own personal savior. He became a whirling dervish. A brujo. A bishop. A warlock. He danced, chanted, prayed, swayed, shaved his head, and yodeled like a pilgrim in a Muslim minaret. He hung out with the Sufis, learned how to manipulate their life-sized puppets: it reminded him, in a joyful way, of politics. He sacrificed goats to Ba’al; he became a macrobiotic vegetarian. He trance-channeled with Shirley MacLaine. He chanted Nam-e Hyo Ho Ren-ge Kyo ‘til the cows came home; he fasted, witnessed, handled serpents, spoke in tongues, took Erhardt Seminar Training, and laid in sensory deprivation tanks until his skin puckered white.

  When he was ready, sometime around Thanksgiving, he went ahead and took one lifetime to become the Spiritual Leader of the World.

  They crucified him.

  He rose from the shadow, some three days later: just in time to see the mushroom clouds bloom.

  And, having risen, knew just what he should do.

  ■

  By Christmas Eve, Jack Fitzpatrick was the wisest man in the history of the earth. It was only fitting that then he made his wisest move.

  He became a child again.

  ■

  Let me explain something. I spent the lion’s share of this whole time getting more and more estranged from my friend Jack Fitzpatrick, who was putting on a virtuoso performance as the World’s Most Intense Schizophrenic. It was a hard time for me, because I really cared about Jack, and I hated watching him switch personalities like a couch potato changes channels. But I had problems of my own: it was not the greatest of years for me emotionally, despite the fact that I had sold my first novel and was finally able to retire from the messenger biz; I was considerably more secure than I’d ever been, but I was still lonely and womanless and still subconsciously sitting on the edge of Armageddon, thinking what if it’s all for naught? Newfound success will do that to you. And if I’d had any inkling of what Jack knew—that we had another fifty years, give or take a few—I would have puttied my face shut. But I didn’t.

  And when he told me, of course, I didn’t believe him.

  Until early early Christmas morning—4:30 a.m., to be precise—when he proved it to me.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said. It was 4:15 a.m., and we were trashed; the previous five hours had been spent at my apartment on West 37th Street, drinking Watney’s Red Barrel and arguing passionately about what he called the truth and I called absolute fucking insanity.

  “Oboy,” I moaned, staring out the window of the Checker Cab that bore us down Broadway toward his 13th Street studio. The snow was new and dainty-white, whipping by the window in thick swirls above, muffling the cab’s tires below. My mind contrasted this pristine vision with lunatic imaginings of his “surprise”: an urban update, perhaps, of Ed Gein’s Wisconsin charnel house, complete with a Frigidaire full of viscera and his mother’s face soaking in the sink. What’s he gonna show me: a pound of homemade meat loaf and a dried-skin lampshade? I felt ill.

  “No,” he said quietly, as if he’d heard my thought. He smiled—a deep, bittersweet smile—and reached into the canvas biker’s
bag in his lap. He pulled out a rather hastily wrapped package. When he handed it to me, my touch confirmed what my eyes suspected: it was a large hardcover book.

  I held it motionless for a moment, as the cab took a muted left onto 14th Street and headed toward Second Avenue. “Don’t open it quite yet,” he said, still smiling that strange smile.

  No problem there. Something about the weight of that book, the way it lay in my hands, filled me with a sense of awe and dread. I think the meat loaf would have been easier to deal with.

  We pulled up to his place at 4:27. I handed the cabbie ten bucks for a four-fifty fare, and we walked in white silence to the door of Jack’s building. He turned at the entrance and said, “You can open it now.”

  “Let’s get it out of the snow,” I replied. “First thing I want to do is fuck up the cover, right?” He smiled and nodded; we stepped through the front door and paused in the foyer.

  I opened the package while he fumbled with his key. Peeling away the bright green and red paper, the first thing that hit me was the title: RENEGADE SAINT—The Secret Lives Of Jacob B. Fitzpatrick. The second thing I saw was a holographic photoplate of a face. It was a decade-plus-change older, easily. Careworn, matured, victorious—but no doubt about it: it was a face I recognized. It was Jack.

  I flipped instinctively to the back. There was another plate there, and another face, similarly aged and weathered. It was the author’s face.

  It was my face.

  My mind reeled. I scanned the brief blurbs beneath the picture. According to the blurb, it was my tenth book. According to the blurb, it was already a best-seller.

  According to the blurb, so were the other nine.

  I looked at Jack, tears in my eyes and a knot in my throat. Jack looked back, that impossible peace and wisdom in his eyes. “It’s a good book, man,” he said, and nodded. “You’ve been very good to me, over the centuries. You’re the best friend I have. That’s why I have to show you this, now.”

  He opened the door. I followed into the darkened entrance hall, glancing once again at the impossible book, the worlds within worlds layered within his face, the publishing date: 2004, Year of Our Lord. Jack flicked on the light at the end of the hall, turned with a flourish, and showed me a thousand futures.