Jerry Quarry Died For Our Sins 4h23f

Jerry Quarry Died for Our Sins

By Al Walentis

Xyla Press

~~~

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© 2017 by Al Walentis. All rights reserved.

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For those who could still find beauty after loss, as they fought through the night

The Heavyweight Championship of the Multiverse

The Field (listed alphabetically)

Muhammad Ali

Record: 56-5, 37 knockouts

Career: 1960-1981

Best night: November 14, 1966. Ali stopped slugger Cleveland Williams in the third round at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, flooring the “Big Cat” four times and introducing the Ali Shuffle.

Jack Dempsey


Career: 1914-1927

Best night: July 4, 1919. Won the heavyweight title by massacring champion

Jess Willard in three of the bloodiest, most lopsided rounds in ring history. “The Manassa Mauler” dropped Willard seven times in the first round.

George Foreman


Career: 1969-1977, 1987-1997

Best night: January 22, 1973. Flattened Joe Frazier in two rounds to capture the heavyweight crown, the champion driven to the canvas six times.

Joe Frazier

Record: 32-4-1, 27 knockouts

Career: 1965-1976

Best night: March 8, 1971. In a battle of unbeaten champions, Frazier earned a unanimous victory over Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden in what was billed as the “Fight of the Century,” leaving Ali sprawled on his back in the final round.

Larry Holmes


Career: 1973-2002

Best night: June 9, 1978. In a war that pushed both warriors to the limit, Holmes scored a split decision over Ken Norton to win the heavyweight crown.

Evander Holyfield


Career: 1984-2011

Best night: November 9, 1996. Opening as a 25-1 underdog, Holyfield outboxed and outclassed Mike Tyson to score an 11th round TKO and reclaim the heavyweight belt.

Jim Jeffries


Career: 1985-1910

Best night: June 9, 1899. Challenging heavy hitter Bob Fitzsimmons for the title, Jeffries dominated start to finish, knocking out the champion in the 11th round.

Jack Johnson


Career: 1897-1931

Best night: July 4, 1910. Johnson outclassed unbeaten Jim Jeffries, lured out of retirement as the Great White Hope to challenge the flamboyant champion. Jeffries’s corner tossed in the towel after 15 rounds of the 45-round bout.

Vitaly Klitschko


Career: 1996-2004, 2008-2012

Best night: June 21, 2003. Although he lost on cuts, Klitschko dominated heavyweight king Lennox Lewis through six rounds. Lewis retired afterward rather than face Klitschko in a rematch.

Wlir Klitschko


Career: 1996-2017

Best night: July 2, 2011. Klitschko executed a 12-round demolition of David Haye, pinning him with his ramrod jab and clubbing him with rights.

Sonny Liston


Career: 1953-1970

Best night: September 25, 1962. Liston delivered power shot after power shot to Floyd Patterson’s heavyweight crown, which Patterson wore for only 2:04 of round one.

Joe Louis


Career: 1934-1951

Best night: June 22, 1938. Avenging the only blemish on his record, Louis knocked out Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 124 seconds in one of the major sports events of the twentieth century, a battle that pitted the “Brown Bomber” against the pride of Hitler’s .

Rocky Marciano


Career:1947-1955

Best night: September 23, 1952. Hopelessly behind on points against Arnold Raymond Cream, also known as Jersey Joe Walcott, Marciano uncorked a right hand for the eons, knocking the champion unconscious with a punch that traveled no more than six inches, yet landed with the force of an asteroid slamming into the earth — the greatest one-punch knockout in boxing history.

Max Schmeling


Career: 1924-1939, 1947-1948

Best night: June 19, 1936. Schmeling handed Joe Louis the first defeat of his career, knocking him down in the fourth and out in the 12th round.

Gene Tunney


Career: 1915-1928

Best night: September 22, 1927. In one of the most famous matches in ring lore, Tunney arose from the infamous “long count” to outbox Jack Dempsey and retain his title with a 10-round decision.

Mike Tyson


Career: 1985-1991, 1995-2005

Best night: June 27, 1998. The richest bout in boxing history to that date proved a devastating mismatch. Tyson made short work of unbeaten Michael Spinks, knocking him out 91 seconds into round one.

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Whenever I hear the name, Jack Dempsey, I think of an America that was one big roaring camp of miners, drifters, bunkhouse hands, con men, hard cases, men who lived by their fists and their shooting irons and by the cards they drew. America at High Noon.

— Jim Murray

“I look at my past Great memories abound For I fought, I bled, and I cried I gave it my all round after round And the world knows that I tried”

— Jerry Quarry

Time is a motherfucker and it’s coming for all of us.

— Jonathan Lethem

Contents

Jack

A Thousand Years

The Lives We’ve Lived

Jack

August 31, 2035

The day he met Muhammad Ali, nineteen years after Muhammad Ali died, Buck Lazarus feared the champ was drunk.

Ali wobbled. His knees buckled and his arms dangled as his hips swayed in a woozy dance.

No way was Ali drunk, nor ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, not the Muhammad Ali of November 14, 1966, the fighter Buck anticipated greeting today, a gladiator at his peak.

Buck dreaded something worse.

He dreaded his heavyweight championship of the multiverse might sunder into chaos and ruin before the competition even took wing.

Ali was clad in a full battle uniform: white satin trunks, tasseled boots, scarlet gloves. His chest glistened with perspiration as he parked himself under the gym entrance, a troll guarding his bridge, ragging the dour figure who sat hunched twenty feet inside on a decrepit wooden stool beside the ramshackle ring.

“Radio chump, radio chump.” Ali spat the words while he showboated and sashayed, pantomiming the role of a sot struggling not to out, rather than a boxer reeling from a haymaker.

“Jesus Chrysler drives a Dodge,” Buck sputtered, thrusting himself toward Ali.

The archway peered into a drab cinderblock cavern. Chipped-paint peeled from its lime green walls surrounding a ring mat dusty with resin. The faded leather turnbuckles remained unadorned by company logos. A row of skip ropes hung on pegs on the back wall, and two heavy bags dangled from silver chains. The musty odor of dank, humid sweat and acrid tobacco smoke permeated the gym. Buck ordered the aroma pumped in to set the mood, a duplicate of the spartan training camp of a champion whose finest days lay between the pages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“Come on, champ, everyone’s on board. You are the Greatest.” Buck clasped Ali in a half-assed bear hug—a cub hug.

“I whup you right here, not on a white man’s radio show,” Ali bellowed, waving his glove across the gym at James J. Jeffries, whose sable hair slicked from Brilliantine.

“Radio?” Jeffries laughed. “We got pictures where I’m from. Moving pictures. Flickers.”

Ali’s eyes glittered with scorn. Jeffries kept Ali in a harsh, steady fix. Buck’s sour grimace, confusion dissolving into panic, betrayed that his tournament had gone hideously wrong.

Face to face, Buck was strikingly angular and dark in an Italian way. From the

profile, his hawk nose dominated, a beak so hooked it might pop open a can of beer. Not quite forty and ravishing in a peacock-striped jacket, Buck projected the flamboyance of a man-child first experiencing the pleasures of the world. Buck’s swagger faded fast. His sneezer sniffed trouble.

Jeffries sprung from his stool. He sported woolen boxing tights stretched halfway down his thighs and clinging to his bulging crotch, flaunting alpha dominance. In fine fettle, he matched Ali: six feet and two inches, 225 pounds, his square shoulders so splendid he might haul a deer carcass nine miles while never flinching, something this steely athlete once did.

Ali blazed into his shuffle, feet a blur, daring Jeffries to storm over and mix it up.

Buck propped himself as a shield between Ali and his nemesis. His sandycolored hair, a Don King electro-cut, was a wiry smorgasbord of tangerine, lime, canary that jutted straight up in crinkled waves, eager to collapse in submission.

“Come on, champs, I’m your promoter. Plenty of time to slug it out soon in the ring.”

Buck tugged at Ali, aiming to guide him back to his own training quarters. Buck assigned each fighter private workout space, Ali’s halfway around the arena. Ali wandered here purposefully, vengeful, eager to torment Jeffries. Buck knew from the films he studied that Ali was playacting, egging on Jeffries, a hot dog with mustard and relish and all the fixings.

Jeffries had never witnessed Ali’s shtick before today. Buck was certain he could not distinguish the Greatest from a nutty boxing wannabe. Jeffries, a fighter from

the faraway past, a duelist with whom Ali should have no quarrel, somehow worked Ali into a high state of agitation. Buck’s palms dampened with sweat.

Ali juddered, pretending he lacked the force to slip free from Buck’s meager grip and flutter across the gym.

Without warning and with a ferocity that shuddered Buck, Jeffries walloped a heavy bag. His fist crunched a deep imprint into the sand-packed canvas. Such vim threatened to crackle the apparatus from its moorings: a sound of thunder that might only come from someone capable of pounding rivets into steel with his bare knuckles, a Boilermaker.

“Your boy here, he looks intemperate,” Jeffries drawled, basking in the shocked quiet that spasmed through the gym after one pulverizing hook.

The word “intemperate,” Buck concluded, referred not to Ali’s brashness, but to suspicions that Ali overindulged in intoxicating spirits. Or that Ali was cuckoo crazy. Jeffries was a warrior, too polite to flaunt the n-word, however popular the slur had been in his time. Calling Ali “boy” was hideous enough.

Ali unhooked the dazzle. Playing make-believe no longer, he flicked free of Buck’s puny vise with the ease of gelatin dessert popping from a mold. Now Ali wasn’t just popping off. He popped off whiplash jabs—pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!—ten in three seconds, a salvo threatening to crack the sound barrier.

Buck ired it as bebop; a lyrical and physical jazz. He basked in the moment, even as the first of many panic attacks sank in, even while something did not sit

right. History spiraled through the building, history not yet made.

He tried to smother Ali, hugging biceps that seemed chiseled from caramel marble, gazing at a face Adonis would envy. He was the most beautiful specimen the boxing gods ever spawned.

“Champ, come on, your training quarters are over here.”

“Hope it’s my Deer Lake training camp. Else I ain’t doin’ no fighting.”

This Old Armory lacked the elegance and space to replicate Deer Lake. The training quarters Buck designed were throwbacks to other eras. Knotty, clothcovered ring ropes, weathered speed bags waiting to deflate. Everything lived-in, some of it altogether spent.

Ali offered no struggle, but he toyed with Buck, a Technicolor-attired promoter fruitlessly aiming to halt a serious rumble. Turning square to Buck, Ali brayed, a mad torrent of syllables mashed together, decades of poetry and fury condensed into one riff, machine-gun rapid, subhuman, unintelligible, except to Buck.

“BiguglybearSonnyListonuglygorillaJoeFrazierThrillaManilaMummyyoutooslowGeorgeForem

Buck froze, not only in space, but in time, across multiple dimensions, in this multiverse he wished were not his own.

When quantum theory proved a decade ago the existence of multiverses, everything changed. Once the conclusive evidence verified an infinite number of parallel universes stacked atop each other, separated by subatomic particles that came to be known as keloidtrons, the inevitability of time travel grew near, before the world government’s obscurantism throttled research. The laws of science proved that for every choice a person makes, the opposite choice renders in an alternate reality. The concept of freedom came unhinged. For some, these discoveries brought hope, for others despair.

“Pinskie!” Buck required reinforcements.

Lester Pinskie schlepped into view. A squat, rumpled man, with a horseshoe of chestnut hair and a pencil-thin mustache, Pinskie served as Buck’s personal assistant, his fixer, his flack, his go-to guy.

Buck caught Ali’s smirk, his shoulders relaxing, catching a breather after a hardfought round.

“It’s Ali,” Buck said, hoping to take ten himself. “He’s provoking a tussle with Jim Jeffries.”

Pinskie caught his first glimpse of Jeffries. “That guy looks pissed. Wouldn’t want to start no rumpus with him.”

“He ran a saloon for a spell, farmed alfalfa crops in retirement, toured the vaudeville circuit. For six years, starting in 1899, he was the baddest sonuvabitch in the known multiverse.”

Ali had no interest hearing Buck sing Jeffries’ hosannas, so he fired off his own verses now. It was poetry so bad, but so street smart, it sired rap music.

Ali improvised a couplet.

“What kind of chance should you give this Jeffries named Jim? Slim.”

Buck wheeled Ali out to the corridor, as much as Ali allowed himself to be wheeled, while Ali flapped his mitt with disdain. Jeffries sprung forward. Eyes smoldering, he coiled like a pillbug, his left hook cocked to snap and strike.

Ali wasn’t drunk before, but he was drunk now, on his own beauty, his vigor, his pizzazz, his aura of invincibility. “Octopus. You need more than eight arms to hit me. I’m too pretty, I’m too fast.”

“Only sissies, they’re pretty,” Jeffries snapped, refusing to blanch.

Buck understood Ali’s mind games. He teased opponents with nicknames that boiled their blood: “The Washer Woman” for Canadian plodder George Chuvalo, mocking the motion of his fists churning; “The Rabbit” for Floyd Patterson, because Ali found him scared like a rabbit. Now Jeffries, “The Octopus.”

Such was the logic behind Ali’s verbal squall minutes earlier, the cannon-fire

blast of insults directed at Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and why Buck feared his tournament faced desperate measures.

Panting, Buck sought to bask in the moment, the sweetest of all sweet scientists eyeballing the greatest of great white hopes. This was what this dream match was all about, the sixteen greatest heavyweights of all time, facing off on the best nights of their careers to crown the heavyweight champion of the multiverse.

“Pinskie, please escort the champ back to his training quarters. I need to find the doc.”

The doc. Dr. Egon Keloid. Master of this multiverse, The eccentric sorcerer whose formulae, equations, and potions returned these old champs to the Old Armory young again.

Buck barreled through the warren of hallways ringing the Old Armory. He christened it the Old Armory, though it was not old, but built solely for this tournament, just outside San Angeles. While the building showcased the stern brick-and-mortar ambiance of the boxing palaces of yore—if a place where men shed blood and teeth and brain matter might be a palace—its layout was unlike any other.

He slowed his charge and glimpsed into the glass-enclosed enclaves where the sixteen fighters Buck had matched would train, each sheltered within a replica of a gym from his era, each a portal to its own time capsule, each festooned with bric-a-brac from eras spanning more than a century. Miami Beach, Brooklyn, the Catskills, Atlantic City, and a dozen others. The arena itself was circular and accessible through gangways off to the right, with 1,500 seats for the VIPs invited to the live event. That was for optics. A multiverse-wide audience would

experience the action via XR, Xtreme Reality, as surrogates for the agony and euphoria of the warriors. No one had experienced the holy sport of boxing for nearly a decade.

Buck gawked through the glass towering floor to ceiling, soaring over two stories high. He found it clever to install one-way mirrors so the fighters might ogle themselves while they sparred. Guests could ire the athletes in privacy from the outside.

Surveying his masterpiece, Buck imagined the gyms morphing into cages populated by beasts of burden locked in a zoo, assembled for the gawking pleasure of the elite: a wax museum of eldritch creatures sprung to life. Buck had no clue how Egon worked his dark magic. Did the fighters arrive in pods, emerging viscid and unformed? Or did they materialize from a swirl of gases, like stars at the dawn of the universe, helium transfiguring into carbon, the building block of life? Were the fighters even self-aware?

Trade secret, Egon always whispered. Egon’s trade was not as a doctor of medicine or biologist, but a physicist with degrees in multiple disciplines, hailed in academia as a genius unequaled.

Buck circled the Old Armory like a doomed rat ensnared in a labyrinth. He craved answers, while he fought back paranoia that struck deep.

The buzzkill of a few minutes faded, and he basked in the rush, his heart fluttering, neither a butterfly nor a bee, but a fanboy luxuriating in the ultimate wet dream. He ired the animals in his zoo, one by one. Gene Tunney, slight of height, bobbing and feinting, a sleek panther about to pounce. Rocky Marciano, crouched low like a fireplug, whistling off hooks and uppercuts. Jack Johnson, big bald head gleaming, arms folded as he grinned with self-

satisfaction, a rock star in his day. Here was a bazaar of heavyweight titans.

Buck skirted up the mezzanine, past the row of skyboxes where the elite might enjoy the matches in safe harbor, like the Romans deciding thumbs up or thumbs down in the Colosseum. Egon’s offices occupied a whole half of the mezzanine. He had insisted that he design his offices himself.

A pantheon of kitschy excess, Egon World nestled behind tall, thin windows, mirrored on the outside and allowing no one to spy inside. Gold and chrome beams crisscrossed at wild, orthogonal angles, a surreal frosting inspired by the old Dr. Caligari movie. Egon had the hots for classic horror films.

Buck gave one loud pound before pitching open the heavy oak door, its nameplate reading in gold-leaf font:

Dr. Egon Septimus Keloid

Chief Scientific Officer

Heavyweight Championship of the Multiverse.

Egon jolted and his eyebrows arched in merriment. “Would you like a gin? It’s my only weakness.”

He tapped the crystal decanter, dominant on his polished, ornate desk. It was as

elongated as a conference table. He wore a double-breasted white smock, as if he were a medical doctor working in a laboratory.

Egon projected self-absorption, charmed by his own pomposity. Edging near fifty, Egon escaped the outdoors, and his sunken cheeks emphasized a sallow complexion. His forehead sloped like a prehistoric fish’s beneath a retreating hairline of frosty white tendrils, an irony born of Keloid’s stature as the foremost scientific mind of his day. He needed such a wicked skull to house such a wicked mind.

Buck yearned for a gin, a tall one, but he shook off the offer with a pout.

“A cigar?” Egon asked, flipping open a tabletop humidor. “It’s my only other weakness.”

That was the Septimus in him talking. Egon delighted in draping his arm over Buck, clasping his shoulder, as a friend or a brother, telling him how he appropriated his middle name from Dr. Septimus Pretorius, the fey dabbler in forbidden science who created miniature creatures displayed in bell jars. That was in the Bride of Frankenstein, a horror classic released one hundred years ago.

Buck never watched it, never wanted to until Egon forced him to soldier through a screening while sipping his gin and puffing his fine cigars. He delighted in dominating Buck before he agreed to cement their alliance.

“Something’s not sitting right, Egon. You brought back the wrong Ali. That trash-talker downstairs is not the Muhammad Ali of November 1966.”

“Bah. A mere foofaraw.”

“He’s down there spouting off about the Thrilla in Manila and George Foreman being a mummy, and he’s jawboning Jim Jeffries. Then his spigot opened and out came all these words, almost as if Ali were speaking in tongues.”

Egon pulled Buck close, and they locked eyes four inches apart, connecting their iBrain chips. iBrain chips permitted telepathic communication and installed five additional senses. Medics implanted them in all newborns.

“Ali had many fabulous nights,” Egon said. “We could…”

“I’d rather blow a ferret,” Buck countered.

Egon didn’t give two runny shits about the sanctity of the tournament, rolling the dice in his gin haze, pissing off Buck.

“Listen,” Buck said. “I can’t fathom who or what’s out there in those training rooms.”

“I told you the basics. Everyone’s DNA contains not only their complete genetic blueprint, but their entire lives, their memories, their complete physical existence, all in that one tiny strand of deoxyribonucleic acid. Turning that DNA into three-dimensional people, the greatest heavyweights, is what our experiment is all about. Genetic holograms.”

Experiment? Buck never signed on for an experiment. This was his life’s work so far, a sporting event for the history books.

“Ali knows about the Woroner tournament, too,” Buck said. “That’s why he has a beef with Jim Jeffries.”

The Woroner tournament, the first computer simulation, had sparked the BuckEgon dyad. Two years back, over some drinks—Egon nursing his ubiquitous gin and Buck a draft—Buck described the tournament. How, back in 1967 with Ali in exile after refusing the military draft, interest in heavyweight boxing had flagged and a radio producer from Miami named Murray Woroner brainstormed a resurrection. He could feed data into a National Cash 315 computer and stage a series of fantasy fights pitting fighters from different eras, crowning what the machine said was the “All-Time Great Heavyweight Champion.”

“A computer the size of an airplane hangar!” Egon roared, gin snorting from his nostrils. “Its innards—its gizzards—were these funky vacuum tubes. So twentieth century.”

Buck told Egon how Team Woroner would input data about each fighter and the computer would whir and purr and crunch bits and bytes. A commentator would pretend he was sitting at ringside, offering a breathless, blow-by-blow narration, accented by faux crowd noises.

“People sat in front of this little box,” Buck said. “They called it a radio and listened every week. Sixteen million tuned in when Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano pitched haymakers at one another for fifteen rounds in the championship fight.”

“And Dempsey whupped his ass?” Egon asked.

“Sorry. Marciano floored Dempsey six times and snatched the $10,000 purse.”

“So many sawbucks. What a jackpot!”

“Here’s the bug in the machine. Marciano was the only heavyweight who quit undefeated. That had to be the key when the computer jizzed out its calculations.”

The Woroner field failed to impress Buck, larded as it was with old-timers. They were no match for the beefier, brainier brawlers competing in the decades since. Those were the fighters Buck studied, whose careers he obsessed over.

“Dumbass computer,” Buck said.

“Here’s another bug. That computer” —Egon gave the word air quotes— “could only offer probabilities. Run a thousand simulations and you’ll wind up with a thousand different simulations.”

“You know what else that computer missed?” Buck asked. “Heart. Cus D’Amato, a damn wise trainer in his day, said, ‘When men of near equal skills meet, the man with the superior will to win will win every time.’ That’s something a computer can never measure. Heart.”

The night Egon said he could make it happen, he put all computer simulations to shame.

“What if we could match the actual fighters, Buck, fighters who fought almost a century apart, and we bring them all together? You’re a fight fan. You’re a showman. How much do you think people would pay to see Ali and Marciano and Dempsey go at it, in the flesh? The real deals. I can do it. We can do it.” Egon gave his best eyebrow arch and gin blossom smile.

Now, here they were two years later, the fighters gathering, the press soon milling, the moment at hand, and Buck sensed his tournament preparing to dine on a dog’s breakfast.

“The radio tournament,” Buck said. “Ali knows about it. After Ali lost to the computer, to Jim Jeffries, he called it a white man’s computer. He went to court. He sued the instigator, that jackass Woroner, for a million bucks for defamation of character.”

Buck knew Egon still wasn’t getting it.

“The Ali who’s fighting for us had his best night in November 1966, when he starched Cleveland Williams in three. The radio tournament came after that fight. If Ali knows about the radio tournament, not to even mention the Thrilla in Manilla and the Rumble in the Jungle with Foreman, then you resurrected the wrong fucking Ali.”

Buck caught himself saying something that should sound foolish. The wrong fucking Ali. What were they dealing with here? Egon never revealed his secrets. How had he materialized these old fighters who existed only in memory?

Egon’s aerie rattled from the tumult detonating within the fighters’ cages. Ali bellowed from the locker room as Buck and Egon jetted down. There stood Ali cocking off, his mouth opened so wide it could engulf a submarine sandwich, if not a submarine itself. Ali aimed his fury now at Rocky Marciano, the Brockton Bomber, a fighter no match for Ali in physical stature, but no heavyweight flattened so many foes. Forty-three knockouts in forty-nine fights, an unrivaled percentage among heavies.

This was the Rock of September 1952, when, trailing on points, he dug deep into the well and flattened Jersey Joe Walcott in the thirteenth. Some say he was greater the next year when he smoked Jersey Joe in one. But heart matters in boxing more than brute force. Or so Buck assumed.

If Rocky was in a cage, Ali rattled it. He pretended to lift Rocky’s toupee, much in the manner he had impishly pinched at sportscaster Howard Cosell’s sad rug. But the Rocky from September 1952 was not wearing a hairpiece.

Ali turned to Buck, a new favorite foil.

“You wearin’ a carpet, too, just like Howard.”

Switching hairpieces to match the moment —Buck called them “units”—was one of his signatures. This morning, he played a dandy in rainbow hues, a box of crayons melting in the sun.

Buck wrapped Ali in a bear hug, again, as tightly as he might, and tugged him out the door. There would be no more daydreaming about the history of this moment.

Buck and Egon leaned against the glass wall outside Marciano’s training room, his cage, the scrunch of Marciano’s zig-zag of a nose ready to propel piss and vinegar. Buck and Egon inched back to Egon’s office.

“Looks like Ali knows about the Marciano computer fight,” Buck said, “another fake bout Woroner promoted, so he could settle the Ali lawsuit for a dollar. Ali was bummed about how the computer savaged his reputation.”

“Ali didn’t do too well in these simulations” Egon said. “Tsk.”

“Fans watched that one on what they called closed-circuit TV,” Buck said. “You bought your ticket at a movie theater. Rocky took it dead serious. Dropped fifty pounds, bought himself a new hairpiece. That fight irritated Ali even more. Claimed they built the computer in Dixie. Rocky died in a plane crash before the broadcast and he never knew he won the fight.”

Pinskie lumbered down the corridor, dragging his heavy body like a sack. “One of our arrivals is AWOL.”

“Who’s missing?” Buck froze.

“Jack Dempsey.”

“Where the hell is he?” Buck asked. “Barnstorming at some riverboat saloon?”

“Doctor Keloid, I’m supposed to tell you that Dempsey...never arrived.”

“We have no tournament without Dempsey,” Buck said. “He might win the whole damn thing.”

Buck didn’t want to play favorites. He was ready to give no fucks, but this was the fight game, and he pulled for Dempsey

Egon streamed another gin, draining his decanter.

“There may have been a problem with the sample,” Egon said.

“Then the tournament’s off,” Buck said. “We can’t hold any tournament without Dempsey.”

“Relax, friendo,” Egon said. “Dempsey will be here.”

“When? We have a press conference in three hours. The whole multiverse wants to meet our fighters.”

“Time is relative, my boy, we all recognize that.” Egon lifted his glass in a silent toast and continued. “Many years ago, on one bright summer night in 1970, they held a party for Jack Dempsey, right before his 75th birthday, in this old arena called Madison Square Garden.”

“I heard of Madison Square Garden. Go on.”

“He was there.”

“Who was there?” He fumed at the way Egon loved to drag things out.

“Jack Hanson.”

“Jack Hanson? He was there?” Buck thought Egon was spitting nonsense.

“He was right there that night, basking in the ring with Dempsey. He shook his hand, he might have grabbed an autograph. Jack Hanson can fetch us what we need.”

“Nobody’s seen Jack Hanson in how many years?”

“Ease on up, Buckaroo. I know where he is. I can reach out to Jack.”

Buck despised that hinky pitch to Egon’s voice, how Egon held his cards tight to the vest, signaling he was the smartest fellow in the room.

“Jack Hanson was there?” Buck asked. He believed none of this.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“That night?”

“That night.”

December 23, 1999

Jack Hanson was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk, not menacingly drunk, not piss-faced drunk, drunk just enough to collapse those ugly waves of melancholia that heaved and quivered down his shoulders, across his chest, ing through his heels like a lightning strike. Jack hunched over his mug of Pabst, frowning into the amber, and watched the foamy head vanish into a thin white film.

“Preach to me, Stanky.”

“You’re a mess, buddy,” Stanky said.

Bluff, portly, deep into middle-age, Stanky swabbed the bar with a soapy dishrag, splattering suds and dregs on his wrinkled white shirt, the same one he wore every night, laundered less than Stanky tapped a new keg of beer.

Jack was a son of the coal regions, the anthracite mine fields of eastern Pennsylvania. He bragged about his capacity to consume vast quantities of brew. Beer coursed through his veins, resisting blackout-caliber intoxication, both his blessing and his doom.

Jack swatted at a gnat buzzing his salt-and-pepper hair, close-cropped in bristles so coarse they might scrape paint. His granite face betrayed only the preview symptoms of age lines around his lips and eyes. He hailed just past fifty.

“Fucker flies I call them,” Jack said. “They thrive on the stench of stale beer.”

“You got something against insects, buddy?”

“Butterflies. I’ll always love butterflies. They’re my only weakness.”

Jack slouched dissolute in the ruin of winter, relieved some spring endured in his step. He eyed himself in the bar mirror. His anguish flattened his face into a mask of nothingness.

“Don’t hold back, Stanky. Am I handsome and am I strong? You got to it I maintained a fighter’s tone—lean, paunch free.”

“You got that drinker’s gauntness, too. Truth is, you look haunted, chief.”

“You can’t cheat an honest man. I’ll drink to that.”

Jack tipped his pint Stanky’s way.

“Do you think you may have swore off the hooch if you had that prizefighting career?” Stanky asked.

“Never know until you try. I never tried.”

“Rough times?”

“Rough year. The Brits have a term for it: annus horribilus.”

“You know your Britspeak.”

“It’s Latin,” Jack said. “Ambrose Gillen taught us Latin in tenth grade at Cooper High. Did you have Mr. Gillen?”

“Nobody taught no foreign language in my days. Diagramming sentences tasked

us plenty.”

Unshaven with three days of stubble, Jack cultivated the rugged look, a manscape persona for some, slovenly for others. He sloughed the Pabst residue, his fifth draft at Chico’s Corner Cafe, his holiday dive bar on a backstreet of row homes in Jack’s hometown. Chico—he pronounced it “chicko,” the way Groucho always addressed his Marx brother—was dead and buried long before Jack reached legal drinking age. Legal drinking meant shit in the Region, as folks called their home.

Dive bars endure for the company of their bartenders. Stanky lent that welcome ear. Aside from the typical bar snacks of the kippered herring, hot baloney, and pickled tripe, Chico’s only buzzed as a true café on weekends when the whitehaired matron everyone called Mom fried her homemade pierogies, slathered in greasy butter and browned onions. No essence of mulled wine, fresh-baked gingerbread, or fresh scents of merriment wafted through the murk of Chico’s that frigid Thursday night before St. Nick slithered down good little boys’ chimneys. Jack sniffed only skunked beer and Stanky’s soiled shirt.

He handed Stanky a homemade CD, its jewel case gunked and flogged after seasons of hard living.

“What’s this?” Stanky squinted. “Can’t read your chicken scratch of a scrawl there. Holiday favorite?”

“Best of all time.”

Jack invoked Bogie. “Play it, Stanky. You played it for her. Play ‘Fairytale of

New York’ for me.”

Stanky slid the disc into the ailing boombox hiding next to the cash , a boombox incapable of booming. Stanky set the volume low. Never guess what musical treasure Jack might tote to douse his sadness.

The harmonies of the Pogues faded in, too weak to annoy anyone sitting more than a few stools down. What did it matter? The t cowered, dead, two days before Christmas and just a half-dozen poor souls scattered around the horseshoe bar.

“It was Christmas Eve babe

In the drunk tank

An old man said to me,

Won’t see another one

And then he sang a song

The Rare Old Mountain Dew

I turned my face away

And dreamed about you

The world moves away from us in time.”

“This one captures that old-timey holiday spirit,” Stanky said.

“This song,” Jack said, with frank authority, “is the greatest Christmas song ever recorded.”

“Better than ‘White Christmas?’”

“Hell better than ‘White Christmas.’”

Jack pulled rank. He was the customer. Play that Irish Christmas music louder. You other barflies deal with it.

“They’re an Irish band,” Jack said, “the Pogues, guest vocals by a singer named Kirsty MacColl.”

He sang quietly along with the music, low voice rasping out of tune:

“You were handsome

You were pretty

Queen of New York City

When the band finished playing

They howled out for more

Sinatra was swinging

All the drunks they were singing

We kissed on the corner

Then danced through the night...”

Three stools down, wearing a Phillies baseball cap, the coot everyone called Crazy Carl blundered through a sing-along. “All the drunks they were singing. Give this songwriter a beer on me.”

Jack, the songwriter who wasn’t, sank in resignation that no one but Crazy Carl paid heed to the greatest Christmas song ever recorded.

A few more hard-cores shuffled in, two foxy ladies giggling with the apprehension of vacationers entering a boardwalk funhouse, two sad factory workers primed to drop shots and beers in private solace.

“Give us two Heinekens.” The factory workers inched some weathered fivers across the bar.

“Heinekens!” Jack blurted. “Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Jack sized up the place, peering over and around the sticky, long expired bottles of whisky and bourbon and other cheap booze lined behind Stanky.

