…Machine…
A Machine was invented that sucked human bodies up like slugs and converted their bodies (and their subsequent deaths) into energy.
It was invented by a man named Albert DiGennero, who went to one of the three top Ivies (Princeton, Yale, or Harvard). He went to whichever one was the top Ivy League school at the time (those three always argued, rotated, and competed for the top spot). He was already white-haired and balding with a greasy comb-over (with a life of its own) when, sitting in his lab one day, he decided to get back at humanity for all the terrible things people had done to him (called him names in Grammar School, teased him for his brilliance). He didn’t have a lot of time left, so what did he care about how he spent the rest of it? Childless and alone, he didn’t care much about leaving a legacy or some sort of improvement in the world. All he wanted was his name and a diagram in a mainstream Biology Textbook, outlining How the great Dr. DiGennero converted Dead Human Flesh into Energy. That’s how he’d make his mark and seek revenge on all those scientists mocking his earlier work (not to mention those evil playground kids who never picked him for kickball). No, the world would never be the same after his great invention. So let them eat themselves, he figured. He wanted people to die in their own stupidity, drown in their own feces. It took years for Dr. DiGennero to reconfigure and modify the old Slug Model into a Human Consumption Machine; each new part and lever making death even more painful and the electrical energy drawn out of it even stronger.
Dr. DiGennero decided to administer the first test (on a small scale of course) on his foot. He wrote his observations in his scientific notebook:
The fat knuckle of the big toe bends under the front of the toe, as though a marble was caught under its nail and settled, lodged there unmoving. The toe looks more like a thumb, separated and larger from the rest of the piggies. The smallest toe has literally folded into itself as the other, longer toes dangle in mid-air, twitching, trying to break free from the mass of skin sticking them together, trapping them like amber. The toes smell like cedar tree-sap, convulsing against the body of the foot. Look at these toes. They are imprisoned by skin, an ugly, malicious, prison master, a sadistic toe with a hunch over its arches. It is a hunchback prison guard, the smaller toes his inmates. The toes try to scream for help, but they have no mouths to scream with. But who would listen to toe screams anyway? Perhaps the toes were mad even before they were put under the treatment of the first model. Why is that ugly foot shooting out so awkwardly from my ankle? It is as if it wants to show off the hidden deformity under the halo of genius, the abnormality under the skin, now on top. Was it ever truly hidden under the surface?
Those piggies, those fat, yellow lumps of skin: hoofs. I will trudge along on them. If I walk barefoot all day, the large calluses under my foot will start bleeding and smell like salty, stale, burnt leaves. Drip. Oil from my skin is dripping, burning, and scalding the panel I placed it on. The oil boils, glistens, corrodes, and churns, coils, slides, slithers. The droplets squirm like amoebas.
If those toes could speak, they would yell out in scattered, delusional tongues. The big toe would yell back words of depravity to get them to shut up, beating them down with his words, like a night stick. The little toes loathe that prison guard toe. The big toe fears the marble stuck in its hull. All sadists are insecure. The little toes want freedom, the big toe wants to enjoy their pain, it wants to torture and harass the little toes, especially the baby stub. It wants them to suffer until they all decay and fall off, black and purple with boils, until they are dead.
Now, the foot itself has lost all its natural beauty, that holy icon of life. It doesn’t twinkle as it sashays across the floor. The experiment is a success. It is dead.
But that was just the beginning. Dr. DiGennero created a large scale Machine, one that could convert a full body, then two, then five, then fifteen. This Machine would solve all energy problems. That was it; that was the only excuse the Machine needed to gain wide acceptance and acclaim from the community. Ethics were no question, who cared if a few died while the rest of the world lived comfortably? Sure, there would be Machiavellian sacrifices, but for the greater good. With more energy, from a bottomless source, the problems of the world could be solved. No more energy crisis, no more blackouts (the environment would be kept intact, while solving issues of over-population). Dr. DiGennero presented his work at conferences around the country. Slowly but surely, the word spread and the little known scientist won the Nobel Prize for his research. The international scientific community applauded his work.
