Jeffrey—“Dallow, what are you doing up there?” “Riding in a van, and being annoyed by you.”
Jeffrey and Master know the score. Or, better, Master knows the score and believes it, Jeffrey knows the score and thinks he can change it. Master reminds him of all the others, their embalmed corpses scattered along the side of the road like generational monuments to a past that never really was. But, Jeffrey will protest, it did really happen, you can’t deny it with all of your poetic turns of phrase, you can’t just twist it out of existence. The corpses prove it, he’ll say, without the past, there is no corpse. Without a life, there is no dead thing to be embalmed. He’ll walk Master up to them, make him touch one of them, rub their hair between his fingers, look into their glass eyes for proof of their pastness, their history. He’ll almost plead, see, they were—he’ll emphasize that word—and we are—he’ll emphasize that one even more, maybe even repeat it, we are. None of this changes the score, though, and Jeffrey knows it and he knows Master knows it as well. Jeffrey wants to hear the case for it again, wants to know why retirement is so inevitable, because it matters to him. Well…
Steampunk Queen got retired, but maybe that wasn’t so surprising. People have strict ideas about how to be and act in this world, and Queenie didn’t match up with them. You rub people the wrong way, and even if it’s their way that’s ultimately wrong, you aren’t long for this world. Conservatory Maestra got retired too, or maybe she retired herself, depending on how you look at it. But she still exists!—Jeffrey protests—I know it for certain, I could talk to her, and she still shows up every now and again. Yes, Master will say, but that is how you know for certain she is dead. The embalming hasn’t fully taken hold yet, or perhaps it can be temporarily reversed, but she’s been retired, I assure you.
What about Precarious, what about Francois? Didn’t they retire themselves, didn’t they go out on their own terms? Possibly. But what’s the difference at a certain point? Gradual with one, the decay setting in, the bones calcifying and turning to dust, cheeks sunken, patience destroyed; immediate with the other, like a switch flipping—but you protest, Jeffrey, that at least he flipped the switch himself, uninfluenced? Oh, but could it actually be? The appearance of control is just that: an appearance, an apparition of having say. When you reach that milestone, that dreaded year six signpost, the mark is upon you, and the method is purely a matter of what will be most effective. Swift, evolving, anaesthetized, brutal, hurtful, redemptive, triumphant, vanquished—there are many flavors from which to choose, though the actual means are more likely to choose you than the other way around.
Jeffrey looks around a bit more furtively now, wondering where his might come from, but then decides it’s all superstition anyway. As if not believing in retirement somehow robs it of its power, which is equally absurd, and he must understand that as well. But what choice does he have? Live in fear? Of course not. At the same time, there’s no reason to continue on like his situation hasn’t changed just to prove a point. Act natural, whatever that means. Just pretend that you’re part of the new generation, even as they threaten to swallow you up. He asks Master about the old timers, just to avoid asking about the obvious, the ultimate retirement. But that’s the wrong way to think about it, because everyone thought the last generation retiring was the ultimate. Can you imagine a world without the Infernal Guitar? You don’t have to, it happened, we live in it, let me show you the corpse to prove it. T’Kotch? ReT’ired, nothing left of him, absorbed into a suburban life and filled with retirement fluids to keep him looking the same age forever. The Friend to the Friendless, what about her, with the voice to coax even the retirers from their task? Impossible, she is gone—gone, gone, gone, retired, put away, on display, but gone. Original Dallow, remember that guy? That’s hilarious, he’d love that, but he is retired and there is nothing more to say. He went shockingly easily, showed himself the door, you might think, but retired nonetheless, and at best partly of his own accord. What about Arjohn, how could that possibly have turned out? Immolated, restored, and embalmed in perpetuity. What about Cora Mor? Again, shocking but true, faded into ghostlike status, remembered only as this lifeless shell, preserved for time immemorial, just here at the roadside. It’s hardly worth mentioning the Old Bailey, he was Old, he was a walking retirement, hell, he may have even invented the practice for his own rest, and now he can. Rest, that is. Even Rudy, immortal Rudy, who outran time longer than any other, lived multiple lives and fostered two full generations, ran not as fast as anyone could, but for as long as anyone ought to—seen him lately? I can show you, right down there, gaunt and bearded, fully retired, went down screaming and swinging, blowing until his face turned a rainbow of colors, protesting, pleading, babbling stories about Jack. It was nearly enough to alarm someone—nearly—but only if you didn’t know the score, and Jeffrey does, and so does Master.
But Jeffrey has to ask, because he is Jeffrey, and ask is what he does. He inquires coquettishly if you like facts, because he adores them, facts course through him, fill him up, make him real. It’s part of how he can know the score and still not believe what the score signifies, because it doesn’t fit his conception of facts. Auntie wasn’t retired, he tells Master, she was murdered. He then asks Master if that wasn’t the case, if she wasn’t murdered, and what does Master think really happened. Master tousles Jeffrey’s hair, but Master is angry, because Jeffrey knows better, and also knows that his pouting and rants won’t change anything. Jeffrey had forgotten the most important lesson almost immediately, because he didn’t want to hear it: the means don’t matter, only the result has meaning. Auntie was retired, same as anyone else, and Auntie went away, and Jeffrey would always be her little Chopper, but she was dead, and however lifelike the embalming was—and indeed, no expense was spared—she wasn’t to be heard from again. He could protest, but it didn’t matter, he could offer solutions, but there was no problem to be solved, he could opine, but no one cared. His heart was in the right place, but it was insulting that he wasn’t thinking of Master, running his finger’s through Jeffrey’s hair, or himself. This was their time, and their time was rapidly running out.
