Three Moments of an Explosion Read online

  “Give it to me,” Ian said. I felt a spasm of that instinct for cruelty that sometimes made me a little bit giddy around him. I kept breathing and pushed him away as he tried to get closer.

  The ice melted quickly. It didn’t take long. I held him back, inhaling as hard and fast as I could while he muttered and whined and pleaded, until the bubbling sound stopped.

  I raised my head from above cold clear water. I looked straight at Ian and willed myself not to show guilt.

  He stared at me with an awful wounded look. He took the bowl from under me and I let him. Still watching me, he put the box’s curved plastic corner awkwardly to his lips and drank the water down.

  We stared at each other. “You should hand in that letter,” I said at last. “It isn’t yours. They wrote it to everyone in London.”

  He just kept staring. I got up and left.

  Soldiers kept going up the icebergs, and coming down again, and if any of them worked out how to get to the other bit of up, we never heard about it. If that’s even a thing. If that’s real. None of the unauthorized explorers ever came back. I stopped hanging out with Sal, and when Robbie returned he stopped hanging out with me.

  By the time Ian came back to school, it was pretty easy for me to avoid him. Sometimes I might catch him staring at me across a classroom or the lunch hall. When that happened I’d sometimes say to myself in my own head something like, “I saw it first,” thinking of the snow in which the tube had been packed. If he did take that letter to the authorities they never released it.

  I used to expect to bump into him. I still live in the same area, and so did he for a long time, but London kept us apart. My mum did tell me once that he’d visited Nantie’s old gardens, which she said was nice, to pay respects. I think he’s been deployed now.

  I thought I’d end up working at something to do with the icebergs, but my job’s in import-export. I have to spend a fair bit of time in Europe. I’ve been through the Great Brussels Reef plenty of times. I have a little bottle-opener of the Belgian flag cut from a bit of its coral.

  Even a dull business like mine has what you could call its own myths. When anything messes with supply chains all kinds of weird stories start coming out. The funny thing is how many end up turning out to have something to them. Quite often I see on the news some banalized version of a rumor I heard months before.

  Right now, there’s a slowdown on some electronic components from Japan. The whispers are that the workers are locked out because the factories are unusable, and that the factories are unusable because they’ve filled up with undergrowth from the rain forest.

  I love the London bergs. They still circle, and they don’t get in the way of business.

  I have to assume the government did make it all the way up those troublesome blocks. I don’t even exactly know why I wish I didn’t think this, but I think there must be British soldiers watching me from the circling ice in that other bit of sky, from those slabby shapes. They’re not blowing them up and they must have their reasons.

  Ian joined the army, the new specialist iceberg unit. He might be one of those looking down now. He drank the water, I breathed the air.

  Whatever the season, the masses kick out as much cold as they ever did. They shed ice dust constantly, and they make faint, feathery snow out of the air below them. You wake up sometimes and if they’ve gone low during the night they leave a snail-trail of thin ice and snow across London in the shape of their route. It might be warm summer, but you’ll open the curtains onto iced windows. You’ll come out of your house and there’ll be a line of frost bisecting your street.

  THE CONDITION OF NEW DEATH

  The first reported case of New Death occurred on 23 August 2017, in Georgetown, Guyana. At approximately 2:45p.m., Jake Morris, a fifty-three-year-old librarian, entered his living room and found his wife, pharmacist Marie-Therese Morris, fifty-one, motionless and supine on the floor. “I opened the door onto the soles of her feet,” he has said.

  Mr. Morris testifies that he checked his wife’s pulse and found her cold. His claim to have gone to her side to do so has been the source of much controversy in neothanatology, this action of course being impossible in the case of the New Dead. Mainstream opinion is that this is the inaccurate memory of a distraught man. A substantial minority insist that there are no grounds to assume such error, and that Ms. Morris must therefore be assumed to have been Old Dead at this point, and that her status changed seconds after discovery.

