I’ve never seen a project quite like this. It’s written by an actress and has a sequential art section and artist’s sketches interrupting a prose narrative. The main characters (even in the prose section) are based on people involved–who are credited as such. Sounds like this would be a fun collaboration.
Back in the ’90s I had friends who were fans of Babylon 5, which is where I think Claudia Christian made a name for herself. So an actor in a sci-fi TV series is now the co-writer of a sci-fi fiction publication–with the main character based on her. That character is Adjudicator Steele.
The Prose Section:
And Hell Followed Him is a western set on a Mars colony. Instead of a shady Indian Agent selling rifles to the Apache, there is a shady outlaw who has been selling people to the mutants. For dinner.
Agent Steele teams up with tough-as-nails Marshall Jake Reeves to rescue a kidnapped teenager before she, too, is eaten by the mutants. There seems to be more going on around Devil’s Ridge than meets the eye, and there’s definitely more to Steele’s mission than what we are told, for now. She hides her true agenda from the Marshall, and from the reader, but if this is just the first installment in a series, I’m sure all will eventually be revealed.
The plotting seems fine, so far. Avid western readers should feel right at home in this opening act. The text could have used some proofreading/editing, though. My guess is Chris MCauley wrote it, based on Christian’s ideas, but there was no other pair of eyes on it before it went to press.
The Sequential Art Section:
Steele is the star of this story as well. Here she investigates a string of murders on a Jupiter “mining platform.” Damage to the victims, plus footage of the murders, suggest the murderer has superhuman strength and wears a “morphic” suit of armor which is more advanced than the most state-of-the-art military combat armor.
It’s a simple mystery, easily solved, but also sets up a longer story arc involving Steele and her homicidal sister, who murdered their parents and now commands a space fleet and works out dirty deals with at least one planetary government.
I’m a little confused about the setting here. What is the mining platform, exactly? I think most of this story takes place indoors–in ships, maybe a biodome or airtight buildings, but some of it is outdoors where it rains. I wouldn’t think the climate on Jupiter would be very human-friendly, yet humans are evidently fine there with just a rain poncho and no oxygen mask or rebreathing system.
Nevertheless, the artwork is very nice. Penciller Staz Johnson seems very comfortable with comic panel work, and his cover art is even more impressive.
My Take:
I watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 back in the day, but never really got into it. I saw it as sort of The Love Boat in Space. But this series looks to be more like Trek Classic: more adventure, with some mystery (and western!) mixed in. It has the potential to be fun. I would like to see what happens in the prose story next, but would like it even more if they transform it into comic form, as well.
Virtual Pulp consistently reviews hidden gems in the cyber-slush pile of online book shopping. Independent authors who you might have never heard of otherwise get their books in the spotlight. The Infamous Gio occasionally gives them a microphone, too, when he conducts interviews. Recently Gio got independent author Shattuck O’Keefe to give an in-depth interview, and is sharing it with you today.
Q1: The Spirit Phone is your first published full-length novel. Why this book and why now?
O’Keefe: As for why this book: The idea for it hit me suddenly one day in August 2009, and I couldn’t let go of it.
As for why now: It really should have been much earlier, but from the time I conceived of it, various life events got in the way of getting it written. I finally got a complete draft done in early 2019, then managed to land a publishing agreement with BHC Press in late 2020, with the release in November 2022. (The audiobook, which came out the following June, earned Daniel Penz, the narrator, a 2023 Voice Arts Award.)
I’ve always loved books, and I decided to write a novel. I’ve long enjoyed speculative fiction as well as allegedly true tales of the supernatural. (Even if you take the latter with a grain of salt, they make for interesting reading.) I’d been mulling over ideas for several years, and one day I was re-reading my copy of Phantom Encounters, a volume of the popular Time-Life book series called Mysteries of the Unknown. It contains a chapter on the alleged “spirit phone,” a device to attempt communication with the dead which Thomas Edison claimed in interviews that he had been trying to develop. Suddenly the idea hit me: What if Edison had actually built such a device, and what if it worked? That could be the premise of a novel, I thought. So, I wrote it.
Edison is a key supporting character, while the protagonists are occultist Aleister Crowley and inventor Nikola Tesla, who investigate the secrets of the spirit phone as its users increasingly fall prey to insanity and suicide.
In the course of my research for the book, I learned about a claim circulating online that Edison stole the spirit phone idea from Tesla. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. I wrote about it in an article posted on Medium.
There’s also a short story connected to The Spirit Phone, titled “A Spirited Conversation,” which appeared in the literary magazine The Stray Branch (Fall/Winter 2021). The magazine is in print form only, but the full text can be read on my website. It previously appeared in Suspense Magazine(Summer 2020), though it’s a slightly different version than the 2021 publication, which I consider definitive. There is a beautifully done audio recording of “A Spirited Conversation” by The Spirit Phone audiobook narrator Daniel Penz. It’s a little over 16 minutes long.
Q2: the way I found your book was purely coincidental. I was looking for new content to cover and (as I often do) I was reading some of the Amazon reviews on The Spirit Phone, when this specific reviewer caught my attention by negatively highlighting the lack of female characters in your book. I knew immediately I had to get you on VP!
What do you think of this modern trend that requires or even demands at times that authors meet a particular demographic representation quota in their stories?
O’Keefe: I don’t agree that a novel or short story must reflect a demographic checklist to be a “proper” work of fiction. Though if, as a reader, the lack of some category of human or other is a deal-breaker for you, so be it. There’s no such thing as a novel that will appeal to everyone.
Your question reminds me of one review (really a non-review) of The Spirit Phone which listed the book as a DNF simply because the reviewer couldn’t get interested in characters who were white men. Nothing whatsoever is mentioned about plot, premise, editing, dialogue, world-building, or anything else that makes a novel a novel. I can’t consider that to be a book review. If you label a novel unreadable simply because you find the skin color or sex of the characters objectionable, you have not evaluated the novel. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with trying to assign “diversity” requirements to a book. Still, I find this to be the exception rather than the rule in the reviews I’ve read.
Besides, diversity of characters is not just things like race, sex, and sexual orientation. There are the characters’ motives, objectives, personal values, temperaments, skills, etc. The protagonists of The Spirit Phone are historical figures. Aleister Crowley was a hedonistic, smart-aleck, pipe-smoking, drug-using adventurer who delved into the occult. He set mountaineering altitude records in an era before bottled oxygen and high-tech winter clothing. Nikola Tesla was a straightlaced, germophobic, non-smoking, work-obsessed genius who made invaluable contributions to electrical invention. Their personalities were very different, and that’s the kind of diversity I tried to depict in my novel. If you want the more “standard” usage of diversity, Crowley’s bisexuality and Tesla’s apparent celibacy are alluded to, but these aspects are included because that’s part of who they were, not for the purpose of satisfying a perceived diversity checklist. Horror author Terence Taylor expressed a view similar to my own on this point in his review of The Spirit Phone for Nightmare Magazine.
As for the particular review you mention, by horror author and editor Amanda Lyons, I see it as a mixed review rather than a panning of the book. There is also praise, and I actually thanked her for it. However, I disagree with the portion quoted below, which I think partly exemplifies the issue you mention:
“For my own tastes this was a bit dry and impersonal and I was chagrined to find very few female characters (and that those who were there came in the form of uncouth harpies and demons at the beck and call of male sorcerers).”
It’s unclear what “personal” elements are seen as missing, so I’ll skip that. As for the rest: Female supporting characters include Sadie the bookseller, who is indispensable in helping Crowley and Tesla. There are two female demons: Lirion and Elerion. Yes, they are bound to male mages (Crowley and antagonist Ambrose Temple, respectively), but Lirion voluntarily goes beyond the scope of her obligations to help Crowley and Tesla, while Elerion–also in freely choosing to aid the protagonists–gives Temple the ultimate dressing down as she declares herself absolved of serving him. This is after she telekinetically snaps the neck of a monster that tries to sexually harass her. Thus, the female demons are much more than simply things to be used by the male mages. There is also Martha, a woman who is crucial in highlighting the moral bankruptcy of Temple and his plan. The only female characters who could reasonably meet the “shrill harpies” description are two in total: one female spirit contacted through the spirit phone and a young woman who Crowley and Tesla encounter in New Jersey. So, with all due respect to Ms. Lyons as a far more prolific author of fiction than myself, I can’t agree with her on this point.
