Machine Of Death (30 page)

I roll my eyes. “My mom did. Drove straight from the doc’s to the nearest Memento Mori office. Hung a big ol’ framed copy on the wall as soon as we got home.” I smile. “On the fridge too.”

“I bet!” Jill says, laughing harder now. Her nose wrinkles when she laughs. Eyes crinkle. It’s a real laugh, the kind you wish you could see every day of your life.

“And she had this bumper sticker: My Child Is Going to Die
WAY
BETTER
Than Your Honor Student.” 

Now this time I
am
shitting her, and she knows it. It earns another wrinkled nose. “Well, hell,” she says, laughing, “all I got was ‘Brain Aneurysm.’ Borr-ring!” She grins, and then suddenly her eyes go wide again.

“Hey, Ricky, you know what? You should
totally
go with us to Toe Tag Night at Club Congress this Thursday. You’ll be a huge hit!” 

To recap: Jill Harrah is currently seated on my desk. Her leg, below the skirt, is covering my memo pad. She’s smiling and, evidently, making plans. With me.

“Well—I guess I have always wanted to be a huge hit…”

“
Yessss
,” she says, triumphant, and holds up her hand for a high-five. But with Jill you don’t just get a high-five; what you get is some kind of complicated “secret” “urban” handshake she’s invented on the spot. Or, maybe, like now, just some additional dap. 

“Thursday,” she says, scooting off my desk. A memo slides to the floor, and immediately looks abandoned and forlorn. 

And then, because I just
have
to push it, I ask, way too casually, “So is Brian going, too?”

When she looks at me, her eyes are neither wide nor crinkled with amusement. “No he is not,” she tells me, and walks away.

Brian is her fiancé. I am an idiot who will apparently die in his sleep someday. 

“You gotta be fucking kidding me!” says one of Jill’s friends, leaning forward to get a better look at my shirt.

On Toe Tag Night no one wears tags on their toes. What we do is use a template on our PCs and print a
graphic
of a toe tag, which we then wear attached to our clothing somewhere, like on a t-shirt. The graphic looks like the toe tags you see on dead bodies—or at least on dead bodies in movies—and yes, sometimes people also include a cartoony image of a toe, or a even a whole foot. Often bloody. Printed on the tag is your Name, and How You Are Going to Die. For mine, I had to use a smaller font size.   

Jill’s friends gather around, squinting. Jill’s friends. Three of them came with Jill to pick me up at my apartment. Guy from upstairs, Leonard, an older, also single man, happened to be in the lobby when the cab pulled up. “Daymn!” Leonard said, pronouncing the “y.” “Big pimpin’!” The truth was, stepping out to the curb, I didn’t feel much like a pimp. More like the pimp’s tagalong little brother, who had not himself gone into the family pimping business, but chose coding instead. Plus, to be fair, these women all had legit jobs. Smart too. They just happened to be dressed strikingly. I really don’t know how they do it, pull off these transformations. Jill was something in the office, but tonight she was something else again. Shiny, exotic, her hair, braided, streaked red, held with these little butterfly clips. The effect was multiplicitous: as if you were used to seeing this already fantastic creature, one of those supernaturally good-looking people straight out of classical mythology, and then one day she shows up with wings. And offers you a ride. I might’ve stood there all night, staring at Jill, stunned, but luckily she gave me a high-five followed by a vigorous chest bump, which basically got me moving again. 

“Is he for real?” Jill’s friend says now, under the club lights, gesturing with her thumb at my tag. Her name, according to her own tag, is “
LIZA
.” Liza will die from “A COLLISION”—one of the vaguer predictions. She and the others are all standing around me in a way that feels great and incredibly awkward at the same time. Jill tells them I’m for real, all right. The club is starting to fill up, getting hotter. Karen, with the long black hair, leans forward, reads, leans back. “Huh,” she says. “Not my type.” She flips her hair over her bare shoulder. “I’m more into the whole ‘Gunshot Wound, Fiery Motorcycle Crash’ thing, y’know?” On her tag, Karen has written “O.D.” The “O” is drawn like a skull with little x’s for eyes. One thing I learned right away upon entering the club is that not everyone prints their toe tags on a laptop at home. Most just use the Sharpies and blank tags you can get for free at the door. 

The club is really filling up now, people pouring in, and Jill’s friends start to drift with the incoming flow, Liza turning away, Karen already gone, and the last friend, Aimee, as if an afterthought, turns to me and says, “Well,
I
think it’s cute.” Which I’m then left to interpret on my own.

Aimee had written “NEVER” on her tag. 

As a joke. 

