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I was in our apartment, I downed some cheap champagne, ate a cold can of Chunky Soup, and watched a news report about what I had just waded through. Apparently, cops fired rubber bullets into the crowd an hour after I left. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time they’ve done that.
    Katy was already drunk by the time I got to the bar. I had to catch up.
    “Happy cure day!” she screamed.
    “Shh!”
    “Okay, okay. I’ll be quiet. But you have to tell me everything. And you owe me some doctor digits. Pony up, kid.”
    We retreated to a corner table. I gave her Dr. X’s info. I told her everything: the chair, the needles, the protesters, etc. Even the blonde girl.
    “She sounds hot.”
    “She was.”
    “Well, happy cure day. Cheers.”
    “Cheers.”
    “Do you realize that you’re now always going to look the way you look at this exact moment? From this day on? This is how you’ll look when you die. Do you realize that? It’s like I’m looking at your corpse!”
    “I didn’t think of it that way, no. But thank you.”
    “You realize you can never retire now, right?”
    “What?”
    “You can’t ever retire now. How are you gonna quit your job at sixty-five if you live for another five hundred years? Did you consider that?”
    I had, but I’d placed it squarely in the “things I prefer not to think about” pile. “This just gives me more time to figure out what it is I really want to do,” I told her. “I’m not preparing for some sixty-five-year end goal anymore. That rush to save money, or whatever, is all gone now.”
    “Ooh! I just thought of something else. Do you realize we could live another five hundred years and the Bills still may not win the Super Bowl?”
    “Will you shut up about all the terrible stuff already?”
    “Okay, okay. You’re right. No dark stuff. This is your cure day. And in a few weeks we’ll be celebrating mine too. Oh yes we will.”
    We staggered home at 6:00 A.M. and I took a shower before going to bed. I washed off the night and emerged from behind the curtain looking relatively fresh. I looked at myself in the mirror: brown hair, round face, sloped shoulders, two gentle smile creases bracketing my mouth. A barely noticeable strawberry mark under my eye. Slight stubble that steadfastly refuses to grow into anything resembling a normal beard. I took a photo of myself. This is how I look now. This is how I’ll look when I die.
    Happy cure day to me, indeed.
    DATE MODIFIED:
6/21/019, 3:45 P.M.

“The Conservative Case for Legalizing the Cure”
    My friend Jeff sent me this an hour ago:
    I don’t know if you’ve been watching Allan Atkins on TV lately, but he’s becoming increasingly unhinged. I’m not political one way or another—though I think a lot of what he says is perfectly reasonable—but he delivered a diatribe yesterday that was pretty nuts. Here’s the transcript:
    “I don’t know what country this is anymore. How can this administration justify doing what it is doing? How? How is it possible? You tell me where it says in the Constitution that this cure is forbidden. You can’t tell me, because it is not in the Constitution. It is not . If the class action lawsuit against the government over this ever gets kicked up to the Supreme Court—and it will, I can assure you—we’re going to see the true face of this Court and of the administration that put many of its judges there. Because any judge worth his salt would look at this ban and see a crime . An outright crime against a country and its citizens. And the only judge that would ban it would be a fascist, activist judge who wishes to impose his or her individual beliefs upon us all.
    “See, this ban is liberal thinking at its absolute worst. They don’t want to give you the freedom to make your own choices. They want you to suffer . They are antihuman. It’s not enough for them to merely hate America. No, now they hate the very idea of humanity. Humans are bad . ‘Oh, you can’t live