8/12/23: Well-Adjusted

Author’s note: took a several month hiatus due to a super-busy stretch at work. Now am back! Thanks, as always, for reading.

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Several months after Tom’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he received a knock on the door. A competent-looking woman stood in the doorway, holding a briefcase.

“I’m not interested,” he said out of reflex. 

“I’m not selling anything,” she said with a smile. “But I will need a few hours of your time.” 

She held up a badge. Adjustment Bureau, it read. 

“I’ve never heard of any such Bureau,” Tom said. He tried to close the door, but the woman stuck her foot in and prevented it from closing. 

“I don’t mean to be rude,” the woman said. “But I’m afraid that neither of us have much choice in this matter. Let’s start over. Hi, my name is Helen Carter. I’m from the State Health Department. Could I trouble you to invite me in for a cup of tea?” 

Tom stood there for a moment. He had been feeling vaguely nauseous that morning, and his afternoon plans had mostly consisted of watching reruns of Friends. 

“Come in. But you should know that my son is coming over in half an hour, so you’ll have to leave before then,” he lied. Though he would never admit to himself, he had been feeling a distinct loneliness for a long time.

A few minutes later, they were sitting at his dining room table, as the water was boiling. 

“I like your wind chimes,” Helen said, looking around. 

“Thanks. I forget where I got them. They’ve been there for as long as I can remember,” he replied. “So what is this about?”

“Well, I’m afraid that ***,” she said, opening her briefcase. “And so I’m going to have to do some calibration testing. Because it’s hard to know with second generation Biotronik implants whether ***.”

Tom blinked. 

“You didn’t hear any of that, did you?” she said with a sigh. She sipped on her cup of tea. 

When had he poured her a cup of tea? The water had been boiling just a moment ago. He glanced down. His right hand was holding a small thin metal rod with a button at the top.

“Let’s try *** instead,” she said. “This *** taking longer than it should.”

He glanced down. His left hand was holding the thin metal rod now. The sun was setting. When he glanced up, there was an empty plate in front of them, and the woman was finishing a sandwich, and there was a stack of papers in front of him.

“So as I was saying, your oncologist has ***, but the other problem with *** is that…” she trailed off, noticing the confused expression on his face. “What’s the last thing you remember me saying?”

“… so as I was saying?” Tom mumbled.

“No, before that.”

“Something taking longer than it should?” he said. “Hey, did you go through my fridge? When did -” 

Helen sighed. “We were making so much progress, too.”

He glanced down. The metal rod was gone from his hand. It was dark outside now, and someone had turned on the dining room lights.

“I think I figured out the problem. The older Biotronik *** models always do this,” said Jane sitting at the table. She was typing on a laptop, which had a cable running to a small machine sitting on the floor. It was making a gentle whirring noise.

“I’m glad it’s not me, I thought I was going crazy,” Helen said. 

Tom looked down at his hands. There was a different device in his hands - it looked like an upside down Xbox controller. When had the second woman arrived in his living room? 

When he looked up, the second woman was gone. 

“Let’s try this one more time,” Helen said. She looked tired. There was another plate in front of her. At some point she must have made herself another sandwich. 

“One more time?” he said. 

Helen pointed at the controller in his hands. “Press the button.”

He pressed the button. Then - 

“Tom. You’re dying,” she said. 

There was some silence. 

Oh. 

“My name is Helen Carter. I am from the Death Adjustment Bureau. Thirty years ago, you elected to have a second-generation Biotronik anti-memetic device implanted. Its intended purpose was to remove the concept of death from your consciousness, along with any death-associated memories. By law, the device must be turned off for a minimum of a 24 hour period for those diagnosed with a terminal illness, to allow for the settling of affairs. Yesterday, your oncologist contacted our office after you failed your third-line chemotherapy regimen and surgery was deemed unlikely to -”

“I’m dying,” Tom said. 

“Yes. You are dying,” Helen said. She handed him a box of tissues. He noticed all of a sudden that there was a small pile of used tissues next to him.

“This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation,” he said. 

“This is the sixth time, give or take,” she said. “You have a legacy model of the Biotronik implant. It kept resetting, and removing your memory of our conversation.”

