Raised in Captivity Page 4

  He first saw the man from a distance. The man stood in the middle of the path, neither walking nor running, hands on hips. He wasn’t dressed for the conditions. He didn’t look dangerous, but he also didn’t look like the kind of person Trevor wanted to encounter at random, since there was no kind of person Trevor wanted to encounter at random. He tacked to his right, preparing to pass without eye contact. But then the man spoke, and he was forced to glance over.

  “Trevor,” said the man in a three-piece suit. “Trevor Pepper.”

  Trevor stopped, his auburn beard loaded with sweat from the heat and mucus from his allergies. He removed his earbuds and looked at a man he did not recognize. “Do I know you?” asked Trevor. They were roughly the same age, so it was possible they were already acquainted. It was becoming progressively difficult to remember whom he had and hadn’t met. His memory had changed after his thirtieth birthday. His head was running out of RAM.

  “Yes,” said the man in the suit. “We’ve met. But not yet.”

  Trevor was not in the mood for riddles. He was never in the mood for riddles and didn’t like people who were. His options, however, were limited. He could have just kept running, which would have been rude, or he could have politely asked the man to leave him alone, which was potentially ruder. But the stranger kept talking, so Trevor was trapped.

  “Can you come with me? I have a vehicle nearby.”

  “No,” said Trevor. “I’m not going anywhere, with you or anyone else. Why would I do that?”

  “Would you be willing to walk around the reservoir with me? We will walk and talk,” said the man. “I have two bottles of water.”

  “No,” said Trevor. “I don’t want to do that.”

  “But I need to tell you something,” said the man.

  “Then tell me now.”

  The man moved closer to Trevor, casually holding up his palms as a gesture of peace. Trevor balled his right hand into a fist, just in case.

  “I need to tell you two things, both of which are significant,” said the man in the suit. “In order for you to accept the second point—which is the more important point—I need to start by telling you the first point, which is that I know everything about you.”

  “Fantastic,” said Trevor dispassionately, already losing interest. The stranger, however, was not lying. He did know everything there was to know about Trevor, and he proved it in less than ninety seconds. He knew everything about Trevor’s family and everything about Trevor’s career. He knew the layout of Trevor’s childhood home. He knew that Trevor’s favorite movie was The Shining, even though Trevor always told people it was Barry Lyndon. He knew graphic details about his sex life, though he framed these details as respectful compliments. He knew a secret Trevor had kept his whole life regarding a flashlight he’d stolen from a church rectory when he was seven, a private shame Trevor had buried so deep in his memory that he’d almost convinced himself it was something he’d read in a book. He knew abstract things about Trevor’s political ideology that felt intuitively true, even though Trevor could not recall having ever voiced such abstractions aloud.

  “I get it,” said Trevor, stopping the man as he described the Pink Floyd poster a fake girlfriend had once given him on Good Friday. “I get it. I mean, obviously I don’t get it get it, because what you’re doing is impossible. But I get that something impossible is happening, and that it’s happening to me. So tell me the second thing you need to tell me. Let’s get this over with.”

  “That reaction,” said the smiling stranger, “is the reason I’m here. Who else could so easily handle this kind of revelation? Who else would readily accept the impossible? Only you. That’s why you’re necessary.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” said Trevor. “Get on with your business.”

  “You already know why I’m here,” said the man.

  “Actually I have no idea, and you’re not making any sense, and this is neither interesting nor charming, and I’m not traveling through time,” said Trevor. “I have no desire for any of this.”

  The stranger rolled his owlish eyes.

  “Now really, Trevor,” said the man. “Why would you possibly jump to that conclusion? What would possibly generate that mental leap? You clearly comprehend what’s happening here. If I know all these things about your life, these things that I could only learn firsthand from you, a man I’ve supposedly never met—I mean, come on. You’re smart. This conversation could only happen if it had already happened before.”

  “Nope,” said Trevor. “Not interested. Whatever this is, I’m not interested.”

  “Trevor, we are going to travel four hundred forty years into the future. I’m going with you. We’re going together. There is no other way.”

  “Nope.”

  “Trevor, this is important. Nothing is more important than this.”

  “There is no way I’m traveling through time. Unless you can make it happen against my will, which you can’t. Because why would we have this conversation if you could?”

  “Trevor, be practical.”

  “I don’t want to travel into the future. Why would I want that?”

  “The reason you were selected is increasingly self-evident,” replied the man in the suit. “And if I told you why we must do this, you’d never accept the offer. No rational person would. So I can’t tell you why we need to do what we need to do. But I can promise that—when all this is finally over—you will be happy you made the right choice.”

  “I don’t think I’d be happy at all,” said Trevor. “I want to be here, and I want it to be now. I’m not some meathead who thinks the world was better in 1973, when rape was hilarious and people said the N-word on network television and you couldn’t prove if anything was true or false. And now here you are, and you want me to go how far into the future? Four hundred and forty years? Why? If they’re blasting people into the future for unexplained reasons, I assume the future must be awful. I don’t need to see a wasteland. I’m not curious about what a dystopia looks like. That future is not my future. That future is your future, and your future is not my problem.”

