Otherwise Pandemonium

By NICK HORNBY

It was just a lousy secondhand VCR—but it brought him to the

very brink of love and desolation!

Mom always sings this crappy old song when I'm in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I'm in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I'm in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white-movie face—eyes wide, all her teeth showing—she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often.) This song is called "Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive," and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we're going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won't give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ's sake. Anyway, today I'm going to do what the song says. I'm going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium's liable to walk upon the scene.

OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That's the upside of it. I know that's probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it's definitely the major event of the week so far. It won't be the major event of the year, I know that—Jesus, do I know that—but it's still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I'm no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I'd set for myself was sixteen, which means I'm a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two years, in fact, because I'll still be sixteen in twenty-two months' time. So let's say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid—a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I'd have to tell you a Stephen King—type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don't want to do that. It wouldn't help me right now.

So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don't, and not just because I haven't got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It's not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren't going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don't want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I'd have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I'm a typical product of our times, or what I tell you about being fifteen, or any of those other questions we have to discuss when we read a story in school. It's not the point. All you need to know is where I got the video recorder from, and maybe, I suppose, why I got it, so I'll tell you.

I found it a couple blocks from my house, in this store that sells used electronic stuff. It cost fifty bucks, which seemed pretty good to me, although now it doesn't seem like such a great bargain, but that's another story. Or rather, it's this story, but a different part of it. And I bought it because . . . OK, so maybe I will have to give you a little background, but I won't make it into a big drama. I'll just give you the facts. My mom and I moved from L.A. to Berkeley about three months ago. We moved because Mom finally walked out on my asshole of a father, who writes movies for a living—although as none of them ever got made, it would be more accurate to say that he writes scripts for a living. Mom is an art teacher, and she paints her own stuff, too, and she says there are millions of people in Berkeley with an artistic bent or whatever, so she thought we'd feel right at home here. (I like it that she says "we." I haven't got an artistic bone in my whole body, and she knows that, but for some reason she thinks I take after her. It was pretty much always me and her against him, so that became me and her against L.A., and because I was against L.A., that somehow made me able to paint. I don't mind. Painting's pretty cool, some of it.)

Berkeley's nice, I guess, but I didn't have any friends here, so Mom made me join this dumb jazz orchestra thing. I'd just started to take trumpet lessons in L.A., and I didn't suck too bad; a couple months after we moved, she saw an ad in a local bookstore for something called the Little Berkeley Big Band, which is like for people under the age of seventeen, and she signed me up. She had to sing the Ac-cent-chu-ate song a lot in the car the first evening I went to a rehearsal, because I'd be the first to admit that I wasn't feeling very positive. But it was OK, not that I'd ever admit that to her. You can make a pretty fucking great noise when you're part of a horn section. I can't say I'm going to make any friends, though. The kind of people who want to play in the Little Berkeley Big Band . . . well, let's just say that they're not my kind of people. Apart from Martha, but I'll tell you about her later. (And now you'll probably have guessed some of the ending, but I don't care, because you only know her name, and not how we ended up having sex. How we ended up having sex is the interesting part.) All you need to know about Martha: a) She's hot; b) but hot in a not-slutty way. In other words, if you saw her, you would never guess in a million years that I'd persuade her to sleep with me. (Hopefully that has made you very curious—"Man, how the fuck did he get to sleep with her?"—which means you'll be more interested in the happy ending, rather than the weird middle, which means I don't have to take the Stephen King route.)

But my argument for the video recorder was this: not only was I not making friends at the band rehearsals, but the rehearsals were actually stopping me from making friends. Here's how it works: I go to rehearsals. We don't have a VCR. (We left ours in L.A. with Dad, and for some insane reason Mom didn't want to buy a replacement right away, I guess because we were supposed to read books and paint and play trumpets every night, like we were living in the Little House on the Prairie or something.) I can't tape the NBA play-offs. I can't talk about the games next day. Everyone thinks I'm a dweeb. Obvious, right? Not to her. I had to threaten to go back and live with Dad before she gave in, and even then she more or less told me I had to find the cheapest, crappiest machine in the Bay Area.

