The Infinite Future Read online

  “So I take it you haven’t found the novel yet,” I said, hedging his commission, still unsure to what extent I wanted to entangle myself in this quixotic scheme.

  “The Infinite Future continues to elude me, yes,” said Sérgio. “But just as Galahad pursued the Grail and Novalis yearned for the Blue Flower, I continue to seek the quintessence of Captain Irena Sertôrian.”

  “And this is supposed to help you find it?” I said. “Searching through his stories, I mean?”

  I hadn’t meant to sound quite so incredulous, but Sérgio caught my tone and his body tensed.

  “I recognize that the chances of finding The Infinite Future by this method are slim,” said Sérgio. “But unfortunately, the more promising avenues of investigation have led nowhere, and this is what’s left. So. I want very much to find Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie and his long-lost novel, and if that involves grasping at straws, then I will grasp at those straws as tirelessly as the situation requires.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, hoping to smooth things over.

  “I don’t think you can,” said Sérgio, the mood in the room turning sour. “Not yet anyway.”

  Chagrined, he looked at the overstuffed binder I held in my lap.

  “I can see now how this all might be something of an imposition,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not. It’s just a lot to take in.”

  Which was true.

  “Yes,” said Sérgio, looking suddenly exhausted. “Yes, it is.”

  VII

  Six weeks after I got back from São Paulo, the Wayne Fortescue situation came to a sulfurous boil. I’d spent three weeks dodging his emails before deciding that the best way out of this mess was to just give the CAC a novel. It didn’t need to be good, it just needed to exist. My plan was to write very, very quickly, just type, actually, without prewriting or revision or thinking too much at all. I’m a pretty fast typist, so I managed to produce an eighty-thousand-word manuscript in about nineteen days.

  Rest assured, the quality was terrible—just abysmal, stream-of-consciousness babble that would make even Kerouac blush. Here’s a (mercifully) brief sample, littered with half-remembered quotations from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

  Elder Byrne, several paces behind Elder da Silva, breathed heavily as they trudged up the hill, and with each breath he drew the hot, dusty air of the favela into his lungs, air that, in spite of its heat, failed to thaw the cold indifference that clutched Elder Byrne’s chest, an indifference that inured him to the sights that surrounded him, sights that might otherwise have kindled a warmth in him—the stray dog with only three legs and mangy fur, the woman hanging her faded laundry, the gang of children chasing a downed kite, the crumpled lottery ticket, and other things like that, like a pipe he saw lying at the side of the road, the kind of pipe that is smoked, not the kind through which water or gas might run, and all of these things converged to inspire a non-reaction, or at least a non-warming reaction in Elder Byrne’s chest.

  Four days after I emailed him a copy of the novel, I got a phone call from Fortescue.

  “I just finished reading that manuscript you sent me,” he said.

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. This didn’t bode well.

  “And?” I said, bracing myself.

  Through the speaker of my phone I could hear him breathing, each exhale almost a growl.

  “Can I ask you something, Dan?” said Fortescue.

  He spoke softly, but sounded like he wanted to crawl out of my phone and smash my face against a wall.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Again, he waited to respond, letting the silence creep ominously forward for a few beats before asking me, “How stupid do you think I am?”

  Another long pause told me he was not asking rhetorically.

  “Zero,” I said. “Zero stupid.”

  He said, “That’s very interesting, Dan, because after reading that three-hundred-page pile of garbage, I can only assume that you think I’m some kind of imbecile.”

  “It’s a rough draft,” I said.

  “Rough draft, nothing,” said Fortescue, ablaze now with righteous indignation. “What kind of scam are you trying to pull here? Huh? You think because we’re a religious organization we’re not going to notice when you try to swindle us? Just a naïve bunch of Bible beaters? Is that what you think? Is it? You think you can take our money, piss it away, and we’ll be fine with that?”

  “No,” I said, standing my ground. “I don’t think that, but the thing is with grants, they usually—”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, Dan,” said Fortescue. “What’s at issue here is that your so-called novel fails to fulfill the terms of our agreement, and yet you appear completely unwilling to return the money we loaned you.”

  “See, that’s the thing,” I said. “I’ve been doing some research, actually, and the fundamental definition of a grant is that it’s an award of non-repayable funds, so it’s not clear to me—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” said Fortescue, “before you waste any more of my time. Fundamental definition of a grant? You know what you should have done instead of dicking around with online dictionaries? You should have reread the contract you signed, where you’ll see it very explicitly stated that if the novel you produce does not meet our standards, then the funds we awarded you convert to a loan, repayable on demand, with interest, and penalties for late payment.”

  “Then why call it a grant?” I said, working up some righteous indignation of my own. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “If it doesn’t make sense, then why did you sign the contract?” said Fortescue.

