Leonard Cohen — Machine of Death

Leonard Cohen

The atten­dant held out the dis­tinc­tive yel­low and orange envelope.

“Thank you Mr. Su” he said cheer­fully as Kam took the enve­lope. “Have a nice day, Sir.”

Kam stepped out of the arcade into the Pacific Avenue rush. He squinted against the low Octo­ber after­noon sun. Damn, no sun­glasses.
He crossed the street to the new two-story Star­bucks and stood in line behind the usual col­lec­tion of black clad teenagers, under-employed hip­sters, and multi-level mar­keters in cheap sports coats. Kam stared at the logo on his enve­lope. A laugh­ably cheap image of crossed fin­gers on a back­ground of the ini­tials LD and the motto “Only Time Will Tell.” He flipped the enve­lope over and fin­gered the flap. Turned it back over and stared at the crossed fin­gers again. His brother had told him that the ini­tials LD stood for Lucky Dayz and that the com­pany that pro­duced the Answer­Ma­chine™ had orig­i­nally been in the busi­ness of man­u­fac­tur­ing claw crane games and bar-top slot machines. In fact the machine itself was orig­i­nally designed as a for­tune telling game called “How Shall I Die?” The designer had had the bril­liant idea of get­ting cryp­tic sound­ing answers by tak­ing ran­dom phrases from a live con­nec­tion to Wikipedia. Mar­ket­ing had loved the for­tune cookie vibe of the answers but had nixed the name in favor of the less def­i­nite Answer­Ma­chine™. Still ‘every­one’ knew that the machine only answered one ques­tion — How am I going to die? And ‘every­one’ knew that the machine was never wrong.

“Lucky Dayz. That’s rich.” he said aloud and then remem­bered he wasn’t alone.

He turned the enve­lope back over and slid his fin­ger under the flap. There were two pieces of paper. A closely printed double-sided “Guide to your Answer”. He ignored this and looked at the 3x5 card with it’s happy orange bor­der and the LD logo in the corner.

“Leonard Cohen?” it read. “What the fuck, they’ve given me some­one else’s results.”

He shoved the papers back into the enve­lope and stuffed it back into his mes­sen­ger bag, elbow­ing the man behind him in the process.

“Oh, sorry.” He apol­o­gized as he stepped up to the counter.

Amer­i­cano in hand Kam walked to the condi­ments bar to get half-n-half. Wait­ing behind the goth girl adding four Splen­das to her soy latte, his curios­ity got the bet­ter of him and he dug the enve­lope out of his mes­sen­ger bag. As he pulled out the card the Guide fell to the floor. An older woman with lots of pre­cise spikes and angles in her gray hair stopped to pick it up for him. Hand­ing it over she stiff­ened when she saw the enve­lope in Kam’s hand.

“Super­sti­tious non­sense.” she mut­tered as she handed Kam the paper “I hope you’re not tak­ing this seri­ously.” She looked vaguely famil­iar.
It slowly dawned on Kam that this was Janet Roberts, a Cre­ative Direc­tor for Finch and Hat­ters­burg. He’d met her 3 months ago some­thing about tooth­paste he thought. He remem­bered the clas­sic Chanel suit in the big pink and black check. She’d eas­ily been the hippest per­son in the room; she was also the only one not try­ing.
“No ma’am.” Kam answered cha­grined at his meek­ness but too flus­tered to for­mu­late a more appro­pri­ate response.
Ms. Roberts scowl soft­ened a bit but not quite enough to make it into smile ter­ri­tory.
“LD is one of our clients. I was con­sid­er­ing show­ing them your work. You just might have the right not-too-threatening urban hip­ster vibe for them.”

“Thank you Ms. Roberts.” Kam said to the woman’s depart­ing back.

Well, that was either very good or very bad. But now to the mat­ter of the man­ner of Mr. Leonard Cohen’s death. He turned the slip over “Kam Su.”

“Okay…” he drawled. ”Do I have to say it again? What the fuck?” There must have been a print­ing mis­take. And poor Leo. He must have got­ten a report with two death pre­dic­tions. Pretty sad for $20. He stuffed the card into his pocket and left the instruc­tions and the enve­lope on the counter.

Nei­ther Stacy nor Scott was home when he got in. He dropped his keys in the brass bowl beside the door and enjoyed the clat­ter. Kam didn’t need room­mates to afford the loft any­more, but hav­ing grown up as the only child of very quiet par­ents he delighted in the con­stant com­pany of the foot­steps, mur­mur­ings, and rus­tle of other peo­ple liv­ing with him.

