The Last Checkout

by Peter Besson

  The carrying capacity of planet Earth, already stretched to the limit, eventually snapped. Couldn’t take anymore. End of the line. There was no bargaining with the natural laws; no amount of negotiation erased the simple fact that Earth was changing, not for the better, and there were too many people sitting on the rock. Period. Most countries implemented a twist on China’s vintage one-child policy: You were only allowed to have a child if somebody died. Room had to be made for that brand-new being. The rules kept the bureaucrats happy. Forms and files and numbers and ratios. Existence on a pie chart. An uneasy equilibrium was reached—an over-polluted, over-populated equilibrium with the sensation of crushing tightness one gets in an overcrowded elevator, and even though at every level somebody steps off, he’s immediately replaced by another person. The few livable spaces became seas of skyscrapers, shooting up ever higher like second-growth forest struggling for sunlight, an ocean of frozen waves of concrete rolling from horizon to horizon—grubby, gray, and morose, and all blanketed by a dark cover of smog.

  People just got tired. Very tired. Nothing made sense anymore. Wars. Pollution. Poverty. The general impression of doom hanging over everything. The suspicion the world was heading for one big monumental catastrophe and nobody could or would do anything about it, if anything could even be done at all. This helplessness was the worst. And so, over time, people lost their will to live. The point, if there had ever been one, seemed lost. People started killing themselves. Simply called it quits.

  Strangely enough, killing oneself isn’t all that easy. Plenty can go wrong. By definition, no one is an expert at suicide—either you get it done the first time, or you fail. Regardless, the sheer number of suicide attempts had the unforeseen effect of driving up costs across the board: medically, therapeutically, juridically… It was the Wild West. Something needed to be done. And far from trying to stop this wave of self-annihilation, governments around the globe embraced it. Hell, at least it kept the population growth under control—but there was no money to be made from people blowing their lights out unsupervised. So suicide became regulated. Taxed. With a fee on top of that. All over the larger cities, so-called ‘Last Resorts’ sprung up—licensed death houses, giving people the expertise and the resources to do it right. Anything one could dream up for ending a human life was made available. From the simple (knives, razors, bludgeoning tools for the adventurous wanting to experience the full impact of death) to the classic (ropes, ledges on tall buildings, electrical outlets near the bathtub and shower) to the formerly illegal (drugs, poisons, chemicals)—all could be found in those death houses, along with a helpful staff, ranging from ex-military to the shadowy realm of contract killers, eager to make your personal death wish come true.

  The Last Resorts made a killing. People came in droves, checked in, and in turn were guaranteed they would never leave again. Before being admitted, one had to sign one’s life away. You could check in, but never check out—a kind of “Hotel California,” except you died in the end. If you changed your mind about taking that last step, it was regrettable but ultimately meaningless. The minute you checked in, your death certificate was filled out. The only things left blank were the date and cause of death. A person went in; a body had to come out. Simple as that.

  At first, nobody could leave the premises of a Last Resort. You were there for one thing only: to not be here anymore. With enthusiasm for suicide running high, the turnover was constant, and everyone was happy: the owners of Last Resorts, the funeral business associations, undertakers, crematoriums, the government… everyone except maybe the poor souls who snuffed out their lights. There were always new check-ins to take their place, though, so the rooms stayed full, as did everyone’s pocketbooks. After some years however, suicide not being as fashionable as it used to be, rooms tended to stay empty longer after a quick check out. As it turned out, people killed themselves out of sheer boredom after a few days at the Last Resort, with nothing much to do but eat, drink, sleep, and converse with other morose souls equally disinclined to talk to you. This would have been fine, but many still had funds in their accounts, money that needlessly drained away to relatives and charities and other undeserving entities. Another way had to be found to squeeze every last cent out of the guests, and after much experimentation, a period of up to eight hours to spend in the outside world emerged as the optimal timeframe: enough for guests not to feel bored, but not so much as to give the impression they could come and go as they bloody pleased. One wasn’t inhumane, certainly, but death was a serious business.