Dr. DiGennero’s foot was amputated and his doctors found that a cancer from the foot spread to his ankle. The cancer, slowly creeping up his leg, would surely kill him. It was time for him to sell his idea, leave something to this world in physicality, not just an idea in text books. He got some big-name buyers next to his hospital bed, first the major computer and software companies then some lower-level insurance corporations. The multinational corporations were all over him. They wanted to keep their businesses alive; everyone needed energy to continue to be a fast-paced commodity (Heaven knows that oil and gasoline were down the drain). Electricity was on big companies’ brains. They craved it for their investors, for their consumers. Money, money; had to get some. By the time DiGennero died, several companies were fighting over the rights; and then the government got a sniff of the stuff and wanted in.
The government wouldn’t leave this technology (non-pollutant, cost-effective energy) to private corporations. Imagine the consequences of having a completely free market. No, no, instead of having to make a million laws preventing individual profit gain, why not just get in on the earnings and make money for the government itself? So, the government monopolized the industry and hired private businesses to manufacture and run the machines. Large plants were built throughout most states in the country, within a two-mile radius of most federal buildings. The businesses hired the same blue-collar workers attending to steel and coal mines to build these People Eating Machines.
Although originally nameless, two fat male engineers, while mass manufacturing the product, nicknamed the Machine Big Sexy. It’s a funny story: The two brothers, Rufus and Julius Ignora, were standing next to a large, hatch door examining the many long, oval blades as they tore into a mechanical conveyer belt. As the blades ripped over the belt (a flaw of their particular model) chemical residue spurted out and caught on Julius’s rubber pant-leg. The toxic, acidic chemicals started to chew through the rubber material, forcing Julius to strip his clothing and Rufus started to laugh.
Ha! Oh man! You got a hard on!
Looking down, Julius realized that he became enthralled in the excitement of the moment; the ripping of the belt, like some ancient rape scene converted into a modern, perverse, mechanical disaster. He imagined the night Rufus took him out to have a picnic with the town slut-turned-prostitute. How no one entered that park because of all the homelessness and debauchery there. Both fully-clothed men ripped open the girl’s flimsy white blouse; he remembered how their bodies, like the food in the picnic basket, unraveled, unwrapped, fell onto the ground (breaking open, smashing together, juices spreading in a myriad of directions). Rufus and Julius joked about how this was so much better than reading the soft porn they had become accustomed to. While usually deprived of their greater, carnal desires, they were finally able to Get It Up at this type of employment.
They looked at each other only to reflect that what they truly wanted (rape, homoerotic incest) was not allowed. How something about the screeching noises, flashes of hot light, and smell of burnt rubber made them horny. Rufus thought of the freedom (not like you or I think of freedom, of men without machines telling them what to do, but the freedom to destroy things). They wanted the freedom to live without morals or principles in a world where modernity allows anything to happen. They envisioned the type of freedom that’s served on a silver platter to a fat man in a lazy-boy chair. Rufus thought of creating a deadly computer virus that festered into unsuspecting computers, killing not only the machines, but the people using them. No, no, he thought more directly of throwing a brand-new, flat screen TV out of a tenth story window, hitting a business man on the way down, the silver, shattered pieces complementing the shimmering red on the side walk. Oh the carnage. Julius thought of a high speed car chase in a brand new Cadillac on a multi-lane highway; the gears shifting, the power exerted over speed and place. Then a giant truck smashes into it (glittering pieces of plastic and metal contort the moist bodies inside). Rufus brought up video games, blood splattering the screen (how he wished it was real blood). He imagined an anarchical world, in which he could run around lawless without morals or rules. (And people say that video games have no effects on real life?) Julius thought of roller coasters, then of a hang-gliding ride at an amusement park near their home. The ride’s intent was to make the boys experience each aspect of hang-gliding, using every sense (even the smell of evergreen below). Julius imagined the ride breaking, his body hurtling towards the chaos below (his body submerged) his sweat, his heartbeat, all senses artificially tenderized. Finally, they were creating a Machine for that. Yes. Big Sexy was what they would call it, the climactic high and the ultimate orgasm. The name spread. And often, employers would find their workers masturbating to the Machines. If only they knew that the engineers in their white collars were doing the same. Gingerly stroking their laptops and car dashboards, watching animated porn on a flat, widescreen TV; the same perverted undertones the blue-collar workers were experiencing was happening in the same way, on a different level.