#

Ms. Roberts never called about LD or any other client. No sur­prise there, but Kam did score some work from another AD at Finch and Hat­ters­burg doing prod­uct shots for a new organic soda. He almost hadn’t taken the job afraid that with a 3rd bev­er­age shoot in a row he was becom­ing pigeon­holed as the king of sweaty cans. But the price was right.
There had to be a photo blue pen­cil some­where. Freak­ing back­wards print­ers, demand­ing markups and cut lines on hard copy. Why couldn’t they take a dig­i­tal file like every­one else? And they wanted three sizes too.
There you are damn it. He hauled the offend­ing pen­cil out of the back cor­ner of the drawer in tri­umph. In doing so he knocked his Answer­Ma­chine card out of its dusty spot next to the dou­ble sided tape.
“Heh,” he flipped it back and forth, enjoy­ing the play between the names. “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”
And some­how the ques­tion got stuck in his head, like a pop song ear-worm. A cou­ple of times a day he’d look up and think “I won­der what Leo is doing now?’ Until he started ask­ing the ques­tion out loud.

#

It had been driz­zling for three days and Kam was feel­ing grey, slow, and damp.He dropped by the offices of the North End Observer with the pho­tos he’d taken of his cousin’s band. It was their first review and Kam had agreed to comp some of the pic­tures from the last gig. It had stopped driz­zling about 20 min­utes ago and there was a weak attempt at sun­shine going on in the East­ern sky. Joy Machine Arcade. Kam stopped. He’d just got­ten the check for the Tony’s Soda shoot. There was eas­ily $20 in blow-it money in that one. And hell, “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”

So he went in.

He bought a token form the bored girl at the front desk.

The Answer­Ma­chine ™ was in the back cor­ner behind the dri­ving games.

The same atten­dant was sit­ting next to the machine. The kid took Kam’s token and indi­cated a stool at the counter. “Left or right handed?” Kam held out his right hand, the atten­dant wiped his mid­dle fin­ger with an alco­hol pad.

Kam placed his hand in the slot, with his mid­dle fin­ger between the guides and waited. The light next to his hand turned red and he flinched at the stab. Kam held still another minute until the light turned green and then pulled his hand back. The atten­dant handed him a bit of gauze to dab his fin­ger with and then a small bandaid. Kam couldn’t think of any­thing to say while they waited for the machine so he just sat on the stool. A cou­ple of min­utes later there was the unmis­tak­able sound of a ink-jet print head rat­tling back and forth.

The machine spit out the card and the atten­dant put it into a pre­pared enve­lope and sealed it. Kam took it and ripped an end off of it.

“Um,” the atten­dant started. “We sug­gest that you open your Answer in the pri­vacy of your own home.”

“Don’t worry kiddo, I’m not going to freak out right here on the carpet.”

Badly stained car­pet at that. Pulling the card out, Kam dropped the guide to the floor. ‘Kam Su’ it read on the front. Well at least they got his name right. He flipped the card. ‘Leonard Cohen’

“What the fuck?”

The atten­dant started to get off his stool, a lit­tle crease of con­cern mark­ing his fore­head. Kam shoved the card at him.

“This is twice that damned machine has screwed up.”

The boy backed away from him, refus­ing to touch the card. “No, Sir. The machine never…” he stopped. “Did you say again?”

Kam nod­ded.

“We don’t sug­gest retest­ing. The results never change, you’re only caus­ing your­self more concern.”

“But my card has two names on it.” Kam said, “Mine and some guy named Leonard Cohen.”

The boy shifted.

“Some guy who’s con­fused as hell because he got a card with two results.” Kam continued.

The kid stalled out, look­ing as if like he was watch­ing video on the back of his own forehead.

“If the cus­tomer receives a result with a proper name reas­sure them by remind­ing them that results are often cryp­tic and that the pres­ence of a name does not reveal how that per­son might be involved in the customer’s death.”

Kam looked at the kid. He’s recit­ing the man­ual at me?

“The name of a per­son as a result can mean many things. Do not assume that your first impres­sion is the cor­rect one.” The boy par­roted. “Only Time Will Tell.”

The boy reached to the counter behind him and picked up another set of Guide to Your Results.

“If you are trou­bled by your results we urge you to speak to a coun­selor at one of the help lines listed in the brochure you received with your card.” Kam noted the ris­ing panic in the young man’s voice.

“It’s okay…” he looked at the kid’s apron. “…Todd. I’m not going to go bal­lis­tic. But you should call your boss and tell him that there’s some­thing wrong with this machine.”

“It was checked last week. You know, paper restock and ink refill, run the diag­nos­tics.” Todd warmed to talk­ing about the machine rather than Kam’s answer.
“I watched it all very care­fully.” Todd swal­lowed ner­vously. I applied to be get into the train­ing pro­gram to be a tech. Did you know that they get 80 hours of paid vaca­tion a year? And 25 of sick leave? It’s a real job …”
Kam stopped and really looked at the kid. 23? 24? and work­ing for min­i­mum wage as an arcade atten­dant. And wear­ing a thin gold band on the third fin­ger of his, Kam did the men­tal flip, yup, left hand.

