The End Specialist
The End Specialist
Drew Magary
A gripping, compulsive thriller set in a future where the cure for ageing has been discovered… to devastating consequencesThe ebook edition contains exclusive extra content.“You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”(An excerpt from the digital journal of John Farrell, cure age 29)2019. Humanity has witnessed its greatest scientific breakthrough yet: the cure for ageing. Three injections and you’re immortal – not bulletproof or disease-proof but you’ll never have to fear death by old age.For John Farrell, documenting the cataclysmic shifts to life after the cure becomes an obsession. Cure parties, cycle marriages, immortal livestock: the world is revelling in the miracles of eternal youth. But immortality has a sinister side, and when a pro-death terrorist explosion kills his newly-cured best friend, John soon realizes that even in a world without natural death, there is always something to fear.Now, John must make a new choice: run and hide forever, or stay and fight those who try to make immortal life a living hell.The e-book edition contains exclusive extra content - for those who want to find out even more consequences of the cure for ageing.
THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary
Dedication
To my wife and children
Epigraph
I was standing staring at the world. And I still can’t see it.
—Mastodon, 2009
Contents
Cover
Title Page (#u2b94b223-c69e-5ab6-8ad2-64c47b7e1104)
Dedication
Epigraph
THE END SPECIALIST
A Note About The Text From The Department Of Containment, United North American Territories
I - Prohibition: June 2019
“Immortality Will Kill Us All”
“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”
“I’m Always Gonna Get My Period”
“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”
The Woman In The Elevator
“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”
“The Conservative Case For Legalizing The Cure”
“They’re All Getting Divorced”
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
At The Protests
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or A Lot Later On”
“How Could You Be So Dumb?”
DC Apparently Stands For “Don’t Come”
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
The Worst Since Kent State
“One Infinite Generation”
“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”
II - Spread: June 2029 (Ten Years Later)
Photo No. 3,650
“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”
I Seek The Grail
Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth
A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll
Afternoon Link Roundup
“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”
The Truth About China
The Back Of The Ambulance
Afternoon Link Roundup
Confessions Of A Nonstockpiler
What Do We Do With Baby Emilia?
“He Looks Just Like You”
The Man Who Will Live Everywhere
“Warmest Greetings From The Church Of Man!”
“We’ll See You Again”
XMN Was Right
“Does It Hurt?”
“Yeah, That’s One Of Them”
“Did You Know That Cigarettes Have Almond Oil In Them?”
When They Tell You Not To Mess With Texas, They Mean It
“I’m Not Even Sure This Is A Marriage Anymore”
“I Don’t Know If Anyone Will Ever Get Married Again”
Afternoon Link Roundup
“This Is Good”
Home Cure?
“Look At Me”
III - Saturation: March 2059 (Twenty-Eight Years Later)
“The Cure For The Cure”
The Hippie In The Graveyard
What They’re Saying About End Specialization
A Few Minutes With The Worst Domestic Terrorist In American History
Exit Interview: Edgar Duchamp
“You Look Just Like Me”
Alison On Stage
“You Get Six Shots”
A Field Trip To The McLean Community Friends Church Of Man
“We’re Going To Take What We Need To Survive—And Then Maybe We’ll Take A Little More”
My Cure Day Surprise
“They Can’t Do Anything To Us”
“Let It Overwhelm Me”
“The Cure For Everything Else”
“They Don’t Think This Is The End Of It”
“They Just Can’t Help Themselves”
“Wait Over There”
“You’re A Real End Specialist Now”
That Was My Hospital
There Is Nothing Left To Lose
IV - Correction: June 2079 (Twenty Years Later)
“We Weren’t Afraid To Love Her Like Our Own”
Today’s Insurgent
The Girl In The Marketplace
The Sweep
The Birthday Girl
“They wouldn’t stop eating”
“This Is The Next Logical Step”
“A Very Urgent Feeling”
An Unwelcome Dawn
The Human Wave
Outtakes
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary is a writer for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim, and Kissing Suzy Kolber. He’s also written for GQ, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, ESPN, Yahoo!, Comedy Central, Playboy, Penthouse, and various other media outlets. The End Specialist is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.
You can contact the author at drew@deadspin.com, or at twitter.com/drewmagary.
A Note About The Text From
The Department Of Containment,
United North American Territories
FEBRUARY 6, 2093
In March 2090 a worker for the Department of Containment named Anton Vyrin was conducting a routine sweep of an abandoned collectivist compound in rural Virginia when he stumbled upon an eighth-generation wireless-enabled projected-screening device (WEPS.8) that was still functional after charging. Stored inside the device’s hard drive was a digital library containing sixty years’ worth of text files written by a man who went by the screen name John Farrell.
The text files appear to have been written as posts for a blog or online journal. It’s impossible to know which of these files Farrell actually published in a public forum, as all mentions of his name in the cloud as it now exists lead to sites whose servers were destroyed during the Great Correction. There is also no way of corroborating that John Farrell was ever a licensed end specialist for the United States government for twenty years prior to the Correction. All U.S. Department of Containment servers were destroyed in June 2079.
However, considering the level of painstaking detail and the highly personal nature of the entries, combined with many of the articles and interviews Farrell saved, his writing is itself evidence supporting its own veracity. As such, his collected entries must be considered one of the definitive personal records of life in the former United States during the sixty-year period that followed the discovery of the cure for aging. It must also be considered the most important first-person account yet of the end specialization industry that thrived in America at the end of the century.
Farrell was a remarkably fastidious record keeper. He used a LifeRecorder app to preserve and transcribe virtually every human interaction he ever had, and he incorporated many portions of those transcripts into his writing. In its entirety, the collection contains thousands of entries and several hundred thousand words, but for the sake of brevity and general readability, they have been edited and abridged into what we believe constitutes an essential narrative, the fundamental goal being to offer incontrovertible evidence that the cure for death must never again be legalized.
NB: The whereabouts of Solara Beck are still unknown.
I
Prohibition: June 2019
“Immortality Will Kill Us All”
There are wild postings with that statement all along First Avenue. If you’ve been in Midtown recently, you’ve seen them. They’re simple black-and-white posters. All type. No fancy fonts or designs in the background. No web address. That one sentence is all they say, over and over again, down and across. When I walked by them, they were clean, as if they had been posted the night before. But I noticed, as I got towards the end of the block, that one of them had already been defaced. The second one from the bottom. Someone had used a cheap blue ballpoint pen to write something underneath the slogan. It was small, but it was unmistakable: EXCEPT FOR ME.
The doctor I saw has an apartment located near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. I got the address from a banker friend. He told me 99 percent of the guys he knows in finance rushed to get the cure for themselves the second it became available on the black market. So if you know a finance guy, it’s not that hard to obtain the name of a doctor who can give it to you. Even now, after the arrests, and even after what happened in Oregon. In fact, it’s much easier than getting weed, at least from my personal experience. All I needed was an address and phone number on a scrap of paper. That was it.
I should have been required to do more to get it, like cross an ocean and fight off a tribe of bloodthirsty headhunters, or answer a series of complex riddles asked by an evil bridge troll, or defeat some really big guy using karate. Something like that. But I didn’t need to do much of anything, and I didn’t feel at all guilty about it. I still don’t. Once I realized that I could get the cure, I instantly wanted it, more purely than I had ever wanted anything. More than any woman. More than any long overdue sip of water. Normally, any decision I make is forced to navigate the seemingly endless bureaucracy of my conscience. Not this one. This impulse was allowed to bypass all that nonsense, to shoot through the gauzy tangle of second thoughts and emerge from me as pristine as when it first originated deep within the recesses of my mind. It was a want. A hunger. A naked compulsion that was bulletproof to logic and reason. No argument can be made against my profound interest in not dying.
The doctor’s apartment is located in a doorman building, but the doorman wasn’t exactly a palace guard. He didn’t ask me to sign in. He didn’t ask me who I was seeing. I’m not even sure he looked up from his racing form. I just walked into the elevator and pushed the button. All too easy.
I got out, walked down the hall, and knocked on the door of the apartment number I’d been given. A voice from the other side of the door, and seemingly from the opposite end of the apartment, asked me to identify myself. I said my name and that I was there to pick up Ella’s toaster. There is no Ella, and she had not left a toaster at the apartment. I found this part of the process far more exciting than I should have.
I heard the doctor walking over to the door and I watched the knob turn. He didn’t quite look the way I thought he would. He was middle-aged, but still youthful looking. Tan. Sharp silver hair. He didn’t look much older than forty. And more like a banker than a doctor. I expected someone a bit dweebier, with glasses and a lab coat and whatnot. Someone far more careful looking. I think I would have preferred that. He shook my hand without identifying himself and shepherded me through the door.
I have to say, visiting a doctor for illegal purposes is a far more satisfying consumer experience than going for legitimate purposes. You ring the bell, and, boom, there’s the doctor. No hostile receptionist. No signing in. No presenting your insurance card. No forgetting to get your insurance card back after the hostile receptionist copies it. No eternal waiting. Hell, no waiting of any sort. It was lovely. I was tempted to ask the doctor if I could visit him like this for all of my future ailments.
“So, John,” he said, “you’re here for the toaster.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I need to see your driver’s license.”
“Okay.” I handed him my ID. He began nodding.
“You’re twenty-nine. Good. That’s just about the perfect age. I don’t give it to people over thirty-five.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it would be foolish. Here, sit.”
He sat me down in a leather chair and took the seat opposite me. I didn’t feel like I was talking to a doctor at all. He had the air of a very cool English professor.
“Now, do you know exactly how the cure works?”
I was briefly disappointed that he stopped referring to the cure as “the toaster”. I really wanted to see how long I could keep it up.
“Yes,” I told him. “I think so. I mean, I know how it came about. And I’ve read everything about it that I could, like everyone has. Some of it conflicts. I’m not entirely certain of what’s true about it and what isn’t.”
“Do you know how gene therapy works?”
“Vaguely.”
“Okay, well, I’m going to go over all this anyway, even if you know it. So, what this involves is me taking a sample of your DNA, then finding and altering—or, more precisely, deactivating—a specific gene in your DNA, and then reintroducing it to your body through what’s known as a vector, or a carrier. In this case, that means a virus. So I’m going to take some blood from you today, isolate the gene, change it, create the vector virus, and then inject that vector back into your system at three distinct points: your inner thigh, your upper arm, and your neck. That’s two weeks from now. And then we’re done. After you go home, the virus will replicate that new gene code throughout your system. Within six months, it will be present in all of your tissue, and your body will stop telling itself to age. The aging of your body will be permanently frozen in place. The rest, after that, is up to you.”
“Will it make me sick?”
“No. No side effects. No allergens.”
“Is it guaranteed to work?”
“Well, I’ve had to re-inject two or three people. But that’s pretty rare, and it’s never taken more than two tries to get it working. I won’t charge you if I have to do it again.”
“Can I still die afterwards?”
“Yes. Of course you can. You can still catch cold. You can still die of AIDS or a heart attack. You can still get cancer. People can still murder you. In fact, that’s why I give people two weeks until they come back.”
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, you have to take a moment to consider what all this entails for you. When people come through my door, the first and only thing they think about is, ‘Oh boy, I’m gonna live forever.’ But they don’t stop to consider what that means. They want to live forever, but they don’t think about what they’re going to have to live with. What they’ll have to carry with them. And whether or not that’s something they really, truly want. Let me ask you: Why do you want to do this? Is it out of vanity?”
“I don’t think so. I’m just curious, I guess.”
“Ah, but think about what curiosity is. Curiosity is seeking out answers to your questions. It’s about satisfying everything you want to know about you or things around you. It’s about your personal fulfillment, isn’t it? So really, is there much difference between curiosity and vanity?”
He had me nailed there. I don’t know why I tried to sugarcoat it for the doctor. I always lie to doctors. Maybe that’s why I want to stay healthy forever and ever. So I can avoid situations where I inexplicably lie (poorly) to stern-looking medical professionals. I relented and gave him the raw truth of it all.
“Okay,” I confessed. “You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”
He patted my leg to give me reassurance. “That’s why they’re all here. Even the ones that believe in heaven and seventy-two virgins and every other good thing supposedly waiting for them in the afterlife. But again, this is no cure for death, even if everyone is calling it that. It’s merely a cure for aging. In fact, if Malthus’s theory is right, you almost certainly will die. It may be a hundred years from now. It may be ten thousand years from now. But it will happen. And not in a pleasant fashion, mind you. What this cure guarantees is that you will never die a natural, peaceful death. And you’re going to have to spend the next two weeks asking yourself if it’s worth all those extra years knowing that your demise will inevitably come at the hands of disease, starvation, or a bullet.”
I immediately pictured myself being gunned down in an alleyway, a smoking revolver barrel the last thing my eyes ever have a chance to focus on. Then the sliding door in my brain shifted and I was eighty-five years old on my deathbed, fat nurses sponging off my rotting skin.
“I don’t think most people die natural, peaceful deaths,” I said. “All the loved ones I’ve seen die have died sick, frail, and helpless. Undergoing chemo. Lying in hospitals. Soiling their beds. Two of my grandparents died alone, with no one to talk to. I don’t think natural death offers much in the way of gentle relief. I think it’s a slow, wrenching thing I’d like to get far, far away from.”
“Okay.”
He stood up and gestured to me to do the same.
“How many of your patients have come back after two weeks and decided they didn’t want the cure?”
“Oh, I think you already know the answer to that. Come on. We’ll take your blood in my lab.”
He walked me over to the apartment’s open kitchen. The cupboards and drawers were all white, painted ages ago and done so in a sloppy fashion, with big streaks of dripping paint frozen and hardened in places. Inside the cabinets, where you normally would see dishes, glasses and assorted sundries, were medical supplies: swabs, gauze, syringes, scalpels, tongue depressors, etc. I marveled at the lack of food or items to help prepare it. He quickly got out everything he needed to extract the blood and slapped a tourniquet onto my arm.
“What do you do if you want to eat here?” I asked him.
“I never eat here. Tell me, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Oh, dear. Another lawyer? I should put a moratorium on you folks. Last thing we need are a bunch of godforsaken lawyers hanging around forever. Here comes the needle.”
He pulled my arm toward him, gave a firm slap to the underside of my elbow, and drew one large vial of my blood. I’d never stopped to consider my own blood before. I’d only really thought of it as the fluid that occasionally seeps out of my body, causing me great alarm. Nothing deeper than that. Now I stared at the blood filling the vial, and it was that deep, rich, unmistakable red, the kind of red they try to reproduce in paint and in lipstick but can never quite match. It looked vital, as if it had its own pulse. Active. Alive. If all went according to plan, I thought, it would soon return to me even more so.
“Let me ask you something, Doc.”
“Of course.”
“What’s your normal practice? What’s your doctor day job?”
“Orthopedics.”
“Ah.”
“I almost went in to plastic surgery, but I didn’t. Thank goodness. Those guys will be doing nothing but sucking out fat from now on.”
“So you run a successful practice, yes? I assume you make a nice living just through your day job.”
“That I do.”
“Then why do this? Why do more than what you need to do? Why risk losing your license to practice medicine by giving this out? Hell, you’re risking your life. What’s the benefit to you, besides making extra money you really don’t need?”
He grinned. “Well John, with this cure I have the power to grant anyone the ability to live thousands of years—possibly forever. Let’s just say it appeals to my curiosity.”
He bandaged me up.
“This won’t cause me to sprout fangs and sleep in a coffin, will it?”
“No, that’s a different gene. Would you like me to alter that one?”
“No, no thank you.”
“Well, you’re all set. I have you in the books for this same time two weeks from now. Don’t bother calling to confirm. Just show up with your money—no denominations higher than fifty dollars, please. I’ll be here.”
(Note: The total cost was seven thousand dollars. Not bad.)
I walked to the door. Four million more questions flooded into my brain. I felt the urge to ask all of them simultaneously. Instead, I offered only one.
“One last thing.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Have you given it to yourself?”
“Of course I have.”
“But you’re over thirty-five.”
He shrugged. “Oh, well. I’ll live. I’ll see you in two weeks, John.”
A cursory wave goodbye and the door shut behind him. I walked back out into the street. A massive thunderstorm had come and gone while I was getting my blood drawn, and as I walked out, all that remained in the sky was that odd, sickly glow that happens when a thunderstorm clears out at summer twilight. It’s an unsettling kind of light. Almost puce colored, as if the sky hasn’t been feeling well. I was stuck between the violent darkness of the storm and the last flickering embers of daylight.
I rushed home. And now here I am, a day later, comfortably seated in immortality’s waiting room.
Date Modified: 6/7/2019, 8:47AM
“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”
I know it’s mere coincidence, and yet it I find it discomforting that the pope would officially come out and damn all postmortals to hell right in the middle of my mandatory deliberation period. This article posted ten minutes ago:
VATICAN THREATENS CURE SEEKERS WITH EXCOMMUNICATION
By Wyatt Dearborn
BUDAPEST (AP)—The pope today issued his strongest condemnation yet of the so-called cure for death, officially codifying it as a sin and promising to excommunicate permanently from the Roman Catholic Church anyone found to have received it, including priests.
Still on his weeklong goodwill tour of eastern Europe, the pontiff purposely chose to deliver his edict in the city of Budapest. Hungary is one of only four industrialized nations, including Russia, Brazil and the Netherlands, that have officially legalized the cure.
“This cure is affront to the Lord and His work,” the pontiff told a crowd of nearly seventy-five thousand at Puskás Ferenc Stadium. “But more than that, it is affront to our fellow man. What responsibility will we feel compelled to bear for one another if we know we can eternally put off standing in judgment of the Lord? Death is what makes us humble before God—knowing that our lives will come to an end and that when that end arrives, we will be forced to answer for them. If we answer not to Him, to whom do we answer? Death is the only thing keeping us in line.”
The pope then went on to issue this warning: “You cannot avoid God’s judgment. Not even if you live for another hundred thousand years. This planet and the sun that keeps it alight are all fleeting. There is no ‘forever’ down here and to believe so is a blasphemy. That’s why, from this point forward, the Vatican officially condemns the taking of the cure as a sin and an excommunicable, unforgivable offense.”
The pope’s words were met mostly with silent reverence from the crowd. But thousands protested outside the stadium, nearly all of them in their teens and twenties.
“The pope hasn’t condemned us,” countered Sasha Delvic, a twenty-three-year-old student. “It’s his church he’s just condemned—to a life of obscurity. How can he expect the people of his faith to accept dying while everyone else out there goes on being happy and healthy? It’s insane. He’ll lose constituents by the millions.
“No one should listen to him,” she added, “he’s just a stupid old man.”
It is believed the pope chose to deliver his address in Budapest as an attempt to pressure the Hungarian government to begin drafting anti-cure legislation. But thus far, here in one of the youngest countries on the planet according to median age, very few government officials appear willing to speak out in favor of doing so.
When I was a kid, I saw religion as insurance against death. It’s what the preachers on the TV used to say. You’re better off believing in God, they’d warn you, just in case. Because you’d hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.
I wonder if we’ve completely flipped the script on that now. I wonder if the cure represents insurance against religion. Because what if the pope is wrong? If I forgo the cure and end up dying at seventy to please a Lord who turns out not to exist, I’m gonna feel like a real jackass. Isn’t it better to live an extra thousand years or so, just in case?
I guess I’ll find out at some point. Some very, very distant point. Twelve more days till the cure.
Date Modified: 6/8/2019, 7:05PM
“I’m Always Gonna Get
My Period”
Until the other night, I hadn’t told anyone that I’m in the middle of getting the cure. I didn’t tell my dad or my sister or anyone at work—didn’t consult them either. They don’t know I’ve done it, and I sure as hell don’t know if they have. I didn’t even tell the banker friend who gave me the address. For one thing, I haven’t finished the process yet, so I’d feel a bit foolish telling everyone I was about to live forever, only to find out a week from now that my doctor was caught and thrown in Rikers.
But more to the point, I have yet to meet a single person who has publicly admitted it. I think we’ve all collectively adopted the unspoken rule that you don’t mention it out in the open. Like getting a nose job. Every discussion I’ve had about it has been conducted strictly in hypothetical terms. “Would you get it?” “What if it were legal? Would you get it then?” “Would you fly to Brazil and do it? I heard about a bunch of people at work who are taking sudden ‘vacations’ to Rio.” Stuff like that. But no one has ever said to me, “Yes, I got it”—which is just so weird. Clearly, people are going to get it. If a random person like me can go have it done, I have to assume I’m not alone. But I suppose there’s just too much uncertainly right now to go around parading the fact.
Anyway, I was more than happy to keep all this to myself. But Katy got it out of me. She’s an interrogator, my roommate. Aggressively interested in other people. Present her with wine, and she’ll pepper you with questions until you feel as if you’re under a hot lamp. She delights in extracting key information from you and then playing with it—stretching it out and bouncing it against the walls until she grows bored with it.
We were sitting in our apartment, watching the news. They were doing their nightly cure story, and Katy turned to me, clear out of the blue. She was squinting one eye.
“Did you get it?”
“What? No.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You are the absolute worst liar ever.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You fell dead silent when that report came on just now. Don’t try to hide it. I have excellent cure-dar.”
“Cure-dar?”
“Uh huh. Remember when I said Jesse Padgett had it done? She totally did. You could tell because she’d clam right up whenever the subject came up. Just like you did there. You should look in the mirror. Your face is so red right now. You look like a giant tomato.”
“Aw, Jesus.”
“You did it! You did it! You did it! I can’t believe this. You slippery bastard!”
She got the confession in record time and beamed in delight at the accomplishment. Her eyes bugged and she smiled proudly. She has a snaggletooth and loves to flaunt it as a distinguishing feature.
“Don’t go broadcasting this all over the place, all right?”
“Oh, I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “I promise you that. But you’re gonna tell me everything.”
“They haven’t even finished yet.”
“They haven’t finished? What do they do to you? Tell me, tell me, tell me. I heard you get sixty shots, all in the armpit.”
“No. They just took my blood, and then a week from now they give me three shots. That’s it.”
“That’s it? Holy underwear. What did it cost?”
“Seven thousand bucks.”
“Seven grand?”
“Shh!”
“That’s nothing! That’s less than nothing! I once expensed a tab at Lusardi’s that was bigger than that! You have to tell me how to do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“This doctor will only take direct referrals from a small circle of people he knows, and one of them happens to be a friend. No extra degrees of separation beyond that. It’s like a drug dealer, I swear.”
“So just give me your guy’s name and I’ll say I know him.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, please. Who made you guardian of the fountain? What—is this like your little boys’ club? Do you all go get the cure and then take a naked swim together? Is that it?”
“I just don’t want to get anyone in trouble. They asked me not to refer anyone.”
“This is so unfair. Who’s the guy you know? Is it Schilling? I bet it’s Schilling.”
“No…”
Another crooked, triumphant grin.
“It is! This is amazing. I don’t even need a polygraph. All I have to do is ask you a question and wait for your head to blow up.”
“Regardless, you still need the address and phone number from me.”
“Well, why hold it back? Honestly. Give me one good reason, apart from your little pinky swear not to, that I don’t deserve the information and you do. I’ve never known you to be timid about anything. But I ask you about this and you turn into a mute. Come on. Don’t be so annoying. It’s not like people won’t find out at some point that you’re having it done. In fact, judging by how quickly I found out, the whole city should know by morning.”
“Okay. Fine. I will give you all the information. After I’ve gotten the final shots a week from now. And, you have to pay the cable bill for six months.”
“What?”
“Referral fee,” I said. “It’s only fair.”
“You’re such a goddamn lawyer.”
“Those are the terms. We have a deal?”
“We do. I can’t believe you found it. Oh, I love you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Yes! You know I’ve been trying to find a curist for months now? I am so relieved. This is gonna be incredible. Except… You’re sure this guy’s legit, right?”
“Yes.”
“Because you know about all the bogus ones out there, right? How do you know this guy isn’t gonna inject you with Cascade? Remember the lady in Queens who had that done to her last week?”
“I’m certain it won’t be Cascade. For one thing, this doctor has no dishes to wash.”
“Okay, then I’ll wait until you get your shots. And if you don’t drop dead on the spot, I’m definitely calling him. I am so excited! I’m gonna be twenty-seven forever! And I don’t have to go to São Paulo to do it!”
She sprung up and rushed to the kitchen, then froze halfway there.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Do you know what I just realized? I’m always gonna get my period. That sucks.”
“Seems like a minor sticking point.”
“We could be roommates forever too. Do you want to sign a hundred-year lease?”
“No.”
“Your loss, because I am gonna party my ass off until the year 5000!”
Then she poured a glass of Shiraz to the brim and danced on the sofa.
Date Modified: 6/13/2019, 10:02AM
“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”
That’s the kind of thing you hear when you talk with my dad for any considerable length of time. I don’t want to say he goes off on tangents, because that would suggest he has a main topic from which to deviate. I enjoy his company because he never answers any question with the phrase “I don’t know.” He either knows, or he’ll talk out of his ass until he’s convinced you he knows. It’s a skill I’ve yet to master.
I’m due to get the cure finished off on Monday. I should be all excited at the prospect of beginning the rest of my indefinitely elongated life, but I’ve found myself increasingly impatient as I grow closer. All I’ve done the past few days is calculate population figures and think about death—mine or anyone else’s. I don’t enjoy thinking about death, which is one of the reasons I wanted the cure in the first place. Now, I seem to be obsessing over it. The irony of it all is infuriating.
All of this ruminating and provocation was beginning to feel like a vise on my head. I was getting sick of endlessly talking about it with myself. I needed an outlet. Someone besides Katy. Any time I bring up the cure with her, she screams out in ecstasy and packs a bowl. She’s got a fabulous attitude about the whole thing, but I needed to go a bit deeper. Besides, I was already visiting my dad for the weekend, and I would have burst like a grape if I didn’t fess up.
My dad has lived in northwest Connecticut for the past fifteen years, in one of those towns you can only get to on Metro North by switching trains at Bridgeport. Then you have to go all the way to Waterbury, at which point you feel as if you’ve been dumped off in a nuclear fallout zone. Towns around Waterbury are populated exclusively by elderly people and kids who took enough acid to permanently unmoor their brains. After more than five days in the vicinity, I have a hard time not wanting to tear off my own skin. Once you’re in that part of the state, there is nothing to do except eat and drink. And that’s how my old man has spent his retirement: eating and drinking.
He picked me up at the Waterbury station and drove me home. He had cold beer and a dish of mixed nuts waiting at the house for us. It was his way of entertaining the way my mom might have, way back when—of adding a nice little flourish to my arrival. I appreciated it greatly. Once we sat down, I couldn’t hold back.
“I’m getting the cure.”
“What?”
“I’m getting the cure. Final shots are on Monday.”
“So it’s real?”
“Far as I know.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
He sat there. He had an inscrutable look on his face. I couldn’t read him in the slightest.
“How did you get it?” he asked.
“I knew someone. It wasn’t that hard. Do you want it? The doctor said he wouldn’t give it to anyone over thirty-five, but I bet I could convince him otherwise, or find someone else to do it.”
“Won’t give it to anyone over thirty-five? Well, isn’t that a bitch? I suppose I’m a member of the ‘unluckiest generation’ now. That’s what they called it in the news report. ‘The last to die,’ they said. It’s like the people who died just as TV was being invented. That had to have been aggravating. You spend your whole life sitting next to some giant radio. And when they finally get around to adding picture to the sound, you’re dead as a doornail. Not really fair.”
“Like I said, I still think I can get it for you.”
“How much did it cost?”
“Seven thousand bucks.”
“I don’t know. Seems like a lot.”
“It’s eternal youth, Dad. It’s not gonna cost the same as a gumball.”
“No, you’re probably right about that. It’s just… I dunno. Look, I don’t mean to sadden you. Because I’m happy as can be that you found something that will keep you healthy forever and ever. I really am. It’s a comfort to me to know you’re not going to grow old and have crappy knees and hit a golf ball no more than eighty yards. But each day I’m down here is another day I’m away from your mother.”
We sat quietly for a moment. My mom died when I was fifteen years old, right after we moved from Buffalo. She died of cancer. For two years, she went through chemo and radiation. She aged forty years in a whisper. All her hair fell out. They kept going back to cut out parts of her again and again. And she stayed alive because she knew this was the only life she’d ever have. No reincarnation. No afterlife. Just this. That’s all you get. By the time the cancer had colonized every inch of her frame, she’d dropped to ninety pounds and looked like a mummy preserved in oil. Just a skeleton with a tarp of skin stretched out over it. There was nothing about her dying that was good.
“You really think you’ll see her again?” I asked him.
“Oh, I have no doubt of that.”
“But she’ll always be there. Why spend the next few years just sitting here waiting? Why not do something with the time you have?”
“I do plenty!”
He gestured to his railroad timetables. My dad collects them in bulk. Five times a year he’ll drive to some random state and attend a timetable convention. He’s the only person at those things who isn’t dressed in overalls and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt.
“I’m just saying that there may be places and people that you still have to discover. You may find a new passion, like antique boats or something.”