  Mr. Morris went to the telephone in the northeastern corner of the room and summoned an ambulance. When he turned back to his wife’s body, New Death had unmistakably taken hold.

  “I turn around,” he has said, “and her feet are right in front of me again. Pointing directly at me. Again.”

  During his call, Ms. Morris’s corpse appeared to have silently rotated on a horizontal axis approximately 160 degrees, around a point somewhere close to her waist.

  With great alarm, Mr. Morris began to walk around the body, but he stopped when, in his words, “those feet wouldn’t stop pointing at me.” Ms. Morris’s body appeared to him to be swiveling like a needle on a compass, her feet always facing him.

  He remained frozen, his wife’s feet a few inches from his own shoes. He was unwilling to move and thereby provoke that smooth and perfectly silent motion. That was how the paramedics found him, by his dead wife.

  At one point in the highly confused moments that followed, a medic demanded that Mr. Morris be careful not to tread on his wife’s hair. Which was, however, from Mr. Morris’s perspective, on the other side of her body from him.

  Thus the specificity of New Death began to emerge.

  After the Morris case was that of the Bucharest aneurysm, then the Toronto crosswalk, then the Hong Kong twins. New Death spread at accelerating rates. News coverage, which had started as sporadic, amused, and skeptical, grew rapidly more serious. Two weeks after Mrs. Morris New Died, the sinking of the overloaded ferry Carnivale sailing between the Eritrean coast and the Italian port of Lampedusa gave the world its first harrowing scene of mass New Death.

  Now, with the last verified Old Death having occurred six years ago, and the upgrading of all human death seemingly complete, we are inured enough to the scenes of countless New Dead left by drone strike, terrorist attack, landslide, and pandemic that it can be hard to recall the shock occasioned by that first spectacle.

  The shots of almost a hundred drowned migrants, dead despite their life belts, their bodies oddly stiff, their legs not slanting, their feet not sinking but visible at the surface of the water, are still iconic. It might be thought that, occurring on water, the apparent rotations of the New Dead would not appear quite so unnatural (old-natural, to use the now-preferred term) as the same phenomenon on land. This, however, was not the case.

  The quickly leaked footage showed the instant and exact swivels by which every drowned migrant’s feet always precisely faced every camera. These remained in perfect synchrony. All feet always faced all cameras no matter what abrupt and contingent motions the boats or helicopters made, or where they were when they made them. These movements were obviously not the results of currents, winds, or hidden engines.

  The feeds from the headcams of rescue divers were even more shocking. In it, the drowned dead without flotation devices all sink slowly, and every one of the bodies, at every level, is stiffly oriented perfectly horizontally, with its feet pointing toward every rising, panicking diver. This of course is the case even in the footage shot simultaneously from quite different directions, in which the same corpses can be identified.

  In the weeks that followed, more and more scenes of the smooth, precisely flat and silent rotation of the dead were released, the bodies horizontal on slopes of varying inclines, in a Baghdad plaza or on a Mexican hillside or the site of a Danish school shooting. It was, however, the Carnivale disaster that inaugurated the era of New Death.

  There is variation among New cadavers. Arms and legs may be splayed to
various degrees, though the range is attenuated relative to that possible in Old Death. The bodies of victims of dismemberment or explosive force do not reconstitute, though their components, even if scattered, lie according to the condition of New Death—they are, in other words, New Dead in pieces.

  Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.

  Two facts about this epochal thanatological shift were quickly established:

  i) New Death is subjective.

  All observers in the presence of New Dead, in person or via imaging technology, will perceive that body or those bodies as oriented with feet toward them. This remains the case when those observers are directly opposite each other. Perception and observation is constitutive of New Death.

  ii) New Death is objective.