“Hey. Good luck with that.” Kam smiled at him.

“Thanks.” Todd said, relieved that Kam wasn’t going to pur­sue the bro­ken machine discussion.

Kam checked his watch, 2:45. If he didn’t daw­dle there was just enough day­light to walk home. Nor­mally he’d catch a bus, but today, just because the chance was so rare in Novem­ber he walked. Pacfic Avenue ran almost the length of town north to south. Start­ing at the Uni­ver­sity in the north sur­rounded by the doc­tors, lawyers, and other hang­ers on. Head­ing south it passed through 10 blocks of dark brick two-story neigh­bor­hood shops and bistros, then a bunch of post war bun­ga­lows and finally peter­ing out into a grimy com­mer­cial dis­trict full of elec­tri­cal sub­sta­tions, fas­ten­ing prod­uct dis­trib­u­tors, and small scale metal fab shops.
Three blocks from the big 3rd floor live/work space that Kam had been call­ing home for the last 7 years, he stopped out­side Sweet Licorice Vinyl and win­dow shopped the lat­est in 1980’s punk rock hits to have been acquired by the owner Buddy. Buddy’s dog Math­ias wan­dered out and nudged Kam’s leg with a sticky ten­nis ball.

“Not today old man. I’ve got work to do.”

Mat was hav­ing none of it. He dropped the ball into his water dish and shoved them over to in front of Kam’s foot.

“Come on dude. You try­ing to kill me?” Kam gave the bull­dog a scratch behind his floppy left ear.

“Math­ias Beau­re­gard…” Buddy’s voice warned through the open door. “Put your dish back.”

Mat ignored his owner’s demand and lum­bered back inside.

Kam laughed, waved at Buddy and walked on push­ing Matt’s dish along the side­walk to its spot under the downspout.

Kam had ramen noo­dles for din­ner. He hated to admit it but even now, when he was rarely short of money, ramen noo­dles were still the most com­fort­ing food he could think of an a driz­zly day. He car­ried his bowl over to his com­puter. So what now? Do the machines really never lie? What did it mean that he got someone’s name as a result?
Two hours later, he could find no exam­ple of a cause of death that couldn’t be explained away by some sort of con­vo­luted logic. Some real stretches but all of them seemed rea­son­able after a lit­tle thought. And in most cases the pre­dic­tions were not only accu­rate, but pretty straight for­ward. 10 years, noth­ing that was flat out wrong. Okay, so his man­ner of death was going to be Leonard Cohen.

Mur­der? Did the machine pre­dict mur­ders and name the killers? He looked up at the time 10:15. Time to call it off, he had real pay­ing work tomor­row.
As he drifted to sleep he thought “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”

#

Tues­day was a long day of tak­ing pic­tures of booze bot­tles with badly designed, cheaply printed labels and a client hold­ing up tear sheets of Ran­dall Schmidt’s award win­ning adver­tise­ments for The Irish Liquor Pro­duc­ers Board and that god awful Japan­ese gin.
By the time he got home at 7pm Kam had zero inter­est in start­ing to process the day’s images. Besides the art direc­tor from LA Col­lec­tive had already cho­sen the 6 he wanted to work with. But really, Kam thought to him­self. Two hours tonight and he’d be rid of the job for two weeks. And get­ting the proof sheets to the AD would put him over line for the 50% com­ple­tion payout.

11:25pm and he’d spent 15 min­utes on the client and almost three hours look­ing up cases of peo­ple who had got­ten names as Answers.
He now knew that names were uncom­mon but not unheard of results and that sev­eral peo­ple had dri­ven them­selves to dis­trac­tion in their search for the per­son they were sure would kill them. Two had died of exhaus­tion and one had been run over by his wife’s SUV when she dis­cov­ered that he was car­ry­ing on with a woman he had met while try­ing to dis­cover whether or not her 3 year-old daugh­ter was going to be the cause his death.

The short ver­sion, it didn’t hap­pen often, and despite a cou­ple of valiant tries by pros­e­cu­tors, the courts con­sis­tently ruled that a victim’s Answer nam­ing another per­son couldn’t be used as evi­dence in a mur­der trial. The machine was too often cryp­tic and had never given the unam­bigu­ous result “mur­dered by so-and-so.”

#

The loft was empty. Stacy had two more days work­ing on the voice-overs for the Children’s Hos­pi­tal giv­ing cam­paign and Scott had dis­ap­peared to god knows where to work on his screenplay.

