POPULAR CULTURE

The Machine of Death can mess up your life, but it will never, ever mess up your death.

...

Some people treat it as a private thing. Like sex, or something. But we’ve all got penises. Or half of us anyway. I think globally it’s actually slightly less than half, but that could have something to do with women living longer on average. And our sex is open to the public, isn’t it? I mean, some people cross-dress, but it’s not like they’re fooling very many people. What’s that they say, knowing someone’s sex isn’t the same as “knowing someone,” (sex.)

It’s not like death is a pleasurable thing for kids too young to know what it is, much less do it. Death has caused no teen pregnancies, but sex has caused 100% of them. But I suppose it could be treated like a sort of a fetish, it’s that pervasive. This is the information age, and everyone’s got equality and all that, so there’s no reason to treat it as taboo. Still, the episodes of kid’s shows about it are still really controversial. But they’ve always had Very Special Episodes about death, right? Only usually it was a bird or pet or something who had died. Not sex so much in the kids’ shows, but we pound Stranger Danger into kids’ heads from day 1, which is equivalent, I guess. Even then we don’t always tell why strangers are dangerous.

I guess it’s a personal thing. Your own death. But it’s not like it’s secret, or even sacred. Personal, mayhap. But it’s not like sex, so the cause of someone’s death isn’t like pornographic or something. Even in the hyper conservative Victorian age it would be soft-core at best.

Well, there is this kindergartener kid I know, Nikko, (I’m good with kids) and anyway Nikko, he swears his cousin’s Slip had a weird string of numbers and letters, but he says he thinks that the adults only pretend that they don’t know what it means, that there must’ve been something wrong with the machine. You can probably guess what those numbers and letters were from that, because I could.

BDSM 69.

It’s not like it’s going to deter Nikko’s cousin from doing what he does to die how he dies; the threat of death only makes it better for those people, I guess. I’m not sure if it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy or what. I don’t know. I should ask Martin, who’s the one who set me out starting to think about this kind of stuff anyway.

How I met Martin was this. The bus schedule in Raleigh is somewhat erratic, so I like to get to the bus stop early, on the way to the Multiplex where I work. There was a kid already there, Martin, like I told you, with his wheelchair parked next to the bench. He had his nose in a paperback copy of the latest Dan Brown. I try to ignore him, not because I’m cripplist (which I’m not, having spent my entire Frosh year in a full body cast) but because I don’t read much anymore. I remember back when I did read, but then I hit puberty, and the Machine came out, and I spent my time trying to convince girls my Slip read NOT IN A THREESOME instead of POPULAR CULTURE like it really does. Maybe my lie would have been more convincing if I actually had a shred of evidence to prove things were the way I said, but fake Slips were more expensive back then, my personal price range was zero dollars, and I couldn’t very well ask my mother to get the one I wanted for me. (The lack of evidence, by the way, why it required so much work at convincing them, before the whole body cast thing came around, which attracts girls enough.)

“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not that. No one ever gets suicide,” he said, after it was clear that the bus was late this time, rather than early.

“Gets?” I said, afraid he wanted to engage me about conspiracy theories.

“The Slip. No one gets suicide.”

I craned over to look at the book. Nothing about death there, from what I can see. They weren’t even trying to defuse a bomb or anything. It was about like the history of 13th century Mayan architecture or something. So he wasn’t talking about his choice of reading material. I relaxed.

“Don’t they?” I thought about it for a while. SNO KONE, EXSANGUINATION, SILLY PUTTY, MILK, KITE STRING. A whole bunch of NATURAL CAUSES and OLD AGE. Heck, I’ve even known a chick who had PLAIN CRASH, spelled like that and everything (I mean, what’s she gonna do, O.D. on vanilla?) But no SUICIDE. Even those I know who’ve killed themselves (which is two people I’ve known and cared for personally, and I-don’t-know-how-many about people I didn’t.) I shrugged. “I suppose not.”

“Nope,” he says. “No-one. ’Cept, of course-”

“You?”

“How often do you think that happens?”

“Dunno,” I answered honestly. Probably at least on one other occasion, because the Slips pull off some weird, and I mean really jacked-up, stuff. SUICICDE could be anything. Someone probably killed by someone else’s suicide bullet, or killed by a jumper landing on them. These interpretations would be few and far between, but people have always been offing themselves, so when a slip doesn’t say SUICIDE but they kill themselves, at least they killed themselves according to the specifications. True SUICIDE suicide could be a really rare thing.

