The Bend of the World: A Novel Read online

  How’re you doing? How about this weather we’re having? What about those Pens, think they’ll win the Cup?

  Yeah, I said. Sorry. Habit. Reflex. Are you cold?

  I’m pissed.

  I’d offer you a ride, I said.

  Now she turned, and she smiled in spite of herself, the sad smile of someone who knew pretty well what was coming. I think you may be missing an important component of that offer.

  True, I said. Does Mark know you’re here?

  No. Yes. I texted him and told him I got lost in Allentown to flip him out. You know, delicate white woman amongst the etc. in the middle of the night. I guess I ought to tell him where I really am.

  That seems wise.

  Wise, she repeated. You’re funny.

  I’ve been accused of worse.

  She tilted her head. Are you trying to flirt with me? she said.

  I flushed. No.

  You should be warned, she told me. I flirt back. She took her phone out of her purse and spent a few seconds composing a text. A moment later, it rang. She answered. Yeah, she said. I’m here. Yes. Yes. No. Yes, we seem to have bumped into each other. She covered the receiver with her hand in the old-fashioned gesture. He wants to know, she said to me, if you’ll wait with me until he arrives. Yes, I said. Yes, she said, bringing the phone back to her mouth. All right. All right. Okay.

  She put the phone back into her bag. She leaned on the rail and looked at the city. I let myself look at her again now that we were alone, and it seemed to me that, while Mark was slightly less than human, she looked, if you can imagine, almost too much so.

  Lovely view, she said.

  Struck by the incongruity, I didn’t reply, but leaned on the rail beside her and looked at the skyscrapers across the way for some period of time.

  Then she touched my chin with her hand, and when I turned, she looked as if she were about to kiss me, so I kissed her, meaning it to be serious but brief, getting something more than I’d anticipated in return.

  Whoa, I said. Um.

  Your girlfriend is very pretty, Helen said. A bit of a space cadet. You ought to pay more attention to her. She smiled. She likes you, I think. And we all need attention, one way or another. It’s our worst quality as a species. We’ll take what we can get.

  Then Mark pulled up and hopped out of the car and strode across the grass and sidewalk to where we were standing. He looked at me, gratitude mixed with calculation, then at her, and he said, Honey, you scared the shit out of me. Jesus.

  I know, she said. Punishment.

  Mea culpa and so forth. Let me take you home.

  You know I will.

  Yes, he said.

  Um, guys, I said. Because behind them, between us and the city, hovering, silent, mirrors so perfect that I could see my own face reflected even at a distance and even in the dark, were three silver disks, twenty or so feet in diameter, rounded at the edges, humming distantly, watching us, or so it seemed to me, as we watched them, before they moved, or seemed to move, at an impossible speed in a vertical line and became nonexistent somewhere above the few thinly visible clouds.

  1

  Three days into sixth grade, a new boy sat across from me at lunch. My two best friends had both been sent to Sewickley Academy, and I felt alone as only an eleven-year-old could truly feel alone even though I’d been going to school with everyone else in Quaker Valley since kindergarten. The boy said, You’re Peter Morrison. He was even skinnier than I was, with a wild tousle of brown hair like a little lapdog had perched on top of his head, and he had a slight lisp: Morrithon, he said. Yeah, I said. I did some research, he said. Did you know that your great-grandfather, William Aloysius Morrison, was a well-known Nazi sympathizer in England who was hung by his neck until he was dead for being a traitor during the war?

  When I told this to my parents that evening, my mother crunched the ice in her scotch and told my dad, I told you we should have sent him to the academy.

  Oh, really, Suzanne, my dad said, and he sipped his Syrah. I think this proves the other point very well. It’s an awfully sophisticated imprecation for someone of Pete’s age, isn’t it? But, buddy, it’s not true. Neither of your great-grandfathers on my side was named William, and our family hasn’t lived in England for hundreds of years. Your grandmother is a Daughter of the American Revolution. Different Morrisons, I’m afraid.

  You’re afraid, my mother said.

  Hm, said my father. Yes, I might have chosen a different way to put it.

  The next day I told Johnny, My dad says that we’re not related to the Nazi guy. Our family has been in America since, like, before the Revolutionary War.

  Oh. His face fell. That sucks. But then it brightened. Maybe your dad is lying, he said. To protect your family from the shame. Maybe, he said, it’s a conspiracy.

