Arrival (Maddy Young Saga 1)
by
Nick Pirog
Published by:
Nick Pirog
Copyright © 2013 Nick Pirog
Chapter 1.
Arrival
“How did you die?”
I turned my head. The girl couldn’t have been more than seven. She had light brown hair held back in a ponytail. Her nose was dusted with light freckles, her cheeks as well, only not as densely as the freckles on her nose. She waited a second for my response, then said, “I went into diabetic shock.”
I nodded, like this wasn’t the craziest thing I’d ever heard.
She continued, “I have an uncle here. Uncle Trent. He died in a car crash when I was five. I’m supposed to go live with him I guess.”
She wrinkled her nose. I had a feeling she didn’t like Uncle Trent. Maybe Uncle Trent was like my Uncle Bill. Maybe Uncle Trent liked to make up stories after ten cans of Miller High Life, then get pissed off when you told him he was full of shit.
“So how did you die?” she came again.
This was the hundredth time I’d been posed that question in three days. How did you die? It was yet to lose its level of absurdity.
I took a deep breath and said, “I slipped in the shower.” I kept the part about how I’d been jerking off at the time to myself. No sense upsetting this delicate flower more than was necessary.
I surveyed the other people in the small room. There were twelve altogether. Plus me. A baker’s dozen. Each was clad in the same getup. Scrubs. That blue meets green color. Coolmint. There were two black people. A man and a woman. Both appeared to be in their thirties. A boy around fifteen, his hair dangling in his eyes. Two old people. One in a wheelchair. One sucking from an oxygen tank. A couple of men around fifty. An Asian woman. Then four women of that indiscriminate age between fifty and sixty.
I peered more closely at the woman to my right. Her eyes were puffy, the lines of her face stretched tight with fear. In fact, as I swept over each individual, I noticed the only shared trait among the group was the fear. Like each was staring into the face of a Bengal tiger.
My gaze returned to the small girl. She was the exception. She didn’t have the fear. In fact, at the present moment, she had something black in her hands. I was not so far removed from childhood that I knew it was a PSP. Playstation Portable. She noticed my eyeing her and smiled. She said, “Grand Theft Auto.”
I found myself letting out a small chuckle. My first in the past seventy-two-hour period. Not many laughs when no one will tell you anything, you are asked thousands of questions, are continually hooked to a machine, have a hand shoved in your ass, your balls fondled, every mole on your body inspected, your teeth cleaned, eyes checked, and are drained of at least a gallon of blood.
The girl continued, “I was up playing it all night. I forgot to take my insulin. I was playing it when I died. They gave it to me a couple days ago.”
She broke eye contact and went back to her game. Interesting. She died and her PSP had come with her. Did this mean that when her parents walked into her room the next morning and found her dead, her PSP was gone? Or was it there, clasped in the whites of her hands. I didn’t have much else to go on. I mean, the only thing in my hand when I died was my dick.
In three days, there hadn’t been many answers—only promises that in time everything would make sense. The only answer, the only definitive thing that anyone would share, the only time anyone would look you directly in the eye was when you asked them if you had died.
They wouldn’t waver, they wouldn’t blink, they would only nod their head and say, “Yes.”
⠔
It was silent for the next ten minutes. Everyone anticipating the door opening and answers walking through. The room itself was antiseptic. A third grade classroom meets a military quarantine. The windowless walls were a light blue. There were four rows of four chairs. Three empties. The chairs were white plastic, just slightly reclined, but not enough to relax, or be comfortable in any way. There was a flat screen television on the facing wall. I was in the front row, ten feet from the large-screen TV. It was on screensaver and the manufacturer's name was plastered on the icy blackness in giant white lettering.
SONYY.
The overall energy in the room was similar to a doctor’s waiting room. Or more accurately, an oncologist’s waiting room. Like everyone here had found a lump and was waiting to hear they would be okay. Or if they would surely die. Only, everyone here was already dead. That’s what I was trying to wrap my head around when the silence was broken. Not by any sound, but by the stale air diffusing into parts unknown.
The door exhaled, a leg propping it open. The owner of the leg was also the proud owner of a white lab coat, its bottom half hanging over brown slacks, which led to brown dress shoes. A doctor’s leg. In the silence it was evident the doctor was having a conversation with someone in the hallway.