“Antique boats? Why would I like antique boats? I’ve met those boating guys. They’re all completely cheesy.”
“It’s just an example, Dad. It could be anything. I just don’t think there’s any need for you to sit here, waiting for the end.”
He grew angry at that remark. “I’m not waiting for the end, John. I’m not in a rest home. I have a life, one I’m glad to have. I’m not some sad old thing you have to come check on occasionally like a houseplant. But I have a date with your mom somewhere down the line, and I don’t want to postpone it longer than I have to. I don’t judge your choice to loiter around this planet forever, like a skateboarder outside a movie theater. So I would hope you would refrain from judging mine.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad or to judge you. I’m being selfish here. I know that. I just don’t want to see you go.”
“You’re gonna have to. I’m sorry.”
We sat quietly for another moment. I checked my watch. It was 9:19 p.m. When I was in grade school, a friend told me that every conversation pauses awkwardly at 20 and 40 minutes past the hour, because the ghosts are flying over your head. I rounded up to 9:20 in my head. For Mom’s sake.
“I know it was hard to see your mom go,” he said. “I was there. I wouldn’t wish the anguish you, your sister, and I went through on anyone. I know why you’d want to hold onto me so fiercely after that. I really do. If your mom were still around, you can bet I’d turn over fourteen grand to your doc quick as lightning. But she isn’t, and I’ve accomplished everything here that I’ve wanted to do. I’m comfortable. So I don’t want you to think this is some awful thing that’s going to happen to me down the line. It’s fine. Besides, I’m already old. I assume this thing doesn’t take thirty years off of your odometer, correct?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. It only puts you in park, not reverse.”
“See, I don’t want to stay old forever and ever. That’s why everyone your age is probably rushing out to get this. It’s not that people don’t want to die. It’s that they don’t want to grow old. Well, I missed out on that chance.”
“The unluckiest generation.”
“The unluckiest generation.” He sipped his drink. “You know I’m still due to be around here for a while, don’t you? I drink red wine. I eat my asparagus. I’m going to be annoying you for quite some time.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“If everyone ends up your age, that’s gonna be one hell of a party.”
“Could be.”
“What do we do about your birthday? Do we wish you a happy twenty-ninth birthday every year from here on out? Do we all have to get you presents every year for the next thousand damn years?”
“I’ll just take a cake.”
“I can do that. I can bake a cake, you know. They have some incredible cake mixes in the store now. They have fudge ripples. Sprinkles. Everything. And they taste just as good as the ones people make from scratch. I’m telling you, cake-batter mixes are one of the great food innovations of the past sixty years. They are a fabulous, fabulous product. I suppose you’ll still be around when they find a way to improve them.”
“How will they do that?”
He thought for a moment. “They’ll fly. In the future, you’ll get to eat flying cake.”
He poured me a glass of whiskey, and we proceeded to talk about the Bills and graham cracker piecrusts and his ten-year crusade to have a stoplight built at the intersection of Rand Avenue and Route 118. I happily would have stayed there, talking to him about anything and everything, for God knows how long.
Date Modified: 6/19/2019, 10:34AM
The Woman In The Elevator
They changed the slogan on those First Avenue wild postings: DEATH BE PROUD. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clever as the first one they tossed up there. Nearly all the posters had already been defaced by the time I saw them. There was one piece of graffiti that I particularly enjoyed. It had been done by someone who was clearly skilled with a can of spray-paint. It was the grim reaper, his own scythe plunged straight through his back, impaling him and leaving him dangling in midair. He was stone dead.
Unlike two weeks ago, yesterday was an insanely gorgeous day. Razor-sharp blue sky, as if you were staring at it through polarized lenses. I took this as a good omen, and walked to the doctor’s office from the subway using my finest New York walking technique: ass tight, legs churning, chin up, purposely avoiding eye contact with any people or objects. I can walk ten blocks like that in five minutes, even if you spring a tour bus group on me in the middle of it.
I had a faint trace of anxiety way in the back of my mind as I approached Dr. X’s building. It had been two weeks. He could have been arrested, or killed. Or he could have already fled the country for Brazil, taking with him thousands of dollars in cash (all in denominations under fifty dollars, of course). Or maybe those people decrying the cure as a giant hoax were onto something.
And the money. I’m not much of a cash person. I’ve never carried more than a hundred bucks on me at a time. Now I had 350 twenty-dollar bills to deal with (the clerk had no fifties). They wouldn’t fit in my wallet, and I didn’t want to keep them there anyway, since it would have bulged out and looked all too conspicuous. So I wadded the bills up and put them in my messenger bag. But my bag has roughly nine thousand pockets, and I’m the type of person who will put something somewhere and then immediately forget where the hell I put it. So on the subway ride there, I did this thing where I’d feel for the cash, only I’d feel the wrong pocket; then I’d quietly freak out and frisk the bag until I found the bulge. This happened at least three times.
But I was out of the subway now, and the crisp day quickly cleared all those niggling obsessions from my mind. It was nice out, and I was about to stay twenty-nine years old for the rest of my life. Nothing else mattered.
Again, the doorman let me sail right through to the elevator. I jammed the button and stared at the numbers above the door glowing progressively downward eight, seven, six, five… still on five… still on five… still on five… Jesus, was someone herding buffalo into the car? It began moving downward again, finally settling on L.
The door opened, and out stepped an unreasonably attractive woman. My fervent urge to get in the elevator was instantly destroyed. She was nearly six feet tall (I’m six foot six), naturally tanned. California blonde. If she hadn’t been standing before me, I’d have sworn she could only be created with Photoshop. She radiated like some kind of bright-shining beacon, welcoming all to a newly discovered paradise, a gateway to unimaginable happiness.
She saw me, gave a small smile, and said hi in a party girl’s raspy voice. I said hi back. I think I said hi back. I may have simply mouthed it and forgotten to make an audible sound. That’s probably what I did.
She walked right past me. I turned to look. So did the doorman. She was the promise of eternal youth made flesh. A feeling of incredible urgency lit up my system. That kind of instant love that you know isn’t the real thing but feels like it all the same. She had an impossible body, athletic and voluptuous all at once. Somehow. Some way. I have no idea. I immediately hoped she was coming from Dr. X’s office. I’ve never wanted to live forever so badly.
She breezed out of the entranceway and turned to walk down the street, out of view. I carefully etched the outline of her body into the most easily accessed part of my brain. That accomplished, I turned to the elevator to get back to business. It had already closed and gone back up. Eight, seven, six, five… still on five… still on five… Christ.
I made it to Dr. X’s door and knocked again. He let me in. His eyes were bloodshot. He beckoned me in and closed the door. I immediately handed him the cash, relieved that I no longer had to be its guardian.
“Oh, excellent,” he said. “Thank you. Would you like a receipt?”
“You give receipts?”
“Oh, sure. I mean, they’re not explicit. They don’t say, ‘Hey, I did something illegal.’ But I’ve had more than my fair share of clients who have employers that would happily bear the cost for this kind of thing.”
Scores was within ten blocks of the building. I immediately put two and two together.
“Before we get started,” I said, “I have a question.”
“Always with the questions. I like that you’re so inquisitive.”
“There was a blonde woman I saw walking out of the building. She was attractive. Highly attractive. Was she here just now, getting the cure?”
“I can’t answer that question. You know that.”
“But she was, right?”
“Again, I can’t answer that.”
He gave me a look that told me she was.
“Can I have her number?”
“What did I just say? Look, do you want these shots or not?”
“Yes, yes! Sorry.”
“Okay. Come on over to the chair.”
He led me over to a chair in the corner of the apartment. It had a lap belt, and belts to bind your wrists and ankles. I became alarmed. “What the hell is this?”
“The restraints help keep you in place during the injections,” he said. “If I don’t use them, you wiggle all over the place and the whole thing takes forever.”
“I thought you said these were three simple shots.”
“They are. But I have to inject them deep into your tissue. If you want, I can apply a small amount of local anesthesia to each area. I do it for some of the female patients.”
“So this will hurt?”
“It’s an ageless life, John. Did you really expect it to be painless?”
I relented and got in the chair. He buckled me in, and I quickly had a vision in my mind of him jumping into his closet and coming back out carrying a cattle prod and wearing a gimp mask. Instead, he wheeled a small cart towards the chair and uncovered the tray on top. There were three huge needles. Hell, they weren’t even needles. They looked like railroad spikes. Katy thought you got sixty shots in your armpit. My dad heard a rumor it was administered via a balloon enema. I would have preferred either option. I handle normal shots just fine. These were elephant shots.
“I do this fast. You’ll feel pressure, and it’ll sting. Badly. Here, hold this.”
He handed me a stress doll, one of those rubber ones where the eyes and ears bulge out if you squeeze it. “I don’t think I—”
“Trust me. You’ll want it.”
I held on. He plunged the needles in rapid succession, and in increasing order of excruciating pain: first my shoulder (not bad), then my neck (agony), then my thigh (like reverse childbirth). I squeezed the stupid doll until its ears could practically touch opposite sides of the room. It was horrible, but it was over quickly. He bandaged me up, undid the restraints, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“That it?”
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re all done. Enjoy the rest of your life.”
“Thank you.”
He gripped my shoulder and looked me in the eye.
“No, I mean it. Enjoy it. You still never know how much of it you have left.”
He patted me on the back and escorted me out. I pushed the elevator button. Again, it stalled at the fifth floor. I couldn’t have cared less this time. Down to the lobby I went. I stepped out into the flawless morning. I made it a point to find that blonde girl again one day. I now have all the time in the world to do it.
Date Modified: 6/20/2019, 2:06PM
“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”
Even if the cure is a complete hoax (and now that I’ve gotten it, that outcome is now a virtual certainty), I still recommend you get it. The placebo effect is marvelous. I’m not supposed to feel supercharged from getting it, but I do. And if I find out ten years from now that it was all a lie, that’s still ten years of tricking myself into feeling downright ebullient. I’ll have to get it again after that.
I felt like I could run a marathon when I got out onto the street yesterday. But because I am far too lazy, I instead opted for a leisurely walk back downtown. I also stopped for a donut, because it felt like the right thing to do. As I walked down into the Forties, I could hear the growing sound of a crowd in the distance. After a few more blocks, everything came into relief. I was close to the UN. The pro-cure protesters were standing outside. And if there is a group of people out there even more fanatical than the pro-death supporters, it’s the pro-cure supporters. They looked angry. One woman appeared to be shaking with rage as she walked around with a sign that read, LEGALIZE IT. YOU ARE LETTING US DIE. She paced in front of the building, stomping her feet like a T. rex.
I made a turn to go across to Second Avenue, but police had already put up a barricade. Helicopters flew over the scene. My only way out was back up First. I quickly turned around to get away. A small flock of new protesters was coming my way. One of them jammed a flyer into my hand.
“Don’t take this shit lying down,” he said. On top of the flyer was the headline THE CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR LEGALIZING THE CURE, BY ALLAN ATKINS. I didn’t know you could now get Allan Atkins rants in pamphlet form. I turned to the crowd in front of the headquarters. Normally, you see protesters demonstrating peacefully, walking in circles and whatnot. But these people were in rows, facing a single direction, pressed as close to the building as the cops would allow them to be. They didn’t look content to simply voice their disapproval. They looked like they wanted in. I got back up into the Fifties and went across town and back down as fast as I could.
Once I was in our apartment, I downed the cheap champagne, ate a cold can of Chunky Soup, and watched a news report about what I had just waded through. Apparently, cops fired rubber bullets into the crowd an hour after I left. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time they’ve done that.
Katy was already drunk by the time I got to the bar. I had to catch up.
“Happy cure day!” she screamed.
“Shh!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll be quiet. But you have to tell me everything. And you owe me some doctor digits. Pony up, kid.”
We retreated to a corner table. I gave her Dr. X’s info. I told her everything: the chair, the needles, the protesters, etc. Even the blonde girl.
“She sounds hot.”
“She was.”
“Well, happy cure day. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Do you realize that you’re now always going to look the way you look at this exact moment? From this day on? This is how you’ll look when you die. Do you realize that? It’s like I’m looking at your corpse!”
“I didn’t think of it that way, no. But thank you.”
“You also realize you can never retire now, right?”
“What?”
“You can’t ever retire now. How are you gonna quit your job at sixty-five if you live for another five hundred years? Did you consider that?”
I had, but I had placed it squarely in the “things I prefer not to think about” pile. “This just gives me more time to figure out what it is I really want to do,” I told her. “I’m not preparing for some sixty-five-year end goal anymore. That rush to save money or whatever is all gone now.”
“Ooh! I just thought of something else. Do you realize we could live another five hundred years and the Bills still may not win the Super Bowl?”
“Will you shut up about all the terrible stuff already?”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. No dark stuff. This is your cure day. And in a few weeks, we’ll be celebrating mine too. Oh yes we will.”
We staggered home at 6:00 a.m. and I took a shower before going to bed. I washed off the night and emerged from behind the curtain looking relatively fresh. I looked at myself in the mirror: brown hair, round face, sloped shoulders, two gentle smile creases bracketing my mouth. A barely noticeable strawberry mark under my eye. Slight stubble that steadfastly refuses to grow into anything resembling a normal beard. I took a photo of myself. This is how I look now. This is how I’ll look when I die.
Happy cure day to me, indeed.
Date Modified: 6/21/2019, 3:45PM
“The Conservative Case For
Legalizing The Cure”
My friend Jeff sent me this an hour ago:
I don’t know if you’ve been watching Allan Atkins on TV lately, but he’s becoming increasingly unhinged. I’m not political one way or another—though I think a lot of what he says is perfectly reasonable—but he delivered a diatribe yesterday that was pretty nuts. Here’s the transcript:
“I don’t know what country this is anymore. How can this administration justify doing what it is doing? How? How is it possible? You tell me where it says in the Constitution that this cure is forbidden. You can’t tell me, because it is not in the Constitution. It is not. If the class action lawsuit against the government over this ever gets kicked up to the Supreme Court—and it will, I can assure you—we’re going to see the true face of this Court and of the administration that put many of its judges there. Because any judge worth his salt would look at this ban and see a crime. An outright crime against a country and its citizens. And the only judge that would ban it would be a fascist, activist judge who wishes to impose his or her individual beliefs upon us all.
“See, this ban is liberal thinking at its absolute worst. They don’t want to give you the freedom to make your own choices. They want you to suffer. They are antihuman. It wasn’t enough for them to merely hate America. No, now they hate the very idea of humanity. Humans are bad. ‘Oh, you can’t live forever! You’ll emit too much carbon! You’ll throw away too much garbage! An owl will die!’ It’s insane. It’s this mentality that we, as human beings, are some ugly blight upon this world, that we do not deserve to live here with all the other innocent little animals—animals that kill and rape each other, just so you know. They believe that every action we take, every building we erect, every road we lay down is somehow a massive affront to their pristine vision of what the earth should look like. They are allergic to progress. This is a sickness. An absolute sickness. And now, it is literally costing us newfound years off of our lives.
“I am a conservative, and that means that, unlike liberals, I deal with reality: with the way humans really behave, and with this world as it truly is. And that’s what makes this war… this, this war on the cure, such a complete and utter crock. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with some utopian liberal fever dream that is neither economically or socially attainable.
“To you liberals out there listening—and I know you are, because our ratings’ demographic breakouts make it plain as day—I have a question for you. If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, would you keep the cure from him? If Thomas Edison were alive today, would you keep the cure from him as well? Would you willingly let some of our greatest statesmen and inventors perish from the globe? Do you think you’re helping the world if you do that? Or is there some special little Hollywood guest list for people you think deserve it? Not Mr. and Mrs. America, of course. They’re far too dumb, and too busy polluting the world, to make your cut.
“Never mind the positive impacts of the cure, like the end of senior citizenship and all the Social Security and Medicare costs that go with it. Liberals don’t have any time for that. They’re too busy dwelling on all the horrible things we naughty humans will be doing with it. So you can’t have this cure. Not even in this country, where it was invented. Can you believe that? Can you believe the gall? Liberals always say they love science. This is science! This is science! This cure is ours. We shouldn’t be banning it, we should be subsidizing it. But we’re letting other countries take this cure and run with it. Do we hand out our gold and oil reserves to other countries? No.
“That is why I say to you friends out there listening now: Buy a gun. Maybe you believe in taking the cure. Maybe you do not. But tell me if you want to live in a country where the government will let you die like this. Buy a gun. I know they’re hard to come by now. I’ve bought plenty myself in recent months. I know my friends at Smith & Wesson—proud sponsors of the show, mind you—are trying to keep up with the demand. But if you have to drive to another state to do it, do it. Buy a gun. Buy as many as you can and learn to be skilled with them. Because the government is robbing you of your life, your liberty and your happiness. You tell me what they’re going to rob you of next. And you tell me what we should do if the Russians decide to visit our shores with an army of twenty million ageless soldiers, because you know they’d like nothing more. Buy a gun. Buy a damn gun! If you love America, and what it stands for, buy a gun. Because right now, I don’t know if the country I live in is fit to be called the United States of America. And I’m willing to fight to get it back.
“Are you?”
Jesus.
Date Modified: 6/24/2019, 11:49AM
“They’re All Getting Divorced”
I’ve been at work all week, ever since getting the cure. This was lousy planning on my part. I should have booked a vacation in Aruba to coincide with it, so I could sit back, relax, have a fruity drink, smoke a joint, and bask in my own foreverness. And now Katy says I can’t ever retire. That was all I could think about this week, as I got loaded with files: you will be doing this forever and ever and ever and ever. I’ll always need money, I imagine. But I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here now. I have no life goal anymore. There are no golden years I have to stockpile for, and the idea of trying to save for some thousand-year retirement makes my head explode. I can’t worry about the future, because now it’s not finite. I can only worry about what’s right in front of me, at this very moment. It’s kind of liberating, when I think about it. I could go be a bartender in Denmark if I wanted. I don’t think I want to, but it’s a nice option to have.
I said nothing to any of my co-workers about getting the cure. But yesterday, while I was doing research for some eight-thousand-page brief, a colleague pulled me aside. Well, not a colleague. One of my boss’ colleagues. Someone far more senior than I am. He asked me if I had a few minutes. This terrified me, because I thought I had fucked something up. Then he brought me to his office.
“Do you know anything about divorce law?” he asked.
“A bit.”
“You need to learn it all. I know you’re buried right now, but I’m organizing a special divorce seminar, and you need to attend.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re all getting divorced,” he said. “All of them. Every banker and hedge fund guy in this town is looking for a way out right now. And if they aren’t looking for a way out, their wives are. We have three guys here who are good with divorce statutes. That’s not enough. We’re gonna have to double or triple the load. We’re talking about cases that could go on for ages. They haven’t even defined the law on most of this stuff yet. Big, big moneymaker. It’s where you’re going to want to be. You don’t want to stay in estate law. It’ll be extinct within two decades.”
“Jesus.”
He then told me a story relayed from one of the divorce partners at some other firm. One day some big swinging dick showed up at the firm, flew past the receptionist, and stormed into his office.
“I want an annulment,” shouted the big swinging dick.
The lawyer was nonplussed. “What?”
“You heard me! I want an annulment, and I want it done quickly.”
“You can’t get an annulment,” the lawyer told him. “You’ve been married to your wife for twenty years.”
“It was under false pretenses.”
“What false pretenses?”
“She got the cure, and so did I. Completely changes the parameters of our original arrangement.”
“Yes, but the cure didn’t exist twenty years ago. For there to be false pretenses, it had to have existed back when you signed the marriage license. And even then, I’m not sure how it would count.”
“Listen, I’m a traditional man. I believe when you take that vow at the altar, you should abide by it. I vowed to stay with that woman all the days of my life. But I figured that was seventy or eighty years, tops. Now I’m supposed to spend the next thousand years with her? That’s insane.”
“I think what you want is a divorce.”
“Why? So she can take everything I own? That woman has been spending every weekend with her personal trainer for six years. And then I have sex five times with a brand manager and I’m the asshole? You tell me how that makes sense. No, I want an annulment. Our marriage never would have existed if this cure had been around.”
“I can’t issue you an annulment under those circumstances. It’s a binding marriage. It lasts forever.”
“But no one told me forever would be this long!” the big swinging dick screamed. “I know I swore to be with her till death, but that was under a different definition of death, was it not?”
The lawyer stammered, “Well, that’s a bit of a gray area right now.”
“Well, ungray it. Make it black or make it white. I don’t care which. I’ll pay you five million if you can get it annulled. Five million. And, if you can’t, you get me my divorce. Then you charge me one hundred million in legal fees. That way, I’m technically broke and she can’t touch the cash. But I only pay you five million, and you ignore the rest of the debt.”
“That’s illegal in about thirty-seven different ways.”
“I don’t care! I want my money, and I want a clean break from that woman. Give her the townhouse if you need a negotiating tool. Between the dog hair and that glass sofa she bought, she’s made the place all but unlivable anyway. And I want it done by fall. I have a two-week vacation in Majorca with our former nanny, and I don’t want to cancel it. Get it done or I’ll find a real lawyer.”
And with that, the big swinging dick stormed right back out. Two hours later, his wife walked into the exact same lawyer’s office, demanding the townhouse, the Hamptons estate, and “alimony for the rest of his miserable existence, regardless of length.”
I’m definitely attending that seminar.
Date Modified: 6/26/2019, 10:10PM
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
Katy demanded I go with her to her cure consultation. I explained to her that there was no waiting room in Dr. X’s apartment, and that I thought he probably preferred that everyone come alone. I made a compromise of walking her to the building, waiting outside for her, and grabbing some drinks with her after she got her blood drawn. “You’ll get drunk even faster, since you’ll have less blood in your system,” I explained. She liked the idea.
When we got off the subway and walked east, we could hear the protesters outside the UN. Their numbers have continued to swell. I’m not sure they even take bathroom breaks anymore. The avenue has been barricaded much farther uptown than when I was last caught in the middle of it, as if there’s a permanent weekend street fair. I was tempted to see if any vendors had set up shop among the throngs, selling paper plates of greasy pad thai for two bucks. I resisted.
We stopped at a bagel shop and grabbed a quick lunch before her appointment. Again, Katy brought up every cure-related scenario that came to her mind, both the good and the horrific. Mostly the horrific. She let her guard down a bit as we ate. My best friend is not the world’s most introspective person. But she took a moment to stop being so damn bubbly.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do after this,” she said. “Suddenly, I’m all worried about the future.”
“That’s what Dr. X said. No one he sees thinks about it until they get it done.”
“Am I doing the right thing here? My grandma’s got pancreatic cancer. Is it fair she has to go through that and I get to sidestep it?”
“You could still get cancer. You think your grandma would wish it on you?”
“No, I guess not. I don’t know. I never really thought about my life before. I knew it was short, and I knew I should have a good time before it’s over. That was about it. I never thought I had the luxury of time—now it’s all I’m gonna have. I feel like I should probably do something more substantial with it.”
“You’ve always had the luxury of time. You’re twenty-seven. Cure or no cure, that’s still plenty of time up ahead. It’s yours to do with as you please. You’re not obligated to be Mother Teresa now. This just means you have more time to do what you enjoy, or find what you enjoy, I guess.”
“Well, you know what I enjoy.”
“I do indeed.”
She grew alarmed. “What if we run out of booze three hundred years from now?
“Oh, I think measures will be taken to prevent that sort of thing. We don’t need glaciers. But vodka? They won’t let the vodka dry up.”
“Thank God.”
We got up to leave and approached the doctor’s building. We got to the southwest corner of the intersection on First. The doctor’s building was across the avenue, on the southeast corner. The light turned for us to cross. Out of my peripheral vision, on the northwest corner, I saw a tall figure outside a candy shop. Blonde. An impossible body. She didn’t have to turn for me to instantly recognize her. In fact, I had memorized the back of her quite capably. I stopped and held Katy back.
“That’s the blonde! That’s the blonde!”
Katy looked at her. “Oh, she is hot.”
“I have to go talk to her. I’ll meet you out front when you’re finished.”
I broke from Katy to cross the street. Katy hurried into the doctor’s building. As I got to the opposite corner, the blonde turned and looked in my direction. I gave a tentative wave, trying to ascertain if she recognized me or not. She appeared unnerved, turned away from me, and began walking up the avenue. I crossed the street in hopes that she was simply walking away and not walking away from me. She gave another look back, saw me approaching, and quickened her gait. I took the hint and stopped outside the candy store, dejected. She blazed down the avenue, only pausing once to look back at the doctor’s apartment building. I turned to do the same.
And that’s when the doctor’s apartment blew up.
Before I could see anything, I heard a gigantic BOOM! Then a quarter of an instant later the corner of the eighth floor blew out onto First Avenue in a single lash of flame. Right where the doctor’s office once was. A makeshift hailstorm of pulverized white brick pummeled the traffic below. Hot black smoke began quickly scaling the outside of the building. A Freidrich air-conditioning unit—one of those heavy, old-school units—crashed into the sidewalk below. If anyone had been underneath it, it would have destroyed them.
Everything, everyone, everywhere, froze to turn. What the fuck just happened? I looked to the doorway but couldn’t see Katy. She was in there. She was on her way to the eighth floor, or she was there already. I didn’t move. I stood still and hoped everything would suddenly reset and be put back in its proper place, because nothing about this felt possible. It felt absurd, like some kind of prank. The building was on fire and I knew I needed to run in but didn’t know how to run or speak or breathe at the moment. Horrible thoughts about Katy dying circled around my consciousness, like strange footsteps you hear outside your window in the dead of night. I heard the sirens blasting and growing louder and more intense, as if they were meant to echo the cries of those suffering inside.
My body finally unlocked and I began running to the building as the fire truck pulled up alongside it. When I was in the middle of the intersection, I looked down the street and saw two more towers of smoke climbing up and up at points farther to the west, towards the Hudson: one less than half a block away, another much farther across town.
An elderly woman came running out of the building. She carried a small black Scottie with her and wore a gypsy’s head wrap. I stepped in front of her to get her to stop. She stared at me, confused by it all.
“What just happened?” she asked.
I pointed inside. “Did you see anyone else on your way out?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? I’m looking for a brunette woman. In her twenties. You saw her. Tell me you saw her coming out.”
I held her shoulders tight, begging her for a response.
“I didn’t see anything!”
She wrested away from my grip and fled. A small number of tenants came out of the emergency stairwell and ran up First. I held the door open for them, let them pass, and then began flying up the stairs. The flow of tenants petered out as I climbed higher. I got to the eighth floor and came out into a lightly smoky corridor. There was a door to a freight elevator room at the end of the hall and beyond that a door to a second hallway where the doctor’s apartment was. I ran to the end of the corridor and saw the door of the freight elevator room come open. I hoped to see Katy and the doctor hand in hand, making their way out safely. It was a fireman. He stopped me and turned me around.
“My friend is in there!” I screamed.
“I can’t let you go. You have to get downstairs right now. Go. Go!”
“Is anyone alive? I’m looking for Katy Johannson.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
I relented and walked back to the stairwell. The fireman turned and reentered the freight elevator room and I immediately doubled back to go find Katy. The fireman was still on the other side of the door, now clearly angry I had defied him. He raised a fist and sent me back where I came from. I heard a huge crash, like a ceiling caving in and I pictured my best friend pressed and flattened and desperate for air. The door to the stairwell came open and a wave of firemen filed by at top speed and pushed me to the side. Heavier smoke began to fill the hallway and I began to swoon and feel as if the walls and floors of the building were molten and elastic. I retreated to the stairwell like a pathetic child and listened to the firemen shouting orders at one another from the other side of the door. I sat there trying to absorb every sound and sight because it was all I could do. I wasn’t remotely qualified to take any sort of bold action. All I could seize was proximity. I felt the urge to run to the doctor’s apartment and sit down in the blaze. I hoped for Katy to pass me by or call me but instead there was a big deafening nothing. So I sat on the gray concrete steps in the sickly fluorescent lighting, waiting. I don’t know how long I was there. No one passed by. Eventually, another fireman opened the door to the hall and ordered me down to the ground level.
I walked down the stairs and out into the street. I smelled my sleeves and they reeked of smoke, of things burned that should never be burned. Up First, I could see one more plume of smoke. Down First, I heard the swarm of protesters yelling and screaming. People were running up the avenue, some to the bridge, instinctively, as a sort of automatic 9/11-type gut response. Many seemed to have the palpable urge to get off the island, to get as far away from the center of the imaginary bull’s-eye as humanly possible.
I stayed where I was, as close to Katy as the FDNY would allow. I checked my phone and saw the EXPLOSIONS ROCKING MANHATTAN headline. The cops and firefighters continued shuttling in and out, saying nothing to me because saying nothing is what they have to do. I checked Katy’s status updates. There was nothing since the last one she posted three minutes before the explosion. She must have posted it while she was in the elevator.
