Machine Of Death (16 page)

Billy tilts his neck to a normal angle and looks at me, a half-centimeter of wire emerging from his nose. Frank—the subject of our abject diagnostics—is our mutual friend and colleague, and he’s going through a rough patch right now. If I flicked the wire into Billy’s face, hard like a fly on a chair arm, I wonder if that would be enough. Then his test might say
Flick
or
Slither
. If he fell backward, he might crack his head on the photocopier or a desk, and then it’d say
Wham!
and he’d become obsessed with George Michael drunk driving or going postal or somebody attacking him with an LP broken into lethal splinters. 

This is how it works: The blood test machine just tells you
How
; never
When
.

Billy says, “Vegetables.”

“He’s gonna die by vegetables?”

He nods. “He took it four times, taking blood from four different parts of his body, and that’s all it said every time.
Vegetables
.” 

My eyes narrow as I visualize random ways to die at the hands of veg, and Billy connects his cheek to his forehead with Scotch tape, pulling it tight so his lip curls into a snarl.  

Frank lives in a small terrace of red brick houses, in an area begging to be demolished and overhauled. Dogs carry knives, and as it’s getting dark, I walk past a gang of ten-year-olds wielding a discarded car bumper, openly discussing whether they could break my shins in one whack.

I knock on Frank’s door, then look down the street at somebody burning a fire in a drum. A section of roof is missing off Jack James’ house three doors down, and inside the exposed cavity is a shack made of corrugated sheets. Jack used to live in the house, but now lives inside the shack in the roof. He took the blood test, and it told him
Pavement
would be his demise. He never considered that falling off the roof is more probable than the ground swallowing him, but this is none of my business, and something I would be interested in witnessing. 

The door opens. Frank is wearing an old, scratched white crash helmet with the visor down. I cringe at his level of mental degradation as the words
Fish
and
Barrel
spring to mind.

Crouching, I wave into the visor and he lets me in.

Frank’s kitchen looks like the courtyard in a scaled down model of a castle, with cans of vegetables lined up along the skirting boards like a perimeter fence. For some inexplicable reason, he’s stacked the Green Giant brand two high.

“Why?” I ask.

“He’s a giant, stupid. Gotta stand taller’n the rest.”

“I mean why aren’t they in your cupboard with the rest of your food, Mr. Stability?”

I open Frank’s cupboards to find other provisions—ravioli, powdered sauces, cornflakes; it seems that only the vegetables have been evicted.

“They can’t fall on me from down there,” Frank says, tapping his crash helmet to acknowledge his ingenuity. 

I briefly visualize a firework getting stuck inside the helmet, resting on the bridge of his nose and blowing the lenses of his small round glasses inward. I want to be in the middle of a city as the world falls off its axis and people melt all round me in the street.

Pulling two chairs out, I make Frank sit and persuade him to take off his cranial protector. His curly brown hair springs out six inches in every direction, except for a strand pasted to his forehead with sweat. Within seconds it bounces to life defiantly, and his eccentric professor appearance returns, with the addition of two new forehead zits since I last saw him.

“Phew,” he says.

“Better, huh?”

Frank agrees, and I make us a cup of tea. Every night, I dream of Armageddon. 

“Mind if I get logical for a second?” I ask him. He shakes his head and curls his bottom lip, like it’s a puzzling question.

“One,” I say. “Even the heftiest can of potatoes, falling six inches onto your head, wouldn’t kill you. Especially with all that padding. Think straight, Frank. Two: you’re more likely to trip over these things and break your neck. When was the last time a can of
anything
fell out of your cupboard?”

Frank looks sufficiently ashamed, and I assist him in returning his food to its rightful location.

“World’s gone mad,” he says, glaring vengefully at a can of Niblets. “Ever since the Newton Twins, they’ve been settin’ fire to churches all over the country.”

