Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Collar

“Collar” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2014.

TOM WAS NAKED, SKIN sparkling yellow-gray from the thick grease he’d been rubbing, almost seductively, into his short, meaty legs. He’d seen the young man walk up and down the beach at least four times. The kid was clearly nervous: with every pass he peered, uncomfortably, at the goods for sale in each stall, trying to figure out whom he could trust. The market centered around Beach 69th in Far Rockaway was an intimidating place if you’d never been there before. Tom decided to be nice and made eye contact. Once they locked eyes, the young man nodded, glanced furtively up and down the shoreline, then straightened up. He was just green. There was no need to be suspicious.

Tom went back to greasing himself and putting on his little show. After all, his clients needed to see that their money would be well spent, that the body on sale could handle the six hours safely, could get them where they needed to go.

“You available?” the young man asked. His voice cracked a little bit on the last syllable. This made Tom smile. “That is, you busy tonight?”

“First time?” he asked back, pointing to a pile of plastic crates behind him, deeper under the crumbling concrete and exposed rebar of the overhanging boardwalk.

Tom’s stall was cozy, like most of the other stalls in this ersatz grand bazaar. A fire, in a small steel-bucket-cum-brazier, gave each room a friendly, warm aura. All along the beach, underneath the rocky awning, the other merchants were starting their nightlong engagement in capitalism. Food stalls serving fried noodles and grilled meats. Supply stalls selling waterproof bags, goggles, wetsuits, and everything else a swimmer might need to last the long swim. The outlying stalls housed the prostitutes, providing sandy fucks to whoever wanted one. And then there were the bare stalls, dark except for their fires, empty but for their crates. Those belonged to Tom and the other navvies.

“Thanks,” the young man said. “What gave it away?”

He walked back into the darkness. Tom saw him wince and crinkle his nose at the condensed vapors of the synthfat he’d been massaging into his skin. It did not have a pleasant odor. One of his fellow guides described it as “dirty sex mixed with rotten meat, and a dash of acetone to cover it up.” It smelled rich and corrupt, but in all the wrong ways. Somehow both barnyard and factory, but with none of the wholesomeness of either. And its color was sickly, too: like cheap fluorescent light passing through a yellowed plastic sheet. But that’s what it took to stay warm out there. Better to stink and be stained than freeze to death miles offshore.

The kid sucked it up and returned with a purple crate which he shimmied into the sand across the fire from Tom.

“Jake,” he said, sticking his hand out.

Tom held up his greasy hand and shook his head. “Tom. Nice to meet you.”

Jake nodded. “Laid off a year now. Unemployment benefits just ran out. Can’t find work anywhere. Wife said it’s the ships or she’s leaving me.”

“She still working?” asked Tom.

“Yeah. Nurse for old folks,” he answered. “Recession-proof, I guess.”

“Unless people stop getting old.”

The men looked out toward the horizon. The sun was setting and they could see the running lights of the factory ships coming on, dipping into and out of view, now obscured, now visible, sprinkled along the edge of the ocean.

“You ever do factory work before?” Tom asked. “You ever been on one of the ships?”

“Nah,” Jake answered. “I was an office guy. IT, mostly. Worked and lived downtown for about five years. When the bridge started going up, me and the wife couldn’t afford Manhattan anymore so we moved to Brooklyn. Had kids, then…” He made a confused half-smile and shrugged.

It was the same “then” as every other person Tom ran into down at the market.

“All work is done in a factory,” Tom assured him, “no matter what color your collar is. You’ll figure it out.”

A little girl of eight or nine came up to the stall opening. “Empanada? Coke? Fries?” she called out. Tom waved her off, but he saw Jake eyeing the deep blue tubs covered with steamed-up plastic wrap, filled with meat pies.

“Did you eat?” Tom asked him. “Alice, over there three stalls down, she fries up some serious singapore noodles with squid. Blow your mind.”

“I’m too nervous to eat,” Jake confided.

“It’s a long swim, kid. You gotta eat something.”

A man and a woman walked by in bathing suits, dry-bags held high, the synthfat covering their heads in a caul which caught and threw the light from the many fires on the beach.

“Gonna drown another one, Tommy?” the woman called out.

“That’s the plan,” he yelled back. “The gods demand their sacrifice.”

The couple went down to the sea. Tom looked back at Jake.

“Friend of yours, I take it,” Jake said.

