This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

  “I don’t know,” Eliot said. “For me, it would be working for a paycheck. I don’t know how important paychecks are now.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to work today,” she said.

  Eliot, wearing sweats and a T-shirt, dialed Rosemary from the garden while Lydia made her calls from the kitchen. The vegetables were established; the annual flowers were growing tall, some of the perennials already blooming. He brushed his hand across the petals of a tulip while Rosemary’s phone rang.

  “Listen, Rosemary?” he said. “Something’s come up. I can’t come in today.”

  “Is everything okay?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Fine.” He bent down and plucked a yellow leaf from the bottom of a young tomato vine. “I’m sure I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Well, I’ll take as many of your patients as I can. I owe you one. A few, actually.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “The next lunch is on me.”

  “Oh!” she said. “That reminds me. I read a review of a place last night. It’s a tea bar and café, and totally punk rock. Can we try it? Can we try it?”

  “Yeah. Rosemary?” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

  Lydia knelt beside him at the flowerbed. Eliot had dragged the cultivating fork between the stems and was breaking up small clods of earth with his fingers. “I was evasive,” she said. “On the phone just now with pasty-faced Gary. What am I supposed to say to him that doesn’t run the risk of ruining his life?”

  Lydia had always understood, in an instinctive way that Eliot envied, the horror of a known fate. She never needed to refer to the case studies from the Oedipus years—the painful period after the machine’s invention, during which human suffering crested as people learned their fates. A few times a year, Eliot would drag out textbooks to remind himself of the grimmest of the Death Machine stories; Lydia cringed when he tried to read them to her.

  “You know,” he said, “you don’t actually know how you’re going to die.” He brushed the soil from his hands. “With twenty-nine years left on the clock, you could totally be cut down by cancer, or—I don’t know—a serial strangler or something.”

  She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, Eliot,” she said. “You always know just the thing to say.”

  That afternoon, they read together in the study. She had a novel; he’d loaded the noon edition of the Times. He lowered the paper and gazed at a blank portion of the wall. “There are cheaper places to live than D.C.,” he said.

  She closed her book around her finger. “And we’ve built up a lot of equity in the house,” she said.

  “Do you think it’s enough? If we sold this place and moved to backwoods Alabama, could we make it for twenty-nine years?”

  “I could still research part-time,” she said. “Telecommute. Leave plenty of time for reading and gardening. I could finally get back into sketching.”

  “I could start a little practice. Just a few patients a week. Couples therapy and things.”

  Lydia shook her head at him in mock exasperation. “You’re going to buy a guitar, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “A loud one.”

  An ambulance ran by a few blocks away, howling, then fading in the distance. “Other people can apply filters to data just as well as I can,” Lydia said. “We could be yokels, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Hot yokels.”

  After dark, after dinner, they sat in chairs in the backyard, glasses of wine on a table between them. The sky had gone overcast and the lights of the city, reflected on the clouds, cast everything in a lambent blush.

  “I’ve been thinking about some of the case studies you’ve told me about over the years,” Lydia said. “I’ve been thinking about the cases when the machine seemed… almost malevolent.”

  “Malevolent?” he said.

  “I’m anthropomorphizing, I know. Still. I remember a case when an adult—a happy, middle-aged man—received a slip that read ‘suicide.’ He started pulling hard on all the loose threads of his life to try to understand the prediction. Everything fell apart and he ended up killing himself a year later.”

  Eliot nodded. The details of that case—Suicidal Sam, students called him—had persuaded a number of his patients not to file Death Machine requests. “Malevolence suggests agency,” he said. “Suicidal Sam was a straightforward tragedy.”

  “Forget I said malevolence. I just mean this: would he have killed himself without the prediction?”

  “Everything we understand about the machine says that he would. The textbooks say he would.”

  “There are the other cases, the misleading fortunes that really do go straight back to Oedipus. Would Oedipus have left Corinth if it hadn’t been for the oracle? Would—was her name Richardson?—have emigrated to Ireland if not for a misleading death slip about snakes? Would that football player have surrounded himself with nothing but men if not for an unusually poetic death slip about a woman scorned?”