When I read that review, I was reminded of an academic paper I’d written on the female characters of Ernest Hemingway’s unfinished story (possibly intended as a novel) “The Last Good Country.” In it, I quote a paper by literature professor Margaret Bauer, who states:
“Hemingway is often criticized for his one-dimensional characterization of the women in his fiction. I would suggest that such critics are actually arguing with Hemingway’s choice of focus. The problem they have with Hemingway’s female characters is not that they are one-dimensional (the numerous studies of them suggest otherwise), but that they are usually not central characters. I would argue that it is the writer’s prerogative as to whose story he or she is most interested in telling.”
I agree with Professor Bauer, and I think her reasoning applies to either a literary giant like Hemingway or an obscure “genre fiction” debut novelist such as myself. Besides, there is no shortage of books with female protagonists in various genres, including fantasy, science fiction, and horror, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Anyway, mixed reviews or bad reviews are a fact of life. Even the Harry Potter books were roundly condemned by Harold Bloom, perhaps the most famous and influential of American literary critics.
Q3: speaking of modern, what I loved about The Spirit Phone is the respect you showed for the period of time/locations where the story takes place. New York, her streets, restaurants, hotels, daily papers, everything is so detailed and so faithful to that time. Do you feel it’s important to keep that level of historical faithfulness even in alternate history fiction?
O’Keefe: Yes. With the caveat that I think of The Spirit Phone as a cross-genre novel, it is among other things an alternate history tale, and I think it’s important to strive for historical accuracy. If you’re going to depict the year 1899 without an effort to do so accurately, why bother calling it the year 1899? Unless, of course, you introduce anachronistic aspects–historical inaccuracies–as a deliberate decision in the service of the story.
One way to do this is to have the entire world be “openly” anachronistic, such as in William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine: The computer (a steam-powered variety) has become a reality in the 19th century, resulting in a global political order which includes a much more powerful British Empire, an independent Confederacy, and a Marxist republic on Manhattan Island. Another example of this approach is Bonsart Bokel’s Association of Ishtarseries.
In The Spirit Phone, which is set in 1899, I tried to make the publicly known technology, infrastructure, political situation, etc. the same as our actual history (with the exception of the spirit phone itself, which is being marketed by Thomas Edison as a consumer product). If you suddenly appeared in the New York of the novel, it would look just like the real 1899 New York. Most of the anachronistic technology, such as a high-speed airship, is behind the scenes.
Every time I thought something might be historically incorrect, I checked it, especially “public” technology and language. I took pains to make sure no one was using a 20th or 21st century expression. One exception is the expletive “wanker,” used by Crowley, that dates from the 1940s (in print), which I decided to use anyway because it conveyed the feeling I wanted. (One reviewer on the website LibraryThing claimed I was adding historical details only to “show off” my research rather than advance the story, but gave no examples of the allegedly superfluous details.)
I dispensed with accuracy in the case of certain biographical details, of course. There’s no evidence I know of that Crowley and Tesla ever met in real life, and a lot of the advanced technology I attribute to Tesla in the book isn’t necessarily stuff the real Tesla made, such as a metal detector and a taser. And as far as I know, Aleister Crowley never levitated naked up the side of Devils Tower in Wyoming.
Q4: Crowley and Tesla were just a delight to see interact with each other! Where did this idea of chocolate consumption for heightened clairvoyant powers come from?
O’Keefe: I actually don’t recall (ironically!) exactly how I came up with eating chocolate as a way for Crowley to recall a crucial lost memory. There is a scene in which Crowley is trapped, mid-teleport, in a bizarre environment. I came up with that first, then decided that Crowley had forgotten the incident, but needed to remember it, and I struck upon the taste of chocolate as a kind of mnemonic.
I think of Crowley and Tesla as a kind of oil & water mix, a speculative fiction “odd couple,” and when I came up with the idea for the book, it surprised me that (as far as I knew) no one else had ever put them together in a novel. I think there might be one other novel out there with the two of them (I can’t remember the title), which I learned of after I started writing The Spirit Phone. And I think Crowley shows up in one issue of the comic Herald:Lovecraft and Tesla.
Q5: all throughout the story we read how Crowley and Temple use these grids to summon ‘familiars’. Tell us more about that.
O’Keefe: In hindsight, maybe I should have called them talismans instead of “grids.” They are taken from a book of magic titled The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, aka The Book of Abramelin. It’s thought to date from the 15th century, but the original publication date is unclear. The book was used by Aleister Crowley in real life, so I decided to draw upon it.
There were already German, Hebrew, and French editions of Abramelin when S.L. MacGregor Mathers, an associate of Crowley’s, translated it into English. Mathers’ translation was published in 1900. The book was used by Crowley early in his occult practices, in particular at Boleskine House, his estate in Scotland near Loch Ness. There are even rumors that Crowley called forth the Loch Ness Monster.
The talismans (“grids” in the novel) are said to be a means to accomplish various feats of magic. Every use in the novel corresponds to a claimed use in The Book of Abramelin. For example, when Crowley summons the demon (or familiar) Lirion so that she can interrogate a spirit trapped within Edison’s spirit phone prototype, he uses a talisman described in The Book of Abramelin as used “To know Secret Operations.” When the demon-familiar Ashtaroth is summoned to try to get rid of a massive lump of magnetite that is causing an emergency aboard the airship, the talisman used is one described in Abramelin as meant to perform “Chemical labours and Operations, as regardeth Metals especially.” Similarly, the names of all three demon-familiars depicted in the novel–Lirion, Ashtaroth, and Elerion–are taken directly from The Book of Abramelin.
This was another point where “historical accuracy” had to give way to the demands of the plot. In The Book of Abramelin, the magical operations described are often time-consuming, meticulous, and ceremonial, but I wanted something more dynamic and fast-paced. So I just have Crowley write out a grid and call the demon, boom.
Q6: you and a few other authors like Bonsart Bokel are redefining modern fiction by using a different approach. Alternate history in the last few years’ mainstream has been, frankly, a joke. But you guys are exploring realms that are opening ground for new and compelling literature. What are your thoughts on this approach?
O’Keefe: Well, I tend to read more “widely” than “deeply,” and I can’t say I have a take on any recently published alternate history fiction. Those works which have inspired me are from the 20th century. For example, Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, and Len Deighton’s SS-GB(which is alternate history but non-science fiction). Then there’s The Man in the High Castleby Philip K. Dick, which depicts a novelist living in an alternate timeline who writes about “our” reality as an alternate timeline. I think the original alternate history novel depicting the introduction of advanced technology into a past era is actually a 19th century work: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Courtby Mark Twain, though it is not usually seen as “speculative fiction.”
I think of The Spirit Phone’s premise and particular mix of historical characters as its distinctive points, but if I’m opening up any new ground beyond that, I’m happy. Maybe it’s also that the occult and technology both feature prominently, either separately or combined, though I don’t think I’m the first writer to try that.
While alternate history is one aspect of The Spirit Phone, I think of it as a cross-genre work combining elements of horror, science fiction, science fantasy, murder mystery, and action-adventure. (Locus Magazine calls The Spirit Phone a historical fantasy. I have no objection to the label.) When I started writing the book, I didn’t think, “I’m going to write a horror novel,” or “I’m going to write a science fiction novel.” It was more like, “I want to write a novel with lots of weird stuff happening,” and added whatever elements I needed to make it so.
Q7: The Spirit Phone seemed to be a complete story. So what can we expect next from Mr O’Keefe? Will the Crowley/Tesla team be somehow reunited? Or any new projects you can tell us about? I think I can speak on behalf of VP and all of our readers and we definitely want to see more of these legends in the making!
O’Keefe: My current projects are: an English punctuation style guide for a publisher in Japan (which is nearly complete); an essay on Aleister Crowley’s poetry collection Alice: An Adultery, which will be partly based upon an article I wrote on Crowley’s visit to Japan in 1901; and a second novel which may or may not be a sequel to The Spirit Phone. It’s very much in flux at the moment.
