The Postmortal (2 page)

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.

“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 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 of 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 been 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 try 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 in a sloppy fashion, with big streaks of dripping paint frozen and hardened in place. 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 into 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 for 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 that 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 the 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.

 

I know it’s mere coincidence, and yet 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:

When I was a kid, I saw religion as insurance against death. It’s what the preachers on TV used to say. You’re better off believing in God, they’d warn you,
just in case
. Because you’d hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.