The End Specialist

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.