Machine Of Death (13 page)

There was a hand under Johnny’s head. Water splashed his face and he opened his eyes. The voice called his name again. Johnny couldn’t see who it was, but the person had Dalton’s voice. That was good enough for him. Water was flowing over his lips now and Johnny swallowed reflexively. He coughed weakly. A head bent down near, and Johnny moved his good arm. He aimed the loop in the bootlace for the head. He tried to catch that throat in his lace, he tried to pull it tight. But he was too weak. He couldn’t do anything. 

“Hey, careful, kid.” Dalton lifted Johnny’s torso in his arms. Now Johnny could hear other voices up at the rim of the chasm. Johnny tried again with the lace, but he couldn’t see anything. He had wanted to kill Dalton so much, and he couldn’t even do that. He couldn’t even kill a man who was fated to be murdered. “Don’t worry, kid,” said Dalton. He wasn’t even paying attention to the bootlace, probably didn’t even realize what it was for. “There’s a little camp on the next island over. I got their medic here. I got food here. You’re gonna be okay. They’re gonna get us out of here.” Dalton hugged Johnny’s head in his arms. “I’m sorry, kid. I’m sorry I did that to you, but I told you to trust me. I told you I could do it. I told you, just keep doing everything you can. Oh, Christ.” Dalton was almost crying now. “I swear to God I thought they were gonna shoot me when I found them. Friendly fire, after everything we’ve been through. But we made it, kid. We made it.” 

A couple of months later, Sarge came to see Johnny in the hospital. His ankle was still mending, but he had finally moved back on to solid food. And his wrist was good enough to write a couple of letters back home. Dalton was right, after all. He was going to make it. He was going to survive. Johnny could hardly believe it. 

“So what did they do to him?” asked Johnny. 

“Court-martialed,” said Sarge. “He’ll be in jail awhile, then he’ll get a dishonorable discharge.” Sarge smiled a little. “They’re not gonna shoot him or anything. Too many extenuating circumstances. Nobody wants to be that harsh on a man who came back for his buddy in the end.” 

Johnny was quiet. Then he looked up at Sarge. “I tried to kill him, too, you know.” 

“When?” 

“When he came back for me with the medic. I was crazy, I guess. I tried to strangle him with my bootlace.” 

Sarge laughed. “Son, when he brought you back to me, you weren’t fit to make a fist, let alone kill anybody.” 

Johnny nodded. “I tried anyway.” He shut his eyes. “It was the worst experience of my life. That hunger was the worst pain I have ever felt.” Johnny shook his head. “I never knew what it would be like. I never knew it would hurt so bad.” 

Sarge patted Johnny’s leg under the covers. “It’s over now, son. You’ll be on your way home before you know it.” 

Johnny laughed a bitter laugh. “Yeah,” he said. What did Sarge care? As soon as Johnny was gone, he wouldn’t be responsible for him anymore. He would feel fine. He’d gotten him out of the jungle alive and sent him home to his folks. That was fine for Sarge. But Johnny hadn’t been lying. Starving was worse than he had ever imagined it could be. And now—since he had lived—he would have to do it all over again some day. 

“Thanks, Sarge,” said Johnny, holding out his hand. What the hell? They might as well shake on it.

Story by M. Bennardo

Illustration by Karl Kerschl

IN
THE
MONTHS
AFTERWARD
, IN
SUBURBAN
DINING
ROOMS
,
THE
BOHEMIAN
BOURGEOISIE
DEBATED
THE
ETHICS
OF
THE
MACHINE
. The first had been installed unobtrusively in leading doctors’ surgeries, and as they spread across the country, schoolteachers and bank managers and creative consultants and publishers met for cocktail parties, suppers, restaurant lunches, and the conversation turned to the machine, the machine, again and again, the machine. Like the weather, or, in time of war, the latest battle, it provided a constant conversational reference point, came to be something akin to a worldwide obsession, in the West, at any rate.

“I saw one,” said Kate Boothroyd, sucking on a cigarette, “on Kensington High Street. There was a line a bloody mile long—madness.”

A temporary silence settled over the Broad’s dining table, broken by the hostess.

“And would you?”

“What?”

“Use it.”

Kate pondered the question a moment.

“No—I don’t think so. I mean, human beings, ultimately, don’t want to know—do they? Or do they? I mean, didn’t somebody write about that?—in trying to avoid the inevitable, you actually bring it about. Who was it, Rory?”

“I don’t bloody know, do I?”

Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Dostoevsky.

The argument continued around the dining table long into the cheese and coffee.

This was the debate, amongst the upper middle classes. Did one really want to know what life held in store? When there was nothing one could do about it at all, when there
was
no happy ending. A blank slip was an impossibility. At best, “old age.” At worst, something unspeakably awful, the self-fulfilling prophecy one couldn’t do anything about.

But people
were
doing it. Sure enough, in the days after department stores and pharmacies installed “the machine,” lines of hundreds formed, eager to know that which could not be avoided. The evening news carried scattered reports of suicides, occasionally
en masse
. Support groups sprang up, devoted to those whose slips had read “suicide,” those for whom the specter of whatever horror could drive them to such desperate measures proved too much. Support groups that turned to cults. One weekend, two hundred teenagers, neatly arranged in two rows along an underground railway station platform on the Victoria Line, stepped neatly to their deaths, drugged smiles on their pimply faces. The whole event engineered by means of the Internet—”Facebook Event Invitations” with a difference.

