Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  I was contemplating this eternity of endings as the bullet entered my brain.

  THE LAST CHANCE

  Yusuf comes at the appointed hour.

  “How are we feeling today, Mr Stephens?”

  “Can’t speak for you but I’m feeling fine.”

  Yusuf smiles. It’s our little joke.

  “Big day ahead,” he says, operating the bed lift that transforms me from a hyphen to an L.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Nervous?”

  “A little.”

  I reach out to him with both arms. He embraces me as intimately as a lover and then, with a heave of his broad back, lifts me across to the waiting wheelchair. To him I seem to weigh nothing, but then so thin and wasted is my body that to a ten-year-old child I would weigh nothing. He settles me in the chair, arranging my legs, lodging my slippered feet on the footrests.

  “Comfortable?”

  “I’m sitting on a prostate the size of a cricket ball and he asks me if I’m comfortable.”

  “Catheter all right?”

  “Chafing a bit but I’ll live.”

  Again he smiles. This is one of our darker jokes—any sentence of mine that ends with “…but I’ll live”.

  “I could rub in some analgesic gel.”

  “A little pain never hurt anyone.”

  “You’re on form this morning, Mr Stephens!”

  I nod at the compliment. “Anyway, as long as something twinges or burns or itches, it’s a good sign. I know I’m still here. It’s when I feel nothing that I’ll have to worry.”

  “I’m sure that will be some while yet.”

  “Good of you to say that.”

  He wheels me out of my room and along the corridor to the lift. This floor of the hospital is as quiet as ever. Out of a weird kind of deference, the entire ward has been left empty, me its only resident. Apart from the duty nurse, the occasional doctor, and Yusuf, this is my private realm. I’m like some left-over museum exhibit that no one comes to see any more. When I’m gone, they’ll gut and refurbish the entire floor, turn it into yet another stem-cell ward, fill it with patients who know they’re going to live. Good luck to ’em.

  We sigh swiftly upwards, Yusuf and I, to the roof, where a gleaming solarcopter is perched in expectation. Pilot and co-pilot track my arrival, heads swivelling. Behind their visors I imagine two wary stares. Yusuf wheels me up the ’copter’s ramp and, inside, fixes my chair in place with the locking bolts. He seats himself opposite, the ’copter engine starts to strum, and we lift off to the soft beat of sun-shivering rotors.

  We’re away, flitting across the city. Stately towers pass by below, like pieces in some gigantic, incomprehensible variant of chess. There are areas of parkland, and my weary, bleary eyes can just make out people among the greenery, tiny basking fleas. A river glitters. A cathedral, in the process of being demolished, reaches up with its gaping roof, the exposed rafters like praying fingers. The dome of an old mosque hoves into view. Painted on it is an advert for the building’s new function: planetarium and laser show.

  Maybe it’s the happy-drugs, maybe it’s an old man’s softening brain, but everything I’m looking down on—this whole gliding landscape—makes me want to cry.

  We hurtle high over a cemetery, lawns stitched with headstones. Full to capacity, but room for just one more? I glance across as Yusuf, and it’s as if he knows what I’m thinking. He shakes his head gently, not having to feign how he despairs of me. It still isn’t too late, his face says. Things haven’t progressed so far as to be irreversible.

  And it’s his affection for me that causes me to wonder, briefly, if I’m doing the right thing. This is perhaps my final chance to recant. To denounce my own heresy. If I stand up (metaphorically speaking) in front of all those grandees and reporters and say that I’ve changed my mind, no one will think any the less of me. On the contrary, there’ll be cheers and hurrahs. They’ll all breathe a sigh of relief, a moral heaviness lifted from their shoulders.

  In fact even after today, if I don’t reverse my decision, there’ll never be a moment when I can’t cop out. Right up until the last moment almost, I could ask to be saved. Certainly I’d lose a lot of face. It would be more than mildly embarrassing. But I’d live. Ha ha!

