summer

My grandfather was the first quarterback in our family. He was six foot four and lived in Missouri for the first fifteen years of his life before he was scouted by Texas and they moved him down south for ‘development’ purposes. They gave him a full ride and even paid for the last couple years of prep school so he could get his grades up, and he did. It was a big deal in those days. He played a couple seasons for Texas and then blew out his knee in ’68. I think he’s still got the Longhorns record for sophomore passing yards over a single season. In ’84 or so they found out that he’d torn his ACL and Meniscus, and he spent the last forty years of his life complaining about what could have been and trying to make back what he could through the three sons he had. My father played for Michigan—his younger brother chickened out and became a doctor, while the older one got shot straight through the head in the Gulf. He played two games for the Dolphins before getting his legs blown out in a car crash. Grandpa didn’t shed a tear at uncle Damien’s funeral, but he bawled his eyes out the day dad got out of the hospital. He was all-Big Ten two years in a row and could run a 4.25 as a quarterback.

Being a quarterback’s not like the other positions. You get all the glory, but you also get all the shit. You could be sixty pounds overweight and still be a phenomenal quarterback. There’s a reason that of the NFL’s 32 teams there’s maybe five or six any given year which have a good QB. The best running back in the world can’t win the league for you. People take you more seriously. When I first had sex with Gillian Donoghue all I had to do was tell her I was starting QB. I wasn’t even that smart. I was failing orgo and hadn’t read a book since high school. But all I had to do was look out the window while chewing some gum and give her a bit of dogshit like ‘you never know what’s going to happen out there when you’re on the 30-yard-line with two downs to go’ and she basically leapt on my cock. This was back when I was at Yale. I’d wanted to play for Alabama, but my dad was a stronger spirit than my grandfather—he’d wanted me to get an education. And, ‘course, those Alabama girls don’t really compare to the Yale ones.

I was six foot even. The skimpy runt of the family, but I had the gift.

Dad didn’t tell me about it until I’d already made all-state. That was when we were living in Milwaukee. I was a sophomore, and he took me out on a drive. Said he was damn proud of me. If there’s one thing that’s always been true it’s that my dad’s been proud of me. He’s told me that since day one. ‘I’m always going to be proud of you, son,’ he says. And I’m damn sure he means it, too. If he’s anything like me then he never thought he had all that much to be proud about himself, so being proud of your son’s the only thing he could ever do. One day I’m going to have a son and I’m sure I’m going to be damn fucking proud of him too, you’ll believe it. Someone’s got to, and for me it was my dad.

He told me that he wanted to talk about something serious. I was fifteen. At first I thought it was about what had happened at Ramona’s last fall. She’d gotten pregnant, and she didn’t know who’s kid it was: it could’ve been mine, for all they knew, but ‘course I knew it wasn’t mine. So he sat me down and gave me the thick of it. But I didn’t really need him to put two and two together. And dad and grandpa never had it as good as I did, anyway. For them it was more like intuition. They didn’t have the foresight. They couldn’t pass a test without ever reading a textbook. That’s why they had to be six foot four to make it all-state while I could do it at six foot and running a 5.02. All I ever needed was the arm. And dad made sure of that—I had the best arm in the country. Later when the scholarships started pouring in I took a look at my scouting report. ‘Novak threw 14 TD passes in his 8 games as a starter this season. He’s a winner if I’ve ever seen one. Yes, the work ethic is questionable, but there’s no doubt about it—with an 85% pass completion rate in ‘21, that arm is absolute magic.’

Absolute magic! What a great phrase. I was proud of it, engulfed by it—I was a cocky piece of shit kid who grew up into a cocky piece of shit adult. Two years into Yale and I already wanted to leave. In ’23 I threw 600 yards three games in a row and the whole country was slobbering to get this cocky piece of shit QB into their squad. A guy from Notre Dame knocked on my parents’ front door. I could go to Michigan, but dad’s legacy was too strong there, and OSU was out of the question. In the end it came down to Stanford and UCLA, and I went UCLA because of the girls. It was a good school, education-wise. I drove across the country all by myself—contrary to what you think, good athletes are solitary creatures. I was surrounded by half-naked linemen all the time but that didn’t mean I had anything in common with them. And it turned out I really needed some isolation, some discipline. I stopped for two weeks at the Grand Canyon. Learned the difference between a condor and an eagle. I found out what a rattlesnake sounded like. When I drove into LA the sound was so obtrusive that I almost turned around to make my way back into the desert, but I got there, enrolled, found a dorm, started my degree. The PAC-12 wasn’t all bad, but I think dad really wanted me to play Big Ten. I picked a major and stuck to it. English. I began to read again. I’d made a reputation of myself at Yale, and it wasn’t a good one. ‘Course, you can’t really say anything to a QB who throws 650 yards a game even if he’s fucked half the cheerleading squad and most of the faculty, too. All throughout my youth I’d only ever wanted to do two things: fuck pussy and play ball. And at Yale I’d discovered the meaning of excess. That’s just how it was with those New England Girls. They suck it out of you. Read you Emily Dickinson later. I needed to pull it together.

And that was me, 20 years old, driving to UCLA knowing that I couldn’t fuck it up the way I’d fucked up at Yale. I wasn’t an Ivy Leaguer no more. I was a ballplayer. A quarterback. And I’m going to tell you about a series of events that happened to me all throughout the ’24 football season, my junior year of college, give you a little taste of what it was like to be someone who thought he mattered. In the end I turned out alright—I played four seasons for the Lions, made the playoffs thrice, but even Tom Brady couldn’t win the Lions the Super Bowl, let alone some kind of piece of shit like me.

