Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  The tires were the perfect mud color to match the lower part of the chassis, which Matt had rescued from a scrapyard in Burlington. The chassis had a tip as red and round as a clown’s nose on either side of the long, sleek body. This baby had crisscrossed the country before I was born, proclaiming the pure love of Ballpark Franks to anyone with half an eye. Just staring at it made me hungry in my soul.

  All around us, Sally’s film-student minions were doing engine checks and sewing parachutes and painting faces onto boomerangs and inflating sex-dolls and making pies for the pie-throwing machine. The usual, in other words. I felt an emotion I’d never felt before in my life, and I didn’t know how to label it at first. Sort of like excitement, sort of like regret—but it wasn’t either of those things. It was lodged down where I always pictured my spine and my colon shaking hands. I finally realized: I was afraid.

  People had told me about fear, but I had never quite believed it existed in real life. I watched Zapp Stillman blowing up a blow-up doll, and something wobbled inside me. I had felt guilt and self-loathing, especially after Reginald, but now I felt worry-fear. Zapp saw me looking at him and gave me a cocky little nod. I nodded back.

  Sally was busy studying a big road map with Janelle, charting the escape route and where we were all going to rendezvous if we made it out of town. Sally had taken my vague arm-wheeling notion and turned it into an actual plan, which would let us escape to the Concorde Turnpike and make for Walden Pond, that place where Henry David Thoreau had built a comedy waterslide two hundred years ago. And then maybe head west. Find a quiet place (so to speak) to wait things out. Sally handed her magic marker off to Janelle and came over to stand with me.

  “What changed your mind,” she wrote in ballpoint on a pad, “about doing more stunts? You were ready to quit, before.”

  I took the pad and pen. Chewed the cap. Wrote: “Ricky won’t leave us alone. We gotta blow town and this is the only way. Plus this is different than just making another weird movie. If this works, maybe we ruin the red bandanas’ day. Maybe we ruin their whole week even. PAYBACK.” That last word, I underlined three times. Sally took the pen back from me and drew little stars and hearts and rainbows and smiley faces around it, until it was the most decorated “PAYBACK” you’ve ever seen.

  One of our lookouts shone a flashlight, and Janelle nodded, and Sally and I got stuffed into a little cubby under the floorboards with no light and almost no air, with all the cameras and filming equipment on top of us. We were scrunched together, so her knee was in my face and my left arm dug into her side. Every few moments, the floor over us shuddered, like someone was knocking things around. Sally shivered and twitched, so I gripped her tighter. I was starting to freak out from the lack of light and air and entertainment options, but just as I was ready to wobble myself silly, Janelle and Thor (Scottie?) lifted the lid off and pulled us out.

  * * *

  So. Ballpark Figure was the last movie we ever made, and it was probably one of the last movies anybody ever made. It was a mixture of fiction, reality and improv, which Zapp Stillman said was pleasingly meta—we were counting on the bandanas and the army to play themselves in the story, but I was playing a fictional character, and so were Janelle and Zapp. My character was Horace Burton, the last baseball fan on Earth who had been heartbroken since the MLB shutdown and who was driving his giant hot dog vehicle to try and find the world’s greatest baseball players, in a Field of Dreams-with-lunch-meat kind of thing. Janelle was a former hot dog mascot who had turned Vegan but still wanted to keep dressing up as a hot dog, now just a meatless hot dog. And Zapp was some kind of coach. We filmed a sequence of the three of us piling into our hot dog car with some animated cue-card exposition, and posted it online with minimal editing, as a kind of prequel to the actual movie, which we promised would be posted live and streaming, right as it happened, on our video tumble.

  By the time we were ready to leave town, an hour before dawn, the Ballpark Figure prologue had been up for a few hours, and we had a few thousand people refreshing our vumble over and over. I had slept a few hours, but Sally hadn’t slept at all and Janelle was guzzling really terrible coffee. Sally wasn’t going to be in the hot dog, she was going to be one of the people filming the action from—I hoped—a safe distance, using Matt’s remote-controlled camera drones, which I had insisted on. If nothing else came of this but Sally getting somewhere safe where she could start over, I could count that the biggest win ever.

