neveralarch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
neveralarch) wrote2011-11-07 08:47 pm
neveralarch) wrote2011-11-07 08:47 pm
Entry tags:
Semi-original writing: Trying to Escape
This is the story that I wrote for the second Machine of Death anthology. The premise of the books is basically that there's a machine that takes a blood sample and tells you how you're going to die. Not a ton of details, no exact time, just the prediction. But the machine is always right.
It's a fascinating idea (at least to someone as awkwardly morbid as I am). I also grew up on shared universe anthologies, and I love the idea of a shared concept anthology. If you're interested, the first anthology is available, free and legal, here.
Anyway, this is the story I wrote. It didn't make the cut, and I'm cool with that, but I hope somebody over here likes it anyway. Also, here is a fic-header, because I don't know how else to present stories.
Trying to Escape
Machine of Death
Rating: teen
(swearing, excessive contemplation of mortality, character death)
Wordcount: 3,000ish
Summary: The story starts when I was five. That is when I became aware of the concept of death.
A/N: Thanks to Suzi and Lisa, the beta readers of radness.
I am Lettie Johnson, and I am staring up at the sky, trying very hard not to burst into tears. I am five years old.
Not actually. I'm thirty-four and writing this on my laptop, sitting on my bed after getting home from work. But the story starts when I was five.
That is when I became aware of the concept of death.
Nobody knows where I got it from. TV, maybe, or just hearing people talk. Maybe I ran across a dead bird and didn’t remember afterward. My relatives and my friends were all alive and well, so there hadn’t been any funerals or awkward conversations. Sometimes it feels like no one died until I was fifteen, as ridiculous as that seems, everyone waiting until I was old enough to handle their leaving. But, at the same time, it feels like they've always been going, so maybe I was just too wrapped up in myself to notice. Kids are like that.
Anyway, five years old and I was having an existential crisis. If I’d been a bit older, I might have just sat on it, figuring everyone felt the same way. But I was young and my parents knew everything, and I wasn’t embarrassed to ask. I headed straight for my mom, going back inside, away from the blank blue sky.
"I'm going to die, aren't I?" Big brown eyes, big brown curls, and about the biggest question humanity’s ever had to deal with.
No one wants to hear that question from their five-year-old daughter. My mom pulled pins out of her mouth, set down the shirt she'd been fixing for my little brother. She opened her mouth.
"Uh," she said, and stopped.
"Everyone dies," I said, making up for her. "So I'm gonna."
"I guess," said my mom. "Sorry?"
"What do I do?"
My parents weren't, and aren't religious. I was born into the wrong generation for easy answers, in my family. If I'd asked any of my grandparents, I bet they'd have told me to look to Jesus, our Lord and Savior. If I'd asked around the neighborhood, well, more of the same. Different kinds of saviors, different kinds of salvation.
"Try not to think about it," said Mom, eventually. "What else can you do?"
Five years old is a hell of a time to be realizing the inevitable futility of trying to survive.
---
I've never been good about not thinking about things. Ideas get trapped in my head, bouncing around the inside, gaining strength and picking up momentum. Recursion and repetition and metathinking. I played and had fun and did all that normal kid shit, but my impending death was always at the back of my mind.
Some of my strongest memories from between ages five and ten are of lying in the dark, unable to sleep because I knew I was going to die. Not right then, probably, maybe, hopefully. But someday. My forehead would prickle and my breaths would come shallow, and now that I'm older I'm pretty sure I was having mini-panic attacks. A lot of people run during panic attacks, trying to get to safety. A lot of kids would have run to their parents, wanting to know everything was going to be all right. I did not run, not after that first talk with Mom. There was no escape, and things were not going to be all right. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to distract myself from my own mortality long enough to fall asleep.
I've always hated graveyards and zombies. I don't understand why people like horror movies. I don't need death shoved in my face when I have to work so hard to ignore it and keep functioning.
---
When I was ten, I read this book. Not that exciting - I was always reading books. But this book liked to get distracted from the story, falling away from heroes and adventure into weird little tangents that never really went anywhere but were much more interesting than the story ever could be. One of the tangents was about how people never really died until their names were forgotten, until no one could remember that they'd lived or that they'd done anything worthwhile. You lived as long as your name was spoken.