  On we go, and now an angled descent, the solarcopter making its approach to the government landing pad. With a hum, a dance, a neat thud, we set down. Yusuf unlocks the wheelchair and then I’m being rolled into the bluster and brilliance of the day. A pair of undersecretaries, or whatever they are, are waiting at the edge of the landing pad to greet me. One of them has a new hand, not yet fully grown, his fingernails like budding pearls. The other has had her eyes recently fixed. You can tell. There’s a freshness, a straight-from-the-wrapper gleam to new eyes. They are unspeakably clear.

  Were these two chosen as my reception party specifically? Is a point being made here?

  I content myself that it’s just coincidence. Pick any two people at random and chances are at least one of them will be having some work done, if not both.

  “Hi, Mr Stephens,” says New Hand, waving.

  “It’s lovely to see you,” says New Eyes.

  I grin my big, sloppy, old man’s grin, showing them my lovely this-way-that-way teeth. The yellowness of my dentine puts their lightning-white gnashers in the shade.

  “Your address is scheduled for eleven-hundred, as you know,” says New Hand as we proceed toward the government building. “So we’re in great time.”

  “There’ll be a short introduction beforehand,” said New Eyes. (She really does have beautiful eyes. I can’t deny that. Indeed, all over she is a truly beautiful woman.) “The Principal Minister himself is going to be making it. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  “His speech will last no more than ninety seconds,” says New Hand. “Then the floor is yours.”

  “You’ll give your address,” says New Eyes, “then we’ll open it up to the media folk to ask questions. We’ve allowed quarter of an hour for that, but we have left a margin for running over.”

  Oh, these people! So obsessed with schedules and timings, when they have all the time in the world.

  All the same, their youthfulness, their briskness, their efficiency …

  “How old are you?” I ask New Eyes.

  She isn’t taken aback. Nowadays it’s not an impolite enquiry. A lady delights in being able to tell you her age.

  “Forty-seven. Forty-eight next week.”

  She doesn’t look a day over twenty.

  “And you?” I say to New Hand. Out of the corner of my eye I catch Yusuf smiling wryly.

  “Past fifty,” says this young, dewy, pink-cheeked creature.

  “Add those together,” I tell them, “and you get an old crock like me.”

  They pretend to be amused but I can see it’s distasteful to them. They don’t like to be reminded that old age is supposed to mean defect and deficiency, even though it’s a state they will never have to face. I imagine that, perhaps a century from now, people will have forgotten old age ever meant anything but more of the same. The same old same old. For the time being, though, there’s still a vaguely sinister aura around the concept. And here am I, in my decrepitude, rubbing these two’s noses in it.

  Ah well. What’s the use in being at death’s doorstep if you can’t indulge in a little mischievous needling every so often? It’s my trump card. I don’t have to fret about every little thing I say or do when I only have a few weeks left. I’m going to die. They’re not. They can indulge me.

  We enter the hallowed portals of government. Everything here is hush and whisper. The ceilings are so high I can barely bring them into focus. People somehow manage to scurry soundlessly. I attract the odd glance as I’m trundled by, and invariably the person doing the glancing either returns for a second look or flips their head away as if they never saw me at all. I get the sense that I used to get all the time before I went into hospital: the feeling of being an eyesore, a freak
. Me with my wrinkles and sparse hair and weak eyes and moles and liver spots. Me with my stiff and shuffling walk (when I could walk). An abomination among these immortals, these forever children. An ungainly souvenir of all they’ve left behind.

  Up, down, through, along, we thread the maze of this vast structure until finally we reach a smallish room, a kind of antechamber, furnished with chairs and a table on which sits an array of hospitality: fatty foodstuffs, sugary beverages, mounds of chocolates, oodles of doughy and cheesy things, a splendid spread of potential heart failure and diabetes. Except, of course, no one fears heart failure or diabetes any more, or even tooth decay. Anything that starts to go wrong with the body can be regrown, replaced, reinvigorated. You can indulge yourself in all that’s bad for you, to your heart’s content. Smoking, I hear, is making a big comeback.