  2

  Johnny and his older brother, Ben, had moved to Leetsdale, a weedy little town just up the river from Sewickley, from Florida to live with their grandparents. Ben was sixteen. He explained, Our parents are total fuckups. They’re like the biggest meth heads in Tampa. Do you know what meth is?

  Yeah, I said.

  What is it?

  Duh, it’s drugs.

  You’re right, Ben said. It’s cocaine for white trash. Do you know what white trash is?

  Yeah, I said.

  What?

  It’s, like, I said, poor people.

  We, Ben said, pointing across the bedroom at Johnny, are white trash.

  Which wasn’t strictly true; their grandparents’ house was small and neat, more a cottage than a real house, in a small clearing at the end of a long driveway on a woody lot surrounded by raised vegetable beds and rhododendrons, and if it lacked the acquisitive grandness of the neighborhoods in my own town of Sewickley, the inescapable tackiness of ostentation even when that ostentation is superficially elegant, it wasn’t what you’d call poor. There was another building on the property, a shedlike garage that was bigger than the house itself, in which Johnny’s Pappy worked on his invention, a metastasizing perpetual motion machine that looked like the vast megalopolis of an immensely advanced but tiny alien race. But I gathered that in Florida their circumstances had been reduced; actually, that was how Ben put it exactly. In Florida, he said, our circumstances were much reduced. He wore eyeliner and listened to the Smiths and sometimes affected something like an English accent. Heeth gay, Johnny told me proudly.

  3

  Now, at a certain point in Fourth River, Fifth Dimension, Winston Pringle’s idyllic tale of East End childhood changes without warning to a crypto-Dickensian tale of row-house deprivation in the shadow of the Edgar Thompson Steel Works in Braddock. The digression involves a brilliant but troubled young student named Wilhelm Zollen:

  Zollen’s stepfather at the time was a member of the Order of the Moose. Most days after his shift ended at the mill, he’d head down to the lodge to throw a few back. A few often became a lot, and his mother would send Wilhelm to collect the old man.

  One day when he was on just such an errand, he chanced upon the head of his stepdad’s union, the United Steelworkers, a man by the name of Dan Sternbecker, entering the lodge with another man young Wilhelm didn’t recognize. I would later learn that this sartorial fellow was none other than Dr. Martin Dopffnording, a famous German expatriate who’d worked on the Philadelphia experiment and was now a vice-chancellor of the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

  Being a curious child, Zollen followed this odd duo. They were deep in conversation, and didn’t notice him.

  To his surprise, they did not go into the bar, but instead passed through a doorway to a small dark stairwell that he’d never noticed before. He gave them a few moments and then followed them. The stairs seemed to descend for many stories, frequently switching back on themselves. Why would a social hall have such a deep basement? he wondered.

  At the base of the stairs was a small lobby with a sagging couch, a few chairs, some filing cabinets, and a receptionist desk. Beyo
nd the desk, there was a heavy wooden door. He surmised the men had gone through the doorway, but dared not follow them, lest he be caught. Instead, he hid behind the desk.

  He must have dozed off. He awoke some time later to the sound of the men emerging from the room. They passed swiftly, speaking to each other in a language that he did not understand at the time, although subsequent studies and investigations lead me to believe that it was an Altaic derivation of middle high Atlantean.

  Wilhelm dashed across the room and through the slowly closing door. The room beyond was vast and dimly lit and very cold. In it, as far as the eye could see, were row upon row of heavy wooden planters, each of which held a single, healthy evergreen.

  Anyway, Wilhelm explores, leaves, finds his stepfather half delirious and drunk at the bar. He gets the man home; the mother—it’s implied that she’s a sort of Blanche DuBois character, lost and alone in the industrial north—remonstrates the stepfather. He strikes her. Zollen attempts to intervene. The stepfather strikes him. When he wakes, he finds himself in some sort of examination room. An orifice opens on the far wall. In walks a man whose principal identifying mark is the big signet ring on his right hand and his eerily patrician voice. Don’t worry, he says. I’m a doctor.

  4

  Johnny said that he refused to believe that I’d seen a UFO.

  I refuse to believe it, he said. You? You saw it? Of all people. Where’s the justice in that?

  We were at the diner on Sunday. I’d eaten a quarter of a wet BLT and pushed it away. Johnny had ordered six scrambled eggs and toast and was working his way methodically through the pile.

  What can I say? I saw a goddamn UFO. Three, actually.