DrinksOnKatyJ: U FOLKS BETTER GET USED TO THE IDEA OF ME
STICKING AROUND HERE A LONG, LONG TIME! 12:13PM
That was the last thought going through her mind. She was ready to welcome another thousand years of joy and happiness, and I had promised it to her. I had brought her to this place. I had planted that thought in her mind. I could’ve stayed strong and never told her a goddamn thing, but I barely put up a fight. Deep down, I wanted her to know it all. I wanted the cheap thrill of being her little cure matchmaker.
And now she’s gone. No hospital admitted her. No one saw her leave. There’s nothing left of her. All the extra plans and hopes and dreams she had for herself will remain just that, forever.
I can’t move.
Date Modified: 7/3/2019, 4:08PM
At The Protests
Our apartment is uncomfortably spacious now. I see the wine stains on the couch, and I hear Katy’s manic giggling like she’s still present. I don’t ever recall seeing her moody or displeased, which makes her abrupt and violent end all the more unbearable. All I can do is keep drinking and banter with her in my mind.
A pro-cure blogger named Ladyhawke posted another account of what happened yesterday, as witnessed from outside the UN. Apparently, she was one of the protesters.
HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE?
We were facing the UN and screaming our heads off when the explosion drowned us out for a millisecond. But no one knew what the hell was going on. One person in the crowd screamed, “They’re trying to kill us!” and that was enough to set people fleeing in every direction. One guy pushed me to the ground so he could run past me. I was lucky; I saw another guy who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, fall and get his head stepped on. I have no clue if he ever got back up. I got up and immediately began running up First Avenue. I assumed it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it was a terrorist attack. But I thought it was, you know, a terrorist terrorist attack. Someone from Saudi Arabia or something. My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets and not at the road ahead of them. So I got bumped into from behind and from the side, as if someone had released a stampede of blind bulls onto the street. I got kicked in the back of the leg. Now I have a black welt there the size of a lemon.
Needless to say, now that we know what really happened, that these doctors had been systematically targeted—I’d argue they were assassinated—we are pissed. We’re already gathering outside the UN and the Capitol right now. We will number in the tens of thousands by morning, I can promise you that. How many more doctors will the president allow to be blown to pieces before he finally realizes he’s made a huge mistake? We’ve been protesting peacefully for months, but these pro-death people—who got what they wanted, by the way—are free to just randomly kill innocent people? These are doctors who treasure life enough to bestow more of it upon the rest of us. We’re through being nice about this. We’re not taking no for an answer this time around.
—Ladyhawke
I don’t know where any of this is going, and I don’t know which side will come out on top, or which side even deserves to. All I know is I feel an increasing urge to get the hell away from it all.
Date Modified: 7/4/2019, 8:47PM
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or
A Lot Later On”
Katy’s family is making funeral arrangements. All the organized grieving happens at light speed, as if it must be done before you realize what you’re grieving over. I miss Katy desperately. The bomb goes off in my mind every five minutes, and I’m left no less shaken by it each time. I have fevered daydreams of a blonde running from me and taking out a phone, pushing the secret code number that kills my best friend. I told the police about her. Every detail of her face and figure. I could have sculpted it from clay. They had a crude sketch drawn and posted. No one has responded. I’m not terribly optimistic.
I’ve spent most of my time reading everything I can about the bombings. The same articles over and over again. I don’t know why I keep reading them—perhaps to help drive the reality of it home. They just released a partial list of the doctors killed. Their count (minus bystanders like Katy) appears to have settled at nine: Charles Bane III, Sofia Gonzalez, Gim Lau, Jocelyn McManus, Vishal Mehta, Frederick Polycronis, DDS, Ian Rosenhaus, Pameer Sanji, and Ameet Thakkar. I know Dr. X wasn’t a woman, nor was he Indian or Asian (unless he was very, very good at keeping his identity hidden, which it seems now he was not). That leaves three possibilities from this list: Bane, Polycronis, and Rosenhaus. At some point, they’re going to release his picture. I don’t know if I can stand to find out which one is him. I gave him seven thousand bucks in cash to keep me young for the rest of my life. And now he’ll never get to use it. The fact that he gave himself the cure only makes the finality of his death harder to take. Who the hell knows how many lifetimes were just robbed from him.
I should have seen something like this coming. What happened in Oregon should have prepared me for it. But the truth is, I didn’t pay much heed to what took place in Oregon. It happened all the way across the country, so I guess even news about murder suffers from East Coast bias. There’s the added fact that I live in Manhattan. When you live here, you can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
I can’t do that anymore. What happened yesterday and what happened in Oregon are now so strongly bonded that it feels like Eugene is located right across the Hudson. A reporter named Mike Dermott wrote a huge piece about Oregon last week. I never bothered to read it before. But I’ve now read it a dozen times in the past couple hours. I can nearly recite it from memory. Copied from Slate:
THE MAN WHO CONQUERED DEATH
By Mike Dermott
Graham Otto never set out to conquer death. Actually, he was just hoping to help out the redheads of the world.
“I’m a redhead,” he noted in his private journal, which I was granted exclusive access to by the Otto family. “I’ve yet to meet a redheaded guy who enjoys being a redhead.” The name of the gene is MCR1. It’s located on chromosome 16. And according to the complete map of the human genome, it’s the gene that causes red hair (along with a rare condition called brittle cornea syndrome). Working with a team of fellow geneticists, Otto targeted this gene in hopes of finding a way to color hair through gene therapy. “It wasn’t the most noble of genetic experiments,” he wrote. “It was the sort of thing a wealthy university like U. Oregon does from time to time, when it feels like playing around.”
“He was excited about the potential business aspect of it. We all were,” recalls his wife, Sarah. “Frankly, I was just thrilled at the prospect of never having to pay three hundred dollars for highlights ever again.”
He didn’t fit the traditional scientist mold. Otto had attended Oregon on a partial scholarship for track and placed as high as eighth in the two-mile event at the 2000 Prefontaine Classic. He was an outgoing man, who always preferred company while working in the lab and who was always able to talk about his work in ways that laymen found not only accessible but downright fascinating.
“I think that’s what made him such a great teacher,” says UO President Raymond Lack. “He was passionate about his work, but not to the point where he became insular. You never felt like he was talking over your head about any of this stuff. He made it sound interesting, even entertaining. And trust me, that’s rare among his peers. I’ve always considered his communication skills a rare gift for anyone, in any profession.”
In terms of changing hair color through gene therapy, Otto was a miserable failure. The problem wasn’t extracting the redhead protein from gene. That proved easy for Otto and his self-described team of “Hair Bears.” The problem was replacing the color. “If you take away a person’s genetically predisposed color, you essentially give them colorless hair—albino hair,” he wrote. “You have to eliminate that protein in the gene and you have to find a way to add the color of your preference, and that’s where the engineering becomes close to a technical impossibility.” Otto experimented with altering proteins found elsewhere in the DNA helix of fruit flies (who can have red eyes that are triggered by the same gene), trying to activate a different color. “We tried blue. We tried brown. We tried green. Nothing worked.”
Exasperated one night in the lab, Otto became careless. In the midst of deadening the red protein in that day’s current batch of flies, he removed an extra protein from the gene as well. “I knew exactly what I had done,” he wrote. “But it was late, and I didn’t feel like starting over. Every good scientist knows that if you contaminate the original sample, you toss it. But I didn’t. I figured it wouldn’t make a difference in the end, so I went ahead and injected the vector. It was pure sloppiness.” When Otto returned the following morning, nothing unusual had occurred. He tried to introduce a new color protein into the flies’ DNA, but it again failed. He placed the batch of flies aside and began taking on a new group of test subjects.
But then something odd happened to that tainted sample of flies. “They wouldn’t die. A fruit fly usually lives for less than two months. And even then, within twenty-four hours or so, you usually begin seeing a handful of them drop. But none of the flies I injected with the vector dropped. Ever. They just kept flying around.”
Up until Otto’s serendipitous mistake, it was assumed that biological aging was controlled by hundreds, if not thousands, of separate genetic proteins found in the body—proteins that worked in concert to determine the rate of aging across various parts of an individual. “We always assumed that a thousand different internal mechanisms and external factors worked together to trigger the aging process,” says Dr. Phillip Frank, head of genetics at the National Institutes of Health. “When you think about it, you begin aging from the second you’re born. Our studies showed that specific proteins in your body activated all the different physiological processes and free radicals that go into both growing up and growing old. There was no master switch.”
Until Graham Otto came around.
The tainted fruit flies carried on living for weeks and weeks, with an apparently limitless supply of energy. The only dead fruit flies Otto found in their container were their offspring (the altered genes, Otto discovered, weren’t passed on), the offspring of their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring’s offspring. The original flies remained alive and fluttering about indefinitely. Otto acted quickly, retracing his footsteps from that late night in the lab, finding the supposedly unimportant protein he had mistakenly altered, and replicating the experiment again, without altering the original protein in the gene. Again, the altered flies had a seemingly indefinite lifespan.
The supposedly innocuous portion of the gene Otto had messed with turned out to be much more important than he had ever envisioned. He rushed to form his own independent biotech firm and called a lawyer to draft a patent for the protein. “Normally, this is something you do over the course of years,” he told Lack in an e-mail. “But we’re doing it in a week, because if we can replicate it across species, maybe there’s something there.” And replicate it he did, across mice, rats, guinea pigs, and others, including his own aging golden retriever, Buggle. In all instances, the altered animals appeared ageless when compared to their respective control groups, never growing old past the day the vector was introduced into their system. And all of them remain alive and well today, in tourist displays set up by the university—except for Buggle, who remains comfortably in the Otto household.
Despite his extroverted nature, Otto wasn’t known as a cocky, presumptuous man. The only careless thing he did in his life was to mistakenly alter the wrong gene in those fruit flies. So when he published his findings, he insisted only on reporting what he had found, and didn’t speculate on the potential enormous worldwide impact of his research. Nevertheless, many in his field declared it junk science. “It was just too easy of an answer,” says Dr. Frank. Still, while many questioned Otto’s findings, they didn’t hesitate to recreate his experiments. And they soon found that his discovery was everything he said it was. Far more than that, actually. “He understated the results, because he didn’t want to sound like some kook. He refused to call it a cure for aging,” says Sarah Otto. “But that’s what it was, and the follow-up research proved it.”
To see if the gene therapy worked in humans, Otto solicited an unlikely test group: patients with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. “A disease like Alzheimer’s is triggered specifically by the advance of age,” Otto wrote in a subsequent email to Lack. “So if we administer the cure to people who are just developing the disease, we can do two things. One, we can potentially prevent further damage to their brains. Two, we can see within a shorter period of time if the cure takes hold. Normally, when you do a CAT scan of Alzheimer’s patient, you see changes—sometimes rather drastic changes—to the brain over a short time span. You can see the dark spots, the ‘cobwebs,’ as it were.”
The ten initial test subjects received monthly CAT scans after being administered the cure. “In every case, the cobwebs stopped growing,” noted Otto in his second published report. “The dark spots on their brains remained dark but never expanded, which is unheard of in Alzheimer’s patients. We studied them for over a year and not one of them saw the disease advance past the early stages. Their brains remained perfectly, blessedly intact.” Two of the patients have since died from unrelated causes; the remaining eight are alive and well.
By the time Otto had published these subsequent findings, the biotech community was busy stress-testing the cure in every conceivable way. Not once were they able to poke a hole in what Otto had discovered. So miraculous were the cure’s effects that many doctors began to confess on the party circuit that they had injected themselves with the vector. According to urban legend in the community, one such doctor, David Spitz, accidentally let spill to a prominent socialite at charity gala in Seattle that he had given himself the cure. The socialite demanded the cure for herself, eventually wearing Spitz down with offers of cash and signing secretly prepared documents that absolved him of all legal liability. Thus the black market for the cure was born, well before it had even crossed the FDA’s desk.
To the very end, Otto remained ambivalent about what he had discovered and its rapid spread. “I was overjoyed when we did the Alzheimer’s study and found what we found,” he wrote in his journal. “The idea that we could cure this disease that had ravaged so many families, the idea that we could prevent people’s memories from being erased—that was wonderful. And certainly, I was excited at the financial prospect of the cure, the kind of money it could generate for the university, as well as me and my family. I’m not immune to that part of it. That was all very exciting. But when I heard about David Spitz, and what he had done with it, I realized that we had triggered a kind of frenzy we were totally unprepared to deal with. You know, science is usually agony. You conduct millions of experiments just to move the world forward a millimeter. But in a way, that’s a good thing. Science usually gives us time to adjust. But the cure hasn’t been like that. I discovered it too quickly, odd as that may sound. That’s why, from the outset, I agreed with the president’s decision to ban it. I was glad someone was willing to step back and declare outright that we needed to know everything about this treatment before we unleashed it upon every citizen. Obviously, that didn’t stop it from spreading. But I’m glad someone stood up and took that stance. It needed to be done. A lot of the world fell in line quickly after that. And that’s good. Just because I benefited from sloppy handiwork doesn’t mean the rest of us will. Because we still don’t know what future effects this cure will have. Think about how many treatments have been fast-tracked for approval by the FDA that eventually needed to be recalled. This cure could end up not working. And that might be the very best case scenario! Heaven help us all if it really does work.”
Graham Otto would never get to find out.
It was another late night in the lab. Despite his astonishing success, Otto had yet to realize any of the potential financial gain from his breakthrough. He dedicated himself to making sure the cure was 100 percent bulletproof, so that it might one day gain legitimate FDA approval and prompt the president to overturn the ban; that is, to overturn it at the right time, not when people found it most convenient or profitable. Otto was monitoring over a half-dozen species that night, comparing their statuses against control groups, trying to detect the slightest sign of aging: the first gray hair, any paunchiness around the middle, anything. The Hair Bears were with him: Dr. Peter Madden, Dr. Brian Lo, Dr. Sidney Brown and three other PhD candidates (Candace Malkin, Dinesh Ganji, and Michael Duggan) in his now-growing department.
The University of Oregon has a security infrastructure that is the envy of most other colleges. Every building requires hologram identification worn on a lanyard. Every entrance is covered by surveillance cameras. The campus is extremely well lit, and hundreds of emergency phones dot the area, for easy access by students and staff who feel immediately threatened.
But the Hair Bears’ lab was no longer located on the Oregon campus. Due to the success of Otto’s program, the university had agreed to build a new lab for him and his cohorts—a facility they hoped would rival that of any genetics lab in America. But, while that was being built, the team was forced to work out of a makeshift lab in a nearby office park.
The Shelby Office Park looks very much like any other office park in the nation. It’s located on Shelby Circle, right near a strip of chain restaurants and home improvement stores. It’s a poorly lit complex—even now, after what happened. A walk from the Shelby parking lot to one of the main buildings in the dead of night is enough to jangle even the toughest nerves. A card-key is needed to enter any of the buildings on the park’s campus. But the parking lot has no such requirement. Parking is free, and there’s no gate to check into. Anyone can drive up to the main buildings. And on the night of August 7, 2016, someone did.
An unmarked van pulled up to the curb in front of Building D, where the Hair Bears made their temporary home. The team typically finished up work at the same time, but Otto was known to tell everyone to go home and get their rest, while staying on alone in the lab—sometimes for a little while, sometimes for hours. (Although he enjoyed the company of his coworkers, Otto claimed to focus better when undisturbed.) From what police have been able to reconstruct, it seems that night he bade his colleagues goodbye and stayed in the lab for a scant ten extra minutes. After he closed up shop, he grabbed his briefcase and made his way down to the lobby.
As he exited the building, he saw the van. He likely also noticed that there were still four bikes parked in the rack next to the building entrance. Many of the team members used bikes, instead of cars, to get around town. The rack should have been empty. In the time it took Otto to recognize that something was amiss, three men had exited the van and accosted him.
They wore black from head to toe, with black hoods covering their heads. They had guns. They forced Otto to the ground and bound his legs, arms, and mouth with duct tape.
They dragged Otto to the van and opened the back. There Otto saw, to his horror, all six of his colleagues similarly bound and thrown in the back on top of each other—a writhing tangle of bodies. They threw Otto in with the rest, doused them and the rest of the van with gasoline, and set it on fire. The three assailants then fled the scene as the van burst into flames. Only one of them, Casey Jarrett of Tacoma, has been identified and charged. Jarrett, who belonged to a pro-death evangelical sect known as Terminal Earth, defended his actions only by saying, “A little bit of bloodshed now, or a lot later on.” Otto, Madden, Lo, Brown, Malkin, Ganji, and Duggan all perished in the blaze. Just hours later, David Spitz was gunned down outside of his home in Seattle.
President Lack still has trouble accepting that his friend and colleague died in such a horrifying manner. “It’s inconceivable to me,” he says. “If there was anyone you wanted to invent this cure, it was Graham. He wasn’t some power-mad scientist hell-bent on destroying the world. He had real integrity, and he rarely acted without considering all the consequences of his behavior. The cure was safe in his hands. I don’t think he even gave it to himself. That someone would stalk him down and murder him and six other bright, wonderful minds like that is just… It takes away my faith in humanity, a faith that people like Graham helped build in me. He’s not here to guide us through this anymore, and we’re so much poorer for it.”
Two floors above where the van burned and burned, a window from Otto’s lab looks out over the parking lot. Perched on the windowsill is a very small glass case containing five fruit flies, five very special fruit flies that turned Graham Otto from a desperate redhead into perhaps the most important scientist in human history. They were the first creatures on earth to be cured of death by Otto, and they were among the last creatures on earth to see him alive.
Date Modified: 7/5/2019, 9:17PM
“How Could You Be So Dumb?”
I had to get out of Manhattan. Katy merrily haunts me in this space, which I more than deserve. I see visions of her all around: in the kitchen, by the television, lunging out the window. Soon there are so many ghosts of her crowding me that I feel engulfed. Sound reason told me I risked insanity to stay around much longer. I had to go see my sister.
I have the good fortune of not having to deal with Penn Station on a daily basis. I’m amazed that current events have managed to create an environment in which dealing with Penn Station is somehow even worse than before. I did not know it could get worse. It already seemed to operate at maximum awfulness. Oh, but I was wrong.
This was an exodus. There was a line just to get in the station. I’d never seen that before. A fire marshal was stationed outside every entrance, holding back travelers until a certain number had exited. They let a handful of people in, then held the line again. It was like trying to get into a nightclub—which is perfect in its symmetry. My goal was the six-thirty train. They ran every half an hour, so I figured if I missed the six-thirty, I could just hop on the seven with a tall boy of Budweiser, and off I’d go. I just barely made the ten-thirty train.
It was around midnight when I pulled in. My sister was waiting for me. She looked tired, but she has two kids, so I think she looks the same way at midnight as she does at all the other hours of the day. Polly exists in a perpetual daze, run down by the burdens of motherhood and falling further and further behind in rest, never to again reach complete wakefulness. I had specifically asked my dad not to tell her what I had done, because I knew she’d make me feel bad about it. I had already suffered through four hours at Penn Station and a train ride so tightly packed you couldn’t have slipped a dime between the bodies. But then, seeing her, I figured I may as well get all the pain out of the way immediately. She drove us back to her house and poured us both a drink.
I confessed almost immediately. “I got the cure.”
She snapped awake (she can only be alert in short bursts). “What? When?”
“Three weeks ago. That’s not all of it. My roommate and the doctor who gave it to me were killed in the July 3 attacks.”
“Oh my Jesus. Katy? Was that her name? Are you joking?”
“No. I referred her to my cure doctor, and when she went to get her blood drawn, the office was bombed.”
“Oh my God. Are you okay?”
“Not particularly. I… I was so excited for her to get it. I didn’t think this could happen and I still don’t know how it did. Now she’s dead, and I feel like I deserve the same fate.”
“Why did you get the cure? How could you be so dumb? You have to swear right now that you won’t tell Mark that you did it. He’s been talking about it and talking about it. The last thing I want is for you to egg him on.”
“Please don’t castigate me for this.”
“But didn’t you realize the danger you put your roommate in? The danger you put yourself in? These crazy people didn’t just start killing doctors a couple days ago, John. And you don’t even know if the thing works. I just can’t believe you’d go to some back-alley Guatemalan Dr. Nick to get your life fixed.”
“He wasn’t some quack,” I said defensively. “He was a legitimate doctor with a well-known practice.”
“Yet he chose to engage in some shady side business. Why is that?”
“It was just some ego thing.”
“And that doesn’t bother you, even now? I saw the doctor Mark wanted to visit to get it done. His name was Frankie, and he looked like he stole furniture out of trucks. I’ve heard some of the people offering to do it aren’t even real doctors. They’re like chiropractors times ten. I’m not judging you for getting it. I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”
“I’m grateful for that, P. I really am. But I’m fine. Mentally, I’m a disaster. But physically, I feel fine. Great, as odd as that sounds.”
She grew a touch curious. “So, you think it really works then.”
“We won’t know for a while. I’ve been taking a photo of my face every day just to see if there are any changes over time I don’t readily notice.”
“And you’re not worried about, you know, hogging all the food and stuff?”
“I promise I won’t eat all the Nilla Wafers in the house, like last time.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. There’s a reason people are fighting so fiercely to keep this cure out of people’s hands. You don’t have kids. I do. I think about this stuff. I think about what’ll be left for them.”
“So you’re never going to get it? And you’ll never let Mark get it?”
She let out a low groan. “I have no idea. I really don’t. I’m guessing there will be a point where it’s legal and everyone has it and I feel obligated to get it too. I was like that with cell phones. I was easily the last of my friends to get one. Everyone else had one. And there I was, outside school at some disgusting pay phone that didn’t even work. Now, of course, I have one and I’ll never go back. That’s how I am. I usually have to be dragged into things. I know it’s probably inevitable that I’ll get the cure and that we’ll all get it. It’s just gonna be something you do. But it opens up all sorts of odd questions that I don’t want to deal with right now. I mean, what happens to Mark and me?”
“Are you guys having problems?”
“No! Not at all. But it’s a whole weird thing, to think you’ll be with someone for that long. I love him, and I’m willing to do it. It’s just… daunting. And the kids… Jesus. You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly that they’ll be okay. And the idea that I’ll be worried forever about them and what they do… I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I’m worried, and I’m worried about having to worry so goddamn much.”
I told her about all the bankers getting divorced.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Sorry.”
“See, that completely freaks me out. One day we’ll get it, and Mark’s friends will all say, ‘Hey, what are you still doing with that old bag?’”
“But you won’t be old.”
“But I’m old already. I have two kids. That makes you old. So then I have that to worry about. Do I have the ability to keep my husband happy for centuries upon centuries? Do I need to get lipo so that I can look like some perky goddamn cheerleader? I have no earthly idea, and I don’t like the idea of having to confront all those issues somewhere down the road. Right now my whole life is plagued with decisions that have to be made: what to get for dinner, which school the kids should go to, which kid’s birthday party we should go to this weekend. It’s just decision after decision after decision, from trivial crap to really important things. By the end of the day, I’m mush. I don’t even eat dinner because I don’t want to choose what to have. I have cereal and call it a day. And now there’s this. Big, huge decision alert. Every question I ask myself about it begets a dozen more. It’s giving me a migraine right now, and I haven’t even done anything.”
“It has to be better than the alternative, though.”
“Does it? I don’t know.”
“Well, you already say you’re old. How does growing old feel so far?”
She sighed. “It sucks.”
“Well, now I feel somewhat better about my decision.”
We changed the subject. Polly handed me a plate of cold roast beef and corn on the cob. We talked, and I ate and, for the first time, Katy’s death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As I ate, the look in Polly’s eyes made it clear she was still thinking about the cure. She had tried for so long to stem the tide, to avoid being overwhelmed by it all. But now here I was: the tsunami at her doorstep.
Date Modified: 7/17/2019, 5:09PM
DC Apparently Stands For
“Don’t Come”
I have a friend in DC who emailed me this in response to reports about the expanded security perimeters to accommodate protesters in Midtown:
Dude, the security bullshit you have to deal with up there is nothing compared to what’s going on down here. The entirety of Northwest DC below M Street has been cordoned off since that girl was beaten to death for her DieStrong bracelet and the riots in Germany started. You can’t drive anywhere downtown. I’m talking about miles the hell away from the White House. And when you come up out of Metro, there are National Guard members with loaded rifles, their fingers ready on the trigger, ready to pull you aside if you look like a threat. They increased the restricted airspace above the town by nearly twentyfold. If you come down on a shuttle from Boston to National, you practically have to go through Ohio. It’s insane.
Downtown DC around the Wizards’ arena is essentially a pedestrian thoroughfare now. I have no issue with this, since people in DC can’t drive for shit, except that Metro stops can be goddamn light years away from each other. That scene you described at Penn Station? That’s every Metro station, except here the station escalators never work, so you have to haul ass up four thousand stairs before you get to emerge above ground. And the buses aren’t running. All the protesters have been forced to demonstrate on the other side of the Potomac, along the bike trail in Arlington. I saw a bunch of them trying to swim across the Potomac to get to the Mall, only to have cops pick them up in a riverboat and haul their sorry asses out of the water. One of them almost drowned in the rip currents.
I have a friend who works on the Hill who says the Supreme Court judges will be moved to an undisclosed location to argue the California case. Lots of bomb threats.
Fucking crazy, man. Fucking crazy.
—MK
Date Modified: 7/18/2019, 11:07AM
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
I was walking down Third Avenue today when I spotted a woman across the street with a remarkable body and blonde hair that broke just past her shoulder blades. I turned electric. I saw a gap in traffic and sprinted across the avenue. A cab rounding from Forty-third blithely took the corner and nearly plowed into me. I kept my focus on the blonde as the driver honked at me three hundred times in the space of four seconds. She didn’t turn her head and kept bouncing down Third, with me trailing behind her and trying to figure out a plan in my head before quickening my pace to identify her. I kept thirty yards behind, dodging dog walkers, tourists, and the meandering hordes of the unemployed. I took out my phone and queued up the number for the police without hitting Send, so I would have it at the ready. I took her picture so I could post it to my feed if need be. If this blonde was the blonde, I’d call the police and alert them to her presence, then follow her until they arrived to detain her.
I made the decision to pass. I sprint-walked closer and closer, until I was side-by-side, then I feigned interest in the window of a Hot & Crusty on the other side of her, and caught a quick glimpse on her face. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t even close.
This sort of wild-goose chase has now taken up firm residence in my daily routine. Spy blonde. Suspect blonde. Chase blonde. Realize I’ve misidentified blonde. Think of my friend bursting into flames sixteen days ago while I remained outside, like a dumb dog that no one bothered to train. Doomed to follow every pointless distraction that crosses my path.
Date Modified: 7/19/2019, 9:34PM
The Worst Since Kent State
From the Washington Post website:
DEVELOPING: FOUR DEAD IN CONCORD CURE PROTEST
By Luke Spiller and Candace English
CONCORD, NH (AP)—Four pro-cure demonstrators were shot dead today by National Guardsmen in the New Hampshire state capital of Concord after a massive protest turned into the most violent cure-related conflict since two students were shot dead in a Berlin riot three weeks ago.
After a widespread report was released yesterday accusing the United States military of offering the so-called cure for death to its own soldiers in exchange for extended pension benefits, protesters here in the Granite State marched on the Capitol. Many were incensed.
“They were trying to force their way inside the building. They wanted to take it over,” says lawyer Jim Watley, who works in the Capitol. “I don’t know what they would have done if they had gotten in, but that was their aim.”
A small group of National Guardsmen aimed with protecting the Capitol tried to keep protesters at bay with shields and threats of tear gas. But witnesses say a crazed protestor threw a lit Molotov cocktail at the guardsmen, which prompted two of them to open fire into the crowd, causing protesters to flee in mass panic. Four people are now confirmed dead. An unspecified number of people were injured, including Jackie Frost of Nashua, NH, who was shot in the leg.
“They were supposed to use rubber bullets!” she cried. “No one else was armed! Why didn’t they use rubber bullets?”
The number of people killed in today’s incident is equal to that of the number killed in the 1970 shootings at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.
Further details forthcoming.
I looked outside my window just now and saw a man running down the median of the avenue, screaming his head off as cars threatened to sideswipe him from both directions. He wasn’t saying anything. He was just unleashing the most primal noise he could possibly make. He was holding up a sign that said GIVE IT TO US NOW.
On the TV right now, they’re showing protesters lined up against the barricades in DC. They look like a mob of shoppers waiting to get into a department store at 7:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. The President is due to speak at 8:00 p.m.
Date Modified: 8/14/2019, 3:20PM
“One Infinite Generation”
Here’s the full text of the President’s speech, copied from CNN:
My fellow Americans:
This is a very tense time. The world has been confronted with a medical innovation that represents a seismic change in the very nature of who we are and how we interact. I am not an enemy of science, nor do I ever wish to be someone who stands in the way of progress. Three years ago, when I first issued the executive order banning the black market sale of the cure for aging, it was never with the intention that the ban would be permanent. Like many of you, I marvel at possibility opened by this cure. It means the potential to have a very long, very wonderful life, surrounded by those we love for perhaps thousands of years or more.