I stopped having freak-outs about death after that, more or less. I had found an escape route. Now my worries were focused on what I was going to do to become remembered. Ten years old, and I needed a legacy.
I threw ideas around. My dad was a cook, my mom worked at a grocery. These were not legitimate avenues for remembrance. Sure, I'd never forget my parents. But I'd die and my brothers would die, and eventually my parents would just be names in a dusty family history. I wanted the world to know my name.
Like Lincoln. My mom's mom had a ton of Lincoln memorabilia. Portraits, books, even a special Lincoln-print couch. The couch folded out into a bed so you could sleep with your face pressed up against Lincoln’s log cabin and your feet resting on his law office. It was kitsch as hell, but it gave me a goal. I was born on the 12th of February, same day as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two men that aren't going to be forgotten as long as there are people. They'd never die, and neither would I.
I think my parents were really excited by my change. I wasn't morbid and withdrawn any more. I put myself out there, talked to people and asked questions about whatever their lives were about. I was fired up by an idea, and I was going to do everything to make it work. I just had to figure out how to get famous.
I started with the normal kid stuff. Firefighters don’t get famous, and astronauts didn’t interest me, but I loved dinosaurs. I was dedicated to paleontology for a good two years, but I got worried that I wouldn't make a big discovery. Too chancy. I dropped it and muttered some excuse to my mom when she found my dinosaur books piled up in my closet, out of sight. I still wanted to know all about dinosaurs, but I had to put them aside. I didn’t have time for anything that wouldn’t help me get to my goal.
Writing and art were out, because I had heard that you needed something to say, some message that came from the heart. All I had to say was 'remember me.' Not the makings of the next great American novel or painting. I read a lot of philosophy and I thought about business, but none of it grabbed me. I looked at my drab brown hair and my drab brown eyes and my drab brown skin and I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it in movies. Looks aren’t everything, but I didn’t look like anything. I couldn't sing. I liked sports, had a pretty muscular build, but I liked soccer. Women’s soccer in America is about the least memorable sport you can play, up there with softball. I kept looking.
My dad encouraged me with each new pursuit. He loved the way I’d throw myself into things, even if he wasn’t thrilled with how I kept giving them up. My brothers seemed content to just bumble along, taking life as it came, and my dad wanted the family to go places, so he put his hopes with me. He even tried to give me advice, though that didn’t work out how he wanted.
"What do you want?" Dad asked me, as I gave up on being a composer. "That's how you'll find what you should be doing."
I wasn't old enough to have learned to lie yet. I still thought that everybody thought like me, that everybody knew that the most important thing in the world was our hopeless struggle against the darkness.
"I want to never die," I said. "And I can't do that, so I'm going to do the next best thing. I’m going to be so famous that no one ever forgets me.” I was already wondering how many people remembered physicists that weren’t Einstein. I wasn’t that bad at math.
I think that's when Dad started to get really worried about me.
---
I was fifteen when I decided I was going to get into politics. I had been dyeing my hair and wearing lots of jewelry in an effort to stand out and stick in people's minds, stop-gap measures in case I got hit by a bus that afternoon. That stopped. I took off the bangles, cut the pink curls down to a respectable brown fuzz, changed in my loud T-shirts for calm and classy button-downs. I started developing opinions and a commanding presence, toned down my kind of annoying squeaky voice into something approaching moderated reasonability. I went to demonstrations, I volunteered at local campaigns. People started to recognize me. I met our congressman, then our senator. I was going to be president and get my name in the history books. Everyone knows the presidents, even the ones nobody cares about. We have to learn their names in school, answer questions about them until the names never leave our minds. If I did something important while in office, even people in other countries would never forget me.
"Do you even care about politics?" asked my dad.
"Politics are important," I said, smooth and practiced. "The running of our country affects each and every one of us. The reason the people in charge can get away with so much is because people like us – people on the fringe of ‘society,’ minorities, the working classes – we don't participate. I can't change that, but I can do my bit." I smiled, sincere as I could. Last week our local teamsters organizer had given me a high-five after that little speech.
