This Is How You Die

by Matthew Bennardo

  That had to be a sign. I had to tell someone what I’d done.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Paganini,” I breathed, dragging Debbie from the counter and leading her outside the R&R.

  “What are you doing, Tess?” she squealed, squirming.

  “Stop it!” I hissed, looking around. “Debbie, you’re my dearest friend in the whole world, so I know you can keep a secret.” She nodded earnestly. “You have to swear that you’ll never breathe a word of what I’m gonna tell you to anyone ever.” She nodded again. “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I lied to you about how I’m gonna die.” She got a strange look on her face. I rushed to explain. “I got on the john, same as Mr. Paganini, only I was so ashamed I didn’t wanna tell anybody. So I lied. And told you I didn’t get my slip at all. Then I started saving up for another prediction.” She was staring at me. “I’m sorry.” Still staring. “Deb?”

  “Tess?” She had a weird look about her.

  “Yeah?” I asked, red faced, staring at my shoes.

  “I got the same thing.”

  My head snapped back up. “What?”

  Talking fast like she does when she’s anxious, Debbie told me she’d gotten so mad at me for not getting my slip that she’d snuck out by herself and gotten her prediction. Only she’d gotten on the john too and threw the slip in the fireplace when she got home. She said she nearly died of shame.

  It wasn’t long before the gossip spread. Debbie told Joe and Joe told his gang and someone in his gang told Lucy, and then everybody knew. Everybody had heard.

  And everybody had done the same.

  Even Mrs. Hudson, who had apparently been too curious to resist the devil’s temptation, tearfully admitted that she had gotten the same slip as everyone else—all lowercase, on the john. Her book-club ladies shunned her for a day but quickly broke down to admit that they had done the same. One by one, people confessed. Joe Schafer scratched his head, embarrassed, and hooked his thumbs in his jeans when he told me, then asked me if I wanted to go to lunch at the R&R sometime. Lucy Swett went into hysterics and wouldn’t leave her house, shrieking that her reputation was ruined. Marge Flicker and Toby Dale called off their wedding. Mayor Leetch called for a town meeting.

  “Residents of Almond Hill, don’t be alarmed.” He cleared his throat. His hands were shaky and covered with liver spots. He spoke very slowly. “The so-called Machine of Death present in our community these past two weeks was a hoax, meant to swindle us out of our hard-earned money. I have contacted the FBI and they have informed me that they have identified a string of incidences similar to this one, perpetrated by the same suspect.” He cleared his throat again. “They call him Johnny.”

  There were some nervous titters at that.

  “We are cautioned to only use approved machines that employ proper medical and legal procedures. Trusted brands include DeathScope, Nex, Future-Care—” Coughs racked Mayor Leetch’s frail body, and we half expected him to die right there. “Justice will be served,” he wheezed. Dr. Hudson rushed to help him.

  We quickly figured out that there was nothing else for Mayor Leetch to say. Everyone shuffled home, murmuring embarrassedly among themselves. I heard Mrs. Hudson sidle up to Mrs. Calloway.

  “Helen, did you know?” Mrs. Hudson asked, trying to be tactful. “Did you know that it was a fake?”

  “I didn’t look closely. I’ve already had mine done.”

  “Could you tell, though? If you had looked closer?”

  Mrs. Calloway made a sound halfway between a chuckle and a sniff.

  “Didn’t have you sign no forms, did it?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Hudson ashamedly.

  “Didn’t take your blood or nothing, did it?” asked Mrs. Calloway.

  “No.”

  Mrs. Calloway shook her head.

  “You all deserved it,” she said. “Bunch of goddamn lying fools.”

  * * *

  Story by Rhiannon Kelly

  Illustration by Leela Wagner

  SHIV SENA RIOT

  Tuesday

  “THANK YOU FOR CALLING MACHINE of Death Analysis. My name is Manisha; may I know your cause of death?”

  “The card just says ‘train.’ ”

  Manisha’s upbeat voice hid the fact that it was the last call of a very long night. She could barely keep her eyes open. Her mother simply did not consider an all-night shift to be an excuse to spend the day in bed, so it had been a while since she’d had anything resembling real sleep.

  “Thank you for providing me with that information, sir. Let me see what data we have on people with the same reading, so we can find the most likely circumstances of your death,” she continued, as friendly as ever. She typed the word into her computer and waited for the stat sheet to appear. “I see that there are twenty-three entries in the database who also got ‘train,’ ” she continued dutifully. “That includes eight already deceased. I’m showing that five were passengers in a train that derailed, two were struck by trains while driving across the tracks, and the last one appears to be a suicide, since it shows he laid down on the tracks the day he got the reading.”

  “So you’re pretty sure it’s going to be a train crash?” the customer asked.

  “Most likely, sir,” Manisha replied. She muted the line so the customer couldn’t hear her yawn. It was too bad they didn’t allow coffee in the calling bay. “There is an average of three thousand train accidents per year, six percent of which are fatal, leading to an average of one thousand deaths annually. Statistically, it looks like you will join those numbers.”

  “So there’s no chance of a… a what would you call it, a joke answer?” the customer asked.