What are the statistics? Is your Slip reading part of the census yet? What were the death rates BMOD and AMOD? Was there a significant difference in suicide rates, now that people felt they could take their lives into their own hands in the other sense of the word? Would Jonathan Brandis still be alive if they came out with the machine half a decade earlier?

All of this I thought during the time we sat there in silence, one minute and twenty-or-thirty seconds. I know, because I checked my watch in wait for the bus. There was something nagging me.

“Why are you talking about your own suicide?” I asked.

“I saw how you looked at me,” he shrugs. “I’m okay with it, really. I’ve always been like this. Paraplegic since birth. Haven’t been trying to ‘fulfill my destiny’ or ‘meet my fate’ or anything.”

Paraplegic? “Oh, no, it’s not that, uh…” I sputtered. I’m not cripplist, like I said, but he wouldn’t believe me if I told him that. “I was actually just afraid you’d engage me about the book.”

He actually looked down at the book as if he had forgotten he was reading it. “Take it you’re not much of a Brownite.”

I try to explain that I don’t have anything against Dan Brown in particular, just that the Slips have pretty much ruined fiction for me, but he just gives me this blank look. I try to explain. “Political thrillers, memoirs, slice-of-life short stories. Everything’s changed but fantasy and historical romance. It’s not like gravity, you know? You can’t just assume it’s in the background of the story, and if someone falls off a cliff, it’s a given that they’d fall ‘downward’ and go ‘splat’ unless there’s a robot to catch them or something. You have to say GRAVITY or A FRIGGING CLIFF or something, and it gets tedious. I don’t know.”

I expected him to give me the same blank look again, because I didn’t explain it very well, but instead he actually looks thoughtful. “Same with movies. They’re remaking Minority Report, you know that? This time with the Slips in.”

My only movie news is through trailers, so I did not in fact know that; I told Martin as much, wondering how Tom Cruise must feel about it. Maybe he feels it fits Scientology somehow. That’s what those kinetic things are, right? Maybe the machine somehow even proves Scientology right (which is at least how the Jehovah’s Witnesses feel, with the blood thing and everything.) It sure proves someone right.

The bus pulled up.

“Are you obsessed with your own death or something?” I asked Martin.

“No. Well, maybe a little.”

I sighed. One of those.

He shrugged as the doors opened. “Well, they say it’s going to be directed by Duncan Jones, so that should at least be interesting,” he said, getting in the special entrance for disabled people. (The big one with the ramp. There’s a word for that, but I’ve forgotten it now. It’s been a decade or so since Freshman year.) I got on the bus the normal way after him, in through the normal door (which they probably don’t have a special name for.)

...

They almost never mention the Slips in the Funnies anymore. Too morbid, or something. These are characters who stay young forever, always trapped at sixteen or thirtysomething or two. Staying the same age, as years and popular culture flow around them to be commented upon. These characters represent ideals, crude stereotypes in the worst of cases and timeless archetypes in the best of them. They don’t die in the Funnies.

Not all comics skirt the issue of death, though. Some of the ageless archetypes embrace such concepts; instead of turning away from the question, they charge boldly into it. But there was already a precedent in these types of stories, another issue to be addressed; these characters were deathless for another reason entirely.

Which is why with superheroes, the Slip always comes out the same: WITH FINALITY. There’s going to be one final time, where they’re not resurrected. One final time. You only need one death in the comics that’s not a comic book death.
It’s funny, because that’s what Martin says about himself; that he’s a superhero, though his slip says SUICIDE instead of WITH FINALITY. He’s cool about being in a wheelchair. Whenever anyone makes fun of him, he just threatens superpowers on them.

“Are you kidding, man?” he says, leaning in conspiratorially. “Don’t tell anyone, but this fragile body is just my mild-mannered alter ego. If you tell anyone, and I mean anyone, I’ll lase your head off.” He leans back again. “And don’t you dare forget it!”

...

Martin invited me to the park.

I really shouldn’t be changing my schedule too much to accommodate him like that. He may be the only real friend I’ve had since I got kicked out of college, but I’m kind of used to the schedule I’ve got, which is very micromanaged. Talking to him at the bus stop is one thing, since waiting for the bus is already in my planner. The park is a different thing.

