Machine Of Death (49 page)

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.”

“But if nobody else pulled flu, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Not everybody dies of the bird flu. The cert isn’t the whole story, it’s just the end. It’s just the last couple of words in your story. If there’s a big flu outbreak, lots of other bad things will happen. Rioting and violence and food shortages. Now all those people who pulled
STARVATION
or
GUNSHOT
will have the order crystallized for them, too. It’s going to be really bad, Maggie. But we’re not talking about the flu, it’s even worse. It’s a nuclear bomb. I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen.”

I took a deep breath and held her other hand. ”I pulled
HEAT
DEATH
OF
THE
UNIVERSE
, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to die in a centillion years. It can mean anything. It’s just words. It’s just the end of the story. That’s what your cert can be, too. The end of the story, not the whole thing. We have to go, Maggie.”

“What are you—”

“Don’t argue, OK? We have to go. Far away. Into the wilderness somewhere.”

“We don’t know anything about the wilderness!”

“We’ll learn. There are lots of places to hide out there.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. She was starting to cry again.

“They’re building camps in the desert. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” she said, quietly.

“To put you all there, away from the rest of us. They’re taking away the ambiguity. They’re crystallizing the causality. They’re going to make a nuke go off there, Maggie.”

“They wouldn’t do that! Would they?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. But they won’t have to. Hawking is right, but for the wrong reasons. Order is taking over because we’re imposing it. The chaos is still there, but the machine lets us choose not to take it. A nuke is going to go off there because that’s what all the people pulled. If you put a lot of people together with that reading, it’s the only way it can happen.”

“Oh God,” she said. She was silent for a long time, and I was out of breath. Finally, she looked at me, red rims around her eyes. 

“We have to go,” she said.

I’m not sure where we’ll end up. Maggie suggested finding her uncle, the one out in the woods somewhere. She doesn’t know exactly where he is, but he’ll know more about surviving out there than we do. She has a few ideas of where he is, so we’ll start there. 

Maggie might still be worried, but she isn’t showing it. I’ve given her some hope, and she’s given me some, too. Hawking might be right, but I don’t think he is. 

I feel better about my own cert, too. I’m leaving the ambiguity on the table, next to this document. Mom, Dad, I’m sorry for taking the car and taking some money. I think you know it’s for the best. Maggie and I aren’t going to be slaves to order like everybody else. I understand why the government is going to put people in those camps. I don’t think they have a choice. All those people who pulled
PLANE
CRASH
and
FALLING
and
BURNED
ALIVE
in September 11 didn’t tell anyone what they got. There wasn’t a database tracking them. That didn’t happen because it was inevitable, it happened because a bunch of terrorists made it happen. Nobody who died on September 11 pulled
TERRORISM
. There’s no joke in it.

My certificate, my reading, isn’t the whole story. I’m writing it as I go, day after day, with Maggie next to me. I don’t know how things will go, or how we’re going to survive.

I only know how it ends.

Story by James Foreman

Illustration by Ramón Pérez

I
SAW
THE
FIRST
ADS
IN
MARCH
. A week or two later it was all over the news, and then for the next few months you could not get away from it. Still, none of us expected it to have the impact it did. It was a killer. By November I had only had eight or nine dreams when I used to have three or four a week. This is how I make my living. I have a dream and then I wait. Eventually they come to the office or sometimes I run into them somewhere else, we talk about it, and they give me money. At least, that is how it had been working.

Right then I was down to my last week’s worth of savings. I had sold my car in August and my stereo and most of my office equipment in September and every day I was looking around thinking about what to cannibalize next. I was getting more and more pessimistic. 

Then I had a dream that I thought was a paying one and I woke up that morning feeling pretty good, not a hundred percent but maybe sixty-five. In the dream I was painting a room with a small bunch of lilies. Specifically, I was back working for Denny Mankino.

I had worked for Denny for two miserable years before I started this new line of work. Denny was a nice enough guy most of the time but maybe two days a week he was a nightmare. He always apologized afterwards, and always paid on time, but I was still thinking about going to work for someone else. I had my first dream around then. 