But we must consider the impact that kind of longevity will have, both on our fellow men and women and on the large yet delicate planet we call home. For the past 243 years, we have existed as a country united in a single goal: liberty for all. We believe in freedom because we believe it is not only the right of every man, woman, and child, but also because freedom serves as the catalyst for our very highest ambitions.
It is this idea—the idea that freedom can make the world a better place—upon which we have built our nation. It is this idea that so many brave young Americans have fought and died for. At Valley Forge. At Gettysburg. In Normandy and Iwo Jima. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our men and women fought not only for their fellow countrymen, but for future generations—generations they knew they’d never live to meet face-to-face.
But there aren’t going to be future generations anymore. Not after this. There will only be us. One infinite generation, forever growing and reaching an unknown and incomprehensible size. And so now we are charged once again with the task of sacrificing for the sake of our nation’s future—a future in which we will all now serve a much larger role than we ever dreamed possible. Because while we may now have a virtually unlimited lifespan, our natural resources almost certainly do not. Gas. Clean water. Land. Mother Nature has blessed us with only a finite amount of each of these things.
We have known, long before this cure was discovered, that we have been consuming resources at an unsustainable pace—a pace that will now quicken at an unimaginable rate. We are a nation of strong, hardworking people. But it is, I’m afraid, part of human nature that we adapt only when forced to. We are told there is only so much crude oil left in the earth. Yet we can still buy gas at the station on the corner, and for a relatively decent price. We haven’t changed our ways because we don’t feel we have to.
It is only in the face of grim reality that we are able to dig down and discover just what we are made of. And that reality is coming, hurtling towards us faster and faster every day now. I cannot tell you when it will come—perhaps long after I’ve left office. But it will come. And the question we must all ask ourselves is: Are we ready for that reality?
I banned this cure three years ago because I wanted us to have as much time as possible to be ready for when that day comes, to be prepared for all the responsibilities this cure demands of us.
But the time has come for me to stop prolonging the inevitable.
One hour ago, I signed an executive order reversing the original ban on the sale of the cure for aging. The cure will be submitted for FDA approval and, pending all relevant testing, people will be free to purchase it from their physician as they please. However, I again remind us all that we must think about what is fair. As part of my executive order, all citizens who get the cure will no longer be eligible for Social Security or Medicare benefits, regardless of how long they live. Furthermore, in accordance with the recommendation of doctors across the country, no citizen under the age of twenty-six will be allowed to purchase the cure. Doctors who violate this edict will have their licenses revoked and be subject to swift prosecution. I also take this moment to again condemn the attacks on doctors administering the cure in New York and Oregon. Anyone found to be coordinating terrorist attacks against doctors offering the cure will be subject to federal prosecution and the death penalty.
This has been a tragic, awful day in our history. Four of our own were killed in New Hampshire. Our hearts go out to them and their families. We grieve and pray with them, and we promise to take all possible measures to prevent deaths like theirs from ever occurring again. They were four young people, passionate in the cause of retaining their youth, of seeing what they could make of a life extended indefinitely by the miracles of technology. They were willing to fight for what they believed in, for their personal liberty, and that makes them Americans to the very core. We will not forget them, nor shall we let them die in vain.
The nation that adapts to the effects of this cure and masters a world changed by postmortality is the nation that will lead the world into the next century and well beyond. Today, I declare my faith that we can and will be that nation. So many gave for our future, and now that future fully belongs to us all. We are ready. We have no other choice.
God bless us all, and God bless the United States of America.
I heard cheers burst out from the street as the President closed his remarks. I looked out the window and saw protesters hugging and raising their fists in victory. They sang songs and drank from open containers. I could see the excitement in their faces, the pure delirium at all the new and wonderful (and legal) possibilities. They had the same look in their faces that Katy had just as we were walking to the doctor’s office.
Date Modified: 8/14/2019, 9:11PM
“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”
I’ve tried to pull together as many responses to the President’s speech as I could. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
The Atlantic:
Proof once again that we Americans can get what we want if we simply stomp and scream for something like the immature schoolchildren that we are. Those protesters in New Hampshire weren’t, as the president implied, banging on the Capitol doors for some grand, noble cause. The idea that they sacrificed themselves like the soldiers at Iwo Jima is farcical and an insult to our intelligence. They did it for themselves and no one else. They weren’t sacrificing for the future. They were trying to hog it. This generation hasn’t had to sacrifice one bit, and its reward for such callousness is now eternal life. It’s a classic American scenario of people wanting everything right now without caring a lick about the long term. You could excuse that by saying, “Well, that’s just the way we are.” Well, the way we are is going to cost us everything.
Bob Mandel’s feed:
It’s like eating a sausage pizza. You know it’s gonna kill you. But it’s not going to kill you now, so who gives a shit? Let’s eat.
My dad:
Well, now I kind of want to get it. Just to see how all this plays out.
Allan Atkins:
He’s the most gutless president we have ever had. He is a liar, a fraud, a terrorist appeaser, and a criminal. If that Times report about the soldiers taking the cure never came out, you never see last night’s speech. I guarantee you that. People had to die for this man to finally listen to me. Troops had to flagrantly disobey their superiors for this man to listen to me. And then, when he finally does listen to me, he legalizes the cure in the clumsiest, most insincere manner possible. It’s disgusting. I am disgusted, and you should be too.
That said, I’m glad he finally legalized it. And now I can finally tell you all: I got it, baby! You’re never gonna get rid of me now!
Choosedeath.org:
You have no idea what you’ve just done.
My sister:
He legalized it? Oh, Christ. I think I’m gonna pass out. Am I the last person to know this? I am, aren’t I?
Joe Weis (NBC):
In the end, the President had no choice but to legalize the cure. Those who would criticize him for his handling of the entire situation need to step back for a moment and consider the issue this president was facing. This is a problem unlike anything any leader of any kind has ever been faced with. Did we really expect this man to handle the issue of the cure perfectly when it stands poised to tip the entire planet on its axis? His first instinct, the correct instinct, was to be cautious with it for as long as possible. Well, turns out three years was as long as possible. He bravely admitted it was a mistake on his part to stall, but he didn’t need to apologize for it. Those three years of waiting allowed him time to decide how to best regulate the cure in a sensible manner. The President spoke of a grim reality that will soon descend upon us all. Well, it seems he is one of the few people out there who has tried to envision what that reality will look like and how we will deal with it. His words were hopeful last night, but the concern in his eyes was unmistakable. He is bracing himself for what’s ahead, and he wants us to do likewise. Because the floodgates are open now.
The floodgates are wide open.
After the President’s speech last night, I took a long walk uptown. The barricades had been taken down and the protesters had dissipated. The entire city seemed to breathe again. Everyone was smiling. Happy. Possibly drunk. The honeymoon was in full swing.
I walked by the UN building: no longer besieged. I walked by the posters on First Avenue. There were no anti-cure messages there this time. Just a bunch of Pepsi ads. I walked by the doctor’s apartment and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Everything felt normal. Everything felt the way it should be. The world was functional again.
But deep in my marrow, I know it won’t stay that way.
Date Modified: 8/15/2019, 10:21AM
II
Spread: June 2029
(Ten Years Later)
Photo No. 3,650
I took my picture again this morning. Still the same. The nose. The eyes. The brow. The chin. Nothing has sagged. No creases have formed. I scrolled through the “Face” folder in my library to compare it with the others. There’s no real variation, except for when I get a haircut. That’s the only time there’s any noticeable difference. My hair gets a little bit longer and a little bit longer, then I get a cut and my image resets, like one of those antique typewriters that slides back into place whenever you hit the carriage return. Though the hair gets longer, not a whisper of it gets grayer.
One day I drew a star on my cheek, just to mix things up. You can see it fade over the course of a week or so. Everyone at work looked at me like I was an unruly toddler after I did that. I’ve tried to keep the same expression throughout the photos, as a control mechanism. But there are some photos where I couldn’t hide my mood. The ones where I’m hung over are fairly easy to detect. I don’t look happy to have my picture taken, even though I’m the pushy fella who’s insisting it be done.
So there are some slight differences there, but the fundamental aspects of my face are identical from each day to the next. If you made a flipbook of it, it would be the most boring film imaginable. The only exciting part is when the star pops up. I haven’t changed. I haven’t grown. The supposed character that aging features provides has not been bestowed on me. You wouldn’t know that I’ve lived ten years between the first photo and the last. All 3,650 photos could—if not for my hair—have been taken on the same day. The time span is invisible. It’s as if I haven’t lived at all.
I have a friend who struggles with his weight from time to time. He’ll reach a certain weight and then grow completely intolerant of what he’s become. So he’ll start running and eating nothing but grilled chicken and asparagus and baked potato chips. Then he’ll get down to a fairly acceptable weight, get a girlfriend, eat her cooking, and gain all the weight back. And once he’s reached his own personal critical mass again, he’ll do it all over. If you took his picture every day for a decade, it would be far more interesting. It would be like watching someone try to inflate a balloon without bothering to pinch the end between breaths. You’d see the history. You would get at least some semblance of the life he’s led and what’s he’s been dealing with. But you can’t see that with me. There’s no story. You can’t tell a damn thing.
Happy tenth cure day to me.
Date Modified: 6/20/2029, 12:14PM
“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”
Sonia wanted to get married. The issue had come up in the past, but I had managed to stave it off for as long as I possibly could. I have found in my life, though, that once a woman introduces the idea of something to you, she’ll never let it go until you finally relent. I don’t mean this as a criticism of women. They’re all so admirably tenacious, whereas I am the exact opposite. I’ll let go of anything if holding onto it comes to require too much effort.
She broke one of the long silences that tended to overpopulate our most serious arguments. “I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” I told her.
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re not going to get me to marry you simply by challenging my manhood. I already know I don’t stack up to most men. The Cap’n Crunch boxes in the kitchen are proof alone of that.”
“This isn’t funny, John. I’ve invested four years of my life in this. There comes a point when it’s fair for a woman to ask what a man’s intentions are. Don’t you think that’s fair?”
“I do. I think it’s more than fair. And I am committed to you. I’ve never cheated. I’ve always been there to support you.”
“And you say you love me, right?”
“I do. I love the hell out of you.”
“You said you’d love me forever.”
“I did. And I meant it.”
Sonia sat down. She didn’t look upset. She looked more as if she was trying to solve a math proof whose solution eluded her. That’s what I always liked about her. She was never unreasonable. If she had an argument with anything, it was backed up by sound logic and analysis. Not everyone I know acts in similar manner. I know I don’t.
“Then I don’t understand,” she said. “You know I’m not a needy person. I can take care of myself. But the reason I’m talking to you about this is because I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to build something with you. More importantly, I don’t want to have this conversation with you every four months. I want this settled.”
“I understand all that. But look out there. Do you see anyone getting married? At all?”
“What does that have to do with us? Are you telling me it’s peer pressure that’s holding you back?”
“No.”
“Because I know what’s going on these days. A man in my office got engaged three months ago and all the other men laughed at him. They laughed right in his face. Every guy is supposed to be some macho, shit-kicking eternal bachelor now.”
I sat next to her on the couch. She had a glass of wine on the coffee table, but she hadn’t bothered to touch it.
“It’s not just a guy thing,” I said. “I’m going to be as honest as I possibly can about this, because you deserve the unvarnished truth. I don’t have the capacity to commit to something—anything—for five hundred years, or however long we’ll both live now. I don’t have the knowledge and foresight to say to you, ‘Yes. I will stick with you no matter what occurs from now until the end of time.’”
“But you could commit to me if you hadn’t taken the cure? That makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does. I could commit to you if we knew our lives were finite. But they aren’t. I have no earthly idea what’s coming next, and it’s not fair to you to promise that from now until the end of time I’ll always be by your side. I can’t promise that, because I don’t know. And you can’t promise that either, because you don’t know.”
“But that’s what marriage is. It’s two people saying we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we promise we’ll get through it together. Being married means there’s one thing you can always count on.”
“I don’t know if I want that. I’m sorry. People got married before because they knew, deep down, that there would come a time in their lives when they would become too old, too ugly and too infirm to have anyone care about them except their spouse. You needed someone to change your bedpan in the hospital and help tie your shoes and all of that. That’s all gone now, Sonia. All of that fear is gone. And whatever urge there is for people to find some lifetime companion… I don’t have that anymore. Every guy I know feels the same way. You want something concrete from me? I love you, but I don’t want to get married, and I don’t know if I ever do. I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
Her eyes tightened, like she was about to swing at a baseball. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“How long?”
“Ten weeks. I just found out this morning.”
“You spring this on me now?”
“I’m not afraid to raise our child alone, John. I’m not. I’m a strong woman and I know I can do that. But I’d like you to be there. I’d like to raise him with you as your wife. It wouldn’t be a chore. It would be wonderful. Indelible. It would be fifty times more rewarding than spending the next three decades getting blasted and watching football with your friends or whatever.”
“I don’t know. I like football quite a bit.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. Not now.”
“I’m not being a wiseass. This is just… more seriousness than I want. This is more responsibility than I want.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you grew up?”
“No. See, that’s what I dislike. I dislike that, just because I reach a certain age, I’m supposed to hunker down and stop enjoying my life. That I’m supposed to leave all the fun for the younger generation. I’m not buying into that anymore, and no one I know is. This is liberation, Sonia. Honestly, why have this child now? Don’t you want to enjoy your life a little bit more before you weigh yourself down with all this?”
“It’s not a weight. It’s something I want. I’m not having this child as some sort of self-punishment. Just because I can have a child a hundred years from now doesn’t mean I want to wait that long. I’m still a woman. I still have the urge to be a mother, and to be a wife. I still have that drive. You’re telling me about liberation. I am free. I don’t have to worry about growing old and never finding a man, like every goddamn magazine used to tell me. I have the freedom now to marry whom I want when I want, and to have children when I want. And I want this child today, and I want to raise it with you. Not because I’m some wet blanket. But because I know life is going to be better with the three of us together. I want something in my life that means something. Don’t you see that? It’s not some invisible cultural force driving all this, John. It’s just me, telling you that I love you very much and want to be with you. You tell me that isn’t what you want. But is that really true? Are you really that scared you’ll miss out on partying and hooking up other women down the line? Why did you go out with me this long if that was what you really wanted?”
“Because I love you.”
“Then tell me how tomorrow will be any different.”
I had no answer. Three weeks ago, I helped our firm devise a lucrative new type of prenuptial agreement between a banker and his fiancée. It’s a forty-year marriage. Set in stone. No divorcing allowed without significant penalties. The couple agrees to be together for forty years, with the marriage automatically dissolving at the end of that time period, and assets divided at a previously agreed-upon percentage. The couple could pick up an additional forty-year option at the end if they wished. My boss has even coined a new term for it: “cycle marriage”. He says it could help raise marriage rates back up to where they were a few years ago. The reason clients like it is because it precludes the acrimony that usually accompanies divorce. You’re less likely to claw at each other’s throats if you know there’s already an end set in place. A couple marries, raises a family, then goes their separate ways to enjoy single life once more after the children are grown and well adjusted. It’s a win-win situation, particularly if you’re the lawyer brokering the deal.
“What about a cycle marriage?” I asked her.
“That forty-year thing you do for asshole bankers? Are you being serious? That’s moronic.”
“That’s all I can offer you.”
She stood up and straightened her skirt. “So this is it. You really don’t want this?”
“I don’t. There’s too much left in front of me. I love you. I really do. But I don’t have the certainty that you have. I’m not ready.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sorry all this has changed your ability to love someone. I can’t stay here.” On went her jacket. “Will you help me raise him? Will you support us?”
“I will. I promise you that I will be the best father I can be.”
“Then I guess that’s the best I can hope for.”
I watched her collect her things and move to the door. She turned to me. She wasn’t crying. But I could see the disappointment. She had plans for us. She had envisioned an entire life for us that she thought was going to become reality one day, and she was so very much looking forward to it all. She thought I would feel the same way. She felt assured of it. She believed in me. But now that she knew the truth, she saw me as a different man, one I don’t think she liked very much.
“I’ll let you know when the first ultrasound is,” she said. “I’ll pack up my things when you’re at work this week.”
“I’m sorry, Sonia. I’m sorry I failed you.”
“Goodbye, John.”
And she left.
Date Modified: 10/31/2029, 5:33AM
I Seek The Grail
I have a friend who’s going to have a cure party next week in Las Vegas. He’s really doing it up, too. He booked a suite at the Fountain of Youth, so our trip is guaranteed to be either cheesy in a fascinating, outstanding way or cheesy in a horrible, soul-sucking way. There’s no in-between when you go to Vegas, particularly if you’re committed to staying at that monstrosity. Before the trip, my friend had a request.
“You’ve had the cure, right?” he asked me.
“Yep.”
“Do you have a grail?”
“No. That’s idiotic.”
“You have to get one. We’re all gonna buy grails and bring them. You have to do it. Prerequisite.”
“Oh, come on. Really? I have to buy one of those stupid things?”
“We’re staying at the Fountain of Youth. We have to go all the way with this. I’ll even pay for yours. I can’t have a half-assed cure party.”
“Can’t I buy it when we’re out there?”
“No, because we’re gonna drink out of them on the plane. Hell, I’m looking forward to the plane ride more than any other part of the trip.”
So I had to get a grail. Derrick’s Grail Shop is located on Christopher Street between a gay sex shop and a head shop. Derrick’s is also a head shop, but it seems they do such good business selling grails right now that the bongs have been pushed to a small section on the side. I wondered when the head shop owner next door would wise up to that fact.
I walked in and took a look. They had thousands of the things. I remember that scene from that one Indiana Jones movie where Indy walks into the grail room and sees all these shiny, golden chalices. Only the real Holy Grail was some crudely made cup sitting meekly on the lowest shelf. All the nice looking grails in the movie killed you instantly. Well, Derrick’s had no crude grails—no real grails. All the ones here were like the fakes the bad Nazi guy drank from, designed to tempt you and then suck all the life right out of you.
That said, they were all quite pretty. Some were knockoff versions of what you can get in the Diamond District, with the fake gold and the giant phony gemstones lining the rims. But there were some cool ones, too. I saw one made of stitched leather with a fake gold inlay. Oxo made a couple of stainless steel ones with comfortable rubber grips—the practical grail, if you will. They also had Goth ones, including a grail that had a curled-up dragon for a stem. If I had a van, I would definitely paint that grail on the side of my van. They had grails made of elaborately carved oak, for the environmentally friendly postmortal. None of them looked all that Jesus-appropriate. But hey, they were still nice grails.
I saw one in a Lucite box. It was made of crystal, with an engraved pattern of infinity symbols. I looked at the clerk behind the glass counter and pointed to the box.
“What’s that one?”
“That’s the DX3490,” he said. “Designed by the Swift himself. It’s the same one he drinks from on tour. You can even send away to have him sign it.” He pointed to a poster on the wall. Sure enough, there was the Swift, wearing a white suit and drinking a purple drank out of the very same grail. Spiffy.
“Do you think I could pull off rocking the same grail as the Swift?”
“Truthfully? No.”
He also showed me a room in the back where you can design your own. They had thick stylebooks you could flip through, like choosing wedding invites. You could pick the pattern, the font, everything. They even had suggested sayings you could have embossed on your grail. You could paint your own clay grail and then have them fire it in a kiln. I saw a couple up on the shelf waiting to be picked up. One said BETTY’S GRAIL. I have no clue why that made me laugh, but I nearly soiled myself when I saw it. They had matching grail-and-bong sets, which I found highly tempting, though God help you if you ever confuse the two at five in the morning.
In the end I chose a simple gold one. I wanted a grail that made me feel like a knight who had just finished a long day’s pillaging. The kind you hold in one hand while you eat a turkey drumstick in the other. The kind where you feel compelled to talk like a town crier while holding it. That’s the kind of grail I wanted, and that’s the kind I ended up getting. Twenty bucks. Not bad for the cup of Christ.
I brought it home, mixed a rum and Coke in it, and gave my usual cheers to Katy. I have to say, the Swift was onto something with this trend. Drinks taste way better when you’re drinking them out of a grail.
Date Modified: 11/7/2029, 8:51PM
Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth
I hadn’t flown to Las Vegas since they opened Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino last year. I already knew it was the biggest hotel on earth, but I wasn’t prepared for the view from the airplane. There are familiar sights you see as you approach McCarran at night: the Luxor’s Pyramid, New York-New York skyline, the Shanghai, etc. But the Fountain now dwarfs all of them. An old lady on the right side of the plane was the first to spot it. She screamed out in joy when she saw it edging into view through her little porthole.
Everyone spontaneously broke into applause and chugged the contents of their respective grails (three steakheads from Long Island on the plane had DX3490s; I’m relieved I didn’t spring for one). I swear the jet spray shooting up from the center of the oval could have tickled our landing gear if we were flying directly above it. I read that the fountain continually pumps four million gallons of water a minute. Seeing it in person, the estimate now feels low. I assume that when they first turned the fountain on, the guy throwing the switch thrust his hips for maximum effect.
Upon deplaning, we circumvented the cabstand (the line stretched so far they had to move up the security checkpoints for the entire airport) and took the shuttle bus down to the Strip. The last time I was in Vegas, the ride took twenty minutes. This time it took so much longer that I asked the driver if there were multiple conventions going on. There were not.
He dropped us off at the main entrance and we walked into chaos. The hotel has over twelve thousand rooms, and this evening it appeared all of its occupants had decided to hang out in the lobby. We stood in the check-in line in shifts; half of us waited while the other half went to get drinks, and then we switched. When it was my turn to fetch alcohol, I walked out into the main atrium and stared at the fountain, a gigantic edifice of water that defies all reason. It’s as if the hotel is trying to put out a fire on the surface of the moon. Colored lights illuminate the mighty geyser in a painstakingly choreographed arrangement. Surrounding base of the fountain are the cure stations: small platforms with a doctor and a single chair that each soon-to-be postmortal sits in to get their shots. Like in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair has straps and belts to hold you down while you are injected. Unlike in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair is a specifically designed throne. You get to choose the theme for your chair. There’s your basic emperor’s chair (made of gold; it matched my grail!). There’s also the Poseidon: Lord of the Sea chair, which is actually a large, chair-shaped fish tank, with miniature sharks and all kinds of imported marine life swimming under your backside. There’s a Space chair, which is shaped like a giant egg and has two hot girls with big fake tits dressed as green aliens on either side of it. And there’s a Viking chair, which features a giant serpent erupting out from between your legs when you sit in it. Those are the four I remember off the top of my head. There were hundreds of these things, no two alike.
I was in awe. I turned to my friend Scott.
“I almost want to get my shots again.”
“You can do that here,” he said. “They’ll throw you a cure party even if you’ve had it done already. They just shoot you up with something besides the vector.”
“What do they shoot you up with?”
“I don’t know. Gin?”
They’ve perfected the process at the Fountain. You get your blood drawn when you check-in (separate, even longer line for that), then they have the vector ready for you three days later. In between, you presumably lose all your money and then spend the next thousand years trying to make it back. It’s incredible. After getting their shots, all new postmortals jump from the platform into the pool at the base of the fountain. Fully clothed, of course. I looked out to the pool and saw hordes of people frolicking in the water, all in soaking wet dresses, suits and tuxedoes, all drunk beyond comprehension. Baptized into the sweet life.
On the way back to the check-in, I noticed a small exhibit called Ponce de León and The Fountain of Youth. It looked like a pointless waste of time, which intrigued me.
“Hey, let’s go in that.”
Scott wasn’t as enthused. “That? That’s for kiddies.”
“We go in there, we finish our drinks, we get another round and head back to the line without anyone noticing. That line isn’t moving at all.”
“Oh, all right.”
So we went in to the exhibit, which was sparsely crowded due to the late hour and the fact that it was stupid. We walked through a dark corridor for about twenty yards, and then found ourselves in front of an enormous, scrolling diorama. A life-sized puppet of Ponce de León was sitting in an exact replica of King Ferdinand of Spain’s royal court. A voice-over narrated our journey as we watched the puppet hop onto a ship, sailing across a miniaturized version of the Atlantic Ocean (with real wind and water!).
In the year 1513, King Ferdinand of Spain commissioned explorer Juan Ponce de León to sail across the seas and find the fabled fountain of youth. It was a dangerous journey, as Ponce de León and his men battled scurvy, hurricanes, and pirates!
At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.
Landing in an exotic new land we now call Florida, Ponce de León rewarded his men with newfound riches of gold, sugar cane, delicious citrus fruits, and beautiful Native American women!
One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.
Ponce de León’s quest for the elusive and mythical fountain proved fruitless, and the legendary explorer died while trying to find it.
The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.
But now, Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!
The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.
Here, at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Do all the things Ponce de León always dreamed of doing! Dine al fresco at Fukuku Oh! See Cirque de Soleil in our exclusive new show, Eternia! Or try your hand at Texas Hold ’Em! It’s all here, along with over five hundred board-certified geneticists ready to give you the cure for death! Only at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Eternal life has never been so luxurious! Right, Ponce?
The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí”. We walked out.
“I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.
“Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”
The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterwards, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.
Next to the casino floor at Fountain of Youth is a stadium-sized mall that exclusively houses shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative t-shirts (I’M HOT…AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY was a popular choice), steel cookware with lifetime warranties, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There were no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.
On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us they dealt with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited along the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by the hotel on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if saying goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude D.
After that, I didn’t relax until we were in the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.
Date Modified: 11/15/2029, 3:02PM
A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll
After my experience outside of the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting from someone who claimed to work at the resort.
Contrary to what hotel officials say publicly, the FOY has been attacked by trolls on numerous occasions. These aren’t just simple bomb threats, designed to have us running around in circles. One troll sneaked into the fountain area, saw a fresh postmortal walking out of her cure ceremony and threw lye right in her eyes, blinding her. The entire time security personnel was wrangling him and making him eat pavement, he was giggling like a madman.
It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.
—DanBenjaminsACheapskate
I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P.J. Matson wrote last month for New York. I needed to take a shower after reading it.
UNDER THE TERRA TROLL BRIDGE
By P.J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are just annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The shop has a relatively sparse crowd this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms say to the outside observer that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was just crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers… I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large subculture of people online known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can: on message boards, on blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the email account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after, you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” he boasts. XMN also cited multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder each day to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore if it happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blindings? “Just one, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”
XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community at SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is just a bunch of bullshit.”
But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’”
I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There’s a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth, or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for committed terra troll crimes as of yet.
I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it’s perhaps a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”
He finishes his burrito and tells me the story of a time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”
I ask XMN why he did it.
“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.
He leaves the shop early as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.
“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”
Date Modified: 11/16/2029, 10:19AM
Afternoon Link Roundup
• South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [Mail + Guardian]
• Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time ever as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. [The Times]
• Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son being executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. [ABC]
• The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. [FNN]
• Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” [The New York Times]
• New studies show postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. [DanBlog]
• The West Antarctica Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. [BBC]
• The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” [The New Yorker]
• Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the US. [NYist]
• The producers of the Saved By The Bell reboot have petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that they don’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. [Variety]
Date Modified: 11/17/2029, 4:44PM
“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”
That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all Thanksgiving Day long, even during the football game.
“I never should have gotten this cure,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”
“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”
“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”
“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrest of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.
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Drew Magary
A gripping, compulsive thriller set in a future where the cure for ageing has been discovered… to devastating consequencesThe ebook edition contains exclusive extra content.“You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”(An excerpt from the digital journal of John Farrell, cure age 29)2019. Humanity has witnessed its greatest scientific breakthrough yet: the cure for ageing. Three injections and you’re immortal – not bulletproof or disease-proof but you’ll never have to fear death by old age.For John Farrell, documenting the cataclysmic shifts to life after the cure becomes an obsession. Cure parties, cycle marriages, immortal livestock: the world is revelling in the miracles of eternal youth. But immortality has a sinister side, and when a pro-death terrorist explosion kills his newly-cured best friend, John soon realizes that even in a world without natural death, there is always something to fear.Now, John must make a new choice: run and hide forever, or stay and fight those who try to make immortal life a living hell.The e-book edition contains exclusive extra content - for those who want to find out even more consequences of the cure for ageing.
THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary
Dedication
To my wife and children
Epigraph
I was standing staring at the world. And I still can’t see it.
—Mastodon, 2009
Contents
Cover
Title Page (#u2b94b223-c69e-5ab6-8ad2-64c47b7e1104)
Dedication
Epigraph
THE END SPECIALIST
A Note About The Text From The Department Of Containment, United North American Territories
I - Prohibition: June 2019
“Immortality Will Kill Us All”
“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”
“I’m Always Gonna Get My Period”
“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”
The Woman In The Elevator
“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”
“The Conservative Case For Legalizing The Cure”
“They’re All Getting Divorced”
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
At The Protests
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or A Lot Later On”
“How Could You Be So Dumb?”
