All alone atop a grass-covered hill in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, Marshall Shmishkiss waited.
With his wheeled carry-on suitcase beside him, handle up and at the ready, he stood and waited and continued to wait as dusk dimmed to night, the temperature tumbled and stars filled a cloudless December sky.
Marshall surveyed them, wondering. Which of them was not a star at all? Which was something wholly different? That one, there, where the Big Dipper was hoisting itself above a line of forested peaks? Or perhaps there, above that semi-frozen lake.
Of all those numberless points of light, which one was even now approaching, decelerating, making the final course correction that would bring it gently down beside him.
At least that’s what he wondered during his first hour on the hill and even during his second, though it was hard to keep watch on stars that bounced while you did jumping jacks to keep warm. By the third hour, however, the aliens could have landed. They could have surrounded him, clearing their throats and pointing at their chronometers, and probably still wouldn’t have caught his attention.
For that was how far he had gone, by that third hour, inside his own head.
Yet how could he have done otherwise, having chosen that hill for the rendezvous? It was the site of his most important early moment, reminders of which were everywhere.
Down there, for instance, where the forest gave way to a field with goalposts, and there, where a crowd of boxy structures congregated on a neighboring rise. The cabins. All dark now, because of course it was December, and summer camps weren’t open in December. But so easy to recall brimming with light, and boys. A lot of very un-Marshall-like boys.
He could see his cabin.
And, seeing it, could not avoid being sucked back in time.
All the way to a July evening in 1995.
That evening he had been upset. Now, in 2017, he saw the cabin and became upset all over again.
And for the same reason.
Those counselors!
Like, first they didn’t notice when Larry Smolsky, kicking from his upper bunk, sent Marshall onto Steve Krantz’s lower bunk and, unavoidably, onto Steve Krantz’s Spider-Man comic, which got wrinkled. Then they continued not to notice as Steve Krantz dug his fists into Marshall’s temples—applying, in other words, the Mongolian Death Grip, which every kid in camp knew, if not broken off within thirty seconds, caused lasting, permanent death. Yet somehow they did manage to notice as Marshall, trying simply not to die, began jumping and rolling from bunk to bunk, with Krantz after him.
“Shmishnik!”
“Hey, Shmishnik. Smarten up!”
That’s what they said, those counselors of his, before going right back to not noticing as everyone whose bunk had been jumped on (that is, pretty much everyone) took turns shoving him, punching him, throwing something at him . . .
Until finally, after locking himself in the bathroom, he climbed through a window into the night.
Would they notice now? On the chance they would, he ran. Away from the cabins, past the turn-off to the lake. Not into the forest, of course—that would have been suicidal. But in the opposite direction, towards The Mountain.
He then ran, walked and trudged, gasping, all the way up The Mountain.
True, it wasn’t really a mountain. The hulking, forested shapes on every horizon—they were mountains. This was a hill. A grass-covered hill. Which the people at camp only called a mountain (or, more exactly, The Mountain) so they could feel like champion athletes when they climbed it. But still, it was high enough that if someone came after him up one side, he could get away down the other. So it seemed like a good place to stop and figure out what to do next.
That being . . .
He now realized he might not have given the matter enough thought, before squeezing through that window. Should he try walking home, to his Boston suburb? How far would he get? Should he sleep outside? But if he did, what would happen in the morning? Come to think of it, how was his life in this camp going to improve once the counselors had given up their precious post-lights-out time trying to find him?
And how, no less crucially, was it going to help with his constipation now that he couldn’t use a bathroom anymore, but only the woods, where of course he could not possibly go.
These and other thoughts filled his mind, setting loose a torrent of forebodings. It was the next day, he imagined, and they were after him. Not just Smolsky and Krantz, but the whole camp—girls too. Now that he’d been such a nuisance it was open season. He was getting chased, sat on, fed ants. He was getting blamed. For everything. For nothing. For . . .
Down he plunged.
Until, for no particular reason . . .
He looked up.
At which point, everything that wasn’t up . . . disappeared.
The forebodings? They were gone. The campers? Gone. The counselors? Gone. Even his clogged intestines vanished in a farty puff, leaving only that part of a person which remains when such things are taken away.
That and a million, zillion, dillion stars.
The universe Marshall saw that night, saw for the first time undiluted by clouds or bulbs, was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. And not only did he see it, he heard it. It spoke with a kind of resounding silence as spectacular as the lights that shimmered in the ink-black sky. And the most astonishing thing about it? Gargantuan as it was, it didn’t make him feel insignificant. On the contrary, it called to him. And he wanted nothing more than to join that breath-stealing immensity.
Up there were worlds—he knew it. Countless worlds harboring countless wonders, and countless living beings, including some like himself. Fellow beings who would understand and even like him. Could he get to them? Maybe? Was there even a chance?
A memory sprang to mind. A memory of a newspaper article his father had kept from the days of the Apollo moon landings, which described atomic rocket engines that were completely ready for a manned mission to Mars scheduled for 1982. Well . . . if people had gone to Mars then, then surely in another twenty years or so, when he was a grown-up, they’d be off to—where? A nearby star? At least! And that meant if he began now and devoted his every minute to being on that mission . . .
Then he’d be on it. How could he not? How could it be otherwise?
And with that settled, he tilted back his head, took a huge breath and opened his every pore to his magnificent future.
Or at least he did until Larry Smolsky, dispatched by the counselors, appeared in front of him and, with the gentlest of shoves, sent him toppling over Steve Krantz, who had crouched behind his legs.
Then Larry Smolsky stood over him, avalanching him with scoffing laughter and hurtful remarks.
And twenty-two years later it went much the same way. There he was, on the same hill, overlooking the same cabins, beneath the same sky, when again Larry Smolsky subjected him to an insulting barrage.
