The 1975ers

Our Short Story Contest Winner

Dear Republic,

We share the winner of our month-long short story contest — Michael Maiello’s “The 1975ers, which wins our first-place $500 cash prize. From our judges:

“The 1975ers” is a standout: high-concept and laugh-out-loud funny, but also emotionally resonant. The story manages to skillfully tackle the narrator’s attempts to come to terms with his impending death from a virus affecting everyone born in 1975 while also working in references to Casey Affleck, Jay Z, 50 Cent, two-thirds of The Black Eyed Peas and the sitcom Different Strokes. It’s a high-wire act and the story could have easily come off as trying too hard to be clever, but Michael Maiello knows what he’s doing. And he sticks the ending with a sentence that brings to mind Isaac Babel’s claim that “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

-Wim Hylen

THE 1975ers

In memory of David Burr Gerrard, author of Short Century and The Epiphany Machine.

Despite objections from the Ford Motor Company, the Ford Foundation and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, the virus killing 51-year-olds worldwide has taken on the name Ford Simplex Virus, after the name of the laboratory that had discovered it lying dormant in every human being born in 1975, activating this year without warning, killing every time.

Ford Medical Research Laboratories of Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, is not affiliated with the Ford Motor Company, the Ford Foundation or the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. That the fast-acting and lethal virus only affects people born the year Gerald R. Ford became the unelected president of the United States, is a total coincidence. To be fair to Ford, people outside of the U.S. aren’t even that caught up in the naming coincidence.

A lot of people think Ford Simplex is a hoax, perhaps a means of control through the media and some transmission of poison. Some blame the Central Intelligence Agency, some blame China. If the person who believes this was born in 1975, they die anyway. Or, they will, some time this year. On HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver remarked, “If you were going to create a worldwide conspiracy to control people, you would not target Generation X. You would just continue to ignore them, like everybody else does.” Then Oliver, born two years later, added, “I’ve never been so happy to almost be a Millennial.”

It took a while to find the pattern, of course. Months, really. Dying at 51 isn’t common, but it’s not unheard of. You can be 51 and still die of something else. Strokes happen. Planes crash. Nobody chews a black and blue piece of Strip House filet 32 times. You would look like a maniac doing that. Or a stroke victim.

I figured we’d die on our birthdays, but my primary care guy, who is cherubic, collects classic cars with an emphasis on Alfa Romeo, and has a budget degree from Guyana, says, “It will just happen this year.” He adds that I still need a colonoscopy. “Insurance will cover it,” he says. “Early detection is key.”

“But I’m going to die.”

He sends me a referral for his butt guy and another for a cardiologist as I need a stress test to make sure I can handle the anesthesia for the bottom play, because I have high blood pressure which, like Ford Simplex, my doctor says I was born with. I’ll probably die in the Commonwealth Health Portal, scheduling with specialists.

While John Oliver is safe because he’s younger than me, my wife Ilyana is thankfully safe because she is a few years older. Our daughter Clara has nothing to fear from Ford Simplex but losing me. I feel very guilty for that, I just do. Professionals and well-meaning people alike tell me not to feel that way. They are right. But I imagine the moments I’ll miss, where she will have expected me.

Ilyana has raised Clara from an Eastern European heritage that seeks to at least accept the possibility that the world is cruel and random. My name’s Malone. So I keen over my future absence at graduations, first jobs, a wedding, a birth. Ilyana says, “Whenever you go, it will be too soon. It will be too soon even if you live a thousand years.” That is a very nice and meaningful and poignant thing to say. I just wish she were saying it about somebody else.

She says I have to look at each day as a gift. She’s right. A lot of people didn’t make it past January. Here we are in late spring. Every day is a stay, an appeal. The congregation at the cathedral where Ilyana and Clara go on Sundays has lost three. I usually only show up for Christmas and Easter, but now I go for their memorials. I am looked on kindly but also with palpable pity. When people like you, they know your birthday, so this has been tough on society.

