This Is the End (2 page)

The doctor stands there in his white coat and I can feel him staring like an asshole at the middle of my back, waiting for me to tell him I’m joking and that we can discuss the results later. I’m not joking; I’m tired. I hear the buzz starting outside the doors to his office.

I just informed the world through the tips of my fingers that there is going to be a press conference. I just became the hottest news story of the decade, yet again. I grab the polished nickel handle, turn it and fling the doors open to face the world.

There are already well over a dozen assorted bloggers, reporters and other journalists foaming at the mouth beyond my security detail, popping pictures, feeding live video streams, fingers blazing over their own tablets and even one guy with a laptop, archaic as that is. I wave. I smile. My security guys push back the thrum of electronics and questions, and we move past them towards the elevator. Someone asks where the press conference will be.

“Outside, in about five minutes or so,” I say back without looking at whoever it was that asked.

The stainless steel on the elevator door is crisp and polished as a mirror; I take a quick look around in the reflection. The hallway is blindingly white, the plants are probably artificial, and the tiles on the floor look too clean for their own good. The art on the wall is too contemporary and my eyes look too deeply set in my head. The initial tests said I had a year, maybe less.

I am Mearsult in
The Stranger
, greeting the crowd, awaiting my death. It’s the best I’ve felt in years.

* * *

The air outside is sharp and cool, it’s springtime in Cleveland, which means that it’s either going to be ridiculously hot soon or that it might snow. Northeast Ohio is tragically unpredictable when it comes to weather patterns.

My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that northeast Ohio is also the armpit of the world, too sticky or too dry, never just right.

I was born here. I went through a series of schools here. I went through a series of shitty jobs here. And I invented the most downloaded and heavily used app in the modern history of apps here. So when the big venture capitalists and investors came around, poking their noses into my app, my baby, I decided to stay. I single-handedly took this city from its stagnant forty-year-long hospice stay to thriving metropolis in less than three years. It wasn’t LeBron James; it was Jeffrey Sorbenstein. The king is dead, long live the emperor.

New buildings are being built; startups and corporations are bringing new cash flows into the region, allowing businesses to actually come back down to the city center. It’s so different from the way it used to be, back in the good old days, when you could walk around downtown and get mugged for the lint in your pocket and the cigarette in your hand.

It’s clean now, sophisticated and scrubbed. I hate it. All of what made the city a hellish nightmare, a place you wanted to flee at all costs, a place that made you, through sheer force of will, want to do something better with your life, is now either muted or gone. It’s the hottest place to live and the fastest growing city between New York and Chicago. We put the final nail in Detroit’s coffin, which, to tell you the truth, felt pretty good because as much as I hate what Cleveland’s become, I really, really, really hate Detroit.

The major news networks are trying to put up a podium full of microphones. The rest of the crowd is made up of everyday working journalists, pavement jockeys, muckrakers and students. All the regulars are here, and by regulars I mean Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, Prison Planet.com. But there’s even more micro news outlets, community site bloggers, hyper local news feed burners, random freelancers and I’m sure some assortment of “others” that I’m totally missing.

It’s loud out on the street; there’s an ambulance siren in the background, and the
thump thump thump
of a helicopter’s beating wings drowns out everything for a few seconds as it lands on top of the hospital.

The crowd is making noise, talking about what the announcement could be. Each camp is trying to out scoop each other and under it all I hear the distinct current of electricity coming from all the devices everyone is carrying. Most likely they’re all running some form of the app as well.

Across the street there is already a small assortment of protestors; the police have them cordoned off into a free speech cage. One of the cops is wrestling a third world country sort of thin girl to the ground and putting her jaw on a curb, another one is frisking an old lady for drugs. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

You would think that with the close proximity to “journalists,” the cops wouldn’t be this brazen, but then again, I’m news and they aren’t. I’m rich, they’re poor. The more things change, right?

