Drew Magary - The End Specialist

THE END SPECIALIST

Drew Magary

Dedication

To my wife and children

Epigraph

I was standing staring at the world. And I still can’t see it.

—Mastodon, 2009

Contents

Cover

Title Page THE END SPECIALIST Drew Magary

Dedication

Epigraph

THE END SPECIALIST

A Note About The Text From The Department Of Containment, United North American Territories

I - Prohibition: June 2019

“Immortality Will Kill Us All”

“Death Is The Only Thing Keeping Us In Line”

“I’m Always Gonna Get My Period”

“Cake-Batter Mixes Are One Of The Great Food Innovations Of The Past Sixty Years”

The Woman In The Elevator

“You Realize You Can Never Retire Now, Right?”

“The Conservative Case For Legalizing The Cure”

“They’re All Getting Divorced”

“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”

At The Protests

“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or A Lot Later On”

“How Could You Be So Dumb?”

DC Apparently Stands For “Don’t Come”

A Blonde Everywhere I Turn

The Worst Since Kent State

“One Infinite Generation”

“The Floodgates Are Wide Open”

II - Spread: June 2029 (Ten Years Later)

Photo No. 3,650

“You Said You’d Love Me Forever”

I Seek The Grail

Field Trip: The Fountain Of Youth

A Day In The Life Of A Terra Troll

Afternoon Link Roundup

“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”

The Truth About China

The Back Of The Ambulance

Afternoon Link Roundup

Confessions Of A Nonstockpiler

What Do We Do With Baby Emilia?

“He Looks Just Like You”

The Man Who Will Live Everywhere

“Warmest Greetings From The Church Of Man!”

“We’ll See You Again”

XMN Was Right

“Does It Hurt?”

“Yeah, That’s One Of Them”

“Did You Know That Cigarettes Have Almond Oil In Them?”

When They Tell You Not To Mess With Texas, They Mean It

“I’m Not Even Sure This Is A Marriage Anymore”

“I Don’t Know If Anyone Will Ever Get Married Again”

Afternoon Link Roundup

“This Is Good”

Home Cure?

“Look At Me”

III - Saturation: March 2059 (Twenty-Eight Years Later)

“The Cure For The Cure”

The Hippie In The Graveyard

What They’re Saying About End Specialization

A Few Minutes With The Worst Domestic Terrorist In American History

Exit Interview: Edgar Duchamp

“You Look Just Like Me”

Alison On Stage

“You Get Six Shots”

A Field Trip To The McLean Community Friends Church Of Man

“We’re Going To Take What We Need To Survive—And Then Maybe We’ll Take A Little More”

My Cure Day Surprise

“They Can’t Do Anything To Us”

“Let It Overwhelm Me”

“The Cure For Everything Else”

“They Don’t Think This Is The End Of It”

“They Just Can’t Help Themselves”

“Wait Over There”

“You’re A Real End Specialist Now”

That Was My Hospital

There Is Nothing Left To Lose

IV - Correction: June 2079 (Twenty Years Later)

“We Weren’t Afraid To Love Her Like Our Own”

Today’s Insurgent

The Girl In The Marketplace

The Sweep

The Birthday Girl

“They wouldn’t stop eating”

“This Is The Next Logical Step”

“A Very Urgent Feeling”

An Unwelcome Dawn

The Human Wave

Outtakes

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

THE END SPECIALIST

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. The End Specialist is his first novel. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children.

You can contact the author at drew@deadspin.com, or at twitter.com/drewmagary.

A Note About The Text From

The Department Of Containment,

United North American Territories

FEBRUARY 6, 2093

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 ever 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 own 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 at the end of the century.

Farrell was a remarkably fastidious record keeper. He used a LifeRecorder app to preserve and transcribe virtually every human interaction he ever 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, the fundamental goal being to offer incontrovertible evidence that the cure for death must never again be legalized.

NB: The whereabouts of Solara Beck are still unknown.

I

Prohibition: June 2019

“Immortality Will Kill Us All”

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. All 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. When I walked by them, they were clean, as if they had been posted the night before. But I noticed, as I got towards the end of the block, that one of them had already been defaced. The second one 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.