Pi Day Doomsday

POETIC AIM

Morning was not welcomed, as the pain grew deeper and more debilitating. He lifted his head from the table, looked around at his bleary surroundings and screamed in agony. The radiation sickness fueled by the hangover overwhelmed him. Then he remembered the knife. He felt around and found it at his feet with a small smear of dark blood on its blade. Quickly, he grabbed his throat. A few drops of dried blood fell into his hand as he released it. Damn! I can’t even do that correctly. He stood and pitched the knife into the sink. “Lived to die another day,” he muttered. “What irony!”

Gradually his plan nudged his mind back into awareness. He had work ahead and his illnesses could not deter him. After a quick trip to the bathroom for his morning constitutional and a quick throw-up, he returned to his wall of shame, plastered with clipped newspaper headlines, and stopped at a small yellow Post-it note off to the side. Staring a moment, he focused his eyes on the five-element list of things to do.

At the bottom was the number 3.1415926… He reached back for a pencil from the table and scratched through the top item, “#1 Introduce Adam.” Snickering with accomplishment, he dropped the pencil nib to the second item and paused. The message, coded so that only he could understand, read “#2 Wax Poetic.”

His years spent in secure clandestine activities made coded messages trivial exercises to create and decipher, so he used them liberally throughout his plan. Now he would embark on the creation of a message warning the world of his intended malfeasance. If someone were smart enough to decode it, they would be forewarned of the impending cataclysm but could do absolutely nothing to stop it. The incongruity of that scenario pleased him and drove him forward. It was his perfect revenge.

Before starting the next task, one of his favorites, he searched the refrigerator for a morsel of food. He was starving. Two slices of moldy stale bread and a disk of hard salami satisfied his need. He grabbed a cold beer and sat with the sandwich at the table. He at first picked a few spots of blue mold from the bread then rationalized that nothing could hurt him more that the deadly radiation in his body. He even thought that maybe blue mold might cure his irreversible sickness. He was becoming invincible: a man on death row with no appeals. A terminal existence.

He bit into the sandwich, took a swig of beer, and opened his laptop. After Windows loaded, he opened Notepad with a Google window on the side and searched for an anagramming site. Perfect! A window popped open requesting a phrase or word to be anagrammed. It was not his first choice for coding: that would have been a one-time-pad cipher creating a message impossible to decode without a key. No, that would not serve his purpose. He needed his warning to be known but with considerable deciphering difficulty to show the genius of its creator.

A modified quatrain, he chose for his carrier, honoring Nostradamus and his prophecies. The anagram, or rearrangement of letters from a phrase into another phrase, he selected for his cipher, permitting the discovery of his embedded forewarning with minimal difficulty. Now he began writing, typing each phrase into the anagramming website.

With some thought, he chose a symbolic but somewhat whimsical title for his poem. He typed in “Atomic Pi.” Nothing suited him. Grinning at his craftiness, he added an “e” and retyped “Atomic Pie.” He rescanned the possible anagrammed phrases and with a wry laugh selected a particularly appropriate one: Poetic Aim. Energized by his success, he typed the scrambled title on the old Smith-Corona typewriter he bought for this purpose at a local garage sale. Its anonymity matched the ream of yellowed paper included in the purchase.

Reading from his open Notepad window, he typed each line, one at a time, into the anagramming site and added to the typewritten page. Within thirty minutes he had assembled his quatrains including a few misleading lines onto the vintage page. After donning a pair of latex gloves to leave no fingerprints, he carefully pulled the page from the typewriter’s carriage. With a cynical chuckle, he held out the page and read his finished poem:

“A masterpiece!” he offered aloud, folding the page into a letter-size envelope. He rushed the envelope into the typewriter and typed “NEWS FLASH! WMDs — A tale of Adam.” He rolled the carriage, freeing his work, then carefully inserted it into a plastic bag and sealed it. With a loud sigh, he relaxed. Another bucket list item gone.

Back at his wall, having crossed the second item off the to-do list, he studied the third: “#3 Publish.” It had caused him great consternation, thinking of the most visible, yet covert, way to introduce his message to the public. He rejected the mail service for fear of its possible loss; hand delivery was his only choice, assuring its arrival into the proper hands. In doing so, however, he risked being seen and recorded by one of the millions of security cameras spread throughout the city. No, he wanted nothing traceable to him. Then all at once, it dawned on him.

Dressed in a black hoodie sweatshirt pulled over his face, dark sunglasses, and a long black cane for support, he was the Grim Reaper as he neared the black Prius. It was a perfect visual metaphor for him if he were caught on tape. His plan was congealing in ways he never imagined. Craftier, more ingenious with each step.

He reached through the open window, placing the bagged envelope on the passenger seat, then pulled up his right sleeve and moved to the front, then rear of the car. His targets were the license plates. With ease, he rubbed his forearm back and forth over each plate, obscuring the numbers with thick bloody smears. He stepped back from the last plate, admiring his work, and with a snide chuckle, murmured, “My new vanity plate. Blood, sweat and radiation.”

Prepared now to travel in complete anonymity, he started the car and drove off to Los Angeles’ largest television studio in Universal City. He planned to park in front of the studio building, walk to the front door and drop the envelope in a conspicuous location. He did not really care who found it; he knew it would reach the right hands in minutes. Since several of his infamous career-crushing interviews occurred there, he knew the area well, but was repulsed at the thought of returning.

He drove east from Dana Point on the PCH until it intersected the I-5 then exited onto a northbound parking lot of impatient motorists stretching as far as he could see. Shit! This could take hours. I don’t have time for this. Time for plan B.

Exiting at the next off-ramp after what seemed forever, he drove into the small picturesque village on San Juan Capistrano. Searching for his target like a lion stalking his prey, he idled down Ortega and happened upon it immediately, as he expected he would. There, out the front window, parked in front of a corner Starbucks was a black-and-white CHP cruiser. As he looked closer, passing the scene, he noticed the front windows were partially down. The space behind the cruiser was red-curbed and empty. He smiled and said, “Thank God for global warming.”

He circled the block once, pulled up, engine running, behind the cruiser, and adjusted the black hood to cover his face. Briskly he stepped out hobbling and limping to the cruiser’s open window. In a flash, he opened the plastic bag and dumped the letter through the window. Then, with his mouth agape, he watched the envelope corner hit the seat, bounce end over end, and finally fall into the gap between the seat and the passenger door. The deed had been done and there was no correcting it now. He looked back, bending over for a low profile, then grimaced in pain as he raced back to his Prius. He could feel the radiation attacking his bones, making them more brittle. Commanding his legs to hold up long enough to return home, he fell into the driver’s seat and sped away, constantly checking the rear-view mirror for the cruiser.

A mile down Ortega, he breathed a sigh of relief, rejoined the I-5 and entered the southbound parking lot. Realizing he was trapped in a massive gridlock, he cursed the I-5 traffic on weekends; travelers heading off in all directions for a weekend of fun. As he sat, stopped in what looked to him to be an infinite number of idling cars, he searched his memory for the last time he had fun. All he could come up with was yesterday, launching Adam.

Inch by inch, he idled home increasing his anger with each mile. The contempt for his critics was spilling over into a hatred for all humanity with their encroaching smothering nearness: a chaotic world he no longer claimed his own. He was ready to check out of life and take much of the madness with him. That thought brought a smile back to his face; he enjoyed the remainder of his trip imagining the doomsday tsunamis from his Genesis couple.