The Postmortal (12 page)

One of the superiors at my firm deals with higher-ups in the Chinese government all the time. You can still get out of the country if you know the right people. When my superior asked his contact about the prospect of bringing Chan back to the States, the official said he would make a phone call. This was a trustworthy contact, someone who had helped extricate many Chinese on behalf of American economic interests. He called my superior back, telling him Chan and his wife had already been arrested. Chan sent me this e-mail twenty-four hours ago, a free man. Now, we have no clue where he and his wife are or where his son is. The Chinese official said it would be folly to divulge Chan’s real name publicly in hopes of exerting pressure, and that it would likely hasten Chan’s death rather than his freedom.

I’m sorry, Chan. I’m so terribly sorry.

I had a nightmare last night about my son’s impending birth. I was in an ambulance with Sonia. Only, she didn’t look like Sonia. She looked like a blonde woman with an impossible body, the kind that pops up in my subconscious on a near-monthly basis. In the dream I thought of her as Sonia, and she spoke with Sonia’s voice. She was lying on a gurney at the front of the ambulance, and I was at the back, some twenty yards away. I was pressed against the back door by a group of policemen wearing blast shields, obscuring their eyes. Three or four more policemen were holding blonde Sonia down on the gurney as she writhed in pain. One of them had a branding iron with her name on it and was advancing toward her. I tried to scream, but my fear was such that my motor function had ceased and my brain couldn’t relay the signal for my mouth to open. I wanted so badly to scream at the top of my lungs to get them to stop. I felt that if I could just get the words out, they’d put the iron down. I tried again to shout, but my jaw remained bolted in place. I struggled against the phantom lock. And just as the policeman began to press the glowing red iron into her shoulder, I woke up, fists clenched, my mouth finally opening. Only, I didn’t say “Sonia.” I just let out a weird nonword: “Swaahhh!” I quickly regained my bearings and shook it off.

 

 

The Chinese official our firm knows has told us it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be able to ascertain where Chan and his wife and son are. I’m powerless to help. Yet, sitting here, I still feel as if I’m complicit in allowing their disappearance to happen.

◗ In British Columbia, three doctors were killed after a pro-death insurgent with dynamite strapped to his chest ran up to them during a hotel conference. (CBC)

 

◗ Sales of adult incontinence undergarments (you know them as Depends) have fallen 46 percent since 2016. (ConsumerBulletin)

 

◗ The mayor has raised tolls at all Hudson River crossings to an even twenty dollars to help pay for the new levee system. (
The New York Observer
)

 

◗ Some good news from the Middle East. Suicide bombings are down nearly 70 percent over the past decade. The problem is that nonsuicide bombings are up 220 percent in the same time frame. (Al-Ihiri)

 

◗ In an interview, Russian president Boris Solovyev vigorously denied numerous reports of police excuting any Russian citizen over the cure age of fifty. (Chris Manning’s feed)

 

◗ The family of the last living Alzheimer’s patient to be “cured” by Dr. Graham Otto is suing his estate for $100 million. (AP)

 

◗ On Ryan Wexler’s five hundredth home run: “It’s clear now that, barring amputation, he should break the all-time record sometime next decade. Of course, he’ll hold that record for about three seconds, because teammates Frank Mitchell and Odalis Concepción are right behind him. And so are about fifty other players in the American League alone. I have no problem with players taking the cure and breaking records and all that. They’re just records. In the end you’re supposed to enjoy the game itself, and not the long-term compiling of numbers. And the never-ending influx of long-lasting talent (thanks to the cure) will make the game better than ever. But one thing that does concern me is how we’re going to quantify success from this day forward. Naturally, Ryan Wexler will break the record, but we all know it isn’t because he is a better player than his predecessors. It’s not a tragedy. It’s just the cure forcing us to redefine the notion of excellence. This isn’t just a baseball thing. This is an issue across the entire culture now. How can you be a success or have a legacy if your career—nay, your entire life—has no definitive story arc?” (BaseballNut’s Feed)

