I check the electronic clock positioned high up on the wall. It is nearly time. Any minute now the last shipment that I was responsible for, before I left my job, will be coming into dock. At Harwich they'll be expecting it empty. Hundreds of vast containers that were loaded with the effluence of our consumption, returning for a refill, the contents having been dumped in Jenjarom and Klang for small children to pick through the rubbishrubble mountains searching for something they can clean and sell, or take back to their family to use themselves. Plastic bags and yoghurt pots. But the container ship won't be empty. I changed the instructions to logistics at the last moment. It will be full, full to bursting with the detritus of our lives. And then the containers will be delivered outside Parliament and dumped. It wasn't easy to arrange. It cost me. I remortgaged the house, but it will be worth it. There is an underworld of wastemanagement in much the same way there are drug-traffickers and an underground slave-trade. Just because it's under the surface doesn't mean it's not there. Where there's demand, there's always supply. The doctor returns with my morphine injection. I didn’t ask for it, but it’s compulsory. Since euthanasia was legalized in this country, clients have been able to choose the method of dispatch, but pain control is still mandatory. There are several options for death. There was a menu. It came with the glossy acceptance pack that also contained advertising for coffins and funerals. I found the thick paged glossiness of the package unnecessary and distasteful. I recycled it as soon as I had chosen. For me there was no real option. I have to be consumed as I have consumed.
13|GREEN ZINE
She has administered the injection and I’m left alone in the Peace Zone, as they call it. But I will not find peace until it’s finally happening, until I am no longer a stain on this once-beautiful Earth. No longer able to defile it with my waste. As lightly as I have stepped these last few months, even that has been too much. I’ve felt it. It pains me. Even my breath is sordid, tainted, a further burden on the slag-heap of humanity. In a few minutes she will return and take my notebook away, lock it in the storage box bearing my number for the minimum 50 years. No point keeping it longer than that. I expect the police will come looking, but they won’t find anything in there. I’ve not tried to hide anything. It will be apparent very soon, and once the flame is lit, it will be too late. So what happens next? A sublime beautiful nothing. Utter emptiness and weightlessness. I can’t wait to feel that for the first time in my life, even if the experience will be fractionally brief. I will soon be led to ‘The Exit’, as I overheard a nurse calling it earlier. The room in which my body, emptied of everything I have consumed, will itself be consumed. To the flames. And then I will disappear. Into thin air.