In 2030 plane crashes in the US began to outnumber successful landings. Global averages varied. And while the total number of flights taking off every day had been steadily decreasing, in no small part due to the intensifying shortage of planes, people were still more willing than one might have previously expected to risk such a catastrophic end. Rather, it had the effect of making everyone so inured to an ambient environment of gruesome, preventable deaths that they hardly thought about the risks any more. Exacerbated by the skyrocketing unemployment, some people had even begun to treat commercial aviation as a relatively easy and effective suicide technique. In almost every airport you could see luggage-less wretches deboarding despairingly from one-way flights. Equally, there were stories about people who, having realized midair that they didn’t yet want to die, had resolved to begin to live rightly when their intended-to-be-final flights beat the odds and landed. They’d go to rental car kiosks and drive home, sometimes thousands of miles from their destination. Car accidents had not yet increased by the same amount as plane crashes, and survival rates were still quite high (for the drivers at least). Children and dogs were being mowed down with rising rates of lethality. Because of how often I’d been searching flights (I suspect), every time I opened my phone I was served a host of notifications to this effect, each linking to news stories, photos, and infographics detailing matter-of-factly our national landscape of mutually reinforcing carnage and indifference. This was the inescapable truth of our times and I have to believe most people had accepted that things just weren’t going to work out.
2030 was also the year of my 15th high school reunion. I decided to fly back home to Worcester for it. Worcester Regional was one of those airports whose business had actually increased in recent years due to the large population of people in the city and surrounding towns who desperately wanted to die. They even advertised their middling 47% flight success rate. My flight, however, passed without event. Walking through the airport I saw a row of bagless people eagerly waiting to board flights in front of the wall of posters for movies filmed in Central Massachusetts, including older pictures like American Hustle, The Game Plan, and Grown Ups as well as more recent ones like an adaptation of William Kennedy’s Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game starring Louis C.K. and Sully 2 – Tom Hanks’ final role prior to his fiery on-set death. I got a rental car after waiting in line behind a coterie of depressives and born-agains and got out.
My mother was watching Ancient Aliens on the TV when I walked in. The show had gained a veneer of respectability in recent years as restructured federal funding requirements had made it eligible for public arts and education grants. She hugged me and asked about the trip. The flight, I said, was unremarkable, but the drive back from the airport surprised me, mostly in how much the area had changed in the years since I’d last been back. The lousy pizza place that people used to regularly drunk drive cars into had been replaced by a barber shop. A private equity firm must’ve bought Jack’s dad’s house – no one seems to be living there, but it had a fresh coat of landlord-grey paint and the hole in the garage door from when he drove the John Deere through it had been patched up. It had gaped open for years, letting the raccoons build their nests out of all the trash we used to leave on the floor. The roads, repaved just a few years earlier, had already developed large holes and fissures, some over a foot deep. I counted three different data centers tucked back off the road on neat little gravel driveways, visible through the gradually thinning eastern hemlock forests. There were two elderly women punching each other in the head outside the dispensary where the elementary school used to be. Eagle lake had finally emptied after the dam that created it crumbled, turning the weedy swamp into an expansive fetid mud pit while the mill building overlooking the sluice had been turned into a nearly empty luxury apartment complex. I am told however that the secluded parking lot next to it’s erstwhile beach is still a popular place for teenagers to fuck and OD in their cars. On main street I watched one of the 20-somethings they hire to sell solar panels door-to-door get knocked off his company-issued Segway by one of the new 15-foot tall Dodge Rams, landing in a crumpled heap in one of the cavernous potholes. The other, much better, pizza place we used to order from had been flattened by a crashed plane. I myself had almost struck one of the new 6G cell towers, placed precariously close to the road, when I didn’t look up from my phone quickly enough. These are things I’d seen everywhere, but I hadn’t realized the extent they were really happening everywhere, even in Holden, which had always seemed frozen in time, or at least only displayed less eschatologically-weighty changes.
