I don’t know why I’m posting this. Why am I posting this? This is horrible. I dread Wednesday.
Carnival Mind (Alternate Title: Writer’s Block Sucks)
On Saturday, July 17, 2049, the world population hit nine billion and I fell asleep at my grandfather’s funeral. As someone who studies human population growth as a career, my excitement over the first fact (which I’d seen on the news as I’d gotten ready for the funeral that morning) should have prevented the second from ever happening. But as it was, nothing in the world was exciting enough to have kept me awake during the most boring funeral service imaginable.
My tiredness in the first place was due to staying up with Grandfather during his final days. Seeing as how he’d outlived all of his children, the rest of the family figured it would be best for one of the grandkids to take care of him as his health started to decline. So I, being geographically the closest, had packed a few things, left my apartment and cat in the care of my next door neighbor, and moved in with Grandfather for what we all thought would be a week at most.
That was back in May. During the three months I spent with him, he actually seemed no different than any of the previous times I’d come to visit. But as May turned into June and June turned into July, he began sleeping less and less and eventually not at all, until his exhausted body finally gave in and resigned to permanent stillness. During his last week, I managed to stay awake with him right up until the very end.
But once he was finally gone, my ability to sleep returned and I found myself unable to stay awake during even the most engaging activities. So one could imagine how well I would handle a funeral. One minute I was listening to the priest ramble on about God and the afterlife and the next minute I was being jarred awake by my step-sister’s elbow as she hissed vulgarities at me under her breath.
“Jesus, wake up, Victor,” she whispered, nodding her head in the direction of the back of the church. “The press is here.”
Of course the press was there. When the oldest man in the world dies, he automatically loses the privilege of an intimate, family-exclusive funeral. I looked back in the direction of her nod. It wasn’t just the press. The Guinness guys were there, too—no doubt to get an official photo of the funeral to publish in their annual book.
Guinness World Records had been tracking Grandfather for 40-some-odd years. In 2017, the oldest living person had died at age 120, leaving Grandfather (who was 119 at the time) as the current record holder. In 2025, he made the record books yet again on his 127th birthday as the oldest human being ever officially documented. And with each additional year he lived, he made that record harder and harder to break for the next 100-something destined to push the limits of human longevity.
—
I’d started working at the U.S. Census Bureau in 2040, when I was 26. Moving to Washington, D.C. for work put me in close proximity to Grandfather, who was 142 at the time but still living independently in Baltimore. Knowing that his last two surviving children were too old ever to visit and that most of the other grandkids were west of the Mississippi River, I decided that it would be good of me to start paying him regular visits. He had raised me after the death of my father, after all.
So every Sunday I’d drive the 100 miles to Richmond. I’d pick him up and we’d get ice cream to take to the park and watch the old chess players duke it out on the public boards. To my surprise, Grandfather took a keen interest in my job once he found out what it actually was that I did. We hadn’t really spoken since I graduated high school and I had to explain how I ended up working for the government. However, he seemed to ignore the “U.S.” part of “U.S. Census Bureau” and ended up always wanting to know about the state of the world’s population, not just the country’s, during my visits.
Every Sunday was the same conversation.
“What’s the score, Vic?” he’d ask.
I’d look it up on the population ticker on the Census Bureau website every Sunday morning so I could give him the most accurate value.
“When we gonna hit the big 9 billion?”
“Soon,” I’d say. As the years progressed, I gave him different estimates. May of 2045. December of 2047. Within the year.
Regardless of the estimate, he’d always shake his head. “Too many people,” he’d say. “Too many living too long. What’s the point of living if you can’t even remember that that’s what you’re doing?”
Once, he equated the growing population with the reason technology had stalled around 2020. “I may be from the 1800s,” he said, “but I’m not an idiot. I knew we’d never get flying cars or teleportation or any of that science fiction nonsense because people would be too busy inventing pacemakers for worn-out hearts and hearing aids for worn-out ears and adult diapers for worn-out pissers, and then re-inventing them so that they didn’t cause chafing during shuffleboard.”
I would look at him sitting there, still as spry and alert in his 14th decade of life as he’d been in his 4th, and try to explain that aging was not as easy for everyone else as it had been for him.
—
Grandfather had lived like he was part of time itself—untouchable and unchangeable by the events around him, but intimately involved in everything that happened. He had married his first wife just as the First World War began in 1914. His subsequent marriages—all seven of them—seemed to coincide with similarly significant events on the world stage. The reason for so many marriages was simple: he was never unfaithful, he never divorced—he just continued to live.
Over a span of 40 fertile years, Grandfather produced 23 children. The eldest was in her late 30s when the youngest was born in 1949. Of the 23, 22 managed to at least reach their 100th birthday. And it wasn’t just his kids who had shunned the conventional lifespan—his kid’s kids—his grandkids—showed a similar inclination towards prolonged finiteness. Some of the oldest ones, by the time Grandfather passed, already had their centennial birthdays behind them.
