Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  This subtle battle of mutual contempt was over. Simon, Roy, and Hayley could hardly write off their parents as yesterday’s news when the children and grandchildren were no more “the future” than Kay and Cyril, whose life expectancy was now indefinite. As time went on, too, the family’s power dynamic shifted dramatically, which was especially hard on Cyril. Once a father and son were both within a stone’s throw of 150, seniority grew meaningless, and this rough parity translated into a dizzying loss of parental clout. The uniformity of the family’s visual ages also made them feel more like friends than relatives—which sounds agreeable, save for the fact that kinship is ineluctable, friendship elective. Thus at get-togethers they all found themselves weighing up in the starkest of terms whether, love and the bonds of blood aside, they actually liked one another.

  Roy was pissy because the very concept of inheritance had become an anachronism. (To be fair, in his disgruntlement on this point, their middle child was not alone. A host of entitled progeny who’d been waiting to come into trust funds would have to make their own way in life after all, and they weren’t all eager to demonstrate their entrepreneurial pluck.) Of the three, Roy was the most inclined to regard everlasting life as a millstone, since living forever meant working forever. Hayley had also made the disheartening discovery that when all your cells replicate perfectly, your fat cells replicate, too. But at least she enjoyed a faster metabolism, and as for slimming? There was all the time in the world.

  Therefore it turned out that the Wilkinsons needn’t have been in such a rush to visit Australia, Japan, Key West, Las Vegas, and Malta. They sampled Russia, Tunisia, and the Philippines. They did mountain treks outside of Cape Town and took boat tours through the Amazon. They visited the obscure spice island of Pemba—where they were put up by an inhumanly generous expat New Yorker named Shepherd Knacker, whom not only his gorgeous wife Carol but the entire local population seemed to adore. In Thailand, they stayed with a fellow Brit called Barrington Saddler; once the booming bon vivant lurched off to bed, they whiled away the boozy wee smalls with his obliging sidekick Edgar Kellogg, musing together about how their overweight and self-satisfied host could be at once so damnably charming. They browsed for antiques in New England, where they made the acquaintance of a woman who seemed cold and standoffish at first, but Kay warmed to Serenata enormously over the weekend, even if the husband could grow tiresome if allowed to go on about LED streetlights. Kay and Cyril cycled alongside the Rhine and ploughed in a submarine along the Mariana Trench. Though they’d foresworn cruises as hedonistic and vulgar, they finally capitulated purely for the change of pace. Once such adventures became affordable, they spent a week in the International Space Station and went camping on the moon.

  The NHS having downsized, Cyril was laid off as a GP, and resisted idleness by writing his memoirs. Unfortunately, infinite leisure to write a manuscript is not in any author’s interest. He produced to excess. He revised to excess. He edited to excess, so that after whittling the record down to nearly nothing he was obliged to build the narrative back up all over again. He dithered over every adjective and rearranged every sentence. Sick of hearing about it, Kay insisted he commit to an inevitably imperfect version and submit the book as-is. But Cyril didn’t find any takers. The whole subject of health care was of little interest to a population all biologically twenty-five, and with time stretching infinitely to the horizon everyone else was writing memoirs, too.

  To her own surprise, Kay grew weary of interior design, and branched into landscaping. Then she qualified as an engineer, and for a while worked in bridge maintenance. As an escape from the responsibility, she tended a shop till, and then she tried acting in an historical television series on its 307th season, which comically entailed wearing elaborate make-up to look like the old woman she had once been in real life. A few years later she segued into municipal government, after which she experimented with what proved the purely theoretical satisfactions of manual labour and learnt to lay bricks. For everyone was swapping places. You could do whatever you’d always wanted to do, and then you could do whatever you’d never wanted to do. Yet it became ever trickier to determine what “wanting” was exactly.

  Cyril had a harder time in the occupational realm, because he’d always been one of those people who’d known from an early age exactly what he wanted to dedicate his life to, and he’d never wavered from that purpose. But Britain no longer required many doctors. After the failed writing project, then, Kay encouraged him to expand his concept of healing and return to graduate school to get a degree in clinical psych. It was good advice. In the post-Retrogeritox world, the demand for counselling and treatment for mental disorders was soaring.

