If you could not die.

 

 

 Mr. Whittier onstage, he stands straight,

 

 on two feet, not stooped.

 

 Not trembling.

 

 The stereo earphones looped around his neck,

 

 leaking loud drum-and-bass music.

 

 Both feet in tennis shoes, the laces untied and one foot

 

 tapping.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a movie fragment, a spotlight,

 

 not a fragment of some old story projected to hide him.

 

 A spotlight shines so hard it erases his wrinkles.

 

 Washes away his age spots.

 

 

 And, watching him, we were God’s children he held hostage, to make God show

 

 Himself.

 

 To force God’s hand.

 

 And if we suffered enough, if we died . . . if Whittier could just torture us,

 

 starve us,

 

 maybe we would hate him from even beyond this life.

 

 Hate him so much, we’d come back for revenge.

 

 

If we died in enough pain, cursing old Mr. Whittier, then he begged for us to come back.

 

 To haunt him.

 

 To give him proof of a life after death.

 

 Our ghosts, our hate would prove the Death of Death.

 

 

 Our role, when he finally told us: We were only here to suffer and suffer,

 

 and suffer and suffer,

 

 and suffer and die.

 

 To create just one ghost—fast.

 

 To comfort old, old dying Mr. Whittier—before he died.

 

 That was his real plan.

 

 

 Leaning over us, he says, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough

 

 to change costume and come back

 

 as a new character . . .

 

 Would you slow down? Or speed up?

 

 If every life is just a basketball game or a play that begins and ends

 

 while the players go on to new games, new productions . . .

 

 In the face of that fact, how would you live?

 

 

 Dangling the key between two fingers, Mr. Whittier says, “You can stay here.”

 

 But when you die, then come back

 

 just for a moment.

 

 To tell me. To save me. With proof of our eternal life.

 

 To save us all,

 

 please, tell someone.

 

 To create real peace on earth.

 

 Let us all be—

 

 Haunted.

 

  

 

 Obsolete

 

 A Story by Mr. Whittier

 

 For their last family vacation, Eve’s dad herded them all into the car and said to get comfortable. This trip could take a couple hours, maybe more.

 

 They had snacks, cheese popcorn and cans of soda and barbecue potato chips. Eve’s brother, Larry, and she sat in the back seat with their Boston terrier, Risky. In the front seat, her dad turned the key to start the engine. He turned the ventilation to high and opened all the electric windows. Sitting next to him, Eve’s future ex-stepmom, Tracee, said, “Hey, kids, listen to this . . .”

 

 Tracee waved a government pamphlet calledIt’s Great to Emigrate.She flipped it open, bending the spine backward to crack it, and started to read out loud. “Your blood uses hemoglobin,” she read, “to carry oxygen molecules from your lungs to the cells in your heart and brain.”

 

 Maybe six months ago, everybody got this same pamphlet in the mail from the Surgeon General. Tracee slipped her feet out of her sandals and put her toes up on the dashboard. Still reading out loud, she said, “Hemoglobin actuallyprefersto bond with carbon monoxide.” The way she talked, as if her tongue were too big, it was supposed to make her sound girly. Tracee read, “As you breathe car exhaust, more and more of your hemoglobin combines with carbon monoxide, becoming what’s calledcarboxyhemoglobin.”

 

 Larry was feeding cheese popcorn to Risky, getting the bright-orange cheese powder all over the car seat between him and Eve.

 

 Her dad switched on the radio, saying, “Who wants music?” He looked at Larry in the rearview mirror and said, “You’re going to make that dog sick.”

 

 “Great,” Larry said, and fed Ricky another piece of bright-orange popcorn. “The last thing I’ll see is the inside of the garage door, and the last song I’ll hear will be something by the Carpenters.”

 

 But there’s nothing to hear. There’s been nothing on the radio for a week.

 

 Poor Larry, poor goth rocker Larry, with black makeup smeared around his white-powdered face, his fingernails painted black and his long stringy hair dyed black, compared to real people with their eyes pecked out by birds, real dead people with their lips peeling back from their big dead teeth, compared to real death, Larry could just be a really sad-faced clown.

 

 Poor Larry, he’d stayed in his room for days after the finalNewsweekcover story. The headline, big and bold, it said: “It’s Hip to Be Dead!”