  “Here again, Trevor, you seem to be ignoring the only detail that’s irrefutable,” said the man. “How long must this go on? How many times must we do this? You know you’re going to eventually agree. There’s no other way we could be talking so calmly about something this complicated, unless you already unconsciously understood something no normal person could possibly comprehend. Which you do. So it’s simply a matter of time before your consciousness agrees. Are you telling me it doesn’t seem strange that someone you’ve never met just showed up and started telling you personal facts that only you could know? It doesn’t seem curious that you naturally anticipated I was going to ask you to travel through time, even though I never brought that up? Why would that be your first reaction?”

  “I’m not your man, man.” Trevor pushed the buds back into his ears and loped away, not looking back. He ran hard for a few hundred feet before downshifting back to a trot. He tried not to think about what had just transpired, but his mind couldn’t let it go. “That was bizarre,” he thought to himself. But then again, maybe not so bizarre. Maybe not. Maybe he’d been too brusque with the stranger. Time travel was theoretically possible, according to the Internet. Supernatural things happened all the time, in places like Russia and Central America. Mathematical probability supports the possibility of aliens. Alternative realities. The multiverse. Wormholes. The fourth dimension. This whole jog around the reservoir could actually be a lucid dream, and he was just realizing that now. Or maybe he’d tripped a few yards back and hit his head on a rock, and this perceived conversation was some sort of neurological event. Maybe he was still in a coma. Maybe the guy was an actor and this had been a setup for some hidden-camera show he would have loved as a teenager. “Only in L.A.,” he said to himself, involuntarily smiling. Were they still making those prac
tical joke shows? He hadn’t seen one in a while, but there were so many channels now. Also, it was getting dangerously warm. He was feeling dehydrated, and the heat plays with your mind. He looked out across the water. The surface was so stagnant it looked like a painting. Not a painting he could paint, of course. A painting by someone who knew how to paint. If Trevor painted that water, it wouldn’t look anything like the way it actually was. But why feel bad about his inability to paint? He’d never tried painting in his life. He’d tried photography, for a while, when he was twenty-one. But photography was entirely digital now, and less of a skill than it used to be. He’d always been taught that a photographer earned his reputation in the darkroom. But now darkrooms didn’t even exist. Maybe he could build one in his unfinished basement and buy an old Kodak camera and get back into it, although he’d probably lose interest after six months, just like he had in college.

  Trevor completed his 4.4-mile lap and returned to his home, every thread of his clothing drenched with perspiration. He stripped off his clothes as he walked through the house, beelining for the outdoor shower ensconced in the backyard. “How was the lake?” asked his husband. Trevor winced.

  “Good,” said Trevor. “Hot.”

  “No kidding. Was anyone else even out there?”

  “Nobody,” said Trevor.

  “You’re dedicated,” he said. “It’s admirable.”

  “I do what I can,” said Trevor. He stepped through the sliding glass door and strolled to the shower, invisible to the world, nude and relaxed and confused.

  Blizzard of Summer

  The meeting was called by the manager, though the singer and the keyboardist had essentially demanded he do so. The guitarist had no idea what was happening. The drummer assumed it had something to do with the upcoming tour. The bassist didn’t show up at all. The DJ wasn’t an official member of the group, but she showed up anyway because she had nothing better to do.

  The manager was too old to be working with a band like this. He was too old to be working with musicians who still argued about what kind of haircuts would make them look like they weren’t concerned with their appearance. He didn’t even like the group’s music, though he never said that directly. For the past two years, he had unsuccessfully tried to convince them to alter their sound, incessantly pushing them away from power pop and toward metal or ska, two genres he perceived as having greater audience loyalty. But now the group was breaking, finally, and for a reason no one could have anticipated: The song “Blizzard of Summer,” recorded for the band’s debut album and never released as a proper single, was suddenly the sixth-most popular download in North America. Without promotion or radio airplay, it had become an underground smash. They had offers from all the major festivals and several touring supergroups, one of which would be playing stadiums in Australia. This was (almost) real success. But there was also an emerging problem, which was why this meeting was called.

  “I’m going to cut to the chase,” said the manager as he vaped. “The following issue was brought to my attention by Barb and Paul two days ago, although I’d already noticed a few curious things on social media before they contacted me. Certainly, we’re all pretty pleased, and I suppose a bit surprised, by what’s been happening with ‘Blizzard of Summer.’ But there is also this other aspect, this other trajectory, that’s becoming increasingly discomfiting, and I know Barb and Paul feel like it needs to be addressed. I’m not sure I necessarily agree with them on this point, but—”

  “How can you not agree?” asked Barb, cutting him off at the pass. “With what part of this do you disagree?”

  “I suppose I’m a little concerned that addressing it publicly will only make it worse,” said the manager. “It’s not like this is a widely known thing. To some degree, this is about optics.”

  “Optics? Which optics?” asked Corey, softly noodling on an unplugged guitar. “Is this about the record sounding thin? If people are saying it’s a little thin, I fucking agree. We should go back and re-record the overdubs. I think if I moved back to some medium eleven gauges, or maybe even thicker, the tone would be where we want it.”

