The Die-Fi Experiment Page 2

  Marie went to Japan to volunteer at a hospital whilst earning credits. My internship with a construction firm kept me busy enough to survive being away from her.

  Those four months felt eternal and blurry. Thanks to Facebook, we left silly messages and videos of our daily lives to experience them together, digitally.

  My tips from the pub and eatery stacked as I covered as many shifts possible for the politically correct affirmation of love, the engagement ring. Apparently, punching someone in the face isn’t enough anymore. Now, we sustain life dragging us around while we update our relationship status monthly: In a relationship; single; it’s complicated. The amount of likes and hearts we receive proving the worth of our relationships or breakups.

  My relationship with Marie blossomed into joint Facebook and Instagram accounts.

  We Skyped no less than twice every weekend. My nights were her days, and vice-versa. That came to an end the day she returned to me.

  ***

  The airport buzzed with activity the day of her return. Dressed in a black suit and a chauffer’s hat, my skin tingled as I pictured her bright eyes and goofy chuckle once she’d see me. The plastic seats numbed my ass. Two cardboard signs propped against my knees bounced as my feet rattled, jittery with anticipation.

  The large flight-screen kept me focused until it finally displayed Marie’s flight had landed. The stained carpet became my own personal treadmill as I paced back and forth. My phone continuously lighting up as I counted the minutes.

  The screen flipped and said Marie’s flight was disembarking.

  Knowing Marie still had to go to baggage claim, I took post near the exit to the loading area like a hired chauffer would. Motionless as a gargoyle, I held the cardboard signs tight against my chest. The one in front emblazoned with ‘MARIE’. The rear pocket to my rented suit bulged against my buttock with the gift I had crammed in there.

  Passengers filed out from the escalator which came from the baggage claim. Marie’s smile lit the whole airport as she descended the mechanical steps. My chest sledgehammered by my nervous heartbeat as she floated downward like my angel arriving from Japanese Heaven. Still, I remained motionless, my face free of emotion as if I were truly a chauffeur.

  Marie clunked off the escalator, wheeling her luggage and carrying multiple bags, even more than she had left with in the first place. She laughed at my attire as I had imagined she would. Feet away from me, she stopped and dropped her bags. She clutched some a rolled up poster board in her hands, running to me, kissing me. Her poster and my signs squeezed between us, caught within our affection. Four eternal months I had waited for her embrace.

  My heart raced to show her the second sign.

  She released her grip on me, bringing her own sign up for me to see.

  “I’M 4 MONTHS PREGNANT!!” it said. Tears flowed from her eyes by then.

  Mine followed suit. Seizing the perfect opportunity, I released the sign with her name, keeping a grip on the one behind it.

  “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” it read. With my left hand, I reached back and pulled a small jewelry box out from my rear pocket and knelt down on my right knee. The second sign flopped to the floor as I released it, bringing the jewelry box up and opening it for Marie to see.

  Her shout caught the attention of everyone around us as she tackled me to the ground.

  “We’re getting married!” she screeched.

  “We’re having a baby!” I screeched.

  Half embarrassed, I scanned the audience we had before us. All of them with their phones out, recording. A few of them ceased recording as soon as they realized what we had shouted. Disappointed, as if expecting an assault to upload onto Facebook, they walked away. The rest of them cheered and whispered to each other how this should be a hit on Instagram.

  #airportmarriageproposal #cutecouple #alwaysthebridesmaidneverthebride

  Graduation was a couple of weeks after. We had made plans to have dinner with both pairs her parents and mine the same night.

  The announcement of our engagement earned us over one hundred likes and hearts and shares on Facebook. On the way to dinner, Facebook was diluted with graduation selfies and family group shots.

  We met our parents at a steakhouse. They received us with appetizer platters and celebratory drinks, a water for Marie, of course. Once our entrees arrived, we all snapped photos of our meals and drinks. Then, in the newly acquired tradition, we stopped our conversations and uploaded them to our social media accounts, showing off our bourgeois lives.