Since then, the Machine had an odd reputation. If just looking at the carnage of the machine made someone horny, the actual experience of it killing someone must have had the effect, ten fold. Rumor had it that the painful sensation inflicted by the Machine as it killed and absorbed energy (converting it to its own electricity) was erotic. That somehow, as the Machine sucked the life out of a man’s juicy organs, he would feel the greatest pain and pleasure possible in a lifetime. Little scientific fact substantiated this claim (but many were curious to test it).
First and foremost, the machines craved human flesh, so businesses realized that they needed volunteers. Businesses just needed a label, some pretty, pink wrapping to cover up the debris inside, something that would sell; something that would inspire people to sacrifice their bodies. The businesses ran telethons, inspiring consumers with the advertisement that this Machine would Reverse Global Warming And Solve Problems With Population Control and that Citizens Can Work Hands-On To Directly Affect Change and most of all, this will Provide Energy so that Anyone Who Volunteers Will Be A Productive Member Of Society, Contributing To The Greater Good. Little did consumers know that they would be consumed.
The first to go were the old widows (the primary victims of telethons) who longed to get out of the house for a new form of productive philanthropy. Overnight, wrinkled hands, sweet smiles, and over-active libidos clutched their enlarged archaic phones, taking their sweet time dialing, feeling each key, because their blind eyes could no longer distinguish their finger tips from the numbers. These widows would clamor for their chance to give back to humanity, and get an extra kick on the side. What a way to go, kill two birds with one stone (give back to humanity and get that last, glistening fuck, the most wonderful, to make their passing just a bit better, to feel fulfilled at last). Their trembling voices muted by the pricking teeth grinning on the other end. They had nothing else to lose, argued the government representatives, who cheered at reduced Social Security spending. Businesses even offered their employees increased benefits if they signed waivers committing to Retirement By Machine (ending their lives through Big Sexy instead of by retiring, and, notably, in place of receiving a pension).
After more enhanced, descriptive rumors of the machine’s nickname spread, next to go were the sadists and masochists (dying for the ultimate, sensually-painful experience, literally). Around the corners of the cinder-block factories, dominatrix play-things could be seen, whip in hand, waiting to end it all. A thin, coal-haired woman wearing all leather with a leash attached to a fat man in a dog collar smiled resiliently against the sky, defying the system she deviated from, fitting into their color scheme at last. But still, there had been no survivors and therefore no first-hand reports of the Machine actually inducing an orgasmic sensation. The Machine’s factual feeding process seemed quite the opposite. The process was, in fact quite tediously wrenching and long, consisting of a loud, humming drone throughout and terrible smells of battery acid. Slowly grinding and mashing up the bodies (feet first), disintegrating any useless parts with a special acid, etc. took up to forty-eight hours. There was no anesthesia; why give it to someone who was bound to die anyway?
After this news came out, the next to volunteers were suicidal maniacs, people desperate for any feeling (because they felt empty most of their lives), longing for death and pain on the way. I’m sure the boiling chemicals pumped into their organs filled them with something. The government therefore installed a Euthanasia Program, liberally allowing what people had been bellowing for, years prior. In response, those dying of terminal illnesses jumped on the bandwagon.
The government got rid of welfare (those who were impoverished and in massive debt were arrested like never before). The justice system incorporated the Machine into rudimentary punishments. Soon, small-time drug offenders were on a new type of death row. And people convicted of just being poor without a government to care for their needs joined them.
Could you believe it? I couldn’t. Reality and Truth spread like wild-fire, exposed to a dry breeze. Nothing these people heard deterred them from allowing the Machine to become ingrained into our society. Humans needed Machines, not other humans. Politicians serve man, don’t they? They give people want they want. If the democratic majority of people were dumb enough to support this Machine, did that mean that it was all for the greater good? All the while, it left me to wonder, was it more victorious to fight or just give in?
I just couldn’t accept that man was so malicious in nature.
Seeing how I was already a dissident from proper society (a penniless artist, in no way Being Productive or Advancing Society, according to the government) I decided that I would fight the mass slaughter and save humanity from itself.