  Spiro, Johnny called to the owner, who was near the cash register reading a newspaper. Can you believe this guy says he saw a UFO?

  Spiro shrugged. Effreeone sees crazy things these days. He shrugged. Welcome to your country. He leaned back in his stool and lifted the paper. I caught the front page: Mayor Denies Gay Rumors Led to Firings at Economy Council.

  So, Johnny said to me, would you say that it was mirrored, or more like quicksilver? Quicksilver? Mercury. Um, both? In other words you had a sense that the skin had a certain liquid quality, as if it had been poured? Yes, yeah. But you say you could see your reflection? Yes, clearly. Was it illuminated? My reflection? No; are you being intentionally difficult; no, the ship! Well, I guess; I mean, we could see it. Wait, we? Yes, I told you: me and Mark and Helen. Who are Mark and Helen? The couple we met at the museum; who formed the entire first half of the story. Did they see it, too? Yes, like I told you. I’m not one to get caught up in the secondary details. Now, the ship, was it illuminated—self-illuminated?—I don’t know; it would have been hard to say; it reflected everything. Did you detect an aura of light around it? What sort of aura? Any sort—listen, you’re the one who saw the fucker, so describe it to me. I would not say there was an aura. A corona? Or a corona. A halo? You mean, like an aura? (Johnny put a hand over his face, inhaled deeply, said: Of all the people, it had to be you. It couldn’t have been me.) Sorry, I said; no, no halo. Did it make a sound? Johnny asked. Not as far as I could tell. No humming, no tones? None. Vibration? I didn’t feel any vibration. In other words, Johnny said, it had no visible or audible means of propulsion. Yes, I said, that would be accurate. When you looked underneath it, did you see a slight shimmering? What kind of shimmering?—sorry, sorry!—I know I’m supposed to describe it. A shimmering, Johnny said, like a heat mirage, like you’d see on a highway on a hot day. No shimmering, but I can’t say I looked very closely; is shimmering important? It’s strongly indicative of anti-gravity, Johnny answered. And you say, when it flew away, it tracked a precise vertical path? Precisely. And did it seem to actually fly away, or would you more say that it receded? I replied, I’m afraid I’m not entirely clear on the distinction. Johnny sighed. Do you remember Stranger in a Strange Land? Not especially well, no. Is that the one where he fucks his own mom? God, no, never mind. What I am asking is: Did the object appear simply to fly away, albeit on an unusual and physically impossible trajectory, or did it appear rather to fade out, as if perhaps phasing out of our plane of existence? The former, I said. It flew.

  And was this—Johnny forked scrambled eggs into his mouth and chewed for a moment—was this all before, during, or after you made out with the chick?

  You said you didn’t . . . Fuck you. You’re just making fun of me.

  A little.

  I didn’t make out with her. She kissed me.

  I do like that sort of creepy, rapey aspect to the story. It plays well with your puerile Ayn Rand philosophy. It would’ve been rad if she’d taken you right then and there.

  My philosophy isn’t an Ayn Rand philosophy.

  Oh, please. Libertarian. Johnny laughed. Ridiculous. And don’t try to tell me that you’re an anarchist or whatever. You people are worse than Constitution fetishists. The individual. Natural rights. That shit makes me LOL in my pants. I happen to know that you had, and probably still have, hidden away somewhere, every book that Ayn Rand ever wrote. Including the books of you’ll-pardon-the-expression philosophy. The trade paper versions. The ones with the crackpot Albert Speer engravings on the front.

  Fuck you, Johnny. You’re just mad that I saw a flying saucer and you didn’t.

  I am, admittedly, a little regretful, but, eh, you know what they say: miracles are wasted on believers.

  Who says that? I asked.

  They do, Johnny said. I don’t know. Catholics, maybe. It sounds like something they’d say.

  I’m Catholic, I said, and I don’t remember saying that. Or hearing it. It sounds like something you would say.

  Please, you’re Catholic like I’m heterosexual. You were born to them, and they assumed you were one of them until around puberty, when suddenly they began to suspect something.

  No one assumed you were a heterosexual, Johnny.

  True, he said. I was born a butterfly.

