The Postmortal

  “Someone ordered an ES?” Ernie asked.

  “Dude, if this van’s a rockin’, don’t . . . uh . . . like, don’t come in.”

  “Your van isn’t rocking.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Nope.”

  “Damn. Feels like it is. Crap.” The door slid open. Out popped a skinny, pale fellow with long, stringy red hair. He was shirtless, with dirty white jeans, dirty white sneakers, and patches of bright-red eczema all over his chest. He beckoned us in. “I’m Chuck. Get in the van. Everyone steals my hydro whenever I come out.”

  We stepped in. The bottom of the van was cut out, and my foot sank into the soft earth below. The entire inside of the van reeked of sewage.

  Ernie looked at his feet. “What am I stepping in?”

  “Mud. I swear, muchacho. I use the Lincoln five cars over to do my dirty work. When it gets hot, you can smell the seepage. Shit’s not so bad today though, right?”

  He offered us gummy bears, which we politely declined. He signed the paperwork and filled out a will form. I fired up the recorder on the WEPS, and off we went. Chuck rattled off a list of reasons why he’d called: He was bored, he had nowhere to go, everyone at the car yard was trying to bogart his hydro, etc.

  “Why not move away from here?” I asked.

  “Move? What’s the point? Anywhere I move, there’s someone else there, man. This is my little space, and that’s about all I can get, brother. One time I went down to Bonnaroo for three days. I smoked all the shit that was lit. I drank every cup that was filled. I sucked all the acid that was printed. It was wild, man. Wild. But after three days, shit’s over, man. That’s what makes a party a party. It’s a special occasion. That third day, it isn’t so special anymore. You get that itchy ass. That’s what I feel like now. I feel like I’m trapped at the show. I need to experience something way beyond that now. Way beyond. That’s why I called you.”

  “How do you want this done?”

  “All right. Good. Are you ready for this shit? Cause I’m about to blow your nuts off. Come on, back door.” He opened the opposite side of the van and escorted us out. He led us, through the mud, all the way to a scrap heap near the back of the yard. I made out lots of old circus equipment. There were faded red tent canvases, trapeze swings that were tough to recognize at first glance because they weren’t taut, and old trampoline springs. Then Chuck maneuvered around the pile and showed us a giant metal pipe painted with red, white, and blue bunting. He nudged me.

  “Huh? Huh?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Human. Cannonball.”

  “You want to be shot out of a cannon?”

  “Just like Hunter S., amigo.”

  “Okay, Hunter S. Thompson shot himself, then was cremated, then had his ashes fired out of a cannon. He wasn’t blasted out of a cannon while still living.”

  Chuck thought about it, then had a revelation. “Then I got him beat!”

  “You’d need a team of engineers to figure out how to do something like this. Now, I know there are a lot of ex-NASA people out there with nothing to do, but I don’t know them personally.”

  “Just WEPS it, brother! Find one to ‘face with. Can’t be that hard.”

  Ernie cut in. “Custom specializations incur additional fees.”

  “That’s fine. I got a little bit of money. This is my last splurge. And I want this shit posted.”

  “Endcasts are an extra hundred dollars.”

  “That’s cool! It’s cool, dude! I can scrounge it!”

  Ernie and I excused ourselves for a moment to discuss the situation. We brought Matt up on the WEPS, and I told him that Chuck wanted us blow him out of a cannon.

  “Does he have the money for it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Then blow his ass out of a cannon.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Figure it out. That’s your job. Now go away. I’m winning an auction for a new hood ornament.”

  He signed out. I looked to Ernie, befuddled. He patted me on the shoulder. “The thing you’re gonna learn about Matt,” he told me, “is that he likes to spend lots of time buying shit he doesn’t need. Also, he’s a fucking psychopath. But that’s why he’s fun to work for.” Ernie led me back to the van, opened his duffel, reached in, and took out an explosive charge. “I’m told this has a blast radius of twenty feet.”

  “You always keep that on you?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes you find yourself in situations where you gotta blow some shit up.”

  I had to draw up additional contracts and liability waivers. While I tended to the grunt work, Chuck came back to the van and took out a small red blanket, which he then tied around his neck as a daredevil’s cape. He also had an old motorcycle helmet that he’d scavenged from the heap. As a final touch, he donned an old pair of red plastic women’s sunglasses. I estimate he spent at least five whole minutes planning this extravaganza. When he was finished getting in costume, he stepped out the front door of the microbus to address the crowd.

  “Who wants to watch me blow up? Anyone who helps gets the last of my hydro!”

  Instantly, dozens of steakheads and tramps descended upon us, ready to pitch in. We led them to the heap where the old cannon lay prone on the ground. It was upright and pointing northwest within seconds. If douchebags are useful for anything, it’s performing brainless displays of strength to impress everyone else around.

  Someone brought in a ladder from the campground. Ernie wired the charge and dropped it in the bottom of the tube. After that, Chuck reemerged from the van to thunderous applause. He put on his helmet and advanced toward the human-missile silo. He turned to Ernie and me.

