“Tell me what you felt when your Keith of twenty years was selected,” I request.

“Relief,” she says. Once a Keith is absent, you remember the tasks you no longer have to do for him, the catheter that can go unchanged. “Embarrassment,” she adds. As soon as they opened him, she experienced the same emotion she had as a newlywed hosting a dinner party, when her mother-in-law pulled up a pair of dirty panties from between the couch cushions.

What did I feel at the death of my husband?

“I felt like I had run errands and forgotten to turn off the oven.”

I was convinced the oven would burn down an entire city block.

At the base of an inactive volcano or hunkered in an abandoned nuclear missile silo, there exists a secret Keith Fulfillment Center for elite members. Gossip is that Keiths in the secret center receive pharmaceuticals that are significantly gentler but manufactured at exorbitant cost. Keiths in the warehouses don’t have to be perfect—though we do try—provided that they are profitable. But barbiturates are taxing in perpetual doses, so our Keiths often have coronary complications from the medication elevating their blood pressure. They have persistent pneumonia issues or, should they have to depend on those training wheels for oxygenation, fluid in their lungs from ventilators. It doesn’t really matter that they’re not quite right, as they are universal donor Keiths or Crystals or Jamals, put into production from a consenting original because they can mix and match with the majority of our general members. This secret center, which is also rumored to be outfitted with snipers and hydroponic vegetables, can double as a high-tech survivalist shelter in the event of a revolution by artificial intelligence, or as a respite from the climate refugee crisis and other unpleasant news.

I’m at a loss as to why these high-quality Keiths are hidden from us. The staff wouldn’t complain about caring for Premium Keiths—it’s not as if the Keiths themselves notice the subtleties between top-of-the-line drugs versus standard sedatives. Yet I’ve also heard that these pampered Keiths are bespoke Keiths, tailored to suit an individual genome, thus eliminating the original’s reliance upon immunosuppressants. If that is the case, then the Keiths wouldn’t qualify as Keiths per se, but as facsimiles of the board, the identical scions of company founders. During happy hour, a nurse in Georges envisions us wheeling in these executives to doze through shareholder meetings while their progenitors are preoccupied. As a result of imagining such an amusing scenario, we come up with a theory for all this clandestine Keithing: our bosses’ bosses’ bosses and their friends don’t want us observing them while they’re drooling on themselves. It’s of no consequence that the droolers aren’t them, if the public can’t pick the CEOs from the droolers.

Honestly, caring for drooling CEOs would almost be reassuring, since it would mean that we still have some career security—that no one lives indefinitely, not yet. When scientists in another secret center solve the problem of senescence for our bosses and ensure their immortality, we will be made redundant, but not as redundant as the Keiths. I understand that aging has something to do with the buildup of damage, which sounds a lot like what it’s like to grieve, the monotony interrupted briefly for random incidents of frustration and stupidity, such as losing my wedding ring after a visit to the emergency room and finding it later, as a widow, in a bottle of my dead husband’s medication. Or it is like submitting another year-end report of my growth and harvest statistics and being told I must increase my target number of dispatched Keiths. Perhaps I would want to live forever if, like it is for the bosses, my participation in work and sickness were optional. There should be an organ that collects sorrow, that filters it through a pliable labyrinth of lobes or valves, and that isthmus of sadness we could replace, too, when it was worn out, for as Keith has nothing to dream about, he has nothing to mourn. His organ of woe would always stay pink and vital.