The Postmortal

by Drew Magary

Normally, any decision I confront is forced to navigate the seemingly endless bureaucracy of my conscience.

I have to say, visiting a doctor for illegal purposes is a far more satisfying consumer experience than going for legitimate purposes. You ring the bell, and, boom, there’s the doctor. No hostile receptionist. No signing in. No presenting your insurance card. No forgetting to get your insurance card back after the hostile receptionist copies it. No eternal waiting. Hell, no waiting of any sort. It was lovely.

Curiosity is seeking out answers to your questions. It’s about satisfying everything you want to know about you or things around you. It’s about your own personal fulfillment, isn’t it? So, really, is there much difference between curiosity and vanity?”

You’re better off believing in God, they’d warn you, just in case. Because you’d hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.

If I forgo the cure and end up dying at seventy to please a Lord who turns out to not exist, I’m gonna feel like a real jackass. Isn’t it better to live an extra thousand years or so, just in case?

In the future, you’ll get to eat flying cake.”

This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations.

“Oh, come on. That whole thing about being in a better place is a crock. It’s just something to comfort people in the face of dying or in the face of losing someone they love.

It’s a funny thing when someone you love dies. You spend all your time with them, caring for them. Then they die, and you’re left with nothing to do. Your obligation to them is fulfilled. There’s no more consoling or hand-holding to do. There’s just this gigantic, yawning space of free time, which feels at once liberating and unnatural.

If douchebags are useful for anything, it’s performing brainless displays of strength to impress everyone else

will never live in a place like this, and I have no clue if that’s a tragedy or not.

When you’ve served in the army for as long as I have, it becomes clear that you are not really serving your country, but that you are serving the very small group of men who control that country.

Nobility sounds wonderful as a concept. But nobility tends to go out the window when you find yourself forced to choose between life and oblivion.

Well, how else can you react? Laughter helps to cover it all up. I don’t know how else to deal with the memory.

You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. They’re always going to do it. Mankind has a path for itself, a trajectory, and you can never knock it off of that course.

You cannot hide from the world. It will find you. It always does. And now it has found me. My split second of immortality is over. All that’s left now is the end, which is all any of us ever has.