It's not possible to die of anything other than natural causes. I spend ten years drinking bourbon and eating Totino's Pizza Rolls. On Friday I get the results of my mandatory, in-office health screening. I score a 6 out of 10. My official health status, in the eyes of my company, is: ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT. I am at risk of all the usual killers. Heart disease. Diabetes. Hypertension. Drunk drivers. Gun violence. Raging, merciless depression. Suicide.
“Joke's on you guys," I think. “I already have some of those things."
“It's not about how high your cholesterol is," my co-worker Amy is telling me over lunch at Ascension. “It's about how much cholesterol your body can handle."
We're eating fancy grilled cheese sandwiches. What makes them fancy is how much cheese they put on them. Here's a fine-dining tip for you: the more cheese they put on, the fancier it is.
“How do you find out how much cholesterol your body can handle?" I ask.
“There's a test you can take," she says. “It's called the Denny's All-You-Can-Eat Grand Slam Breakfast Special. $7.99 on Saturdays. $6.99 if you're over sixty-five."
As a thirty-four-year-old type-1 diabetic with a history of high blood pressure and questionable-at-best eating habits, I should probably be more interested in things like cholesterol. For example, I should probably find out what it is. I know that, like most things, cholesterol comes in two kinds: good and bad. And I know that, like most things, it can kill you.
Saturday morning I go to Whole Foods to stock up on the usual health essentials. Health food. Health booze. Health chocolate chip cookies. Health AAA batteries.
“Just because you buy it at Whole Foods doesn't make it healthy," my wife, J, says.
J's cute but I don't think she gets how Whole Foods works.
The lady at the checkout counter looks like healthy Kathy Bates. She's checked me out before. I remember because she looks like healthy Kathy Bates. And because she always checks my ID.
“1987," she always says sadly. “Same as my son."
I am occasionally given little reminders from the universe that thirty-four is a perfectly possible age at which to die.
It's early December. Our street is wall-to-wall glow-in-the-dark inflatable snowmen. This is our first Christmas in this neighborhood. We didn't know what to expect. We should have expected more inflatable snowmen. At night they sway back and forth with these lunatic smiles on their faces. In the morning they're all deflated puddles of nylon, just the top hats sticking up like turnips in this farming video game I used to play. It's a warm winter. Eighty degrees during the day. We bundle up in hats and sweaters. We wear fingerless gloves.
“I dress for the weather I want," J says. “Not the weather I have."
At night I turn the air conditioner down to 65. The whole house rattles and hums. This winter is brought to us by the TXU Electric Company and sponsored in part by my junk mail copywriter salary. Promotional consideration provided by the inflatable snowman department of our local Home Depot.
I make a living writing junk mail for a large financial company out by the airport. You might not have heard of us but you probably owe us money. You might have gotten a letter from me about it. It's the one that started like this: “Hello!"
On Friday, I am asked to write a letter to customers in the gulf who may have been affected by the recent natural disaster.
“Natural disaster?” I say to the woman who put in the request. “Is there any other kind?”
For breakfast I make pre-cooked, microwavable bacon. You microwave it for five seconds.
For crispier bacon, the instructions say, microwave for seven seconds.
In an attempt to not just up and die any day now, I've been cutting down on red meat, red wine, red sauce, Red Vines. Let me put it this way: if it's red, I'm cutting down on it. I tell myself I'll just have two pieces of bacon. Then I microwave four pieces of bacon.
Well, I think, it would be a waste not to eat all four pieces of bacon, seeing as they've already been microwaved.
For Christmas J gives me a three-year-old juniper bonsai tree, my mom gives me a $50 Amazon gift card, my brother gives me an hourglass desk ornament. It's gold-plated, marble-based. He got it at Target. It takes fifteen minutes for the black sand to pass from one side to the other. Then another fifteen minutes to pass back. 96 turns and a day has gone by. 2,673,552 turns and your life is over.
“Merry Christmas!" my brother says.
We're at my parents’ house in Wylie, a small town outside of Dallas full of Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers. They're all very friendly. They wave at you when you drive by. Today's forecast in Wylie is eighty-three degrees and sunny. My seven-year-old nephew from Houston asks me: “Why is it hot in the winter?"
“Oh, I don't know, Albert," I say. “Maybe because the world is ending?”
I never know what to say to kids. I don't know what they want to hear. And I don't know how they want to hear it. J's getting her PhD in educational psychology. She says I should talk to them like they're adults.
“Yep," I say to Albert. “Things sure aren't looking good future-wise."
Lacking confidence in my ability to survive another year, I recently took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on myself. In the event that I just up and die, J will become a millionaire. They'll send her a check. Apparently a thirty-four-year-old buying a million-dollar life insurance policy on himself raises some questions. I am sent, via email, a QUESTIONNAIRE.
Do you plan on living the longest, healthiest life you possibly can?