Not the real Larry Smolsky, of course. The real Larry Smolsky had grown up, become a professional ethicist and gone to work at a think tank. The assailant this time was reality. It was the blunt truth of Marshall’s circumstances, now that he hadn’t been taken. But it struck with such Smolsky-like ferociousness that he couldn't help imagining his old tormentor was back . . .
Back and no different from before.
Hey, Shmishy! he could hear the familiar voice jeering. Do you realize how old you are?
You’re really, really old, Shmishy. Too old for atomic rocket rides, that’s for sure. 'Cause face it, by the time they come along? You’re gonna be rotten! And forgotten! IN YOUR COFFIN!!!
Overcome with delight, the imaginary Larry Smolsky pranced about, just as the actual Larry Smolsky had so many years before.
OK, OK . . . , he continued excitedly. But suppose it wasn’t like that. Suppose those old-timey rockets hadn’t been scrapped, and were going to all those places, just like you expected. Would you be on them? You? With your eyes? With your math scores? Or don’t you remember what happened when you applied to all those big-time schools?
He began counting them off. Caltech, Stanford, MIT . . . What did those rejection letters say about you ever getting into a spaceship, huh Shmishy? Or getting in anywhere except, oh yeah—he deepened his voice to imitate a self-important announcer—the Physics for Poets program at Lake Chagog State College.
He then switched to an equally bad impression of a TV huckster and crowed, But wait, there’s more.
'Cause you never finished Lake Chagog, did you? 'Cause you quit, six months before graduating, to start that computer company. Now you'd be so rich, you could build your own rockets. But wait! Wait again! What happened this time? How come Gates and Jobs and Bezos could pull it off, but not you? Was it your garage? Nooooo. You sure had as nice a garage as any of them. Remember how your dad had it organized, with the special hooks for the rakes and hoses? Who in the world with a garage like that could possibly not start a successful computer company? Except you, Shmishy, you. You pathetic clown. You four-eyed lard butt. You jobless, moneyless, girl-less, hopeless—
“But not everyone has the same abilities,” protested Marshall, so wrought up by this fantasized encounter that he was speaking out loud to the forest and the stars. “What matters is what you do with what you have, and look what I did, even when I was in debt because of my start-up and couldn’t go back to school. I became a journalist. A science journalist. To inspire people. About the future. Every month for nine-and-a-half years I wrote about the future we could all have if we worked towards it and believed in it, so that even if I didn’t achieve my dream, well, someday others would.”
But Larry Smolsky wasn’t impressed.
If you were such a journalist, he said, then how come you can’t get a job being a journalist now? How come nobody remembers that magazine you worked for, seven months after it got sold? Huh? Well I’ll tell you. Because nobody read the stupid magazine. Nobody but a tiny bunch of techie tail-waggers. So who would hire anyone who wrote for it? Real journalists see a magazine like that, they throw up, they poke their own eyeballs out. They—
“Nooooooo!” retorted Marshall in a tremendous bellow that soon collapsed, however, into choking sobs. “It was a great magazine, written with care and integrity. It was my life, my family. And three thousand subscribers isn’t so negligible, by the way, when you consider how educated and influential—”
Nothing but a bunch of tail-waggers.
“No, they weren’t!”
Were too!
“Were not!”
Tell it to your boss at Circuit World.
This was a low blow, even coming from Larry Smolsky. Marshall went rigid. “I am not going to work there,” he vowed before the Berkshire Mountain Range and its surrounding woodlands.
Oh, really? said Larry Smolsky, now acting puzzled. That’s new. Because it seems to me that a certain person promised himself that if he hadn’t been, as he likes to say, taken, by tomorrow, he’d be applying to, ahem, Circuit World.
“Tomorrow isn’t here yet.”
A certain person, it seems to me, realized that at a certain point in the future—like, say, now—he’d have no choice but to stop being a fucking idiot and get a job.
“I said, tomorrow isn’t here yet. There’s still hours.”
And if I’m not mistaken, it has been made very clear to this person what sort of job he’s suited for.
“She didn’t know what she was talking about!” he all but shrieked, but it was too late, the allusion having brought her fully to mind, along with his recent appointment at the Massachusetts Department of Career Services.
And now there she was, in her brown pantsuit, in her government cubicle, more undermining than Larry Smolsky himself. “What does it say here, Mr. Mishkin?” she was demanding, as with a tobacco stained finger she tapped a document. “What does it say here in black and white? If you want to keep on receiving unemployment compensation, then you must make a reasonable effort to find work. That is, an effort commensurate with your background and ability. Do you know what the word commensurate means?”
She actually thought he didn’t know what commensurate meant!
“It means you cannot be applying to the New York Times and Time magazine and whatnot, and expect us to keep paying you, after all you’ve done is work for some pamphlet.”
She called it a pamphlet!
“You have to face facts, Mr. Mishkin,” she went on. “You are misrepresenting yourself. You are claiming to have worked in the journalism industry when the truth is you have never worked in the journalism industry. Or any industry for that matter. All you have is maybe a bit of general technical knowledge, and mister if I was you I’d be looking very closely at something entry level at a place like Circuit World, where maybe they’d find that useful.
“Actually, I can see you at Circuit World,” she added semi-brightly, trying to encourage him on his way out.
Circuit World, Circuit World, singsonged Larry Smolsky. At age thirty-two Shmishy’s gonna be the dickhead selling TVs at Circuit World.
“I will not, I will not, I don’t care, I will not . . . ,” mantra’d Marshall down the hill and through a fringe of forest and then along the gravel road that led out of the camp.
Although on this occasion his prehistoric Prius did not fail to start, it was understandably unable to get him home in time for Star Trek.
Which, even when he did see it, barely steadied him.
And certainly could offer no alternative to the future that faced him now.