Warp

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  For my family even though I hadn’t met you yet

  PREFACE

  I wrote my first novel over a period of about five years, 1992 to 1996, in a series of increasingly tiny, dingy, cheap apartments full of roaches and non-right angles and off-brand miniature kitchen appliances, first in and around Boston, then in New Haven, and then in New York City.

  I remember each of these apartments in encyclopedic and totally unnecessary detail. A dark-wood studio, perfectly cubical, in an old building that still had a cage elevator; the second floor of a listing clapboard house where I stuffed pillows into the heating vents to try to muffle the neighbor’s TV, and which contained the last non-ironic black-and-white TV I ever watched; a cell in a hospital that had been repurposed as dystopian graduate student housing.

  In each of these apartments I wrote and rewrote and rewrote Warp, working at a desk made of an old door propped up on two trestles, using a chunky beige Mac Classic with a tiny monochrome screen like an oscilloscope. Five years is a long time to spend on a novel as short as this one, but I wasn’t messing around. I worked on Warp constantly, whenever I could, usually every day, jobs and classes permitting. It is the intense, concentrated, boiled-down essence of the unhappiest years of my life.

  When I left college in 1991, I was profoundly unprepared for the demands of everyday life, emotionally, professionally, financially, and in every other possible way. For years I couldn’t seem to get a career started. I worked dead-end internships and temp jobs—as I wasn’t presentable enough to answer phones, the temp agencies generally sent me out to do word processing in Dunder Mifflin–style offices and “light industrial” tasks in warehouses. The low point may have been my stint as a liquor store accessories salesman—you know, novelty bottle-openers and such—from which I was fired after one day. I read Roger Zelazny novels, drank cheap vodka, listened to WFNX, wrote scores of bad short stories, and played Beyond Dark Castle II on my Mac Classic. When I wasn’t working, I went to bed at dawn and woke up at noon.

  These were lonely, depressing years. Like Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth, I was stuck in the Doldrums. I had few friends, and my isolation and lack of success made me bitter and self-involved, which led to my having even fewer friends. (This was before the mass adoption of the Internet and cell phones, remember, when isolation had real teeth: no e-mail, no texting, no Twitter, no Facebook.) I drank too much. I haunted campus parties at my alma mater, the cautionary ghost of Christmas past. I wasted time in bulk. I was still hung up on my college girlfriend, whom I had boorishly broken up with before realizing that I was in fact in love with her, and who rightly wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t seem to find my voice.

  Mind you: that didn’t stop me from writing. I wrote constantly. You don’t absolutely have to have found your voice in order to write fiction, it just makes the work that much slower and harder and less fun and more grinding. Nothing comes naturally. Everything is forced, the way you force bulbs to flower in winter.

  That’s the period of my life from which Warp emerged. But it also came out of a particular moment in American cultural history—it’s a period piece. The year I graduated from college was the year Richard Linklater released Slacker and Douglas Coupland published Generation X. A quarter-century later it’s hard to recover a sense of how radical and powerful those works were at the time, but to me they felt authentically contemporary in a way that nothing else did. I recognized the people in them: like me they thought and read way too much, and did and earned and had way too little. Mainstream middle-class life seemed spiritually and aesthetically bankrupt to them, but any kind of counterculture felt embarrassingly jejune and naive. That left you stuck in between, with nothing to stand on, spinning madly in place.

  I wanted to tell my side of that story. Slacker was set in Austin, Generation X was in Southern California, but I was in New England, living a darker, colder variation on the theme. Slacking could be a lot of fun, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked. It required gumption, and resourcefulness, and a gift for easy social connections, and these were gifts I lacked. I wanted to write about feeling trapped in a world where all the answers felt wrong but I couldn’t seem to raise any coherent objections to them; a world where I envied the energetic, hyper-ambitious type A achievers who were constantly coursing past me on their lean muscular legs, but couldn’t imagine joining them; where I knew I was way off the rails but couldn’t figure out how it happened or how to get back on them, I just knew that it was my fault. I wasn’t really a slacker; I was more just a loser.

  The most prominent feature of my life at that time, one that is stamped very clearly on Warp, was my awareness of the extreme disjunction between the dreary stasis of my daily existence and the intense, vibrant, magical romance of the various fictions I was reading, watching, and playing: comic books, video games, movies, spy thrillers, science fiction and fantasy novels, and TV—I was obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation but I would watch anything. (I am the last living fan of Space Rangers, a gritty show about an interstellar colony, canceled after six episodes in 1993.) Why was the reality I was trapped in so unsatisfying and poorly organized compared to the fictions I consumed so voraciously and in such massive quantities?