Anyway, it's pretty great, this place. It sells old TVs—like really old, Back to the Future old—and guitars, and amps, and stereos and radios. And VCRs. I just asked the old hippie guy who runs the place for the cheapest one he had that actually worked, and he pointed me over to this pile right in the corner of the store.

"That one on the top works," he said. "Or at least, it was working a few days ago. Used to be mine."

"So why aren't you using it anymore?" I asked him. I was trying to be sharp, but that doesn't often work for me. Give me an hour or two and I'm sharp as a box cutter, but sometimes in the moment, things don't work out as good as I'd want.

"I got a better one," he said. I couldn't really argue with that. He could probably have made one that was better. Shit, I could probably have made one that was better.

"But it records?"

He just looked at me.

"Records and plays?"

"No, kid. It does everything else, just doesn't record or play."

"So if it doesn't record or play, what's the point ..." Then I realized he was being sarcastic, so of course I felt pretty dumb.

"And you never had any trouble with it?"

"Depends what you mean by trouble."

"Like . . . with recording? Or playing?" I couldn't think of another way of putting it.

"No."

"So what sort of trouble did you have?"

"If this conversation lasts any longer, I'll have to put the price up. Otherwise it's not worth my time."

"Does it come with a remote?"

"I can find you one."

So I just dug in my pocket for the fifty bucks, handed it to him, and went and got the thing off the top of the pile. He found a remote and put it in my jacket pocket. And then, as I was walking out, he said this weird thing.

"Just . . . forget it."

"What?"

"I did."

"What?"

This guy was old-school Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Gray beard, gray ponytail, dirty old vest.

"Cos it can't know anything, right? It's just a fucking VCR. What can it know? Nothing."

"No, man," I said. Because I thought I had a handle on him then, you know? He was nuts, plain and simple. Weed had destroyed his mind. "No, it can't know anything. Like you say, what could it know?"

He smiled then, like he was really relieved, and it was only when he smiled that I could tell how sad he looked before.

"I really needed to hear that," he said.

"Happy to oblige."

"I'm forty-nine years old, and I got a lot to do. I got a novel to write."

"You'd better hurry."

"Really?" He looked worried again. I didn't know what the fuck I'd said.

"Well. You know. Hurry in your own time." Because I didn't care when he wrote his stupid novel. Why should I?

"Right. Right. Hey, thanks."

"No problem."

And that was it. I thought about what he'd said for maybe another minute and a half, and then forgot about him. For a while, anyway.

So I was all set. I had a band rehearsal that night, so I wired the VCR up to the TV in my room, and then I did a little test on it. I recorded some news show for a couple minutes, and then I played it back—A-OK. I checked out the remote—fine. I even put my tape of The Matrix in the machine, to see what kind of picture quality I was getting. (The kind of picture quality you get on a fifty-buck VCR was what I was getting.) Then I worked out the timer, and set it for the last part of that night's Lakers game. Everything was cool. Or rather, everything would have been cool, if my mom hadn't decided to interfere, although as it turned out, it was a good sort of interference.

What happened was, I got a lift home from Martha's dad. With Martha in the car. I mean, of course Martha was in the car, because that was why her dad had turned up at the community center, but, you know. Martha was in the car. Which meant . . . well, not too much, if you really want to analyze it that closely. I didn't talk a whole lot. Like I said, give me a few hours to think about it and I'm William fucking Shakespeare; I'm just not so good in real time. I guess it's my dad's genes coming through. He can write OK dialogue if he has enough time to think about it—like a year. But ask him the simplest question, like "What's going on with you and Mom?" and he's, you know, "Duh, yeah, well, blah." Thanks, Dad. That's made things real clear.