Do you generally enjoy being here and would prefer to drag this thing out as long as possible?
Do you own a double-barreled shotgun, snub-nose revolver, or have access to maybe a little too much prescription medication?
Do you see where we're going with this?
Are you going to make us say it?
When I get to the question about cholesterol, I explain to the questionnaire that it’s not about how high your cholesterol is, it’s about how much cholesterol you can handle. When my denial letter arrives five days later, in an unmarked white envelope from Nebraska, it makes sense.
“Looks like you’re going to have to become a millionaire the old-fashioned way,” I tell J.
“I thought cashing in on your dead husband’s life insurance policy was the old-fashioned way,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “Then I guess you’re going to have to do it some new kind of way then.”
Monday morning I wake up so hungover I have an out-of-body experience. That’s convenient. My body is no place for me to be right now. It’s been declared uninhabitable. I’m the one who declared it. I just kind of float around the room for a while thinking about stuff.
“You live too much inside your own head,” a cute girl in high school once told me.
“Why would I want to live anywhere else?” I said. “My head is accommodating! My head is tropical! It’s 97 degrees in here all year round!”
I spend Monday eating Annie’s-brand minestrone soup and having mild, hangover-induced panic attacks. In an attempt to avoid any psychosomatic false alarms, I have carefully avoided learning the early warning signs of stroke, heart attack, brain aneurism, and other catastrophic health events. Sometimes it's best not to know. Last year a man came to our door and invited J and me to an End Times Prophecy Event at the local crackpot Pentecostal church.
“No thanks," J said. “We don't like spoilers."
A few years ago my doctor told me that if I didn't make some major life changes there was only one way this was going to end. “Don't be dramatic, Pam," I said. “There's only one way this ends no matter what."
The heat comes in waves. The cold comes in fronts. On Tuesday it's 75 degrees. On Thursday it's 29. I spend five days detoxing, then five days re-toxing.
“It's not about how much whisky I drink," I yell to J from the couch. “It's about how much whisky I can handle."
Recently my doctor asked if I'd heard of Blue Zones.
“Yes," I said.
Later I looked it up. It's these places in the world where people live to be a hundred years old. The secret, Wikipedia said a study said a doctor said, is fish.
They call the diet THE HOLY MACKEREL.
And if they don’t call it that, they should. It’s called marketing.
When the three-year-old juniper bonsai J got me for Christmas dies before the end of January, after nearly four weeks of me putting zero effort into keeping it alive, J asks me what went wrong.
“Did you over-water it? Under-water it? Over-fertilize? Under-fertilize? Forget to prune it? Prune it too much? Not put it in the sun enough? Leave it in the sun too long?"
I shrug and shake my head.
“It was just its time to go," I say.
On Wednesday I go to Whole Foods.
“I'M HERE FOR THE MACKEREL," I announce.
It's in the back, behind the counter. You have to talk to the fish guy. It smells fishy back there. It smells like this city I used to live in by the ocean where everyone played acoustic guitar and had long-term girlfriends. I ask the fish guy for seven mackerels and he just looks at me.
“Seven," I repeat slowly.
At the checkout counter, Healthy Kathy Bates rings up seven mackerels, three bags of gummy worms, two cases of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a six-pack of Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate bars, an oversized cinnamon roll from the bakery. Rather than abstaining from bad things, I'm going to balance them out with good things instead. Drink a beer, eat a mackerel. Drive a gas-powered car, eat a mackerel. Net zero. Like I was never here.
I show Healthy Kathy Bates my ID.
“Same as your son," I say, and she looks pretty freaked out.
I spend the weekend drinking bourbon and eating mackerel. The house smells like dead fish and cheap booze.
“This is a blue zone now," I announce, about the living room.
“This is a blue zone now," I announce, about the bathroom.
“Blue zone. Blue zone. Blue zone," I go around the house saying about every room I'm in.
“Just because you're eating fish and making announcements doesn't mean you're in a blue zone," J says.
J's smart and all but I don't think she gets how blue zones work. She goes around behind me opening all the windows, pumping the doors back and forth, trying to get the fishy smell out of the house.
“How much longer is this going to go on?" she says.
“Not much longer," I say. “If everything goes according to plan, only sixty-six more years."
I turn the hourglass. I microwave some pizza rolls. I set an alarm on my phone so I don't sleep away the evening, but I sleep it away anyway. It's happened so many times. I’m used to it by now. I wake up at 2am on the couch with a half-empty glass of beer next to me and an aquarium for a mouth.
Whitman was large and contained multitudes. I am skinny as a rail and contain whisky farts and ibuprofen. I contain cholesterol, both good and bad. I have tentative plans to buy another bonsai tree and do it right this time. Last night I got a text from an unknown number in a city where I used to live and thought I wouldn't survive. “Hello!” it said.
MIKE NAGEL
Mike is the author of the non-fiction novella Duplex, available now from Autofocus Books.