We were making progress quite nicely. Quite nicely in-fact, until now. The train, experiencing a bit of turbulence, possibly some animal on the tracks, had decided to stop. I was all too anxious to make it to my destination.
“What happened?” I asked, slightly perturbed.
“Nothing, just another poor soul who decided life just wasn’t worth it”
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, horrified.
“I know!” The man replied. “Isn’t it such an inconvenience? We could already be halfway to our end, if it wasn’t for that pitiful wretch.”
The man speaking to me was dressed quite nicely wearing a well fitted navy suit with grey pin stripes, a neatly pressed shirt, and brown leather shoes.
“Well, is he going to be okay?”
“He hopes he won’t. I do too. He’s damn near made us late for our destination. Such a shame. I hope he was at least successful. Most of them are.”
“How many are there?”
“Ah, so many! Who really cares though? The trains get most of them, and they are so easy to overlook. If you sit just right, and tilt your glass a certain way, and focus for a split second too long on the wine, you may not even notice the train hit anything it all. It really is a marvelously designed train. Honestly, that’s the way we like it. Not one stop till Kingdom come. Only this man must have been important. That’s the only reason they stop. The remains of the important are quite important indeed. Damn fool is going to make us late, though.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“It doesn’t really matter, you know. Like I said, you can just ignore them. Unless you’re unfortunate enough to hit a governor or celebrity or something. Last time I was on this train, we went the whole time hitting nothing but prostitutes and hobos. It was grand, it really was. We made not one stop from here to
“You can’t be serious. So many people offing themselves like that?”
“Yeah, they drop like flies really. Well, then again, that’s only those who feel they are important. They climb the highest mountains. Dressed all nice, in their Giorgio and Dolce. They put on their best perfume, fix their hair just right. Then as soon as the nearest jet flies by, down they jump right into the engines. For a split second they even feel uplifted, and stare down on the world in scorn, just as they did their entire life. They still think they’re better, I’d imagine. Right up until the point where they think no more. One little whoosh and just like that, they’re in. The blades spin, and the people pass on through. The passengers on the flight seldom notice unless just a bit of finely sewn pin striped polyester isn’t quite chopped up enough and it floats by their window. They don’t really mind though, they applaud their audacity. The poor rich people themselves, well they’re damn near ground to the finest of bits. Quite a precipitation they can cause! No one minds, though. Oddly enough, it’s decreasing the amount of acid rain. And really, the people on the ground are so busy planning their own funerals that they barely notice the red tint in the rain to follow the next day.”
“Even the rich want to die? Are they mad?”
“Well, they’re mainly lawyers. And CEO’s. It all depends with the lawyers, though. Some lawyers can’t bring themselves to climb that high; they were scared of liability issues and such. Other lawyers had to, because even with the trains, there are legal issues. They have to wait till just the right moment, because apparently there is a law somewhere that states the internal gears on the machine have to line up in just the right spot to be able to withstand such an obstacle. If they weren’t then your purgatory is ten years longer unless you paid a certain legal fee that most just pre-paid like a retainer. Really the fee could be waived though, as long as you were between six and seven feet and born between July of 69 and August of 73. It was a whole bunch of red tape and all for lawyers. Politicians are the worse for us, I suppose. So sticky they almost stuck the damn train to the tracks. But after a while they got smart and learned to bribe the conductors to go just a bit faster than they should around certain pre-agreed upon places. That took care of the problem.
“But why do so many people want to die?”
“That’s pointless really. Times just aren’t as fun as they use to be, and you can only be so thrilled before everything is dull, and really the only thing no one has experienced is the final check-out. Sometimes it takes a catalyst, something to convince them their life is just not worth living. Some people get their orders messed up in restaurants. Other people have a slight collision on the interstate. A few people just didn’t feel like going to work on a Monday. Suicide has become quite trendy. All the meds not working and what not, really it’s a million things.”
The lights in the train flickered a bit as we started up again.
“You can’t possibly be serious,” I scoffed. “People are just offing themselves left and right for things like that? No one stops them?”
“Why should they? I mean it is their life, who are we to tell them how, or whether, they should live it? For a few good years, people even treated death as a commodity. Bought and sold it like candy. A simple bullet to the head was the cheapest. But if you could afford enough, you could even get a whole firing squad. People started betting on death in the stock market once it went public. That didn’t last long, before it was condemned, and the next thing you know its prohibition all over again. Man, when the law forced death to hit the black market, it nearly caused three damn depressions. And what’s more people were left with their depressions, and no way to get rid of them unless they could pay the right ‘agents’. It was quite a tragedy.”
“No one stopped them?”