 

◗ Utah finally declares cycle-marriage contracts illegal. That was fast. (
Deseret News
)

I know everyone’s into stockpiling right now. I haven’t taken any kind of action on this front. I’m the antistockpiler. I can’t get rid of my crap fast enough. I looked in the fridge the other day and found three items, two of which had gone bad. The mustard is still good, if I ever buy anything to put it on. Closet space is at a premium in my apartment. If I buy a sweatshirt, it better be the greatest sweatshirt ever invented to justify the space it takes up.

I have at least two friends who have rented out storage facilities in New Jersey at prices that would make you wince. They haven’t put anything in them yet. One of them is still haggling with his wife over what should be included in the cache. But they’re amateurs next to this one client I met with a week ago.

This guy was originally from Texas but now maintains a giant compound out in eastern Pennsylvania. I drove out there with my boss. The estate was completely walled, on all sides, and there was a watchtower with a guard on duty twenty-four hours a day. The only thing missing were those little slit windows for archers to shoot out of.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“I think it looks very . . . safe.”

“The best part about it is that my daughter can’t sneak out at night anymore to go to parties. In fact, that’s damn near the only reason why we have the walls and the guard and all this superficial bullshit. It’s not about keepin’ people out. It’s about keepin’ that wild child in. Because unless I got a goddamn chopper in the sky watching her every move, she weasels out and is raisin’ hell first chance she gets.”

“She sounds cool.”

“That’s what all the boys say. Like I said, this is just window dressing. Let me show you the real state-of-the-art shit.”

He took us out of the main house and across his campus to a very small stainless-steel shack. It didn’t appear to have any door. He punched a code into a smooth keypad etched on one side of the structure. A panel opened next to it, with a small glass plank extending out toward us. Then the Texan took a small Q-tip out of his pocket, swabbed the inside of his cheek, and smeared it on the glass. The plank retracted into the panel, and a hidden door materialized on the adjacent side.

“Genetic identification,” he said. “When they first set it up, it would take a drop of my blood. But I got sick a havin’ my finger poked every time I wanted to show this puppy off, so they engineered one that uses Mr. Q-Tip here.”

We walked through the hidden door, which turned out to belong to some kind of elevator. The Texan pushed a button, the door closed, and down we went. Dropping. Dropping. Dropping. I began sweating. The floor finally stopped giving way beneath us, and the doors opened to reveal a vast luxury apartment. I let out a sigh of relief. There may have been four billion tons of dirt and rock above us, but the lavishness of our surroundings served to diminish that fact considerably. It was a fallout shelter. But it was a really
nice
one. We could have been at the top of the Dakota, if the Dakota had somehow been inverted or sunken down into the earth’s surface. A low-sink high-rise, if you will. There were marble floors, UDTVs, pieces of furniture that probably cost as much as my apartment, and more. Fresh, cool oxygen permeated the air, as if I were back on the Fountain of Youth casino floor, fighting to stay awake at 5:00 A.M. The Texan poured us a drink and guided us through.

“How did you get all this stuff down here?” I asked him.

“All through that little elevator shaft. Can you believe it? Took’em two years to build the space and another two years to furnish it. Y’all New Yorkers think you’re so smart and tough. But it takes a real Texan to know how to fend for hisself. Don’t let all this fancy shit fool you. This space is 100 percent self-sustainable. You see this water?” He turned on the tap. “It’s tapped from the groundwater above our heads. Completely independent piping system. I never told the county about it. Matter of fact, I didn’t tell the county jack shit about this place. All they see is a steel shit-house. See these air vents?” He pointed to the air vents. “That’s a central air system that pipes in oxygen from up on that mountain y’all drove over to get here. There’s a filter midway through the system that takes out any impurities, plus a Geiger counter. If the radiation goes over a certain level, the system automatically seals itself off and we go on oxygen reserve. I have a twenty-year stockpile of it. Same with the water. And the whiskey’ll last me
thirty
! Ha!”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, he’s here too.” He pointed to a velvet painting of Jesus behind the wet bar. “I told Jesus that if the water and whiskey run out, I promise to start believin’ in him again. He’s my backup backup. I’m not a wine guy otherwise. Let me show you the pantry.”