Underneath it all I guess football really meant a lot to me. You’d think it wouldn’t, because of the foresight. You can call it magic, my dad called it the gift, but I always just thought of it as ‘my foresight.’ It’s a bit like intuition, but also knowing that your intuition is right. Only it was right about everything. One of the reasons I liked Gillian Donoghue so much is because she was a math major and one evening that we were doing molly in her 911 she taught me about determinism and nondeterminism. For most people foresight was deterministic. They knew that if they did x they would more or less get y, like if you pressed the power button on your TV remote then the TV would turn on. Sure the remote could be broken, but you knew that that’s what the damn thing did. For me it was less simple causality and more like infinite threads of possibility extending in all directions and I knew what each one of them would do. I knew, for instance, that if I told Shelly Bushwick that I wanted to kiss her she’d take me out back to her shed and take her shirt off. I also knew that if I instead told her that I just wanted to see her in the shed she’d kiss me but she wouldn’t go all the way. It wasn’t like I saw it, visually, things just clicked into place and I would know it would happen. Like memory, but for the future. I was twelve years old and I didn’t even know what tits were, but I knew that Shelly would take her shirt off and I don’t think even she knew why she did it but she did. And it was because of me—I knew what to say, I knew what to do. Always. Out on the field I knew what plays they’d run, that the FB would trap block. And, sure, the TV remote would be broken sometimes, but I didn’t need to win every play. 85% of them would do. Sometimes I fucked up on purpose, and sometimes my arm gave out. It was a magic arm, but it wasn’t perfect.

Before driving out to UCLA I spent my summer with Gillian’s family out in the Hamptons. Gillian was the first person outside my dad who I ever told about my foresight. She was beautiful in a bit of a strange way—dark hair, pale skin, but what I really liked were her wrists. So small and delicate, and she was one of those girls who wore a bunch of bracelets and kept them all covered up. I had a habit of pulling them back over her forearm and kissing the patch of skin that covered her vein, as if I was going to rip out her arteries with my teeth. I guess she was about as close to a girlfriend as I’d ever got. She was one of those people who were kind of unpredictable, in that I knew how to manage her overall but I wasn’t able to know for sure what she was going to say or do at any given moment. That summer we did all kinds of experiments trying to figure out just what the hell I could do with it, and there was an evening we dropped a lot of acid and were lying out there by the beach and everything was quiet, except I knew that I wanted to fuck her on the beach and that there was really nothing I could do to get her to fuck me on the beach. That was a puzzle, that was. So instead I sat up and I told her that I was moving out to UCLA in the fall and that I was a morally compromised individual and that she deserved better than me. She gave me the usual shit about how it’s her choice, not mine, but I was really serious, this time. I would fuck this girl up. I’d already given her mono and I’m pretty sure I’d passed on crabs as well. She started crying and I walked away. It’s one of the few moments in my life I’m proud of.

‘Course, I already kind of knew that my trip to the Hamptons would be cut short, anyway, but it was a surprise to mom and dad. Despite everything I knew that mom, at least, thought I was a fuck-up. It was one of those things I was always kind of bummed about. She’d been a stay-at-home mom for God knows how long, and once I left for college she didn’t have anything to do. As a kid I remember going to church and praying for a sister but in the end I didn’t have any siblings, and I could tell she was relieved by it. This was the year she was just finishing off her psychology MA because she’d decided to become a therapist now that she had all that free time and she’d learnt that stuff about personality disorders and Cluster A and Cluster B and she was convinced that she’d given birth to someone who had a Cluster A personality disorder only she knew there was no way she could ever get me to go to therapy or whatever would fix it. And truth be told I didn’t like living with someone who would go to God and pray that her son become a man instead of just sitting down and talking to him. She had some idea what I’d been up to at school and she didn’t like it. She was really one of those new age spiritualism type people who thought that the natural environment of kids was unstructured play and she thought that the football had done a number to my head. Once she gave me an amulet that she got from the sea. It was a beautiful conch shell and she said she’d had it blessed by a shaman, and I loved it, I really did. But she spent so much time worrying about her son that she never got to know him, and I knew, even then, that when she was going to die of breast cancer about a decade from that summer there were practically no series of events that led to me spending enough time with her to really make some good memories that I could cherish after she was gone unless I stopped with the football altogether. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Even at fifty-five. But in the end I chose football.

