Error

by Ásgrímur Hartmannsson

Chapter 16

'Error' synopsis

One day, Jonas, who has recently migrated to the city, discovers that all his records — including his assets — have been erased somehow. No longer able to get work, buy anything on credit or sell his now legally non-existent car, his life becomes a unique adventure.

Jonas drove downtown. He figured that he would have enough fuel to last him until Monday. But would the car last until the fuel ran out? That was the real doubt in Jonas’ mind. It had absorbed quite a bit of punishment during the chase. He parked the car in a well-lit lot and had a look at it.

Jonas already knew that the muffler had been bypassed somehow. When he looked under the car, he could see that it was missing entirely. He was not really surprised to find that the entire segment of exhaust had disappeared too.

The driver’s side was all scratched, with the sheet-metal bent in, especially near the rear, and the driver’s side-view mirror was missing. That was just a notch worse than the rear-view mirror inside the car. That now lay on the passenger side floor. At least it was not missing, thought Jonas.

The rear had a dent in it from his first run-in with his pursuers. But the front was the worst. The bumper was missing entirely. Jonas did not remember it falling off, but he supposed it must have happened shortly after hitting that car at the red light.

Also missing was the grille. The lights were still there, hanging crooked, but present. It seemed to Jonas he had hit that car harder than he thought. The whole front was slightly bent out of shape. Or was that from all the jumping? He did not know. At any rate, it would be easier to explain the missing front plate now that the bumper had fallen off.

The car looked like it had been used in a stock-car event. It only needed to have a number and a couple of sporty lines or a motor oil ad painted on it.

Jonas went back into the car after inspecting it. Nothing critical was damaged, at least not at first sight, but he dared not open the hood for fear that it might not close again. He hid the car in a dark lot where nobody would notice it while he went to see if Frank and the guys were at their usual hangout.

When Jonas came within range of the bar, he saw people coming out of it. Plumes of smoke followed them as they made their distance from the place. When Jonas was within thirty meters, he began to smell it: the heavy foetor of burnt leaves. He had to go in. He had to ask Frank about those new people.

When he came to the door, he took a minute to prepare himself mentally and bodily for the experience. He took a few deep breaths and told himself that he would soon be out again, or at the very least eventually, and afterwards it would be much better to breathe the air outside again, as bad as it was, filled with fumes emanating from the burning of diesel and gasoline in a variety of engines.

Besides, it could hardly be worse out here. Catalytic converters made the fumes worse out here, but inside the bar nothing was done to make the fumes more malicious to the human body.

Jonas opened the door and let some of the smoke pass him before he ventured inside.

The bar was almost filled with people. Most were contributing to the heavy, toxic air. Jonas wondered how much different this was from being inside a gas chamber. Most of the barflies looked sort of dilapidated, and even though some were coughing, nobody seemed to be actually suffocating. That would happen after ten, maybe twenty years, outside of the bar.

Unsurprisingly, the bar served beer and other alcoholic beverages. Jonas got himself a glass of beer and had a seat in the corner beside someone. Whoever it was, he hoped it was someone who would not mind.

The one he sat beside, when noticing that he no longer had the seat to himself, turned to Jonas and said to him, “There you are.”

Jonas looked at the man, and through the thick smoke he could see that it was the man he was looking for: Frank.

Jonas asked Frank about the people following him. Frank knew them.

“Competition,” he said, “are they bothering you?”

Jonas told him how they had chased him back and forth earlier, causing some damage to his personal vehicle, leaving out the bit where one of them had had a spectacular crash on the freeway.

“Oh, I guess they don’t like you very much. I would tell you to get out of the country, but you can’t do that, can you?” said Frank.

“No,” said Jonas, shaking his head. He took a big sip of his beer.

“If they find you again, I guess they will rough you up. Or maybe they’ll just kill you,” said Frank.

“How comforting,” said Jonas, and took another sip of his beer.

“They’ll probably hang you. You know, make it look like a suicide,” said Frank matter-of-factly, as though he were discussing how best to fit a light fixture or to cook a chicken.

“Like that guy?” asked Jonas.

“What guy?” asked Frank.

“That guy I was supposed to deliver the parcel to, the one who never showed up — you know,” said Jonas.