  He had me there, no getting around it. Obviously, I should have read the contract more carefully. I had nothing more to say for myself.

  “Get the money together or the Coalition will be forced to take action,” said Fortescue, and hung up the phone.

  The next morning, Fortescue sent me a statement calculating how much interest had accrued on the seven thousand dollars—more than I would have expected—and reminding me that if payments were not forthcoming, the consequences would be dire.

  By this point it was as clear to me as I’m sure it is to you that the Young Religious Novelist Grant was some kind of bizarre scam. Unfortunately, though, it seemed to be a legally binding one. After reading through the contract, I discovered that every condition Fortescue had mentioned was there in black and white, with my signature at the bottom ratifying the entire document. If there was a way out, I couldn’t see it, and since I couldn’t even begin to afford a lawyer, that was that—I could either pay the money or face the wrath of the CAC. And really, even there I didn’t have much choice. I was broke, and so paying them back was not an option. I told Fortescue as much in an email, and then braced myself for the consequences.

  For several weeks, I heard nothing from Fortescue or the CAC, which scared me even more than Fortescue’s bluster had. Wherever I went—on my way home from church, or biking to work, or even checking my mail—I kept half expecting to be ambushed by muscular thugs who would break my fingers and burn my skin with cigarettes. At night, I only half slept, willing myself to stay alert to any noises that might signal an intruder’s entrance into my dark and vulnerable apartment. At the flower shop, I regarded customers with a wary eye, vigilant for any sign that might betray them as CAC goons sent to surveil my place of business. But for two weeks I didn’t see or hear anything suspicious, and I began to half wonder if Fortescue had decided to leave me alone.

  Then one day I came home a few minutes early from work and found a woman I’d never seen before rummaging through my underwear drawer.

  “Hey!” I said, reaching for my phone.

  “Hey Danny,” she said, apparently unconcerned by my presence. “Is that what people call you—Danny?”

  Li
ke I said, I’d never seen this woman before in my life. She was about my age, maybe a few years older, and couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall. She wore a gray suit and a green blouse with one of these ruffles down the front, but what really caught my eye were the black leather gloves on her hands, not bulky burglar’s gloves, ideal for lifting heavy appliances, but slim, elegant assassin’s gloves, intimately tailored to the fingers so as not to interfere with precision knife work or the squeezing of a pistol’s trigger.

  “I’m calling the police,” I said, more frightened now than surprised. Although she hadn’t yet produced a gun, I couldn’t help but imagine one tucked away beneath that smart gray blazer.

  “You don’t want to do that,” she said, lifting the mattress of my bed and sweeping her arm under it. “You’ll only embarrass yourself.”

  With the emotionlessness of a seasoned professional, she dropped my mattress and then crouched down to examine the stacks of CDs next to my bed. She wrote something in a steno pad she held in her left hand, and stood up. I took a step back as she passed me, the possibility of violence still hanging in the air.

  “What are you doing,” I said, unable to resist asking, despite my discomfort.

  At my desk, she opened my laptop and turned it on.

  “It’s fine,” she said, looking directly at me for the first time, taking me in with dispassionate shark eyes. “I’m with the CAC.”

  This was not fine.

  “You work for Fortescue?” I said.

  “I work with Wayne Fortescue,” she said.

  She waited for my laptop to finish booting up, then she wrote something down and closed the laptop.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m really going to call the police if you’re not out of here in, like, five seconds.”

  She said, “If you were going to call the police, you would have done it already.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And for your sake it’s a good thing you haven’t. I’m not breaking any laws here—you agreed to all of this in your contract.”

  “Agreed to what?” I said as she lifted a fistful of pens from the mug on my desk and then looked inside the empty mug with those dead eyes of hers. She replaced the pens, and then one by one, she picked up the books from my desk and, holding them spine-up, flipped their pages to see if anything would fall out. Only my bookmarks did. She wrote that down.

  “I’m cataloging your assets,” she said. “Your meager assets, I should add. The contract stipulates that if you’re not forthcoming with the scheduled loan repayments, the Coalition is entitled to a thorough catalog, prepared by a party of their choosing, of everything you own. Furthermore, the Coalition is not required to provide you with advance notice of this cataloging, and in signing the contract, you grant the party of the Coalition’s choosing express permission to enter your residence, whether or not you are present at said residence at the time of the cataloging. So. Here I am.”

  The contract again. Of course.

  She opened a kitchen cupboard.

  “Is this a rice cooker?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, sitting down at the edge of my unmade twin bed.

  “Does it work?” she said.

  “It did the last time I used it,” I said.

  She wrote that down in her notebook. She gave my fridge the once-over and then opened the freezer door.

  “Come on,” I said. “The freezer? Do you really need to know how many chicken potpies I own?”

  She poked around with her pen and made another note in her steno pad.

