The Postmortal

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

“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

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.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

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.

TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN

—MASTODON, 2009

 

 

 

 

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.

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.