Anyway, we got in the car, and . . . Oh—first of all, I should tell you that it's turning into a regular thing, which is how come I wasn't too disgusted by my performance that night. And maybe I should confess that I nearly blew it, too. This is where Mom's good/bad interference comes in. What happened was, she dropped into this little gallery in the neighborhood, to see if they'd be interested in exhibiting her stuff, and she got talking to the owner, who turns out to be Martha's dad. And somehow they got onto the subject of the Little Berkeley Big Band, and like two seconds later they've divided up the rides. I'll be honest here: I completely freaked out when she told me. No amount of singing her song would have calmed me down. She explained that she met this guy who lives real near and his daughter was in the band and so he was going to drop us off and pick us up this week and it was her turn next week and . . .

"Stop right there."

"What?"

"Do you realize what a bunch of pathetic losers they are in that band? You really expect me to sit in a car with one of them every week?"

"I'm not asking you to date her. I'm asking you to sit in a car with her for ten minutes once a week."

"No way."

"Too late."

"Fine. I'm quitting the band. As from this second."

"You don't think that's an overreaction?"

"No. Goodbye."

And I went up to my bedroom. I meant it. I was going to quit. I didn't care. Even if I was giving up a future career as a superstar jazz trumpeter, it was worth it if it meant not sitting in a car with Eloise and her bad breath. Or Zoe and her quote unquote gland problem (in other words her intense fatness problem). Anyway, Mom came up five minutes later and said that she'd called the guy and canceled the ride, told him I had a doctor's appointment first so I wouldn't be leaving from home.

"A doctor's appointment? Great, so now everyone thinks I've got some gross disease. Thanks a lot."

"Jesus." She shook her head.

"And anyway, how am I going to get out of coming back with them?" I will admit, I was being pretty difficult.

She shook her head again. If I hadn't been so mad, I might have felt sorry for her. "I'll think of something."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Just get in the car. We'll be late."

"No. Now it's too embarrassing. I'm still quitting."

"Paul will be disappointed. I got the impression that he had high hopes for you and Martha. He thought you sounded like ..."

"Whoa. Martha?"

"Do you know her?"

"Maybe."

"Do you like her?"

I tried to be cool about it. "She's OK. I'll just go and find my trumpet."

Respect where it's due to Mom: she didn't say anything. Didn't even smile in a way that would have made me freak out all over again. Just waited for me downstairs. She was still in the wrong, though. OK, it turned out well, but there was like a 99.9% chance (or rather, because there are maybe fifteen girls in the band, a ninety-four-point-something percent chance) that it could have been a total disaster. She didn't know it was Martha, or even who Martha is, so she was just plain lucky.

Before we get back to me in the car with Martha, which sounds way more exciting than it actually was, there's one more bit of the story that's important, but I'm not too sure where to put it. It should either go here—which was roughly where it happened—or later, when I get back from rehearsal, which is where I actually discovered it, and where it has a bit more dramatic effect. But the thing is, if I put it later, you might not believe it. You might think it's just like a story trick, or something I just made up on the spur of the moment to explain something, and it would really piss me off if you thought that. And anyway, I don't need any dramatic effects, man. This story I need to calm down, not pump up. So I'll tell you here: I messed up the VCR recording of the Lakers game. I was so mad that I watched five minutes of The Matrix, which meant removing the blank tape. I remembered to take out The Matrix tape, but I forgot to put another one back in. (I forgot because once Mom mentioned Martha, I was in kind of a hurry.) But I didn't know I'd messed up then. See what I mean? If I'd left that part until later, it might have had a little kick to it—"Oh, no, he didn't tape the game. So how come ..." But if that little kick means you believe me any less, it's not worth it.

Anyway, again. We got in the car after the rehearsal, me, Martha, and her dad, and . . . You know what? None of this part matters. Shit, maybe I should have left the tape thing until later, because now I've brought it up, I kind of want to get back to it. I can't just keep it back for suspense purposes. And if you think about it, that's how you know most stories aren't true. I mean, I read a lot of horror writers, and those guys are always delaying the action to build it up a little. As in, I don't know, "She ran down the path and slammed the front door with a sigh of relief. Little did she know that the Vampire Zombie was in her bathroom.

"MEANWHILE, two thousand miles away, Frank Miller of the NYPD was frowning. There was something about this case that was troubling him ..."