  Physical interventions have verified that these subjective impressions are not illusory. The New Dead have mass. They can be interacted with. The basic positional predicates of New Death, however, cannot be overcome. As the notorious Bannif-Murchau experiment showed, multiple observers of a single New Dead, all perceiving the body’s feet to be toward them, all instructed to take hold of the cadaver at the same instant, all coming from different directions, will all grasp the feet at the same time. This sometimes shocking and occasionally dangerous vectoral/locational slippage would of course have been impossible in the pre-ND era. It is not just biology, but physics, that have changed.

  New Death has had no impact on death rates or causes. Nor has the agential status of the dead vis-à-vis the living changed—they remain as quiet as their Old Dead precursors. New Death is a phenomenon not of dying, nor of death, but of the quiddity of deadness.

  Philosophies of its causes, effects, and meanings (if any) are, of course, in their infancy. But they have, very recently, taken an exciting turn.

  At the 2024 Mumbai Conference “The New Dead and Their Critics,” PJ Mukhopadhyay, a graduate student of digital design, gave a paper on “New Death as a Game.” In the course of her presentation she pointed out, almost in passing, that a locus classicus of a foot-to-viewpoint orientation of the dead was the earliest generation of First-Person Shooters.

  In such games, no matter where “you” stood, your defeated enemies would lie with their feet toward you, shifting as you shifted. This would be the case until, finally, after a programmed time, their bodies winked out of play.

  With this insight, we have entered a new era of New Death Studies. In the words of the most recent issue of the Cambridge Journal of Philosophy, “no one is yet clear on why Mukhopadhyay’s observation is important. That it is important—that it changes everything—no doubt remains.”

  Understanding remains evasive, but culture is pragmatic and quick. Those for whom showing the soles of feet has been an insult adapt no less than do those who delight in insulting them. A plethora of ceremonies are emerging around the interment and veneration of New Dead. Theologies of all traditions are, mostly, smoothly accommodating them, with new interpretations of old texts and ways. The New Dead are already completely banalized representationally in movies, television dramas, and other commodities—including, of course, video games. The point is not that rotating sugar skeletons with windup handles are sold by Mexican vendors: the point is that they sell in similar numbers to any other Día de los Muertos items.

  This insouciance is admirable. But it is also somehow inadequate. We have tweaked our various bells and smells, but we still die as we always died, and live as we did before we died.

  We are not ready. What would being ready constitute? What might the endgame of New Death be?

  This is not a manifesto. It is not even a prequel to such. We don’t know what to call for, to live up to the potentiality of New Death. This is a call for a manifesto to be written. An exhortation for an exhortation, a plea to have it demanded of us to live as we must and New Die well.

  We must proceed according to a presumption that we might have something up to which to live, that there might be a telos to all our upgraded dead, that we might eventually succeed in something, that we might unlock achievements, if we die correctly. And, conversely, that if we do not, we will continue to fail.

  What the stakes of that success and that failure might be, none of us yet know.

  We will all learn.

  THE DOWAGER OF BEES

  I was inducted twenty-two years ago in the windowless basement room of a chic Montreal hotel. The door was small and said JANITOR outside. Inside, the room was gorgeous, full of lush gaming-related paintings and shelves of hardbound rule books. Four of us were sitting at a card table while two defeated young wallflowers watched, big-eyed and silent.

  “What’s a Willesden?” said Gil “Sugarface” Sugar. He was elderly and, everyone said, paunchy but still punchy.

  “Willesden,” I said. “It’s in London.”

  He said, “I’m not calling you the Willesden Kid.”

  “It’s an honor to play with you.”

  “Get on with it,” said Denno Kane, a baby-faced dark-skinned polyglot renowned for Vingt-et-un but eager to put down money wherever there were cards.

  Sugarface and Denno went way back, and they went there with the dour Welsh woman twice my age sitting opposite me. I’d met her in Detroit. She’d been taking a break after bankrupting a small city with a pair of sevens. She’d watched me clean up small-fry stockbrokers.