  While we wait, I munch down a few peanuts even though they’re lethally salty and they’ll give me diarrhoea. The clock ticks round toward eleven. New Hand, whose name I learn is Harry, goes over the schedule with me one more time. No doubt he’s been told that old people’s memories go. Then New Eyes, whose name is Hazel, checks that I’m clear on the proper etiquette for speaking to the Principal Minister and to Ordinary People’s Representatives. “The PM is ‘your lastingness’. An OPR is ‘your durableness’.”

  Then the time comes. Yusuf gives me an encouraging pat on the shoulder, and we make our entrance onto the podium of the great debating hall.

  The place is crammed. Flashbulbs strobe. Reporters jostle. There’s a kind of ripple of applause but it peters out rapidly. No one’s sure if this is a celebratory moment or not.

  The Principal Minister gladhands me, beaming beatitudinously. He’s one of the handsomest men on God’s green earth. Even close up, his skin is flawless, his eyes are clear, his cheekbones are like someone’s idea of an angel’s. He doesn’t even flinch slightly as he looks down at me. He squats beside my chair, turns to the cameras, and the photo-op passes by in a flash. Several flashes. I imagine how the pictures are going to look: shrivelled, ancient me hunched in my seat next to healthful, balanced-on-the-balls-of-his-toes Reginald Carver, Principal Minister of the North-Western Eighth, a demigod in suit and tie.

  The event commences. Principal Minister Carver delivers a short statement concerning me, my state of health, my uniqueness, my decision. He summarises what I’m about to say, and does it all in, as near as I can tell, precisely the decreed ninety seconds.

  And then it’s my turn. A lowered microphone is brought over. Yusuf steps away. I’m on my own on the podium, in front of several hundred faces, all turned on me, inquisitive, doubting, puzzled, interested. And not a blemish on any of them. Not a zit, a grey hair, a scar, a fleck of blood in an eyeball, an ingrown hair follicle, an ounce of superfluous fat. A sea of youth, unaltering, unending.

  “I …”

  My voice falters. My throat is dry.

  I try again.

  “I am the last man who will ever die of natural causes.”

  There’s a susurration around the hall. I’ve uttered a taboo word: die.

  “I’m suffering from spinal cancer. The cancer has metastasised and the little black cells are charging all over my body, doing their worst wherever they can. I’ve lost the use of my legs as you can see. My body is in constant pain, though most of it is kept secret from me thanks to some wonder drugs whose names I can’t even begin to pronounce. I’m a physical wreck. I’m dying.”

  “And there is no need for this to happen. Tomorrow I could, if I wanted to, embark on a course of treatment. Doctors could take a drop of my blood, study it, and learn all they needed to about me to mend me. They could build me a new spine from scratch. They could replace every bit of me that’s gone wrong. They could reverse all the symptoms not just of my disease but of my age. I could have a full head of hair again, and joints that don’t ache, and eyes that can see sharply, and teeth as straight and white as sugar cubes. I could, within a month, be dancing the rumba, snowboarding with the best of ’em, drinking myself happily into an alcoholic stupor. I could, like any one of you here, be perfect.

  “I have elected not to be.

  “I have elected to allow nature to take its course. I have chosen to succumb to entropy. And I have done so for the simple reason that I believe this is how it’s meant to be.

  “It puts me in a minority of one, of course. All of you out there, in this room, reading a transcript of my words in your newspaper, watching at home, undoubtedly think I’m mad. And you’re probably correct. Throughout the past couple of decades, as I’ve allowed myself to wither and decline and resisted the urge to go along and be fixed, I’ve watched everyone around me stay as they are. I’ve known someone lose a leg in a car accident and be jogging around on a new one in next to no time. I’ve seen friends of mine nip into hospital like they’re just popping down to the supermarket, emerging pristine each time, minted anew. The slightest flaw, the least problem, and off they go to have it erased as easily as rubbing out a pencil mark.

  “Ladies, gentlemen—this is not life.

  “This is not life as I understand it. This is not the process by which we learn and adapt and accept and become human beings. This is not the path from innocence through experience to wisdom. This is not the plan as laid out by the laws of tradition and nature.

