The End Specialist. Drew Magary

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?