  “I know. It’s hard for me to believe that the machine isn’t sometimes, whatever, malevolent. In some of those cases, it sure looks like the fortune was designed to prompt the very decisions that eventually bring it about.”

  Lydia topped off their glasses and checked the level in the bottle. “You don’t have to go as far as design. I’m just saying that the machine itself is sometimes involved as a necessary link in the causal chain.”

  “Yeah,” Eliot said. “It’s not the received view, but it seems obviously true to me.”

  “So here’s one possible scenario. In twenty-nine years, a dinosaur-killer asteroid hits the earth and everybody dies.”

  “Sure.”

  “Here’s another. I tell Gary what I’ve discovered. You tell Rosemary.” Eliot shifted in his chair. “I confirm the trends with standard, accepted statistical methods and take it to the bosses. Over the next three decades, word leaks and spreads. People leave their jobs to pursue lives that seem more important in the gloomy new context. Court systems, police forces, infrastructures grow weaker as people withdraw to take up painting or ballroom dancing or saxophone. The date approaches, the level of panic rises, riots break out and spread, and the world ends.”

  “I think I prefer the asteroid,” Eliot said.

  “Except—”

  “Except what? ”

  “The second scenario could be averted.”

  “Lydia! Of all the people—”

  “This isn’t as unorthodox as it sounds. I don’t think so, anyway. Look, if the machine is involved in the causal chain, we have an opportunity to take it out. If Oedipus hadn’t heard the prediction of the oracle, he wouldn’t have left Corinth. This is Oedipus writ large. If the people don’t hear the prediction, the machine is removed from the causal chain, and the fate doesn’t come to pass.”

  She took a long drink of wine and put her glass down on the table, leaning over the arm of her chair toward him, and continued. “We should have years yet before the death slips trigger the standard trip wires. I just stop developing my new work—claim it was a failure. We can use the time to coordinate a response—a cover-up, I guess—with one or two bosses we know we can trust. If we can keep this contained, it could work.”

  Eliot looked at Lydia. He wanted to reach out and touch her. One day—one day on her heels after devastating, life-changing news—and she was already forming a plan to fight back. A plan that struck him as totally plausible. “Does this mean no Alabama?” he said. “Does this mean I have to go back to work tomorrow?”

  “I don’t see any real choice. We kind of have to try.” Lydia reached between the chairs to squeeze his knee. “We’ll start looking for something better for you,” she said. “In the evenings.”

  The next morning, Lydia and Eliot shared a grapefruit and a pot of coffee. They got dressed and walked to the driveway to wait for pasty-faced Gary. Across the street, he and his wife, Alina, were already outside, strapping a roof rack to their sedan. Both of them were moving in bursts of energy that remin
ded Eliot of Lydia in the garden two days before.

  “Gary!” Lydia called. “What’s up?”

  Gary jogged across the street while Alina finished tying off the rack. “You’re still here?” he said, squinting against the sun. “I didn’t know.” He looked over his shoulder at his wife, then back at Lydia. “We’re going to stay with Alina’s parents while we reorient.”

  “Reorient?” Lydia said.

  “I hate my job. Alina hates hers. Who wants to prepare for Armageddon by wasting a life?”

  “Armageddon? What are you talking about?”

  “Seriously, Lydia. You freaked out and disappeared from work in the middle of the day,” Gary said. “You were creepy. We checked what you were working on. IT opened up your computer for us, and the files were all right there.” He looked like he couldn’t decide whether he was embarrassed or annoyed. “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  Lydia looked at Eliot, then turned back to Gary. “So the bosses know what I found?”

  “Yes, they know,” he said.

  “And you told your family too? Parents? Cousins?”

  “Them too,” he said.

  Eliot watched Alina across the street. He thought she might be crying. Gary gave Lydia an awkward hug and shook Eliot’s hand. Eliot and Lydia waited as their neighbors loaded the trunk and roof rack, climbed into the car, and drove away.

  “Well,” Lydia said, “I guess Armageddon’s back on.”

  Eliot fought back a grin.