Make sure to check out the author’s work if it sounds interesting to you. Tell us what you think in the comments and tell somebody else about what we’re doing at Virtual Pulp.
I’m beginning to notice a pattern with some of our last few guest authors and the source material they are basing their works of fiction literature on. Instead of just trying to emulate other writers, they are tapping into the vast inspiration provided directly by history itself; taking real historical characters/events and applying new and creative ideas to them for innovative storytelling.
The latest gentleman to join this group is A.S. O’Keefe with The Spirit Phone.
What it’s About:
Based on true accounts of Thomas Edison’s attempts to build a phone-like device to communicate with the dead, The Spirit Phone throws the reader into a vortex of the historical, the paranormal, and the technological.
Our two main characters in this dystopian alternate history are none other than Allister Crowley and Nikola Tesla: two individuals far apart in personality, yet with just enough in common to prevent a demonic invasion of our plane of reality–for the spirit phone turns out to be not the tool to speak with the deceased, but rather the key to unlock entry of evil entities called ferox into our world! Only mage A. Crowley and acclaimed scientist N. Tesla stand in the way of doom!
Characters:
Honestly, it doesn’t matter how much you know about Crowley and Tesla, it doesn’t even matter what your opinion of these two historical figures is if you do know of them. The synergy between the two in this alternate historical setting is the stuff of legends! One is the hedonistic occultist with a flair for the extravagant; the other the more pragmatic scientist with a fixation for numbers. Yet, where one lacks in certain skills or knowledge, the other always seems to compensate for it. And that’s how they comprise a complimentary team.
O’Keefe manages to infuse just enough sense of humor into the Crowley/Tesla duo while avoiding the ridiculous or campy. These characters’ personalities and the situations they get into can be hilarious at times, but in ways that feel natural and not at all forced.
Reviewer’s Take:
Even the paranormal and the technological elements involved in the story always feel quite plausible. Yes this is a work of fiction and yes the author is adding stuff of his own to these historical characters, but none of it ever feels too unlikely to have possibly happened in actuality.
The reason why this alternate history universe works is first and foremost due to the author respecting the source material, which in this case is the historical period of time itself: from the locations, to the people, to the food, restaurants and hotels, to the daily newspapers, everything feels authentic. This is not about taking a historical period and simply changing the gender or the sex of its characters to virtue signal or to highlight the ‘injustices of white westerners’ or the ‘oppression of women’s voices’.
The underlying core theme is MANKIND and his ongoing struggle to deal with his own mortality. An invention that promised to let us communicate with our dead loved ones turned out to be a tool for evil to rule our world. Man, in all his technological advances, still is like a baby just learning how to crawl. This story is much more than just your next fantasy trope on your TBR list. This is the stuff legends are made of.
I’m very glad to say that Mr O’Keefe deservedly enters our elite group of legendary authors here at Virtual Pulp!
How could I pass up a novel with time travel, demonic conspiracies, the Knights Templar and their modern day descendent (an organization called GRAIL–see what they did, there?)?
GRAIL has a time machine. They’ve been monitoring demonic activity in the present day and believe the world is at the breaking point because of it. But if they are able to recover a Medieval text on demonology (the eponymous Codex Babylon), they might just be able to turn the spiritual tide against the unseen enemy.
Martin Raines is a unicorn honest attorney who has just won a case that could open big doors in his career. But he is choosing early retirement instead. He doesn’t just want to leave the rat race of law, but the Current Year dystopian madhouse altogether. Neither he, nor the narrator, bother to articulate just what all is wrong with modern society, but he knows things are getting increasingly ugly. He is relocating his family to rural Idaho, where he hopes to protect them from the worst of whatever insanity is yet to come.
The ambiguity of the demonic outbreak was no problem for a reader like me. Whatever the author means by “demonic activity,” it was easy for me to assume he was referring to the Cold Civil War, the culture war, and the spiritual conflict behind them. A normie reader would just chalk it up to a fictional aspect of the world the author built, and read on, giving it no more thought than the existence of monsters in a Larry Correa novel.
GRAIL finds Martin and informs him that his instinctive revulsion to current events and trends isn’t ultimately due to woketardery (or whatever), but instead is a result of a drastic upsurge in an age-old demonic force. It will soon achieve such power that Martin’s family won’t be safe, even in Idaho. To have a chance at checking the demonic power, GRAIL needs the Codex Babylon. And Martin is their best candidate to send back to get it.
After the obligatory hero’s resistance, Martin finally agrees and is transported back to the Middle East in between crusades.
The Knights Templar, like so many institutions, started out with good intentions, but eventually transformed into something antithetical to their original purpose. Kroese has his main character go back to the point in history when the Templars’ apostacy arguably began.
That, too, was one battle in the demons’ war against the good, beautiful, and true.
What we know about Martin Raines is:
He loves his family.
He’s fairly well-studied in history.
He’s better-than-average at learning languages.
When he dreams, he can communicate with GRAIL’s empath (?) back in the 21st Century.
Martin’s quest is a frustrating tour of Medieval Europe and the Middle East, chasing the spoor of anybody who might know where to find the demonology book. There were times when I felt like yelling at some of the characters. (“Go look at the papers on Benedict’s desk, you dolts!” “Don’t trust her, you moron!”) However, if you can accept time travel as a plot device, everything that happens in the story is believable.
Codex Babylon is Book One of The Cross-Time Crusade Series. It does arguably stand alone. But the link (cliffhanger) to the next book in the series does seem rather tacked-on. This is a common issue with series fiction. Authors employ different literary tactics to make episodic novels both stand alone and work as an integrated narrative. Sometimes they work better than others.
Another common issue with series fiction is that the first book ends after setting the stage, but often before the story hits its stride. This might be the case here, too. There’s a lot of intriguing ingredients introduced in this book. I may have to read Book Two (paid link) to see what kind of dish is produced from this recipe.
If you didn’t see this movie in the theater, you might be tempted to watch it now that it’s streaming on Prime and possibly other services. Read this first.
For fans of military history, Napoleon represents an historical force. His accomplishments should be studied with respect, if not reverence.
It is safe to assume that director Ridley Scott is not a fan of military history.
Like nearly everyone calling the shots in Homowood, government, and every other institution, Scott is a geriatric leftist. There are exceptions, but his demographic is notorious for bad relationships with their fathers. Why Scott chose to treat the subject matter as he did might have been guaranteed by his life-long contempt for strong patriarchal authority figures–especially those widely considered to be great.
This is not a film about Napoleon the strategist, Napoleon the Emperor, or even Napoleon the ambitious overachiever. It is a pedestrian screed against “toxic masculinity” which elevates the female (especially Josephine) to the Eternal Pedestal. Even Marie Antionette is granted a more sympathetic portrayal than the eponymous character.
Since this movie is about a man obsessed with a woman, it’s relevant to warn you that he is portrayed as emotionally unstable, egomaniacal (not just egotistical, which the real Bonaparte probably was), and sexually inept.
In reality, Bonaparte’s fixation on the sexually adventurous widow pointed to his own capacity for blunder in his personal life–if not a sign of ignorance, arrested development, some sort of fetish, or a character flaw. In the movie, it is inflated to carry the all-too-typical gynocentric trope that a man’s value as a human being depends upon the approval/acceptance of a woman. The message comes across that (with the exception of Toulon) Bonaparte’s military successes were directly linked to his social credit score with Josephine. As their relationship soured, his great victories turned into colossal defeats. And when she died, that brought about his ignominious end.
Part of what was necessary to pull off this message (in a biopic about an historical figure defined by his military exploits, no less) was to simply ignore Bonaparte’s multiple campaigns and shove 95% of his military career off-screen. Only three battles are depicted–and only in part: Toulon, Austerlitz, and Borodino. The last was reduced to an half-assed montage of cavalry galloping through snow, in a half-assed Russian Campaign sequence that amounts to an ambiguous afterthought.
Also painfully lacking is sufficient insight into why the battles (much less the respective wars) were fought.
C’mon, guys: the director has better things to do than spend that multimillion dollar budget showing you yucky military stuff in a biopic ostensibly about a military man. The director’s primary role is an apologist for female behavior–in this case, a haughty royal blinded by her own privilege, and an unfaithful slut who married up about as high as she could go, but still drunk with entitlement to the point she delighted in making her husband miserable.