Kam sat down at his desk and woke up the com­puter. He clicked over to the browser, typed Leonard Cohen in to the search box and pressed Enter.
The first 10 pages showed noth­ing but one poet. Accord­ing to Wikipedia a 76 year old Cana­dian who’d spent a num­ber of years as a Zen monk fail­ing, by his own admis­sion, to achieve enlight­en­ment only to reemerge into the world bank­rupt and in love. Kam watched a cou­ple of YouTube videos and rec­og­nized Hal­lelu­jah and a cover of Dance Me to the End of Love by Mis­stress Bar­bara. He tried again this time adding –poet. Pages and pages into the Google search results and Kam still was star­ing at an old man. He added to his grow­ing list of exclude words –singer, –monk, –song, –lyrics but the world was still all poet.

Stacy came home about 5pm. She hummed as she rus­tled around in the kitchen load­ing gro­ceries into the cupboards.

“Hey Kam, you hun­gry?” she asked “I’ve got falafel from Rudy’s and beer.” Get­ting no answer she opened a Fat Tire and walked across the loft to hand to Kam over his shoul­der.
“Oh, um, yeah I am.” Kam looked up at her. “And thanks for the beer.” He smiled.

“Leonard Cohen, rich stuff.” She pointed at a video on Kam’s mon­i­tor. “I liked that one a lot.” Kam clicked on Clos­ing Time and took a few swal­lows of the cold beer. He liked the look of it, dark, styl­ized, black and white, very smooth over the implied violence.

“What are you going to use it for?” Stacy asked.
Last sum­mer there had been a cam­paign for fruit fla­vored bub­ble gum that had come with a play-list of 50’s do-wop songs instead of a mood board. Songs that Kam had played over and over for the two weeks that it had taken him to shoot the images for three mag­a­zine spreads, a bill­board, and two bus wraps. He had nailed the mood; the cam­paign had been a huge suc­cess, with every­one. Every­one that is except with his room­mates.
“You know,” she reminded him. “I still can’t lis­ten to the Plat­ters or the Ink Spots, with­out see­ing that bil­ious green and orange packaging.”

“No, not work.” Kam hes­i­tated and then impul­sively handed over his Answer card.

Stacy fin­gered it, turned it over, turned it back, and turned it over again. “That’s weird.”

Stacy brought two falafels back from the kitchen, handed one to Kam and pulled up a sec­ond desk chair. Kam slid out of her way. Stacy was a genius at dig­ging through the detri­tus of the Inter­net. She pointed at his absurdly long search string.
“You could elim­i­nate half the dic­tio­nary and you’d still be get­ting Leonard Cohen videos and lyrics.”
“Try adding some­thing instead.” She cleared most of the search box. “Like…” she appended MD to the name. “Maybe some doc is going to botch an impor­tant operation.”

The results for ‘Leonard Cohen M.D.’ came up: an aller­gist in D.C., a urol­o­gist in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, and an ob/gyn in Hous­ton.
“That last one seems unlikely” she said. “Or you could try look­ing for some­one closer to home.”

She back­spaced over the MD and added their zip code instead. 21 results. Three of them seemed to referred to the same guy with a pen­chant for for­get­ting his own court dates.

“Oh great,” Kam said, “Some local two-bit is going to shoot me over my light­ing gear.”

Stacy clicked on the most recent link. Leonard P. Cohen, a 38 year-old tech­ni­cal writer who held that park­ing meters were an uncon­sti­tu­tional attempt to restrict access to pub­lic facil­i­ties, to wit the local streets, based on the abil­ity to pay and were noth­ing less than a mod­ern poll tax. The fact that he lived across from the court house, that the city had recently turned the sur­round­ing three blocks in to a 24/7 2-hour max­i­mum time park­ing zone, and that he didn’t want to pay his land­lord the extra $275/month for an off-street park­ing space didn’t fig­ure into the mat­ter in any way.
“Okay, an unlikely assailant.” Kam laughed.
“Or you could search by adding a mid­dle ini­tial. Like X.”
A cou­ple of dozen X-Factor results later and Stacy tried again. “How about adding some quotes ‘Leonard X. Cohen’”

Some guy who may have worked for a real estate com­pany, a chemist, and some­thing in French about the pro­ducer of Futu­rama.
“Alright, Futu­rama.” Kam cheered. “That’d be cool, to be knocked off by the pro­ducer of the most bril­liant car­toon in his­tory.”
“Except,” Stacy said, “that the pro­ducer of Futu­rama is David X. Cohen.”
“Drat”

Three beers, a sec­ond falafel sand­wich, and whole of lot Stacy’s excel­lent google-fu later it was clear the the Cana­dian poet was pretty much the entire world’s sup­ply of inter­est­ing Leonard Cohens.
“It could be worse” Stacy reas­sured him. “His stuff is pretty good. I have some if you want to read it.”
“Nah, I’ll just buy the album.” Kam grinned.
««»»

 

(This was my sub­mis­sion for the sec­ond Machine of Death vol­ume. Sadly not accepted. But you can read it here for free.)