The reason my schedule is so micromanaged is this. I kind of used to be an alcoholic, which got me in a lot of trouble, leading directly to me getting kicked out of college in the first place. My sponsor decided that I should keep a rigorous schedule to avoid distraction. It worked, and I’ve been clean for a few years now, but during that time, I kind of got a bit too used to the rigid schedule. I’m now an obsessive planner.

They say that’s how support groups work, anyway. They get you hooked on the community instead of whatever it was you were addicted to, so it’s not uncommon to start doing it again just so you could go back to your friends.

But, like I said, none of the people at AA were any real friends to me, so I didn’t relapse or anything. I just planned, and kept planning, rigorously.

Martin, though, Martin’s a friend.

I think I will take some time off for him.

I erased the overtime I had planned on doing Saturday, and, in neat penciled-in letters, put PARK WITH MARTIN. Underneath that, I carefully detailed each conversation piece I want to bring up, starting with my ideas of the strange things “SUICIDE” could mean.

I don’t think I’m right about any of it, but we’ll see.

Martin says he does believe some of my theories, because the Slips can do strange things, he tells me at the park. “Mess up your life and everything, you know? In all sorts off ways. Strange things. But that’s not the half of it, you know? No, by ‘strange things’ I don’t mean strange things to your life. I mean it can actually do some strange frigging things. Like Call Forwarding.”

I put down my nachos (we had gotten nachos.) “What’s that?”

“Call Forwarding? That’s just a name we’ve got for it in… certain circles. It’s like the FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE guy. You’ve heard of the FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE guy before, right?”

I had not.

“What Call Forwarding is, is there was this guy once whose Slip had said FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE, so he went around not eating fortune cookies for the rest of his life. Makes sense, right? Only he decided that he wasn’t going to let it ruin his life, so he still went around eating Chinese food all the time, only he always picked through his noodles and stuff to make sure no fortune got mixed in there or something. He even took the fortune cookies he got at the Chinese restaurants and brought them home with him, only he never opened them. He just like put them in a trophy case or something of fortune cookie fortunes he had ‘survived.’ I don’t know how he slept at night, knowing that those were in his house, but how does anyone sleep at night anymore?

“Anyway, one day as he was walking across the street to go hook up with his boyfriend for brunch or whatever (he was supposed to be like bi or something) he got hit by a frigging bus. A frigging bus. The name of the driver wasn’t Fortune C. Fortune, the name of the bus line wasn’t the Fortune Cookie Fortune Bus Company, the bus wasn’t traveling to Fortune Cookie Fortune Island. It didn’t even advertise fortune cookie fortunes on the side. No, alright. So everyone’s all confused as all-get-out, thinking, was his Slip mixed up with someone else’s? Or what? Only it wasn’t. They test his blood, and sure enough, it still comes out FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE. So they get this idea, alright? They go into his house, crack open the trophy case and all the scores of cookies therein, and have a look at the fortunes. And each of the fortune cookie fortunes said the same thing: CONFUCIUS SAY DON’T MISS YOUR BUS WHEN IT COMES.

Followed by, of course, the lucky lotto numbers, which were also probably right.”

I didn’t believe him. I curled my lip. “That’s a sick joke. Not how the Machine works at all.”

“It is actually exactly how the Machine works. Ironic, vague.”

“But fortune cookie fortunes didn’t kill him.”

“What’s written on the Slip is not always the cause of death, but merely the circumstances surrounding it,” he told me. “You know, if anyone were to administer the test to a horse, the Slip would come out TURNED INTO GLUE, even though that’s not how the horse died, and it’s no secret what a cow’s Slip -no pun intended, I swear- would say. In this case, the circumstances were fortune cookie fortunes.”

I still didn’t believe him. He told me to look it up on Snopes.

“But there’s also a bunch of crap going around that’s not true, like how your Slip result can come back differently if you spend your time eating a bunch of tomatoes and other antioxidants. Something to do with free radicals not changing your DNA. It’s bull, but a lot of otherwise respectable celebrity doctors are espousing it. That probably once happened in some form or another, otherwise they wouldn’t say these things, but it’s just anecdotal.