The first thing I did was try to deplete the Machine’s source of energy. I widely distributed birth control (condoms, diaphragms, and the infamously prescribed Pill) for six months. I found that not only were people still producing babies (the wheat of the flour) but in even greater numbers, now that they knew if they couldn’t keep the baby, they could always donate or contribute their baby to the Machine. When government caught on to the Murder Label the Machine was receiving, the government exploited the Machine’s deadly nature and sold it as the new birth control. This would be Less Costly And Less Emotionally Damaging (not to mention more productive) Than Abortion Or Adoption. One couple was quoted as saying, Hey, as long as our TV and microwave keep running, who needs protection? The government advertised the cost-effectiveness of this procedure of slaughtering newborn babies in their famous advertisement A New Wing To The House Or An Active Way Of Conserving Energy… Give Back To The Community. The government made Murder the new Recycle. Why have people, when we have a regime? If the average Joe was ignorant and going to die anyway, why not use him in a productive way to solve all the government’s Intellectual energy problems? The government couldn’t run on empty, it needed some type of fuel.
In reaction, I saw only one thing that I could do: kidnap newborn babies and raise them on my own, for fear their parents would redistribute energy through them. As long as I protected innocence, I could raise these babies into a pacifistic army to one day revolt against the heinous crimes of the government. I would teach these babies love and peace, telling them that their mission in life was Not To Be Productive. These babies were not Machines; they did not have to fulfill a purpose that would serve the rather misguided desires of humanity. Ads in magazines said Reproduce The New Way a way feeding directly into our electrical outlets and computer screens. See how definitions can be contorted full circle in this world (as long as words are used to a regime’s advantage).
So I tried to steal one baby. I dressed like a nurse with the nametag Rumpelstiltskin. While holding one small baby, I came within five feet of the hospital exit before I was almost arrested. Almost. I escaped by putting the baby on the counter and claiming that I was a covert government inspection officer Just Peeking At The New Crop—the latest nutrients to be harvested by the Machine downtown. Can you believe that they bought that? They didn’t even bat an eye. They even let me touch the baby more to determine how much energy could be made out of it. City people, how they love their Machines; those sexy industrialized wastelands. Watch any car commercial and what do you see? Big city, sexy driver, shiny leather interior—another Machine attracting the human libido.
I needed to escape, to survive, to rescue those idiots drooling over interior design magazines, home-shopping networks, and titillated by the latest online coupon. I had to save the consumers from consuming themselves.
The leaves were quickly falling from the trees, like tourists rushing onto subway trains, their distinct colors lost in a rushing haze of yellow, red, brown. They all mixed together, dying together, falling together. I looked on the ground and a beetle crawled out from a crackling brown leaf. The leaf made a print, like an ink stamp on the pavement. The bug hustled its shiny body past the underbelly of the leaf, into the afternoon sunlight, creeping its way past the cinnamon imprint, escaping from the trap of the moment. The sun blurred into the skyline, creating that beautiful pink time of day (the most surreal part of every day). I heard a mockingbird. I dread mockingbirds. Their noise always reminds me that it’s the end of the day. They always make me aware that something is dying, that time is fleeting, that my time is slowly fading away. Those mockingbirds tell me that the paranoia of the night is going to commence soon. Run; I had to run back to my home, before the night enclosed me, before I was lost in its bleak shadows.
My home was a small apartment located near a bakery. Well, it was a bakery until it was torn down in place of a two-in-one combo: a Machine and a Machine factory. Machine Factory. Machines producing other Machines. This was progress? This was supposed to be the modern advancement of man? But man wasn’t doing anything. I used to buy food from the bakery. It was yummy. After the Machine was built, I would watch people line up along the sidewalk waiting to die. They were distracting and not producing lovely smells. Most of them smelled like they had wet themselves in line. Their faces were pale in the moonlight, and even paler in the rush of morning. I loved mornings until the Machine was built near my home. Then, I would dread them. Because every morning I would wake up, feel calm and collected, just happy to be alive, smiling, and then I would look out my window: the business man, coffee still in hand, wearing the latest executive-member tie given out by the club, stands in line, like the others, still clutching his briefcase (it is not filled with office papers, but sweet remembrances and bank statements he wants to take with him to the afterlife, a note from his girlfriend in college, the one that committed suicide, a picture of his dog that died when he was nine, a video of his diseased mother singing to him in his crib). These remembrances would be stashed, with the others, in a side room to the main Machine chamber. Stories of the inner workings of the Machine spread not through the mouths of those who committed themselves, but from the workers, who boasted about the latest finds in some of these rooms. One found a book of psalms, another a golden watch (and the craziest find, an embalmed poodle). And as these remembrances of love and humanity were discarded like loose bills in a pocket book of a millionaire, so would this man’s body be boiled, burned, and grated (creating the worst smell in the world, the smell of burnt pubic hairs, flesh, fat and oil). Like the rest of the people in line, he would be considered contributing to the greater good, and my skin would crawl as I looked at him. I would not drink coffee that morning; I would stare blankly out my window, unable to ignore the dozens of people lined up, unable to ponder, to wonder What’s going through their heads? How can they think it is justified to do this? What are they thinking as they wait (as they fill out bureaucratic papers releasing their lives to a corporate-government complex, to the Machine behind the Machine)? No, all thoughts would ooze from the pores of my skull, leaving me brain dead as I focused on their lifeless faces. My coffee cup would smash against my wooden floor like the leaves against the pavement, desperately trying to make a lasting imprint, only to be removed by the dust and the wind.