“Friendly competitor, more like it,” Tom replied. “So you gonna get some food or what?”

“No offense, but this market doesn’t look like the cleanest place to eat,” Jake said. “What if I get the runs?”

Tom made a little explosion with his hands. “Then you shit in the water, like the fish.”

“Fair point.” Jake smiled and got up. “Singapore noodles?”

“With squid. Tell her I sent you over. She’ll be sure to wash her hands then.”

“I’ll be back.”

Jake walked out of the stall and headed left. Tom followed him to the entrance and leaned against a pylon, watching the boy go down the shore. The warm air brought many of the other stall-holders to their makeshift doorways, under ragged awnings that gently luffed in the breeze. When Jake reached Alice, Tom could see him trying to explain something complicated to her. She got annoyed. Confused, he pointed back at Tom’s stall. Alice nodded excitedly and waved at Tom. He waved back. She then grabbed Jake’s hand, lifted the awning to let him through, and they both disappeared from view in the darkness beneath the concrete roofing.

He’d always had a soft spot for Alice. She’d been an institution at the night market long before the navvies worked the boardwalk. He wondered if the story was true, that her family had died, burned when the canals in Queens flooded, and that now she could only sleep during the day. It was a good story. And a good story could keep you safe.

He checked his watch. It was half-past seven. Slack tide would soon be over and the ebb tide would begin. Time was running out. The patrols would be looking for him at ten. He needed to close this deal and get in the water or the next time he went swimming, they’d stun him and not bother fishing him out. So either the kid was a little sacrifice to the gods of the day, or he was.

It was not a kind thing to do, but everyone came up against it. And his luck had run out after five years. He knew the others had done it. Drunken early-morning confessions, after they’d swum back, pounds lighter, slurring their shame through the stink of sea and synthfat, made all the more absurd by their salt-hardened hair, sticking out like a clown’s wig.

Jake came back, following three young men who were eyeing each stall, uncertain of where to go. He carried an old plastic yogurt container filled with steaming noodles. An errant green onion clung to the side.

“Eat up,” Tom said, “and let’s talk business.”

“How long you been doing this?” Jake asked.

Tom looked up at the sky and cocked his head thoughtfully. “November, five years ago. I went out to work. It was awful, just after a late-season hurricane. No guides, then, just desperate men, desperate for money.”

The legislation had passed through Congress swiftly: all products or services for sale in the U.S.A. cannot be made, or rendered, on foreign soil. It was political posturing and everyone knew it. The Chinese had built factory ships for years to skirt their own trade wars with the WTO, but now, with high fuel and labor costs at home, they saw a perfect opportunity to export our own jobs back to us. The law, which on paper was meant to protect workers, ended up doing the opposite. Near-shoring, they called it.

No one was surprised.

But to create the illusion that they didn’t want to do exactly what they planned to do, they created the Labor Police to patrol the coast up to the international water boundary, which, conveniently, the U.N. had rezoned to six miles from the high-water mark. No exclusive economic zone. No contiguous zone. Just six miles from the sun chairs and umbrellas and you’d find an internationalist free-for-all.

Nobody knew if they were supposed to work or starve, except the companies who realized it was just a matter of dragging those factory ships from the edge of Chinese waters to the edge of ours, then let the free market supply the workers. After all, it had already supplied the law.

“Damn. You’re old school, man.” Jake was impressed. “That’s pretty brave, going out on your own.”

“I used to surf and fish around here, so I knew the water pretty well.”

“Weren’t they rounding people up like crazy back then? You ever get picked up?”

Tom answered, straight into Jake’s eyes. “A couple times. Back then the Labor cops were aggressive, but stupid, so you could bullshit your way out of it. Or bribe them.”

Jake looked a little concerned. “They’re not a big deal anymore?”

“Not as much. They’ve had bad in-fighting since their union sold them out. Their managers got a golden parachute and the rest of ’em got a fist in the ass.”

“So that’s a no?” Jake pushed.

“Now it’s mostly privatized. Those guys work on commission: independent contractors like everybody else, so they’re pretty aggressive. Though rumor is if you put up a big enough fight, they’ll recruit you.”

Tom was now vigorously rubbing the synthfat into his face and bald head, the fire in the bucket reflected through tiny flames on his scalp.

“There’s another recession-proof job for life,” he continued, “keeping other people down.”