  “Which isn’t to say that I disapprove of any of you. Far from it. I understand completely why you do what you do. Who in their right mind wouldn’t? In olden days there was no fear of death because there was the certainty of an afterlife. Today there is no fear of death because, except in certain exceptional circumstances, there is no death. That’s paradise by any other name. We have made heaven here on earth. Only a fool would wish to leave it.

  “So I must be that fool. But I wonder if I am.

  “Sometime, not tomorrow, not in the near future, but sometime, perhaps some of you will begin to ask: is this all there is? Sometime, maybe, you will begin to perceive how nothing around you is any different, how everything seems to be staying just as it is. You may begin to tire of seeing the same faces—literally the same faces—around you all the time. You may start to grow bored with the fact that whatever you do to yourself, however badly you injure yourself, your body can be mended and righted and spruced up like nothing ever happened. You may find yourself yearning for imperfections. Longing for a little bit of flaw. A hair out of place here, a hint of a wart there.

  “And then you may find yourself actively seeking out these minor disfigurements, and graduating from there to major disfigurements.

  “Eventually, as the centuries wear on, you may actually find yourself entertaining the notion of death. Why not? It would be a change of scene, wouldn’t it?

  “I’m not saying this will happen. I’m simply raising the possibility. The future of mankind may not be continued questing and progress. With the virtual abolition of death, without that constraint to achieve, without the impetus of mortality to concentrate the mind, the future of mankind may be stasis and ennui. Death, in the end, may come back into vogue, its necessity understood again, its grim inevitability welcomed. How would that be for irony? The outcome of this period we have embarked on, this era of infinitely protracted life, this age of no more entropy, may well be nothing other than a greater appreciation of life’s opposite.

  “For your sake, I hope not. For my sake, I hope so.

  “I’m looking forward to death. Whether it finishes everything for me or is the beginning of something new, I don’t care. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a destination. You are all still travelling and have long, long journeys ahead of you. I am about to arrive.”

  No one claps. There is an uneasy shuffling and rustling throughout the hall.

  I don’t mind. I’ve said my piece.

  There is no interrogation from the reporters, either. I think everyone wants me out of there as quickly as possible, so I signal to Yusuf and he comes forward to fetch me.

  Principal Minister Carver make
s some conciliatory noises but I’m out of there, I’m leaving, and no one seems particularly aggrieved to see me go. Blasphemer. Iconoclast. How dare I. What a nerve.

  Shortly, I’m in the solarcopter again, winging back towards the hospital. I look over at Yusuf and see sadness in his almond-brown gaze. He advised me all along against making the address. Now, as he feared, I’ve made an ass of myself. I can’t deny that it hurts to have gone down in his esteem.

  I try and put a brave face on it. “They’ll get over it,” I tell him. “Pretty soon everyone will have forgotten what I said anyway. They’ll have forgotten me. I’ll be in the ground, and then the last remaining gravedigger will be out of a job, and that’ll be that. The world will move on.”

  “Except perhaps you’re right,” says Yusuf. “Perhaps the world won’t move on. Perhaps your death will be the last change that ever occurs. Everything afterwards will be nothing but the same.”

  I turn and peer out of the ’copter window at the city below. When the mosques and cathedrals and synagogues are gone, those excrescences of religion now no longer needed, the city, too, will never alter. Like a person, it will be tended, mended, kept in balance, shored up, perpetually itself. And the humans who inhabit it—it and all the other cities on the planet—will go on revelling in their own genius, content to believe that nothing ever need be improved any more.

  But then I surreptitiously look back at Yusuf and see him examining his hands, frowning. Searching for a blot of white on a fingernail? A crease in the palm that shouldn’t be there?

  I don’t know.

  But I may have planted a seed of doubt in his mind.

  And where there is doubt, there may also, eventually, be revolution.

  LONDRES AU XXIÈME SIÈCLE

  [Note: With the recent discovery of Jules Verne’s early “lost” novel of 1863, Paris au XXème siècle, came the simultaneous discovery of a hitherto unknown sequel, judged to have been written in 1904, toward the end of the writer’s life and career.