See, if that shit with the Vampire Zombie was real—REAL AND HAPPENING TO YOU—you wouldn't care whether Frank Miller was frowning or not. You've got a zombie in your apartment with a fucking chain saw or a blowtorch or something, so what does it matter what a cop does with his eyebrows on the other side of the country? Therefore, if you'll permit me to point something out that may ruin your reading pleasure forever, you know that the story has been made up.

But you know this story, the one I'm telling you, hasn't been made up. You know it a) because I told you that thing about the tape straightaway, when it happened, rather than trying to get a little zinger going later, and b) because I'm not going to go into who said what to who on a car ride, just to bump up the page numbers, or to make you forget about the tape thing. You just need to hear this much: Martha and I didn't say an awful lot, but we did some smiling and whatever, so at the end of the ride we maybe both knew we liked each other. And then I got out of the car, said "Hi" to Mom, and went upstairs to watch the game.

Well, you know now that there wasn't a tape in the machine, but I didn't. I sat down on the bed and turned on the TV. Letterman was just starting. He was doing one of those dumb list things that everyone pretends is funny but which really no one understands. I pressed the rewind on the remote: nothing. Not surprising, right? And then I pressed the fast-forward button, I guess because I thought the timer recording hadn't worked, and I wanted to check that there was a tape in there.

This is what happened: I started fast-forwarding through Letter-man. I was pretty confused. How could I do that? The show wasn't even finished, so how could I have taped it? I pressed the eject, and finally I found out what you've known for a while: that there was no cassette in there. With no cassette, I can't be fast-forwarding. But my TV doesn't seem to know that, because meanwhile, Letterman's waving his hands in the air really really fast, and then we're racing through the ads, and then it's the closing credits, and then it's the Late Late Show, and then more ads. . . . And that's when I realize what's going on: I'm fast-forwarding through network fucking television.

I mean, obviously I checked this theory out. I checked it out by keeping my finger on the remote until I got to the next morning's breakfast news, which took maybe an hour. But I got there in the end: they showed the next day's weather, and the best plays from what they said was last night's Lakers game—even though it wasn't last night to me—and, a little later, a big pileup on the freeway near Candlestick Park that had happened in the early morning fog. I could have stopped it, if I'd known any of the drivers. I got bored after a while, and put the remote down; but it took me a long time to get to sleep.

I woke up late, and I had to rush the next morning, so I didn't get to move any further through the day's TV schedule. On my way to school, I tried to think about it all—what I could do with it, whether I'd show it to anyone, whatever. Like I said, I'm not as quick as I'd like to be. Mentally speaking, I'm not Maurice Greene. I'm more like one of those Kenyan long-distance runners. I get there in the end, but it takes like two hours and an awful lot of sweat. And to tell you the absolute truth, when I went to school that morning, I didn't see it was such a big deal. I was, like, I saw this morning's weather forecast last night; well, so what? Everyone knew what the weather was now. Same with the pileup. And I'd seen a few of the best plays from the Lakers game, but everyone who didn't rehearse in a stupid jazz band had seen the whole game anyway. Like, I was supposed to boast to people that I'd seen stuff they saw before I did?

Imaginary conversation':

"I saw the best plays from the Lakers game."

"So did we. We watched the game."

"Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show."

"So did we."

"Yeah, but I saw them on the breakfast news show last night."

"You're a jerk. You need to have your ass kicked." What's fun about that? Watching breakfast news seven hours early didn't seem like such a big deal to me.

It took me a while longer than it should have done to get the whole picture: If I just kept fast-forwarding, I could see all kinds of stuff. The rest of the play-offs. The next episodes of Buffy, or Friends. The next season of Buffy or Friends. Next month's weather, whatever that's worth. Some news stuff, like, maybe, a psycho with a gun coming into our school one day next year, so I could warn the people I liked. (In other words not Brian O'Hagan. Or Mrs. Fleming.) It took me longer than it should have, but I began to see that fast-forwarding through network TV could be awesome.

