Virtual Death by Shale Aaron Above the buildings that lined the tracks, a narrow throat of purple sky held a discontinuous string of clouds, which shone pink in the dying light, like sutures in a bruise. I touched my own throat, goose-pimpled from the cold, a single vein throbbing against my fingertips, then I shoved my fists in the slender pockets of my skirt and leaned against a light pole on the concrete platform. The pole held an umbrella of fluorescent lamps whose light turned my skin a pale green. Frankly Adams, my best friend and roommate, lingered on the station s open deck beside me. We had no destination ourselves, but waited for the arrival of my brother, who had fallen into some kind of trouble, the kind of trouble that could not be discussed over the phone. The delay had me worried. "Lydia," Frankly said, turning from the digital train schedule, "you're out of your mind." He said this as if it were listed on the schedule: 4:15 Lydia Melmoth wigs out. "Hush," I said. "It's your chance to be somebody again," Frankly went on. "Everything important you do happens a long time ago." Frankly was a Nowist and refused to speak in the past tense. "I sell my mother for a chance like this." "They don't want your mother," I told him. Earlier, the crowd at the station had boiled in readiness, 1 head and then another bubbling up, peering into the vacant distance. But now, the train 2 hours late, Frankly and I stood alone on the expanse of lacquered concrete, looking alternately at the darkening sky and the long stretch of tracks. Each held the future, I thought, the tracks vibrating with the remote promise of train, the sky coloring with inevitable darkness. I had reached that point where worry turned to boredom. Beneath my feet, polished pebbles embedded in the lacquer sparkled in the light. I imagined this as the past?shiny particles glued together, which, under a spray of artificial light, possessed a certain kind of beauty. What, then, of the present? I wondered. Where was the present? Vending machines, crowded together in a row, provided a windbreak. They dispensed candy, condoms, combs, and disposable guns. A cold blow whistled through the gaps, sending a swell of greasy pistol wrappers tumbling past my boots. Frankly hugged himself and began hopping. Fully erect, in his bare feet, he reached the height of a 3rd grader. He hopped to be taller?a leftover trait from an old act. For 3 years he worked as a stand-up depressionist, his last stint more than a year past. The routines slept within him, waking occasionally to anoint the ears of strangers with his professional misery, or to send him hopping around a train station. "Plus they pay you a thousand bills," he said, poking my arm at the crest of a hop. "How can you sneeze at a thousand bucks?" "Blackout," I said. "I'm not going." Among the dedicated, the dying addicts, the serious Morbids, I still reigned?the Living Angel, the Mistress of Death, the Queen of Dying. By my 18th birthday, I had died 7 times?a record that still stood, almost 20 years later. My display in the Hall of Dying Fame proclaimed me "Lydia Melmoth, the Original Genius of Dying." The buzzbox beneath my photo announced my accomplishments: "7 verifiables. All zerO-beat/zerO-hums. No discernible gray rot." In the photo I'm a teenager smiling the old lowers-only snarl?the big fad back then, stupid-looking now. I had visited the Hall only once, disguised and alone, both thrilled and embarrassed at the celebration of my past. This weekend a boy named Qigley would attempt to surpass my record?our record; he had tied me last August before thousands of spectators and a national television audience. Qigley had the half-mouth most dying artists got, which caused the stutter the kids imitated; otherwise, his head held together well?no obvious gray rot, 7 deaths and counting. As for me, I had only an eye-twitch now and again. No neurological business. I had excelled at the craft of dying. A professor at Emory University wanted to study me, to isolate a biological factor that let me come and go easily. "I don't want to be known as a dying queen anymore," I'd told him when I turned him down. "And I don't ever want to be known as a lab rat." Quintessential Broadcasting Network had requested I attend the record-breaking die in Filadelfia to do an interview. "Just yak about the old-timey days," the QBN girl had said over the phone. "Nothing major. Little lip service 'bout Cops, danger. We'll pay you a grand, plus tickets to the show." I died before it was legal?in illicit bars, at the homes of patrons, once in the middle of the night in a public park. No 1 had ever paid me to die?to take money for it amounted to selling out. All of us felt that way back then. I last died the year men were growing Grizzlies, those grotesque on-the-neck-only beards. The cartoon adventures of Fuffy the Slipper had the kids temporarily enthralled, and