The Gray Machine

Tapes, Summons

July 4th, 2032 – a clear afternoon on a motor boat on the Sea of Cortez. Jasmine Woods sat alone, gazing up into a deep blue sky.

"A pale, ratty, lonely girl dreaming," Jasmine told herself. Una desperada, on the edge of nothing, adrift off the shores of a desert that might has well have been Mars. Living in a world and a family divided. Nothing to get excited about." She thought of her once almost-lover Ray, in a frozen field in Ukraine or Kazakhstan... fighting. Awkward, graceful, sensitive Ray Sohal, the only real friend with whom she'd ever connected...

Jasmine pulled out her ancient boxy cassette recorder, trying to ignore the sound of it scraping against the zipper of her denim backpack, and hit the red button that opened the door to another kind of infinity. Stories beat out the small agonies of days. The horrible sound people's shoes made as they walked, the echo of people itching themselves, the smell of people who'd smoked for too many years, the way grocery stores reeked of old milk.

Stories were Jasmine's only hope. By the time she'd become a teenager in old Waypoint High, West Wendover, Nevada, she'd realized it wasn't like this for everyone. Every little thing didn't grate on them like a pair of symbols behind their head. But by then she'd withdrawn into herself. And there were worlds upon worlds inside—endless, swirling, but most of all, smooth.

"Why do you read so much?" Ray had asked once, riding along as her guest on a family road trips across the border. That short special summer with Ray, they'd rode in parade of station wagons and Winnebagos redefining the art of the hot mess. "You want drama? Look out the damn window."

"See, the problem with real life," Jasmine had said, trying to ignore her aunt Debby wiping cheese puffs off her yoga pants, "is that it's the same story, over and over."

And so today like all days, she'd been dictating to fill the lonely hours, to avoid the nonsense until evening kicked in.

"...and because I want to be an author," Jasmine now told her recorder in a wistful voice. "I want to live in the top story of a New York brownstone and stare from my chaise lounge out at the rain drizzling down through the great gray city. I'll have several relationships – men and women from Milan or Tokyo or Lagos, and we'll argue about postmodernism and whether we're happy. I'll sit studio under an Andy Warhol print of myself and sip cold black coffee, and write stories about authors, who write stories about aliens, living amongst us... but the author in my stories will realize the characters she's writing about are real, and New York is full of aliens, and maybe she's the only human left."

Her Ego, which she'd put to sleep enough to let her enjoy the sky, asked in a convivial female voice for the seventh time that afternoon if she meant to have her memo recorder on.

"No, no, no! Just leave me the fuck alone!"

"Working –" it said, unfazed by her temper.

"Off. Sleep. Go to sleep."

It finally acquiesced.

Jasmine had begged for the Ego since turning twelve, and immediately gotten sick of it. All of that saccharine helpfulness and bland consumerist fluff. It came in handy now and then—so much porn!—but the tape deck fit her better. It was older than her by twenty years at least, its vintage metal case dented and scratched, and the weight of it in her hands felt electrifying. The dial let you slow it down so that the playback became a demonic growl, or speed it up to an assaulting metallic screech, a crispy broadcast from the end of time. The smallest rustles of clothing and uncontrolled exhales became nightmarish howls and shrieks of radiation mutants. In other words, it had a secret power: to make everyone experience the little things the way she did.