And for the next two days, that's all I did: I sat in my bedroom with the remote, watching the TV of the future. I watched the Lakers destroy the Pacers in the NBA finals. I watched the As get smashed by the Yankees. I watched "The One Where Phoebe and Joey Get Married." I fast-forwarded until I got blisters. I watched TV until even my dreams got played out on a 14" screen. I was in my bedroom so often that Mom thought I had just discovered jerking off, and wanted me to call my father and talk. (Like, hello, Mom? I'm fifteen?) I could rewind, too; I could watch reruns of the TV of the future if I wanted.

And none of it was any use to me. Who wants to know stuff before it happens? People might think they do, but believe me, they don't, because if you know stuff before it happens, there's nothing to talk about. A lot of school conversation is about TV and sports; and what people like to talk about is what just happened (which I now can't remember, because it was three games back, or the episode before last) or what might happen. And when people talk about what might happen, they like to argue, or make dumb jokes; they don't want someone coming in and squashing it all flat. It's all, "No, man, Shaq's not looking so young anymore, I think the Pacers can take them." "No way! The Pacers have no defense. Shaq's going to destroy them." Now, what do you say if you know the score? You tell them? Of course not. It sounds too weird, and there's nothing to bounce off anyway. So all I ever did was agree with the guy whose prediction was closest to the truth, to what I knew, and it was like I hadn't seen anything, because the knowledge I had was no fucking good to anyone. One thing I learned: School life is all about anticipation. We're fifteen, and nothing's happened to us yet, so we spend an awful lot of time imagining what things will be like. No one's interested in some jerk who says he knows. That's not what it's about.

But of course I kept going with the remote. I couldn't stop myself. I'd come back from school and watch, I'd wake up in the morning and watch, I'd come back from rehearsals and watch. I was a month, maybe five weeks, into the future—time enough to know that Frazier gets engaged to some writer, that there's a dumb new sitcom starting soon about a rock star who accidentally becomes three inches tall, and that half the Midwest gets flooded in a freak storm.

And then. . . . Well, OK, maybe I should say that I had noticed something: The news programs were becoming really fucking long. It took a whole lot of fast-forwarding to get through them. And then one night I came back from school and picked up the remote, and all I could find was news. As far as I could tell, in about six weeks' time, all of network TV—every channel—is just like one long fucking news show. No Buffy, no sports, no nothing; just guys in suits with maps, and people in weird countries you've never heard of talking into those crappy video things which make them go all jerky and and fuzzy. It was like that for a couple days after 9/11, if you remember that long ago, but sooner or later everything went back to normal; I was trying to find that part, but I couldn't get there.

Now and again I stopped to watch the people talking, but I didn't really understand it; there was stuff about India and Pakistan, and Russia, and China, and Iraq and Iran, and Israel and Palestine. There were maps, and pictures of people packing up all their shit in all these places and getting the hell out. The usual stuff, but worse, I guess.

And then, a few days' TV-time later, I found the president. I watched some of that—it was on every channel at the same time. She was sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the American people, with this really intense expression on her face. She was so serious it was scary. And she was telling us that these were the darkest days in our history, and that we were all to face them with courage and determination. She said that freedom came at a price, but that price had to be worth paying, otherwise we had no identity or value as a nation. And then she asked God to bless us all. Straight after the show they cut to live pictures of more people getting the hell out of their homes, carrying bundles of their possessions under one arm and small children under another. These people were walking down the steps of a subway station, trying to get underground. The pictures weren't fuzzy or jerky, though. These people lived in New York City.

I didn't want to watch it anymore, so I picked up the remote; never in my life have I wanted to see the opening credits of Sabrina so bad. But after a couple of hours of news stuff there was nothing. The TV just stops. Network TV canceled. I've spent most of my time since then trying to see if I can get beyond the static, but I'm not there yet.