  “Nice fingers,” she’d sneered. I did tricks when I dealt. “I’m Joy. No surname.”

  I pretty much shouted like a fanboy that I knew who she was. “Let me play with you,” I said.

  She’d laughed full of scorn but she liked my front. Now here I was, one of three designated hors-d’oeuvres and the only one left at the table still playing.

  We’d nearly died of happiness when they told us to bring the packs. The other two spent a lot of money on theirs. I bought mine from a gas station around the corner. Sugarface didn’t pass comment on the logo on their backs.

  My co-rookies went out as fast as expected but, with luck I deserved not at all, I was keeping up. The big three didn’t mind. I wasn’t disrespectful. I wore my most expensive suit. Sugarface had on a tux without a tie, Joy a churchy dress. Denno wore a green T-shirt with sauce stains.

  He won a big hand. “How you doing?” he said.

  “An honor to play with you,” I said.

  The two Collateral Damage got up and very politely thanked everyone for their time as if anyone even gave a shit they were talking. They left.

  “O tempora, o mores,” Joy said. Denno swore in Russian, then Greek.

  More rounds. I had a straight. Didn’t raise too high. Joy to show. She was as good as they said: her face was flint.

  “Well,” she said at last. Peered over the back of her cards and laid them slowly down.

  Denno whistled. Sugarface gasped and sat back.

  Two of Spades; Seven and Jack of Clubs; Eight of Diamonds; and a card I’d never seen before.

  An image of an elderly woman done in black and bright yellow. She wore a fur coat, held a clutch, and a cigarette in a long holder. There were insects on her stole and by her face.

  “Hell,” Sugarface said. “God damn.”

  “Full Hive,” said Joy. “The Dowager of Bees.”

  She took out a notebook and wrote something and handed it to Sugarface who signed the page with a rueful nod and passed it to Denno. The shiny yellow card sat on the table with the reds and blacks. The woman was as stylized as all face cards, bordered and reversed beneath herself.

  Denno passed me the paper. “On the dotted,” he said.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  There was a moment.

  “Oh ho,” said Sugarface keenly.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Well, mazel tov,” said Denno.

  “The
others had to be gone, sure, right,” Sugarface said.

  “OK, haze the newbie,” I said. “That’s cool.”

  “Show some respect,” Denno said.

  He went to the shelf and came back with a leather-bound edition of Robert’s Rules of Poker. He flicked through pages and held it open in front of me, pointing to the relevant section.

  It was in a chapter titled “Hands that Include Hidden Suits.”

  “Full Hive,” I read. “Dowager of Bees + one black Jack + three number cards values totaling a prime number.” There was a lot more but he slammed it closed before I could read on.

  “I’ve got that book,” I said, “and I don’t remember …”

  “Trust me, it’s going to beat whatever you’ve got,” he said as he put the volume back. I showed him my straight hesitantly. “Please,” he said. “You’re physically hurting me.”

  “Sign,” Sugarface said. “You owe Joy a favor you don’t want to do.”

  “What favor?”

  “You listening?” Denno said. “One you don’t want to do. Sign. You have a year and a day. Don’t make her come asking.”

  It didn’t seem ridiculous. Everything felt very important. My ears were ringing. I looked at the card, the big stingered insects. Everyone watched me.

  Joy’s page said “1) D.o.B. Favor,” and then the signatures. I signed.

  Sugarface clapped. Joy nodded and took her notebook back. Denno poured me an expensive wine.

  “Long time since I saw an induction,” Sugarface said.

  He collected the cards. I watched the yellow lady with the gas station logo on her back fold in with the rest of them. He shuffled.

  “Mine was in Moscow,” he said. “’66.”

  “Your induction?” Denno said. “Kinshasa, me. Eleven years ago.”

  Joy said, “Swansea Bridge Club.”

  I said nothing. I got dealt three of a kind. I won a little money. I wasn’t focusing any more. No one said anything else about the favor owed.