by Drew Magary
“Even if I could, I can’t. I’m not the one who administers the dose. My partner is in charge of that, and it’s a bit late to get him over here.”
“So do it yourself. Come on.” She scooted closer. “It’ll be fun. We’ll bust your cherry.”
“I can’t do this off the cloud.”
“Like hell you can’t. I know how you end specialists work. I know how you deal with those freezer babies in the foster houses.”
“DES may do that, but my outfit doesn’t.”
“Do this for me as a favor. I’ve gotten all the pleasure I can out of this good thing. The lemon’s out of juice, darling. You can give my hourly fee to charity or something.”
“Look, it’s late and I’m high. You should really take a day to think about this.”
“No,” she insisted. “This is not an impulse purchase. I’ve thought about it before. I’ve come across you for a reason. I want it now, and I want you to be the one who gives it to me. No one ever does me favors, so I’d appreciate it if you were the first.”
She was intractable. I went to the bathroom and called Matt, who never sleeps. He came on the WEPS from his garage. He was working on an old BMW. Orange, of course. “What’s this girl’s deal?” he asked. “She’s a hooker?”
“Yep.”
“What’s a hooker doing in your place at 3:00 A.M.?”
“Do you really need me to explain that to you? Look, I’m gonna send her on her way.”
“Don’t do that. That’s free money walking out the door. It’s a perfect little transitional assignment for you. Is she sober?”
“I think so.”
“You have supplies with you?”
“They’re in the plug-in.”
“Then get them, scan her license, and get it done. I can get you e-certified to administer the dose. Go for it.”
“Are you sure this is the right thing to do?”
“I don’t give really give a shit. Listen, there’s something you should know before you do this. It’s not a warning. It’s just a fact.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a certain emotional strength you need for this, Johnny Boy. That’s why it makes sense now to see if you have it. Every one of them you take is gonna take a piece of you with them.”
“I already know that.”
“Not the way Ernie, Bruce, and I know it. You’ll be surprised. So I wish you good luck.”
He turned on a blowtorch and waved goodbye. The call cut off, and I went back to Julia and told her to wait while I got the supplies. I came back with a dose, sat down next to her on the bed, and gave her the RFE to fill out, which she did. She handed it back to me. “What now?” she asked.
“I give you the interview,” I said, “and then you get the dose.”
She looked at me with suspicion. “I think you forgot something in between.” She put her hand on my thigh.
“We don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, but we do. This is where I shine. That’s the bitch of it. This is the only time when I get to be convincing. This is the only time when men realize that I’m a woman in full.” She slid her hand up. It felt good.
“I was built for this,” she said.
“I feel like a scumbag.”
“That’s okay. Sometimes it feels good to feel like a scumbag. Run with it.” She turned and slipped one of the straps of her camisole off her shoulder. She began breathing deeper. I followed suit. “Men know I’m bad for them, John. They always know what’s bad for them. But they just can’t help themselves. Because it feels so . . . fucking . . . good.” She looked over to the dose sitting on my nightstand and whispered in my ear. “I want you to stick me with that when I’m getting off.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. You can because I want you to. We don’t need an interview. No one will care what I said or what I didn’t say. I just I wanna go as I come. Do it. Be my angel.”
She started kissing my neck and sliding her hand farther up. I laid back and let her. She started to unzip my fly and peel off my jeans. I returned the favor and turned her around on her knees. I fucked her in a trance until I could hear her barking at me now, Now, NOW. I reached to the nightstand and grabbed the little plastic tube. She strained and moaned as she hit the point of no return, and I jammed the lance into her backside. She looked back at me with a devilish grin and set her head down on the pillow, where it froze in place. Her eyes half-open, as if drunk. Her smile drooped a bit, giving her the look of someone having a good time but certain to forget all of it. I stared at her naked expression. Then I looked over to the empty shot in my hand.
And that’s when I had a heart attack.
DATE MODIFIED:
6/29/2059, 4:56 A.M.
“Wait over there”
Scott entered the room and was greeted with the sight of a naked dead girl on my bed and me convulsing in pain beside her. It was like someone had wrapped a swimsuit drawstring around my heart, and then cinched it as tightly as possible. He ran to me. “What the hell?”
I could barely wheeze out any discernible words. “She . . . was a client,” I said. “Hospital . . .”
Scott pinged the hospital for an ambulance, and we waited. He covered Julia with a blanket. He held my hand as I locked my back in an arch and turned eggplant. He tried to slip pants on me, but my legs were buckling and he couldn’t wrestle my jeans back on. He threw a top sheet over me, and I waited with Julia at my side—two shades of death parked next to each other.
I felt like a very small Greenie was inside my body, trying to crush my heart in one hand while eagerly slicing through my diaphragm with the other. I took in a small amount of air at a time. Each breath seemed to tighten the Greenie’s grip, as if he had caught me defying orders. Scott looked at me writhing on the bed and concluded that waiting for the ambulance was a bad idea. He threw my pants in a gym bag and wrapped a belt around the sheet covering me. He cinched it, and now I was in a makeshift toga. He made a move to get me off the bed, but I pushed him away.