Of course, there are clamors for explanations and treatments and cures. Of course, industry has mobilized, they say. But we feel abandoned. Most people weren’t born in 1975. For most people, this is someone else’s problem. “It’s the Rapture,” some say, “you should want to be taken to heaven.” Others believe it is a hoax and that none of these people are dead at all, just taken by aliens looking for human specimens born in the year when Kodak developed its first digital camera.

Serious efforts to stop the disease are slow. I know I’m being cynical, but I wonder if they’re actually just not motivated to find a cure. We are, or were, like 0.8% of the U.S. population and falling. It’s not a growth business, it’s a one-time opportunity, slipping away. If only somebody with influence and power like Jay-Z had been born in 1975, but we got 50 Cent, instead. Casey Affleck, rather than Ben. Two thirds of The Black Eyed Peas. It’s even acceptable to mention in public that this might not be a bad thing, just the Earth culling the human population in a controlled way, for the overall benefit of nature, as if Gaia is real and hates “Love Will Keep Us Together,” the anthem of 1975.

Nobody seems in a hurry to save us. They just say they will.

I’m trying all of the internet cures. Ilyana won’t let me take this lying down. I do seven minutes of Tai Chi every morning. I drink mushroom coffee with adaptive species of fungi clinically proven to improve my immune health. I megadose Vitamin C until I know who Linus Pauling is. I meditate nightly. And morningly. And mid-daylingly. I wear a magnetic wristband that aligns my fields and chakras. I monitor my vitals through every device I carry or wear, until I’m not sure whether to wind my ass or scratch my watch. I have no idea what I will do if my devices trigger a warning. By then, I am told, it’s too late.

Ford Simplex death is an unexpected system failure, leading to a forced reboot without the re, or the boot. It’s a sudden shutdown, like a vacuum cleaner being dragged so far down the hallway that its cord is ripped from the socket.

They say it’s painless. But they haven’t gone through it, have they?

If I am lucky, I have through December 31st, which is 1.47% of my entire life. It’s the same amount of time I spent in mom’s tummy. I think, from either vantage, that’s a very short time that feels long, maybe infinite.

I still go to work. I still make mortgage payments. My life insurance company offers to pay me right now, at a 30% discount, and I say “no.” I am still planning for the future.

“But you could die tomorrow,” says Ilyana.

“That was always true, my daffodil.” I call her that because she looks like the flower, all attention drawn to her wide face, ringed with golden hair.

Despite impending finality, we argue over stupid things, in sitcomish defiance of time’s arrow, because we were raised on and by TV families, wondering why our parents didn’t run public television networks or work as New York City tycoons who adopted kids from Harlem for fun. We still think about and discuss what they promised us on television as children, when we had all the time in the world.

Clara worries over every activity and outing, from volleyball practice to hanging out with friends to studying or playing video games. She thinks she should spend all of her time with me, and a lot of 75er children are going to look at this year as a loss socially, academically, and artistically.

I try to encourage her to live a more normal life. We talk in her bedroom, which still celebrates her childhood. Her walls are covered with colorful abstract paintings that she made between the ages of 3 and 6, when Ilyana bartered her services in marketing and public relations to an entrepreneur from church, who had started a Brooklyn art studio focused on teaching children and childlike adults. Clara’s toys, mostly Nintendo figurines from the “Legend of Zelda,” hide on shelves and her bureau. The Hunger Games books are prominently displayed. Then there were all of the instruments she had tried to play, the guitar, the bass, the banjo, the ukulele and a lone snare drum with a pair of black sticks.

Clara looks like she could have stepped out of her mother’s yearbook, with her shoulder-length blonde hair, upturned nose and pale blue eyes which, this year, are always near teary. “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t know that I had made every effort to spend time with you.”

”We have spent time. We will spend time. All we get is the life we’re given, you know. That’s true with or without the virus.”

“Are you scared?”

“Nothing scares me except heights, small spaces and tree nuts. And that third one is really more of an allergy.”

