Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  I found myself sniffing the air a lot, for danger or just for amusement. If anyone had still been able to hear, they probably would have been doubled up laughing, because we were all going around sniffing and grunting and mumbling in funny voices as soon as we had no clue how ridiculous we probably sounded.

  Almost every corner seemed to have red bandanas standing on it, looking bored and desperate for someone to fuck with them.

  But meanwhile, I was Entertainer Explainer’s New Talent of the Month, because I’d managed to avoid getting murdered in an amusing fashion, and the video had gone mega-viral. I was seeing my own face on shirts and on people’s phablets more and more often. Our film showed the part where Reginald, the wild-eyed mustache dude in the Viking helmet, was chasing me around and trying to tear my arms and legs off, but not the aftermath, where Reginald got pulverized and lit on fire by the red bandanas. (That part, maybe, not as funny.) In any case, Sally and I were suddenly kind of famous, and we had to clear out our freezer to make room for all the meat and casseroles and stuff that people kept bringing over.

  Everybody was bracing themselves for the next thing. We still believed in money, kinda-sorta, even after a ton of people had lost their savings and investments in the big default spiral. We didn’t not believe in money, let’s put it that way. We still had electricity and cell phone service and Internet, even though many parts of the country were on-again, off-again. The red bandanas and the rump government needed a cellular network as bad as the rest of us, because they needed to be able to organize, so until they figured out how to have a dedicated network and their own power sources, they would make sure it kept running for everyone. We hoped so, anyway.

  Sally and I spent hours arguing about what sort of movie we should make next. All of my ideas were too complicated or high-concept for her. I wanted to do a movie about someone who tries to be a gangster but he’s too nice—like he runs a protection racket but never collects any money from people. Or he sells drugs but only super-harmless ones. So the other gangsters get mad at him, and everyone has to help him pretend to be a real gangster. And he does such a good job he becomes the head gangster, and then he’s in real trouble. Or something.

  Anyway, Sally said that was too complicated for people right now; we had to shoot for self-explanatory. Some of the film geeks wanted us to make a movie about the fact that everyone was deaf, but that seemed like the opposite of escapism to me—which I guess would be trapism, or maybe claustrophilia.

  Sally was all about recapturing the Vikings-and-Samurai glory, like maybe this time we could have Amish ninjas who threw wooden throwing stars. I was like, Amish ninjas aren’t high concept? I was happy to keep debating this stuff forever, because I didn’t actually want to make another movie. Whatever part of me that had let me turn calamity into comedy had died when I fell out of a window on top of Reginald and watched him die on fire.

  Snow fell. Then hail, then sleet, and then snow again. Things felt dark, even during the day, and I felt like my sight, smell, and touch were going the way of my hearing. Only my taste burned as strong as ever. Everything was salty, salty, salty. You could slip and break your leg in a ditch and nobody would know you were there for days and days.

  This was going to be a long winter.

  * * *

  “ROCK MANNING. WE NEED YOU.”

  I stared up at the giant scrolling light-up banner over Out Of Town News in Harvard Square. I blinked the snow away and looked a second time. It still looked like my name up there.

  Okay, so this was it, the thing my school therapist had warned me about back in fifth grade: I was going narcissistophrenic and starting to imagine that toasters and people on the television were talking to me. It was probably way too late to start taking pills now.

  But then a guy I had met at one of our movie shoots saw it too. He tugged my sleeve and pointed at the scrolling words. So unless he and I were both crazy the same way, it really did say my name up there.

  A bus zipped past. (They’d gotten a few buses running again.) The big flashing screen on the front didn’t say, “WARNING. BUS WILL RUN YOU OVER. GET OUT OF THE WAY” as usual. Instead, it said, “ROCK MANNING, YOU CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO REBUILDING SOCIETY.” I grabbed the guy, whose name was Scottie or Thor or something, and pointed at the bus for more independent confirmation that I wasn’t losing it. He poked me back and pointed at a big screen in the display window of Cardullo’s delicatessen, which now read, “ROCK MANNING, COME JOIN US.” I grabbed my cell phone, and it had a new text message, much the same as the ones I was seeing everywhere. I almost threw my phone away.

  Instead I ran toward the river, trying to outrun the words. Over the past few months since everyone went deaf, I’d seen the screens going up in more and more places, and now all of a sudden they were all talking to me personally. Computer screens on display at the big business store, the sign that normally announced the specials at the Mongolian buffet place—even the little screen that someone had attached to their golden retriever’s collar that would let you know when the dog was barking. They were calling me out.

  I got to the river and ran across the big old stone bridge. In the murky river water, the letters floated, projected from somewhere in the depths: “WHY ARE YOU RUNNING? WE THOUGHT YOU’D BE FLATTERED.”

  When I got to the other side of the bridge, Ricky Artesian was waiting for me. He was wearing a suit, and instead of the red bandana, he had a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, but otherwise he was the same old Ricky from high school. He held up a big piece of paper:

  “Relax, pal. We just need your help, the same way we needed you once before. Except this time we’re going to make sure it goes right.”