“Maybe the machine ran out of ink on one letter or something. Like golems. Truth without aleph becomes death. Or there was a bubble in the ink supply.

“Like, the guy gets his Slip as a kid or whatever, and it says B-A-B-O-O-N-S, only he eats a lot of antioxidants, and the next time he goes in, it says B-A-L-O-O-N-S, and he doesn’t know how to spell balloons or something, and he thinks by changing his blood he changed his fate. That’s my theory as to how it started, anyway.”

...

That night, I looked the FORTUNE COOKIE FORTUNE story up on Snopes.

It was true.

I spent the night curled up into a tiny ball. I did some more research, and one of the lotto numbers was also true, for a lottery that happened in Washington a week later. Since the guy lived in Israel or something, I don’t think that matters, but it’s still kind of mind-blowing of how many combinations of numbers there are the odds that would happen. That’s nothing compared against the odds against all the “don’t miss your bus” fortunes, but all the fortunes are right like that, you’d expect the numbers to have anything at all to do with it. Maybe that single set of lotto numbers was a coincidence. It was, after all, one combination of numbers out of almost a hundred, which he could’ve gotten at any point in his Chinese food eating spree.

I told Martin my theories about it. That night, Martin spent the night curled up into a tiny ball, paralyzed legs and everything, avoiding any and all reruns of “Lost,” he told me. Or maybe, he said, the lotto numbers were a code spelling out DON’T MISS YOUR BUS.

...

His brother, Jackson, is in the military, even though he probably shouldn’t be. The military doesn’t really like people who know their own cause of death, for obvious reasons. The Slips are all put into a manila envelope and mailed to one of the higher-ups. They don’t even let their squadron commanders know their own soldiers’ causes of death. Double-blind, scientists call it. Only the people running the entire thing have an inkling as to who gets a placebo or not.

But Jackson, he had already gotten his test, though never officially. Just, with a few friends and a test slide, behind the Dumpsters at school. His Slip had read OVERDOSE, which figured. Jackson’s a major junky skunk. He got into the Navy anyway, faking his blood test as well as his urine test. Figured the Navy’d be safe for him, he’d live longer than if he’d gotten IN COMBAT or anything there. Unless he got stationed in Amsterdam or something, he would make it through whatever missions they sent him on. He said he would do something with his life, he said he’d return a hero. He thinks that the military’s rule is stupid, and maybe even downright harmful.

I can’t agree one way or the other.

...

I don’t know much about Catholicism, how they canonize saints. I think that it goes like they were a saint all along, it just takes a while for the Church to recognize it, but, anyway, they’re canonizing a patron saint of the Machine. St. Randy or something. Some Canadian guy. Get him to make intercession for you, but I’m not sure how that works. Make intercession for what? Not have you be killed, ever? Have your death’s gruesome name be terribly misleading? Have the slip be wrong, once, ever, and die by excessive bunnies rather than drowning in gasoline?

...

All day at work, I thought about that. I remember back when everyone was really obsessed with the Slips, but now, it’s just background noise. Culture at large has assimilated.

Well, for some subcultures, it’s still in the forefront- for like deadheads and fetishists and stuff, it’s still there, and I’ve even seen some videos online about people enacting “creative” renditions of their own deaths (if you know what I mean)- but generally, nobody cares anymore. Not very many people know the things that should be common knowledge, because it’s no longer the new thing. These things come in cycles, I suppose.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the only one messed up. How pervasive can it get? People can get pretty obsessive, I know, for obvious reasons, but culture will return to normal, won’t it? Isn’t it? It’s been years. Culture should be returning to normal.

It’s like cars, isn’t it? Everyone has one, and we’ve built entire highways to accommodate that fact. Some cars are really nice, and some aren’t. The Middle East’s economy booms because the cars need to be fueled by what the Middle East’s got. Entire magazines are devoted to hot rods.

People are still people. People will always be people. There was graffiti found preserved in the toilet stalls of Pompeii, wasn’t there? But this argument could go both ways. People are people, so they’ll go back to normal, people are people, so they’ll always obsess over death.

Maybe it’s like being gay or something. Is this small death crisis the equivalent of questioning your sexuality? Once that has happened and you’ve changed, is it possible to “go back?”

I realized that I didn’t know anything about popular culture anymore.