"But is that really what you want? Is that what you’re excited over?" My dad's face was confused under his giant beard. People always remembered him for that beard and his dreads, tons of hair, but that wouldn't be enough when he was gone.
I didn't say anything. I didn't understand the question.
"Baby," said my dad. "Listen, I cook because I like it. I like figuring out what people will eat and what they won't. I like figuring out what tastes good and what's too expensive to sell. I'm doing what makes me happy, and I'll do it until the day I die. I just want you to be as happy as I am."
"It doesn't last," I said. "I need something that will."
I think we talked some more after that, but all I remember is my dad's crinkled forehead and his disappointed eyes.
---
When I was sixteen, that's when the Machines started rolling out. At first, nobody was sure whether they were real or just a scam, but then the first deaths started happening, just as predicted. No special time, no determined place, but the method of death was just what had been printed on the card.
If I had been that first guy who died from an elephant stepping on him an hour after getting his prediction, I'd have kept going for at least a decade. He's an urban legend now, but I remember the news reports. It happened.
But I don’t remember his name, so I’m glad I wasn’t him.
My dad didn't want the test. I think Mom got it, but she wouldn't tell anyone what the machine predicted. I just kind of ignored it all. We’re all going to die someday. Why does it matter how?
The Machines started getting everywhere. Dad ended up having to take the test anyway - our state was mandating them for food workers, just like the Hep A shot. Dad was pretty happy when he got 'Heart Attack' instead of 'Food Poisoning' or 'Botulism' or something. The restaurant wouldn't have fired him, but he would have probably had to leave anyway.
I was at the mall with Dad when we saw the new, cheap Machine kiosk. There was a skinny white guy taking money, running people through as fast as he could. They went in looking hopeful, looking nervous, and they all came out looking sad or scared.
I guess I looked for a while. I didn't really want to take the test, it was just interesting. All those people, going into the kiosk, coming face to face with their mortality just like I had when I was five. They were adults, and they were only just now coming to grips with the world.
A lady came out actually crying, big wet sobs that crumpled her face. I don't know why she was so upset, and I probably should try to understand, but I just wanted to shake her. She was always going to die. Everything she was was always going to come to an end. Finding out how shouldn't matter, especially when you didn't know how long you had left. The manner is just a detail.
But my dad saw me looking, and he caught the look on my face. I was angry, but I was pretty curious, too.
"You want to try?" he asked. "Think it will help?" Probing at me, like he did whenever he thought I was getting morbid.
"I dunno," I said. Because yeah, it didn't matter. But if it didn’t matter, why not just do it? "I guess."
We got in line. Fifteen people ahead of us, dwindling down as the guy kept grabbing bills and shoving people in. When we got to the front, my dad handed the guy a twenty.
"Right, get in," said the guy, not quite touching my dad's arm as he urged him to the kiosk.
"No, no, it's for her," said my dad. "For my daughter."
"Over-eighteen only," said the guy. "No can do."
I might have passed for a baby-faced eighteen, but not with my dad paying. My dad glared at the guy, puffing himself up like he always did when someone challenged him. He was a bit scary when he did that, but the guy didn't back down.
"I'm her father," said my dad. "She can take the test."
"It's against the law," said the guy. "I could lose my license."
"She could drive with me in the car," said my dad. I only had my learner's permit, then. "She can get her ears pierced, if I’m there. She can do this, because I said she could."
"She can't get a tattoo, even with you along," said the guy. He fingered a spot under his shirt, I'm guessing where he'd had some ink done. "Look, man, some things don't heal when you take the posts out. Let it be. You're holding up the line."
My dad puffed himself up even more, until he was just looming over this guy. I tugged on his arm.
"Dad, it's not a big deal. I can wait a couple years, okay?"
He didn't deflate, like I'd been hoping. Just took a step back. The little old white lady behind him squeaked and hurried out of his way.
"If you're sure, honey," he said. He gave the guy a glare, just to let him know he hadn't won, and we left.
---
I came back the next day with my fake ID.