Now, all this time, I haven't spoken to anyone about any of this shit. Not to Mom, not to anyone at school, not to Martha. That's one thing they get right in stories, even though I didn't use to think so: You don't want to talk about spooky stuff. In the stories, there's always some reason for it, like, I don't know, the words don't come out when they try to speak, or the magic thing only works for the guy who's telling the story, something like that, but the real reason is, it just sounds dumb. When it finally clicked that I could watch NBA games before they happened, then obviously I thought I was going to ask a bunch of guys to come over to watch. But how do you say it? How do you say, I've got a video recorder that lets me fast-forward through the whole of TV? You don't, is the answer, unless you're a complete jerk. Can you imagine? The only quicker way to get a pounding would be to wear a STA-COOL T-shirt to school. (I just thought of something: If you're reading this, you might not know about STA-COOL. Because if you're reading this, it's way off in the future, after the static, and you might have forgotten about STA-COOL, where you are. Maybe it's a better world where people only listen to good music, not stupid pussy boy-band shit, because the world understands that life is too short for boy bands. Well, good. I'm glad. We did not die in vain.) And I was going to tell Mom, but not yet, and then when I got to the static . . . People should be allowed to enjoy their lives, is my view. Sometimes when she gives me a hard time about my clothes or playing my music loud, I want to say something. Like, "Don't stress out, Mom, because in a month or so someone's going to drop the big one." But most of the time I just want her to enjoy her painting, and living in Berkeley. She's happy here.

When I remembered the guy I bought the machine from, though, I wanted to speak to him. He'd seen the static too; that's what that conversation in his shop had been all about, except I didn't know it. He realized why I'd come as soon as I walked in. I didn't even say anything. He just saw it in my face.

"Oh, man," he said after a little while. "Oh, man. I never even started my novel." Which I couldn't believe. I mean, Jesus. What else did this guy need to help him understand that time is running out? He'd seen the end of the fucking world on live TV, and he still hadn't gotten off his stoned ass. Although maybe he'd figured he wasn't going to find a publisher in time. And he certainly wasn't going to get too many readers.

"Maybe we're both crazy," I said. "Maybe we're getting it all wrong."

"You think network TV would stop for any other reason? Like, to encourage us to get more exercise or something?"

"Maybe the thing just stopped working."

"Yeah, and all those people were going into the subway with their kids because they couldn't find any child care. No, we're fucked, man. I never voted for that bitch, and now she's killed me. Shit."

At least you've had a life, I wanted to say. I haven't done anything yet. And that was when I decided to ask Martha out.

(OK. That was the weird middle. Now I'm going to give you the happy ending: the story of how I got to sleep with the hottest girl in the Little Berkeley Big Band, even though I'm only fifteen, and even though she doesn't look like the sort of girl who gives it up for anybody.)

One thing about knowing the world is going to end: It makes you a lot less nervous about the whole dating thing. So that's a plus. And she made it easy, anyway. We were talking in her dad's car about movies we'd seen, and movies we wanted to see, and it turned out we both wanted to see this Vin Diesel movie about a guy who can turn himself into like a bacteria anytime he feels like it and hang out in people and kill them if necessary. (Although to tell you the truth, I used to want to see it more than I do now. There are a lot of things I used to want to do more than I do now. Like, I don't know, buying Stuff. It sounds kind of dumb, I guess, but if you see a cool T-shirt, you're thinking about the future, aren't you? You're thinking, Hey, I could wear that to Sarah Steiner's party. There are so many things connected to the future—school, eating vegetables, cleaning your teeth. ... In my position, it'd be pretty easy to let things slide.) So it seemed like the logical next step to say, Hey, why don't we go together?

The movie was OK. And afterward we went to get a pizza, and we talked about what it would be like to be a bacteria, and about the band, and about her school and my school. And then she told me that one of the reasons she liked me was that I seemed sad.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Does that sound dumb?"

"No." Because a) nothing she says sounds dumb; b) even if it did, it would be dumb to tell her; c) I'm sad. With good reason. So I'm not surprised I look it.

"Most guys our age don't look sad. They're always laughing about nothing."

I laughed—a little—because what she said was so true, and I hadn't even noticed it before.

"So are you really sad? Or is that just the way your face is?"

"I guess ... I don't know. I guess I'm sad sometimes."

