Poor Larry, he'd stayed in his room for days after the final Newsweek cover story. The headline, big and bold, it said: “It's Hip to Be Dead!”

All those years of Larry and his band dressing like zombies or vampires in black velvet and dragging dirty shrouds, stomping around graveyards all night wrapped in rosary necklaces and capes, all that effort wasted. Now even soccer moms were emigrating. Old church ladies were emigrating. Lawyers wearing business suits were emigrating.

The last issue of Time magazine, the cover story said: “Death Is the New Life.”

Now poor Larry, he's stuck with Eve and his dad and Tracee, the whole family emigrating together in a four-door Buick parked in a suburban split-level ranch-house garage. All of them breathing carbon monoxide and eating cheese popcorn with their dog.

Still reading, Tracee says, “As less hemoglobin is available to carry oxygen, your cells begin to suffocate and die.”

There was still television on some channels, but all they played was the video sent back by the space mission to Venus.

It was the stupid space program that had started all this. The manned mission to explore the planet Venus. The crew sent back their video of the planet surface, the face of Venus as this garden paradise. After that, the accident wasn't because of chipped insulation panels or broken O-rings or pilot error. It wasn't an accident. The crew just chose not to deploy their landing parachutes. Fast as a meteor, the outer hull of their spacecraft burst into flame. Static and—The End.

The same way that World War II gave us the ballpoint pen, the space program had proved the human soul was immortal. What everybody called the Earth was just a processing station that all souls had to pass through. A step in some kind of refining process. Like the cracking tower used to turn crude oil into gasoline or kerosene. As soon as human souls had been refined on Earth, then we would all incarnate on the planet Venus.

In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process.

Sure, it sounded nuts, but there was the video sent back by the space mission that crashed itself on purpose.

On television, all they played was the video. As the mission's landing vehicle orbited lower and lower, dipping down inside the cloud layers covering the planet, the astronauts sent back this footage of people and animals living as friends, everyone smiling so hard their faces seemed to glow. In the video the astronauts sent back, everyone was young. The planet was a Garden of Eden. The landscape of forests and oceans, flower meadows and towering mountains, it was always springtime, the government said.

After that, the astronauts refused to deploy the parachutes. They drove straight down, pow, into the flowers and sweet lakes of Venus. All that was left was this grainy, hazy few minutes of video they sent back. What looked like fashion models wearing glittery tunics in a science-fiction future. Men and women with long legs and hair, sprawled, eating grapes on the steps of marble temples.

It was heaven, but with sex and booze and God's complete permission.

It was a world where the Ten Commandments were: Party. Party. Party.

“Beginning with headache and nausea,” Tracee reads from her government pamphlet, “symptoms include a faster and faster pulse as your heart tries to get oxygen to your dying brain.”

Eve's brother, Larry, he never really adjusted to the idea of eternal life.

Larry used to have this band, called Wholesale Death Factory. He had this one groupie slut called Jessika. They used to tattoo each other with a sewing needle dipped in black ink. They were so cutting-edge, Larry and Jessika, the very margin of the marginalized. Then death got to be so mainstream. Only it wasn't suicide anymore. Now it was called “emigration.” People's dead, rotting bodies aren't corpses, not anymore. The stinking, bloated piles of them, heaped around the base of each tall building, or poisoned and sprawled on bus-stop benches, now these were called “luggage.” Just left-behind luggage.

The way people had always looked at New Year's Eve as some kind of line drawn in the sand. Some kind of new beginning that didn't ever really happen. That's how people saw emigration, but only if everyone emigrated.

Here was actual proof of life after life. According to government estimates, as many as 1,760,042 human souls were already freed and living a party lifestyle on the planet Venus. The rest of humanity would have to live on through a long series of lifetimes, of suffering, before they were refined enough to emigrate.

Going around, eroding in the Big Rock Tumbler.

Then the government had its big brainstorm:

If all of humanity died at once, then there would be no wombs and no way to reincarnate souls here on Earth.

If humanity went extinct, then we'd all emigrate to Venus. Enlightened or not.

But . . . if only one breeding couple was left behind, the birth of a child could call back a soul. From just a handful of people, the whole process could start again.

Until a couple days ago, you could watch on television as the emigration movement dealt with people who were still noncompliant. You could watch the backward populations that weren't enrolled in the movement, you could see them being forced to emigrate by Emigration Assistance Squads, dressed all in white, carrying clean white machine guns. Whole screaming villages, carpet-bombed to relocate them to the next step in the process. Nobody was going to let a pack of Bible-waving hillbillies keep the rest of us here, here on dirty old planet Earth, the less-than-hip planet, not when we could all hurry on to the next great step in our spiritual evolution. So the hillbillies were poisoned to save them. The African savages were nerve-gassed. The Chinese hordes were nuked.

We'd pushed fluoride and literacy on them, we could push emigration.

If just one hillbilly couple stayed behind, you could become their filthy, ignorant baby. If just one rice-paddy band of Third World tribesmen didn't emigrate, your precious soul could be called back to live—swatting flies and eating spoiled mush studded with brown rat-turds under their sweating-hot Asian sun.

And, yes, sure, this was a gamble. Getting everyone to Venus, together. But now that death was dead, humanity really had nothing to lose.

That was the headline on the last issue of the New York Times: “Death Is Dead.”

USA Today called it “The Death of Death.”

Death had been debunked. Like Santa Claus. Or the Tooth Fairy.

Now life was the only option . . . but now it felt like an endless . . . eternal . . . perpetual . . . trap.

Larry and his rocker slut, Jessika, had been planning to run away. Hide out. Now that death had been co-opted by the mainstream, Larry and Jessika wanted to rebel by staying alive. They'd have a litter of kids. They'd fuck up the spiritual evolution of all humanity. But then Jessika's folks had spiked the milk in her breakfast cereal with ant poison. The End.

After that, Larry went downtown every day to hunt for painkillers in the abandoned pharmacies. Taking Vicodins and breaking windows, Larry said, that was enough enlightenment for him. All day, he'd be stealing cars and driving them through abandoned china shops, coming home stoned and dusted with the white talcum powder from exploded driver-side air bags.

Larry said he wanted to make sure this world was good and used up before he moved on to the next one.