Futurist Folktale #1: The Nitrogen Death Salesman
With author’s note
An old woman sits alone 1000 years from now. She's 150 years old, but looks 72. She doesn't like the state of politics that she sees on the TV that encircles her entire couch and living room and face and tousles her hair and pokes at her body. Augmented-reality style.
She's watching the State of the Union, but touching and smelling it, too. It smells like a copper penny left in the rain and bled upon by soldiers, as you might imagine. It feels to the touch like a varnished church pew.
An AI-generated leader assembled, ostensibly, by the votes of all the people; An AI leader comprised of the gathered up hopes, dreams, wishes: the data of all the longing of the people; A gender-less, ethnicity-less, origin-less orb of pandering ideas pulled together into a tall body (everyone agreed the leader should be tall) — the aggregate of the entire focus group of the human experiment, now addresses the Union using English, peppered with Mandarin and Russian expressions, and several words whose derivation I cannot place, though I am listening my very hardest, from my vantage point on this couch of mine, in 2024.
The leader speaks and the old woman shudders. There's a knock at the door. The delivery she's been expecting has come. Her heart leaps.
She opens the door. A ravishingly handsome man appearing to be the most vivacious sort of 60 year old, but in truth he's 130, stands at her door in the suspenders and suitcase customary of a traveling salesman of the 1940s. He tips his hat to her. She hasn't been this happy in 100 years.
"May I come in?"
He's chivalrous. He's strange. The suitcase has a magnetism. His high-waisted pants radiate sartorial charisma.
"Come, come. May I get you something?"
He leans toward her ear, mischievously,
"Do you have alcohol?"
The State of the Union blares from the democratically assembled humanoid on the screen that surrounds them. The old woman turns the volume up with her mind. There is no ‘off’ button. She whispers back, "You know that isn't legal anymore."
"Fine, Madam, you leave me no choice." He pulls a flask from his suit jacket. "Do you have big ice cubes? That's still legal, isn't it?"
She sets two glasses before them on the couch and he crosses his spindly, but formidable, legs and places his salesman hat beside them.
She is prim and slim. As is he. Fatness was long ago eradicated. But no one remembered it in any visceral way so this was not cause for celebration, but just another scientific landmark to which all had become habituated and toward which no one felt any particular thing.
The State of the Union ends, mercilessly. They look at one another, clink glasses with a furtive twinkle, then, “To the old times,” they whisper amicably.
After a sip.
"Show it to me.”
He opens the briefcase and spreads its two halves on the coffee table. Revealed in the hotel room light are two long, thin canisters, each equipped with an airtight mask.
"Rather retro looking, no?"
"Not what you expected?"
"Looks positively ancient."
"Well, that's the nature of my industry." He grabs at his pant leg, thumbing condensation into the pleated fabric. Shrugging with a twitch, "I don't have a lot of choice where I source the nitrogen, but--"
"It works?"
"It does. You can die anytime. And I even throw in a spare, in case… in case you love it so much, you wanna die twice." He smiles like the kid in school who never listened.
She laughs hard then giggles. Her eyes meet his, then flicker down.
"Plus," he looks down to the immaculate fleece carpet, "I can come pick up the extra canister and resell it. So."
"You would do that? You'd come back?"
"Sure. Why come only once when I could come twice?
A questioning and perverse silence.
"Oh, I didn't mean. No, no, I don't."
They both reach for their sweating bourbon glasses.
She speaks in a torrent: "I just don’t know how this works — your business or your motives or who you are." Then apologetically, "But then, I’d be dead so it doesn’t matter what you do."
"It does matter." (She uncrosses her ankles and sits up straighter to match his sudden decorum.) He continues, "I check on my clients after — to. I’m not…. It's risky on my part to return but. It’s. I have to."
"You and I, we’re too old to flirt."
He is exceedingly surprised by this, "Are we flirting? Oh, that’s… terrific."
"I think," she leans toward him, grabs a suspender, "we are." She bashes his head with hers by accident, but all is forgiven as they begin making out.
She had planned to definitely-maybe die, but this is a fantastic surprise!
The nitrogen death salesman and the lonely woman fall deeply in lust. And even though she’s lived so long, there seems no harm in staying a bit longer?
They keep the nitrogen handy and it gives their lives meaning and a teasing urgency. For the first few months, they look at it passively when they drink their mushroom caffeine product.
Time comes that they place the suitcase in what is now their shared closet and they see it at the edges of their unblemished vision everyday as they dress and undress.
And they live together: until she's 160 and he's 140, respectively. And then they kill themselves, collaboratively, and the Union is IRRITATED (in a seething spray of 1s and 0s) that they didn’t buy all their drugs and part-replacements and live to 200.
They are reincarnated as cockroaches (not for the first time!), but don’t meet up until several lifetimes later, as humans again, in a time so far away that it fatigues my wanting mortal imagination to dream it sufficiently for you.
They live happily (and sadly, and rapaciously, atavistically, magnanimously) ever after, in a manner of speaking.
Author's note:
This short story is adapted from a series of scenes I dreamt up as one of the plot lines for my one-hour TV pilot script, Time Famine, set in a future time when productivity has become an obsession and poets are sent to the moon.
It’s a beautiful and funny script I wrote in 2018, but like all my TV attempts, it feels better situated somewhere else. Somewhere softer and more loving than the TV industry, which intimidates, frightens, and exasperates me. Perhaps on Substack. Perhaps as a play. I’d like to start dusting off some of my old scenes for release here, adapted like this one or shared in the original dialogue I wrote.
I thought maybe this piece (and maybe others, too!) would be interesting as a futuristic, sci-fi folktale, a little parable, in this case about how dignity in dying can give life an extra boost and about the enlivening power of love, coupled with memento mori, and the ever-present specter of our impermanence.
I am personally very interested in longevity (112 years is a goal that Luke and I share and often chat about, but 122 is something I’d be open to considering, in the hopes that some friends stick around with me) and "healthspan.”
I think it goes with the territory, so I’m also interested, politically-speaking, in medically-assisted suicide, which I think, though it ensnares with it a morass of unresolved ethical and legal quagmires, is moral, necessary and, IF… big caveat here, IF it came bolstered by a robust healthcare, mental health system, and legal framework for it, would make me feel so much better about aging, life, and death: my own and other’s.
Here’s a relevant article on the above themes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162
And here’s the book I just read (a gift from my friend and collaborator, Ann Bermont. Thanks, Ann!) that, to my surprise, inspired me to adapt my old writing into a folktale alongside commentary, which is exactly what this author does, with off-color and super quirky Japanese folktales.
This is so imaginative and moving.. wonderful folk tale.
Pretty interesting, Emma. A wonderful heart-breaking book about assisted suicide is In Love by Amy Bloom.