338,169¥ (Chapter 21 of 38)

With more "work" on the horizon, Gil figures it's time for another visit to his wife's grave. This time he'll keep Dan in the car. Not that this keeps Amy's lifestone from finding other reasons to be angry with him. 

Transcript

It was two weeks later before Reverend Tom left another note at the park bench. 

I kept thinking about the call I got from Aron Bekker. The more time got in front of that phone call, the more I wondered if it had all been some kind of hoax. I had tried to call him back a few times since and had gotten nowhere. I even got into a sort of argument with that AI receptionist. I wanted to ask Aron if it was possible that I could get a little more time to get the money, but after a while I started to doubt if it had been real at all. Obviously, it wasn’t a prank, but maybe it was some kind of con job. There had been a time when I got a scam call once a week, but that was back in the day. Eventually that stuff died out. 

Even if it really was Aron, the idea that he had found some way to make people live forever didn’t feel real either. It was too big. Some in the media were saying that the whole thing had been a deepfake, but thousands of people, including celebrities and politicians, had taken the shot since the press conference, and they were living proof. I don’t keep up on movies like I used to, and politics I never did, because you can’t believe anything you see these days anyway. One name I did recognize though, was Mao Chuanzhi, the president of the Chinese Communist Party. But everyone knows him. Even better than Xi Jinping, who lived to be as old as Methuselah. It backfired though, because although Mao may have been biologically twenty-five now, he must have been one of those late bloomers like me, because after he took the shot he looked like a pimple-faced sixteen-year-old. A real nerd too. The man, or the boy I should say, was even uglier than me! As a seventy-something-year-old man, with grey hair, and that chiseled old face, he looked full of wisdom and experience, but after the shot and his first appearance addressing the nation, he was the laughingstock of the world. You could actually see some of his own cabinet members putting their hands to their faces to hide smiles when he stepped up to the podium (apparently those cabinet members weren’t present at the next meeting, or any other one, or anywhere else). If the shot worked like Bekker said it did then he would start aging again, eventually, but he had a long wait on his hands. 

See, it’s not like back in the day when we had honest, dependable news channels like CBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. All that’s long gone. Now there’s thousands of different news sites and independent journalists for everything depending on what you believe. So some people were saying that the whole story was a deepfake, that Chuanzhi had been dead for years, and the CCP was just making these videos because he was a national hero. Even after Aron Bekker himself confirmed that Chuanzhi had been given a shot people said even that was a deepfake video, so there was no way to know. The way I saw it, why would they make deepfakes of him if the whole thing had been an embarrassment? 

But what do I know about Chinese politics? I barely follow Canadian politics. 

I would change all that if I ever got my hands on that shot. I was going to educate myself, go to college, be up on politics, have a good job, and see the world. I was going to go on that Jesus hike in Israel, and God only knew where else. If I was going to have a second chance then I wasn’t going to waste it. I just needed the money for the shot. And the money for all that other stuff I was going to do after. 

That’s if I didn’t go to jail. Well, only the worst of the worst go to jail these days. The rest have a chip on their shoulder. But I didn’t want to be walking around in short sleeves with a digital tracker tattoo on my arm either. 

Getting back to the note Reverend Tom left on the park bench: He said that Melvin had to pick up a single couple, just two people, but it was the largest pay yet. They had forked out 250,000 yuan for the trip. Each! Whoever they were, they weren’t shy for a dollar. Unless they had been foolish enough to have given every cent they had. What was the point of coming to Canada if you were going to start with nothing? And if they did have that kind of money, why didn’t they find a better way out of the country? On average it’s only the poor and middle class that smuggle themselves out anyway. The poor usually try to do it themselves, and the middle class pays a coyote like Melvin. The rich just bribe their way in like they always do. But most of the rich just build fortresses around themselves and hire dangerous men to guard them. Technically no one is allowed to leave the country anymore, and Canada isn’t allowed to accept them. Technically. 

I made sure I had everything ready in the basement, and after that there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. So I decided to visit Amy. 

I went in the car this time and Dan came with me as always, but I didn’t let him out. Mrs. Henries wasn’t there, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Some other poor woman could be there, and besides I didn’t want him peeing on Amy’s grave again. Once was bad enough, and he tended to choose the same spots over and over. 

As Amy’s social posts were changing, a picture appeared that showed Amy sitting on my brother Scott’s lap, blowing out candles on a cake at her birthday party. She only looked to be in her twenties so I assumed it was probably taken in the nineties. Which meant it had to be scanned and uploaded because digital cameras weren’t even that popular yet then, let alone social. And when I looked closer I could see that it wasn’t her birthday at all, but his, because there were way too many candles on the cake, and the icing was chocolate. Amy hated chocolate icing. Someone was on the opposite side of the table, but you couldn’t see their face, all you could see was their hands out as if exaggeratingly trying to get Amy to stop blowing out the candles. Amy and Scott were laughing so much that it looked as if there were tears in their eyes. Looking closer at those small hands I had to guess they were probably mine. My hands are about half the size of most men’s hands —something I was never too proud of. Scott’s hands on the other side of the table, meanwhile, were like baseball mitts. He was a big boy. Not fat, just big, all muscle. I took it harder when he died than when either of my parents passed, even Mom. Amy took it hard too. She was crying for days, and hardly spoke for weeks. They were best friends. 