The atten­dant held out the dis­tinc­tive yel­low and orange envelope.

“Thank you Mr. Su” he said cheer­fully as Kam took the enve­lope. “Have a nice day, Sir.”

Kam stepped out of the arcade into the Pacific Avenue rush. He squinted against the low Octo­ber after­noon sun. Damn, no sun­glasses.
He crossed the street to the new two-story Star­bucks and stood in line behind the usual col­lec­tion of black clad teenagers, under-employed hip­sters, and multi-level mar­keters in cheap sports coats. Kam stared at the logo on his enve­lope. A laugh­ably cheap image of crossed fin­gers on a back­ground of the ini­tials LD and the motto “Only Time Will Tell.” He flipped the enve­lope over and fin­gered the flap. Turned it back over and stared at the crossed fin­gers again. His brother had told him that the ini­tials LD stood for Lucky Dayz and that the com­pany that pro­duced the Answer­Ma­chine™ had orig­i­nally been in the busi­ness of man­u­fac­tur­ing claw crane games and bar-top slot machines. In fact the machine itself was orig­i­nally designed as a for­tune telling game called “How Shall I Die?” The designer had had the bril­liant idea of get­ting cryp­tic sound­ing answers by tak­ing ran­dom phrases from a live con­nec­tion to Wikipedia. Mar­ket­ing had loved the for­tune cookie vibe of the answers but had nixed the name in favor of the less def­i­nite Answer­Ma­chine™. Still ‘every­one’ knew that the machine only answered one ques­tion — How am I going to die? And ‘every­one’ knew that the machine was never wrong.

“Lucky Dayz. That’s rich.” he said aloud and then remem­bered he wasn’t alone.

He turned the enve­lope back over and slid his fin­ger under the flap. There were two pieces of paper. A closely printed double-sided “Guide to your Answer”. He ignored this and looked at the 3x5 card with it’s happy orange bor­der and the LD logo in the corner.

“Leonard Cohen?” it read. “What the fuck, they’ve given me some­one else’s results.”

He shoved the papers back into the enve­lope and stuffed it back into his mes­sen­ger bag, elbow­ing the man behind him in the process.

“Oh, sorry.” He apol­o­gized as he stepped up to the counter.

Amer­i­cano in hand Kam walked to the condi­ments bar to get half-n-half.  Wait­ing behind the goth girl adding four Splen­das to her soy latte, his curios­ity got the bet­ter of him and he dug the enve­lope out of his mes­sen­ger bag. As he pulled out the card the Guide fell to the floor. An older woman with lots of pre­cise spikes and angles in her gray hair stopped to pick it up for him. Hand­ing it over she stiff­ened when she saw the enve­lope in Kam’s hand.

“Super­sti­tious non­sense.” she mut­tered as she handed Kam the paper “I hope you’re not tak­ing this seri­ously.” She looked vaguely famil­iar.
It slowly dawned on Kam that this was Janet Roberts, a Cre­ative Direc­tor for Finch and Hat­ters­burg. He’d met her 3 months ago some­thing about tooth­paste he thought. He remem­bered the clas­sic Chanel suit in the big pink and black check. She’d eas­ily been the hippest per­son in the room; she was also the only one not try­ing.
“No ma’am.” Kam answered cha­grined at his meek­ness but too flus­tered to for­mu­late a more appro­pri­ate response.
Ms. Roberts scowl soft­ened a bit but not quite enough to make it into smile ter­ri­tory.
“LD is one of our clients. I was con­sid­er­ing show­ing them your work. You just might have the right not-too-threatening urban hip­ster vibe for them.”

“Thank you Ms. Roberts.” Kam said to the woman’s depart­ing back.

Well, that was either very good or very bad. But now to the mat­ter of the man­ner of Mr. Leonard Cohen’s death. He turned the slip over “Kam Su.”

“Okay…” he drawled. ”Do I have to say it again? What the fuck?” There must have been a print­ing mis­take. And poor Leo. He must have got­ten a report with two death pre­dic­tions. Pretty sad for $20. He stuffed the card into his pocket and left the instruc­tions and the enve­lope on the counter.

Nei­ther Stacy nor Scott was home when he got in. He dropped his keys in the brass bowl beside the door and enjoyed the clat­ter. Kam didn’t need room­mates to afford the loft any­more, but hav­ing grown up as the only child of very quiet par­ents he delighted in the con­stant com­pany of the foot­steps, mur­mur­ings, and rus­tle of other peo­ple liv­ing with him.