One of the other things I liked about Gillian is that even though she was a hardcore third-wave feminist who believed in all these things like the Wage Gap or Polyamory or Emotional Labour she had at her core a series of concrete behaviors that I can’t describe better than traditionally girly. For example in that summer in the Hamptons when we were doing all those experiments (and there were a lot of them, another one of her far-out beliefs was in the validity of the so-called ‘scientific method’) she would note down her hypotheses and results in a lined pink notepad on the cover of which she’d stenciled “Gillian and Barry’s Magic Book.” As I said, she was the kind of girl who wore bracelets and would say things like ‘Of course you’re a Scorpio Moon’ and for a while there she really had me believing in astrology to the point that I was reading the paper before the game against Dartmouth and wondering if that was the source of my foresight in the first place. Can you believe it? She had me believing in astrology, me being a born-and-raised Milwaukee quarterback who had the ability to see the future and could verify, independently, that none of these horoscopes would ever pan out—yet she somehow still got me thinking things like ‘that Taurus son of a bitch couldn’t keep his hands out my refrigerator’ despite knowing that it was all some kind of correlation vs causation trickery. Believe it or not, when I did graduate UCLA it was with a minor in Statistics—something about knowing the future made me particularly interested in mortal attempts to combat uncertainty, and I proved quite good at it as well. As for the Magic Book, I’ve still got it, and after Milwaukee I was iterating on the premises of the experiments we’d run together. I’d like to think that walking away from Gillian had given me some initiative, and my own experiments towards the end of the summer were the first time in a while I was able to apply initiative towards something I was actually curious about. I wasn’t the curious sort of kid, but I became deeply interested in things as an adult. Like my father—when I was young his hobby of choice was chainsmoking, but by the time I was a tween he’d bought all these books about World War II and when he’d be talking shit about a coworker with my mother he’d moved on from merely saying ‘that faggot’ to ‘he wouldn’t last a day in Guadalcanal.’ These things seep into families. Later I impressed this Indian girl at Yale by moodily describing to her the tragedy of Stalingrad. ‘A million people,’ I said. ‘A million people died in that battle. All for a city that was already reduced to rubble, in a war that was already lost.’ Women have a tendency towards getting really close to you and whispering in your ear even if you’re all alone in a room together, and at that moment if you kiss them they won’t pull back. Formally Gillian and I had an ‘open relationship,’ which was very convenient and very clever to me at the time but in hindsight was another example of my stunning moral cowardice. Needless to say I was a troubled young man. Knowing that I would feel guilt about choices in the future didn’t prevent me from making those choices anyway, especially because I knew I’d turn out alright. But I liked to think at the time that this open relationship enabled me to get an actual education of the kind that I was missing out on by playing hooky with all my courses (I still got solid Bs by going through the lecture notes a couple days before the tests—the things that were going to appear on it would sort of ‘pop out’) through these girls. The Indian girl, for instance, gave me a lasagna recipe for the ages. She was quite a bit cleverer than most in that she knew what she was getting into and she had about her this air of I can do whatever I want until my parents marry me off to some doctor, anyway, which led to her having developed a similar lackadaisical attitude towards morality because in a way she was perfectly well aware of what her future held, too.

The first experiment in the Magic Book was during Finals Week and was so simple so as to be almost meaningless—Gillian flipped a coin and asked me to guess whether it’d be heads or tails. What this revealed was that I wasn’t actually particularly great at predicting truly random choices. We repeated this one several hundred times over an evening and over the summer and in the end it turned out that I was right about 60-65% of the time, which was definitely far above the expected average of 50% but also didn’t mean I had God-like omniscience. When we repeated this experiment with her holding a balloon in either hand and asking me to guess which one she’d drop I did much better, guessing correctly about 85% of the time (because my telling her which hand would influence the outcome, I wrote down my prediction on a piece of paper, instead). It meant that I was a lot better at predicting what people would do than with completely random events like the weather; if things had some kind of narrative significance I would be much better off, like knowing what the weather would be on the day of the game than on any random day of the week in, I don’t know, Laos. We ended up calling this the ‘significance of the actor,’ which in this case was me. I couldn’t see ‘the future’ in the abstract. I was in-tune with my future. As if I had access to a book which would tell me all the consequences of my own actions but wouldn’t give me a whit about the Powerball numbers next week (and trust me, Gillian tried to get the Powerball numbers). The sole weekend we weren’t up to something deranged in her almost-empty Hampton house was in June when we drove down to Atlantic City to test my precognitive abilities in a moment where there were actual stakes. I was pretty excited to go gambling partly because I’d never done it before but also because I was generally attracted to shiny things which glowed and sparkled—it’s also why at UCLA I had Cathy sprinkle glitter-dust on my helmet before going out on the field. It was about a four-hour drive and I was kind of surprised to find that we only crossed one state line. If I remember correctly I had a strong intuition about the potential hazards of gambling for someone like me ever since I was a teenager, but I was surprised by how much Atlantic City proved to be a minefield. I don’t really think of myself as having an addictive personality. I smoked pot moderately, I never drank in excess, and when I did do coke it came with the usual athletic guilt of ‘fuck what if they detect this shit in my system during a random drug test,’ but the one reason I never tried heroin was because I’d heard these horror stories of guys shooting it up once and then throwing their lives away chasing that same high, and every scenario in which I could try heroin always ended up with me writhing in pain after some kind of full-body orgasm. Gambling was similar. I could tell that I’d get completely addicted because this was precisely the thing I was bad at. So when we did end up gambling the games I played were blackjack and poker, obviously, and we won big and spent it all on ordering the entire menu at this triple Michelin Star restaurant in Manhattan. I always liked the idea of having money but never really wanted it. Which is why I liked Gillian so much, I guess.

We did a few more of these trivial experiments in order to verify what kind of things I was best at foretelling, which turned out to be

guessing sports plays—when we repeated the balloon experiment with a baseball I turned out to do even better, and had perfect accuracy when done with a football,

predicting the responses of people—accuracy proceeded as young women, older women, authority figures in that order, and

determining contents of documents before I’d taken a look at them.