 

 All those years of Larry and his band dressing like zombies or vampires in black velvet and dragging dirty shrouds, stomping around graveyards all night wrapped in rosary necklaces and capes, all that effort wasted. Now even soccer moms were emigrating. Old church ladies were emigrating. Lawyers wearing business suits were emigrating.

 

 The last issue ofTimemagazine, the cover story said: “Death Is the New Life.”

 

 Now poor Larry, he’s stuck with Eve and his dad and Tracee, the whole family emigrating together in a four-door Buick parked in a suburban split-level ranch-house garage. All of them breathing carbon monoxide and eating cheese popcorn with their dog.

 

 Still reading, Tracee says, “As less hemoglobin is available to carry oxygen, your cells begin to suffocate and die.”

 

 There was still television on some channels, but all they played was the video sent back by the space mission to Venus.

 

 It was the stupid space program that had started all this. The manned mission to explore the planet Venus. The crew sent back their video of the planet surface, the face of Venus as this garden paradise. After that, the accident wasn’t because of chipped insulation panels or broken O-rings or pilot error. It wasn’t an accident. The crew just chose not to deploy their landing parachutes. Fast as a meteor, the outer hull of their spacecraft burst into flame. Static and—The End.

 

 The same way that World War II gave us the ballpoint pen, the space program had proved the human soul was immortal. What everybody called the Earth was just a processing station that all souls had to pass through. A step in some kind of refining process. Like the cracking tower used to turn crude oil into gasoline or kerosene. As soon as human souls had been refined on Earth, then we would all incarnate on the planet Venus.

 

 In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we’re meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothingbadabout this. This wasn’t suffering, it waserosion.It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process.

 

 Sure, it sounded nuts, but there was the video sent back by the space mission that crashed itself on purpose.

 

 On television, all they played was the video. As the mission’s landing vehicle orbited lower and lower, dipping down inside the cloud layers covering the planet, the astronauts sent back this footage of people and animals living as friends, everyone smiling so hard their faces seemed to glow. In the video the astronauts sent back, everyone was young. The planet was a Garden of Eden. The landscape of forests and oceans, flower meadows and towering mountains, it was always springtime, the government said.

 

 After that, the astronauts refused to deploy the parachutes. They drove straight down, pow, into the flowers and sweet lakes of Venus. All that was left was this grainy, hazy few minutes of video they sent back. What looked like fashion models wearing glittery tunics in a science-fiction future. Men and women with long legs and hair, sprawled, eating grapes on the steps of marble temples.

 

 It was heaven, but with sex and booze and God’s complete permission.

 

 It was a world where the Ten Commandments were: Party. Party. Party.

 

 “Beginning with headache and nausea,” Tracee reads from her government pamphlet, “symptoms include a faster and faster pulse as your heart tries to get oxygen to your dying brain.”

 

 Eve’s brother, Larry, he never really adjusted to the idea of eternal life.

 

 Larry used to have this band, called Wholesale Death Factory. He had this one groupie slut called Jessika. They used to tattoo each other with a sewing needle dipped in black ink. They were so cutting-edge, Larry and Jessika, the very margin of the marginalized. Then death got to be so mainstream. Only it wasn’t suicide anymore. Now it was called “emigration.” People’s dead, rotting bodies aren’t corpses, not anymore. The stinking, bloated piles of them, heaped around the base of each tall building, or poisoned and sprawled on bus-stop benches, now these were called “luggage.” Just left-behind luggage.

 

 The way people had always looked at New Year’s Eve as some kind of line drawn in the sand. Some kind of new beginning that didn’t ever really happen. That’s how people saw emigration, but only ifeveryoneemigrated.

 

 Here was actual proof of life after life. According to government estimates, as many as 1,760,042 human souls were already freed and living a party lifestyle on the planet Venus. The rest of humanity would have to live on through a long series of lifetimes, of suffering, before they were refined enough to emigrate.

 

 Going around, eroding in the Big Rock Tumbler.

 

 Then the government had its big brainstorm:

 

 If all of humanity died at once, then there would be no wombs and no way to reincarnate souls here on Earth.

 

 If humanity went extinct, then we’d all emigrate to Venus. Enlightened or not.

 

 But . . . if only one breeding couple was left behind, the birth of a child could call back a soul. From just a handful of people, the whole process could start again.