DC Apparently Stands For “Don’t Come”
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
The Worst Since Kent State
“One Infinite Generation”
“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”
II - Spread: June 2029 (Ten Years Later)
Photo No. 3,650
“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”
I Seek The Grail
Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth
A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll
Afternoon Link Roundup
“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”
The Truth About China
The Back Of The Ambulance
Afternoon Link Roundup
Confessions Of A Nonstockpiler
What Do We Do With Baby Emilia?
“He Looks Just Like You”
The Man Who Will Live Everywhere
“Warmest Greetings From The Church Of Man!”
“We’ll See You Again”
XMN Was Right
“Does It Hurt?”
“Yeah, That’s One Of Them”
“Did You Know That Cigarettes Have Almond Oil In Them?”
When They Tell You Not To Mess With Texas, They Mean It
“I’m Not Even Sure This Is A Marriage Anymore”
“I Don’t Know If Anyone Will Ever Get Married Again”
Afternoon Link Roundup
“This Is Good”
Home Cure?
“Look At Me”
III - Saturation: March 2059 (Twenty-Eight Years Later)
“The Cure For The Cure”
The Hippie In The Graveyard
What They’re Saying About End Specialization
A Few Minutes With The Worst Domestic Terrorist In American History
Exit Interview: Edgar Duchamp
“You Look Just Like Me”
Alison On Stage
“You Get Six Shots”
A Field Trip To The McLean Community Friends Church Of Man
“We’re Going To Take What We Need To Survive—And Then Maybe We’ll Take A Little More”
My Cure Day Surprise
“They Can’t Do Anything To Us”
“Let It Overwhelm Me”
“The Cure For Everything Else”
“They Don’t Think This Is The End Of It”
“They Just Can’t Help Themselves”
“Wait Over There”
“You’re A Real End Specialist Now”
That Was My Hospital
There Is Nothing Left To Lose
IV - Correction: June 2079 (Twenty Years Later)
“We Weren’t Afraid To Love Her Like Our Own”
Today’s Insurgent
The Girl In The Marketplace
The Sweep
The Birthday Girl
“They wouldn’t stop eating”
“This Is The Next Logical Step”
“A Very Urgent Feeling”
An Unwelcome Dawn
The Human Wave
Outtakes
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE END SPECIALIST
Drew Magary is a writer for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim, and Kissing Suzy Kolber. He’s also written for GQ, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, ESPN, Yahoo!, Comedy Central, Playboy, Penthouse, and various other media outlets. The End Specialist is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.
You can contact the author at drew@deadspin.com, or at twitter.com/drewmagary.
A Note About The Text From
The Department Of Containment,
United North American Territories
FEBRUARY 6, 2093
In March 2090 a worker for the Department of Containment named Anton Vyrin was conducting a routine sweep of an abandoned collectivist compound in rural Virginia when he stumbled upon an eighth-generation wireless-enabled projected-screening device (WEPS.8) that was still functional after charging. Stored inside the device’s hard drive was a digital library containing sixty years’ worth of text files written by a man who went by the screen name John Farrell.
The text files appear to have been written as posts for a blog or online journal. It’s impossible to know which of these files Farrell actually published in a public forum, as all mentions of his name in the cloud as it now exists lead to sites whose servers were destroyed during the Great Correction. There is also no way of corroborating that John Farrell was ever a licensed end specialist for the United States government for twenty years prior to the Correction. All U.S. Department of Containment servers were destroyed in June 2079.
However, considering the level of painstaking detail and the highly personal nature of the entries, combined with many of the articles and interviews Farrell saved, his writing is itself evidence supporting its own veracity. As such, his collected entries must be considered one of the definitive personal records of life in the former United States during the sixty-year period that followed the discovery of the cure for aging. It must also be considered the most important first-person account yet of the end specialization industry that thrived in America at the end of the century.
Farrell was a remarkably fastidious record keeper. He used a LifeRecorder app to preserve and transcribe virtually every human interaction he ever had, and he incorporated many portions of those transcripts into his writing. In its entirety, the collection contains thousands of entries and several hundred thousand words, but for the sake of brevity and general readability, they have been edited and abridged into what we believe constitutes an essential narrative, the fundamental goal being to offer incontrovertible evidence that the cure for death must never again be legalized.
NB: The whereabouts of Solara Beck are still unknown.
I
Prohibition: June 2019
“Immortality Will Kill Us All”
There are wild postings with that statement all along First Avenue. If you’ve been in Midtown recently, you’ve seen them. They’re simple black-and-white posters. All type. No fancy fonts or designs in the background. No web address. That one sentence is all they say, over and over again, down and across. When I walked by them, they were clean, as if they had been posted the night before. But I noticed, as I got towards the end of the block, that one of them had already been defaced. The second one from the bottom. Someone had used a cheap blue ballpoint pen to write something underneath the slogan. It was small, but it was unmistakable: EXCEPT FOR ME.
The doctor I saw has an apartment located near the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. I got the address from a banker friend. He told me 99 percent of the guys he knows in finance rushed to get the cure for themselves the second it became available on the black market. So if you know a finance guy, it’s not that hard to obtain the name of a doctor who can give it to you. Even now, after the arrests, and even after what happened in Oregon. In fact, it’s much easier than getting weed, at least from my personal experience. All I needed was an address and phone number on a scrap of paper. That was it.
I should have been required to do more to get it, like cross an ocean and fight off a tribe of bloodthirsty headhunters, or answer a series of complex riddles asked by an evil bridge troll, or defeat some really big guy using karate. Something like that. But I didn’t need to do much of anything, and I didn’t feel at all guilty about it. I still don’t. Once I realized that I could get the cure, I instantly wanted it, more purely than I had ever wanted anything. More than any woman. More than any long overdue sip of water. Normally, any decision I make is forced to navigate the seemingly endless bureaucracy of my conscience. Not this one. This impulse was allowed to bypass all that nonsense, to shoot through the gauzy tangle of second thoughts and emerge from me as pristine as when it first originated deep within the recesses of my mind. It was a want. A hunger. A naked compulsion that was bulletproof to logic and reason. No argument can be made against my profound interest in not dying.
The doctor’s apartment is located in a doorman building, but the doorman wasn’t exactly a palace guard. He didn’t ask me to sign in. He didn’t ask me who I was seeing. I’m not even sure he looked up from his racing form. I just walked into the elevator and pushed the button. All too easy.
I got out, walked down the hall, and knocked on the door of the apartment number I’d been given. A voice from the other side of the door, and seemingly from the opposite end of the apartment, asked me to identify myself. I said my name and that I was there to pick up Ella’s toaster. There is no Ella, and she had not left a toaster at the apartment. I found this part of the process far more exciting than I should have.
I heard the doctor walking over to the door and I watched the knob turn. He didn’t quite look the way I thought he would. He was middle-aged, but still youthful looking. Tan. Sharp silver hair. He didn’t look much older than forty. And more like a banker than a doctor. I expected someone a bit dweebier, with glasses and a lab coat and whatnot. Someone far more careful looking. I think I would have preferred that. He shook my hand without identifying himself and shepherded me through the door.
I have to say, visiting a doctor for illegal purposes is a far more satisfying consumer experience than going for legitimate purposes. You ring the bell, and, boom, there’s the doctor. No hostile receptionist. No signing in. No presenting your insurance card. No forgetting to get your insurance card back after the hostile receptionist copies it. No eternal waiting. Hell, no waiting of any sort. It was lovely. I was tempted to ask the doctor if I could visit him like this for all of my future ailments.
“So, John,” he said, “you’re here for the toaster.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I need to see your driver’s license.”
“Okay.” I handed him my ID. He began nodding.
“You’re twenty-nine. Good. That’s just about the perfect age. I don’t give it to people over thirty-five.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it would be foolish. Here, sit.”
He sat me down in a leather chair and took the seat opposite me. I didn’t feel like I was talking to a doctor at all. He had the air of a very cool English professor.
“Now, do you know exactly how the cure works?”
I was briefly disappointed that he stopped referring to the cure as “the toaster”. I really wanted to see how long I could keep it up.
“Yes,” I told him. “I think so. I mean, I know how it came about. And I’ve read everything about it that I could, like everyone has. Some of it conflicts. I’m not entirely certain of what’s true about it and what isn’t.”
“Do you know how gene therapy works?”
“Vaguely.”
“Okay, well, I’m going to go over all this anyway, even if you know it. So, what this involves is me taking a sample of your DNA, then finding and altering—or, more precisely, deactivating—a specific gene in your DNA, and then reintroducing it to your body through what’s known as a vector, or a carrier. In this case, that means a virus. So I’m going to take some blood from you today, isolate the gene, change it, create the vector virus, and then inject that vector back into your system at three distinct points: your inner thigh, your upper arm, and your neck. That’s two weeks from now. And then we’re done. After you go home, the virus will replicate that new gene code throughout your system. Within six months, it will be present in all of your tissue, and your body will stop telling itself to age. The aging of your body will be permanently frozen in place. The rest, after that, is up to you.”
“Will it make me sick?”
“No. No side effects. No allergens.”
“Is it guaranteed to work?”
“Well, I’ve had to re-inject two or three people. But that’s pretty rare, and it’s never taken more than two tries to get it working. I won’t charge you if I have to do it again.”
“Can I still die afterwards?”
“Yes. Of course you can. You can still catch cold. You can still die of AIDS or a heart attack. You can still get cancer. People can still murder you. In fact, that’s why I give people two weeks until they come back.”
“What do you mean?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, you have to take a moment to consider what all this entails for you. When people come through my door, the first and only thing they think about is, ‘Oh boy, I’m gonna live forever.’ But they don’t stop to consider what that means. They want to live forever, but they don’t think about what they’re going to have to live with. What they’ll have to carry with them. And whether or not that’s something they really, truly want. Let me ask you: Why do you want to do this? Is it out of vanity?”
“I don’t think so. I’m just curious, I guess.”
“Ah, but think about what curiosity is. Curiosity is seeking out answers to your questions. It’s about satisfying everything you want to know about you or things around you. It’s about your personal fulfillment, isn’t it? So really, is there much difference between curiosity and vanity?”
He had me nailed there. I don’t know why I tried to sugarcoat it for the doctor. I always lie to doctors. Maybe that’s why I want to stay healthy forever and ever. So I can avoid situations where I inexplicably lie (poorly) to stern-looking medical professionals. I relented and gave him the raw truth of it all.
“Okay,” I confessed. “You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”
He patted my leg to give me reassurance. “That’s why they’re all here. Even the ones that believe in heaven and seventy-two virgins and every other good thing supposedly waiting for them in the afterlife. But again, this is no cure for death, even if everyone is calling it that. It’s merely a cure for aging. In fact, if Malthus’s theory is right, you almost certainly will die. It may be a hundred years from now. It may be ten thousand years from now. But it will happen. And not in a pleasant fashion, mind you. What this cure guarantees is that you will never die a natural, peaceful death. And you’re going to have to spend the next two weeks asking yourself if it’s worth all those extra years knowing that your demise will inevitably come at the hands of disease, starvation, or a bullet.”
I immediately pictured myself being gunned down in an alleyway, a smoking revolver barrel the last thing my eyes ever have a chance to focus on. Then the sliding door in my brain shifted and I was eighty-five years old on my deathbed, fat nurses sponging off my rotting skin.
“I don’t think most people die natural, peaceful deaths,” I said. “All the loved ones I’ve seen die have died sick, frail, and helpless. Undergoing chemo. Lying in hospitals. Soiling their beds. Two of my grandparents died alone, with no one to talk to. I don’t think natural death offers much in the way of gentle relief. I think it’s a slow, wrenching thing I’d like to get far, far away from.”
“Okay.”
He stood up and gestured to me to do the same.
“How many of your patients have come back after two weeks and decided they didn’t want the cure?”
“Oh, I think you already know the answer to that. Come on. We’ll take your blood in my lab.”
He walked me over to the apartment’s open kitchen. The cupboards and drawers were all white, painted ages ago and done so in a sloppy fashion, with big streaks of dripping paint frozen and hardened in places. Inside the cabinets, where you normally would see dishes, glasses and assorted sundries, were medical supplies: swabs, gauze, syringes, scalpels, tongue depressors, etc. I marveled at the lack of food or items to help prepare it. He quickly got out everything he needed to extract the blood and slapped a tourniquet onto my arm.
“What do you do if you want to eat here?” I asked him.
“I never eat here. Tell me, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Oh, dear. Another lawyer? I should put a moratorium on you folks. Last thing we need are a bunch of godforsaken lawyers hanging around forever. Here comes the needle.”
He pulled my arm toward him, gave a firm slap to the underside of my elbow, and drew one large vial of my blood. I’d never stopped to consider my own blood before. I’d only really thought of it as the fluid that occasionally seeps out of my body, causing me great alarm. Nothing deeper than that. Now I stared at the blood filling the vial, and it was that deep, rich, unmistakable red, the kind of red they try to reproduce in paint and in lipstick but can never quite match. It looked vital, as if it had its own pulse. Active. Alive. If all went according to plan, I thought, it would soon return to me even more so.
“Let me ask you something, Doc.”
“Of course.”
“What’s your normal practice? What’s your doctor day job?”
“Orthopedics.”
“Ah.”
“I almost went in to plastic surgery, but I didn’t. Thank goodness. Those guys will be doing nothing but sucking out fat from now on.”
“So you run a successful practice, yes? I assume you make a nice living just through your day job.”
“That I do.”
“Then why do this? Why do more than what you need to do? Why risk losing your license to practice medicine by giving this out? Hell, you’re risking your life. What’s the benefit to you, besides making extra money you really don’t need?”
He grinned. “Well John, with this cure I have the power to grant anyone the ability to live thousands of years—possibly forever. Let’s just say it appeals to my curiosity.”
He bandaged me up.
“This won’t cause me to sprout fangs and sleep in a coffin, will it?”
“No, that’s a different gene. Would you like me to alter that one?”
“No, no thank you.”
“Well, you’re all set. I have you in the books for this same time two weeks from now. Don’t bother calling to confirm. Just show up with your money—no denominations higher than fifty dollars, please. I’ll be here.”
(Note: The total cost was seven thousand dollars. Not bad.)
I walked to the door. Four million more questions flooded into my brain. I felt the urge to ask all of them simultaneously. Instead, I offered only one.
“One last thing.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Have you given it to yourself?”
“Of course I have.”
“But you’re over thirty-five.”
He shrugged. “Oh, well. I’ll live. I’ll see you in two weeks, John.”
A cursory wave goodbye and the door shut behind him. I walked back out into the street. A massive thunderstorm had come and gone while I was getting my blood drawn, and as I walked out, all that remained in the sky was that odd, sickly glow that happens when a thunderstorm clears out at summer twilight. It’s an unsettling kind of light. Almost puce colored, as if the sky hasn’t been feeling well. I was stuck between the violent darkness of the storm and the last flickering embers of daylight.
I rushed home. And now here I am, a day later, comfortably seated in immortality’s waiting room.
Date Modified: 6/7/2019, 8:47AM
“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”
I know it’s mere coincidence, and yet it I find it discomforting that the pope would officially come out and damn all postmortals to hell right in the middle of my mandatory deliberation period. This article posted ten minutes ago:
VATICAN THREATENS CURE SEEKERS WITH EXCOMMUNICATION
By Wyatt Dearborn
BUDAPEST (AP)—The pope today issued his strongest condemnation yet of the so-called cure for death, officially codifying it as a sin and promising to excommunicate permanently from the Roman Catholic Church anyone found to have received it, including priests.
Still on his weeklong goodwill tour of eastern Europe, the pontiff purposely chose to deliver his edict in the city of Budapest. Hungary is one of only four industrialized nations, including Russia, Brazil and the Netherlands, that have officially legalized the cure.
“This cure is affront to the Lord and His work,” the pontiff told a crowd of nearly seventy-five thousand at Puskás Ferenc Stadium. “But more than that, it is affront to our fellow man. What responsibility will we feel compelled to bear for one another if we know we can eternally put off standing in judgment of the Lord? Death is what makes us humble before God—knowing that our lives will come to an end and that when that end arrives, we will be forced to answer for them. If we answer not to Him, to whom do we answer? Death is the only thing keeping us in line.”
The pope then went on to issue this warning: “You cannot avoid God’s judgment. Not even if you live for another hundred thousand years. This planet and the sun that keeps it alight are all fleeting. There is no ‘forever’ down here and to believe so is a blasphemy. That’s why, from this point forward, the Vatican officially condemns the taking of the cure as a sin and an excommunicable, unforgivable offense.”
The pope’s words were met mostly with silent reverence from the crowd. But thousands protested outside the stadium, nearly all of them in their teens and twenties.
“The pope hasn’t condemned us,” countered Sasha Delvic, a twenty-three-year-old student. “It’s his church he’s just condemned—to a life of obscurity. How can he expect the people of his faith to accept dying while everyone else out there goes on being happy and healthy? It’s insane. He’ll lose constituents by the millions.
“No one should listen to him,” she added, “he’s just a stupid old man.”
It is believed the pope chose to deliver his address in Budapest as an attempt to pressure the Hungarian government to begin drafting anti-cure legislation. But thus far, here in one of the youngest countries on the planet according to median age, very few government officials appear willing to speak out in favor of doing so.
When I was a kid, I saw religion as insurance against death. It’s what the preachers on the TV used to say. You’re better off believing in God, they’d warn you, just in case. Because you’d hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.
I wonder if we’ve completely flipped the script on that now. I wonder if the cure represents insurance against religion. Because what if the pope is wrong? If I forgo the cure and end up dying at seventy to please a Lord who turns out not to exist, I’m gonna feel like a real jackass. Isn’t it better to live an extra thousand years or so, just in case?
I guess I’ll find out at some point. Some very, very distant point. Twelve more days till the cure.
Date Modified: 6/8/2019, 7:05PM
“I’m Always Gonna Get
My Period”
Until the other night, I hadn’t told anyone that I’m in the middle of getting the cure. I didn’t tell my dad or my sister or anyone at work—didn’t consult them either. They don’t know I’ve done it, and I sure as hell don’t know if they have. I didn’t even tell the banker friend who gave me the address. For one thing, I haven’t finished the process yet, so I’d feel a bit foolish telling everyone I was about to live forever, only to find out a week from now that my doctor was caught and thrown in Rikers.
But more to the point, I have yet to meet a single person who has publicly admitted it. I think we’ve all collectively adopted the unspoken rule that you don’t mention it out in the open. Like getting a nose job. Every discussion I’ve had about it has been conducted strictly in hypothetical terms. “Would you get it?” “What if it were legal? Would you get it then?” “Would you fly to Brazil and do it? I heard about a bunch of people at work who are taking sudden ‘vacations’ to Rio.” Stuff like that. But no one has ever said to me, “Yes, I got it”—which is just so weird. Clearly, people are going to get it. If a random person like me can go have it done, I have to assume I’m not alone. But I suppose there’s just too much uncertainly right now to go around parading the fact.
Anyway, I was more than happy to keep all this to myself. But Katy got it out of me. She’s an interrogator, my roommate. Aggressively interested in other people. Present her with wine, and she’ll pepper you with questions until you feel as if you’re under a hot lamp. She delights in extracting key information from you and then playing with it—stretching it out and bouncing it against the walls until she grows bored with it.
We were sitting in our apartment, watching the news. They were doing their nightly cure story, and Katy turned to me, clear out of the blue. She was squinting one eye.
“Did you get it?”
“What? No.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You are the absolute worst liar ever.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You fell dead silent when that report came on just now. Don’t try to hide it. I have excellent cure-dar.”
“Cure-dar?”
“Uh huh. Remember when I said Jesse Padgett had it done? She totally did. You could tell because she’d clam right up whenever the subject came up. Just like you did there. You should look in the mirror. Your face is so red right now. You look like a giant tomato.”
“Aw, Jesus.”
“You did it! You did it! You did it! I can’t believe this. You slippery bastard!”
She got the confession in record time and beamed in delight at the accomplishment. Her eyes bugged and she smiled proudly. She has a snaggletooth and loves to flaunt it as a distinguishing feature.
“Don’t go broadcasting this all over the place, all right?”
“Oh, I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “I promise you that. But you’re gonna tell me everything.”
“They haven’t even finished yet.”
“They haven’t finished? What do they do to you? Tell me, tell me, tell me. I heard you get sixty shots, all in the armpit.”
“No. They just took my blood, and then a week from now they give me three shots. That’s it.”
“That’s it? Holy underwear. What did it cost?”
“Seven thousand bucks.”
“Seven grand?”
“Shh!”
“That’s nothing! That’s less than nothing! I once expensed a tab at Lusardi’s that was bigger than that! You have to tell me how to do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“This doctor will only take direct referrals from a small circle of people he knows, and one of them happens to be a friend. No extra degrees of separation beyond that. It’s like a drug dealer, I swear.”
“So just give me your guy’s name and I’ll say I know him.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, please. Who made you guardian of the fountain? What—is this like your little boys’ club? Do you all go get the cure and then take a naked swim together? Is that it?”
“I just don’t want to get anyone in trouble. They asked me not to refer anyone.”
“This is so unfair. Who’s the guy you know? Is it Schilling? I bet it’s Schilling.”
“No…”
Another crooked, triumphant grin.
“It is! This is amazing. I don’t even need a polygraph. All I have to do is ask you a question and wait for your head to blow up.”
“Regardless, you still need the address and phone number from me.”
“Well, why hold it back? Honestly. Give me one good reason, apart from your little pinky swear not to, that I don’t deserve the information and you do. I’ve never known you to be timid about anything. But I ask you about this and you turn into a mute. Come on. Don’t be so annoying. It’s not like people won’t find out at some point that you’re having it done. In fact, judging by how quickly I found out, the whole city should know by morning.”
“Okay. Fine. I will give you all the information. After I’ve gotten the final shots a week from now. And, you have to pay the cable bill for six months.”
“What?”
“Referral fee,” I said. “It’s only fair.”
“You’re such a goddamn lawyer.”
“Those are the terms. We have a deal?”
“We do. I can’t believe you found it. Oh, I love you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Yes! You know I’ve been trying to find a curist for months now? I am so relieved. This is gonna be incredible. Except… You’re sure this guy’s legit, right?”
“Yes.”
“Because you know about all the bogus ones out there, right? How do you know this guy isn’t gonna inject you with Cascade? Remember the lady in Queens who had that done to her last week?”
“I’m certain it won’t be Cascade. For one thing, this doctor has no dishes to wash.”
“Okay, then I’ll wait until you get your shots. And if you don’t drop dead on the spot, I’m definitely calling him. I am so excited! I’m gonna be twenty-seven forever! And I don’t have to go to São Paulo to do it!”
She sprung up and rushed to the kitchen, then froze halfway there.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Do you know what I just realized? I’m always gonna get my period. That sucks.”
“Seems like a minor sticking point.”
“We could be roommates forever too. Do you want to sign a hundred-year lease?”
“No.”
“Your loss, because I am gonna party my ass off until the year 5000!”
Then she poured a glass of Shiraz to the brim and danced on the sofa.
Date Modified: 6/13/2019, 10:02AM
“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”
That’s the kind of thing you hear when you talk with my dad for any considerable length of time. I don’t want to say he goes off on tangents, because that would suggest he has a main topic from which to deviate. I enjoy his company because he never answers any question with the phrase “I don’t know.” He either knows, or he’ll talk out of his ass until he’s convinced you he knows. It’s a skill I’ve yet to master.
I’m due to get the cure finished off on Monday. I should be all excited at the prospect of beginning the rest of my indefinitely elongated life, but I’ve found myself increasingly impatient as I grow closer. All I’ve done the past few days is calculate population figures and think about death—mine or anyone else’s. I don’t enjoy thinking about death, which is one of the reasons I wanted the cure in the first place. Now, I seem to be obsessing over it. The irony of it all is infuriating.
All of this ruminating and provocation was beginning to feel like a vise on my head. I was getting sick of endlessly talking about it with myself. I needed an outlet. Someone besides Katy. Any time I bring up the cure with her, she screams out in ecstasy and packs a bowl. She’s got a fabulous attitude about the whole thing, but I needed to go a bit deeper. Besides, I was already visiting my dad for the weekend, and I would have burst like a grape if I didn’t fess up.
My dad has lived in northwest Connecticut for the past fifteen years, in one of those towns you can only get to on Metro North by switching trains at Bridgeport. Then you have to go all the way to Waterbury, at which point you feel as if you’ve been dumped off in a nuclear fallout zone. Towns around Waterbury are populated exclusively by elderly people and kids who took enough acid to permanently unmoor their brains. After more than five days in the vicinity, I have a hard time not wanting to tear off my own skin. Once you’re in that part of the state, there is nothing to do except eat and drink. And that’s how my old man has spent his retirement: eating and drinking.
He picked me up at the Waterbury station and drove me home. He had cold beer and a dish of mixed nuts waiting at the house for us. It was his way of entertaining the way my mom might have, way back when—of adding a nice little flourish to my arrival. I appreciated it greatly. Once we sat down, I couldn’t hold back.
“I’m getting the cure.”
“What?”
“I’m getting the cure. Final shots are on Monday.”
“So it’s real?”
“Far as I know.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
He sat there. He had an inscrutable look on his face. I couldn’t read him in the slightest.
“How did you get it?” he asked.
“I knew someone. It wasn’t that hard. Do you want it? The doctor said he wouldn’t give it to anyone over thirty-five, but I bet I could convince him otherwise, or find someone else to do it.”
“Won’t give it to anyone over thirty-five? Well, isn’t that a bitch? I suppose I’m a member of the ‘unluckiest generation’ now. That’s what they called it in the news report. ‘The last to die,’ they said. It’s like the people who died just as TV was being invented. That had to have been aggravating. You spend your whole life sitting next to some giant radio. And when they finally get around to adding picture to the sound, you’re dead as a doornail. Not really fair.”
“Like I said, I still think I can get it for you.”
“How much did it cost?”
“Seven thousand bucks.”
“I don’t know. Seems like a lot.”
“It’s eternal youth, Dad. It’s not gonna cost the same as a gumball.”
“No, you’re probably right about that. It’s just… I dunno. Look, I don’t mean to sadden you. Because I’m happy as can be that you found something that will keep you healthy forever and ever. I really am. It’s a comfort to me to know you’re not going to grow old and have crappy knees and hit a golf ball no more than eighty yards. But each day I’m down here is another day I’m away from your mother.”
We sat quietly for a moment. My mom died when I was fifteen years old, right after we moved from Buffalo. She died of cancer. For two years, she went through chemo and radiation. She aged forty years in a whisper. All her hair fell out. They kept going back to cut out parts of her again and again. And she stayed alive because she knew this was the only life she’d ever have. No reincarnation. No afterlife. Just this. That’s all you get. By the time the cancer had colonized every inch of her frame, she’d dropped to ninety pounds and looked like a mummy preserved in oil. Just a skeleton with a tarp of skin stretched out over it. There was nothing about her dying that was good.
“You really think you’ll see her again?” I asked him.
“Oh, I have no doubt of that.”
“But she’ll always be there. Why spend the next few years just sitting here waiting? Why not do something with the time you have?”
“I do plenty!”
He gestured to his railroad timetables. My dad collects them in bulk. Five times a year he’ll drive to some random state and attend a timetable convention. He’s the only person at those things who isn’t dressed in overalls and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt.
“I’m just saying that there may be places and people that you still have to discover. You may find a new passion, like antique boats or something.”
“Antique boats? Why would I like antique boats? I’ve met those boating guys. They’re all completely cheesy.”
“It’s just an example, Dad. It could be anything. I just don’t think there’s any need for you to sit here, waiting for the end.”
He grew angry at that remark. “I’m not waiting for the end, John. I’m not in a rest home. I have a life, one I’m glad to have. I’m not some sad old thing you have to come check on occasionally like a houseplant. But I have a date with your mom somewhere down the line, and I don’t want to postpone it longer than I have to. I don’t judge your choice to loiter around this planet forever, like a skateboarder outside a movie theater. So I would hope you would refrain from judging mine.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad or to judge you. I’m being selfish here. I know that. I just don’t want to see you go.”
“You’re gonna have to. I’m sorry.”
We sat quietly for another moment. I checked my watch. It was 9:19 p.m. When I was in grade school, a friend told me that every conversation pauses awkwardly at 20 and 40 minutes past the hour, because the ghosts are flying over your head. I rounded up to 9:20 in my head. For Mom’s sake.
“I know it was hard to see your mom go,” he said. “I was there. I wouldn’t wish the anguish you, your sister, and I went through on anyone. I know why you’d want to hold onto me so fiercely after that. I really do. If your mom were still around, you can bet I’d turn over fourteen grand to your doc quick as lightning. But she isn’t, and I’ve accomplished everything here that I’ve wanted to do. I’m comfortable. So I don’t want you to think this is some awful thing that’s going to happen to me down the line. It’s fine. Besides, I’m already old. I assume this thing doesn’t take thirty years off of your odometer, correct?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. It only puts you in park, not reverse.”
“See, I don’t want to stay old forever and ever. That’s why everyone your age is probably rushing out to get this. It’s not that people don’t want to die. It’s that they don’t want to grow old. Well, I missed out on that chance.”
