by Christopher Mari
“Excuse me? This is roughly the first decade of the 21st century, isn’t it?”
Now I’ve heard a great many strange things since moving to New York from a very large and very ordinary suburb where few people know their neighbors well enough to say anything more than hello to them, but this—well, this I just chalked up to plain old not having heard right. I was plugged into my iPod at the time, I was surfing the Net, IMing a couple people, whatever. Did somebody really just ask me for directions to which decade we’re in? I pulled my earbuds out and stole a glance at the man making the inquiry. It goes without saying I expected to see some homeless guy with a week’s worth of growth on his face and a month’s worth of body odors looking for a handout. Instead I beheld a man of six-two with a thick glistening mop of slick black hair, neatly combed and parted as if with a knife, piercing blue eyes and the kind of jaw most square-jawed movie heroes believe exists only as a Platonic form. He was also built like a brick house, his wide shoulders the top two points of a perfect V torso. He was Mr. Universe Schwarzenegger, the Greek god Apollo and your dad at his idealized best all rolled into one. He was also, alas, wearing a black and tan skintight jumpsuit with matching knee-length tan cloak and boots with black piping. Oh, and his shirt had a lightning bolt etched across the chest. In gold. This being Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, I was convinced I was about to be asked out to the annual Halloween parade. Only problem was Halloween was two weeks ago.
“Did you, um, just ask if this was the 21st century?”
“I did indeed,” Lycra Man replied, with his awe-inspiring Chiclet-sized chompers flashing. “Specifically, I’d like to know if this was the first decade of it.”
“Uh yeah.” I eyed the guy over the rims of my thick-framed rectangular glasses and gave him a withering glance. I know I look like an arrogant douche when I do that but how can one help it at a moment like this? “It’s 2007,” I said finally. “Do you, like, need the month too?”
“Thank you, but no. That’s easy enough to calculate.” Titling his jutting square jaw into the bright clear early November morning, the man scratched at his ear with a grin and a sigh. “But this doesn’t much look like 2007 at all. And it feels even less like November.” He turned back to me, glancing over one broad shoulder. “Global warming?”
I shrugged. “Calling it climate change these days.”
“Al Gore still leading the charge?”
“Just won the Nobel Prize for it.”
“Is he the president?”
“Uh—no.”
“Strange how that never works out for him.”
Lycra Man nodded his noble-looking head, folded his hands behind his back under his cape and began beating a path in front of me. I kept wanting to glance down at my open laptop—my songs had just finished downloading—but a guy in a skintight suit and matching cape is kind of distracting. Especially when he seems to be taking notes by speaking into his very eighties-looking digital wristwatch.
“Global warming. That would only make sense,” he said more to himself—I mean his watch—than me, “but it doesn’t account for the complete lack of architectural innovation or the ubiquitous use of fossil-based fuel sources. Strange.”
Little aside here. Did I mention that I had lost my job the day before this little encounter took place? I had planned on pounding through job sites on an overpriced coffee high that morning, that is, until mid-70s David Bowie decided to park his freaky sci-fi self in front of me. So unless I was getting some money for this I was quickly getting tired of playing along. “Okay look, so am I on TV or something?”
The man cocked a grin in my direction and then bellowed a hearty laugh. “Why of course you are! Haven’t you noticed all of the cameras positioned around the park?” He was even kind enough to point a few out to me. “We all are!”
“Whatever. So am I like on some stupid reality show or what?”
Lycra Man flipped his cape jauntily over one shoulder and folded his arms across his massive chest. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. And unfortunately, I don’t have the time to discuss the matter. Could you please be so kind as to briefly explain to me why your 2007 is so—I’m afraid to call it ‘primitive’ but there it is.”
“My 2007? There another one lurking around?”
Another bellowing laugh. Nearby pigeons fluttered away from a half-eaten pint-sized Chinese carton of rice left on a nearby bench and shot into the air as a single sheet of wings. “It all makes sense now! You don’t have Dimensional Slips here, do you?”
“Say what?”
“Dimensional Slips. To move between alternate realities?” His wide and hopeful eyes chased recognition but only found my face powering down to a blank. “I’m from Time Share Reality 84762, quite different from this Earth.”
“Time Share Reality? Sounds like a real estate company.”
“It’s a silly name I know, but no worse than the World Wide Web, right?” He eyed me curiously. “You do have the Web on this Earth, don’t you? ”
I gestured at my laptop. “Again,” I said, my eyes screwed up to full withering mode. “This Earth?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say anything more. I think I may have inadvertently given too much away already.” He starts to walk down the path, then turns back looking wistful. “So no Dimensional Slips, eh?”
“Afraid not.”
“That’s a shame. You’d quite enjoy them.”? “But if you can’t tell me about them . . .”