  “This is gonna work, right?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Ernie lied. “That thing’ll shoot you right to the heavens, kid.”

  “Sweet. What happens if it doesn’t go the way I want it to?”

  “Well, you could ask for a refund, but you’ll probably be too dead to claim it.”

  “Right.”

  Chuck began scaling the ladder. Ernie turned to me and shrugged. He had no real clue whether the charge would have the desired effect. At the top of the cannon, Chuck took a last hit of hydro, which was met with more clapping and hooting. He jumped into the barrel and slid down to the ground. I made everyone sign a waiver. Ernie asked Chuck if he was ready.

  “Let’s fly, muchacho!”

  Everyone took cover behind a row of cars fifty yards away. Ernie set his WEPS on the hood of an old truck and began streaming a shot of the cannon. He grabbed the charge remote and leapt behind our row. He opened the switch. Suddenly, the entire vibrant mood of the scene flicked off, an aura of unease and tension taking its place. But Ernie didn’t allow it to linger for more than a split second. He plunged the button down, and the bottom of the cannon made a loud sneeze. A few stray bits of Chuck flew out of the top and landed on some of the surrounding windshields. The top of the cannon began to smoke, like a novelty-sized Marlboro. We rushed to the cannon, fire extinguishers in hand, borrowed from a nearby camper. I wrapped a rag around my fist and knocked on the side of the cannon.

  “Chuck?”

  There was no answer. Three steakheads pushed on the side of the cannon until it fell back to the ground. We looked in the opening at the bottom. Some of Chuck remained. The rest was ash, never even close to touching the sky.

  DATE MODIFIED:

  3/3/2059, 3:08 A.M.

  What They’re Saying about End Specialization

  There have been times over the years when I didn’t feel all that much like living anymore. When Keith and I spent 2047 in Guatemala, I’d stay up every night and stare at the Texan’s gun, daring myself to use it, before I eventually passed out drunk. I’ve never had the guts to put my money where my mouth is. When I was a kid, I was always told that suicide was the coward’s way out of life. I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel the exact opposite. Chuck may have been a burnout and a hippie li
ving in a van, but at least he had the balls to think of an exit and see it through without hesitation. I don’t have that inherent bravery, chemically enhanced or otherwise. I’m not courageous enough to die now, nor have I ever been. I just keep on hanging around.

  The first week of the job went according to Matt’s description. Mostly older people, many disabled and in pain. There were a couple of exceptions. There was an alcoholic woman with a cure age of only thirty or so. Very attractive. But she had been in and out of AA for three decades. She hated it. Called it a rest home. She didn’t want to live without drinking, but she knew she couldn’t stay alive if she stayed on the bottle. She chose the third option. Ernie gave her the shot while she downed one of her own. Then there was a gamer who asked for us because he had grown despondent over the fact that Omni-Warrior: Dhuria had become too overpopulated for his tastes. None of these clients wavered in their decision making. All of them appeared to be at peace—a peace that has eluded me for so long that I’m not sure I would even recognize it if it came around again.

  So that’s how I justify this new gig to myself, I suppose. I know other people don’t particularly agree. I went around the cloud and found plenty of disparate voices ready to sound off on the issue.

  Bob Maclin:

  We’re no better than Russia now. End specialization is the single most unethical American enterprise since slavery. I am all for population control, but what is unacceptable to me is how this government can endorse subsidized suicide. It’s downright ghoulish. We are preying on the weakest members of our society—the elderly, addicts, people with mental illness—then handing them a loaded gun and saying, “Go ahead. Pull the trigger.”

  Shepard Anson:

  This is the least evil solution to a situation that has nothing but evil solutions. There are 720 million people in this country right now. We’re a third-world nation, and we have been for quite some time. If we don’t get a firm handle on our population, which is spinning wildly out of control, nature will be more than happy to assume command for us.

  Paolo Estes:

  I understand the need for end specialization. But this whole Patriots Program where they enshrine suicide victims like they’re opera donors? That’s creepy. I’m sorry. That’s really, really messed up.

  Kensi Patton:

  My brother had an end specialization performed three months ago. He was thirty. That wasn’t his cure age. That was his real age. Thirty with a cure age of twenty-six. And when he decided to end his life, the state was more than happy to send two people over to assist him.

  I can’t help but think he died not only because he wanted to, but because everyone else wanted him to. That’s what this is really about. We spend forty minutes waiting in line at the charging station, we spend an hour looking to park, we share a one-room apartment with three other people, and we’re wishing everyone else would just get out of our way.

  And now we’ve agreed, as a society, to implement a program that performs assisted suicides without any consideration of whether someone has been here thirty years or a hundred years. Aren’t there some people out there worth saving? Karl Olmert tried to commit suicide as a teenager, and now he’s one of the finest architects on earth. Now that wouldn’t happen. Should we simply let people like him vanish because we aren’t willing to share?