  My future father-in-law excused himself to the restroom, staring into his phone’s screen the entire way. Even as he exited the men’s room, his face illuminated with the lit up by it.

  Watching him return from the restroom reminds me of a recent Facebook post of a government study. The caption had captivated me, ‘How Shitty Is Your Phone?’

  I embraced my curiosity and followed the link. The article explained some governmental scientists set out to analyze how much feces spread with the arrival of the Toilet/Social Media infusion. They learned 75% of mobile phone owners used their phone while on the toilet. A subsequent study showed one out of six smart-phones had traces of fecal matter.

  With 7.4 billion people in the world, assuming they all have mobile phones—infants and toddlers included—this calculates to roughly 1.2 billion of them having traces of feces on their phones. At least 1.2 billion shitty phones are out there, pressed against faces, handed to each other to show a hilarious video. That’s a lot of fecal matter. Enough to disturb me the day I read it to the point of placing my phone on the bathroom counter, wiping myself, flushing the toilet, then scrubbing my hands red.

  Thank you, Facebook, for that scientific tidbit.

  And there I was with my fiancée and both sets of our parents, uploading our entrees with our shitty phones.

  After finishing our meals, Marie ran to the restroom, returning quickly with her face flushed. Her lips warm against my ear lobe, she informed me her period had started and needed me to run to the convenient store.

  I did.

  Just as flushed with embarrassment as Marie, I paid for her tampons and headed back to the steakhouse. A recent fun fact I learned from a Twitter post is the word ‘tampon’ derives from the French ‘tampion’, meaning: a piece of cloth meant to plug a hole.

  Thank you, Twitter, for that lovely piece of information.

  The restaurant’s parking lot glowed with the flashing lights of an ambulance, a firetruck, and a police squad car. This forced me to park slightly further than I had cared to.

  Walking up to the entrance, the doors swung open and a gurney was wheeled out. Laying on it, in a lethargic-fetal position: Marie.

  Her period was aggressive, her bleeding flowed violently. She screamed, the cramps nothing like she had felt before. At the hospital we learned what was supposed to be a great night—a celebration of our graduation, engagement, and pregnancy—had turned into the worst night we could have imagined.

  Marie had miscarried our unborn child.

  Both sets of our parents left us alone to grieve together.

  Marie turned and said to me, “Any money we have, let’s use it and leave town. A vacation or something.”

  “No,” I replied. “Not unless we get married first.”

  Her tear streaked cheeks stretched into a smile. “Okay, but right away. Tomorrow. By ourselves. I just want to be with you. Nobody needs to know about this until we get back. We’ll search for tickets right after we get married.”

  “Okay. A shotgun wedding deserves a shotgun honeymoon.” We both choked out a somber chuckle.

  “Okay,” she said. “But like I said, we do this alone. The honeymoon too. We can brag and post about it once we return.”

  “Sure, love. But do you have anywhere in mind you’d like to go?”

  “Yes. I’d like to show you Tokyo.”

  #chapterfive

  Out of all four of us contestants, the two playing the game and the two of us stra
pped to chairs and locked in boxes, I was the only one left unscathed at the commencement of the second challenge.

  The Italian man had won the first challenge, yet was tasered unconscious and the woman boxed in across from me lost her thumb.

  Marie had her hand smashed and I remained strapped with only numbness to complain of.

  While the male geishas left the stage, stagehands worked on the Italian’s consciousness, the cameras switched to a brief recap of the events which had taken place.

  The challenge which caused so much pain and so many tears: The Welcome Post. The contestants were handed mobile phones to post a tweet. A grammatically correct sentence ran across the large screen at the rear end of the set. The task: fit the sentence into a one hundred and forty character tweet, no less, and no hash-tags.

  Through subtitles, the geisha host explained, “The winner receives no pain, but a faceless teammate—shown strapped to a chair—would be the one to receive the punishment. The loser will also experience misery. Only the winner and the loser’s anonymous worthless teammate will remain free of punishment.”