“Her . . . first.”
“I can come back for her,” he said.
“We can’t . . . leave her . . . Oh, Jesus Christ!”
A solar flare went off in my chest, and my neck hooked wildly around until my ear was practically grazing my back. I passed out from the pain and woke up in the front seat of Scott’s plug-in. Julia lay covered in the back. I could see tangles of her hair poking out from under the blanket.
The roads were packed, bottlenecks every fifty yards because groups of plug-ins huddled together on the shoulder and in the right lane in impromptu car towns. The crushing sensation in my chest periodically subsided during the ride, allowing me to sit up. I glanced back at Julia’s body. I didn’t want her ignored. I fought against recalling her death and recalling that I was profoundly turned on by the look of ultimate satisfaction on her face. We pulled up to the ER. Scott ran in and left the plug-in idling.
The ER’s enormous automatic glass doors were already wide open, with a line of people stretching out of them and hugging the side of the building where the line extended around the corner. Some of them were in wheelchairs. Some were lying on the ground, ailing. Scott sprinted inside the building to find the front of the check-in line. People were packed against all sides of the hospital breezeway, between the two sets of glass doors. Beyond that, I could only see slivers. More bodies. Every time a crack between two people opened as they jostled around, it was filled by another body not that far past. Scott gave up and ran back out.
The ER drop-off was a rotary, with a grassy infield at the center. Scott dragged me over to the infield and let me fall to the ground, where I joined numerous other folks with bullet wounds, hacking coughs, burns, and pretty much anything else you could tick off on a chart. We lay there together in the night’s deathly humidity, melting and spreading like lumps of cookie dough thrown in an oven.
“I’m leaving you here,” Scott said. “I’m going to drop her off at the morgue with her ES p
apers, and then I’ll come back to check you in. I won’t be long.”
“Thank you.”
My little infield became very crowded, with broken people lying down closer and closer, eventually almost spooning me. Occasionally, one of the spotlights on the roof of the hospital would sweep the infield, the beams blasting straight through my shut eyelids. The pain returned, and I felt like my heart was being flattened by an invisible stone monolith.
Scott got back and saw me still on the ground. Before he tried to pick me up, he looked around to see if any of the other ablebodied folks would offer to assist him. None did. They ignored him as if he were a late-boarding train passenger looking for an empty seat. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and hoisted me up, tightening my chest even further. I felt my rib cage turn to crumpled cellophane.
“Sorry, brother,” he said, “but you have to be present at check-in.”
He dragged me into the melee and stood in the line. Hours passed. I lay on the ground. When the line advanced, Scott prodded me with his foot to move me forward a bit, like a carry-on bag. I called David to tell him I loved him. He offered to come down, but I insisted he remain in New York. An hour later a very nice collectivist named Ken met us in line and offered to relieve Scott of his duties. Scott accepted and went home to sleep. Ken opened a fanny pack and gave me carrots and diet soda. He brought clean clothing for me (khakis and a denim shirt, of course), and I put it on slowly, while remaining on the ground. He offered to have a church healer come and lay hands on me. I declined. The line ticked forward. A very large, very stern nurse awaited us.
“Name?”
I stood and gave her my name in short, halting breaths.
“Symptoms?”
I told her I was having a heart attack.
“Date of birth?”
I told her October 1, 2030. She gave me a derisive glare.
“A heart attack? At twenty-nine? I don’t think so. Wait over there.”
She nodded to a giant room labeled POSTMORTAL TRIAGE UNIT. That’s where I was sentenced to go, my own heart attack serving as evidence that my heart attack should not be treated right away.
Just as the nurse pointed in our direction, my sister ran frantically into the ER, fresh from Jersey, happily elbowing anyone in her way. She helped Ken drag me over to the PTU and laid me gently on the carpeted floor. She stroked my hair. I grew lightheaded, fighting against the urge to pass out a second time but wanting to pass out all the same. So I passed out.
I woke back up. The pain had subsided once more. I could breathe. Not deeply. But at least my chest had regained the ability to expand. I was still in the PTU. A young black man with a gunshot wound in his shoulder sat with his mother on a bench nearby. He had a towel held up to his wound. The blood on the towel had dried ages ago and was now brown. He saw my eyes opening. “You have a nice nap?” he asked. “Wish I could nap like that.”
“We’ve been here for twenty-six hours,” his mother said. “I wasn’t in the hospital that long when I gave birth to him.”
I looked at Polly and Ken. They were staring up at a flat screen with dispatches from China. All the networks had available to broadcast were still photographs. I saw shadows burned into the ground. Blackened bodies. A lone shoe where a pedestrian once stood, before being blasted into nothingness. I saw stretches of rubble that I assumed were once city blocks. They looked more like extensive gravel driveways. Only a few photos were shown at a time. Mostly, talking heads yammered on about the situation. Snippets of their dialogue piled up in my LifeRecorder:
◗ “There have been whispers coming from China for ages that something like this might happen, Tom . . .”
◗ “I don’t see why America should take any action other than official denouncement, Taryn. What do you do to a country that nukes itself? Nuke it again?”