For a while there this made me gleeful, knowing that there was some essential determinism in my life—that I’d turned out the way I was precisely because my gifts facilitated that lifestyle, but Gillian provided a more harrowing thought in that the reason why I was good at these exact things was because my foresight could be trained, and these were the things I’d chosen to train it on since birth. Gillian was always sophisticated about this stuff. In the Book there’s long freestyle documentation of hypotheses and explanations, and several notes on methodology which tried to adjust for the fact that I was inherently an unreliable source—the results of experiments would vary depending on what I was feeling or whether I could predict the outcomes of the experiment. A few weeks after we played the coin-tossing game Gillian repeated the experiment after asking me what I thought the outcome would be, first. I had to explain to her that the foresight was kind of like using your own brainpower; there was a basic amount I was using all the time to do simple things, but just the way in which you had to sit down and do a math problem sometimes I also had to sit down and really focus to know what the future would hold especially if it came to the long term consequences of my actions. In football I’d gotten so good at taking advantage of it that it was as automatic as using your ear or your eye. No manual sensory processing. I was just playing a different game from everyone else. But she did something very clever which I didn’t anticipate because by that time I’d stopped trying to manipulate Gillian and allowed her a modicum of free will—I could still predict what she’d do by and large but I wasn’t trying to engineer one outcome or the other and so the probabilities of her responding in a particular way were sort of many but uniform. That’s to say that there were about ten different ways she could respond to something I did and I had stopped choosing actions which resulted in the ways I wanted her to react (I somehow ended up doing this anyway with people I’d grown comfortable with—I wasn’t trying to gain anything out of them and so I would just ‘let them be’ unless I wanted something) and the probability of her picking any one of those ten ways was about even and so about 10%, on the whole, which was really too small for my mind to consider significant. In other words, I’d stopped trying to manipulate Gillian, and so she had the potential to surprise me. In this case what she did was she repeated the experiment—which she called coin-tossing-with-guessing—about ten times, of which she randomly picked one trial in which she would just ask me the outcome first but wouldn’t toss the coin later. This caught me off guard. Each time my foresight had told me something like ‘this time I’ll predict 7 out of 10 coin tosses successfully’ but when she refused to do the experiment there was a collapse of outcomes and two things happened simultaneously. First, I got a horrible migraine. Second, I was unable to remember what I’d guessed. Gillian called this the ‘future memory hypothesis.’ Briefly speaking, what it said was that once I had chosen a particular thread and carried it out to fruition, I would be unable to access what would have happened in the other threads. She did some more extrapolation to try to solve the problem of why, if this was the case, was I not constantly collapsing into some kind of paradox that bent inwards, because the micro-choices I made at any given moment would inevitably lead to such collapses happening at every instant, but that was the one question we weren’t able to answer. Somehow I existed. I was simply because I was.

After that Gillian became increasingly methodical with the experiments because she knew I was now an unstable source. She set a clock to ring thrice randomly during any 24-hour period and those were the times we’d do the experiments, so that I wouldn’t ever become better at guessing their outcomes. The rest of the time we were out on hikes, sailing, and, of course, fucking. This was the first time I’d ever been left alone with someone I liked for any long period of time. I learnt all her quirks and her imbalances and all sorts of things that almost left me out to dry. For instance, I’d always known that a thread to avoid with Gillian was one in which I overtly mentioned or even spent a lot of time staring at her upper incisors which were—I hate to say it—a bit bucky, that’s the only way I know how to put it. It was a sensitive spot for her. Every one of those interactions was supposed to end with her either getting angry at me and running off, or worse: nodding along and then silently resenting me for saying this, an action which would ultimately damn our relationship. So I almost short-circuited when one day mid-June we’d spent most of the morning having sex in her parents’ bedroom and it turned out that the ‘optimal’ thing to say in this situation was point out how funny her teeth were and she’d respond by giggling and biting my ear. This had never happened to me before. I’d just never known anyone long enough. I always thought people were fixed, you know. Like Mitch Douglas, the kid who always had this fantasy about TPing people’s houses—you didn’t have to be me to know that he’d end up selling real estate. But this was different. Gillian was different. I wanted to make her happy, and the way I’d do this kept changing. All of a sudden that bus stop and locker room talk started making sense to me. Taha going on about how his girlfriend got pissed at him for getting her flowers. I laughed out of courtesy, but inside I was always surprised that she hadn’t left him yet. But that’s not how these things worked. People wouldn’t just get up and leave one day. And that’s not even to mention the sex. Before Gillian I’d never had sex with the same person for a sustained period of time—why should I? I already knew what it was going to be like. Fucking to me wasn’t all that different from jerking off, only, a pussy was much better than your hand. It was warmer, nicer, all that stuff. I sometimes felt bad for having this kind of knowledge, knowing that you could get girls to do all sorts of things. Occasionally I’d go down on a girl knowing that she’d fold my laundry after. They were all kind of the same, but the experience was different enough. Usually I wasn’t even fucking to get off. I just thought it’d be funny to see a few chicks fight over me. Or like fucking Professor Adams to get an A. I could pass her class, sure, but I just wanted to be able to say ‘that’s five points right there,’ that sort of thing. Or fuck a woman while her husband was in the house. Once I sucked a guy off just for the hell of it. It was his first time, too, but unlike me I think he was seriously questioning. I’d like to think I did him a favor. ‘Course, I didn’t care much what happened to him afterward. But with Gillian I found out how strange sex could be with the same person. For example she didn’t want the same things all the time. I could go down on her, but she wanted some variability. Sometimes she’d like doing it on the sofa. I could tell, but it was always a bit of a shock, anyway, that that’s what she was wanting right now. Gillian was like that. Kept me on my toes.

