“What does that mean?” she said, to me. I shrugged.
“I’m not sure,” I said. It was kind of a lie.
“Have you told anybody else?”
“Just my girlfriend. My parents don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you tell your parents?”
“I didn’t want them to worry.”
“Then you do know what this means,” she said, pointing to the cert in her hand.
“I sort of do,” I said. “It’s when all the heat in the universe dies. It’s sort of the end of the universe, I guess.”
“That can’t be real,” she said, to me, as if I were lying to her.
“That’s what it says,” I said. “It’s never wrong, is it?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t.”
“Hey, this kid’s a genius,” said the man, who was looking at the trophy on my shelf. The trophy wasn’t for Being a Genius, it was for a Whiz Kids competition a few years earlier.
The woman looked over his shoulder at the trophy. “A lot of kids win those.”
“No, he invented something. Right?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“An immortality machine,” said the woman.
“I discovered a new kind of algae,” I said.
“That’s it,” said the man. “With holistic properties.”
“No,” I said. “It’s just algae.”
“I thought I read that somewhere,” he said. “It kills cancer or something.”
“I haven’t heard that,” I said.
“Oh. I must have made it up. Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s OK,” I said, relieved that they would be going.
“Hey, one more thing,” he said. His partner put my cert back on the desk. She hovered over it for a few moments, shaking her head, as if she still couldn’t believe what it said. “What did your girlfriend pull?”
“She wouldn’t tell me,” I lied. “She says it’s private.”
“But you told her yours,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s private?”
“It can be, I guess.”
“But not to the kid who’s going to live to the end of the universe, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. I really didn’t think about it much.”
“Hey, if you find a cure for cancer, let me know, okay?” he said, smirking.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Does it matter, though? If you pulled CANCER, right?”
He looked at the woman, who shrugged and walked out of the room. He looked back at me.
“I didn’t pull CANCER,” he said. “But you never know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it wouldn’t matter if you did.”
He chuckled and put his hands in his pockets. “Cancer can cause a lot more than death. A cert is just how it ends, right? It’s not the whole story.”
Sometimes you can feel the changes coming. You can’t sleep right the night before, and you’re tired and not dealing with your feelings very well, and you’re not prepared for it when it happens. Maybe it’s order asserting itself, freezing the top layers while the stew roils and boils underneath, like when my mom puts chicken soup in the fridge so the fat rises to the top and hardens and she can ladle it out.
I had a lot of nasty dreams about car accidents and jigsaw puzzles and big, long scars on Maggie’s face and her teeth falling out.
The next day was the first day of school after the big New Year’s break. There were police cars all over the parking lot, and some government cars. I walked to homeroom, and the man from the FBI was there. He nodded to me as I sat down at my desk. My homeroom teacher looked nervous, and told me to have a seat. I wondered how Maggie was.
“You’ve probably heard on the news,” she said. I hadn’t, and a few other kids hadn’t, either, so she started to explain. She was having trouble finding the right words.
“There are a few other people who have pulled…something that might not be good for the rest of us. And Agent Williams here is—”
Agent Williams, the FBI guy who looked too young to carry a gun, put his hand on her shoulder and stepped forward.
“No need to get excited, kids,” he said, because some of the others were starting to raise their hands. “This is just a routine investigation. We got permission from the school board to have you all tested, in some cases for the second time.” He looked right at me and smirked a little. “It’s all going to be very smooth and organized, so I don’t want anybody freaking out, okay?”
Nobody freaked out. They converted the gym to a big laboratory, with beds and curtains everywhere and the blood-reading machines set up in the corners. Some of the younger kids cried when they got their blood taken, but that was all. Doctors and nurses and other people in blue scrubs and lab coats were all over the place, carrying racks of samples to the machines.
They put us in our homerooms and told us not to wander off, but the force of that authority was fading. The teachers looked more worried than the kids, and weren’t really paying attention. I didn’t have the nerve to get up and find Maggie, but she would try to find me. I decided it was best to stay put.
I sat on the gym floor with a few of the other kids, nerds like me, except while I had found a place all by myself in the wide, deep strata of high school culture, they had stuck together and taken the chess club and the computer club stratum as their own, as the previous nerds and geeks had graduated after initiating them. Now they were on top, the smartest kids in school. Well, except for me.
“Hey, Brian,” said one of the nerds, a kid whose name I couldn’t remember. I think it was Jake, but I never really cared to learn it. He was a junior. “What did you pull?”
“That’s a personal question,” I said, not taking my eyes away from the book I was reading, Stephen Hawking’s book, the one that had gotten me thinking so much. I had to read it again, and was reading it a lot. I was back at the part where he was describing the machine’s inner workings. He thinks the machine hangs on a cosmic string, tied like a noose around our necks.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I was just curious.”
“I didn’t pull the nuke,” I said.
“I hope I do,” said the Junior, proudly. He had obviously been thinking about it.