  The drug didn’t precisely eliminate death, as Calvin Piper’s nefarious nostrum for his species’ demographic ills had amply demonstrated. During what was thereafter referenced as “Calvin’s Cull” back in 2042 (when world population had ballooned to an alarming 11.3 billion with no end in sight), the Wilkinson family would have been perceived as unusually lucky—though they didn’t feel lucky. Oh, the loss of Simon and his son Geoff would have been devastating in any circumstance. But in a world in which both men could credibly have lived a thousand years, their demise was even harder to take. And now not only loveliness lasted forever. So did grief.

  Still, as Calvin’s Cull receded in memory and its survivors grew fanatically risk-averse, death became exceedingly rare. Consequently, death also became alien, and far more terrifying. Perhaps suddenly vanishing from the surface of the planet had always seemed strange, but now it seemed wrong, morally wrong; it was an abomination. Denounced as the ultimate violation, dying had lost any sense of inevitability, of nature taking its course. Whilst the bereaved of yore had often suffered depression, now even the loss of a not-especially-close friend could result in utter derangement.

  After a long plateau of worldwide mortality, however, the death rate began to tick up—and not due to a freakish vogue for skydiving or rock climbing without ropes. Cyril’s patient load increased, until once again his schedule was full to early evening. Universally, the psychic crisis was teleological. Having come within a hair of acting on the same impulse in 2020, Cyril was unusually qualified to offer succour and sympathy. For people came to Dr Wilkinson in droves because they couldn’t stop contemplating suicide.

  On the face of it, the pathology was baffling. The patients were healthy. They mightn’t have all been devastatingly attractive, but the bloom of youth partially redeemed even the unprepossessing. None of them lived with the looming dreads that had haunted their ancestors: of physical dysfunction, aesthetic corruption, senility, irrelevance, loneliness, and the fearsome flop of the final curtain. If they didn’t like their jobs, there was plenty of time to train to do something else. If they were unsatisfied with partners or spouses, so were loads of people, and there was plenty of time to find another soul mate as well. In a highly automated workplace, most employees didn’t put in more than twenty hours per week, and the hobbies and holidays on offer were multitudinous. Why, Kay herself had learnt Portuguese, mastered caning chairs, and thrown mountains of ceramic flower vases they didn’t need. Granted, it did transpire that she had no talent for ballet, was rubbish at tennis, and made an appalling jazz drummer, but there was always the tango, field hockey, and the pan flute. Whatever was these party poopers’ problem?

  * * *

  “Well, that’s it,” Kay announced, colouring a dented rectangle with a magenta marker. “With Oman, it’s a complete set.”

  She stepped back so they could both admire the artwork tacked to the wall: a variegated map of the world, every single country now coloured in. The Middle East had been low down their to-do list, since Kay retained a faint prejudice against places that had once compelled women to shuffle around in bin liners.

  “Does that mean there’s nowhere left to go?” Cyril asked, failing to disguise a hint of hopefulness.

  “We could always start the exercise all over again and go to
every country in the world twice.”

  “I’m afraid I may not enjoy travel quite as much as you do, bab.”

  “You have only said that three million times,” Kay snapped. All right, that was a hyperbole. But given the longevity of their marriage, the notion of having heard the same sentiment word-for-word “millions” of times wasn’t as great an exaggeration as all that.

  “Roughly the number of times you’ve taken my head off for saying it,” Cyril said. “What you dislike is not my repetitive conversation, but the truth of the sentiment. I’ve made a yeomanlike effort to overcome a general preference for staying home—”

  “You have infinite opportunity to stay home!”

  “I do not want to visit every country in the world twice,” he said flatly. He might have looked twenty-five, but deep down inside that strapping youngster was a grumpy old man trying to get out.

  “But since we’ve been there, all those places could have changed!”