  The hero of Warp, or at any rate the main character, is named Hollis Kessler. Like a younger and even more inchoate Walter Mitty, Hollis is mentally adrift on a choppy sea of imaginary adventures that echo and mock and annotate the dreary real world around him, reflecting it in reverse, recurring and recurring as leitmotifs. (One of these motifs is drawn from a boy’s-own-adventure-type story that I read as a child, about a fisherman who is dragged under by a manta ray. I searched for this story for years while writing Warp and never found it. Just now I Googled it and found the full text in two minutes: it was “The Sea Devil” by Arthur Gordon.)

  Hollis is recognizably descended from a long line of such alienated, mentally hyperactive, outwardly ineffectual young men that includes Holden Caulfield and the nameless hero of Bright Lights, Big City and hearkens further back to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, and the hero of Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds, which is the book Warp most strongly resembles (although it’s not nearly as good). Hollis also contains trace amounts of Deborah Blau from Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

  Hollis has descendants, too: Quentin Coldwater of The Magicians is of his line. Although I was nice enough to give Quentin magical powers after a chapter and a half, at which point his life gets a lot more exciting than Hollis’s ever did.

  I finished Warp in 1996, when I was 27. At around the same time, I had the single greatest stroke of luck in my professional life: a friend of mine got a job at a literary agency. I sent Warp off to her and she agreed to represent it. No bidding wars broke out, but she eventually sold it to St. Martin’s Press for $6,000, and they published it—after a little trademark trouble over what was basically an image of the starshi
p Enterprise on the cover—as a trade paperback in 1998.

  From a commercial point of view, Warp was not a success. It earned some respectful reviews, very little publicity and near-zero sales. It never found its audience, and it quickly went out of print and stayed there; to this day, boxes of unsold copies are always turning up in my house, in closets, filing cabinets, and obscure flooded corners of my basement. It was a disappointment, but after a suitable period of mourning I wrote it off as dues-paying and went on to my next book, Codex, which ended up taking another six years. For a decade and a half, I rarely thought about Warp. I didn’t reread it. I avoided even thinking about it, the same way you instinctively avoid ever listening again to that one album you listened to obsessively while you were getting over having your heart broken for the first time.

  But when I finally did go back to it, I remembered why I worked so hard on it in the first place. Warp is a careful, orderly portrait of a group of people at the most chaotic, desperately lost time in their lives. It brought it all back to me, the whole terrible authentic texture of that moment: the cheap booze, the black humor, the nameless longings, the alienation, the total poverty, the wasted days, the wasted nights, the circular conversations, the pay phones and old-school video games and pre-grunge alt-rock, and the total conviction that the world was worthless and that everything important happened elsewhere, in fiction and fantasy and dreams and unreal nowhere-places that didn’t exist and meant nothing.

  It wasn’t till I was in my early thirties, when I at last had a proper job and a proper apartment and a wife and a nascent career, that I really definitively left that life behind for good. Until then, I think I was a little afraid to reread this book, for fear that I would get sucked back through the rift, back into the temporal anomaly, back into those shadowlands where I fumbled away so much time. Warp is for everybody else who has spent time there, too. And it’s especially for those who are still there now.

  CHAPTER 1

  THURSDAY, 5:30 P.M.

  “I’m trying to think who the girl reminds me of,” Hollis said.

  “Somebody famous.”

  It was a brilliant, freezing fall day, and the sky was a bright clear blue. Hollis kept his hands in the pockets of his green overcoat. It had a fake fur collar, and all the buttons had fallen off the front.

  “Jennifer Holquist, maybe,” said Brian.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “She was in that TV show. The one about the tennis prodigy.”

  Hollis squinted into the sun, which was starting to set.

  “Did you watch that?” he said. “I can’t believe you watched that.”

  From the top of the hill they looked down at the rest of the park, a huge, empty green field that sloped down and away. In a neat little baseball diamond at the far end, a man and a woman were playing catch with a tennis ball. While they watched he threw her a tricky grounder, which she snapped up one-handed.

  “How come you’re still here, anyway? Somebody told me you were already gone.”

  “I am.” Brian grinned and started jogging in place to stay warm. “I’m going. I’m fucking history. I’m dust.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Germany. I have an internship there, in Stuttgart. With Lufthansa. They’re putting together some kind of international commission. Airline deregulation. EC stuff. It’s a big fat Euro-party.”

  “What are you going to do for them?”

  “I don’t really know,” Brian said. “It’s no big prize—somebody saw my thesis title and jumped on it. I’ll just be some kind of glorified gopher, probably.”

  He held up his hands in protest.

  “I’m no hero. Please, ma’am—don’t thank me. I’m not a celebrity.” Brian was tall and athletic, slightly over six feet, with longish blond hair and a stubbly chin. He was wearing sweats and a blue Windbreaker.

  Hollis cupped his hands and blew into them to keep warm. The evergreen bushes dotting the park cast long, black shadows back towards them, away from the sun. The wind was making cat’s-paws on the coarse green grass.

  “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” Hollis said absently.

  He found a thread on the front of his coat and snapped it off.

  “How’s your German?” he said.

  “Bad. You know any?”

  “Kenne nur Bahnhof.”