  As we rolled into the middle of the street and cranked the hot dog up to its maximum speed of fifty miles per hour, I had time as I clambered out onto the outermost front reaches of the metal bun to obsess over the contradiction between Horace Burton and myself. Horace’s goal, in this movie, was to take his hot dog out onto the open road and find the lost spirit of baseball. Horace didn’t want any trouble—but I, meanwhile, had no goal other than trouble, and (if I were being honest) no plans after today.

  How was I going to play that, in a way that preserved the integrity of Horace and his innocent love of sportsmanship? In fact—I reflected, as I raised a baseball and prepared to hurl it at the shaved head of the red bandana standing on the nearest corner in front of a shuttered florist—that might be the reason why people root for the comic hero after all: the haplessness. This fresh white baseball was emblazoned with a slogan about bringing back the greatest game, and the story called for Horace to toss them out as a promotional thing, and to hit a militia member in the head purely by accident. So it was important for the story that I not look as though I were aiming. But I also couldn’t afford to miss. Horace is a good person who just wants to bring joy to people, and he gets caught up in a bad situation, and the moment you think Horace brought this on himself through meanness or combativeness, that’s the moment you stop pulling for him.

  The baseball hit the teenager in the jaw, over the neatly tied red cloth that looked too big for his skinny neck, and he whipped around and fired off a few shots with his Browning Hi Performance, while also texting his comrades with his free hand.

  I tried to wear a convincing look of friendly panic, like I hadn’t meant to wake a thousand sleeping dogs with one stray baseball, and danced around on the front of the hot dog so hard I nearly fell under the wheels. I slipped and landed on my crotch on the very tip of the hot dog, then pulled myself back up, still trying to toss out promotional baseballs and spread goodwill, and it occurred to me for the first time that I had spent so much time worrying that I was going to hurt someone by accident, it never even occurred to me that I would finally reach a point where I would decide to cause harm on purpose.

  Our hot dog had red bandanas chasing us, with two motorcycles and some kind of hybrid electric Jeep. I had no idea if anybody was still shooting at me, because I couldn’t see anyone aiming a gun from where I stood on one foot and I couldn’t see any bullets hitting anything—

  —until a bullet hit me in the thigh just as the hot dog swerved without slowing and we released the blow-up dolls in their makeshift baseball uniforms. The blow-up dolls flew behind us, and I saw one of them hit a motorcyclist right where the red bandana tucked under his round white helmet, so that he lost his grip on his handlebars and went somersaulting, and I felt the blood seeping through my pants like maybe it had missed the bone but hit an artery and I was cursing myself for forgetting to bring a giant comedy bottle of ketchup to squirt at people, because ketchup is like fake blood only more cheerful, when Ricky Artesian climbed on top of the third car of the five that were now chasing us and held up a big flatscreen TV that read “YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE ROCK TIME TO PAY.” And another bullet tore through my side just as the hot dog made another sharp turn and we disappeared into the tunnel from the abandoned Back Bay T extension project.

  The hot dog came to a stop in a dark hutch Xed in by fallen rusted steel girders, just as one of our bready tires gave out and the whole vehicle slumped on one side, and our support crew set about camouflaging the Wienermobile with rocks and planks. Janelle cli
mbed out of the cab and came over to show me the vumble, the insane number of hits we were getting right now and the footage, in a loop, of me hurling baseballs at the red bandanas.

  Janelle noticed that I was pissing blood from my leg and my side, and started trying to get me to lie down. Just then a message came through from Sally, who was still masterminding the filming from a remote location: «“theyre not taking the bait.”» The bandanas were staying on their side of the line and not trying to chase us into the army barricades like we’d hoped.

  I slipped out of Janelle’s grasp—easy when you’re as slick as I was, just then—and leapt onto Zapp’s bicycle. Before anybody could try to stop me, I was already pedaling back up the ramp the way we’d come, past the people trying to seal and camouflage the entry to the tunnel, leaping from darkness into the light of day. I raced close enough to Ricky Artesian to make eye contact and hurl my last baseball—absolutely coated at this point with my own blood—at his pinstripe-suited torso. And then I spun and tore off in the direction of Storrow Drive again, not looking back to see if anyone was following me, racing with my head down, on the ramp that led up to the Turnpike.