Creative license was used to the opposite effect for the men, of course. There is not one single male character in the film that is likeable.
This is a cinematic hit piece, at most–a depressing one that leaves you wondering what the point was (other than “patriarchy bad”–gee, what a groundbreaking message).
Although there is an actor who wears funny hats who you see throughout the film, he he bears little resemblance to the Napoleon Bonaparte of history. I suspect he’s really a stand-in for a filmmaker’s father.
You’d have to be blind to not notice how stupid-happy I was after that short little evening and morning. Still, Dad didn’t press me on it. He left me alone with my thoughts and fresh memories for the next leg of our trip.
I did finally ask him if it would be possible to correspond with Gloria. He turned thoughtful, gave me a long look, turned back to the road, thought some more, and finally said, “It’ll be tricky, but maybe we can work something out.”
***
After a few more days, I was able to function again and actually think about something other than Gloria Benake.
While meandering through the plains and deserts of the Southwest in that hot rod Willys, we got into a discussion about time travel. Dad asked me a question he had to rephrase a few times. But once I understood what he was getting at, I would think about it a lot as I got older.
“Okay, Sprout: You’ve been to a few different points in time already. You started out with your life there in St. Louis. Then you jumped back to the Orange Grove. You jumped forward with me to BH Station. Then way back to New Orleans for Sullivan-Corbett. And now back to this road trip. Did I get it in the right sequence?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you figure? How can you be sure of any linear sequence when the illusion of time is no longer relevant?”
My reply was steeped in wisdom and just slopping over with all the intellectual prowess of a pre-adolescent boy: “Huh?”
“The only solid evidence we have that time even exists is entropy,” he said. “But anyway, of all the space-time coordinates you’ve visited, New Orleans is the earliest. BH Station is the latest. So wouldn’t the correct sequence of your travels begin with New Orleans, and end with BH Station? And where we are right now should be in the middle, right?”
“No,” I said, vigorously shaking my head.
“Why not? That’s proper chronological order.”
“Because that’s not the order of how it happened.”
“So you’re saying that St. Louis is the singular reference point; that everything else is lined up in the sequence according to that coordinate.”
“Um, yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“But why? How do you know what sequence is correct? 1892 came before any of the other coordinates, right?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“And 1934 comes after 1892. Then 1947 comes after 1934. So the chronologically correct sequence is New Orleans, the Orange Grove, then this vacation, St. Louis, then BH Station. That’s just simple math. 1892 is the earliest date, so of course you went there first. 1934 is the next earliest date. So that’s where you went next.”
“That may be the historical sequence,” I said, “but I visited those times in a different sequence.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I remember how it happened.”
“Ahh. So your memory is calibrated from that one reference point, back in St. Louis. And your memory records remain consistent throughout the series of warp jumps. Why is that?”
“Because that’s just the way it happened.”
“What you’re saying is, that’s how all the puzzle pieces fit together in what you consider reality,” he said. “But can we even define reality anymore? Is our concept of reality even relevant?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I said.
“I’ll answer the question for you: Yes. You’re right. And the supporting evidence is relative growth. Even though you’ve been moving backwards and forwards through time, you’re still aging—according to a sequence that is anchored in the reality you lived in St. Louis. You didn’t grow decades older when we went to BH Station, and obviously you didn’t grow younger for every year we went back, or you would have ceased to exist before we got to these coordinates. So you’re right. But why are you right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t know either, Sprout. But I’ll tell you—I sometimes wonder if that truth is ironclad. Maybe reality can change—and our memory will self-adjust to accept it. Wouldn’t that be a mind-blower?”
I didn’t answer. This whole conversation sounded crazy.
“Pretty smart scientists have proposed that time itself is just a stubbornly persistent illusion,” he said. “Other scientists have determined that there are at least six dimensions beyond the four that we perceive. Now, somebody with a warp generator can pierce the illusion and jump through unperceivable dimensions. That means it’s theoretically possible to exist outside of time altogether.”
I wasn’t following his logic, so I remained quiet.
“Let’s say it’s Thanksgiving and the Macy’s Parade is underway. You’re watching it from the top of a skyscraper, with binoculars, while most people are watching it at street level. Down there, the Budweiser float has just passed the people standing at Times Square or wherever. Right in front of them is the Coca-Cola float, and if they lean to peak around that Coca-Cola float, they’ll see the one with the Charlie Brown and Snoopy balloons.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to picture the scene he described.
“So you remember the Budweiser float. You see the Coca-Cola float in front of you right now, clear as day. And you think you can see far enough to predict that the Peanuts float is coming next. Budweiser is the past, Coca-Cola is the present, and Peanuts is the future. Well, up on top of the skyscraper, you see all three floats simultaneously. You can see every float in the entire parade. You don’t have to remember or predict anything, because past, present and future are all there for you to clearly see. In fact, there is no past or future. Everything is present.”
“How does that relate?” I asked. “You say I’m on the skyscraper…outside of time. How could I actually get there? Who could actually be there?”
“Outstanding question, Sprout. Maybe you can’t ever get there. Probably only God is outside time like that, looking into our stream and seeing everything at once. But if He’s there, looking at past, present and future simultaneously…then that’s the reality that supersedes all others, ain’t it?”
I had no answer for that; nor was I prepared for what came next.
“So if that’s the true reality, then there is no actual separation. There is no linear progression. It’s just a stubbornly persistent illusion—it’s an imposed limitation. Well, I suspect our subconscious mind can glimpse into the unperceived dimensions sometimes. Some people more than others, probably. But that might explain where some of our weird dreams come from. Or bizarre phenomena like deja vu.”
“Dreams?” I asked.
“I have dreams, sometimes, that don’t make much sense,” Dad said. “But when I analyze them, I wonder if they’re not evidence that my subconscious is perceiving into different streams. If there is one true reality, then not only do past, present and future exist simultaneously in a given stream; but even the different streams themselves…the different realities…are all actually one. God simply determines which illusion we are limited to and calibrates our memory accordingly. You, me, anybody with a warp generator can trespass into illusions we weren’t assigned to, but our calibration anchors our cognition to the reality we originated in—at least during conscious thought. And our biology, too.”
“I’m confused,” I admitted. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
He chuckled and shrugged. “Well, at least remember this conversation. Think about it. One day you’ll understand at least what I’m asking. And if you ever think you’ve found an answer…let me know.”
“Okay.”
Not long after that, we were driving somewhere north of Roswell, New Mexico, and I experienced an oppressive, creepy, foreboding sensation. I got goose bumps, and began looking around in and outside the car, wondering if the source of the feeling was visible.
Dad noticed me looking around and studied me. He noticed the hair on my arms standing up, and pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road. That’s when I noticed that he had goose bumps, too.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You tell me,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
He rubbed his own arm, then looked down at mine. “You feel that, right?”
“I feel…something,” I said.
He got out of the car, gesturing for me to do the same. “Describe what you feel,.” he said.
I did my best to put the sensation into words.
He nodded, using his more expansive vocabulary to clarify my attempt at description. “Ominous. Tumultuous.”
“Maybe evil…?” I suggested.
“Interesting,” he mused, looking out over the plains. “I guess this might make sense.”
“It does?” I asked. “What does?”
“Maybe it wasn’t a weather balloon after all,” he muttered.
“Say what?”
“I guess you never read the details about this,” he said, then pointed out into the plains. “Somewhere out there is a ranch—not very far, I’d guess. Right about here and now, something has crashed, is crashing, or will crash very soon at that ranch. You never heard of the Roswell UFO?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Area 51. Hangar 18. Right?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I’m not a UFO nut. But now I know something is happening here, too.”
“Here, too? You lost me, Dad.”
He chewed on his lip for a while, studying first me, then the landscape. “Tell you what: let’s take another field trip real quick.”
We got back in the car, took off, and immediately warp-jumped to a place he called “S.A. Station.” The scenery was exotic and beautiful.
It turns out “S.A.” stood for South Africa, and the year was 1958. But we had only stopped there to pick up the VTOL with cloaking capability.
The VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) was quite an aircraft, even without the Predator technology. It had retractable, forward-swept wings and cowled propellors that could swing from vertical to horizontal. But Dad distracted me from examining it much by showing me some equipment similar to what the Erasers used.
It was like a heavy poncho—the outside of it covered with thousands of little L.E.D. screens. Wires crisscrossed inside the fabric of the poncho. For every screen, there was a microcamera on the opposite side of the poncho, recording whatever it “saw.” So the LED screens displayed live footage from behind whatever or whoever the poncho covered. No matter what angle you looked at it from, you simply saw a distorted image of the background on the far side of it. An electronic, active camouflage. Dad said that more advanced cloaking tech had come out since the poncho was made, available in jumpsuits and facemasks. He said the suits were very heavy and hot to wear, and they still just distorted the light rather than truly enabling invisibility; but made a person or vehicle extremely difficult to detect, unless you knew where and what to look for. He turned it on, and it became just a visual anomaly. Then he handed me his sunglasses and told me to put them on. When I did, I could see the poncho, with all its tiny LED segments glowing.
“That’s why you wear these all the time,” I said. “What are they?”
He hung up the poncho, shut it off, and took the shades back. “Relatively simple technology. The lenses block ultraviolet light, and are also polarized. The polarization keeps the LEDs from tricking you.”
“So you can see the Erasers, plain as day,” I said.
He nodded. “One of my science labs is working on a contact lens prototype. For now, we’ve got these.”
“Can I get a pair?”
“I guess so, Sprout. But let’s hope you never need them.”
We strapped into the VTOL and took off—up and away. We shot a warp and Dad cloaked the craft as we approached a large city.
There was a park or something with a little patch of woods inside the city. Dad guided the VTOL down through a gap in the trees and landed it expertly. We disembarked. Using the electronic compass in his “pocketwatch,” Dad navigated on foot to the edge of the copse, coming to a halt before breaking through the treeline. He held his arm out sideways to keep me from emerging into the open.
The city we saw from our ground-level perspective was quite an eyeful. Tall columns lined the streets, colorful banners hanging from them. Heroic sculptures were placed all over. The architecture of the buildings was alien to me. Some of it could perhaps be described as art-deco, but most of it looked like something else—gleaming new, but stylistically a throwback to antiquity.
Upon a large parade ground were perfectly- arranged mass formations of soldiers and vehicles. Just beyond this, dominating the scene, was a colossal structure, shaped like a sporting arena. The enormous stadium reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the ancient coliseum in Rome, only much bigger. A roar of a great multitude cheering rose out of the stadium.
“You’ve been studying history, right?” Dad asked in a hushed tone. “You know where we are?”
“Nazi Germany,” I said, noting the hundreds of huge red banners with black swastikas inside white circles.
“Specifically, the Olympiad,” he said. “Berlin, 1936. The Olympic Games. I discovered this at a Nuremburg Rally, but it’s here, too.”
“What’s here? I asked.
“The Big Spooky. Relax for a minute. What do you feel?”
Before I could answer, what looked like clouds of swirling confetti wafted up from the stadium and into the sky—defying gravity. The roar of 100,000 voices shook the air again.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Pidgeons. Or doves. Some kind of birds. Supposed to symbolize world peace or something.”
“Yeah, right,” I said with a sneer, remembering what the Nazis actually brought to the world.
“Concentrate, Sprout. Evaluate what you feel.”
I tried to both relax and concentrate at the same time, ignoring my conditioned response to all the swastikas, and the inherent danger of the situation which caused us to speak quietly, lest we be discovered.
“It’s a lot like what I felt back in Roswell,” I said, incredulous that the same unusual oppressive atmosphere would be here on the other side of the planet and 11 years earlier. “Only, there’s also…”
Dad nodded. “Right. In this case, it’s ominous…but it’s also got a seductive quality, doesn’t it?”
“Seductive?” I repeated, confused. “You mean like in sex?”
“That’s not how I mean it. I mean appealing. There’s almost a temptation to want to be a part of the great, momentous event going on.”
“Yes!” I agreed, amazed at how accurate his description was of something I personally felt. “That’s it, exactly.”
He nodded again. “It was the same at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. But I’m not taking you there. This is a big enough risk.”
“But this is a sporting event,” I observed. “Not a UFO landing.”
“Right. I don’t know exactly how the Olympiad is so significant in the scheme of things, but there’s no denying the sensation. And that extra, seductive aspect…it must be the added zeitgeist factor—like at Nuremburg and 1917 Petrograd, and 1959 Cuba, and…”
“What’s a zeitgeist?” I asked.
“It means ‘spirit of the times.’ It’s when mass portions of a population all get on the same page. They all jump on the same bandwagon, share the same emotion collectively, believe in the same ideology, adopt the same goals…this is one coordinate right here and now that has it in droves.”
“Too bad we can’t watch the Games,” I said.
“Yeah. Jesse Owens won four gold medals for America and embarrassed Der Fuehrer right out of the stadium. But we’re taking a big enough risk already, Sprout. Neither of us speak the language and you don’t want to go barging into one of these socialist Utopias without your papers in order. Besides, the games last for two weeks, and the cloaking tech is gonna drag down our batteries much sooner.”
He took one last glance toward the imposing stadium, and sighed. “What’s really going on here, under the surface? It’s more than pole-vaulting and discus throws.”
We returned to the VTOL and lifted off out of the little copse, into the sky.
We jumped a warp once airborne, and Dad began to breathe a bit easier. But soon we were approaching another city—more modern, but at least as big. He noticed my curious expression, and announced, “Dallas, Texas. November 1963.”
We approached a downtown area, descending on the way. “This…sensation you felt,” he told me, “I discovered it by accident, but I started tracking it through history. It happens a lot, at coordinates all over the four-dimensional map. We’re just hitting some of the highlights this time. For some reason, in the ’60s they spring up all over, like popcorn. Like weeds. Most of them are like the Olympiad—meaning I don’t know exactly what’s so significant about the coordinate. I picked this one for this trip because it’s fairly easy to grasp the significance.”
He lowered the VTOL to a landing in a grassy field in the middle of a square bordered by multi-story buildings, and shut it down while leaving the cloak active.
“This is such a public place, out in the open,” I observed, as we stepped outside. “What if somebody bumps into the VTOL?”
Dad shrugged. “People are gonna see all kinds of stuff here tomorrow that doesn’t make much sense. Whatever doesn’t fit The Narrative will be ignored or discredited. At worst, somebody’s story of an invisible futuristic craft parked in Dealey Plaza the day before the assassination will be easily dismissed as just another ‘crazy conspiracy theory’.”
“Assassination?” I asked.
He just nodded.
We strolled around the plaza. Dad studied the top of a few buildings; a rain gutter and a grassy area behind it; sections of the street; trees, light poles and signs. “You feel it?” he asked me.
I nodded. The ominous sensation was as thick as gravy. You couldn’t see it, hear it, smell it or touch it, but it was there in abundant quantity. I wondered if being exposed to deadly atomic radiation was like this, or if you wouldn’t even know you were exposed to it until your skin started falling off. Or maybe some people could feel it—as I was feeling whatever this was, now.
Assassination. Dallas. 1963. Dealey Plaza. These words came together in my mind and triggered something in my long-term memory. “Kennedy! JFK—this is where he was shot?”
“Not ‘was’ shot. Will be shot. Tomorrow.”
It began to rain. Pedestrians around the plaza opened umbrellas. Dad ushered me back to the VTOL.
Before he took off, he opened a metal case and activated a squadron of microdrones, disguised as flying insects. One at a time he remote-piloted them to different spots around the area, landed them, and placed them on “stand-by.”
“You’re going to record the assassination?” I asked, strapping in.
“Yup,” he replied. “I plan on getting a lot of footage from multiple angles and vantage points. Nobody here and now knows about my drones, and therefore they can’t be tampered with.”
He fired up the engines and we took off.
“Why?” I asked, remembering his speech about how changing history would split the timestream and tip off the CPB to our presence.
Dad shrugged. “‘Cause I want to know what really happened. Don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. The JFK assassination happened long before I was born, and hadn’t particularly interested me so far. The name “Lee Harvey Oswald” echoed through my mind. They knew who the killer was, so there was no mystery to solve. To me the battles of the Crusades or the best Rose Bowl games ever played were much more interesting.
