time to sigh before you're 36, and then 54. Anyway, you start to die much earlier. Did you know, that after 25, a human loses a hundred thousand brain cells per day? After 40 this process sharply accelerates and after 50 the brain starts to dry out noticeably. There's no arguing with the fucking science... We try to deceive ourselves too long. At 40, we try to tell ourselves that we're the same as always, though actually we've been sliding downhill for a long time. And at 50 you notice that you aren't just sliding but accelerating with the wind in your ears. Hold the handrail, ladies and gentlemen, the next stops are Arthritis! Sclerosis! Cancer! Infarct! Stroke! Parkinson's! Alzheimer's! Do you understand, Bettie?"
"I think I do," the girl answered without any real confidence, "but..."
"You don't understand a damned thing. And then, when you realize that ahead of you is only misery and after that–darkness and void, you start to look back at your past, searching for at least some meaning. But there isn't any, Bettie. Have you ever thought about how the life of an ordinary man is absolutely awful?"
"Maybe in Bricksville."
"Forget your fucking Bricksville! As if in New York, Paris, or Venice things are different! Every day a man goes to work, doing some nonsense like advertising chewing gum or selling canned cat food. He may pretend that it interests him, or honestly admit to himself that he hates his idiotic job –it doesn't change things a bit. For all his life, beginning in school, he diligently works like a squirrel in a cage to provide himself with money. What does he spend this money on? On food which several hours later is flushed down a toilet bowl, on buying things whose main purpose is to show how much money was spent on them, on vacation trips where he is baked on a beach like a pig in an oven or runs like a sheep in a herd following the guide and shooting views which were already photographed 300 million times by other sheep. Work and other routine activities leave him no more than a couple of free hours a day, and how does he dispose of them? He kills them watching stupid TV shows or playing poker. Then, if he is in the mood, he fucks his wife and if not—he just falls asleep immediately. In the morning, sleepy and angry, he again goes to work. And this goes on day after day. Somehow, he believes that all this is just a prelude to some bright and fine future–until it becomes obvious that the only future for him is a wooden box with decaying meat which will be pushed in the ground or into an oven, far enough from the eyes and noses of those who face the same fate later. And nothing will remain of him, absolutely nothing. Even the cat food which he sold all his life won't be named after him."
"Children will remain," Bettie objected.
"Sure, and from them–their children, and from those–their... Don't you see that all this is one big nothing? A million zeros added together makes a zero!"
"Maybe if you had children, things wouldn't seem so gloomy."
"I didn't say I don't have any–I said I don't have a daughter."
"So you have a son?"
"Yes. He's twenty years old and recently he got a job in a supermarket."
"Is he troubled about anything?"
"Seems to me he's happy."
"Then everything is okay with him?"
"Completely, if you don't count his Down syndrome."
"Oh... I'm sorry."
"That's all because of a guy named Gene Chromosome," said Palmer. "Have you read Kuttner?"
"Who?"
"Kuttner... or Gardner, I always mix them up. One wrote mysteries, the other science fiction. So the sci-fi writer had a series about Hogbens. Really funny stories. Hogbens are mutants, powerful almost like Superman, but living like typical bumpkins. When the grandfather tells the kid about mutations, the kid says: "I got a notion some furrin feller named Gene Chromosome had done it." Basically, I don't know whether we ourselves understand much more than that. There weren't any such birth defects in my family or in my wife's–if she didn't lie as usual."
"Sounds like you don't get along with her too well.”
"For the past 74 hours I've been trying to understand why I endured the bitch for the last 20 years."
"Is her name Bettie?"
"What? My God, no. Her name is Margaret, and, God help me, I like the name despite hating that stupid fat shrill hysterical bitch. I even married her