Velma rOOst had just debuted her now world-celebrated bosom. My dying belonged to that time, that part of history, while my current self, I hoped, belonged to the present. Frankly had once had some fame himself. He had played several of the stand-up depression clubs in Manhattan. But his misery revolved around his height. When the country elected as President J. S. "Stumpy" Gallion, Frankly found himself out of a job. Short no longer sold. Afternoon turned to evening. A layer of clouds moved in, making the sky close, turning it the gray of pencil smudge, like a bad erasure. The distant pop of neighborhood gunfire punctuated the constant whoosh of wind, a tuneless melody like Arbitrary Real Rhapsody, the antiArt music that had briefly dominated the radio. I hated artistic pretension? although not enough to dress unfashionably. I had on an angle-cut houndstooth print jacket and matching skirt, a zebra-stripe leotard beneath it. The skirt barely reached midthigh, and my legs nubbled and ached from the cold. I took consolation in reminding myself that I looked good, that Frankly had told me I could pass for late 20s. But why would I want to appear anything but my real age? Whenever I tried to worry through my relationship to the prevailing culture, I got lost, could not tell what existed outside my head and what originated in my own skull. Even my considering it all seemed fashionable. "Your brother doesn't remember me whenever we meet," Frankly said now, sounding almost sad about it. "He remembers you," I said. "He just doesn't like you." "Same thing," Frankly insisted. "He forgets me from the very start. Like you forget what it is to be successful, so you aren't going to this die." "Oh, give it up, will you?" What I couldn't make Frankly understand was how much dying disrupted my life. It appeared simple. The dying artist was given Ater?1 whiff caused instant death?then the rescue crew fit the Accu Shock/Retrieval unit over the artist's chest. The Accu was shaped like a huge gray butterfly, with levers like wings that ignited the shock. Early on, the crew also administered mouth-to-mouth, but the practice was abandoned; people wanted to see the artist s face the whole time she was dead. It looked simple, but dying worked strange tricks on daily life. It made me weirdly distracted, made me forget things?not where I put my keys or how to program my refrigerator, but how to go about having a romance, or what it was I had planned to do with my life. Things like that. The digital marquee started flashing: sniper alert downtown/air quality sub-ephemeral/train 3 minutes from station. Snow began to fall, brown and fluffy, spiderlike. "I should have worn hose," I told Frankly, but he was examining the "1-Shot" disposable gun machines. The company sold condoms under the same name. "Tacky," I said. "This is good material for a routine," Frankly said, fingering the change slots, "but it doesn't depress me." He shook his big head at his unfortunate contentment. In 1 of his routines he had measured heads in the audience to prove his own normal in size. "I have the cranium of a man 6 feet tall," he would say, then produce a curved mirror that made him look that height, his head perfectly proportioned in the reflection. "Smoke," Frankly said suddenly, turning from the machines, pointing. The dark exhaust of the train appeared over the tops of the nearest buildings. "Finally," I said, thinking, The future is a train. I could almost see it coining. The train arrived with the piercing screech of brakes, a black haze of smoke, and a corrosive odor. Now and then I felt nostalgic for the technoPast, the way things had been before the InfoTechno Collapse, and never more so than when smelling a stinking new train. The Collapse had happened 20 years ago, long enough past that I didn't think much about it. A temporary pause, most people had predicted back then, a technological respite?which had now lasted 2 decades. Except for a few aging Rads, people hardly considered it at all anymore. A fact of life, like television, taxes, IT. The sliding doors opened as the train shrugged to a halt, a torrent of people pouring out. Several carried guns. Frankly offered the traditional hands-overhead gesture, but I merely smiled and hoped they weren't lunatics. Hundreds of people flooded past, but my brother Stamen did not appear. "Son of a prick," Frankly said. While I searched the faces of the people remaining on the landing, the conductor, a black man with hamburger sideburns, grabbed my elbow. "Lidya Melmouth?" "Moth," Frankly said. "Melmoth." The conductor ignored him. "I got a package for you from your brother." He waved a fat manila envelope and puckered his lips dramatically. "He said you'd give me a 20 tip." "Nobody gets a 20 tip," Frankly said. "Stamen doesn't say this." The conductor pulled a folded scrap of pape...
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