He took us into a miniwarehouse with shelf after shelf of packaged goods, condensed milk, and booze. At the end was a walk-in freezer that extended back some thirty-odd yards. Entire sides of beef were vacuum-packed and stacked on large metal shelving units inside.

“I can probably make this last ten years,” the Texan said. “Long as I don’t get greedy.”

There was more to show us. There was a control room with seismic detectors that could create a digital image of the ground above us, presumably to defend against anyone trying to burrow into the shelter and steal all the ground chuck. The command center monitoring this activity was manned at all times. The Texan told us he hired miners for the job, since they were so used to working underground. There was a gaming room. And a walk-in humidor. He also showed us his arsenal. Then he showed us his other arsenal. Then his third arsenal. He showed us a giant wall toward the back of the bunker that was made entirely of vulcanized rubber. Behind the rubber was another steel wall, then more rubber, and then a forty-thousand-barrel oil reserve. He also had a room dedicated solely to his toy train set. I thought that was a nice touch. I pictured him wearing a big engineer’s cap and yelling out “choo-choo!” while the world burned above him.

When the tour was over, he turned to me. “You start stockpiling yet?”

I felt inadequate. My lifetime assets could have fit in his liquor cabinet. “Not really,” I said. “I do keep an extra stick of deodorant in the closet, just in case.”

“Well then, you’re wayyyy behind! Hell, I don’t really plan on ever living in this stupid place. But at least I know I have a secure area to house my supplies. You best do it sooner rather than later. I’m tellin’ you. Just like the guidelines in Marty Frost’s book say, you need a couple years’ worth of water; a couple years of canned beans, tuna, and vegetables; a couple years of powdered milk . . . What about guns? You got guns?”

“No.”

“Good God! That’s damn near irresponsible! Most valuable commodity we have right now. Didn’t you say you had a baby boy on the way? You need a gun. Here.” He opened up the inside pocket of his hunting jacket, took out a small automatic, removed the clip, and handed the gun and clip to me. “Take this.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Take it! I’ve fallen out of love with this one anyway. I can’t promise you an invite down into this lovely abode when the shit hits the fan. This is the least I can do. Take it.”

“All right.” I took the gun. There’s something about holding a gun. It feels so comfortable in your hand, as if the grip has been molded just for you. It’s always inviting you to squeeze it.

“That’s right,” he said. “You take that gun and you learn to fire it at a movin’ target. And start stocking up. Even if you don’t end up needing it, there might be some poor soul out there willing to pay you handsomely for it. Now let me show you the septic system.”

He showed us the septic system, which he said could treat two hundred pounds of raw sewage a week. At the end of the tour, he took us up in the elevator and back out into the glare of raw daylight. I took in the air, which tasted stale compared to the oxygen buried a thousand feet below in the Texan’s nuclear-holocaust condo. On the ride back to the city, I offered the gun to my boss.

“I don’t want it,” he said.

“What the hell do I do with it?”

“I dunno. Sell it or something.”

When we got back, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up dinner. I stared at the bottled water on the lowest shelf. I thought about grabbing a bunch of cases. But I didn’t have an airplane hangar buried in the earth’s lower mantle to house them. So I grabbed a frozen pizza and a Coke instead. At my apartment I took the gun and clip and stashed them both away in my closet. There’s a police station fifteen blocks away that will give you a seventy-five-dollar gift certificate for groceries if you trade in your gun. I’m taking advantage of the offer, because I need all the canned beans I can get.

Transcribed from Cara Forlani’s piece on CBS’s website: