Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  But there was no way I was calling Charlie. I had told no one about my trip to South Korea or about the money or about the counterfeit passport.

  I tried to imagine that conversation with Charlie: “Hey, Charlie? It’s me. See, I got this gig out in South Korea, man…I’ve got three million won and a phony passport…Now all I gotta do is find a red cooler that probably contains a dead prostitute’s kidney.”

  I decided not to mention my little Korea trip to anyone. I figured I’d be back in San Francisco before anybody caught wind that I was gone. Then I could just forget the whole thing, pretend it never happened.

  The airport was huge, like being on a cruise ship bound for the Pleiades. There were spas and lounges, a private golf course, tennis courts, a casino, an ice-skating rink, and a swimming pool. Little robots roamed hither and thither, like bumblebees, doing God knows what, directing traffic or printing boarding passes or calling cabs. Talk about a vision of the future. I have never felt so utterly transported, so removed from planet Earth, so Martian, as I did when I landed at the Incheon International Airport in 2010. I half expected to look out the window and see a thousand stars suspended in the emptiness of space.

  Incidentally, it was one of those little robots that told me what to do next. I was standing there like an idiot, with my mouth agape, when a blue automaton on wheels rolled up to me, looking like Rosie from The Jetsons. It said something in Korean, and then, after a pause, repeated in English, “How may I assist you?”

  I stared at the robot for a moment. A yellow light blinked on and off, on and off, and for all I could tell, it was staring right back at me.

  “How may I assist you?” it repeated.

  “Lost luggage?” I said.

  “Which airline?”

  “Delta Air Lines.”

  “Terminal A,” the robot said. “Follow the yellow arrows to baggage claim. Proceed down Corridor C1. Delta Air Lines will be on your left.”

  I have told this next part many times since, at parties and social gatherings, with my friends and family. And it almost always raises the question “Are you sure it wasn’t your imagination?” I will never know. There was a lot of hustle and bustle, and the robot’s voice was full of static, but this is how I remember the end of our interaction.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Nothing in the universe is perfect, except maybe God, if he exists, and Oreo Cookies,” the robot replied.

  I have since been to Incheon International Airport two other times, and I have tried to re-create this interaction with the robot aides there, to no avail. It seems, these days, they guard the secrets of the universe more carefully.

  I followed the robot’s instructions and found myself standing at the main hub for Delta Air Lines in a matter of minutes. I chose the prettiest, friendliest-looking representative, a young Korean woman with a smile that took up half her face, and hoped I could use my charm to grease the wheels a bit.

  “Annyeong,” she said as I approached. “English?”

  “Yes, English,” I said.

  “Checking in?” she asked.

  “Actually, no,” I said, “I seem to have lost some luggage.”

  “Next window, please,” she said, and before I could work my magic, turn on the charm, so to speak, she yelled something in Korean, and the line shuffled forward, and I was nudged aside.

  I slid down to the adjacent window, where I was greeted by a surly-looking character, much larger than my first host, and a lot less pretty.

  “Uh-huh?” he grunted as he flipped through some files, which seemed to be occupying his immediate attention.

  “I’d like to report some lost luggage,” I said.

  “Flight number?” he said, never looking up.

  “Two-two-four-five,” I said.

  “Name?”

  Here I gulped. “Logan Wallace.”

  He punched a few things into his computer, and then he said, “No flight two-two-four-five in the system.”

  “It was a few days ago,” I said. “Monday, I think.”

  He looked up at me, eyebrows knitted. “Monday? I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, Monday, flight two-two-four-five to Chicago. The flight was canceled, and I never received my luggage.”

  “You report this already?” he said.

  “No, first time. First time I report this,” I said.

  He shook his head and let out an exaggerated sigh.

  Then he disappeared into a back room.

  He came back a few moments later.

  “No luggage.”

  “Could you check again?” I pleaded. “There should be a red ice cooler.”

  He eyed me suspiciously for a moment.

  “You have a baggage claim ticket?”

  Did I have a baggage claim ticket? Oh God! Who knew those were good for anything? Of course I didn’t have a baggage claim ticket. Even if I really were Logan Wallace, I wouldn’t have kept the baggage claim ticket.

  “No, I lost it,” I lied.

  “Then no luggage,” he said and resumed thumbing through the files on his desk.

  “Look,” I said, “is it back there or not, the red cooler? It should have my name on it, ‘Logan Wallace,’ and I have my passport,” at which point I laid the phony passport on his desk as means of proof.

  “No ticket, no cooler,” he said.

  “Then it’s back there?” I exclaimed. “The red cooler?”

  The man picked up a newspaper and began to read.

  Then, without really thinking it through, I pulled a fifty thousand won note from my pocket and laid it on the counter.

  The man looked up from the paper. He frowned at the money as if it were something vile, gruesome, fecal. He looked away.

  I took another ₩50,000 from my pocket and laid it on the table.

  This time, the man’s eyes lingered a long time on the money. Then he put the newspaper down carefully, on top of the money, rolled it up into a tube, and slipped it into his back pocket. The money was gone.

  He disappeared into the back room, and when he returned, he was holding a red cooler.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said, perhaps too eagerly.

  He grunted and slammed the icebox down on the counter.

  “Check everything is there,” he said.

  And then he did the unthinkable. He opened the cooler.

  CHAPTER 15

  THERE WERE NO LOCKS, no iron bars, no alarms to stop this man from unlatching the cooler lid and sliding it back in one swift movement, like a man firing a gun.

  I was frozen, paralyzed. In a few quick seconds, this man had done the one thing I had never dared to do.

  I became conscious of all the people around me: the pretty attendant chatting away at the next window, the elderly couple with the Pekingese standing at the counter beside me, the man with the impatient frown waiting his turn in line, the airport security guard pacing the adjoining corridor like a sentinel.

  I imagined that their attention had turned toward me like the spotlight of a prison watch.

  And because the contents of the red cooler, which were buried deep inside the little box, were not immediately visible to me, the Delta Air Lines representative tilted the cooler forward for all the world to see.

  If anyone was looking, this is what they would have seen: a turkey sandwich.

  It was wrapped up in a clear plastic baggie and nestled between two melted ice packs.

  The Delta Air Lines representative eyed me sternly, as if he couldn’t decide whether to shake his head or laugh. One hundred thousand won for that! I thought. One hundred thousand won for a turkey sandwich?

  I heard the suit behind me grunt with impatience. Surely, whatever luggage he had lost was of more value than this!

  Spoiler alert: not so, not so.

  Magnum Opus.

  The Delta Air Lines representative clicked the lid back into place with a jerk, and pushed the icebox toward me, and then resumed reading the newspaper. I grabbed the cooler an
d swung around, conscious that I was holding up the line. Then something caught my eye.

  A woman at the other end of the long counter slammed an identical red cooler down on the help desk. She was white, possibly European judging from her style of dress, but she spoke to the airline representative in what I assumed to be Korean. The red cooler sat between them on the counter.

  The representative slipped a tag around the handle of the cooler and handed the woman a baggage claim ticket. Then the cooler disappeared behind the kiosk.

  The woman turned.

  She saw me and stopped dead. Her face registered something of recognition as her eyes lighted on the cooler in my hands; then, quickly, her features assumed the cold, impassive air of a sphinx.

  I did nothing to hide my surprise. I just stood there, mouth agape, and considered the possibility that this woman and her red cooler had any connection to me and mine. Surely, there were other red coolers in the world, I thought.

  Then the woman turned stiffly on her heel, as if pulling herself away from the scene of an accident, and disappeared into the fray. Before I could think what this strange coincidence could mean, the woman was gone.

  I caught a flight home within the hour, and was sleeping in my own bed by the same time the next day. Customs had been easy. I didn’t claim anything, and they didn’t bother me about it. Besides, there were no laws about bringing a turkey sandwich into the country.

  I e-mailed Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. as soon as I got home, and they reminded me where and when to meet the man in the Santa suit, and then the whole thing was out of my hands, and I was ten thousand tax-free dollars richer—oh, plus the five hundred thousand Korean won that Santa said I could keep.

  Merry Christmas to me.

  All was fine and dandy. Except my mind kept going back to the woman with the red cooler. I felt like Tarzan having encountered Jane in the jungle. For such a long time there had been only me, roaming solitary through the world, delivering red coolers. Was I alone? Were there others like me?

  And then out of the mists of the jungle there had appeared this woman, a woman with a red cooler.

  She stayed with me for some time, reappearing to me in dreams and hallucinations as the winter grew colder. But with Christmas parties and New Year’s parties and Chanukah parties, and with visiting my parents in Malibu, and then with the blind date with a Santa Clara grad student—a redhead finishing a PhD in music theory, whom I had to commute forty-five miles each way to see—and with no subsequent contact from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., the memory of Seoul, of the woman with the cooler, of the turkey sandwich, began to fade away.

  Then in the first week of February, when my life seemed to be taking on an easy, predictable rhythm—I was still dating Jen from Santa Clara, and I was having brunch with friends on Sundays, and I was jogging in Golden Gate Park—more typical of the other twentysomethings I knew, I received another package in the mail.

  In my last e-mail to Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc., I had given the company my new address, thinking I didn’t want them sending another counterfeit passport to the wrong guy, and knowing the post office would not keep forwarding my mail indefinitely.

  My concern proved to be well-founded.

  An envelope arrived with another fake passport, this time with the alias “Brooke Buchanan,” and a plane ticket to Paris, and two thousand euros, for a return flight, and, guess what?

  Five thousand US dollars with the promise of ten thousand more if I decided to take on a new mission.

  CHAPTER 16

  YESTERDAY was an exciting day here at the house. It was Pilar’s day to clean, and I had promised to be out of the house, which Pilar prefers since I tend to forget when she has just mopped or waxed the floors, and she doesn’t much like it when I leave footprints all over the place like a wet dog.

  It was the big day of my appointment with Dr. Haug, the brain guy, and Eliza was coming over at noon to take me to get my mind downloaded to a tiny microchip. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, per Dr. Haug’s instructions, and had been prescribed a muscle relaxant in preparation for the procedure. I was also supposed to be exercising twenty minutes every day, Dr. Haug said, for a speedy recovery. He said the process felt a lot like whiplash; only, I wouldn’t be awake for any of it. However, for a few days afterward, I’d be groggy, and my neck and spine would be sore, and there would be some temporary memory loss, but people who exercised regularly tended to experience fewer side effects.

  The muscle relaxant was making me sleepy, and a little stupid, so I didn’t get much writing done last week, much less any exercising.

  Eliza said, “Stop wasting your time on that book of yours. We’ll have your whole life story on a microchip in a few days.”

  I’d like to know what she thinks would be a better use of my time. All I’ve got is time. And money. Time and money. If you are worried about not having enough time on this planet, wait until you are pushing seventy-five, and then tell me if you still think there isn’t enough time.

  Eliza has a gas-powered car that she drives only on special occasions—because fuel is so expensive. She was going to chauffeur me to the clinic since she wanted to do some shopping while I was getting my brain downloaded, and the clinic is in Palo Alto, and Eliza likes the shopping out that way. The procedure takes about four hours. Eliza was going to drive me home after it was all done, get my dinner going, and put me to bed, since she said I’d be too much of a zombie to do anything myself.

  So on the special day—yesterday—Eliza arrived about an hour early. I was still in bed reading the paper, like I do, and Pilar had already started on the kitchen. Eliza was early because she wanted to get into the attic. She said there were still some boxes up there from my mother’s condo, and she wanted to see if she could find any more old photographs. She was working on a family tree for her scrapbook, she said, with pictures.

  The attic is accessible by a steep staircase that could more aptly be called a ladder, which descends from the ceiling by pulling a cord. Eliza insisted Pilar stop in the middle of mopping to climb three flights of stairs and lower it for her.

  I was still in bed when I heard the scream. Eliza had slipped scaling the staircase and had landed with a crunch on the floor. I have never heard so many obscenities out of the mouth of one person. Pilar was standing there looking dumbfounded.

  “She only fell a few feet,” was all she could manage to say to me.

  Eliza has a habit of exaggerating. For example, when she had her first period, she told her mother that her intestines were falling out. And when she was in a minor car accident as a teenager, she claimed to have blacked out, and complains to this day how the car crash ruined her back. Kendra Ann, who was in the car with her at the time, described it as a fender bender.

  I doubted Eliza was in much pain. However, when we slipped off her shoe, which took a considerable effort, we saw how swollen the ankle was, and how discolored it looked, and we all agreed she had to see a doctor.

  Since I am not allowed to drive, and because Eliza was indisposed, Pilar had to drive. The emergency room is just around the corner. Nevertheless, we had to sit in the waiting room an hour to be seen, and at one point I think Eliza passed out from the pain, although I still suspect it was an act. Eliza has a penchant for dramatic flair.

  As it turns out, she shattered her heel bone. We were in the emergency room for six hours while they fitted her for a cast. Pilar stayed with me the whole time.

  When we could finally go in to see Eliza, the first thing my darling girl said to me was: “I’m so mad at you for missing your appointment.”

  Eliza called this morning from bed, where her poor daughters are attending to her every need. She hasn’t been able to reschedule my appointment with Dr. Haug. He’s all booked up. And since I will be gone all summer in Paris with Spencer, there’s no likelihood of squeezing me in anytime soon. She made sure to put special emphasis on the words “Paris with Spencer.” I don’t thi
nk she much approves of my going.

  Dr. Haug assured her that he is looking into setting up an appointment for sometime after Christmas.

  “Can you believe that?” Eliza said to me. “You could be dead by Christmas!”

  Eliza doesn’t much approve of my going to Paris with Spencer, I think, because she is afraid I won’t come back. Paris is a very special place to me. It is where I met Greta. She spent her young adult life there, in and around the Sorbonne. I, too, spent a great deal of time in Paris in my youth, but never before Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. sent me there on a phony passport.

  My flight was scheduled to depart on Valentine’s Day. Jen and I were planning to spend the holiday in Napa Valley floating over the vineyards in a hot air balloon, munching on pâté and sipping Chardonnay. Jen’s idea, my money.

  She had even requested the day off from her internship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Jen wanted to be a high school music teacher. She wanted to change lives. Incidentally, she went on to teach at the prestigious Vivian Strauss High School for Performing Arts in San Francisco and was named the 2022 National Teacher of the Year by the US secretary of education. After she died, the high school named a building after her, the Jennifer Abbott Library of Music, and the walls of the foyer are decorated with over two hundred testimonials from students who claim Jennifer Abbott changed their lives.

  My testimonial, if I had written one, would have read, “I’m sorry, Jen, for standing you up on Valentine’s Day to go to Paris. And I’m sorry that I never called you when I came back.”

  I flew to Paris on Valentine’s Day 2011, a romantic prospect if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was going illegally on a phony passport to spend less than fourteen hours there under the alias Brooke Buchanan.

  Ah, Paris.

  The instructions in the letter, which might have proved sufficient to any well-traveled courier with some working knowledge of French and the Parisian metro system, were to me as indecipherable as hieroglyphs.