“No, no, I can’t go,” she deliberately pushes Monkeys are Made of Chocolate, a Costa Rica travel-memoir I had given her, to the edge of the desk.

“What if you don’t go and they find a cure?”

“Then I’ll have spent time with you.”

“Clara, you’re going to spend more time with the world than with me no matter what happens and that’s the point of life, my petal.”

Clara believes I am going to die and Ilyana believes it, too. But I don’t. I think there’s going to be an out for me. Call it a personal anthropic principle, I have to survive just to be around to ask what makes me so special. Clara is unconvinced, but I insist that she go to Costa Rica. She wanted to go before this ridiculous pandemic pandamned us, so she should go now.

The next day, I go to work because Talxalot, the software company where I’ve been trying to make my fortune, views us 1975er employees like any others who could not show up on any given day because they are dead or in rehab.

Also, the U.S. government doesn’t view being born in 1975 as any sort of disability from the standpoints of rights and benefits. It had been proposed, but a Congressional lady from Colorado argued, “Everybody born in 1812 is dead. Every single one of them. And we don’t make special accommodations for them, born in a year named after a war.”

1975ers are expected to work and pay bills and plan for our futures, like anybody else. Doesn’t matter what the job is. You can even still fly a plane if you’re 51, so long as your co-pilot isn’t the same age.

Not all of us 75ers can just fuck off to Woodstock 99. Clara is going to college in two years. Every dollar I make and don’t spend can go towards that. Yes, it would suck to die in the cubes and canyons of a company that “imbues digital experiences with human emotion to drive opportunity with a relentless focus on strategic execution and value creation,” but if I do die in those environs, all of my stock vests and goes to Ilyana and Clara. If I quit or get fired or take a page from Sartre (who I am not sure I ever understood in the first place) that stock goes back to our founder. Our founder is so rich that he is taking classes to wrestle a bear, all to settle an argument with the founder of a competing company, over whether The Revenant is a good 21st-century film. Whatever happens to me, I want Clara and Ilyana to have the stock. And I really want the bear to teach our founder about Darwin.

Today is my birthday, which this year goes unmentioned at home and work. Nobody does birthdays at work this year, everybody knows it’s in bad taste. There’s such a global cultural consensus about this that the website Slate actually ran an article arguing that we should bring back the office birthday party.

Soon after I reach my desk (which isn’t really “mine,” we all share work stations) I am summoned to meet Dan from People Leadership. Dan reports right up to our Chief People Officer. We know better than to call people resources. We people are not like coal or coffee or bananas or anything useful. We are special.

Dan was born in 1985, a year without a disease and with nothing to apologize for but The Cosby Show. Dan is tall and thin. He has short and tufty red hair, an equine face and wears thick, square-framed glasses. People who get the reference to The Muppet Show call Dan “Beaker,” but Dan has never watched the Muppets. He knows he’s being mocked, though, and he’s got a bit of a chip on about it.

We meet in a small “huddle room” with a white table and a pair of uncomfortable chairs. The “huddle” rooms are designed to repel, so that people don’t camp out in them all day. The air is oddly warm in any season and there’s always a container from somebody’s lunch in the wastebasket.

“These are difficult and uncertain times,” Dan says. The words had become something of a standard greeting over the past few months. “And we have to expect more from people while they deal with unprecedented challenges.”

“I think I’m holding up pretty well, Be-- Dan.”

“Well, that’s good. We want all of our people to hold up well.”

Again, thanks to the good lady of Colorado, it’s fine to lay off 1975ers. We’re not treated differently for having Ford Simplex. It’s an advantage, really (is what she said) that we don’t have to worry about the “low rent discrimination of special treatment.” What keeps companies like Talxalot from just getting rid of us is that when we’re gone, they’re all going to have to live with each other. Nobody wants to look callous or ruthless or mean. They want to be those things, sure, but they don’t ever want to be called them.