  My phone thrummed with messages but I ignored it. I was already reaching the top of the ramp, all thoughts of Horace Burton, and lovable fall guys in general, forgotten. The checkpoint was a collection of pale blobs at ground level, plus a swarm of men and women with scorpion heads rushing around tending their one statuesque mecha and a collection of mustard-colored vehicles. My eyesight was going, my concentration going with it, and my feet kept sliding off the pedals, but I kept pedaling nonetheless, until I was close enough to yank out my last limited edition promotional baseball, pull my arm back and then straighten out with the hardest throw of my life.

  Then I wiped out. I fell partway behind a concrete barrier as Ricky and the other bandanas came up the ramp into the line of fire. I saw nothing of what came next, except that I smelled smoke and cordite and glimpsed a man with the red neck-gear falling on his hands and rearing back up, before I crawled the rest of the way behind my shelter and passed out.

  * * *

  When I regained consciousness, I was in a prison camp, where I nearly died, first of my wounds and later of a fiendish case of dysentery like you wouldn’t believe. I never saw Sally again, but I saw our last movie, once, on a stored file on someone’s battered old Stackbook. (This lady named Shari had saved the edited film to her hard drive before the Internet went futz, and people had been copying Ballpark Figure on thumb drives and passing it around ever since, whenever they had access to electricity.)

  The final act of Ballpark Figure was just soldiers and red bandanas getting drilled by each other’s bullets until they did a terrible slamdance, and I have to say the film lost any of its narrative thread regarding Horace Burton, or baseball, or the quest to restore professional sports to America, not to mention the comedy value of all those flailing bodies was minimal at best.

  The movie ended with a dedication: “To Rock Manning. Who taught me it’s not whether you fall, it’s how you land. Love, Sally.”

  The Day It All Ended

  Bruce Grinnord parked aslant in his usual spot and ran inside the DiZi Corp headquarters. Bruce didn’t check in with his team or even pause to glare at the beautiful young people having their toes stretched by robots while they sipped macrobiotic goji-berry shakes and tried to imagine ways to make the next generation of gadgets cooler-looking and less useful. Instead, he sprinted for the executive suite. He took the stairs two or three at a time, until he was so breathless he feared he’d have a heart attack before he even finished throwing his career away.

  DiZi’s founder, Jethro Gruber—Barron’s Young Visionary of the Year five years running—had his office atop the central spire of the funhouse castle of DiZi’s offices, in a round glass turret. Looking down on the employee oxygen bar and the dozen gourmet cafeterias. If you didn’t have the key to the private elevator, the only way up was this spiral staircase, which climbed past a dozen Executive Playspaces, and any one of those people could cockblock you before you got to Jethro’s pad. But nobody seemed to notice Bruce charging up the stairs, fury twisting his round face, even when he nearly put his foot between the steps and fell into the Moroccan Spice Café.

  Bruce wanted to storm into Jethro’s office and shout his resignation in Jethro’s trendy schoolmaster glasses. He wanted to enter the room already denouncing the waste, the stupidity of it all—but when he reached the top of the staircase, he was so out of breath, he could only wheeze, his guts wrung and cramped. He’d only been in Jethro’s office once before: an elegant goldfish bowl with one desk that changed shape (thanks to modular pieces that came out of the floor), a few chairs, and one dot of maroon rug at its center. Bruce stood there, massaging his dumb stomach and taking in the oppressive simplicity.

  So, Jethro spoke first, the creamy purr Bruce knew from a million company videos. “Hi, Bruce. You’re late.”

  “I’m . . . I’m what?”

  “You’re late,” Jethro said. “You were supposed to have your crisis of conscience three months ago.” He pulled out his Robo-Bop and displayed a personal calendar, which included one entry: “Bruce Has a Crisis of Conscience.” It was dated a few months earlier. “What kept you, man?”

  * * *

  It started when Bruce took a wrong turn on the way to work. Actually, he drove to the wrong office—the driving equivalent of a Freudian slip.