  Marie cried as she punched buttons on the touch screen and ran away from the anvil.

  The hosts laughed as one of the audience members stepped out with their arm crooked out to the side, catching Marie directly in the throat.

  Her body made a wet, slapping noise as she landed on her back, choking for air.

  One of the geisha men grabbed her phone and tossed it to the host who then shuffled toward the nearest camera, his geisha bun bouncing the whole way. What he showed to the viewers, what popped up on the big screen for the live audience to see, she had dialed 9-1-1.

  He laughed and shouted, the subtitles saying, “This is Japan! Wrong number and no signal anyway! Only Wi-Fi!” The host shouted, laughing. “Next time somebody attempts a stupid act as to escape or interfere with the progress of the show, they will be put to nap.”

  My wife crawled back to the large, black anvil where the Italian man waited patiently, eyes wide and glossy with tears.

  The screen behind them brightened and exhibited their phrase.

  “I would like to welcome the world to The Die-Fi Experiment. Please join us in the fun that is the deterioration of the world by means of social media.” One-hundred and fifty characters. Ten too many.

  Two different camera angles were busy giving close ups on both contestants screens.

  Marie’s scraggly fingers fumbled the letters as if they were in cursive, her wedding ring shimmering under the stage lights. The delete button became her demise.

  The Italian man’s stubby fingertips moved across his phone’s screen swiftly, typing the whole phrase out correctly, then making the edits.

  In no time, he tweeted, “I’d like 2 welcome the wrld 2 the die-fi experiment. Please join us in the fun thats the deterioration of the wrld by means of social media.” One-hundred and forty characters. Perfect.

  The samurais jumped and cheered.

  Marie cried as a samurai grasped her hand without hesitation, tugging her and placing it onto the anvil, holding it there, sustaining his strength against her resistance.

  The Italian man’s face covered in droplets of tears and sweat like a rotting flower with morning dew.

  As the miniature sledgehammer landed upon Marie’s hands, they cut back to the live-stream, bringing the live audience and the internet viewers across the web back to the show.

  The geishas no longer geishas, they were dressed as babies. Bonnets covered their heads. A necklace with a pacifier straddled their necks. They were barefooted and close to naked, save for the oversized cloth diapers they wore.

  Marie and her opponent sat in small chairs on either side of the anvil. The man-baby host shouted into the cameras. The subtitles shot across the screen in front of me. The next task: The Hairball Challenge.

  A man-baby snuck out from behind the large screen in the background. The diapered man wheeled a cart across the stage and stopped next to the anvil. A clear tube the length of a ten gallon fish tank sat on top. The tube was held midair horizontally, propped up by a plastic stand on either side.

  Marie and her opponent stared at the screen behind them, reading the subtitles as the man-baby host shouted.

  “The Hairball Challenge will leave somebody here speechless. The goal is to blow this hairball through the tube and into their opponent’s mouth.”

  The man-baby host held up a ball of what appeared as matted grey hair for the camera, displaying it to the audience and viewers.

  The subtitles read, “As to where we found this beautiful little hairball, well, that’s the least of their worries.”

  The audience laughed.

  The man-baby laughed.

  A screenshot of a twitter post popped up on the bottom left corner of the screen: @allybobbler tweeted, “I can’t believe I’m watching this…#awesome #lovethecosplay #thediefiexperiment”

  #fuckmylife #somebodyhelpus #please

  The bottom of the screen displayed a running ticker. 1.7k thumbs up. 1.3k wow-faces. 435 laughing-faces. 288 angry-faces. 29 hearts. All on the rise.

  The man-baby host placed the hairball in the tube, and with some sort of oversized chopstick, shoved it to the center.

  The Italian man cried and placed his beet-red lips over his end of the tube.

  Marie cried and shook her head.

  One of the subordinate man-babies grabbed a fistful of Marie’s hair, jerking her mouth into her end of the tube.