Marion Broad was out shopping in the West End the day of the Victoria Line suicides, the day public transport was crippled and she had to take a cab to Kate’s for lunch.

Stringy hair, no makeup, Kate answered her door with a drawn look to her face, lit cigarette between her fingers.

“Jesus,” breathed Marion. “You’ve done it, haven’t you?”

She followed her into the house, through a bluish haze of tobacco smoke.

“Emphysema!” barked Kate. “Bloody emphysema!”

The words hung between them, over the John Lewis coffee table.

“Not exactly a surprise, but still… At least I won’t be needing to quit anytime soon.”

A dry laugh crinkled her darkened eyes, and Marion’s heart grew cold.

And so it went on, for months and months. Parliament rejected bids to outlaw the machine, and rejected them again, despite the frenzied speeches of religious groups, political organisations, mothers, fathers, societies for the old, societies for the young, all futile in the face of humanity’s child-like curiosity.

Supermarkets quietly erected them, in the entranceways, by the photo booths.

Leaving Selfridge’s, Marion saw a well-dressed mother leading her infant daughter out of the curtained booth, tears trickling down, melting away the makeup.

James Broad, good-natured and stoical, steadfastly refused to do it. Late at night, taunted by the faces of her friends, Marion envied her husband’s easy sleep, as she tossed and turned. Dinner parties were a grim fandango of fraught nerves, now. Those who had “done it”—euphemisms all round, like it was something dirty—seemed half-dead and half-alive, eyes dull, filling in time until what was predetermined by the fates rolled around. Emphysema. Cancer. Cancer. Suicide. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer.

For the rest, eggshells everywhere. Mentioning the mode of death marked out for anyone at your dinner table was taboo, and the Broads desperately strained to keep the conversation away from illness, disease, and demise. Almost buckling under the strain, like tired horses, never a pleasure, only a chore, they gave up entertaining.

Bars emptied in the suburbs, where stoical stockbrokers bunkered down in semi-detached splendor to await their various tumors and cancers and sleep apneas. In the cities, they filled by night, as cosmopolitan sophisticates drowned their morbid sorrows. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, the lithe young bodies that washed up on the banks of the Thames posed a serious danger to public health.

And then, one afternoon, coming out of the Food Hall at M&S, she stopped, bags over both wrists, and stared solemnly at the new machine in the vestibule. Rebuking herself, she passed by.

That night, in the darkness of the witching hour, across the bed-sheets: “Are you ever tempted?”

From the husband, only gentle breathing.

The next morning, unspeakably early, pale and baggy-eyed after a sleepless night, nursing bitterness in the kitchen: Enough! Enough!

On with the jeans and cardigan, and out into the car, down the deserted, cold, early morning city streets, to the nicest place she could find.

She slipped inconspicuously into the booth, inserted the credit card, tapped in the passkey. Pale and wincing, placed her finger under the needle, poised like the sword of Damocles.

Down and up, in and out, she barely felt a thing. The machine churned out its slip, and she turned it over, in fearful, trembling hands.

“Cancer,” there, and nothing more.

Marion Broad walked slowly through the empty foyer, towards the car in the empty lot, maneuvered herself into the driver’s seat, and drove carefully home.

Letting herself into the grey and silent house, she tiptoed upstairs and into the bedroom, where the light of dawn seeped around the edges of the curtains. Slipping off her trousers and sweater, she drew back the covers and let herself into the bed, and into the small of her husband’s back, smiled a secret smile.

Story by Camron Miller

Illustration by Les McClaine

I
HAD
DINNER
WITH
AN
OLD
HIGH
SCHOOL
ACQUAINTANCE
THE
OTHER
DAY
. We’d bumped into each other on the street after years with no contact at all. Even though we hadn’t been very close when we were teenagers, it was a pleasant surprise to see him. After standing at an intersection chatting through a few cycles of the traffic light he asked if I was too busy to have a meal and really catch up. One thing I’m rarely accused of being is busy, so we were soon at a stylish little restaurant he knew.

Conversation quickly moved from the banal to his travels. It turned out that after graduating from university he’d spent a long time out gallivanting through all sorts of parts of the world. He’d saved up a bit of money and went to countries where it would last him a long time. That’s what this guy was like. He’d always been the one to do the things everyone wanted to do. As teens it had made him the dare taker, the gutsy one, and understandably led to him being much more popular than a nobody like me.

Even as kids when he talked about his adventures he never sounded like a braggart. That hadn’t changed. He’d always been matter-of-fact in talking about the sorts of scrapes he’d been in and he came off as brave, instead of filled with bravado. Even though he lacked a beard, it only took a few minutes for me to settle on a descriptor: grizzled. He seemed like a veteran of something.

Thinking about this, I asked him if he’d had any experiences out in his travels that he’d thought he wouldn’t make it through, that he felt lucky to be alive after.

He sat back in his chair a bit, the slice of bread in his hand forgotten while he thought. “Lucky to be alive? It’s hard to say. Because of my emphysema, it’s never really bothered me.” I was about to offer an apology when he stopped me. “I mean, I don’t have emphysema now, but that’s what my death is going to be. Eventually. I breathe just fine these days so it’s hard to feel like that’s ever going to affect me.”