Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Its voice was slo-mo, robotic sizzle, white noise.

“There’s still the trial, the judge, the jury,” I said, groggy.

“It’s not about that anymore. It was never about that. Everything’s primetime now. Everything’s within budget. We know what you know. We’ve been where you’ve been.”

“You know what we want you to know.”

“The judge?”

“He’s a fair man. We’ve checked him out. We can count on him.”

“Adopted for an afternoon. Age eight. Picnic in the hills.” Clicking. “He doesn’t recall. His parents, if asked, remember a different day.”

“You contaminated the lines.”

“We made him family. His brainstem is our brainstem. His heart, our heart.”

I slipped my left hand out from under the thin sheet, lowered it toward the carpeted floor, toward my Yeltsin-70. Light swarmed the room like a photon ocean. I could barely see. Neon red filaments fired up and down my optic thread.

“The jury, then,” I said.

“The world is a statistical difficulty, not an impossibility. We knew them before they knew themselves. We… visited.”

“The tissue samples… ”

“Cellular reformulation. Nanobots injected into the eye during routine optometric exams. Ascended along the inferior rectus into the braincore. A slow process of reconfiguration. Growth. A flowering.”

“They don’t act convincingly human… ”

“Because they’re not convincingly human. Everyone’s a talkshow host waiting to happen. Everyone’s a book deal in the making. Think beta test. Tv pilot.”

“Our planet’s your entertainment channel.”

“Ten years. Five, all things being equal.” I touched cool ceramic. Fingered the safety catch. Clack . “Imagine. A galactic atrocity theme park. You should be happy. You should be content. Now you have a purpose. You’re becoming a vacation destination.” I palmed the oily handle. Trigger. “There are so many sights to see, so many journeys to take.”

“We’re becoming a moving wax museum.”

“You’re becoming yourselves. Serial killers. Political assassins. Human sacrifices among the ancient ruins. A full family getaway. And nothing out of the ordinary. All you have to do is be who you are. Cooperate. Help the inevitable process toward the inevitable product. Help happen what will happen without us. Keep your thoughts to yourself.”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing.”

I rolled off the bed and simultaneously brought up my semi-automatic. The light swamping the room turned pulsating blue. My pillow turned into a haze of smoking feathers. The cockroach turned into steam and shreds.

Only not before it’d broadcast the emergency signal. A high, short, piercing shrill. Not before the end had been set in motion.

A long heart-pump of silence and, milliseconds later, the crash at the front door. Footsteps clumping through the foyer. Rumble on the stairs. My pale hand flying around the bedstand drawer, searching for my cassette.

Beginning the final dispatch, which maybe someone is listening to right now, and which maybe someone isn’t…

The apocalypse isn’t about clouds of boiling seawater sucked miles into burning atmosphere off the blue coasts of the Bikini atoll. It isn’t about the Berlin Wall or the Cuban Blockade or the Butcher of Baghdad, melting polar ice caps or greenhouse gasses or misfiring DNA. It’s all about watching. It’s all about observing the almost unobservable like a stunned carcrash victim while wondering if what you just saw is real, brakes and flames and palms across the inside of the fiery windshield.

And it is. Every word of it.

It is.

37. THE DISCOVERY: CHANNEL

Kerwin Penumbro, who’s taking his birthday off from his job designing and manufacturing certain popular body organs (a greasy heart still breathing in a madman’s fist is a perennial favorite, though you should never underestimate the power of a bluish-white intestines wrapped on a surprised housewife’s fire poker) at the small Japanese-owned special effects house, Goo & Pwin-Ti, just off Pioneer Square in Seattle, is expecting maybe a beige sweater with maroon stripes, or one of those Timex watches that lets you know the hour in Australia and Greenland simultaneously and is water-resistant down to a hundred meters, from his live-in girlfriend, Syndi Shogunn, who Ker met four years ago in front of the remainders bin at that just-slightly-kinked record store a block over, The Vinyl Fetish (Ker looking for the esoteric compilation on Air Pyrate Muzzik containing every pertinent Beatles song played backwards, Re: Volver; while Syndi, a secretary over at the local police station, ferreted for a disc housing themes to all those really great action-adventures-with-even-a-vague-connection-to-law-enforcement on the tube from the late sixties and early seventies, to enhance her workplace ambiance, those golden years that brought you “I Spy,” “Mannix,” “Mission Impossible,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” “The F.B.I.,” “Batman,” “The Fugitive”… a-and even those truly warped masterpieces like “The Prisoner,” if you stretched your operational definitions a little… Syndi able to just go on and on about such things), but no way the knock on their apartment door this Thursday morning, Syndi away at the office, coffee spiking the air… not the May sun in Ker’s rattled eyes… and certainly not the two men in khaki shirts and khaki pants and five-o’clock stubble at maybe nine-o’clock in the a.m. standing next to the neat cardboard box nearly five feet tall and four feet wide, saying: “Mr. Penumbro? We got your tv here… ”

21. IMMORTALITY: STEALTH

A-and not your standard tv, either. Uh-uh. This baby is humongous and looks like it’s been designed in a wind tunnel. It’s made out of smooth black plastic and has lots of curves everywhere and Kerwin could under the right circumstances imagine it flying.

Plus it’s one of the first HDTV models, the renowned Mitsubishi Stealth.

Plus it comes with one of those incredible mini-satellite deals you hook up outside your window and get like a bazillion channels on.

Kerwin Penumbro falls in love with Syndi Shogunn all over again.

While he’s doing so, the delivery people search for the optimum viewing area, 7.4 feet to 13.6 feet from the screen, hook up the cable, adjust the tuning mode to AUTO position, flick the STEREO/MONO switch to STEREO, toy with the convergence panel, the quick-view, the remote.

Instead of breakfast, Ker sits in his bean-bag chair in the middle of the living room like a king on his bamboo throne on a South Pacific island (he’s wearing only his grayish jockey shorts, which he knows as well as anyone should really undergo a good washing about now, but, hey…) and studies his owner’s manual.

Instead of the nap he planned on taking sometime before noon, he makes himself this monstrous bologna birthday sandwich with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, a wedge of onion, mustard, and this serious dollop of mayo (the expiration date on the jar barely noticeably out of fashion) on top of which he sprinkles cashews and what’s left of his jelly-bean stash, tears open a bag of O’Boise potato chips, and flips the top of a Bud, collapses in his threadbare bean-bag chair 8.3 feet from the black monolith, squirms toward comfort, and clicks the ON button the femtosecond the delivery people nod, shrug, and close the door behind them.

Clicks the OFF button.

Stands, trots into the bedroom, rifles through his sock drawer, finds his last Baby Ruth, shnorks it for an improved disposition on the way back to the living room, squirms into his bean-bag chair like John Glenn into Friendship 7, clicks the ON button.