The whole family was a delightful genetic anomaly for age researchers. In 2014, the year I was born (my father had managed to produce me at age 65; I try not to visualize the night of my conception), some company paid the family a significant sum to allow a thorough exploration of their genes. The researchers had sampled Grandfather first and found that his unwillingness to submit to the reaper was likely due to the presence of two rare genetic mutations—one that slowed the deterioration of his genetic material, another that affected his chromosomes’ resistance to cancers. The odds of these two mutations occurring in the same person, the researchers told him, were lower than the odds of someone winning the Powerball twice in a row.
But they also told him that the likely reason his children were living so long was because he’d passed these miracle genes onto them. And indeed, the tests revealed that the mutations were the gift that kept on giving: 22 of his children were told that they, too, had won the genetic lottery. My father, the second youngest of the bunch, was the statistical anomaly within the statistical anomaly. He possessed neither mutation.
—
None of Grandfather’s children made it to his funeral. They’d lived long, of course, but none had lived long enough to see the death of the man that had gifted them with life back in the previous century. They waited for him, though—posed solemnly and unmoving next to their various mothers in the cemetery ground where we would all head once the in-church portion of the service concluded.
I made a mental note to myself as I sat in the pew, playing with the buttons on the front of my jacket to alleviate my boredom, to say hello to my father once we were down there. I did the subtraction in my head: 2049 – 2028. He’d been gone for 21 years.
—
It was only in July that Grandfather’s health had truly started to decline. He’d gradually been sleeping less and less, and by the middle of the month he was awake for upwards of 22 hours a day. His breathing grew labored and though he couldn’t sleep, he was too weak to get out of bed. I had tried to keep up a regimen of daily walks—at least one per every six hours—but the regimen had to be abandoned as even sitting up became too difficult an activity for Grandfather to carry out.
The fourth day before he died was the last day he slept at all. It was a Sunday. He was obviously too weak for an excursion to the park, so I brought a bowls of Rocky Road to his room and opened the window so we could hear the birds in the tree outside. Pulling a chair next to the bed, I joked about trying to find a televised chess game so that we could complete our usual Sunday experience.
His appetite had left him. He had no desire for the ice cream but asked me the same question he always did whenever we had our weekly get-togethers.
“What’s the score, Vic?”
“8,999,860,340.” So said the ticker that morning.
“Soon?”
“Soon,” I replied. “Very soon. Next week, maybe.”
He wanted to say more, I think, but became racked with a wet cough that sounded like an engine trying to turn over in his lungs. Still, as he coughed he shook his head disapprovingly at the statistic I’d provided.
“Too many people?” I asked, assuming that was what he was thinking.
He nodded, the cough dissipating, and cleared his throat of the mucus before speaking again. “Too many. I want a flying car before I die.”
—
There were at least 320 people at the funeral, not counting the media. They were all relatives, most of them direct. I’d stood in the back and counted before the service began. Undoubtedly others had trickled in as the priest led the opening prayers. Perhaps others had snuck out due to how boring it all was. And as much as I wanted to leave—I could wait for Grandfather down at the cemetery with my aunts and uncles; surely they could provide me with at least as much liveliness as the priest—I was scheduled to give a short eulogy along with four of my other step-siblings once the priest had finished his blessings. At least, I hoped they would be short. Mine was.
I snuck another glance over my shoulder at the six or seven photographers and reporters, all who looked as bored as I felt. They had exhausted the polite amount of pre-procession photos and questions and were standing around picking their fingers and shifting their weight, waiting as the rest of us were for the priest to proclaim his final “Amen” and let us be mournful again rather than just bored.
—
There was great media hoopla when grandfather turned 150 in 2048. His unprecedented age earned him unprecedented fame, which he responded to with quiet humility (“I’m just getting old,” he’d said. “Anyone can do that.”). CNN’s article about him was entitled, “The Oldest of the Oldest Old.” Huffington Post was a bit more humorous: “150 is the New 100.” But it was Time that scored an actual interview which ended up taking five pages in an edition that featured a well-lighted portrait of Grandfather on the cover and the words, “Man of the Century and a Half” printed below.
The interviewer asked him about his exceptionally long past. What was his earliest memory? (Playing with his next door neighbor Georgie during the summer of 1899.) His favorite decade? (The 1940s.) Most memorable political event? (Either JFK’s assassination in 1963 or the election of Koss, the first Gray Party President, in 2044.)
Then things got a bit more serious. She asked him what he knew about the genetic testing performed on him and his family, to which he replied that he knew very little. She asked about his kids, who he could still name perfectly as if he was reading from a roster, before zeroing in on my father and the fact that he lacked the genes that had kept his brothers and sisters going well past 100.