“So what do I need you for?”

“You don’t. There’s the ocean,” Tom said, gesturing toward the water with his palm up. “Start swimming.”

“Hey,” Jake said, mistaking Tom’s comment for hurt, “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I know,” Tom replied. “They’re definitely still around, the cops and the private cops. Now they try trickier things: some hero fucker wants to make a career for himself. Comes to the market, finds a guide, makes some arrests. If they get really cocky, they bring the hammer down and close the whole boardwalk. You can smell those guys a mile away.”

“Why is that?”

“They act like men who have jobs,” he said. “But the law isn’t the problem anymore. The real trouble comes from the patriots. Vigilante assholes bankrolled by rich leftists who think taking jobs from the Chinese is destroying the country. They don’t arrest. They blow things up.”

Jake slurped up some noodles.

“So how do you know I’m not an undercover cop or one of these terrorists?”

“Can’t know for sure, of course,” Tom said as he started to rub the fat on his upper thighs and groin. The hairs on his body swayed left and right, like seaweed caught in competing tides. “But, like a lot of those fuckers have learned, asking a strange man to take you on a six-hour swim at night in cold water can be a good way to drown. It’s a lesson you only need once.”

“For the record,” Jake said, “I’m not.”

“The thought, my friend, never crossed my mind,” Tom replied. “Right. Enough morbid shit. Back to practicalities. You said you did IT?”

“Yeah,” Jake replied. “I was a coder.”

“I can’t guarantee you’ll find a ship where your particular talents would be useful. Some factory ships are call-centers, some do computer stuff, others need programmers and developers. But most are just factories…making baubles for the natives.”

“So I’ll be an assembly-line worker?” Jake looked upset.

“What were you before? C-E-effing-O? An innovator?”

“Maybe I should go ask one of the other guides.” Jake said, a defensive edge in his voice. “Shop around.”

Tom continued to stare out at the sea. “Go right ahead. Three stalls down is Ahmed. He’s good. Ask away. Or, like I said, the water is right there. Enjoy the swim.”

Jake sat silently. The sound of the surf broke through the susurrus of stall chatter.

Talk like that, Tom thought, will not close this deal.

“Look, I’m not saying it’s impossible,” Tom said, his tone softer now. “Maybe one of the full-time workers got sick or transferred. You might get lucky and steal their job. It’s better for me, right? I work on commission. But this is New York. There’s a lot of competition.”

“So it’s just as bad out there as it is up here?”

“It’s different. Not everyone is up for swimming six hours in the cold through one of the busiest waterways in the world. The Chinese respect tenacity. I met one in a bar once who told me that if we’d showed that kind of work ethic in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Harsh.”

“Yup. But true.”

“Fuck that,” Jake said. “I worked my ass off and got screwed.”

Tom stood up and looked himself over, checking to make sure the synthfat was evenly and correctly applied. He was a greasy gray-yellow statuette. Perfect. He reached for his waterproof bag.

“We all did.” He dug around inside the bag and pulled out a little gun. “I need to tag you.”

“What?”

“It’s for my commission. They’ll scan the code when you negotiate your contract and I’ll get my cut.”

Tom checked the magazine of chips. There was white corrosion all over its edges. If he stuck it in the gun, it’d frizz out for sure. The guns were expensive and not easy to come by.

“Fuck. I’ll be right back. Gotta get more chips. Eat those noodles before they’re cold.”

Jake watched Tom rise and leave the stall. Flickering in the warm yellow light, under the grease, he could see alternating bands of rippled and smooth skin on Tom’s back, a birds-eye view of marbled scars.

A few stalls down the sand in the opposite direction from Alice sat Ari, an old Lubavitcher from Williamsburg who’d moved to the beach to retire back in the teens. Why he hadn’t moved to Inwood with the rest of the Hasids when the bridge started going up was unclear. Tom doubted his religiosity, as he’d seen him getting stoned with some of the other stall merchants and had definitely shared some of Alice’s squid noodles with him. But donning religious garb was a good way to avoid being robbed and must have helped him keep his identity so far from his missing friends and family.

Bearded, bald, and wearing his rekel (which he did regardless of the weather), Ari sat on a little stool atop a vaguely middle-eastern-looking rug he’d spread out over the sand. The plastic containers he used as shelving had their flaps open, presenting lots of trinkets and gadgets and things…sunscreen, cigarettes, amphetamines, water, swimsuits, fins, goggles, snorkels…like a degenerate triathlete’s beach shop.