I nod understanding and pat his arm, even though inside I scorn our species completely, and wish ill upon almost everybody. The Newton Twins were the first to try to force the machine to be wrong. Both their tickets said
Old Age
, so they committed suicide. Ten times they tried, and ten times they failed.

Gun jammed. Car engine died. Gas ran out. Tree branch snapped—and by now, the media was all over it. They injected
HIV
, and it just went away. Concrete slippers in the lake, underwater for half an hour—but the medics brought them back to life, pictures of health.

One of the twins, Julie, jumped off the railway bridge, but her sister was scared of heights, so abstained. Nonetheless, she was caught by the tarp on a slow-moving train, and trudged home three days later.

I try to inject some perspective, but it’s hard when religion died overnight.

“Look Frank—it doesn’t change a thing. It just means science shed new light on it, and our deaths are proven to be pre-destined. We’re still gonna die, same way we always have done. Are ya gonna wear a crash helmet and eat nothin’ but meat for the next forty years, right up to gettin’ run over by a Peapod delivery truck?”

He slumps, dejected, then looks at me with those puppy-dog eyes that broadcast a big and unpleasant request on the way.

“Mick?” he says, his voice quivering for dramatic effect. 

I could slap his face, but refrain.

“What?”

“I’m scared. I could live with
Old Age
; that gives you a reasonable chance of having a decent amount of time left. But…how are ya supposed to live with
Vegetables
?”

“Forget about it. It’s gonna take ya by surprise, whatever your ticket says. But it’s up to you whether ya greet it with a
Fuck You
, or spend the rest of yer life crying over milk that hasn’t even spilled yet. We all die; it’s hardly a revelation, is it?”

Frank starts crying, so I cave and slap him hard across the face. The sniveling stops, and a white handprint lingers on a bright red cheek.

“Get a
grip!”
I yell. “Are we dying younger cuz of it? No. It’s mass hysteria; they’ve got therapy groups and protestors and are trying to get ’em banned. But they’re makin’ too much money to ban ’em, and all you repulsive fashion followers takin’ the tests and then blubbering about it like you’re an unwilling victim seem to have forgotten one thing:  Prior to receiving your delivery note, you were
still
slated to croak one day! You weren’t immortal just because you didn’t think about it or know how. So stop thinkin’ about it and it therefore ceases to exist. Okay?”

Frank nods, his eyes still wet but now wide and grateful, and then he asks me, “Will you stay a few days, ’til I get my shit together?” 

With every passing hour, I see the potential for many tragic accidents.

“I couldn’t say no,” I tell the bottom of Billy’s shoe as he fishes behind my desk for the box of staples he just knocked off. A euphoric cloud of omnipotence lingers comfortably in the back of my mind, everywhere I go.

TV commercials warn us against the tests. Flip the channel and they tell us, Take the Test Today and Get a 20% Discount! I wonder how many people get
Iraq
or
Antichrist
or
Insanity
. Nobody cares about Tomkat or Brangelina anymore, and even Britney’s parenting abilities have gone back to being her own business. Everybody’s test-obsessed these days, and since the advent of the machines, life has been draining out of people’s eyes piece by piece.

Upside down, Billy grunts something inaudible in a tone that suggests disdain for my weakness, and then humps my mouse as he adjusts his position in the staple hunt. I picture him drooling into a power-outlet, his legs shooting into the air. His ticket would say
Drool
or
Power
or
Idiot
. His shoe is a slip-on, brand new, with a walnut inlay crafted into the shiny black sole. I could snatch it off and club him to death with it in a second. Then he’d get
Shoe
or
Walnut Inlay
or
Contemptuous Colleague
. Instead of killing Billy, I wonder what Jim Morrison’s or Mama Cass’s tickets would have read.

I also wonder if the machine ever prints names, and if this would stand up as evidence in court. 