There’s a lot more that Gillian wanted to discover that we couldn’t even with all the time in the world. I’d met her when she was a senior and she was off to Columbia in the fall. We had the house keys, the boat keys, the car keys; we used all of them in equal measure, and after a couple screaming matches we’d discovered pastimes that didn’t involve our clothes lying face down on the floor. Chess was a big one—knowing what she was going to move did nothing at all, and I was completely resistant to improvement. Gillian said I played like a 5-year-old. She taught me how to watch a movie and enjoy it even if I knew the ending. ‘Everybody knows what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘The joy is in seeing it happen in front of you.’ We watched Manhattan in Manhattan. She didn’t talk to me for half an hour after I told her the 17-year-old was hot—I knew she’d do that, but I also knew she’d forget. Back then I thought the summer was going to last forever. Sometimes we’d just talk about things. She was impressed by my knowledge of World War II. What if Pearl Harbor didn’t happen? What if they didn’t drop the bombs? Great questions, but she was disappointed that my answers were the some as anyone else’s. My web of consequences was limited to myself. I had no idea how these large-scale events went. All I ever cared about was the next game, the next girl. For the first time in my life I felt shallow. She found an apartment in New York City and was going to live with a roommate, and she was planning to cook alone. She liked having me cook with her. Cooking’s the one place where she thought my talent was very useful. She didn’t want to learn the hard way how the Mac and Cheese would turn out. She let me complete that for her. A few times she let her guard down and told me all these things about her own time at Yale: she’d dated two guys before me, and both of them had been assholes. I was reluctant to believe this—every girl thinks her exes are assholes—but in her case it really seemed like it was true. She was too smart for them, too clever. One of them never kissed her in public. Girls love that stuff. The flip-side of knowing all these behaviors they had in common was also knowing just how different each of these girls were, just how different were the things that they expected from guys. ‘Course, there were girls that wouldn’t sleep with me no matter what I’d do. Gillian told me that they thought I was an asshole. I always wondered how come they thought I was an asshole if they’d never met me. She said that they could smell it on me. Once she asked me a question that still haunts me at night. She asked me if I’d ever thought of doing the things that’d make everyone like me. I realized that I’d dropped the possibility once I found out it wouldn’t get me what I wanted.

Why was Gillian doing this? Why was she so interested in the mechanics of my foresight? I asked these questions myself repeatedly throughout that glorious summer, and it was tantalizing precisely because every time I would ask her that or even projected what her answer would be assuming I asked her I was always greeted by an unassuming ‘because.’ I was convinced that she was trying to use me to get money or fame or something tangible. And, truth be told, I didn’t give a single shit if she was doing that—I was happy to let her use me for any purposes, noble or otherwise. It never struck me once that she might be interested in me merely because she was interested in me, or even simply because she was in love with me. My understanding of human behavior was purely through observation; I had never given a thought about what was actually going on in her head, only how she would act or react. It never occurred to me that sometimes people ate ice cream because they were happy and sometimes they ate ice cream because they were sad. Things were literal to me—people ate ice cream, that’s it. I knew that my mother was disappointed, and I knew it had to do with my behavior up in school and the fact that I played football, but I never understood why those things could cause her disappointment, only that they did. At UCLA all my electives ended up being some combination of computer science or statistics, and I remember this one computer science course taught by an old Chinese professor who had so much excitement in his system that after every mildly interesting statement he would pop like a human soda can and imprint whatever wisdom he had found in it upon our brains. It was a small class as far as those things went—maybe ten or twelve people on the whole. I remember him saying that there were people out there who thought that the human brain was merely a sufficiently advanced machine and that it all came down to inputs and outputs. I thought that was a startling summary of what I had learnt during my time at Yale. Press the right buttons, get the right outputs. In the case of my mother, I thought that her system was one of generating disappointment, and the inputs were football and debauchery. But after my time with Gillian I realized there might be more to it. But even by then I’d given up on ever making my mother happy.

By the time my last two weeks at the Hamptons rolled around Gillian’s ideas and experiments had become systematic and far more complex. She was keeping a secret from me; I knew that the only way I could wrestle it out of her was through means that would otherwise end our relationship, so I persisted. I tried to sit down and think ahead to what the secret would be but Gillian had laid a trap for me: if she suspected that I had cheated and if my behavior was in any way consistent with me having figured out the secret through precognition she would simply refuse to tell it to me under any circumstance. She really was too clever for her own good. Determined, too. It turned out that the ‘secret’ simply was the fact that she thought that the ability I called my foresight was in fact not a single, unified thing. It was two different precognitive frameworks working in tandem. One was the part that would predict outcomes, which was simply the nondeterministic web of causality I talked about previously—the ability which would tell me what would happen if I pressed the remote. The other was a vaguer, more nebulous ability that had a stronger understanding of my own personal future similar to a personal history—an intuition that would tell me what future would actually happen. We ended up calling them near-foresight and far-foresight. Even before I came to the Hamptons I had some sense that I would leave sooner than expected. But this made no sense in terms of my near-foresight: all that would tell me was what would happen if I decided to leave early. On the other hand, my far-foresight knew that what I would actually end up doing was leaving early. It was an eerie sort of tryst between the two that I lived in. And my far-foresight was never wrong. Somehow or the other, things would work out in such a way that I would end up taking the series of actions that led to it being vindicated. It was a careful balance of determinism and nondeterminism that was far beyond our abilities to understand that summer. But by the end Gillian came up with a truly genius experiment to separate the two. We’d long past moved beyond coins and balloons, and what she instead did was write a short computer program that the Book says looked something like this:

x = (time(button.press) % 2) ? 0 : 1

The setup was that I would press the spacebar on her computer, and if the second I pressed it (we measured seconds from the beginning of the program) was an even second then it would output 0, while otherwise it would output 1. Gillian wanted me to guess what number I would output. Because the output of the experiment was deterministic, my near-foresight wouldn’t help me here: both she and I knew what would happen if I pressed it at an even or odd number respectively. But the genius thing about it was that she would start the clock while I was in a different room and bring me in so that I had no idea whether I was on an even or an odd second, and then run a check as to whether my predictions were correct. If there was a correlation, I must be making correct predictions beyond simply knowing perfect outcomes of my actions. I should know with some clarity what ‘would’ happen—true future sight. And she turned out to be right. My guesses were correct with something like 80% probability. I could see more than just outcomes. I knew which ones would occur.