#

Ms. Roberts never called about LD or any other client. No sur­prise there, but Kam did score some work from another AD at Finch and Hat­ters­burg doing prod­uct shots for a new organic soda. He almost hadn’t taken the job afraid that with a 3rd bev­er­age shoot in a row he was becom­ing pigeon­holed as the king of sweaty cans. But the price was right.
There had to be a photo blue pen­cil some­where. Freak­ing back­wards print­ers, demand­ing markups and cut lines on hard copy. Why couldn’t they take a dig­i­tal file like every­one else? And they wanted three sizes too.
There you are damn it. He hauled the offend­ing pen­cil out of the back cor­ner of the drawer in tri­umph. In doing so he knocked his Answer­Ma­chine card out of its dusty spot next to the dou­ble sided tape.
“Heh,” he flipped it back and forth, enjoy­ing the play between the names. “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”
And some­how the ques­tion got stuck in his head, like a pop song ear-worm. A cou­ple of times a day he’d look up and think “I won­der what Leo is doing now?’ Until he started ask­ing the ques­tion out loud.

#

It had been driz­zling for three days and Kam was feel­ing grey, slow, and damp.He dropped by the offices of the North End Observer with the pho­tos he’d taken of his cousin’s band. It was their first review and Kam had agreed to comp some of the pic­tures from the last gig. It had stopped driz­zling about 20 min­utes ago and there was a weak attempt at sun­shine going on in the East­ern sky. Joy Machine Arcade. Kam stopped. He’d just got­ten the check for the Tony’s Soda shoot. There was eas­ily $20 in blow-it money in that one. And hell, “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”

So he went in.

He bought a token form the bored girl at the front desk.

The Answer­Ma­chine ™ was in the back cor­ner behind the dri­ving games.

The same atten­dant was sit­ting next to the machine. The kid took Kam’s token and indi­cated a stool at the counter. “Left or right handed?” Kam held out his right hand, the atten­dant wiped his mid­dle fin­ger with an alco­hol pad.

Kam placed his hand in the slot, with his mid­dle fin­ger between the guides and waited. The light next to his hand turned red and he flinched at the stab. Kam held still another minute until the light turned green and then pulled his hand back. The atten­dant handed him a bit of gauze to dab his fin­ger with and then a small bandaid. Kam couldn’t think of any­thing to say while they waited for the machine so he just sat on the stool. A cou­ple of min­utes later there was the unmis­tak­able sound of a ink-jet print head rat­tling back and forth.

The machine spit out the card and the atten­dant put it into a pre­pared enve­lope and sealed it. Kam took it and ripped an end off of it.

“Um,” the atten­dant started. “We sug­gest that you open your Answer in the pri­vacy of your own home.”

“Don’t worry kiddo, I’m not going to freak out right here on the carpet.”

Badly stained car­pet at that. Pulling the card out, Kam dropped the guide to the floor. ‘Kam Su’ it read on the front. Well at least they got his name right. He flipped the card. ‘Leonard Cohen’

“What the fuck?”

The atten­dant started to get off his stool, a lit­tle crease of con­cern mark­ing his fore­head. Kam shoved the card at him.

“This is twice that damned machine has screwed up.”

The boy backed away from him, refus­ing to touch the card. “No, Sir. The machine never…” he stopped. “Did you say again?”

Kam nod­ded.

“We don’t sug­gest retest­ing. The results never change, you’re only caus­ing your­self more concern.”

“But my card has two names on it.” Kam said, “Mine and some guy named Leonard Cohen.”

The boy shifted.

“Some guy who’s con­fused as hell because he got a card with two results.” Kam continued.

The kid stalled out, look­ing as if like he was watch­ing video on the back of his own forehead.

“If the cus­tomer receives a result with a proper name reas­sure them by remind­ing them that results are often cryp­tic and that the pres­ence of a name does not reveal how that per­son might be involved in the customer’s death.”

Kam looked at the kid. He’s recit­ing the man­ual at me?

“The name of a per­son as a result can mean many things. Do not assume that your first impres­sion is the cor­rect one.” The boy par­roted. “Only Time Will Tell.”

The boy reached to the counter behind him and picked up another set of Guide to Your Results.

“If you are trou­bled by your results we urge you to speak to a coun­selor at one of the help lines listed in the brochure you received with your card.” Kam noted the ris­ing panic in the young man’s voice.

“It’s okay…” he looked at the kid’s apron. “…Todd. I’m not going to go bal­lis­tic. But you should call your boss and tell him that there’s some­thing wrong with this machine.”

“It was checked last week. You know, paper restock and ink refill, run the diag­nos­tics.” Todd warmed to talk­ing about the machine rather than Kam’s answer.
“I watched it all very care­fully.” Todd swal­lowed ner­vously. I applied to be get into the train­ing pro­gram to be a tech. Did you know that they get 80 hours of paid vaca­tion a year? And 25 of sick leave? It’s a real job …”
Kam stopped and really looked at the kid. 23? 24? and work­ing for min­i­mum wage as an arcade atten­dant. And wear­ing a thin gold band on the third fin­ger of his, Kam did the men­tal flip, yup, left hand.

