The Postmortal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  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

  “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

  “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

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for THE POSTMORTAL

  “Magary has created a fictional future as wildly entertaining as it is eerily foreboding. The Postmortal is as funny, inventive, and outlandish as anything you’ll read this year. Or next. Assuming we’re all still here.”

  —David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive

  “A darkly comic, totally gonzo, and effectively frightening population-bomb dystopia in the spirit of Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, and the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.”

  —Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad and Stretch

  “I suppose you could wait for the inevitable Postmortal movie. But then you might miss Magary’s rendering, his word play, his singular sense of humor. A book that is, at once bracingly funny and—get this, Deadspin Nation—unmistakably poignant.”

  —L. Jon Wertheim, coauthor of Scorecasting

  “A startling leap forward. The Postmortal is dark, funny, and terrifying. This book draws such a vivid, convincing picture of immortality that it, quite literally, made me want to die.”

  —Will Leitch, author of Are We Winning? and God Save the Fan

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE POSTMORTAL

  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. His first book, Men with Balls, was released in 2008. This is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

  You can contact the author at [email protected] or at twitter.com/drewmagary.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2011

  Copyright © Drew Magary, 2011

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Magary, Drew.

  The postmortal / Drew Magary. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54374-0

  1. Aging—Prevention—Social aspects—Fiction. 2. Longevity—Social aspects—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A33P67 2011

  813’.6—dc22 2011014531

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

 
; TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN

  I was standing staring at the world. And I still can’t see it.

  —MASTODON, 2009

  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 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 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 in the last part of the century.

  Farrell was a remarkably fastidious record keeper. He used the LifeRecorder app to preserve and transcribe virtually every human interaction he 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, and incontrovertible evidence that the cure for aging 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. Just 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 the hoardings. When I walked by them, they were clean, as if they had been posted the night before. But I noticed, as I got toward the end of the block, that one of them had already been defaced. Not on the lowest rung but the second 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 the moment it became available on the black market. So if you know a finance guy, it’s not that hard to get 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 in my experience. All I needed was an address, a password, and a 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 than I had ever wanted anything. More than any woman. More than any long-overdue sip of water. Normally, any decision I confront 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 could 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 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 had stopped referring to the cure as “the toaster.” I really wanted to see how long we 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 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 into 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 the new gene code throughout your system. Within six months, it will be present in all your tissue, and the aging of your body will be permanently frozen
where it is. 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 reinject 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 afterward?”

  “Yes. Of course you can. You can still catch a 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 own 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 young 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.