Ari was no triathlete. Degenerate, maybe. His big belly swelled under his white collared shirt, his tzitzit fringing his lap.

“I need a chip magazine. The one I have is fucked. Corroded.”

“Second row,” he said, with a thick foreign accent despite having been born in Brooklyn, “on the right.”

Next to the aluminum squeeze tubes of energy goo, Tom found a cardboard box full of magazines. Used, mostly. He grabbed a new one and examined it. The label read “Proudly made in the U.S.A.”

Tom waved the magazine at Ari. “How much?”

“For you, forty-five.”

“Five a chip?” He opened his mouth wide, feigning shock. “Outrageous.”

“They’re not dropping many anymore. Most of the magazines are rotted away. I guess even their hiring is slowing down.”

It was true. In the last few months there’d been fewer and fewer ships out there. He’d had to turn more and more clients away to keep his track record up, which made tonight’s swim a little more depressing. But if he was going to keep his job, he had to do what had to be done.

“Fewer of you boys out there these days,” Ari went on. “Lots going up north, to Canada.”

“Right. Those libertarian candidates finally broke the labor laws there. Gonna be tough work. Much colder water, that far from the Gulf Stream.”

“Even the sea has been outsourced.”

“Bad omens, Ari. Put it on my tab.”

“Of course.” The old man smiled at him. “By the way, perhaps you could do me a little favor. My nephew, David, needs to find work.”

Ari had thousands of nephews. Tom’d placed a lot of them.

“What does he do?”

“He was a lawyer. Tax stuff. He just lost his job last week, but he has a baby on the way. Can you help him?”

“Can he swim?”

“He’s not exactly what you’d call ‘in shape,’ my David,” Ari said. “I thought maybe you might be able to ask around when you go out tonight and see if anyone needs someone of his abilities. Perhaps they could arrange a pickup.”

Nobody did pickups anymore. At least not the kind you’d want. Today’s pickup was very different.

“If he’s on Manhattan, I can’t get him out. It’s on him.”

“No. His mother was a goy. He wasn’t allowed to go with the family.”

One diaspora replaces another. Tom nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He got back to his own stall as Jake finished his noodles. The container was empty, scraped clean. Even the overboard onion was gone.

“Hungry after all?”

“You weren’t kidding. These are amazing.”

He had left his gun on his stool. It looked a lot like a label maker: featureless grey plastic with a heavy handle to hold the magazine. He jammed the clip into the gun’s butt and pulled back the charging handle.

“Ready for your shot?”

“Does it hurt?”

“Only your pride.”

Tom pressed the gun against Jake’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. It emitted a little puff of air. Jake grunted.

“Welcome to the workforce,” he announced and tossed the can of synthfat over to Jake. “Get those clothes off. Time to grease up.”

Jake smiled. “Yessir.” He pulled his pants off, rolled them tightly, and stuffed them into his waterproof bag.

“Underwear, too,” Tom told him. “You don’t want your dick to freeze off.”

Jake started to turn around to strip, hesitated, then turned back and took off his briefs.

“Okay. Take a handful and slap it on. Work it in like sunblock. When you think you’ve finished, blow on it. If you feel anything other than just a light pressure, put some more Crisco on,” Tom said.

“Wait,” Jake said. “Like the stuff for cookies?”

“Nah. It’s some kind of synthetic fat,” Tom answered. “We just have a sense of humor. Haha. For all I know, it’s partially hydrogenated polar bear blubber, but the stuff works. Get greasy, kid.”

Jake opened the tin. “Jesus, it stinks. I thought that reek was just you.”

“You wish.”

While Jake starting greasing up, Tom stretched, working the kinks out of his back. His last job had been a week ago, and he was still sore. The client was a nightmare: a forty-five-year-old dumpy advertising executive who’d put his life savings up his nose. The man was desperate and offered him half his contract pay, five times the usual commission. It was clear weather but very windy, with big swells. From the moment they entered the water, the man complained. Eventually, he gave up completely and Tom had to drag him. That’s when the Labor Police caught up, darted them, and landed them on the boat.

His client was delirious, babbling about how he didn’t want to be here, and how did it come to this. After the anesthetic wore off, Tom made a deal with the patrol. He’d get them their trophy, just not today. He had too much money riding on this whale. Give him a week, and he’d give them their prize.