  “A joke answer?” Manisha knew what he was asking, but she was urged to never cast the machine in a malicious light.

  “You know, like the guy on the news who got ‘drug deal,’ then had an allergic reaction to discount aspirin,” the customer clarified.

  “While overall the percentage of ironic readings is forty-nine percent,” Manisha answered, “with your reading in particular it’s been pretty straightforward. One hundred percent of those we’ve gathered data on have in fact been killed by locomotives.”

  “Well, the reason I’m asking is because I just started a new job, and I begin training tomorrow,” the customer interjected nervously.

  “No need to be concerned, sir.” Manisha knew what he was getting at. “If training were your cause of death, the card would certainly say ‘training’ or ‘trainer.’ Not simply ‘train.’ While unexpected synonyms are often the cause of ironic readings, the machine always gets the grammar right.”

  Training might be the death of me, though, Manisha thought, remembering she had to be in three hours early for her next shift. For the third time in a month she was going to have to trade sleep for a mandatory training session.

  “That’s a relief.” The customer sighed.

  “Are you located in the city of Houston, Texas, sir?” Manisha asked suddenly.

  “How did you know that?” the customer asked, proving her guess to be correct.

  “As I mentioned, we have fifteen live listings in the database for death by train,” Manisha responded, proud of her catch, “and all of them are in Houston, Texas. Given the close proximity, the likelihood of all of you dying in the same train accident is sixty percent, and in cases such as this, when all of the participants of a potential large-scale disaster are in the same place at the same time, the accident is likely to occur within seven to fourteen months. Most likely this winter, since accidents are more likely when there is ice or snow present.”

  “Oh God.” The customer sounded terrified.

  “Is there anything else I can assist you with today, sir?” Manisha asked pleasantly. She was sure she would get a good score on this call.

  “I have a new baby on the way in March,” the customer added.

  “Congratulations, sir,” Manisha replied.

  “Are—are you sure that’s what’s going to happen?” the
customer stuttered.

  “Please be advised,” Manisha quoted from her training manual, “that Machine of Death Analysis does not claim or provide advanced knowledge of the eventual details of your demise. We merely provide facts and statistics that may help you gain a better understanding of the likeliest possibilities.”

  The customer went silent for few moments. He began stammering as if trying to come up with something to say. Finally, he asked, “What is your cause of death?”

  Manisha froze. No one had ever asked her that. “I’m sorry, sir, I cannot provide you with that information.”

  “I just need someone to talk to, you know?” the customer pleaded. “I can’t tell my wife about any of this; this pregnancy’s giving her enough to worry about.”

  “I cannot provide you with any personal information,” she responded.

  “What’s the difference?” he asked. “I’m paying by the minute here, aren’t I?”

  Manisha knew he was right.

  “I’ve never gotten a reading,” she admitted.

  “Never?” the customer asked. “Don’t you want to? How can you spend all day answering questions about a machine you’ve never used?”

  Do I? she wondered. Manisha had never really thought about it. After all, she spent six months answering calls for a GPS service without feeling like she was missing out on anything, and she didn’t even own a car. “I’m located in Mumbai, India. We don’t have the machine here.”

  “Are they banned?” The customer seemed relieved to have something to talk about other than his imminent death by train.

  “Not officially,” she explained, “but we have a group here called the Shiv Sena, who’ve appointed themselves the moral watchdogs of the city. And their leader doesn’t approve of it.”

  “One guy gets to decide what is and isn’t allowed?” the customer asked.

  “Not officially,” Manisha explained, since the customer was, after all, paying by the minute. “But if anyone ignores him, there end up being riots, so most everyone listens to him just to avoid the hassle. It’s gotten to the point where all of the movie studios arrange private screenings for him to censor their movies before they come out because they know if he doesn’t like them, people will end up setting movie theaters on fire. He doesn’t like Valentine’s Day, so if any stationery stores stock ‘I Love You’ cards, they get bricks thrown through their windows.”

  “What’s his problem with Valentine’s Day?”

  “It’s a Western holiday that he feels contradicts Hindu culture, just like he feels the Machine of Death contradicts local things like numerologists.”

  “Numerologists?”

  “They use birth dates and times to predict marriages, deaths, and such. My mother has one, and she lets him control every decision my family makes. When I was baby he predicted that I would die in water. I mean, most people don’t believe in it, but the Shiv Sena don’t like Western technology telling them what to think.” Saying this, Manisha realized that if she had taken the test, she could finally prove her mother wrong. It also reminded her how much grief her water-weary mother had given her for her entire childhood and she immediately felt guilty for having put this man so on edge.

  “Look, this isn’t the psychic hotline,” she said, much calmer than before. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. The fact that you got ‘train’ probably means you’re safer than most people. A train can’t exactly sneak up on you. You’re probably not going to run out and buy a ticket a couple of months before your baby’s born, and you’re clearly concerned enough that you know to steer clear of tracks. It will take a lot of long, happy years for it to slip your mind enough to happen.”

  “Thanks,” the man said. She could hear in his voice that he meant it.