All that’s to say that my summer with Gillian was the first time I’d really ever opened my mind to avenues beyond the hormonal. I remember knowing that right there on the beach was surely the last time I’d see Gillian and finding it so strange that she wouldn’t come chasing after me all night. I remember thinking on the way back that the house was quite airy and barn-like and the words Dutch Colonial started floating around in my head, and when I looked them up on my phone I became unsettled by the mechanics of the chicken-and-egg paradox I’d just committed: I’d looked the words up because I was going to look them up, anyway, and right there that unsettled feeling crystallized into the realization that somehow or the other Gillian had given me what a taste it was like to be someone who was stuck in time. ‘Course, ordinarily I did such things all the time. But she didn’t get back that evening and she didn’t catch me pack or take an Uber to the airport. It was a long and annoying trip, and I was wishing all the while that I had my car on me, and when I finally did arrive in Milwaukee it had been over two nights since the time I’d set out and all that while Gillian had never called or texted once. I remember being confused by this for a long time; surely she would call me and ask what had happened, surely there would be something, but it was radio static. It disturbed me so much that even two years later I asked Cathy and Cooper about it one evening and they both kind of agreed that it was one of those ‘If you love them let them go’ things that women had a solid aptitude for and an unbelievable ability to actually follow through with. But I got back home alright and found my parents thrown off by the whole early return, even my dad, and when I asked him about it he just shook his head and said ‘one day,’ ominously. And yet even I hadn’t anticipated how miserable I’d be once I’d gotten back to the Milwaukee suburbs and how the whole place sort of existed in this simultaneous blend of real and fake, where on one hand I’d have my mothers’ cooking and old Packers reruns on TV while on the other the life I’d been living in the Hamptons and in Yale before that was so alien to my moral instincts that it turned everything into a hyperreal mesh. I mostly just spent a lot of time lying around and doing nothing, counting seconds in my head and perusing the Magic Book—which I’d kept even knowing how much it meant to Gillian—and idly thinking of more experiments, more things to try with my foresight. The whole rest of the summer I was kind of a fuck-up. But both dad and mom were for once in agreement that spending August being a fuck-up wasn’t much of a problem. I tried to read books and I got pretty far along the Great Gatsby before being thrown off by something that made me think that the narrator was kind of gay, and since I knew that Gatsby would die anyway I just threw the book into the trash. After that whole business with the Great Gatsby I wrote down in the Magic Book my own hypothesis that the mechanics of my foresight were somewhat magical and counterintuitive, because I would’ve had to finish the book to gain ‘future knowledge’ of what was going to happen but that wasn’t the case. Without Gillian the experiments didn’t have anything to them. They were just numbers and paper.

I spent a lot of time just picturing Gillian by the beach, wondering whether I should paint the memory I had to ensure that it never faded away, or something like that. My mom was pretty excited by this painting idea and bought me a canvas and some oils which I was determined to use to produce something of worth, but I gave up after etching out a misshaped stick-figure and a sun which looked like it could have eyes and a smile on it. I tried to use my foresight to become good at painting but it didn’t yield anything; my hands were just too bumbling. More than anything I hated knowing that I was going to fail but still persisting just because I felt so bad. Despite the mediocrity of the whole thing my mother still liked the painting anyway and said it had been a nice attempt to quote ‘bring some color into your life,’ but she’d been so inundated by that psychology mumbo-jumbo that I suspected that the real reason she had liked it was so that she could parade around to her cultured friends some kind of ‘neo-expressionist Rorschach test’ business. I missed Gillian a lot during that time. I hated the fact that she had turned into a static entity, and that all my memories of her were now in the past and looked more like prerecorded snippets and freeze-frames rather than the beautiful, textural reality of her future selves. I had perceived Gillian as all of her multifaceted possibilities and now she was reduced to an image on a beach. It was a duly limited perception, and I didn’t like it. My experiments had hit a dead end, and instead I spent a lot of time that summer just smoking pot in my room. Lucas and Tyler had made a big show of wanting to smoke pot with me when they’d found out I was back in Wisconsin and I’d obliged, but their limited existence to me as guys just going through the motions at UW made them unappealing. They looked at me with a sickly awe that I’d never liked, not once in my life; they said they were my friends but really they worshipped me and wanted to tell girls back at school that they were my friends and the whole thing made me feel quite gross and detached. Mentally I hadn’t left the Hamptons. And it turned out that I hated smoking pot with other people around because they proved a big nuisance through their constant digressions and recitation of banalities as if they were profound. ‘Can you believe it, we’re, right now, like, in this room, man,’ and so on—it was just a big load of dogshit. But then the way I used pot was far more morally compromised. The first thing it did was make it hard for me to concentrate on all possible futures and instead made me really zoom into the richness of a singular future—likely one that would never come to pass—and it rendered in a full, almost daydream-like fashion that I completely inhabited. I could come up with an unlikely future in which I would somehow encounter Gillian again and just lay back and fuck her brains out in my head. I got so good at this that I could spontaneously bring myself to cum just with the thought of her, even when high. It feels so stupid to say things like that now. Later Cathy tried to interrogate me in the hopes of understanding the difference between a ‘regular’ daydream and an alternate-future daydream. I’ve never really been able to daydream in the way normal people do, because every daydream also involves me having foresight except simulating foresight is really hard to do in a scenario in which I’m not actively using it. From what I understand in a daydream you can get a person to do anything, but this is also somewhat cheap because they’re just a make-believe person in your head. You’re really just fucking yourself in the daydream, if you know what I mean. An alternate-future daydream is not like that. You’re going through the possibilities but the actual future version of the person is involved, so yes it’s more limited in terms of what you can achieve but also correspondingly far more vivid and interesting. With the assistance of pot I could isolate the exceptionally low probability threads that I knew with certainty would not occur and follow them to the end. Like it was not completely impossible that I randomly encounter Gillian in the store tomorrow, but it also wasn’t going to happen, and my foresight confirmed that it wasn’t going to happen. But the pot allowed me to access that thread anyway, and so in my head I could just simulate what was going to happen.

