Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  That said, young people who were authentically young—who not only looked twenty-five, but who’d truly been alive for only twenty-five years or so—were much sought after. Their artlessness, ignorance, transparent pretension to sophistication, unconvincing simulation of world-weariness, fierce certainty about what was wrong with society and how to rectify it, and genuine hunger for the experiences that their chronological betters had sampled up to the eyeballs? Well, the whole authentically fresh-faced package was intoxicating. They fell in love! Wretchedly and unrequitedly, and they thought they were going to die! They converted to Islam! They had crises of faith, and unconverted from Islam! But it took disappointingly few years for that faux world-weariness to morph into the real thing.

  Every funeral was as costly, elaborate, and crowded as the ceremonies that once mourned a head of state. The public gloried in marking an event that was so rivetingly irrevocable. Indeed, the public had acquired an appetite for death, the sole remaining taboo; what replaced pornography was illicit videos of gory expiration by a raft of creative means.

  Film, television, theatre, and fiction crafted before the Retrogeritox watershed—aka “pre-Retro retro”—were also unfailingly popular. For the narrative arts had gone flat. The quality of “edginess” was consigned to a bygone era. As stories cleansed of ageing and mortality didn’t appear to function, all contemporary plotlines came across as inconsequential. Even grand star-crossed romance no longer scanned. What was the big deal? If a relationship doesn’t work out, get over it and find someone else. Whenever modern directors attempted to recreate the epic tragedy, the most emotion that could be summoned from an audience was, “Well, that’s too bad.” Thus Kay never wearied of David Lean, and Cyril had now seen Cool Hand Luke several hundred times.

  A birth here, a death there, but for the most part the human population of planet Earth was fixed. In the absence of an asteroid to take them all out of their misery, the people alive now would be the same people alive thousands of years hence. Perhaps that should have presented this uniquely privileged generation the opportunity to become wiser, better educated, more well-rounded, more compassionate, more insightful, more hilarious, and more spiritually advanced than their predecessors. Yet as for the cultivation of these many desirable qualities, most regular people soon approached a hard limit, whilst the truly distinguished members of this perma-cohort—the few artists who showed early promise of creating truly moving contemporary work against the odds, the scientific geniuses, the visionary philosophers, the great leaders—were the most likely to blow their brains out. The evidence was in. The betterment of only one human attribute was demonstrably boundless: the capacity to be dull as dog dirt.

  * * *

  “So, what do you think?” Kay proposed over still another wild mushroom fajita; it was tough to decide between eating the perfectly crisp, superbly gooey wafer and throwing it at the wall. “Should we kill ourselves?”

  Naturally, they had conducted this conversation before, but their favourite topic was rationed. Technically today was Kay’s birthday, though she’d lost track of which one. After so many, they didn’t bother to celebrate birthdays any more, and licence for this parcelled exchange was the closest Kay would come to a present.

  “Tell me,” Cyril said, as he was meant to. “Why would we do that?”

  “Well, what are we trying to achieve here? I’d hoped awfully that after hanging about all this time the nature of the project would become clearer. It hasn’t done. I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it is we’re supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead—though the whole idea of ‘wasting time’ seems to have gone by the wayside now that there’s so bloody much of it. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in the next hundred years if I failed to grasp it during the last hundred—which must have been full of nettles.”

  “Yes, you’ve said roughly the same thing more than once.”

  “What have we agreed?”

  “No apathy.”

  “No, I mean what else?”

  Cyril thought a moment. “That we won’t give each other a hard time for saying the same thing over and over.”

  “Thank you. Go to the head of the class.”

  “Perhaps we should make another rule that even your birthday doesn’t give you leave to be so snippy.”

  “Fair enough,” she said sullenly. Kay was supposedly the one who knew how to enjoy life. Kay was the one who appreciated its many lulling rituals like cleaning the kitchen—AGAIN—in all their sumptuous mundanity.

  “Why are you so impatient?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s no excuse, is there? We should both have nothing but patience. But: speaking of patients. Why do all these people you counsel claim to want to top themselves?”

  “It varies a bit, but it’s not as idiosyncratic as you’d expect. Their malaise is rarely triggered by a dire turn of events or a relationship gone rancid. My patients are lost. They can’t enjoy anything. Sensory satisfaction doesn’t work: sex, food, drink; even the effects of hallucinogens become predictable. They can’t keep partners or spouses and they don’t even care, though they still get lonely. They feel trapped—and at the same time they know they’re experiencing more freedom than any human being in history, which just makes them feel worse.”