“You what Hunter S. Thompson wrote?”

Stanky did not. His job was to listen.

Jack sneaked a smoke from Stanky’s pack, pretending it was encased in a gold holder, transforming himself into HST. “We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that… and now, you know what? It’s us…”

Close by the door, gaunt, gray-whiskered Old Man Franken fired down bottles of Bud and sucked on Lucky Strikes, hands shaking with every drag. The smoke he blew in the neighborhood of Big Crow didn’t annoy that twenty-something alcoholic in training, Crow’s eyeglasses hitched high on his head, every sentence punctured with “Da fuck, da fuck.”

Jack’s loins pointed toward the two foxes, one clearly foxier than the other. Her butterscotch hair hung lank and long, framing alabaster skin, high cheekbones, and a Mona Lisa smile. Jack caught her eye, then quickly turned away, facing out a smeary window. Jack felt his face flush. He grew shy meeting new people. Once, in what seemed two lifetimes ago, he fell in love that way.

“Her name’s Peg,” Stanky said. “She gets everybody’s rocks swelling when she’s in town. She’s visiting her friend there, Gloria. Go on over. Put a little stink on your Jack Johnson.”

“Been a while since I got some mud on this turtle. There’s no stink about Peg. She sends over a vapor of beauty. It drifts all the way over your smelly bar.”

“Peg’s a looker,” Stinky said.

Outside, the night whipped bitter, damp flakes. This crumbling coal town, where the widows failed to find work once the dress factories shuttered, aged grimmer by the second, and Chico’s, a blast from Jack’s past, helped him not forget, to sadly .

Stanky tilted Jack’s pint beneath the tap, perfection every time, until Jack let the head fade to a white membrane, downing his lagers in fits and spurts, brooding.

The lyrics to the next track on Jack’s party disc washed familiar.

“‘Fairytale of New York,’” Jack answered, not asked. “This version’s by Celtic Thunder. More than a hundred bands covered this song. I burned twenty of them on this CD. I can burn you a copy?”

Stanky edged down to refill drinks. “Thanks, but I think I’ll . I figure I’ll listen to twenty versions tonight.”

“Jack here lives in the city,” Stanky told Crazy Carl. “But he was born and raised right here in our own Shen-an-do-ah.”

Stanky stretched the syllables, comic emphasis. Most crackers shorten it to Shendo or Shendodafuck. Some hardboiled natives lengthen it to Shendo462dafuck, adding the borough’s telephone prefix.

“Coal cracker, yeah?” the crazy one asked. Puffy-cheeked, Crazy Carl sported a walrus mustache and beer blubber that pressed firm against his lumberjack flannel shirt.

“Finished a whole case of Rolling Rock one night when I just eighteen” Jack said. “We drank up on those coal banks. I bought quarts when I was sixteen. It took brass to walk into bars when you were sixteen.”

“Did it myself. Lost my cherry at seventeen.”

“Give Carl a frosty on me,” Jack said. “Nights like this only come along once in a lifetime.”

Carl detected Jack’s anxiety. “You’re down in the dumps, buddy. Your music could turn Happy the Clown’s red nose blue. How many times we have to go into this drunk tank?”

“Eighteen more tracks. The Pogues pick me up, every Yule.”

“Jack’s had a rough year,” Stanky said.

Carl skipped a beat. “Care to share?”

Jack did not. “Nobody, but nobody, has seen the trouble I’ve seen.” He quoted Tennessee Williams, his favorite playwright, citing a headline in Esquire magazine. Jack knew Carl never read a word in Esquire, nor had any other resident of Shendodafuck, except maybe the issue with Sonny Liston decked out as Santa Claus on the cover.

“The holidays can be a mofo.” Carl gave Jack a friend’s pat.

Jack quivered, the melancholia washing up. He fought it as he must every night, a boxer pummeled.

“You have no gut to suck in there,” Carl said, patting his own belly. “Exercise

like a fiend, I bet?”

“Try to lift three times a week, whack the heavy bag here and there. Work out hard and play hard.”

“Jack here’s a fighter. Once you are a fighter, you are a fighter for life.” Stanky’s puppy dog eyes glowed with iration.

Carl perked up, thus did Peg.

“Jack won the Golden Gloves, up in New York City, next door to Madison Square Garden,” Stanky said. “Fighters were something special in them days.”

Jack sought no pedestal. He sought a fresh Pabst.

“He stood right there in the ring with Jack Dempsey,” Stanky said, “Jack partied at Dempsey’s restaurant. A Shendo boy, how about that?”

“I’m through with the show now,” Jack said. “I’m all used up.”

“Dempsey was the greatest puncher who ever lived,” Carl said. “If I got to shake Dempsey’s hand, that hand that scorched Firpo and Willard…”

Crow nested near a Stegmaier poster of a model faking it as a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader, his cockamamie eyeglasses tilted high. “My great-uncle fought as a lightweight, a contender back in the Thirties. Stan Kowal was his name, da fuck, say he had enough punch to knock out Willie Pep. When Stan hit you, it was like a jackass kicked you in the nuts, da fuck, da fuck.”

Peg shot Jack a flirty look. She inched Jack’s way gracefully, sweeping into his space, her pearly smile mesmerizing. Her perfume shared the springtime whiff of lilac. Jack’s heart simmered.

Her tongue flicked her wine glass, a sensual brush. He struggled not to peer at her breasts, while she saw him peer at her breasts, tightly outlined beneath the pink cashmere of her sweater. Her quiet, playful nod whispered she thought Jack naughty. She looked forty, maybe younger.

“When did you fight in the Golden Gloves, slugger?” she asked.

“Class of 1970. I fought as a heavyweight. Just amateur stuff. Never got to turn pro.”

“Ya coulda been a contender,” Stanky said, offering a dulcet impression of Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”

“My name’s Peg, Peg Cameroy. Lots of guys play football around these parts. First time I ever stood this close to a real fighter.”

“Jack Hanson. Ex-slugger.”

“So, were you a bully, beat up your classmates in the schoolyard? Know what they say, Shendo is the wildest Wild West town in the East.”

Shendo, she pronounced it. Mother tongue.

“I had to hold my own when I went to sister school. I never got in the ring until I was a junior at NYU.”

Jack bounced to his feet, bobbing, feinting, slapping out a right jab, a respectfully safe distance from Peg.

“Jack conquered whoever they put in front of him.” Stanky talked him up, hoping to strike a spark with Peg.

“I held my own,” Jack said. “But let me tell you, the fight game is not glamour. The punches rattle your bones, punish your body, your soul, your connection to life itself. You learn that the hard way”

Jack fixed hard on Peg’s eyes, hoping to connect with her soul. Her smile glistened. He studied the contours of her lips, broadening ever further as Jack spoke.

“Can I buy you another wine?”

“Chardonnay. If you’ll have another cold one with me.”

The hairs on Stanky’s neck bristled from the sparks.

“So, tell me, golden boy, tell me more about your brilliant career in that Golden Gloves tournament.”

“I watched a few fight cards the year before at the Felt Forum. This one fighter, if you want to call him that, he was a real butterball, five foot six or seven and 225 pounds of bloat. Bums like that I thought I could handle, so why not give it a shot?”

Jack puffed his cheeks to mock the butterball.

“I confess. I had no experience, less ring savvy. Over at the college’s athletic center, I got lucky and ran into this old trainer, Pappy Calhoun, hair white as snow, hanks of whiskers. His kid worked as an assistant athletic director. Pappy told me he grew up along the Mississippi delta. He reminded me of a character out of a Mark Twain story. He said he once trained Archie Moore, a lightheavyweight who boxed until he was near sixty. They called Archie the Mongoose.”

“Those mongeese,” Stanky said, “they’re those critters that can kill cobras.”

“And I needed somebody who could teach me how to slay cobras,” Jack said.

“Pappy told me right from the start I had to decide if I wanted to be a boxer or did I want to be a puncher. One thing I knew about boxing was you’re better off as a puncher. Take the judges out of the equation.”

“Give her a sample of that old razzle-dazzle, champ” Stanky said. “Show her how you whipped those boys. He was a contender, not a pretender, our Jack.”

Jack limbered before ducking into his crouch. The crook of his left elbow pressed hard defensively against his nose, forming a tight V. His right wiggled, cocked and loaded. He hummed a trio of uppercuts. Though Jack was not lefthanded, his stance was southpaw.

“He had to fight in close, wing those uppercuts,” Stanky said. “That’s how champs get it done.”

“You know who you remind me of?” Old Man Franken said, hauling on his Lucky. “That skinny fuck from Plan Nine from Outer Space, the chiropractor. He doubled for Bela Lugosi after Lugosi dropped over dead. The guy walked around with a cape draped in front of his face, like common folk like us were too dumb to notice.”

Franken heaved himself to mimic the spectacle, but stumbled off his stool.

“Old timers tell me I reminded them of Jim Jeffries,” Jack said. “They’re right. Jeffries reminds me of an octopus, the way he flailed his arms as if he had eight of them.”

Jack’s impersonation unfurled clumsy and forced, no tribute to the Boilermaker. He shot Peg a fast smile, hoping she was not viewing him as just another braggart drunk.

Beanie, a kid with a bad henna-colored mullet, pitched in his two cents.

“Never heard of this Jim Jeffries.”

“You would have, if you lived a century ago,” Jack said. “He was the best heavyweight on the planet. The Great White Hope. Never lost a single fight in his prime. The films from way back don’t look so hot, so I never got a sense of how polished he was. But some say he was a match for Ali.”

“He never could beat Dempsey!” Franken was adamant.

Jack shrugged. “Suppose we’ll never find out.”

Peg rubbed her hand up and down his bicep, her head cocked with that same sensual tilt, genuine, rapt.

“So old Pappy works my corner and I breeze through the preliminaries, six fights, six knockouts. Pappy tells me in his old Mississippi drawl that the preliminary fights are all about conditioning and heart, not real boxing skill. Whoever’s will to win ranks stronger. Now I make it to the finals and I’m going to fight this Irish kid named Mickey McCafferty. I scoped him out and learned he flattened his every opponent in one round, three inside of a minute, one in

nineteen seconds. So, I’m going like, whoa, now I finally had an inkling of what I was getting myself in for.”

“You Irish, too, Jack?” Peg asked.

Stanky coughed out a raspy chuckle. “Our champ here is Lithuanian. All four grandparents sailed on the same boat.”

“I guess I need some kind of alliterative nickname, the Lithuanian something... oh, I don’t know…”

“The Lithuanian Lip,” Peg offered. “You sure like to talk.”

“My name’s an anglicization.” He wrote down the original spelling: Hynclewicz.

“So you’re in the finals, Jack. I want to hear.”

“I did a little asking around, and it turns out this Mickey McCafferty never fought in the amateurs like me. What he did for a living was toil away in the gym as a sparring partner. He trained with the best heavyweights of the day, contenders like Ernie Terrell, Oscar Bonavena, Thad Spencer. They may only be names to you, but they were scary good.”

“They call bums like McCafferty ringers,” Stanky said.

“But you won the title so things didn’t turn out so bad,” Peg said.

“Pappy came through for me again. He told me McCafferty had scouted me, too. He knew my style, would figure out a plan to counter it. So Pappy trained me to switch, don’t mix it up in close, neutralize McCafferty with unorthodox feints and bobs. Become the octopus times eight.”

“And it worked, too,” Stanky said. “The champ here took home a split decision.”

“That night in the Felt Forum was the last time I saw Pappy. They found him dead three weeks later, sitting in his favorite chair, almost cuddling the ring apron in the athletic center. Old Man River, they eulogized him. They buried him back in Mississippi.”

Jack brushed his hand against the delicate cashmere on her shoulder, bewitched by the luxuriousness of her sacred beauty. He hadn’t expected to smile at all that night.

“Tell Peg about Dempsey,” Stanky urged, “that night in the Garden, that night.”

Jack didn’t want to go there, but he did. “One night in June 1970, there was this boxing card at Madison Square Garden. Jack Dempsey’s seventy-fifth birthday was the next week, so they brought in these old champions, more than a dozen, to honor him. The Golden Gloves gave a salute, too, and I had the honor of presenting Dempsey with a plaque in the ring.”

“You do any more fighting after that, Jack?” she asked.

Jack winced. “Always fighting. Every day. But in the ring —”

One beat ed, two, several more.

“Story for another time” he finally said. “And I hope there will be another time, Peg… many.”

From across the bar came a wizened rasp. “Fightin’ ain’t no sport, ain’t no sport at all, I can tell you that.” He sang it like a one-person Greek chorus with an Irish lilt.

Franken clutched a longneck Bud. His greasy Notre Dame sweatshirt had seen better seasons. Tobacco juice stained the few teeth left wobbling in his gums.

“My uncle was a boxer. Paddy O’Brien. He fought all the top fighters in these parts, up and down all across the east coast. By the time he turned fifty, he needed someone to tie his shoelaces. When they cut him open on the slab, they said his brain had turned to jelly, just ran out like a liquid jelly.”

He waggled his longneck at Jack.

“You’re lucky you got out when the getting out was good, if you did get out when the getting out was good. Who knows if you did. Ain’t no glamour in it, none.”

“Sorry about your uncle.” Jack turned away.

Peg pulled him closer, a snap-out-of-it tug.

“I like you, Jack. It takes a man with spine and soul to step into that ring, put it all on the line, no matter the risk.”

“I like you, too,” Jack whispered.

“You needed to find yourself someone else to work with you in the gym, someone with polish. There must have been plenty of top trainers around when you were up there in New York. I bet as a pro, you’d have made top ten, at least.”

“I guess I’ll never know.”

“Time for some holiday cheer,” she said. “What do you think, slugger?”

“Can you pop that disc back in, Stanky?”

They sat down together, Jack and Peg. The metal of their stools clanged, then a brush of their knees, the satin of her velvet slacks polishing against his denim. He didn’t pull away, nor did she. Her arm draped over his shoulder and she gave a gentle squeeze.

“Tell me, later, all about that night in the Garden when you met Jack Dempsey. You know, it’s cool with me that you never turned pro. That old guy was right. That night was your deliverance.”

Peg’s look pierced his soul.

“You were there,” she said. “You won just by being there, on a special night.”

“I was there,” Jack agreed. “That night.”

June 17, 1970

Jack Hanson splashed two bourbons, on the rocks. He jiggled one glass, handed the other to Daisy.

“One Jack for another. Jack Daniels to Jack Dempsey.”

Just twenty-two with his undergraduate work complete, he weighed the rigors of the ring versus the rigors of grad school. She was two years younger. She weighed whether to major in art history or world lit or some other liberal arts

curriculum that proved useless outside academia.

“And I can’t ignore my favorite Jack,” Daisy said. “It’s been three years. Us. Love you.”

“Right back at you.”

They cuddled, then a soft, gentle touch of the lips. He downed his triple shot; she took a tiny sip of her single.

Her affection, her tone, turned into a scold. “Please don’t come home wasted tonight. Last drink until you’re back with me, promise? Don’t forget what else you promised me.”

“Trust me, Daisy.”

Jack lied.

Wearing flats, Daisy gave an Amazon vibe next to Jack, and Jack was a rangy six feet, toned, in fighting trim, Brown bangs mopped his forehead and down his neck in a shag, wispy sideburns curled around his jaw. Hirsute and square-faced, he stood almost at eye level with the woman he cherished.

“I’ve loved you across centuries.” His face glowed when he told her that. Tonight was the happiest he’d been.

“Your Garden party will be a night to . But after this night, as far as you and boxing…” She made a slicing motion across her throat.

Daisy stood firm, unbending, before her resolve melted into sweetness, a cherub with dimpled cheeks, smoky eyes that could burn with fire or ire, and a nimbus of wavy peach-colored hair, a halo fit for an angel.

“Through with boxing.” He lied.

They shacked up that summer in the west Village in a ninth-floor dorm in Joe Weinstein Hall on the NYU campus, a silver edifice on University Place. The Washington Square arch beckoned a block ahead. Jack’s roommate flew home to Colorado during summer break, and Daisy moved in, on the sly—coed rooming wasn’t a thing yet—but she never needed to muss the covers in the vacant bunk. The drab cinderblock walls, slate green, reminded Jack of an armory, an old-time dressing room where boxers slipped on their protective cups and satin trunks and laced on their gloves and geared up for battle.

As he pulled on his Golden Gloves T-shirt, his official uniform this night, Jack spotted Daisy lock on his pecs, smooth and taut, appreciating.

“, you promised.”

Jack nodded and scrutinized his V-neck, gilded background with jet black boxing gloves crisscrossed. Self-absorbed, Daisy sometimes thought him. Jack had picked a shirt one size too small.

“Seize the night” she said.

Only slight excitement graced her voice, politeness, a girlfriend’s obligatory .

“I’ll be here for you, watching you on TV, proud of you. Just , you promised. You come home right after the Quarry fight, no funny business. No partying with those boxing people.”

She gave a tight hug, focused deep into his eyes.

“I care about you.” She yanked him to attention. “Look at me, look at me. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I stood by your side through your whole Golden Gloves adventure. But you will not do any more boxing. You promised.”

Jack made that promise. And he meant it, at that moment. Then tonight’s gig materialized, the opportunity to represent the Golden Gloves at Jack Dempsey’s birthday party. Right after the ceremony, the main event, Jerry Quarry vs. Mac Foster, and after that, angle up shoulder up with the top trainer in the game, Quarry’s cornerman, Teddy Bentham. Jack wanted to share his ambition with Teddy, fighting as a professional, becoming heavyweight champion of the world, after Quarry’s reign ended, of course. Just talk to Teddy. Let Teddy soak in his ion. Listen to Teddy’s advice. No harm in that.

Jack pressed to erect a straw man, change the subject. “A little night music, before I catch the uptown train?”

Jack slipped the long-player on the turntable, a clunky monaural, its grey fabric frayed atop a lonely speaker, the kind of record player Grandma used to own. He cued the album to his favorite song of the moment, “Magic in My Socks,” off Al Kooper’s album, You Never Know Who Your Friends Are.

Daisy stared down at the jacket, illustrated with a photo from the 1968 Chicago riots, police stomping and billy-clubbing protesters at the Democratic National Convention. The record crackled with the scratches of a stylus they had not replaced since before that ugly summer of 1968:

“Taste with me the joys of life and make them all your own

And anything that turns you on by all means take it home.”

Jack yearned for Daisy to him that night, but ringside seats were scarce. Jack was lucky to land a single spot at ringside in the company of a dozen greying warriors, Dempsey’s peers and disciples. Daisy’s distaste for boxing ground deep into her essence. She tolerated his march through the Golden Gloves, cheered his final triumph, never let him forget how she grimaced every time punches peppered his head or body.

When the referee hoisted his arm in triumph, he looked her way, flashed the pearly white of his mouthpiece dotted with blood, and patted his glove against his heart.

Daisy’s tolerance for the sport diminished as Jack’s enthusiasm strengthened.

“Come quick, Daisy,” Jack hollered whenever they showed replays of Ali’s fights on the old 19-inch Philco in the dorm they shared: Zora Folley cartwheeling across the canvas after an Ali left-right; Cleveland Williams, the Big Cat declawed in three rounds with ferocious precision.

“Boxing historians will declare that fight the greatest night of Ali’s career.”

“I don’t see what the fuss is all about” Daisy said. “Clay’s fleet, but so what?”

“Not Clay. Ali. This TV does him no justice. Someday we’ll be able to afford a bigger screen, and, when they let us control the slow-motion, you’ll be able to see just how quick Ali’s hand speed is.”

“Ali, Clay, whatever. I think his bluster is... an emblem of jerkiness.”

“Well you’re wrong. I love you anyway.”

“I love you, Jack. Can we turn the fights off now?”

“Can’t you give up boxing?” she asked, more than once. “It’s brutal. It’s not a sport. It’s hate. It’s rage. It’s stuff you can’t take back. That punch, once it lands, you can’t take it back.”

He had that talk with Daisy three weeks ago, when they snuggled under the blanket, cuddling in their bunk in the heat of the night, her head resting on his

bare chest in the glow that lingers after making love. He was thinking about turning pro, scrapping grad school, fulfilling his destiny as a future heavyweight king in the lineage of Jack Dempsey and Jim Jeffries and so many heroes past, present, and future.

Daisy bolted up. “You can’t do that, Jack. Your future is not in fighting. My future with you is not in fighting.”

“Okay.”

She knew he did not mean it.

He knew he did not mean it.

“I’ll love you across time and space, across centuries,” he said. He hoped the subject had been changed, once and forever that night.

Jack thought there’d be no stopping him if he had Teddy in his corner. Quarry was the best damn white heavyweight since Dempsey, better than Marciano, damn better than Ingemar Johansson, the Swede left twitching in the throes of death after a clobbering by Floyd Patterson.

He rode the subway from Sixth Avenue to 34th Street and whistled through the will-call gate. He was high on life, floating, giddy, in love, the happiest he’d been.

Jack took his seat at the far end of the press table, right beneath Quarry’s corner. A swarm of sports writers pecked away, the ring-zing of the carriage returns piping out a discordant melody. Next to Jack, hunched over a beat-up Underwood, clacked Spike Daley. Old Spike, they called him, a fixture at ringside for the better part of fifty years.

“So, sonny, is the Herald sending over interns to cover this fighting extravaganza?”

Spike didn’t bother to glance up. His index fingers danced a clackety-clack on keys whose paint had long chipped away.

“Name’s Hanson. Jack Hanson. The Golden Gloves awarded me the honor of delivering Jack Dempsey’s birthday plaque. I hope to turn pro myself someday, soon, this week.”

Spike nodded with disinterest, the nod of a man who had heard it all before. He sprouted a tousle of white hair, a turkey neck pushing near a wide-bottomed tie hanging loose and askance from an unbuttoned collar, a green visor dipping over his eyes. His red, bulbous nose had breathed too much whiskey. Sweat stains branded the armpits of his weathered tan shirt, some moist, some baked in. His breath reeked of cigars.

Spike gestured toward the crowd piling in across the ring.

“How come you didn’t land a seat over on murderer’s row?”

Jack squinched, puzzled. “Murderer’s row? Wasn’t that the Yankees?”

“Before your time, 1927. Best damn hitting team in baseball history. That section, over there, that’s where all these old champs will sit.”

“Why did you call them murderers?”

“Ever see any of them in the ring? You’d understand.”

“You ever see anybody die in the ring?”

Spike said but one word: “Paret.”

Jack shared the horrors of that night, Bennie Paret, welterweight king, against Emile Griffith. He watched it on Uncle Joe’s oval Sylvania, 1962.

“Paret called Griffith a faggot,” Uncle Joe told Jack. “You watch, Griffith will kill the cocksucker. There ain’t no faggots in boxing.”

Figure of speech or not, Uncle Joe proved partly prescient. Paret, unconscious, comatose, pathetic in his helplessness, died a week later in intensive care. Much later, Griffith would be revealed as gay.

“Paret wasn’t the only fighter I watched die up there,” Spike said. “You don’t always die right then and there. A little of you dies each time you step into that ring. Somebody may get killed in the ring tonight for all we know, but he won’t breathe his final breath until ten, twenty years later. Your past can come back to kill you.”

Jack enjoyed small talk, even while he sensed the salty scribe found him callow.

“Historic fight tonight, Quarry and Foster,” Jack said.

Spike flashed the stink eye. “Son, Dempsey would mash both those palookas tonight, and the man’s turning seventy-five years old. Fighters today, most got no heart.”

A sandy-haired writer with black-framed glasses shook his head. Jack recognized Zane Hister, editor of Boxing News magazine.

“Old Spike figures any fighter born after the nineteenth century is a bum.”

Jack identified with Quarry’s hardscrabble upbringing. Jack’s father, a coal miner, died of black lung—miner’s asthma, they called it—and Jack’s mother provided for his modest, lower-class upbringing, working wearying hours in a sweatshop sewing ladies dresses. Jack rode a rust-bucket, hand-me-down bike while the other neighborhood boys piloted Schwinns. Jack wasn’t uprooted like Quarry, landing in 34 different schools, migrating like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Jack was stuck in one place, the moribund coal town where the evil barons sent his father to an early grave.

“Quarry’s old man is gonna kill him,” Spike said. “He’s treating him like a sixbuck hooker. He started Jerry boxing when he was only three, sent him in the ring more than a hundred times by the time he was fifteen. Too much punishment for any kid to suffer.”

“Quarry’s just peaking now,” Jack said. “Boxing News readers voted him the most popular fighter three years running, Time magazine called him the first great white hope since Marciano.”

“You watch Irish’s last fight?” Spike asked. “Pitiful.”

Jack ed it with a flinch. Irish Jerry Quarry turned into Hard Luck Jerry Quarry in the spell of a ten count. His foe was George Chuvalo, a Canadian warhorse that nobody ever knocked out, but who rarely won the matches that mattered.

“Quarry dominated,” Jack said, struggling not to stammer. “He won every round until the seventh. He pounded Chuvalo’s right eye to a pulp. Then a fluke left hook…”

“Down goes Quarry!” Spike blustered.

“He bounded right up, but he took a knee…”

“... then he got counted out.”

“...because he lost track of the count in the noise…”

“Son, the champs, they don’t take a knee. They scramble up and fight. You’ll see tonight, when they replay Dempsey’s old fights. The old timers, they didn’t get knocked out by any patty cake punch to the hairline.”

“You can’t argue with old Spike,” Zane said. “He was there, seen it all.”

Jack tried to change the subject, but wily Spike held his turf.

“You know they call Mac Foster the Fighting Marine,” Jack said, “just like Tunney.”

“And they call George Chuvalo the Molasses Mauler. And he laced Irish Jerry with one pop.”

“Stuff happens,” Jack said. “Fighters get confused. Don’t forget the long count. Dempsey suffered that brain freeze.”

The seventh round, Soldier Field, 1927: Jack had watched the replay dozens of times. The overhand right to Tunney’s jaw, the left hook, then the murderous combination as Tunney began his slide to the canvas, another overhand right, two left hooks and a right, Tunney sitting on his ass, hanging on to the bottom rope, gazing with faraway eyes as he picked up the count from referee Dave Barry.

Why didn’t Dempsey retreat to the neutral corner, Jack asked himself? He pissed away the opportunity to make ring history, win back the belt.

Spike coughed out a loud “Heh!” The clacking stopped on press row.

“You don’t think Dempsey knew what he was doing? He knew exactly what he was doing. With Dempsey, there was no fair or foul—there was only fighting. Primitive rage, furious rage. Sure, the referee ordered him to a neutral corner, and Dempsey said, ‘I stay.’ Dempsey said he couldn’t move, instinct. He wanted to club Tunney the second the son of a bitch staggered up, circle him from behind.”

Jack saw Spike’s eyes well up. They glistened, rheumy and tired from his life’s work covering prizefights, living hard, playing hard.

“You want the backstory about the long count?” Spike asked, sucking the snot back up his nostrils. “I was there that night, that ballpark in Chicago, inched up as close to the apron as we are right now. Gold gilded the ring posts. Old Tex Rickard pulled out every stop to promote that one. Class. Kitsch, you’d call it now.”

Jack closed his eyes, traveling back in time to that moment.

“I was a whippersnapper, like you,” Spike said, “so I pushed ahead in Tunney’s locker room, Soldier Field. He choked in oxygen, struggling to breathe, exultant, but so clear-minded. He made his choice right then to do the right thing: quit. He

vowed to quit right there. The punishment from Dempsey in those short, long seconds had nothing to with it. That hellish flurry helped clear the cobwebs. See, Tunney told me that in training camp a sparring partner socked him so hard he suffered amnesia. Tunney told me he didn’t know who he was for forty-eight hours. Gene Tunney climbed into the ring with Jack Dempsey not sure he was Gene Tunney. That’s a heavyweight champion. Not until the seventh round, not until the long count, did Tunney return to normal.”

Spike fished a half-smoked stogie and fired up the stub.

“That long count saved Tunney’s life,” Spike said, relishing a deep haul. “He had this overwhelming desire to walk away forever, first chance that came up. One last payday, before a beating in another fight with the likes of Dempsey scrambled his brain into custard.”

“You’ve had this amazing career, covering so many famous fights.”

“Listen to me, son, when you sit at the ringside long enough, the flops of sweat aren’t all that’s soaking you. The blood sprays over you, too. Warm, sticky. It sticks to your hair, splashes in your eyes, soaks the paper you’re typing on. Sometimes the copy desk can read it, sometimes they can’t.”

Spike exhaled the smoke into the air in a broadening circle.

“Dempsey could be a fool,” Spike said. “He thought he wouldn’t get cut if he massaged beef brine in his face, pickling his puss with beef piss. He thought he’d be immune. He didn’t count on head butts. Or the punches that slashed through all that piss. Tunney cut him up, his eye, his ear. Dempsey’s blood

sprayed down on me. Marciano’s, too. And Sugar Ray’s and Jake LaMotta’s. I got drenched with a crimson tide of the boxing hall of fame. A man’s inner juices, his whole life story, splattering on the writers trying to make sense of it all. And we never could.”

Jack reveled in the way Spike reveled in reliving the old war stories, and these were stories about war. Spike was roughly Dempsey’s age now, canny, whipsmart.

Sandy Musket, from the New York Bugle, snugged near. “He’ll tell you yarns until your ear wax melts.”

“You can’t look at old fight films and think you know the sport,” Spike said. “You got to be there, smell the blood.”

Johnny Kilgore from the Telegraph-American nudged Jack. “Vampires could feast on old Spike.”

Spike ed his disagreement with a hacking rasp, then sucked down the phlegm.

“I didn’t cover Jess Willard’s fight with Dempsey, but Grantland Rice shared me the carnage. He said Willard left with cuts above and below both eyes, blood rivering out his mouth, cheek smashed in seventeen places, half-dozen teeth mired in Dempsey’s mitts. Paint a picture of a thick hamburger steak, painted blue and purple and red, plaster this to the side of a man’s face, and you see how Willard looked in the middle of that third round. If a six-inch shell exploded against his jaw, his face hardly could hurt more.”

“Aw, you’re embellishing it,” Jack said. “Time does that to memory.”

“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Dempsey owned the right stuff, instincts of a jungle cat. Quarry will never have it. Dammit, most fighters never get it.”

The preliminary bouts unfolded with a flair opposite a cavalcade of champions. They chatted amiably, the old general who’s seen too many battles end cruelly and the youngster eager to enter the game. Spike returned to work, clacking furiously—“What they call a color story, son, the atmosphere, the ambience, for the first edition”—when the fighters entered for the semi-main event, Jerry’s kid brother, Mike Quarry, matched against the ham-and-egger Ray Ayala.

“They call this an advance story,” Spike said. “Head start on deadline. I’m setting the stage for Quarry’s final fight. Not many have the common sense to walk away at twenty-five.”

“Why do you think he should quit?”

“Took too many punches. No spring in his step. The best fighters have no quit. The mediocre better quit.”

Spike fractured the mood with a sneeze, a blaring honk, and he snatched out an old hankie to mop the snot juice.

Jack’s heart thumped, not because of any action in the ring, a plodding ten-round

majority decision for Mike, but the anticipation that Dempsey would arrive next with the old champions, and that Jack would them in the limelight, basking in the company of the ageless mauler.

Jerry Quarry, Jack was certain, would show this cynical scribe who owned spunk and drive. Then over across Broadway to Dempsey’s landmark restaurant, he would meet Teddy Bentham and plot his future.

A beer vendor clumped up the aisle drawling, “Ass-cold beer. GET YOUR ASSCOLD BEER!”

“Can I buy you a cold one?” Jack asked.

“Not when I’m on the clock. Later, over at Dempsey’s lair, I might treat myself to an Irish whiskey. A wee one, in memory of Quarry’s exit.” Spike’s voice had the swing of a mischievous leprechaun.

“Why do you keep dumping all over Quarry? Quarry’s got whole lot of heart. You’ll see, tonight, you’ll see. This fight will define his career, I’m willing to bet. He’s only twenty-five. He’ll be fighting a long time.”

“You need to sit here at the ringside to understand what I’m saying,” Spike said. “The bloodlust, the unleashing of the savage beast, it’s a feature, not a bug, unless you’re the poor soul whose future is getting all used up. Something tonight will change your mind.”