  “No one is complaining about the thinness of the record,” said Paul. “No one is worried about the gauge of your guitar strings.”

  “Then what the fuck are we worried about?”

  The manager was not sure how to explain this to Corey, a guy who believed unicorns were real animals that had gone extinct during the Ice Age. Even Dana, the drummer, thought Corey was stupid, and Dana was the type of person who thought Drake memes were subversive. Still, the manager had to try, so he tried: “Blizzard of Summer” was a track Barb and Paul had written about the end of their romantic relationship, a rupture that had occurred around the same time the band was forming. In truth, their love affair had always been tepid and contrived. Many of their peers suspected their only motive for falling in love was so that they could eventually break up and fabricate a micro version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The central riff on “Blizzard of Summer” was a synthesis of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” and the opening theme to Sesame Street. It was supposed to be a melancholy song that sounded happy on the surface, a little like something by the Carpenters, but the words were so indistinct that any underlying darkness was invisible. The title of the song was never used in the lyrics. It was written in a 4/4 time signature. It was exactly three minutes long. And for reasons that were impossible to isolate, racists seemed to love it.

  Not since Skrewdriver’s 1983 single “White Power” had a song resonated so overwhelmingly with racist consumers of mainstream pop. It was a runaway alt-right banger (Richard Spencer had supposedly worn one of the band’s T-shirts while delivering a speech advocating the use of chemical weapons in Mexico). An instrumental bluegrass version of the track was recently performed at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Indiana. Most perplexing was a capsule review of “Blizzard of Summer” in the Stormfront-sponsored music publication Modern Xenophobe, where culture writer Wolfgang Wallace noted that he begrudgingly loved the song’s fascist ideology despite disliking the composition of the music, a dissonance that contradicted his philosophy as a formalist critic. Barb and Paul first suspected something was amiss while doing press for their upcoming remix album, when multiple radio hosts queried their thoughts on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were equally disturbed by a demographic chart illustrating where “Blizzard of Summer” had been most aggressively streamed and downloaded: The deepest saturation coagulated around South Boston, although the track was also inordinately popular in Serbia.

  “I’m not sure how we proceed here,” said the manager. He conceded that this was not an issue he’d dealt with before. “I think the first thing we should do is establish our baseline position. Barb and Paul have already expressed their views. But just so we’re all on the same page: Is everybody in this band against racism? Could I safely put out a press release stating that no member of the group is a white supremacist?”

  “I am not a white supremacist,” said the drummer.

  “I am not a white supremacist,” said Corey. “And even if I was, I don’t like labels.”

  “I am not a white supremacist,” said the DJ. “And I think that should probably go without saying, since I’m black.”

  “Okay, great,” said the manager. “We’ve established a clear political identity. I think the next move is to figure out how and why this happened.”

  This, it seemed, was unfathomable. The band fundamentally agreed on one point: If oppressed minorities viewed the song as racist, then it was, in fact, accidentally racist. But that did not seem to be the case. No one had accused “Blizzard of Summer” of being pejoratively offensive. No one found it hateful or problematic. The only people who viewed it as racist were white people who thought racism was awesome. The lyrics made no references to white nationalism. The song’s subtext was vague and possibly nonexistent. The manager noted that the title did include the word blizzard
, and blizzards are made of snow, and snow is white. But Paul was quick to admit that this was a reference to Barb’s temporary cocaine addiction. Corey rhetorically asked if Paul and Barb had possibly broken up over a racial argument, and if it was possible that the emotion of the dispute had infiltrated the texture of the song in a manner so understated that it could only be sensed by unusually perceptive racists. However, the value of his hypothesis was undercut by his second theory, which was that the problem could be solved with the addition of a solo reminiscent of early Jeff Beck.

  The band was at a crossroads, and not the kind of crossroads you want. This crossroads did not involve Robert Johnson, Steve Vai, or Britney Spears. Barb wanted to stop playing “Blizzard of Summer” altogether, even if it cratered their career. Paul agreed with Barb, but added that it wasn’t that simple (and that maybe they should play the song, under the right circumstances, as a way to reclaim its power). Corey thought they should continue playing it at every show, but that they should augment the set with a cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” The drummer said he would do whatever everyone else wanted. The DJ didn’t get a vote, nor did she want one.

  “We’re dealing with a fundamental question about art,” the manager finally said, trying to sound like a person who understood the problem. “Does the motive of the artist matter, or is the received message the only thing that counts? Two of you wrote a love song. Some people think it’s a hate song. Smart people get it. Dumb people don’t. But dumb people are still people. We can’t discount the taste of dumb people. That’s half the audience. Half the people who loved the Beatles were idiots. Charles Manson thought the song ‘Helter Skelter’ was about a coming race war. It’s actually about a British carnival slide. But nobody got murdered because ten million people didn’t think ‘Helter Skelter’ was about racial genocide. People got murdered because one person thought that it was. So again, this is about optics. We need to weigh the value of many normal people understanding the song in a shallow way, against the risk of a few abnormal people misunderstanding the song in a profound way.”