by Chris Wiberg
IN THE NEAR FUTURE, SOMEONE WILL invent a bomb that can be
disguised as a credit card. Everything gets smaller and more destructive,
and just the thought of something is as good as it already happening. And
then it will be a thing that exists in the world: compact, light, commonplace,
undetectable. Nuclear.
The person who uses it will be motivated by ideology or religion or
vengeance or resentment or love or a crucial imbalance in brain chemistry,
and this little credit card will be the tool he’s been looking for, and like
anything, like anyone, he’ll get his hands on it. He’ll craft a plan to create
maximum chaos and tragedy. A concert at a football stadium. A summer
evening. An unsuspecting city.
Because the agent will be vaporized in the same instant as everyone
else, he’ll never be questioned. Because he acts on his own, he’ll never be
identified. We’ll never know exactly why he did what he did or what his
final hours and minutes were like. But because he was one of fifty thousand
people in that stadium, we can guess at some broad strokes.
He clicked through a website to the event; he searched and selected
a seat. He solved a puzzle to prove he was not a robot. He entered a credit
card number. He accepted terms and conditions. He received a link, down-
loaded and printed a PDF of his ticket or kept it in an app on his phone.
He drives or takes a train or rideshare. He parks or disembarks or
hops out at the stadium, a couple hours before sunset on the eleventh
longest day of the year. He follows the crowd streaming in, joins the mass
at the stadium gate. He gets in line, shuffling forward and appearing in
the background of other people’s selfies. He removes his wallet, keys, and
phone from his pockets and raises his arms over his head to be frisked.
He walks through a metal detector, and while at the next station a forty-
five-year-old dad trips the alarm with a forgotten Zippo lighter, the man
with the weapon of mass destruction in his wallet passes through without
notice. The security man, who in three hours’ time will be a trail of parti-
cles drifting toward the ozone layer, tells him to have a great night.
Someone scans his ticket with a laser. He walks through a turnstile.
His hand drifts unconsciously to pat the wallet in his front pocket. There
was a caution, he recalls, to avoid letting the card get too warm. The wallet
is pressed against his thigh. A trickle of sweat runs down the back of his
neck, but his anxiety dissipates as he realizes it no longer matters. The plan
can work exactly as imagined, or the bomb can go off at any moment. The
result will be the same.
He enters the concourse, where concert goers buzz around buying
pizza and giant pretzels and beer and T-shirts and keychain fobs. He drags
his tongue around his mouth; he’s thirsty. There is literally no reason in
the world not to indulge his momentary physical comfort, so he stands in
line and buys a bottle of water. The concession employee apologizes as she
twists off the cap and discards it, explaining that the caps have been used
as weapons to pelt opposing teams and opening acts. He tells her it’s no
problem, he understands.
Around him on the concourse, people carry cardboard containers
of nachos and plastic cups of rum cocktail. They text each other and take
photos and adjust their outfits and chase after their kids. Most of them are
basically good people. He’s thought a lot about this over the past couple
months, and he’s had all the thoughts he’s going to have on that particular
subject.
He locates his seat and thanks the people who stand to make room
for him to slide past. He sits down in the small metal chair and swigs from
his now lukewarm water bottle. The sun has yet to sink behind the stadium
wall. The venue is only just filling in. Recorded music plays over the PA.
He waits like they all wait, killing time on his phone, shielding his
eyes from the sun. He takes little notice of the warmup band except that he
recognizes one of their songs, a moderate hit from three or four summers back.
When they leave the stage, the people next to him clap out of politeness.
He has been leaning forward, shielding his thigh from the sun.
Roadies come out to dismantle the opening act’s equipment and set
up for the main attraction. The PA music is occasionally interrupted by
stray guitar chords and drum crashes as each instrument is tested. Finally,
the house lights go dark, the spotlights come on, everyone rises to their
feet, and the stadium awakens.
He is casually familiar with this group’s music. It inspires tremendous
passion in a great number of fans, but his own tastes have always been
more particular and esoteric. Still, the power of the moment is undeniable:
the rapture of the crowd, the command of the lead singer, the thundering
of the band, the spontaneous community among these fifty thousand
strangers who will, in minutes now, be reduced to atoms.
As emotion surges through the crowd, he wonders if he should have
given this band more of a chance. He’d always thought of their music as
simple, sentimental, and one-note, but here he discovers shades and
provocations he’d never anticipated. The woman next to him has stopped
moving, staring open-mouthed and damp-eyed at the stage. The people in front
of him dance and sing and cheer and brush damp hair from their eyes, and
he realizes this was part of the trade, that he should feel this last, desperate
community with all of them. That he should understand what he’s taking
away from everyone else—not just these fifty thousand lives, but this feel-
ing, this innocent transcendence, which no one will ever feel, not in this
exact way, ever again.