Spike looked Jack straight in the eye, the old guy schooling the young urchin, addressing Jack not as an eager student of the sport, but as a Golden Glove alumni basking in his finest hour.

Jack had not thought about Daisy for more than an hour.

Spike nudged him and motioned toward the opposite ring apron. There sat Dempsey, puffing on a fat brown cigar, offering hearty handshakes to all who penetrated his aura.

“Main event coming up,” Spike said.

Before Jack muttered that Quarry-Foster came after the Dempsey tribute, Spike gave a wrist flick saying, I know.

“The birthday party will be the real headline event,” Spike said. “More people came here tonight to see the champ than either of them bums.”

The Garden fell pitch-black as a mighty jungle roar consumed the arena. Two giant screens suspended on opposite ends of the building flashed to life with a film of the most insane two rounds in ring history: the Polo Grounds, 1923, Dempsey defending his belt against the Argentinian slugger, Luis Angel Firpo, forever known in lore as the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Both men pushed each other to the limits of human endurance in that epic brawl—if 237 seconds could be deemed epic.

The 15,915 spectators in the Garden gasped as one when a Firpo right, his first punch of the fight, dropped the champion on all fours. Jack thought it was a flash knockdown, a down-and-up so swift the referee had no time to count, until Spike leaned over and whispered, “Dempsey must have had this footage doctored so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. I was there that night, it all clear as day. Dempsey was floored for a count of three.”

Jack hushed Spike. Dempsey delivered his own color commentary, out of the darkness.

“There was just this fog before my eyes,” Dempsey said, “and this big guy getting up every time I knocked him down and the crowd screaming so loud it made it harder for my brain to try to think.”

Spike harrumphed as Dempsey dropped Firpo with a double-barreled assault of left hooks, then again, three more encores, five falls total.

Without warning, another Firpo pile driver plopped Dempsey’s gloves on the mat.

“Not many people that knockdown because of what came next,” Dempsey said. “That boy, Firpo, he could hit.”

Another knockdown for Dempsey, then another, the seventh one a nine count that left Firpo flopping like a beached sea mammal. But the Argentinian had no quit. Then the moment, the volley by the Wild Bull singeing Dempsey, driving him against the ropes, where a mighty overhand right bludgeoned the champion —“the scythe of death,” Spike whispered atop the shriek rumbling through the

Garden—sailing Dempsey backward, head over feet through the middle rope, crashing atop the gallery of writers and their writing machines.

The film showed Dempsey clambering in to resume the war within mere seconds.

“Doctored film,” Spike said. “He might have been out of the ring over ten seconds.”

From the darkness, Dempsey said, “I have no memory, not a whisper, of the most spectacular moment in my career. All I could see were twenty Firpos standing across the ring.”

Another brutal barrage by Firpo, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen unanswered punches elevated the round into the realm of immortality, Dempsey taking a groggy walk back his corner.

“I was only semiconscious,” Dempsey confessed. “Doc Kearns said I asked what round Firpo knocked me out in. He said, ‘You slipped. You’re coming out for the second. Now!’ Guess those smelling salts did the trick”

Dempsey recovered with a fury. A crashing right and a shove sent Firpo sprawling for knockdown number eight. A wicked left-right, and the Wild Bull lay writhing, roadkill, just fifty-seven seconds into the second round.

Jack’s jaw hung slack.

“Greatest prizefight you’ll ever see, son,” Spike said.

The crowd gasped while the highlights continued, Dempsey slashing and slicing Willard again and again in a first round almost as brutal as the Firpo opener.

“I wasn’t always such a nice guy,” Dempsey joked as he smoked the tottering giant with a kidney punch.

Then the long count with Tunney, perhaps the most famous twenty seconds of ring war ever filmed.

“Stubborn as a mule I was,” Dempsey said. “Tunney won fair and square. Smart? Became best buddies until the end.”

A spotlight shined toward the ring, following Dempsey, the titan, the oldest living ex-champion, bounding into the ring, regal, beaming, bowing, swiveling to face each corner of the arena, the crowd surging to its feet in euphoria, an unseen announcer prompting a massive rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Jack stood with all the others, his heart fluttering.

They called the old-timers, Jack’s contemporaries, into the ring first.

Jack Sharkey assumed a fighting pose and Dempsey matched his horseplay, before they embraced, chuckling like school boys.

Georges Carpentier, a Dempsey victim forty-nine years earlier, planted wet ones on both his cheeks.

With Gene Tunney, a whispered exchange, a long handshake, and a hearty bear hug.

Joe Frazier, strutting the proud gait of Dempsey’s heir, hoisted a portrait of the old champion. Dempsey acknowledged the fanfare with a bow and a handclap of his own.

They came to pay tribute in waves, old and young, champions all. Joey Giardello, Ismael Laguna, and Carlos Ortiz. Emile Griffith and Dick Tiger. Peter Scalzo. Lou Salica. Phil Terranova. Paul Berlenbach.

Jack did not recognize all the names.

When Mickey Walker, legendary welter and middleweight king of the Roaring Twenties, slithered in, Spike leaned over to Jack.

“He got in a scrap with Babe Ruth at the Firpo fight. Let me tell you about it later.”

The wave continued... Sandy Saddler, Jake LaMotta, Willie Pep... George Chuvalo, and a smirk from Spike.

A deafening cheer welcomed Floyd Patterson, twice heavyweight king, but that familiar pompadour, that bashful, sheepish grin, never appeared.

“Ain’t here,” Spike said. “Always ducking out, always quitting. You know, after Liston knocked him out in one, took his crown in 1962, Floyd came prepared with a disguise, a silly wig and a goatee, so he fled from his embarrassment. Let me tell you, you can’t flee from your past. Never can.”

Spike made the cluck-cluck-cluck noise of a chicken, all the funnier the way the loose flesh of his turkey neck jiggled, as he flapped his arms like wings.

Finally, it was Jack’s turn.

“And now, representing the amateurs, the fighters of the future, the next generation of great fighters, on behalf of the New York State Golden Gloves, the 1970 heavyweight champion, Jack Hanson.”

Dempsey clasped Jack’s hand, firm but friendly.

“I hope you can come over the restaurant after the main event,” Dempsey whispered. “Tonight’s party is just starting, pally”

The party done, Dempsey struggled through the ropes, clutching Frazier’s portrait and the Golden Gloves plaque, the stride of an old man now, two attendants guiding him down the stairs.

“I the first time I saw Dempsey climb into the ring, 1923,” Spike said, luring back distant memories.

“Dempsey-Firpo. You were there that night?”

“First title bout I ever covered. Rookie reporter, step above cub. Dempsey entered wearing a white cardigan sweater draped over his shoulders. The pink of fitness. Firpo looked the part of a jazz-age rascal. He had on this yellow and black checked robe, with purple highlights on cuffs and collar. Black-and-white film can’t reveal such secrets. There were eighty-eight thousand fans there that night. They had to turn thirty-five thousand away.”

“Were you at the writer’s table when Firpo knocked him through the ropes?”

“Right behind. Second row. He crashed down in an avalanche, jammed his hip on the table, slashed the back of his neck on Hype Igoe’s typewriter. Didn’t rub enough beef brine back there, I guess. Sure, we pushed him back in. Sure, it broke the rules, but it seemed the right thing to do.”

Spike pulled Jack to face him squarely.

“Do you think you ever might inflict such punishment on another human being?” Spike asked. “Do you think you could absorb such a terrible beating? Boxing was the cruelest sport back then. Nowadays, the referee steps in and stops the fight over a nosebleed. Twelve damn knockdowns, inside two rounds. Think you’ll ever see that again? You never will”

They both thought their own thoughts, what it meant, what it might mean, until the zhoop of Spike’s typewriter picked up.

“What you writing there, boss?” Jack asked.

“Leads. Possible leads. I try to get a heads-up on creativity. Let my inspiration flow.”

“Can I read it?”

“Don’t think you want to, but here.”

Jack read the copy, the perfectly spaced Corona type:

Jack Dempsey made sure the most desperate seconds from his brawl with Luis Angel Firpo were cut from the fight film shown at his 75th birthday celebration last night, but Jerry Quarry found no way to excise the ten seconds he spent face down following a knockout flurry from Mac Foster.

“Might need a little fine tuning here or there,” Spike said.

“You have it in for Quarry, huh?”

Spike grinned, enigmatic.

“Just giving your chain a crank. I’m pulling for Quarry. Rooting for him real hard, just for you. Make your night”

Quarry and his entourage breezed by, the fighter’s brocade jacket brushing Jack’s elbow as he ed. Quarry wore white. His lip bore the hints of a mustache. Foster, in scarlet, showed the dominant physique. Normally a fast starter, the Irishman begin slow. Foster tagged him in the first three rounds. Foster’s nine-inch reach advantage kept Quarry at bay, but Foster’s blows were short, direct, precise. A welt blotched beneath Quarry’s left eye. Jack thought Quarry looked confused heading back to his corner after the third. Jack leaned in close to pick up the exchange.

“I can’t get to this guy,” Quarry said.

“ what we talked about before the fight?” Teddy Bentham growled, as happy as a trainer can be to only mop sweat, not blood, off his fighter’s brow. “Foster’s a mechanical fighter, knock him out of his comfort zone. Hit him downstairs, knock him on his mechanical ass.”

Bentham screeched into Quarry’s ear. “If you don’t keep your hands up and punch to his body, I’ll be the one kicking your fucking ass”

Quarry found his footing in round four. He battered Foster in the midsection with rifle-shot lefts, then mixed it up solid rights to the head.

“Foster’s guard is coming down.” Jack patted Spike on the thigh. Spike pecked away.

The fifth was all Irish, Foster, despite his 24-0 record, exposed as a green fighter, incapable of letting go of a losing battle plan. Quarry uncorked a barrage, wounding the Fighting Marine with an evil salvo, sending him teetering diagonally against the ropes in the sixth, before the ref signaled the end. At 2:05, it was over. Quarry thrust gloves skyward and the victor walked away from the vanquished. Jack locked gazes with Quarry.

“That image, it will be an indelible one in boxing lore,” Jack predicted. “Tonight is Jerry Quarry’s greatest night.”

“Guess I’ll need a fresh lead. That’s why they call me Spike. They have spikes in the newsroom, on the copy desk, where bad stories not worth the paper they’re typed on get spiked through the heart, left to bleed to death. We all bleed ink, we newsmen, blue ink. Fighters, they only bleed red.”

“Not all fighters have to bleed,” Jack said. “When I turn pro–”

“Trust me on this one, Jack, you don’t want to. Don’t wreck your life.” Spike called him Jack for the first time, draping his arm over his shoulder, father to son. “You don’t want to be no fighter. Take your Golden Gloves trophy, go home, put it up on the wall, share those war stories with your wife and kids when you’re fifty.”

“I want to try,” Jack countered. “You know what they say about the road not traveled.”

Spike shook Jack to gather his attention.

“Dempsey, Tunney, they’re survivors. They quit the sport young. Not everyone is a survivor. Most are not. Dempsey’s lower back, when he crashed assbackward on Hype’s typewriter. His back hurt that night, this night, every night after that night for the rest of his born days.”

“Dempsey likes reeling us in with fish stories,” Jack said. “Enhance the legend.”

“When the legend becomes fact,” Spike said, “print the legend.”

Spike’s pep talk wound down. “Be a survivor, Jack. There are other dreams, better dreams.”

The lecture, wise though it was, ed with Jack for several minutes, only until he crossed 49th Street to the west side of Broadway where the orange-neon sign of Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant beamed him welcome.

Dempsey came into sight, perched in his favorite corner booth facing the window, greeting the well-wishers one by one as they queued up to exalt the courtly owner, rapt in his sway. Jack stood off to the side, watching Dempsey grasp one hand, then another, taking his time, making each guest feel honored.

Jack entered the foyer from a little door on Fiftieth Street. A menacing security guard, wearing a name tag identifying him as “Mealey,” gave Jack an up-anddown, his glower suggesting, You dare not crash this party, chum. The restaurant was closed that night to the usual tourist crowd, the out-of-towners who flocked inside to shake Dempsey’s hand, pat his broad back, grab a red-and-gold souvenir menu adorned with Dempsey’s photo and autograph.

“Golden Gloves,” Jack said, pealing back his jacket to show the T-shirt. “The boss gave me an invite when I shook his hand in the ring.”

The guard whistled Jack through, where three slim blondes, costumed in riding jodhpurs, scarlet coats, and white stocks, waited to safe-keep guests’ belongings. Off to the right, a green rope and another creepy bouncer, hands crossed at crotch level, guarded the entry to the tavern. A glass and silver cocktail bar, vacant now, anchored the center of the foyer. To the left, a high desk with an enormous guestbook marked the entrance to the restaurant.

The bouncer flashed Jack a charmless grunt, unbuckling the velvet rope to let him . The restaurant sprawled cavernous and barn-like, glowing in red and gold. Dempsey held court, working the room like a master politician, greeting every guest as if they were long-ago best friends.

Jack stood and listened. “Know who named me the Manassa Mauler?” he heard Dempsey say. “Damon Runyon.” The old champ shined bright-eyed, alive, more beloved in retirement than ever in the ring. Jack watched him clowning, feigning terror as a visitor pretended to sail a punch his way.

He inched closer. Dempsey’s navy blue suit did not hide his stockier frame, but he was not at all out of shape. His hair was gray, a bit thin, decades removed from the high-and-tight trim, his ring trademark. Dempsey worked his way back

up the line, darting from guest to guest—“Sure, sure, I you. How are the wife and kids?”—like a fighter circling his prey.

“Let me show you around this place... Glad to see you. Glad to see you. How’s my old pardner… I’ll be over later and have a chat with you, pally.”

Jack snagged a spot at the back of the line, eager to reintroduce himself, tell him how much the allure of Dempsey’s brilliant career now shaped his own life, his tomorrows, blessed once more to stand in the champ’s shadow.

“Golden Gloves, my main man!” Dempsey said, clasping Jack’s hand with both of his.

Dempsey struck a fighting pose, his movement quick, catlike. “So, do you have any more fight left in your future?”

Jack stammered. His thoughts turned to Daisy.

“I... I’m not sure. I hope to, yes, sir. I anticipate meeting Teddy Bentham, see if he can share any pointers, perhaps let me do a tryout at his gym.”

“Teddy Bentham, good man, good man,” Dempsey said. “You know, I wanted to be champion since I was eleven.”

“Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Dempsey. Tonight is a night I will always

.”

“Jack, always Jack, one Jack to another.”

Dempsey curled a fist and love-tapped Jack on the shoulder. Jack was buzzed. Daisy will know, his friends, the world, that he fielded a punch from the Manassa Mauler.

Jack surveyed this palace, a museum of times past, years lost. He marveled in the shadow of the famous oil painting by George Wesley Bellows, Firpo blasting Dempsey through the Polo Grounds ropes, like an animal pounded between the bars of his cage. James Montgomery Flagg’s panoramic mural illustrated Dempsey in less-desperate times, hunched at the waist, fierce, savage, ready to spring at Jess Willard like a cobra.

Jack ordered a Jack, a double, a double Jack Daniels on the rocks in tribute to Dempsey.

Quarry swept in with his posse, gliding o’er all, resplendent in natty gray sharkskin tros, cobalt blue shirt unbuttoned to the nipples, and white loafers. He pumped high his fist, saluting the night, acknowledging the huzzah. The birthday boy pivoted as he applauded, urging the crowd to stand with him. The two men embraced, old and new, the mighty mauler of a half-century ago, and the anointed heir of the boxing gods. Screw Joe Frazier, Quarry was the baddest man on the planet that night, his future so bright he should have worn shades.

Jack mashed his palms together until they hurt, thinking for a moment he might catch Quarry’s eye or Teddy Bentham’s. The trainer stood behind Quarry,

wearing a green polo shirt, sucking deep on a victory stogie, shoulder to shoulder with Jerry’s dad, Jack, sporting a cat-that-ate-the-canary smirk. Jack found it too impertinent to duck over now, invading Quarry’s space, the reigning king of the night.

This night, this night, I’ll never forget this night...

Jack downed his bourbon and headed back to the oval bar, thoughts racing through his mind: If only Daisy were here, to freeze this moment in time, bask in the presence of a warrior, triumphant, after the fight of his life. This is what boxing is about, not that doom and gloom springing from Spike Daley.

The second bourbon Jack snarfed in two crisp swallows. He might need a few more, more lubricant, to work up the cojones to approach Teddy and to sell him on his dream of ing the Bentham stable, his first baby step toward the championship.

Jack eavesdropped as Emile Griffith and Dick Tiger, foes before, friends today, engaged in cheery chatter. Dempsey gathered with Jake LaMotta at the base of the Firpo painting, feinting and parrying at empty air, recalling moments lost in the mirage of time.

The room bustled with the din of 200 partiers, Jack guesstimated, muscling between the folks propped on the bar stools, aiming to gain the attention of the three bartenders working the beer taps, the wine cooler, the liquor stock.

Quarry sidled down from the fat end of the counter, close to Jack, swigging from a Heineken longneck, whooping it up with one of the young women in riding

gear.

“Great win tonight,” Jack said.

Quarry patted him on the shoulder and offered a long smile. Jack saw he wore his partial plate, his denture. He hadn’t thought about it before, but Jack consigned himself to losing a few chompers in the ring. If that’s what it takes, live with it. Daisy, too.

Jack inched away from the crush of the bar rail. Where was Teddy? Jack spied him in animated gab with a well-muscled Latino, a welterweight perhaps, who still towered over Teddy, a gnarled little man with white hair, dark-framed eyeglasses, and scar tissue carving a river across his brow.

Teddy patted the Latino on the back and turned to walk Jack’s way. Jack pounded down the bourbon and tottered toward the man who tonight will shape his future.

June 22, 1980

“My name is Jack, and I am a survivor.”

“Hello, Jack.”

They wrapped a tight semicircle around Jack Hanson, welcoming him with one

voice. Six lost souls were gathered together, two couples, Archie and Beryl, Bub and Laura, and two singles, Hollywood Howie and Sophie. The spilled their memories of loss, bared their heartbreak, united in a community of anguish. Jack told his tale last, his first meeting of Survivors Anonymous in this gloomy church basement and, he hoped, his last for a thousand years.

Dr. Yale Borg moderated from the middle, pivoting on his swivel chair, this way and that to face his confessors. Now came Jack’s turn. The survivors fidgeted and squirmed on the crushed padding of dinky metal folding chairs, the kind that come on loan from a funeral parlor.

“So why did you us here tonight, Jack?” Borg asked.

Borg carved a sliver from a Granny Smith apple with a paring knife, Jack’s archetype of a psychologist. Shiny bald head, half-spectacles, ginger-and-pepper beard.

The others eyed Jack with a kindness born of grief, earning relief from their own pain by hearing someone else share his misery.

Borg supplied the refreshments, set them on a cheap folding table with flimsy plastic tablecloth, two punchbowls filled with wan fruit beverage, a plate of processed cheese, and some apples and pears and bananas. Jack sipped fake cranberry juice that started life as a powder.

“I’m here, like you all, because I’m in pain,” Jack said.

“We’re here to help,” Borg said. “That’s why we all are here.”

Jack came to describe her, their doomed love, but he did not know if he yet had the fortitude.

“I used to be a fighter,” he began.

“You are a fighter,” Borg interrupted, putting harsh emphasis on the present tense. “Every one of us here is a battler. We have to be.”

They nodded together, the other six, like cult parroting what their pastor sought to hear.

“We must fight through these times, difficult they may be,” Borg said. “Emerge as survivors.”

“Amen,” Sophie added.

Jack pegged Sophie as the most religious, grinding her way through life via faith, prayer, token hallelujahs. Though her hair was gray, thinning, her eyes sunken, she was not past 50. Earlier tonight, her muffled sobs smothered her words while she painted a picture of the nursing home where every day she stroked the hair of her only living relative, spoon fed her, her older sister, lingering in the depths of brain damage, after a stumble two years prior exiting the shower.

“Don’t you hold faith in a higher power, Jack?” Sophie asked.

Jack shed his faith years ago.

“Know what I believe in?” he said, “I trust in science. I attended sister school, so let me tell you my experience. This old sportswriter I met once at ringside taught me something, only speak from experience, always. One friend, back in first grade, asked the nun why God was meaner in the Old Testament, turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt and all that jazz. Guess what this nun did? She clutched this kid’s hair and slammed him face-first on his desk. The impact made this sick sound, must have been what it sounded like in 1923 when Luis Firpo sent Jack Dempsey crashing through the ropes.”

Jack thought no one will pick up on the boxing reference. Archie did.

“Jack Dempsey, best damn heavyweight there was,” he said. He had a ready grin even with his front teeth gone, knocked loose or rotted.

Jack took a liking to Archie. Bony, rangy, almost gaunt, skin the color of anthracite, he had a pep the others lacked. His wife, Beryl, much beefier, sad and stoic, rubbed Archie’s thigh. Jack’s gaze drifted into soft focus earlier when Archie clutched his shivering wife, while she keened over how their son had overdosed on speed, black beauties, found him dead, face blue, in his bed at sixteen.

His unkindness to Sophie resonated. He jiggled his cup, the melting ice swirling like pebbles. It made him think of bourbon. Next time, if there is any next time, Jack would tote his flask, sneak a nip in the men’s room,

“I’m sorry, Sophie, that was out of line. I didn’t come here expecting any redemption. Tonight, any old nostrum will do.”

Sophie mouthed the words “that’s okay,” her glow of forgiveness beatific.

Jack had sought respite through prayer, crying many nights in his solitude, praying for emotional rescue to no deity in particular, his prayer born of agnosticism and cynicism, until Jack understood his only deliverance was selfreliance.

“What I meant to say,” Jack said, “was I was a boxer, not just a fighter. I fought in the Golden Gloves, in 1970, up in New York City. You would never know it looking at me now.”

“Better shape than most of us here,” Beryl said, her belly bouncing.

Jack spoke with unmasked irony. He labored hard to keep in fighting trim. When the crush of life wore him down, he ed how Jerry Quarry prowled the ring before the opening gong, eyes on the canvas, and Jack would shadowbox in the mirror, ire himself, imagine standing there in the ring once more, arms at his side, feet shuffling, powerful, poised, confident, the lion in spring, telling himself “I am a monster and a warrior.”

Other times Jack scrutinized himself and watched someone different, a sot, dissolute, bourbon blubber leavening his cheeks.

It was time, time to talk about her, how she shadowed his memories every day, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, how he never let go, what he had, what he lost, always wondering what might have been, if not for the awful choices from one night. If only one waveform had collapsed differently, how different might have been the lives they’ve lived.

He came here to talk about her. Things he had never shared with anyone. He had brooded in solitude for ten years.

“What’s the source of your pain?” Borg asked, carving away.

“Ten years ago... I lost a future.”

“A future?” asked Borg.

“We all have many futures. And many pasts. I came here to talk about one.”

“Okay,” Borg said.

Jack sensed none of them could understand, yet.

“A future and a past I come to share is I wanted to become a professional boxer, win the heavyweight belt.”

“Why’d you ever want to fight?” Beryl asked.

“Ever read Norman Mailer? Helluva writer. He put it this way: No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract attention. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.”

“You sought humiliation?” Borg asked.

Perhaps Jack did, maybe that was it. Self-destruction. He was crushed, doomed to live a life etched in the past, a history he plotted to one day recover.

Jack told them how his initiation into the holy sport of boxing came through the static of the twenty-one-inch TV set Uncle Joe owned. Fight of the Week flickered every Saturday night while Jack eased into his teenage years, and Uncle Joe, gruff, wise in the ways of the ring if not ringwise as a warrior himself, spoke about the sport’s dank underbelly more than ringside announcer Don Dunphy ever did.

“Just you watch,” Uncle Joe said the night Willie Pastrano defended his lightheavyweight crown against Argentinian Gregorio Peralta. Just as the network cut to a spot for Gillette, he predicted “The referee is going to stop the fight.”

Peralta, a furious body puncher, and Pastrano, the head-hunting champ, waylaid each other for five rounds, but now a gruesome wound blossomed over the Argentinian’s left eye. Just as Uncle Joe forecast, the ref waved the fight to a close to start the sixth.

“Fix,” Uncle Joe said.

In professional wrestling, there was a name for it. Kayfabe. Fake, the result preordained.

Jack had no clue if the ref was crooked as a humpback—Jack was only fifteen that night in 1964—but he wondered why Uncle Joe worshiped a sport if he insisted the results are rigged.

“You must score knockouts,” Uncle Joe said. “That’s the only guarantee you win. The referee or the judges will rip it right from you.”

Uncle Joe had no stomach for fighters who failed to train hard, like Pastrano, or loudmouths like Ali, still known as Cassius Clay. Uncle Joe rooted for Sonny Liston the night they fought in Miami Beach in 1964.

“First punch Liston nails him with, lights out Clay,” he said. “Liston won’t let those judges steal it from him.”

The local newspaper ran a contest: pick the round and the winner and win $100. Uncle Joe pegged Sonny in one. Jack conservatively predicted Liston in three. The fight ended with Liston sitting on his stool, looking as fit as a Russian weightlifter, refusing to come out for the seventh.

“Kayfabe,” Uncle Joe said.

When the newspaper ran a photo of the sweepstakes winner, Clay in seven, Uncle Joe waved the paper with mock delirium.

“Did you see the results? Timmy Oakley! Picked Clay by a TKO in seven.”

Jack didn’t know the man. Staring at the photo of Timmy accepting his prize, Jack detected that Timmy, who nailed the Clay-Liston result to the minute, was mentally retarded, as they called individuals with that disability in those pre-PC times.

Those memories of the sweet science remained sweet. Jack came here to talk about her, how he might recover from a decade’s worth of anguish.

“I will gather them all back, those days,” Jack said. No one divined his cryptic nuance.

What the others lost appeared beyond reversal, Bub and Linda’s daughter’s car crushed by a drunk driver, her skull smashed like a peach dropped on concrete, her body hooked to tubes and respirators and catheters for five terrible weeks. And poor Hollywood Hank. Five weeks before, ovarian cancer killed his mate of 42 years.

Jack had listened to all their stories, empathized, comforted them with his meager words. He never will feel sorry for himself, Jack vowed, not when so many others endured so much more pain.

“What happened ten years ago, Jack?” Borg asked.

“I had this vision, perhaps a stupid notion. I wanted to continue as a boxer, turn professional, one day become the heavyweight champion of the world.”

“That’s some ambition,” Borg said.

Bub raised his hand, politely. An aw-shucks kind of guy, he had the persona of a benevolent teacher, owlish spectacles, flaxen hair swooping down his forehead, love handles sagging out from a white shirt two sizes too tight. His daughter was shot dead by a robber while she walked home on the dark side of town, left to bleed out, alone in her final minutes.

“So, why’d you abandon your dream?” Bub asked. “A failure of nerve you regret?”

Jack shook his head. “Not that simple.”

The way Borg looked at him, piercing, quizzical, struck Jack as… off. This psychologist perhaps read through him, recognized who he was, his alter ego, while they played this therapeutic charade of anonymity.

Jack freshened his drink. He craved a Jack Daniels, not this magenta-tinted horse piss Borg put out. Now he became the tale-teller telling his tale—June 17, 1970, Mac Foster pitted against Jerry Quarry that night—then Archie drowned his flow

and cracked wise again.

“Jerry Quarry. He loves getting beat up by niggers.”

The crunch of Beryl’s foot grinding down on Archie’s instep reverted in a lacerating wave. Jack assumed it was not the first time she put on the hurt that way. It stung more than a kick at the ankle, and Beryl had no clean line of attack at his balls.

“I’m sorry. My husband, he’s acting like a big ol’ asshole again.”

“Hey,” Archie shot back even as he grimaced from the pain, “Richard Pryor said that. That ain’t my joke.”

Jack had to stick up for his man, Quarry. Every fight from the decade ingrained in Jack’s memory, the beatings he delivered, the beatings he took, the vicarious rush of combat.

“Jerry Quarry, in case any of you don’t know, was the most popular fighter on the planet, four years running.”

Jack glanced around at the others. Did anyone else care? Did Borg?

“Pardon my French, or make that my Irish, but he fucking took down Buster Mathis,” Jack said. “Buster Mathis, he smoked Joe Frazier at the Olympic trials

at the World’s Fair in New York back in 1964.”

“Lard ass of a heavyweight,” Archie said.

“Quarry kicked Ron Lyle’s ass, too. They called him Ron Fucking Lyle. Know why? Nobody would fight him. And Earnie Shavers. Hardest hitter ever, among every heavyweight who ever lived: Quarry took him out inside one round.”

“He never beat Ali or Frazier,” Archie said. “Quarry ain’t doing too much fighting these days, is he?”

“He was smart enough to quit,” Jack said. “Ain’t no shame in quitting. Sometimes survivors need to know when to quit. In another time, Quarry would be champion of the world. He was small for a heavyweight, about the size of Jack Dempsey. I would love to see him matched against some of those oldtimers, scrappers his physical equal.”

Howie knew his boxing. “This is the Golden Age of Heavyweights. Look who all else has been fighting these past years: George Foreman, Oscar Bonavena, Jimmy Ellis, Floyd Patterson, George Chuvalo...”

Jack winced at the mention.

“... they still ranked Sonny Liston in the top ten when they found him dead in that hotel room in December of 1970.”

“Guys, swell conversation,” Borg said. “Glad you bonded over this Jerry Quarry guy.”

“Rather listen to this than rave on about all our hurt,” Beryl said. She patted her husband’s thigh. All was forgiven.

“There’s more to talk about than boxing,” Linda said.

Jack refused to defer. “My story starts and ends with boxing.”

He had to regain his mojo, tell how about the night he won the Golden Gloves, the night he climbed through the ropes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Jack Dempsey, standing at the center of the boxing universe that night, the crowd orgasmic.

“All I wanted was to talk with Teddy Bentham, the guy who trained Quarry. He was like a mechanic to Rolls Royces. Real, old-school wizard. He might laugh or call me stupid or tell me he has no use for amateurs, but I wanted to hear him tell me that.”

“So, what did this Teddy guy tell you?” Bub asked. “Did he shoot down your dreams, send you here tonight with us, the beautiful losers?”

“I don’t know what might have been. I lost my future that night.”

“Losing a career is never as bad losing your child,” Linda said.

“I can’t downplay the pain you endure, every one of you endures,” Jack said. “There’s no closure for me either. Not in this lifetime, not in this multiverse.”

Now it was time. “There’s something else I need to talk about. Someone. A woman I lost.”

“I knew there was more,” Laura said. “Missing out on a career you never had is not the same as losing a person.”

Jack shrugged. “You never get over any of it, never, for this one reason. You always wonder what might have been, what if I had done one small thing different. What if you got to voyage backward and change just one little thing.”

That’s what this whole conversation was pointing to, the com of time. To them he was maddeningly cryptic.

“There is a certain pain that goes beyond pain,” Jack said. “Never leaves, not in a thousand years.”

“You need closure,” Borg said. “Time to let go.”

“There is no finality,” Jack said. “Time consumes us. Time is relative.”

“You’ve got to kick out your demons,” Borg said. “Let go of the ghosts. Look forward, not behind you.”

Bub changed course. “What happened to Quarry?”

“He got old when he was still young,” Jack said. “He fought fifty times before he was thirty. He looked real old the night Smoking Joe smoked him the second time. Told his corner after the first round he had no gas left in the tank.”

“Desolation’s a harsh mistress,” Borg said. “There comes a time to forget.”

“No,” Jack said. “I will take them back.”

“Take what back? This woman?”

“No. I will take them back. These ten years robbed from me.”

“Sorry you got the shitty end of the stick,” Archie said. “We all lost something dear, but years ed are history.”

“What if I told you they are not.”

Jack felt the room buzz with bewilderment and quizzical glances and Sophie chanting in a whisper, “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance...”

“Time flows on,” Borg said, as if he knew shit about physics. “You earn only one bite at the apple.”

“Well, I’m taking a second bite, and a third and a fourth, and the whole damn apple. Maybe I’ll make it a pear. It can be accomplished, I know that.”

Borg daggered his pear.

