Countdown

Pinned: "T-minus ten. A small announcement." by Exterminators (posted 9:05 PM, 1,904 replies)

cold_open_77 · 9:12 PM · 880 likes: This is the best production value I've ever seen on a hoax.

mothlight · 9:20 PM · 760 likes: The little drawings!! Is that hand-inked?

m_aurelius_jr · 9:31 PM · 410 likes: Fake or real? I'm giving it a 3.2 for commitment.

velvet_hour · 9:44 PM · 290 likes: Voted. Not sure why my hands are shaking, honestly.

The post appeared on a Monday night at five minutes past nine, and by the next morning it was all anybody on the fourth floor of Whitlock & Crane would have talked about, if only any of them had known what it was.

Asher had read it twice before he fell asleep. He read it a third time in the subway, standing, with the paper cup of coffee from the stand outside the station balanced in one hand and the phone in the other, and the whole length of the car swayed with him through the tunnel as though he were being carried on a river. It was a long post. It was in the plain white letters on black, with the white mask at the top, and it was headed, in bold, T-MINUS TEN.

A small announcement, it began.

In ten days there will be an event. Some of you have been following our correspondence and will know what I mean. Those who have not may treat this as an exercise in storytelling, which is, I hope, what the room has always been for. I will be posting once each evening until the day. I will not say more than I need to. There is no hurry, but there is a date.

Beneath it were the pictures.

There were nine of them, in a row, and they were not photographs. They were drawings, in black ink and red, on cream-colored paper, in a style that Asher thought at first was a children's book and then recognized, with a flicker of something he did not examine, as a kind of comic. They were done with a steady line. There was a mask in the first, a white mask on a black field, very large. There was a door in the third, half open, with a rectangle of light on the floor. There was a figure in the sixth, a small pale figure with its back turned, shown in only a few strokes, and there was a clock in the seventh, a plain round clock with the hands at ten past nine. Every one of them was drawn with the same unhurried patience. Every one of them used the same three colors, black and white and a bright flat red, and in two of the nine, in the corners of the frame, there was the edge of a floor drawn as a checkerboard of squares, which the artist had shaded, with great care, in a cold gray-blue.

The thing that held him was how quiet they were. They did not show anything. They did not need to. They had a stillness, a deliberateness, like the stills from a film by a director who knew exactly where to stop, and as he looked at them the train went into a long dark curve, and the lights flickered, and for a second he saw his own face in the window with the pictures laid over it.

He thought: this is a person who loves what he does.

The second thought came a moment later, and took him unawares. It was: I would like to be shown the rest.

The train came up into the light. A woman beside him shifted her bag. Asher put the phone in his pocket and held on to the pole, and found that his heart was beating more quickly than the morning warranted, and told himself it was the coffee.

…

At twelve-fifteen the canteen smelled of lentils.

He had come down early, to get the corner table, and had propped the phone against the napkin dispenser at an angle, as he always did, so that he could eat and read at once. There were no more than eight or ten people in the whole room. A cleaner was pushing a wet mop slowly along the back wall. Over by the window, two men in suits were talking quietly about a golf course. And at the long steel counter, in his white apron, with the big pot steaming in front of him, Tomas stirred his soup.

Asher did not look up. He heard it from a long way off, the dull wooden sound of the paddle going round the pot, and counted it without meaning to, as one counts the strokes of a distant clock. One. Two. Three. And then a pause, and he was reading again.

The comments had gone past two thousand. The room, he saw, had split into two warring camps. There were those who said it was brilliant, the finest piece of immersive fiction they had ever had the privilege to follow, and there were those who said it was in poor taste and wanted it stopped, and the first group were louder and a great deal more numerous. A man called quill_and_ink, whom Asher had never seen before, had written a long and rather excited post arguing that the drawings were an homage to a certain Italian film from the seventies, and that the date was obviously a Halloween reference, and that the whole room was being given a gift. Nine hundred people had agreed with him.

"Asher?"

It was Dana, with a tray, and behind her Corinne from the paralegal pool, balancing a salad and a yogurt and a paper cup. They had stopped beside the table. Dana had her glasses pushed up into her hair, and her face wore the careful, friendly, slightly braced look of a person who has decided to try once more.

"We're sitting by the window. There's room, if you want."

"In a minute," said Asher, not raising his eyes.

"Okay. We're not in a hurry."

"Great."