My security guys are flanking me, scanning the crowd both here and across the street. They’re waiting for the shots, or the grenades or anything else that might be immediately hazardous to my health. I keep telling them that it doesn’t matter anymore, but they keep telling me, “As long as the checks keep coming, you’ll die a very slow and painful death from cancer and nothing else.”

The front of the clinic is pristine and modern, a glass obstruction to the marvels of the natural world. Seventy-five stories of pure architectural wonderment poking itself into the sky like a middle finger to God.

Someone from the back of the crowd wants me to get on with it already, someone else tells them to shut the fuck up or leave. I shake my head slightly and look down trying not to laugh.

This is the announcement of my eventual death, it should be somber; I should be more morose or melancholic, but I’m not. I don’t care.

The audio visual tech signals that everything is ready to the lead man on my security team and he walks over to the podium and checks it again for whatever it is they check for, and then nods to me to come over.

I clear my throat. Everything goes quiet except the crowd across the street. I look at them and smile. I pull out a cigarette from my pack of American Spirits and light it. I take a long drag and I feel the cancer inside my chest grow. Every time I breathe it feels as if my lungs have gallons of chunky fluid in them.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” I say into the vast conglomeration of microphones. There’s a slight echo back.

“Thank you for joining me today on such short notice.”

2.

After I make the initial announcement that I’m dying of cancer, and after I explain that it’s not a joke—what else can I really say about it?—I wait for the eventual “
How are you going to treat it?
” question. It comes from a representative of MSNBC, state-run media if ever there was one in this country. Everyone thinks that Fox News is the GOP-run television network, which, of course, they are, but nobody ever questions where MSNBC gets all their funding from. Let me put that to rest: your tax dollars. I’m rich—I don’t pay taxes.

“I’ve decided to freeze myself,” I say, and a very literal hush falls over the crowd, even the protestors have shut up at this point.

Someone starts laughing. I don’t know who it is exactly or else I would have called them out on it personally, so I look out at the crowd and smile.

“I’m sorry, I don’t find any of this funny. This isn’t a joke; I’m going to freeze myself until they find a cure.” People stop laughing. Instantly fingers move across touchscreens. I can feel the zoom lenses coming in on my face like planes on King Kong, but I’m the emperor, I have the last laugh.

“You can’t be serious?” asks one of the microbloggers, who I absolutely know for a fact wasn’t shit until my app’s advertising feature catapulted them into the big time.

“No, I’m
very
serious about all of this. I’m going to freeze myself until they find a cure, and then, when you’re either all too old or all too dead to report on it, I’m going to wake up and live out the rest of my filthy rich life.”

I look right into the microblogger’s face and smile. I want him to know he may have a couple million, but I have nearly half a trillion in capital, liquid-fucking-capital, to do whatever I want with.

“What about your company?” asks one of the manicured plastic surgery beauties from Fox News.

“Look, everything will continue on. We have more than enough money to continue to destroy your brains with our apps for years to come,” I say. People chuckle.

Then I start hitting them with big fucking atom bombs of truth. This was the plan all along. Okay, not all along, but at least since I found out I have cancer. I let the cigarette drop and grind it into the composite concrete steps that run under the small platform the podium is set up on.

“In fact, we’re working with both the DHS and NSA on a project right now that will totally compromise the intelligence of generations to come.”

I smile again and then let my face go serious. They smile back, but then start to get it. I’m not joking. I’m not having a laugh with them; I’m laughing at them.

“Are you being serious?” asks someone else from the megacorporations. I look right over to the Prison Planet.com guys.

“Yes, Alex Jones and his staff had it mostly right. I couldn’t be more serious. Though, to tell you the truth, Alex works for the CIA as well. I mean, hasn’t anyone wondered why he’s still on the air if he’s exposing real secrets?”

The crowd across the street goes wild with venomous joy, some of them even applaud. The journalists representing Prison Planet.com aren’t having fun anymore.