I smoked so much pot that summer that my dad became quite seriously concerned for my well-being and came up to have a talk. He was a chill dad, really. He knew I’d smoke and there’s nothing he could do about it, so he never made any more than the usual performative fuss that dads do: told me about how bad an idea it was, about all the guys who he knew smoked pot until they were unemployable, so on, and in high school he’d do these random room checks which were just to put me on guard more than anything. I looked and felt pathetic. I wouldn’t take showers for days, and I hated leaving my room. Inside my room everything made sense. If I left I knew I’d encounter something so directly in contrast with my New England lifestyle that even thinking about it felt grotesque. If I went shopping with my mother she’d tell me all these stories about Emily Ross having a kid or her going to watch the new Avatar movie or something and I hated being reminded of these things I’d outgrown. That was not a world I inhabited anymore. But at the same time I also felt the classic depressive guilt of the changed son coming home and being unable to recognize those things he grew up with—I knew, of course, that I was being selfish and condescending, and felt a vague disgust with myself about not appreciating all those mundanities of life that I’d been so devoid of at Yale, but it never really broke through. Gillian had really done a number on me. She’d fucked me up. She’d done something to me which I still, even now, feel resentful about: she’d got me thinking.

--- chapter ends, incoherent from this point on ---

‘Oh no. Oh no. Oh no, oh fuck—Maddie, what was in that tea?’

‘Chamomile…? You must’ve had it before, right?’

‘No!’

‘You’ve never had chamomile tea before? It’s a herb. I was thinking you’d like it, it’s very good for your sleep and digestion. You said you were tired, it soothes you.’

‘Maddie, I don’t drink tea. I’ve, like, never had it.’

‘You’ve never had tea?’

‘No! What do you think I am, like fifty? I’m not an old woman, I don’t sit around having fucking tea of all things—’

‘Well, maybe you should.’

‘Or maybe I shouldn’t—what the fuck is chamomile? What the fuck does it do?’

‘Okay, calm down, babe. What’s the problem?’

‘I—I—I—I—I don’t know. Like I don’t know what’s happening. I think I’m going blind or something—’

‘Wait, seriously? I didn’t know you could be allergic to chamomile—’

‘Oh my God. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I can’t—I can’t see anything—oh my God, fuck—no don’t come any closer, Maddie stop moving—’

‘Wait. How many fingers am I holding up?’

‘Four, I think.’

‘Okay. How many fingers am I going to hold up five seconds from now?’

‘Two, I don’t know.’

‘It was going to be just one. Here you go.’

‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything, we already know that it’s pretty random—’

‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, babe. I mean that I was going to hold up one definitely, regardless of what you would’ve said.’

‘You’re fucking with me.’

‘Sit down. What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow?’

‘I—’

‘Oh my God. You can’t tell!’

‘There’s no way.’

‘You’ve lost your foresight!’

‘Fuck fuck fuck—’

‘There’s no way. From chamomile? You’ve got to be kidding me. Wait—I know about Adderall, I know about weed. What about cocaine? You’ve done cocaine, right? What does cocaine do to you?’

‘Maddie—I—I can’t—’

‘Sit down, babe. Barry, sit down. Right now.’

‘No, I mean—I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to say—’

‘Barry, sit the fuck down.’

Barry sits.

‘Great. Now tell me what the problem is.’

‘I—I don’t know, I don’t know!’

‘Do you know what I’m going to say?’

Shakes his head.

‘Ha! You’ve lost your foresight!’

‘You’re finding this funny?’

‘It’s pretty funny. No, but don’t worry, okay, I’m sure it’s just temporary—’

‘No, I don’t think you understand. You have to leave, like right now.’

‘No I don’t. I don’t have to do anything—’

‘Shut the fuck up. Oh my God you’re fucking crazy, what the fuck—’

‘Where did that come from?’

‘Fucking hell—’

‘Wait. Babe, do you really not know what I’m going to do? It’s not that hard, you don’t need your foresight for that. Listen—I know what’s going on, right? If you say something strange, it’s fine. I’m going to be here regardless. It’s not a problem.’

‘It is. Believe me.’

‘What, you think you’re going to, like, hit me or something?’

‘Well, hitting people is almost always bad.’

‘Well, thank God. But that’s an example, right? You know you’re not supposed to hit me. Look, I love you, right? I’m not going to just leave you because you some stupid things when you were disabled.’

‘No, I’m just going to start telling you about, like, that text from your mom or Michael Rockefeller or like how in your diary you say that you masturbate with a toothbrush or how I had a pot-dream of Amanda—’

‘You had a pot-dream of Amanda?’

‘Yeah, after lunch that day—’

‘And what the fuck is this diary?’

‘The one you kept when you were 13, which your mom has stashed along with the photo albums in the bottom-right drawer of the cabinet of the guest bedroom—’

‘You’ve never been to my house!’

‘Yeah but I’m going to be there in June when you invite me to your cousin’s wedding somewhere in the Chicagoland area—’

‘Okay, Barry, I think you’re right. You need to shut the fuck up, like, right now. Somehow you are just, like, actually saying the exact sequence of things that’s going to get me to leave you.’

‘I don’t think you get it. Shutting up is often a pretty bad idea—’

‘Trust me, it is not. You should shut up.’

‘How do you do this? I don’t know what to do. I think I’m going to die.’

‘Well, it looks to me that you’re still speaking. It’s not as if you’re catatonic. God, chamomile—how about this. Stop thinking. Just do what you want to do.’

‘You’ve gotta come closer for that. What I want to do is kiss you in the mouth right now.’

‘That’s what you want to do?’

‘Well, obviously. This is what I want to do most of the time.’