  “They most certainly will have changed,” Cyril said with a know-it-all haughtiness that got on his wife’s nerves more than ever. “They’ll have grown more the same. With everyone trying on new countries like outfits, there’s no difference between anywhere and anywhere else aside from the landscape. Everyone speaks English. Even here, forget regional dialects. There’s no longer such a thing as a discernible British accent—much to the dismay of American tourists. So I don’t see the point. We can find all manner of exotic foods, and all manner of people who at one time might have seemed exotic, in Lambeth.”

  Kay bombed to the sofa and glowered. Face it: she was irritable not because she disagreed with him, but because she felt the same way. Kay being the adventurous, curious one was a distinction between them to which she was attached. But the role had worn out. Oman had been boring, and she’d been glad to see the back of it. The trip had constituted the silly closing obligation of an arbitrary project, which had long before ceased to be an expression of genuine geographical appetite. Cyril was right about the creeping sameness, too, though the homogeneity was more overarching than a melding of global cultures, which had all blended into a giant mulligatawny soup. What was the difference between Kay and Cyril, or between Kay and anybody?

  Which recalled the sage advice of her instructor in a metalsmithing class she took yonks ago. The woman said that in art your limitations are also your strengths. What you’re not good at, what you can’t think of, even the mistakes you make all contribute to your personal style. To have no such constraints is to be shapeless, she said, and to have no voice. This dictum helped explain Kay’s growing identity crisis. She had been good at too many things: design, engineering, municipal government, all that. She had visited too many places and become “best friends” with too many people. As a result, the molecules of her disposition were spread so thin that her character was no longer solid matter but more like a formless gas.

  Kay glanced dully around the sitting room. After about this interval she’d usually be getting ideas for another renovation. Although by all appearances this was still the same house, every joint, lintel, sill, door, and panel of plasterboard had been replaced multiple times. But now even her chronic dissatisfaction had exhausted itself.

  As a perpetually peaceable coexistence would have been soporific, she and her husband tried to generate a few conflicts as a discipline, so maybe a trace of testiness this afternoon was all to the good. She wished she could return to the original exhilaration of watching her beloved age in reverse—but exhilaration by its nature is not an emotion one can sustain, and surety that her husband’s face would always look that creaseless and his long legs would always remain that shapely made these attributes seem less dear.

  They’d talked about getting divorced—and not in a state of raging hair-tear, but matter-of-factly, even frivolously. Like Oman, getting divorced was prospectively just one more thing to do. It was a matter of plain biological fact, much discussed because anything at all that there was to discuss had been much discussed: human beings were by nature serially monogamous at best. More marriages had gone the distance in the olden days because life was so savagely brief. Had Kay and Cyril married in 1841, when records began in England and Wales, actuarially Cyril would have died before forty, Kay by forty-two. (They’d looked it up. They’d looked everything up.) Thus their wedded bliss would have needed to last just sixteen years, and that was assuming Kay didn’t die in childbirth. This was what, untampered with, the animal kingdom had in mind. But now? They didn’t know a single other couple on a first marriage. It was not uncommon for people to have wed a hundred times—although “till death do us part” had been quietly dropped.

  The Wilkinsons’ secret, if you could call it that, wasn’t being so supremely well suited or forging a love that was so fiery and true. Rather, they’d both come to the same pragmatic conclusion. All around them people were romantically mixing and matching, as if running through a set of mathematical possibilities that might seem countless but that, with a finite population, a computer could calculate quite precisely. Theoretically, then, in this game of musical chairs, Kay and Cyril could both marry everyone else on the planet and eventually come back to each other, running out of options and having to repeat the sequence much the way they had just run out of map. Moreover, the freshly formed couples they encountered consistently seemed to recreate pretty much the same relationship as the last one, and the one before that. Why, look at Roy, who reliably found some woman, or man, or something in-between, depending on his mood, off of whom he could mooch and whose generosity he could abuse. So why bother with the change-up?

  And it wasn’t as if the Wilkinsons hadn’t experimented. Oh, with newly nubile bodies, the sex had been ace at first, and neither wished to stray. But—surprise!—the sense of rediscovery didn’t last. (That did seem to be the overall lesson: human beings now lasted forever, but nothing else did.) They agreed, tentatively at first, to explore an open marriage—which proved occasionally titillating, but most of the time gross. They tried three-ways, but someone always felt left out, and no one ever seemed to know what to stick where. With mutual permission, they both dabbled on the other side, though after Kay’s awkward affair with Glenda the friends avoided each other for months.