Jack rocked, amused, while the others shrunk as if he were some mad fool. He had plenty more to tell, about her, that night, and how one day he might help them retrieve what they had lost.

“I’m going to tell you about her, but hear me out on this.”

He watched Borg scribbling on his yellow notepad, no longer ing in the conversation. Jack gave a nod of recognition, his cloak of anonymity lifted. Before he left, he would shoot a glance at that notepad. “One day, Jack Hanson will change the world,” Borg wrote, before crossing out “world” and marking in “universe.” But first, Jack would bare his crushed soul near these strangers, the opposite of hallelujah.

August 31, 2035

Lester Pinskie flew in, mopping sweat off his moon face.

“Something’s wrong with Liston,” he panted. “He’s acting mean.”

“He’s Sonny fucking Liston,” Buck said. “Did you expect him to emcee a hootenanny?”

“Best see for yourself.”

Buck stalled outside Egon’s office, now a dumpster, a dumpster fire, Jack Dempsey MIA, Jack Hanson a ghost reborn.

“When I drafted Charles Sonny Liston for his tournament, I knew we must deal with a bully, a jailbird, an all-around prick. Ali called him the Big Ugly Bear in 1964, when Ali was still Cassius Clay and the writers thought him nuts to provoke Liston, pissing Liston off, from one edge of the multiverse on back.”

Pinskie nodded. “Liston looks plenty pissed now.”

Liston remained the one ring general whose acquaintance Buck never sought.

Buck and Pinskie gathered in Liston’s quarters. Liston’s scowl pierced through Buck. Why didn’t Pinskie send one of his staff in here, so this soup sandwich didn’t scald his lap?

“What’s bothering you, champ?” Buck figured he’d best address every one of the not-so-sweet sixteens as “champ.”

Liston nodded toward the wall, the stark cinders decorated with an oversized cover of Esquire magazine depicting Liston sporting a macabre glare and a Santa Claus hat. Buck concluded Liston’s pout involved the juxtaposition of personas, childhood myth and gangland thug.

“Why am I in this cage? And who are those fucks over there?” Liston aimed his fist at his Esquire visage.

The training quarters of the Klitschkos, Wladimir and Vitaly, the only brothers to hold title belts, butted ass with Liston’s quarters. The Klitschkos yapped and yelped in Ukrainian and annoyed the fuck out of the Honorable Charles Sonny Liston. Liston did not have a neural translator installed like Buck.

Liston’s quarters that Buck designed replicated the old 5th Street Gym on Miami’s South Beach, with all its attendant stink and grime. The Klitschkos’ den matched their Tomorrowland of a camp high in Austria’s Tirolean Alps. Their room shimmered, pristine and idyllic, stocked with state-of-their-moment training equipment, sedulously calibrated saunas and fight films playing in a loop, and digitized medicine balls that measured torque. Sonny Liston made sense of none of it. Even the gold ID shingle outside was a tease: Dr. Wladimir Klitschko and Dr. Vitaly Klitschko.

Buck could not squelch Sonny boy’s grievances, not when facing down a powerhouse puncher of freakish dimensions: eighty-four-inch reach, neck a gargantuan eighteen inches. What impressed Buck most were his meaty, ham

hock hands. Tightened into a fist, they measured fifteen inches around, double the circumference of other mortals.

If this bear wanted to shit in the woods, Buck didn’t want to be anywhere near those woods.

Buck slipped out, fearful to turn his back. Liston was not a tall fighter, but he towered a half-foot over Pinskie, whose jaw scraped the floor as Liston glared down, pounding together his mighty mittens while Buck exited to deal with the frantic hullaballoo drifting from the Klitschko den.

Why the hell did he make them share such a fab training space? They may have been brothers, but they weren’t no damn Siamese twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton. Buck knew they might have to face each other down the road... and, sure as chicken salad can turn to chicken shit, that became the dominant issue.

“No, we will not fight one another.” Wladimir said, pounding fist onto palm.

“We pull out of this tournament,” Vitaly said.

Egon never said fighters had the option to bolt the field. Must he negotiate contracts now?

“I never fight my brother,” Wlad added. “We will not be foes.”

“Promised our mama,” Vitaly said.

“Look, guys—champs—you’re in opposite brackets,” Buck said. “You don’t have to fight one another.”

“We both win our brackets,” Vlad said.

“That’s for sure—”

“I won’t fight my brother. Never harm family.”

“Won’t hurt you either, bro.” Vitaly hugged Wlad in solidarity.

Both brothers earned doctorate degrees, and Buck recognized they had mastered the art of the deal.

“Tell you what,” Buck said, “you win your brackets, you can be co-champs.”

“Co-champs,” Wlad said. “Yes.”

“Two baddest heavyweights in the multiverse,” Vitaly nodded.

Roll the dice, why not? Buck gambled neither would win his bracket. Neither’s skills matched Ali’s quickness and primal drive, nor Dempsey’s hands of stone and his adamantine heart. Buck worried nonetheless. His own research proved that fighters from the waning years of the twentieth century were bigger and stronger and better trained than workhorses from the sport’s golden era.

He found comfort in the grainy old interview he had screened of Dempsey: “I was knocked down plenty. I wanted to stay down, but I couldn’t. I had to collect that $2 for winning or go hungry. I was one of those hungry fighters. You could hit me on the chin with a sledgehammer for $5. When you haven’t eaten for two days, you’ll understand.”

Buck luxuriated in the notion of soon meeting the legendary Dempsey, or whatever genetically holographic version of him Egon aimed to materialize.

Let Mama Klitschko sleep easy… then Buck caught himself. There isn’t any Mama Klitschko. This isn’t real. These are doppelgängers or simulations or...what?

Buck swabbed at the sweat beaded on his candy-colored frizz. His tournament grew more complicated.

The next dumpster fire burned straight ahead. Mike Tyson, student of boxing lore, wandered from his gym, heading Buck’s way, another scuffle perking.

“Pinskie! Tyson escaped from his cage.”

The Ali conundrum stuck in his craw, kindled Buck’s imagination, now this cumulative buildup of chaos and entropy smoldered. Buck grasped how Egon conjured his wraiths, and it whipped him with dread.

June 17, 1970

He never ed everything that happened that night, and what he recalled was the horror of it all.

The clink of the door latch rousted him from his grainy slumber to the throb of the morning after. A blast of awful white light and a stabbing behind his eyes kept in soft focus the old man with white hair and janitorial togs hovering over him.

“Your eyes are like needles,” he said, wielding a dust-caked broom. “Better wake up. It’s 4:30. Long past closing time.”

Memories from the night before returned half-formed in quick pops, like the explosions of light bulbs on an old box camera. Jack ed mingling in the crush at Dempsey’s and stumbling over to Teddy, flickering his eyes to bat out the cobwebs, slurring a sloppy introduction, fearing he might make a drunken skunk of a fool out of himself.

He thought Teddy invited him down to Gleason’s Gym on the Brooklyn waterfront, telling him to stop by and audition for a role in his stable.

He ed veering off to the left of the dining hall, stumbling out the hallway into a wood-ed carrel, plunging on a burgundy leather couch, lost in dreams about Teddy and sparring with Irish Jerry and losing his fix with reality. Jack steadied himself on the sofa, brushed away the old custodian and stumbled to the exit and out on Broadway.

He rode the downtown to 6th Avenue, disoriented from the booze. As the train rattled toward the Village, rocking Jack into pangs of nausea, he recognized that night might not have stood as his shining moment, nor opened his gateway to hip with Team Quarry.

He ed how he lied to Daisy.

Jack hustled up 8th Street, past the pizza ts, dark and shuttered. He ignored the panhandlers propped against the storefronts, scrounging for loose change.

The lights in their room burned, and Jack did a dizzying swirl around the room looking for Daisy. She must have been down in the cafeteria eating breakfast, but that early?

Jack curled on their bed. At 9:00, a door unlatching roused him for the second time that morning.

“Hey, where were you?” Jack asked. He kneaded his bloodshot eyes.

“Where was I? Where were you? I know what time the fight ended.”

“Dempsey invited me over to his restaurant, okay. You won’t even ask me, how’d it go last night?”

Daisy refused to answer. She snatched a Coke from their mini fridge.

“What’s the matter, babe? Where were you last night?” He hoisted himself on wobbly feet.

“Out. Grabbed a beer. You didn’t come home. So, I headed out.”

Jack did not think he had done anything amiss. He asked anyway, “What did I do wrong?”

Daisy blurted her answer. The words spilt fast. She cared not what Jack offered. “So, did you meet up with that trainer friend of yours at Dempsey’s, make those plans for your future? Huh?”

Jack ed sheltering his words. “I didn’t… I had a few too many to drink last night. I might have talked with him a little.”

“Sure, Jack.” She looked at him in a way Jack never saw before, with sadness, rejection. “You promised me. I don’t know who this person with me is anymore.”

They slept together that morning in the bunk, but they did not touch. They shared deli sandwiches for lunch, making scant small talk. Daisy faced the window, snuggling her coffee, faraway eyes. They slept together that night. When Jack inched closer, she recoiled.

“Come on, Daisy, makeup sex.”

She said nothing, acknowledging him not even with a brusque “Go to hell, Jack.”

They did not make love that night, or the next night, or the night after that.

Days later, he had to ask her, not with empathy but with a cringe of victimhood.

“How long must this continue? What’s wrong?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“What?”

“We’re through.”

Jack’s mind warped with a wave of disbelief, panic, regret, contrition. That

moment tattooed a wound on his soul.

“Is there someone... else?”

She nodded.

“When did you meet him?”

“That night. You didn’t come home. I got pissed off, so I drifted to Julio’s and got myself a drink.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t have to tell you that. I will not tell you.”

She bolted for the door. Jack grabbed her arm. She yanked free and she left. Jack paced the dorm in a fog. He dug out the flask of Jack Daniels locked away in his vinyl suitcase, far in his closet, hidden beneath their checkered quilt. He took two generous belts and continued on his way.

Down at the edge of the Bowery in a tumbledown saloon called Tartuffe’s, Jack nursed drafts, sulking. The barkeep, Romulo, propped himself like a priest hearing Jack’s confession.

“I’m lost,” Jack said. “I’m lost, but I haven’t lost. Know what I’m saying?”

He did not. Romulo said he did, but he did not.

The waveform of the only multiverse Jack knew collapsed the morning of June 24, Dempsey’s birthday. He found the note, folded, propped against the television.

Jack,

I waited up for you that night. I know when the fight ended. I thought we had an arrangement, but I guess not. It’s not my fault I went out and met someone else.

Go tilt at your windmills until they catch fire and burn you up like the Frankenstein monster. That’s what matters to you. I’ll see you again when you’re heavyweight champion, but I can’t watch you try. It’s best we live separate lives.

Daisy

What struck him first was the closing, abrupt, impersonal. Just Daisy. No longer Love, Daisy.

He realized, in his swirl of confusion, that his sweet relationship with Daisy was never all lollipops and rainbows. He girded for the foray to recapture her soul, if even it were necessary or was this some cruel mind game to force his hand to

stall his boxing career looming ahead. She would jubilate when he held up his title belt, a fairytale resumed.

Jack quivered, reading her letter again, lingering, realizing no matter what happened the next day or the day after or the night of his first professional fight, his first victory, nothing could ever be the same between them, never again. He quailed from an avalanche of deadly sins... despair, anguish, jealousy, wrath. Who was that someone else? Who was he? He clutched Daisy’s note and wondered, for a moment, was she heading back home, should he grab a cab to the Port Authority, catch the same bus back to coal country? But he let that notion wisp away.

He checked her closet. Daisy had fled with all her blouses and skirts, slacks and shoes, the closet rod absent of all but stray hangers.

The rusty fridge next to the desk rattled with age. No matter how much his head hurt, Jack popped open a cold one and slipped the Al Kooper record out of its frayed paper sleeve. That angry photo of the cops clubbing the protesters, his empathy shared for both. A tingly knot in his gut, that quiver, that pain, spiraled into Jack’s eyes until he could not fight the swell of moistness. Jack Hanson was no fighter at that moment.

The track crackled with vicious sarcasm, the next to last, “Anna Lee,” a ballad of one-sided departure. The lyrics pieced themselves together and connected, penetrating Jack’s alcohol fog:

“You left me when the crops were failing, and the chickens died...

Now once upon a time you swore you was mine and I loved you so”

Jack prowled the Village, powerless, his fists of fury muffled, his mind of fury insane with determination. He stumbled toward Tartuffe’s whenever dusk turned gloomy, smirking at the “e” on its ragged awning blighted by pigeon shit.

“My lair of doom,” Jack said, poised to rocket down draft after draft. He sullied the acrid air with tales of woe and loss, scanning the eyes of strangers at his sides, wondering what sagas those eyes might have told: joy, peril, whatever. He groped to find his voice there. Romulo hovered, his muse.

“What is up with you tonight, Jack?” he said. “You are not yourself.”

“I am not myself,” Jack said. “I am altered, in an altered state, in my gloaming.” It made no sense. Jack knew that. Romulo knew that.

“I am here for you,” Romulo said. “You will always be a champion in my mind’s eye.”

Daisy faded in distance, yet, in Jack’s lonely nights, never far away. He came to hate how their bond turned out so one-sided, how he longed for her, but she was...where, with whom? It was all so unfair… it was like… his mind trapped boxing metaphors: Dempsey getting blasted out of the ring by Luis Firpo, or Quarry staying on one knee to George Chuvalo while the referee peeled the count of ten.

Gotham grew uglier to Jack, sucking in the Seventies. Ugly graffiti, Jack saw everywhere, tearing his eyes during the coldest September he ever shivered through. Jack returned to classes, graduate school, a distraction to restore his sanity.

The pain welled up, flowering like a poison weed across the decade. The flashbacks kicked in at odd times, the pain of rejection, getting cut loose, alone into the world outside the ring, and it always led back to that night, to Daisy, to his choices and her choices. The feelings ganged up in spasms or lingered and returned from the jab of a memory, a stroll through Washington Square Park where he wandered with Daisy Sundays after brunch, when the air smelled silly, their arms swinging as they clasped hands, chuckling at the old men playing checkers and the minstrels and the peculiar denizens with faces out of a Fellini film. The snowflakes on brownstone now hurt like acid.

He never bumped into Daisy around campus. He never saw Teddy Bentham again after that night.

August 31, 2035

If a lightbulb floated above Buck’s head, it clicked on with the sound of “Aha!” What floated above his head instead was a mammoth digitization of Sonny Liston, twisting his torso, feinting and firing a jab the size of a locomotive piston.

Pinskie clambered among the rows of tables in the press room, flipping down press kits at each seat. Allowing for the possibility of a technical failure, Buck arranged backup presentation material atop the chestnut lectern. His role-playing required massive bluster, ballyhoo constructed out of confidence about why this tournament the greatest sporting event in multiverse history.

The morning’s exuberance had exited Buck. He had swapped his candy-colored hairpiece in favor of modest, close-cropped dark bangs, his Julius Caesar homage. Gone, too, was his Technicolor dream coat. He wore loose-fitting khakis and the tournament’s promotional T-shirt. If things continued to unravel, Buck would have to be all business.

Behind them, techs tested the visual counterpoints, massive holograms stretching two stories high and flashing in a perpetual loop. Hologram Sonny Liston thrust out wicked jabs, his scowl unyielding.

“ART 6.0 masterminds our tournament.” The repercussions quivered through Buck.

Pinskie grimaced as if he had been cold-cocked. “But there is no ART. Not any more, ten years ago the project was shut down.”

“These aren’t Egon’s formulas that resurrected our heavyweights. Egon filtered his formulas through ART. He coded ART 6.”

ART stood for ARTificial Intelligence or AI, a computer so fast and smart its intelligence sured the capacity of any human. The project was named March into ART, an international endeavor involving the greatest thinkers and scientific geniuses collaborating to a code a machine that weighed choices, learned, and used that intelligence to eradicate mankind’s faults and foibles: hunger, war, poverty, environmental destruction.

“Those were dangerous waters,” Pinskie said. “That’s why they had to shut it down.”

Buck paced, convinced he solved the puzzle. “They didn’t have to. Egon argued that scrapping the project was the worst scientific reversal in the history of the multiverse. He was part of the project and he kept was remained of the codes.”

“This is all about the Bilderbergs?” Pinskie asked.

“Everything is always about the Bilderbergs. It’s been that way for three quarters of a century.”

“The elites,” Pinskie hissed. “The bankers, politicians, business people, the movers and shakers, the princes of government and finance who rule the world, the wizards behind the curtain. How come there aren’t no fighters who get to the Bilderebergs?”

“No fight promoters make the cut either. Egon’s the closest any of us will come.”

The Bilderberg Group was not quite a secret society, nor did it its domination over world affairs. Buck could listen through the hushes. The entire world learned about the Bilderbergs in January 2021, when the clique emerged from the shadows to rescue the planet from nuclear annihilation.

“He was mad as a rabid fox,” Pinskie said. “Donald Trump, somehow us fools put him back in office for a second term.”

“I was as big a fool as you, Pinskie. A harmless figurehead we thought, an amusing buffoon who would let Vice President Kid Rock mind the store while Trump clattered away on his mobile device with his stubby nubs to post ridiculous Trumps.”

Trumps were what people called Tweets after Trump bought Twitter and changed its name to Trumpet.

“He sure trounced Dwayne Johnson,” Pinskie said. “Those damn Russians spread lies that he once used steroids.”

No one thought Trump had access to the nuclear codes any more. He did.

“We still were damn lucky,” Buck said. “That 50-megaton bomb swelled a mushroom cloud one hundred forty thousand feet into the sky.”

“Five times taller than Mount Everest.”

“Only thing that saved us all is Yalta bordering the Black Sea. The winds blew that nuclear dust over the waters, killed sea life by the trillions, instead of us by the millions.

“I never could figure how, if somebody wanted to drop an atomic bomb on Yemen, the order would come to strike Yalta.”

“Trump,” Buck said with a shrug. “What else can you say? Trump.”

“ when they came for him, those storm troopers in their BG vests? Trump babbled like a little baby while they waddled him toward a chopper on the south lawn.”

“No resistance from the Secret Service. None. I wonder if he’s still in a stalag on the island of Cuba, Guantanamo Bay?”

Like the rest of civilization—some areas left uncivilized—Buck discovered the secrets of the Bilderbergs after its leader telepathed the announcement about the new world corporate government forming.

“I guess the time had to come to merge us all, Pinskie, our whole planet into a single corporate and political entity. A united world.”

“There was no alternative. Russia and North Korea and Israel and Iran and the United States were ready to blast each other to atoms.”

“ President Kid Rock’s inaugural speech? He was scared shitless.”

Stealthily, the Bilderbergs purged the world’s repositories of information. Buck unearthed sketchy intelligence from a defunct site called Wikipedia, the archives of which he salvaged from the Wayback Machine on the forbidden Dark Web.

Buck poked further in the gutters and alleys of this information highway. Boxing seized his ions, its history from the bare-knuckles era buried in furtive bits and bytes. Within months of WorldGov forming, the sport returned to those days of illegal prizefights on riverboats and speakeasies.

The secrecy surrounding the ART Project, the prospect of a machine forgiving man for his sins, was a prospect the scientific world found incapable of keeping under wraps. ART 1.0 came effortlessly, then ART 2, then 3 and 4. Just as ART 4 approached the cusp of the point of no return when machine would exceed human brainpower ART 4 created ART 5 on its own. Pulling the plug proved no easy feat. ART 5 vanished into wisps of vapor. WorldGov decreed research into AI must end forevermore.

Buck grew certain that the heavyweight fighters training in his armory, the greatest who ever fought, were generated by a super-potent artificial intelligence that never should have existed.

“Egon worked on the original ART project,” Buck repeated. “He helped build every single line of code. This mad science isn’t about Egon summoning genetic holograms. He’s a biogeneticist and a physicist and a software developer. He knew more about ART than anyone else. This tournament became about him feeding the formulae and equations into ART and letting ART handle the dirty work.”

Buck steeled himself, queasy, the matchmaker for what was now a most dangerous game. Egon dragged him into his illegal bloodsport, and Buck surfaced as a conspirator in a crime against humanity, facing punishment for not just his own sins, but for who knows what damage ART 6 might do to the fabric of time, the membrane of their multiverse.

“Egon may have unleashed the hounds of hell,” Buck said, “and one is going to chomp down hard on my goddamn ass.”

Buck aped Ego’s drawl, the image of Egon smiling his serpent’s grin, pouring out slugs of gin and boasting how one day his research will draft a new unified theory of physics for the twenty-first century. “Six will change...everything. Six…six...six.”

What the hell was Egon talking about? Six, six, six. The antichrist? Now Buck knew. Egon Septifuckimus Keloid himself was the antichrist.

“Bigger question, boss. Do think Egon is monkeying around with time travel?”

“I’m sure Egon tasted the juice of every forbidden fruit.”

Time travel was another miracle consigned to the dustbin of forsaken science as too perilous. Had Egon cracked that code? Or did ART 6 invent the first time machine? Egon broke all the protocols of scientific ethics, and like it or not, he dragooned Buck into the vortex.

The two circled the armory, flicking their gazes towards Ali, pulsing the speed bag.

“Our Ali problem,” Buck said, “the Ali from a different year dancing and clowning, paying Louisville Lip service to Jim Jeffries, taunting Frazier and

Foreman, that may not be a bug in Egon’s formulas, but a choice, a decision by ART 6. I must have been wrong about what night Ali celebrated his greatest triumph.”

“What about Dempsey? Did ART 6 disqualify him from the competition? And what’s this business with Jack Hanson? How is Jack supposed to get whatever the hell kind of sample Egon needs from Dempsey? Jack Hanson went 30 years ago. If he’s alive, the man will be eighty-five years old.”

Buck’s hands coiled into a strangler’s grip. Egon’s neck hovered like a hologram. in Buck’s imagination No, that will be the wrong move. Best to play dumb. If Egon suspected Buck knew how Egon manipulated the rules that erased any strategic advantage.

Egon paced, plotting. “Not a word of this to no one, Pinskie. Not a single soul.”

June 29, 1980

Dr. Yale Borg locked eyes with Jack Hanson.

“Anhedonia,” Borg said.

They all gathered again in the church basement, one week later, clutched in a tight ring around Borg. Archie and Beryl, Bub and Laura, Hollywood Howie and Sophie. They welcomed two new souls to Survivors Anonymous, Carlos, a stocky hombre of Mexican descent, described how his only siblings were

deported, and Francine—Frankie—who lost her 10-year-old son to leukemia.

“Annie... Donna?” Archie looked puzzled.

Borg spelled the word in big block letters on his yellow legal pad and ed the sheet to the group. His eyes stayed fixed on Jack.

“Do you know what anhedonia means, Jack?” Borg asked.

Damn straight he did. Jack blurted the definition before Borg patronized him and all the others.

“An inability to ever be happy.”

“Not technically accurate but...”

“Close enough,” Jack said.

Borg’s sniffling nostrils, like a jackrabbit’s, told Buck he smelled the stench of hard liquor, the fuel for his brooding and his return to spill more secrets to the basement of strangers never dreaming they might see him again.

Jack could not let Borg talk down to him. He shot daggers right back at Borg.

Who’s alpha male today, bitch?

“Anhedonia is a psychological condition,” Borg pontificated. “It means an individual cannot derive pleasure from activities that provide pleasure, such as hobbies, sex. Woody Allen its he suffers from it.”

Borg sliced a chuck from a banana and dipped it into a bowl of yogurt.

Jack heard the others fidget, restless.

“This is all getting so clinical,” Laura said. “We’re all suffering from something here, and not this annie-stuff you’re blithering about.”

Jack expected to field an amen from Sophie.

“That’s why I’m here, too,” Jack said. “Find relief.”

“What I’m trying to find out is if Jack might have that... disorder,” Borg said. “Talking things through may not be the ideal way for him to advance.”

Jack accepted Borg was right. He would never achieve nirvana in this lifetime, not without Daisy in his cling, not without recovering his lost days.

Borg tried to walk it back. “Sometimes... conditions... like anhedonia have unusual side effects, many times a touch of genius.”

Jack hated those verbal twinkles from Borg. Jack held firm with his stink eye.

Laura signaled exasperation with a harrumph. “Take it to the university. All this jabber about neuroses. You are both giving me a headache.”

Bub spoke wisely, “Perhaps Dr. Borg is right. You can’t let go of your long-ago. We’re survivors today, not because of the tragedies we had to endure, but because we can look to the future.”

The booze lubed Jack sufficiently to discuss his work, his mission, what this clash meant for him, for others—not erasing the past, just how to regain it.

“Embrace the quantum,” he said.

All except Borg waited, mystified.

“Quantum can have several meanings,” Borg explained to the group, not Jack. “But I’m guessing Jack is referring to small things explored.”

Jack sensed Borg was set to unmask his secret identity.

“That’s right, “Jack said. “The smallest particles of light and matter.”

“Always enjoy reading some top-shelf science fiction,” Archie said with his gummy gleam. “I’m going to embrace me some of that quantum.”

“Not science fiction,” Jack said. “Science fact. The law of little things. Quantum physics, but names are irrelevant. What is important is, when we enter the world of atoms and photons, the building blocks of matter and light, the ordinary laws of physics break down. Particles can be in two places at the same time. An electron can be over here and over there, all at once. When an observer tries to measure that particle, only then does it assume one definite position.”

“So, what you trying to tell me,” Hollywood Howie said, “is if I was living in your little quantum world, I’d be here listening to you talk daffy and at the same time enjoying a few cold ones at Bloddy’s Taproom?”

“Only until I observe you,” Jack said.

“And you’ll be back here with us,” Frankie said, “testing the limit of survival in Jack’s physics class.”

Sophie dabbed her eyes. “What do little particles we can’t see have anything to do with me? My sister, she will not recover.”

“I respect your cynicism,” Jack said. “In the quantum realm, all possibilities exist until they are observed. We know that. It’s been a proven fact in science for

close to a century. What we’ll find out next is every possibility that can happen, does happen, somewhere.”

“But I don’t care about some little atoms wiggling around,” Sophie said.

“There’s got to be a way to reconcile the laws of quantum science with the laws of our physical universe, the world all around us. Once that happens, every possible outcome in life that brought ruin for me, for you, for us all, is not the only reality. Everything that could happen, happened.”

“So, you telling me,” Archie asked, “I could lace on some gloves and stand toe to toe with Larry Holmes and walk home as the heavyweight championship of this world?”

“Leon Spinks skunked Muhammad Ali,” Jack said. “Leon No-Teeth Spinks, he had seven fights. The sucker outboxed The Greatest.”

“And Ronald Reagan, the movie actor, will be next president of these United States?” Howie asked.

“In another reality, not here certainly, but in some parallel universe.” The booze had long since worn down, but Jack had to keep going, explain how his notions of space and time mattered in their world.

“Don’t you all see? In a parallel world, Bub and Linda’s daughter took a left turn instead of a right. Sophie, you bought your sister a new bath mat and she never

slipped. And, Carlos, your loved ones weren’t at home when the immigration authorities visited. And... in another world, Daisy stayed in our dorm that night, and this night I’d be home with her, not enjoying the pleasure of you good folks’ company.”

Bub pressed Linda’s hand. Jack cringed as she choked up.

“What does it matter about any parallel worlds?” Bub asked. “We live right here in this world?”

“What if a way exists to cross over? We advance into a parallel world we hope to live in, escape our ruin, our loss.”

“You’re selling these survivors pipe dreams,” Borg said, “the way Hickey did to the barflies in The Iceman Cometh. Our own iceman cometh to these meetings, but perhaps he should goeth.”

“How many punches you say you took to the head?” Carlos asked. “This is all like some bad Hollywood movie that turns up on the late, late show. Tell him, Howie.”

“What do you do to make a living?” Howie asked. “You never gave us much personal detail.”

Jack didn’t want to get into any of that, but he had opened a can of wormholes.

“They pay me to think about things like this.” Jack smiled, not gloating, matter of fact.

“Neat gig, brother,” Archie said. “Let me know where I can sign up.”

“This isn’t a pipe dream, Borg,” Jack said. “Survival is about never giving up.”

Jack and Borg locked gazes once more.

“Embrace the quantum,” Jack said.

August 31, 2035

Buck Lazarus fine-tuned PhantomVision, stretching the 3-D image to span floor to ceiling in the press room. The showman in him called it PhantomVision. In reality, it was a powerful shared app controlled by iBrain.

He came into focus, Muhammad Ali shuffling his awesome shuffle and riffing off jabs that thundered over Buck’s head with the roar of fighter jets cracking the sound barrier. Ali trifled in mind games with Buck, as he did with all the lesser mortals he dispatched into oblivion. The hour Buck must explain this emerging fiasco to the media brewed.

Poetry erupted from Ali.

“Now Jeffries disappears from view.

The promoter is getting frantic,

But our radar stations have picked him up. He’s somewhere over the Atlantic.

Who would have thought when they came to the fight

That they’d witness the launching of a human satellite.”

Ali shuffled again, size 60 boots a hairbreadth from kicking out Buck’s feet, shins, reputation, career. Buck detected a wink during the attack of the fifty-foot Ali.

“Pinskie,” Buck said, “I’m the one getting frantic.”

This was not the Ali Egon vowed to deliver. Ali mocked Buck as he raged with his contumely against Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope who derailed him in that stupid radio tournament during Ali’s exile in the waning years of the 1960s.

“You know, Pinskie, this Ali may be sharper than the fighter who smoked Cleveland Williams in his heyday. Egon never needed me as a matchmaker. The ART Project arranged pairings better than mine.”

WorldGov banned the ART Project, covert research into artificial intelligence, ten years ago, but Buck remained convinced Keloid constructed the codes and created the ultimate AI brain. ART 6 didn’t need Egon and his crackpot equations either. Evil machines controlled this tournament.

“You know, I don’t care which Ali floats into the ring,” Buck said. “I had toyed with bringing aboard both the fleet-of-foot fighter from 1966, call him Cassius Clay, and the rope-a-doping tactician, Ali, who shocked the world under that African night sky in 1974, the Ali who sent George Foreman pirouetting into oblivion. Clay vs. Ali. Who would you bet on in that clash of titans, Pinskie?”

“Those Klitschko boys are troublemakers, pledging allegiance to each other. Pairing Alis I and II could have been a nastier derailment.”

“The tournament already is shaping up as a clusterfuck the size of Godzilla.”

And where the hell was Jack Dempsey? Buck ground his teeth.

“Maybe ART 6 doesn’t want Dempsey here at all,” Buck said. “But 15 fighters doesn’t make for even pairings.”

Pinskie did another schlep from table to table, depositing fancy pitchers of chilled sparkling water and beer on ice, looking miserable because he knew today would be a wretched day.

“It’s not out of the question that ART has another fighter in mind, not Dempsey,” Pinskie speculated.

“Better than Dempsey? No way. Something’s up with Egon that he’s not telling us.”

Buck’s iBrain summoned the PhantomVision menu. His script for the presser floated at eye level.

“Muhammad Ali was a folk hero. Jack Dempsey was a demigod. Listen, friends, over 100,000 people came together to cheer at some of the sensational fights of the last century, in stadiums built just for that one night. Fight night was the biggest night of the month. Boxing meant something. Who we were as a people. Water cooler talk. water coolers? Guess not. (pause for laughter) We will crown the best of the best, the greatest heavyweight champion of all time, of this multiverse, fighting at his peak moment in time, thanks to Dr. Egon Keloid.”

He had researched dozens of fighters’ careers, watched thousands of rounds, set the seedings, now it was all imploding, undone by an AI program that thought it had a sense of humor. Joe Louis was crawling and cooing in his training room as a toddler for all Buck knew.

Egon let no one else observe the fighters’ arrival. For how much Buck knew, these warriors crackled into view like the staticky ghosts from an old black-andwhite TV set he beamed at, awestruck as a kid, when he visited the Twentieth Century Broadcast Museum.

Buck had no clue if each old champ, young again now, arrived as a homunculus.

Keloid dubbed them “genetic holograms.” They just... were... there. Sometimes it made Buck squirmy. Did Dempsey arrive all sticky and inert, like a cucumber left to rot in the sun? Would shady science expose Dempsey as a simulacrum?