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“No it isn’t,” he said, but not just to me. The other nerds were shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. This kid was probably the one with all the stupid theories. Every friend group has one. “Do you know how a nuke kills you? You’re incinerated. You probably won’t even know it’s coming. That’s a lot better than EMPHYSEMA or something. Do you know how EMPHYSEMA kills you? You drown in your own mucous.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Oh really? Why? What, did you pull EMPHYSEMA? Or AIDS?”
“Shut up,” I said.
“I’m telling you, the nuke is the way to go.”
“There are lots of ways a nuke can kill you,” I said. “Not just in the first blast, either. Do you know how radiation poisoning kills you? Say you take about a thousand rads or so. For the first few days, you’re fine. You don’t even know anything’s wrong. You might even feel great, like you just got laid, but that’s a bad example because you don’t know what that’s like.”
A couple of the other nerds giggled.
“But then you start getting diarrhea, as the cell walls in your intestines break down and die. It’s not just ‘I ate too many M&Ms’ diarrhea, either. It’s bloody and chunky. That lasts for a few days, and then you go crazy from the pain and the diarrhea and the radiation scrambling your circulatory system, and you start bleeding out of every hole in your body.”
I had the nerds squirming. A couple of them stood up and walked away. The Junior stared at me with the same expression he probably had when his mom told him there was no such thing as Santa Claus.
“But you’re right,” I said. “I hope you p
ull the nuke, too. It’s a better way to die, right?”
I didn’t care about the rules anymore, and I wanted to make a good exit. I went over to the bleachers. I still didn’t see Maggie anywhere. I asked one of her friends where she was, but her friend didn’t know. She said her parents had come to take her out of school after homeroom. She wasn’t the only one, either.
“I heard you pulled OLD AGE,” said her friend, after a few awkward moments of standing around, like teenagers do.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I dunno. Just a rumor I guess. People were asking me like I should know.”
“I didn’t pull OLD AGE. Nobody does.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “My mom’s first boyfriend did.”
“Did you actually see his cert?”
“No,” she said. “Why would my mom lie about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems kind of implausible.”
“Why?” I got that question a lot.
I shrugged. “It’s really ambiguous.”
“So? Lots of certs are ambiguous.”
“Don’t mistake the exception for the rule,” I said.
“What?” She was getting annoyed. I got that a lot, too.
“Just because somebody gets a weird, ambiguous cert doesn’t mean they all are. Or even most of them.”
She shrugged and looked away.
“I was wondering,” she said. “Did you and Maggie do it?”
“That’s private,” I said. She didn’t see me blush.
“Yeah,” she said. “You know what you said about ambiguous stuff? I was thinking. I think that’s what it’s all about, you know? It’s ambiguous for a reason. That’s why nobody pulls YOUTH.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “Nobody pulls OLD AGE, either.”
“Whatever,” she said, and shrugged and walked away.
People were always walking away from me. I started to think that if I was going to live forever, I was going to be pretty lonely.
I tried to call Maggie, but her parents weren’t answering the phone. I went to bed sad and worried, so I snuck one of my mom’s Tylenol PMs to help me sleep.
That stuff gives me weird dreams. I dreamed I was standing on a charred ball of dirt, like a chunk of hamburger that sticks to the grill, all wrinkled and black and ashy. I watched the sun gutter and spit and go out, like a wick on a dead candle. It was cold. My breath came out and crystallized in front of me, a growing cloud of spiky ice.
Some dreams are like an emotion magnified into a wide, flat layer and wrapped around your whole brain, so everything that happens in the dream is stained with it. I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced that I was the only person left on earth, in the universe. Reality filtered in slowly, muffled and grey. I heard my dad snoring in the next room, and pulled the blankets close. I got myself back to sleep by imagining Maggie next to me. I missed her warmth.
It was happening all over the country. By the next day, the number of kids who had pulled the nuke was over a thousand. A lot of people were starting to get worried. I stopped watching the news with my parents because I couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie and what was going to happen to her, or what was going to happen to all the other people who had pulled it. Everybody was comparing it to 9/11. Now that we know that these people are going to die from a nuke, maybe we can do something about it. Maybe we can avoid another one.
A lot of parents didn’t want their kids to get their blood drawn, and kept their kids home. The FBI was using the Patriot Act to get their blood by force. I started to think that Stephen Hawking was wrong, that chaos was going to win. A nuclear bomb is pretty much the definition of chaos, after all.
I walked to Maggie’s house after school. She was anxious, but I think seeing me made her feel better. We hugged in her kitchen, and her mom and dad left the room to leave us alone. Her parents didn’t mind. The boy genius who would live forever could go console the Nuclear Kid.
I had only been there for a few minutes when they came to test her. Her parents were furious but powerless, which made them even more furious. They looked at me when the FBI agents came to the door, as if I could do anything. Agent Williams was there with some cops and an ambulance that the government was renting out. It had a machine in the back, humming as it warmed up.
I sat on Maggie’s bed, waiting. I listened to her iPod. She was listening to a lot of Tori Amos lately, songs about rape and wrath.