Patrols were easy to bribe that way.

It was too bad, though, because Tom’d taken a real dislike to the asshole. Jake, on the other hand, seemed like a pretty decent guy.

He opened up his bright yellow dry-bag, pulled out a pair of Speedos and a well-worn orange-covered book. He put on the swimsuit, rolled his clothes, and put them into the bag. Out on the sea, the lights from the ships were getting brighter and closer together. Closing in…edging…right up to the territorial waters.

He looked over at Jake rubbing the synthfat on his chest; great rolling globs of grease trapped in frozen waves.

“You gotta work it in. Smooth it out,” Tom instructed. “That shit ain’t cheap.”

Jake looked at him, squinting. “I thought the chinks dropped cases of it in the water for us to find.”

“Easy with that language,” Tom warned him. “Those chinks of yours are about to pay your fucking bills.”

Jake looked down and continued greasing himself, taking smaller scoops of synthfat and slapping them on his naked body, wattle and daub.

“That’s right. Nice and even. It’s a second skin.” He went over to Jake and stuck his pinky against the man’s chest. It made a squishy sound. He lifted it to Jake’s face. “See how it’s about halfway up the nail? That’s the right amount.”

Jake looked at it, then proceeded to smooth out the rest of his body.

Tom opened the book with a little flip of his wrist. Its pages were stained with grease.

“What’s that?” Jake asked.

“Eldridge.” He checked his watch. Seven forty-five. Shit.

Jake shook his head. “What’s Eldridge?”

“Tide book. If we leave as the tide begins to ebb, we can ride it out and double our speed. Hit a current right and we’re barely doing any work at all.”

“You still use books for that? Why?”

“Same reason you can’t take anything but a rowboat out: without that passport from Homeland Security to bypass the EMP generators at the bottom of the bay, any electronics will stop working the minute you hit the high-water mark.”

“Right. Sorry. Stupid question,” Jake said, sheepishly. “I guess I’m a bit nervous.”

“Relax. Worry about staying warm and staying as low in the water as you can. It’s pretty calm today, so we won’t have much chop—that makes us easier to spot. And the warm water attracts wildlife.”

“What…like sharks?” Jake asked.

“Patriots. They’re too lazy to go out when the weather is shit, but if it’s a calm, warm night, who doesn’t like a little cruise around New York Harbor: see the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the new pylons being driven into the bay for the Manhattan Bypass Bridge.”

“So if the weather is lousy, we have to worry about the cops and if the weather is nice we have to worry about vigilantes?”

“Career office didn’t tell you about this, eh?”

“Can’t say that they did.” Jake stood up, admiring the job he’d done putting on the grease. “This look okay?”

“You’re an Adonis. Put on your fucking swimsuit.”

He did.

The two men stared out into the ocean for a while. The ship lights came closer and closer together, now a pale necklace dotting dark skin. A few broke ranks and started moving, independently and quickly, toward the shore. He could see Jake craning his head to figure out what they were.

“Just trawlers,” Tom said, “coming in for the night.”

“They ever take people out?”

“No. Those passports are hard to come by and are passed down, like heirlooms. If they got caught, they’d screw their entire family, kids, grandkids, out of a livelihood. Not worth the risk.”

Jake relaxed and sat back down.

Tom added, “You won’t see the trouble until it’s on top of you.”

“Right” Jake said, incredulous. “Their boats are invisible.”

“Not exactly. But they don’t use running lights. It’s all infrared.”

“So how do you know if they’re on to you?”

“Look for emptiness. Blankness on the horizon. Stars and other lights blotted out by some kind of wandering darkness. When the lights go out, that’s when you worry.”

“What do they do to you?”

“They’ll either arrest you or kill you. Either way, they’ll start by throwing a halogen cannon on you, then dart you with a paralytic. The light is hot enough to blister your skin if you let it sit on you long enough. That’s the drawback of the Crisco: acts like a lens. Saw one guy, his back burned right off. Third-degree, blisters and shit. They just cooked him up with those bright lights, then dumped him on the beach, a few blocks down the shore. They aren’t legally allowed to kill you, but…you’re paralyzed, floating in the sea…easy enough to have an accident.”

“Fuck me,” Jake said, quietly.