He was just the matchmaker, Buck, student of a sport consigned to the dust heap of history for over ten years, supplanted in popularity by mixed martial arts, and then... not even that… no flesh-and-blood warriors. All of it outlawed by WorldGov diktat as too brutal, people now had just the augmented reality of blossoming technologies placing gamers in the matrix as participants. The “wow” factor stayed high only until the novelty boiled away. Nothing was real.

Buck first plotted the tournament with Egon two years back, over lunch at Luigi’s overlooking the bay, sharing a plate of oysters on the half-shell. Artificial, of course, the seabeds long since depleted of edible foodstuffs.

“Ah, the joy of biogenetics,” Egon said, slithering down a briny faux mollusk, seasoned with a dollop of thick white horseradish. “My tastiest creation.”

Dashing as always in a double-breasted silk blazer accented with a plum ascot, Egon quaffed from his double martini, gin with a vapor spritz of vermouth. Buck sipped scotch on the rocks, his hairpiece of the day woodpecker red, his round shades tinted magenta.

“What do you miss most in this brave new world we’re living in?” Egon asked, moving closer to overcome the thrum of the noonday crowd. “And I hope you say nothing, because science is making everything possible, the impossible possible again.”

“You know what I miss, I miss boxing.”

“You were a fighter yourself, I can tell.” Egon squeezed Buck’s forearm.

“Never. I miss the art, the poetry, but most all the animal instincts of one man pitted against one other.”

“So, tell me, Buck, who was the best heavyweight to walk this multiverse?”

“Many say Muhammad Ali, but you have to journey further back, to the Roaring Twenties. Jack Dempsey. There was no quit. You fought until your wounds moved you near death.”

“Let me ask you, did you ever hear of Ray Kurzwell?”

Buck squinted one of those are-you-kidding-me type of squints.

“Kurzwell was an author, a computer scientist, an inventor, but most all a futurist. He postulated, and I believe his postulations are correct, that one day we will send a nanorobot inside a speck of an individual’s genetic code and capture memories, everything we need to know about that person from a single point in time, and create a genetic replica of a person from any moment in a person’s past. That one day is right about now.”

Buck nodded. He guessed Egon’s path.

“We’ll bring them back,” he said, clutching Buck by the wrist, waiting for approval. “The greatest heavyweights of all time fighting each other on the best nights of their lives. You’re the matchmaker, Buck, the face of this tournament. I’m the one who can make the science work.”

“There are kinks to overcome, but...”

“If I can genetically engineer a mollusk, I can genetically engineer Jack Dempsey.”

“Nothing like taking baby steps.”

They met again at Egon’s office, Keloid Genetic Research and Development, a week later. Egon wore his laboratory scrubs, even though Buck never witnessed Egon do any actual lab work. Egon dusted his desk with the accouterments Buck did not associate with a serious scientist. A human skull, missing the lower jaw. A scale-model of the strange contraption with colored lights and whirring sundial Rod Taylor rode to zip into the future in the sci-fi chestnut The Time Machine.

“Buckaroo, my friend, shall we make this happen?”

“Let’s roll,” Buck said.

Buck’s mother gave him that nickname, Buck, based on his facility for sucking

in cash dollars from promotions nobody else paid any heed toward.

“Salesmanship,” she said, “is your gift. Use it for good.”

The art of promotion he nurtured, ever since he was a lad of ten and he launched his own internet business, ordering trashy bobble heads from China, dropshipping them to bargain hunters across the globe. He dubbed himself with his new surname later, Lazarus, after one entrepreneurial idea tanked and he sucked it in and founded another, hawking boxing memorabilia and hauling in twice the profit.

Boxing became his forte, his hobby, his obsession, never a quest he would pursue himself. He devoured old fights on digital media until the advent of HV, hologram video, the game changer. Buck found the medium that might answer the question burning in his head: Who was the heavyweight who would beat every other fighter who ever lived, if they fought on their best night?

“Think about this,” Buck told Egon. “They banned boxing because they said it was a bloodsport. Nobody anymore re what it feels like, taking a thunking over and over, writhing in misery. What about making this tournament a genuine bloodsport?”

“Xtreme Agony,” Egon said. “Make them experience it. I like it.”

Egon’s sadism bubbled to the surface. Buck embraced it.

“We might have a billion people watching online,” Egon said, his voice pitched high with zing. “Let them gag on their own blood, their teeth rattling loose from their gums, their kidneys leaking red. You don’t merely watch. You’re right in that ring, nose to nose with Marciano or Louis or Foreman. Everyone decides how much pain he wants to dial up. Let the sissies slouch in ivity. Those brave of heart became Muhammad Ali, become Jack Dempsey. The moment is real.”

Buck was pumped. This added dimension, a fifth dimension of voluntary agony, would make his tournament the biggest sporting event in the history of the multiverse.

“I can make it happen,” said Egon.

Anxious in the press room, Buck had no clue how ART 6 viewed any of this, or why Egon let ART dictate the flow.

“Mind the fort, Pinskie. Egon and I need to hold a chinwag.”

“You will not ask him anything about the ART Project?” Pinskie mopped his shiny pate.

“We’re having a presser in a few hours and we have real problems and we will face awful questions. I don’t know what Egon will tell the media, but I want to feel him out. I don’t want him to it coding ART 6, because I’d be complicit.” Buck’s stomach knotted again. “I... don’t know... what he’s unleashed.”

Buck spun through the corridors of the arena, needing a doctor himself, a real doctor, not a rogue physicist flouting international law. Might Buck slaughter millions by unleashing on them the deadly blows of history’s most savage fighters?

“Egon, the press will be here in a few hours. Do you know what you will say?”

“We have a plan. You welcome me, I introduce you, you crank up the PhantomVision, we take questions.”

“They will be hard questions. This might turn into a ratfuck in a hurry.”

Egon laced his arm around Buck and hugged him, fatherly. “Relax, Bucko, we’re all a little nervous. Our moment is at hand.”

“We’re having problems. You summoned the wrong Ali. He will be spouting poetry mocking Jeffries or Frazier or Foreman while I introduce him as the Ali of 1966.”

Egon brushed him off. “Nobody will pick up on that. Who re some wackadoodle radio mishmash 65 years ago? The timeline of Ali’s greatest fights is lost to history.”

“I it. I studied it. It’s important to me. And how did you bring him back?”

“Proprietary.”

“They will ask you that.”

“Proprietary.”

“And how did you make him materialize? Did he come in a cocoon, just pop into view? How? You won’t let me see any of that.”

Egon wouldn’t budge. “Genetic holograms. All anybody needs to know. Everything else is proprietary.”

“Proprietary. You love that word. Do you hold patents? Patents are public documents.”

Egon brushed back his shock of white hair and smiled. “I don’t need any stinking patents. They’re my formulae and my equations.”

“Right,” Buck said. “Proprietary. Going to be one hell of a press briefing.”

Buck caromed from roadblock to roadblock. His tone switched to a lawyer conducting cross-examination.

“And Dempsey? What about Dempsey?”

“On his way, on his way,” Egon said in a sing-songy pitch. “Probably us even before the press leaves.”

“Time travel. They’ll ask you if time travel is involved.”

“And I’ll tell them I know WorldGov wants no one to discuss time travel. Would I risk collapsing the multiverse for some cockamamie boxing tournament?”

The time might have been there to spring a hint about the ART Project, but Buck held back, the answer unbearable.

Buck braced for the final question. “They will ask you how many of these formulae and equations were your own work.”

“What do you mean?”

“How much was your own independent research,” Buck asked, “and how much belonged to the findings of Dr. Jack Hanson?”

March 26, 2000

“Let me begin,” Dr. Jack Hanson began, “by quoting T. H. White’s epic novel The Once and Future King: ‘Everything not forbidden is compulsory.’”

The lecture hall sloped skyward in a steep arc, an auditorium designed to pack in so many students that the professor never learned a single name. Jack counted heads before he began. Forty-five guests sprinkled across eight rows: a goat screw of coeds in cutoffs, jocks in sports jerseys, geeks wearing frat blazers, nerds squinting through telescopic eyewear, preppies in polo shirts. One guest stood out, a kid of about fifteen. Jack spied him slouched in the last row under the glow of the neon EXIT sign, as though he were pouncing for a getaway once he drained his thermos of coffee and Jack’s lecture induced slumber.

“What that quote means,” Jack resumed, “is when we are talking about the realm of physics, unless there is a specific scientific principle forbidding something, that something will occur. Inevitably. If we wait long enough, it must transpire.”

Jack glanced up at the kid, hoping for rapture, not befuddlement.

“This means,” Jack said, “time travel is not science-fiction.”

He paused. He expected perhaps a gasp despite the title of his lecture eliminating any trace of suspense, “The Past Is Now: The Future Is Here.”

“But you know that. That’s why you’re here.”

Jack’s venue was the Updike Hall at Alton College. He lectured there full time, a

tenured professor in theoretical physics and quantum theory, today a guest speaker, hoping students not enrolled in his curriculum might make sense of his research rattling the scientific community.

“We live in two universes,” Jack said. “One is the macro universe, the universe we see, the universe of planets and solar systems. Since the time of Isaac Newton, scientists have understood this universe obeys fundamental laws of physics. The rules, they’re the same everywhere in this universe, whether you’re sitting here in this lecture hall or floating above the planet Saturn. But there’s another universe. The universe of the tiny. Once you peer at the subatomic level, the laws change. That is the quantum universe.”

Jack wrote the word QUANTUM in green block letters on the whiteboard.

“In the quantum universe, there are no laws, only probabilities. Photons, the basic building blocks of light, can exist in two places simultaneously. So can electrons. We call that a waveform. And, listen up, this is important, only when one measures the particles does that waveform collapse and the particles take a definite position. Where that particle lands is based on mere probability.”

Jack let that one sink in.

Now the questions poured.

“You’re saying, Professor Hanson, that just by somebody observing a bit of matter determines that particle’s position in space?”

“Let me quote another great thinker on his explanation for quantum mechanics,” Jack answered. “Niels Bohr wrote, ‘Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot have understood it.’”

“Professor, didn’t Albert Einstein say the universe has to observe certain rules, God doesn’t play dice with the universe?”

“It’s not a smart idea to argue with Einstein,” Jack said. “But when we dig down into the fundamental levels of matter and study cause and effect, cause results from statistical probabilities. Nothing is absolute. I can’t be certain if there is a God, but, if there is, he’s got one wicked craps game going.”

The auditorium vibrated with laughter. Jack had them warmed up.

“Let’s suppose you are trapped in a concrete prison cell,” Jack said. “You pace all day, back and forth, moping over your predicament. At one moment at the snap of a finger, you find yourself back in your dorm room. Impossible? It happens at the subatomic level. We call that quantum tunneling, and it has been proven. And if tiny particles can move through space, what’s to say they cannot travel through time?”

“Professor, isn’t that a big leap between moving through space and moving through time?”

“Somebody brought up Einstein,” Jack said, “so, let me quote him again. Einstein said, ‘People like us, who believe in physics, recognize the distinction between past, present, and future is only a persistent illusion.’”

Jack caught the eye of the kid in the back row, the most rapt of the bunch.

“How many heard of Schrödinger’s cat?” Jack asked.

Eight hands shot up.

“Well, there was this cat named Erwin Schrödinger. Not a real cat. He was an Austrian physicist and he devised this thought experiment back in 1935. A thought experiment means you can’t actually perform the experiment, just think it through. What Schrödinger proposed was placing a live cat inside a closed box with a device that released radioactive atoms, along with a Geiger counter and a tube of poison.”

Jack heard a few “Ewws!” from the women in the audience.

“Dig the experiment. After one hour, a radioactive atom will be emitted. If the atom has decayed, the poison will be released and the cat will die. If it has not decayed, the poison stays in the vial and the cat’s alive. It’s a 50-50 shot. So, can anyone think this through?”

A burly dude wearing AC/DC gear and leather-studded belt waved for attention. “What I think it means under quantum law is until someone peeks into the box, the radioactive particle is in two stages at once, so the cat’s neither dead nor alive.”

“Or it’s both? At that moment, the universe splits into two. In one universe, Tabby enjoys her saucer of milk. In the other, she’s exhausted her nine lives.”

“So where are these other universes, professor?” A cute brunette tapping a pen looked perplexed. “Isn’t the universe... everything? Isn’t that how the universe is defined?”

“We call them multiverses. Some prefer the term many worlds. They’re right here, on top of our universe, possibly only an atom apart. See, when the cat dies —or lives, I prefer to be an optimist—that doesn’t change much in the vast scheme of the cosmos.”

“But, professor, it may not alter much now, but eventually won’t it? That dead cat won’t have kittens, a driver someday swerves to avoid one of those kittens, hits a child instead.”

“Excellent point! The multiverses will diverge more and more. Become unique.”

“So how come we can’t see other multiverses, Dr. Hanson?”

“They may be separated from us by only an atom. There are extra dimensions too small for us to detect. Some physicists say there are ten. Others think there could be as many as twenty-three. These additional dimensions are the only way we have to reconcile Einstein’s and Newton’s laws of physics with the quantum realm.”

The kid out back put his cup down. Sheepishly, Jack thought, he raised his hand and held up a dog-eared paperback.

“Have you read this, professor?”

Jack squinted to make out the title. A jock type with raging biceps sitting in front of the kid turned and announced in a smart-alecky voice, “A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.”

“Of course,” Jack said. “Anybody else?”

He scanned the auditorium. No hands.

“Time travelers go back to the Jurassic age,” Jack said. “One of them crunches a butterfly. When they return to the present day, dinosaurs rule the Earth. Ray Bradbury gave us the term butterfly effect.”

The kid’s arm shot up again.

“It means a butterfly fluttering its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.”

Jack applauded lightly, politely. No one ed. They had dandy questions, these undergrads, but now a gangly teenager upstaged them all.

“Here’s how to visualize these emerging multiverses,” Jack said. “Think of a thin, pliable sheet. Now imagine our universe is a membrane, a membrane 42 billion light years tall, but a membrane nonetheless. Now suppose each time the cat lives or dies, or we make a choice, whether to do our homework tonight or not, the universe splits into two and a new multiverse branches out, all of them stacked, like pages in a book, stretching to infinity.”

“But, professor, what does any of this have to do with time travel?”

“Okay, now imagine the membranes—scientists call them ’branes for short—are not pages in a book, but tectonic plates brushing against each other, like the plates that create earthquakes. When we, and by ‘we’ I mean science-fiction authors, envision time travel, we think of traveling linearly backward in our same universe, our same multiverse.

“Now imagine,” Jack continued, “that the ’brane above us shifted, putting us one atom away from another moment, another time. Cross over into the adjacent multiverse and you remove all those logical impediments to time travel.”

Jack posed a question.

“The grandfather paradox. Who can explain what that means?”

The kid oozed confidence.

“If you travel back in time and murder your grandfather, you never would have been born and therefore you cannot travel back in time to kill your grandfather.”

Jack nodded. “The paradox is removed now because every time a choice is made, a new ’brane, a new multiverse branches off.”

“How are we ever going to cross over one of these ’branes, professor, whether they are an atom apart or a billion light years?”

“I can’t answer that yet,” Jack said. “But I will. Those are the mysteries I am working to solve.”

“Professor, if time travel is real, how come we never meet any visitors from the future?”

“If there were any chance of George W. Bush snatching the presidency this November, our multiverse would be crawling with them,” Jack said. “There may be a time traveler in this room.”

They looked at each other with bright smiles as they gathered their texts and notebooks.

The kid aced the punchline. “An Agatha Christie novel. The murderer is right here in this room!”

“I leave you with this,” Jack said. “Embrace the ’brane.”

The kid bounded near as Jack stacked papers in his briefcase. Up close, Jack estimated he was a sophomore in high school, but grad school material.

“Professor Hanson, can I bother you for a couple minutes?”

“No problem, kid. You did a man’s work today.”

The kid was skinny, a bit unkempt, but sparkling with the fervor of a life yet unlived.

“You can’t be enrolled here at the college. Just hanging around to audit? Score a head start?”

The kid gawked, bewildered by the use of that word, audit, as though he had accidentally stumbled into an economics lecture and did not absorb a single word.

“Audit,” Jack said. “Sit and observe any class. No grades, no tests, no pressure. This was a freebie lecture today.”

“I love science,” the kid said. “My mom told me you were the most brilliant scientist alive. If I ever have the chance, she told me, I must catch one of your lectures.”

“Your mom sounds wise in her generation.”

“People say your lectures sometimes can be difficult.”

Jack empathized with the kid, whose face burned red with embarrassment.

“Of course, they can be. This is advanced science, college level. A genius scientist once said, ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’”

The kid came right back at him.

“Dr. Hoenikker used to say any scientist unable to explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”

“Can’t say I ever had the pleasure of meeting that gent.”

“Felix Hoenekker. He’s a character in a novel I read, Cat’s Cradle. Kurt Vonnegut wrote it. Funny writer. Dr. Hoenekker invented ice-nine, water that stays solid at room temperature.”

“Sounds as if you can teach me stuff about this multiverse we live in.”

“I want to learn about time and multiverses from you, Dr. Hanson.”

Jack ired the kid. Once he eased past his shyness, he showed spunk, zest, an eagerness to comprehend the incomprehensible.

“Come on, kid. We can go talk. There’s a place that makes great milkshakes. My treat.”

They walked the bridge next to the college over to West Alton, a spicy, multicultural town. Banners touting the college’s arts fair flapped on the light poles. The cafes and galleries brimmed with the aura of youth. It reminded Jack of New York, the Village, Daisy, a lifetime away. The warm air whisked over them, that spring day, bright and cloudless. They strolled almost wordlessly the three blocks to the Marvelous Diner and grabbed a corner table facing the bustling avenue.

The Marvelous, as everyone in those parts called it, was nowhere close to being marvelous, more a grease pit where the short-order cooks flipped burgers behind the counter and at breakfast time served up a chipped-beef-on-toast concoction affectionately dubbed shit on a shingle.

Jack ordered his usual morning brew, a tall iced tea in a foam cup, dark, unsweetened. The kid opted for a chocolate shake and sucked at it through a curved straw.

“Where do you want to start, kid? You know the basics, right? Teach you that in

high school.”

“I learned the cosmos acts weird. Things we see around us don’t behave the same as the stuff we can’t see behaves, the world of atoms, photons, electrons. You talked about that. The theories of relativity, space, time: that’s what fascinates me.”

“And why are Einstein’s theories and quantum theory so contradictory? That’s a riddle that defines the cosmos.”

The kid offered no quick answer. Jack respected that.

“I’m sure you’ll solve it someday, Professor Hanson.”

Jack took a long haul, swirled the ice fragments in the cup, poured a few in his mouth.

“Iced tea. It’s my only weakness.”

Jack didn’t aim to perplex the kid with his insider trivia, but he was doing a fine job.

“I’m just riffing on an old black-and-white horror movie. Before your time.”

Jack shook his head. “Just kidding. I have other weaknesses. I don’t want to elaborate, kid, but I’m an awfully weak man.”

The waitress pushed over Jack’s next beverage.

“Don’t get too wired, Dr. Hanson,” she said.

“I want to get buzzed, honey. Classes done for the day.”

Jack turned his focus back to the kid.

“A little alcohol,” Jack said. “My other weakness. Lubes the mind. Inspires new theories. Makes me be creative.”

“I’ll try it, when I’m older.”

“Twisted physics, kid, all twisted physics.”

“Twisted universe?” The kid flashed confusion.

“Twisted multiverse. Multiverses. Plural. To accomplish time travel, all we have to do is get from here to there. One lousy piece of an atom away.”

The kid’s eyes glowed with fascination. He hadn’t touched his shake in five minutes of space-time.

“I have several mottos, kid, but here’s the one that rings most true. All possibilities exist, and if they can exist, they will exist in a parallel universe. I want to visit one of the parallel worlds someday. Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t, but you will in your lifetime.”

“What do you think the first time machine will be Professor Hanson? Some crazy contraption with spinning wheels and whirring blades and blinking lights, the kind you see in the movies?”

“I don’t think it will anything mechanical, not a wormhole or anything like that either. I think it will be something small, nanotechnology. I hope whoever invents the first time-travel device has a sense of humor. Shape it like a butterfly. A device a billion times more powerful than anything we can imagine today, yet it’s no bigger than your fist.”

He fluttered his hands, the imagined flap of wings.

“In some ways, kid, we take comfort knowing if we’re living in one among infinite multiverses, then there is another one where you can live the life of the path not traveled. On the other hand, you need to live the life, you do live, shoulder your burdens, pay the consequences. If it came down to that, going back, who can tell if you’ll take the right fork in the road?”

Jack’s mind drifted toward horrible potentialities. “In another multiverse, say a trillion atoms removed from ours, the country elected Charles Lindbergh president. But you wouldn’t know anything about Lucky Lindy and the Nazis.”

The kid frowned. “I need to brush up on my history.”

“Do you want to talk about anything else? Boxing? Do you want to hear about the night I met Jack Dempsey?”

“I’d love to. Later. I’m sure you can bend my ear so much it will never straighten out.”

“Forget the Alamo,” Jack said. “The past has ed. Look ahead. Always ahead.”

“Can I attend some of your other lectures? What did you call that… an audit?”

Jack patted him on the shoulder as he grabbed the check. “Sure, kid, anytime.”

“If you could travel back in time and change one thing, professor, what would that be?”

Jack sucked down the lemon pulp clinging to the base of his beverage. “That I’ll have to think about.”

A Thousand Years

August 31, 2035

Two and two didn’t equal four, not in Buck’s mind. The sum was six, ART 6.

“Jack Hanson is partnering with Egon,” Buck told Pinskie. “The greatest scientific mind of the final quarter of the twentieth century ing forces with the evil genius of the first third of the twenty-first century.”

“Madness,” Pinskie said. “But it makes zero sense. Nobody’s heard from Jack Hanson in decades.”

“Egon says he has a way to reach Jack, retrieve that sample from Dempsey he needs.”

Buck shivered, considering the implications.

“If they’re in cahoots, I have a bigger problem. Those two won’t give a rat’s fuck about defying international law. Hell, if they coded ART 6, what’s to stop them from upgrading to ART 7.0? Or beyond?”

Buck waxed wistful. “Will you come pay a visit when I wind up in the gulag sharing a cell with Donald Trump?”

Pinkie waxed serious. “You won’t be with Trump. My sources tell me Trump didn’t last a month in captivity, biggest pussy the Bilderbergs ever met. Sources tell me he drifted into a catatonic state as soon as they forced him to watch his sons’ flogging on the waterboards. But that’s just my sources.”

“Were you old enough to the headlines, Pinskie, back in 2005?”

“Sure I was. WORLD FAMOUS PHYSICIST DISAPPEARS. The FBI explored a few leads, but he had no relatives, Jack, nobody to push anyone to enlarge the investigation. The world’s top scientific organizations stepped up, offered a twomillion-dollar reward, but no one reported anything. Never found any trace of Jack Hanson.”

“Those rumors,” Buck said, considering all possibilities. “Jack lived as a hermit in a cabin near Missoula, Montana, slept on a bear rug. Or he grew insane when his neurons popped from the complexity of his work. Or he discovered something so vile, so hideous, so threatening to the world order, that he burned all his papers and vanished from public life.”

Buck didn’t want to dis Jack and repeat other gossip, that Jack was a fraud from the beginning and all his theories were horseshit, the rants of a lunatic destroyed by inner demons haunting a man. No matter the truth, Jack’s research papers, the equations and formulae and algorithms he claimed would alter the landscape of physics, were never recovered.

“Hanson would be over 85 years old now, “Pinskie said. “Why would he be working with Egon, and where would he be hiding out all this time? The ART Project didn’t launch until Jack was missing twenty years.”

“Egon said strange things these last few days. I asked him about Dempsey, why he’s missing, and Egon said Hanson was at the Garden that night, the night they celebrated Dempsey’s seventy-fifth birthday, and Egon knew where to find Hanson and get Dempsey’s sample. I thought Egon was just playing blowhard to cut the tension and that he would run whatever reanimation process he runs, that he’d execute it again, and Dempsey would poof into view. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Perchance another lame Egon joke,” Pinskie suggested.

“Egon mentioned years back that he read Hanson’s notebooks. I couldn’t tell if it was more crap. I confronted him about it minutes ago and he gave that coy, smirky look.”

“I know that look.”

“The thing I like,” Buck said, “if they are working as a team, perhaps Egon didn’t need to code ART 6 to get our tournament rolling. They’re not just the two smartest guys in the room, they may be the two smartest guys on the planet.”

Their happy hour hobnobbing over drinks and finger food in the lobby complete, the media gaggle scrummed in, poised to make Buck’s next few hours a living hell. Buck loathed them. His tournament he aimed at the common folks, the laborers with soot under their fingernails, the people who embraced boxing when it was the sport of salvation and escape. To Egon, they were the hoi polloi. Ordinary fucking people, Egon said, I hate them. The media, for Buck, represented the elite, the Bilderbergs in green eye shades.

Buck thought he should begin, “This is a people’s tournament…” No, he would

improv. Get that old flamboyance back, Buck. He had swapped units, now sporting a Mohawk hairpiece, tricolored in ocean blue, seaweed green, and sand yellow, and over his chest an African tribal dashiki. He arranged to introduce the Foreman-Dempsey match last. If word came Dempsey was on the move, Buck planned to stall by detailing how George Foreman wore that same garb when he fell to Ali in Zaire in 1974.

Not that Buck entertained any illusions he’d see Dempsey today. If ever.

Egon grabbed his spot next to Buck on the lectern.

“Good to go, partner,” Egon drawled.

Buck nodded, ready with his stemwinder.

The front row mimicked the press tables at ringside. Fancy table clothes with the official logo, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE MULTIVERSE, silkscreened on the overhang, a spinning red atom beneath. Ice water on the tables, cans of beer in coolers, snack trays with cashews and trail mix, thick press kits both print and digital. Some writers sneaked in flasks, as boxing reporters have done across centuries.

Behind that single press row, other invitees slumped on cushioned chairs, all men, except hiding in their shadow off to the side, one fine dame Buck thought he’d like to meet. Buck regretted he hadn’t salted the group with a few ringers uncorking softball questions.

“Stop your fretting,” Egon whispered. “There aren’t many people here today who matter to us. You know the motto, even bad press is good press.”

Egon spoke truth. Hard as it was to believe, five regional news organizations still published print editions in the United States: Chicago, Los Angeles, south Florida, Texas, and New Jersey, now the most densely populated strip of land on the planet since Manhattan gurgled underwater in 2028.

Buck’s strategy extended past what once was Old Media, now Dead Media. New Media, digital, became the new Old Media after President Trump shuttered the internet in 2019 to halt the spread of what he called fake news. What mattered now was Living Media, the delivery of content directly to the consumer via implanted nano chips and corneal lenses.

That was how most consumers would experience the tournament. A billion fans. That was what Buck aimed for. One followed by nine zeroes.

He surveyed his audience. Buck didn’t recognize every face, but he identified some. Almost all were pricks.

Buck summoned the pairings up on the PhantomVision behind him, twenty feet tall.

Gene Tunney vs. Muhammad Ali

Sonny Liston vs. Mike Tyson

Jack Johnson vs. Max Schmeling

Jim Jeffries vs. Joe Louis

Larry Holmes vs. Rocky Marciano

Jack Dempsey vs. George Foreman

Joe Louis vs. Vitaly Klitschko

Wlir Klitschko vs. Joe Frazier

Work your magic, Buck pepped himself, froth the crowd into a lather.

“Thank you everyone for coming to learn about this unparalleled sporting event, a unique adventure in the history of this multiverse. Boxing has not been part of our culture for several years, but there was a moment when Muhammad Ali was the most famous person on our planet, when Jack Dempsey was a folk hero beloved by mankind. Thanks to the scientific breakthroughs of my partner, Dr. Egon Keloid, we now can bring together Ali, Dempsey, and the fourteen other greatest heavyweights who ever lived, to fight in an elimination tournament where they will box each other on the best days of their lives. And fans can experience the thrill of competing against the grandest gladiators ever through the science of Xtreme Agony. Share the ecstasy! Share the agony! Welcome to the Heavyweight Championship of the Multiverse.”

Some awful marching music Pinskie picked out swelled. Buck gestured toward the bracket, lingering in hyperspace, expecting fanfare. Instead he jerked backward from the first lob of cynicism.

A white-haired cynic, no fight maven, shot Buck a question without waiting for acknowledgment. Fucking cock sparrow.

“My name is Dr. Casimir Czankre. I represent the World Health Lobby. Why resurrect boxing at all, Mr. Lazarus, in any way, any shape, or any form? Fifteen fighters died in the ring during the last year before WorldGov outlawed boxing. Our children don’t need you to set this example.”

Buck’s eyes blazed, pun on his lips. Czankre sore.

“This is only a simulation, Dr. Czankre. what they said about video games back in the last century, how they would lead to violence and mayhem and teenagers murdering other teenagers. That did not happen.”

Egon jumped in.

“This is history. History in the making. Technology emerging. The possibilities of recreating the past are enormous. Imagine being able to bring back Abraham Lincoln at the instant he delivered the Gettysburg Address? Or Albert Einstein when his brain gave birth to the theory of relativity?”

Gunther Bilko, a rat-faced reporter with tartan suspenders holding aloft his sagging tros, chimed in.

“Well, why don’t you bring them back, Lincoln and Einstein? I don’t want to discuss no physics. You do. But people would rather you conjured great individuals instead of Sonny Liston.”

Buzz Ogre’s heavy voice rumbled a reder.

“Sonny Liston was a thug, a goon. He got his kicks beating up dock workers. The bastard lacked the skills to read or write, and now you’re saying we’re supposed to celebrate his return. Stay in your grave, old Charlie Liston, rot in your well-deserved grave.”

Buzz and Buck shared a history. An old-schooler, Buzz was still trying to hang on in print. Once he was Buck’s drinking crony, now bitter because his paper had to move across the river to New Jersey.

Buck sought to quell his rival.

“Keep if cool, Buzz. We’re not bringing anyone back.”

“Genetic holograms,” Egon said. “Cutting-edge science.”

“What is a genetic hologram, Dr. Keloid?” Bilko asked

“Proprietary science.” Egon’s stock answer.

“What are these doppelgängers or apparitions or genetic holograms as you call them?” A white-haired man wearing a clerical collar butted in. “Do they have souls?”

Priests, why are they in here, Buck tried to fathom.

“Nobody in this room has a soul,” Buzz roared, “or else none of us would be here.”

How Buck hated this awful old man, with his wild man’s beard, hair flapping over his eyebrows, string wart defining his jowl.

A buzz flexed through the room, cynicism waving goodbye to disgust and widening gloom.

“Probably computer simulations, done by a seven-year old flicking his cornea…”

“... or actors who can’t find work in a crummy Hollywood movie.”

“No,” Buck fired back. “This new technology designed by Dr. Keloid will

enable us to interact again with towering figures from the past.”

“Towering figures?” Buzz harrumphed. “Look who else is in this lineup. Mike Tyson, he raped women. And Max Schmeling. He was palsy-walsy with Adolph Hitler.”

Buck smelled an opening.

“Dr. Czankre, nobody wants to see any fighters get hurt, but might I point out Max Schmeling lived to be a remarkable ninety-nine years old. So not all fighters wind up with scrambled eggs for brains.”

Challenges came now from Living Media reps assigned to the back rows.

“Why don’t you bring your fighters out front so we can meet them?”

“We have them all here, fifty feet tall,” Buck said. “We all love Ali, don’t we? Let’s greet him now.”

Ali crackled into view. He made funny faces at the assembly, but his voice was a combination gargle and death rattle. Low-tech, something unacceptable forty years past.

The laughter rained enormous

Rib nudging and chortles. Buck hated them all, every single fucker in that press dungeon. In Buck’s mind, Czancre was sharp as a bowling ball.

The technical failure rattled Buck, until Buck realized it wasn’t a technical failure at all. His jaw gaped. He marveled at the beautiful physical specimen Ali was, and Buck wondered, at what moment, during Ali’s slide downward, when did their ships cross in the night, and when, at what moment, what instant of time-space, he might outbox the greatest boxer who ever lived in his multiverse?