I expressed this alienation to my mother but she was unmoved. “It wouldn’t be such a shock if you’d visit more often.” She adjusted her reading glasses to swipe through another level of “Candy Fuck” (a pornographic romantasy version of Candy Crush) on her phone. A hung werewolf flashed on the screen. “Don’t be so precious either. Things haven’t changed here as much as Paxton. Our house is holding its value, but they’re directly below a major flightpath. That place looks like a warzone! You can get a house there for under seven figures. So count your blessings.” She swiped through another level to one featuring a jacked vampire in a codpiece and muttered “In the end we get what we deserve.” We were interrupted by a knock on the door. It was my father’s nurse Eunice arriving to change the filter in his iron lung (polio had come back and he’d been one of the unfortunate ones to get it in the first wave – the first of many, I have to believe). He’d been whirring away in an opioid-induced haze in the corner since I’d arrived, but I didn’t have the heart to try to talk to him. Facetiming him with my mothers help was always torture, me having to supply all his words through clever guesswork based only on the series of contradictory ‘yeses’ and ‘nos’ he’d respond to my questions with. Tonight I’d rather just let him sleep. Eunice nodded to us silently and went about her work. My mothers phone emitted a faint groan of pleasure and the sound of flapping dragon wings as I retired to my childhood bedroom to scroll my phone for the rest of the night.
***
The reunion was held the following evening in the event room of one of the few businesses still around from my high school days – Jade Dynasty, a sprawling Chinese restaurant known for its scorpion bowls and other watered-down tiki drinks. Our high school’s gymnasium was unavailable for use due to having been struck by an Airbus approaching Logan a few months prior. I walked in alone, scooped up a handful of crab rangoons from the buffet table and began to hunt for someone to talk to amidst the crowd of semi-familiar faces.
I had to skirt around a high top table to avoid getting stuck in a conversation with Brendan. The last time I’d seen him had been a few years after graduation. I was at the bench press station in the gym (back when I still tried to exercise) and I saw him chatting with another of our former class mates, Joey, about his new job selling Cutco knives. Joey had seemed interested in getting involved as well and they set up a future meeting to talk about bringing him on board. While Joey had since died in a place crash en route to the Cutco National Convention, Brendan still evidently really enjoyed the work because he was now, in the present, discussing a new line of paring knives with his ex-girlfriend Jess, pulling a business card out of the inner pocket of his torn polyester sport coat that was stretched taut over the sagging remains of his once prodigious shoulders.
I settled down at a low table next to Charlie, who sat alone, sullenly nursing a Mai Tai. We had played in a band together occasionally in high school, butchering Galaxie 500 covers in his parents basement, but drifted out of touch, despite an honest effort on both our parts. Neither of us played our instruments much any more, him not at all. Growing further and further away from something he’d loved had increasingly made the act of even sitting down with his guitar terrifying. When he so much as thought of it, the idea of how bad he’d sound after going so long without practicing, sounding so shitty, made his heart beat fast in shame and embarrassment. Even thinking about playing music started to make him sad. He still listened to plenty of music, maybe more than ever before, but never too closely, just to fill the quiet hours. If he started to think about the hands on those instruments too closely, or the work that went into writing those melodies it cast a shadow over the rest of his day. He sought out new stuff especially. Listening to anything he’d liked when he was young brought back too many memories of trying to learn the chords by ear. Generally, he said, life had felt like a sort of slowing down. Even as days passed faster he felt his own mental acuity dulling – simple calculations took longer, recall of the basic facts about his own life, things he liked, was a struggle. It had taken him until he had finished his Mai Tai, he told me, to remember my name.
After he’d settled into a gloomy silence I drifted back to the buffet table to get myself a few of the chicken fingers they have at all these places – the ones coated in that fried batter with the packing-foam texture and the layer of whitish slime created at the chicken-batter interface when the frozen meat steams during the frying process. I stood facing the wall absent-mindedly chewing on one when I realized Dylan was standing beside me doing the same and breathing heavily through his mouth between bites. I remembered him as the simple kid from band class who loved metalcore and let another, more violent, simpleton, Zack, shock him in the head behind the timpanis with a homemade battery-powered set of electrodes because he told him it would unlock more of his brain, “like the marines.” When it didn’t work, Dylan got mad and threatened to tell the principal what Zack had been doing, to which Zack responded by making several very public death threats and then disappearing off the face of the earth. Dylan now worked at the last mall in Worcester county selling T-shirts and shoes, and trying to get teenagers to get snake bite piercings just like his. He had been doing ok money-wise until he got scammed again last month by someone who emailed him pretending to be a record label in search of one final artist to fill out their roster, saying they’d loved his SoundCloud. Now he was struggling to pick up extra shifts again. Chris sauntered over to join us. He was a pastor at a non-denominational Christian fellowship church in a strip mall down in Auburn. I said no when he asked if I’d seen any of their livestreams on Facebook, but Dylan said he thought he might have. Sensing a lost soul, Chris became more aggressive. I left them behind when Chris started asking if he ever felt lonely and if he ever wanted to die, and drifted away through the crowd over to the bar to score another Mai Tai.
