The Bicycle Messenger

Johnny Smith

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Johnny Smith

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1983.

I woke groggily and reached for the bottle of water. Sunlight burnt down through the metal slats of the mini-blinds onto the pockmarked tatami floor. I could hear the yakiimo truck selling steamed sweet potato in the park. Its ice cream truck like chant seemed higher pitched than normal and scratched at my head after each permutation. The digital alarm clock read 9:09 AM. Three hours until work. I took a gulp of water, flicked on the television and tried to shake off the thick film of jack-and-coke that was wound tightly around my head.

The Solar Report was on. A gaunt, pale man with disheveled hair and thin, wire-framed glasses was talking in rapid-fire Japanese. A large pulsing animation of the sun glowed behind him. The button-nosed female host, cute and small breasted, asked him polite questions in an affected, high-pitched voice. The pale man would pause in thought for a heartbeat, then plunge again into his explanations at breakneck speed, gesturing wildly at the screen behind him where huge solar flares now flicked out of the sun's corona like thick plasma tentacles flailing into space. The sun was a giant, bloated octopus in its death throes at the center of the cosmos, its trailing tendrils lashing at the planets.

The grotesque image and the booze floating around in my gut were enough to raise greasy bile in the back of my throat and send me running to toilet to heave out the whole of my insides.

By the time I finished puking, the Solar Report was thankfully over, replaced with three young women in volleyball uniforms leading a horde of elderly health enthusiasts in low-impact aerobics. Wiping my mouth on the collar of my shirt, I flopped heavily down on the futon and checked the text messages on my mobile. Two from Caroline and one from Kenji.

Caroline: “get home safe? call me”

Caroline: “call me when you wake up. i wanna talk.”

Kenji: “only 419 yrs and 6 days left til the world ends! hahaha!”

****

The New Scientists say the Earth has 8000 to 10000 years left. The Heidelberg Revisionists claim that we have at least 20000 years, and the Classicists argue that it's as high as 30000 or more. They are all wrong; the Earth has only 419 years left before the burgeoning outer layers of the sun turn our planet and most of the inner solar system into little more than spinning cinders. 419 years and 6 days to be precise.

When Helios I transmitted back its data analysis on helium abundance in the sun, the researchers assumed that the intense magnetic fields emanating from the solar winds must have somehow damaged the probe's sensors. A second probe was sent, Helios II. It returned the same exact measurements, and the world went into a panic.

I was only five at the time, but I vividly remember the news broadcast. Walter Cronkite's thin strands of grey hair, his dark suit and blue tie. His jowls quivered as he spoke and the loose flesh under his chin bobbed up and down in a steady rhythm as he announced that the sun was at least 4 billion years older than originally believed and near the end of its life.

The chart behind him illustrated the life cycle of stars, of their movement on and off the main sequence, of how they survived by fusing hydrogen into helium thereby warding off gravitational collapse. He further explained that after billions of years and with its fuel supply nearly depleted, the outer layers of the sun would begin their own fusion reactions, puffing the star up to thousands of times its current size, engulfing Mercury and turning our own planet into an ashen desert. The seas would boil and the atmosphere would be burnt away. All life would perish.

“This will be the end of the world,” Cronkite's calming voice cracked slightly as he ended the broadcast. By the next week, every person on the planet understood the complexities of stellar evolution.

The chaos of the following decade was predictable. Rioting, looting, hysteria. Religious conversions, zealotry, persecutions. Murder, suicide, genocide. Pervasive terror, desperation, and hopelessness. Martial law was declared in every country.

And then, it all subsided, like the rolling back of some terrible tide. As mankind accepted its fate, the terror was replaced by malaise and stagnation. While government task forces worked frantically on the Solar Problem, society, eroded and weak, slowly and steadily crumbled away.

Kenji and I often talked about the 10 years after the announcement. As a member of the Church of Truthful Rites, he had strong convictions. He believed that the troubles of that decade were a time of testing. We had to prove our worthiness to God, he told me. Did we, I asked. He wasn't sure.

He drove the #130 bus that looped around the city. There were more than thirty stops on the route, but no one ever got on. Nonetheless, everyday Kenji dutifully stopped at each empty bus shelter and waited the requisite 30 seconds before proceeding to his next stop. A lot of jobs were like that now. Clerks in shops where no one made a purchase; garbage trucks that collected nothing but empty bins; chefs in restaurants cooking meals that were never eaten. The central government paid the wages. It gave people something to do, gave them purpose. Kenji was proud of having never once been late to a stop.

