Bottled by Mike Bozart - HTML preview

The prevailing topic of discussion the other day in our near-uptown, closer to midtown, heavily air-conditioned office (why, it’s hot as hell in Charlotte in early August) was the old message-in-a-bottle bobbing literary motif. The other two agents with me pleaded to have their numbers changed to random symbols, and not have their names mentioned to protect their identities (for what reason beats me). Yet, supreme ringleader Ernie (the electronic earwig) relented. Well, without further ado and undo, here’s a transcript of our heady, steady conversation.

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[the sound of some papers being shuffled on a desk, followed by the faint sound of the Message in a Bottle song by the English rock band The Police]

^|^: “Ah, Message in a Bottle. Haven’t heard that one in a while.”

~(~: [begins singing] “Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S. I’m sending out an S.O.S.”

^|^: “Ok, enough. You’re slaughtering that tune.”

33 (me): “You have an S.O.S. situation – in distress with immediate danger to life and vessel – and you are going to launch a message in a bottle? That’s bonkers! Completely nutzoid [sic] in a nutshell.”

~(~: “Well, it’s just a pop song. And, he’s not on a sinking ship; he’s stranded on a deserted island. The guy is ready to immediately die from loneliness. It’s probably about Sting [lead singer for The Police] dying to be with a hot woman – a sexy lady like me. Yes, just some very excusable poetic license exercised, if you ask me.”

^|^: “Speaking of messages in bottles, did you hear about the one that turned up after Hurricane Sandy?”

[the sounds of coughing, throat-clearing and sneezing]

~(~: “The guy in coastal New Jersey who got back the note that he tossed in the drink when he was 12, back in 1963? [starts singing] Late December, back in ’63 …”

33: “Hey, hey, hey; you’re no epik [sic] all-leaguer singer.” Epic all-leaguer singer? What does that mean?

~(~: “And you’re not, either, 33.” She’s completely right.

^|^: “Will you two please stop it?! You are acting like coarse schoolkids in a fine trapezoidal sandbox.” He must have read that line somewhere. / He stole that.

33: “Trapezoidal? Never saw a trapezoid-shaped sandbox on any playground. Not once. Nowhere.”

~(~: “Stop playing for the recorder, dudes.”

^|^: “Can we please get back on topic? Hurricane Sandy. Message in a bottle. Remember that?”

33: “Ok, ok, ok. Sure. Well, yeah; I forgot about that one: Dennis Komsa’s message in a bottle. I believe that his was an ocean-current experiment that he did with his dad. I think that it washed up less than a quarter-mile from where he threw it in fifty years prior. Just tidal action, I would guess.”

^|^: “Correct-a-mundo. [sic] That’s true, 33. But, actually, I was thinking of the one that a 10-year-old girl threw in, back in the fall of 2001, right after the 9-11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.”

~(~: “I remember her. I saw her story on the national news a few years ago. Sidonie Fery. She tossed her bottle into Great South Bay, off of Long Island, New York. And Hurricane Sandy washed it up in Patchogue.”

^|^: “You must have the fastest Google link in the world.”

[laughter]

33: “There is something exhilarating and fascinating about launching a message in a bottle. Will it be fate or chance if/when the note is found and read?”

^|^: “Unfortunately in this case, it was the intersection where fate and chance cross with tragedy.”

33: “Oh, did something happen to her?”

^|^: “She died in 2010 in Switzerland, two and a half years before Sandy hit.”

~(~: “Yeah, she was only eighteen years old.”

33: “In Switzerland? Was she on vacation?”

^|^: “No, she was attending an American college over there. She fell off a cliff over 200 feet high after drinking some beer with a fellow student. He fell to his death, too.”

33: “They both died together, at the same time?”

^|^: “I believe so. Maybe one of them started to slip and grabbed the other, pulling him/her off the precipice with them.”

33: “Yeah, that’s very tragic. Terrible.”

~(~: “What about a joint suicide? You know, 1-2-3, jump!”

^|^: “Will you stop with all of the suicide theories!”

~(~: “Well, you can’t rule it out, given the circumstances.”

33: “What did her note say? Her message in the bottle.”

^|^: “It read: ‘Be excellent to yourself dude’. [Click here to see the actual note.]

~(~: “I think I’ve heard that quote before.”

^|^: “Yeah, it’s a quote from the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It was her favorite film at the time.”

33: “Well, that sure is a nice positive note. Some good self-help advice. So many people mentally beating themselves up, day after day.”

~(~: “Yeah, at least it didn’t say, ‘You wasted five minutes of your feckless life extricating this meaningless note from a bottle that last contained horse piss.’ Or, something nasty like that.”

33: “How ironically lovely and disgusting. But, I don’t think many 10-year-olds do the message-in-a-bottle thing anymore. They’re all on their tablet computers all day.”

^|^: “Yeah, these days it would be a virtual message in a bottle tossed into cyberspace.”

~(~: “I wonder if she thought that it would ever be found. And, I wonder if she ever thought about it while in Switzerland.” Or of it being used in a psecret psociety pshort pstory. [sic]

33: “What are you getting at?”

^|^: “You think that she quickly forgot about it?”

~(~: “Probably after a few years, I would imagine. I know that when I was eighteen, I didn’t think about things that I did when I was ten. A girl’s life is in such a different phase then.”

33: “I wonder if she told anyone about her message in a bottle. Was it a secret?”

^|^: “If it was, it surely isn’t now. They even have a bronze plaque in her name in that town.”

~(~: “Now, I certainly doubt that she foresaw that – all the notoriety. Her story spread all over the world.”

33: “I know some friends and acquaintances who have died and, well, their internet presence lives on, in a ghostly kind of way.”

^|^: “What if, at some point in the future, our online presences – after we have physically died – automatically update based on a hyper-learning, ultra-intuitive algorithm?”

~(~: “Like a program that is so smart, it would write something just like we would write given a certain stimulus, such as a post or comment on a social network?”

^|^: “Yeah, something like that.”

33: “Or, what you guys just said.”

[laughter]

^|^: “And we would appear to be ‘living’ forever in the electronic binary realm.”

33: “Wait, do you really have a pulse?”

~(~: “You know, guys, at some point in the future, the message in the bottle will be someone’s whole existence in ones and zeros.”

^|^: “And, it may not be static.”

33: “Hey, we could put our conversation today on a thumb drive, and then drop it in a small bottle.”

~(~: “Glass or plastic?”

^|^: “Glass could break.”

33: “You would want to add a desiccant packet to keep the water vapor down.”

~(~: “Absolutely.”

^|^: “Ok, where do we launch our conversation?”

33: “Well, my wife, Agent 32, may be going to the Philippines next year. She will most likely be riding on a ferry in an area that has strong inter-island currents. She could ‘accidently’ drop it overboard in mid-channel. It could go from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean very easily.”

^|^: “Ah, yes, and wash up on Reunion Island. They might think it came from the Malaysian Airlines 777 that disappeared from radar back in March 2014.”

~(~: “You’re coo-coo. Bottled. Even worse than Jim.”

33: “Ok, I think this discussion is completely cooked now. This meeting is summarily adjourned.”

^|^: “Gimme that flash drive, 33. C’mon, hand it over.”

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[a scanned copy of Sidonie Fery’s 2001 message-in-a-bottle note]

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