He snapped back to reality.

“That’s Ali horsing around. Eavesdropping on everything going on. The Greatest, let me give it to you straight, is not pleased.”

Buck glowed that Ali didn’t mouth off about Frazier or Foreman or Jeffries and reveal the actual tech failure, that Egon had summoned an Ali from some very wrong night, not the night Buck had chosen as Ali’s triumphant moment, the third-round smoking of Cleveland Williams.

“How about we meet Gene Tunney, the Fighting Marine?” Buck said. “Or Joe Louis, another true war hero?”

Dr. Czankre wore hard his rumble sticks.

“Fine to talk about the young Joe Louis, a credit to his race, as the bigots of that

time gloated. Did your research tell you much about old Joe Louis, five months in a psych ward, broken down, dead at age sixty-six? Let’s talk about that Joe Louis, Mr. Big Shot Fight Promoter. They’d park Joe’s wheelchair at ringside and he’d nod when they told him, ‘They’re fighting now, Joe.’”

Another rifle shot from the back. Buck forgot to duck.

“Instead of just bringing together old champions, did you think of adding an underdog the fans might want to root for? A scrapper like Jerry Quarry.”

“Bet everyone a beer Buck doesn’t know who Jerry Quarry is,” Buzz said. He wagged his arms to share in his mirth.

The sweat gobbed under Buck’s arm, but another bodily fluid crept to mind, how pissed off Buck stewed.

“Best damn heavyweight never to win the belt during the last half of the twentieth century. The biggest fan favorite four years running. You make a good point—not you, Buzz, you never make good points—but you do, back there, about underdogs.”

“Are you aware what happened to Jerry Quarry? Do you care about anyone but yourself, you selfish prick?” Czankre asked.

“Next question,” Buck said.

There would be no next question, just the clamor of shouts and bedlam and tomatoes that Buck dodged whirring past.

“… shame… bloodsport… time travel… international law… Jack Hanson… research papers…”

Buck face bled turnip red. The media never met the fighters. He batted off too many questions, none nice. The one polite person stood far away, in the back, a coltish woman with strawberry blonde hair dropping across her forehead, lush figure. She stifled bite-your-cheeks glee throughout the inquisition, and she awarded Buck fanfare after his sallies.

He respected her chops. He may have been a part of her before. Centuries before. Buck thought in those , the distance of time.

“Miss, let’s not let the guys land all the punches. Do you have questions, remarks, wisecracks? Hit me with your best shot.”

She shook her head.

“Not at the moment.”

“Somebody must pay you to be here today,” Egon said. “I’ll try to give you an exclusive later, when we clear out these… gentlemen.”

“I’m not with the press or media,” she said.

She wore a name tag. Egon squinted to read it from his lectern.

“I came here to see my father. He told me to meet him here today.”

The presser engulfed Egon in churlishness. He did not think this the proper moment for family gatherings.

“And your name is?”

“Daisy. My name is Daisy Hanson.”

“Your name... is... Daisy Hanson?”

Egon slumped stricken, ashen.

Daisy flashed a faint smile, a gentle smile. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“Your father is…” Egon said.

“Jack Hanson. He’s a great scientist. Have you heard of him?”

“When did he tell you to come here today?” Egon gasped. “When did he tell you this?”

“He didn’t tell me. He left me a letter. Many years ago.”

“Can I ask, who is your mother?”

“Her name was Daisy, too. I was named after my mom.”

Egon’s tournament was not just flying off the rails, over the cliff, into a dumpster fire massive enough to emblaze Yellowstone Park. Now it caromed into a whole new multiverse, one he cared never to visit.

Pinskie huffed in. His big, bald head glinted with sweat, the underarms of his shirt doused through.

“You better come with me,” he said. “Something you’ve got to see in Dempsey’s training room.”

Buck had a hunch he would not meet Jack Dempsey in Jack Dempsey’s training room.

Egon and Buck split down the hallway, past the other fighters bobbing and feinting in their glass cages, waiting for their closeups. Pinskie, winded, lagged minutes behind.

A fighter stood in the ring’s far corner, inside Dempsey’s training room, his back to them, for maximum impact. This fighter wore white satin trunks. His gloves gripped the top ropes. Buck ired him. His physique, the tone of his body, how his shoulders were ripped, a fighting specimen. The fighter turned. He was younger than Dempsey, early twenties, Buck guessed, and he wore a hippie hairstyle, not Dempsey’s high-and-tight military cut. He bent into an odd crouch, left arm crooked into an orthogonal V-shape shielding his nose, his right hand cocked to rip off uppercuts, a fighter used to fighting in close range.

Buck recognized he was not Jack Dempsey.

Egon braced for the shitstorm soon to engulf him like a septic tank exploding.

“Who here’s ready to rumble?” Jack Hanson asked.

May 28, 2005

FROM: Roxanne Small

TO: Vince Kaledas, Articles Editor

RE: Interview with Dr. Jack Hanson

Attached is the partial preliminary draft of my interview with Dr. Jack Hanson, conducted May 5, 2005. Dr. Hanson ed me on May 3, and said he wanted to sit down for what he said would be his final interview. I asked Dr. Hanson why this would be his final interview, and his words were measured. He spoke coyly that he may do another interview in “a thousand years.” I could not discern what he meant. I asked why he chose me, and he said he trusted me to be fair and honest and he wanted to give an exclusive to his hometown magazine, the Schuylkill County Monthly.

During our two-hour interview, which Dr. Hanson permitted me to tape record, he refused to discuss his work in theoretical physics or the breakthroughs he’s making in proving “multiverses” exist and the implications for time travel. He said his research will resumed by others and those analyses are best left to scholarly journals to sift through.

Instead, Dr. Hanson insisted the interview focus on the topic of how little he knows. He wanted to relate experiences from his past, a romance he enjoyed in college with a coed named Daisy, and his affinity for the sport of boxing. I did research and found that Dr. Hanson fought in the Golden Gloves in New York City in 1970. He said he had never discussed those personal events in a public forum, and he hoped our publication might put them on the record.

I tried to Dr. Hanson for a follow-up interview, but I have been unsuccessful. I did not interpret Dr. Hanson’s elusiveness to be in any way selfdestructive. I sensed a buoyancy, an upbeat vigor in his tone, that there were things in his past he wanted to share, that he wanted to share with me now.

I will continue to reach out to Dr. Hanson to meet again. I welcome your input.

Thank you.

Here is my early draft:

He Had No Way of Knowing

By Roxanne Small

Dr. Jack Hanson had no way of knowing he would reunite with his soulmate when they first locked eyes at a freshman mixer, across the dim lights of a dance floor at the Loeb Student Center, in August 1967. The acid rock of Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermint” swirled through the sweltering air, providing the pop-pop-pop patterns for the red and blue strobes flashing with the rhythms. He saw her for the first time, a true Daisy, his Daisy, cute and alive in a bright floral top, hanging loose and sexy over her shoulders, inviting, her slacks, clinging: a perfect figure, decorated with black and yellow psychedelic curlicues.

He had no way of knowing.

He had no way of knowing whether she shared the magic when they floated into each other’s orbit in what projected to Jack Hanson like slow-motion, a stroll into the future, some other world, some nether world, Tony and Maria meeting in the shallow-focus haze of the dance at the gym in West Side Story.

“You were giving me the look,” she said to him.

“It was the look.”

“My name’s Daisy.”

“Jack. You got a boyfriend back home, Daisy?”

“If I did, and I do not, those relationships end when a girl leaves home for university.”

Now she gave him the look.


He had no way of knowing whether they would connect that evening when they strolled off, hands locked, over to Bleecker Street, stopping outside a windowless storefront, a place Jack frequented, a Village landmark. A sign two feet square swung like a lawyer’s shingle, illustrated with the crimson silhouette of a witch in pointy hat, straddling a broomstick, a crone modeled on Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

“Let me guess” Daisy said. “The Red Witch?”

“Nope. The Witch’s Titty. [NOTE TO EDITOR: Can we say that?] Neighbors

threw a hissy looking at that sign, so the owner went minimalist.”

“Is this a coffee shop?” she asked, new to the area, new to the scene, “Is this a place where the folkies play Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger?”

“Just a front for cheap beer. The t’s quiet at night. The students from out of state don’t even know it’s a bar, so they don’t pack in. The drinking age is only eighteen in New York, not like in Pennsylvania, and I’d rather a good happy hour than a rotten amateur hour.”

They grabbed a spot near the back, away from two other couples sharing solitude. They parked at a circular wooden table that creaked and wobbled when they rested their arms. The room felt cramped, dark. Sawdust covered the floorboards, hiding a past undiscovered.

“What are you gonna have?” the barman barked. His bolero tie bisected a torso curved like a pear.

“Two Schaefers,” Jack said. “Pints.”

The barkeep’s face twisted into a scowl as he nodded at Jack, turned to size up Daisy. “Who else here is eighteen?” he asked.

“You are,” Daisy said.

They both giggled. He would not serve her. Jack wondered, Am I letting her down on our first date? Does this even count as a first date? They had no beers in their bellies, but they did clasp hands. They jaunted down Mercer Street toward the Washington Square arch, illuminated, welcoming.


He had no way of knowing when he first saw her they shared a coal region heritage, a geographic bond and a spiritual one.

“You’re not eighteen yet, Daisy?” Jack asked during their slow stroll around the Village.

“Seventeen. Graduated a year early.”

“A prodigy, huh?”

“Just an easy high school, I suppose.”

“None sucked more than mine,” Jack said. “Cooper High, the heart of pitchcoal-black darkness, coal country in Pennsylvania.”

“Small world. I studied at Anthracite High, a bit further south, if you want to call what I did studying. I guess you’d call my high school... the gall bladder of darkness.”

Jack adored the way she spun off metaphors, loved her waveform of unformed beauty collapsing into a pilgrim soul, loved how that feeling of falling in love consumed one in small moments. He squeezed her tight, soaking her radiance.

“Your smile… it’s like an angel’s… ah, sorry, I suck at poetry.”


He had no way of knowing how deeply he would fall in love with her when he escorted her back to her dorm, Lipton Hall, at Washington Square West, in her cozy one-room facing the arch. He greeted her roommate, Diana.

Diana, a Jewish American princess from upstate Easton, Pennsylvania, whined how she missed her pony on this first weekend in the city. Jack pulled Daisy aside while Diana poured armfuls of blouses and skirts on her bed, huffing and sulking.

“My roommate’s family is old money, too,” Jack whispered. “He brags his ancestors came over on the Mayflower. He says he may head off to Disneyland next weekend with his mom. Such a snoot.”

“My family can’t afford none of that,” she said, almost bragging about the dirtpoor upbringing she shared with Jack. “I’m working as the mail girl in the chemistry department, doing mimeographing and stuff, for pocket change.”

“We won’t always be dirt poor, Daisy.”

“Pact,” she said, sealed with a hug, not a handshake.

They didn’t make love that night. Jack envisaged they would have if he pressed the issue, but he did not. That night did not require extra magic. The anticipation, the journey, not the destination, became a moment to cling to.


He had no way of knowing if they would make love the next weekend. Jack’s roommate headed off to the coast, and Daisy spent Friday and Saturday, cramped against him in his lower bunk, pressed against the cold cinderblock stone. He didn’t ask if it was her first time. Her grimace suggested it might be.


He had no way of knowing if their affection would endure after they shared a bus ride the next weekend from the Port Authority back to Pennsylvania, navigating a snaking route that turned a three-hour excursion into five, through the grimy coal towns of Mauch Chunk and Tamaqua and Mahanoy City.


He had no way of knowing whether Daisy would embrace the young lovers’

tradition of “parking,” making out in seclusion in his rust-colored Rambler, hardly a rattletrap, yet a clunker that rattled while they rolled, muffling the music warbling from Jack’s eight-track player under the dash. They did what many couples did in those days. They parked atop a rocky coal bank, obscured from the access roads. They crawled into the backseat and necked and petted and made love, cramped but blissful.

“You need to be agile to do it this way,” she said.

“I love your agility,” he said.


He had no way of knowing if Daisy would return the favor when after skipping only a quick beat, and before he had time to think it through, added, “And I love you, Daisy.”

“I love you, too, Jack.”

“Promise?” Jack asked.

“Promise,” Daisy said.

They resumed intimacy, the shock absorbers in the Rambler squeaking up and down, an image often played for laughs in a bad comedy floundering on the

silver screen, neither of them thinking of agility.


He had no way of knowing how this night would play out, June 17, 1970, whether he would muster the enterprise to approach Teddy Bentham, Jerry Quarry’s cornerman and one of the best trainers in the land.

He had no way of knowing whether Daisy would embrace his career choice if he ed Teddy’s boxing stable, whether she would ire his courage, become what they call a boxing widow, even though Jack knew he had the will and the skill to evade physical damage.

He thought he knew.

But he had no way of knowing.

He had no way of knowing whether Daisy would be the person he would spend his life with or if memories of her would haunt him for thirty-five years.


He had no way of knowing why that first night when he met Daisy, across the dance floor, why he entered the student center as though emerging from a haze, why the moment unfolded as the opposite of a blackout, why a white fog

dimmed his vision, why his mind scrolled a blank slate, a tabula rasa, until he saw her.


FROM: Vince Kaledas, Articles Editor

TO: Roxanne Small

RE: Interview with Dr. Jack Hanson

Your prose can get a bit florid with your parallel construction, but a famous person’s private life can make for candid reading. I’m fascinated by the white fog imagery you allude to at the end. I’m sure Dr. Hanson will show up soon.

May 3, 2025

“We’ve all seen movies about time travel,” Egon Keloid said. “The movies get time travel all wrong. Dr. Jack Hanson got it right.”

The audience packed as tightly as drupelets in this hotel ballroom: journalists, scholars, students, sci-fi fanboys and fangirls, ordinary people, both the curious and the skeptics. Egon welcomed them all.

The pasteboard sign outside announced:

Journey to the Past:

The Vanishing of Jack Hanson

By Dr. Egon Septimus Keloid

“We all have a favorite movie about time travel,” Egon began. “What are some of yours?”

Just entering middle age, his tufts of white hair angled wildly, Egon projected a maestro’s swagger, a researcher looking toward the future while he obsessed over the past.

Sitting down front, a lad wearing springtime colors thrust his hand.

“The Time Machine, from 1960,” he said with bravura. “A scientist played by Rod Taylor builds a time machine and tempts the laws of providence by jumping ahead into a dangerous future.”

“A George Pal classic!” Egon said. “You know your time machine movies if you dip back that far... into the past. What is your name, young fellow?”

“Garth—Gary. Some call me Buck.”

“Glad you made it today, Gary.”

Egon shunned the nickname. Too juvenile. He ired Gary’s dash, even if he found him raw, in dire need of a wing to be taken under.

“How many here have read Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder?’” Egon asked.

A smatter. Ten hands.

“Come on, guests. Do your homework. Gary here did. This is a seminar about time travel.”

Egon clicked on the first slide, an illustration of a Tyrannosaurus rex towering over five men wearing oxygen masks and toting safari rifles.

“The past becomes a tourist destination in that classic short story. A hunter crushes a butterfly during one journey to the past, and when he returns to present day, dinosaurs rule the globe. And this is where science-fiction gets time travel all wrong. We do not return to the past as mere observers. We return as participants in our own past, and only in our own past. Sadly, we will never meet the dinosaurs. Once Dr. Hanson’s theories, startling as they are, are proven correct—that we live in only one of an infinite number of multiverses—time travel became inevitable.”

Egon spoke with a barker’s glee, an enthusiasm for what might be conveyed as dull scientific gravitas, a point not lost on young Gary.

“Today, we will talk about the work of Dr. Jack Hanson, and I will forward my theory about what happened to him and where this genius has lived these past two decades.”

A pert brunette, legs crossed, jotting notes, waved her hand. “Dr. Keloid, can you explain what a multiverse means, what it means to me?”

“Each time we choose, an either-or decision, the universe splits into two. Should I attend this seminar or not? You came, so at that moment the universe branched off, and you live in one multiverse.”

“The better multiverse,” she said to polite laughter.

“At that instant the multiverses are identical, except you stayed at home. What happens next? You decide you need a drink, because you’re sad you missed out on the chance to listen to Dr. Keloid gas on. So, you head out to a singles bar and you meet a handsome swain and he turns out to be your soulmate and... you see where this is heading? From one single choice you made, everything that comes after changes. Not only for you, but for the entire multiverse.”

Egon clicked the next slide, a stack of pages, pages from a book, towering high, titled ’BRANES.

“Just where are all these funky multiverses?” Egon asked. “They are piled on top of one another, infinitely high. We call them ’branes, short for membranes. Dr. Hanson thought the ’branes may be only an electron apart. My thinking: It’s a new particle, a particle so small our puny human brains can’t comprehend it, a particle yet undiscovered. Let’s call it a keloidtron.”

Chuckles waved through the room. Egon pointed to the back.

“These ’branes, why can’t I see them?” a puffy-cheeked man inquired.

“Because there are more dimensions than are dreamt off in your philosophy, Horacio.” Egon shook off his own pomposity. “Forgive my bad Shakespeare. We think only of four dimensions, height, length, depth, plus time. The reality is there are many more, perhaps twenty-three, curled in on themselves, so tiny we may never detect them.”

He crunched his hands, then his body, a shriveling movement, then pointed at the second ’brane from the bottom on the stack.

Egon gestured to his slide, pantomiming the shifting of branes.

“Only two things are necessary to travel back in time. First, we must get this brane to slide over this way, to the left, to the point where we want to reenter the past. Then all we need to do is hopscotch a keloidtron’s worth of real estate to the next ’brane. Think of the ’branes as the plates in our Earth’s crust, pressing against each other with mighty force until something has to give and we have a

—”

“Timequake!” Gary said.

Egon’s face exploded in treasure. “Dr. Hanson’s equations proved this is possible. We can do it. We have not done it yet. But we will. I will!”

Gary applauded, mannerly applause swelled through the ballroom.

Egon kept on. “Now here’s where Dr. Hanson’s theories run counter to our accepted notions of time travel. However, our accepted notions come from movies and novels and short stories, not science.”

The next slide animated a ’brane gliding horizontally from the year 2025 to 2015.

“Let us suppose,” Egon said, “I go back ten years. Physically, I go nowhere. Emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, I will inhabit my body from ten years past.”

“Make me young,” squalled an older gent who’d seen better days.

“Would you care to live the same life you’ve lived to this point? That may not be much fun all. It would be like replaying an old movie, which in your case, sir, may last 75 years, without surprises, without suspense.”

A broad-shouldered Oriental woman in a dress too small offered, “So, can you change the past?”

“What fun would traveling back in time be if the laws of physics prevented that?” Egon answered with a wry grin. “But you’re not changing your past. you’re living in a different multiverse.”

“So I can’t travel back and kill baby Hitler?” the old-timer asked.

“Sorry, baby Hitler lives. Even you are too much of a whippersnapper to journey that far into the past.”

Egon got back to business. “I can guess what you’re thinking. Once Dr. Keloid builds me a time machine, I’ll travel back to when he was a young man or a young woman and I’ll set everything right, make this a better place, a better world. Anybody hear the classic Faces song, ‘Ooh La La’?”

No one did, of course.

“Well, it doesn’t work that way. Travel back in time and you can change one thing. One thing of significance involving you or any other person. One thing and one thing only.”

Egon held up a single finger. He prowled the rostrum, letting his last point sink in, eyeballing every guest. “What would be that one thing you would want to

change?”

He caught the swoosh of balloons deflating, cold water splashing against faces, exhalations of despair. “Now you’re thinking, What happens next, after you change one thing? Then the ‘you’ from the future, the memories from your future, fade away. Perhaps swiftly, perhaps instantly. You become the person you were at that previous time. Emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.”

“Bummer,” a freckled twenty-something said.

“This is nature’s way of preventing someone from traveling back and trying to rewrite history,” Egon said. “You all speak Pennsylvania Dutch here, so pardon my French: If you fuck with time, time will fuck with you.”

A reporter squinting behind owlish eyeglasses, asked, “Dr. Keloid, million-dollar question. What happened to Dr. Hanson?”

“My theory. While you can only change one thing—and one thing only on one trip to the past—there’s nothing that may prevent you from traveling back again and again. Live your life over, reach the point in your life when you first achieved time travel, whenever that may be, and start over, go back in time again, try again to fix whatever you hope to fix.”

“But there must be a limit?” Gary asked.

“I think there has to be, too,” Egon said. “After so many stabs, the multiverse

fights back. You... disappear. Or something else happens.”

“So, Dr. Hanson may be unstuck in time?” Gary asked.

“You brushed up on your Kurt Vonnegut, Gary. Stick around after the seminar. We can chat some more.”

“What do you think the limit is, Dr. Keloid?” asked a white-haired man long past retirement age, here for who knows what. “Can we only endure so much, or do the multiverses rebel?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.” Egon mused. “A thousand years?”

From the third row, a matronly woman in a drab print dress veered off-topic.

“What got you excited about science, Dr. Keloid?”

“Oh, ever since I was a little boy, I guess I had this inquisitive mind. While the other kids were shooting hoops, I spied bugs beneath a microscope.”

“Guess you have to start somewhere,” she said.

“I was named after Egon Spengler, the character Harold Ramis played in

Ghostbusters. My mother didn’t even like the movie. Her favorite was Back to the Future. Thank God, my father won out and they didn’t name me Biff.”

Egon had a story to share that he did not share: how his mother once told him his unimmaculate conception happened while his parents watched Ghostbusters at a rutty drive-in, banging away in the backseat. She shared lots of tales about his early years. Not an unhappy childhood, by any means, but Egon didn’t much care to discuss it, odd news for a scientist consumed by time travel.

His father, Mike Keloid, labored hard in the construction business, installing roofing and siding, his meaty hands gnarled early in middle age. His mother gave up her own career to raise her only child. Her friends claimed she married down, and she always told them without Mike there would be no Egon. If she had married someone else, Egon would not have been born.

Things changed as Egon reached his teenage years. His mother changed. She became sullen, despondent, desperate, almost haunted as though something gnawed at her soul.

When Egon turned eighteen, she called him aside one morning and told him he was a man now and she would always love him and Dad would be there for him every day. Egon saw his mother for the last time as she eased out the door, Mike aching to plant one final kiss.

“You take care of yourself,” Mike said. “It’s a strange world out there, Daisy.”

May 3, 2005

The kid arrived twenty minutes before class, first one in the lecture hall. Jack unpacked the usual material from his briefcase: binders and lessons and folders. Jack recognized him right away. A certain bonding. The kid he took under his twisted, broken wing.

“Hey, kid,” Jack said. “How’s it hanging? How are things on your edge of the multiverse?”

“Seen better, seen worse.”

“Haven’t we all,” Jack said.

“I need you to visit some ghosts, Jack.”

He never called him Jack before.

Jack faltered. He knew this day might come, perhaps now, perhaps later, but sometime. He wanted this day to come. He welcomed it. He must embrace his fate now, with the kid.

“Can you go back to that night?” the kid asked. “Only you can accomplish this. I don’t blame you if you won’t, but I’m asking, will you?”

The kid didn’t identify what night. No need.

“That night?” Jack asked

“That night.”

Egon pressed the butterfly into Jack’s palm.

June 17, 1970

He sat alone in the bathroom, writing feverishly. What he needed to stretched beyond the outer limits of mnemonics. He couldn’t take anything to this adjacent multiverse except his presence, the present tense of his mind and soul, 2005.

He was back at NYU now, in Weinstein Hall, Daisy lounging outside.

Jack mulled their teal shower curtain, streaked with mildew. Dust and grime caked the chipped floor tiles. Neither Jack nor Daisy paid much mind to housecleaning.

He materialized in Weinstein naked, Daisy absent, like some Terminator from he future. He ed the precise hour Daisy went shopping at 8th Street Record World to buy the latest Neil Young and Firesign Theater LPs.

Nothing returned with Jack except the butterfly. He caressed its fragile wings, turned it over, iring this dainty insect with wings so seraphic they whipped across centuries. He longed to reverse engineer secrets it held. In the hours to come, the butterfly would devolve in the dementia of Jack’s mind into a whatnot, what they dismissed as a bauble back in the coal regions, tossed away in a bureau drawer, forgotten.

He tucked the butterfly into his denim pocket.

He thought of Daisy now waiting in their dorm room, the incandescent Daisy of June 1970, but ten feet away, whose face he could not bear to behold, not the Jack Hanson of 2005.

He hunkered, writing directions as to what he needed to do. He considered flinging open the door, grabbing Daisy, hugging her, wrestling her down on the bed, making her feel the unfulfilled ion he’d held inside for ten, twenty, thirty years.

He dwelled on it. Go in there, Jack Hanson, get on the bed. Do it. One more time. Tear down her panties. Lick her pussy to within an inch of her life. He debated reason versus a surrender to lust.

He wrote in black ink, crisp block letters. He craved her while he wrote, unknowing if they might make love that night, certainly in one of an infinite multiverses, perhaps this one.

“Everything okay in there, Jack?”

“Just freshening up. Big night ahead. The biggest of my life.”

Jack’s heart thumped. He fantasized about reliving this night for what ed as slowly as a thousand years. Now he lacked the moxie to confront her. This second, she might have been planning to leave him. Or maybe she longed for him, too. Daisy existed in a state of supposition, both leaving and staying, both possibilities existing. Schrödinger’s cat, both dead and alive, Jack’s future living and dead.

Trim and supple, sporting a fighter’s build, he ired himself in the mirror. Don’t hyperventilate, Jack. Don’t say anything that gives away who you are, that you are not the Jack Hanson from Daisy’s present, his past. You only have one shot at this.

He exited the bathroom, into another multiverse, now his own.

Daisy sprawled on the bed, moping over Jack’s plans that night, confronting his future in the fight game and her future with him.

“Hey, Daisy, cheer up now, for me.”

“For you, maybe.”

He planted a kiss, moist and lingering. He hoped she did not detect the rapid pulse of his heart.

Jack’s mission was straightforward, collect a DNA sample from Dempsey and make certain it found its way to Egon sixty-five years in the future. He had no clue how the rest of that night might play out, staying with Daisy, lovers across centuries. Or perhaps his whole wave function would collapse into a multiverse filled with even more loss and longing. He might not evolve into Dr. Jack Hanson, only a bum, never a contender in either science or boxing.

Getting the DNA was a breeze. Dempsey signs his autograph, and he asks the champ to seal the envelope, a keepsake for Jack Hanson’s grandkids. Egon wasn’t fixated about Dempsey’s saliva. Technology progressed so rapidly until 2035, that the skin flakes on pen and paper would be a viable sample, Egon informed Jack.

A fleck, a fleck was all he needed.

Getting it to Egon, well, Egon had that figured out. A nondescript building off 9th Avenue, Universal Science & Life, opened as a repository for rich brats to store their DNA, decapitated heads, cadavers, whatever, hoping to be resurrected or cloned in the faraway future. The business launched in 1969 and still stockpiled specimens in 2035, all sealed and built to last. Egon supplied Jack the information.

Now, this night, back in June 1970, Jack took no chances. The Universal, Science & Life instructions were in his pocket. His focus shifted to Daisy for these last hours before meeting Dempsey, Daisy radiant in her prime, embracing him, facing a multiverse of unknown consequence.

She grabbed an album to spin on their workhorse record player, “That Summer Feeling,” by folkie Jonathan Richman. Jack knew Daisy could not pick up on the irony of the lyrics:

“If you’ve forgotten what I’m naming

You’re gonna long to reclaim it one day

Because that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

And if you wait until you’re older

A sad resentment will smolder one day

And then that summer feeling is gonna haunt you

And that summer feeling’s gonna taunt you

And then that summer feeling is gonna hurt you one day in your life.

Jack’s head bounced with beat. Make that every day of your life.”

“Promise me again, Jack,” she said.

“I promised you.” Jack recollected how she insisted, how he lied.

“Promise me again.”

She held him, her smoky eyes focusing deep into his.

“I promise you,” he said. “I’m never going to fight again, it’s just that —”

“No!”

She shrank away.

“Promise me once more.”

“Okay, I promise. Again.”

They repeated this conversation back and forth, to and fro.

“Never again,” she said then.

“Never again,” she said now.

“I will not fight again,” he said. “I will shake the hand of the greatest heavyweight king in boxing history and represent New York amateur boxing and walk away for good.”

“And watch other men beat the tar out of one another. You might get lucky and see somebody die in that ring tonight. I don’t understand, why in a thousand years, anyone would want to do that: climb into the ring, beat someone up. Most men don’t want to fight one another. Why do you?”

“Boxing is a state of mind. Boxing is art at its most primal.”

“So artistic,” Daisy said. She could not halt the waver. “How much do you think I pained up inside, sitting ringside and watching you get knocked flat by McCafferty? I feared he hurt you really bad. He knocked you on your ass three times, Jack, three times. And each time I felt like he was pounding on me.”

“That was just one fight.”

“Your last fight! You were twitching on the canvas. You hadn’t a clue where you were. And now you tell me all you need is some big-shot trainer, and you can compete as a professional. You’ll never be a fighter, Jack, not in this lifetime.”

“I swear. Meeting Teddy Bentham is not on my agenda tonight.” Jack paused a beat. “I might want to say hello, shake his hand.”

“Goddamn you, no!”

Her mouth snapped shut. She locked her arms tight against her breasts, defensive, closed off.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, Jack. This isn’t the first time you’re hearing this.”

December 23, 1999

Jack Hanson slugged back his Pabst.

More holiday revelers tumbled into Chico’s, filling the bar with the hubbub of drunken blabber and clouds of cigarette smoke and the murmur of bad Nineties pop on Stanky’s boombox.

“Care to go for a walk, Peg?”

“With you, sure.”

Jack and Stanky exchanged winks. Jack aimed to ignite a spark with Peg or light a flickering candle or a kindle a flame that might burn bright and pure across the roil of time. All possibilities existed in his superposition.

They stepped into the murk of winter. The sky wept spit and cold.

He gripped her shoulder as they moved up Coal Street toward the center of town, across the bleak tatter of his childhood, a community rotting, preserved tonight only by the shrieking wind.

Perhaps Katz’s Taproom remained open ahead, or he’d get lucky and take Peg back to his place for nightcaps and a triumph of the flesh.

“So, tell me about your other fights, champ,” she said.

“I hung up my gloves while they were still golden.”

“Do you regret never boxing again?”

“All depends.”

“It depends?”

“Depends on what year I’m living in.” Jack needed to holster his enigmas if he didn’t want to chase Peg away.

The sidewalks on Coal Street fracked and buckled under a century of pain. She was a spellbound listener. He wanted to share something else, something he needed to share before their pheromones musked their auras: Daisy.

Dark and dingy, the storefronts lingered in misery, their cracked showroom windows nailed secure with sheets of warped plywood. The stench of decay byed his lungs on a path directly to his gut, the pain of memory when his hometown bustled with bloom and promise and he and Daisy shared this same stroll, young and gleeful about possibilities ahead. He felt his kinship with Daisy foster, along with the pain. Not now, not when you’re with Peg, the woman who may come to matter.

“You said you were thinking about doing more fighting. What happened?”

“I thought about turning pro, but I would need a good trainer after Pappy ed. That night in the Garden, Jerry Quarry had the best trainer on the block, an old buzzard named Teddy Bentham. I wanted to talk to him, but I had this girlfriend, Daisy, and she meant so much and she—”

She hushed him. “I hear what you’re saying. Some women love fighters, and some just want their man to play things safe, take the path left untraveled. Me, I’m a gal who loves fighters, guys who take chances in life.”

“Well, I didn’t take any chances... and I lost her, too. Such is life.”

“Do you mourn for her?”

“No.”

He lied.