  I heard a rumor recently about a fire department dispatcher in a town in Massachusetts. Sometime last year the dispatcher got a call in the middle of the night. It was a relay from a 911 operator. There was a fire in a housing project. One of the really bad ones—drugs, gang members, all of it. When the operator told the dispatcher about the fire, he refused to send a truck to put it out. “Spontaneous end specialization,” he said. Then he hung up and went back to playing solitaire on his WEPS while the firemen slept upstairs. They just let the thing burn. No one ever reported the fire on their feed. No one ever figured out how many people perished or how the fire began. No one cared. That’s how cheap life is now. We get a surplus, and we burn it off.

  I wonder if those firemen would have rescued my brother. Clearly, no one else wanted to bother.

  DATE MODIFIED:

  3/8/2059, 4:09 P.M.

  A Few Minutes with the Worst Domestic Terrorist in American History

  Randall Baines is still ranked number one on the FBI’s list of most-wanted fugitives. He’s been implicated in the July 3 bombings, so I know all about him. I see his face and I find myself again chased out of that hallway by the FDNY, forced to sit in a cold, gray stairwell while my best friend burns alive.

  An anonymous journo who uses the pseudonym Flywheel was able to score an iFace interview with the guy. Everything about the video appears to be real. Here’s a section of the transcript :

  Flywheel : You’re sick?

  Baines: I am. I’m very sick.

  Flywheel : Cancer?

  Baines: I’m not going to go into details. But suffice it to say that my time here is nearing an end, which is as it should be. As you can see, I’m quite old.

  Flywheel : You never got the cure.

  Baines: No how, no way. True organic to the core.

  Flywheel : Never tempted?

  Baines: No. The people who have gotten it are fearful and weak. The average man—and I mean the truly average-inevery-way man—is led by a set of profound, animalistic urges that forever enslave him. And the cure has amplified those urges. That’s why you’re seeing the secessions. That’s why more and more walls are going up around homes and towns. That’s why the D36 gangs are raping and looting all over the place and why kooky Texans are shooting at trespassers with their bows and arrows. This is an epidemic of living.

  Flywheel: What about you? What about the lives you’ve taken?

  Baines: Everything I have done for this cause has been motivated by a single goal: saving lives. That’s what people fail to understand. Without death, we don’t learn a goddamn thing about life. I’m trying to help us here.

  Flywheel: Explain how killing over five hundred people helps.

  Baines: Because the people I have helped kill are facilitators of spreading the human virus across this planet. They are reckless people who are endangering the lives of everyone alive just so that the so-called luckiest generation can go around eating and drinking and having sex for an extra millennium.

  Flywheel: Well, wait a second. Wait a moment. Let’s get more specific about the people you have killed. In 2035 you helped orchestrate the bombing of a Vectril processing plant, an attack that killed over seventy-five people.

  Baines: That’s correct.

  Flywheel: Of those seventy-five people, fourteen were children who were attending a day care center in the plant. And the rest of the victims were plant workers and administrators who were simply trying to earn a living.

  Baines: Let me ask you a question. When we were in Afghanistan, did we kill civilians? Did we kill children?

  Flywheel: Yes. But that’s war.

  Baines: So is this! This is a war! This is the only war! In your so-called useful war, strategic targets, such as enemy arms stockpiles, are taken out. If there’s a kid killed in the blast, what does the army say? Well, that’s too bad. We’re sooooo sorry. But this was something we had to do in order to protect ourselves. Same logic here. Every doctor that prescribes Vectril and every store that sells it is a weapons stockpile.

  Flywheel: So is that how you justify having, in 2045, one of your colleagues walk into a CVS store in Chicago wrapped in C4, blowing it up and killing two dozen people?

  Baines: Yes. It’s justified because it helps contain the damage the cure is causing. I know much of this insurgency is powered by evangelicals and more extreme religious groups. But that’s not why I’ve taken up this cause. I have pragmatic reasons for trying to end postmortality in this country and the world at large. We’ve already seen the devastating effects of it, haven’t we?

  Flywheel: But how does killing hundreds of people change the situation? Isn’t it simply a drop in the bucket
? You haven’t stopped the cure from spreading, and you aren’t going to. So why not face reality and look for solutions that don’t include shooting up a medical school or planting a pipe bomb in a testing facility?

  Baines: Excuse me, you’re saying I should face reality? Me? I am practically the only person in this nation who has any grasp on reality. I could have told you forty years ago that this cure would turn the Congo into a permanent slave state. I could have told you that it would deplete, entirely, the world’s supply of fish. I could have told you that it would cause India to instantly revert to abject poverty and despair. Look at that nation. It was on the brink of becoming one of this century’s great powers. Now it has two billion people and no possible way of accommodating them. That’s reality, and no one out there seems to give a shit because they’re too busy jumping around all excited and saying, “Whee! I get to live forever!” That’s why this cure is so insidious. People are endangering the entire planet simply by sitting there and being. What I am doing is providing the only jolt of reality left. Everyone thinks that they can’t die now. Well, they can. And they will.