“Yes yes, you’re quite right. Do you mind telling me about this Earth though?” He swung around so his cape could catch the wind in a hard snap—quickly, dramatically—then sat down next to me and crossed his legs. “I see no harm in that!”
I smiled politely. I really really did. “I’d like to know who I’m talking to first.”
“How silly of me. My name is Al,” he said extending his hand.
It’s entirely possible that a man from an alternate Earth is named Al. And that he knows we shake hands on this one.
* * *
An hour later Al and I were sitting on my park bench—him in his cape and stretchy spandex, me in my baggy jeans and stretched-out hoodie—sucking down mochachinos. I had sprung for them—another primitive aspect of “my” 2007, money—so he felt obliged to go and fetch them. I had expected him to make a beeline for the next sucker after he palmed my ten spot, figuring that’s what he had been after all the while, but then he came traipsing back into the park, a jumbo mocha in each hand, grinning as broadly as if he had just saved someone’s kitten from a tree. Oh man—why hadn’t I gone with him when he placed our order in that get-up? But then again, you’d be surprised how few people in New York even blink at a man in a cape sipping a refreshing beverage on a park bench.
Mochachinos taste the same across parallel dimensions. Al was convinced they were one of reality’s few constants. He had been to Earths on which dinosaurs had evolved bodies small enough to become the dominant intelligent lifeforms on the planet, Earths that had seen the Roman Empire last into the Enlightenment, Earths that fueled their flying cars with birdseed, Earths that had never developed internal combustion engines—every kind of Earth except for a one that made a bad mochachino. Even the dinosaurs made a fairly good one, he admitted, though he never got around to asking what exactly they put in it. “I can’t imagine it was anything meant for human consumption!” He guffawed at that—a too loud, open and honest guffaw that made heads turn in a way his stretchy outfit hadn’t. Oh, and did I mention Al gave me the change when he handed me my mochachino?
The other constant in most of these alternate realities seemed to be my new friend. You see, Al’s a historian, specifically one specializing in alternate realities. It’s a pretty “diverse” field—get it? (Al loved that one.) Truth is, I imagine it must be, considering that Al claimed the universe holds an infinite number of realities created by every choice every single being on the planet—even the planet itself—makes in a given day. So, for example, if an Earth’s clouds don’t form in just the right way, there’s no rain on Tuesday, which means there’s a greater chance of a poor crop for our local fill-in-the-blank generic farmer, which means higher food prices for you, the consumer, who has now decided that you will buy, say, beets instead of carrots because they’re cheaper. If alternate realities sound a lot like economics, it’s because both play with cause and effect. If the clouds have formed the right way, if it’s rained, if the crops grew a bit more heartily—all alternate realities. Catching on? Al said he studies these alternate realities at the behest of his clients, basically corporate interests who like to better understand various possible outcomes to their ventures. Right now—well, I’ll explain why he came to our reality in a minute.
So we sat sipping and surfing the Web. Al was pretty fascinated by the Internet. Though he had heard of it on other Earths, he claimed he had never used it or knew much about it. And what grown man from a reality such as his would, right? I tried to explain the jist to him, networked computers, packet switching, IPs, all that. Nothing. No penetration. The concept, that he understood well enough, but the whole point didn’t make sense to him. He just sat there smiling broadly and good-naturedly shaking his head. Why hadn’t we, in “my” 2007, just built a giant self-sustaining supercomputer near the Earth’s core where it could tap into all that geothermal energy and keep the sum of mankind’s knowledge safe for all eternity? Al’s supercomputer could handle more than a whole million requests for information per minute and could distribute answers to every last one of these requests flawlessly via a series of pneumatic tubes that riddle the Earth’s surface like holes in a cheese grater. Naturally, he explained, not everyone could use the supercomputer—only those in authority who needed its great computational skills or its vast warehouse of information may access it. But those who did have access needed only to put in a request and the answer would immediately be sent to their home or place of business via one of these tubes. (The supercomputer, it seems, also used vacuum tubes that powered rows of very pretty flashing lights.)
Al not only completely dismissed the idea of “this Earth’s” networked computers, he also saw no point in allowing everyone on the planet access to such an important resource like the Internet. After all, how could one be certain if the information was accurate if anyone could create and update web pages? Where was the controlling legal authority, a vetting process by peer review, documentation? And besides that—what had I been doing with this precious resource for the last hour? Instead of diligently looking for jobs, as had been my intention, he noted almost smugly (at least as smugly as such a goofball could be—down pat he had not my withering glance!), there I was IMing friends, downloading songs, adding to my blog and showing off pornographic pictures and films. Al had asked for not porn specifically, but he wanted to see a popular “destination” for “web surfers.” (The quotes came out very clearly in his request; where he picked up such hip happening lingo I can scarcely guess.) Al claimed looking for a new job would be much easier in his reality. All I’d have to do is send a request form in triplicate to the nearest World Computer Bank office and they would send me a list of jobs for which I would be qualified—no need to procrastinate. I could be doing some more useful things. Or so says Al.