"Is that the Pelham thing?" asked Corinne, nodding at the phone.

"It's research," said Asher. "It's a bit complicated to explain."

"Sure," said Corinne, and glanced at Dana, and the two of them moved on across the room with their trays. He saw them sit. He saw Dana look back once, over her shoulder, and then turn to Corinne and say something that made them both lean in and laugh in a low voice, and he thought, with a faint pleasant sensation of superiority, that people who ate lunch in groups never had the time to get anything done.

Seven, he thought. Rap. The wooden paddle struck the iron rim.

Somewhere behind the counter a ladle began to fall into the pot and rise again. There was a shuffle of slippers on the tile, and he was aware, dimly, that someone had come up beside the table. A bowl was set down at his elbow with a soft clink. The steam rose past his face. He did not raise his eyes. He had just reached a comment by a user who said that she could not stop looking at the clock in the seventh drawing, and he wanted to see what the reply was.

"Eat," said a heavy gentle voice above him. "Before it's cold."

"Mm," said Asher.

The shadow stayed there a moment. He felt, without lifting his head, the quiet attention of a man standing at his shoulder, an older man, large and patient. He was aware of a pause. He thought, vaguely, that the soup smelled good. But there was a fascinating dispute going on about the shade of the red, and a long discussion of whether a hand-inked line could be forged by software, and he waved a hand at the air in a small dismissive gesture that meant thank you, yes, later, and the shadow withdrew. He heard the slippers go back across the tile to the counter.

He ate three spoonfuls without tasting them. He did not see Tomas stand behind the counter for a long moment afterward, and look at him, with the paddle held loosely in one hand and an expression on his broad face that was neither hurt nor offended but only puzzled and rather sad, as a man looks at a child who has gone on ahead without noticing that his shoes are untied.

…

The poll went up at a quarter to eight that evening.

He had been waiting for it. He had gone home through the rain, and changed his shirt for no reason, and eaten a bowl of cereal at the counter without sitting down, and by seven-thirty he was on the bed with the laptop and the phone side by side on the blanket, as a man sits before a performance. When the page refreshed, the second installment was there. Five more drawings. A calendar. Nine days and a few hours. A line of text beneath them, short and calm.

A question for the room. I am told there may be something to see afterward. Should I release it? A poll follows. It is optional, and anonymous, and entirely at your discretion.

And under that, a box, with a title in clean white type.

Who would like to see the full version?

There were two buttons. One said Yes. The other said No. Beneath them, in gray, in small type, was a bar showing how the vote stood, and a count of those who had taken part, which stood at 1,418 and rose as he watched.

His phone lit on the blanket.

Marcus: ok, who's voting.

Priya: I'm voting no. Obviously. Please.

Marcus: lol of course you are. You vote no on everything. I'm voting yes. It's a fictional snuff film, what could be better.

Noah: I'm not voting.

Priya: Noah!

Noah: I just don't want to. Is that allowed?

Marcus: it's your funeral, buddy.

Priya: Marcus!!

Marcus: sorry. bad joke. I'm sorry. Asher, you in?

Asher looked at the screen. The bar said sixty-one percent for Yes, and thirty-nine for No. He read the question again, slowly. Who would like to see the full version? It was a ridiculous question. It was a question put to a roomful of people who had spent the evening admiring a series of cunning drawings, and the answer, plainly, was yes, because who would not want to see how a thing came out? He thought of his own life and its small humiliations, of the pen and the cabin photograph and the tapping, and he thought, with a flush of private feeling that he did not examine, that he had earned a good ending.

He thought, also, that it was only a story.

His cursor hovered between the two buttons. A little gray drop of rain slid down the window beside the bed, and he watched it go. He counted. One, he thought. Two. At three he pressed Yes.

A small green check appeared. Thank you. Your vote has been recorded. The bar jumped by a hair's breadth, and settled, and now said sixty-one percent, and then it said sixty-two.

Done, he typed to the others. Obviously.

Marcus: THAT'S MY BOY.

Priya: Ugh. Fine. I'll watch you both through my fingers.

Noah: Okay.

He put the phone down. He got up from the bed and went to the window to look at the rain and the blue-white sign of the laundromat, and he drank a glass of water, and thought about the drawings, and the bright flat red, and the way a stranger could get into a man's head with a few strokes of a pen. He thought about it for a long time, and with pleasure.

Three seconds later, he had forgotten that he had pressed it.