Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Who — who even set this up?” Jen had asked. “Is he expecting us? Me?”

“Just try to let go,” Travis had said. “Experience the experience.”

But Jen had no clue as to what she was being asked to let go of, given the obscurity of the origins and cause of her appointment with Baz Angler and the ominous haze that hung around Angler himself, an eccentric recluse and certified genius with a stated interest in MDMA-aided time travel and a net worth estimated in the mid-to-high nine figures.

Chewing a thumbnail in the beneficent glow of the iMac G3, Jen skimmed the latest batch of Total Transformation Challenge essay submissions. She considered the instructions for the fourth category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 4: EARTH

How can you challenge yourself to strengthen your pact with Mother Earth and commit to leaving the natural world a better place for our children?

Your response here:

I challenge myself to experience the experience of paradise-in-progress.

Jen reckoned that the best way to prepare to experience the experience of her journey to Belize was to look things up about Baz Angler on the Internet, or at least on the past-imperfect tense of the Internet available in the breakfast room of the Garinagu Eco Lodge.

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There were numerous undisputed facts about Richard Benedict “Baz” Angler available online. One of three sons of a computer science professor father and a librarian mother, he spent his early childhood outside Sydney and thereafter grew up in Massachusetts. He dropped out of MIT after three semesters, and at age twenty-two founded the video-game developer Gembryo Systems Inc., best known for the late-1980s blockbuster Furthermost, a free-roaming fantasy role-play video game set in a mystical dystopia, and its equally successful sequels Farthermore and Everending, the last of which featured the voice-acting talents of one Leora Infinitas as both the Dawn Queen Angharad, Defender of the Cloak of Athanasia, and the Twilight Queen Blodeuwedd, Protector of the Crown of Impregnability. A decade later, the software behemoth Vidente Corporation acquired Gembryo in a landmark deal in which Angler personally netted at least $100 million. He earned at least that again through savvy early investments in various enterprise software and antivirus software upstarts, as well as in Seagate and Microsoft. Meanwhile, royalties and licensing fees from the various Furthermore movie franchises, TV-cartoon franchises, comic books, merchandise, and increasingly degraded and desiccated video-game sequels, prequels, and spinoffs had flowed forth for years after Vidente had swallowed Gembryo whole.

There were equally numerous disputed facts about Baz Angler available online. One rumor was that the financial apocalypse had devastated his investments, forcing him to sell numerous properties around the world — a cattle ranch in Australia’s Northern Territory, a horse ranch in Montana, a beachfront estate in Hawaii — and driving him to far more modest quarters in unglamorous Belize. One largely unsourced report, which Jen found on a reputable gaming blog, had him developing antibiotic plants on the New River with a pair of comely Big Pharma refugees; another, almost entirely unsourced report from a different, less reputable gaming blog claimed that the antibiotic-plant project was a front for a drug-smuggling operation. The most stubbornly viral rumor suggested that Angler’s longtime immersion in the universe of the Furthermost trilogy, paired with his equally longtime immersion in cutting-edge hallucinogens, had severed the line he’d always walked, both in his life and so profitably in his work, between fantasy and reality.

In Everending, the raven-haired and brooding wizard-in-training Trahaearn has acquired both the Cloak of Athanasia and the Crown of Impregnability in his questing across the postapocalyptic greenscapes of the once and future kingdom Apologia, where he is accompanied by the loyal druid Maredudd and the wily genetically engineered dragon Wmffre; for his efforts, Trahaearn is honored by his Leora Infinitas — voiced twin warrior queens with the title of Earl of Cockney, which was the nickname bestowed upon the pubescent Baz Angler by his classmates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who mistook his Australian tones for those of East End London. By the time of Everending IX: The Enlargement, the Earl of Cockney né Trahaearn’s countenance and form had shape-shifted into a hologram of Angler himself: flapping dark tresses now rusty tufts, tanned and buffed hide now all sharp, freckled-pale angles. Baz Angler’s own creation had become Baz Angler.

“And thus Trahaearn, Earl of Cockney, becomes himself!” proclaimed the Dawn Queen Angharad and the Twilight Queen Blodeuwedd in unison.

As Jen scribbled down Maredudd’s genealogy in her notebook, she knew the exact moment both halves of the Animexa tablet began to take effect, because of the subtlest tremor that stirred her hand as she wrote, and the equally subtle euphoria that animated the tremor — euphoria miniaturized into a pinprick, a coruscating grain of sand, the slenderest threading thrill zigzagging up her throat, clutching her jaw, and starbursting behind her eyes so that her entire field of vision both brightened and narrowed, whiting out any signal or noise outside her skull and screen. It was the same subtle and tightly focused euphoria that had fueled the writing and rewriting of a hundred unread LIFt memos — only stronger now, as Jen’s tolerance had slipped during her months of abstinence.

Last, Jen found, there were numerous previously disputed facts about Baz Angler available online — that is, they were disputed until Jen was able to report them firsthand. One of these, given glancing notice in an alt-medicine blogger’s mostly amiable post on the antibiotic-plant project, was that Baz Angler was a connoisseur of the sharp arts: a student of knife making, a historian of ironmongery, a somewhat profligate collector of ancient swords.

Jen silently confirmed this later the same morning, as she shut the door of Eva’s dented Corolla behind her and moved through the overgrown grass toward Baz Angler’s clapboard house-on-stilts, imagining that the roseate apparition at the top of the front steps, who gripped a rocks glass in one hand and a machete in the other, held the machete toward her as a totem not of warning but of welcome, like a plate of fresh-baked brownies, she thought, or a cool glass of lemonade, or a simple outstretched hand.

“It’s just real life out here, you know?” Baz Angler was saying.

Baz Angler had already given Jen a brief tour of his “compound,” as he referred to it, situated on several acres of cleared forest, with a two-thousand-square-foot main house ringed in the rear by a semicircle of smaller, crookeder bungalows, a vegetable garden, and a greenhouse nearly the size of the central residence. Accompanying Baz Angler was a lanky aide-de-camp who looked not yet out of his teens, who introduced himself as Ram and who radiated a grinning, gushing, anything-to-accommodate energy of a kind that always stiffened Jen’s neck and shoulder muscles and set a vein in her forehead pulsing — a tension born of recognition of the same energy in herself, a response to stimuli akin to flinching away from a mirror. Baz Angler seemed immediately more at ease once they were back in the sparsely furnished front room of his primary residence, where the air was cooler and the smell of sewage wasn’t as strong as it was outdoors, and where Ram excused himself to the kitchen with an exaggerated wave and a doggy grin. A young woman in cutoffs and a white tank top, whom Baz Angler introduced as Star, slumped mutely on a sunken, faded red couch, painting her toenails, a mangy German shepherd napping at her feet. Star’s apparent doppelgänger, who wore cutoffs and a blue tank top, whom Baz Angler introduced as Unity, slumped mutely in the doorway to the kitchen and sullenly watched from a few feet away as Baz Angler stood and held court for his audience of three, the sash of his grape-and-lemon-yellow dressing gown coming dangerously loose at his lower abdomen, his lectern a deeply scarred slab of picnic table that he tapped and slapped and occasionally pounded with his glinting jade-handled machete.