They turned down Main Street, the hooked lampposts decorated with lonely green tinsel and flickering ruby bulbs, past Katz’s Taproom, not only closed for the night, but padlocked dead. The bistro where he used to play five-dollar limit poker, before he hooked up with Daisy, and now a sad cafe endured only in memory. This holiday should not be one for weeping. Peg deserved more than ghosts. The word ghosts stuck in his mind, and he reminisced about Jerry Quarry, so atop his game that night, clubbing the big Marine, the world ahead of Quarry in his headlights with Jack riding shotgun into future glory, titles, a lifetime with Daisy.

“Why are you so sad tonight, Jack? I think you have the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m just a misfit, I guess.”

Jack paused, motioning to Peg to hold up.

“He died this past year, right after Christmas. Jerry Quarry, the fighter who won the headline event that night, won spectacularly. Ever hear of Quarry?”

“Just a name. What happened?”

“Premature dementia killed him. That’s what they call it when you’re punch drunk. Too many power shots to the head.”

He stared into her eyes, gauging if any of this meant much.

“The punishment Quarry absorbed, unendurable by mortals such as us,” Jack said.

“Sucks. He’s just a name to me, but he mattered to you, and I want what matters to you to matter to me. Deal?”

“He died at fifty-three.” Jack said. “I’m fifty-one. If I kept on fighting, that might be me, now, then, or in two years.”

“But it’s not you. You’re still here. You’re with me this night.”

She pulled him tighter, intimate in the wet snow washing his eyes.

Jack filled in the details of Quarry’s sad decline, the brawl with Ken Norton, when the two thrashed each other for four rounds like Rock’ Em Sock’ Em Robots until the onslaught rained down only on the Irishman with a sound of

thunder. The years after that for Quarry filled with mad self-destruction, an illadvised comeback against all odds and logic.

“He lingered in a convalescent home during his final years. He had to wear diapers. His family spoon-fed him jars of Gerber.”

A community’s demise can be excruciating, too. Jack sized up his hometown. Shenandoah gave up, but he must not give up, not in this multiverse, nor in any other. Tonight might be the night that changes everything, a grim, forbidding night. Freeze Daisy from his memories.

“I’m staying with my girlfriend Gloria while I’m in town. Want to head over with me? You need some cheering up tonight.”

“I have a cool CD,” Jack said. “Ever listen to the Pogues?”

“Funny man.”

They swapped nudges.

“I do have a son,” she said. “He’s just a toddler, and he’s such a cutie.”

Jack tensed.

She slapped her head. “I should have started by mentioning, I’m a single mom. His father has never been part of his life.”

“I do want to meet your son.”

“I love Saturday Night Live. Did you ever watch Wayne’s World? I named him after one of my favorite characters.”

Jack rubbed her shoulder, gauging her reaction. She wrapped her arm around his chest, hugging him tighter. She gave him a wet smooch.

“I named him Garth—Gary.”

“Let’s go say hi to Garth—Gary.”

Jack never thought about Daisy again that night as they shivered onward, into a brightening gloom.

June 17, 1970

Jack Hanson tiptoed toward Dempsey’s Restaurant, tiptoeing as gingerly as he ever tiptoed in his life. His eyes gazed downward, aware of every crack in the sidewalk, every crawling insect. Nothing could be risked to collapse the waveform.

The fight card held no suspense, leaving Jack to fake it, fake his enthusiasm, fake his callowness. He resisted the impulse to make a wager with old Spike Daley, the know-it-all sportswriter, wager that Quarry flattens Mac Foster in round six, send him reeling across the ropes as paralyzed as a clothes rack toppled by a sot at Chico’s.

Smugness was not a wise choice. From the memories from Jack’s visit to the Garden, he grew to respect old Spike’s wisdom.

Jack held three envelopes in his inside jacket pocket. The envelope for Jack Dempsey’s autograph and pen, with a plastic sealer. The instructions from Egon he labored hours to memorize: where he must transport the samples, the flecks, for preservation for the next sixty-five years. And a third envelope, the final one he had written.

He inched forward across Broadway, each step revealing the care of a mother clamping her tot’s hand. He spied Dempsey through the window at his favorite table, holding sway. Do everything the same, Jack, everything.

First, he must embrace the night, its breath, its shimmer, how it felt the first time he experienced it, in another multiverse no longer his own.

His thoughts wound back to Daisy, where she camped that night once his mission was complete. Wondered where she would be tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and all the tomorrows in all the years coming, until Egon ventured to deliver the butterfly.

Dempsey’s Restaurant emitted an unfamiliar aura. Funny how memory can color truth. He stood beside a cluster of fans gawking at the mural of the Firpo fight.

He hit the bar, same spot as before. He ed those he made idle chat with, what he drank. He gaped as Dempsey snaked through the house, the lion in winter glad-handing apostles as though each were his best pal in the multiverse. The old champ slid over to Jack and he handed Dempsey the photo, a shot from the Willard training camp.

“Can I get an autograph please, champ?”

“Just for you, pally.”

Jack touched his finger to his tongue.

“Uh, sorry, the pen might be a little dry.”

Dempsey moistened the ballpoint tip

Jack asked the champ to slip the photo into the plastic sleeve.

“I want to preserve this. A keepsake for my grandkids, some day.”

Jack didn’t think this would collapse the waveform, but the probabilities of certainty were vague. He could not forecast how swiftly this Jack Hanson, circa 2005, melted for eternity.

He brushed his way toward Quarry, the Irishman dapper in sharkskin, king of the night.

“Jerry, I have something to give you. Please read it.”

“What you got there, goldie? Did you fill out an application to spar? I’m going to need plenty of spar mates. Ali might be next on my agenda.”

Quarry seethed gusto. Jack noticed his bridgework cemented in place.

Jack hustled toward the exit rudely, time for one parting glance of Quarry peeling free the letter, the contents laboriously memorized before the butterfly cemented Jack to his past.

He toppled against a philodendron guarding the door as he witnessed the look of confusion, dread as Quarry hollered, “Wait a minute. You, come back here. Who are you?”

Jack bolted, watching Quarry scan it once more.

Jerry, Tonight was your night. The best fight of your life. It won’t get any better

than this. Quit. Tonight, buddy, please quit.

And then the obituary The New York Times would publish on January 5, 1999:

Jerry Quarry, a heavyweight contender of the late 1960s and early 1970s who faced the sport’s greatest names of his era and then spent his final years debilitated by boxing-induced brain damage, died Sunday at Twin Cities Community Hospital in Templeton, Calif. He was 53.

Quarry, who lived with relatives in Paso Robles, Calif., suffered complications of pneumonia that had been brought on by dementia, his family said.

He fought Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, had two shots at the heavyweight championship, earned $2 million in purses and posted a record of 53-9-4 with 33 knockouts. But by age 50, Quarry experienced severe memory loss and crippled motor skills from dementia pugilistica—brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head. His only income was said to have been Social Security disability checks.

“He hallucinates, he hears voices,” his brother James, who cared for Quarry at his home in Hemet, Calif., told an interviewer in 1995. “When he walks off, we have to go find him. Sometimes we can’t find him, and we have to call the police and they bring him back.’”

Jack signed the letter, A Friend from the Future.

Jack hustled up Broadway, his memory fuzzing, drifting away in fragments, pieces of a jigsaw. Soon a fog, a blankness unlike anything Jack experienced before. Where was he heading? Back to Dempsey’s, something about talking to Teddy, but the remaining flecks of his memory told him, no, he said something to insult Jerry Quarry and he never should return. Or did he talk to Teddy? Why can’t I ? What do I tell Daisy about this night?

He stumbled down the subway steps into the night.

Jack mustered the energy to stamp downtown to Tartuffe’s, where he anchored himself on the nearest bar stool and called for a pitcher of Schaeffer’s.

“Rough night?” Romulo asked.

“One for the ages,” Jack said.

Jack yanked the butterfly out of his pocket. Strangest damn thing, a zig-zag pattern faint in its membrane, not organic, but a grid of intersecting lines thinner than the thinnest of hair. He flipped it over and over, tried to make sense of it. It was more than a trinket, the junk a barker handed over when Jack tossed a hoop atop a milk jug at the Hookie’s block party.

He poised to fling the butterfly over the bar, clanging it into the steel trash can, before returning it to his pocket. No, this embryonic butterfly belonged to another time. His prizefighting future in tatters, Jack would return to grad school and earn his doctorate in physics and begin to decode the mysteries of the butterfly.

The Lives We’ve Lived

October 21, 2035

Buck braced for his descent into the maelstrom.

They roosted in the VIP ringside section, Buck and little Daisy—LD he called her—behind the velvet rope separating the grandees of sports and pop culture from the other masters of the elite, those packing the raked grandstands behind. Evander Holyfield, the oldest living ex-champion, lounged two chairs over from Buck, a punch-drunk poster boy, nodding in the throes of his aphasia with Derek Jeter, the winningest skipper in New York Yankees history, who regaled the champ with war stories. North West, rap’s reigning superstar, mingled among movie stars, recording artists, high society—the glitterati of the day all abuzz, as Buck planned.

How many, Buck wondered, came to show off in their finery, and how many would him in experiencing extreme pain?

He gave a shout out to the VIPs. “, you all can in, pick your favorite fighter, and feel every punch that they do. Turn on your Xtreme Agony and in the action.”

He tried to avoid Evander’s gaze.

LD clasped Buck’s hand.

“Please don’t do this, Buck.”

“I have to. I’m the promoter, I brought boxing back from the ashes. What will the fans think if they knew the promoter was a wimp?”

What Buck refused to share with LD was ART, the possibility Egon had hatched an AI demon with capabilities far beyond anything Buck fathomed. What if ART interpreted boxing as a demon sport, best left outlawed, and those who partook of the forbidden fruit and dialed up the juice on Xtreme Agony must die?

The victims might number millions.

No, if others would die for his sins, then Buck would absorb the punishment with them, his own private seppuku. If Egon unleashed ART, Buck was a dead man walking.

The ring floated before them, a hologram conjured by iBrain. The fans twisted, turned the perspective through neural impulses, eager to share either battler’s point of view, become that fighter.

Crank up the pain. Taste the ecstasy of victory. Understand the agony of lying supine, glazed eyes blinded by the bright lights, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Buck knew little Daisy didn’t want to be here, wanted no part of this championship of the multiverse. She wanted one final chance to plead her case.

“Buck, don’t do what my father did to my mother.”

“I have no idea what Jack did to your mom. I can ask him later.”

“My dad who’s here now, he’s not my dad. He’s a replica of a young man living his dream. His life hasn’t been shattered yet. Yes, such is the glory of this time travel business. I can comprehend things about my dad that changed his life.”

Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson sprang through the ropes for the first match. Liston glowered as he rolled his shoulders side to side. Tyson, decked out in black, fixed his eyes on his foe.

“In this moment, LD, I’m Iron Mike.”

Buck cranked Xtreme Agony up to five.

His head swung side to side and creeks of sweat poured off him, on LD, a pistolwhipping by Liston. Buck’s virtual lip exploded in a geyser of blood. Tyson acted the bully, and bullies could be bullied right back by a bigger bully like Sonny Liston. Buck fell into free-fall, an instant of unconsciousness. Follow the light, Buck, the white light. Buck crabbed back to reality, a gush of relief. The agony flitted away.

Possibly Egon never coded ART, or ART was benign. Or ART awaited better days to pounce, a later fight.

“So, did you enjoy your trip?” LD asked, arms crossed.

“Quite a rush, let me tell you. Kind of like jumping out of an airplane shouting Geronimo.”

“You missed it, Buck, the whole match. It lasted one minute. Tyson pelted asleep on the mat.”

“I missed nothing. In that one single moment, I was Mike Tyson.”

“It’s not real, Buck. This thrill from ringside is not the pain Mike hurt in the moment. And that’s not Mike, just some avatar or whatever Egon calls his creations. This is not reality. You need to regain reality.”

Of course, this was not real. Buck absorbed none of the humiliation, the pain that lingers a lifetime. He only felt the vicarious thrill of getting whipped by Sonny Liston, none of the swelled brain cells would persist. He hoped.

“How do we tell if anything is real, LD? Is what’s real in this multiverse any more real than in an alternate multiverse?”

LD slouched deep in her chair. The rest of the card loomed harsh and ugly.

Larry Holmes and Rocky Marciano met at center ring, a grudge fight for one fighter at least, the Brockton Bomber squaring off against the Easton Assassin, the undefeated Rock against the champ who came one bout shy of matching him at 49-0 and, in defeat, whined that Marciano lacked the gumption to tote his jockstrap.

Buck tuned into Marciano. He pushed Xtreme Agony up a notch to six.

Marciano strafed Holmes’ midsection with paralyzing hooks, some landing low on the overmatched Holmes’ jockstrap. Holmes retreated, circling the ring, fleeing against the ropes, flicking off weak jabs, few rattling Buck. By the sixth, Holmes’ tank ed empty. Marciano smashed a left hook on Holmes jaw. All that remained was the inevitable tally of ten.

“Victory!” Buck vaunted.

Jack Johnson and Evander Holyfield stepped up next, the White Man’s Burden who spit in the face of racist America against a beefed-up cruiserweight who utilized state-of-the-art sports medicine to prove the pundits dead wrong.

Buck picked Johnson. He upped the pain nozzle to seven. He said nothing to LD.

Johnson clowned with the bush leaguers, sneering as he brushed off the outclassed Holyfield, lacing him with punches that curled out like tree limbs then branched in to tar Evander’s jaw with evil precision. The fight proved neither entertaining nor nerve-scraping. Johnson mocked the fans as the judges signed off on a unanimous 15-round decision.

A throb buzzed in Buck’s head. No more stinkers, please.

Joe Louis vs. Vitaly Klitschko was a match Buck had doubts about. Bt he knew he had to experience the majesty of the Brown Bomber. He kept Xtreme Agony locked on seven.

Klitschko’s gloves rarely tasted Louis’s head or body. An impenetrable target, Louis whiplashed the Ukrainian, finishing him with a dazzling uppercut just 2:06 seconds into the first.

It dawned on Buck. What if ART is inflicting permanent damage on the losers tonight? Buck’s been riding easy, beating up outclassed fighters. He had to share what was happening to the other fans participating in this twisted tournament.

Wlir Klitschko vs. Joe Frazier, Buck banked, would prove a fascinating match. The Ukrainian held huge advantages in size and reach, but Frazier’s bulllike charges were relentless. Buck selected the Ukrainian. He cranked Xtreme Agony up to nine.

Klitschko lacked the muster, the science of brutality necessary to evade the marauding Frazier. Frazier caned him with twin jawbreakers, somersaulting Klitschko to the ropes. The referee signaled a halt before Klitschko could try to lurch upright.

“Well, did you have fun with that one, Buck?” LD grew cross.

“Wasn’t so bad. Out like a dream, up feeling refreshed.”

“You call this entertainment. Men pounding at one another, until one collapses, trembling, dead to the world.”

“Why don’t you turn on your pain regulator, LD? Crank it up to one. Live in the moment. You ever dodge any real pain?”

“How dare you! That shows you know nothing about me.”

Jim Jeffries vs. Max Schmeling worried Buck. The German had no business taking part in this tournament. Hitler’s poster boy. Buck inserted him as karmic payback, for the night he left Joe Louis asleep on the floor, the Brown Bomber’s first defeat.

Buck picked the certain loser, about to discover what it feels like to be a Nazi for a few minutes before getting knocked flat. Buck became a wuss now. He cranked Xtreme Agony down to five.

The German held his own, coping with Jeffries’s awkward style. Neither fighter did much damage until the fifth, when a welt over Schmeling’s right eye squirted blood and the ref waved an end.

Lester Pinskie bounded toward Buck. “The ratings, they’re huge. Five hundred million simulcasts. About a quarter of them turned on Xtreme Agony.”

“Any problems with those experiencing the show, not just watching it? Know what I’m saying?”

Pinskie was on board. ART. “Problems? Those that shared the punches, not just watched them, reported it was the thrill of a lifetime.”

“This may not be a complete goat screw.”

“The goats will enjoy a happy ending,” Pinskie said. “Your tournament will end up the biggest entertainment event... in the history of the multiverse.”

Buck relaxed, preparing for the thrill of entering Muhammad Ali’s shell for his fight against the doughty Gene Tunney, undisputed champion who exited the sport with a single L blemishing his record.

An exercise in ring science in its purest form, the fight spooled terrifically close. Ali floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, every round, Buck inside Ali’s head every second. How can he do this—how can I do this?—without getting winded? What a remarkable athlete.

Tunney bounded left to right, counterpunching with precision. The fans, standing all, punched their fists skyward with whoops, roars. Ali earned the decision, close but unanimous.

“Daisy, that was such a thrill, the biggest thrill of my lifetime!”

“Good for you. Now can you stop this nonsense? Please!”

Buck sensed ART in wait. The juice he must crank to the outer limits.

“Do you what you told me the first time we made love?” she asked.

Of course, Buck ed. He lounged in his office, working out details. She reclined on the red leather settee across the room. They had met just days earlier. She looked so inviting, her blue eyes refulgent, skin soft as cream.

“There’s something magical about you, Daisy Hanson. I feel as if I know you across centuries.”

“Perhaps you have.”

He sat close to her and she moved closer. Buck reached back to lock the door. Soon he was undressing her, tenderly, then with the alacrity that animal ion demands. Their lovemaking was fierce, furious.

“My mother hated boxing. Did you know that, Buck?”

“I do now.”

“I know you have this tournament to run and all that. Promise me when this is over, you won’t try anything like this again. You won’t bring this brutal sport back to life.”

“I promise.”

He meant it. He must not reveal ART, a monstrous choice he could not undo.

Back at ringside, Daisy begged him again to stop playing with the pain.

“I’ve got to go to ten. I have to feel what the fans are feeling.”

“Then I’m not staying. I think you have some hard choices to make.”

She stalked away. Buck turned to watch George Foreman slide through the ropes, a picture of menace.

All that was left for Buck was to await Jack Dempsey.

December 5, 2000

Peg soured before she finished absorbing the email.

Jack thought it innocent enough, a coincidence surrounding his symposium, Time Travel in the Twenty-First Century, the message from Daisy.

Hi, Jack,

Many years, no see.

Congratulations on becoming the most brilliant mind in the multiverse we share!

Just so happens I will be in Chicago that week, too. Maybe we could meet for dinner or drinks or something.

Let me know.

Daisy

(still me)

“Dinner and drinks?” Peg said. “What then, you’ll take her back to your room?”

“No hanky-panky.”

“Why do you want to meet her, Jack? You don’t owe her a goddamn thing.”

“Talk, that’s all. Recover the past.”

“Recover what? Maybe you can resume your boxing career, too. Fight until you’re sixty like George Foreman or that Archie mongoose character you talk about.”

Peg harrumphed and skulked to their bedroom. She about his doomed relationship with Daisy. He shared with Peg almost everything, a lot about that night in 1970.

The next morning Peg’s spirit collapsed. Her eyes swelled red. A fighter’s eyes, a fighter unable to endure more punishment. Her hair, once silky and sheened, ravaged in a Medusa tangle.

He caressed her as she quaked, quivered, then fell limp, as though her soul fled her body. She sagged dead in his grip.

“What are you looking for?” she asked. “Closure?”

“Closure from what?”

“You haven’t seen her in thirty years. You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you.”

“People don’t change.”

“People do change. You don’t change, Jack.”

“Time is relative.”

His life would be hollow without Peg. Yet he begged for something else, confronting a past clutching him with the pincers of failed potential. Jack leaped into the quantum: His heart once broken, he could break Peg’s heart, two possibilities equally likely.

“There’s an essay that stuck with me from philosophy class, stuck in my craw,” Jack told her. “C. S. Lewis, the philosopher, wrote that no one has a right to happiness, not when one person’s happiness inflicts misery on another person. That’s me, I guess. Anhedonia, destined never to be happy.”

“So you’d sacrifice our future for a tête-à-tête with the woman who broke the back of your youthful innocence?

Jack splashed full a tall Tanqueray, the juice glass challenging its brim. He gazed at the framed photos lined across the mantle, a chronicle of their year of living vigorously, hiking the dirt trails at Gring’s Mill, hoisting steins at the Bavarian

Festival, sharing bleenies and kielbasa at a Polish shindig.

He cupped Peg’s damp face.

“Did you fall in love with her again?” she asked.

“I never stopped loving her. I just stopped thinking about her.”

She bared her teeth, a witch writhing at her cauldron.

“Go live in your own private hell, Jack Hanson. Live your past over and over and over again.”

“You can’t control your own emotions, Peg. Why do you think you can control someone else’s?”

“I know, you can’t blame a man for whatever direction his dick goes. That’s like blaming a com for pointing north.”

Peg had a knack to sovereign him with wry putdowns.

“Pour the lady a tequila sunrise,” Jack said.

“If you see Daisy, and you know if you do see Daisy, then I will know it and that is it for us. You’re a terrible liar, Jack. Let go of your past. Time only marches forward.”

Such irony Jack could not relish in that instant.

He loaded his Tanqueray tall and strayed outdoors, down the stony path, dusky under the shade of sycamores. The sky burned from the dazzle of five thousand suns.

“I’m going to get some six-packs for me,” Peg said. “You, go sleep in your gin bottle. When I come back, make your decision for Christ. Sign on the line that is dotted.”

Jack descended into the quantum, the superposition sliding into position. Would he stay, and perhaps they’d wed and raise her son together? Or would he pack and bid goodbye to the little boy he came to love as his own? Two states at once, until he observed the quantum and the waveform collapsed. He marveled how the masters of the multiverse ganged up on him.

The minutes ed brief, eternal.

Her gimpy Toyota clattered back up the gravel driveway.

Jack eased down on the dew-stained grass. His hand quavered as he steadied the

gin atop the Golden Gloves shirt he wore for the first time in thirty years. He glared at the Milky Way, lost in the night.

August 31, 2035

Jack Dempsey hulked in the archway, erect as a granite monument, his whitewall hair style an emblem of intimidation, fists scratching at his thighs.

Jack Hanson marked his territory, a pit bull standing his ground on the ochre canvas.

“What the Charles Dickens you doing in my training ring?” Dempsey growled. “Do I know you?”

“You will. We’ll meet again.”

Lester Pinskie wheezed in, sweaty as a heart attack, gliding courteously past Dempsey.

“There were two samples, two samples in the envelope. Egon’s lab processed them both. Two Jacks. Dempsey and Hanson.”

Buck exhaled, his field complete.

Egon offered a champion’s nod toward Dempsey, ramrod straight, then turned to Jack Hanson, bopping on his toes.

“What are you doing here, Jack?” Egon asked. “Why did you do this?”

“The champ here will need a sparring partner,” Jack Hanson said.

December 13, 2000

The world did not salute his genius, not yet, but Dr. Jack Hanson plumbed his own brilliance. That night at the symposium, at the gathering of minds he organized, he unveiled his equations to the scientific community—preliminary equations, but the framework of theories to dash Einstein’s.

While the guests piled to their seats, Jack bounced in place, a fighter on his toes, his head cutting circles in the air, limbering up. His ideas enjoyed no from this . He invited only skeptics: Dr. Walter Pistoff of the Albert Einstein Institute, astrophysicist Shannon Falstaff, quantum maven Harry deLight, science-fiction writer Rex Elgerton. Even a sci-fi author refused to sign on to the possibility of riding a ’brane, hopping over to the next, reliving one’s life, changing the one thing that mattered most.

Jack didn’t think about the fight game again until he saw Daisy perched in the third row, extending a modest wave and a bright, heavenly smile. She waited until it ended and the applause dimmed before sashaying up to Jack. He brushed away well-wishers as she neared. Finally, their Rick and Ilsa moment.

“You look great,” she said.

“You look great, too,” he said.

“There was this hush in the hall, Jack, such quiet. Then this buzz after your presentation. My whole body vibrated with goose flesh.”

Jack understated it. “I can’t complain.”

“I didn’t understand any of it. You lost me at ‘Good evening.’”

“The people who matter will.” He knew his choice of words landed with a thud. “You always will matter, Daisy.”

“Back at you.”

They hugged softly until Daisy delivered the inevitable.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

One lied.

“We still could do it,” she said.

“We need to go back to the lives we’ve lived. The chance that we might make it happen again, that you’d ask me that this evening. That’s all that counts. Redemption central.”

“You didn’t let me finish. I was talking about sex.”

Jack beamed. “All that matters is possibility. All possibilities exist until they are observed. Let’s allow our possibilities to shine like an uncut diamond.”

He scanned her fingers for jewelry, a wedding band,. There were none.

“One thing I don’t understand, Jack. The fighter who headlined that night at the Garden. Jerry Quarry. When he was on his deathbed, he had a glimmer of lucidity. He said some young guy who won the Golden Gloves handed him an envelope that night. You know what Quarry said? Inside was his obituary. Quarry babbled and bawled that he should have quit that night, he should have retired that night in the Garden with Jack Dempsey. That night.”

“Do you believe any of it?” Jack asked.

“I don’t. But you know what, a magazine printed a copy of that letter and it looked authentic. But it was some silly supermarket psychic tabloid and it’s all so goofy.”

She gauged Jack’s reaction. “Do you know anything about it?”

“No,” he said.

“Did you ever fight again after that night? I kept checking the papers, but I never found anything about you.”

He shook his head. “My heart was never in it any more. Once you lack heart, you’re a beaten fighter before you ever climb into the ring.”

“Maybe it was all for the best. You wouldn’t be able to do the work you are doing now if things upstairs got scrambled.”

Jack detected a tinge of guilt.

“You steered me right, Daisy. Look at Muhammad Ali. He was a great orator. He could have been a United States senator or anything he set out to be. Look at him now, the shape he’s in. There are no second acts for prizefighters. Jack Dempsey, maybe he was an exception.”

“You’ve had a brilliant career, Jack.”

“The best is yet to come. I only look toward the future.”

Jack reached into his shirt pocket. He handed her the origami, a sculpted butterfly, precious and white. While she fiddled, he slipped the sheet into her purse, folded in half like the note she left him in the Weinstein dorm so many years ago. The poem he composed the night prior in his hotel room after polishing his presentation.

“A Sliver in Time”

Me

To you

A sliver

In time

You

To me

The fulcrum

Everything

Once possible

Now impossible

All that’s

Attainable yet

Unattainable

The mountain

Once climbed

Never

Summited

Again

They embraced farewell, and he was gone. He regretted it as soon as he rolled out of the parking lot, but he did not turn back. He flopped straight into bed, and when the morning came, he wasn’t sure if he had dreamed what he had dreamed, watching Daisy undress, the ion they shared when they were young and beautiful, when their multiverse beckoned with joy and promise and the possibility of surmounting the impossible.

Jack knew this was all real, that it all happened, but in another multiverse, not his own.

May 3, 2005

Jack fingered the butterfly while the kid, no longer a kid, but Jack still called him the kid, weaved groggily up the aisle, toward the rear of the lecture hall.

The students filing in whispered and pointed.

“He looks drunk.”

“Like a fighter ready to fall.”

“Class, show some class, some respect,” Jack said. “Not everyone here today is going to one day be a champion physicist.”

Jack hollered up.

“Stick around, kid, you might learn something.”

“I won’t .”

“You’ll everything that happens in today’s class, believe me.”

Jack tore open the envelope Egon left on his desk. He rifled through the pages, more than a dozen pages, exhaustive instructions. Egon must have memorized it all, transcribed it in another classroom. Before he read a word, Jack knew his destination.

He waited until Egon ended his woozy climb and collapsed into his familiar seat. The life he lived in an adjacent multiverse was folding into this one. Plenty impressive, kid, plenty impressive.

“We’re going to wing it in class today. Q&A time.”

“So. if the multiverses are real —”

“They are real,” Jack interrupted.

“—a time traveler returns to the same spot in time again and again, lives the life he lived again and again, until he got it right.”

“Those are the laws of this multiverse.”

“So, a thousand Professor Hansons live out there?”

“Might be more,” Jack said. “Not an infinite number. At some moment, the gods of the cosmos rebel and you disappear physically from your starting point.”

Jack swirled his arms, a galvanic gesture

“Think of it like rewinding a reel of film. You find your mark in an adjacent multiverse and you step into it. You embody your younger physical body, but only until you alter something significant in the fabric of time. You relive your old life from that moment forward, oblivious that you are a voyager from the future.”

Now Egon, young once more, jumped in.

“Like that movie Groundhog Day, the one with Bill Murray.”

“You nailed it, kid. But all possibilities exist again. You don’t know if you’re stepping into heaven or hell or purgatory.”

A skinny student with acne that lived long past its expiration date asked, “If time travel is real, how come nobody from the future has visited us yet?”

Jack rummaged through documents in his valise and stuffed them in a tall brown envelope. “How do you know they haven’t? you can only change one thing before memory fades.”

“Professor,” a lantern-jawed guy in tweed asked, “why didn’t any time traveler erase the fiasco in Florida, back in 2000 when more people voted for Al Gore, but Bush won?”

“How do we know a visitor from the future didn’t changed things in Bush’s favor? How do we know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? We may not know that for years to come. Maybe not for a thousand years. what sunk Gore in West Palm? The butterfly ballot. And what’s the icon of time travel? The butterfly, the butterfly effect. Time travelers may have quite the sense of humor.”

Jack wrote on the envelope.

“I leave you with this,” he told his class. “When a famous scientist disappears and the fruits of his research cannot be located, bank on him being a time traveler maxing out on multiverses.”

Jack bid his students farewell for the final time. “Thank you and have an awesome future and a marvelous past.”

He sealed the packet:

DO NOT OPEN UNTIL THE DAY YOU EARN YOUR DOCTORATE.

Jack slipped Egon his research, his equations.

October 28, 2035

Buck’s eyes shot open, a zombie awakening from the dead in a bad horror movie. Pinskie recoiled, then crept toward Buck.

“Am I dead?” Buck said, chest heaving. He wiped away the thick fever sweat. He wore no unit today, his existing hair dirty blonde, short and thinning.

Daisy rested her head across his chest. “We thought we lost you there, hon. We thought you weren’t coming back.”

Hon. She called me Hon. Buck reckoned he must have been dead.

“Wait, I inhabited Jack Dempsey’s skin last night, right? All that frantic hullaballoo getting Dempsey here and he gets slaughtered.”

“That wasn’t last night, but Dempsey won,” Egon said, a glum scowl scarring his face. “He stopped George Foreman in the 10th in what you fans used to call one of those pier-sixers.”

“Christ on a cracker!” Buck luxuriated in ecstasy.

“You were a lucky Buck,” Daisy said. “Cranked it up to ten, brave boy. You crashed here in a coma for eight days.”

Buck sniffed the sickly sweet wafts of the hospital ward.

“If Dempsey won, then why am I here, hooked up to these tubes and shit?”

Jack Hanson, strapping lean at 22, his mop shorn at the sides to match Dempsey’s famous trim, leaned against the far wall, proud in his gray TEAM DEMPSEY T-shirt.

“Because you are not Jack Dempsey,” he said.

“If I was here a week, I missed the semifinals,” Buck said. “Any more bad news?”

“Are you ready for it?” Egon asked. “We have some dead fans.”

Buck lurched to strangle Egon, but an IV and catheter and other unpleasant medical apparatus tethered him. He slumped back.

“How many?”

“I’m still crunching numbers,” Pinskie said, his face blood red. “We guesstimated seven hundred million views, and about seventy percent dared to run Xtreme Agony. Most chickened out with a setting of one or two, but two million ratcheted it up to eight or nine or ten. Most died, the others are critical.”

Buck emitted the low groan of a caged dog awaiting euthanasia.

“We know what went wrong,” Egon said. “Jim Jeffries killed Louis in the ring last week. In the fifth round, Jeff had Joe doubled over against the ropes and he pounded him again and again in the chest. Jeffries cracked his sternum in two spots, ruptured his aorta. Joe died in the ambulance.”

“The ambulance? What the WTF, Egon? I thought these were genetic holograms?”

“Everything’s real,” Egon said. “As far as this tournament is concerned, this, my friend, is reality. When Joe Louis died, those fans, many of them, had to perish with him.”

