Rage Is Back (9781101606179) Read Free Page B

foolish enough to run my mouth and blow my own spot, end up getting my foot run over by Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair or some shit.
    Sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious. The deal is this: if you enter the stairwell of this building at lobby level and walk all fourteen flights of stairs—which nobody would, since there’s a very nice elevator tricked out with mirrors and wood paneling and it always seems to be idling right there, doors open no less—you emerge on the top floor having traveled exactly twenty-four hours into the future.
    And no, smart guy, you can’t walk down and go back. That would be hot, obviously. You could make a fortune, like the dude in
Back to the Future Part II
. It was the first thing I tried.
    I’m going to say this once and then I promise I won’t come back to it, or even address the reader in the second person anymore, which I can see getting annoying very quickly, seeing as most people want to lose themselves in stories, not open a book and have a finger pointing at them all the time, unless it’s a pop-up book. If you’re already frowning and thinking I’m an unreliable narrator, or going “oh goody, I love magical realism,” then you should cut your losses and go read
Tuesdays with Morrie
, before I get to the really wild shit later on. Skepticism is an admirable trait, but so is asking yourself if you’re really such a fucking Master of the Universe that things might not be happening beneath the surface of your world right now without you knowing. Or even in midair when your back’s turned. I mean, hell, they didn’t discover the duckbilled platypus until 1896, and then everybody thought it was a hoax because mammals aren’t supposed to lay eggs, you feel me?
    I’ve thought about it a lot, and as far as I can tell, there’s very little to be gained by jumping one day forward. It seems like there should be, but really you’re behind. You missed work, school, you don’t know if the Yankees won. Also, whenever I get my H. G. Wells on, I step into the future with a queasy stomach, spangly vision, a general desire to curl up and die that lasts an hour, maybe two. It didn’t happen the first time, before I knew what I was doing, so possibly it’s not travel sickness but some psychological aversion to flouting cosmic law, giving physics the finger.
    The whole thing reminds me of this game I used to play with my boy Cedric in sixth grade, where we’d invent these doofus superheroes. Like, The Salamanderer, who has the regenerative powers of an amphibian: if you cut off his arm, it grows back, weaker and smaller, in about six weeks. Or Diner Man, who’s totally invincible, but only in diners, and spends all his time trying to convince supervillains to grab some pie. Or this dude we never got around to naming, whose power was that he could fly six inches off the ground. We used to convulse on the floor of my bedroom, laughing at this stuff. It wasn’t until recently that I realized it was a metaphor for something. And only as I write this does it occur to me that Graffito The Elusive should have been on the team: will go to any extreme to save the innocent, unless they’re his relatives.
    The reason I didn’t take the elevator up to fifteen to begin with is that I figured the stairwell in this yupster breeding tube would be as good a place as any to pinch a bowl out of my customer’s bag and get zooted. You can’t risk smoking on the street these days, not if you’re young and brown—Karen’s genes are the dominant ones, at least in my complexion—and especially not with a messenger bag full of seventy-dollar eighth-ounces of bomb O.G. Kush in miniature mason jars slung across your chest. Plus, unlike most people my age, I only smoke from glass pipes. To me, blunts are disgusting. You can’t even taste the weed. That might be the point if you’re smoking