  “You know, this eternity we’re stuck in almost replicates locked-in syndrome,” Kay said. “The way you become inured to sensory input like taste, which is close to having no input. Remember when I stopped drinking red wine? I shocked myself, but I’d simply had enough red wine. And this passivity . . . I think unbridled freedom and passivity amount to the same thing. Being able to do anything is like being able to do nothing. We keep coming up with another career, or another hobby, or another friend who we convince ourselves is going to be different from all the other friends we tired of—but it’s all a running in place. Nothing changes. As if the whole species is laid out on a hospital bed staring up at a stain on the ceiling the shape of Norway. Spiritually at least, we’re paralysed. We’re physically able to speak, but we can’t say anything new, so what’s the difference? Our only real activity is helpless mental churn. Because this whole ellipsis of ours feels like a dream. Some days, a bad dream. I’m one of the oldest people the world has ever seen, and I sometimes feel as if I’m not here at all, or as if I’ve never been here. It’s getting . . . strangely horrible.”

  “I like that: locked-in syndrome. You’ve never said that before. Am I allowed to say that? That you’ve never said something?”

  “Yes, my dear,” she said, squeezing his hand. It was important to remember that they still loved each other, or more impressively still liked each other, even if frequently fractious exchanges could make it hard to tell. After all this time, they should more often commemorate the fact that they could bear to be in the same room together.

  “These patients of yours, who are tormented by suicidal ideation,” she added. “What do you tell them?”

  “More improv! You’ve never asked me that.”

  “Haven’t I? Why, that’s appalling.”

  “I tell them that human beings have fought to locate a sense of purpose from the year dot—even back when most people dropped dead by forty. I say that, beyond mere physical survival, finding purpose is your job. And that job is never done, because you’ll no sooner find an answer than you’ll have to revisit that answer, which won’t suffice on examination, and you’ll have to find another one. The advice is a bit circular, but the hypnotic nature of anything that goes round and round has a calming effect. I’m really closer to a priest now than to a doctor.”

  “You didn’t used to talk like this,” Kay said. “It was all li
fe expectancies and NHS budgets and bed-blocking.”

  “Well, that was one of my answers that didn’t last.”

  So they’d made one more character swap. She used to be the reflective, musing, philosophical one, whereas Cyril was all brutal brass tacks. That impatience of hers, for example—a cut-to-the-chase what’s-the-point—it used to belong to her husband. Apparently they weren’t all just trading genders or careers, but trying on being completely different people.

  “With some of my cleverer patients,” Cyril added, “I suggest trying to get beyond purpose—because goal-directed behaviour is time-bound, and a consequence of mortality, as well as having been metaphorically borrowed from biology: the need to eat and sleep and mate to endure. But the universe simply is. It needn’t justify itself, and by analogy we needn’t justify our presence in it, either.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I can’t say I’ve mastered the art of purposelessness myself.”

  “You know, you’ve grown much more humble,” Kay said.

  “I feel more humble. It’s surprisingly pleasant.”

  “But whatever happened to all your crying out for social justice?” she puzzled.

  “After Calvin Piper’s idea of a practical joke”—it had grown commonplace to elide the gravity of the tragedy by being flippant—“everyone may not be wealthy, but they are prosperous, and I’ll not lose any sleep over whether they can all afford to dune buggy on Mars. Also, I came to worry that I championed social justice largely to think well of myself . . . Oh, right!” Cyril remembered. “The other thing I tell my patients is that, despite the impression they’ve been given that we’re all immortal, it isn’t so. At any moment, they could cross the street at an inopportune juncture and get flattened by an archetypal White Van Man. Believe it or not, that’s the reminder that seems to cheer them up.”

  “You did have that one patient who died at her own hand. That was so hard on you.”

  “The inaptly named Jess Hope,” Cyril recalled sadly. “Who jumped off Blackfriars Bridge chained to six kettle bells—not exactly a ‘cry for help.’ But most of these ‘worried well’ will never resort to anything so drastic. They’ll just keep coming back to me, self-consciously complaining that they’ve nothing to complain about. Remember when you talked me out of taking the Seconal on your eightieth? You quite elegantly parsed the costs and benefits: much was potentially to be gained by living, and nothing to be gained by dying. You said the only good reason to commit suicide was to bring an end to suffering. But my patients aren’t suffering—or not precisely.”

  “Maybe not suffering is a kind of suffering,” Kay posited.

  “You’ve never said that before either.”

  “This is almost like a real conversation!”

  As she leant back to savour the rare spontaneity, Kay’s gaze snagged on the framed photo on the bookshelf behind Cyril, from their golden wedding anniversary in that self-impressed restaurant. It was the one token image of themselves in real old age that they kept in open view, as it was a touchstone of sorts. Since she finished her last dose of Retrogeritox, Kay’s face hadn’t changed per se, but a chronically hard look in her eyes hadn’t been there in 2013. The cold glare was the one expression her body could give to the tumultuous package of exasperation, fury, and despair that consumed her daily, but for which she had no earthly excuse.

  “Do you ever look at that picture?” Kay asked, pointing.

  “Often,” Cyril said, not needing to turn around. “It presents something of a conundrum.”

  “I know what you mean. I look awful. I suppose you look awful as well, but not to me. My own face in that shot—I’m repelled by it, but it also makes me wistful. As if I’ve lost something, but what? What’s valuable about looking like a dried fig?”