“Oh, that guy... Yeah, like that guy,” said Frank. He nodded his head as he continued: “That is what they do.”

“O... kay. Fine. I guess they can only murder me so much,” said Jonas.

“That’s the spirit!” said Frank, giving Jonas a pat on the back.

They sat around drinking for a while, ruminating how he could get away from them long enough to do some vandalism in the Bureau of Personal Information Protection building. Frank, being stoned, offered to help. Jonas agreed to his offer. Rick and Eddy too, were only happy to help him out.

Jonas felt nice to be in such friendly company. But he also knew that they were probably all well known to the entire police force, so they would not stay in jail long. They would confess to whatever they were being hauled in for and out they would go again, to do their thing — whatever it was. They seemed to mainly hang around in that smoky bar and talk.

Jonas told them he would come back at about ten the following night. They said, “Sure, no problem.”

Frank asked what he was planning to do about the thugs who were after him.

“I’ll just drink a lot of coffee,” he answered, “and try to stay alert until I’ve finished doing my thing.”

Frank nodded, and then started to fumble around in his pockets. “Coffee? Try this instead,” he said handing Jonas four little white pills he got from his pocket.

Jonas looked at them in his palm and then at Frank.

“Amphetamine,” Frank explained, “much better than coffee. Just take one when you feel sleepy and it will make you feel wide awake in no time.”

“But isn’t that harmful?” Jonas asked.

“In the long run, yeah, but not so much just over one weekend,” said Frank.

“I keep hearing that it can be instantly deadly,” said Jonas.

“Only in large doses,” said Frank.

With this new wisdom in mind and pills in his pocket, Jonas left to look for his car. In just a couple of hours more, the sun would begin to come up. He stood around for a couple of minutes after clearing the smoke screen of the bar, and just took a deep breath. Being in the bar was just like being inside a volcano. Hot, smoky and malodorous.

Jonas found his car, and got in it. He quickly felt that the bar had left its smelly trace elements all over him, so he figured he would just roll down the windows. That had worked before.

The driver’s side window only went down a couple of inches. Jonas closed it and tried again. That time it went down completely. But it did not go up again once down. Jonas looked at the sheet-metal on the outside of the door. It was mangled. Not crooked, just flattened.

Jonas did not care. He had gloves. He started the car and turned the radio up: Classic rock, of course. It had never failed him. He turned it loud enough to overpower the increased volume of the engine. Then he backed out of the space and drove away, always keeping a sharp eye out for his good friends in the mountain cars. He did not need to meet them again.

What now? Jonas thought as he rolled along on the almost empty streets. First, park the car a suitable distance away from his own apartment. Second, take a bath and change clothes to get rid of evil smell. Third, take a pill and go outside to behave normally until next night.

It was Saturday now. Most people were at home or on their way home, suffering from a hangover. They would sleep until mid-day, then wake up and begin preparing to go out again. Jonas had often thought about it. Why was life in Smoky Bay so horrible, that the only thing people ever did for fun was to go out and get drunk?

It had something to do with too much time spent at work, too little productivity and a special cultural relationship with alcohol, stemming back the centuries, when booze was even more expensive then it was today. It was harder to come by, and things that are hard to come by become valuable because of it. And the effects of too much use were pain and suffering, sometimes bankruptcy because the stuff was so expensive.

Well, booze was being slowly accepted as a normal commodity now, and as result, more was being ingested, but with less pain than before. Drugs were not. And use of drugs was on the rise. Soon it would take over from alcohol as the first choice for boredom relief. They still had that stigma of being expensive and hard to come by. That stigma is better than any advertisement on TV or in the paper.

Perhaps, in a hundred years, people would go out en masse on weekends to smoke pot, drop acid and take cocaine like coffee. In the future, chemists might well be able to counter the bad effects of this by mixing in some more drugs. Or just forget about the bad effects. Let nature run its course. Nature hardly ever gets to run its course nowadays. It would be fun, for once, to see what happens if society were left unchecked by the mindless, multi-voiced and aimless authorities.

The sun came up as Jonas drove into a parking lot on the opposite side of his neighbourhood. In five or six hours it would go down again as though nothing had happened.

To be continued...