Ghost With A Machine

Source: Pixabay via Pexels

[STILL WORKING?] appears on his screen with a Google ding as Martin flicks his bedroom light switch on and off, up and down, watching the room brighten and dim. Without realizing it, he’s begun matching the tempo of the reverberating bass beat of Kriss Kross telling everyone to jump almost as loudly as they can.

He types [Everything works.], pressing send and taking a sip of coffee that went cold an hour ago.

When he stole it from the train station this morning, he’d needed something to convince him that the empty streets of Amsterdam weren’t a dream. Martin had shuffled through cobblestone bridges stretching over the canals, catching ten-foot whiffs of stale pot smoke every hundred meters and listening to the creaky scream of the gulls. A city of eight-hundred-thousand, and they were the only ones talking.

He checks his cell for the time and thinks about calling Danique long enough to think himself out of it.

If the empty streets were a dream, the coffee hadn’t worked.

[CRAZY!]

[Dude you can turn off the caps.]

[SORRY I’m excited. This is insane!]

[I’m just glad you’re okay.]

Martin’s little sister, Gail, is at SUNY Cortland, taking great pride in having a red dragon on every piece of clothing she wears. Freshman enthusiasm he hoped would wear off but knew wouldn’t.

[How many people are you with?]

[online? you mack and lindsay. in the dorm…all solitary here big bro]

[Are Mack and Lindsay on campus?]

[negatory. skiing somewhere for break]

[Do you think mom remembers how to use Skype]

[LMFAO]

When Martin was in college, he’d swung a visit to the anechoic chamber in Syracuse, its walls and most of the floor made with hard foam spikes. Like an iron maiden. The design meant to devour sound.

The intern who took him in explained that people went crazy inside. Some can only last a few seconds before the sheer totality of emptiness sends barbed wire strands into their nervous systems. Fight or flight malfunctions. Their brains start to boil over, but they talk about it like an alleyway acid trip when they get out into the safety of noise. That comfort and stability. We’re so enveloped by sounds that we stop noticing them. They become ghosts. The sinking buzz of power lines, the infinite tiny echoes of concrete, traffic from miles away. The commotion in the background. Always behind the thing that’s behind the thing that’s right in front of us.

The intern said that some people lose it as soon as the door closes. They don’t even get comfortable enough to let their heartbeat contort into a subwoofer. Some said they could hear the blood flowing in their veins. Some said they could hear their own thoughts. One man swore he could hear himself sweating.

That’s what Martin felt like walking the deserted streets of Amsterdam that morning.

[brb got an idea, big bro!]

Martin tosses the corpse of his coffee into the sink and stomps to the living room where he cranks up the volume on his speakers, hoping that someone will bang on their ceiling, knock on his door, or call the police. It’s Sunday, and he’s disturbing the peace.

When he gets back to his laptop, he’s missed a Skype call from his mother.

“Mom, are you all right?” he says, the grainy image of her face sharpening into existence.

“Oh, Martin. Thank God! What’s happening?”

She’d been crying.

“I spent an hour trying to get this damn thing to work, but you know I don’t know what button does what, and it said it needed to update, and after that I didn’t understand how to log in. I called, and you didn’t answer.”

“It’s okay, mom.”

“You didn’t answer. You weren’t there.”

“I’m fine. Gail is fine. We’ve been on Gchat for a while now.”

“G-what?”

“Don’t worry about it, mom.”

“I’m scared, Martin. It’s so good to hear your voice.”

He’s never heard her like this. The woman who made star-shaped pancakes when they were kids. The woman who stood her ground when dad wanted to take them to the other side of the country. The woman who worked two jobs and still managed to be mother and father and jailer and guide. She’d spun around the house all morning, trying to call people, and getting dead signals. When she dialed 911 and heard static, she’d burst into tears.

“I’m alone,” she says.

“I am, too, mom. But we’ll figure this out. There must be an explanation.”

“And you’re on the other side of the world, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Take a deep breath and be glad I can see your face.”

[back! it’s a little cold out there lol]

[Where did you go?]

“Mom, Gail’s back online. Do you see her on Skype? On your contacts?”

[lindsay and miriam dared everyone to go streaking last month but I was chicken]

“Gailbear98? Is that her?”

[so I figured now is the best possible time to go! lol]

[You just ran through the quad naked?], he types, hoping Gail can sense his disapproval.

“Yeah, that’s her.”

“What’s she saying?”

[it was a rush big bro!]

“She’s reading her biology textbook, waiting for someone to figure out what’s going on.”

“I keep waiting for the TV to tell me what’s happened, but all the channels are gone,” his mother says, shifting in her chair to look across the room at something Martin can’t see.

“Huh. That’s a good idea, mom. Hold on a second.”

Martin skims through a handful of government websites. The White House, FEMA, Homeland Security.

When he walked the streets this morning, he told himself that it was an explainable fluke. There were fewer tourists in the post-Christmas cold, and it was early enough for everyone to still be in bed. He kept imagining that he’d just missed seeing a jogger by a block, that he simply couldn’t hear the rumbling of a garbage truck over the sound of the gulls.

He’d passed beside row houses reaching up to the sky in stony silence and a playground where swings creaked without laughter. He’d passed by a bakery that should have been open, then finally emerged onto a block where the main train station stood in full view, tomblike and hollow. There was no rationalizing after that.

“Sorry, mom. I couldn’t find anything. No one’s updated.”

[Hey Gail. Imagine for a second that everyone else is in the same situation we’re in.]

“Yeah, okay, dear.”

[ya ok]

[You’re the president, and you want to send a message to everyone else.]

[i’d be the best prez]

[If the internet is working, why wouldn’t you post something online?]