***
Our next stop was Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. Yup—same old goose bumps. Same ominous, foreboding sensation. The “Big Spooky” was on the scene. We mixed with the crowd a little bit, seeing what we could see. I watched smelly, long-haired potheads and drug addicts clash with police in riot gear. Dad seemed more interested in listening to people not engaged in violence—whether they were in a conversation or shouting slogans to any who might hear.
“What’s different about this coordinate?” Dad asked me once we had broken away from the crowds and had some relative privacy.
“Nobody was fighting at the other coordinates,” I said. “There was unity. Right?”
“Yes and no. There may not have been a manifestation of violence in Berlin or Dallas, but there was violence in the air. And don’t let the conflict here fool you—there’s still a zeitgeist at work…a powerful one. This is just a struggle for control of the left-wing. People on both ‘sides’ want the same thing; it’s just that the New Left want it faster than the Old Left, while the Old Left wants to maintain the facade of actually loving what they’re trying to destroy.”
“Who wins?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hegel.”
“I don’t know who that is, Dad.”
“You’ll learn about him when you’re older.” He pointed to the building where the convention was being held. “Thesis.” Then he pointed to the rioting protestors. “Antithesis.” Now he waved toward me, then himself. “The world we grew up in is the synthesis.”
I had no interest in politics yet, and let the subject drop.
“The ’60s is the beginning of the end for America; but it still has a lot going for it if you can ignore that,” he opined, as we strolled back toward where he had hidden the VTOL. “Fantastic decade for a young man—especially the last half.” He craned his neck to ogle some women in miniskirts walking toward the convention. “It’s easy to get girls; females are still feminine; and obesity is still fairly rare.”
Meeting Gloria had jump-started a process in my body and mind that would soon result in radical changes. My attitude toward the opposite sex began to change with it, so I did take an interest in Dad’s observation.
***
Our next stop was another November—this one in 1910 at Brunswick, Georgia. After leaving the VTOL cloaked in an area surrounded by tall trees, Dad and I snuck over to a small, lonely, terminating rail station. We chose a discreet point to observe from, and ate snacks quietly while a train rolled up in the dark of night.
It was the shortest train I’d ever seen, and I whispered as much to Dad.
“That’s a private car in between the locomotive and caboose,” he whispered back. “Came all the way from New Jersey. If you knew anything about railroads, you’d know somebody powerful had to pull some strings to get this little train’s routing priority above all the crucial freight and passenger trains. In these times, the railroads are the national infrastructure. They’re how people get mail, food, fuel…everything. You don’t make room for some private ‘duck hunting trip’ in the middle of all that unless you’ve got enormous clout.”
“Duck hunting trip?” I echoed.
Dad nodded toward the private rail car. It looked fancy. The windows glowed dull yellow—probably from kerosene lamps inside. Shadows flashed in the flickering light, betraying movement inside.
“That’s their cover story,” Dad said. “Do you feel anything?”
I shook my head. “Feels normal.”
He nodded, then gestured for me to follow. We left our observation post and crept quietly toward the train. When we came within a few yards of the private rail car, the Big Spooky hit me with such force, I nearly wet my pants.
Dad looked at me, an expectant question in his eyes. I nodded.
On the other side of the train from us, the conductor opened a door on the rail car, and a handful of men began filing out. I could make out feet and legs by peering underneath the train. I heard their voices, too.
Now the Big Spooky throbbed so excessively that my eyes watered.
Dad grasped me by the shoulder and steered me back toward our surreptitious vantage point. As we went, the oppressive sensation faded. Once back in our spot, I felt tremendous relief.
“Why didn’t I feel anything until we got close?” I asked.
“It’s concentrated, here,” Dad explained. “I’m not saying we can’t find the Big Spooky at earlier dates, because we definitely can. I have. But here and now it’s like…I don’t know…a seed, or something. Maybe a beach head. From here it grows and spreads out—like to the other places we found it.”
“It sure was intense right there,” I said. “Is this another one you don’t understand, or is there something significant about these coordinates?”
“Oh, it’s significant,” he said, solemnly. “The men getting off that train—they’re gonna climb on a boat that takes them to a private venue on an island, where they’ll have a meeting. In that meeting, they’re gonna develop a plan to destroy the United States of America, and freedom…and a whole lot of other stuff.”
“Destroy America?” I asked, confused. “But…”
“Not tomorrow,” he said. “Not next week. Not by some sudden catastrophe. In fact, their plan won’t seem to have made much of a difference for a long time. For three years there won’t be any evidence at all that an American could point to. But they’ve put something in motion. Three years from now, they’ll take a big step toward their goal.”
“Their goal…” I mused. “Destruction of the USA?”
He nodded. “In seven years they’ll take another step. They’ll suffer a few setbacks here and there, but 19 years from now they’ll take another big step. In 22 years they’ll start taking huge steps, one right after the other…starting in another November, in fact.”
I didn’t understand what he was alluding to, but I was getting the idea that November was a popular month for the Big Spooky.
“There will be plausible deniability for generations,” Dad went on. “In the post-war USA, it’s the most prosperous time anyone in world history has seen. Only a crackpot would argue that anything could be wrong, right? Even back in the coordinates you came from, almost nobody could see the problem.” Now he pointed to the locomotive. “America was a big, powerful, fast-moving engine, with a lot of momentum built up. It took over a hundred years for the cancer, eating away at her from the inside, to be obvious to enough Americans to even be mentioned in the mainstream. By the time there’s enough people aware of the problem to demand repairs, the poison will have spread everywhere. It’ll be too late. The locomotive will come off the rails; the boiler will explode; the whole thing will collapse into a pile of mangled metal. Then all the foreign vultures we’ve helped and protected over the generations will move in and pick through the scrap, taking whatever’s valuable to them. That was happening in the coordinates I came from.”
His speech had lost me. He must have realized my confusion, because he sighed and forced a grin as he tousled my hair. “But you and me have a way to cheat Fate. At least we can survive the slow-motion train wreck. And some day you’ll take an interest in history. We’ll talk then—a lot. Then all this should make more sense.”
We made our way back to the VTOL. Once inside it, I asked him, “Is there something special about us? I mean, why can we feel the Big Spooky but nobody back in Dallas or Berlin did?” I frowned and scratched my head. “Or did they? That would be even more confusing.”
Now Dad’s smile didn’t appear forced. “That’s a great question, Sprout.” He leaned back in the pilot seat and folded his hands. “You ever hear the parable of the frog?”
I shook my head.
“If you want to boil a frog,” he said, “you don’t throw it into a pot of water that’s already hot—it’ll jump out. What you do is put it in the water with the temperature nice and comfortable…then gradually turn up the heat in stages. Be patient. The frog gets used to water that’s 70 degrees, then you turn it up to 80. It’s uncomfortable for the frog at first. It may complain a little, but if you’re patient, it’ll become acclimatized to the discomfort. Then you can turn it up to 90. It’s uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough for the frog to jump out of the pot. The Founding Fathers said something, in the Declaration of Independence, along the lines of: ‘men prefer to just suffer, while evils are sufferable.’ That’s what the frog does. If you keep cranking up the heat, but you do it gradually enough for each new level of misery to become the status quo for a while, eventually you’ll boil the frog alive.”
“Have you ever done that to a frog?” I asked, disgusted.
He sneered. “Of course not. I’m not a sick, sadistic dirtbag. This is a parable. A metaphor. It’s how America will be destroyed. It’s why the people who wouldn’t take shit from the Japs, or the British, or the Barbary pirates, will let their freedom and future be stolen from them by enemies in their own government. In fact, they’ll obediently fund the thieves who do it. But I think it might also be why people living in certain coordinates never notice the Big Spooky. It comes on them gradually enough, they acclimatize to it. You and I notice it because we ran into it from ‘normal’ times, and it hit us all of the sudden. Like a stinky house—if you live in it, you get used to the smell, and don’t notice it. But if you enter from out in the fresh air, it hits you hard.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “But what is the Big Spooky? What causes it?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I wish I did.”
