Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Inside I found a smaller cardboard box, and inside that box the device. It was a cheap video-game controller from the 1970s, a scuffed black plastic case with a big red button on it. It looked like a joke. I wondered if Bickle hadn’t sent me across the country so I’d leave the academy unattended. Maybe I was being fucked with. I took the device back to the hotel and sat on the bed looking at it. If I believed it was bogus, some sort of prop, then it didn’t matter if I pushed the button or not. But if it really did set in motion the end of our times, then it mattered very much whether I pushed it. If I pushed the button, it meant I wasn’t sure whether it was real and I was only pushing it to find out. Pushing it was an admission of skepticism. If I didn’t push it, on the other hand, then part of me really did believe that it brought about the Fucked Up Shit. Did it matter whether or not I pushed it? I thought of my dead parents, my sister. My childhood home swept into the sound on a tidal wave of mud. I paced the room. I was in a rock/paper/scissors stalemate. Belief versus disbelief versus curiosity. Had Nick really invented a remote control to end the world? Ridiculous, right? I had to get out of the room, so I walked through the tourist shit of Times Square, mumbling the arguments for and against, blending with the human tide. Some subterranean part of me whispered that it was only a matter of time before I pushed the button. I was going to push it! I talked myself down. I’d operate as though I’d never come out here. I would throw the controller in the East River and catch a flight home.

When I got back to the hotel, I realized I was starving so I placed a room service order worthy of a death row inmate’s last meal. Plan was, I would watch an on-demand movie and gorge myself before I flew back to Vegas. After a while the room service guy arrived and pushed the table into my room. Young guy, with buzz-cut red hair. He positioned the table in front of the bed and started lifting silver domes off things, peeling the Saran wrap off my water glass. That’s when it happened. My wallet was sitting on one of the bedside tables. If I’d had it in my pocket, I would have been able to take it out and give him his tip while facing him. But I had to turn around, my back to him, so I could reach it sitting beside the room service menu. While my back was turned, he said, “What’s this?” and before I turned around I knew what he was referring to. My mouth was preparing the word “Don’t” but not soon enough. I turned in time to see his finger make contact with the red button and press it. The device made a solid click.

I couldn’t move. He’d pressed the button. The room service guy had pressed the fucking button. He shrugged and set it back on the table. Then he handed me the bill. I don’t remember signing it, but I remember him leaving the room, because he paused at the door and said, “ Take care, Fly .”

So there was this one momentous thing happening in my head, the pushing of the button, and then there was the second momentous thing, the room service guy calling me by the code name the dropouts had given me. I had to sit down on the bed and think about what had just happened. I’d been played. The dropouts knew I’d be coming to New York to pick up the device. They didn’t have the means to break into a bank, but they could plant a guy at a hotel to come to the room to push the button. Outside, buildings remained standing. Manhattan operated as it always had, as far as I could tell.

How long did you stay in New York?

I checked out as soon as I regained my senses. As I walked to the ticket counter at Kennedy I had no idea where I was going until I slapped down my ID and asked for the first flight to Seattle. I was sure that by the time the plane touched down the world would be in flames. I found myself landing at SeaTac, grabbing a cab, going through these transitional moments like I was wearing a suit made out of an aquarium, the world outside of me blunted and muffled and drab. I was in a cab and on a ferry, and in another cab. Then before I knew it it was night and I stood at the overgrown driveway leading to Star’s house. I had no flashlight, I just felt along ahead of me with a stick, dragging my roller bag through the mud. When I got to the clearing, there was the shack and the shed and the unborn skeleton of the never-completed house. Suddenly, boom, I was on Bainbridge again. I had to catch up with the idea, like one of those online clips where the video speeds up to sync with the audio. As I was asking myself what the hell I was doing here, the door opened, and Star’s silhouette was framed in light. I came forward and found her looking exactly as she’d looked when I’d left. As if she hadn’t aged. Same housedress, same hair in pigtails. If you looked at us you’d have thought I was the older one. My beard streaked gray, my skin creased by the Nevada sun. She beckoned me in with her finger like a witch in a fairy tale. And like a character in a fairy tale, I walked right through that portal into my past. The body odor/incense/oniony smell of a hippie house. We didn’t say anything to each other. She took my coat and stuck my bag in a corner. Then I collapsed on the couch and fell into a night of hyper-realistic dreams. I dreamed I was a boy again, maybe ten years old, and it was winter. I was in the woods playing with Nick and we’d made a fort, really nothing more than a chair and an old step ladder we’d dragged under the boughs of a cedar. It was getting dark and I told Nick I wanted to go home, but he said he wanted to keep playing, so we stayed under the tree in the patch of bare ground while snow continued to fall from the darkening sky. I sat on the step ladder hugging myself for warmth and Nick sat on the chair doing the same. In the dream I faded to sleep and woke up in complete darkness. Panicked, I had to feel my way out of the snowy woods, stumbling along the path. When I came to the clearing where Nick’s house stood, it was dawn, and I realized that I’d left Nick back there. But instead of going back I decided to pretend I didn’t know where he was. The scene changed and it was quite some time later, in a different season, springtime. I stood at the edge of the woods while police with chattering radios recovered Nick’s body. His skin was yellow and his head flopped to the side as they carried him out. Somehow the cops figured out that I had abandoned him out there and Star stood next to me, angry, shaking. I needed to escape the cops. They seemed distracted anyway, so it wasn’t hard to slip away back into the woods. But now it was a different season, summer, and I was an adult, and as I climbed over fallen logs I had a conversation with myself about how I had just been dreaming that Nick had frozen to death in the woods. A dream within a dream. I heard traffic ahead and pushed through some foliage to find myself on a sidewalk in New York City. Behind me the woods were dense and dark, but in front of me cars and buses honked and squealed. Instead of buildings, a thick wall of trees rose along the sidewalk at my back. Like I was standing at a sort of membrane between two island worlds. I started walking downtown, toward Times Square. Soon I stood in front of the hotel I had just checked out of, with my hand finding its way to my pocket, where it found my swipe key. I felt like I was walking around in my aquarium suit again. I rode the elevator to the floor I had stayed on, walked down the hall, tried the key, and opened the door, overwhelmed with black, sticky dread. There was my luggage, the newspaper I’d read that morning, the device with the red button sitting on the table. I was back, in a dream, in New York City, where I’d just been. I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking that this was turning out to be one hell of a long dream. There was a knock and the words “room service” came through the door. I opened it and the same guy who’d pressed the button earlier wheeled in another cart laden with food, and he went through the same procedure of removing the Saran wrap from my glass and lifting lids off entrées. I was locked into an algorithmic set of options, as if I’d rehearsed; I reached for my wallet on the bedside table as the guy picked up the device, said, “What’s this?” and pressed the button. Exactly as it happened the first time. Except now I knew he was a dropout. But I was locked into the routine and couldn’t do anything different with this knowledge. The button got pressed again. And this time, in the dream, I went to the window to see buildings falling. When I woke up, I was in Star’s house, but she wasn’t there. In fact, she’d been gone for years.