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 called It'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 actually prefers to 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 called carboxyhemoglobin.”
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 final Newsweek cover 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 of Time magazine, 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 nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion. 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