  Every check-in had an indestructible metal band with a built-in GPS tracker clamped around their wrist, and each time a guest left the premises of a Last Resort, a countdown started on that wristband, displayed on a large digital read-out, impossible to miss. And as soon as the guest returned to the Last Resort, the countdown reset to eight hours. But if the numbers ever reached zero and the unfortunate guest hadn’t made it back, a termination clause kicked into effect, requiring immediate check-out, either voluntarily or through the expertly trained staff of the Last Resort. Expressway to the gallows. The contracts were ironclad—labored over by countless lawyers and, over time, made incontestable—and so you were forcibly shuffled off this mortal coil; no appeal possible, no messy paperwork to file. To make room on the planet, people had to die or, ultimately, everyone would.

  At some point, the government released a study proving conclusively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that reincarnation was a fact, a scientific fact like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics—something not to be disputed. They held a press conference with smiling doctors in white coats, all god-given authority, and they presented to the world a small child, around six years old, a cute multi-ethnic boy with precisely the right kind of skin coloring so every race on Earth could feel included. They said they had found that kid with scientific methods no one really understood, and they dredged up charts and calculations and DNA samples and threw in some quantum mechanics (always good for giving the air of an explanation when none could be had), and they pointed to that kid, standing right there: This kid has lived before. With absolute certainty. And he’ll live again. With equal certainty.

  There was shocked silence in the conference room as everyone held their breath and tried to process what had just been said. The magnitude of what that kid on stage represented for every human being on the planet… One could almost hear traditional beliefs and centuries-old doctrines shatter under the harsh light of scientific discovery.

  Then a lightning storm of camera flashes went off that never seemed to stop.

  Wow. Reincarnation. Eternal life.

  The world spun in a tizzy.

  And then the floodgates opened. People couldn’t get rid of that pesky life of theirs fast enough. They called it a ‘reboot.’ Don’t like your life? Hell, a bullet to the brain can fix that. Not happy enough? Jump off a building. Feeling slightly morose, depressed, uncertain? No need to deal with any of this. Just reboot. Last Resorts sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, every one with a euphemistic name. ‘Last Exit.’ ‘End of the Rope.’ ‘Final Destination.’ Or even ‘Fin,’ for the Francophiles who couldn’t stop being persnickety even in their last moments.

  The bodies piled up in unforeseen masses. No mechanism existed to manage the tide of the dead washing up on the doorsteps of the funeral businesses. A stopgap measure had to be put in place: Everyone was cremated. There was neither the time nor the space to dig up valuable real estate for a funeral. Out of the death house the bodies went, put on a freight train and then hauled away to factory-sized crematoriums far, far away. No one wanted to see that part of the business, so the trains rolled through the dark of night, their containers filled with bodies, eyes cloudy, staring at nothing. On and on they rolled, wheeling their cargo toward huge smokestacks on the horizon spewing black clouds of human ash into the sky.

  ***

  But nothing lasts forever. Everything new becomes old. Even the enthusiasm for death waned
eventually. People weren’t so sure anymore. This wasn’t just like trying on new clothes to see how they fit—it was one’s life, after all, as lousy and rotten and intolerable as it might be. Doubt, so easily tossed aside in the first excitement about a new life, gradually crept back, making people hesitate, think carefully before shoving a gun in their mouth.

  So the government held another press conference. This time the smiling doctors paraded two kids around the podium—twice the proof of reincarnation. They delivered a litany of scientific facts twice as long, but somehow, this event didn’t make as many waves as the first one. A handful of reporters, mechanically snapping pictures, listened to the scientists prattle on about the infallibility of their conclusions. Really, they seemed to say, it’s perfectly fine to commit suicide. There’s another life, another chance waiting. But a nagging question remained: Where was the guarantee the next life would be any better? This one was certainly bad enough, but what if the next one turned out to be even worse?

