psychotic billionaire so reclusively and obsessively shrouded in secrecy for so long it might be argued that the man who appropriated his memories became more the real rememberer than the real rememberer himself (Year Four: 13 March 1972).
More than these, the crucial reference points of the Apocalyptic Calendar were moments of nihilistic derangement no scheme could accommodate. If the various connecting timelines that the Occupant had drawn in red and black between murder and mayhem and madmen were secret tunnels running through a mansion of memory, in which history was only the floor plan, certain insane events large and trivial eluded the Calendar’s geometry altogether. They included the erection of London Bridge in Arizona (Year Four: 10 October 1971), the gassing of a subway in Tokyo (Year Twenty-Seven: 20 March 1995), the discovery of a burial ground of slaughtered eagles in Wyoming (Year Four: 3 August 1971), the disintegration of an American spaceship and all its crew due to the erosion of a tiny rubber ring (Year Eighteen: 28 January 1986), the discovery and announcement that video games triggered epilepsy (Year Twenty-Five: 14 January 1993), the decapitation of a notorious snuff-film director in a Manhattan traffic tunnel (Year Fourteen: 3 October 1981), the hounding unto death of an English princess by tabloid photographers in a fatal car crash in Paris (Year Thirty: 31 August 1997), and the mass marriage of four thousand people performed by a cracked Korean minister who chose their spouses for them, on 16 July 1982 (Year Fifteen), which by sheer coincidence happened to be the same day Kristin was born.
But finally, the Occupant told Kristin, he had determined that the true center of the Apocalyptic Age, and the true center of the true millennium that began on the seventh of May 1968, and the true center of the Apocalyptic Calendar among all its crisscrossing lines and floating anarchic events, the true vortex where all meaning collapsed into blackness, lay between two abysmal events so beyond the pale of unreason that a civilized person could barely bring himself to contemplate them. One, on 5 May 1985, was the pilgrimage of an American president to a German cemetery for the express purpose of laying a wreath in honor of the most singularly vicious, sadistic and incontestably evil human beings of the Twentieth Century. The other, only twelve days before on 23 April, was the utterly arbitrary decision by America’s greatest soft-drink company to immediately discontinue the single most successful product in the history of modern commerce, in order to produce in its place a bad imitation of its obviously inferior competitor.
B Y THE TIME THE Occupant had finished talking, afternoon had given way to dusk and dusk had given way to night. No light came through the pale blue calendar that papered over the windows except small throbbing white orbs of streetlamps on the road below the back of the house, that curved to the east before curling down the hill.
Bonkers with a capital B, Kristin said to herself. Around and around in the dark, in clockwise circles, the Occupant paced furiously. It was not unlike the night Kristin had awakened to hear him prowling the foot of her bed; mindlessly he kicked vodka bottles out of his way. She could see his blue eyes glittering in the dark. “What?” she said nervously to his silence.
He stepped toward her. He pulled her up from the small footstool where she’d sat almost motionless for hours and ran his hands over her body, as though searching for a particular spot on her thigh, along her forearm, under a breast.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Not so long ago,” he said, “I made this … confounding determination.”
“OK. Confound me.”
He knelt at her feet and ran his hands up one leg, as though looking for the button that would open a hidden door. “I determined,” he said, “that if modern apocalypse is indeed an explosion of time in a void of
More than these, the crucial reference points of the Apocalyptic Calendar were moments of nihilistic derangement no scheme could accommodate. If the various connecting timelines that the Occupant had drawn in red and black between murder and mayhem and madmen were secret tunnels running through a mansion of memory, in which history was only the floor plan, certain insane events large and trivial eluded the Calendar’s geometry altogether. They included the erection of London Bridge in Arizona (Year Four: 10 October 1971), the gassing of a subway in Tokyo (Year Twenty-Seven: 20 March 1995), the discovery of a burial ground of slaughtered eagles in Wyoming (Year Four: 3 August 1971), the disintegration of an American spaceship and all its crew due to the erosion of a tiny rubber ring (Year Eighteen: 28 January 1986), the discovery and announcement that video games triggered epilepsy (Year Twenty-Five: 14 January 1993), the decapitation of a notorious snuff-film director in a Manhattan traffic tunnel (Year Fourteen: 3 October 1981), the hounding unto death of an English princess by tabloid photographers in a fatal car crash in Paris (Year Thirty: 31 August 1997), and the mass marriage of four thousand people performed by a cracked Korean minister who chose their spouses for them, on 16 July 1982 (Year Fifteen), which by sheer coincidence happened to be the same day Kristin was born.
But finally, the Occupant told Kristin, he had determined that the true center of the Apocalyptic Age, and the true center of the true millennium that began on the seventh of May 1968, and the true center of the Apocalyptic Calendar among all its crisscrossing lines and floating anarchic events, the true vortex where all meaning collapsed into blackness, lay between two abysmal events so beyond the pale of unreason that a civilized person could barely bring himself to contemplate them. One, on 5 May 1985, was the pilgrimage of an American president to a German cemetery for the express purpose of laying a wreath in honor of the most singularly vicious, sadistic and incontestably evil human beings of the Twentieth Century. The other, only twelve days before on 23 April, was the utterly arbitrary decision by America’s greatest soft-drink company to immediately discontinue the single most successful product in the history of modern commerce, in order to produce in its place a bad imitation of its obviously inferior competitor.
B Y THE TIME THE Occupant had finished talking, afternoon had given way to dusk and dusk had given way to night. No light came through the pale blue calendar that papered over the windows except small throbbing white orbs of streetlamps on the road below the back of the house, that curved to the east before curling down the hill.
Bonkers with a capital B, Kristin said to herself. Around and around in the dark, in clockwise circles, the Occupant paced furiously. It was not unlike the night Kristin had awakened to hear him prowling the foot of her bed; mindlessly he kicked vodka bottles out of his way. She could see his blue eyes glittering in the dark. “What?” she said nervously to his silence.
He stepped toward her. He pulled her up from the small footstool where she’d sat almost motionless for hours and ran his hands over her body, as though searching for a particular spot on her thigh, along her forearm, under a breast.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Not so long ago,” he said, “I made this … confounding determination.”
“OK. Confound me.”
He knelt at her feet and ran his hands up one leg, as though looking for the button that would open a hidden door. “I determined,” he said, “that if modern apocalypse is indeed an explosion of time in a void of
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