I feel a hand on my shoulder. Jill. “You coming?” She tips her head toward the crowded center of the club. It’s hot there, pulsing.   A bare-chested man beneath a strobe light is performing a dance that appears to somehow involve kung fu. Lots of kicking. I tell her I’m good.

Jill smiles, studying me. “Relax,” she says after awhile. “Have a drink. Hang out. People-watch.” She pats my shoulder, lightly, once. 

The bar is strung with skeleton lights. They’re already out of the urn-shaped mugs when I get there, so I settle for a plastic cup. The girl ordering next to me reads my tag and laughs. Another guy slides up on her right and says, “Hey, what’s your sign? Mine’s CANCER!” Grins. My whole generation stands on the gallows, sharing the same humor. And because this is Toe Tag Night and not a certified dating service, people are free to write pretty much whatever the hell they want about how they’re going to die. Which can be confusing.   Right away, I count no fewer than five people who’ve each written “
ALCOHOL
POISONING” under their name, and you can’t say for sure, looking at their sweaty, shouting faces, who is just being funny and who is actually on the way. Over there by the winking Coors sign, a guy named “STEVE” has stuck a tag on his trucker hat that reads “
AFTER
MULTIPLE
ORGASMS
.” That’s another popular one, but considering it from the perspective of Steve’s partner, maybe not so much fun?

Then again, like the bumper sticker says: “We’re All Necrophiliacs Now.” Not quite accurate, but oddly appropriate, I think, to our absurd condition. I lift my beer. In the corner by the bathroom, a man is groping a woman who’s painted her face and lips blue, his face is smeared blue now too; his eyes, squeezed shut, have pennies tattooed on the lids.

Cheers. 

“Seriously?” the guy in the Misfits shirt asks. “Dude, that rocks.” He leans forward, slaps my tag. “You take that shit to a real dating service,” he says, swaying toward me slightly. “Fuck amateur hour. You know?” I nod. Smile. Swaying a little myself. I know what he’s trying to say. I’ve been told before that from a matchmaking perspective—particularly to those looking for an LTR—how I am going to die is considered extremely desirable. “Pussy magnet” as Leonard put it. Then he went back upstairs to watch his
Battlestar Caligula
internet porn and eat a single-serving microwave dinner.

The guy in the Misfits shirt stumbles back into the crowd. On the far wall they are projecting footage from last year’s
Dia De Los Muertos
parade, a festival that has become increasingly popular in recent years. The images of the parade revelers in full costume superimposed on the club-goers creates a blurred, surreal effect, and I realize I have been drinking too fast. I turn away, toward the stage. The flyers posted everywhere said that tonight would feature the shock-punk band, Anna Nicole’s Death Fridge. Instead there’s an all-woman three-piece called Violet who play straight ahead rock-and-roll refreshingly free of irony.  

I’m bobbing my head, not a thought in it, when suddenly there’s Jill. She gives me a high-five, and then, still clasping my hand, manages to snap her fingers three times in a row without letting go. “What’s the haps?” she says jokingly, her nose crinkled and perfect. Her face is flushed from dancing. She looks wholly alive.

A group of goth kids push their way up to the bar. Jill peeks at me over the tops of their heads and smiles. Or maybe they’re just dressed like goth kids. If you’re a real goth kid, every night is basically a kind of Toe Tag Night. And words like “SUICIDE” make for extremely stylish tattoos. I lean toward Jill and shout over the music. “Hey!” I shout, cupping my mouth with my hand, “I read that in England they don’t have Toe Tag Nights! It’s Headstone Night!”

“Really?” Jill scoots down the bar, closer to me. She tilts her head, tucking her hair delicately behind one ear. Our knees touch. “Yeah,” I continue, my face hot, “you know: ‘Here Lies So-and-So,’ died of ‘Shingles’ or whatever…” I want to say something else, about how their graphics are probably much better, all graveyards and moonlight, but I stop myself because I don’t want to sound like a dork.

“I bet their graphics are killer!” Jill says. “Hey!” She squeezes my arm. “We should do a shot!” She orders and the bartender brings out a cardboard box painted to look like the machine and we reach inside and get our cards. Mine says “
BOURBON
.” Jill gets “
SAMBUCA
.” “Trade ya!” she shouts. Her eyes are ablaze, reflecting neon. She winks. We don’t trade. We share. One of each.   

The band is taking a break and Jill has just finished showing me a new handshake that somehow ended up with both of us locking elbows and wiggling our open hands above our heads like antlers or antennae, laughing helplessly, and for no reason I can name I ask her why Brian doesn’t come to these things. Jill stares at me, pop-eyed, for a full second. Then gives me the finger. Only it’s the finger next to the middle one, which I’m guessing is kind of like the variation she gives to her handshakes, and I’m just glad she’s still smiling. 