But Grandfather had refused to answer her question regarding his feelings about my father’s death in 2028 and her subsequent question about the impending fate of my father’s son (me), who also lacked the mutations that had given the rest of the family extended lives. The end of the printed article had undergone careful editing so as to still contain what had actually been said but to also mask the fact that Grandfather had walked out of the interview spewing profanity and ranting about invasion of privacy.
—
My father’s funeral had been held on a Friday afternoon, three days before what would have been his 80th birthday. It wasn’t a media sensation. It was quiet and family-only. He’d had had a stroke. It was quick and likely painless, according to his doctors. The suffering was reserved for those who outlived him.
I was 14. I’d shaved for the first time for the funeral. My deepening voice was starting to sound like Father’s. I was pubescent and I was mourning, and seeing Grandfather smiling over the open casket that morning incited both my hormones and my grief. It was the first time I’d ever truly yelled at anyone. It was the first time I’d ever cursed. I ran from the church and spent the rest of the burial service crying beneath the outside stairs.
Grandfather found me and apologized, but it was a long time before I publically forgave him. It was an even longer time before I let myself stop thinking about that smile every time I saw him.
—
By Wednesday, July 14th, Grandfather had been sleepless for nearly four days. So had I. Together we drifted within the dreamlike phase between consciousness and unconsciousness. His breathing sounded like the broken bellows of a music-less accordion, and when he talked it sounded like air was escaping somewhere within him, giving an eerie hollowness to his words.
All day he seemed like he was working up the strength to tell me something, but couldn’t get more than a word or two out at a time. But that night he requested a cold glass of water, which he drank with the voracity of someone who’d just finished a marathon. This seemed to give him the energy he needed to finally say what he wanted to say.
“Seven years ago,” he said, the loose rattle of mucus in his lungs forcing him to speak slowly, “I remember waking up one morning in this bed, laying here just like this. I remember closing my eyes and realizing that, in that moment, I could remember everything that had ever happened to me.” He held his hands out, palm facing upward, as if he was trying to channel his younger self.
“Every memory was there in the front of my head, all kind of melded together.” He gave a weak huff of laughter. “It was like a carnival—a big celebration or something. I could recall my first wife as clearly as I could my last. I could see you as a kid, as same age as Georgie, the kid I used to play with back when I was 10. It was all there, everything together. The memories were like people to me. I stayed in bed that whole morning just living with them.”
He paused to catch his breath, waiting for the rattling to abate before continuing again. “Seven years ago. You know what I think it was? I think it was my sweet spot. I think, at that point in my life, I had just enough memories. Everything fit with everything else.”
Another pause. He tried to fight through his labored breathing, the gaps between his sentences lengthening. “I never felt that way again. After a certain point, there were too many memories. Too many people. So the carnival stopped. People started packing up and going home, one by one. And things got quiet.”
Almost as if to emphasize his point, he held his lungs still for a moment and the rattling ceased, revealing a background of static silence in the dark, still bedroom.
“When things get quiet…that’s when you start to get tired. That’s when you start to wear out.” He turned his head towards me. It was the first time he’d looked directly at me in three days. “Your father and you…you’re lucky. The rest of this family, we don’t die like normal people. We don’t have strokes or get cancer. We don’t get Alzheimer’s. We don’t even get arthritis or bad knees. But 100 years, 150 years…it’s a long time. You get too many memories. You get tired and you wear out.” His breathing was rapid and raspy, but he somehow managed to roll onto his side so that he was directly facing me.
“That’s why I was so happy the day your father died. I was happy for him, Victor. He got to die. He didn’t have to just wear out.” He took a few labored, hollow breaths. “People deserve to die.”
His eyes looked as if he wanted to continue but was physically unable to. He rolled onto his back again and concentrated on his breathing. I realized that, as he’d been speaking, I’d placed my hand on a blanketed portion of his upper leg and was probably gripping him a little too tightly. I relaxed my grip but didn’t remove my hand. I didn’t say anything. What could I have said? I wiped my eyes. I kissed him gently.
The bellows of his lungs continued to pump with a hollow timbre throughout the night, the rhythm slowing, then quickening, then slowing again as if consistency was something for which they no longer had strength. However, by sunrise, even the shallowest pumping was too much of a strain for their owner, and with one last expulsion, they finally came to rest. On July 15, 2049, Grandfather died at 151 years old. Officially, as later verified by Guinness, he had lived a total of 151 years, 3 months, and 21 days.
—
The priest was finally done. He gave up his place at the front of the church after announcing to the audience that some of the members of the family wished to pay their respects with brief eulogies. I was first. As I made my way forward, I felt the faintest smile touch the edges of my lips. Grandfather may not have died the way he’d wanted to, but he had finally gotten there. He had finally gotten what he deserved.
I knew that wherever the afterlife took him, he was with my father again, the two sharing moments that had been lost to the time between a son dying in an instant and a father living well past his allotted years. And if the afterlife granted him any awareness of those who were still living, I knew that he would still be happy for me. He would be happy that I was destined to die rather than fade—that I would get to keep my carnival.
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