Deaths I have outsmarted - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Belk
IT IS STRANGE TO BE CLEAN OF TERROR in a world filthy with it. When we were kids, my sister and I had to go looking for it. Now it is delivered to our door, addressed to the householder, wrapped in plastic. It is hard to reconcile relaxed and comfortable with alert but not alarmed, and often I struggle.
My sister, too, still worries. At the moment she is outsmarting bird flu, an end of the world of considerable charisma – and one I admit briefly held me in its claws. After watching a Lateline interview with a European pandemic expert, I made Lea promise that the day they announced a case of person-toperson transmission in Australia, we would lock the doors and not leave the house for a six weeks. I watched the race to procure a vaccine, desperately hoping the drug companies could manufacture enough in time. As the government pumped in millions, and the same bastards who made their money in IT shifted portfolios to biotech, the whole thing began to look more and more like Y2K with feathers. Fear is currency, cold and hard, and the longer I watch and learn, the more I want in.
In late 2005, NASA quietly released details of asteroid MN4. It had the highest ever recorded probability of an asteroid-earth impact: one in sixty. For days after learning of this, the inbound asteroid orbited my thoughts. It spun loops in my head and impacted my brain. Even if NASA could prove beyond doubt that MN4 would not hit Earth, there would be doubters. What about the way, the very next day, NASA downgraded the threat of impact to one in twenty-six thousand? What about the recent landing of the NEAR spacecraft on Asteroid Eros 433? That had to be a practice run for laying nuclear charges on MN4, didn't it? And what about the impact date? April 13, 2029 – a Friday.
I liked it. It was not as elegant as Y2K, or as impending as bird flu, but still a nice little end-of-the-world scenario. I got out of bed and went shopping. This would be my superannuation package. This time, I would own a piece of the action.
Sitting in my kitchen at 3am, unperturbed by the reflection in the black window glass of a man in novelty monkey pajamas selling his soul, I attempted to register the domain name for an apocalypse twenty-five years in the future. Maybe all that time I had invested in fear and paranoia was not wasted. Who would be better at writing the script for the next impact-based end of the world than me? MN4.com was taken. I was bewildered. I typed the URL into the address bar like a sore loser. The page loaded.
MN4.com is a shopping centre in Alfafar, Spain. It has that unbeatable consumer combination of designer fashion stores, designer restaurants and a bowling alley. Using the "translate now" function in Google, I was able to ascertain that, "Each one of the facilities has a personal touch, which causes that they are different from others, creating cosy spaces to pass a good moment." MN4.com.au and MN4.net.au were available. I bought them both.
The next day, I rang my sister. Together we worked up a sublime conspiracy to make us both rich. My concern at having an Australian web address and not a dot.com was allayed when she told me that obviously we couldn't run it from the United States – we had tried, but the government had shut us down. I suggested the front page of the site should contain a single line of ten-point text reading: "This website contains independent information on the impact of Asteroid MN4 that some people may find disturbing." Under this there would be two buttons, "enter" and "I don't want to know".
The latter would redirect you to the NASA press release detailing how the asteroid will miss us by an astrological bee's dick – thirty-six thousand kilometers, one-tenth the distance to the moon. My sister suggested a clock spinning down the seconds to impact, with an animation of MN4 colliding with earth playing. I told her visitors should be able to type in the name of their town to see a projection of the impact odds, and the estimated casualties. My sister told me this would be easy to achieve using an algorithm running from a population database.
We were back in her room. Nostradamus shot light-beams out of his eyes.
The sky will burn at 45 degrees,
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up,
when they want to have verification from the Normans.
– Century 6, Quatrain 97
My sister told me that forty-five degrees could be the angle at which MN4 would enter the atmosphere. I told her we could make the new city either New York or Sydney. She told me we could say that the huge scattered flames leaping up were a nuclear missile launched to destroy the asteroid just before it impacted. I told her I couldn't think of anything for verification from the Normans. She told me no, neither could she. We had plenty of time to think of something.
MN4.com.au and MN4.net.au are up for renewal soon and I will let them slip by. There are enough arseholes using fear to get what they want without me joining in. I guess maybe it was the stories I was addicted to. Besides, the Mayan calendar ends in five years, and mayancalender.net is available.
RECENTLY I ASKED MY SISTER WHY WE ARE the way we are. Why do we so easily become terrified and obsessed over these possible deaths? It is easy for me. I can just blame her, filling my sweet little head with crazy philosophers, asteroids and nuclear war. But what about her?
I asked her whether it was all the magic mushrooms she ate when she was a teenager. She and her hippie friends would come back from adventures in the hills with bags of the strange little things. They would cook them, eat them with toast, then go lay under the pomegranate tree and talk for hours about how three-dimensional it all was. She told me no, that wasn't it.
I asked her whether she though it was the lead. A filthy ancient lead smelter blew its load across our house – the irony of ducking a metaphorical pewter mug while living in its wet patch lost on me until I was twenty, when I realised what the "Sulphide Factory" actually was. People out our way had all sorts of weird-arse problems. She told me no, that wasn't it.
I asked her whether she thought it was the motorbike accident – the time at fifteen she was pillion on a Yami that swerved to miss a coal truck on a winding mountain road. How she went flying through the air over a cliff and nearly died, smashing herself to bits. How we thought for a while she would lose both legs, and how happy we all were when the steel pins finally took. She told me no, that wasn't it either.
I asked her if whether was because of Dad. How he left us six kids and Mum all alone just like that. Driving that purple taxi and himself into the ground at forty-three. How everyone kept saying he was too young. He was too young. She told me yeah, that probably had something to do with it.
But she told me that she really thought it was this. When she was twelve, she was lying on our grandmother's bed. All of a sudden she realised that one day she was going to die. She said a strange feeling spread over her as if she was collapsing into herself. She said it was warm and heavy. She said she really, really realised that one day she was going to die.
I told her yeah, that happened to me too. ♦