  Her upper lip broke out into a bloody drip from the impact. She wrapped her lips around the tube accordingly, blood drizzling the inside of her end of the clear tube.

  The hairball danced around in the center with the contestant’s sobbing.

  The man-baby host placed his hand over the tubed hairball, smiled at the camera, then jerked his hand away in a street race fashion.

  In an instant, both Marie and the Italian man blew mightily. Both of their bloodshot eyes stretched open with their force.

  The hairball hesitated in the center of the tube, moving back and forth no more than an inch. Either end of the tube fogged over with the contestant’s warm breaths.

  The Italian’s nostrils flared as he took a breath and blew again.

  Marie’s eyes locked in a terrified gaze, veins enflamed and reddened. Even on the screen, I could see her pupils dilated from her surge of adrenaline.

  Both contestants competing to avoid punishment, fighting to inflict agony on the other, as well as their faceless ally. In Marie’s case, me.

  The hairball shot toward Marie’s teeth, which were pressed against her bloody end of the tube. A quick gust of air shot from her mouth, keeping the hairball at bay. She removed her lips to take a breath, a string of blood followed her upper lip. Like a rusty car backfiring, a burst of air shot into the tube, propelling the hairball toward the Italian.

  The adult babies laughed hysterically.

  Luckily for him, he coughed into the tube, bringing the ball of hair to a stop inches from his mouth. His nostrils gaped open, he took a large breath of air in attempt to catch his breath from his coughing fit. He faulted by not removing his lips from the tube.

  The hairball had stopped completely until then, that is, until he inhaled profoundly as if preparing himself to inflate a birthday party balloon. The ball of hair caught speed, shooting into the Italian’s mouth. In a panic, he smacked the tube off from the cart and fell to his side in another coughing fit.

  The ball of hair shot from his mouth in a saliva saturated pulp.

  Marie fell to her knees, tears flowing from her eyes. Blood dripping in thick threads from her upper lip, she bawled.

  The group of adult babies cheered, hopping in circles, embracing each other in a group hug.

  My mouth propped open, I shouted in excited vowels. Marie survived. She would go unharmed this round.

  On the screen, one of the adult babies grabbed the Italian by the jaw. His other hand latched onto a metal skewer, he swung it forward in
a fluid motion, shoving it into the Italian man’s left cheek. Its sharpened edge exploded out through his right cheek, blood dripping from the exit wound like spring rain on a window.

  The man-baby host shouted at the camera, grinning.

  The camera panned over to the Italian’s mouth, the metal skewer visible in between his teeth like a rusty retainer.

  “Now he can be sure there won’t be another hairball going into his mouth! Let’s check on the winner’s comrade!”

  The screen in front of me showed a man peeking over my shoulder. In front of his face, a pair of hedge-shears rose, still stained with the woman’s blood from her thumb amputation.

  I fought against every one of the straps and zip-ties holding me still.

  Nothing.

  The television screen showed the man-baby walking around to my side. Slapping my forehead with the blades of the snips, laughing. In his other hand, he teased everyone watching through their own live-stream, snapping a pair of medical tongs at the camera, opening and closing them.

  On the screen, wow-faces floated across. An Instagram post popped up: @tommygunsvillain had this to say, “Yes! Do it! For the love of God, DO IT!! #thediefiexperiment #blasphemy #fuckit #letssmokesomeweedtothis” The photo was a selfie, behind him was his laptop where he streamed my predicament. Next to that, a resin stained bong.

  On the screen in front of me, behind the floating laughing-faces, behind the Instagram screenshot, the world watched as one of the man-baby reached his medical tongs into my mouth, clamping down on my tongue and jerking it out through the dental mouth gag.

  All of my jerking and kicking entertaining the world.

  On the screen, the man-baby brought the hedge-shears to the side of my dry, pasty tongue. His hands closed, the handles fighting to come together. The blades opened again, closing again more aggressively.

  A deluge of blood warmed my mouth, adding to the metallic taste from the mouth gag. A freezing chill flooded my body from my head down to my bare feet.