***
We jumped a warp and came down inside another city—this one easily the biggest I’d ever seen. It had art-deco skyscrapers to prove it. We landed inside a vast expo complex and, this time, Dad turned off the cloak and shut all the power down. I asked him about this as he locked the VTOL’s hatch. He told me people would assume our craft was an exhibit and, by the time organizers looked into it, we would be gone.
It was 1939 in New York City and the goose bumps sprang up from that oppressive, ominous sensation. Again, Dad said there was no obvious reason why the Big Spooky was present at that space-time coordinate, but it was unmistakable—although at a weaker dose than other stops on our tour.
He also revealed the purpose of this tour: to confirm that I recognized the same sensation at the coordinates where/when he experienced it.
The research portion of our experimental time tour over, he advised me to try ignoring the Big Spooky and enjoy the rest of the day.
Over the course of the day I gradually grew accustomed to the Big Spooky—kind of like how I hardly noticed the noise of traffic, barking dogs and gunshots around the old trailer park. I did enjoy the 1939 New York World’s Fair, very much. We spent the entire day there exploring “The World of Tomorrow.” I was fascinated by everything—in detail and as a whole. And I could tell Dad enjoyed it all, too.
There was a big robot (named “Electro the Moto-Man”); a time capsule; a carnival-style ride that took us through a “city of the future”; some fantastic, futuristic (in an art-deco way) locomotives and trains, showed off in a special railroad park; new fabrics and inventions on display (including the “tele-vision” and a “View-Master” which you could use to look at three-dimensional slides); new music, sculptures, paintings and other art; and a science fiction convention.
Evidently this was the first world sci-fi convention ever held. Dad bought me an armload of books (and some of the very first superhero comic books, about characters like the Human Torch and the Submariner) while he stopped and chatted with some of the authors.
Of course most of the speculative “technology of tomorrow” envisioned at the World’s Fair was long obsolete by the time I would be born, but I still found it incredibly cool. I had never owned or seen a View-Master before, so the 3D slides were new to me. It was neat seeing what television was like when the technology was new. And it was cool discovering what artists, authors and scientists thought the future…my lifetime, give or take…would look like, even though they were almost all completely wrong.
For most of my life after that initial exposure to the 1939 World’s Fair, I found myself wishing that the future some of those dreamers imagined had turned out to be the real one.
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We took a tour of New Orleans, collecting from the various bookies. Each one paid us $400 in then-current denominations. With a net of $300 from each bet, we now had a couple thousand more than what we’d brought there.
We found our horseless coach where we’d left it, climbed in and shot a warp back to the hangar at BH Station. As we got out, Uncle Si handed me the stack of money and said, “And that’s one way to get yourself some seed money.”
I flipped through the stack of bills, unbelieving.
“You could take that stake right there, buy up a bunch of real estate in Florida, and you’ll be a millionaire in the post-Disneyworld USA.”
As I examined one of the bills, I was reminded of what had bothered me before. “Uncle SI, why does it say, ‘the United States will pay to the bearer $100?’ If you’re the bearer, you already have $100. What’s gonna happen—they just trade you this hundred for another one?”
He chuckled and tapped his temple. “You’re sharp, Sprout. It’s good you notice these things, and question them. You should always be that way.”
I followed him back into the cool underground labrynthe and he explained on the way. He began by producing a bill from his own wallet and handing it to me.
“Compare those two,” he said. “Aside from the denomination and the design, what else is different?”
After I pointed out a few superficial differences he shook his head, made a cutting gesture, then pointed at the bottom of my bill.
“What does that say?”
“United States Note,” I replied.
Now he pointed toward the bottom of the bill he’d pulled from his wallet. “How about that one?”
“Federal Reserve Note,” I read, aloud.
He took his note back. “You don’t see anything on here about paying the bearer anything, either.” He flopped it around a bit before putting it back in his wallet. “Just some vague statement about it representing legal tender for all debts, public or private. This is what’s known as ‘fiat’ currency. It has no worth whatsoever, beyond durable fire kindling. It’s propped up only by assumptions, and the credibility of a government.”
He now pointed to my stack of money. “That’s not real money, either. It’s paper. The difference is: it doesn’t pretend to be real. Before it was replaced by funny money, you could take it to a bank and exchange it for real money—the amount of money printed on the note.”
I scratched my head. “Okay…then what is real money?”
“Gold or silver. That’s what a government backs paper currency with, if it’s honest, and not trying to screw the people. At your age it’s probably too much of a complicated, boring mess to be of much importance to you. But we’ll talk about it more when you’re older. Ultimately, the fate of the USA was settled by this very issue.”
***
We turned in our period clothing at the wardrobe and dressed comfortably again. Carmen fixed a meal for us, then we relaxed in the living room.
“So tell me what you learned on our field trip,” my uncle said.
“Well,” I said, “if you can travel through time, that means you know the future when you’re at earlier points in the time stream. You can make easy money when you know about what hasn’t happened yet.”
“Well said, Sprout. And now you know one of many reasons why history is important for you to know.”
“How many times had you seen that fight?”
“That was my first time.”
“B-but…” I stammered. “How…?”
“I’ve studied history,” he said, with a smirk. “I knew that Corbett won that fight.”
“But you knew more than that,” I protested. “A lot more. You were predicting what would happen, and when.”
He tapped his temple again—obviously one of his most common gestures. “Pattern recognition. I’ve got it. You’ve got it, too. That’s one reason why television bores you so much.”
“Especially sitcoms,” I said, reacting to his remark without considering how he knew this about me (we’d never talked about TV before).
“As you get older, it’ll help you out when you apply it to stuff beyond television, too. Important stuff.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, I’ve read a little about Sullivan, and a little about Corbett. Enough to make some deductions. The other part is, I know about fighting, and fighters. I’ve seen a whole lot of fights in my life. I’ve been in a few. That’s gonna become part of your training—watching fights. The more you do it, the more you’ll learn. When I first started, I didn’t understand much. I couldn’t tell when a man was hurt. I assumed the guy with the best physique was stronger and therefore would win. I didn’t understand why clinching was so effective. Actual real-life knockout punches didn’t look that impressive to me…partly because in Hollywood movies, guys get hit with freight train haymakers all the time…with bare knuckles, no less…and it hardly fazes them, unless some 98 pound chick throws it. Or unless the plot calls for it”
He opened a dark bottle of something and took a swig. “So what else?”
I replayed the “field trip” in my mind, briefly. “People couldn’t have been more wrong about the matchup,” I said. “It was completely backwards from how they thought it would go.”
He chuckled and leaned back in his seat, gaze roaming across the ceiling for a moment. “So much for ‘experts’—then and now. There’s some psychological factors at work, here. It can give you clues about human nature; and you can extrapolate from there into other situations. The sports writers who wrote all those articles you read? They probably saw Sullivan in action back when he was young, in shape, and hungry.”
“He sure didn’t look hungry when I saw him,” I said.
“That’s not the kind of hunger I’m talking about,” he said. “It has nothing to do with food. Once upon a time, Sullivan was hungry…probably starving…to prove himself. To make his mark in the world. To become a world champion. Then to stay champion. It made him very dangerous. He was a wild brawler, but was probably pretty good back in the day, relative to his contemporaries in the game. Remember that boxing was mostly illegal up until the fight we just saw, so there were social disincentives to get involved in it at all. There might have been somebody better during his own time—but if so, they didn’t fight him. Hell, Corbett himself might not have been able to keep out of range from the young, hungry John L. Sullivan.
“Anyway, that’s the Sullivan people remembered. When he wasn’t in a fight…and he’d been inactive for four years when he met Corbett…it was like he was invisible to the public at large. They didn’t realize he was becoming an alcoholic couch potato. They still remembered him as he was in his prime, and that’s who they expected to see again.
“In fact, they had probably exaggerated their own memories until he was better in their minds than he actually had been. There were 10,000 men in the audience, and most of them had never seen him fight before. All they knew about him was from exaggerated stories they’d heard—second or third-hand hearsay in a lot of cases, embellished at every telling. That’s why so many people assumed he was invincible.”
I nodded. This made sense, when I considered it this way.
