Rant

the traveler’s mother or father, at a time before the traveler’s conception—for the purpose of killing that ancestor.
    Shot Dunyun: Again, do not confuse Stoking with Resolving Origin. Stoking means you flashback to breed a better you. Resolving Origin means you slaughter some ancestor to make sure you’ll never be born. I’ll grant you, they’re both pretty nasty.
    Neddy Nelson: Historians, don’t they call it Destroying Source or Severing Origin? Haven’t you heard it called Resolving Origin? Doesn’t it make sense, that, serial killers like the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper, those were people dropped back into time and having trouble finding and “resolving” their mothers?
    Tina Something: I never hear from Wax, not until a long, long time after Rant Casey takes his suicide dive off the bridge. In the meanwhile, certain police have been asking me if Wax has been in touch. It seems some kids died rolling a Jaguar X-Type inside a concrete highway tunnel. The car turned out to be stolen, and Wax’s wallet was in the back pocket of some jeans left behind in the wreck. As if Wax totaled a Jag, killing two kids and leaving his gaddamn pants behind…
    Neddy Nelson: You wonder why we always have war and famine? Can you accept the fact that the people, the Historians who run everything, they get off on watching our mortality?
    Tina Something: A couple weeks later, the cops are calling about Wax again. Seems another kid’s died in a stolen car, this time a BMW 3 Series 325i. Seems a witness is ready to swear that, the second after the car sailed off the top of an eight-story parking garage, landing nose-straight into a concrete sidewalk, killing the kid in the shotgun seat, after that disaster Karl Waxman climbed out from behind the shattered windshield and walked away.
    And again, I told the cops I hadn’t heard a word.
    Neddy Nelson: How can you expect Historians to feel anything for the suffering of the rest of us? Do you cry when a flower wilts? When a carton of milk goes sour? Don’t you think they’ve seen so many people die that their sympathy or empathy or whatever is pretty much wore out?
    Tina Something: Another time the cops called, they claimed they’d matched fingerprints on the steering wheel of the BMW to fingerprints in Wax’s apartment. The cops asked, was I harboring him?
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: One of the common tenets shared by widely divergent spiritual beliefs is the rule that an individual can only attain true power by “killing his father.” One possibility is that said rule was not meant metaphorically. The primary difficulty would lie in transporting oneself backward to a time before one’s birth.
    Then, of course, comes the physically easier but emotionally tricky task of murdering one’s own parent.
    Tina Something: To try and find Wax, I looked up his mom in the phone book, Gloria Waxman, but she’s not listed. Her maiden name was Elrick, so I call the few Elricks I find. One says, wrong number. When I ask for Gloria Elrick or Waxman at the other number, some old lady hangs up the phone on me. About ten times this old lady hangs up, so I drive over for a visit to the address listed in the phone book. Behind the apartment door, the same old-lady voice tells me to go away, but I don’t.
    I keep knocking and pounding, saying I know Gloria and Wax are around and saying I only want to talk.
    Finally, I threaten to tell the police, and somebody inside unlocks the apartment door. Some old man opens the door enough I can see the gaddamn chain’s still on, and he tells me to go away or he’ll call the police himself. This old man says his daughter, Gloria Elrick, she died almost twenty-some years back. Seems she was parking with her steady boyfriend, and a maniac shot them both dead in the car. A total stranger, a young man with no apparent motive, somebody nobody knew from Adam, had killed Gloria and her boyfriend. And the old man slams the door in my face.
    Through the door, I ask what was the boyfriend’s name. And the old man says, “Go away!”
    I yell, “Just tell me his name!”
    And the old man says, “Anthony.” Through the door he yells, “Tony Waxman.” He yells, “Now, you go!”
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: However, once one had made the journey and completed the task, to become immortal, to live eternally in a world where everything and everyone would wither and die while you accumulated knowledge and wealth, becoming