The chorus peaks and drops away as the cheers of the crowd overtake
the music. He checks his watch but already knows. Without allowing a
moment’s reflection, he pulls his wallet from his pocket, slides out the card,
holds it in his fingertips, flexes, and bends until it breaks in half.
He doesn’t live long enough for his eyes to register the flash.
***
That same night, in another city, in a different time zone, in your
apartment, in your bed, I’ll wake from a nightmare with adrenaline crashing
through me, my body terrified as my mind struggles to reorient. You’ll be asleep
beside me, murmuring and oblivious. As I catch my breath and my eyes
assemble shapes into meaning, I’ll recite to myself that I’m here, I’m safe,
and it was just a dream, but the physical terror will linger. I’ll prop myself up
on an elbow and trace the rumpled line of the sheet across your shoulder,
your arm, your hip. As always, I will try to outrun the guilt and chase the
feeling of unaccountable luck that has lately been losing its definition as
you become part of my life rather than some incredible invader. It’s getting
harder to access.
But I stay in your bed, calm and patient, until I can see enough to
focus on your hair tucked over your shoulder for sleep, but as you take in
a deep breath, a few strands and then a lock slip down your shoulder and
back, pooling on the mattress behind you, and I think to myself once again,
You are a bastard, but you’re a lucky one. And safe at last in that feeling, I
climb from your bed and pad to the door.
In your living room, I switch on the lamp on the far side of the sofa,
the dimmest light in the room. Barely any of it will creep inside your door,
which you always keep open. I walk barefoot to your kitchen, open the
fridge, and pour a glass of water from the filter. I take the sweaty glass
back with me to the couch, pick up my phone from the coffee table, and
thumb the button to wake it up. And this is where I would check the news
and learn about the explosion at the concert, except I don’t because as I’m
swiping through my apps I hear the floor creak behind me, and it’s you,
bed-headed and goose pimpled from the AC.
I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry.
You tell me it’s okay, you were already awake, and I don’t say I know
that’s not true. You ask if I was having another one of my dreams. I nod,
and you come and sit next to me on the sofa, pulling me over to rest against
your chest, the edge of your nightgown tickling my cheek. You hold me like
this even though I’ve never told you the half of it.
I dream of the end of the world. Earthquake, volcano, meteor,
pandemic, nuclear war, alien invasion, ice age, supernova, entropy, reverse big
bang, end simulation, celestial predator, four horsemen, collision with a
parallel universe, vanishing one by one, failure of gravity, flood, fire, acid
rain, fallen stars, poison clouds, death ray, compulsive mass suicide.
I’ve never told you this, and I’ve never told you in each scenario it’s
somehow inescapably my fault. How every time I think about you, I end up
thinking about my own home, from which I’m playing hooky tonight on a
barely believable last-minute trip for work.
Rather than tell you the truth, I accept your tenderness. I let you
whisper my name, and I turn my face into your breast in a way I know
will elicit an I love you—stolen goods I don’t have the faintest right to, and
you know it, but you let me have it anyway, and that same feeling courses
through me like a drug, the feeling I’ve had every day since you first invited
me inside that door still standing open behind us.
I’m already drifting back to sleep as you, wide awake and invisibly
frustrated, reach with your free arm to the coffee table and with your
fingertips pull your own phone within grabbing distance. With my head in
your lap, you wake the phone, tap open your news app, and there it is, the
first post at the top of the screen. At first, you think it’s a paid post, a movie
promo in bad taste. Then it has to be a hoax. Then a mistake. All you can do
is scroll and stare, until eventually it occurs to you to jiggle me awake and
say to my uncomprehending face. Babe, something’s happened.
Together we read from your phone, frozen in place on the sofa,
unable to disengage for even long enough to find the controller and turn on
the TV. And of course, I’m stunned and terrified, and of course I struggle to
believe it, but at the same time, the part of me that dreams is not surprised.
Because minutes ago, I fell asleep in your lap, and as I did, I was thinking
not of the end of the world but of that moment, three years ago by now,
when we barely even knew each other, although we thought we did from a
few months of careless flirtation and private jokes, the way those things can
make you so overconfident. I was standing on the sidewalk talking on my
phone, and you came walking up the street in a summer dress, and I wasn’t
supposed to be there then, it just worked out that way, so it was a surprise,
and we noticed each other at the same time, and both our minds went back
to our last conversation, that one stupid thing we laughed about for ten
minutes straight, and our eyes met, and yours bloomed into a smile just at
the moment you passed within inches of me; you kept walking on down
the street, and with that smile still tickling the inside of my head, I under-
stood for the first time that there were things in the world so much more
powerful than compassion, than commitment, than faith, than mercy.