“The unluckiest generation.”
“The unluckiest generation.” He sipped his drink. “You know I’m still due to be around here for a while, don’t you? I drink red wine. I eat my asparagus. I’m going to be annoying you for quite some time.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“If everyone ends up your age, that’s gonna be one hell of a party.”
“Could be.”
“What do we do about your birthday? Do we wish you a happy twenty-ninth birthday every year from here on out? Do we all have to get you presents every year for the next thousand damn years?”
“I’ll just take a cake.”
“I can do that. I can bake a cake, you know. They have some incredible cake mixes in the store now. They have fudge ripples. Sprinkles. Everything. And they taste just as good as the ones people make from scratch. I’m telling you, cake-batter mixes are one of the great food innovations of the past sixty years. They are a fabulous, fabulous product. I suppose you’ll still be around when they find a way to improve them.”
“How will they do that?”
He thought for a moment. “They’ll fly. In the future, you’ll get to eat flying cake.”
He poured me a glass of whiskey, and we proceeded to talk about the Bills and graham cracker piecrusts and his ten-year crusade to have a stoplight built at the intersection of Rand Avenue and Route 118. I happily would have stayed there, talking to him about anything and everything, for God knows how long.
Date Modified: 6/19/2019, 10:34AM
The Woman In The Elevator
They changed the slogan on those First Avenue wild postings: DEATH BE PROUD. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clever as the first one they tossed up there. Nearly all the posters had already been defaced by the time I saw them. There was one piece of graffiti that I particularly enjoyed. It had been done by someone who was clearly skilled with a can of spray-paint. It was the grim reaper, his own scythe plunged straight through his back, impaling him and leaving him dangling in midair. He was stone dead.
Unlike two weeks ago, yesterday was an insanely gorgeous day. Razor-sharp blue sky, as if you were staring at it through polarized lenses. I took this as a good omen, and walked to the doctor’s office from the subway using my finest New York walking technique: ass tight, legs churning, chin up, purposely avoiding eye contact with any people or objects. I can walk ten blocks like that in five minutes, even if you spring a tour bus group on me in the middle of it.
I had a faint trace of anxiety way in the back of my mind as I approached Dr. X’s building. It had been two weeks. He could have been arrested, or killed. Or he could have already fled the country for Brazil, taking with him thousands of dollars in cash (all in denominations under fifty dollars, of course). Or maybe those people decrying the cure as a giant hoax were onto something.
And the money. I’m not much of a cash person. I’ve never carried more than a hundred bucks on me at a time. Now I had 350 twenty-dollar bills to deal with (the clerk had no fifties). They wouldn’t fit in my wallet, and I didn’t want to keep them there anyway, since it would have bulged out and looked all too conspicuous. So I wadded the bills up and put them in my messenger bag. But my bag has roughly nine thousand pockets, and I’m the type of person who will put something somewhere and then immediately forget where the hell I put it. So on the subway ride there, I did this thing where I’d feel for the cash, only I’d feel the wrong pocket; then I’d quietly freak out and frisk the bag until I found the bulge. This happened at least three times.
But I was out of the subway now, and the crisp day quickly cleared all those niggling obsessions from my mind. It was nice out, and I was about to stay twenty-nine years old for the rest of my life. Nothing else mattered.
Again, the doorman let me sail right through to the elevator. I jammed the button and stared at the numbers above the door glowing progressively downward eight, seven, six, five… still on five… still on five… still on five… Jesus, was someone herding buffalo into the car? It began moving downward again, finally settling on L.
The door opened, and out stepped an unreasonably attractive woman. My fervent urge to get in the elevator was instantly destroyed. She was nearly six feet tall (I’m six foot six), naturally tanned. California blonde. If she hadn’t been standing before me, I’d have sworn she could only be created with Photoshop. She radiated like some kind of bright-shining beacon, welcoming all to a newly discovered paradise, a gateway to unimaginable happiness.
She saw me, gave a small smile, and said hi in a party girl’s raspy voice. I said hi back. I think I said hi back. I may have simply mouthed it and forgotten to make an audible sound. That’s probably what I did.
She walked right past me. I turned to look. So did the doorman. She was the promise of eternal youth made flesh. A feeling of incredible urgency lit up my system. That kind of instant love that you know isn’t the real thing but feels like it all the same. She had an impossible body, athletic and voluptuous all at once. Somehow. Some way. I have no idea. I immediately hoped she was coming from Dr. X’s office. I’ve never wanted to live forever so badly.
She breezed out of the entranceway and turned to walk down the street, out of view. I carefully etched the outline of her body into the most easily accessed part of my brain. That accomplished, I turned to the elevator to get back to business. It had already closed and gone back up. Eight, seven, six, five… still on five… still on five… Christ.
I made it to Dr. X’s door and knocked again. He let me in. His eyes were bloodshot. He beckoned me in and closed the door. I immediately handed him the cash, relieved that I no longer had to be its guardian.
“Oh, excellent,” he said. “Thank you. Would you like a receipt?”
“You give receipts?”
“Oh, sure. I mean, they’re not explicit. They don’t say, ‘Hey, I did something illegal.’ But I’ve had more than my fair share of clients who have employers that would happily bear the cost for this kind of thing.”
Scores was within ten blocks of the building. I immediately put two and two together.
“Before we get started,” I said, “I have a question.”
“Always with the questions. I like that you’re so inquisitive.”
“There was a blonde woman I saw walking out of the building. She was attractive. Highly attractive. Was she here just now, getting the cure?”
“I can’t answer that question. You know that.”
“But she was, right?”
“Again, I can’t answer that.”
He gave me a look that told me she was.
“Can I have her number?”
“What did I just say? Look, do you want these shots or not?”
“Yes, yes! Sorry.”
“Okay. Come on over to the chair.”
He led me over to a chair in the corner of the apartment. It had a lap belt, and belts to bind your wrists and ankles. I became alarmed. “What the hell is this?”
“The restraints help keep you in place during the injections,” he said. “If I don’t use them, you wiggle all over the place and the whole thing takes forever.”
“I thought you said these were three simple shots.”
“They are. But I have to inject them deep into your tissue. If you want, I can apply a small amount of local anesthesia to each area. I do it for some of the female patients.”
“So this will hurt?”
“It’s an ageless life, John. Did you really expect it to be painless?”
I relented and got in the chair. He buckled me in, and I quickly had a vision in my mind of him jumping into his closet and coming back out carrying a cattle prod and wearing a gimp mask. Instead, he wheeled a small cart towards the chair and uncovered the tray on top. There were three huge needles. Hell, they weren’t even needles. They looked like railroad spikes. Katy thought you got sixty shots in your armpit. My dad heard a rumor it was administered via a balloon enema. I would have preferred either option. I handle normal shots just fine. These were elephant shots.
“I do this fast. You’ll feel pressure, and it’ll sting. Badly. Here, hold this.”
He handed me a stress doll, one of those rubber ones where the eyes and ears bulge out if you squeeze it. “I don’t think I—”
“Trust me. You’ll want it.”
I held on. He plunged the needles in rapid succession, and in increasing order of excruciating pain: first my shoulder (not bad), then my neck (agony), then my thigh (like reverse childbirth). I squeezed the stupid doll until its ears could practically touch opposite sides of the room. It was horrible, but it was over quickly. He bandaged me up, undid the restraints, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“That it?”
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re all done. Enjoy the rest of your life.”
“Thank you.”
He gripped my shoulder and looked me in the eye.
“No, I mean it. Enjoy it. You still never know how much of it you have left.”
He patted me on the back and escorted me out. I pushed the elevator button. Again, it stalled at the fifth floor. I couldn’t have cared less this time. Down to the lobby I went. I stepped out into the flawless morning. I made it a point to find that blonde girl again one day. I now have all the time in the world to do it.
Date Modified: 6/20/2019, 2:06PM
“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”
Even if the cure is a complete hoax (and now that I’ve gotten it, that outcome is now a virtual certainty), I still recommend you get it. The placebo effect is marvelous. I’m not supposed to feel supercharged from getting it, but I do. And if I find out ten years from now that it was all a lie, that’s still ten years of tricking myself into feeling downright ebullient. I’ll have to get it again after that.
I felt like I could run a marathon when I got out onto the street yesterday. But because I am far too lazy, I instead opted for a leisurely walk back downtown. I also stopped for a donut, because it felt like the right thing to do. As I walked down into the Forties, I could hear the growing sound of a crowd in the distance. After a few more blocks, everything came into relief. I was close to the UN. The pro-cure protesters were standing outside. And if there is a group of people out there even more fanatical than the pro-death supporters, it’s the pro-cure supporters. They looked angry. One woman appeared to be shaking with rage as she walked around with a sign that read, LEGALIZE IT. YOU ARE LETTING US DIE. She paced in front of the building, stomping her feet like a T. rex.
I made a turn to go across to Second Avenue, but police had already put up a barricade. Helicopters flew over the scene. My only way out was back up First. I quickly turned around to get away. A small flock of new protesters was coming my way. One of them jammed a flyer into my hand.
“Don’t take this shit lying down,” he said. On top of the flyer was the headline THE CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR LEGALIZING THE CURE, BY ALLAN ATKINS. I didn’t know you could now get Allan Atkins rants in pamphlet form. I turned to the crowd in front of the headquarters. Normally, you see protesters demonstrating peacefully, walking in circles and whatnot. But these people were in rows, facing a single direction, pressed as close to the building as the cops would allow them to be. They didn’t look content to simply voice their disapproval. They looked like they wanted in. I got back up into the Fifties and went across town and back down as fast as I could.
Once I was in our apartment, I downed the cheap champagne, ate a cold can of Chunky Soup, and watched a news report about what I had just waded through. Apparently, cops fired rubber bullets into the crowd an hour after I left. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time they’ve done that.
Katy was already drunk by the time I got to the bar. I had to catch up.
“Happy cure day!” she screamed.
“Shh!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll be quiet. But you have to tell me everything. And you owe me some doctor digits. Pony up, kid.”
We retreated to a corner table. I gave her Dr. X’s info. I told her everything: the chair, the needles, the protesters, etc. Even the blonde girl.
“She sounds hot.”
“She was.”
“Well, happy cure day. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Do you realize that you’re now always going to look the way you look at this exact moment? From this day on? This is how you’ll look when you die. Do you realize that? It’s like I’m looking at your corpse!”
“I didn’t think of it that way, no. But thank you.”
“You also realize you can never retire now, right?”
“What?”
“You can’t ever retire now. How are you gonna quit your job at sixty-five if you live for another five hundred years? Did you consider that?”
I had, but I had placed it squarely in the “things I prefer not to think about” pile. “This just gives me more time to figure out what it is I really want to do,” I told her. “I’m not preparing for some sixty-five-year end goal anymore. That rush to save money or whatever is all gone now.”
“Ooh! I just thought of something else. Do you realize we could live another five hundred years and the Bills still may not win the Super Bowl?”
“Will you shut up about all the terrible stuff already?”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. No dark stuff. This is your cure day. And in a few weeks, we’ll be celebrating mine too. Oh yes we will.”
We staggered home at 6:00 a.m. and I took a shower before going to bed. I washed off the night and emerged from behind the curtain looking relatively fresh. I looked at myself in the mirror: brown hair, round face, sloped shoulders, two gentle smile creases bracketing my mouth. A barely noticeable strawberry mark under my eye. Slight stubble that steadfastly refuses to grow into anything resembling a normal beard. I took a photo of myself. This is how I look now. This is how I’ll look when I die.
Happy cure day to me, indeed.
Date Modified: 6/21/2019, 3:45PM
“The Conservative Case For
Legalizing The Cure”
My friend Jeff sent me this an hour ago:
I don’t know if you’ve been watching Allan Atkins on TV lately, but he’s becoming increasingly unhinged. I’m not political one way or another—though I think a lot of what he says is perfectly reasonable—but he delivered a diatribe yesterday that was pretty nuts. Here’s the transcript:
“I don’t know what country this is anymore. How can this administration justify doing what it is doing? How? How is it possible? You tell me where it says in the Constitution that this cure is forbidden. You can’t tell me, because it is not in the Constitution. It is not. If the class action lawsuit against the government over this ever gets kicked up to the Supreme Court—and it will, I can assure you—we’re going to see the true face of this Court and of the administration that put many of its judges there. Because any judge worth his salt would look at this ban and see a crime. An outright crime against a country and its citizens. And the only judge that would ban it would be a fascist, activist judge who wishes to impose his or her individual beliefs upon us all.
“See, this ban is liberal thinking at its absolute worst. They don’t want to give you the freedom to make your own choices. They want you to suffer. They are antihuman. It wasn’t enough for them to merely hate America. No, now they hate the very idea of humanity. Humans are bad. ‘Oh, you can’t live forever! You’ll emit too much carbon! You’ll throw away too much garbage! An owl will die!’ It’s insane. It’s this mentality that we, as human beings, are some ugly blight upon this world, that we do not deserve to live here with all the other innocent little animals—animals that kill and rape each other, just so you know. They believe that every action we take, every building we erect, every road we lay down is somehow a massive affront to their pristine vision of what the earth should look like. They are allergic to progress. This is a sickness. An absolute sickness. And now, it is literally costing us newfound years off of our lives.
“I am a conservative, and that means that, unlike liberals, I deal with reality: with the way humans really behave, and with this world as it truly is. And that’s what makes this war… this, this war on the cure, such a complete and utter crock. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with some utopian liberal fever dream that is neither economically or socially attainable.
“To you liberals out there listening—and I know you are, because our ratings’ demographic breakouts make it plain as day—I have a question for you. If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, would you keep the cure from him? If Thomas Edison were alive today, would you keep the cure from him as well? Would you willingly let some of our greatest statesmen and inventors perish from the globe? Do you think you’re helping the world if you do that? Or is there some special little Hollywood guest list for people you think deserve it? Not Mr. and Mrs. America, of course. They’re far too dumb, and too busy polluting the world, to make your cut.
“Never mind the positive impacts of the cure, like the end of senior citizenship and all the Social Security and Medicare costs that go with it. Liberals don’t have any time for that. They’re too busy dwelling on all the horrible things we naughty humans will be doing with it. So you can’t have this cure. Not even in this country, where it was invented. Can you believe that? Can you believe the gall? Liberals always say they love science. This is science! This is science! This cure is ours. We shouldn’t be banning it, we should be subsidizing it. But we’re letting other countries take this cure and run with it. Do we hand out our gold and oil reserves to other countries? No.
“That is why I say to you friends out there listening now: Buy a gun. Maybe you believe in taking the cure. Maybe you do not. But tell me if you want to live in a country where the government will let you die like this. Buy a gun. I know they’re hard to come by now. I’ve bought plenty myself in recent months. I know my friends at Smith & Wesson—proud sponsors of the show, mind you—are trying to keep up with the demand. But if you have to drive to another state to do it, do it. Buy a gun. Buy as many as you can and learn to be skilled with them. Because the government is robbing you of your life, your liberty and your happiness. You tell me what they’re going to rob you of next. And you tell me what we should do if the Russians decide to visit our shores with an army of twenty million ageless soldiers, because you know they’d like nothing more. Buy a gun. Buy a damn gun! If you love America, and what it stands for, buy a gun. Because right now, I don’t know if the country I live in is fit to be called the United States of America. And I’m willing to fight to get it back.
“Are you?”
Jesus.
Date Modified: 6/24/2019, 11:49AM
“They’re All Getting Divorced”
I’ve been at work all week, ever since getting the cure. This was lousy planning on my part. I should have booked a vacation in Aruba to coincide with it, so I could sit back, relax, have a fruity drink, smoke a joint, and bask in my own foreverness. And now Katy says I can’t ever retire. That was all I could think about this week, as I got loaded with files: you will be doing this forever and ever and ever and ever. I’ll always need money, I imagine. But I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here now. I have no life goal anymore. There are no golden years I have to stockpile for, and the idea of trying to save for some thousand-year retirement makes my head explode. I can’t worry about the future, because now it’s not finite. I can only worry about what’s right in front of me, at this very moment. It’s kind of liberating, when I think about it. I could go be a bartender in Denmark if I wanted. I don’t think I want to, but it’s a nice option to have.
I said nothing to any of my co-workers about getting the cure. But yesterday, while I was doing research for some eight-thousand-page brief, a colleague pulled me aside. Well, not a colleague. One of my boss’ colleagues. Someone far more senior than I am. He asked me if I had a few minutes. This terrified me, because I thought I had fucked something up. Then he brought me to his office.
“Do you know anything about divorce law?” he asked.
“A bit.”
“You need to learn it all. I know you’re buried right now, but I’m organizing a special divorce seminar, and you need to attend.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re all getting divorced,” he said. “All of them. Every banker and hedge fund guy in this town is looking for a way out right now. And if they aren’t looking for a way out, their wives are. We have three guys here who are good with divorce statutes. That’s not enough. We’re gonna have to double or triple the load. We’re talking about cases that could go on for ages. They haven’t even defined the law on most of this stuff yet. Big, big moneymaker. It’s where you’re going to want to be. You don’t want to stay in estate law. It’ll be extinct within two decades.”
“Jesus.”
He then told me a story relayed from one of the divorce partners at some other firm. One day some big swinging dick showed up at the firm, flew past the receptionist, and stormed into his office.
“I want an annulment,” shouted the big swinging dick.
The lawyer was nonplussed. “What?”
“You heard me! I want an annulment, and I want it done quickly.”
“You can’t get an annulment,” the lawyer told him. “You’ve been married to your wife for twenty years.”
“It was under false pretenses.”
“What false pretenses?”
“She got the cure, and so did I. Completely changes the parameters of our original arrangement.”
“Yes, but the cure didn’t exist twenty years ago. For there to be false pretenses, it had to have existed back when you signed the marriage license. And even then, I’m not sure how it would count.”
“Listen, I’m a traditional man. I believe when you take that vow at the altar, you should abide by it. I vowed to stay with that woman all the days of my life. But I figured that was seventy or eighty years, tops. Now I’m supposed to spend the next thousand years with her? That’s insane.”
“I think what you want is a divorce.”
“Why? So she can take everything I own? That woman has been spending every weekend with her personal trainer for six years. And then I have sex five times with a brand manager and I’m the asshole? You tell me how that makes sense. No, I want an annulment. Our marriage never would have existed if this cure had been around.”
“I can’t issue you an annulment under those circumstances. It’s a binding marriage. It lasts forever.”
“But no one told me forever would be this long!” the big swinging dick screamed. “I know I swore to be with her till death, but that was under a different definition of death, was it not?”
The lawyer stammered, “Well, that’s a bit of a gray area right now.”
“Well, ungray it. Make it black or make it white. I don’t care which. I’ll pay you five million if you can get it annulled. Five million. And, if you can’t, you get me my divorce. Then you charge me one hundred million in legal fees. That way, I’m technically broke and she can’t touch the cash. But I only pay you five million, and you ignore the rest of the debt.”
“That’s illegal in about thirty-seven different ways.”
“I don’t care! I want my money, and I want a clean break from that woman. Give her the townhouse if you need a negotiating tool. Between the dog hair and that glass sofa she bought, she’s made the place all but unlivable anyway. And I want it done by fall. I have a two-week vacation in Majorca with our former nanny, and I don’t want to cancel it. Get it done or I’ll find a real lawyer.”
And with that, the big swinging dick stormed right back out. Two hours later, his wife walked into the exact same lawyer’s office, demanding the townhouse, the Hamptons estate, and “alimony for the rest of his miserable existence, regardless of length.”
I’m definitely attending that seminar.
Date Modified: 6/26/2019, 10:10PM
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
Katy demanded I go with her to her cure consultation. I explained to her that there was no waiting room in Dr. X’s apartment, and that I thought he probably preferred that everyone come alone. I made a compromise of walking her to the building, waiting outside for her, and grabbing some drinks with her after she got her blood drawn. “You’ll get drunk even faster, since you’ll have less blood in your system,” I explained. She liked the idea.
When we got off the subway and walked east, we could hear the protesters outside the UN. Their numbers have continued to swell. I’m not sure they even take bathroom breaks anymore. The avenue has been barricaded much farther uptown than when I was last caught in the middle of it, as if there’s a permanent weekend street fair. I was tempted to see if any vendors had set up shop among the throngs, selling paper plates of greasy pad thai for two bucks. I resisted.
We stopped at a bagel shop and grabbed a quick lunch before her appointment. Again, Katy brought up every cure-related scenario that came to her mind, both the good and the horrific. Mostly the horrific. She let her guard down a bit as we ate. My best friend is not the world’s most introspective person. But she took a moment to stop being so damn bubbly.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do after this,” she said. “Suddenly, I’m all worried about the future.”
“That’s what Dr. X said. No one he sees thinks about it until they get it done.”
“Am I doing the right thing here? My grandma’s got pancreatic cancer. Is it fair she has to go through that and I get to sidestep it?”
“You could still get cancer. You think your grandma would wish it on you?”
“No, I guess not. I don’t know. I never really thought about my life before. I knew it was short, and I knew I should have a good time before it’s over. That was about it. I never thought I had the luxury of time—now it’s all I’m gonna have. I feel like I should probably do something more substantial with it.”
“You’ve always had the luxury of time. You’re twenty-seven. Cure or no cure, that’s still plenty of time up ahead. It’s yours to do with as you please. You’re not obligated to be Mother Teresa now. This just means you have more time to do what you enjoy, or find what you enjoy, I guess.”
“Well, you know what I enjoy.”
“I do indeed.”
She grew alarmed. “What if we run out of booze three hundred years from now?
“Oh, I think measures will be taken to prevent that sort of thing. We don’t need glaciers. But vodka? They won’t let the vodka dry up.”
“Thank God.”
We got up to leave and approached the doctor’s building. We got to the southwest corner of the intersection on First. The doctor’s building was across the avenue, on the southeast corner. The light turned for us to cross. Out of my peripheral vision, on the northwest corner, I saw a tall figure outside a candy shop. Blonde. An impossible body. She didn’t have to turn for me to instantly recognize her. In fact, I had memorized the back of her quite capably. I stopped and held Katy back.
“That’s the blonde! That’s the blonde!”
Katy looked at her. “Oh, she is hot.”
“I have to go talk to her. I’ll meet you out front when you’re finished.”
I broke from Katy to cross the street. Katy hurried into the doctor’s building. As I got to the opposite corner, the blonde turned and looked in my direction. I gave a tentative wave, trying to ascertain if she recognized me or not. She appeared unnerved, turned away from me, and began walking up the avenue. I crossed the street in hopes that she was simply walking away and not walking away from me. She gave another look back, saw me approaching, and quickened her gait. I took the hint and stopped outside the candy store, dejected. She blazed down the avenue, only pausing once to look back at the doctor’s apartment building. I turned to do the same.
And that’s when the doctor’s apartment blew up.
Before I could see anything, I heard a gigantic BOOM! Then a quarter of an instant later the corner of the eighth floor blew out onto First Avenue in a single lash of flame. Right where the doctor’s office once was. A makeshift hailstorm of pulverized white brick pummeled the traffic below. Hot black smoke began quickly scaling the outside of the building. A Freidrich air-conditioning unit—one of those heavy, old-school units—crashed into the sidewalk below. If anyone had been underneath it, it would have destroyed them.
Everything, everyone, everywhere, froze to turn. What the fuck just happened? I looked to the doorway but couldn’t see Katy. She was in there. She was on her way to the eighth floor, or she was there already. I didn’t move. I stood still and hoped everything would suddenly reset and be put back in its proper place, because nothing about this felt possible. It felt absurd, like some kind of prank. The building was on fire and I knew I needed to run in but didn’t know how to run or speak or breathe at the moment. Horrible thoughts about Katy dying circled around my consciousness, like strange footsteps you hear outside your window in the dead of night. I heard the sirens blasting and growing louder and more intense, as if they were meant to echo the cries of those suffering inside.
My body finally unlocked and I began running to the building as the fire truck pulled up alongside it. When I was in the middle of the intersection, I looked down the street and saw two more towers of smoke climbing up and up at points farther to the west, towards the Hudson: one less than half a block away, another much farther across town.
An elderly woman came running out of the building. She carried a small black Scottie with her and wore a gypsy’s head wrap. I stepped in front of her to get her to stop. She stared at me, confused by it all.
“What just happened?” she asked.
I pointed inside. “Did you see anyone else on your way out?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? I’m looking for a brunette woman. In her twenties. You saw her. Tell me you saw her coming out.”
I held her shoulders tight, begging her for a response.
“I didn’t see anything!”
She wrested away from my grip and fled. A small number of tenants came out of the emergency stairwell and ran up First. I held the door open for them, let them pass, and then began flying up the stairs. The flow of tenants petered out as I climbed higher. I got to the eighth floor and came out into a lightly smoky corridor. There was a door to a freight elevator room at the end of the hall and beyond that a door to a second hallway where the doctor’s apartment was. I ran to the end of the corridor and saw the door of the freight elevator room come open. I hoped to see Katy and the doctor hand in hand, making their way out safely. It was a fireman. He stopped me and turned me around.
“My friend is in there!” I screamed.
“I can’t let you go. You have to get downstairs right now. Go. Go!”
“Is anyone alive? I’m looking for Katy Johannson.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
I relented and walked back to the stairwell. The fireman turned and reentered the freight elevator room and I immediately doubled back to go find Katy. The fireman was still on the other side of the door, now clearly angry I had defied him. He raised a fist and sent me back where I came from. I heard a huge crash, like a ceiling caving in and I pictured my best friend pressed and flattened and desperate for air. The door to the stairwell came open and a wave of firemen filed by at top speed and pushed me to the side. Heavier smoke began to fill the hallway and I began to swoon and feel as if the walls and floors of the building were molten and elastic. I retreated to the stairwell like a pathetic child and listened to the firemen shouting orders at one another from the other side of the door. I sat there trying to absorb every sound and sight because it was all I could do. I wasn’t remotely qualified to take any sort of bold action. All I could seize was proximity. I felt the urge to run to the doctor’s apartment and sit down in the blaze. I hoped for Katy to pass me by or call me but instead there was a big deafening nothing. So I sat on the gray concrete steps in the sickly fluorescent lighting, waiting. I don’t know how long I was there. No one passed by. Eventually, another fireman opened the door to the hall and ordered me down to the ground level.
I walked down the stairs and out into the street. I smelled my sleeves and they reeked of smoke, of things burned that should never be burned. Up First, I could see one more plume of smoke. Down First, I heard the swarm of protesters yelling and screaming. People were running up the avenue, some to the bridge, instinctively, as a sort of automatic 9/11-type gut response. Many seemed to have the palpable urge to get off the island, to get as far away from the center of the imaginary bull’s-eye as humanly possible.
I stayed where I was, as close to Katy as the FDNY would allow. I checked my phone and saw the EXPLOSIONS ROCKING MANHATTAN headline. The cops and firefighters continued shuttling in and out, saying nothing to me because saying nothing is what they have to do. I checked Katy’s status updates. There was nothing since the last one she posted three minutes before the explosion. She must have posted it while she was in the elevator.
DrinksOnKatyJ: U FOLKS BETTER GET USED TO THE IDEA OF ME
STICKING AROUND HERE A LONG, LONG TIME! 12:13PM
That was the last thought going through her mind. She was ready to welcome another thousand years of joy and happiness, and I had promised it to her. I had brought her to this place. I had planted that thought in her mind. I could’ve stayed strong and never told her a goddamn thing, but I barely put up a fight. Deep down, I wanted her to know it all. I wanted the cheap thrill of being her little cure matchmaker.
And now she’s gone. No hospital admitted her. No one saw her leave. There’s nothing left of her. All the extra plans and hopes and dreams she had for herself will remain just that, forever.
I can’t move.
Date Modified: 7/3/2019, 4:08PM
At The Protests
Our apartment is uncomfortably spacious now. I see the wine stains on the couch, and I hear Katy’s manic giggling like she’s still present. I don’t ever recall seeing her moody or displeased, which makes her abrupt and violent end all the more unbearable. All I can do is keep drinking and banter with her in my mind.
A pro-cure blogger named Ladyhawke posted another account of what happened yesterday, as witnessed from outside the UN. Apparently, she was one of the protesters.
HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE?
We were facing the UN and screaming our heads off when the explosion drowned us out for a millisecond. But no one knew what the hell was going on. One person in the crowd screamed, “They’re trying to kill us!” and that was enough to set people fleeing in every direction. One guy pushed me to the ground so he could run past me. I was lucky; I saw another guy who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, fall and get his head stepped on. I have no clue if he ever got back up. I got up and immediately began running up First Avenue. I assumed it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it was a terrorist attack. But I thought it was, you know, a terrorist terrorist attack. Someone from Saudi Arabia or something. My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets and not at the road ahead of them. So I got bumped into from behind and from the side, as if someone had released a stampede of blind bulls onto the street. I got kicked in the back of the leg. Now I have a black welt there the size of a lemon.
