A photo album titled: Your Grandchildren
What you get, by law, is a box the size of a fist. Everyone who can prove citizenship gets one, no different than a passport or the right to vote. Out here at the North Coast station we cover most residents in the 707 area code. They haven’t split it up yet, and that makes us one of the biggest stations in the state, maybe the country. You can see it from miles away on the turnpike, this huge grey building that looks like a row of office towers laid on their sides. The bureaucracy sits in the building out front, a couple of offices where you can get your power-of-attorney forms approved or appeal an inspector’s decision or get on a waitlist as soon as a doctor signs a Probable Viable Pregnancy form. Otherwise, it’s just the afterboxes. Hallways and hallways, rows upon rows—a storehouse of all the things people believe will follow them into the next life.
You can see the building from space, they say. It looks like fingers, like a hand reaching out.
A tiny vial of blood, smuggled
A Swiss Army Knife
Twelve gold coins
Out in the hills there’s a billionaire with a box the size of a dozen airplane hangars. Inside he’s been building a facsimile of the neighbourhood he grew up in and a facsimile of the estate he lives on now. He’s building a grain silo and a water tower, a seed vault and a gun locker, a bunker and a stockpile of antibiotics. By law the doors of the box must stay open while there are workers inside.
A yearbook page
Not far from the original mine in Arizona the cops found a cult commune, its members all gone but one. In a small cabin at the centre of the ranch the spiritual leader’s assistant sat next to the leader’s body, whispering a small chant of gratitude. On the other side of the property, outside a sealed, shack-sized box, they found a fading mandala in the sand and a hundred pairs of shoes.
A recipe for bundt cake
If you drive a few miles south of here, into the Bay Area proper, you’ll find the Green Hospice, where people go to die altruistically. Years ago, a technology baron donated money to build a box the size of a single-family home, and at all times the box is filled with refuse—landfill trash, nuclear waste, contaminated material from the Superfund sites. Every time a resident of the Green Hospice is on the verge of dying, the box is marked with a sample of their hair or blood, and in dying they rid the world of a small piece of its ugliness. The hospice is run by Orthodox Ascensionists. They believe the next world to be a place of infinite space and infinite grace, and so believe it a sin not to use one’s death this way, as a cleansing rite. They post pictures of every deceased, along with a picture of the garbage they take with them, and a small note of thanks. Should everyone choose to die this way, they say, the world would be made significantly cleaner.
Underwear
Last Christmas the Supreme Court ruled against the assisted-dying facility in Burlington. In the year since, all fifty-four petitioners in that case have died. Only not together, and not without pain.
A bottle of aspirin
A Purple Heart
War and Peace in miniature print
Around noon, a woman and her son walk in. The boy is maybe six years old and too thin. There’s a strange device strapped to his arm; it looks like a clear phone case and there’s some kind of liquid inside. A tube snakes from the case to a needle in the crook of the boy’s arm. It appears painful and he can’t bend his arm, but he looks happy.
It must be the case that sets off the metal detector, but the security guard waves the woman and the boy through anyway. The woman takes a number, but she doesn’t get two steps toward the chairs before an inspector calls her ahead of everyone else, and if anyone in the waiting area thinks this is unfair, they don’t say it.
The woman has all kinds of paperwork, but the inspector doesn’t look at it. He smiles at the boy instead and asks him what he’s got there in his hand. A Transformer, the boy says. That’s so cool, the inspector replies.
The inspector leads the woman and her son down a hallway. I follow them, keeping my distance. I watch.
The inspector opens an empty slot. Each slot sits atop a scale, and every time the weight of the slot drops for an instant to almost nothing, a little light on the slot’s lid turns from red to amber to green. The inspector takes a gloved hand and makes a small show of pulling a single hair from the boy’s head, pretends it’s a magic trick of sorts. The boy laughs. The inspector places the hair in a tiny compartment within the slot’s lid and on the lid’s digital screen a checkmark appears.
I’ve seen this before. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. There are rules, procedures.
It’s all yours, the inspector says. He pushes the slot inwards and it pops out, revealing the inner compartment. The boy gently tries to places his toy inside, but it won’t fit. The inspector’s face drops but the boy says, Hold on. Awkwardly with one hand he manipulates the toy, turns it from robot to car, and as a car it just barely fits.
The inspector says Yay, and the boy says Yay, and as the slot slides closed the boy’s mother breaks down crying.
A scented candle
A wristwatch
A Taser
There are protestors in the parking lot. It’s a bigger crowd than usual. Usually we get them on Sundays and on Christmas Day and today happens to be both. On one side of the lot the Second Amendment people are demonstrating against the handgun ban. It’s said the standard box size for government slots was chosen specifically to be too small for guns, and I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but in the years since, they’ve come up with smaller guns, so now there’s a ban. It’s not universal. None of the rules are. In New York State you can’t store anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon; some folks have been turned away with their grandmother’s sewing kit. In Delaware, you can put a grenade in if it fits. But here in California you can’t store guns, and every Sunday someone’s out in the parking lot protesting.
On the other side of the lot is an assortment of the outraged devout. Every religion, it seems, has a branch or denomination that considers what goes on here heretical. They stop people on their way in, the same way members of the Forward Club do, but instead of trying to convince people to put the latest gadgets in their slots so as to keep the next life as advanced as this one, they try to convince them not to use the slots at all. If God exists, do you think these things will help you, they ask. And if God doesn’t exist, do you think these things will help you then?
Some people stop and listen. Most don’t. It’s hard to uppercase God in a place like this.
Otherwise it’s quiet. The most excitement we get for the rest of the day is when a detective and a plainclothes show up with a warrant. I shuffle over to the hallway where the slot they’re looking for is. I watch the guy from the law enforcement liaison’s office turn the master key. The detective looks inside. It’s empty.
When did it clear? the detective asks.
The liaison officer checks the paperwork. It never did, he says. It’s always been empty.
The detective curses. He hands the slot back to the liaison officer and walks off, the plainclothes following.