It still wasn't important. But I hated being denied something. And anyway, what if it gave me a clue? Like, if it said assassinated, maybe I'd know I was on the right track with this politics thing. Paleontologists don't get assassinated, not unless they're also spies or something.
The guy was gone. There was just an Asian woman who didn't even ask to look at my ID. She just took my twenty and waved me through.
Inside was barebones, without all the extra tech and dazzle you saw on TV. I stuck my hand into a slot, palm up, and bit my lip when I felt the prick of the needle. A piece of card came out of another slot, and I grabbed it and walked out without looking. I waited until I was sitting down in the food court to turn it over and read what it said.
"Trying to Escape"
I started grinning, and I didn't stop for the rest of the day.
---
I've shown my card to a few people. Sometimes for work, sometimes just because they asked. Nobody takes it the same way I do.
People get worried, because I'm going to go to prison, or be kidnapped, or run into trouble while I'm overseas. I’ll get trapped, they’ll say, and I’ll die while trying to run.
None of them realize that we've all been trapped since the day we were born. At least I’m trying to get away.
My dad's gone now. The heart attack got him hunched over a range grill. My mom went a little while after, hit by a car while she was out with her friends. We all have to go, and the best we can hope is that it will be while doing something we love, or that we care about. I guess I learned my lesson from my dad. I helped my brothers bury him, anyway, and I’ve told his name to as many people as I can. David Johnson. He’ll go on for a while yet.
I’m an aide now, helping out a Senator who I think might make it a bit higher. I’m still working on that President thing. I’m not thirty-five, not quite, I still got time before I’m even eligible to be elected. Hopefully I’ll last that long, and longer.
Somebody at the office today was complaining about his job, about having to come in and waste at least eight hours of his precious life five days a week. He’s going to have cancer, hasn’t had it yet, doesn’t know when it’s coming. But he’s so upset about his expiration that he can’t stand to lose any moment to something he doesn’t want to do. I told him that I guess I understood, and he asked me why we didn’t just quit. This is my answer, even if I’ll never show it to him.
I won’t quit, not ever. I’d rather lose time today than lose my eternity. I don’t know if I love my work, but I know I’d be miserable without it, without this chance for release. And I know that I'll die having never given up. I'll be remembered, or I'll die trying.
I’ll always be trying to escape my fate.
It's a fascinating idea (at least to someone as awkwardly morbid as I am). I also grew up on shared universe anthologies, and I love the idea of a shared concept anthology. If you're interested, the first anthology is available, free and legal, here.
Anyway, this is the story I wrote. It didn't make the cut, and I'm cool with that, but I hope somebody over here likes it anyway. Also, here is a fic-header, because I don't know how else to present stories.
Trying to Escape
Machine of Death
Rating: teen
(swearing, excessive contemplation of mortality, character death)
Wordcount: 3,000ish
Summary: The story starts when I was five. That is when I became aware of the concept of death.
A/N: Thanks to Suzi and Lisa, the beta readers of radness.
I am Lettie Johnson, and I am staring up at the sky, trying very hard not to burst into tears. I am five years old.
Not actually. I'm thirty-four and writing this on my laptop, sitting on my bed after getting home from work. But the story starts when I was five.
That is when I became aware of the concept of death.
Nobody knows where I got it from. TV, maybe, or just hearing people talk. Maybe I ran across a dead bird and didn’t remember afterward. My relatives and my friends were all alive and well, so there hadn’t been any funerals or awkward conversations. Sometimes it feels like no one died until I was fifteen, as ridiculous as that seems, everyone waiting until I was old enough to handle their leaving. But, at the same time, it feels like they've always been going, so maybe I was just too wrapped up in myself to notice. Kids are like that.
Anyway, five years old and I was having an existential crisis. If I’d been a bit older, I might have just sat on it, figuring everyone felt the same way. But I was young and my parents knew everything, and I wasn’t embarrassed to ask. I headed straight for my mom, going back inside, away from the blank blue sky.
"I'm going to die, aren't I?" Big brown eyes, big brown curls, and about the biggest question humanity’s ever had to deal with.