I strained to hear the words, but I could only hear the muffled, throaty voices of grown men. After thirty seconds, the man straightened, and walked briskly into the room. I squinted. He looked to be in his late thirties. He had that perfect olive skin you only see on commercials and in magazines. He had a sharp nose and thin, wispy brown hair. He was maybe 5’10”, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds. This put him six inches shorter than me and six pound lighter. He wasn’t unattractive. Nor was he striking. He struck me as a Matt. If you took all six men leaning forward, almost hovering over their uncomfortable white plastic chairs, and put them in a blender, Matt might be what you came out with.
Matt walked to the front of the room, settling in directly in front of the flat screen. That second Y, that extra Y that someone had decided to tack onto the old reliable lettering that had been imprinted on my DVD player, that unnecessary Y that was causing me more grief and anxiety than the Bar exam I’d been studying for, was still visible, clinging to the right edge of Dr. Matt’s lab coat.
Matt cleared his throat and in a voice a hundred pounds heavier than his body, he told us his name was Dr. Raleigh. He had a disarming manner about him and you could almost feel the collective pulse of the room drop a hundred points. He said, “Now I’m sure you have plenty of questions and over the next couple days, I will try to answer most, if not all of them.”
“Where are we?”
Twelve heads turned and stared at the black man who had blurted out the question we’d all been thinking for the past three days. At least the question I’d been thinking for the past three days. I couldn’t be certain how long each of my classmates had been here.
Everyone whipped their heads backwards and bore their eyes into Dr. Raleigh. He gave a wry smile and said, “The truth of it all is that no one knows—”
I almost heard myself yell, “What? What do you mean nobody knows. What kind of lame answer is that?”
If I did say these words aloud they were drowned out by a woman bursting into tears and someone—I think the same black man—jumping out of his seat and screaming, “Nobody knows! My ass! Where the fuck are we?”
“He wasn’t finished.”
I looked at the young girl. She was staring at the black man, her video game held in one hand. “He wasn’t finished,” she repeated.
The man sat down. The room went silent. I found myself fighting back a smile.
Dr. Raleigh looked at the small girl and said, “Thank you. You’re right, I wasn’t finished.”
He waited for her to acknowledge him, but she was already back to her video game. Already in the process of stealing a car. Or killing a hooker.
Dr. Raleigh looked up and said, “As I said, nobody knows what this place is, or where it is. The truth is that it do
esn’t matter. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as where you came from. Where we all came from. It’s the same Earth. Same solar system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. All of them. The food is the same, the weather is the same, TV is basically the same, the buildings look almost the same, the cars. Most things are the same. There are, of course, some small differences, but we’ll get to that later. The only major difference between where you are now and where you were is, everyone here has died.”
I noticed he didn’t say that everyone here was dead. For all of us, all thirteen of us, plus Dr. Raleigh, we were very much alive. Not ghosts, not replicas of our old selves. This wasn’t heaven or hell, or some sort of purgatory. We were the same exact person on the same exact Earth and with, as far as I could construe, the same exact problems. Only we had died. Only the seven-year-old girl next to me forgot to take her insulin and she’d died. And I couldn’t shake the image of Joni Isaac bending over to get her notebook and I was jerking off in the shower and I slipped and hit my temple on the water spigot and I’d died.
I looked around the room. My comrades didn’t seem to feel as relieved about the prognosis as I did. For the most part, faces were still stricken, eyes still puffy, heads still down. But then again, most of these people had families. Families they would never see again. Kids, they would never play with again. Other than me, the teenager, and the young girl, there was a good chance everyone in this room had children they would never again lay eyes on.
For the first time in my life, I felt lucky. Lucky I only talked to my parents for six or seven minutes once a year, five of those minutes spent listening to my father talk about how his portfolio had grown in the last quarter and his recent real estate purchases throughout Fort Lauderdale. Lucky my only sibling was twenty-five years older than me, with a family, and a job, and didn’t want to be a part of her accidental little brother’s life. Lucky I moved out the day I left for college and never looked back. Lucky I never took a dime of my father’s millions. Lucky I was a loner.
No, I had no idea what any of these people were feeling. How could I? How could I possibly know what any of these people were going through? I couldn’t. Couldn’t even scratch the surface.
“Yes.”
I looked up. Dr. Raleigh was looking at one of the menopausal fifty-something women. She had her hand raised.
Dr. Raleigh said, “You have a question.”
She sniffed a couple times and said, “They must have a name for this place. They must call it something.”
“Actually they do.” He cleared his throat and said, “Welcome to Two.”