Needless to say, now that we know what really happened, that these doctors had been systematically targeted—I’d argue they were assassinated—we are pissed. We’re already gathering outside the UN and the Capitol right now. We will number in the tens of thousands by morning, I can promise you that. How many more doctors will the president allow to be blown to pieces before he finally realizes he’s made a huge mistake? We’ve been protesting peacefully for months, but these pro-death people—who got what they wanted, by the way—are free to just randomly kill innocent people? These are doctors who treasure life enough to bestow more of it upon the rest of us. We’re through being nice about this. We’re not taking no for an answer this time around.
—Ladyhawke
I don’t know where any of this is going, and I don’t know which side will come out on top, or which side even deserves to. All I know is I feel an increasing urge to get the hell away from it all.
Date Modified: 7/4/2019, 8:47PM
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or
A Lot Later On”
Katy’s family is making funeral arrangements. All the organized grieving happens at light speed, as if it must be done before you realize what you’re grieving over. I miss Katy desperately. The bomb goes off in my mind every five minutes, and I’m left no less shaken by it each time. I have fevered daydreams of a blonde running from me and taking out a phone, pushing the secret code number that kills my best friend. I told the police about her. Every detail of her face and figure. I could have sculpted it from clay. They had a crude sketch drawn and posted. No one has responded. I’m not terribly optimistic.
I’ve spent most of my time reading everything I can about the bombings. The same articles over and over again. I don’t know why I keep reading them—perhaps to help drive the reality of it home. They just released a partial list of the doctors killed. Their count (minus bystanders like Katy) appears to have settled at nine: Charles Bane III, Sofia Gonzalez, Gim Lau, Jocelyn McManus, Vishal Mehta, Frederick Polycronis, DDS, Ian Rosenhaus, Pameer Sanji, and Ameet Thakkar. I know Dr. X wasn’t a woman, nor was he Indian or Asian (unless he was very, very good at keeping his identity hidden, which it seems now he was not). That leaves three possibilities from this list: Bane, Polycronis, and Rosenhaus. At some point, they’re going to release his picture. I don’t know if I can stand to find out which one is him. I gave him seven thousand bucks in cash to keep me young for the rest of my life. And now he’ll never get to use it. The fact that he gave himself the cure only makes the finality of his death harder to take. Who the hell knows how many lifetimes were just robbed from him.
I should have seen something like this coming. What happened in Oregon should have prepared me for it. But the truth is, I didn’t pay much heed to what took place in Oregon. It happened all the way across the country, so I guess even news about murder suffers from East Coast bias. There’s the added fact that I live in Manhattan. When you live here, you can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
I can’t do that anymore. What happened yesterday and what happened in Oregon are now so strongly bonded that it feels like Eugene is located right across the Hudson. A reporter named Mike Dermott wrote a huge piece about Oregon last week. I never bothered to read it before. But I’ve now read it a dozen times in the past couple hours. I can nearly recite it from memory. Copied from Slate:
THE MAN WHO CONQUERED DEATH
By Mike Dermott
Graham Otto never set out to conquer death. Actually, he was just hoping to help out the redheads of the world.
“I’m a redhead,” he noted in his private journal, which I was granted exclusive access to by the Otto family. “I’ve yet to meet a redheaded guy who enjoys being a redhead.” The name of the gene is MCR1. It’s located on chromosome 16. And according to the complete map of the human genome, it’s the gene that causes red hair (along with a rare condition called brittle cornea syndrome). Working with a team of fellow geneticists, Otto targeted this gene in hopes of finding a way to color hair through gene therapy. “It wasn’t the most noble of genetic experiments,” he wrote. “It was the sort of thing a wealthy university like U. Oregon does from time to time, when it feels like playing around.”
“He was excited about the potential business aspect of it. We all were,” recalls his wife, Sarah. “Frankly, I was just thrilled at the prospect of never having to pay three hundred dollars for highlights ever again.”
He didn’t fit the traditional scientist mold. Otto had attended Oregon on a partial scholarship for track and placed as high as eighth in the two-mile event at the 2000 Prefontaine Classic. He was an outgoing man, who always preferred company while working in the lab and who was always able to talk about his work in ways that laymen found not only accessible but downright fascinating.
“I think that’s what made him such a great teacher,” says UO President Raymond Lack. “He was passionate about his work, but not to the point where he became insular. You never felt like he was talking over your head about any of this stuff. He made it sound interesting, even entertaining. And trust me, that’s rare among his peers. I’ve always considered his communication skills a rare gift for anyone, in any profession.”
In terms of changing hair color through gene therapy, Otto was a miserable failure. The problem wasn’t extracting the redhead protein from gene. That proved easy for Otto and his self-described team of “Hair Bears.” The problem was replacing the color. “If you take away a person’s genetically predisposed color, you essentially give them colorless hair—albino hair,” he wrote. “You have to eliminate that protein in the gene and you have to find a way to add the color of your preference, and that’s where the engineering becomes close to a technical impossibility.” Otto experimented with altering proteins found elsewhere in the DNA helix of fruit flies (who can have red eyes that are triggered by the same gene), trying to activate a different color. “We tried blue. We tried brown. We tried green. Nothing worked.”
Exasperated one night in the lab, Otto became careless. In the midst of deadening the red protein in that day’s current batch of flies, he removed an extra protein from the gene as well. “I knew exactly what I had done,” he wrote. “But it was late, and I didn’t feel like starting over. Every good scientist knows that if you contaminate the original sample, you toss it. But I didn’t. I figured it wouldn’t make a difference in the end, so I went ahead and injected the vector. It was pure sloppiness.” When Otto returned the following morning, nothing unusual had occurred. He tried to introduce a new color protein into the flies’ DNA, but it again failed. He placed the batch of flies aside and began taking on a new group of test subjects.
But then something odd happened to that tainted sample of flies. “They wouldn’t die. A fruit fly usually lives for less than two months. And even then, within twenty-four hours or so, you usually begin seeing a handful of them drop. But none of the flies I injected with the vector dropped. Ever. They just kept flying around.”
Up until Otto’s serendipitous mistake, it was assumed that biological aging was controlled by hundreds, if not thousands, of separate genetic proteins found in the body—proteins that worked in concert to determine the rate of aging across various parts of an individual. “We always assumed that a thousand different internal mechanisms and external factors worked together to trigger the aging process,” says Dr. Phillip Frank, head of genetics at the National Institutes of Health. “When you think about it, you begin aging from the second you’re born. Our studies showed that specific proteins in your body activated all the different physiological processes and free radicals that go into both growing up and growing old. There was no master switch.”
Until Graham Otto came around.
The tainted fruit flies carried on living for weeks and weeks, with an apparently limitless supply of energy. The only dead fruit flies Otto found in their container were their offspring (the altered genes, Otto discovered, weren’t passed on), the offspring of their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring’s offspring. The original flies remained alive and fluttering about indefinitely. Otto acted quickly, retracing his footsteps from that late night in the lab, finding the supposedly unimportant protein he had mistakenly altered, and replicating the experiment again, without altering the original protein in the gene. Again, the altered flies had a seemingly indefinite lifespan.
The supposedly innocuous portion of the gene Otto had messed with turned out to be much more important than he had ever envisioned. He rushed to form his own independent biotech firm and called a lawyer to draft a patent for the protein. “Normally, this is something you do over the course of years,” he told Lack in an e-mail. “But we’re doing it in a week, because if we can replicate it across species, maybe there’s something there.” And replicate it he did, across mice, rats, guinea pigs, and others, including his own aging golden retriever, Buggle. In all instances, the altered animals appeared ageless when compared to their respective control groups, never growing old past the day the vector was introduced into their system. And all of them remain alive and well today, in tourist displays set up by the university—except for Buggle, who remains comfortably in the Otto household.
Despite his extroverted nature, Otto wasn’t known as a cocky, presumptuous man. The only careless thing he did in his life was to mistakenly alter the wrong gene in those fruit flies. So when he published his findings, he insisted only on reporting what he had found, and didn’t speculate on the potential enormous worldwide impact of his research. Nevertheless, many in his field declared it junk science. “It was just too easy of an answer,” says Dr. Frank. Still, while many questioned Otto’s findings, they didn’t hesitate to recreate his experiments. And they soon found that his discovery was everything he said it was. Far more than that, actually. “He understated the results, because he didn’t want to sound like some kook. He refused to call it a cure for aging,” says Sarah Otto. “But that’s what it was, and the follow-up research proved it.”
To see if the gene therapy worked in humans, Otto solicited an unlikely test group: patients with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. “A disease like Alzheimer’s is triggered specifically by the advance of age,” Otto wrote in a subsequent email to Lack. “So if we administer the cure to people who are just developing the disease, we can do two things. One, we can potentially prevent further damage to their brains. Two, we can see within a shorter period of time if the cure takes hold. Normally, when you do a CAT scan of Alzheimer’s patient, you see changes—sometimes rather drastic changes—to the brain over a short time span. You can see the dark spots, the ‘cobwebs,’ as it were.”
The ten initial test subjects received monthly CAT scans after being administered the cure. “In every case, the cobwebs stopped growing,” noted Otto in his second published report. “The dark spots on their brains remained dark but never expanded, which is unheard of in Alzheimer’s patients. We studied them for over a year and not one of them saw the disease advance past the early stages. Their brains remained perfectly, blessedly intact.” Two of the patients have since died from unrelated causes; the remaining eight are alive and well.
By the time Otto had published these subsequent findings, the biotech community was busy stress-testing the cure in every conceivable way. Not once were they able to poke a hole in what Otto had discovered. So miraculous were the cure’s effects that many doctors began to confess on the party circuit that they had injected themselves with the vector. According to urban legend in the community, one such doctor, David Spitz, accidentally let spill to a prominent socialite at charity gala in Seattle that he had given himself the cure. The socialite demanded the cure for herself, eventually wearing Spitz down with offers of cash and signing secretly prepared documents that absolved him of all legal liability. Thus the black market for the cure was born, well before it had even crossed the FDA’s desk.
To the very end, Otto remained ambivalent about what he had discovered and its rapid spread. “I was overjoyed when we did the Alzheimer’s study and found what we found,” he wrote in his journal. “The idea that we could cure this disease that had ravaged so many families, the idea that we could prevent people’s memories from being erased—that was wonderful. And certainly, I was excited at the financial prospect of the cure, the kind of money it could generate for the university, as well as me and my family. I’m not immune to that part of it. That was all very exciting. But when I heard about David Spitz, and what he had done with it, I realized that we had triggered a kind of frenzy we were totally unprepared to deal with. You know, science is usually agony. You conduct millions of experiments just to move the world forward a millimeter. But in a way, that’s a good thing. Science usually gives us time to adjust. But the cure hasn’t been like that. I discovered it too quickly, odd as that may sound. That’s why, from the outset, I agreed with the president’s decision to ban it. I was glad someone was willing to step back and declare outright that we needed to know everything about this treatment before we unleashed it upon every citizen. Obviously, that didn’t stop it from spreading. But I’m glad someone stood up and took that stance. It needed to be done. A lot of the world fell in line quickly after that. And that’s good. Just because I benefited from sloppy handiwork doesn’t mean the rest of us will. Because we still don’t know what future effects this cure will have. Think about how many treatments have been fast-tracked for approval by the FDA that eventually needed to be recalled. This cure could end up not working. And that might be the very best case scenario! Heaven help us all if it really does work.”
Graham Otto would never get to find out.
It was another late night in the lab. Despite his astonishing success, Otto had yet to realize any of the potential financial gain from his breakthrough. He dedicated himself to making sure the cure was 100 percent bulletproof, so that it might one day gain legitimate FDA approval and prompt the president to overturn the ban; that is, to overturn it at the right time, not when people found it most convenient or profitable. Otto was monitoring over a half-dozen species that night, comparing their statuses against control groups, trying to detect the slightest sign of aging: the first gray hair, any paunchiness around the middle, anything. The Hair Bears were with him: Dr. Peter Madden, Dr. Brian Lo, Dr. Sidney Brown and three other PhD candidates (Candace Malkin, Dinesh Ganji, and Michael Duggan) in his now-growing department.
The University of Oregon has a security infrastructure that is the envy of most other colleges. Every building requires hologram identification worn on a lanyard. Every entrance is covered by surveillance cameras. The campus is extremely well lit, and hundreds of emergency phones dot the area, for easy access by students and staff who feel immediately threatened.
But the Hair Bears’ lab was no longer located on the Oregon campus. Due to the success of Otto’s program, the university had agreed to build a new lab for him and his cohorts—a facility they hoped would rival that of any genetics lab in America. But, while that was being built, the team was forced to work out of a makeshift lab in a nearby office park.
The Shelby Office Park looks very much like any other office park in the nation. It’s located on Shelby Circle, right near a strip of chain restaurants and home improvement stores. It’s a poorly lit complex—even now, after what happened. A walk from the Shelby parking lot to one of the main buildings in the dead of night is enough to jangle even the toughest nerves. A card-key is needed to enter any of the buildings on the park’s campus. But the parking lot has no such requirement. Parking is free, and there’s no gate to check into. Anyone can drive up to the main buildings. And on the night of August 7, 2016, someone did.
An unmarked van pulled up to the curb in front of Building D, where the Hair Bears made their temporary home. The team typically finished up work at the same time, but Otto was known to tell everyone to go home and get their rest, while staying on alone in the lab—sometimes for a little while, sometimes for hours. (Although he enjoyed the company of his coworkers, Otto claimed to focus better when undisturbed.) From what police have been able to reconstruct, it seems that night he bade his colleagues goodbye and stayed in the lab for a scant ten extra minutes. After he closed up shop, he grabbed his briefcase and made his way down to the lobby.
As he exited the building, he saw the van. He likely also noticed that there were still four bikes parked in the rack next to the building entrance. Many of the team members used bikes, instead of cars, to get around town. The rack should have been empty. In the time it took Otto to recognize that something was amiss, three men had exited the van and accosted him.
They wore black from head to toe, with black hoods covering their heads. They had guns. They forced Otto to the ground and bound his legs, arms, and mouth with duct tape.
They dragged Otto to the van and opened the back. There Otto saw, to his horror, all six of his colleagues similarly bound and thrown in the back on top of each other—a writhing tangle of bodies. They threw Otto in with the rest, doused them and the rest of the van with gasoline, and set it on fire. The three assailants then fled the scene as the van burst into flames. Only one of them, Casey Jarrett of Tacoma, has been identified and charged. Jarrett, who belonged to a pro-death evangelical sect known as Terminal Earth, defended his actions only by saying, “A little bit of bloodshed now, or a lot later on.” Otto, Madden, Lo, Brown, Malkin, Ganji, and Duggan all perished in the blaze. Just hours later, David Spitz was gunned down outside of his home in Seattle.
President Lack still has trouble accepting that his friend and colleague died in such a horrifying manner. “It’s inconceivable to me,” he says. “If there was anyone you wanted to invent this cure, it was Graham. He wasn’t some power-mad scientist hell-bent on destroying the world. He had real integrity, and he rarely acted without considering all the consequences of his behavior. The cure was safe in his hands. I don’t think he even gave it to himself. That someone would stalk him down and murder him and six other bright, wonderful minds like that is just… It takes away my faith in humanity, a faith that people like Graham helped build in me. He’s not here to guide us through this anymore, and we’re so much poorer for it.”
Two floors above where the van burned and burned, a window from Otto’s lab looks out over the parking lot. Perched on the windowsill is a very small glass case containing five fruit flies, five very special fruit flies that turned Graham Otto from a desperate redhead into perhaps the most important scientist in human history. They were the first creatures on earth to be cured of death by Otto, and they were among the last creatures on earth to see him alive.
Date Modified: 7/5/2019, 9:17PM
“How Could You Be So Dumb?”
I had to get out of Manhattan. Katy merrily haunts me in this space, which I more than deserve. I see visions of her all around: in the kitchen, by the television, lunging out the window. Soon there are so many ghosts of her crowding me that I feel engulfed. Sound reason told me I risked insanity to stay around much longer. I had to go see my sister.
I have the good fortune of not having to deal with Penn Station on a daily basis. I’m amazed that current events have managed to create an environment in which dealing with Penn Station is somehow even worse than before. I did not know it could get worse. It already seemed to operate at maximum awfulness. Oh, but I was wrong.
This was an exodus. There was a line just to get in the station. I’d never seen that before. A fire marshal was stationed outside every entrance, holding back travelers until a certain number had exited. They let a handful of people in, then held the line again. It was like trying to get into a nightclub—which is perfect in its symmetry. My goal was the six-thirty train. They ran every half an hour, so I figured if I missed the six-thirty, I could just hop on the seven with a tall boy of Budweiser, and off I’d go. I just barely made the ten-thirty train.
It was around midnight when I pulled in. My sister was waiting for me. She looked tired, but she has two kids, so I think she looks the same way at midnight as she does at all the other hours of the day. Polly exists in a perpetual daze, run down by the burdens of motherhood and falling further and further behind in rest, never to again reach complete wakefulness. I had specifically asked my dad not to tell her what I had done, because I knew she’d make me feel bad about it. I had already suffered through four hours at Penn Station and a train ride so tightly packed you couldn’t have slipped a dime between the bodies. But then, seeing her, I figured I may as well get all the pain out of the way immediately. She drove us back to her house and poured us both a drink.
I confessed almost immediately. “I got the cure.”
She snapped awake (she can only be alert in short bursts). “What? When?”
“Three weeks ago. That’s not all of it. My roommate and the doctor who gave it to me were killed in the July 3 attacks.”
“Oh my Jesus. Katy? Was that her name? Are you joking?”
“No. I referred her to my cure doctor, and when she went to get her blood drawn, the office was bombed.”
“Oh my God. Are you okay?”
“Not particularly. I… I was so excited for her to get it. I didn’t think this could happen and I still don’t know how it did. Now she’s dead, and I feel like I deserve the same fate.”
“Why did you get the cure? How could you be so dumb? You have to swear right now that you won’t tell Mark that you did it. He’s been talking about it and talking about it. The last thing I want is for you to egg him on.”
“Please don’t castigate me for this.”
“But didn’t you realize the danger you put your roommate in? The danger you put yourself in? These crazy people didn’t just start killing doctors a couple days ago, John. And you don’t even know if the thing works. I just can’t believe you’d go to some back-alley Guatemalan Dr. Nick to get your life fixed.”
“He wasn’t some quack,” I said defensively. “He was a legitimate doctor with a well-known practice.”
“Yet he chose to engage in some shady side business. Why is that?”
“It was just some ego thing.”
“And that doesn’t bother you, even now? I saw the doctor Mark wanted to visit to get it done. His name was Frankie, and he looked like he stole furniture out of trucks. I’ve heard some of the people offering to do it aren’t even real doctors. They’re like chiropractors times ten. I’m not judging you for getting it. I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”
“I’m grateful for that, P. I really am. But I’m fine. Mentally, I’m a disaster. But physically, I feel fine. Great, as odd as that sounds.”
She grew a touch curious. “So, you think it really works then.”
“We won’t know for a while. I’ve been taking a photo of my face every day just to see if there are any changes over time I don’t readily notice.”
“And you’re not worried about, you know, hogging all the food and stuff?”
“I promise I won’t eat all the Nilla Wafers in the house, like last time.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. There’s a reason people are fighting so fiercely to keep this cure out of people’s hands. You don’t have kids. I do. I think about this stuff. I think about what’ll be left for them.”
“So you’re never going to get it? And you’ll never let Mark get it?”
She let out a low groan. “I have no idea. I really don’t. I’m guessing there will be a point where it’s legal and everyone has it and I feel obligated to get it too. I was like that with cell phones. I was easily the last of my friends to get one. Everyone else had one. And there I was, outside school at some disgusting pay phone that didn’t even work. Now, of course, I have one and I’ll never go back. That’s how I am. I usually have to be dragged into things. I know it’s probably inevitable that I’ll get the cure and that we’ll all get it. It’s just gonna be something you do. But it opens up all sorts of odd questions that I don’t want to deal with right now. I mean, what happens to Mark and me?”
“Are you guys having problems?”
“No! Not at all. But it’s a whole weird thing, to think you’ll be with someone for that long. I love him, and I’m willing to do it. It’s just… daunting. And the kids… Jesus. You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly that they’ll be okay. And the idea that I’ll be worried forever about them and what they do… I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I’m worried, and I’m worried about having to worry so goddamn much.”
I told her about all the bankers getting divorced.
“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Sorry.”
“See, that completely freaks me out. One day we’ll get it, and Mark’s friends will all say, ‘Hey, what are you still doing with that old bag?’”
“But you won’t be old.”
“But I’m old already. I have two kids. That makes you old. So then I have that to worry about. Do I have the ability to keep my husband happy for centuries upon centuries? Do I need to get lipo so that I can look like some perky goddamn cheerleader? I have no earthly idea, and I don’t like the idea of having to confront all those issues somewhere down the road. Right now my whole life is plagued with decisions that have to be made: what to get for dinner, which school the kids should go to, which kid’s birthday party we should go to this weekend. It’s just decision after decision after decision, from trivial crap to really important things. By the end of the day, I’m mush. I don’t even eat dinner because I don’t want to choose what to have. I have cereal and call it a day. And now there’s this. Big, huge decision alert. Every question I ask myself about it begets a dozen more. It’s giving me a migraine right now, and I haven’t even done anything.”
“It has to be better than the alternative, though.”
“Does it? I don’t know.”
“Well, you already say you’re old. How does growing old feel so far?”
She sighed. “It sucks.”
“Well, now I feel somewhat better about my decision.”
We changed the subject. Polly handed me a plate of cold roast beef and corn on the cob. We talked, and I ate and, for the first time, Katy’s death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As I ate, the look in Polly’s eyes made it clear she was still thinking about the cure. She had tried for so long to stem the tide, to avoid being overwhelmed by it all. But now here I was: the tsunami at her doorstep.
Date Modified: 7/17/2019, 5:09PM
DC Apparently Stands For
“Don’t Come”
I have a friend in DC who emailed me this in response to reports about the expanded security perimeters to accommodate protesters in Midtown:
Dude, the security bullshit you have to deal with up there is nothing compared to what’s going on down here. The entirety of Northwest DC below M Street has been cordoned off since that girl was beaten to death for her DieStrong bracelet and the riots in Germany started. You can’t drive anywhere downtown. I’m talking about miles the hell away from the White House. And when you come up out of Metro, there are National Guard members with loaded rifles, their fingers ready on the trigger, ready to pull you aside if you look like a threat. They increased the restricted airspace above the town by nearly twentyfold. If you come down on a shuttle from Boston to National, you practically have to go through Ohio. It’s insane.
Downtown DC around the Wizards’ arena is essentially a pedestrian thoroughfare now. I have no issue with this, since people in DC can’t drive for shit, except that Metro stops can be goddamn light years away from each other. That scene you described at Penn Station? That’s every Metro station, except here the station escalators never work, so you have to haul ass up four thousand stairs before you get to emerge above ground. And the buses aren’t running. All the protesters have been forced to demonstrate on the other side of the Potomac, along the bike trail in Arlington. I saw a bunch of them trying to swim across the Potomac to get to the Mall, only to have cops pick them up in a riverboat and haul their sorry asses out of the water. One of them almost drowned in the rip currents.
I have a friend who works on the Hill who says the Supreme Court judges will be moved to an undisclosed location to argue the California case. Lots of bomb threats.
Fucking crazy, man. Fucking crazy.
—MK
Date Modified: 7/18/2019, 11:07AM
A Blonde Everywhere I Turn
I was walking down Third Avenue today when I spotted a woman across the street with a remarkable body and blonde hair that broke just past her shoulder blades. I turned electric. I saw a gap in traffic and sprinted across the avenue. A cab rounding from Forty-third blithely took the corner and nearly plowed into me. I kept my focus on the blonde as the driver honked at me three hundred times in the space of four seconds. She didn’t turn her head and kept bouncing down Third, with me trailing behind her and trying to figure out a plan in my head before quickening my pace to identify her. I kept thirty yards behind, dodging dog walkers, tourists, and the meandering hordes of the unemployed. I took out my phone and queued up the number for the police without hitting Send, so I would have it at the ready. I took her picture so I could post it to my feed if need be. If this blonde was the blonde, I’d call the police and alert them to her presence, then follow her until they arrived to detain her.
I made the decision to pass. I sprint-walked closer and closer, until I was side-by-side, then I feigned interest in the window of a Hot & Crusty on the other side of her, and caught a quick glimpse on her face. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t even close.
This sort of wild-goose chase has now taken up firm residence in my daily routine. Spy blonde. Suspect blonde. Chase blonde. Realize I’ve misidentified blonde. Think of my friend bursting into flames sixteen days ago while I remained outside, like a dumb dog that no one bothered to train. Doomed to follow every pointless distraction that crosses my path.
Date Modified: 7/19/2019, 9:34PM
The Worst Since Kent State
From the Washington Post website:
DEVELOPING: FOUR DEAD IN CONCORD CURE PROTEST
By Luke Spiller and Candace English
CONCORD, NH (AP)—Four pro-cure demonstrators were shot dead today by National Guardsmen in the New Hampshire state capital of Concord after a massive protest turned into the most violent cure-related conflict since two students were shot dead in a Berlin riot three weeks ago.
After a widespread report was released yesterday accusing the United States military of offering the so-called cure for death to its own soldiers in exchange for extended pension benefits, protesters here in the Granite State marched on the Capitol. Many were incensed.
“They were trying to force their way inside the building. They wanted to take it over,” says lawyer Jim Watley, who works in the Capitol. “I don’t know what they would have done if they had gotten in, but that was their aim.”
A small group of National Guardsmen aimed with protecting the Capitol tried to keep protesters at bay with shields and threats of tear gas. But witnesses say a crazed protestor threw a lit Molotov cocktail at the guardsmen, which prompted two of them to open fire into the crowd, causing protesters to flee in mass panic. Four people are now confirmed dead. An unspecified number of people were injured, including Jackie Frost of Nashua, NH, who was shot in the leg.
“They were supposed to use rubber bullets!” she cried. “No one else was armed! Why didn’t they use rubber bullets?”
The number of people killed in today’s incident is equal to that of the number killed in the 1970 shootings at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio.
Further details forthcoming.
I looked outside my window just now and saw a man running down the median of the avenue, screaming his head off as cars threatened to sideswipe him from both directions. He wasn’t saying anything. He was just unleashing the most primal noise he could possibly make. He was holding up a sign that said GIVE IT TO US NOW.
On the TV right now, they’re showing protesters lined up against the barricades in DC. They look like a mob of shoppers waiting to get into a department store at 7:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. The President is due to speak at 8:00 p.m.
Date Modified: 8/14/2019, 3:20PM
“One Infinite Generation”
Here’s the full text of the President’s speech, copied from CNN:
My fellow Americans:
This is a very tense time. The world has been confronted with a medical innovation that represents a seismic change in the very nature of who we are and how we interact. I am not an enemy of science, nor do I ever wish to be someone who stands in the way of progress. Three years ago, when I first issued the executive order banning the black market sale of the cure for aging, it was never with the intention that the ban would be permanent. Like many of you, I marvel at possibility opened by this cure. It means the potential to have a very long, very wonderful life, surrounded by those we love for perhaps thousands of years or more.
But we must consider the impact that kind of longevity will have, both on our fellow men and women and on the large yet delicate planet we call home. For the past 243 years, we have existed as a country united in a single goal: liberty for all. We believe in freedom because we believe it is not only the right of every man, woman, and child, but also because freedom serves as the catalyst for our very highest ambitions.
It is this idea—the idea that freedom can make the world a better place—upon which we have built our nation. It is this idea that so many brave young Americans have fought and died for. At Valley Forge. At Gettysburg. In Normandy and Iwo Jima. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our men and women fought not only for their fellow countrymen, but for future generations—generations they knew they’d never live to meet face-to-face.
But there aren’t going to be future generations anymore. Not after this. There will only be us. One infinite generation, forever growing and reaching an unknown and incomprehensible size. And so now we are charged once again with the task of sacrificing for the sake of our nation’s future—a future in which we will all now serve a much larger role than we ever dreamed possible. Because while we may now have a virtually unlimited lifespan, our natural resources almost certainly do not. Gas. Clean water. Land. Mother Nature has blessed us with only a finite amount of each of these things.
We have known, long before this cure was discovered, that we have been consuming resources at an unsustainable pace—a pace that will now quicken at an unimaginable rate. We are a nation of strong, hardworking people. But it is, I’m afraid, part of human nature that we adapt only when forced to. We are told there is only so much crude oil left in the earth. Yet we can still buy gas at the station on the corner, and for a relatively decent price. We haven’t changed our ways because we don’t feel we have to.
It is only in the face of grim reality that we are able to dig down and discover just what we are made of. And that reality is coming, hurtling towards us faster and faster every day now. I cannot tell you when it will come—perhaps long after I’ve left office. But it will come. And the question we must all ask ourselves is: Are we ready for that reality?