No one wants to hear that question from their five-year-old daughter. My mom pulled pins out of her mouth, set down the shirt she'd been fixing for my little brother. She opened her mouth.
"Uh," she said, and stopped.
"Everyone dies," I said, making up for her. "So I'm gonna."
"I guess," said my mom. "Sorry?"
"What do I do?"
My parents weren't, and aren't religious. I was born into the wrong generation for easy answers, in my family. If I'd asked any of my grandparents, I bet they'd have told me to look to Jesus, our Lord and Savior. If I'd asked around the neighborhood, well, more of the same. Different kinds of saviors, different kinds of salvation.
"Try not to think about it," said Mom, eventually. "What else can you do?"
Five years old is a hell of a time to be realizing the inevitable futility of trying to survive.
---
I've never been good about not thinking about things. Ideas get trapped in my head, bouncing around the inside, gaining strength and picking up momentum. Recursion and repetition and metathinking. I played and had fun and did all that normal kid shit, but my impending death was always at the back of my mind.
Some of my strongest memories from between ages five and ten are of lying in the dark, unable to sleep because I knew I was going to die. Not right then, probably, maybe, hopefully. But someday. My forehead would prickle and my breaths would come shallow, and now that I'm older I'm pretty sure I was having mini-panic attacks. A lot of people run during panic attacks, trying to get to safety. A lot of kids would have run to their parents, wanting to know everything was going to be all right. I did not run, not after that first talk with Mom. There was no escape, and things were not going to be all right. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to distract myself from my own mortality long enough to fall asleep.
I've always hated graveyards and zombies. I don't understand why people like horror movies. I don't need death shoved in my face when I have to work so hard to ignore it and keep functioning.
---
When I was ten, I read this book. Not that exciting - I was always reading books. But this book liked to get distracted from the story, falling away from heroes and adventure into weird little tangents that never really went anywhere but were much more interesting than the story ever could be. One of the tangents was about how people never really died until their names were forgotten, until no one could remember that they'd lived or that they'd done anything worthwhile. You lived as long as your name was spoken.
I stopped having freak-outs about death after that, more or less. I had found an escape route. Now my worries were focused on what I was going to do to become remembered. Ten years old, and I needed a legacy.
I threw ideas around. My dad was a cook, my mom worked at a grocery. These were not legitimate avenues for remembrance. Sure, I'd never forget my parents. But I'd die and my brothers would die, and eventually my parents would just be names in a dusty family history. I wanted the world to know my name.
Like Lincoln. My mom's mom had a ton of Lincoln memorabilia. Portraits, books, even a special Lincoln-print couch. The couch folded out into a bed so you could sleep with your face pressed up against Lincoln’s log cabin and your feet resting on his law office. It was kitsch as hell, but it gave me a goal. I was born on the 12th of February, same day as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two men that aren't going to be forgotten as long as there are people. They'd never die, and neither would I.
I think my parents were really excited by my change. I wasn't morbid and withdrawn any more. I put myself out there, talked to people and asked questions about whatever their lives were about. I was fired up by an idea, and I was going to do everything to make it work. I just had to figure out how to get famous.
I started with the normal kid stuff. Firefighters don’t get famous, and astronauts didn’t interest me, but I loved dinosaurs. I was dedicated to paleontology for a good two years, but I got worried that I wouldn't make a big discovery. Too chancy. I dropped it and muttered some excuse to my mom when she found my dinosaur books piled up in my closet, out of sight. I still wanted to know all about dinosaurs, but I had to put them aside. I didn’t have time for anything that wouldn’t help me get to my goal.
Writing and art were out, because I had heard that you needed something to say, some message that came from the heart. All I had to say was 'remember me.' Not the makings of the next great American novel or painting. I read a lot of philosophy and I thought about business, but none of it grabbed me. I looked at my drab brown hair and my drab brown eyes and my drab brown skin and I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it in movies. Looks aren’t everything, but I didn’t look like anything. I couldn't sing. I liked sports, had a pretty muscular build, but I liked soccer. Women’s soccer in America is about the least memorable sport you can play, up there with softball. I kept looking.
