Copyright
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 [email protected], 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.
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 for themselves the second it became available on the black market. So if you know a finance guy, it’s not that hard to obtain 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 from my personal experience. All I needed was an address and 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 purely than I had ever wanted anything. More than any woman. More than any long overdue sip of water. Normally, any decision I make 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 can be made against my profound interest in not dying.
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 of 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