A guy immediately slumps onto the stool next to hers. “Hey, what’s your sign?” he says through a loose grin. “Mine’s—” 

“Cancer. Got it.” Jill turns on her seat back to me.

Liza arrives with a guy dressed in Spandex and a cape. He’s made his tag into a giant crest, emblazoned with the word “
HEROICALLY
.” He has a gym-built body; the wide chest and shoulders and comparatively small legs make him look, fittingly, like a Bruce Timm cartoon character. Except for the hair gel. Liza makes no introductions. She whispers something in Jill’s ear, and I’m thinking of the people you sometimes read about, who learn that they’re going to die from “A BULLET” or “
FLAMES
,” but rather than spending their lives hiding or trying to avoid their fate, go on to join the police department or become firefighters. Aimee and then Karen slowly walk up to the bar and nod to Liza and Jill, but not the guy. Aimee heads immediately to the front of the drink line and returns almost as quickly, a sweating death’s head cocktail in hand. Karen smokes a cigarette and looks at nothing. 

There passes several moments when no one speaks, which I can only describe as uncomfortable. The Spandex guy suddenly remembers the friends he left at the other end of the bar, and returns to them in a single bound or so. Aimee, I notice, has scratched out “NEVER” on her tag and written in “
BOREDOM
.” I am glad to have a drink because it gives me something to do with my hands. 

Later, I am taking a deep breath, preparing to say something, anything, when the band starts up again—incredibly loud. Which is how I know Jill’s phone was probably on vibrate. She leans forward on the barstool, holding the phone to one ear and plugging the other with a finger. A deep crease begins to form between her eyebrows. Suddenly, still bent forward in that same position, she bolts. “Don’t—!” I hear her yelling into the phone as she darts headlong through the crowd.   

I look to the other girls. “What an asshole,” Liza says, turning to Aimee. “Brian’s tag should read, ‘Crushed Under Own Ego.’”

“‘Being a Total Dickweed,’” Aimee replies.

Karen exhales a cloud of grey smoke. “‘Cock Suckery.’” 

I have been trying to follow this exchange arcing back and forth over my head like a lethal volleyball. “
Really?
” I say at last, with a look of what I can only imagine is total astonishment on my face. “Why is she going to marry him, then?”

All three turn to me, silent. 

“Hey, Dies-In-Sleep,” Liza finally says, after what feels like a long time, “you’ve got a good life ahead of you, why don’t you go buy us a round?”

I am hustling back from the bar, a glass in each hand and one balanced between them on the tips of my outstretched fingers, forming a kind of drink triangle—Liza’s non-sequitur having seemed somehow perfectly reasonable coming from her—when an entirely different thought finally occurs to me:  The finger that Jill gave me earlier was the ring finger. Without the ring. 

I find her by the bathrooms, wiping her eyes with toilet paper. “He wasn’t always like this,” she says without preamble, sniffing. “He got one of those fucked up predictions. You know? Like Liza?” She wipes the corner of her eye. “‘Attacked.’ I mean, how fucked up is that? But instead of just dealing, it made him all paranoid and mean. And he never wanted to go out, and when we did stay in he was always—”  She stops and blows her nose. Laughs. “Fuck it,” she says, her wet eyes shining. “He probably was always like that, and is just using it as an excuse for being a shitty person.” She sniffs again and tosses the wadded tissue into her purse. “That’s what I’ve been telling Aimee, anyway.”

From the stage, the bass player begins an elaborate, extended solo.   

“Um, listen,” I say, lamely. “Aimee and everyone, they want to leave. Go to this party they heard about.” I attempt a wry smile: “Karen says this place is dead.” 

Jill looks at me seriously, and doesn’t break eye contact. “I’m really tired,” she says at last. “Can I just stay at your place?”

I am standing outside in the warm Arizona night air, waiting for a cab. I am a little drunk maybe, and trying to make things fit together in my mind. Me. Jill. Jill and me. When the cab pulls up, we get in, sliding to the center on the hard vinyl seat. The door handle on my side is made almost entirely of duct tape. Jill smells like flowers and other people’s cigarettes. Her presence fills the cab. Jill. I give the driver the address to my apartment and I’m trying to remember, is there still a dirty cereal bowl on my living room table? Clothing balled on the floor? Underwear? The driver’s accent has a recognizable musicality which I think places him from India. The air conditioner in the cab is not strong, but Jill and I stay huddled together in the back. It seems like the most natural thing in the world to put my arm around her. My arm lies stiffly across the back of the seat. “I don’t understand those dating services,” she says to me. “All those ‘Heart Attacks’ and ‘Tumors’ getting together. It all seems so grim.”