Ring.
John the painter called. You never met John, so I’ll try to recreate him best I can, so you can get a better impression.
Are you alright? His voice was raspy in the mornings, as if he had a voice box implanted in his throat.
No, I answered.
You can’t let this kill you; it’s already killing so many others. You have to live, despite the deaths. Just to prove the Machine wrong. Just to exist in spite of the carnage.
You live. What do you do? You don’t have a Machine next to your house; you don’t see the lines outside all through the mornings, all through the evenings. People lining up because of its popularity. What can I do to live if they die? I die with them.
No, John said. You are smarter than them. You will live despite them.
I will be like the old woman on Masada, who must live as the sole-survivor, to tell the tale of the suicides because it will be so late in my life that I will die soon anyway. Except, there are no Romans. Or are the Romans the energy? Are the Romans the energy as western society?
Stop! Just stop. I’m coming over.
John was quiet. He entered the room wearing a sweater, a scarf, and a knit hat I made for him one year with some gray and brown string. He loved that hat. He slowly unraveled the red scarf and placed it upon the wooden coat-rack at the entry way. It was as if with each article of clothing he stripped, he tried to reveal himself to me (as if he would make this place holy, he would make this a sanctuary, a place of truth). I could recognize him now. The grooves in his face were familiar, abandoned by the earthly covers of modernity. He took off the hat, revealing his messed black hair (he had been scratching at his head at night, violently probing his brain for an answer to the pain and empathy he felt). He hadn’t slept well. Finally, he stripped the warm sweater and looked at me sadly. I stood by the window in panties with a glass of water. You will ask Half Full or Half Empty? You will see.
Don’t just stand like that, John said. Watching them. He walked closer toward me, staring at my chilled breasts and messed hair, red eyes.
The widow’s open, you must be freezing, he said. And he shut them. He put his arms around my cold body (a hand on my left breast and another on my right hip).
I am a sculpture, Pygmalion. Won’t you carve some warmth in me? I imagined him painting purple circles around my nipples, drawing on each ligament, brushing his paints against my skin (some feeling, the tickle of the brush against the freckles on my arms, something).
You’re going crazy in here.
And you’re not? I snapped back, looking directly at his cheek next to my face.
I can’t watch you standing here.
Then let’s go out and do something about this. I can’t stand idly by.
John walked behind me; he placed his mouth on my shoulder, gently soothing his chapped lips on my skin. I stood still, watching John (the artist at work).
We have friends, he told me. We have resources. We’ll go out into the community and be the first ones to fight this thing.
I turned my head and he licked my neck.
You’re smart, he told me. You tell me who to get together and what we’ll do. We’ll have a convention.
What should we call it?
Not all movements need names.
His hand relaxed down, removing the last thing covering me.
We got together other artists. Megda (the freckled, red-haired Midwestern poet) Evan (the blonde with brown eyes) Fredrick (the graphic artist) Gregor and Shina (the performing artists) Shawn (the abstract artist, painter-sculptor extraordinaire) Emily and Kyle (the short musicians who refused to wear socks) Henry (the painter who refused to wear sandals or shoes at all for that matter. And together, our liberal, intelligent, creative minds created a convention to start fighting the Machine. And people say that Art doesn’t affect Society.
So, I got together other artists to draw huge Apocalyptic Disaster Pieces comparing the Machine to a non-discriminatory Genocide (then just any Cide, Suicide, Infanticide, etc). Until finally we coined the term Machineocide (Death By Machine). This time, however, Death By Machine wasn’t referred to as a penalty (although the government instituted Machineocide for convicts on death row and imprisoned enemy combatants to light up computer screens last spring, without informing the public).