“Look,” I tell Frank, making my best I’m Not Joking face. “Just so you know—this is takin’ our friendship too far. You’re abusing my good nature, and this is wrecking my important plans for the week. So let me make myself clear, right off the bat. I’m in charge here, or I walk. We’re gonna face this stupid fear head-on, or I walk. I’m not wasting my precious time having an arrested-development pajama party with my derailed friend for recreation. This is inconvenient, so if you’re not ready to deal with it, I’ll get my stuff and come back when you are. Comprendez?”

Frank nods, his lip trembling, and I fling his jacket at him, aiming to snap the sleeve into his eye but missing. 

The outdoor market is busy and loud, allowing for nothing faster than a shuffle through the damp, cardboard-smelling clusterfuck trapped in a repulsive conga line of aged welfare recipients in unwashed brown clothing. We’re surrounded by carts piled eight feet high with vegetables, and Frank’s face is the color of fresh cauliflower. I can tell the spineless little rodent wants to skitter off and cry—but per
Rule 18
I enforced, pertaining to my conditional residence in his stinking asylum—
When shopping for vegetables, we are handcuffed together at all times
.

The key is in my right sock. Some people are so weak they’ll go along with anything you say. Slap them in the face a few times and you could tell them the moon is made of edam cheese. Prior to leaving the house, per
Rule 11
, I made him smoke a joint, and have been whispering paranoia-inducing suggestions into his ear all morning. The poor sap’s eyes are pink and perpetually brimming with fear-tears.

“I could reassure you, Frankie,” I tell him as we pass between two wheelchairs loaded up with bulging bags full of carrots and cabbages and sprouts. “But it’d completely defeat the purpose of my stay.”

In addition to his regular blend of ugly, pathetic, sniveling, disgusting, and completely-at-my-mercy, Frank looks confused.

I get my wallet out, and already he’s shaking his head, so I grab his cheeks with my free hand, squeezing hard enough to give him a toothache.

“You need to face this alone,” I tell him. “I can’t be there forever. You have to build some self-reliance, Frank. Now go buy thirty pounds of whatever veg scares you the most. And before the seller bags them up, I want you to sniff ’em, and inhale the essence of your terror. Look the devil in the eye, Frank.
Now
.”

We take the motorway home,
Rule 31
requiring that Frank watch as I tailgate and cut off and drive with reckless abandon around a sixteen-wheeler
Smith’s Garden Produce
truck at ninety miles an hour. The sadistic delights are never ending in this vegetable-laden culture. It’s raining and the road is slick, and Frank is curled up in the back seat, whimpering and surrounded by sacks of every vegetable we could find. As the truck driver blasts his horn, I flip my middle finger at him, then take a slug from a quart of vodka and start typing a text message on my phone.

Frank starts crying and I grin.

It’s late now and Frank’s asleep on the sofa.

Earlier on, before he crashed out drunk, he asked me, “Haven’t you ever been curious? Hasn’t it ever tempted ya?”

I said no, but I was lying. I took the test three weeks ago.

Everybody’s curious—it’s impossible not to be, but my curiosity was aroused in a different way than most. The testing brought death close and made it seem normal. People realized once again that death is everywhere, all around us all the time. And out of the panic and the closeness came opportunities to assist destiny. I always suspected I was capable of such foul deeds. 

Billy’s funeral was on Saturday. His ticket in the end would have read
Icy River
or
Cut Brake Lines
or
Betrayal
. I hated that smarmy prick from the moment we met, and my only regret is not seeing his face as he died.

The demented old bastard next door in his piss-stench—I have no idea what his ticket would say, but I beat him to death with his noisy dog and stuffed them both in the oven.

My ticket’s worn now, thumbed and crumpled. But as I scoop a handful of cold mashed potatoes from the pan, and get the roll of tape so Frank can’t spit it out, I read for the hundredth time: 
Electric
Chair
.

I screw the ticket up and flick it in the trash, smiling, then walk towards him wielding what he’s learned no longer to fear. 

Story by Chris Cox

Illustration by Kevin McShane