"Me too."

"Yeah? Why?"

"You first."

Oh, man. I've seen enough movies and soaps to know that the sad guy is supposed to be the quiet, sensitive, poetic one, and I'm not sure that's me. I wasn't sad before I knew there was going to be a terrible catastrophe and we're all in trouble; suddenly, I went from like NBA fan to tortured genius-style dude. I think she's got the wrong impression. If PJ Rogers, who's this really really stupid trombonist kid in the orchestra, the kind of jerk whose wittiest joke is a loud fart, had seen what I'd seen, he'd be a tortured genius too.

"There's some stuff I'm worried about. That's all. It's not like I'm this really deep thinker."

"Lots of kids don't worry even when there's something to worry about. They're too insensitive."

"How about you?" I wanted to change the subject. I was getting way too much credit.

"I don't know why I'm sad half the time. I just am."

I wanted to say to her, Now, see, that's the real deal. That's being sensitive and screwed up ... the classic Breakfast Club stuff. I'm an amateur compared to you. But I didn't. I just nodded, like I knew what she was talking about.

"Do you want to tell me about the things you're worried about? Would it help?"

"It'd help me. I think it would fuck you up."

"I can take it."

"I'm not sure." "Try me."

And I was so sick of being on my own that I took her up on the offer. It's probably the most selfish thing I've ever done in my whole life.

I asked her over to my house for lunch, after a Saturday morning rehearsal. Mom took us back and fixed us sandwiches, and when we'd eaten we went up to my room to listen to music—or that's what she thought we were going to do. When we got upstairs, though, I explained everything, right from the beginning. I'd prepared this; I'd rewound to the point where the news started taking over the networks, and I'd found a section where they were talking about what happened when, and all the dates they mentioned were in the future. That was my evidence, and Martha believed it. It took a couple more hours to get back to the New York City subway scenes, but she wanted to see them, so we just sat there waiting. And then she watched, and then she started to cry.

Listen: There's something that's bothering me. Before, when I said that I asked Martha out on a date because I haven't done anything in my life yet . . . I'm not so much of an asshole that this was the first thing I thought of. It wasn't. It was one of the first, sure, but, you know—six weeks! There are lots of other things I wanted to achieve in my life, but I'm not going to get them done in six weeks. I'm not going to go to film school, and I'm not going to have a kid, and I'm not going to drive across the U.S.; at least sex is something achievable. And it's not like I was just looking for the first available piece of ass, either. I really like Martha a lot. In fact, if... but let's not go there. This is the happy ending, right?

Anyway. The next part came naturally. She stopped crying, and we talked, and we tried to understand what had happened. Martha knows more about that shit than I do; she said things were

already pretty bad, now, in the present, but because things are happening in other countries a long ways away, I hadn't noticed. I've been watching the basketball, not the news. And then we had this real sad conversation about the stuff I'd already been thinking— about what we'd miss, and what we'd never do. . . .

The truth is, she suggested it, not me. I swear. I mean, I wasn't going to say no, but it was her idea. She said that she wanted us to get good at it, which meant starting like straightaway. (She said this before, by the way. She didn't say it in response to anything, if that's what you're thinking.) So I made sure Mom was still out, and then we kissed, and then we got undressed and made love in my bed. We didn't use anything. Neither of us can have any sexual disease, and if she gets pregnant, well, that's fine by us. We'd love to have a kid, for obvious reasons.

Well, that's it. That brings you up-to-date, whoever you are. Martha and I see each other all the time, and this weekend we're going to go away together; I'm going to tell Mom that I want to see Dad, and she's going to give her parents some other excuse, and we'll take off somewhere, somehow. And that'll be something else we've checked on the list—we'll have spent a whole night together. I know it's maybe not the happy ending you were hoping for, but you probably weren't hoping for a happy ending anyway, because you already know about the Time of the Static. Unless you're reading this in the next six weeks, and I'm sure as hell not going to show anybody. How is it where you are? Have people learned their lesson? How was that show about the three-inch rock star? Maybe they canceled it.