  “You’re smiling?” Lydia said. She looked at her car and at their house and down the empty street. “That’s totally inappropriate.”

  * * *

  Story by D.L.E. Roger

  Illustration by Sam Bosma

  SCREAMING, CRYING, ALONE, AND AFRAID

  1

  “THIS IS NOT GOOD-RIGHT,” Jabu said.

  He stank. That his stink was discernable amid the competing odors of the Harare market was a mark of just how intense it was. He clutched the vial of blood Kira had given him within filthy fingers.

  “For you I do yesterday, but no do for somebody else unless he comes himself. Not good-right. It like cheating. Bloodread is private. Like diary.”

  Kira knew that Jabu didn’t really have a moral issue. He was just after more of that mzungu money. Having white skin in Harare was like wearing a sign that said, “Have Money, Please Swindle Me.” No need to beat around the bush. “I’ll pay you extra. Double.”

  Jabu grinned; his teeth were stained and uneven. He held the vial up and shook the blood like a bartender preparing a cocktail. “Money first.”

  Kira handed him forty U.S. dollars. Since 2009, Zimbabwe had been using the U.S. dollar. Kira still had some one-trillion notes from before the switch. They were party pieces she took with her whenever she went back to England for Christmas.

  Jabu took the blood to a large wooden chest he had at the back of his kiosk. He glanced to see if anyone was looking before pulling it open. He poured some of the blood into a disc and pressed a button. It purred into life. Jabu meanwhile lifted an animal’s skull from behind the chest. Kira guessed it was a cow’s or buffalo’s but she couldn’t be sure as she was not well versed in bovine anatomy. Jabu began to sway while mumbling a chant.

  Eight years ago, back in England, when Kira had got her forecast, it had been in a sterile room akin to a gynecologist’s clinic. While waiting she had flipped through the pages of a tabloid magazine. Watching Jabu’s gyrations and gobbledygook was a more diverting way to wait for a result than reading the sordid details of the Sugababes’ love lives.

  As he had the day before, Jabu finished his ritual by flinging aside the skull and collapsing. She waited politely as he rose, composed himself, and lifted a small slip of paper out of the chest. He read it and his eyes widened.

  “What is it?” Kira asked.

  “I’m sorry.” He handed her the slip.

  Jabu grabbed Kira’s hand, clumsily trying to express sympathy. “It is to be badly dying for your friend.”

  Kira looked at the prediction. SCREAMING, CRYING, ALONE, AND AFRAID.

  Shit. Nothing useful. Back to square one.

  2

  To think, Jabu had almost not bought the rickety Death Machine. When Mr. Richards, the man from whom Jabu bought expired medical supplies, had told him he had acquired a Death Machine, Jabu had said, So what? He didn’t think it would make him money. Besides that, there was the risk. Privately owned Death Machines were illegal. All predictions were meant to be made at the state-owned ZFC (Zimbabwe Forecast Center). Mr. Richards had convinced Jabu to lease it for a month and see if it was worth buying. He had been shocked. More people paid him to find out how they would die than paid him for cures. Death predictions and love potions were the top sellers.

  Jabu’s neighbor Marcus Chuma sold books. He sold many that were on the government-banned list, so there was no chance of him telling the police about Jabu’s Death Machine.

  Naturally curious, Marcus strolled over. “What did that white lady want?” As always, he was wearing a dusty suit. No matter how hot it was, Marcus wore a suit.

  “She wanted a bloodread,” Jabu answered in Shona. Both Jabu and Marcus spoke Tswana and Shona, but Jabu’s Shona was better than Marcus’s Tswana. “It won’t help your paper, though. It was a repeat. SCREAMING, CRYING, ALONE, AND AFRAID, like last week. I think maybe she was sent to check I was not fake by her friend. I would check too after such a scary prediction. Poor girl.”

  “Unless two people had the same prediction. I wonder how often that happens,” Marcus said pensively.

  Jabu was unsurprised. “Another book idea?” Marcus was always boring him with ideas he had for books and academic papers.

  Marcus nodded. “Maybe. But I think maybe, after this one is finished, never again. Too much work.”

