Lisa, we called her. Oh, yeah, she was fine—we knew she would be. We took a blood sample in the second trimester and had it tested: She’s going to die of emphysema, so unless she’d been bumming smokes off the placenta in there, we were in the clear. She and I.
She’s going to be an interesting case, actually—it’s not something that happens quickly, emphysema, so I’ll be intrigued to see how I fail this woman so utterly that I end up repeatedly exposing her to a toxic gas over the course of enough years that it ultimately destroys her lungs and kills her. Am I just going to forget to tell her, for her entire life, “Oh, and don’t smoke”? You have to wonder.
I was already overcompensating—I actually hit a guy last week for pulling out a cigarette at a housewarming party I was hosting at Pete’s old place, my old office, the place where it started. He’d left it to Jen, but she’d given it to me when she left the country. She didn’t ask for any money and I didn’t offer any; Jen and I had a double-share each now, so it made no difference to either of us. We hardly talked, anyway. Tragedy doesn’t bring people together, who started that bullshit? It’s like nitro-fucking-glycerin.
“Does anyone have a light?” he said.
“No, but I have a…lights out…sandwich?” I almost said, before realising how amazingly lame it was. I’d already hit him by then, too, so I think the point had been made. It was almost a reflex.
I’ve been steadily losing it for a year now. I should come up with a more peaceful solution, like “Actually I’d rather you smoked outside. In Kazahkstan.” But I don’t think it’s going to come up again, not now.
I was working in my old office when it happened, the crib within arm’s reach. He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster, and nearly fell over trying to stop. For that split second, when it was just a blur, on my life I thought it would be Pete.
It wasn’t Pete. He was huge. A big, broken, sad face. I didn’t say anything, just stared. He must have been six foot six. He stared too, wild. We stared. He said two low, fragile words, “My son,” then trailed off and just pointed it at me.
The words sounded dumb even as I spluttered them: “Please, I have a—”
He dropped the gun, apparently surprised by what he’d done, though from my perspective it was hard to see how it might have been an accident. I couldn’t see what was in his other hand, but I had a good guess. He presented it to me timidly, like a receipt for our transaction, and I could see then that this had not been his plan. He must have imagined shoving it in my face, or making me eat it as I died. The whole thing seemed to be surprising him a lot more than it was me. I always figured I had something like this coming.
I was paralysed, I could feel that immediately. My body felt like soft lead, heavy and heatless, as I slumped against the oak-panelled wall, heart pounding, my head bent awkwardly down into my chest as the last twinges of control and sensation faded from my clammy hands. I gurgled like a baby. Blood, I saw, sticky brilliant blood dribbling down my chin. Messy business.
I couldn’t take the slip from his hand, but I could read it even through the rivers of sweat trickling into my eyes. And I could see his issue with me—with us, but Pete lucked out and died first. I could see how horrible the last three years must have been for this hulking man and his tiny kid, and how much worse that final moment must have been. POISON. One of the machine’s bitterest pills. He probably thought it was the worst you could get. I knew better, but I wasn’t in a position to argue.
Ah, who knew? Maybe it was. I tried to imagine watching Lisa suckle one of those cold rubber teats I filled Cath’s role with, knowing that any given gulp might be infected with a fatal toxin. He must have known that checking his food beforehand wouldn’t help, but I knew, now, having Lisa, that it wouldn’t have stopped him. Nothing could have stopped him. He probably starved him for a while. Okay, big guy, maybe you’re right. You’ve certainly got me beat. All I had to endure was seven months of knowing that I’d kill the woman I loved. I got off easy. I deserve this.
It wasn’t until after a few sizable seconds of self-pity that something I’d said over a year ago suddenly drifted through my head again. “When something actually happens, you forget,” or words to that effect. I almost laughed. Ha! I just remembered, I don’t die like this! Screw you and your dead son, asshole! I’m going to get up and kick your ass now, and after that I’m going to raise my goddamn daughter to lead a long, happy life dying of emphysema! If you’ll just give me the use of my limbs for a moment.
