STATIC (Save A Smile for the Firing Squad)

I: Lateral Movement

I’ve known how I’ll die for most of my life.

It’s not a parlour trick, that’s just how it works now. Ever since we picked up the transmission and made the mistake of listening intently, everyone else knows when I'll die, and I know when they’ll die and how, just from looking at them. But they already know that.

It’s not just death, though that does preoccupy a lot of people's thoughts. The transmission changed the way we experience time completely. Now, we sort of see our lives as one continuous moment, birth, death and the rest occur simultaneously and have simultaneously yet to occur, forever.

We can still experience individual moments or ‘leap’ between them, but we’re forced to do so with all the hindsight and foresight of knowing precisely where and how it fits into the grand, pre-written film of our lives. That means living can feel a lot like reliving, and reliving can feel a lot like moving through a very interactive scene in that film.

Right now, I’m at the bit where I sit in the waiting room, listening to the repetitive beeps and clicks of pens from behind the desk, digging my thumbnail into my knee in that absent way I’ve noticed I do when I’m nervous. A phone rings. A patient is impatient, an edge hardens on the receptionist’s voice. Somewhere behind me, a child cries. We get it.

While I watch a toddler run havoc over the puzzle toys, I wonder if there’s any point to being here. The puzzles are, of course, perpetually completed and wrapped in neat plastic, as well as split at the edges and soaked in toddler drool.

Kind of like me; sitting here soaked in toddler drool, optimistic and naive at one end, rotting and stinking at the other.

I know what’s coming, and I can’t change it. It’s technically already over. So why am I still sat here? People see a doctor to find out what’s wrong and what they can do about it, but I know what’s wrong and I can’t do anything about it. So, it seems pointless to be sat here going through the motions yet again, but I stay seated.

A tele in the corner of the room plays that documentary about the transmission on repeat.

“That’s the curse. When we first sent messages into space, we’d never heard anything but static in return. At first, Ext-Terra-2974a seemed like more indiscernible white noise. Then, it seemed like a gift, a voice spoke out and it sounded like waves crashing together at the birth of primordial time and the eventual heat-death of the universe all the same time, if you can imagine such a thing.

We no longer saw each other as defined people existing within the outlines but as kind of blobs of static that shifted, at the slightest movement or change of angle, into shades of a person.

Now we have conversations with babies and watch fifty-seven-year-old businesswomen spit up on their ties mid-meeting...”

To dampen the decline of my sanity, I actively prevent myself from listening and fill my head with the melody of a random song. My brain picks an Ezra Furman song about vampires.

A beep from the appointment screen has everyone craning their necks.

They know it isn’t their turn.

#

II: Shotgun Martini

I brought a book with me. A Journal of The American in Europe. I’m about a third of the way through and I was enjoying it but I hate the ending and now it feels kind of pointless to keep going, you know?

It's about a narcissist travelling through Europe on a gap year, condescending to the locals while he waxes boilerplate philosophy and generally feels superior.

It reads like a bad Kerouac ripoff, but it does demonstrate a significant point. People used to be interesting. Life used to be dynamic and unpredictable.

Before the transmission, time moved in a linear manner, one event preceding the next as if you were physically moving through it. Hard to imagine, but try. What a luxury it must've been to live a life full of spontaneity and possibility, every day a key to the next. How sweet the rain must’ve smelt when it wasn’t promised again. How the dew must’ve glistened when you’d no idea if you’d feel it soak your shoes tomorrow.

I don’t appreciate the grass or the dew or the fact that I’m here to experience them. Even if I wanted to, I’d be too late. We knew we’d pave over the grass eventually, anyway, so why delay the inevitable?

I remember it, and it’s technically still here, in the past-now, but I know exactly how long I have to appreciate things. Nature, youth, the love and respect of family. I cram it all into the remorse section of my life, which begins around two years before my condition takes its final turn.

 At this point, the only enjoyment grass can bring me is from reliving the experience of crushing it beneath my shoes over and over again.

A beep brings me crashing back to the not-now. This time, I’m the only one who doesn’t look up at the screen because I'm already walking towards Examination Room Three.

Inside, the doctor and I sit opposite one another and he drops the damp bomb we all know is coming but won’t explode for years.

Once I’ve reacted and he’s trundled through the treatment plan we both know by heart and have already given up on, he flips the page on his pad to a more general health questionnaire. He asks me the questions, but he writes down the answers before I’ve even answered.  I answer anyway.