  Gradually, the steady stream from the Last Resorts—live bodies in, dead bodies out—slowed, thinned, and sputtered, and one after another, the death houses blinked out, their lights extinguished by the age-old market forces of supply and demand. Only a few, servicing what remained of the incurably suicidal, kept their doors open, feeding the night-trains that clattered through the darkness to stoke the crematorium fires.

  ***

  Hotel Terminus had been one of the earliest Last Resorts, but now it was one of the few still standing. It used to be called The Grand back when it was merely a regular hotel, even then considered a classic of pre-cataclysm architecture; its sweeping columns, high inlaid windows, and unduly dramatic frontispiece recalled earlier, carefree times more concerned with the living of life than with the ending of it. It was a modest twenty stories high, stunted in comparison to the tangle of superstructures reaching ever higher around it, but still, with the concrete splash border circling it, it was plenty high for the jumpers. It even had short spring boards for the sportily inclined, affording flair to their final moment of grace before the earth reclaimed them so violently. To bring it up to federal code regarding the operation of death houses, several improvements were made: The power lines were completely stripped and re-laid, upgraded to industrial strength with redundant breaker boxes and trip fuses liberally sprinkled in to withstand the voltage necessary to fry humans taking baths with electrical appliances. Outside walls were reinforced to stop bullets from a 9mm caliber handgun, the standard issue for any Last Resort. No one wanted to cause an electrical fire that might spread, or hurt an innocent bystander walking by at the wrong moment. What happened inside a Last Resort should stay there. But whoever was indoors, on grounds of being there voluntarily, had it coming.

  Being one of the older buildings, Hotel Terminus also featured some of the last few ‘permanents’—perms for short—early suicide enthusiasts who now, almost twelve years later, still hadn’t worked up the nerve to follow through on their intentions. They were a select few, since only the extremely wealthy could afford to postpone their date with the Grim Reaper for an extended period of time: Any unpaid bill had to be settled, and there were only two ways to pay for it. One involved money; the other didn’t. The rates had been dirt cheap when the killing boom started, thanks to cut-throat competition in the burgeoning suicide business and, due to legal convolutions that would make a lawyer’s brain combust, prices were fixed until the person checked out.

  No one could have foreseen the decade-long indecision some of the penthouse dwellers of Hotel Terminus seemed stricken with, but as long as the bill was paid, nothing could be done. As one of only a handful of perms left in the entire city, Ansel counted himself as a member of a peculiar group of people who dealt with their own mortality on a daily basis. They knew, unlike most, that dying of old age or disease was out of the question for them. Every day carried the seed of their demise with it, and so they hovered in a strange twilight between life and death, nothing to look forward to but the end of it all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PERMS

  The morgue of Hotel Terminus hummed to itself, gray-green fluorescents in need of replacement flickering overhead. It was huge, like that of any Last Resort; federal statute required a Last Resort’s morgue to hold a few hundred bodies at once, just in case every guest on every floor decided at the same moment to call it quits. Storage lockers were stacked from floor to ceiling on three walls, the steel of their doors glinting in the cold light. A long row of autopsy tables ran the length of the room, all shining white porcelain, waiting to receive the dead.

  The morgue was empty except for a single body on one of the autopsy tables, covered up to the chin with a white sheet, exposing the head. Or what was left of it.

  Edward.

  He still looked put out, as if death hadn’t turned out to be to his liking after all.

  Ansel was sitting on the next table over, studying the ruined mess before him. Smoke from the inevitable cigarette between his lips curled into the frigid air.

  “What’s it like, Eddie?” he said.

  Edward, being dead, didn’t respond.

  Ansel studied his face closely, as if trying to see beyond the peculiar mask that death gives to every body, the appearance of flesh wrapped around bones with nothing willfully fighting gravity anymore.

  “You were a pain in the ass, Ed. You really were. But you’re here. And so quick about it.” Ansel took a drag. The tight pull of poison in the lungs. “Eddie…” He slid off the table and inched closer. “Anything you want to tell me? Any advice?”