I managed to cough a bubble of blood, close enough to stain him with a few flecks. Take that! My breath stank of, what, money? Dirty loose change, that acid stink. The only thing I could feel was the sweat trickling down my face, nothing below the neck—so much goddamn sweat. Who knew getting shot was such hard work? I was excited now, though, this was my thing. My heart raced. The impossible, you big-boned prick, is my goddamn speciality. You are so fucked. I was just about to stand up, I felt sure, when he slammed an enormous knee into my chest and kept it there, kneeling on me with what must have been all of his gigantic weight.
When I came to I saw, even as the pressure mounted, nothing on my chest. Both the man’s knees were walking away from me to investigate a tiny cry from Lisa in the crib. I couldn’t see his reaction, I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t get this invisible fucking thing off my chest, I couldn’t breathe.
I had just enough time to think, “Oh come on, this hardly counts,” before I let out a sad little rasp and it all closed in.
Fuck.
Story by Tom Francis
Illustration by Jesse Reklaw
NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT THE FOURTH DAY OF NINTH GRADE IS WHEN YOU GET YOUR RESULTS. I mean, that’s the way it happens in our town; other towns do it differently. Amy, who moved here from Atlanta, said that in the big cities they do it when you’re born, since they have to take blood from babies, anyhow, to test for HIV and that disease that means you can’t drink Diet Coke. (She says she’s going to be shot in a botched robbery, but I think she’s lying. She also said her aunt is on Days of Our Lives, and I don’t believe that either.) But here, in our town, all the parents got together and decided that they just couldn’t take knowing before we were at least in high school. Tim K. says it’s because when you’re in ninth grade, your parents find you so annoying that they can actually bear to think about you dying. Allycia thinks it’s because when you’re our age you think you’re immortal and they want to scare it out of us. That might have been true for our parents, or our grandparents, but I don’t know anyone our age who hasn’t always known that they’re really going to die.
The way it works is pretty easy. The first day of ninth grade, in homeroom, the school nurse comes in and takes blood samples. She gives a ten-minute speech about the machine and how it works. (Short answer: nobody knows, but it’s never been wrong.) She tells us that she’s going to die in a fire. She doesn’t even shiver when she tells us that—I guess when you’ve known for years and get up and talk about it every year, it becomes routine. And I guess as a nurse she knows that more people die from smoke inhalation in a fire than from actually being all burnt up.
It’s weird to see other people’s blood. Darryn and Mike, the two biggest boys in homeroom, can’t even watch. I watch the needle go in, careful not to look away. I might want to be a doctor someday. It’s hard to decide what you want to do with your life until you know how it’s going to end.
All the blood, each sample in a little barcoded tube, goes into one of those freaky BIOHAZARD mailers, and the nurse seals it in front of us. She has a whole cart of packages. Our homeroom was last.
Then we wait. Of course it’s all anyone can talk about. Helen wants to die glamorously, like in a terrorist attack. “Do you know how much money your family gets if you die in a terrorist attack?” Naturally, we all hoot at this—there haven’t been hardly any terrorist attacks at all, since the machine. There are sti
ll some every once in a while, in really poor places like India and Russia, where people can’t afford the test, but it’s hard to scare people about terrorism if they know they’re going to die because they stuck a fork in a toaster. Kells wants to die of old age, but that sounds awful and boring to me. And everyone knows that it’s impossible to get a job in a rock band if you have a test that says “old age.” All the record labels are looking for the next Kurt Cobain—death, even when you know it’s coming, still bumps up downloads and sales. You know that singer Bryson? She got “drug overdose” and you can’t even click on a tabloid page without a picture of her looking wasted. Her music sucks but everyone can’t wait to see how she flames out. My brother thinks it’s all a big put-on. He thinks she’s totally straightedge and “drug overdose” means that some overworked nurse is going to give her the wrong dose eighty years from now when she’s in a nursing home. Mylena wants mad cow disease. She says if she gets that it means she’ll never die, ’cause she’s a vegetarian, and always has been. Her parents are vegetarians and everything.
