I remember everything about that day. It was right there at the mall, between the ice cream stand and Hot Topic, a big hunk of metal with a hole and a slit. There we were, my girlfriend, the voyeur, and I. We went for ice cream, she wiped a spot of vanilla from my forehead with one of those little napkins they give you, and then I did it.
It’s incredible, I don’t even remember the girl’s name, but I still remember what kind of ice cream I got. Vanilla and rocky road. And PIANO. Friggin’ PIANO, man.
I didn’t know what to make of it, at first. What did it mean? Would a music store collapse on me? Would a kid stab me with a Casio keyboard? Would a piano crush me on the street, and would I stick my head out of the wreckage with black and white keys for teeth? Would I die like Sylvester the Cat?
You try not to think about it, try to live your life like before, when you didn’t have to try to not think about it. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t live in Manhattan, the skyscraper capital of the world. I was constantly looking up, searching for a crane, a scaffold, a couple of guys holding a rope with a big ol’ concert grand swinging back and forth, all the while fingering and twirling that little cardboard rectangle inside my pocket.
“Pay attention to where you’re going,” my mom used to say. “Get your head out of the clouds.” I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to die from falling into a sewer hole or getting hit by a car. Unless it was a piano-moving truck, of course.
Eventually it got the best of me. The girlfriend dumped me after I had a nervous breakdown watching Mr. Jones. You know, Richard Gere. The scene where he takes the girl to the store chock full of… I can’t bring myself to say it anymore. And he sits down and plays on one…and then two…I couldn’t take it. I snapped.
Hey, she got off easy. She should have seen the drama a couple days later, when Big was on and I watched in sheer horror as Tom Hanks danced Chopsticks with his boss.
It was bad. I spent my days cooped up in my room, staring at the Internet and listening to “Bright Eyes” for hours on end. My mom suggested therapy, but I was too embarrassed to discuss it with anyone. It would have been so different if the machine had sentenced me to LANDMINE, or SEPPUKU, or even LOW CABIN PRESSURE. Those were good ways to go, dude! Manly. But no, the utter ridiculousness of PIANO haunted me night and day.
And the looking up. All the time, everywhere, looking for the Piano of Damocles swinging over my head.
After three years of thinking about death, facing death, and ultimately waiting for death—just hoping that it would show itself and rid me of the friggin’ question—a thought assaulted me during one of many sleepless nights. It was a new thought, but at the same time it was the same old one that whirled around in my mind all the time, just turned backward. I whacked my forehead at four a.m.
I knew how I was going to die, right? So what did I also know?
How I was not going to die.
I slept like a baby.
I woke up a brand new man. Everything around me was colored different. Cereal smelled sweeter, the wind felt crisper, and traffic sounded like chirping birds. Everything changes when you start to live without fear. I left high school in the dust. I called up friends I had neglected for too long. And I made a decision about the rest of my life.
See, it was all the looking up. My head had literally been in the clouds for three years. And in the sky, I found the love of my life.
I wanted to fly.
Everything fit. I could never be scared of flying at twelve thousand feet, because I knew perfectly well that no plane under my command would ever crash. I’d find my niche among the aircraft’s buttons, levers, and instruments. As long as none of them were musical instruments, I would be fine.
So I went to flight school. None of my instructors had ever seen such a confident student. They were used to seeing regular people shaken or even a little daunted by the complexity of a flying machine. Not me: I grabbed the controls and took her up like I was riding a bike. Not a moment of hesitation. If only they knew I had the certainty that nothing would ever go wrong with me at the stick.
The skies became as familiar to me as home. And I was good! It was amazing: knowing I couldn’t crash realized and solidified the fact that I would never crash.
Passed every test with flying colors, so to speak. Finally made my mother proud. And how could I fail? I was unafraid. That little card, the one I carried in my pocket everywhere I went, had told me the only thing that could ever kill me. PIANO. Ha! I laughed at the word now. It was just a harmless little word. All I’d had to do was wrap myself in a piano-less world. And planes and pianos do not mix.
I wish I’d known earlier how knowing the exact way I’d die would grant me such happiness and self-confidence. I wanted to kick life in the shin. I became such a daredevil that I joined the military. Yeah, why not? I would go to war. That white card was my carte blanche. It didn’t say BULLET, did it? It didn’t say BOMB or MISSILE, either. I was unstoppable.
I climbed the ranks like crazy; I made captain like you’d make a hardboiled egg. No one was able to match my piloting skills and daring stunts in the air. I was the envy of the entire service. They trained me to fly helicopters, and I aced that as well. I couldn’t wait to get into combat! That’s how psyched I was. I even heard they thought I had a deathwish. But death was the least of my concerns. If it wasn’t playing the Cheers theme song, I said bring it on.
I was the first in line to tour the Middle East. There’s always something over here that needs bombing, and I was counting on being the first one off the ground. They even put me in charge of a Black Hawk. A Black Hawk, man! The predator of the sky.