“Funny thing is that when you get hit with the light and the dart, it’s an incredible feeling. You’re four miles out. Cold. Delirious. Suddenly that warm blush hits your spine and shoulders, like the sun rising, and you think, ‘Maybe now is a good time to take a little break, just lie here for a bit, warm the old bones and muscles.’ You’re warm and numb and exhausted. It’s paradise. Until you smell your flesh burning.”

“What’d you do with the guy’s body?” Jake asked.

“Dunno. Ask Alice,” he said, as seriously as he could manage. “We told her to take care of it.”

“It’s funny what passes for squid these days,” Ari shouted from his stall.

Laughter came roaring in from the guys drinking at the meat stall next door. Jake blushed.

“More crap from you,” Jake said, smiling. “Do you even know how to swim?”

“You’ll find out soon. Still hungry?” Tom asked. “Need something else?”

“I don’t think so.” He stood and looked up and down his own body. “I guess I’m ready.”

Tom nodded. He grabbed two bungee harnesses from under his stool and threw one to Jake.

“Over the shoulders and around the waist, then attach your dry-bag. You’ll want about six feet behind you.”

He put his own on and clamped a carabiner to the metal ring of his yellow bag, which he lifted above his head.

“Hold it up like this, until we get into the water.”

Jake fumbled a little with his straps, and Tom had to help him out. He saw the young man’s hand shaking, palsied, from fear.

“Too early to get cold, kid,” he said, with a short laugh. “Wait a couple hours. Here.”

Tom unfouled the lines and adjusted the belt.

“Good?”

“I guess so.”

“Follow me.”

In silhouette, they looked like a pair of oversized fetuses, looking to reenter the womb.

Tom stared at the break as he waded out. The sea was surprisingly warm. That didn’t matter. In two hours he’d be shivering so hard his ribs would bruise and he’d be turning back to shore after delivering the kid to the patrol boat. Or maybe they’d forget about the deal. That could happen. Maybe they were just playing a mind game with him. Maybe they wanted to recruit him for full-time work.

The answer was just a few miles offshore.

Something pinched at his foot. He looked down. A tiny crab, scuttling sideways, snipped at him angrily and scuttled off. He smiled and looked back at Jake.

“Time to pick your lucky star,” he said.

“How can I choose?” Jake said. “It’s just one big streak of light out there.”

Tom looked back toward the sea. Jake was right. The factory ships had come in even closer and the lights were now a continuous band straight across the water. A bobbing, burning, solid white fence. A noose. A cage.

A collar.

He walked farther into the surf.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll go for that one,” he said, not bothering to point anywhere.

Dandelion

Boing Boing

She broke the silence, "Jared went in last week."

"Where?" I knew, but I was being difficult.

"You know where: the clinic."

"Oh."

Our living room was always small, but today it felt particularly cramped. We sat on opposite sides of the white microfiber couch. I stared at the TV.

"Is he good?" I asked.

"Yup. Got the dose yesterday. He’s recovering at home."

When we got tested, I watched them take her blood. She was calm; I was a fucking wreck. The one thing our species wants and it comes down to a genetic lottery: if your mitochondria objects, get in line for the grave; if not, you’ve got a lot of living to do.

"Good. I hope that he and Gail have a long, happy life together," I said.

She ignored my joke, leaned over the side of the couch, and fished her purse off the dark wooden floor. It rattled. "Turn off the TV. I want to talk to you about something," she said.

I did as commanded. With the light gone from the screen, the room became dark and silent. There was a loud rushing in my ears.

She turned on a little lamp, and started looking through her bag. Even with the light, the room was small and cold and the faint marbling in the walls made it even more tomblike. The rushing grew louder.

"I went to the hospice—to the clinic," she corrected herself, "the other day, for my session with the counselor." She pulled a small orange bottle from her purse.

"The hospice is a fucking waste of time…something we don’t have too much of, remember?" I spat the words.

She ignored my tantrum. "Look. We have as much time as we always had, just like before. It’s no one’s fault other people have more."

"More is addition. More is multiplication. More is a few extra years. They don’t have more. They don’t have finite or infinite. They have a number divided by zero. It’s impossible for us to understand. Time doesn’t exist for them anymore. We’re the ones with time. Don’t you see?"

I realized how loud I was. Every time she tried to help, I’d go off. "So the counselor?" I asked, softly.

