Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.

Gossip says a secret dog pack of folks run the world. Folks who can't never die, so they keep the rest of us stirred up for laughs. Depends on how they monkey with history, but tomorrow could be I won't be no more real than Superman or King Arthur.

It don't take a brain surgeon to tell, that talk's got to be made-up lies.

Neddy Nelson: Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night?

You see how fast reality fades away?

Tina Something (Party Crasher): What would I change? The next Party Crash night, anytime any gaddamn Maserati or Rolls-Royce pulls up to the curb, I'm climbing inside.

The rest of you gaddamn losers—enjoy your death.