COMPLICATIONS

The story COMPLICATIONS is inspired by the Machine of Death concept created by Ryan North.  The concept is used with permission.

For more information, or to purchase, read or listen to Machine of Death in whole or in part, visit http://www.machineofdeath.net.

The reader may benefit from knowing all stories in the Machine of Death milieu have one thing in common: they occur in a world containing a device that can tell the means by which someone will die, precisely and with unerring accuracy, from a quick and simple blood test. The machines provide no further information, nor do their results ever change with subsequent tests, and they seem wickedly determined to confound us via a persistent and morbid irony.

Cover Photo by Greg Emmerich (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

~ A shopping mall in the early 1980’s ~

Buck came tearing back in from the lobby, his face red and his lumberjack arms pumping in time to the chug of his legs. He yanked off his clip-on tie, pointed a big pink frankfurter of a finger at me and hissed, “Lobby. Now. Customer.” Normally he barked his orders but something had him frightened and I had never seen that, not even once, during my two years in his employ. Mark shot me a look, eyebrows raised as though to say, Well well well, someone's a bit huffy. His eyes twinkled with amusement. I hated him a little when they did that. Everything about him could twinkle if he wanted it to.

Buck didn't even stick around to see if I had obeyed him. The door to his office shot open and would have shot closed if it had been hung properly in the first place. Instead he had to fuss with the handle before it would latch, taking some of the heat out of what he clearly wanted to turn into a good hard slam. I let myself smile just a tiny bit at that, checked my tie in the big mirror and spritzed Binaca on my tongue.

Mark clicked his cheek and winked at me. “Go get 'em, tiger.”

The lobby of the store was wallpapered a relatively inoffensive cream but over that was a complicated, interlocking pattern of elaborate and poorly defined plants falling all over one another. The attempt had been made to depict bouquets that were bursting with lurid blossoms so busy the eye wouldn't notice how quickly the pattern repeated or where the symmetries were wrecked by a poorly placed seam. The furniture – all love seats – was patterned to match in the way magazines said the homes of rich women had been decorated in spring of the year before. The lighting was low, mostly lamps with 40-watt bulbs and thick shades casting sharp pools of light. A French marketing firm had designed the whole effect a year ago. The pitch was that their psychologists put together a space that would seem welcoming to someone tired of walking around the mall but would also make them feel lonely: seating for two occupied by individuals, pink and gray blossoms in the wallpaper to suggest the hair and skin of someone aged past his or her prime and bright lights right at the level where a client could notice their own wrinkled hands while they filled out the questionnaires. It was the trap we laid for lonely hearts and it worked. Those French guys knew their stuff.

Our sign in the mall corridor, over the store's entrance, read TIL DEATH DO US PART in flowing script stamped out in plastic. It sagged in the middle and needed dusting. Every day when I came to work I tried to affix an apostrophe to the front of that first word through sheer force of will but it never worked.

The woman in the lobby looked familiar to me but so did many of the women who came here. This was because they all looked so much like one another: of a certain age, dressed well enough to afford a computerized dating service and wearing their dyed hair up in one of those hairspray constructions suggesting an elegant whirlpool. She was daubing at her eyes with a paper tissue she'd pulled from her over-the-shoulder handbag decked out in tasteful buckles. She was obviously upset but, more than that, she looked plain bad. She looked like she hadn't slept right in a week.