“But that’s the fun part of web surfing,” I said, “looking at stuff you’d never normally want to know about!”
“But it’s just so darned inefficient! Why, in my 2007, you could have a new job within a week!”
“Gee, it would take a whole week?”
“That was sarcastic.” Al smiled and wagged a finger at me. “You’re not fooling me anymore.”
“The big computer at the Earth’s core would find me the perfect job, right?”
A big sigh worthy of the world’s finest teenage drama queen passed his lips. “It would be a simple matter of processing your qualifications against a list of vacancies . . . ”
“Sounds nice. I bet you’ve even cured cancer in your 2007, right?”
Al’s melodrama was replaced by befuddlement. “You mean to—you haven’t cured it here?”
“Uh no.”
I had confounded him. He sputtered: “What about poverty, chronic diseases, famine? You can’t still have those!”
I pressed invisible buttons in the air. “Check, check and check. Still got ‘em.”
Al sat back, deflated. “This is unbelievable. Barbaric!”
I shrugged. “You’re telling me.”
“How is this possible?” His eyes darted around at the faces in the park, at the buildings across the street, at the cars parked along the curb. He looked for something to justify what I had just told him. “Was there a war? Or a plague? Something that held your civilization back?”
“A war? We’ve had one just about every generation going back a century. And that’s just in this country. Plague? Well, there’s AIDS, SARS, Ebola –”
Al held his hands up. He was in the corner hanging onto the ropes, barely standing. I had pummeled him ugly. “Enough.” He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands rubbing his eyes. “My goodness. It’s just devastating to hear this. This is completely unlike every other reality I’ve ever charted.”
I have to say it. He honestly looked surprised—as if he didn’t know this world was for shit, had been for a long time and would probably remain that way provided we don’t off ourselves somehow. He looked so pitiful sitting there that for thirty seconds, a minute tops, I almost could see past the spandex and the golly-gee-wiz attitude and believe—well, maybe not that he was a man from an alternate reality but that he honestly believed everything he was saying.
“Never—in all my travels—a place like this,” he muttered. Everything he saw seemed to take on a new level of revulsion for him, from the trucks passing belching out black tokes of diesel to the face-pierced NYU girl walking past sucking down a clove cigarette. He studied a businessman sitting on a bench adjacent to ours as he yapped away on his cell phone about instability in the mortgage sector. A passing woman flung a half-finished coffee cup towards a garbage can, missed and continued walking. He watched a couple of teenagers walk obliviously into an old man and keep going without much in the way of recognition other than a quick backwards-glancing covered-mouth giggle. He stifled a gag as a homeless man caked in filth and smelling of piss shambled by on a pair of shoes made from cardboard boxes. Is this all they are? Just this? And this alone?
“No one has ever suffered as you have. Not even the Second Stone Age population in Time Share Reality 109642. At least they were busy reinventing the wheel.” He slapped his muscular thighs and stood up. “But this is what you are. I can do nothing here.”
“So on your world there’s no disease or war or famine?” I crossed my arms and shrugged my shoulders. “Care to tell me how?”
Al continued to eye his environs with disbelief—and maybe, for the first time, even a little disgust. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, since your technology and culture is so, forgive me, primitive. Perhaps it can save your world. I don’t know.” Something in his manner made me think he really had been a history professor at a point in his life before he lost his mind along with his fashion sense. Maybe it was the way he was standing. I’m not sure. But I was compelled to listen. I’d felt like this before, years ago when I had been intrigued by something an instructor said in an otherwise boring course.
“It was shortly after atomic weapons were first detonated in the mid-20th century. While the Soviet Union and the United States were waging a proxy war on the Korean peninsula, a spacecraft landed in Washington, DC. Inside it was a man—a great man—who would attempt to warn us of our folly, of our dangerous ways. When our leaders didn’t heed his warnings, he threatened to annihilate the planet if we should venture into space with our weapons. We might not have listened to him while he was on Earth but his warnings echoed in the weeks and months after he left. People began to watch the skies in fear. They forced the politicians of our various nation-states to sue for peace. In the end, our fear of imminent destruction enabled our leaders to sign treaties that not only banned all offensive weapons but also forced us to channel our primitive understanding of atomics into peaceful uses. Before long, countries began to work more closely together, not only in the field of atomic energy but also in chemistry and medicine and biology. Our first colonies on the Moon were established under the auspices of the old United Nations. Within a couple of decades a new egalitarian world government emerged, dedicated to . . . ”
If this story seems to be abruptly interrupted, that’s because it was—by my absolutely offensive howling laughter. I had tried to keep it together, really. As I was wiping tears from my eyes, I could swear my mild-manner friend Al from the alternate reality of Time Share Wack-a-doo looked as if he actually had a temper tucked under that cape of his.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Lemme guess, this alien visitor has a British accent and a big robot named Gort he controlled with the words ‘Klaatu barada nikto’— right?”