So, I defend myself. The lizard brain takes over: “I am, by all measures, more productive this year than last, which is amazing if you think about it,” I say. This is not hyperbole. My job is to help our clients use the Talxalot platform to improve their customer relations by using the Talxalot AI platform. My success is measured by a combination of client retention and rising average revenue per account, meaning that after talking to me, they sign up for higher tiers of service. “I am totally killing it,” I add. “Top-tier performer by all metrics.” According to our comp tables, I should be eligible for increased equity if I make it to the fourth quarter, and accelerated vesting of my previous awards. These are the facts. I am good at my job.

Dan shrugs.

“Malone, I just want to start by saying that we really value your contributions here at Talxalot. You know, you’re right, your metrics are strong. A lot of 1975ers get distracted, but you seem driven to work harder. It’s really admirable. I would say it’s even brave, though I don’t want to discriminate against you by complimenting your work.”

“Thank you, Dan. Honestly, I’ve always considered myself more of a coward. I didn’t eat a raw oyster until I was 25.”

”The thing is that Talxalot has, well, changed a lot. The economy has changed and we’ve evolved. A lot. Society has changed, our customers have changed, and so the way we do business as a company has to change. I mean, you might have noticed that just this week we hired a Director of Transformation. I wanted to call the position Director of Change but he thought it sounded too much like a cashier.”

Dan stood, took a plastic cup from the dispenser on the watercooler and filled it. I stood and also got some water. We had to sort of dance with each other to get back into our chairs. When we settled, Dan belched, “The metrics we have been using to measure your performance for the purposes of compensation and promotion no longer apply.”

To answer the expression on my face, likely the one of a driver who has just had a parking spot stolen from him outside of a crowded sports arena, Dan says: “This is from senior management and the board,” as if he were Moses, being questioned impertinently by some wandering nobodies about why all the new rules are on two stone tablets of dubious origin and not up for discussion. “But, you know, one thing is that, as you know, we do promotions and equity grants next February. So, if you do well on the new requirements and you’re still with us, you’re up for everything promised.”

”But you assume I’ll be dead.”

“Malone, nobody is saying that.” He finishes his water. “Not at all. Nobody is saying anything about you specifically. In fact, this has nothing to do with the virus or anything like that at all. See, this is why I should never have complimented your bravery under these conditions. Even in a friendly way, I opened the door of discrimination which can never be shut! But this has nothing to do with when you were born. It has to do with when you were hired and what we were looking for then and what we need now. Right now, we’re hiring for very high-level intelligence. Off the charts kind of stuff. Crazy math people with very full chalkboards and unmown lawns at home.”

“I’m smart, you know. I have a B.S. in Philosophy. From Hartford University.”

“Malone, I was hired for soft skills, too. We are just asking that everybody who was hired back then take the tests they would need to take to be hired now. No big deal. Heck, an applicant has to take these tests on their own time, you’ll be paid.”

“And if the tests don’t go well, I’m fired?”

“More like, unhired. But let’s not start out as Doomers. Management has requested this, and we should do it, right?”

So, the meeting ends. Dan will send me a testing schedule, starting next Monday. The tests will take up a week. I point out that this will interfere with my ability to retain and upsell customers, and he tells me not to worry.

One thing about knowing you could die at any moment is that you suspect you’re dying at any moment, and that’s a hard trip to abandon. I go back to my cubicle, and I start calling clients like a machine, trying to make up for all the good work that won’t get done next week, while I am answering multiple-choice questions to save my job. It’s an impossible task. Dan’s already wasted much of my Wednesday and tomorrow is “Friday junior” and after that is real Friday.

I call, leave messages, follow up by text, my heart’s fluttering the whole time, and I think, this is it, I won’t have to take the tests and I will die here and at least be able to transfer my stock to my family. I work hard but I live through it. Later, I learn that Skip McCallister, an accounts payable manager based in Oklahoma City, died that afternoon, at lunchtime, Central Time. He was a 1975er. Nobody knows if the virus got him or if he choked on a chicken wing served to him as part of a “free appetizer on your birthday” special put on by the chain restaurant that he had treated himself to for a birthday lunch alone. Skip and I had the same birthday.