  Ansel leaned even closer. Brought his ear close to Edward’s dead lips. Listened. For a long stretch of time.

  “Mmmm-hhm.” Ansel nodded to himself. “Thanks, Ed.” And with that, he flipped the sheet over Edward’s face.

  ***

  The elevator lurched to a stop with a great clanking of gears. Like the building itself, its best days were behind it. It couldn’t be long before it took matters into its own hands and checked guests out by plunging them to their death, Ansel thought. He pulled his pocketknife from the override keyhole and slipped it into his back pocket.

  One day, when he’d already been a resident for almost a year, out of sheer boredom, he’d poked his knife into the hole to see what would happen if he turned it. He’d found himself in the basement, a labyrinthine expanse of unpolished concrete hallways and storage rooms and, at the end of a wide corridor lined on either side by empty trolleys, the morgue. He’d been surprised by the cold down there, the immense deep rumbling that vibrated the floor and made the lights flicker, and he couldn’t resist the urge to discover what was behind those double doors. He’d found the vast morgue filled with bodies in various stages of processing, and the sight of so much death overwhelmed him. He’d wanted to turn and flee down the corridor, back to the abstract notions he used to have about the end of life, but something inside him made him walk forward instead, to close the doors behind him and stand between the dead, to understand the concrete reality of what he was heading toward. Somehow, being surrounded by all that death reduced it to the commonplace occurrence it truly was and made it more bearable, transformed it into a thing that needed to be endured, like giving blood at the doctor’s office: As a child, it was terrifying, but as one went on with life, it turned into a banal routine.

  From that day on, Ansel came down to the morgue at least once a week. He felt soothed by it. The vibrating cold, the resonating hum of high-powered condensers, the endless quiet of the dead. He’d never gotten caught, and if he did, he wasn’t sure anyone would care. Well, Morton, the hotel manager who seemed to have made it his life’s mission to squeeze every dime out of his guests, undoubtedly would—he’d be happy to add a ‘therapeutic cold’ fee to Ansel’s bill. And the cost for a new elevator lock at an eye-watering price, without bothering to replace it—Morton Gallagher could get very creative when it came to inflating invoices.

  The elevator doors ra
ttled open and Ansel stepped into the hall of the penthouse level. It was wide and high, wallpapered and light-fixtured and crown-molded to evoke a past no one remembered but everyone thought of as ‘the good times.’ There were a handful of suites here on the twentieth floor, but most stood empty.

  It hadn’t always been like this.

  Ansel remembered the hallway spilling over from people’s parties, their last, exceedingly extravagant checking-out celebrations where the rich tried to become poor and leave this world with nothing. There had been more than one party that, at its later stages, deteriorated into an orgy, with the added wrinkle of a few deaths thrown in once the naked bodies disentangled. There were mutual destruction parties where people entered into a pact and attempted to shoot one another at the exact same moment. It rarely worked out, nerves being what they are, flinch reflexes kicking in, and the occasional bad shot all conspired to leave no one in the room truly dead, but only gravely wounded, to eventually expire in dreadful pain. Other guests were even more audacious and had their friends—for lack of a better word—hunt them with all manner of weapons in a deadly game of hide and seek. There were poison-drinking parties, everybody-jump-out-the-window parties, gatherings where the stench of burning flesh hung thick in the air from bodies sizzling in large hot tubs, with heavy live wires running to the nearest breaker box. Drugs and booze fueled these festivities, one chasing the next, days bleeding into nights and giving way to morning again, until Ansel couldn’t remember if he’d just left one or was heading for another, stumbling from room to room, stepping over bodies dead and alive, clothed and naked. He had been grazed by bullets and knifes; he had tasted poisons; he’d been shocked and beaten, strangled and gassed, but still he survived—one of a select group of perms who woke up one day, hurting and dazed, took a look around, and wondered where everyone had gone.