1 SNEAK PREVIEW
And here, in the cerebral sci-fi movie—not a blockbuster, not my style—based on the next year or so, the title card will roll. SOMETHING EVOCATIVE IN ALL CAPS. Cue the score, the swelling bwahhh bwahhhh chest-rattling synth undercut by tinkling wind chimes as the blackness fades. CUT to HAYES FIGUEIREDO on a beach in the furthest part of the multiverse you can dream up, staring out at a sea strewn with stars.
I’ve seen a million versions of myself, on a million different worlds, so who knows who’d they’d cast as me. Hopefully some unknown who could say he got all Method and really mined his darkness to tackle the role of troubled filmmaker. Troubled, sure, even though the studio will cut most of the depressive bouts of self-medicating, and the functional alcoholism, and the MDMA-euphoria bonfires with the pack of other lost queers I lived with in my twenties, in that crumbling co-op we all called Saint Homo’s Home for Wayward Boys. All to focus on the story of the man I love and the futures I’ve seen where he has to die, again and again, so the world isn’t smashed to bits by an asteroid, or swallowed up by a rogue black hole, or nuked until it’s a glowing pile of ash.
HAYES (VOICE OVER)
Do you see all the stars out there? All the possibilities?
SLOW PAN out, following HAYES’S eyes out to sea, then the camera angle flips upside down and vaults into space, where an unassuming asteroid floats by the screen.
* * *
There’s nothing quite like the sunrise on the beach in this corner of the multiverse.
The juicy lemon wheel of the sun rises over the ocean and torches the horizon with the colors of fruit punch I used to drink as a kid. I rustle on the leaky air mattress, which sends a rubber balloon fart across the pink sand, towards the copse of beach grasses that thicken into what looks like ferns the size of redwoods. That graceful wakeup call would’ve gotten a smile out of Yusuf, not long ago. Before he left. He hasn’t been smiling lately. Just his dark, downturned eyes, and his short sentences.
I mean, of course I get it. It’s tough to tip your head to the sunlight when you know that billions of people have to die because you’re alive. And the man you love kept that from you.
I putter around the camp for a while, with our ring-of-rocks fire pit and our improvised refrigerator that’s a shallow hole covered with palm fronds. The dunes of pink sand and the tropical forest of ferns with their coconuts that taste like bananas and their bananas that taste like coconuts. I’m alone on this island and the whole planet, as far as I can tell.
I knew the end was coming, so I woke up the past few mornings before Yusuf and tried to memorize every detail of him. The shadows on his cheeks from his beard. The swoops of his sooty eyebrows. His halo of black curls. The moles dotting his body like he’s a constellation of some ancient hunter.
SCENE: A sad man alone with a bunch of junk that seems washed ashore from a shipwreck.
* * *
I wish, sometimes, that I never crossed paths with that fucking machine. But then I never would’ve met Yusuf. The Envisioner—the huge, dark gray box with all its facets and spindly metal spider legs—sits about a quarter mile down the beach. You know how spiders can feel anything that brushes against their webs because all the strings give off a different vibration? I can feel the other universes like glowing threads when I press my hands against the machine.
I don’t know how the thing works exactly. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever loved has had some hand-waving here and there. Let’s just take this premise and go with it, deal? I mean, I don’t know how airplanes exactly work either, but they do.
Anyway, the thing is a predictive device. It’s a gateway, sorta. It’s also a plague. A time-bomb fucking with reality on a multi-universal level. Yusuf talks a lot about knots in the fabric of multidimensional space-time, with each Envisioner a point connecting different paths. When he talks like this, words get all crammed together and I can’t make much sense of him or anything else.
The thing crunches a bunch of numbers and spits out predictions. There you go. You’re all caught up.
* * *
Yusuf tutored me in physics when I first arrived at the Compound, and I was still interested in not feeling like an idiot around the global brain-trust of the research staff. I use tutoredloosely since the sessions were him doodling on his bedroom window with a marker and me wondering at what point in his talk about quarks I could slide his underwear back down and get him to swear in Arabic under his breath again.
“In nature, quarks exist in twos and threes,” he said one session. “You can’t ever find a solo one flying around.”