“That sort of thing is a danger for everybody, to some extent,” he went on. “If you’re not careful, you’ll add to or take away from memories, until the actual truth is replaced by some more pleasing, or more convenient, modified version. Then you cling to your romanticized truth, and even if you’re reminded of the actual truth now and then, you’ve grown to like your version better, so you hang on to it and dismiss whatever disagrees.”
“That’s silly,” I said, laughing.
He shrugged. “Human nature is often silly. And what I just described is mild. Some people keep twisting and twisting the original data in their mind until they fall off the deep end. They can’t accept reality anymore because this fantasy they’ve concocted becomes their reality. And what’s even crazier is that groups of people…sometimes in the millions…can all adopt the same basic fantasy, insisting that it is truth and that their fantasy is the actual reality.”
I hadn’t yet witnessed this. Without experience or context, I couldn’t imagine it. I was sure Uncle Si knew what he was talking about, but the phenomenon had no more meaning or import to me than did the “West Coast Offense” during my life before picking up a football magazine in my mother’s favorite hair salon.
“What else?” he asked.
“What you’ve been teaching me about sudden violence,” I said, “it really works. It worked for me against the kids in the park. It worked for you against the guy with the handlebar mustache.”
He waved, as if shooing a fly. “That clown was no threat. Except to our ability to watch the bout. What else?”
“About Sullivan and Corbett?”
“Well, yeah. For starters. I’ll give you something to think about: what you saw there in New Orleans is the culmination of a pattern that has happened over and over again, and probably always will.”
I leaned forward and rested my chin on my fist.
“You see this especially in the Heavyweight Division of professional boxing,” he said. “Western boxing, that is. Some brawler comes along, and he’s a wrecking machine. He doesn’t just score knockouts on his way up the ranks, but he ends careers. His victories are so devastating, the victims are psychologically damaged afterwards. They’re beat so bad, it shakes their confidence. They’re never good enough to seriously contend again after a beat down from the Bad Boy. So finally, he slugs his way to the top. He is crowned champ, and in such convincing fashion that people assume he’s invincible. Including himself, sometimes.
“But then, now that he’s on top he gets complacent. Maybe because he believes the hype about himself, but also because there are no serious challengers now. None of the potential contenders have survived the mauling he dished out on his bloody climb to the top. So guess what happens?”
“He stops training?”
Si nodded, pleased with my answer. “Sure—in many cases. Or he stops taking his training seriously. Bottom line is, he gets soft physically at exactly the same time his ego goes out of control. What does overconfidence do?”
I recited what he taught me: “It leads to arrogance. Arrogance leads to recklessness. And recklessness leads to defeat.”
“That’s my man, Sprout. So while the Bad Boy is on his ego trip, up comes some fresh new guy, who wasn’t a victim of the bad boy’s rampage…maybe he hadn’t turned pro yet; was too young; inexperienced; whatever. But he climbs up the human rubble left over from that rampage, and next thing you know, he’s in position for a title bid.”
“And nobody takes him seriously?”
“Of course not! Not in a fight against the Bad Boy. The Bad Boy is invincible!”
I laughed at this.
He knocked back another shot of booze. “Let’s call this guy ‘the Challenger.’ Y’know, I can think of one time when he wasn’t even all that good, but the result was the same.”
“Big upset? New champion?”
He nodded. “That’s right. Every single time. Well…I take that back. There’s one exception in the history of western boxing: Marciano. The Rock never got complacent; never slacked off on his training; never stepped through the ropes without bad intentions…until retiring undefeated as a professional. And he stayed retired.”
“I think I’ve heard of him,” I said.
“But like I said: the Rock is the exception. The only exception to this pattern.”
“So the same thing happened to Corbett?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Not exactly. Corbett was never a wrecking machine, so he doesn’t fit the pattern, anyway. Still…there are similarities. After he became champ, he got lazy. Starred in a Broadway play about himself instead of defending his title.”
“And along came the Challenger!” I crowed, proud of how clairvoyant I was.
“Bob Fitzsimmons,” my uncle said, nodding. “A blacksmith by trade, so he had pretty good upper body strength. Looked like a heavyweight from the waist up, but skinny little birdie legs. He was actually a middleweight, if memory serves. Tough son of a bitch, too, I’m guessing.
“So he gets a title shot. Gentleman Jim isn’t at his best, but he hasn’t fallen apart, either. I forget how many rounds they go, and Corbett just makes him look stupid. But Fitz isn’t out of shape and over the hill like Sullivan was. He’s game, and waits for his puncher’s chance.”
“I guess he got it,” I surmised.
“Yup. And a body shot, at that. Sports wags called it ‘The Battle of the Solar Plexus.’ Knocked the wind out of Corbett. Gentleman Jim couldn’t beat the count. New champ.”
“The solar plexus—where’s that?”
He reached over and gently pushed his fist against the center of my torso just under the sternum.
“Pit of the stomach. You take a big shot there, it can paralyze you for a minute or so. It’s one of those nerve centers I’ll teach you about down the road. There’s another one in your ass. Anybody ever literally kicks your ass…I mean between the cheeks and up into the hind part of your crotch…it hurts like a blind mother. I mean pain like high voltage chainsaws ripping all through your body.”
I knew what he was talking about. Allyson had kicked me there when I was six years old. The pain was crippling. She made fun of me for crying, but I couldn’t stop.
“So what else did you learn?” he asked.
I thought some more before answering. “Corbett’s technique had flaws. His punches were sloppy—lousy form, and sometimes he telegraphed, too. It’s just that Sullivan couldn’t slip or block them, anyway.”
“So what does that teach you?” He fixed me with a piercing gaze.
“Perfection isn’t necessary to win,” I said. “Sometimes mediocrity is enough.”
He scared me by jumping to his feet and whooping, his bottle held high over his head. “Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder! Outstanding!”
Carmen entered the room to see what all the noise was about. He pulled her into an embrace and covered her mouth with his. I turned away as they seemed to be trying to eat each other. But then he pulled away, Carmen’s lipstick now smeared all around his mouth, and pointed at me. “That is one sharp young man, right there! What’re we gonna do with him?”
What he would do with me, it turned out, was test me to see if I could put what I knew to use.
Well, honestly, it might have already died from dehydration.
Thomas Jefferson is often thought to have said we need a new revolution every generation. Here’s the actual quote that might have come from:
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
But you know what? If our forbears had revolted every generation…or at least every four generations…we wouldn’t be losing our country as I write this. The enemy could not have infiltrated and neutralized every last check and balance; corrupted every single institution; rendered the separation of powers meaningless; thoroughly compromised every single organization meant to protect the people and our lives, liberty and property; nor sold us out to foreign interests. I can think of a few historical markers where rebellion would have steered us away from this cliff we are now toppling over. Can you?
On this day in 1944, the greatest amphibious invasion in history took place (ahem! after the greatest airborne operation the night before).
This was the culmination of years of planning and sacrifice-in-solidarity by Americans who thought they were setting the world free.
America faces a greater existential threat right now, right here on the home front, than any threat posed by the Axis Powers then.
Since 1917 Americans have been sent to fight other countries’ wars and die for everything except American interests. American fighting men served and put their lives on the line, believing they were preserving freedom. I was one of them.
Has the cause of freedom actually been served, though? Is the world, or even our country, a better place thanks to all the sacrifices Americans have made?
Americans enjoy less freedom now than ever before. We’re also less prosperous than previous generations, even when the GDP and Dow Jones numbers look good. What has happened to our industrial infrastructure, that was once the most powerful in the world? What has happened to our families? What has happened to morality? What has happened to our unity?
If China attacked us tomorrow like Japan did on 12/7/41, about half the country would be clamoring for surrender. They would want, and work toward helping, the Communists win because they hate our country so much.
How would we pay for a war–borrow the money from our enemies (and continue giving millions of it back to them as foreign aid)? How would we get medicine and spare parts to our troops, when we’ve been duped into outsourcing all that production to our enemies?
What have our sacrifices earned us?
We’re on the verge of losing everything we still have left, and half the population wants to make it worse. In fact, they will attack you if you get in the way of the corruption and destruction.
The masses were deceived then, and are deceived now. But the America we live in now is not the America our grandfathers thought they were fighting for.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