‘Really?’ She blushes.

‘What? Why are you happy now?’

‘I guess shutting up isn’t always the worst idea.’

‘You’re going to leave me, I—I swear—’

‘Babe, people don’t just leave each other. That’s not how it works.’

‘But you just said—’

‘There you go. I can’t believe it. Now you’ve ruined it. Okay, now actually shut up.’

‘But—’

‘Okay, no. This is not a joke. Actually shut the fuck up.’

They think for a while.

‘Okay, here’s what I think we should do.’

Barry says nothing.

‘You can talk now.’

Barry still says nothing.

‘How about you just listen to me. If you do exactly what I tell you to do, then we’re going to be fine, right? Until this problem is sorted out?’

Barry still says nothing. She groans.

‘No, don’t tell me… I can’t believe it. You’re constantly avoiding situations in which you have to do what you don’t want to, right? And you’re finding the one in which I’m still happy. That—you know what, I have to hand it to you. That’s impressive. Jesus. I didn’t know you were this insane. I thought you were just using it to play ball and, like, get me flowers or whatever.’

Barry looks around guiltily.

‘I think we should have sex.’

‘WHAT?’

‘Oh my God. Oh my God—babe, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you surprised before, like, ever. I don’t know how I never noticed this.’

‘Sex—what—’

‘I want to know how good you actually are at sex. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the best sex I’ve ever had, but I want to know how much of that is you and how much of that is just your foresight.’

Skip Anderson is going to crash into me with the force of two elephants and a battering ram. I’m going to smash headfirst onto the ground with two linemen and a fullback pressing down against my neckline. There’s a 22% chance the pressure fractures my uppermost vertebrae and a 14% chance I break my collarbone. I’m going to lie bleeding on the 40-yard line feeling like someone ran a spike through my heart, and I’m going to be carried out on a blue stretcher and within 15 minutes transferred to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where a radiologist is going to confirm everything I just said to the trauma surgeon. The trauma surgeon is a man called Parker Fogel and he was born in Jacksonville to parents who ran a factory that made spare parts for John Deere. He’s been a Jags fan since he was five and he’s one of three people in the greater Philadelphia region who have Eagles season tickets but have never yelled ‘Go Birds!’ once in their life. He’s got a four month old daughter they’re calling Sandy. Two minutes after they bring me in he’s going to ask for a Brain MRI and two days before they let me out he’s going to ask me for my autograph on a Lions cap. Sandy Fogel will grow up supporting the Lions. When she’s fifteen she’s going to tell her parents she wants to get emancipated and they won’t know why. When she’s twenty-two she’s going to apologize to them for how much of a bitch she was and how she’s so glad that they never went through with it and swear that from now on she’s going to be the daughter they deserved. She’s going to keep her promise. Outside the hospital there’s going to be journalists from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The New York Times, and maybe The Boston Globe—I can’t control these things down to the millimeter. It’s going to be snowing. The journalist from CNN is a young woman whose fiancé told her twenty minutes ago that they need to talk and she’s too scared to know what that means and she’s going to stutter through the report but pretend that it was the cold. When she gets home he’s going to kiss her on the mouth and tell her that all he meant was that she’s been spending too much time at work and he wants them to go away to Hawaii together in the first week of February and she’s going to be so relieved she’ll say yes but won’t get more than two days off and they’re going to be pissed but eventually they’ll learn and make it work. She’s going to be standing under a pine tree and say ‘Is this another repeat of what they’re already calling the ‘Novak Family Curse’?’ It’s going to be a beautiful day that I come to. It’ll be sunny. There will be birds chirping in the morning. They’re going to let me look out the window and Cathy will come rushing towards me and she’s going to start crying. My father’s going to be watching the TV. He’s going to take one look at me and smile. His name is Archibald Novak. My grandfather’s name was Harrington Novak. Harry, Archie, Barry. That’s how it goes. He’s going to die at 83 from pancreatic cancer, or maybe not, I can’t tell. I’m going to look at Cathy and tell her how beautiful she is. She’ll never know the things I know about her. She’ll never know that a year after my injury she’s going to be returning back from Kohl’s after an evening of Christmas shopping when a ten-ton truck is going to slip on the late-December snow and barrel right into her side, killing her instantly. She’ll never know that I’m going to cry so hard at her funeral that I give myself a nosebleed. She’ll never know that she was pregnant. She’ll never know that the time we drove up to San Francisco to watch the Giants game I already knew that we were going to marry each other. I don’t know when I’m going to die. I wish I did. Thirteen hundred miles away about half-hour out of New Orleans there’s a pair of young kids watching the news on their mom’s cell phone trying desperately to find out whether Barry Novak is ever going to play another game again. They’ve got Lions caps on. One of them’s even got a UCLA jersey. Fourteen years from now the younger one is going to die as a soldier while the older wins the Super Bowl three times in a row. Their mom is going to look up Barry Novak online. She’s going to find out about the Novak family lineage. She’s almost going to cry. She’s going to curse God for what could have been. She’s going to pray to all ends that God’s grace shine on these wonderful people who could have been so much more than these broken ballplayers with broken families and broken homes and she’s going to pray that if Barry Novak doesn’t survive then God carry his spirit upwards, far from the end zones and the freshly mown grass where he could be with his savior God. And for a second her faith will falter, and she will beg God that if He was indeed there with His hands outstretched towards all those He loved then He send her a sign, any sign, but then she will realize how foolhardy she had been to make such a demand of God and how selfish she had been when she betrayed his trust in Him by doubting that he would lead all those on this Earth to the happy land they deserved.

They’re already going to have edited my Wikipedia page. There will be names tossed around. Someone’s going to compare Barry Novak to Mario Lemieux. I don’t know.