“Why?”
“Because the force that binds them actually increases the farther you try to pull them apart.” He squiggled a wavy line between two circles on his window.
“How in the hell does that even make sense?”
“It’s like an invisible umbilical cord connects them. Quarks can’t exist on their own.”
When he told me he was leaving, I wanted to say something about how we’re bound together, too. Except it would’ve been shitty of me to hold him emotionally hostage.
I know it’s small-picture thinking to focus on Yusuf breaking up with me with all we’ve done—surfing across universes and messing up timelines. And I know it doesn’t sound self-determination-y to say, but he is what makes me feel the most myself. He makes me know that this me is not a random jumble of molecules or events or whatever. Maybe my life is less my own and more an expression of how I love him. That’s why I’m supposed to be here.
He bickers with me a lot on the meants and the shoulds and the supposed tos—anything that sounds remotely like a bearded, white director set this whole universe up for us and we are just bit players hitting beats in the script. He’s all, in a multiversewhere literally every possible version of every possible event exists simultaneously, nothing is meant to happen, and nothing is important, and… Which is usually when I have to anchor him with a tug on his hand and a joke. Like, jesus, lighten up. I just asked if we should get dinner.
I’m aching, like the thread between us is tied to one of my ribs. And this thread pulls tighter with every breath, now that we’re drifting farther apart.
* * *
This flash-forward teaser is running a little long, but give me a break because with all my universe road-tripping and Envisioner scrying, my sense of time is fucked. Maybe I’m also stalling because I’m not really looking forward to getting into how all of this was my fault.
I pull Junior, my hand-held camera, from the supply stash by the air mattress and plod over to the shade of the fern forest. I rest Junior on a rock, point her lens at me, and flick her little video screen around so that I can see my face during my seaside confessional. I tap the red “record” button and settle on another rock across from the camera.
I look too thin. Sunburned, with green shadows under my eyes. My therapist ex, Narek, told me once that my docs and films are all vanity because everything I make is about me. But he’s wrong—also an asshole—because I already exhaust myself with my constant thoughts so I don’t need to make whole films devoted to myself. My filmmaking is more about record-keeping and storytelling, as proof that these people existed or these things mattered. A middle finger to entropy.
This isn’t about me, I guess is what I’m trying to say. It’s a warning. Or something.
“Welcome to Hayes’s Disaster Drive-In Theater,” I say to the camera. “You already missed the coming attractions, but that’s okay. Sit back and I hope you enjoy the show.”
I suck in a deep breath, close my eyes, and trace the threads back to the start.
2 THE HERMIT
Ididn’t expect to have an audience when I stumbled out of my cabin late one morning to take a leak.
My feet hit the worn wooden steps in the woods of Connecticut, where, like the other artists here, I was supposed to be head-down and plowing through my Great Work. Mostly, my head was foggy from last night’s weed. Unlike when I film and all bets are off, I don’t like to get high while I’m editing a doc, which is supposed to be all about discipline. Drinking water and eating vegetables and working all day, and all these other good habits I’d heard so much about. But last night, boxed in by the trees outside my windows, everything I’d lost the last few months bowled into me at once, dragging me into a pity-party of one.
I yawned, murky-mouthed, and blinked away the sleep while I battered the grass with piss.
“Sir?”
I jumped at the voice and turned, hand still down the front of my shorts and the other idly scratching a mosquito bite on my bare chest. Four men stood in front of the cabin. The closest guy was dressed in a light sweater and khakis, even in the scorching July heat. My first sight of the man I’d love so hard that I’d break through universes for him, and I thought, is this off-duty English lit professor lost in the woods?
I don’t believe in love-at-first sight lightning bolts and angels whispering you’ve just found your soulmate. And I know it sounds weird, but I love that I met him—probably the most important moment in my life—while grasshoppers bounced away from my piss stream in the grass.
“Yeah?” I asked, cocking my head.
The guy at the front cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. The other three were rooted to the earth, all earpieces, clenched jaws, and lumpy shapes under their black jackets. They looked like black ops personal trainers who could kill me three times before I hit the ground.