The dream was about our client. She was a nice person I did not know a thing about, other than she always said hi and once she brought me a coffee. In the dream, she was swimming in a pool filled with milk, trying to empty it by drinking as she swam. At the end of each lap the pool would be maybe half-full. The problem was that the whole time she was swimming it was raining milk. Not hard, but enough to keep filling the pool. Now the strange part, as opposed to the weird part, was that in a barn maybe thirty yards away, a farmer was spinning a millstone. It was a huge, regular millstone-type millstone, but he spun it like it weighed nothing, like it was a lazy Susan on your kitchen counter. This is what was making it rain. Like I said, strange. But it was just a dream and when I woke up I forgot about it. 

That afternoon while Denny was out doing whatever he did, the client came home, walked up to me and started pouring out a dream she had had in which I was holding an invoice she had to pay. She did not even take off her coat, just walked right up to me and started talking.

I had no idea what was happening and thought maybe she was not a nice person but a maniac and I was about to find out how wrong I had been, but then I noticed that she was drinking from a big carton of milk and my dream came back to me like a bolt of shimmery cloth unfurling across the floor.

We went into the kitchen, sat down, and I told her all about it. When I got to the part about the guy, the farmer, she started paying close attention. 

“He had a medium-sized freckle above his right eye, half in the eyebrow.” She slowly nodded her head as though she knew what I would say next, and then got up and went over to the sink. I waited. When she finally turned around she said, “Can I give you some money?” She looked like a huge weight had been lifted off her. I was glad she was feeling better, but the notion of taking money kind of creeped me out.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve just helped me. A lot.”

I gave her a moment to tell me how but she did not. Instead she found her checkbook and wrote out a check. She handed it to me. It was for five thousand dollars, payable to ‘cash.’

As you can imagine, I was dumbfounded, and I guess since I was not saying anything, she felt the need to. “The guy in your dream is my brother. At least, it makes perfect sense if he is. He died, nine years ago tomorrow.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

She wasn’t finished. “And now, finally, I think I understand. I’m sorry, but I’m kind of freaked out by all this and I’d rather not talk about it. We don’t have to talk about this anymore, do we?”

I didn’t want to jinx either of us, and now that I had a great big check from nowhere, I didn’t want to jinx it either, but I had no idea what we were supposed to do.

“I don’t know. Let’s see. If you have to tell me, I guess you can come find me. Are you sure you want to give me this? It seems like a lot.” 

She sat down and looked very calm and smiled a really nice smile. “Yes.” 

I waited, but she wasn’t saying anything else. “Okay then.”

She went back to the sink and poured out the milk, and I went back to work.

She never got back in touch with me so I never found out what it was all about, but her check was good. So there was that. 

Within about six months the clients were coming pretty steadily. I quit working for Denny and got the office, and for maybe four or five years I made a nice living. It was kind of like I was just walking around, delivering things, but with no real time pressure, and at almost every stop people gave me money. Though it was kind of aimless, there was a weird logic to it all.

Then the machine came along. 

I was not convinced that my new dream about Denny was a paying one. Who was supposed to be my client? Myself? That was creepy. The dream just did not make sense the way others had. So I sat in my office, waiting to see what was going to happen next. And then Mr. Watson came in, which I was absolutely not expecting at all.

Mr. Watson was the shop steward of my local, Local 111 of the S.S.C.W.I. For a long time I kind of thought the union was a scam, a way of conniving me out of 5% of my earnings, until they helped me out of a legal scrape that otherwise would have sunk me. That, and they offered a pretty good medical package that included dental, and of course a pension.

For a moment, just long enough to see that he was not my client, I looked at him without saying anything. He sat down on the corner of my desk and looked back at me. I had no idea what he was up to so I kept my yap shut. It must have looked pretty silly, both of us staring at each other, blank-faced, as though we were having some kind of conversation but without actually speaking.

He did not look good. He was in his late fifties and cultivated a Columbo look anyway: rumpled trench coat, cigarette, bad haircut and if you got close enough a deep, almost subliminal smell of smoke, but still. He was close enough that I smelled the smoke. That was his day job. He was an investigator for the fire department; the rumor was that he had a perfect record. I do not think this had anything to do with his side job, though; he was just a tenacious and thorough guy. He once explained that he was really only a witness anyway. “If you pay close enough attention,” he’d said, “ninety-nine percent of the time it’s obvious how it all burned down.”