It’s hard to know what to wish for. Old age could be dying in bed, with all of your family around you, just like in a movie, with your daughter holding your hand and a room full of flowers, or it could be horrible Alzheimer’s and being tied to a bed so you don’t wander off, with no one there at all but you don’t care because you can’t remember anyone anyway. Car accident could be instant or it could be paralysis or amputation and infected bedsores that give you that staph they don’t have antibiotics for anymore. Heart failure could be a dramatic heart attack, the fall-down-clutching-your-chest kind, or it could just be you get old, your heart stops. As I said, it’s hard to know.
My mom and dad have the same one. Cancer. They met at a death party in college, where you got paired up with someone who was going to die the same way. They were the only two cancers at the party; by the time the machine came around most cancer was curable. Which sucks for them because they know they’re going to have one of the bad kinds of cancer, like ovarian or pancreatic or brain, the really painful kinds. At least now when you get those kinds of cancer the doctors know you’re going die from it, and they give you lots of painkillers. It used to be that it was hard to get painkillers, my mom told me. When her grandma died of breast cancer she was in lots of pain but the doctors wouldn’t give her drugs in case she got addicted. That’s because nobody knew she was going to die of the cancer. They thought maybe the cancer would go away and then they’d have an old lady addicted to morphine to deal with. That doesn’t happen anymore.
My brother has just “accident,” which freaks him out. It freaked us all out. Usually the machine is pretty specific. Car accident, household accident, whatever kind of accident. Just plain accident is pretty rare. For a while he went through what everyone goes through—the whole avoidy thing. He put grab bars in our shower. He walked to school, instead of riding the bus or his bike or driving. He was really worried that it would keep him from becoming a pilot, which is what he really wants to do, but then he talked to a recruiter and the guy said they don’t really pay attention to that so much. He said so many pilots actually have “plane crash” that he knows ten guys, personally, who are nicknamed “Crash.” It’s like a macho thing, to get in that plane every day knowing you’re going to die in a crash. Of course most of them crash flying their own personal miniplanes, not the jets.
My grandmas are both dead; one died before the machine, just had an aneurysm. The other grandma, my dad’s mom…she was one of the first ones to use the machine in their town. Her ticket said suicide. My dad said she didn’t tell anyone she was having the test. She just waited for all of them—my dad, his sister, his dad—to leave the house the next day, and then she took two bottles of sleeping pills. They didn’t even know she had them; she got the prescription in another town and had been saving them. She didn’t leave a real note. She just wrote “I’m sorry, I knew it” on her machine report and left it on the table. My grandpa—her husband—he’s never taken the test. He says that it’s wrong to know, and that the whole human race is going to descend into mediocrity because of it. (He talks like that a lot.) He says that the fear of death, coupled with its unpredictability, is what drives humanity to achieve. He likes to talk about how there haven’t been any real scientific advances since the machine. He says everyone is too busy spending time with their families and enjoying life to do any real work. Then he laughs and lights another cigarette. He’s the only person I know who smokes. It’s crazy old-fashioned, like wearing a monocle or having a gas-powered car. He can’t even buy them in town anymore, he has to have them imported from India. Once they shipped him the wrong brand and he had to smoke bright pink ones for a week until he got more. The pack played this loud Bollywood song whenever he opened it. That was even funnier.
My other grandpa, my mom’s dad, is going to die from pneumonia. He says his goal is to put it off as long as possible. He always gets a flu shot, he drinks all this horrible green vitamin juice powder stuff, and he exercises more than anyone I know. We all tease him about it, but he says he’s going to be the world’s oldest pneumonia victim.