“I hope you’re doing well up in heaven,” I said. “I’m doing okay I guess, but my nerves is run ragged with all this coyote stuff. I knows I’m not cut out for it, but I don’t have much choice.” 

“You got a choice,” she said, “you just don’t want to end up in the ground like me.” 

“I just feels like I deserves another chance.”

“A chance at what?”

“To live again.”

“You are living.”

“I’m not living.”

“You’re more living than I am.” 

“I’m just waiting around to die. I want to start fresh. Just one more life. And then I’ll be done. I don’t think I’d want to live any more than two lives anyway.” 

“Until you gets old again. If you starts at this it will never stop. You’ll always find an excuse to have another go at it. You’ll get addicted to living. Don’t you want to ever see me again?” 

“I will eventually. Reverend Tom said time is funny in heaven, that one hour is no different than a thousand years. So a long time for me will be nothing for you. Imagine, living for a thousand years. For ten thousand years. It’s so hard to take in that that might be real for Park and God knows who else that’s alive now.”

“Speaking of time, did you remember to bury me with my gold watch?”

I was stunned. How did she…it, know that? It must have read through her social account. I know it’s not really her, but I couldn’t lie. 

“I’m sorry. I forgot.”   

“Is you serious? Is you actually serious? One of my few dying wishes.”  

“I forgot. But sure you can’t take a watch to heaven.” 

“How do you know? You’re not dead.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s still with your remains. It’s a waste anyway. That watch cost a lot of money.”

“See! I knew it! I knew it! You were too damn cheap to put that watch in the casket with me. It wasn’t that you forgot at all.” 

“That’s not true. I had the watch on top of the fridge, ready to give the funeral home, and I was so confused and sad that I just put it to one side and forgot about it.” 

“Bullshit. It was an open-casket funeral. You could have put it on my arm at any time. You had to have noticed that it wasn’t there.”   

I didn’t know how to continue. 

“Well,” she said, “you got nothing to say?”   

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” 

“About what?” 

“The open part of your open casket funeral.” 

“What?” 

“It wasn’t exactly open, per say.” 

“Wasn’t ‘exactly? It was either open or it wasn’t open. They didn’t just crack the lid. Why wouldn’t it be open? 

“Because it was closed.” 

“Why in the name of God wasn’t it an open casket funeral? I would have gotten cremated if I wasn’t going to have an open-casket funeral! Why wasn’t it open? Did the mortician drop me off the table, did the funeral car get into an accident, what happened? Please don’t tell me because it was cheaper. Please don’t tell me that, Gil.”

“The printer screwed up the casket.” 

“Printer? Did you get one of those EverythingStore caskets? You buried me in a EverythingStore casket.” 

“They’re nice caskets! And the resin is biodegradable, instead of sitting in the ground for hundreds of years.” 

“I picked out a beautiful casket at Maisen’s Funeral Home. You cheap bastard.” 

Up until that moment I was kind of fooled by the A.I. But then I remembered I was talking to a computer. “She wouldn’t have said that.” 

“Who wouldn’t have?”

“You.” 

“I just did.”  

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have called me a cheap bastard if you was here.”

“Well, you deserve it. Oh my, if I was at the house now, I’d go in the room and have a cry for myself.”

“Yeah, that’s more like you. Believe it or not, I miss that.”

“I’m afraid to ask you how the printer screwed up the casket.” 

“It printed the wrong dimensions so I had to…we had to…the mortician had to, sort of…”

“He never cut me up, Gil?”

“God no! He had to put you in…a little bit…sideways.”

“Sideways?”

“Not completely on your side. Just a little bit on one hip, like the way you used to watch your stories.”

“So you got me in a shitty EverythingStore casket, turned to one side like someone waiting to get a needle in their ass for eternity. With no watch. All because you wanted to save a dollar and was too cheap to print another one. Or get the one I wanted in the first place.”  

“I can’t believe it, you’re dead, and we’re still arguing. I miss you you know. I even miss this, arguing with you.”

“You can’t miss me that much if you’re planning on not dying,” she said, but the voice softened up a bit. 

“I was looking at your lifestone feed when I got here,” I said, changing the subject, “and there was a picture of Scott’s birthday party. You were tagged in the picture because it was long before we started using social. Someone must have scanned and uploaded it because most people weren’t even using digital cameras then. I was thinking I might have took it, but it couldn’t have been me, because I didn’t scan it. I do remember that party, but I can’t remember you sitting in his lap and blowing out his candles. I knows you and him got along well, but it seemed like you was having lots of fun. Was I there when that picture was taken? It looks like me on the other side of the table, but my face is cut off.” 

Silence.

“Hello? Amy?” 

Nothing. She was giving me the silent treatment.  

I decided to leave, and I could hear Dan barking in the car anyway. Either he was hungry or needed to pee. I went to the car and let him out with the leash on. He broke free and squatted on Amy’s grave. I yelled at him because I thought he was going to do number two, but it was just number one. I never saw him squat to pee before, so the only thing I could figure was that his hips had gotten too sore to lift his leg anymore. Just one more sign he was on his last legs. Poor boi.