You’re not my friend, Buck sought to say, and Jeffries didn’t kill a million people, you did, with ART. Instead, he offered, “So, I guess this tournament is done, burnt bagels with no cream cheese. Glad to make your acquaintance, Jack Hanson. See you in anther quarter-century.”

“I’m planning on sticking around awhile,” Jack said, hugging LD. “Dempsey will need a spar mate for the quarterfinals.”

“The hell this tournament’s over!” Egon said. “Think of the potential. You’re the impresario. Imagine the free publicity, the ratings, the merchandise.”

Egon’s glee throttled Buck.

“Get cracking on the posters, Laz. Challenge the fans. Can you take a powerhouse punch from Jim Jeffries? Are you man enough to find out?”

Jazzier slogans from the depths of a coma dwelt in Buck’s wheelhouse, but this was no time for a pissing contest.

“WorldGov will shut us down,” Buck said.

“Why should they?” Egon shot back. “Don’t forget the taxes, the money WorldGov siphons from each ticket. These are the poors paying ission to get clubbed by Dempsey and Jeffries and Ali and whoever the hell else is left.”

“The lawsuits—”

“Send in the lawyers. We told fans this is Xtreme Reality, that no one gets hurt, but did the fans read the fine print? The of service right there in iBrain, thirty-seven pages worth. ‘Promoter not responsible for unexpected occurrences.’ Joe Louis getting killed certainly counts as an unexpected occurrence. Sudden death is an unexpected occurrence.”

Egon had an answer for everything. Buck rejected his answers, but Egon hatched answers.

Buck pushed himself up and jerked the IV free. “What happened in the other fights?”

Jack Hanson preened. “Dempsey smoked Jack Johnson in eight. Dempsey had a top spar mate, I guess.”

“Now don’t you go getting hurt, too,” Daisy said.

“Liston stopped Frazier,” Jack said. “Sliced him up real bad in the eighth. Ali outpointed Marciano with no fuss. Revenge, I guess, for that computer simulation.”

“So, we have Liston, Ali, Jeffries, and Dempsey in the semis.” Buck thought like a matchmaker again. He avoided seeding the tourney. He wanted to plot the best

crowd-pleasers as the matches wore on.

“Can we clear the room, please?” Buck said. “And get a nurse in here, a male nurse, preferably, someone to pluck out this damn catheter.”

“The fan base will erupt,” Egon said. “And the final title fight! The greatest sporting moment in the history of this multiverse. Those dead fans will be fantastic for business, Buckaroo. Our business model. We could not have planned it better.”

December 13, 2000

His symposium a triumph, Jack Hanson cuddled Daisy with an energy that pulsed, straight into her, an electric current merging two souls into one as if it were 1970 in replay.

“I fantasize about you,” Jack said. “I fantasize about you a lot.”

“What do you fantasize about?”

“Here’s what I fantasize about. Just the two of us, together, lying naked on the bed. We hold each other. We close our eyes and we don’t say a single word, not for the longest time. Just savor the moment. Live only in the present. Forget the Alamo.”

“How far are you willing to go to make this fantasy a reality?” she asked.

“Is this a fantasy you might share?”

“You might convince me.”

“Do you want to go to my room?” he asked.

“Someone might catch us,” she said.

“Are you involved with anyone who gives a damn?”

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

“No,” he said.

One lied.

“I hope you don’t get pregnant.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“One never knows.”

He unbuttoned her blouse the second they crept inside. His eyes ed hers, soulmates for one night. She wrapped her arms around the firm muscles of his neck and shoulders, and he moved his lips closer to hers, luxuriating in each second frozen in time.

They undressed each other, until she stood before him slim, bronze, lustrous. She peeled off his boxers. Jack flexed his pecs, proud he had maintained his fighter’s frame. He rolled his hands down the small of her back until he fondled her buttocks.

“You stayed deliciously svelte,” she said.

“I love to see you naked, especially from the back.”

They slid on the bed clumsily, and they giggled as they inched into comfort, face to face. “Live in the present,” she whispered. They closed their eyes. They said not a single word for the longest time.

August 31, 2035

Buck loitered outside Muhammad Ali’s training room, iring the champ’s fleetness, the feathery touch of his jab, when she pulled his arm.

“Do you know why I’m here today?” little Daisy asked.

Before he answered, she handed over the letter.

My dearest Daisy,

You don’t know me, at least in the sense that I never have been part of your life. I met you once, but you were only a baby, and your mother thought it best if I stayed away. That hurt me, but I had to respect her wishes.

Four years later, I gave her this letter. I asked that she share it with you when you were older. I want to see you again. On August 31, 2035, they will hold a tournament to decide the greatest heavyweight ever. Don’t ask how. Just be there. I will be there and we can meet and share the lives we’ve lived. You may think I will be an old man, and you may think I might not even be alive, but trust me. You won’t understand while you read this, but you will as the years wear on and the possibilities of life come into sharper focus.

I will be there. I hope you will, too.

Love you, across time and space.

Jack (Dad)

“He doesn’t know who I am, Buck. I showed him the letter and all he said is he’s Jack Hanson, Golden Gloves champion, and he came to spar with Jack Dempsey. And he said I look like the woman he loves, Daisy. My mother. This is crazy.”

“He can’t know you. He’s Jack Hanson from June 1970, and what he’s telling you is the truth.”

“What’s going on here? This is all so creepy. Who conquered time travel? You or Egon or my dad?”

“You heard what Egon said. They’re genetic holograms. Replicas. That’s your father, Jack Hanson, as he lived on the night of June 17, 1970.”

“He’s my father? Except I’m over 10 years older than he is.”

“He’s the one who told you to come here today. He cares that much for you across so many years.”

Buck tried to comfort her with a gentle touch, but she jerked away.

“I have no answers, LD. I’m not holding anything back. Egon won’t tell me a damn thing. He gloats they’re his trade secrets.”

“Trade secrets, Buck. Trade secrets! You said it yourself, Muhammad Ali over

there is like some animal in a cage. You’ve turned one of the greatest men who ever lived into a beast of burden. You’re punishing these fighters for your pleasure.”

“He may not be your real dad, LD, but this is who he was on that one night. A snapshot in time. What else is the multiverse, but an infinite series of snapshots in time? How many of us ever get to share more than one snapshot? Jack wants you to share this snapshot with you. He’s living his dream.”

She did not flinch when he reached toward her, his smile adoring, mixed with shame.

“My mother loved him that night. She left him and broke his heart. She said he was the person she should have spent her life with.”

Her quiet sob throbbed against his shoulder.

“You can love your father,” Buck said. “This night.”

November 4, 2035

Lester Pinskie delivered the grim news on the death count that kept mounting.

The latest toll: 2,632,472 dead in 67 countries. Another five to six million predicted to develop virtual premature dementia.

“Virtual premature dementia?” Buck echoed. “What other plagues have we unleashed on our multiverse?”

Buck slumped forward at his desk, hands shielding his eyes from the grimace of an angry planet. He kept his door latched, curtains drawn, no more lovemaking on his couch.

“And WorldGovs?” Buck asked.

“They promise, and I quote, ‘a complete and thorough investigation,’ but not until after the tournament is complete. So we’re good to go.”

Buck noticed the wispy strands of Pinskie’s combover had thinned, the penalty for strain.

“More bad news,” Pinskie said. “Jeffries had some kind of racial thing with Joe and he kept using the N-word while crushing his midsection. He had a rhythm going with each punch and each slur.”

“Well, that was Jeff’s time. He fought in a different era. Egon got at least one fighter right.”

“There are dozens of groups protesting that we’re destroying racial harmony. They blame you, they blame you for resurrecting a bigot and a Nazi. They blame you for celebrating a dead sport they say should stay dead.”

“I guess I better head out of Dodge when this is all over.”

“The glad news is business is a-booming,” Pinskie said. “The tournament’s become a guy thing. There are thousands of outlaw clubs whose are challenging each other to see who can endure the most punishment.”

“Splendid. What’s two million more dead? Just another dozen Chilean earthquakes.”

Buck’s career—his life—was sinking like a mammoth ocean liner that had collided with an iceberg.

“You know what the captain of the Titanic told his crew right before the ship went down?” Buck said. “You have done your duty, boys. Now it’s every man for himself. You’re a good man, Pinskie. Grab a lifeboat. Get out while the getting out’s good.”

“I’m not going anywhere, boss. I’m sticking with you until the bell ends the final round.”

Buck shot over to Egon’s office and charged in. He didn’t care if Egon was banging some masochistic groupie on the couch.

“Tonight’s the semis, Egon. You’ve got to give me some answers. My ass is on the line here.”

Egon poured a nip of brandy from a crystal decanter.

“They’re my trade—”

“Fuck your trade secrets with Max Schmeling’s kraut cock! I know you mastered time travel, and I know you have Jack’s formulae. I know about all the rules of engagement for time travel, and I know it’s all true. My question is, did you code ART 6? Because that is a big deal.”

Egon cackled with the cluck of a hyena ripping apart the carcass of a zebra. Buck scented Egon’s fake-outs, his feints.

“So which is it? Did you screw the tournament up by yourself, bring back the wrong fighters, or is ART behind all this and you’ve lost control of ART?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference. Fans are dying by the millions. They’re dying because I became your partner and trusted you to play by the rules.”

“Boxing never played by any rules. The sport always was savage, and the people dying paid money to experience savagery.”

“Which is it? Were the formulae flawed and you won’t it it, or is ART still out there set to pounce?”

“What if I did code ART? So what? ART performs his task and then I disable him. It.”

“Why do you think WorldGov banned AI? So you can monkey around and we can stage a stupid boxing tournament —”

“—and earn hard cash for WorldGov.”

Egon twirled an artificial butterfly, a strange, delicate thing like nothing Buck ever encountered.

“You know what?” Buck said. “You never intended to bring back Jack Dempsey’s ‘genetic hologram.’ You wanted an excuse to switch on your little travel machine and meet Jack Hanson in the past. But something went wrong, didn’t it? You never expected Hanson to show up, too, did you, along with his daughter, your sister?”

“Half-sister.”

“All right, half-sister. What does she know about you, because you never heard of her?”

Egon slammed down his brandy, poured another, took a long haul.

“Because my mother left when I was a teenager, before little Daisy’s birth.”

“And why was that? Why did your mother leave? Do you have any clue where Jack Hanson went on his many side trips around the multiverses? Do you think he always zoomed straight back to 1970? Maybe he detoured and ed your mother, told her to meet him at a time-travel symposium, so they’d enjoy a quickie? LD told me her story. Do you think that’s it, that’s why she left?”

Egon winced. Buck knew he had nailed it.

“How many multiverses are you going to ruin, Egon? This one is shot.”

“You asked if those fighters out there, the ones you matched, have a soul. Do you?”

“I did, once,” Buck said. “See you at the fights.”

Buck did not see Egon at the fights. He held hands with LD at ringside, his Xtreme Agony logged off. He never thought she would show up.

“I thought you hated boxing, LD. Your mom loathed it. You said it’s not in your genes?”

“Just half my genes.”

The roar in the Old Armory was a only a small roar compared to the roar of a billion strong enveloping the planet, the colossal roar of a different millennium, gladiators in a colosseum, Muhammad Ali feeding Jim Jeffries to a million lions, the roar of the lions and the fans united for Ali, a reversal of fortune for the Great White Hope, dragged to the slaughter in 1910 against Jack Johnson.

Ali unleashed a cannonade of burning hell on the hapless Jeffries, a firestorm of power Ali exhibited nowhere else in that competition.

“Radio chump! Radio chump!” Ali taunted while tattooing the stone-cold-dead Boilermaker with merciless combos. When Jeff wobbled, grubbing for the ropes, Ali hoisted him, resumed the smackdown.

“Jeffries fought in an epoch when fighters never quit,” Buck said, “even when their mojo was shot.”

“The other half of my genes is starting to hate boxing.”

Buck didn’t care anymore about right or wrong as Ali pounded the Great White Hope into a Great Crimson Mess. Buck wished he could toss in the towel himself.

Cheeks split, eyes bulged shut, his torso a Jackson Pollock abstract of blood,

nearer to death than exhaustion, Jeffries sank to his knees halfway through a long eleventh.

Another million dead, Buck estimated. Darwinism at its extreme.

Then the headliner, Jack Dempsey against Sonny Liston. Buck never predicted Liston lasting this deep, and he didn’t want to see him advance to the title round, not after Ali beat him twice under dubious circumstances, once with Liston cemented on his corner stool, refusing to fight, and again a year later, Liston flopping on the canvas from a single powderpuff punch few at ringside even glimpsed.

“We’ve got skin in the game on this one,” Buck said, spying Jack Hanson massaging Dempsey’s shoulders awaiting the bell.

Dempsey flew out of his corner in a rage, scalding Liston with twin rights on the cheek. Liston, never one to give an inch, shuffled a step backward. Dempsey bulldozed in, pressing his head against Liston’s chest while strafing his midsection, left and right, left and right, left and right, followed with an exclamation point of an uppercut that bent Liston over the top rope like a parenthesis.

Before Liston could straighten, Dempsey rocketed as perfect a left as Dempsey ever rocketed. Liston’s jaw snapped. His visage of evil dissolved as swiftly as a candle tossed into a broiler. Dempsey pounced, a flying left propelled Liston’s mouthpiece and his eyetooth and rivulets of blood spinning in the air.

Virtual blood spattered Buck and LD. Liston curled in a fetal death curl. Time:

48 seconds. Buck prayed nobody jacked the meter up to ten for this one.

Jack wiggled through Dempsey’s retinue, pumping his fist, floating toward Buck and LD.

Buck fist-bumped Jack exchanging energy. “Dempsey against Ali, fighting for pain and glory as the greatest champion in the history of this multiverse,” Buck said.

“Side bet?” Jack jutted out his hand.

September 14, 1923

There was a sound of thunder.

The bleachers, erected just beyond the infield dirt near second base, collapsed rickety-rick, temporary bleachers ordered up by promoter Tex Rickard. They swayed first like a seesaw, then a shipping vessel, stern to bow, piling five hundred souls in one heap, clawing at each other less for survival, then to gander at the ring, where Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion of this multiverse, knelt, groping the legs of Luis Angel Firpo, while the referee tolled “one… two... three..."

Just five feet away, at the writers table, rose a dreamy scent of disbelief at the mighty Dempsey felled, a mere mortal.

Perry Grogan, the Western Union correspondent, clacked the bulletin out to the world: “First punch of the fight propels Dempsey to the mat.”

“Sweet mother of pearl,” gasped Eddie Neil of the Associated Press

Hype Igoe, reporting for the World, cast his prediction. “This night shall be historic.”

Dempsey hitched himself up, the way champions always do, but the bleacher bums did not. They scraped and scratched at each other under the wedge of timber. The earth shook from the hearty roar of 90,000 strong, the Polo Grounds pulsing from the tremors of an earthquake of noise.

Down in the crush, Mickey Walker, welterweight champion of this multiverse, wiggled beneath the fat man capsized on his chest and lungs. “Get off me, you rotten cocksucker.”

The fat man pitched skyward and Walker knew not it was out of respect for his stature or from the roundhouse Mickey Walker planted flush on the fat man’s nose.

“You broke my nose, you little prick,” he said, wapping the supine Walker with unhinged volleys.

Those was fighting words in Mickey Walker’s orbit. He sprayed punches until he realized the enemy was someone on whom he should tread lightly.

“Babe Ruth!” said Walker.

“Pardon me if I don’t shake your hand,” Babe Ruth said, “but I think I broke it.”

Others who tumbled from the bleachers moaned, staggered, clambered in agony, their bleats overpowered by the roar that vibrated the debris of wood, the entire Polo Grounds.

Up in the ring, Dempsey refreshed and enraged, starched the Argentinian with an onslaught unseen in that multiverse, up and down Firpo went, as if he were riding a pogo, a sad casualty of Dempsey’s mission of oblivion.

Those at the writers table scratched notes, agog, disbelieving.

“What was that, four or five knockdowns?” asked Hype.

“Not doing your job for you, Hype, next time bring an abacus,” said Walter Winchell.

The kid, green as the visor shielding his eyes, rhapsodized, “Wow!”

“He’s done,” said Jack Lawrence of the Tribune, watching Firpo roll over, in dreamland from the sixth—or was this the seventh—knockdown. Neither Hype

nor the other sports writers were certain, and they were getting paid to report on the carnage. Such was the moment.

Lawrence finished his prediction as Dempsey’s ass kissed against him, stretched between the slack ring ropes, Firpo pounding him, a man possessed, until that looping right hand —the “scythe of death”—crashed flush on the champion’s chin and the ferocious follow-through dumped Dempsey into their laps.

The thud of Dempsey’s hips splintered the oak table. The back of his head impaled the carriage lever of Jack Lawrence’s writing machine, giving off the sick sound of a peach dropped on concrete. The writers pitched Dempsey over on his stomach, then his back, 192 pounds of dead weight, back onto the ring apron. The champion’s eyes lolled backward, almost white. Blood spritzed from his mouth. The kid wearing the visor thought Dempsey tried to speak, but he learned later it was a reflexive gurgle, blood burbling up from the lungs. Dempsey’s left arm flopped down, brushing Perry Grogan as he clacked out the latest bulletin.

Only four feet away, Luis Angel Firpo’s chest bellowed, gloves pressing on his thighs, steadying the falter in his knees. Referee Johnny Gallagher combatted the shiver in his own stomach as he snapped the count over Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion of that multiverse for two seconds longer. When Gallagher tolled ten, Firpo hovered no longer. He sank to his knees, his head dropping to the mat, a submission to pain and exhaustion. But for those in the Polo Grounds far away from the impact, it appeared a bow to the fighter who had defined boxing in the twentieth century.

The mighty roar that had consumed the Polo Grounds reduced to a windy “Whewwww,” then the dull sizzle, a low bleat, the euphoria sucked into a gloom of horror. Then silence. Two champions were down.

“The Marquis of Queensbury is dead,” declared Grantland Rice, anticipating the lead of the column that earned him the Pulitzer. “Long live the new marquis, whoever that may be.”

“Better find yourself a new beat,” Hype Igoe told the shellshocked cubbie named Daley, who sobbed beneath his visor. “Give baseball a tryout. That Babe Ruth will change the game the way he’s mashing that potato.”

“If he don’t get hurt,” Rice said.

Tex Rickard scrambled into the ring, Doc Kearns right behind. A genuine medic entered, then another, waving for a stretcher, then a second. The horror waved through the September chill, the mass snuffle transformed into a welter of sobs, a cacophony of wails and animal howls, like the engers from the Titanic suffering in the frigid Atlantic on another night.

Out behind second base, the Bambino slung his arm over Mickey Walker’s shoulder, strangers in the night, brothers in blood now, Babe’s hand throbbing, swelling. Walker’s nose dripped red. Neither noticed. Neither cared.

“Some night,” Walker said.

“Buddy, nobody will ever see a night like this in a thousand years.”

November 12, 2035

His firewalk complete, Buck Lazarus glared into his scotch, haggard. If the morning after was for recovery, this night after begged for reflection and brooding.

His hairpiece du jour rested coal black, goth.

“I don’t know nothing, not a goddamn thing,” Buck said.

“Why the frowny face?” Skip said.

Skip, a bartender with a head shaped like a root vegetable, invaded Jack’s space, keen on ducking close to the showman elevated overnight to a multiverse celebrity.

“I mean, last night, one helluva fight.”

Buck hunched numb on the barstool at Dempsey’s Restaurant. Not the real Dempsey’s Restaurant; that t perished years before the old Mauler himself. This ringside saloon was a replica, a theme bar created for this tournament. Canvas-lined stools and corded ropes stretched end to end in the barroom. Buck nursed his scotch, a double, his third, jingling the ice cubes and staring at the huge mirror straight in front.

Reality seeped in. Not all realities, because Buck understood there can be no final reality. For him, only this reality.

“Don’t play this disappointment game with me,” Skip said. “I know guys like you, always thinking three moves ahead, twenty-three-dimensional chess. You gave me my money’s worth last night. That pain dial I cranked up to three. Yowzer!”

“Glad you don’t feel gypped, so cherish those memories. Always better to experience misery in memory.”

The championship unfolded as one doozy of a dustup. The first five rounds were all Ali. Dance, dance, dance, absolutely the Ali who clocked Cleveland Williams in 1966.

“Maybe Egon didn’t add so much stink to this toejam,” Buck told LD, sweaty hands locked at ringside.

The momentum flipped. Dempsey tore out for round six, his wrath laser-focused. He pinned Ali in the corner and drilled his kidneys, pocking indents in Ali’s midriff as if Dempsey worked the heavy bag. Both fighters emitted deep grunts with each sidewinder.

“Dempsey’s juju is singing!” Buck clinched LD in an embrace no referee could pull apart.

Ali battled in tight with Dempsey in the eleventh. Buck peered at Jack Hanson, Jack’s snicker a tell that this was an Ali misfire, Dempsey’s tank a quarter full while Ali’s sputtered on fumes. A quick right by Ali shrieked off Dempsey’s chin in the twelfth and he dipped to one knee and pitched right up. Buck and LD shuddered.

“A flash knockdown,” Buck said, deflated. “But that might be the flashpoint of the fight.”

Dempsey brawled through the thirteenth and fourteenth with unfurled savagery, blasting blows beyond the limits of exhaustion, often landing, sometimes off by a hair. Ali fired back with weak counters.

“Championship round coming up,” Buck said. He yanked LD so near her seat caromed into his.

Ali looked straight at Buck, a kinship shared. Buck turned toward Dempsey. Buck sensed a bond there, too.

Both fighters started the fifteenth warily. A minute in, Dempsey dodged an Ali jab and launched a bazooka of a left hook on Ali’s jaw as though there were a target painted there. Ali wobbled against the ropes, scrabbling the top strand as he slid down. Ali hitched up at five and, on heart alone, eluded Dempsey’s mad charges until the final bell.

“One knockdown each,” Buck said. “Let’s see how this plays out.”

It played put as a draw, one judge calling it for Ali, one for Dempsey, and the deciding scorecard dead even. LD covered her ears as the deafening rumble accelerated. To Buck, a cacophony of bullshit.

Finally, she was able to shout in his ear. “You know what they say about a tie?”

“Yeah, it’s like kissing your sister.”

“No, it’s better than taking a whipping.”

Back at the faux Dempsey’s, Buck snapped out of his reverie.

“You are one shrewd motherfucker,” Skip said. “Tell me if I’m wrong. You’ll set up a rematch, bring in more fighters. Gotta give you a hand. Next drink’s on me.”

Skip said it so loud the nosy ears nearby perked up.

A drunk with jug ears was the first to yell over. “Are you the guy who promoted this? Let me shake your hand.”

Buck waved him away.

“Next time do the middleweights.”

“Or how about pro wrestling. Match up them grunt and groaners, Gorgeous George, Bruno Sammartino…”

“That Dempsey, must have been something to see him fight. They called him a flame of pure fire.”

Buck hoisted his scotch. “To the ’branes. Long may they run.”

He knew none of them had the slightest clue what he meant, but they ed in his toast.

“Thank you for your appreciation, but I’m retired. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m expecting someone.”

He withdrew to the window booth, Dempsey’s nest.

LD arrived minutes later, in flowing black skirt and charcoal top, his song of beauty.

“Cold night here in San Angeles,” she said, shivering.

“The gods of boxing are kicking up a rage.”

He waited for her to warm up before telling her. “Did you hear the news that broke this morning out of California?”

They both tuned in iBrain.

Jerry Quarry, a former heavyweight boxer and United States congressman from California who was a key figure in championing the nationwide ban of boxing, died this morning of heart failure. He was 90.

Quarry fought as a professional from 1965 to 1970, compiling a record of 35-5-4 with 22 knockouts. Quarry shocked the boxing world when he abruptly retired following a June 17, 1970, upset KO over unbeaten Mac Foster.

“I don’t have the heart for this anymore,” Quarry said. “They say Irish don’t quit, but I’m quitting today. I took a lot of punches, man, a lot of punches.”

After his bother Mike’s premature death from dementia in 2006 at age 55, believed to have been brought on by punishment absorbed during his 91 professional bouts over a thirteen-year career, Jerry Quarry began a crusade to outlaw the sport in the United States. When petitions to the Department of Health and Human Services failed to gain traction, Quarry mounted his own political career. He challenged incumbent Zoe Lofgren in 2010, and scored an upset win in the Democratic primary in California’s 13th District. He went on to a landslide win in the general election.

Ali and Quarry never met in the ring. Quarry retired months before Ali returned from a three-and-a-half-year exile brought on by his refusal to serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War.

Quarry founded the Mike Quarry Foundation for Dementia Pugilistica in 2015, which funds research into head trauma and treatment.

“Did you ever hear of Jerry Quarry?” Buck asked.

“He fought that night at the Garden, that night my mom left Jack.”

Buck was weary now, weary of it all.

“This ’brane has collapsed, in utter collapse,” he said, then shouting toward the bar, glass lofted high, “Fuck this ’braneworld. To Jerry Quarry, dead at 90.”

They all gaped over. None ed in the toast. Buck was not sure if it was because they didn’t know what a ’braneworld was—and he was certain they didn’t—or because they never heard of Jerry Quarry or if they thought Buck was a pathetic drunk or a raving lunatic.

“What multiverse are we living in?” Buck said. “I don’t know anymore. They’re collapsing in on each other.”

“Buck, you’re scaring me. Have you been drinking too much?”

“That I have. But you know, sometimes, from the alcohol comes clarity.”

Buck handed LD the letter from Jack.

“I found this in Egon’s desk this morning.”

The letter was stark, to the point.

Egon,

I hope this will all make sense when you read it. The Heavyweight Championship of the Multiverse will be worthless without Jack Dempsey. He may not be there for you now, but I can make it happen. Go to this cryogenics center. I have attached the details.

I trust in your budding brilliance. You can make my equations work. There is still much work to do, reconcile the multiverses and the ’branes and the warped dimensional ages. You can make it happen.

You know what they say in , au revoir... we’ll meet again.

Your friend and partner across time and space.

Jack Hanson

P.S. Place a small bet for me on Dempsey, if they still allow betting in your multiverse.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“I knew you wouldn’t. I’ll explain it all later.”

“Where is Egon?”

“Hell if I know. I think he’s in some sort of infinite time loop with your father. Egon goes back to see Jack and gives him a message, and Jack gives Egon a message to read in the future. And so forth. They’re exchanging equations across decades. Who needs ART? They are ART, a collective brain.”

“My brain’s starting to hurt.”

“Your brain. I’m sure you mean b-r-a-i-n. Well, this ’brane is starting to hurt, and I mean b-r-a-n-e.”

“Buck!”

“Jack and Egon are going back and forth, invading multiverses each slightly different from our own. And fucking each one of them up.”

Buck motioned for more scotch and a merlot for LD.

“And this tournament, every punch that detonated, every punch ducked, every one was a quantum choice, a waveform waiting to collapse. The undisputed champion of this multiverse is different than the champion of the multiverse where Egon is socking back his gin now.”

Then the news flashed on Buck’s iBrain. WorldGov intended to investigate whether any rules and regs on “scientific research” were violated. Dr. Egon Keloid and promoter/matchmaker Garth Camoroy a.k.a Buck Lazarus would be detained for questioning.

“Noble of you to take leave now, Egon,” Buck said, a toast of snark. “I guess I’ll have to live up to my adopted name, Lazarus, a beggar reborn.”

The severity of it hit, scotch be damned. “I sure could use me one of Egon’s butterflies right around now. All I’m praying, LD, is that you stay by my side when I head for the sticks.”

“Shoulder to shoulder.”

“I heard Egon say something like this one time: You know what happens when you fuck with time? Time fucks you right back.”

“This is our reality,” she said, her hand atop his. “Let’s live it. Live the moment. Live our moment. There are an infinite number of realities out there, all with

their own potential, their own dangers, a literal universe of possibilities. This was always about the potential of multiverses, or your tournament never had a prayer.”

“You’re right. And I’m sure your dad went back and back, back to that night, changing a little something each time, never knowing the outcome. Trying to make things right. An elusive futility. Infinite possibilities. Infinite failures. Aching to make it right, one time.”

Skip set down the next round.

“You know what Jack Dempsey told his wife after Gene Tunney snatched the decision in their first fight?” Buck asked.

“Tell me.”

“He said, ‘Honey, I just forgot to duck.’ In a different multiverse, Dempsey did not forget to duck. In an alternate universe, Max Schmeling, the fighter I hoped my tournament would humiliate, won the whole damn thing. In another multiverse, just a ’brane or two or three away, Jerry Quarry didn’t retire at the peak of his career. He soldiered along for who knows how many years. He reigned as champion of the world and suffered mightily for it, for our cruel pleasure. In a parallel world, he lingered month after month as much a vegetable as an eggplant. Somewhere out there, Jerry Quarry died for our sins.”

His talk turned personal, about them, what’s next.

“In a parallel universe, Jack didn’t hook up with your mom for that one-nighter, and you wouldn’t be here.”

“But I am here. I’m here with you.”

“Somewhere Jack found redemption, somewhere he found love with your mother, somewhere Jack Hanson became champion of the world. Every possibility that can happen, does happen, somewhere.”

She sought to move on. “I made a mixtape. It is like real twentieth century, I know, but these songs I think you’ll get into. My mother used to play them for me. I want you to hear this one by Al Kooper, and this crazy holiday carol about spending the night in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve.

“I can relate,” Buck said, sniggering into his drink.

“This other band is from Ireland. They’re called the Pogues. And you know that special feeling that overwhelms you during the summer months, that certain feeling that can haunt you for the rest of your life? There’s a song about that, too. Let’s go give it a listen.”

“It’s not Christmas and it’s not summer, but it is damn cold out for November. So sure.”

“Things will be okay,” she said. “What was it Hemingway said, a man can be destroyed, but not defeated?”

“Me? I’d rather be defeated than destroyed, because I am defeated now. Hell, though, I’m resilient. I’m a survivor. Since you devour fiction better than that fake fried chicken Egon invented, I got to thinking about your father and the final words of this novel called Breakfast of Champions. Ever hear of it? It was written by a fabulous tale teller, Kurt Vonnegut.”

She had not. “What were those final words?”

“Make me young, make me young, make me young. And so forth.”

“We all will share that, Buck, someday, we all will yearn to be young again. We will rage to go back, erase our losses, but we will miss the beauty that can follow loss. There is beauty right here, right in front of our faces this moment. The beauty in all these people all around you that you scorn, those who respect you, what you accomplished. The beauty of reality. You just can’t see it. We’re young now. You and me. We don’t need to find reality anywhere else.”

So serious. She eased.

“And so forth,” Buck added

Buck crunched the melting cubes for his amen, his final drips of scotch for this night.

“It’s a strange multiverse we live in, Daisy Hanson.”

“Stranger every day. Spooky things across a distance.”

“Let’s go see Jack,” Buck said. “I want to tell him about Quarry.”

“I want to see him.”

“I think I know where to find him.”

Their iBrains fused, no bullshit, never more, a meld of candor.

“Through with boxing?” she said.

“Through with boxing,” he said.

He pitched the door open into the gathering gloom and let her lead.

“My mother once dated a fighter,” he said. “She never told me much about him.”

He bundled tight against the cold, clutching her shoulder, and they moved forward, up the avenue, deep into the night.

Acknowledgements

“Fairytale of New York,” copyright Island Records, Inc., writers: Jeremy Max Finer, Shane Patrick Lysaght Macgowan. “Anna Lee (What Can I Do for You)?” copyright 1969, writers: Al Kooper and M. Bloomfield. “Magic in My Socks,” copyright 1969, writer: Al Kooper. “That Summer Feeling,” copyright 1983, writer: Jonathan Richman, Rockin’ Leprechaun Music.

About the author

Al Walentis, a recovering journalist, is an author, educator, instigator, wag. He was in the audience at the Garden for Jack Dempsey’s 75th birthday celebration and the Quarry-Foster fight. His prior works include The Secret World of Jon and Kate: The Stupidest Story in the History of the Universe and the People Who Covered It. He teaches writing and film studies at Reading Area Community College.

Cover design by Patty Mahlon

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