There were counterfeit cards in those days, sure, back when home color printing was first taking off. There were entire cartels devoted to the issuance of counterfeit cards. And, eventually, because this is how people are, some portion of the collecting world became equally taken with the fakes. With the result that the Topps Company began issuing cards with watermarks and testimonial stamps. A McClintock rookie card, class B, would thus have the titanium arm and the Topps watermark, which was in the shape of a standard-issue baseball bat.
“How do you know about that?” I asked, as we were seated. And I said it with a fair amount of shock.
“How do I know about what?” said D.
“McClintock, class B cards.”
“You told me about it.”
“I don’t think I did.”
“You did.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
You know, there are any number of powerful additives in the water supply these days, additives that are meant to redress the follies of human character, diseases of the age, such as repeated reorganizing of household objects, hearty laughter at neutral remarks, the ever-popular fear of photosynthesis and photosynthesizers. And chief among these, I well know, is the almost total inability to remember anything that has happened, also known as elective pseudo-dementia. The almost total inability to remember events that seemed earth-shattering less than a year ago, the complete obliteration of trends inside of weeks, the reversal of strongly held opinions, and so forth — I wasn’t the only person who had disabilities like these. Therefore, I wasn’t likely to remember if I had or had not discussed Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock with D. Tyrannosaurus. And yet I believed I had not. I believed that Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock, class B series, and all facts pursuant to this matter were secured in a register of discretion that I did not trot out for just anyone, especially not a frequenter of ladies of the night. And perhaps the incompleteness of my trust was evident on my face, because the man known as Tyrannosaurus immediately began to attempt a flanking maneuver.
“Forget about it, man.” The waiter brought around a plate of unidentifiable smoked meats.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Everybody knows about McClintock and the class B cards.”
“No, everybody does not,” I said.
Again, I began combing through my half-remembered and somewhat fuzzy recollections of events at which D. Tyrannosaurus had been present, over the weeks. I began trying to decide if his sudden appearance was nothing but an attempt to locate one of the nation’s preeminent dealers in baseball cards, in order to blandish him out of valuable assets and transfer them to who knows where, Macao, or Mauritania, or Madagascar.
“Montese,” D. offered, “this seems sudden, so I’m just going to tell you the truth. You know it in your heart anyway. What my particular interest is, these days, well, my particular interest is in collecting things that are in danger of being lost. That’s why, for example”—gesturing around the chronically empty interior of the restaurant of smoked meats—“I wanted to come to this… grill. There are more people standing around waiting to serve the food than there are people in here to eat. The only people left who can really afford restaurants bring security.
“Let’s say I knew you had some baseball cards, okay? Let’s say I even came down to this furnace of a place because you have some baseball cards. Does that mean that I think any less of you? Does that mean that I hung around for however many weeks just to get some damn baseball cards? I know how this sounds, and I’m sure it’s hard to hear, but I stuck around because I’m happy to spend some time with other people who see how things are now. You’re an interesting guy, Montese. You’re a guy with vision. Maybe even you’re a genuine part of history. You’re the man who was able to anticipate history, to anticipate what the body is in the process of becoming, and in this card you see the composite that is the human body, the composite it’s becoming, and so you’re the man I, and the people I represent, needed to see.”
I would describe my discontent as being like a skin lesion, or like an archipelago of buboes. I had felt that D. was my first legitimate new friend in some years, and now I felt like some kind of exotic figurine he had collected so as to have me on his manifest, along with one of the Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock class B baseball cards and a bunch of cyborg prototypes. Another man might have left the table immediately, certain that he would sunder relations with D. Tyrannosaurus. Another man might have lamented his naïveté, or started a fistfight, or contacted some oversight agency, or hired a trained professional to deal with Tyrannosaurus. But not me.
I said: “It’s a wager.”
Because even if he was a wheeler and a dealer, or some kind of conceptual artist who specialized in duping innocents, I would crush him on the chessboard. I would read up on games played with a missing pawn; I would read up on the Bulgarian tactics that had proven so popular in the chess world recently. I would find whatever hidden stratagems I required to make D. Tyrannosaurus, convicted felon, rue the day he had come to the desert.
Next, as an effective researcher, I determined to use my talents to see what was available about D. on the web, now largely pages in Cantonese. As any citizen of the NAFTA treaty knows, the surveillance capabilities of the web permit much, for a nominal fee, and I managed to locate the alumnae association from his graduate school, the prison records for all the prisons in his home state; I even scoured lists of art exhibitions by persons with variants of his name. I did find six or seven persons with names that had D’s and T’s as their initial consonants who had similar biographies. But as far as a particular D. Tyrannosaurus, or any variant of this name I could come up with, the results were thin. What was the nature of his felony? Was his crime against property? Was he an arsonist or some kind of detonator of government buildings? Was his crime somehow indivisible from his art? Was his crime political or philosophical? It was only the most determined, these days, who could stay out of the reach of the global media, but among these, apparently, was D. Tyrannosaurus.
He had his reasons, evidently, and I believed they would come to light. But my principal reason for wanting to play this game of chess was that I wanted the work. I wanted to write the novelization he described. And I wanted to make my life better, in a Horatio Alger sort of way — I wanted the money, I wanted the self-respect, and I wanted the approval of Tara Schott Crandall, the woman with the new lungs. This made a rather adorable story, writing a science-fiction novelization in order to impress a double lung transplant from whose side I had not strayed for more than three or four hours in a couple of years, except when she was in the ICU and I left her, for example, to give a reading at Arachnids. But just as the chess match was looming on the calendar, something awful happened, the awful thing that goes by the name fungus. Prior to the events described here, I knew nothing about fungus but that mushrooms were tasty and that you should wash between your toes. But fungus, in particular aspergillus, would become my wife Tara’s greatest threat.
There are a number of kinds of organ rejection, as we now know from the medical literature. The first of these is instantaneous, in which the organ is flooded with lymphocytes, and death is immediate. Tara, to our great relief, did not suffer this rejection, which is rare in the era of nanotechnological agents. A second kind of rejection is chronic, and characterized by a hardening of the tissues involved at the spots where the organs are connected by the surgeons. While a certain amount of antirejection therapy can help here, the long-term prognosis is cloudy and dark. Still, you may have time to see your child graduate or your spouse appear, inevitably, on a reality-based web program.