Jacek Blaszkiewicz

Huge

“You’re making a huge mistake,” explained the time-traveling podcaster to the highway cop. “I don’t belong here.” The time-traveling podcaster had landed on a tangle of severed coaxial wire that tore his jeans clear through to his Mack Weldon boxer briefs. Highway grime coated his graphic tee so that

BALL SO HARD UNIVERSITY

now read

BALL S

The highway cop hovered over him with suspicion, his left eye twitching in the sun. “Teleportation fines double in work zone,” he clipped as he punched into a bulky electronic device on his wrist. Behind him, a printer perched on the squad car’s dashboard shrieked out a ticket.

“Officer, I can prove to you that I’m somebody,” asserted the time-traveling podcaster. “I have a podcast. It’s huge. I’m telling you, Officer, I don’t know where I am, but I don’t belong here.”

The truth is that he knew it was not where but when. He knew, from his many TMZ appearances, what it looked like to cross a line. He could smell it in the rusty stench of the highway air, and in the fact that the highway cop’s twitching eye, upon further inspection, was in fact a faulty prosthetic camera a tad too big for the eye socket into which it was lodged.

The time-traveling podcaster, raising himself to his feet, squinted at the billboard across the highway. A bare-chested, bonneted woman, her skin detergent-blue, straddled a mechanical bull. In a rotund sans-serif, the billboard announced

NEW BELL ATLANTIC TELEPHONE LINES COMING FALL 2094

The time-traveling podcaster felt a wave of confidence take hold in him. After all, his episode on the Zea Vertov Time Authority conspiracy had primed him for the very situation in which he found himself. For a red-pilled, pomaded alpha with a target on his back, it was always easier to be out of time than out of place.

“Sir,” shouted the highway cop, tensing at the time-traveling podcaster’s sudden movement. “Show me your hands.” He reached for the black club dangling against his thigh.

“Easy, Officer, I can prove that I don’t belong here,” continued the time-traveling podcaster coolly. “Let me pull out my Galaxy and show you. I have over a hundred and fifty thousand followers—that includes Vines, Officer.”

“Sir,” cracked the highway cop, “keep your hands where I can see them.” He then shook his head violently, causing his prosthetic camera-eye to rain little sparks onto the gravel.

“Fucking manual radio transistor,” he muttered. “10-20, 10-20, unsanctioned chronemic teleportation in a work zone, resisting arrest. Over.”

“Whoa, I’m not—look, Officer…Qrupshev? I cover 4chan discourse. Remember that little Russian car with the graffiti? Obama is a Schmuck! Obama is a Schmuck! I blew that one up, Officer…Qrupke!”

The backseat of the Crown Vick smelled like copper and chicken. Pleather seats were welded together with silver tape, whose rips were sealed with more tape. A Styrofoam cup protruded from the cup holder, its straw mangled flat. The little ticket printer was still shrieking out blank paper onto the empty passenger seat.

“My advice,” grunted the highway cop, barely audible through the thick plexiglass divider, “is to shut up. I got you admitting to blowing up a Russian car. We don’t take kindly to time travelers blowing things up. You people did enough of that in your time. And who in the blue hell is Obama?”

The Crown Vick screeched away. The time-traveling podcaster glanced at the odometer, whose red needle had, within seconds, surpassed a hundred and twenty. The earsplitting hiss pouring through the Crown Vick’s open windows drowned out his mumbled repetitions of “Jesus fucking Christ.” He became queasy and soon revisited the donut he had eaten for lunch twenty minutes and eighty years earlier.

“Fuck!” yelled the highway cop. He slammed on the brakes, sending the time-traveling podcaster’s skull into the plexiglass divider.

On the highway sat another man. He wore a tattered white dress shirt that ballooned in the sleeves. Half of the top buttons were missing to reveal a pastrami-hued, hairless chest. His jowls were swollen and sagging and engulfed what looked like a former varsity player’s boxy jawline. The man raised himself to his feet, licked his bloody hand, slicked back his product-weighted hair, and began to squeal wildly in a dialect that the highway cop swore he hadn’t heard since the twenty-seventies: that regional, lo-fi tongue that had promoted those “sterling silver” supplements filling NICUs and daycares with aquamarine babies in the thirties; that bumpkin twang that had lobbied to jam all those surplus automotive microchips into highway cops’ orifices in the fifties.

“Shit, another one,” grunted the highway cop. He heaved himself out of the Crown Vick and ran over to the time-traveling radio host who, he would soon learn, was huge in 2004.

Jacek Blaszkiewicz’s work appears in Gargoyle, Exacting Clam, Twin Flame Literary, Argyle, Midcult*, and various academic venues. He is the author of a book about music in nineteenth-century Paris and teaches music history at Wayne State University.