Part 8 (1/2)

”Clearly it would come to just the two of us and he would need to take my blood and I would submit and it would come up 'Emphysema'. He'd give an impa.s.sioned speech about how I was the only one who truly understood struggle while the bodies slowly froze around us. Then he'd want to go find his leader and the rest of the revolutionaries to test them and it wouldn't stop until everyone in those mountains was dead. And I'd have to run for home and safety, knowing what I'd set loose.

”So yeah, none of that happened.” Both of our plates were gone and dessert menus lay in front of each of us, unread. ”In reality we ate a fake-jovial meal and gave toasts all around. Everyone was scared, like they could hear barbarian hordes just over the hill, but there was nothing they could do except eat their bits of goat.

”MJ kept on treating me like an honoured friend right until the end. I wanted to hit him. h.e.l.l, I wanted to shoot him and send all those kids home. But I didn't. A kid was my guide to the path after the feast was over. I didn't warn him to get the h.e.l.l away from that machine. Couldn't have really. I stayed in a guest house, barely sleeping. I took off before dawn and didn't stop until I was on a bus and far away. If I were any sort of human being I would have wrecked the Machine before I left. I didn't do that either.”

My friend had let all this out in a quiet rush, much quicker than the measured pace of the rest of his storytelling. He had another gulp of water, and caught his breath. ”I guess I've never told this story before.” He tried one of his usual self-deprecating smiles. It didn't quite work. ”Harder than I thought.”

I couldn't let it go there. ”But then what happened? Did they get the Machine working? Did they all kill each other?”

He looked hard at me. ”I don't know. After I left, I refused to pay any attention to the news from that area. Plenty of other things in the world to care about, right? Besides, maybe I didn't affect anything. The Machine might have done exactly what they thought it would do. Maybe they never got it working. Who knows?

”But I'll tell you this: I'll never go back. If that means I miss a few mountainscapes, so be it. I knocked about in the third world for a few more months but my heart just wasn't in it anymore. I tried keeping clear of revolutions but there are just too many kids out there with guns. Too hard to forget.

”Eventually, of course, I came back to civilization. And here we are.”

Here we were indeed.

I stared at my dessert menu and decided on an inconsequential tiramisu.

Story by J Jack Unrau Ill.u.s.tration by Brandon Bolt

VEGETABLES.

”THE BLOKE'S A f.u.c.kIN' WHACK JOB.”

Billy, the Director of Marketing, tells me this while he's picking his nose with a paperclip. ”He wasn't right to start with; he's the last b.a.s.t.a.r.d who should've got that blood test. He's been treading water all his life, but he's sinkin' now.”

He straightens the paperclip, then slides it between his thumb and finger to squeegee the snot off. Unimpeded by my Ugh Ugh face, he wipes his fingers on the fabric of my cubicle wall. In the background a phone has been ringing for five minutes without kicking into voicemail, and in the next cube, somebody's screaming at a subordinate employee on another line. I want to kill them all and dance to the sounds of their suffering through the junkyard of smashed computers and office plants and overturned desks. face, he wipes his fingers on the fabric of my cubicle wall. In the background a phone has been ringing for five minutes without kicking into voicemail, and in the next cube, somebody's screaming at a subordinate employee on another line. I want to kill them all and dance to the sounds of their suffering through the junkyard of smashed computers and office plants and overturned desks.

I ask Billy, ”What did it say?”

Tilting his head back, throat tight, Billy inserts the straightened paperclip once again into his nostril. He's wearing a tailored Armani suit that probably cost more than I make in two months. This time he keeps pus.h.i.+ng, until the wire disappears into his skull.

”It doesn't talk,” he informs me. He makes quotation marks with his fingers. ”It didn't say say anythin'.” anythin'.”

If I whacked the stub of the wire with the heel of my hand, Billy would be dead in a second. If he took the test, it might say Paperclip Paperclip or or b.a.s.t.a.r.d b.a.s.t.a.r.d or or Whim Whim. Instead of killing him, I say, ”I know it doesn't talk, you facetious p.r.i.c.k. I meant what did his ticket say? How's Frank gonna die?”

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 Flick or or Slither Slither. If he fell backward, he might crack his head on the photocopier or a desk, and then it'd say Wham! 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. 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 How; never When 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 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 b.u.mper, openly discussing whether they could break my s.h.i.+ns 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 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. 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 Fish and and Barrel Barrel spring to mind. 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 gla.s.ses 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 anything fell out of your cupboard?” fell out of your cupboard?”

Frank looks sufficiently ashamed, and I a.s.sist 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 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?”