I don’t remember the details of this particular mission; I know it went something like this: the Humvees and the .50-cals were supposed to roll into some town somewhere, neutralize the insurgency, and go home. Our four birds were the air support, and I said no worries, dudes. There’ll be no Black Hawk Down with me on board, baby. Right?
Wrong.
OK. I hope all this is readable, by the way. I’m writing in the dark
on some scrap of cloth I found lying around on the floor of the cell, and you do not want to find out what I’m writing with.
At this point, if anyone ever does read this, you must have figured out there’s no happy ending for this one. Obviously I’ve been taken captive—a hostage to barter with, or perhaps payback for all the Gitmo/Abu Ghraib crap they must have seen on Al Jazeera. That would explain all the cruel-and-unusual we’ve been subject to for the past…week? Month? I don’t even wanna know anymore. This is as far as I want to remember. I’d like to get to the point of all this before I lose the rest of my mind.
I have to think hard about what the point of all this was…I’ve been having problems gathering my thoughts, lately. It’s been hell with the lightbulb, and the mask, and the hi-fi sound system constantly blaring in the background…actually, the foreground when you think of it, since there’s nothing over or under it, aft or fore…it smears my days and it haunts my dreams and I know, I know now what it’s all come to—I know that music, I know precisely what musical instrument is playing that music, and I have time to think about it too, as I weave and heave and lie here in the darkness, silently contemplating my death…
It’s a symphony, it’s a concerto, it’s “Great Balls of Fire,” and yes…whatever it is…it’s a solo.
Story by Rafa Franco
Illustration by Kean Soo
HIV INFECTION FROM MACHINE OF DEATH NEEDLE
“WELL,” I thought, “that sucks.”
Story by Brian Quinlan
Illustration by KC Green
EXPLODED
“FUCK!”
It came from the den. Later I’d learn that it had followed a much quieter, “Oh fuck. Oh—”
My first thought was that it had broken. I was going to spend a lot of time over the next five years wishing that I’d been right about that.
He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smack
ing the handle deep into the plaster. He nearly fell over trying to stop. I didn’t say anything, just stared.
“391! He was on the train this morning! He was one of the victims!” He stared too. We just stared. “Look it up!”
I didn’t have to. An electric buzz, as much like actual pain as excitement, jumped from my stomach to my head. I didn’t have all our test cases memorised yet, but Mr. 391 I did know: EXPLODED. He was one of the reasons I was sure it wasn’t working— his prediction was a joke. He saw I wasn’t looking it up, saw me looking at him, and knew I knew, but said it all the same:
“It fucking works.”
We were eating.
“Okay, well, it’s on now.” I munched a chip.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s on.” I pointed a chip at him for emphasis.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just—”
“I get that it is on.”
“Okay.” I put my chips down.
I fixed myself a drink.
He came into my office again, calmly this time, through the broken door. My office, his house. We left all the doors open that afternoon, and just walked around doing small, unimportant things, occasionally meeting in the corridors of his big, dusty old house and swapping new thoughts.
“What’s the latest count? How many others died?”
“Wikipedia has a hundred now.” I told him, underplaying it a little. “Some places have two.” They all had two.
“Christ. From one bomb?”
“They think it was a few, and it was on the subway, so…”
“Yeah. Christ.” He slouched against the wall and looked up at the cracked ceiling. “This isn’t quite how I imagined it working.”
“You know we still have to publish our results, right? I mean, that was the point of no return, right there.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just—” He looked at me. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting off this.”
I laughed, then met his eyes. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting from it? Pete, it’s going to look like we did it. You don’t seem to realise how sceptical people are going to be about something like this. You’re the only person in the world who has any idea how this box works, and to the rest of us it looks a hell of a lot like a hoax. And when some small-minded prick with a bag of pipe bombs decided commuters were responsible for all the world’s problems this morning, it became the most vicious hoax in history. We’re going to have protesters on your lawn around the clock, we’re going to get ripped to shreds in the press, we’re going to be hounded by cameras. We’re going to get mail bombs, Pete.” I sat down, and lowered my voice. “They’re gonna try and kill us. Nobody knows yet, but I promise you that at some point in the next eighteen hours, someone Googling the victim names is going to find our prediction list and our lives as they stand will be over.” I was realising most of this as I said it. I felt sick. We were fucked.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
“We’re not fucked.” I thought about it. We were definitely fucked. “No, we’re not fucked.”
He shook his head. “We’re so fucked.”
I sighed. We were so, so fucked.
“I don’t, you know,” he said suddenly, as we boxed up the prototype.
I frowned. “What?”
“Have any idea how it works. I’m the same as anyone else, except I know it does.”
“You made it, Pete. I just did your accounts.”
“I didn’t really. I discovered it. If it had done what I built it to do, if it had been the thing we were trying to make, if it had been the Death Clock—”
“I told you we couldn’t call it that.”