Why wasn’t anyone else doing something to stop the madness?
Then, we decided to transfer our focus onto television sitcoms, because TV was such a hot commodity. Our show’s premise was that a family living in the future had to deal with the perils of what seemed to be an At-Home, Make-Your-Own Machineocide. There were moments such as when Kevin was restrained from converting his sister Suzy into battery fluid.
Mommy? What’s homicide?
That’s when you put someone in the Machine that you like.
But I don’t like Suzy at all!
It was complicated, at first, intricately weaving some realistic stories into a fictitious world. Whoever thought social commentary could be so artistic? The surreal became realistic and the realistic became surreal. We posted these episodes as video clips online, until we got major TV networks to sign on to the project (giving us a one-season contract). Nobody minded how radical our ideas were; they just thought that it was Science Fiction (and Science Fiction can’t change people’s minds or provoke social change, right? It’s merely entertainment). There wasn’t supposed to be any greater meaning behind anything.
Our second major network show was about a group of intelligent people who volunteered to live inside a hygienic bubble, to be studied by scientists in the outside world. The people inside of the bubble were conscious of life only within the bubble and remained oblivious to outer-world conditions. One day, the researchers on the outside all died of an infectious disease that was slowly but surely eating away at the greater population. A scientist from the outside manages to tell the people inside the bubble. Our questions were these: How would they deal with it? Would they believe the news? Would they be indifferent to the deaths of the people outside their comfortable ecosystem? Or would they actually miss them? Would they stay in the bubble forever? Or go outside and fight the disease to save humanity?
We created spin-offs to our shows (one in which everyone in society got plastic surgery, took psychotropic drugs, and of course, ate and bought the same clothes made by starving, over-worked children, so they could all look alike and subsequently think identical thoughts). It was hilarious. And the viewers loved it. Our show received some of the network’s highest ratings. Another spin-off was about really fat people who ate all of the world’s food, until there was nothing left for anyone else. It hit Number One in Prime Time. Our infamous group of writers, story designers, and collaborating artists got first pick of the best time slots. The last show we made was about how everyone played a certain videogame to escape real life. However, the videogame had factual consequences in reality. For example, if two players had sex in the game, they had sex in real life and had to deal with a subsequent pregnancy. If someone killed someone else in the game, the victim was killed in reality. The players soon had to make life inside the game-world as structured as in actuality in order to survive the chaos and destructive nature of humanity. We won an Emmy.
After television, we decided to move into film. We made artsy underground cult films. Our films were mostly documentaries, recording the destruction of the Machine. We interviewed family members of some of the original volunteers. People left our movies with chills, but then resumed their normal routines the next day (just feeling a little bit queasy). I wonder what would have happened if we exposed workers of the Machines to these tapes. But they were probably immune to the grotesque reality of their work already. It wasn’t like A Clockwork Orange, where we could strap them down, hold open their eyelids, and administer a serum telling them what pain to empathize with (telling them what was Bad and Good in this world). Government advertising was already doing that for us. No. People still had the free choice to hate one another and to kill each other; apparently, because it was so propelled, endorsed, and motivated by the government.
We made posters and put them up around major cities and some smaller suburbs; we produced Top Ten sitcoms on TV, only to find that our First Amendment ad-campaign (and especially our pride in signing our outspoken artwork) labeled us Enemies Of The State and made it easier for the government to catch Shawn and John (the Jackson Pollacks of our time) and convict them (sentencing their free words to the Machine murder they fought so hard against, the death prescribed for so many other patriots). Well, maybe not Patriots, anymore. Is a Patriot someone who loves the foundational beliefs of a county? (i.e. the Bill Of Rights and the Constitution) or someone who changes and molds to conform to current government beliefs? If not a Patriot, he was at least a Savior Of Humanity (my Savior; he never told the government about my or any of our coworkers’ involvement) seeing as how the government was against, not for, us in the end.