I had thought the Death Machine and its Slips became part of the background noise, but I’m not sure anymore. Are we really getting over it? I don’t know, and I’ve got no way of knowing, seeing as I’ve avoided popular culture since the Machine came out.

Maybe this discovery has sent us spiraling out of control.

After my shift, I walked down to the drugstore and bought a whole bunch of the latest cheap paperback romances, spending the rest of the afternoon flipping through them. Some of them were romances of the historical variety, and it turns out I was wrong, even those have changed. They may not have invented the Slips in the story yet, but the writers seem obsessed over telling you how these characters are going to die, with the added fun of filling in the specifics when the characters are still alive, which can only be done in fiction.

A few days later, I re-subscribed to cable.

This cutback in my budget makes it so I can’t buy as much food, but I’ve always been good with going hungry.

I stayed up over the weekend, flipping through the channels in my shorts. It’s everywhere. OWN, Comedy Central, NatGeo, Food Network, Animal Planet, the Disney Channel, even home shopping networks.

On the news I saw that Discovery’s making a network based entirely around death.

Screaming into your pillow is really quite therapeutic.

I got deeper and deeper into the internet subcultures. Message boards, chat rooms, even a few of those conspiracy theory YouTube videos that only have like twelve views. There’s this professor I met, one of the major scientists studying the machine’s workings back before they settled on the multideaths theory, and his theory is that the Machine actually works by reading the past and translating what it finds into words, and humans actually experience the time flow backwards, only with psychic powers so we “remember” the future. He got a lot of slack for it (yes, he was the guy with the horn-rimmed glasses and tiny Hitler mustache on “South Park,”) but it actually makes a lot of sense when he briefs you on the nature of the Space-Time continuum. He says the multideaths theory is bushwa, that it violates the conservation of energy or something.

But a lot of people are really stupid about the Machine. Like that particularly notorious (in some circles) episode of CSI: Detroit where they actually hook the Machine up to a GPS locator to track down the murderer. They explain him as being one of the original inventors and thus being psychically tied to it or something, but that still makes no logical sense, especially with the multideaths theory, which is what they used in the episode. (Of course, the mileage is going to vary here, because we are talking about the same show where they reconstructed what a pen had written by figuring out the angles of the ink trajectory as it left it, but still. (I’m not kidding; I think it was in season 3.))

And the superstition. The Machine came out after I was no longer little enough to do immature stuff like that, but there’s all sorts of it surrounding your Slip. Like, you wait thirteen days after you get it before you read it, you turn it over thrice in hand without looking at it before you start uncovering right to left, so that the first time you read it you read it either backwards or upside-down. At least that’s the ritual in Raleigh. Even adults have this weird thing around theirs or somebody else’s Slip. It’d be silly anyway, but considering the subject matter, it’s even more so. I mean, what, are they afraid that it’ll read NOT OBSERVING THE RITUAL? That’s the only situation in which that would make sense. Observing the ritual. It reminds me of a joke about Heaven, and stepping on ducks.

I guess seeing how you’re going to die creates an anticlimax or something. All our lives we live in dread of the ending, but once we know how it’s going to come, what’s there to do? So we build up rituals surrounding the Slips. Once the truth is there in black and white, there’s nothing to do to change it.

...

The world’s been numb since the invention of the Machine. I think that death and life shouldn’t be mixed like that. It’s like two complementary colors getting mixed; everything just comes out gray.

It’s ruining our lives. We can’t go back.

I think society is actually devolving. It won’t be long before the government fall apart, I don’t think. I’m not sure anarchy is a natural order, since anyone who’s take Sociology 101 would tell you society leads to government. Anarchy isn’t natural. But then again, neither is the Machine.

Natural order could work backwards.

Things could get bad.

I’ve got to save us all from this somehow. The anarchy.

It’s like that thing with Jackson, only magnified. Wham-O! Toys is actually suing a guy because he’s going to get killed by a Frisbee, you know that? Society was perverted enough before this. Back when the world still felt things.
I’ve got to save us all from this.

...

I couldn’t think of anything. I still can’t think of anything. I put on my planner: THINK OF SOMETHING. THINK OF SOMETHING. THINK OF SOMETHING. On every empty schedule block, I plan to THINK OF SOMETHING.

...

