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“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?”