“—Then I would have made it. But you can’t make something like this, it’s out there waiting to be found.”
“Well, I certainly hope you can make it. Because we’re going to need a job fucking lot of them.”
“You know, this is the best possible way it could have happened.”
“What the hell?” I was actually shocked.
“No, I mean, to prove it. You couldn’t ask for a more conclusive test.” He put up a hand to silence me, “I know, I know loads of people are going to think we blew up a train to sell a box, but this is still going to convince more people than we ever dreamed we would. Your investor friends aren’t going to think we blew up San Francisco, they’re going to think it works.”
“They’re not going to like the publicity.”
“They don’t have to, yet. No one has to know they’re investing, and they all know that by the time they come to sell them, the whole world will realise they work.” I was the business brain of the operation, but Pete wasn’t an idiot. I knew it from the moment he said “391”: this would make us.
“Did you tell Jen yet?”
“What? Yeah, of course! You didn’t tell Cath?”
“Not yet.” Honestly, it had only just occured to me.
“Well why the hell not? You’ve got to tell her, dude.” I hate it when he calls me dude.
“I just—how do you say it? How did you say it?”
“I said ‘Jen, it works,’ same as I said to you.”
“Actually you said ‘It fucking works!’” I mocked, in my best nasal geek voice. “But you told her how we know?”
“Yeah.”
“Was she freaked out?”
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“I’m—I’ve been—” I came clean. “I feel sick. I’ve been feeling sick for three hours now.”
He looked straight at me; I don’t talk like that often. “You’ve got to tell her. Jen’ll tell her, and she’ll tell her when I told her. You know what they’re like, women just find a way to get times into conversations.”
“I can’t say I’d noticed.”
“Well, they do.”
I walked into the den. Pete was tinkering again, already. I set his coffee down and took a sip of mine.
“Thanks.”
I ignored him. “Here’s what we do. You spend the rest of the night packing all this away, everything you need. I hire a van. You hire a hangar. I hire an agent. You draw me up a list of the components that went into the latest prototype—not the ones you think you’ll need for the new improved version, I know you. The components for this one. I’ll give the investors the heads-up before the news breaks, and tell them we need the first payment by noon tomorrow. You call every engineer friend you trust and get them on board. Write out a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow in the van on the way, then make sure we don’t hire any idiots to follow it. I order us a new pair of phones, we throw these away, and we give the new numbers to no one but Cath and Jen unless I say. We disappear. I can sort out accommodation once we’re out of here, and a few months down the line we can buy a new place, but right now we have to get as many of these things built and making predictions as possible. The more predictions they make, the more get proved right, the fewer mail bombs we get.” I sipped. “What’s that?” He was writing something.
“It’s a step-by-step assembly guide an idiot could follow.” He put it on a thin pile.
“What are those?”
“Well,” he leafed through them, “this one’s a component list for the prototype, this one’s a map to the hangar we’ve hired, these are the resumés of the three most expensive agents I could find, this one’s a printout of a receipt for two iPhones, this one’s a fax from the Hyatt confirming our reservation, and these are the keys to our new van.” He tossed them to me. I looked around the room, I guess for the first time. It was full of neatly packed boxes.
“What do I do at this company again?”
“It’s never really been clear to me.” He took a sip of his coffee and went back to writing. “Call the investors!” he shouted after me as I left, forgetting my mug.
“We’re not going to get killed by a mail bomb, you know,” he said in the van on the way up. It was dark, I was driving, which meant the radio stayed off. “We know that muc
h. Whatever happens with this, it won’t kill us. I’m an aneurysm and you’re a heart attack, those were the first two tests we ever ran.”
“Yeah.” I’d been thinking about that a lot since we discovered the box really worked. I wondered what it would feel like. “Christ, what about Cath and Jen?” I’d refused to let either of them be tested.
“We’ll have them take it, we have to now.” They were coming up tomorrow. The thought of it made me queasy.
“No,” I said suddenly. “No. I don’t want it hanging over them.” Then, feeling the familiar emotional crunch of stepping on Pete’s toes when it came to Jen, “Not Cath, anyway.”
“We have to.”
“You think about it, don’t you? What it’s going to feel like? Come on, we don’t want that for them.” He stared at the wing-mirror. “If I looked through your browser cache, I’d find a bunch of sites about aneurysms, right?” ”
“No.” He looked back at the road. We sat in silence for a few minutes, the blank road purring beneath us as a half-tunnel of arched black trees flashed by either side. “I cleared it.”
I looked away from the road for the briefest moment. He was smiling.
So that was that day. I persuaded Cath not to take the test, and Jen didn’t need persuading: she said over her dead body, and I said we probably wouldn’t bother if she was already dead, and she said good, and updated her position to “Not even over my dead body.” In all of our discussions that night, I don’t think Pete or I considered that they’d have a say in it themselves.
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