  As if I would ever forget the time I got blackmailed into helping Ricky’s crew make a propaganda movie—that was the start of me losing my mind. As our movies had gotten more popular, Sally had gotten paranoid that terrible early film, in which I played a heroic red bandana, would turn up online and ruin our credibility. But I was pretty sure it was lost forever.

  Ricky had a couple other guys in suits behind him, also clearly red-bandana honchos. I thought about jumping off the bridge, and kept looking over my shoulder at a dark shape below me. The river had defrosted but still looked chilly. I looked over the edge again, tossed a mental coin and jumped.

  The loose boat was right where I thought it was. It had drifted downriver from the Harvard boathouse, and I landed in the stern without capsizing it all the way. I righted the boat and found the oars. Someone had either forgotten to chain it up, or had vandalized the chain. I slotted the oars into their nooks and started to row. I’d never sculled before, but how hard could it be?

  After half an hour of rowing as hard as I could, and going in the same circle over and over while Ricky watched from overhead, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I texted Sally that I was in a boat trying to escape and didn’t know how to row. She Googled rowing. She said I needed to straighten out and row the same amount with both oars, and then maybe I’d stop going in circles. Also, go with the current. Meanwhile, Ricky and his friends were grabbing a big, scary-looking hook.

  I tried to figure out what the current was. It took me a long while to find a drifting leaf and figure out I should go the same way. I tried to row in that direction, but the boat kept veering and swerving. Then I saw a bench right in front of me that looked like someone was supposed to sit facing the other way. So maybe part of the problem was that I was sitting backwards? I got myself all turned around, but I lost my grip on one of the oars and it floated away, much faster than my boat had gone so far. At this point, the hook snagged my boat, and a moment later I was a landlubber again.

  “Hey Rock,” Ricky said. I was up to about ten percent accuracy with my lipreading. He held out his hand, and I took it out of reflex.

  We all went for burgers at this little diner nearby, which had survived everything without changing its greasy ways. I admired that. It even had a little jukebox at each table, and the red
checkered vinyl tablecloth with stray burn marks from when you could still smoke indoors. Ricky smoked, because who was going to tell him not to?

  “i think it’s great you’re still doing the same thing as in high school,” Ricky’s laptop screen said. He swiveled it around and typed some more, then turned it back. Now it said: “you found something that worked for you, and you stuck with it. that’s kool.” I nodded. If Ricky had been talking instead of typing, he probably would have made this stuff sound like compliments. He typed some more: “you know i always liked you.” The other two guys didn’t try to say anything, or even read what Ricky was typing; they just ate their burgers and stared out the window at the handfuls of students who were crawling back to Harvard.

  I didn’t try to contribute to the conversation either, I just read whatever Ricky typed. He hadn’t touched his burger yet. He told me about how he’d moved up in the world since high school, and now he was working for some pretty juiced-up people in government, and everything was really under control. You would be surprised, he said, at how under control everything was.

  I nodded and half-smiled, to show that I knew what he meant, but really I didn’t think I would be that surprised.

  I thought about the oar that had gotten away from me, floating downriver toward freedom, as fast as it could go. Where would it end up?

  Ricky said I shouldn’t worry about a repeat of what happened last time. We were both older and more experienced, and he’d gotten smarter since then. But the thing was, he said, people were still in shock—almost like little children, right now. And they needed their cartoony entertainment to keep their minds off things. So here was the deal: he would get us resources—resources like we couldn’t imagine, like our wildest dreams were this tablecloth and the actuality was up there on the ceiling. And in return, we would just portray authority in a kind way. Nothing too heavy, like everyone wearing the bandana or any army uniforms or anything. Just occasionally we see that the militia and Army are trustworthy, and the people in charge have everyone’s best interests at heart, etc. Most of the time, we’d have a free hand.

  I had to get up and go wash my hands so I could type on Ricky’s laptop. I didn’t want to get his keyboard greasy. Then it took me a minute to hunt and peck: “sally wont go for it she thinks you killed her boyfriend which duh you did.”

  I swiveled it around before I could think twice about what I’d just typed.

  Ricky’s eyes narrowed. He looked up at me, and for a moment he was the legbreaker again. I thought he was going to lunge across the booth and throttle me. Then he typed: “the robot guy?” I nodded. “that was a situation. its complicated, and many people were to blame.”

  I tried really really hard not to have any expression on my face, as if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I ran out of hamburger, so I ate my fries slow, skinning them and then nibbling at the mashed potatoes inside. Everything smelled meaty.

  “tell u what, just dont tell sally im involved,” Ricky typed. “just tell her the government wants 2 support your work.”

  It was easy for me to agree to that, because I knew my face was a giant cartoon emoticon as far as Sally was concerned, and she would know within seconds that I was hiding something.

  Ricky didn’t threaten to break parts of us if we didn’t go along with his plan, but he didn’t need to, and he only made some gauzy promises about payment. He did say he could get me some rowing lessons.

  * * *

  It took me two hours to find Sally. I almost texted her, but I had a bad feeling about my cell phone.

