Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

producing nothing except ports and out-corded transcripts. The real push was targeted at young adults, ranging from fourteen to forty-five. Among that demographic, not being ported was equivalent to not being able to read. Or not getting inoculated against some common disease. Or not wearing glasses if you needed them. Like you were a total cretin.

It's no coincidence that age group is the people most likely to Party Crash, to drive or ride along as part of a team. But I have to shut up. Hush. We're not supposed to talk about that.

Neddy Nelson: Jumping backward in time, wouldn't you be living alongside history, knowing what the news would be since you've already lived this part? Couldn't you be getting older, hooking up, trying to inseminate another, better generation of yourself? Buying lottery tickets and betting on horse races that always pay off?

If you lived long enough, couldn't you watch yourself be born? Couldn't you raise yourself? Be your own old man?

Echo Lawrence: Get this. Most passenger cars are crash-tested no faster than thirty-five miles per hour. The automotive industry reasons a driver will take evasive action and hit the brakes before the moment of impact. The pulse. Not my mother.

The officer at the scene reported that our car never slowed as it crossed the centerline. No skid marks proved my mom had tried to brake. While I snoozed in the backseat, she'd steered us head-on into another car. For all I know, my dad was right. But it's funny, I try to find, to meet and talk to, the engineers who worked with my parents. They'd only be in their thirties or forties by now, but they're all dead. Dead or missing. Killed in car wrecks, or just vanished.

Neddy Nelson: All I'm saying is: What if time is not the fragile butterfly wing that science experts keep saying?

What if time is more like a chain-link fence you can't hardly fuck up?

I mean, even if you fucked it up, even ten hundred times—how would you ever know? Any present moment, any 'right now,' we get what we get. You know?

Lynn Coffey (Journalist): Take the time to review the press releases, and the government's official statements seem to conflict with actual events. The rubberneck study wasn't suspended due to passage of the I-SEE-U Act. The study died because its chief engineers were failing to report for work. If you tally the expense reports and cross-reference them with payroll records and police statements, you'll find a pattern of wrecked government vehicles, and a significant number of the engineers driving those vehicles appeared to have fled the scene of each accident. They didn't die, but they've never been seen again.

Neddy Nelson: And by the time you were old, like creaky, fucked-up old, and you'd spermed your last version of yourself—wouldn't you get with that latest-model, young you and have a little heart- to-heart? Let's say this finely tuned new hybrid you is eighteen or nineteen years old?

Tina Something (Party Crasher): Forget it. Nobody's going to tell you what's the real goal of Party Crashing. Go ahead, keep telling yourself we're all just goofing around. A bunch of lamebrains who get our jollies by ramming each other with cars.

Besides, most of these idiots are operating based on rumors. Stories. Nobody's sure how it really works. Nobody's going to tell you what's really going on.

But a few of us are going to become gods.

Neddy Nelson: All I'm saying is: What if it's not Rant's fault he's the result of somebody's longtime, sick-assed plan?

Didn't Rant use to say, 'The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday'?

You got all that?

35–A Flashback

Chester Casey (Farmer): Here comes a load of bullpucky.

The night before my boy, Buster, goes and kills himself, some old coot tells him this long, impossible yarn. This rich old coot named Simms says how, when he was Buster's age and first moved to the city, he was in a car wreck. This Green Taylor Simms is a young man just driving along, and a car coming in the opposite direction, it crossed the centerline without slowing down a hair, and slammed into the man's car.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): The way Rant told me the story, Simms wakes up in a hospital bed, asking, 'How long have I been here?' And the nurse tells him, 'Four days…'

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): At the hospital, this young guy asked, 'What happened to my car?'

And the doctors said, 'What car?' The police found him unconscious in the street. He was bruised, with a broken collarbone and breastbone.

The guy asked, 'Where's my clothes?'

And the doctors said, 'What clothes?' The police had found him naked.

Chester Casey: Everybody knows this is crazy talk, but Buster didn't know that. Buddy must've believed the old man.

Echo Lawrence: All those years ago, the police asked the guy his name and how to contact his family, and this guy told them. The next day, they came back to his hospital bed and told the guy that those people, his family, they didn't exist.

Shot Dunyun: The cops asked for his name and Citizen ID and Social Security numbers. And a day later, they told the man that he didn't exist.

Echo Lawrence: In the hospital, the doctors took one look at the scars on the guy's arms, the punctures and puckers in his skin, and they asked, 'What drugs were you doing?'

They asked, 'Were you aware that you're infected with rabies?'

Jarrell Moore (Private Investigator): The injuries that Simms described to Rant Casey—the bruises across the iliac crest of the man's hips, the cracked sternum, and the broken clavicle—these are all consistent with injuries inflicted by lap and shoulder belts during a high-speed head-on collision.

Shot Dunyun: So, when Green Taylor Simms was twenty-three years old, he sneaks out of that hospital. As soon as they mention a move to the psych ward, he bails before they can put him behind a