I make it home alive. Ilyana and Clara celebrate my birthday by making homemade sushi together. They have gathered supplies and ingredients and techniques in secret. They even took a class together. The meal is magnificent and joyous and we all laugh as each maki, nigori and sashimi slice has its own, largely anthropomorphized story. The meal is, in fact, a break from all that’s going on. It can’t last forever, but I’ll never forget it.

Later, Clara studies and I’m sitting on our royal blue sofa with Ilyana. We have generous pours of ruby gamay, served in bulbous glasses atop thin stems. As we wind back into the real world, I tell Ilyana about my day and she tears it down to the bones, as she is a vicious hunter of facts. “Whatever you do on those tests, they’ll find a reason to let you go, obviously.”

“And cancel my equity.”

“Your own founder said on social media that it’s insane to give long-term incentives to short-term people.”

“Should I call a lawyer?”

“They’d love that. They want to get into a multiyear battle with a guy who they expect will be dead any day now.”

I put my glass down.

“It’d be funny if they cured this thing, wouldn’t it?”

“It’d be a miracle. It would be a blessing. It wouldn’t be funny.”

“You could die taking those tests. And for what?”

“What if I do really well? What if it helps my career? I’m not one of those people who can just act like there’s no future. You know, like all those people who suddenly took up smoking as if it’s a badge of honor to die with blackened lungs.”

I couldn’t listen to her. I did show up for work the next week and I took all the tests. In 30 minutes I learned that I wasn’t the extrovert I thought I was, that I was conscientious, eager to please, and comically neurotic. Who knew that 90 multiple-choice questions in thirty minutes could reveal so much?

I took the cognitive assessments and did well. All of that algebra and geometry I thought I’d never use was still lurking about, ready for its cue to come to the stage. Ethically, I outperformed. I took no short cuts, even though each day’s passage either brought me towards the ultimate accountability or total freedom from it, depending on your point of view.

At the end of the week, Dan unhires me. “You’ve been a great member of the team and we appreciate all of your contributions, but you’re just not what we’re looking for.”

I threaten to file a complaint with the attorney general and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. I tell him I’ll get my own attorney and bring him to court.

“Is that really how you want to spend your time?” he says. He offers this as advice, as if he is asking a sage question that will free me to enjoy whatever days I have in front of me. I realize at that moment that it is not, though. It’s a dare, a challenge even. He knows that complaints against employers almost never succeed and that when they do, they take time that I don’t have. Maybe Ilyana could carry on a lawsuit for my equity and whatever else I’m owed, but is that what I want to leave for her and Clara? Dad’s gone. Let’s keep up the fight against Dan for whatever time we have left.

Time slows and though I don’t move and Dan doesn’t move either, I feel a distance grow between us, as if I’m being sucked into my own mind. I feel my brain putting away all of the thinking parts that want to do the right thing, to get along with people and to live according to that poster they used to show us in school about how they teach us everything we need to know about life in kindergarten. When all those thinking parts are safely hibernating, I lunge with my right arm, like a bear swiping its paw, and what happens is that the tip of my ring finger lands right in Dan’s eye and the heel of my hand crushes the bridge of his nose. My hand lands onto the white table, leaving a bloody paw print.

There is so much blood! I had never hit anybody before, but you don’t figure that people should bleed so easily. I think maybe it’s his fault. Maybe he’s some sort of inbred hemophiliac. Maybe firing people for a living has made him soft. Or maybe I’m better at swatting people than I’d imagined and had left a special calling unexplored for all these years.

My brain releases the thinking parts again and I realize with horror that Dan has flopped from his chair and that his blood has turned his blue gingham shirt into a sullied butcher’s cloth. People have seen this and the office is frantic with motion. The door bursts open, people push past me to help Dan. There are cries to call security and the police. These cries are heeded. Two thick NYPD officers take me into another conference room to ask me what happened. I am honest. I tell them everything.