  She was in a group of film students building a giant ramp that looked as if they were going to roll a mail cart into a snowbank. She saw me and then turned away to watch her pals slamming boards together. I nudged her, but she just ignored me. I remembered she’d said something about this movie they wanted to make about a guy who works in the mailroom and discovers a hidden doorway that leads to Hell’s interoffice mail system, and he has to deliver a bunch of letters to demons before he can get out. High fuckin’ concept. Anyway, she was pissed that I’d been blowing her off for weeks, so now I couldn’t get her attention.

  Finally, I wrote just the name “ricky a” on my cell and shoved it in front of her without pressing send. Her eyes widened, and she made to text me back, but I stopped her. I grabbed a pad and a pen and wrote down the whole story for her, including the signs in Harvard Square. She shook her head a lot, then bit her lip. She thought I was exaggerating, but the guy who’d seen the signs showed up and confirmed that part.

  “We’re so small time,” she wrote in neat cursive under my scrawls. “Why would Ricky care?”

  Under that, I wrote: “1. He remembers us from hi skool, unfinished biz. 2. He likes us and wants to own us. 3. He hates us and wants to destroy us. 4. those guys are scared of losing their grip & they think we can help.”

  It was a cold day, and I’d gotten kind of wet trying to escape in a Harvard boat, plus the sun was going down, so I started to shiver out there on the lawn in front of BU. Some students were straggling back in, just like at Harvard, and they stared at the set, abandoned half-finished against one wall. Sally gestured for her gang to get the ramp to Hell’s mailroom back into storage.

  We piled ourselves into the back of the equipment van, with Zapp Stillman driving, and headed for the Turnpike, because the sooner we got out of town the better.

  We got about half a mile before we hit the first checkpoint. There were soldiers with big dragonfly helmets standing in front of humvees, blocking off most of the lanes of Storrow Drive, and between the soldiers and the swiveling cameras on stalks, there was no way you would get past their makeshift barricades. They were checking everybody coming in and out of the city, and a hundred yards past them stood an exoskeleton thingy, or a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face. My brother Holman had probably piloted one of these things in Central Asia or Central Eurasia, someplace Central. The pilots of these things had a high rate of going A.U.T.U., because of all the neural strain. This one wasn’t moving, but it was cranked up and operational because you could see the ground shivering around it, and there were fresh kills nearby: Cars still smoking, a few unlucky bodies.

  Our van turned onto a side street as fast as possible, and we swerved back toward Boston University. By the time we got back there, Janelle had found some forum posts about the cordoning off of several major cities. It was part of a sweep to round up certain radical elements that threatened the shaky order: you had the red bandanas inside the cities, and the army outside.

  We were still in the van, parked on a side street just off Dummer St., sheltered by a giant sad oak that leaned almost to the ground on one side. You could put a tire swing on that oak and swing underground and maybe there would be mole people. Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?

  I wasn’t sure if we should get out of the van, or if someone would spot us, but Sally went ahead and climbed out, and Janelle followed. I got out and stood on the sidewalk, shrugging in a sad ragdoll way. Sally stomped her foot and gritted her teeth. She tried some sign language on me, and I got the gist that she was saying we were trapped—every way out of the city would be the same thing. I just looked at her, waiting for her to say what we were going to do, and she looked weary but also pissed. This not-talking thing meant you really had to watch people, and maybe you could see people more clearly when you couldn’t hear them.

  I studied Sally. She had the twitch in her forearms that usually meant she was about to throw something. She had the neck tendon that meant she was about to yell at someone, if yelling were still a thing that happened. Her mouse
-brown hair was a beautiful mess bursting free of her scrunchie, her face so furious it circled back around to calm. Biting her tongue, the better to spit blood.

  She wrote on her phone: “the army outside + red bandanas inside. occupation. city is screwed. we r screwed. trapped.” She erased it without hitting send.

  I took the phone and wrote: “red bandanas + army = opportunity.”

  She just stared at me. I didn’t even know what I had in mind yet. This was the part of the conversation where I would normally start spitballing and suggesting that we get a hundred people in koala costumes and send them running down the street while someone else dropped hallucinogenic water balloons from a hang glider. But I couldn’t spitball as fast with my thumbs.

  I paused and thought about Ricky, and the other bandanas I’d met, and how they were so desperate to be someone’s hero that they were even willing to ask someone like me for help representing them. I thought about Holman, and how much he looked down on civilians, even before he got the A.N.V.I.L. socket in his skull. I thought about how Ricky and his guys had engineered a clusterfuck at that peace protest, making the cops think the protestors were shooting at them so the cops shot back. I thought about how the bandanas weren’t leaving the city, and the army wasn’t coming in.

  “i think I have a bad idea,” I wrote.

  * * *

  All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.

  With its sleek red hot-dog battering ram surrounded by a fluffy bun, it was like the Space Battleship Yamato made of bread and pork, made of metal. This MIT student named Matt had been suping it up with a high-performance electric engine and all-terrain wheels, just saving it for the right occasion. And somehow, Janelle had convinced Matt that our little adventure was it.