  “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

  “Yeah, that villains-tying-people-to-the-railroad-tracks thing. That just happens in cartoons, right?” The customer laughed. Manisha was glad to hear him joking.

  “Certainly,” she replied, “but be wary of anyone with a handlebar mustache.”

  Wednesday

  “Please excuse me,” the trainer began. “I don’t speak Indian, so I’ll have to conduct this training in English.”

  Manisha was on her fifth cup of coffee. All of her fellow agents sat groggily around a large conference table while a jet-lagged but grinning middle-aged woman gestured wildly. Manisha had spent years trying to convince her mother (who had loudly protested the idea of her daughter spending her nights in an office, especially without consulting the family numerologist) that she actually liked being a call center agent. These training sessions were the one exception.

  “But don’t worry,” the trainer continued. “This isn’t going to be just any boring old training session. This is going to be fun!”

  Manisha had never been to one of these ‘boring old’ sessions that every trainer she’d ever met was certain to distance themselves from. Every one she’d ever attended was conducted by some fresh-off-the-plane American who was convinced she had cracked the code to making learning fun because she had bought a book on team-building exercises or come up with an acronym. And they all thought that “Indian” was a language.

  “What’s the number one complaint you hear from customers?” the trainer asked.

  Everyone was quiet. They knew she was reaching out for a certain answer and that it was more related to what she wanted to talk about than what the actual answer was.

  “Come on,” the trainer urged, “there are no wrong answers.”

  Keya raised her hand from across the table. “Hold time?”

  “No, that’s not it,” the trainer replied.

  Everyone remained silent.

  “I want to talk to an American!” the woman exclaimed, and looked at the group expectantly. “How many times have you heard that from a caller?”

  Everyone nodded their heads.

  “Now, just what does the customer mean when they say that?” the trainer asked.

  No one responded.

  The woman walked over to the whiteboard and wrote the letters A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N across it. Here comes the acronym, Manisha thought.

  “Agent Managing Empathetic Responses Instead of Canned Answers,” the trainer said aloud as she wrote it across the board, then paused a moment, looking back over her own words with pride. “When the customer says they want to talk to an A.M.E.R.I.C.A.N., it just means that they feel you aren’t showing them enough empathy. No offense,” she continued, “but most Americans consider your accent to sound a little robotic and inhuman.”

  Why would I ever take offense at that? Manisha thought.

  “So you really need to make up for that with a lot of empathy,” the trainer said as she underlined the word on the board. “Can anyone tell me what empathy is?”

  “Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes,” Vivek responded from the far side of the room, in a voice Manisha found to be quite human, despite the trainer’s insinuation.

  “Exactly,” the trainer shouted, thrilled that someone had answered according to her script. “Death is one of the most uncomfortable things for Americans to talk about. Getting a reading and having it analyzed are very stressful experiences, as anyone who has done so will know. How many of you have gotten a reading?”

  No one raised their hands.

  “No one?” she responded. “Has anyone ever seen a Machine of Death?”

  Everyone looked at one another anxiously but remained quiet. There were posters of the machine all over the calling bay, and diagrams in the training manual, but none of them had ever seen one in person.

  “Well, how can you put yourselves in the customer’s shoes if you’ve never even been in a shoe store?” The trainer chuckled. From beneath the table, she pulled out a large brown duffel bag.

  Here comes the team-building exercise, Manisha thought.

  But rather than rustle through the bag to find a rubber-banded bunch of dollar-store markers for some communal
art project, or Lincoln Logs to make team towers out of, the trainer just turned the bag upside down so that a single object would thud dramatically onto the table.

  A noticeable hush fell across the already quiet room. It was smaller than they’d all imagined it would be. The smooth white finish was scuffed as though it had seen its share of use.

  It was a Machine of Death.

  The silence was broken by a bit of nervous giggling as the two people closest to the machine reached across the table to touch it.

  “Who wants to give it a try?” the trainer asked. Finally, she had their full attention.

  Reno went first. He nervously placed his finger inside and jumped back in surprise as it was pricked by the needle. After a few seconds, a small card popped out.

  “Choking,” he announced, and immediately stopped reaching for the snacks in the center of the table.

  He slid the machine over to Neha. She stuck her finger in without a moment of hesitation and seemed excited to read her card.

  “Landslide,” she told the group, then pumped her fist in the air victoriously, knowing what a cool way to go that would be. The machine continued to make its way around the table.

  “Shellfish allergy,” began Vivek nervously, “but I’m veg!”

  “Sounds like you better stay that way,” said Savio, who kept laughing until he read his own card. “Autorickshaw.”

  Manisha heard all of this happening, but her mind was elsewhere. She was picturing the look on her mother’s face if she came home with one of those cards. She was picturing all of those summers she wasn’t allowed to go to the beach. The days she had to stay home alone because she wasn’t allowed out in the rain. The showers she wasn’t allowed to take without her mother’s supervision. The jobs she’d been fired from because her mother made her skip work during the floods. All because an old man in orange pajamas did some math problems and decided water would kill her. She was picturing the smile on her own face when she finally proved her mother wrong.