The Reversal

I am Ryan. I am writing this before I become too young to do it.

See, mental faculties would not be affected by the reversal at first. If anything they would be improved, experiences and notions and memories now carving their way into younger brain cells, supple and thirsty like sea sponges. I am as wise as you might expect from someone my venerable age, 159. But the physical faculties, oh well, those would follow the biological clock to the minute since the moment the needle entered your arm, just in reverse. If you are a 5R-year-old, as I am, it won’t be long before you lose the ability to write. It’s not that you’ll forget; your hand will just not know how to coordinate its thirty-plus muscles into the holding of a pen, and eventually you’ll go back to scribbles and doodles, squiggling in your high chair to grab the pencil in front of you. By that time, the neural scaffolding supporting your thoughts and intentions will be a quarter of its original size and will be faltering and crumbling under the weight of too many firing synapses, mercifully returning you to its original blank slate. It is the most humiliating thing, I was told by those younger than me, and those final years are the ones everyone fears the most. But you know, by now I have seen so many people die helplessly wrapped in swaddling clothes --- not only family and friends but movie stars, presidents, and dictators --- that I don’t feel any fear or self-pity anymore.

We lost all media and communications systems around ten years ago, so I genuinely do not know what is going on out there. Maybe some genius kid in some Russian lab has found a way to stop this, to put things on the right course again. But based on what I see around me, I may well be the last kid on earth. So if you found this message, you’re either dying as I am (sorry, pal) and the last thing you need is a recap of what happened 77 years ago, or you are some Messiah coming from another planet who is wondering what the fuck happened on Earth. This is for the Messiah.

• • •

It all began with the vaccine, of course. The Amaranth virus blossomed all over the world like its namesake in a hot summer of 78 years ago, and it took the lives of almost one billion people before we managed to eradicate it. Within one year, everyone between the ages of 14 and 80 who could get a vaccine had got one. Everyone who had not, because of age limits or health issues or because they happened to exist on the wrong side of some social fault line, had died of the virus. So, see, we still got the better end of the deal. But that’s when the reversal began.

It took the scientists a good couple of years to understand what was going on. At first, amidst the general euphoria mixed to collective grief and trauma that inebriated all of us survivors, there was a lot of fanfare about how everyone looked healthier and younger coming out of this. But then pubescent men started seeing their tentative facial hair grow back as if pulled from the inside of their cheeks, until it disappeared altogether. Young girls stopped having their periods, and older women woke up to red stains on their bed sheets again. And then people’s chronic illnesses started receding, lab results looking the exact copies of ones from months before, tumors becoming smaller and smaller until the ultrasound would not find them anymore. That’s how we learned that our bodies had started to live backwards.

They came to some very elaborate explanation, something to do with the DNA helix spinning to the left rather than to the right. An illustration used in informational leaflets of all sorts was that of a friendly big-headed silhouette pushing the switch on a power drill: To the right, the drill moves its way into the wall. To the left, the drill swirls back unto itself until it is ejected as smoothly as it went in. The bottom of the matter is, we could not move forward anymore, we could only trace our steps back. And that meant that no woman could procreate. That’s when we realized we were doomed to extinction.

• • •

I was very old when I got my vaccine, almost 81. Okay, well, I was a little past 82, but my daughter was a nurse and she sneaked me in during one of her busy emergency shifts. That’s why I am one of the youngest now. My daughter was 45 at the time she got the vaccine, and she died in my arms crying like a baby when I was 37R. And if you think mourning a child is the worst fate anyone can endure, imagine mourning your spouse at the age of two, as my son-in-law did, his body shaking to tears and to a pain it wasn’t big enough to contain.

In the last picture I took of them, they are in the back of our house. The neighbors’ yard appears in checkers through the wire fence to the right, littered with the tiny plastic wagons and dinosaurs they had played with until they had died a few months before. My daughter is driving a red ride-on truck, large sunglasses on and a scarf around the neck like a French actress from the 1940s, and my son-in-law is bent forward, pretending to be filling her tank with a garden hose. They wear matching overalls, and believe it or not, they look genuinely happy in that moment.

In fact, by then we had all got used to the new reality. Most of us had lost all of their loved ones, and we had survived. Some of the younger people hated us---the Methusas, they called us, and in the first years after the reversal they even organized into some underground militia to threaten, abuse, and sometimes kill us. I don’t think there was much to envy in our condition. Knowing that your death date is so far in the future that you’ll see everyone else die around you is no privilege in my book. But I can understand how college freshmen who were given 15 years to live --- or their parents --- would see this hunched pile of wrinkles hobbling toward decades of sunrises and sunsets and want to smash my fucking head. But that didn’t happen, and in the end I survived them all.

And it wasn’t all bad during those times. We tried to adapt, you may even say we came together to face this as a species, for once. We reoriented all of our health and social services to care for the needs of a rejuvenating population, with pediatricians and developmental psychologists in high demand to help adults grow younger. We reorganized our workplaces to reassign existing jobs to an older member of the family when someone turned 14R, and we elaborated complex rituals to make our zero birthday, as we came to call our death, as joyful as possible. Hey, we even made a market out of this. Just imagine all the witty quotes you can put on a mug about male genitals getting smaller by the day. And it became common for parents to give their child a small heart-shaped locket on their 18Rth birthday, containing a simple piece of paper with their exact death date eighteen years in the future. Wearing the necklace every day was an important symbol and reminder of the spiritual process of accepting one’s death and living with purpose toward it. My parents had been dead for more than two centuries when I reached 18R, so there was nobody to give me my memento, but I kept the one that I had given my daughter, carrying the correct date of when my heart stopped beating, too. I still wear it, and if you found this note you can probably see it around whatever is left of my neck. I hope I’m not too mushy. Ha!

• • •

My generation will not enjoy the privilege of having caretakers, of course, so the agreement we made is to freely dispose of ourselves around the age of 3R, when we feel we cannot take care of our basic needs anymore. There is no written rule about this, it is up to anyone to choose how and when to go. In fact, this was the last decision we made before we dissolved any form of government two years ago, when anyone left to undertake public office could hardly sign their own names and hold their pee for more than two hours. Now, if you’re keeping the math you probably realized that I have a couple of years left as I write this. As I said at the beginning, I am not afraid. I have so much food and water stored into the big warehouse just outside the city limits that I could survive for another twenty years. As part of our new education programs, we all learned how to grow all sorts of vegetables and train working animals, in addition to basic survival skills that will allow me to remain self-sufficient for as long as possible. I have a plan to go away peacefully, which I made when I was still an adult but is simple enough for a kid to accomplish. And there are many dogs living in the city, so I am never alone. We share the uncanny feeling of having minds that exceed our bodies, and we exchange complicit glances on the street.

I have decided to live the time I have left as a true kid, shedding off everything that kept me into some freaky version of an adult until now. Writing is the last thing on my list, and the hardest one to let go of. But my hand is hurting and it is so beautiful and quiet outside, it just makes me want to drop everything and put my feet in the dirt, running in circles and flying twigs and making airplane sounds.