My dad encouraged me with each new pursuit. He loved the way I’d throw myself into things, even if he wasn’t thrilled with how I kept giving them up. My brothers seemed content to just bumble along, taking life as it came, and my dad wanted the family to go places, so he put his hopes with me. He even tried to give me advice, though that didn’t work out how he wanted.
"What do you want?" Dad asked me, as I gave up on being a composer. "That's how you'll find what you should be doing."
I wasn't old enough to have learned to lie yet. I still thought that everybody thought like me, that everybody knew that the most important thing in the world was our hopeless struggle against the darkness.
"I want to never die," I said. "And I can't do that, so I'm going to do the next best thing. I’m going to be so famous that no one ever forgets me.” I was already wondering how many people remembered physicists that weren’t Einstein. I wasn’t that bad at math.
I think that's when Dad started to get really worried about me.
---
I was fifteen when I decided I was going to get into politics. I had been dyeing my hair and wearing lots of jewelry in an effort to stand out and stick in people's minds, stop-gap measures in case I got hit by a bus that afternoon. That stopped. I took off the bangles, cut the pink curls down to a respectable brown fuzz, changed in my loud T-shirts for calm and classy button-downs. I started developing opinions and a commanding presence, toned down my kind of annoying squeaky voice into something approaching moderated reasonability. I went to demonstrations, I volunteered at local campaigns. People started to recognize me. I met our congressman, then our senator. I was going to be president and get my name in the history books. Everyone knows the presidents, even the ones nobody cares about. We have to learn their names in school, answer questions about them until the names never leave our minds. If I did something important while in office, even people in other countries would never forget me.
"Do you even care about politics?" asked my dad.
"Politics are important," I said, smooth and practiced. "The running of our country affects each and every one of us. The reason the people in charge can get away with so much is because people like us – people on the fringe of ‘society,’ minorities, the working classes – we don't participate. I can't change that, but I can do my bit." I smiled, sincere as I could. Last week our local teamsters organizer had given me a high-five after that little speech.
"But is that really what you want? Is that what you’re excited over?" My dad's face was confused under his giant beard. People always remembered him for that beard and his dreads, tons of hair, but that wouldn't be enough when he was gone.
I didn't say anything. I didn't understand the question.
"Baby," said my dad. "Listen, I cook because I like it. I like figuring out what people will eat and what they won't. I like figuring out what tastes good and what's too expensive to sell. I'm doing what makes me happy, and I'll do it until the day I die. I just want you to be as happy as I am."
"It doesn't last," I said. "I need something that will."
I think we talked some more after that, but all I remember is my dad's crinkled forehead and his disappointed eyes.
---
When I was sixteen, that's when the Machines started rolling out. At first, nobody was sure whether they were real or just a scam, but then the first deaths started happening, just as predicted. No special time, no determined place, but the method of death was just what had been printed on the card.
If I had been that first guy who died from an elephant stepping on him an hour after getting his prediction, I'd have kept going for at least a decade. He's an urban legend now, but I remember the news reports. It happened.
But I don’t remember his name, so I’m glad I wasn’t him.
My dad didn't want the test. I think Mom got it, but she wouldn't tell anyone what the machine predicted. I just kind of ignored it all. We’re all going to die someday. Why does it matter how?
The Machines started getting everywhere. Dad ended up having to take the test anyway - our state was mandating them for food workers, just like the Hep A shot. Dad was pretty happy when he got 'Heart Attack' instead of 'Food Poisoning' or 'Botulism' or something. The restaurant wouldn't have fired him, but he would have probably had to leave anyway.
I was at the mall with Dad when we saw the new, cheap Machine kiosk. There was a skinny white guy taking money, running people through as fast as he could. They went in looking hopeful, looking nervous, and they all came out looking sad or scared.
I guess I looked for a while. I didn't really want to take the test, it was just interesting. All those people, going into the kiosk, coming face to face with their mortality just like I had when I was five. They were adults, and they were only just now coming to grips with the world.
A lady came out actually crying, big wet sobs that crumpled her face. I don't know why she was so upset, and I probably should try to understand, but I just wanted to shake her. She was always going to die. Everything she was was always going to come to an end. Finding out how shouldn't matter, especially when you didn't know how long you had left. The manner is just a detail.