“We have to take you in,” says Officer Rodriguez, though I gather he’s not thrilled about it.

“You really have to?” I say. “I could die in jail, just waiting to be arraigned.”

“That’s always true,” says Officer Rodriguez. “I don’t have a choice.”

I’m in the back of the police car and they’re driving me down to 100 Centre Street which is central booking in New York. I don’t know this, of course. Rodriguez tells me everything that’s going to happen. He doesn’t have to do that, he says. His partner just nods, doesn’t say anything. “Do me a favor,” says Rodriquez. “Don’t talk to anybody about what you did, or didn’t do or why you did it or didn’t do it. It can’t help.”

Rodriguez and his partner lead me to the stone entrance of central booking where I am assembled with a group of newly arrested people and brought inside by a trio of corrections officers. We are pat-down searched and the guy in charge says, “Just behave and wait for your time with the judge. And be nice to my guys. They’re not the ones who arrested you, right?”

Rodriguez is long gone. He’s the only reason I think I’m not going to die in there and he’s gone. The holding cell is a pen with about thirty people in it. There’s no place to sit. The people who are sitting don’t look eager to scooch over. You wouldn’t ask them, anyway, not even on the subway. There’s one toilet and sink with a water fountain attached for all of us. There’s no information, no updates. I just stand and wait with the others. It’s cold. There’s a vent blowing cold air into the room. Some kid wets paper towels in the water fountain and uses impressive acrobatic techniques to try to plug the vent with the soggy towels. This has no effect. Time passes and school lunches are brought in: sunbutter sandwiches and nearly expired cartons of milk. I want to ask if I am supposed to get a phone call but I heed the advice of Officer Rodriguez and say nothing. I can only cause further trouble.

I am eventually led out in a line with about a dozen other guys, told the whole way how lucky I am that the court has decided to stay open to process cases, or I would have had to wait overnight to see my fate.

I am assigned an attorney who I don’t meet until I am in front of the judge, a pudgy and serious looking man on a high bench. I feel like a child staring up at the teacher’s desk. He and my attorney, who has barely introduced himself to me, speak quickly about the facts of the case and I am released on my own recognizance, with the order to commit no acts of violence. My attorney elbows me and smiles, “You’re not allowed to commit acts of violence anyway, right?”

An investigation must occur, says the judge. To create time for so serious a matter, he sets a trial date for late 2026. I realize it’s a kind of parole. I thank the judge, he doesn’t even acknowledge me. I walk out of central booking and it’s nighttime.

I don’t feel badly about hitting Dan, but I’m not proud of it, either. There’s no amount of fights I could get into that would change the circumstances. 1975 already happened and I am part of it.

I don’t count the days, but I try to live differently. I don’t think about work, or Dan. I practice Spanish with Clara and we research the history and culture of Costa Rica together. I go on dates with Ilyana, which I realize we had somehow stopped doing over the years. We see silly Broadway shows with dancers and puppets. We eat rich foods served in tiny courses. We take from my retirement savings without worry.

Then one day in July, we drive Clara to Newark International, pay to park and walk in with her as far as they allow, me dragging her big suitcase towards check-in. We all hug and kiss and we watch Clara go through security.

We put the car back in the garage and then we walk back to our apartment, holding hands. Ilyana cries and I say we miss Clara already, but that’s not what’s bothering my daffodil.

She says the last few months have been a long goodbye, as if we were two strangers who had met, become infatuated, shared a fabulous night and then tried to separate, only to find ourselves walking in the same direction. It’s both awkward and wonderful, she says. That’s the last thing I remember.

Michael Maiello is a New York-city based author and playwright. His work has been published by McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Weekly Humorist, Vautrin, and New Pop Lit. He writes the free substack “Middlebrow Musings.”