“Hayes Figueiredo?” the guy at the front asked, peeking down at a tablet in his hands.
“Who’s asking?”
“We need you to come with us.”
Behind the group, tall grasses swayed in the breeze.
And here’s where I die, I thought. I’ve been chased out of bars and had my ribs broken in alleyways. I’ve been tear-gassed in political riots. People who come to you knowing your name are never there to just chat. Worse when they’re smiling, when they’re needing. We need you to put down your camera. What use are you—really—in this village, or in this school, or in this bar with these sad and twisted people?
Mostly, I didn’t think I’d die while holding my dick in the woods, hoping the little film festivals where I showed my work would have a nice memorial after they screened one of my docs. Hayes Figueiredo, thirty-three, was gunned down in the woods while at an artist fellowship. This was his final work. Roll credits.
I shook off, snapped the waistband of my shorts, and slapped on fake cockiness. “I don’t fucking think so,” I said.
The guy at the front with the tablet blinked, tipping his head. “I’m sorry—what?”
A too-tight string snapped in my chest, and I bolted into the cabin, slamming the door behind me. For fuck’s sake, why didn’t I bring my mace here? A knock on the door matched my manic heartbeat.
“Mr. Figueiredo? We’re actually here because—because we need your help.”
“With what?” I called out.
“I can’t really say,” the guy said. “We’re here to ask you to come with us, to someone who can fill you in.”
The guy leaned at the window of the cabin’s door, the glass mashing his thick black glasses to his face.
“Can I see some ID or something?”
“Uh—all I have is my badge from work. Does that work?”
“Sure.”
There was some rustling outside until the guy pressed a white card with his picture on it to the window. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I squinted at the badge for what I thought was a good amount of time for me not to seem gullible. His name was Yusuf Hassan. On the little picture I saw the same face as the one peeking through the window—a stubbled face with wide eyebrows. Unsmiling full lips and dark eyes that seemed focused on something just behind me. Slightly wild curly hair. I sucked in air to try to douse the fire in my blood.
“Alright. Hold on.”
I opened the door just wide enough to look outside.
Yusuf toed my worn front step, only risking eye contact for a second before glancing at the three hired guns behind him.
“I’m realizing that this looks more forceful than we intended,” he said.
“You think?”
“Sorry.”
His wavering smile eased some of the stiffness in my shoulders. I opened the door wider and stepped back into the mish-mash of my tiny cabin, strewn with notebooks and underwear, with stills from my latest doc taped to the wood walls.
“What could you possibly need my help with?” I asked. “A film?”
I’d done a few guest lectures at my old college before, when my doc about an underground gay bar in Barbados made the festival rounds. I can’t say that I gifted the students with a ton of wisdom. I’d overheard some douche professor had bellyached about the film chair even inviting me there to talk about my “smutty fag art.” And, oh man, I almost tattooed that badge of honor on my forearm.
Yusuf hesitated for just a second. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Alright. Where are we going?”
He turned to the group for some hush-hush chattering, and, jesus, if this was how all of our conversations were going to work, this was going to take forever.
“California,” he said, finally.
“Oh,” I sputtered. “Oh.”
I’d seen a few of my other film school dropout friends—thebonkers, perfect weirdos who shoved their uncompromising shit on a world that didn’t ask for it—get snatched up by studios in LA that wanted new talent to liven up their bizarrely mainstream movies. Each time, I threw them parties and popped cheap bubbly for their Big Break, wishing for them all the luck in the world. But maybe next time it’ll be me, was the thought that I held between my teeth because you were never supposed to say it out loud.
“Wait. I don’t have my passport here,” I said.
The Second American Civil War had lasted just over a year and had ended with the secession of California, then Oregon, to join the Union of Pacific States, three years before I was born. I remembered the maps projected onto the boards at school, showing the shifting borders of America shaped by two generations of wars—warring troops, warring truths—withoutthe resources or leadership to anchor what was left of it together. On the map, the borders of Texas and other states shifted and I’d wondered if I’d just been hallucinating—a little too well-done after my wake-and-bake. Before the war, Hawaii had already been an independent nation for going on ten years. Last election, President Whatshisname ran on some platform of mythical reunification, his speeches broadcast to a nearly independent constellation of cities sometimes called the Urban Archipelago of America. With wide patches of unincorporated land and rural, self-governing towns stretching between coasts connected by high-speed mag-trains and shared memory. That reunification hadn’t happened yet and probably never would. My future was now circling the drain because I’d left my passport in Boston and wouldn’t be able to get to California. Wonderful.