I inserted myself at the table Chris had ambled over from, where Olivia and Sean were debating the growing use of brain chip implantation. Sean, our class valedictorian, had come back home to gloat about his success in tech – developing an AI chatbot that could replace one’s social life in its entirety. It could substitute for friends, parents, hobbies etc. The secret, he said, was the entirely new proprietary combination of datasets he’d used to train it, drawn from short-form video site scrapes, Facebook eye-tracking, urban wastewater quality data, the transcript of every therapeutic session at Richard C. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Institute, and geospatial data of iPhone usage in commercial areas. It was exceptionally good, he said, at letting you live in exactly the kind of world you wanted, though users were seldom able to recognize this. The only issue he’d had was that the user suicide rate was still quite high. Nonetheless the beta version was publicly available to test, and came with a notice that users were to desist if they began ideating. If they continued to use it after that point, it was not the company’s responsibility. Olivia, by contrast, had driven over from her job as a nurse in Worcester and wanted to warn everyone about the destructive effects of vaccines on men’s testicles. This had led naturally to the heated argument on the AI-enabled chips Sean had suggested he was interested in developing. He maintained they had value for increasing workplace productivity and discipline, while Olivia cited the Book of Leviticus to demonstrate their demonic nature. Matt drunkenly joined in, without really listening, saying they were starting to use some brain chip technology in the prison where he was a corrections officer. “Fucking animals get what they deserve,” he said, “If I’ve learned one thing it’s that justice happened in the prisons, not in the courts.” He bragged that had personally beaten an accused pedophile with a stick in a room they called “the black hole.” Though slightly surprised, both Olivia and Sean agreed with this statement. Even Shea, who’d been expelled in tenth grade for selling pills joined in to say the criminal justice system in this country was broken. Violent criminals and drug users were walking free with only a slap on the wrist. He had heard about too many teenagers ODing in the bathrooms of the restaurants he owned. He raised his cocktail in a toast, saying “Here’s to the Holden Police Department,” taking care to make sure his sleeve slid down enough to make his Rolex visible. There was broad agreement and the cheers-ing of Fog Cutters in the direction of the table of Cops, which they did not see through the cloud of vape smoke that had settled around their table.
Our high school had produced an extraordinary number of police officers who’d followed the pipeline leading from a 2.1 GPA to the ranks of the Holden Police department. There were at least two dozen here tonight, and I know for a fact that wasn’t all of them. The kid we all used to refer to as “Dog Fucker,” and who until recently had gone by Officer LaPlante, was under house arrest after being catfished attempting to meet what he thought was a 14 year old boy in a mall bathroom. The whole scene had been live streamed by a Youtuber called Drain0. 15,000 people watched as he got maced in the face then tased by the group of teenagers and one 37-year old guy that had confronted him. The department had at first closed ranks around him, but when closer examination of the video made it clear that their co-worker had become visibility aroused during his beating they abandoned him to face the justice system alone. This was mere weeks earlier, and they were still cagey about talking to outsiders – idly rubbing their holstered guns with pupu platter-greased fingers when any former Young Democrats passed too close to their table.
By the windowless wall, Ryan held court over a small crowd, telling old golf stories. He’d remained popular amongst my classmates even if he’d technically been in a different graduating class. In the last week of classes our senior year he’d been T-boned by a garbage truck on his way to school. Rumors quickly circulated he was dead, but he pulled through, though he didn’t wake up from his coma until after graduation. His jaw had been wired shut, which stopped him from chewing the military-strength caffeine gum he was known for having on his person at all times. He officially graduated a year later once he was able to walk and speak again, after months of intense therapy. I’m told it was an exceptionally emotional moment. Having survived an unfathomable trauma and clawed himself back from the brink of death, he’s taken this hard-won perspective to his position as a transactions specialist at a medical billing management firm in Hartford. He had managed to carve out a totally unremarkable life for himself despite it all. The only trace of the fact his brain had nearly been split open was the stutter which ruined the punchlines of all his jokes.