I started to lose it. You know how sometimes you’re done eating, and go to throw away the leftovers and stuff, but forget which order it goes in and so you almost throw away the tray instead of the food? It was like that, only more so. To put a hammer in a fridge is one thing, but to put your phone in the toaster, and then toast it…

...

Cognitively, it got worse from there. I’m usually very good at memorizing and remembering things. You ever get so tired you black out for half a second? It’s like that. I just looked at a shopping list and closed my eyes. For a second I could see it perfectly clearly in my mind, but then came this flash, this big old sobbing wave of weariness, and I had forgotten what was on the list, forgotten what the list was even about, and started wondering if there even was a list in the first place. My senses were useless. I couldn’t tell whether or not I had anything between my fingertips.

Then I opened my eyes. The paper was still there. I tried paper cuts. It didn’t work.

I need bed rest.

I’m going to call into work, get a sick day.

Then I’m going to get lots of sleep.

...

I dreamt that there were these cyborg mice time traveling from the future, who transported people back in time to meet their younger selves and create a paradox.

...

I dreamt that I was at the store, and I spilled the milk, and it just kept coming and coming out and splashing down the drain, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

...

I dreamt I was at AA again.

I was sitting there, listening to some fat bum tell about how he found Jesus and doesn’t need to drink anymore, and it occurred to me when I woke up that that was precisely the reason we need Saint Ryan. Even if he’s powerless to save us from our deaths, we still need him. To comfort us.

...

I’m still tired.

...

With pets, there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy created by people going for dogs with BY MASTER’S SIDE or FIGHTING OFF COYOTES or any other loyalty-inducing image like that, over dogs who die ANTISOCIALLY or PUT DOWN AFTER BITING CHILD’S FACE OFF or anything like that. (That’s just an example, by the way. I think the whole self-fulfilling thing works the other way when it’s something negative like that as opposed to something positive, since no-one’s going to let their child near that dog, unless the dog got tested for whatever reason after it had been put down. What after that? “Yup, that’s what happened?”)

...

What do you do? Tastes and proclivities change. Sometimes you can’t go back. Predictions that don’t make sense begin falling into place like pieces of a puzzle. Or gears of clockwork. Or something.

...

It gets creepy.

...

I’m also doing that, too, thanks for reminding me.

I dreamt last night that we were at the movies, and there was like a scene in a Catholic school or something. There were these Catholic schoolgirls, like, both eleven years old, dressed in their hot tight uniforms. One even had a short leather whip, and was cracking it into the air. I sat there leering and licking my lips. I’m a really creepy perv in my dreams. I want to rape and kill a small child or something.

You know how it is after you wake up, and are trying to clear your head.

I turned on the radio. Oldies. “Love the One You’re With” was playing. What a great message in this circumstance.

I figured out a theory how not to die. It’s perfect. No death, just rebirth. Rise from your own ashes.

...

I have a signed copy of Chris Martin’s Cause of Death Slip from this Coldplay concert I went to my Senior year in high school. I keep it on the wall in my room. Framed in oak. Or pine. A nice dark hardwood. I can’t remember exactly my reason for getting it, I was sloshed that night, maybe they were just on sale.

Chris’s name shines down in silver ink, a reminder that our giants are real. That’s an old phrase, isn’t it; we like to remind ourselves that our giants are real, and therefore slayable.

But what now, now that our giants are already slain?

...

I signed up for classes at the University of Arizona online. I went to go get my blood tested the next day. It doesn’t come out blank this time, like it logically should. I’m still going to die.

It’s funny, though.

That should have worked.

...

THINK OF SOMETHING.

...

I am a raccoon. I AM A RACCOON. You can try to surgically replace my sweet coony coony face with a person’s, but that won’t make me human.

...

THINK OF SOMETHING.

...

I’m still tired.

...

THINK OF SOMETHING.

...

I began drinking again.

Flipping through the channels, playing drinking games with the CBS late night talk show hosts. Take a shot every time David Letterman grins to reveal the gap between his front teeth, every time they have to censor out Craig Ferguson. I stayed up through the morning, through all the reruns and infomercials, thinking sobering thoughts and drowning them again.

I thought about call forwarding. About POPULAR CULTURE, and SUICIDE. I put two and two together. And thought of something.

Tonight, I am going over to Martin’s house.

...

And I am going to save both of us.