You remember the moment clearly;
wide awake, drunk, floating in the light of the TV screen in your living room,
reeling from whatever recent heartbreak had stolen your sleep, you watched the
nice lady demonstrate what looked like a phone booth on a stage somewhere in
California. Another booth was set up in Times Square, New York, and the screen
feed split to show the sunny beach and the east coast sidewalk. A lady walks up
to the phone booth, waves to the crowd and viewers like you, and steps into the
booth. The door closes. It opens in New York, and be damned if it isn’t that
same girl. The presenter opens the first booth, and by now, you’re leaning
forward, mouth dry. It’s empty, predictably, though you don’t know why or how
you predicted that.
They made you uneasy, for some
reason. Breaking the body down into millions of particles and transmitting them
as a long wave before reassembly. The people who did it said that it felt
halfway between a tickle and an orgasm, and you woke up fully assembled in your
new booth, a little woozy, perhaps, but understandably so.
Amazon.com started delivering
through longwave blink. Order something, get it less than sixty seconds later.
Don’t like it? Send it back, get a refund, get something else, all in less than
five minutes.
Unions demonstrated, sure. The
postal system collapsed when people installed blinkers the size of microwaves
into their walls. Roads crumbled. No one used planes anymore. The car industry
shrank to five percent its original size, purely reserved for hobbyists and
those rich enough to afford an ostentatious car and a track to run it on. You
still didn’t use them. People laughed at you, called you a weirdo, said there
was nothing to be afraid of.
Things started to get sticky. A guy
when to jail when he blinked his girlfriend a puppy. The legal case was
convoluted; no one could figure out if it was animal cruelty or not. They
decided it wasn’t, and then to celebrate that same dumbass decided to blink
himself to his same girlfriend holding the puppy. Something went wrong, he came
out with puppy ears and half a dog attached to his chest, still kicking its
feet. He went to jail that time. Class action lawsuits followed, people got
mad, PETA spent a joyous day in the city reaffirming the need for their
existence by smashing blinkers with sledgehammers and baseball bats until they
clashed with riot police and six people died. Christian fundamentalists called
the devices “of the devil,” or “a crime against nature.” A couple got married
in a blinker and then blinked off to their honeymoon in Aruba.
Vacation prices fell. Now the only
cost to get to a foreign country was five bucks, if you used a public blinker,
just the electricity if you used your own. Illegal immigration skyrocketed. It
was impossible to measure all the time. The US blocked all blink signals coming
in to the United States from Mexico and Cuba, until they realized that like all
signal disruptors it was merely breaking up the signal, which in this case was
a human being. The loved ones on the Mexican or Cuban sides thought “no news is
good news” and piled in bootleg blinkers. A hundred thousand people died before
they figured out what was happening. As penance, the US had to build a field of
granite monuments to the immigrants who sacrificed themselves to the wall of
static.
You remember the first time that
you saw a family member use it. Your little brother. The blinker sat in your
living room. This was a new model, with a screen on it so the person on the
other side could wave to you when they hit wherever they were going. He stepped
into the blinker, closed the flashguard, and punched in the destination code.
The seams around the door flashed deep, retina-searing purple, and then the
door automatically slid back open. In Washington, your brother waved on the
screen before walking off to his new college, luggage in tow.
You remember the first time
something went wrong. Grandma confusedly trying to figure it out and your whole
family shouting instructions into the screen to make sure she didn’t
accidentally pop into one of those one way blinkers in Afghanistan or Yemen.
She finally figured it out, stepped into the booth, and something like Grandma
stepped out the other side.
She didn’t remember you. She didn’t
remember anyone. It was Christmas, for Christ’s sake, and she was lost in her
daughter-in-law’s home. You took her to the hospital. Blink-induced amnesia.
“Could be temporary,” the doctor said. You all took her back the house, only
the youngest in your family eyeing the yet-unopened presents. Mom cried. Dad
tried to comfort her, blustered a little bit about the damn blink companies and
their faulty technology. No one in the family made fun of you for a while. No
one in the family used the blinker for a while.