  They also went through a phase of changing sex, for transgenderism had become recreational. Kay quite liked having a penis, though Cyril admitted that he missed his, and he found breasts more exciting on someone else. Meantime, other people were getting tits and penises, or vaginas and phalluses side by side so you could poke one in the other and have intercourse with yourself; or they’d get three breasts, or two penises, or an extra anus, but it all stopped being interesting (pornography was dead; rather than watch a lithe young Thai ass-fucked by a donkey, most men preferred to do the crossword), and, in the end, the Wilkinsons swapped back to their original equipment. For only one thing did not get tired: sleeping in each other’s arms. If there really was a secret to their marriage, that was it.

  Kay roused herself from the sofa with the arduousness with which she’d stood up at eighty, although the struggle was motivational. “So what do you want for dinner?”

  “I don’t care,” Cyril said.

  “What have we agreed?” Kay said, swinging round and pointing an accusatory forefinger. “No apathy.”

  “Sorry,” Cyril said, as he always did. “I could die for your wild mushroom fajitas! And how about a side salad of buffalo mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, a sprig of fresh basil, and that fabulous balsamic glaze?” The fervour was fake, but even theatrical enthusiasm beat all too sincere ennui.

  “Crikey,” Kay said, filtering to the loo. “I do miss weeing standing up.”

  * * *

  The one fad the Wilkinsons had resisted as pointless, possibly tasteless, and at length banal was switching race. After all the historical agony over skin colour, perhaps it was passingly notable that virtually no one amongst what were once called “minorities” or “black and brown people” or “people of colour
” and finally “seeable people” exhibited the slightest desire to become white. Repigmentation and plastic surgery were all in the other direction, to the especial consternation of Jamaican Britons and black Americans, who could no longer distinguish their “real” brothers and sisters from fraudulent undercover crackers masquerading as hip and taking full advantage of their wholesale permission to use “the N-word” in all its six-letter glory. Black communities objected that they were being “infiltrated,” “robbed,” and “mocked.” Yet bills to forbid the practice as the ultimate “cultural appropriation” were struck down by the courts, because lawyers defending the bans were unable to cite what legal principle the new conversion therapy was violating. Although the fashion eventually burnt itself out, the one positive result of no longer being able to distinguish between bona fide black people and the secretly naff incognito kind is that no one gave a toss any more what colour you were, until the very word “racism” came to refer innocently to an enthusiasm for driving cars around a track very fast—as in, “Yeah, Lloyd just bought another Ferrari, because he’s really into racism.” Besides, towards the end of the infatuation with skin treatments, the most popular hue was Smurf Blue.

  War, too, was defunct. Sacrificing droves of citizens gifted with eternal life was unthinkable; famously, during the final attempted conflict, between Canada and Lapland, conscripts with too much to lose had refused en masse to fight. Criminal violence had also dried up. Murder seemed only more grievous when victims were robbed of godlike immortality, and “life imprisonment” might entail banishment to a small room for thousands of years.

  Nevertheless, what with the odd accident, not to mention the perplexing raft of suicides whose rising incidence became the subject of numerous hand-wringing long-form essays, a smattering of replenishment human beings were still allowed to gestate. Kay and Cyril were fortunate in having already borne a family, but without lucking out in the Population Replacement Lottery, harder to win than the old kind with buckets of cash, their great-grandchildren were unlikely to become mothers and fathers. Being so scarce, children were universally spoilt, and immoderate doting didn’t have an improving effect on the adults they became. Proud parents often kept their small people indoors, because word that a proper child had been spotted on such-and-such a street spread like wildfire, and in no time queues of rubberneckers would form, taking photographs and begging to pat the urchin’s soft little head. Whereas in times past many parents had felt a touch of melancholy when offspring seemed to grow up too quickly, modern parents met the moment when their specimen of an endangered species turned twenty-five with full-tilt desolation: from then on physically ossified, their erstwhile status symbol looked abruptly like everyone else.