I watched John line up outside the Machine from my apartment window. He looked up to find me. Emily had already given him enough narcotics so that he wouldn’t feel a thing going into it. She snuck it through a courtesy package during the trial, just in case anything ever happened. I watched him lined up with Shawn. I watched John’s black eyes stare down the sunrise as his feet crackled against the leaves on the sidewalk (he was only nine steps away from the entrance). I opened my window and I dropped a glass of water. It crashed on the ground below. And the line of Machine Volunteers moved away from the side of my apartment building. They weren’t afraid to die, but they were afraid of a little water? Never mind the shards of glass. I stuck my head out the window and John looked up toward me. I wanted him to see me, not what society had trapped me in, not the box around me. I wanted him to see what he had always seen inside, beyond all that. I stuck my head out that window and he looked at me, his eyes tearing. I imagined the very cells of clarity in his brain, seeping through the membrane of his skull, of the skin, dripping beads of their essence onto the surface of his forehead, like a glistening crown. I stepped out onto the ledge, my body not supported by anything on the inside. I didn’t care that I could fall. I didn’t care, because I knew John had already fallen. I took off my clothes, piece by piece (first the shoes, then the socks, the sweater, unzipped the pants). I took off everything, until I was nude and cold, standing on the ledge outside my window. The people gawked at the nude girl parading from the side of the apartment building.
Get off of there! an old man from the line yelled. You’ll kill yourself.
Would you rather I was nude in there? I motioned toward the building. And John stared at me as I stared into his eyes. Droplets of his soul oozed out of him as I imagined the visions in front of him that would pierce his head. I wanted him to paint me with his eyes as the globs of tears stained his own canvas.
Paint me!
But I’ve already painted you! he cried out. My mind has painted you.
I envisioned his brushes caressing my skin. People shook their heads and thought that we were nuts. We received evil glances from people who had decided to commit suicide for their own selfish purposes. Converting your body into energy is not a form of self-sacrifice; it is a form of self-mutilation for respect in our society and loathsome prestige from the government. These people were not part of some greater cause. They wanted the fame and glory, like any of the rest of us. I didn’t watch them after a while, my mind so fixed, so concentrated on my last moments with John. I imagined his hands holding me still, supporting me on the ledge so that I would not fall (so that I would not descend like the rest of them). The smell of dogwood filled the air.
Most people didn’t elect to receive the remains (the very few parts of loved ones that remained) but instead let the Machine workers dump relatives, lovers, and friends into garbage cans. John (what free parts of him remained) did not belong in the trash. The government had me collect his plastic-bagged body from a local mortician at the back entrance of the Machine factory, later that day. Our friends did not come, for fear that they would be arrested for some arbitrary claim and end up with the same fate. I stood alone with Dr. Emerson. His old eyes did not smile at me, at all. He waited for it to be five o’clock, so he could call his workday over (when he would no longer be surrounded by dead people). When Dr. Emerson looked at me, it was as if he was looking at a dead person, too. I was dead to him. I was as dead as John’s Body in that Plastic Bag. My image somehow Died With Him, according to Dr. Emerson. In a way, I was just like what was left of John’s corpse. I didn’t feel anything. If the Machine guards tried to talk to me, to make eye-contact, I stared into space, unable to linger on the loose strands of their conversation. It was near evening when the bag was finally released. John’s body reeked and I was sure that it had started to decay. A mockingbird sang and I felt nauseous. My stomach caved in on itself and started to howl and I felt so bitterly alone, so empty. Suddenly, I wasn’t living. I was watching my life on a movie screen (eating popcorn, my feet up on the seats in front of me) and someone just shot a huge hole through the screen. The hole was black and enormous and blocked out everyone’s faces. Nothing would be the same, now that John was gone. I would have to rebuild my life around that hole, because nothing would bring him back, not ever. I gagged in the back alleyway. I sobbed and my tears drained my remaining energy to stand. I was on my own, in a strange and empty world that I had to fight on my own. I don’t know how I got back to the apartment, but I remember lying on my bed for a long time without realizing where I was. I felt the cool on the pillow next to me. I picked up a strand of his hair. I cried out alone at night in an empty bed, reminiscent of his smell from past mornings, suddenly silent with death.
John’s funeral was on a Tuesday. I wish that I could say it was raining or that there were millions of old women crying in the street, but neither occurred. Not even his sister, Joan (or her son William) showed up. It was like I was all the family that John had left in the world. I was the only family that could associate with him after his dreadful death. I imagined that his relatives were too afraid that they would be caught by the quick grasp of the Machine, too. Or, perhaps they didn’t want to be identified as the relatives of a fighter, a convict, a deviant from society. They didn’t want to be caught supporting his views in public, for fear of public punishment, when secretly they must have agreed with him.