“You’re fine,” he said. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”
“Okay.” I tried to iron out the jitters in my voice. “Can you give me a couple of minutes to get my stuff?”
“Just be quick.”
* * *
In the 1980s movie montage, I tried on a bunch of outfits in the mirror before I finally decided on the shoulder-padded threads I’ll wear when I waltz into my studio Big Break meeting. When really, I rinsed in the cabin’s outdoor shower and crammed some stuff in a duffel. I was a week into my five-week editing bender away from my life in Boston, and I’d already gone full hermit. I hadn’t showered in days and was living mostly on instant coffee and beef jerky, avoiding the other artists because I was in the zone.
I’d also been hiding. I didn’t need Narek to pull his horn-rimmed glasses off his nose and tell me that. After I finally left him, I threw myself into documenting my friend Genesis’s fight for legal protections for synths. Then I lost her, too, a few months back—just as she became the face of the movement. I was here to work and hide and try to pull myself together again. I’d buzzed my hair when I got here. Something about shedding the outside world.
I don’t own anything professional-looking—I mostly look like I pinch my clothes from thrift shops. Which is sometimes true. I yanked on a white T-shirt that smelled clean and a pair of khaki shorts that were splotched with paint from my occasional house-painting gigs when film work dried up. I made sure to stuff Genesis’s tarot deck, my laptop, and Scarlett, my lucky hand-held camera with her red electrical tape slashes, into my duffel before meeting Yusuf and the others outside.
They followed me down the dirt paths, through the humid July air that was thick with biting flies, to the main house of the grounds, where a black bulldozer of a car idled in the driveway. I’d spent a lot of my twenties getting into cars with strangers, so what the hell. I hopped inside, into an air-conditioned bubble of awkward silence with me alone in the back row.
“Anyone you need to call to say you’ll be out of touch for a few days?” the guy in black at the wheel asked, as he rumbled off the dirt driveway and onto the main road.
I guess I could’ve called someone, theoretically, then and during the previous night’s grief bender. I had some friends, still, though the gap that Genesis left in my chest widened every day. The people I cared about were used to me ghosting on them for six months while I worked on a doc. My mom was in the ground, but if you’d asked me how long it’d been I’d have to stop and close my eyes against all the air leaving my lungs because five years still felt like twenty seconds. I’d lost her to uterine cancer before the cures rolled out, and me and my dad, who’d peaced out of half-drowned Boston to live in Florida, had mercifully agreed to stop talking. Once you realize that every phone call ends in a screaming match it’s better to stop pretending blood means anything.
“No, I’m good.”
Yusuf sat in the row ahead of me. I got the sense that if anyone was in charge here, it was him, though he wouldn’t cough up much when I tried to wheedle some info out of him. He didn’t mention a specific studio, but maybe it was a superhero thing? The CGI-fueled skull-rattling action movies were on their way out, making room for a return to more realistic filmmaking. I’d heard, anyway, which could be why they wanted me and my hand-held films that zoomed in on sweaty hairlines and the searching eyes of my doc subjects.
The other guys—security guards?—called me “sir” and “Mr. Figueiredo” and asked if the air conditioning was alright. I cracked some stupid joke like Mr. Figueiredo is my mother, but I can’t really remember because I get all blabbermouthed when I’m nervous.
Slowly, the giant hand cranking a bike chain around my gut eased up. Everything was a fast-forward blur. We drove a while, then hit the highway, then off again to a tiny airfield where the car rolled to a stop by a plane. A plane—what the actual fuck—a private plane with gorgeous flight attendants in red lipstick and little sleeper pod things in two neat rows. They were nice enough not to look embarrassed for me, in my paint-splotched clothes and frayed blue hoodie that was this close to disintegrating. Only people with statues of dead relatives in city parks could afford cross-country flights, what with the high-speed mag-trains connecting the coasts, and the first-born cost of fuel.