  “Damn Jerries. Who won the war, anyway?” Brian sniffed and cleared his throat. “And what’s with these German girls? They’re all like sophisticated or something. You know who they remind me of? Tasha Yar. You remember that woman on Star Trek? Blond. Slim. Butch, but vulnerable at the same time. Kind of a feminine butchiness. She was the security officer before Worf—she quit after the first year.”

  “Didn’t she get killed?”

  “Yeah,” said Brian. “That’s right. She was eaten by Armus. Armus, the Skin of Evil. Then her acting career started not working out, and she tried to get back on the show. It was complicated—I can’t remember it all. She ended up sleeping with a Romulan. It was very complex.”

  “I should get so lucky,” Hollis said.

  “It was too much, really.” Brian yawned, holding the back of his hand against his teeth. “It’s kind of sad. Sometimes I wonder how she’s doing. I saw her in a guest spot on some one-season, no-count action series or other. Dark Justice, Dark Knight, Night Justice—something like that. She looked depressed. She’s even already posed for Playboy.”

  Hollis hugged himself. All he had on under the overcoat was a cheap black T-shirt with a white Atari logo on it. The plastic stuff of the decal was cracking and flaking like the surface of an old oil painting.

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s Frank Sinatra’s granddaughter or something.”

  “Bing Crosby. Jesus Christ, that’s her name, for God’s sake—Denise Crosby. That actress. She’s Bing Crosby’s granddaughter.”

  A stretch of road ran along the edge of the green for a few hundred yards. A white Toyota Camry pulled off it and onto the wide shoulder, crackling across the gravel.

  “Hell,” said Hollis.

  “What is it?”

  “I knew this would happen.”

  Hollis walked over a few steps, casually, so that Brian stood between him and the car.

  “Jesus, what is this, Hollis?”

  “Relax. Just act natural.” He crouched down a little. “It’s nothing—I’ll tell you in a second.”

  “You know, I really don’t have the time to get stuck in the middle of something.”

  “Who’s asking you to? Jesus, just stand still for a second. Just act natural. Be yourself.”

  The front door of the car opened, and a fit-looking older man with salt-and-pepper gray hair and a mustache got out. He whipped off his hunter-orange baseball cap and shaded his eyes, scanning the park, hands on hips.

  “Look at him,” Hollis said. “Ever the fashionable little carnivore. God, I have to get out of this city.”

  The man grimaced, spat on the grass, and sat back down into the car.

  At the same time the back door opened and a young black woman in a nylon ski parka got out, tenderly cradling something in her arms. She bumped the door shut with her hip and set the thing gently down on the grass. Immediately it started to scamper off on the end of a leash, and she followed along after it without much enthusiasm.

  “That’s a ferret,” Hollis said. “She does this every day. Same time, same station. I don’t even think it likes it all that much—I think ferrets are supposed to live on prairies or something.”

  Hollis and Brian saw and heard the solid metal pop of the trunk opening. The man got back up out of the front seat again, circled around to the rear, and heaved out a bag of golf clubs. Then he locked all the doors with a remote control, slammed shut the trunk, and walked briskly off through a stand of trees and out of sight, the bag of clubs bumping vigorously against his hip.

  Hollis straightened up again.

  “Who was that?”

/>   “My landlord,” said Hollis. “Looks like he’s taking a little driving practice. I told him I was going to Aruba for six weeks—if he saw me here there’d be some fireworks, let me tell you.”

  He kicked at the grass. The pale orange sunlight seemed not to carry any heat, and a cold wind was starting to come up. An empty plastic shopping bag tumbled by, weightless, ten feet over their heads.

  “Oh. I saw Eileen Cavanaugh a couple of days ago.” Brian hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his sweatpants. “On the street. I didn’t talk to her—I was in a car. She looked different, though. Her hair’s all wavy now.”

  “They always get prettier after we break up,” Hollis said. “I hear she has a real-live adult job now—she works at an investment firm downtown, one of those big-time, old-money ones.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Brian tossed back his blond hair. “Which one?”

  In the distance they could hear the high-pitched warning beep of a big truck backing up.

  “I don’t remember the name.”

  The air smelled like wet grass. Hollis turned all the way around, slowly, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, just looking out at the view. By now the road on the other side was completely in the shadow of the little hill they were standing on.

  He turned back around to face the sunset again. Looking down at the rolling, sea-green expanse of the park, he was overcome by a rush of memory—something he’d been assigned to read when he was in elementary school. It was a story.

  It was about the ocean.

  Malo lived with his family in a little village by the sea. When Malo was a little boy, his father made a rule:

  “Never, never fish alone at night,” he said. “Bring your brother with you. Or better still, do not go at all.”

  But the summer Malo turned eleven years old the fishing was very bad, and his family had nothing to eat. His mother fell sick. At last he could wait no longer. One night Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep, then he slipped out the window and down to the docks where the fishing boats were kept.