But my dad saw me looking, and he caught the look on my face. I was angry, but I was pretty curious, too.
"You want to try?" he asked. "Think it will help?" Probing at me, like he did whenever he thought I was getting morbid.
"I dunno," I said. Because yeah, it didn't matter. But if it didn’t matter, why not just do it? "I guess."
We got in line. Fifteen people ahead of us, dwindling down as the guy kept grabbing bills and shoving people in. When we got to the front, my dad handed the guy a twenty.
"Right, get in," said the guy, not quite touching my dad's arm as he urged him to the kiosk.
"No, no, it's for her," said my dad. "For my daughter."
"Over-eighteen only," said the guy. "No can do."
I might have passed for a baby-faced eighteen, but not with my dad paying. My dad glared at the guy, puffing himself up like he always did when someone challenged him. He was a bit scary when he did that, but the guy didn't back down.
"I'm her father," said my dad. "She can take the test."
"It's against the law," said the guy. "I could lose my license."
"She could drive with me in the car," said my dad. I only had my learner's permit, then. "She can get her ears pierced, if I’m there. She can do this, because I said she could."
"She can't get a tattoo, even with you along," said the guy. He fingered a spot under his shirt, I'm guessing where he'd had some ink done. "Look, man, some things don't heal when you take the posts out. Let it be. You're holding up the line."
My dad puffed himself up even more, until he was just looming over this guy. I tugged on his arm.
"Dad, it's not a big deal. I can wait a couple years, okay?"
He didn't deflate, like I'd been hoping. Just took a step back. The little old white lady behind him squeaked and hurried out of his way.
"If you're sure, honey," he said. He gave the guy a glare, just to let him know he hadn't won, and we left.
---
I came back the next day with my fake ID.
It still wasn't important. But I hated being denied something. And anyway, what if it gave me a clue? Like, if it said assassinated, maybe I'd know I was on the right track with this politics thing. Paleontologists don't get assassinated, not unless they're also spies or something.
The guy was gone. There was just an Asian woman who didn't even ask to look at my ID. She just took my twenty and waved me through.
Inside was barebones, without all the extra tech and dazzle you saw on TV. I stuck my hand into a slot, palm up, and bit my lip when I felt the prick of the needle. A piece of card came out of another slot, and I grabbed it and walked out without looking. I waited until I was sitting down in the food court to turn it over and read what it said.
"Trying to Escape"
I started grinning, and I didn't stop for the rest of the day.
---
I've shown my card to a few people. Sometimes for work, sometimes just because they asked. Nobody takes it the same way I do.
People get worried, because I'm going to go to prison, or be kidnapped, or run into trouble while I'm overseas. I’ll get trapped, they’ll say, and I’ll die while trying to run.
None of them realize that we've all been trapped since the day we were born. At least I’m trying to get away.
My dad's gone now. The heart attack got him hunched over a range grill. My mom went a little while after, hit by a car while she was out with her friends. We all have to go, and the best we can hope is that it will be while doing something we love, or that we care about. I guess I learned my lesson from my dad. I helped my brothers bury him, anyway, and I’ve told his name to as many people as I can. David Johnson. He’ll go on for a while yet.
I’m an aide now, helping out a Senator who I think might make it a bit higher. I’m still working on that President thing. I’m not thirty-five, not quite, I still got time before I’m even eligible to be elected. Hopefully I’ll last that long, and longer.
Somebody at the office today was complaining about his job, about having to come in and waste at least eight hours of his precious life five days a week. He’s going to have cancer, hasn’t had it yet, doesn’t know when it’s coming. But he’s so upset about his expiration that he can’t stand to lose any moment to something he doesn’t want to do. I told him that I guess I understood, and he asked me why we didn’t just quit. This is my answer, even if I’ll never show it to him.
I won’t quit, not ever. I’d rather lose time today than lose my eternity. I don’t know if I love my work, but I know I’d be miserable without it, without this chance for release. And I know that I'll die having never given up. I'll be remembered, or I'll die trying.
I’ll always be trying to escape my fate.