  “I’m not only wistful,” Cyril admitted. “I’m jealous.”

  “Isn’t that odd.”

  “I’m jealous of our old urgency.”

  “Yes,” Kay said gratefully. “That’s it on the nose.”

  “So, thanks to my prescribing privileges, we still have a facsimile of Seconal in the fridge. I refreshed it recently. It’s your birthday. What say you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, stretching and shooting a resigned glance at the dirty kitchen. “We could always do it next year.”

  10

  Of Ignorance and Bliss

  Typically for the posh establishments, residents of Journey’s End progressed through three tiers. To begin with, if you could dress, wash, and feed yourself, and you were not incontinent or noticeably away with the fairies, you could live in a private flat, to which you were welcome to import your own furniture, wall hangings, and knickknacks. As medical needs escalated, you shifted to a more hands-on situation with greater assistance, and then finally to full-time nursing care. Residents in the last tier were not, Kay noted, trotted out to meet prospective customers. Their tour guide merely opened a door and closed it again, eager to move rapidly on to the in-house cinema.

  Talking up Journey’s End as if it were a swanky country club, the more independent residents Kay and Cyril met tended to be highly educated professionals or successful entrepreneurs, so the social situation seemed promising. Though the fees were eye-watering, there was a waiting list—to which, were they to put down a substantial deposit, the Wilkinsons were free to add their names.

  “I’m afraid I’m having second thoughts,” Kay confessed at the kitchen table in Lambeth on return from the visit to Aldeburgh. “I mean, I’ve little doubt that Journey’s End is the best we’re likely to do. The facilities are fabulous, it’s clean, and the staff seem personable. But I still found it depressing.”

  “Well, there’s no getting round what it is,” Cyril said.

  “Exactly. I realize now that what bothered me about my mother’s care home wasn’t the cheap architecture and the bad food. However you disguise it, these establishments are warehouses for the pre-dead. With bars on the windows or chintz curtains, the residents are still battery hens being farmed for fees.”

  “I thought you were the one advocating that we be pragmatic, and face the future squarely, rather than lying to ourselves like everyone else.”

  “I still think there’s merit to planning ahead and preparing for exigencies. We should probably keep that long-term care insurance just in case, even if the premiums are getting larcenous. But maybe there’s such a thing as being too far-sighted, and skipping to the rubbish bit of our lives before we have to. We’re not old yet, by most people’s lights. Maybe we shouldn’t push the programme.”

  “That administrator at Journey’s End was very clear on the dangers of putting the move off for too long and deteriorating to the point that we won’t be admitted,” Cyril reminded her. “She said, ‘Beware the five-minutes-to-twelve syndrome,’ remember? It’s the same mistake everyone seems to make, because they don’t realize that five minutes to twelve is basically twelve.”

  “Maybe waiting so long that we miss out on a five-star funeral parlour is a risk worth taking. I’d rather have more good life, in which we control who our friends are and what we have for dinner, even if that means at the tail end we land in some geriatric madhouse doing the hokey cokey in wheelchairs.”

  “There is a whole movement that advocates ‘ageing in place.’”

  “I’m all for it,” Kay said emphatically. “I like it here. I’ve put loads of work into this house. The conservatory is exquisite. I’m thrilled with the trailing orchid wallpaper in the sitting room. I want us to keep our garden. I want to pour myself a second glass of red wine without having some officious matron whisk it away because it isn’t good for me.”

  “There’s still the danger that I whisk it away,” Cyril said.

  “Just try.”

  In the end, they never put down that stonking deposit for Journey’s End. Giving the ritzy safe haven a miss was a gamble, but, as Kay observed, every decision we make in this life is a gamble, isn’t it?

  That
said, the couple did continue to organize their affairs with an eye to the future, keeping wills up to date, ensuring that the DNR directives in the event of mental vegetation were easy for the family to find, restricting their spending primarily to necessities, and investing their assets with caution. With no little sense of fiscal seasickness, they’d already survived the choppy waters of the dot-com crash and the market hysterics after 9/11. The Great Recession of 2008 proved especially worrying, because at sixty-eight Kay was just starting to draw down her private pension, which had nearly halved in value, whilst London property prices took a hit, making their six-bedroom backstop less of a consolation. But they’d no intention of selling their house and rode out the slump. The markets better than recovered, and even the financial apocalypse forecast by the Confederation of British Industries and the Bank of England in the event of a win for Leave in 2016 failed conspicuously to materialize.

  Yet no investment strategy no matter how conservative could ever have countered the veritably worldwide economic shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Once the UK finally lifted the last of the restrictions on commerce and freedom of association, the much-hoped-for “V-shaped” recovery resembled a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet: a backwards J. A host of businesses had been obliterated. The welfare rolls were groaning; unemployment was sky-high. It proved a great deal easier to shut down an economy than to rev it up again.