  “If you ever finish it.”

  “She was nice looking, the white lady,” Marcus said. “Not skinny like they usually are.”

  Jabu wondered if she’d be back.

  3

  The seventh body was found in a Dumpster behind a mosque. Like the first six, it was heavily bruised and covered in wounds from a knife or scalpel. The coroner confirmed that the body had been washed thoroughly postmortem.

  The victim was young Ethiopian girl, probably sixteen or seventeen.

  “No signs of rape,” the coroner said. “There’s that at least.”

  Kira said nothing. She supposed it was natural to try to find a positive to cling to, but she couldn’t. This girl had been abducted, tortured, and finally killed.

  “Did you?” she asked.

  Surreptitiously, he handed her a vial of blood. “Did the last one help?”

  “I’m grasping at straws,” Kira replied. “Whoever is doing this, they are meticulous. Nobody has seen anything.”

  “And if she’s like the others”—he waved a hand over her body—“I’ll find no traces.”

  “The first six were all found near churches,” a familiar voice said behind Kira. “Now he’s killed a Muslim, he left her by a mosque.” The owner of the voice was a tall balding man with coal-black skin who loved what little authority he had so much that Kira was sure he slept in his uniform. Detective Inspector Mudarikwa resented Kira, and she loathed him.

  “He left traces,” Mudarikwa continued. “If you know how to look. The way he beat them but then washed them and wrapped them in a blanket. The fact he left them near their places of worship but one in a derelict building, two in Dumpsters, one…”

  Kira started walking out. She didn’t have time to listen to Mudarikwa’s pontificating. He had studied criminal psychology in South Africa and he seized upon every opportunity to choke people with displays of his superior knowledge.

  “Yes. Go,” he seethed. “Leave it to the police.”

  4

  “What this for?” Jabu barked at Kira four days later. “Is they ashamed to come for themselves? Do they pay you much money and you come have it cheap-cheap?”

&
nbsp; “If you have a problem doing this, I can go to someone else.”

  “No, no, no,” he yelped. “I just ask because strange. You no want to say, all right.”

  Jabu’s kiosk was more cluttered than it had been the last two times Kira had come. Clearly he had just had a delivery. He had remedies for everything. Pills for headaches, salves for burns, and beyond that more esoteric cures. A blackboard hanging from a loop of razor wire had a chalk-written list beneath the title “DOCTOR 7 DAYS” (he guaranteed all his remedies worked within a week). Impotence. Drunkenness. Bad dreams. Wife beating. Kira wondered which of the bottled syrups was Jabu’s wife-beating cure. She had found divorce papers had worked well enough. Simon had punched her only once. Nobody knew. Kira’s mother didn’t know, and in letters she still updated Kira on what Simon was up to. Kira wasn’t sure why she had never told her what had actually happened. The lie she told was that Simon had cheated on her. For some reason it had been easier to tell people that.

  “Infidelity,” Kira suggested when Jabu completed his ritual and handed her the sliver of paper with the forecast.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Infidelity, unfaithfulness. You should add a cure for that.” She pointed at the blackboard. “You would sell many.”

  “You need?” he asked, totally misunderstanding her intent. “I can make for you cheap-cheap. But how, I wonder how? How can it be? What man would be bad faith to woman like you? You beautiful.” He puckered his lips and blew her a kiss.

  She looked down at the paper.

  HE WILL LAUGH WHILE YOU CRY.

  5

  FROM “NECROLINGUISTICS”

  By Marcus Chantunya

  One of the reasons people find it hard to accept Death Machine forecasts as purely scientific phenomena is the language of the predictions. You would expect a machine to produce purely empirical data, as one would find in an almanac. GPS coordinates or simple descriptive words like “heart attack,” “internal bleeding.” However, so many predictions are poetic. “WHILE TRYING TO SAVE ANOTHER” instead of “fire.” “HE WILL LAUGH WHILE YOU CRY” instead of “beaten and tortured to death.” Some predictions have a sense of humor. In some cases the word choice indicates sadness or anger. The language of the predictions seems to reveal personality. Whose personality? God’s?