Williams came into the room and sat down on the bed. I muted the iPod, Tori’s pounding piano ringing echoes in my ears.
He looked concerned, and then looked away, pretending to scrutinize the posters on Maggie’s wall.
“It’s scary, I know,” he said.
I didn’t respond, hoping my stare would drive him away.
“I guess you’ve got it made, though. A couple of trillion years, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“There will be a lot of girls to love,” he said, suddenly, like he couldn’t keep it in anymore, in that fragile moment where small talk cracks and shatters under the weight of Bigger Issues. “My high school girlfriends are distant memories. I hardly ever think about them.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He chuckled, and said “I’m glad they’re still teaching sarcasm.”
“What are you going to do to them?”
“I’m not going to do anything,” he said.
“Until they tell you to.”
“Don’t make more of this than it is. Nothing like this has ever happened before. If we can see something coming, don’t you think we should do something about it?”
“What does it matter? If I’m not going to die in a nuke, what if I stayed right by her? Moved in, worked from home, holed up in a bunker? I’m still not going to die of a nuke.”
Williams sighed and rubbed his eyes with his palms, then sat back on the bed, resting his shoulders on Maggie’s The Nightmare Before Christmas poster. Jack Skellington loomed over his shoulder, grinning.
He reached into his wallet and pulled out a yellow, crumpled cert. The stamp had been worn away, and the corners were soft and blunt.
“It’s only fair,” he said.
I tried to act disinterested, I tried to be disinterested, but curiosity moved my hand.
It was his cert, and the cause of death was OLD AGE. I stared at him, ready to accuse him of faking it.
He shook his head and took it out of my hand. He pushed play on the iPod, and left me to myself.
Tori sang about earthquakes.
The universe began as a wad of crumpled paper. Since then, invisible hands have been smoothing it out. Stephen Hawking thinks the machine makes those hands human, and makes them move faster.
Nobody pulls YOUTH because there’s no ambiguity. The exception is the rule. There is so much irony that it has lost its meaning. A metaphor can kill, a homonym can predict. Nobody pulls YOUTH because there’s no joke in it.
Hawking is wrong because the order is imposed, it’s an ice cube made of human thought. We believe the cube freezes the lava, but it’s just as hot as it was before.
I poked around on the Internet for a little while. The numbers were up. Three thousand, now. Rumors of camps being set up in the desert. Tent cities for children. The government won’t comment. The ambulance in front of Maggie’s house says enough.
The ambulance pulled away with Williams in the passenger seat. He saw me at the window and waved.
Did he know what I was planning to do? He planted the seed, after all. I took it as a blessing.
Maggie came back to her room and sat down mechanically on her bed next to me.
“You’re nervous,” she said. Maggie. Always worried about me, not worried enough about herself. I would have to worry for her.
“There are three heavy-metal bands called ‘Heat Death of the Universe.’ There are twelve books by that title and one independent movie. There are a hundred thousand Google hits with those words.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said.
“That FBI guy showed me his cert. He pulled OLD AGE, Maggie. It’s true. It does happen.”
I held her hand.
“I’ve figured it out. The exception is the rule. People pull OLD AGE but they don’t pull YOUTH. Ambiguity is built into it. The machine doesn’t tell us how we’re going to die, it picks a word to describe it. It’s unspecific for a reason.”
“For what reason? You’re scaring me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A joke, maybe. Or a test. You can’t die of youth but you can be shot by a young person. You can die of old age but you can also be killed by an old person. What you pull is what you’re going to die of, but it’s just language. It’s just words. It doesn’t define anything until you start acting on it. Until you force it. We make the order out of the chaos, but the chaos is still there if we want it. That’s how people deal with the certs and the machine and knowing how you’re going to die. They just don’t think about it. They don’t act on it. They just live their lives.”
She didn’t like my enthusiasm.
“It’s not a joke,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about nuclear war.”
“Your cert doesn’t say NUCLEAR WAR. It says NUCLEAR BOMB.
That can mean a thousand things, and only one of those is nuclear war.”
“Then why is everybody so worried?”
“September 11. Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Governments can’t take the risk, or don’t want to. I can’t really blame them. Last year, a hundred thousand people died of INFLUENZA. I looked that up too. What if they put all those people in one place? What if they rounded them up and put them in camps?”
“I don’t know,” she said, watching me talk, watching me gesture. She looked worried, maybe a little scared. I squeezed her hand.
“That would make something happen, Maggie. That’s what takes the chaos away. That’s what forces the order. It’s not the certs that crystallizes the order into something sharp, it’s us. It’s what we do with them.”
“What does that have to do with the flu?”
“Because if you force everybody together, then they won’t just all get the flu randomly at once. That’s not how it works. It would be bad, Maggie. The universe or order or God or whatever would have to impose a way on those people for them all to die of the same thing. Like bird flu, or something worse. It would be an outbreak, probably. It would be bad.”
Machine of Death Page 36