I figured I would never love again. No one would ever touch me. I didn’t want to be touched. I would be scum to the Earth. I imagined my body growing old with decay and brittle from the lack of the soft oil of human fingertips. I imagined my carcass melting into sand, skin like an alligator but with holes like Swiss cheese. I would decay just as rapidly as what was left of John’s rotting corpse. Invisible bugs and disease would fester in my untouchable remains, my barren cadaver, and my useless body. I wilted away, like a medieval painting under too much light. No. I wasn’t the paper crinkling. I was the Self-Portrait. I was Dorian Gray’s Portrait (the innocent one, reflecting a nasty image). I was just an effigy, after all. What was I, without the living man?
You must realize that I think (now) that that was a very foolish way for me to look at the world. I still had a life ahead of me, and John would have wanted me to live it. I would be alone, but all I needed was me (my mind and my soul). All I needed was my own memory, which was all I would ever have. When I was little, my mother sent me to Sleep-Away Camp and I became very homesick. I called her up and I told her how much I missed home.
Home, she sternly mumbled through the receiver, is not a place. It’s a state of mind. Home will travel with you. You are your own home, your own shelter. All you need is yourself.
I wouldn’t be alone, because I had myself to share my own experiences with. All I needed was one body to live through the pain and joys of life. That was all I needed.
John and I never talked about what would happen if one of us ever died (as if it wasn’t inevitable). Not to mention if one of us died in our Cause. We never spoke much about each other when we talked about the future. We believed in self-sacrifice at the highest, that (above all) to help other people was our calling. John never really talked much about himself. He never woke up in the morning and thought I’m in a bad mood today; I don’t want to do any work. I’m just going to lie in bed and not doing anything and that’ll be fine. When John wasn’t doing his own commissions, he worked as a house painter. And even then, he never complained about making ends meet. He just thought ahead. We never relaxed. We never smiled, unless it was something defiant against this evil cause. We never just blew air onto our foreheads, realizing we had pissed another day away. We never drank beers in our underwear while humming jazz tunes. We never (we never). John was gone. And there were so many things that we hadn’t done. We never went on a proper date together (dinner and a movie, the whole deal). We met at a Protest. We never sang Beatles songs, together. Or debated over which side of the bed we liked more. We were never quiet together. We never just sat in our own presence and enjoyed each other’s company. We never talked about anything other than Politics. And that was fine (we got a lot of work done for the Rest Of The World). But in the end, I just felt empty and burnt out. I felt like a flesh-eating bacterium was thinning me, sucking away at my bones as I stood looking out at the factory.
I wanted John back. I wanted his soul in his body and I wanted him to talk to me. I wished I could touch his smile once more (the way the lines in his cheeks crinkled when he moved them, when he looked at me and when he liked the feeling of my cool palms around his mouth). Touching his still, chemical-corroded face wasn’t the same. It wasn’t him at all. I knew what we would talk about: We would talk about the Machine. He would just push me harder to stop its control. But, John would not tell me how to get over him. He would not tell me to do the laundry, even though he was gone. He would not tell me Stop crying or Find someone else. He would not say that I had stepped in a puddle and that my clothes were slightly wet. No. That was what my damp tears were for, to remind me that life went on although the one I loved was gone. Hell, the Machine was still running. It never skipped a beat. If anything, it was spreading like the plague.
Through peer pressure, our government forced neighboring international governments to conform to our communal slaughter. The Commodity Of Death became more fashionable than Jeans And A Coke. I became even more indignant as ignorance spread. Barely anyone died of natural causes anymore (most obituaries originally read Death By Machine, before the government created the euphemism Death By Recreation). The government made it seem as though, through death, these people gave rebirth to energy (instead of just feeding our already skyrocketing supply of technology). The Machine served as the end-all, be-all reproduction.
Why Wonder About The Afterlife, When You Could Die Knowing Your Body Would Generate Energy?
Live After-Life Through The Big Sexy.
People even re-defined Be Fruitful And Multiply to mean obeying a life cycle revolving around the Machine. People worshipped the Machine (people craved it as much as the Machine craved them). And as soon as modern life revolved around Big Sexy, people needed the Machine as much as it needed them. It seemed like the two were inseparable.
Until you stepped in.