She rattled the bottle. "The counselor gave me this prescription. It’s for both of us."

"No. I’m not doing that." I was shouting again. "I may not outlive the universe, but I’m not gonna-"

"It’s not that. That’s only if you take too many. At small doses, it’s the opposite. It’s an in. He said it slowed things down. Time times two. Time times twenty."

"I don’t fucking want time times twenty. I want time forever."

She slammed the pills on the coffee table. "And my great desire is to sit here and watch everyone else stay young and stay perfect, while the two of us get old and broken and fat and diseased and wrinkled, incontinent, blind and fucking useless. You think that’s my choice, you selfish shit?"

We sat in silence. The rushing, gone during our argument, roared back. Between the fake marble walls, the thundering quiet, and the overwhelming closeness and whiteness, the room felt more tomblike than ever. I moved to turn on the TV.

She spoke, calmly. "We can’t have time forever. At least we can have this…" She grabbed my hand. "We can manage. Together."

Life. Terminal, but manageable. I stared at the marbling, imagining the veins pulse. She continued to stare at me, holding my limp hand.

"So the drugs?" I asked, giving her hand a little shake, and pulling mine away.

"The counselor said that you can either take them daily, or you can take them when you start getting…when you start feeling it’s all…slipping away."

"What do you mean slipping away?"

"Like when you’re having a good day, and suddenly you realize that the day has just…gone. If you take it while you’re having a good time, it slows everything down. Makes you more aware. Makes you more in-the-now."

I ought to be grateful that both of us didn’t check out. At least the immortals made our lives comfortable. A pension; an apartment. Bribes to make us feel better until old age, decrepitude, and decay stole our teeth, our bones, our skin, our minds. We’d get older and older. They wouldn’t. A small gift to those of us with numbered days, from the host who’d see the sun explode in fifty million of what I still called a lifetime.

I tore my eyes off the marble walls and looked at her. She was still watching me.

"This is a now I wish I was less in." I said. "I want to be in everybody else’s now,"

"No one said life would be easy."

"Fuck easy. This is unfair."

She sighed. "No one said it’d be fair either."

"You know why can’t I live forever? Two billion years ago, some fucking bacteria crawled into my great-great-whatever-grandmother. He became my mitochondria. That little bastard can’t take the dose. If it had been the bug right next to him, I’d be through the gates of paradise right now. Instead of here."

"You think maybe they made a mistake, that your letter was wrong?" she said, in a patronizing way. "You want to try your luck and take the dose anyway? Go down to Canal. That’s where all the counterfeit shit is. You’ll have your shot in ten minutes. It might be a needle full of saline, gasoline, or amphetamine. Or it might be the real deal. But you better hope that letter was wrong. Otherwise you won’t even get the time you do have left.

"You know what else that little bastard of yours gave you? He sealed your place in history. You know who you are? You’re one of the last men. We’re it. We’re the ancients now! We’ll be the heroes of their new stories. There’s your eternity. We’ll be myths."

"I don’t want to be a fucking myth." I slammed my fist on the couch arm. The impact raised a tiny puff of dust. "I want to be a god."

We sat in silence for a while. She stared at the wall above the TV. The bottle of pills glowed from the cheap lamp light , turning it into a sickly orange star. I picked it up. The label was covered with a half-dozen warning stickers.

She broke the quiet. "You know, it’s not going to be easy for them. Think about how quickly they’re going to fill up the planet? Where will we put them all?"

"They’re already building colony ships. They’ll see other worlds. They’ll see all the worlds the universe has. I’ll see only this one, until the day I die.”

"So what? A forever, floating through emptiness, hoping to find somewhere to land? Some of them will be out there for millions of years. You can’t understand that. No one can. I hope they’re ready for it."

Her sympathy jarred me. Just because our bodies can handle infinity, doesn’t mean our minds can. Still, it’d be a nice trouble to have.

"Champagne problems," I said, with mock disdain, waving my hand. "Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, right?"

I laughed. She laughed too. This was a moment worth having. As soon as I thought it, the moment slipped away.

"This is what those pills were made for, right?"

"Yup. Capture time. Slow it down. Get every detail."

"Time times two." I said, wondering.

"Time times twenty." She smiled, dropped my hand, and turned on the TV.