I tried to settle into the white egg of my sleeper pod. I spilled water all over myself and had to cram my eyes shut during takeoff so that my stomach didn’t fly out of my ass. I managed to doze for a while, somehow, though I don’t remember dreaming, only a blackout worthy of my best tequila benders. A sea of green beneath the plane greeted me when I woke up, with trees that seemed to stretch out forever. I bounced into one of the open pods to get a different look.
“Great Basin National Forest,” Yusuf said, a flash of his white teeth poking out from behind his lips. “Have you seen it from up here before?”
Looking back, it lights me up to think about how much courage it must’ve taken him to start talking to me out of nowhere, when he was usually happier staring out the window in silence. That was the longest string of words I’d gotten from him, with his eyes that seemed to dodge everything finally settling on me. Some accent I couldn’t quite clock flavored the low tune of his voice. His secret-identity glasses cut black lines across his face. His dark hair wasn’t short and wasn’t long, a messy, curly mop with shorter sides. He was handsome enough that it’d take me two drinks, easy, to screw up the balls to make a pass in a bar—sorry, professor, my dog ate my homework.
“Never,” I said.
I actually cried, just a few tears and a snotty nose, as I looked down at the forest that from here looked like the green crocheted comforter of my mom’s bed. She’d told me stories, when I was a kid, of shriveled-up plains, and ozone holes, and droughts torching the green fields of what used to be the United States. Before the trees spliced with quick-grow genes borrowed from bamboo birthed pop-up forests around the globe to suck up the carbon, before the United Arab Emirates-led desalination of millions of gallons of seawater a year to be used for crop irrigation, before the refreezing of the ice caps. Even though that had come a few years too late to stop the flooding of coastal cities, and the sinking into the sea of the small Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic where my mom was from.
One night after she’d spread little kids’ history picture books on our splotched blue carpet, I’d dreamed of elephants with rib bones poking out, of tigers konking over from heat, and I’d screamed myself awake.
“Querido, that was before we learned to work together to fix things,” she’d told me, kissing the sweat on my forehead.
The plane touched down in the desert far beyond the forest, and then we all hopped into another black car. A single inky road led us over the flat earth, past a tall wire fence and a security post to a building that looked like a giant beetle with a white, geodesic dome for a shell. And where the hell in California were we? Weren’t there supposed to be palm trees and models/actors everywhere? I could only guess that we were on some big-budget set. The car rolled into an underground parking garage where the three guys in black took a hike, leaving Yusuf as my only tether through a maze of white halls, bleached overhead lights, and glass doors marked with white block lettering. Cold storage. Dormitories. To Theater.
My duffel bag bounced against my hip as we passed people in white lab coats who gawked at me like a pair of nuts were dangling from my forehead. One woman actually spun away into a side room blabbing a “sorry” behind her. The bike chain started winding around my stomach again. My tongue was a slab of jerky in my dry, salty mouth.
Just as I started to wonder if Yusuf was lost, he flashed some badge at a heavy white door that led down another hallway.
“Good luck,” he said.
“You’re not coming?”
His only answer was to leave me in my dirty sneakers in front of a plain white door that looked like a broom closet. What the hell. I came all this way, I might as well walk in.
Inside was a small white room with a single circular conference table and a huge screen stuck to one of the walls. The only person there was a slim, white-coated woman with dark hair who turned from one of the big screens to face me.
The screen must’ve been a live security feed of the room or something, because on it I stood by a wall of glowing hard-candy-colored buttons. But I was wearing some long green coat instead of my traveled-in clothes. And the room didn’t look quite like here. And—what the actual fuck—the guy who was maybe me but also definitely not leaned over what looked like a giant mechanical spider pounded out of shadows, fiddling with some dials.
“Perhaps you can tell me,” the woman said, her asymmetrical bob swaying by her chin as she tipped her head, “why this is you.”
The bike chain grinding around my gut hit a snag, and the floor dropped out from under me.
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