Want to know the day of your death, so you won’t be caught off guard or make unnecessary dinner reservations? The Internet has the answer, as usual. Simply visit the Death Clock (deathclock.com)—the Web’s “friendly reminder that life is slipping away”—and enter your date of birth, gender, estimated body mass index, and whether or not you smoke. Thanks to this highly scientific assessment, I now know that I’ll die on Wednesday, May 14, 2053—which means, the site calculates, that I have roughly 1.3 billion seconds left to live.
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Marisa Wegrzyn suggests that some people have another way of acquiring this information. According to her play Hickorydickory, now receiving its world premiere at Chicago Dramatists, they’re born with pocket watches in their heads—”mortal clocks” that count down the time their hosts have left to live. We’re told everybody has a mortal clock (a term that pops up in Wegrzyn’s script with the same numbing frequency as “vagina” does in The Vagina Monologues), but they’re usually nestled behind our hearts so we don’t notice them. An unlucky few, however, have the device in their noggins and can hear it ticking away, which somehow lets them know exactly when they’re going to die.
Oddly enough, Cari Lee hasn’t aged a day since she left Jimmy, shortly after giving birth to Dale. And, inasmuch as she was still in high school at the time of her pregnancy, she and her daughter are now the same age. What happened, Jimmy explains, was that he tried to add more time to Cari Lee’s clock when he found out she was slated to die on the day of Dale’s birth. But he broke it instead, leaving Cari Lee frozen at 17 forever.
Through 6/12: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, 312-633-0630, chicagodramatists.org, $15-$32.