Tom stared at the tissue box, which she had left in his lap. He must have cried in the previous iterations of this conversation, but there were no tears that came now. Perhaps his body had simply run out of tears.

“Why would I…” 

Helen read from the laptop next to her. “Thirty years ago, you wrote: ‘I am tired of death, and thinking about death, and obsessing over death, and having death intrude into my daily life. I can’t drive without daydreaming about hit by a semi-truck. I can’t go to work without daydreaming about my funeral, and whether my coworkers would actually be upset. I can’t go home without noticing how quickly my parents are aging, and how much time they have left. The other day, Melvin’s father died, and I spent the rest of the day in a state of perpetual existential dread. I just want to spend time with my family and not be thinking about, ‘how many more Thanksgivings will we have together, how many more - ‘ “

“That’s enough,” Tom said. 

Helen stood up from the table, stretching her legs as she did so. “I’m going to give you some time to process. Over the next minute or two, some of your memories will come back. When you’re ready, we have some paperwork to go over - estate planning, messages to loved ones, taxes, that kind of thing. And after all of this - which I’m expecting will take two to three hours - you’ll have to decide whether to turn your implant back on.”

“What do most people do?”

“Most people turn it back on. Almost all, actually.”

“And they forget that they’re going to die? Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Helen got up and left the room. I suppose that giving me space is part of the protocol, Tom thought. 

Then, I can’t believe I’m going to die.

He looked back down at the table. There was a notepad in front of him. In his own handwriting, he saw the words, “Oncologist’s prognosis: weeks to months. When pressed, would not give specific number of weeks or months.”

His eyes were puffy. He remembered crying, now. He remembered the previous 5 conversations he had had with Helen; although none had gotten very far. He remembered the other woman, Jane, coming in with wheeled luggage - the “Biotronik interrogator” as she called it, while Helen made them all sandwiches using supplies from his fridge.

He remembered seeing the commercials for the implant thirty years ago. Remembered walking into the clinic and signing the paperwork, and writing the words that Helen had read to him. 

He remembered his parents. The device had erased his memory of them after they died, he realized. He remembered why he had been so lonely these past few years, in his 70’s - it was because his friends had started dying off, one by one. And he had forgotten about them all, after they were gone.

He remembered Rebecca, his wife. He looked around - there were photos of the two of them together everywhere. After she had died, the device must have blanked the photos out from his memory in real-time, and so he had never removed them. She had always wanted to go to Turkey, he thought. They had never gotten a chance to do that.

He remembered Stanley, his son, who had been accompanying him to every oncologist’s appointment for months. He had never understood why Stanley cried so much after each visit. 

He remembered the device being turned off at mandated five year intervals - each time for service checks. Each time he had been asked if he wanted it turned back on again, and each time he had said yes.

He remembered the concept of oblivion. And for the first time in a very long time, he felt afraid. 

I’m going to die, he thought.

Helen walked back in. She smelled vaguely of smoke; she must have stepped outside for a cigarette. 

“Do you need more time?” she said. “I can give you more time.”

“How do you cope?” he said. He felt like he had a huge hole in his chest, and that any second now, he would involute into nothing.

“I don’t,” she said. “I have a device of my own. A newer model. My manager turns it off for me when I arrive at work. I’ll forget about this trip - and you - when I go home. Helps keep my work and life separate.”

“I think I need more time,” Tom said. Helen grabbed a pack from her bag, and stepped outside again.

Everything felt more real than it had earlier that morning, when the only plans he had had were to watch TV. His whole body felt full of fear, and that fear made him suddenly acutely aware of the shape of the chair beneath him, the taste of the air-conditioned breeze on his tongue.

He felt more alive than he had in a long, long time. The sound of the wind chimes swept in from outside the house, as they had for decades. He remembered now where he had gotten them. His daughter had bought them at a Ren fair, had stood on a ladder and tied them up by the front porch. Her name was Teresa. She had died in a car crash when she was young. He had loved her very much.

And so he sat there, late in the evening, with a stranger smoking in the backyard of his house, surrounded by pictures of friends and family he was only now remembering. He sat there, living and dying, one minute at a time. And then he called the stranger back in.