Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Pattie Reynolds (Bartender): I was at Pump Seven. The man you're talking about was at Pump Five. I heard splashing and turned to look, and this old man was hosing gasoline all over the mattress tied to the roof of his red car. He wore a dark-blue business suit. Gray hair. Good wingtip shoes. The gasoline soaked into the mattress, except a few drips of it rolled down the sides of the car, the windows. The smell was suffocating.

I remember he climbed into the driver's seat and started to drive off. He had to turn on the windshield wipers, so much gasoline was running down the windshield.

Wallace Boyer: Like I told you, I didn't really meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. The remainder of that flight, the time I sat next to Chester Casey, he tried to teach me the impossible. He drank my scotch and told me that time is not a straight line.

Time is not a river. Or a clock or hourglass. It doesn't only run one way.

You could hire a gaggle of brilliant experts to dissect how it might happen, but some people will still look at the proof and argue that the world is flat. Humans didn't evolve from something else. And Elvis Presley is still alive.

From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: I'm Tina Something with a Graphic Traffic emergency bulletin. All westbound lanes of the Madison Beltway are closed, due to the crash of a burning car at the CenterPoint exit. Emergency crews are on the scene trying to control the fire. Already traffic is backed up to the Market interchange and the 287 Freeway. Traffic on the eastbound Madison is also slowed to stopping…

Shot Dunyun: Shit. I don't know how flashbacks work. I couldn't tell you exactly how a lightbulb works, much less make you one from scratch. But I can use one.

You burn out your brain with rabies. Go all theta-trance-y with driving. You hit something and wake up naked in history.

Wallace Boyer: If it helps, consider how people used to think the world was flat. Two- dimensional. They only believed in the part they could see, until somebody invented the ships and somebody brave sailed off to find the rest of the earth. Consider that Rant Casey is the Christopher Columbus of time travel.

From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Traffic on the West Side is at a standstill. A parking lot. Emergency crews report the fire at the CenterPoint interchange is extinguished, and the accident has been moved off the roadway, but the boysin the meat wagon are still waiting for their cargo.

According to the early rumors, the burned Daimler-Benz appears to be empty. Bringing you the gory details, this is DRVR Graphic Traffic…

41–Rant Revisited

From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: You don't have to look up at the sky to tell it's a full moon tonight. We already have reports of a fender bender at Milepost 14 of the 217 Freeway, where two bridal parties appear to be throwing handfuls of wedding cake at each other. With the Rubberneck Report every ten minutes, this is Tina Something for Graphic Traffic…

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): Doesn't everybody know, people still Party Crash? To attain that road-trip trance where you come up with ideas? Or maybe people get off on the chase? You know, to meet people and spend time together?

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): Relax. If Shot Dunyun manages to transplant himself into the past, the rest of us will wake to the new reality that he's become the father of boosted-peak technology. Shot will finally use his education, to become the Thomas Edison of neural transcripts. That's if he remembers enough about the actual science. It's one thing to be an auteur, but it's another to birth the entire fucking art form.

No, the instant he goes back and tweaks history, the rest of us might wake up, tomorrow, to a world without neural-transcript boosts. We'll still be watching movies and reading books. But his little pug dog, Sandy, will still be alive.

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): Maybe Rant wasn't so…ballsy or big as we remember him. Maybe this is how any religious figure gets created—his friends brag him up, huger and huger, so they can get laid. You can picture St. Peter in a bar telling some pretty girl, 'Yeah, I hung with Jesus Christ. We were best buds…'

Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe it's lies like that, anything that smells better than the idea of death—black, inky, forever death—it's those kind of sexy lies that set up world religions. Maybe Rant is just dead.

Echo Lawrence: Consider the source. Maybe Shot Dunyun just wants to slip back in time without any competition.

Shot Dunyun: Bullshit. You know, if Echo jumps back in time, she'd be around today, but with both regular arms and legs. Normal. And with living, alive parents. Not whittling and staining sex toys. Echo would be the same age as Rant or Chester, or whatever he calls himself now. They'd be just two regular, boring middle-aged people.

Echo Lawrence: If Neddy manages to go back, there'll be no Infrastructure Effective and Efficient Use Act. People will live the way the cavemen did, everyone indoors or out, anytime they choose. No curfews. One colossal traffic jam, the way the world used to be.

Shot Dunyun: You could argue that we constantly change the past, whether or not we actually go back. I close my eyes, and the Rant Casey I picture isn't the real person. The Rant I tell you about is filtered and colored and distorted through me. Like any boosted peak.

And all these ways I change the past—I don't even know I'm doing most of them. You could say I constantly fuck up the past, the present, and the future.

Echo Lawrence: If Rant ever gets it right—if he ever gets back in time to save his mother from…becoming his mother—chances are you'll never have heard the name Rant Casey. He and Green might both be Historians, without beginning or end.

Shot Dunyun: How weird is that? Instead of a biography, this story will become fiction. A factual historical artifact documenting a past that never happened.

Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, another obsolete truth.

Bodie Carlyle (Childhood Friend): My head's working overtime to swallow the mess of this. Folks say Rant's skipped back in time, crazy folks, and maybe he'll do something so none of this won't never be. Or maybe just so only he won't be.