“Well preachers tried for a while. They’d yell at them and what not. They tried to scare them out of it using lots of fancy rhetoric, but in the end the people did what the people needed to do. One preacher followed a man out to the railroad tracks, tried to drag him off. He couldn’t quite get it out of his head that no matter what he said or did, nothing worked anymore, and he just had to let the state of things be the state of things. Well, sure enough, he got killed right along with the man. The church made him such a martyr you would have thought he was St. Peter or something.
“This is ridiculous. Doesn’t the government do anything to stop them?”
The government tried for a while. They made it to where you had to live till you were damn near a hundred, sick and all. You had to die on your own. That wasn’t working out with people at all. It’s all about power and control I guess. The government controlling their deaths but forcing them to keep their lives. That didn’t settle well with anyone, so they just settled themselves. Tried almost anything for a while. Heads in the oven, extension cords in the bathtub, those were the real cuckoos. They wanted secret ways of doing it, but you really can’t find anything that dignified that’s also that secretive. So finally people got fed up with it. They decided to do it all openly. Now it’s a matter of pride. The more flamboyant you can make your death, the better. One guy last year strapped himself to a train just right, so when he was ripped open, the fireworks he swallowed the day before would go off in a nice little blast. Really left us quite a light show. Of course the government found all kinds of violations with that, and they hauled his corpse up in the courtroom and tried him for it. In the end he was sentenced to five more years of life, so they sewed him up and resuscitated him. Now the government rarely interferes. Usually if they do, you can pay them enough money, for all the taxes you won’t be able to pay dead and all, and if you satisfy them, they can kindly forget you existed or that you are hauling your sad body down to the nearest tracks to wait for the next train out. Trains really are the best way to do it. And looking on the bright side, the government found it really did decrease the homeless population. The number of homeless people is now right around zero, and those are some pretty good statistics, you have to admit.”
“But what about the loss in population? The bodies?”
“Ah, no one really cares about the loss of the people. You can get more of those by the ten dozen these days. The bodies, well, the government for years has been putting a chemical in the food that makes us more decomposable. Works like a charm. People didn’t really notice. Complained that everything tasted like sulfur for a while, but before you know it, the sulfur was the new sage. Before that they tried to put scoops on the front of the trains, to kind of scoop up and throw the bodies into an open train car in the back. The only problem was they could never quite get the aim right. I remember one time a local mayor got busted for running a male prostitution ring. Kind of convinced him to bump up his travel reservations a few weeks earlier than he planned. Well he was wearing nothing but his scantily fitting laced lingerie and was scooped right on up and deposited at his daughter’s wedding the next town over. Landed rear first on the two foot tall wedding cake topper. That pretty much put an end to that idea. On the bright side, He really would have been late for the wedding if it wasn’t for the train, and everyone knows weddings are more enjoyable dead. Especially since his daughter was marrying a lawyer. Now no one really bothers with the bodies. Sometimes, they lay out padding on the sides of the track to catch them and try to harvest the organs. The organs go very well on the black market to be transplanted into our livestock.”
I felt a slight bump. I was too afraid to ask what it was. I was beginning to feel very sick.
“I need to get off soon. Really soon. I’m not feeling so well. How far are we from
“Doesn’t really matter, man. They aren’t going to stop. They make no stops really. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like we’re going anywhere, anyways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it has gotten so problematic that the government now assumes everyone wants to die. They’ve started using trains as mass vehicles to fulfill people’s wishes. They removed a part of the track up ahead. Experts say it will be quick and painless. Might even be a bit fun. They promised us all the loud music and light shows they can spare.”
“What? Are you kidding me? And you are okay with this?”
“Sure man, I mean everyone else is doing it, and even if I don’t want to die right now, I know I may want to die eventually, so it really is not an inconvenience at all. In a way, I got lucky. I ended up on the train that gave me what I’ll probably want later, right now. It’s sort of like I won the lottery.”
“You’re crazy! There’s no way I can go through with this. I’m getting off. I’m getting off of this train.”
I smashed a window and jumped out, as a crowd gathered around the window and stared in a very confused horror.
“That idiot!” said the man in the finely pressed suit. “No one ever does it like that. There’s no fun in that at all. If he’d have only waited about ten minutes…”
The crowd murmured their disapproval, nodded in agreement, and went back to drinking their champagne.
When I awoke, I felt very small, and I was lying in a clear glass bed of some sorts. I was outside at some sort of boarding station and I saw lots of people who were joyfully chatting away. There were babies in little cribs all around me being pushed up a ramp and into the door of a train car. I began to move. As I looked down I saw a pair of finely pressed navy slacks with thin gray stripes leading to down to exquisite leather shoes.