I looked at her, imagining her growing old, hair greying, skin mottling, eyes dulling. I wondered which of us would die first and what saying goodbye would be like. That letter was a constant reminder of our mortality. If you checked out, and got the dose, you had to surrender it. But despite that bureaucratic certificate assuring me of my own doom, I still thought of the moment like a scene out of a movie…unreal.

"Come here," she commanded. I obeyed and put my head in her lap. The TV kept playing, but all I thought about were her warm, soft thighs. The rushing in my head was gone. I was calm.

When I woke, my legs were so stiff that it was clear I’d been asleep for a long time. Another reminder of my impending collapse. She’d gone off to the bedroom. The TV and lamp were off. I filled the kettle and, next to the jar of loose tea, found the orange bottle of pills. She knew where to leave them so they’d be the first thing I saw when I woke up. Very clever. The clock above the range told me it was a little before seven. I sat back down on the couch, in the darkness, with my cup. There was no way I’d get back to sleep now. Time to start another day.

Six weeks ago I came home and found her sitting on the couch, with the two letters in her hands. The sight of those envelopes, bright white against her olive skin, made me feel like I was going to shit myself. She had suggested that I open hers, and she open mine. I said that all men die alone and took my fate from her hands.

I didn’t want to see her letter in case both of us didn’t have the same results. I tore mine open before she had a chance to open hers. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.

We’re sorry…

I felt…nothing. All my fear and uncertainty disappeared and my bowels stopped gurgling. I felt exactly like I had, moments earlier, before I opened the door and saw what was in her lap. Nothing had changed. I managed a quiet "Damn."

I saw her face as she looked at me after opening hers. I knew what it said. Nature duck-duck-goosed right past both of us in the game of immortality.

The anger came later.

"Of course it’s unfair," she’d said. "Life is unfair. It’s always been unfair and it will continue being unfair long after we’ve rotted away back to starstuff and the people on the street are thirty million years old."

It was the first time I’d heard her be bitter about anything. She was always so level. I guess even the steadiest of people have their limits.

We didn’t talk much that night. Just sat on the white couch, eyes on the wall, watching TV.

I thought about what she’d said last night, about her sympathy for the immortals. They had their future. They’d scatter like dandelion puffs across the universe. They’d be subject to rules she and I would never have to deal with. New forms of government. New ethics. New aesthetics. And there’s very little that the right mitochondria can do for you if your colony ship plunges into a sun. Their certainty was one of uncertainty.

I had a certainty. I will die. That gave me time. The immortals didn’t have time; they had a coordinate for locating things in the past and the future. I…we…had a finite resource. And we could use it however we wanted. Who’s going to tell a dying man what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to read, think, or feel? Our time was freedom.

For a little while at least.

I finally understood why I’d felt nothing when I opened my letter. I had felt nothing, because nothing had changed.

I was still the same man I was the moment before I opened that letter, with exactly as much time left. My life was still my life.

I was wasting it being selfish.

Time to live, to share the life we’d dreamed of, been excited about, before. We’d experience life, aging, dying, and death, together. Almost nobody else would have that. I wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Let’s make the sun chase us.

I looked out the window. The sun was coming up. I hadn’t realized it, but the trees were bare, and there was a trace of snow on the sidewalk. When had it become winter? All down the street, in the little apartment windows, lights were coming on. A car drove by, illuminating the small snow drifts that were blowing about. It looked cheery and cold outside. I liked that.

I turned on the lights. She’d be up soon. For the first time in months I was excited.

There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge. We were meant to take it over to Jared and Gail’s to celebrate, but this seemed much more important. I popped it open, and poured into two small stemless glasses. I sipped mine. It tasted mineral and sharp: perfect for the morning. I shook two pills out of the bottle and placed them beside each glass.

Time for a grand gesture. Something poetic and symbolic and beautiful to toast the rest of our lives.

I went over to the bookshelf and started scanning. The poem was her favorite, but I could never stand the damn thing. She could consider this a peace offering. My finger stopped. Andrew Marvell. The book was well-thumbed enough that I opened straight to it. Sometimes you need to hear words aloud.

"Had we but world enough, and time…" I said to the empty living room.

A letter slipped from the back pages of the book, landing on the floor. It had the letterhead that almost everyone on the planet loved. I didn’t have to read the whole thing. The first two words said it all.

We’re happy…

What was it the counselor said? Time times two. Time times twenty.

I think if I take the whole bottle, I can give her time forever.