  He was on the interstate at seven thirty, listening to a banjo solo that he hadn’t yet learned to play. Out his right window, every suburban courtyard had its own giant ThunderNet tower, just like the silver statue in Bruce’s own cul-de-sac—the sleek concave lines and jet-streamed base like a 1950s Googie space fantasy. To his left, almost every passing car had a Car-Dingo bolted to its hood, with its trademark sloping fins and whirling lights. And half the drivers were listening to music, or making Intimate Confessions on their Robo-Bops. Once on the freeway, Bruce could see much larger versions of the ThunderNet tower dotting the landscape, from shopping-mall roofs as well as empty fields. Plus everywhere he saw giant billboards for DiZi’s newest product, the Crado—empty-faced, multicultural babies splayed out in a milk-white, egg-shaped chair that monitored the baby’s air supply and temperature in some way that Bruce still couldn’t explain.

  Bruce was a VP of marketing at DiZi—shouldn’t he be able to find something good to say about even one of the company’s products?

  So, this one morning, Bruce got off the freeway a few exits too soon. Instead of driving to the DiZi offices, he went down a feeder road to a dingy strip mall that had offices instead of dry cleaners. This was the route Bruce had taken for years before he joined DiZi, and he felt as though he’d taken the wrong commute by mistake.

  Bruce’s old parking spot was open, and he could almost pretend time had rolled back, except that he’d lost some hair and gained some weight. He found himself pushing past the white balsawood-and-metal door with the cheap sign saying ECO GNOMIC and into the offices, and then he stopped. A roomful of total strangers perched on beanbags and folding chairs turned and stared, and Bruce had no explanation for who he was or why he was there. “Uh,” Bruce said.

  The Eco Gnomic offices looked like crap compared to DiZi’s majesty, but also compared to the last time he’d seen them. Take the giant Intervention Board that covered the main wall: When Bruce had worked there, it’d been covered with millions of multicolored tacks attached to scraps of incidents. This company is planning a major polluting project, so we mobilize culture-jammer flash mobs here and organize protesters at the public hearing there. Like a giant multidimensional chess game covering one wall, deploying patience and playfulness against the massive corporate engine. Now, though, the Intervention Board contained nothing but bad news, without much in the way of strategies. Arctic shelf disintegrating, floods, superstorms, droughts, the Gulf Stream stuttering, extinctions like dominos falling. The office furniture teetered on broken legs, and the sa
me computers from five years ago whined and stammered. The young woman nearest Bruce couldn’t even afford a proper Mohawk—her hair grew back in patches on the sides of her head, and the stripe on top was wilting. None of these people seemed energized about saving the planet.

  Bruce was about to flee when his old boss, Gerry Donkins, showed up and said, “Bruce! Welcome back to the nonprofit sector, man.” Bruce and Gerry wound up spending an hour sitting on crates, drinking expired Yoo-hoo. “Yeah, Eco Gnomic is dying,” said Gerry, giant mustache twirling, “but so is the planet.”

  “I feel like I made a terrible mistake,” Bruce said. He looked at the board and couldn’t see any pattern to the arrangement of ill omens.

  “You did,” Gerry replied. “But it doesn’t make any difference, and you’ve been happy. You’ve been happy, right? We all thought you were happy. How is Marie, by the way?”

  “Marie left me two years ago,” Bruce said.

  “Oh,” Gerry said.

  “But on the plus side, I’ve been taking up the banjo.”

  “Anyway, no offense, but you wouldn’t have made a difference if you’d stayed with us. We probably passed the point of no return a while back.”

  Point of no return. It sounded sexual, or like letting go of a trapeze at the apex of its arc.

  “You did the smart thing,” said Gerry, “going to work for the flashiest consumer products company and enjoying the last little bit of the ride.”

  Bruce got back in his Prius and drove the rest of the way to work, past the rows of ThunderNet towers and the smoke from far-off forest fires. This felt like the last day of the human race, even though it was just another day on the steep slope. As Bruce reached the lavender glass citadel of DiZi’s offices, he started to go numb inside, like always. But instead, this time, a fury took him, and that’s when he charged inside and up the stairs to Jethro’s office, ready to shove his resignation down the CEO’s throat.