 

 Until a couple days ago, you could watch on television as the emigration movement dealt with people who were still noncompliant. You could watch the backward populations that weren’t enrolled in the movement, you could see them being forced to emigrate by Emigration Assistance Squads, dressed all in white, carrying clean white machine guns. Whole screaming villages, carpet-bombed to relocate them to the next step in the process. Nobody was going to let a pack of Bible-waving hillbillies keep the rest of us here, here on dirty old planet Earth, the less-than-hip planet, not when we could all hurry on to the next great step in our spiritual evolution. So the hillbillies were poisoned to save them. The African savages were nerve-gassed. The Chinese hordes were nuked.

 

 We’d pushed fluoride and literacy on them, we could push emigration.

 

 If just one hillbilly couple stayed behind, you could become their filthy, ignorant baby. If just one rice-paddy band of Third World tribesmen didn’t emigrate, your precious soul could be called back to live—swatting flies and eating spoiled mush studded with brown rat-turds under their sweating-hot Asian sun.

 

 And, yes, sure, this was a gamble. Getting everyone to Venus, together. But now that death was dead, humanity really had nothing to lose.

 

 That was the headline on the last issue of theNew York Times:“Death Is Dead.”

 

 USA Todaycalled it “The Death of Death.”

 

 Death had been debunked. Like Santa Claus. Or the Tooth Fairy.

 

 Now life was the only option . . . but now it felt like an endless . . . eternal . . . perpetual . . . trap.

 

 Larry and his rocker slut, Jessika, had been planning to run away. Hide out. Now that death had been co-opted by the mainstream, Larry and Jessika wanted to rebel by staying alive. They’d have a litter of kids. They’d fuck up the spiritual evolution of all humanity. But then Jessika’s folks had spiked the milk in her breakfast cereal with ant poison. The End.

 

 After that, Larry went downtown every day to hunt for painkillers in the abandoned pharmacies. Taking Vicodins and breaking windows, Larry said, that was enough enlightenment for him. All day, he’d be stealing cars and driving them through abandoned china shops, coming home stoned and dusted with the white talcum powder from exploded driver-side air bags.

 

 Larry said he wanted to make sure this world was good and used up before he moved on to the next one.

 

 As his little sister, Eve, told him, Grow up. She told him Jessika wasn’t the last slutty goth rocker chick in the world.

 

 And Larry had just looked at her, stoned and blinking in slow motion, and he’d said, “Yeah, Eve. Jesse pretty much was . . .”

 

 Poor Larry.

 

 That’s why, when their dad said to pile into the car, Larry only shrugged and climbed in. He got in the back seat, carrying Risky, their Boston terrier. He didn’t bother to fasten his seat belt. They weren’t going anywhere. Not anywhere physical.

 

 Here was the New Age spiritual equivalent of any fix-all idea, from the metric system to the euro. To polio vaccinations . . . Christianity . . . reflexology . . . Esperanto . . .

 

 And it couldn’t have come at a better time in history. Pollution, overpopulation, disease, war, political corruption, sexual perversion, murder, and drug addiction . . . Maybe they weren’t any worse than they’d been in the past, but now we had television carping about them. A constant reminder. A culture of complaint. Of bitch, bitch, bitch . . . Most people would never admit it, but they’d been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good.

 

 Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just the finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.

 

 Sitting in the car, as the vents blow smoke in her face, Tracee reads, “As your heart beats faster and faster, your eyes close. You lose consciousness and black out . . .”

 

 Eve’s dad and Tracee, they’d met at the gym and started doing couples bodybuilding. They won a contest, posing together, and got married to celebrate. The only reason we didn’t emigrate months ago is, they were still at their contest peak. Never had they looked so good, felt so strong. It broke their hearts to find out that having a body—even a body of ripped, defined muscle with only 2 percent body fat—was like riding a mule while the rest of humanity was zipping around in Lear jets. It was smoke signals compared to cell phones.

 

 Most days, Tracee would still be pedaling her stationary bicycle, alone in the gym’s big empty aerobics room, pedaling to disco music while she yelled encouragement to a spinning class not there anymore. In the weight room, Eve’s dad would be lifting weights, but limited to machines or lighter free weights, since no one was around to spot him. Worse than that, there was nobody around for Dad and Tracee to compete against. Nobody for them to pose for. Nobody for them to beat.

 

 Eve’s dad used to tell this joke:

 

 How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?