Sometimes I rode with him. The front of the bus was fitted with a rack for my bike. After securing it tightly to the grill as quickly as possible, I would hop into the already moving vehicle, Kenji being in a hurry to make up the lost time. The streets on his route were always devoid of any signs of life. After the announcement, people gravitated to the city centers, crowding in on each other. They lived three and four families to a single apartment. It was as if we were fearful that our cities, like the sun, would soon begin to slough its outermost layers into the bleakness of space.

Those who stayed on the outskirts were simply lost or disappeared, and the buildings there artifacts of a city abandoned by civilization, perfectly preserved as if waiting some alien anthropologist to try and determine their function. I often imagined them tentacled and multi-eyed intently studying a child's stuffed bear, wondering if it held some religious significance. Sometimes I imagined them comically stumbling into Sam's Sex Emporium and Adult Novelties. Kenji thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

“Imagine what they would make of pocket pussies,” he said howling with laughter.

I had told Kenji that the sun would go red giant in only 419 years.

“Bullshit,” he responded simply. “How do you know?” And I told him about being a bicycle messenger.

Weaving through the gridlocked streets or dodging in and out of sidewalks clogged with people is an instinct. It is a three-dimensional awareness of space and situation and in a second projecting it all forward into the future. Air traffic controllers called it having the flick. A van pulls out of a blind alley. A taxi changes lanes suddenly. City buses scream past. Pedestrians stroll. Red light. Green light. Stop, go.

When you first start riding, it’s slow. You pick your way through the cars and crowds carefully like a cautious old man. Then you start to extend your line. You don’t see yourself where you are, but where you will be in 5 seconds. Then 10 seconds. 20. The longer you spend on the bike, the further down the line you project yourself. As I speed down the footpaths and streets of Namba and Shinsaibashi, my vision becomes a narrowed, unending striation of the way ahead, threading the tangles of people and traffic. As long as I follow the delineation, I glide through the city. I don’t deviate off my line, and it is a golden path pulling me inexorably forward.

“So what the hell does that have to do with the sun going red,” Kenji asked. And here is what I had difficulty explaining.

“Bike messengers see the way ahead as a line and project themselves down that line. Lines are one-dimensional extents that are without depth or breadth, extending infinitely. And I can see infinitely down its entire length. When I ride, I see the future.”

“Bullshit,” Kenji chortled. “I drive a bus with no one on it,” he mocked. “I drive around and around the city. When I drive the bus, I see the future, and it's a big ass circle!”

“No, you aren't getting it,” I told him. I tried to explain again. “To ride through this city without getting killed you have to be able to see what's going to happen before it happens. Or you get hit by bus.”

“Too right,” he jabbed. I ignored him.

“It's just that I can see a lot farther than just what's in front of me.”

Kenji eyed me sidelong for a second then burst into laughter again.

“So, tell me, Nostradamus, what's going to happen five minutes from now?”

“It doesn't work like that. I can only see down the line. Every point I'd pass through on the bike, if I just kept riding. And the line stops in 419 years and it's going to be very balmy.” I glanced at Kenji expectantly, hoping he'd laugh at the joke.

“That's some of the craziest shit I've ever heard come out of you,” he said, laughing so hard he could hardly drive.

****

I didn't talk to Kenji for 2 weeks after our conversation until he called to tell me that the Church of Truthful Rites had declared me an iconoclast and ask if I wanted to go out for a beer on Friday. He said he felt bad about the declaration. I told him not to worry about it and I'd see him on Friday.

That night I don't sleep. I open a bottle of scotch and sit on my balcony waiting for the sun. The cool winter air set a dull ache in my jaw. And I drink more to ease the pain and warm my gut. Fourteen floors down, the first trickles of the day's traffic begin their crawl across the city, the acrid wisps of exhaust and diesel snaking up from the street. Then the warm glow of dawn creeps between the buildings.

I don't go into work today. I go downstairs to the bike and ride west. The sun an angry god chasing me through the streets. I see the future stretch out before me. I know that somewhere down that line, I am going to die. And somewhere not too much farther down, so will everyone else.

If you liked this, look for other stories from the Bicycle Messenger’s world at Smashwords. You can also find Johnny at Timekeeping on Mars.

Johnny Smith's favorite pastimes are slouching and glaring menacingly at teenagers. As a native-born Texan, he possesses a mean mosey but also has a well developed stroll and saunter. This year he plans to branch out into the areas of ambling and trudging.