After a few minutes of this and the words fade to nothing in my ears. The office fades. I’m already transported.

This time I’m eleven. It’s early September and I’m running for my life again. Dad bought me a Jar-Jar Binks backpack, it’s swinging wildly from my shoulders. My school shoes pump against the pavement.

They never need more provocation than my braces or my hand-me-down shorts, sometimes they just remember I exist, but today is different. The back pack really has their bloodlust pulsing.

They’ve been on me for two roads now, we’re out of sight of school and the playground and I’m starting to run out of puff. Tears stream into the fine hair on my cheeks. Shame burns in my lungs like hot coals.

But, as the galloping footsteps of the many-legged beast behind close in on my heels and the snarling heads all blend together, I realise something.

I’m free when I’m running. I’m not thinking about how I die or the pointlessness of it all. I’m just running. I’m taking a natural step necessary to avoid a brutal hiding.

I won’t avoid it, of course. I’ve got the rest of Avondale and about a third of Stirling Avenue before the redhead one with the pug nose kicks my leg out from under me and I tumble beside the blue moped. They pummel me so badly that I end up in the hospital for a day or two, and Mum pulls me out of school. I won’t feel free when that happens. No matter how much perspective you gain with time, it’s hard to appreciate getting punched in the head.

But for now, for the three-to-four hundred metres I’ve got before the fists pummel my ribcage, the wind skims through my buzzcut and I’m alive again.

Mercifully, I’m back in the doctor’s office before they catch me.

“Maybe try smiling through it,” he’s saying as he stands to invite me to leave.

I stand too, instinctively. “What was that?” I want him to repeat it.

“Try forcing yourself to smile, maybe laugh, even if you don’t feel like it.” He shrugged as he pulled the door to his office open and welcomed in the waiting room melancholy again. “They say laughter is the best medicine.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” I grin while I shake his hand. “I think I’ll try just that.”

#

III: Smile Like You Mean It.

As best I can, I follow Doc's advice.

I smile and grin and smirk my way through every mundane interaction and meaningless repetitive experience.

I smile so much it even permeates the rest of my life and I end up grinning through the times before he even gave me that advice.

Schoolyard pantsing, parents' divorce, sneezing on the precipice of losing my virginity and head-butting Amy Pho on the bridge of her nose. I smile like a lunatic. Ear-to-ear through my father's funeral, I deliver my tribute with aching cheek muscles.

It doesn’t help, but I persevere. Doctor’s orders, you know?

Even when I jump forward to a rush hour crowd just outside Harlington Station, all gasping and pointing up to the sky, I’m grinning while the warheads carve the clouds like dying satellites.

This time though, something is different. We’ve all seen shimmering death plummet towards the city skyline, at this point it’s old hat, but now it’s a reflection through a lens of shifting water.

Ancient and wooden, glass and steel and smog that asphyxiates the cosmos, smoke and rubble and lung-peeling haze. Every moment of the city's existence plays out in front of me simultaneously, terrible and bustling and relentlessly onwards. Spires rise and fall, heaving spines on a colossal beast. It's so beautiful that tears stream from my eyes. My smile aches like fire but for some reason, I can’t stop.

Knowing the last time I'll feel the breeze doesn’t make it any less cool against my skin. If I walk knowing the soil will become the pulverized dust of civilisation, is the crunch of that dust any less satisfying beneath my shoes? The great tragedy might not be that we know the ending, but that we let it ruin the build-up.

The bombs fall and I wind up where I always do, surrounded by my children and their children, I’m smiling to background music of heartrate monitors and gentle, perfunctory weeping. They’ve been here before.

Shit, me too.

I don’t have long now, but we’re past most of the pain and it’s pretty peaceful from this point onwards, for me at least. I’m still grinning except now it’s devolving into manic giggling and it’s getting awkward.

Amira's trying to share a lovely memory we have from visiting the bunny park when she was seven, but she keeps getting distracted and giving me strange looks. They’re all giving me strange looks now.

“Grandpa, stop. I’m being serious,” Amira says, turning to my daughter, “Mum, what’s going on?”

Elsie leans close and rests her hand on my thigh with a concerned and slightly inconvenienced look, as if she’s annoyed this thing isn't going as smoothly as usual. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

“Sorry, sweetheart.” I wipe at the tears streaming down my cheeks, “sometimes you can’t help but laugh.”

#