A few weeks later a spokesman for
the company wearing a mock turtleneck rolled out the new design. No more blink
induced amnesia (super sorry about that, by the by), people could blink with
luggage in the same trip, multiple people could blink together (up to four), it
took less than a tenth of a second, the booth looked more like a shower, and
cost half as much. The people rejoiced. Lowe’s had a huge event where people
lined up six times around the building to get the new blinkers. The Apple store
started carrying them. The same couple that got married in the blinker made a
porno where they had sex in a blinker and tried to blink during it. The camera
on the other side was showered in ichor and entrails and then a metal band
stole the footage and made it a music video and the family of the deceased
filed about fifteen lawsuits and people got nervous about the blinkers again but it was just so easy. You can try to
not blink, if you really think it’ll help, but when the store is fifteen miles
away and you don’t want to drive your old, expensive car to the store, fill it
with expensive gas, drive it on the rotting roads back home, and carry the
groceries into the house, it’s so much easier to blink to the store, pick up
the fettucine, wine, and French bread, plug the basket into the store’s
complimentary blinker and be home in time to put away the groceries and catch a
Parks and Recreation throwback marathon.
Then the sickness started. Amnesia,
dementia, and psychosis tore through minds. Hospital waiting rooms flooded with
screaming, howling, staring patients. Children smashed their heads against
walls. Fathers fell asleep on grills during memorial day, melting their faces
to the burgers. Dogs drowned themselves in ponds and rivers. Newscasters came
on the air to urge people not to panic, though they themselves had been the
ones to stir up panic at the early stages of the pandemic, though they
themselves went mad on air. A stage magician cut his throat at a children’s
hospital. They laughed in glee until they realized that there was no trick and
the spreading pool wasn’t corn starch and dye. You wanted to feel smug, but
when the world was quietly melting down, it’s impossible.
Scientists couldn’t explain it.
Religious leaders tried. They bombastically pontificated about the existence of
the soul, how man should not meddle with the stars and the human body, and then
they themselves went mad on their television shows and in the sanctuaries of
their churches, exposing their hypocrisy.
A government branch patrolled the
streets with tranquilizer guns, subduing the people that showed signs of
madness. They stationed themselves at college graduations (a college president
had his neck broken by a raging sorority girl), at birthday parties (a six year
old set himself on fire with the candles, his parents watched and laughed), at
sporting events (a home run king started slugging straight into the bleachers)
and they covered up grand central station, which looked like a telephone booth
showroom and often the travelers would stumble out, completely mad, dancing in
a hail of toxic darts and dragged away like a wild animal.
People stopped using them, but it
was too late. One by precious one, their minds left their bodies. Families tried
to bury them, but there were no cemeteries left. Eventually an industrial-sized
temporary crematorium was set up in Waco, and refrigerated trucks would unload
canvas-wrapped frozen bodies to be thrown into the flames. The ashes were mixed
with concrete and shaped into bricks, stacked behind the crematorium (no
cameras allowed).
You found yourself at your parents
cabin, sequestered in the green mountains, hidden among the cedar and pine. The
air was rich and smelled of earth and rain, and you could almost forget what
lonely madness the world was sinking into. The TV broadcasts grew less
frequent, but you still listlessly watched. Sometimes you’d open a cabinet to
find a can of food your mother had put away for a dinner, or peel away a
crackling sticker one of your nieces or nephews had put on the walls. After a
while, you took the pictures down. Finally, you covered the hulking menace of
the blinker in the corner with a sheet from what had been your parents’ bed,
unplugged it from the wall so no one could blink in. One day, you turned on the
TV to find that there was no broadcast. The station fed static in a loud wave
through the room, until you turned it off. You felt like going down the
mountain, but rust had fused the bicycle chains in their stable in the garage.
You didn’t want to walk.
The cans of food dwindled slowly.
You tried to forget how your brothers looked when they smiled, what a full
restaurant on a Friday night sounded like, the way a crowd at a football game
would roar and rise as a runner broke free. You missed the rumble and smells of
a mall food court on a Saturday morning, you missed the hiss-whine of a jet
pressurizing before the sudden pressing weight of acceleration pushed on your
chest.
You would sit outside sometimes,
nursing one of the last sour beers you had, straining for human sounds from the
empty city far below. The silence cascaded over the mountain, leaving a few
birds to whistle and whirr overhead. You were never one for peace: you never
found solace in solitude.
One day, you whipped the taupe
sheet from the blinker. You plugged it in, letting the machine hum to life. The
screen lit up through the dust; a dead bug fell from the top and clicked on the
floor. You stepped into the blinker, punched in the code for a surf shack on
Miami beach, and closed your eyes.
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