I don’t really know too much about other people’s tickets. Most people don’t talk about it. It’s hard to know what to say, when you find out someone’s going to be shot, or hit by a car, or fall from a height. You either find yourself saying “that’s not so bad” or you just talk about something else. It’s kind of rude to ask someone that you don’t know well. And since it’s so vague, sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. I heard that there was this girl in Charlotte, one of the first people to get the test, and her ticket said she’d die at graduation. So she wore black all through high school, really gothed-out. She was like, queen of the goths. And her graduation came and went, and nothing happened. College, too. She went to law school: nothing. I heard she finally died driving across a totally different campus and the crane that was putting up the graduation reception tent backed into her car. I know this is probably an urban legend but I don’t want to snope it and find out.
Some people you do know how they’ll die. Like, if they’re famous. Famous people’s tickets always get out. Someone they told will tell the tabloid pages—I’ve heard they pay a lot of money for famous tickets. Politicians have to disclose it. One guy who was running for governor in Tennessee faked his—his really said “shot by a hooker” and he got it to read “stroke.” Of course someone sold that story. Now the politicians have to have their tests taken in public and read right there. That one movie actress, the really pretty one, what’s her name—her ticket actually says “broken heart.” I’ve never heard of anyone else having that one. Of course people didn’t believe her so she went on TV and had the test retaken, and there it was. She is always being paired with her costars in the tabloids, like, she’ll be in a movie with some guy and the headline will read “WILL HE BE THE ONE TO KILL HER???” She just laughs it off, but I’d be afraid. You can’t help falling in love, right? It’s not like you can have a grab bar for going on dates.
The day you get your results back there aren’t any classes; you just show up for homeroom. They call you in one by one to another room to get your ticket, and then you just go home. Lots of people’s parents take the day off. If they’re really dorky they meet you at school. You can’t really hang around after, although everyone’s texting each other on their phones. Not asking, outright, just “U OK?” Lots of people don’t talk about theirs, and that’s cool. The teachers discourage it, for the most part, and sometimes your parents get mad if you tell somebody. There was this girl, Julia, in my brother’s class and hers said AIDS. She told just one person, her best friend, and then they had a fight and that girl spread it all over school. They wrote “SLUT” on her locker and stuffed it full of condoms. It was awful. Her folks didn’t know what to do. Finally they just moved. I think they live in Asheville now. Maybe she even changed her name.
When they called me I felt a little nervous. Like, everyone knows
they’re going to die, but it’s still a wobbly feeling to find out exactly how. My knees felt like they wanted to bend the wrong way, and I almost tripped getting out of my chair. I grabbed my bag and waved to Kells. She mouthed “old age!” at me and gave me a thumbs-up. I smiled back.
I went into the room and sat down, and the counselor made me go through the whole routine. I had to tell him my social, twice. I had to do the iris-scanner, both eyes. I had to show him the waiver from my parents that allowed him to tell me without them present, and I had to sign a form allowing him to tell me, period, and releasing the test people from liability. Then I had to do the breathalyzer; a couple of years ago kids would show up wasted or high for their tests, so now you can’t get the results unless you’re sober.
Finally he brought out my ticket. It wasn’t in an envelope or anything, it was just the top one in his folder. The folder was black, which I thought was kind of weird. Like, why make the folder black? He was dressed in just regular clothes, tan pants and a blue shirt, no tie or anything, so the black folder just seemed kinda pretentious.
“You have a slightly unusual result,” he said. That wasn’t good. Unusual meant stuff like mauled by a bear, or electric-mixer accident, or choked on a pickle. Stupid stuff. Not dramatic or cool.
“Let me see.” I really didn’t want to wait. He pushed the ticket over to me.
In block letters, it said NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING.
The man said, “It’s a line from a poem.” He held his pen like he didn’t know what it was for.
“But it still means I’m drowning, right? It’s not so bad.”
“We’d like you to have the test retaken. It’s unusual to get something like this. Something so…allusive.”
Machine of Death Page 15