“Hey. Good luck with that.” Kam smiled at him.

“Thanks.” Todd said, relieved that Kam wasn’t going to pur­sue the bro­ken machine discussion.

Kam checked his watch, 2:45. If he didn’t daw­dle there was just enough day­light to walk home. Nor­mally he’d catch a bus, but today, just because the chance was so rare in Novem­ber he walked. Pacfic Avenue ran almost the length of town north to south. Start­ing at the Uni­ver­sity in the north sur­rounded by the doc­tors, lawyers, and other hang­ers on. Head­ing south it passed through 10 blocks of dark brick two-story neigh­bor­hood shops and bistros, then a bunch of post war bun­ga­lows and finally peter­ing out into a grimy com­mer­cial dis­trict full of elec­tri­cal sub­sta­tions, fas­ten­ing prod­uct dis­trib­u­tors, and small scale metal fab shops.
Three blocks from the big 3rd floor live/work space that Kam had been call­ing home for the last 7 years, he stopped out­side Sweet Licorice Vinyl and win­dow shopped the lat­est in 1980’s punk rock hits to have been acquired by the owner Buddy. Buddy’s dog Math­ias wan­dered out and nudged Kam’s leg with a sticky ten­nis ball.

“Not today old man. I’ve got work to do.”

Mat was hav­ing none of it. He dropped the ball into his water dish and shoved them over to in front of Kam’s foot.

“Come on dude. You try­ing to kill me?” Kam gave the bull­dog a scratch behind his floppy left ear.

“Math­ias Beau­re­gard…” Buddy’s voice warned through the open door. “Put your dish back.”

Mat ignored his owner’s demand and lum­bered back inside.

Kam laughed, waved at Buddy and walked on push­ing Matt’s dish along the side­walk to its spot under the downspout.

Kam had ramen noo­dles for din­ner. He hated to admit it but even now, when he was rarely short of money, ramen noo­dles were still the most com­fort­ing food he could think of an a driz­zly day. He car­ried his bowl over to his com­puter. So what now? Do the machines really never lie? What did it mean that he got someone’s name as a result?
Two hours later, he could find no exam­ple of a cause of death that couldn’t be explained away by some sort of con­vo­luted logic. Some real stretches but all of them seemed rea­son­able after a lit­tle thought. And in most cases the pre­dic­tions were not only accu­rate, but pretty straight for­ward. 10 years, noth­ing that was flat out wrong. Okay, so his man­ner of death was going to be Leonard Cohen.

Mur­der? Did the machine pre­dict mur­ders and name the killers? He looked up at the time 10:15. Time to call it off, he had real pay­ing work tomor­row.
As he drifted to sleep he thought “I won­der what Leo is doing right now?”

#

Tues­day was a long day of tak­ing pic­tures of booze bot­tles with badly designed, cheaply printed labels and a client hold­ing up tear sheets of Ran­dall Schmidt’s award win­ning adver­tise­ments for The Irish Liquor Pro­duc­ers Board and that god awful Japan­ese gin.
By the time he got home at 7pm Kam had zero inter­est in start­ing to process the day’s images. Besides the art direc­tor from LA Col­lec­tive had already cho­sen the 6 he wanted to work with. But really, Kam thought to him­self. Two hours tonight and he’d be rid of the job for two weeks. And get­ting the proof sheets to the AD would put him over line for the 50% com­ple­tion payout.

11:25pm and he’d spent 15 min­utes on the client and almost three hours look­ing up cases of peo­ple who had got­ten names as Answers.
He now knew that names were uncom­mon but not unheard of results and that sev­eral peo­ple had dri­ven them­selves to dis­trac­tion in their search for the per­son they were sure would kill them. Two had died of exhaus­tion and one had been run over by his wife’s SUV when she dis­cov­ered that he was car­ry­ing on with a woman he had met while try­ing to dis­cover whether or not her 3 year-old daugh­ter was going to be the cause his death.

The short ver­sion, it didn’t hap­pen often, and despite a cou­ple of valiant tries by pros­e­cu­tors, the courts con­sis­tently ruled that a victim’s Answer nam­ing another per­son couldn’t be used as evi­dence in a mur­der trial. The machine was too often cryp­tic and had never given the unam­bigu­ous result “mur­dered by so-and-so.”

#

The loft was empty. Stacy had two more days work­ing on the voice-overs for the Children’s Hos­pi­tal giv­ing cam­paign and Scott had dis­ap­peared to god knows where to work on his screenplay.