  5

  As penance for my failing to come home the night before—Mark and Helen had dropped me off at Johnny’s, and I’d slept on his weirdly grandmotherly couch with his fat tabbies, Anton and LeVay—I’d told Lauren Sara that she could use my car for the day on the condition that she be the one to bus over and retrieve it from Oakland. The Greek had gotten a show at a gallery downtown, and Lauren Sara was going to help her move her paintings. Johnny and I left the diner. Johnny was supposed to meet some people about starting a noise band, and he said he’d walk with me as far as my apartment before heading over to Bloomfield. As usual he was wearing shorts, although it was only forty-five degrees and there was a chilly drizzle. Don’t you ever wear pants? I asked him. You used to wear pants, I think.

  And deprive the world of my magnificent calves? He shrugged. Shorts are more comfortable.

  Yeah, but aren’t you cold?

  I know that your so-called heterosexuality reacts violently to even the thought of contemplating a masculine physique, but I find it impossible to believe that you haven’t noticed the hirsute girth I’ve wrapped myself in since we were kids. I am impervious to cold. I’m a goddamn hrimthurs.

  A what? And not since we were kids. You were still skinny in college.

  True, but too hairy to be a twink, so I decided to go all-out bear.

  What’s a twink? I asked.

  Really, Johnny answered, you know perfectly well. I know you’re terrified that people think you’re a fag, as if the sad heterosexual dystopia you’ve left in your life’s wake isn’t evidence enough of a shameful sexual parochialism, but no one buys the ignorance act.

  Okay, I said. Christ.

  So. Let’s talk about the flying saucer some more. Now, Pringle is a little, let’s say, inconsistent on the issue. In Fourth River, Fifth Dimension, he’s pretty clear that UFOs are extradimensional and that they travel back and forth from our universe and their own through a basically magical process, but then in Fountain of Spooks, which is the third book in the serie
s, he implies that they come out of the hollow earth. He doesn’t say much in the second book, about UFOs anyway. Your descriptions are pretty consistent with the hollow earth variety. The extradimensional ones are more like balls of light.

  Ball lightning, I said.

  Shut it down, Johnny said. It is very strange, though, that we’re seeing both varieties in close proximity.

  Yes, I said. You’ve definitely identified the part of this story that’s very strange.

  Speaking of very strange, any progress on the Where’s Winston?

  No, I said.

  You haven’t even tried. I shrugged. Not that I expected otherwise. You’re such a materialist. It’s depressing. Maybe your close encounter will awaken some basic human curiosity in you.

  It was definitely curious. How many books did this guy write?

  Well, there are five that are under his sole authorship and another two that he cowrote with someone named Dr. Wilhelm Zollen, and then there are a bunch of sort of fan-fic, self-published versions that have popped up, apparently from people who heard him speak at conventions or whatnot and became convinced that they were participants in Project Pittsburgh. I’ve read the first three so far.

  Project Pittsburgh is the thing.

  Project Pittsburgh is the everything. It’s pretty awesome. You should read this stuff instead of shooting your load in bullshit liberal blog comments all day. It’s sort of an all-encompassing conspiracy theory. I mean, usually you get a Nazi, a time portal, and a train full of gold, or you get aliens and Feds, or you find out that Tesla was really Rasputin or Gore Vidal’s grandfather created chemtrails or AIDS was caused by sexual congress with bigfoots, but Pringle’s got a real conspiracy puttanesca thing; it’s all in there; he’s the Whitman of wack jobs; containment has failed on the multitudes.

  Well, that all sounds very elaborate. What’s the upshot?

  The upshot? Jesus Lord Mother of Mercy, you are becoming a corporate hack.

  In a nutshell, I said.

  Fuck you, Johnny said, but he could never resist; he was a pedant at heart. So basically, he said, you’ve got this ancient sacred geometry, sacred topography, what with the three rivers and the underground fourth river all meeting at the Point. Usual backstory. Indians knew it was holy, blah blah blah. So the Marquis Du Quesne, who’s the governor-general of New France, and who also just happens to also be the grand master of the Priory of Sion, hears about this, in particular the fourth river, which is, duh, obviously, the underground stream of medieval European esotericism, immediately puts together an exhibition, kicks out the Indians, and builds Fort Duquesne. So then Adam Weishaupt, the thirty-third-degree Freemason and immortal founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, gets wind of this, and basically does the Illuminati version of Aw No She Di’in! Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either is or is manipulating, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn Remembrances of Conspiracies Past. Well, the point is to open up the transdimensional portal between quantum realities, allowing travel between any points in space-time and total control over the historical timeline and all that good stuff. I’m telling you, it’s fucking awesome.