Carly told me Ben had finally stopped calling her last month. Unfortunately, it was because he’d died in a manner as stupidly as he’d lived: driving the wrong way down I-190 with his caseworker tied up in the back seat. This wasn’t the first time he’d died either. Once in high school he’d drank so much cough syrup that he was convinced he had died and his everyday life was just his continuing to haunt the rest of us. He kept coming to school everyday with a not-unusual blank smile on his face and no one had any idea until one day, months later during study hall a look of surprise came over his face during an otherwise unremarkable conversation, and he earnestly asked “Am I alive?” To my understanding he said his experience in the afterlife was sort of beautiful, but judging by the course of his life since then, he had learned nothing from the experience, except maybe that he’d preferred being dead. In the intervening years he’d lived recklessly, driven by some compulsion he couldn’t shake off to ruin the lives of everyone around him. Flying headlong into an eighteen-wheeler, he had finally gotten what he’d deserved, she mused. As for Carly, life had settled into a hard-won peace in the years since they broke up. She’d repaired her relationship with her mom, got her GED, and took classes at Fitchburg State at night while working full time at the Dunkin Donuts and learning how to speak Albanian with her co-workers with whom she now attended mosque. It was certainly a relief, but sometimes she’d still pick up one or two of the dozen spam calls she got everyday to see if it was a new number Ben was calling from, and whether he wasn’t really gone, that he might have snapped to once again, maybe having finally learned something.
Increasingly inebriated, I stumbled over to talk to Patrick – someone I really, truly, and honestly thought would have already been dead. In fact, he looked OK, a bit pale, very skinny, but far more alert than the kid regularly nodding off in study hall or wandering uninvited into other people’s parties with a spray paint stain around his mouth. I’d watched his opioid addiction progress through the occasional photos other people would tag him in on Facebook. In 2019 he was the most unwell person I’ve ever seen holding a baby in a picture. Then his account went inactive and I assumed he’d died. But here he was today, alive, though not visibly happy about it. I asked what he’d been up to and he said mostly he was tired. He delivers packages for Amazon and it’s starting to hurt his back again but he can’t take anything besides Tylenol. He still wants heroin too much, even years after going to Arizona to dry out. The rehabilitation doesn’t really work, it just keeps going forever. That’s what he told me. I drunk-drove home without event (I hope) and fell into a heavy black sleep.
***
This is what I recounted to my mother over breakfast the next morning (except the drunk driving). She wanted to know why I had only spoken to the most dour and dismal of my classmates. Why did I always seek out such miserable stories? I had graduated with normal people as well. In fact she’d just talked to Kyle Mahoney’s mom at the Basket Mart last week and he was doing great working as an aide on a congressional campaign. He’s the sickest of them all, I thought, noting to myself to write that one down. What was even more surprising, she said, was that everyone was so direct with me about their sufferings and shortcomings – I’d never been the most outgoing nor forthcoming with my own emotions, but somehow every sad sack at the Jade Dynasty had spilled their guts to me. I shrugged it off and said the rum made me chattier than usual.
I didn’t tell her, of course, that in actual fact I had not talked to a single person at the reunion. When I got there I’d felt too angry to start a conversation, I think. I didn’t want anything. Nothing about their drab fleshy faces elicited anything in me but a sort of indifferent disgust. Life had nothing to do with them. Instead I’d just sat at the bar and scowled into one tiki drink after another. Brendan, Patrick, Dylan, Chris, the Cops, Ryan, Carly, Sean, Olivia, Matt, Shea, and Charlie had all been there though – it’s just I didn’t speak to them. Instead, not wanting to tell my mother I’d come all this way and not talked to a single person, I pulled out my phone and opened up Sean’s chatbot, Sigil-3, which I’d seen him share during the testimonial section of one of Pastor Chris’s worship meetings on Facebook a few months ago, talking about how his AI was ushering in a whole new way of letting Christ into our lives. I’d actually been using it quite a bit recently, I’d even set it up to curate and summarize the newsfeed on my phone. One by one I had it come up with descriptions of the life trajectories of the familiar faces I saw in the crowd by supplying it with the few anecdotes I could remember from our school days. I asked it to imagine how my digital twin would navigate this event, what some of the resulting dialogue might be, then committed as much of it to memory as I could. As I was telling her these stories I realized I was not entirely sure whether some of the things I told her were not really things that I had actually overheard – it always reported them with such astonishing matter-of-factness. The pounding in my forehead confirmed, however, that I had driven home exceptionally drunk at the very least.
After breakfast, I said goodbye, took my bag full of brand new Cutco knives outside, brushed a few red-stained feathers out of the grille of the rental car and returned to the airport for my flight back to Kuwait via Philadelphia. These were going to be my 15th and 16th flights of the year. Oddly, I felt a genuine excitement over being in the air again. Maybe I’d finally get what I deserved.
— Owen Harrington lives in Chicago in reality, in Pennsylvania on paper, and in the hills of central Massachusetts in his dreams. His work has appeared in Burial Magazine and Energy Research & Social Science. You can also find him on Twitter as @the_papacy_