  “You’d be surprised what people keep in their freezers,” she said. “I once found twelve thousand dollars’ worth of heirloom jewelry under a bag of mixed vegetables.”

  There was nothing so glamorous in my freezer, though, and she shut the door.

  “So what are you?” I said. “Some kind of burglar-for-hire?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” she said, pulling the refrigerator away from the wall and then running a gloved hand up and down its back. “In-house counsel for the Coalition.”

  “Then I take it you’re responsible for the contract I signed,” I said.

  “I wish,” she said, bracing herself with a wide stance and pushing the fridge back against the wall. “It’s an excellent contract. Elegant, muscular, and airtight. I have tweaked a few passages here and there at my employer’s request, but not enough to claim authorship. Sadly. It really is a beautiful document.”

  She wiped the dust from her gloves on my kitchen dishtowel.

  “It’s funny you say that,” I said, “because the attorney I’ve hired tells me the contract is so flimsy it’ll fall apart the second we step into a courtroom.”

  She looked at me with a patronizing smile and said, “We both know that you’re not meeting with any lawyers, and even if you were, no lawyer that you could afford is going to find any wiggle room in that document you signed. Trust me.”

  She walked across the room and opened the flimsy accordion door that separated my cracked toilet and dripping RV shower from the rest of the apartment. She lifted up the lid of the toilet tank and looked inside.

  “Then why the gloves?” I said.

  “Huh?” she said, replacing the lid of the toilet tank. She picked up my shampoo bottle from the damp floor and gave it a vigorous shake.

  “The gloves,” I said. “If this is so aboveboard, then why are you wearing gloves?”

  “It’s cold out,” she said.

  “Not really,” I said. “Plus, we’re inside.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So, yeah. I’m wearing gloves. I would be stupid not to. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but here it is: I’m coming into your apartment totally blind, right? I have no idea beforehand what kind of person you are, other than you’re someone who can’t fulfill his financial obligations. And I know I’ll be going through your stuff, but what I don’t know is whether or not this is a clean person I’m going to be dealing with. Are there going to be—I don’t know—used needles hidden in piles of trash or something? I mean, that’s an extreme example, but even just garden-variety deadbeat filth is not something I want to be getting all over my hands.”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  “Let me finish,” she said. “I don’t want that on my hands, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable aversion. That said, in your case you have a reasonably clean living space. You are obviously a lonely person, and your apartment does make me sad, but nobody could accuse you of being a slob.”

  She pulled my desk chair to the center of the room, climbed up on it, and ran her hand over the top of the light fixture.

  “Are you just about done here?” I said.

  She looked around.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Kitchen area. Sleeping area. Bathroom. Desk. Check, check, check, and check. Tiny one-room apartment—makes my job a lot easier.”

  “Are we done then?”

  She got down from the chair and pulled it back to the desk.

  “What’s the deal with that binder, by the way?” she said, pointing to the collection of Salgado-MacKenzie stories that Sérgio had given me.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “You realize that only makes me more interested,” she said.

  “It’s a translation project,” I said. “They’re photocopies of stories by a Brazilian science-fiction writer. Nobody’s heard of him.”

  “What’s his name?” she said.

  “Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie,” I said.

  “Never heard of him,” she said.

  “Like I said.”

  She considered this for a moment.

  “A translation project?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m happy to hear you’re pursuing something so lucrative.”


  “It’s not about money,” I said.

  “Clearly.”

  She stood there a moment, hands on her hips, looking around my apartment.

  “I did notice,” she said, “that you have some orange juice in your fridge. Do you want to offer me a drink?”

  And so, totally discombobulated by this request, I did. I didn’t own a couch—there wasn’t really space for one anyway—so the two of us sat at the edge of my bed, each with a mismatched cup of chilled orange juice.

  “Is it Danny or Daniel?” she said. “Or Dan. You never answered my question.”

  “Danny’s fine,” I said, having given myself over to the warped logic of this unexpected, unwelcome interaction.

  “Danny, then,” she said. “Christine Voorhes.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Very polite,” she said. “Can I give you a piece of advice?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said.

  “And this is totally off the record,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Give Fortescue the money,” she said. “Just do what you have to do. Get the money together and give it to him. He’s going to get it from you one way or another, and the longer the process drags on, the more humiliations lie in wait for you.”

  “A nice piece of unbiased advice from Fortescue’s own lawyer,” I said.

  “I told you,” she said, “I don’t work for Fortescue. I work for the CAC—he and I both do. And anyway, are you aware that the penalties accrue weekly? Weekly, Danny. If you don’t have the money—and I know you don’t—then borrow from your family. It’s embarrassing and awkward, I know, but trust me, it’s the cleanest way out of this.”

  “No one in my family has that kind of money just lying around,” I said.