Everyone else begins to yell. It’s a feeding frenzy of questions. My security guys become restless. A cop puts another frail-looking student, this one appears to be a man or boy or whatever, that was attempting to reach our side of the road into the pavement.

“He was right about my corporation working with the two agencies; he was half-right about the facial recognition and biometric scanning software that allows you to tag your ‘friends,’ and almost right about my whole company being propped up by the government.”

Fingers are moving at speeds that are probably not supposed to be possible for jointed appendages. Someone yells my name and I look over and point.

“Why should we believe any of this?” they ask.

I let that one sit for a minute. And then, when I’m ready, I smile and flash the five thousand buck beauties at them and say, “Because…I’m fucking dying.”

* * *

The news conference lasts another hour and fifteen minutes. It’s physically exhausting, but I let it all out. I answer questions about why I’m freezing myself: “Because I can.”

Why am I coming out now about everything? “Why the fuck not; what are they going to do to me? I’m already dying.”

What do they think caused it? I hold up the next cigarette in my seemingly never-ending supply and then say, “Next.”

Finally, after all the stupid questions, the silly, unimportant issues like what about my investors—“I bought them out and will be the sole owner of the company, even in suspended animation”—someone asks about my wife.

I look out into the faces of the crowd and say, “I haven’t figured that one out yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to either kill her or divorce her.”

The protestors across the street have all been let out of the free speech zone; the crowd has nearly tripled. Even the cops have slack jaws and are listening to me go on and on about the truth. The way the world really works. The way business is run: the back room deals, the underhanded way that everything is pushing us towards a total takeover of our lives by megacorporations, about how individuality is a lie, how being unique is really a way to market products to sub-niche groups. The revolution wasn’t televised, it was advertised, branded, bought and sold, to you, for you, by you. And you just eat it up.

After I’ve said my piece, after I answer the last few questions, I’ve had enough of their glass-eyed looks and yapping maws to end it, plus I have things to do and money to spend before I freeze myself.

So I wave, shoot the bird out to everyone and say, “Thanks, folks. Fuck you.”

I turn to leave. My security guards make a tight circle around me. Big dudes who have more technology, testosterone and weaponry than should legally be allowed fold in around me like a wall of meat and we move back into the lobby of the hospital. The sun is low in sky and my chariot awaits; I’m flying out to my office on a private helicopter.

We make our way into the elevator and up to the landing pad on top of the hospital that’s normally reserved for life flight choppers. My black bird is there waiting for me. The blades are spinning enough for me to bend over slightly. As we pull away I look down at the front of the hospital. The crowd is still there, standing like those Terracotta Warriors in China, silent and fragile, endless and broken.

3.

I check my email on the tablet while the chopper makes its decent towards the roof of my building. I want to see what the world is saying about my little truth sit-in. All the usual suspects have spun it to make it sound as if I’ve lost my fucking mind. The market has dipped a bit, especially in the tech sector, but the underlying news that I have more apps coming out has hedged any sort of short sells that might have happened due to my chat with the public. Alex Jones is adamantly denying that he works for the CIA. I look away and down towards the landing pad.

I see two figures standing on top of the roof. One of whom is my lawyer, who I am happy to see—go figure. The other is my soon-to-be ex-wife, who I am obviously not so happy to see.

By now the video of the press conference has had enough time to go around the world three or four thousand times, but I knew this moment was coming. I’m not going to lie to you though; I was sort of hoping that I wouldn’t have to deal with it until right before I freeze myself. It’s a character trait I’ve always had, and it goes like this: as much as I like to make a shit, I don’t actually like having to deal with the smell of it.

I need a cup of coffee and another cigarette. I also
need
to finalize a couple of things that shouldn’t take me more than a day or so. But seeing her standing there on the landing pad—her hair cut and colored the wrong way for her ugly, frown-lined face but the right way for whatever passes as fashionable—tells me that this is going to seriously suck big balls.