[hahaha lol you think the president knows how to update a website?]

[Shit. You’re right.]

[he could send an email to it though]

[it?]

[I.T.]

[So, we’re waiting for the people in charge to realize the internet works, figure out they can send emails back and forth, and then figure out they can send a message to the guy who updates the site. Perfect.]

“What’s all that typing?” his mom asks

[brb lindsay might have sour patch kids in her room]

“Just talking things through with Gail,” he says, trying to stifle his growing irritation. “Mom, can you do me a huge favor?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have Aunt Julia’s email address?”

“Somewhere.”

“Send her a message, work out a plan to go to the A&P on Bradford at a specific time.”

“To see if we meet up. Got it,” her voice steadies. Nothing like a task at hand to harden his mother’s resolve. “I’ll try to pump some gas, too.”

“Brilliant. You know what will really be wild?”

“What?”

“If you can take home the same groceries she can. I’ll wait for you here. Maybe the government will find its asshole by then.”

“Language, Martin. What if I can’t call you back?”

“I’ll leave the video open. It’ll be fine.”

Lights blinked and cascaded everywhere inside the train station, lying about the trains being on time. Store fronts were blocked off by thick, metal rolladens. The food court smelled like soil and marble. Martin made his way all the way to the back, where he stepped across a covered street and stood on the river’s edge. Usually there was a ferry here to take people and bicycles and tiny cars across the steel waves of the IJ. Usually there were a billion bodies slamming through the train terminals, waiting impatiently to get across the river, or standing dumbstruck — cameras in hand — as the stunning, palatial spires of the Gothic station loomed overhead. Usually the city wasn’t completely empty.

Eyes adjusting to emptiness and sea spray, Martin had decided he needed more coffee to shatter the dream and bring everyone back, so he’d hopped the counter at De Brooodzaak and helped himself. After leaving a few euros on the counter, he’d headed back to his apartment, briefly stopping to consider what would happen if he stole a canal boat and took it for a spin.

[back no sour patches. imma go down to the bookstore. they have em there]

[Hold up. Before you go looting, I need a favor.]

[wut?]

[Mom’s emailing Aunt Julia back home. I need you to go on the Cortland message board and see if anyone’s posted there. Make a post yourself.]

[yeah, smart]

[I’ll post something on Reddit.]

[why not email danique?]

Martin hesitates for a moment, swirling potential words in his mouth like motor oil.

[We broke up. It was messy.]

[messier than this?]

The question is so obvious that it had escaped him. A defensive pride swells in his gut.

[Just check the school message board, please.]

[martin?]

[Yeah?]

[it’s evolution.]

[What’s evolution?]

[this. what’s happening. we’re reading a book about it in class right now. there’s this guy bonner who theorized in like the 1940s that the environment evolves along with us. specifically in tune with how we’re evolving.]

[So what?]

[i’m just saying maybe we’ve been training ourselves for an existence where no one else is around but everyone is still online.]

[Whatever the reason, we’ll fix it. Someone will know what to do.]

[it makes me worry about mom.]

[Yeah. I know.]

[do you think i’ll have to learn to farm or something?]

[Go loot stuff]

[aye aye big bro]

Martin pushes back from his computer desk and makes enough laps around his apartment to memorize exactly what he would write to Danique. He thinks about how funny it is that context means everything. How a bad grade on a term paper can disappear from your mind after graduation. How the biggest worry about your little sister going to college can evaporate in a single morning. How you can’t remember what caused that final fight.

He types fast enough to fool his nerves and clicks send.

Shuffling into the living room, Martin adds another log to his fire and turns the volume down on Neil Diamond serenading his sweet Caroline.

He imagines breaking into the Rijksmuseum to see “The Night Watch” without another soul in sight and all the soul-revving things he could do without the maw of the crowd. All the boats and row houses and mansions and zoos he could live in. All the time he had to build whatever life he liked.

Then he thinks about a blonde pixie cut, and a sour glass of wine that made them both crack up laughing, and a day in Vondelpark where it felt like they invented the sun. He thinks about the last time he held Danique in his arms, but it was months ago, and the memory is already starting to retreat. To become a ghost. The thing behind the thing behind what’s in front of him.

His fire is almost out by the time he hears his mother’s voice coming through the computer.

“Hi, mom. Any luck?”

“As much food as I could hope for, but Julia wasn’t there. I’m emailing her now.”

As they speak, Martin gets his own message. A response from Danique pops up in his inbox.

“Mom, I’ve gotta go. I’m gonna try to find Danique.”

He rides his bike through the cold, passive streets of the city, eyeing the Van Gogh Museum without a block-wrapping line out front. He makes a mental note riding past the Concertgebouw to sing on its enormous stage to an audience of none. He pushes on. It takes him a little over an hour, but he makes it past the Albert Cuyp Market, thinking about her message.

“I’m at home. Waiting for you.”

When that intern was leading Martin out of the anechoic chamber in Syracuse, Martin asked him why certain people were bothered by it while others seemed to tolerate a lack of external sound. The intern explained that it was only a matter of sensitivity. Some people are designed to withstand the loss of something invisibly familiar while others can’t bear to lose it. None of that really matters, though. After a while, everyone cracks. The record was eight minutes. The intern said that the tingle in your spine grows so loud that it won’t let you be shut off from the world.

Martin goes to chain his bike to a rail, but then abandons the idea with a laugh, letting it lean up unprotected from thieves against the metal. It’s cold, and a soft rain begins to fall when he climbs the steps to Danique’s house, straining to hear if there’s any life inside.

He knocks on her door, waits, and listens.

This story originally appeared in MYTHIC Magazine #5 alongside a dozen other great tales. Computer icon via Prettycons at FlatIcon.