“How—how did you know that? I thought you said you didn’t have Dimensional Slips in this reality.”
“But we do have DVDs, friend Al. But I’m sure you know that, since you just recited the plot to a classic sci-fi movie from the fifties.”
“What on Earth are you talking about?”
Could he possibly be so off his nut that he actually believed what he was saying? “Jeez, Al—the first half of that story is the plot of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Here.” A couple of clicks and I pulled up a fan website devoted to the movie. “Take a look.”
Al snatched the laptop from me and sat down. He stared at the screen, his right hand brushing it as he scrolled down the page with his left. There it all was—the flying saucer, the giant robot, the “invader from Mars” in his cheesy spacesuit and helmet—all of it, all the camp and drama of mid-century sci-fi in all its glory. The only difference was to Al, it was real, his world’s history turned into an entertaining morality tale. As he scrolled through the site, Al gave me a solid impression of an open-mouthed fish a couple of times. He then read the guy’s blog for a while, as if that would somehow explain it all away. After several minutes he turned his face to me. The skin seemed as fragile as tissue paper.
“You mean this, none of this,” he said, patting the top of the screen with his palm, “is real? This didn’t happen? This is just some movie to you?”
My giggles were gone suddenly. “Yeah. Just a movie.”
“The seminal event of our civilization,” he said a little too loudly, “is just a film here? That you ridicule?”
“Not ridicule, Al, I mean, I wasn’t laughing at that, you know I loved it as a kid—”
He waved a hand. “Don’t patronize me, sir. Just tell me one thing. Do you even have colonies on the Moon and Mars? Have you come into contact with any of the people Klaatu represented?”
I scratched my neck. “Well, Al, uh–”
“What?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “No one’s been on the Moon since the early seventies, I think.”
“Do you even have a space program?”
“We’ve got a space shuttle. And there’s an international space station where they, uh, grow crystals and stuff.”
A laugh scraped the top of his throat and died there. It was a bitter sound, the bitterest thing I had ever heard coming from him, a victim. “This world isn’t a very good place, is it?”
“It hasn’t lived up to your ideals, no, Al.”
“I wish it had.”
“Me too.”
Al shakes his head. “I came here to compare your reality’s space program to that of a multi-conglomerate’s in Time Share Reality 8463951.” His eyes looked south, towards downtown and an emptier skyline. “I have to leave now.” He turned to me. “Besides if I don’t leave soon, the impact I might have on a culture this primitive—”
“Stop, stop!”
My eyes shot up to see a couple of uniformed cops running in our direction. For whatever reason I assumed it was a joke. That or someone was shooting a scene for a movie since we were practically sitting in the screening room of NYU’s film school. But the two cops were charging hard and looked serious. I had never seen real cops chase anyone on foot before. Al muttered something about them “being dressed as figures of this reality’s authority” or some such and took off. The cops panted and puffed past me behind their cop guts. As I turned to see them, Al had run off somewhere behind me. When the cops went running in his direction, I got up and followed them, curious. I jogged behind them, cradling my laptop under my arm, searching the area for Al. How hard could it be to spot a guy in a cape in Washington Square Park, right? But nothing. I stopped and scanned the horizon in a 360. Unless he was hiding behind the arch—which was basically like hiding out in the open—he had vanished. I looked for the cops, figuring they might point me in Al’s direction. But they were gone too.
I toured the park figuring I’d see them somewhere or run into the insane amount of backup that comes screeching up whenever cops get involved with anything. But there wasn’t a squad car anywhere. Could that nut job have really—
Come on.
A minute after that I was drifting back to my bench wondering if this world of ours would really be such a disappointment to Klaatu or anybody else looking in on it from the outside. I mean, it did look pretty bad from the inside. Then I got to wondering if we could go about creating a better world here and how without some stupid alien in a tinfoil suit showing up and telling us to be nice to one other. Maybe I could even help out. I flipped open my computer and went online figuring I could join an environmental organization or something now that I was unemployed and had the time to spare—but then my friend sent me this hilarious bit from You Tube that I had to forward to just about everybody I knew.
About the Author
Christopher Mari received his education at Fordham University. His fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in a number of publications. He is also the editor of four reference books.
©2009 Christopher Mari