◗ “I’m aghast at just how indifferent the international community has been in the wake of this, David.”
◗ “I think this is only phase one. There are plenty more cities that China would like to ‘reset,’ to use one of its euphemisms.”
◗ “Really, Jill, what else do you expect from a country that tattoos newborns?”
◗ “The people who make Vectril have blood on their hands today, Karen. They have been illegally supplying China with the cure through Russian channels for decades now. There’s a stack of evidence a mile high to support it. Is it mere coincidence that this is the same company that helped develop the TEZAC tattoo-removal equipment? They’ve supported population growth in China to the point where the government felt compelled to do this. This is insane! This is insanity!”
I looked away. I tried to block it out of my mind, because I could feel the drawstring tightening again. I could hear other would-be patients in the PTU getting angry and cursing over at the check-in desk. I could see nurses walk by and everyone shouting questions at them as they avoided eye contact at all costs, like a waiter who isn’t ready to serve your table. I pictured every doctor in the hospital sequestered behind a series of elaborately constructed vault doors. I shut out all the commotion. A small pamphlet had fallen to the ground beside me. I picked it up and read it over and over. With my WEPS battery in need of recharging, it was the only thing I had to read, the only words I had to stare at to keep me from hearing about the self-inflicted devastation going on half a world away—to prevent my brain from reminding me that I had just euthanized someone. I can now recite the copy verbatim.
NEED A LITTLE MORE BREATHING ROOM?
Try once-a-day Claustrovia
Claustrovia is the first prescription drug ever medically proven to help treat symptoms stemming from overcrowding anxiety disorder (OAD).
Claustrophobia
Germophobia
Sudden increase in heart rate
Irritability
Stress
Paranoia
Ask your doctor if Claustrovia is right for you. Claustrovia is not recommended for women who are pregnant or nursing. Children under eight should not take Claustrovia. If you’re a postmortal over the real age of sixty and you have liver problems, check with your doctor before taking Claustrovia. Side effects may include drowsiness, dry mouth, and liver damage.
Polly saw me staring at the brochure. “I don’t think that does anything for a heart attack.”
“It might do something for the wait, though,” I said.
“It doesn’t do anything for anything. I’ve tried it. Why are you dressed like a collectivist?”
“I lent him the clothes,” Ken told her. “They’re mine.”
“Why did you need new clothes?” she asked me. “And why did you have a heart attack?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said. I steered her off course. “I didn’t know you were on Claustrovia.”
“If it comes in pill form, I’ve tried it.”
“Are you depressed?”
“In waves. You know me. It’s only when I have time to sit down and think about things that I realize I’m a bit of a wreck.”
“You look good.”
“Well, you caught me early in the day. I always look my best before noon, before the day starts pounding away at me.”
“How’s the little one?”
“Tony’s climbing now,” she said. “He climbs up to the top of everything—stairs, boxes, shelves, desks. It’s like he thinks he just won a gold medal in something. It’s very cute. Everything is good. Everything is fine. Dave and Tony are fine. Everyone’s happy and healthy, and we can afford water, and that’s all I can ask for.”
“Ever hear from Mark?”
“I saw him at the store a couple of weeks ago. He had his new kids with him. We did that thing where we spotted each other and gave a friendly wave. That was about it.” She paused. “I still feel like he’s my husband, you know. I see him with these new kids of his, and my wiring starts smoking and shooting sparks. Something doesn’t compute. It’s like I’ve been reincarnated, but God or whoever let me remember every damn thing fr
om my past life. Then I come home to Dave, and I think to myself, wait, did I hire a substitute Mark? And shouldn’t this kid I have be my grandchild? Shouldn’t I be handing him off to some nice, sensible daughter-in-law somewhere? How many more husband iterations am I going to go through? Two hundred years from now, will I realize I already married my eighth husband five husbands earlier? I go to buy a couple of oranges, and I end up tied in an existential square knot. So that bats my head around the tetherball pole pretty good.” She stuck out an open bag of chips. “Dorito?”
Just then a nurse called my name. I sprung up and jumped for her attention, in case she decided to pass me over and send me to the back of the ER’s deli line. She waved me forward. I gave Ken a limp hug and thanked him for his help. He left without asking for his clothes to be returned.
They brought Polly and me into the emergency ward and sat me in a lone chair in the center of the hallway. I still wasn’t sick enough to merit an actual room. Dozens of patients lined the corridor in wheelchairs and on gurneys. They stripped me, dryshaved a couple of patches on my chest, hooked me up to a WEPS screen, got an EKG reading, and left Polly and me there for another three hours. We passed away the time betting on whether nurses passing through the corridor would trip and eat the floor. I said nothing about Julia.
I noticed, as we gambled, one patient being escorted down the hall. Unlike every other patient I’d seen in the ward, this one seemed to be getting treated as if his condition were a real emergency. There were nurses and doctors surrounding him. I hadn’t seen a doctor all night and day. It was like catching a glimpse of a movie star walking along a red carpet. There he is! And they moved with alacrity, as if they were genuinely interested in saving his life. Again, not a common occurrence in hospitals these days.