I banned this cure three years ago because I wanted us to have as much time as possible to be ready for when that day comes, to be prepared for all the responsibilities this cure demands of us.
But the time has come for me to stop prolonging the inevitable.
One hour ago, I signed an executive order reversing the original ban on the sale of the cure for aging. The cure will be submitted for FDA approval and, pending all relevant testing, people will be free to purchase it from their physician as they please. However, I again remind us all that we must think about what is fair. As part of my executive order, all citizens who get the cure will no longer be eligible for Social Security or Medicare benefits, regardless of how long they live. Furthermore, in accordance with the recommendation of doctors across the country, no citizen under the age of twenty-six will be allowed to purchase the cure. Doctors who violate this edict will have their licenses revoked and be subject to swift prosecution. I also take this moment to again condemn the attacks on doctors administering the cure in New York and Oregon. Anyone found to be coordinating terrorist attacks against doctors offering the cure will be subject to federal prosecution and the death penalty.
This has been a tragic, awful day in our history. Four of our own were killed in New Hampshire. Our hearts go out to them and their families. We grieve and pray with them, and we promise to take all possible measures to prevent deaths like theirs from ever occurring again. They were four young people, passionate in the cause of retaining their youth, of seeing what they could make of a life extended indefinitely by the miracles of technology. They were willing to fight for what they believed in, for their personal liberty, and that makes them Americans to the very core. We will not forget them, nor shall we let them die in vain.
The nation that adapts to the effects of this cure and masters a world changed by postmortality is the nation that will lead the world into the next century and well beyond. Today, I declare my faith that we can and will be that nation. So many gave for our future, and now that future fully belongs to us all. We are ready. We have no other choice.
God bless us all, and God bless the United States of America.
I heard cheers burst out from the street as the President closed his remarks. I looked out the window and saw protesters hugging and raising their fists in victory. They sang songs and drank from open containers. I could see the excitement in their faces, the pure delirium at all the new and wonderful (and legal) possibilities. They had the same look in their faces that Katy had just as we were walking to the doctor’s office.
Date Modified: 8/14/2019, 9:11PM
“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”
I’ve tried to pull together as many responses to the President’s speech as I could. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
The Atlantic:
Proof once again that we Americans can get what we want if we simply stomp and scream for something like the immature schoolchildren that we are. Those protesters in New Hampshire weren’t, as the president implied, banging on the Capitol doors for some grand, noble cause. The idea that they sacrificed themselves like the soldiers at Iwo Jima is farcical and an insult to our intelligence. They did it for themselves and no one else. They weren’t sacrificing for the future. They were trying to hog it. This generation hasn’t had to sacrifice one bit, and its reward for such callousness is now eternal life. It’s a classic American scenario of people wanting everything right now without caring a lick about the long term. You could excuse that by saying, “Well, that’s just the way we are.” Well, the way we are is going to cost us everything.
Bob Mandel’s feed:
It’s like eating a sausage pizza. You know it’s gonna kill you. But it’s not going to kill you now, so who gives a shit? Let’s eat.
My dad:
Well, now I kind of want to get it. Just to see how all this plays out.
Allan Atkins:
He’s the most gutless president we have ever had. He is a liar, a fraud, a terrorist appeaser, and a criminal. If that Times report about the soldiers taking the cure never came out, you never see last night’s speech. I guarantee you that. People had to die for this man to finally listen to me. Troops had to flagrantly disobey their superiors for this man to listen to me. And then, when he finally does listen to me, he legalizes the cure in the clumsiest, most insincere manner possible. It’s disgusting. I am disgusted, and you should be too.
That said, I’m glad he finally legalized it. And now I can finally tell you all: I got it, baby! You’re never gonna get rid of me now!
Choosedeath.org:
You have no idea what you’ve just done.
My sister:
He legalized it? Oh, Christ. I think I’m gonna pass out. Am I the last person to know this? I am, aren’t I?
Joe Weis (NBC):
In the end, the President had no choice but to legalize the cure. Those who would criticize him for his handling of the entire situation need to step back for a moment and consider the issue this president was facing. This is a problem unlike anything any leader of any kind has ever been faced with. Did we really expect this man to handle the issue of the cure perfectly when it stands poised to tip the entire planet on its axis? His first instinct, the correct instinct, was to be cautious with it for as long as possible. Well, turns out three years was as long as possible. He bravely admitted it was a mistake on his part to stall, but he didn’t need to apologize for it. Those three years of waiting allowed him time to decide how to best regulate the cure in a sensible manner. The President spoke of a grim reality that will soon descend upon us all. Well, it seems he is one of the few people out there who has tried to envision what that reality will look like and how we will deal with it. His words were hopeful last night, but the concern in his eyes was unmistakable. He is bracing himself for what’s ahead, and he wants us to do likewise. Because the floodgates are open now.
The floodgates are wide open.
After the President’s speech last night, I took a long walk uptown. The barricades had been taken down and the protesters had dissipated. The entire city seemed to breathe again. Everyone was smiling. Happy. Possibly drunk. The honeymoon was in full swing.
I walked by the UN building: no longer besieged. I walked by the posters on First Avenue. There were no anti-cure messages there this time. Just a bunch of Pepsi ads. I walked by the doctor’s apartment and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Everything felt normal. Everything felt the way it should be. The world was functional again.
But deep in my marrow, I know it won’t stay that way.
Date Modified: 8/15/2019, 10:21AM
II
Spread: June 2029
(Ten Years Later)
Photo No. 3,650
I took my picture again this morning. Still the same. The nose. The eyes. The brow. The chin. Nothing has sagged. No creases have formed. I scrolled through the “Face” folder in my library to compare it with the others. There’s no real variation, except for when I get a haircut. That’s the only time there’s any noticeable difference. My hair gets a little bit longer and a little bit longer, then I get a cut and my image resets, like one of those antique typewriters that slides back into place whenever you hit the carriage return. Though the hair gets longer, not a whisper of it gets grayer.
One day I drew a star on my cheek, just to mix things up. You can see it fade over the course of a week or so. Everyone at work looked at me like I was an unruly toddler after I did that. I’ve tried to keep the same expression throughout the photos, as a control mechanism. But there are some photos where I couldn’t hide my mood. The ones where I’m hung over are fairly easy to detect. I don’t look happy to have my picture taken, even though I’m the pushy fella who’s insisting it be done.
So there are some slight differences there, but the fundamental aspects of my face are identical from each day to the next. If you made a flipbook of it, it would be the most boring film imaginable. The only exciting part is when the star pops up. I haven’t changed. I haven’t grown. The supposed character that aging features provides has not been bestowed on me. You wouldn’t know that I’ve lived ten years between the first photo and the last. All 3,650 photos could—if not for my hair—have been taken on the same day. The time span is invisible. It’s as if I haven’t lived at all.
I have a friend who struggles with his weight from time to time. He’ll reach a certain weight and then grow completely intolerant of what he’s become. So he’ll start running and eating nothing but grilled chicken and asparagus and baked potato chips. Then he’ll get down to a fairly acceptable weight, get a girlfriend, eat her cooking, and gain all the weight back. And once he’s reached his own personal critical mass again, he’ll do it all over. If you took his picture every day for a decade, it would be far more interesting. It would be like watching someone try to inflate a balloon without bothering to pinch the end between breaths. You’d see the history. You would get at least some semblance of the life he’s led and what’s he’s been dealing with. But you can’t see that with me. There’s no story. You can’t tell a damn thing.
Happy tenth cure day to me.
Date Modified: 6/20/2029, 12:14PM
“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”
Sonia wanted to get married. The issue had come up in the past, but I had managed to stave it off for as long as I possibly could. I have found in my life, though, that once a woman introduces the idea of something to you, she’ll never let it go until you finally relent. I don’t mean this as a criticism of women. They’re all so admirably tenacious, whereas I am the exact opposite. I’ll let go of anything if holding onto it comes to require too much effort.
She broke one of the long silences that tended to overpopulate our most serious arguments. “I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” I told her.
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re not going to get me to marry you simply by challenging my manhood. I already know I don’t stack up to most men. The Cap’n Crunch boxes in the kitchen are proof alone of that.”
“This isn’t funny, John. I’ve invested four years of my life in this. There comes a point when it’s fair for a woman to ask what a man’s intentions are. Don’t you think that’s fair?”
“I do. I think it’s more than fair. And I am committed to you. I’ve never cheated. I’ve always been there to support you.”
“And you say you love me, right?”
“I do. I love the hell out of you.”
“You said you’d love me forever.”
“I did. And I meant it.”
Sonia sat down. She didn’t look upset. She looked more as if she was trying to solve a math proof whose solution eluded her. That’s what I always liked about her. She was never unreasonable. If she had an argument with anything, it was backed up by sound logic and analysis. Not everyone I know acts in similar manner. I know I don’t.
“Then I don’t understand,” she said. “You know I’m not a needy person. I can take care of myself. But the reason I’m talking to you about this is because I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to build something with you. More importantly, I don’t want to have this conversation with you every four months. I want this settled.”
“I understand all that. But look out there. Do you see anyone getting married? At all?”
“What does that have to do with us? Are you telling me it’s peer pressure that’s holding you back?”
“No.”
“Because I know what’s going on these days. A man in my office got engaged three months ago and all the other men laughed at him. They laughed right in his face. Every guy is supposed to be some macho, shit-kicking eternal bachelor now.”
I sat next to her on the couch. She had a glass of wine on the coffee table, but she hadn’t bothered to touch it.
“It’s not just a guy thing,” I said. “I’m going to be as honest as I possibly can about this, because you deserve the unvarnished truth. I don’t have the capacity to commit to something—anything—for five hundred years, or however long we’ll both live now. I don’t have the knowledge and foresight to say to you, ‘Yes. I will stick with you no matter what occurs from now until the end of time.’”
“But you could commit to me if you hadn’t taken the cure? That makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does. I could commit to you if we knew our lives were finite. But they aren’t. I have no earthly idea what’s coming next, and it’s not fair to you to promise that from now until the end of time I’ll always be by your side. I can’t promise that, because I don’t know. And you can’t promise that either, because you don’t know.”
“But that’s what marriage is. It’s two people saying we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we promise we’ll get through it together. Being married means there’s one thing you can always count on.”
“I don’t know if I want that. I’m sorry. People got married before because they knew, deep down, that there would come a time in their lives when they would become too old, too ugly and too infirm to have anyone care about them except their spouse. You needed someone to change your bedpan in the hospital and help tie your shoes and all of that. That’s all gone now, Sonia. All of that fear is gone. And whatever urge there is for people to find some lifetime companion… I don’t have that anymore. Every guy I know feels the same way. You want something concrete from me? I love you, but I don’t want to get married, and I don’t know if I ever do. I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
Her eyes tightened, like she was about to swing at a baseball. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“How long?”
“Ten weeks. I just found out this morning.”
“You spring this on me now?”
“I’m not afraid to raise our child alone, John. I’m not. I’m a strong woman and I know I can do that. But I’d like you to be there. I’d like to raise him with you as your wife. It wouldn’t be a chore. It would be wonderful. Indelible. It would be fifty times more rewarding than spending the next three decades getting blasted and watching football with your friends or whatever.”
“I don’t know. I like football quite a bit.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. Not now.”
“I’m not being a wiseass. This is just… more seriousness than I want. This is more responsibility than I want.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you grew up?”
“No. See, that’s what I dislike. I dislike that, just because I reach a certain age, I’m supposed to hunker down and stop enjoying my life. That I’m supposed to leave all the fun for the younger generation. I’m not buying into that anymore, and no one I know is. This is liberation, Sonia. Honestly, why have this child now? Don’t you want to enjoy your life a little bit more before you weigh yourself down with all this?”
“It’s not a weight. It’s something I want. I’m not having this child as some sort of self-punishment. Just because I can have a child a hundred years from now doesn’t mean I want to wait that long. I’m still a woman. I still have the urge to be a mother, and to be a wife. I still have that drive. You’re telling me about liberation. I am free. I don’t have to worry about growing old and never finding a man, like every goddamn magazine used to tell me. I have the freedom now to marry whom I want when I want, and to have children when I want. And I want this child today, and I want to raise it with you. Not because I’m some wet blanket. But because I know life is going to be better with the three of us together. I want something in my life that means something. Don’t you see that? It’s not some invisible cultural force driving all this, John. It’s just me, telling you that I love you very much and want to be with you. You tell me that isn’t what you want. But is that really true? Are you really that scared you’ll miss out on partying and hooking up other women down the line? Why did you go out with me this long if that was what you really wanted?”
“Because I love you.”
“Then tell me how tomorrow will be any different.”
I had no answer. Three weeks ago, I helped our firm devise a lucrative new type of prenuptial agreement between a banker and his fiancée. It’s a forty-year marriage. Set in stone. No divorcing allowed without significant penalties. The couple agrees to be together for forty years, with the marriage automatically dissolving at the end of that time period, and assets divided at a previously agreed-upon percentage. The couple could pick up an additional forty-year option at the end if they wished. My boss has even coined a new term for it: “cycle marriage”. He says it could help raise marriage rates back up to where they were a few years ago. The reason clients like it is because it precludes the acrimony that usually accompanies divorce. You’re less likely to claw at each other’s throats if you know there’s already an end set in place. A couple marries, raises a family, then goes their separate ways to enjoy single life once more after the children are grown and well adjusted. It’s a win-win situation, particularly if you’re the lawyer brokering the deal.
“What about a cycle marriage?” I asked her.
“That forty-year thing you do for asshole bankers? Are you being serious? That’s moronic.”
“That’s all I can offer you.”
She stood up and straightened her skirt. “So this is it. You really don’t want this?”
“I don’t. There’s too much left in front of me. I love you. I really do. But I don’t have the certainty that you have. I’m not ready.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sorry all this has changed your ability to love someone. I can’t stay here.” On went her jacket. “Will you help me raise him? Will you support us?”
“I will. I promise you that I will be the best father I can be.”
“Then I guess that’s the best I can hope for.”
I watched her collect her things and move to the door. She turned to me. She wasn’t crying. But I could see the disappointment. She had plans for us. She had envisioned an entire life for us that she thought was going to become reality one day, and she was so very much looking forward to it all. She thought I would feel the same way. She felt assured of it. She believed in me. But now that she knew the truth, she saw me as a different man, one I don’t think she liked very much.
“I’ll let you know when the first ultrasound is,” she said. “I’ll pack up my things when you’re at work this week.”
“I’m sorry, Sonia. I’m sorry I failed you.”
“Goodbye, John.”
And she left.
Date Modified: 10/31/2029, 5:33AM
I Seek The Grail
I have a friend who’s going to have a cure party next week in Las Vegas. He’s really doing it up, too. He booked a suite at the Fountain of Youth, so our trip is guaranteed to be either cheesy in a fascinating, outstanding way or cheesy in a horrible, soul-sucking way. There’s no in-between when you go to Vegas, particularly if you’re committed to staying at that monstrosity. Before the trip, my friend had a request.
“You’ve had the cure, right?” he asked me.
“Yep.”
“Do you have a grail?”
“No. That’s idiotic.”
“You have to get one. We’re all gonna buy grails and bring them. You have to do it. Prerequisite.”
“Oh, come on. Really? I have to buy one of those stupid things?”
“We’re staying at the Fountain of Youth. We have to go all the way with this. I’ll even pay for yours. I can’t have a half-assed cure party.”
“Can’t I buy it when we’re out there?”
“No, because we’re gonna drink out of them on the plane. Hell, I’m looking forward to the plane ride more than any other part of the trip.”
So I had to get a grail. Derrick’s Grail Shop is located on Christopher Street between a gay sex shop and a head shop. Derrick’s is also a head shop, but it seems they do such good business selling grails right now that the bongs have been pushed to a small section on the side. I wondered when the head shop owner next door would wise up to that fact.
I walked in and took a look. They had thousands of the things. I remember that scene from that one Indiana Jones movie where Indy walks into the grail room and sees all these shiny, golden chalices. Only the real Holy Grail was some crudely made cup sitting meekly on the lowest shelf. All the nice looking grails in the movie killed you instantly. Well, Derrick’s had no crude grails—no real grails. All the ones here were like the fakes the bad Nazi guy drank from, designed to tempt you and then suck all the life right out of you.
That said, they were all quite pretty. Some were knockoff versions of what you can get in the Diamond District, with the fake gold and the giant phony gemstones lining the rims. But there were some cool ones, too. I saw one made of stitched leather with a fake gold inlay. Oxo made a couple of stainless steel ones with comfortable rubber grips—the practical grail, if you will. They also had Goth ones, including a grail that had a curled-up dragon for a stem. If I had a van, I would definitely paint that grail on the side of my van. They had grails made of elaborately carved oak, for the environmentally friendly postmortal. None of them looked all that Jesus-appropriate. But hey, they were still nice grails.
I saw one in a Lucite box. It was made of crystal, with an engraved pattern of infinity symbols. I looked at the clerk behind the glass counter and pointed to the box.
“What’s that one?”
“That’s the DX3490,” he said. “Designed by the Swift himself. It’s the same one he drinks from on tour. You can even send away to have him sign it.” He pointed to a poster on the wall. Sure enough, there was the Swift, wearing a white suit and drinking a purple drank out of the very same grail. Spiffy.
“Do you think I could pull off rocking the same grail as the Swift?”
“Truthfully? No.”
He also showed me a room in the back where you can design your own. They had thick stylebooks you could flip through, like choosing wedding invites. You could pick the pattern, the font, everything. They even had suggested sayings you could have embossed on your grail. You could paint your own clay grail and then have them fire it in a kiln. I saw a couple up on the shelf waiting to be picked up. One said BETTY’S GRAIL. I have no clue why that made me laugh, but I nearly soiled myself when I saw it. They had matching grail-and-bong sets, which I found highly tempting, though God help you if you ever confuse the two at five in the morning.
In the end I chose a simple gold one. I wanted a grail that made me feel like a knight who had just finished a long day’s pillaging. The kind you hold in one hand while you eat a turkey drumstick in the other. The kind where you feel compelled to talk like a town crier while holding it. That’s the kind of grail I wanted, and that’s the kind I ended up getting. Twenty bucks. Not bad for the cup of Christ.
I brought it home, mixed a rum and Coke in it, and gave my usual cheers to Katy. I have to say, the Swift was onto something with this trend. Drinks taste way better when you’re drinking them out of a grail.
Date Modified: 11/7/2029, 8:51PM
Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth
I hadn’t flown to Las Vegas since they opened Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino last year. I already knew it was the biggest hotel on earth, but I wasn’t prepared for the view from the airplane. There are familiar sights you see as you approach McCarran at night: the Luxor’s Pyramid, New York-New York skyline, the Shanghai, etc. But the Fountain now dwarfs all of them. An old lady on the right side of the plane was the first to spot it. She screamed out in joy when she saw it edging into view through her little porthole.
Everyone spontaneously broke into applause and chugged the contents of their respective grails (three steakheads from Long Island on the plane had DX3490s; I’m relieved I didn’t spring for one). I swear the jet spray shooting up from the center of the oval could have tickled our landing gear if we were flying directly above it. I read that the fountain continually pumps four million gallons of water a minute. Seeing it in person, the estimate now feels low. I assume that when they first turned the fountain on, the guy throwing the switch thrust his hips for maximum effect.
Upon deplaning, we circumvented the cabstand (the line stretched so far they had to move up the security checkpoints for the entire airport) and took the shuttle bus down to the Strip. The last time I was in Vegas, the ride took twenty minutes. This time it took so much longer that I asked the driver if there were multiple conventions going on. There were not.
He dropped us off at the main entrance and we walked into chaos. The hotel has over twelve thousand rooms, and this evening it appeared all of its occupants had decided to hang out in the lobby. We stood in the check-in line in shifts; half of us waited while the other half went to get drinks, and then we switched. When it was my turn to fetch alcohol, I walked out into the main atrium and stared at the fountain, a gigantic edifice of water that defies all reason. It’s as if the hotel is trying to put out a fire on the surface of the moon. Colored lights illuminate the mighty geyser in a painstakingly choreographed arrangement. Surrounding base of the fountain are the cure stations: small platforms with a doctor and a single chair that each soon-to-be postmortal sits in to get their shots. Like in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair has straps and belts to hold you down while you are injected. Unlike in Dr. X’s apartment, each chair is a specifically designed throne. You get to choose the theme for your chair. There’s your basic emperor’s chair (made of gold; it matched my grail!). There’s also the Poseidon: Lord of the Sea chair, which is actually a large, chair-shaped fish tank, with miniature sharks and all kinds of imported marine life swimming under your backside. There’s a Space chair, which is shaped like a giant egg and has two hot girls with big fake tits dressed as green aliens on either side of it. And there’s a Viking chair, which features a giant serpent erupting out from between your legs when you sit in it. Those are the four I remember off the top of my head. There were hundreds of these things, no two alike.
I was in awe. I turned to my friend Scott.
“I almost want to get my shots again.”
“You can do that here,” he said. “They’ll throw you a cure party even if you’ve had it done already. They just shoot you up with something besides the vector.”
“What do they shoot you up with?”
“I don’t know. Gin?”
They’ve perfected the process at the Fountain. You get your blood drawn when you check-in (separate, even longer line for that), then they have the vector ready for you three days later. In between, you presumably lose all your money and then spend the next thousand years trying to make it back. It’s incredible. After getting their shots, all new postmortals jump from the platform into the pool at the base of the fountain. Fully clothed, of course. I looked out to the pool and saw hordes of people frolicking in the water, all in soaking wet dresses, suits and tuxedoes, all drunk beyond comprehension. Baptized into the sweet life.
On the way back to the check-in, I noticed a small exhibit called Ponce de León and The Fountain of Youth. It looked like a pointless waste of time, which intrigued me.
“Hey, let’s go in that.”
Scott wasn’t as enthused. “That? That’s for kiddies.”
“We go in there, we finish our drinks, we get another round and head back to the line without anyone noticing. That line isn’t moving at all.”
“Oh, all right.”
So we went in to the exhibit, which was sparsely crowded due to the late hour and the fact that it was stupid. We walked through a dark corridor for about twenty yards, and then found ourselves in front of an enormous, scrolling diorama. A life-sized puppet of Ponce de León was sitting in an exact replica of King Ferdinand of Spain’s royal court. A voice-over narrated our journey as we watched the puppet hop onto a ship, sailing across a miniaturized version of the Atlantic Ocean (with real wind and water!).
In the year 1513, King Ferdinand of Spain commissioned explorer Juan Ponce de León to sail across the seas and find the fabled fountain of youth. It was a dangerous journey, as Ponce de León and his men battled scurvy, hurricanes, and pirates!
At this point, three pirate puppets popped up from the water and dueled with the Ponce de León puppet, who then cut off their heads. I drank to his victory. The Ponce de León puppet made landfall as we kept walking.
Landing in an exotic new land we now call Florida, Ponce de León rewarded his men with newfound riches of gold, sugar cane, delicious citrus fruits, and beautiful Native American women!
One of Ponce de León’s puppet crew then started making out with a buxom female Indian puppet. I should have been offended, but I was too busy being turned on. The Ponce de León puppet soon came upon a giant fountain, which disappeared down into the ground.
Ponce de León’s quest for the elusive and mythical fountain proved fruitless, and the legendary explorer died while trying to find it.
The Ponce de León puppet then shouted out, “Nooooo!” and keeled over.
But now, Ponce de León’s dream has finally been realized!
The Ponce de León puppet’s corpse was airlifted by his strings across a fake U.S. landscape to a miniature model of the hotel we were standing in.
Here, at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Do all the things Ponce de León always dreamed of doing! Dine al fresco at Fukuku Oh! See Cirque de Soleil in our exclusive new show, Eternia! Or try your hand at Texas Hold ’Em! It’s all here, along with over five hundred board-certified geneticists ready to give you the cure for death! Only at Daniel Benjamin’s Fountain of Youth Resort and Casino! Eternal life has never been so luxurious! Right, Ponce?
The Ponce de León puppet then sat up, looked at us, and said, “Sí”. We walked out.
“I don’t think that presentation was historically accurate,” Scott said.
“Well, sometimes you have to take dramatic license.”
The rest of the weekend was spent in a drunken fog, each hour as pointlessly hazy as the last. For his cure ceremony, our friend chose the Velvet Dream chair, a throne nine feet high and made of a purple fabric that purported to be velvet but was almost certainly some kind of space-age, sweat-wicking polymer. It was a practical choice. If you’re going to be stabbed by three giant fire pokers, you’re gonna want to feel as relaxed as humanly possible. Afterwards, we visited the Spearmint Rhino IV club. Every girl inside had a long, lucrative career in front of her. I’m not terribly comfortable in these places, which I find reassuring in a way.
Next to the casino floor at Fountain of Youth is a stadium-sized mall that exclusively houses shops selling cure-related merchandise. You can get your pick of commemorative t-shirts (I’M HOT…AND I’M STAYING THAT WAY was a popular choice), steel cookware with lifetime warranties, go-tox clinics for older postmortals, safes, laser vision correction, and thirty-year tattoos. There were no wedding parlors, and I didn’t see a single bachelor party the entire weekend. Just one cure party after another.
On our last day, there was a bomb threat in our section of the hotel. They evacuated our rooms and made us wait outside on the Strip. It was the only time during our trip that I was reminded of 7/3/19, and it unnerved me. The manager assured us they dealt with these threats all the time, which only served to worry me more. As we waited along the Strip, I saw a group of men pass by the hotel on the opposite side of the street. They stopped, looked at the hotel, whispered some things to one another, and then kept walking. As they did, I saw one of them wave to the building, as if saying goodbye. I ran to alert a nearby officer, who seemed unconcerned. The men turned the corner. One of them saw me talking to the cop and smirked. He held up his hands and gave me the death symbol: a cupped left hand pressed against his straight right hand, forming a crude D.
After that, I didn’t relax until we were in the plane heading back to LaGuardia. The flight was delayed for three hours due to traffic on the runway.
Date Modified: 11/15/2029, 3:02PM
A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll
After my experience outside of the Fountain of Youth, I came across this anonymous blog posting from someone who claimed to work at the resort.
Contrary to what hotel officials say publicly, the FOY has been attacked by trolls on numerous occasions. These aren’t just simple bomb threats, designed to have us running around in circles. One troll sneaked into the fountain area, saw a fresh postmortal walking out of her cure ceremony and threw lye right in her eyes, blinding her. The entire time security personnel was wrangling him and making him eat pavement, he was giggling like a madman.
It’s not the pro-death insurgents we fear while working here. We have tight enough security to make sure guns and bombs are kept out. It’s the trolls that are the big problem. Because they aren’t looking to kill people. They just want to ruin lives. If you stay here, you always have to keep your eyes out for them. Or else, boom! A handful of lye.
—DanBenjaminsACheapskate
I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P.J. Matson wrote last month for New York. I needed to take a shower after reading it.
UNDER THE TERRA TROLL BRIDGE
By P.J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are just annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The shop has a relatively sparse crowd this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms say to the outside observer that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was just crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers… I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come more other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large subculture of people online known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can: on message boards, on blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the email account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after, you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” he boasts. XMN also cited multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder each day to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore if it happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blindings? “Just one, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”
XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community at SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is just a bunch of bullshit.”
But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’”
I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There’s a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth, or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for committed terra troll crimes as of yet.
I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it’s perhaps a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”
He finishes his burrito and tells me the story of a time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”
I ask XMN why he did it.
“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.
He leaves the shop early as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.
“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”
Date Modified: 11/16/2029, 10:19AM
Afternoon Link Roundup
• South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [Mail + Guardian]
• Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time ever as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. [The Times]
• Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son being executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. [ABC]
• The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. [FNN]
• Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” [The New York Times]
• New studies show postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. [DanBlog]
• The West Antarctica Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. [BBC]
• The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” [The New Yorker]
• Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the US. [NYist]
• The producers of the Saved By The Bell reboot have petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that they don’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. [Variety]
Date Modified: 11/17/2029, 4:44PM
“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”
That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all Thanksgiving Day long, even during the football game.
“I never should have gotten this cure,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”
“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”
“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”
“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrest of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.
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Drew Magary
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A gripping, compulsive thriller set in a future where the cure for ageing has been discovered… to devastating consequencesThe ebook edition contains exclusive extra content.“You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”(An excerpt from the digital journal of John Farrell, cure age 29)2019. Humanity has witnessed its greatest scientific breakthrough yet: the cure for ageing. Three injections and you’re immortal – not bulletproof or disease-proof but you’ll never have to fear death by old age.For John Farrell, documenting the cataclysmic shifts to life after the cure becomes an obsession. Cure parties, cycle marriages, immortal livestock: the world is revelling in the miracles of eternal youth. But immortality has a sinister side, and when a pro-death terrorist explosion kills his newly-cured best friend, John soon realizes that even in a world without natural death, there is always something to fear.Now, John must make a new choice: run and hide forever, or stay and fight those who try to make immortal life a living hell.The e-book edition contains exclusive extra content – for those who want to find out even more consequences of the cure for ageing.