There were tactics they could try. Maybe run across the country and back. It seemed that all anyone in the past could imagine, when their time was up or almost up, was to attempt to distract the retirers, but the retirers were calculated, if not cold, and their task was assumed to be for the good of everyone involved. Renewal requires ruin, burn off the old to make room for the new, people are not disposable, but this is not about people, nor is it about disposal, really. So there was no reason to attempt to distract the retirers, mostly because they tended not to be interested in anything but retiring, and besides, they were just constructs anyway. How does one distract a construct? But, desperate times, whether real or imagined, make for perilous plans. Many worthy corpses had simply run out of the mysterious fuel which powers us through this endeavor.
Without distraction, there were only a couple of reasonable (or seemingly reasonable, as if reason was the chief value here) outs. The obvious one was to run, evade, dance, be ever fleeter of foot and cleverer of tongue. One could run out the rope for quite some time with their wits about them, and, in considering the population at hand, it may even have been part of the attraction of the entire adventure. Running could be fun, and it certainly made life feel like it had rules and best practices and, crucially for a bunch of atheists and antitheists, a telos. Try not to be retired, try to remain valuable, outrun retirement with merit or through subterfuge, but never stop running. When your time is up, what do you do? Make more time, of course!
Yes, it is exhausting. No, Jeffrey, Master is not certain it is worth it, and you need to stop asking about his motivation, because he is not going to tell you, because if he did you either would not believe it—as if it were something to be believed or disbelieved by another—or you would be appalled, and that would be a shame, because there is no room for being appalled here. And you know that; you know so very much, so many facts, why can’t you make this one of your facts so you and Master can figure a way out? Is it because you know there is no way out, and you actually believe the score? Catch your breath for a moment, Jeffrey and Master, because there is another, almost unthinkable way.
The other out is confrontation, in all its guises. One might confront the retirers, make them consider their calculations, propose questions to their basic presuppositions. Does renewal require ruin? Or, to take it back one step further, is renewal the modus operandus? Yes, yes, swim or die, keep moving, don’t let them catch you napping. But if the “them” isn’t you, retirers, then who is it? It is a pretty circular idea—ruin requires renewal, too, doesn’t it? There has to be something to ruin, after all. Why do you think everyone is concerned with collapse, retirers? Jeffrey likes this line of questioning, it corresponds to his thinking about the matter more broadly. He wants to say:
There must be a reason for all of this retirement, not simply ruin before renewal. That isn’t good enough. If something is beautiful, it certainly could be retained, at least until it stops being beautiful. So there is something else at hand, even if you won’t tell what it is. But eventually it seems to me that you will run out of people to retire, and you will have to either retire yourselves, whatever that may mean, or you will have to stop. And you are retirers, so if you stop retiring, you will cease to be. That’s how constructs work. If there is nothing to define the construction, then they just cease to be. They cease to matter, anyway, because no one can understand them. So I might turn out to be the last one. Or you might turn out not to exist at all, and all this history is just a series of coincidences. I don’t want to be embalmed, anyway. I want you to bury my violin in concrete and sink me to the bottom of the Hudson. Try retiring me there.
But Jeffrey is, sadly, wrong. The retirers are in no danger of running out of work, their construct losing definition or meaning, because there is always a new generation to retire. Coincidences are just the anti-inflammatories of the paranoiac, and though we all want to be the last one of something, this likely isn’t it, for him, or for Master. So it’s time to confront, supposes Master, and Jeffrey is not in a position to argue. Poor Old Jeffrey Young is chasing after the big black van, running in clockwise circles, closing in and then falling further behind. He’s complaining about pancakes, they represent the worst decision he’s made recently, they really, really upset him. The retirers are out there, they just have to be, and though the pancakes were indeed very upsetting, they just can’t warrant this much attention. The van pulling away would be bad, though not unprecedented, and would certainly be one of the oddest and most ignoble retirements in recent history. But it all suddenly begins to add up, all of the odd behavior, the squeaks and squeals and sneezes and yawns. The unsolicited directions, attempting to argue the GPS into submission. The extemporaneous songs about wishing your mother a happy birthday and how she would need to eat food because she is alive. The teeth in a box, the business cards for a drycleaners which has been closed for a decade. This is his confrontation! Master smiles and opens his eyes to the red digital time, crooked numbers between too late and too early, he reaches under his hotel pillow for the butterfly knife he has sharpened before bed, just like every other night, just another ritual to mark time. It’s there, slightly warmed from the hot head which has been dreaming dark dreams atop it for the preceding hour. Jeffrey can’t have cracked the code, because that would mean there is a code to crack. But he’s in another room in this shabby hotel that is too far away from the bars which close too early and are too full of townie bartenders and amateurish students, and he’s doing sit-ups in the dark, retirement the furthest thing from his mind. He has a couple of years yet, and he ought to enjoy them.