Kam sat down at his desk and woke up the com­puter. He clicked over to the browser, typed Leonard Cohen in to the search box and pressed Enter.
The first 10 pages showed noth­ing but one poet. Accord­ing to Wikipedia a 76 year old Cana­dian who’d spent a num­ber of years as a Zen monk fail­ing, by his own admis­sion, to achieve enlight­en­ment only to reemerge into the world bank­rupt and in love. Kam watched a cou­ple of YouTube videos and rec­og­nized Hal­lelu­jah and a cover of Dance Me to the End of Love by Mis­stress Bar­bara. He tried again this time adding –poet. Pages and pages into the Google search results and Kam still was star­ing at an old man. He added to his grow­ing list of exclude words –singer, –monk, –song, –lyrics but the world was still all poet.

Stacy came home about 5pm. She hummed as she rus­tled around in the kitchen load­ing gro­ceries into the cupboards.

“Hey Kam, you hun­gry?” she asked “I’ve got falafel from Rudy’s and beer.” Get­ting no answer she opened a Fat Tire and walked across the loft to hand to Kam over his shoul­der.
“Oh, um, yeah I am.” Kam looked up at her. “And thanks for the beer.” He smiled.

“Leonard Cohen, rich stuff.”  She pointed at a video on Kam’s mon­i­tor. “I liked that one a lot.” Kam clicked on Clos­ing Time and took a few swal­lows of the cold beer. He liked the look of it, dark, styl­ized, black and white, very smooth over the implied violence.

“What are you going to use it for?” Stacy asked.
Last sum­mer there had been a cam­paign for fruit fla­vored bub­ble gum that had come with a play-list of 50’s do-wop songs instead of a mood board. Songs that Kam had played over and over for the two weeks that it had taken him to shoot the images for three mag­a­zine spreads, a bill­board, and two bus wraps. He had nailed the mood; the cam­paign had been a huge suc­cess, with every­one. Every­one that is except with his room­mates.
“You know,” she reminded him. “I still can’t lis­ten to the Plat­ters or the Ink Spots, with­out see­ing that bil­ious green and orange packaging.”

“No, not work.” Kam hes­i­tated and then impul­sively handed over his Answer card.

Stacy fin­gered it, turned it over, turned it back, and turned it over again.  “That’s weird.”

Stacy brought two falafels back from the kitchen, handed one to Kam and pulled up a sec­ond desk chair. Kam slid out of her way. Stacy was a genius at dig­ging through the detri­tus of the Inter­net. She pointed at his absurdly long search string.
“You could elim­i­nate half the dic­tio­nary and you’d still be get­ting Leonard Cohen videos and lyrics.”
“Try adding some­thing instead.” She cleared most of the search box. “Like…” she appended MD to the name. “Maybe some doc is going to botch an impor­tant operation.”

The results for ‘Leonard Cohen M.D.’ came up: an aller­gist in D.C., a urol­o­gist in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, and an ob/gyn in Hous­ton.
“That last one seems unlikely” she said. “Or you could try look­ing for some­one closer to home.”

She back­spaced over the MD and added their zip code instead. 21 results. Three of them seemed to referred to the same guy with a pen­chant for for­get­ting his own court dates.

“Oh great,” Kam said, “Some local two-bit is going to shoot me over my light­ing gear.”

Stacy clicked on the most recent link. Leonard P. Cohen, a 38 year-old tech­ni­cal writer who held that park­ing meters were an uncon­sti­tu­tional attempt to restrict access to pub­lic facil­i­ties, to wit the local streets, based on the abil­ity to pay and were noth­ing less than a mod­ern poll tax. The fact that he lived across from the court house, that the city had recently turned the sur­round­ing three blocks in to a 24/7 2-hour max­i­mum time park­ing zone, and that he didn’t want to pay his land­lord the extra $275/month for an off-street park­ing space didn’t fig­ure into the mat­ter in any way.
“Okay, an unlikely assailant.” Kam laughed.
“Or you could search by adding a mid­dle ini­tial. Like X.”
A cou­ple of dozen X-Factor results later and Stacy tried again. “How about adding some quotes ‘Leonard X. Cohen’”

Some guy who may have worked for a real estate com­pany, a chemist, and some­thing in French about the pro­ducer of Futu­rama.
“Alright, Futu­rama.” Kam cheered. “That’d be cool, to be knocked off by the pro­ducer of the most bril­liant car­toon in his­tory.”
“Except,” Stacy said, “that the pro­ducer of Futu­rama is David X. Cohen.”
“Drat”

Three beers, a sec­ond falafel sand­wich, and whole of lot Stacy’s excel­lent google-fu later it was clear the the Cana­dian poet was pretty much the entire world’s sup­ply of inter­est­ing Leonard Cohens.
“It could be worse” Stacy reas­sured him. “His stuff is pretty good. I have some if you want to read it.”
“Nah, I’ll just buy the album.” Kam grinned.
««»»

 

(This was my sub­mis­sion for the sec­ond Machine of Death vol­ume. Sadly not accepted. But you can read it here for free.)