The Stopping Institute

It was a rainy Thursday when I opened the letter nobody wants to get. It was from The Stopping Institute. Of course, there was no return address on the envelope. So I spent some rueful days wondering what would have happened had I merely pitched it in the trash as junk mail, unopened. Because the only contents of the envelope was that little cardstock rectangle with the dreaded words in blue ink on it:

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO STOP.
UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH. ONE MONTH.
HAVE A NICE DAY.

I already knew it wasn’t a joke. I knew all about the people who had disregarded the “invite” and ended up murdered in various gruesome ways. Everybody did by now. I didn’t want to end up like young Mr. V., fed to sharks in his city’s aquarium after hours. Or poor elderly Ms. L., who was steamrolled in front of the bakery where she would purchase her favorite flatbreads. The thing is, even if you tried to comply with the stopping request, there was no guarantee you would stop the correct behavior, or stop in time. And there was an electronic component on the back of the card which apparently let the Institute know the message had been received. God help you if your significant other or kids opened it and just tossed it in the trash without telling you. Because it was your name inscribed at the top of the card. Your fate. Or now, mine.

The first week I stopped smoking weed, drinking, all amours, both aboveboard and belowboard. I stopped swearing, using social media. I stopped self-pleasuring. I even stopped napping. I stopped a lot of other small behaviors that I thought might have some negative connotations. “How do these people even know what I’m doing?” I wondered. I would look around on the street and study my devices for any hints I was being watched or monitored. Nothing. Nothing at all.

After ten days, I received the dreaded second notice.

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO STOP.
UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH.
20 DAYS REMAINING.
HAVE A NICE DAY.

This is when the terror really started in earnest. The thing is, the people who survived these stopping challenges admit they never knew what it was they stopped doing which saved them. There were apps designed to assist you in surviving the challenge; they had checklists. But there were disclaimers on these apps that nobody really knew what motivated The Stopping Institute and there were no guarantees the app could save your life. Even celebrities had fallen victim, politicians and Hollywood types had been offed. The government claimed to be working on breaking up this mysterious syndicate but it wasn’t only in my country. It had gone global. People received the cards in other lands, the warning written in different languages. The result was the same. Some people survived. Some were killed.

I stopped living any semblance of a normal life after the second notice. I stopped working, stopped eating more than was absolutely essential to survive, stopped breathing so much, shallowing my breath with meditation. I spent an entire week sitting zazen, doing absolutely nothing.

And then the third card arrived in the mail.

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO STOP.
UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH.
10 DAYS REMAINING.
HAVE A NICE DAY.

It was at this point that I attempted to seek out survivors of the stopping challenge. Most of them are incommunicado since you can probably imagine the sorts of constant messaging and harassment they receive from those rabidly curious or seeking survival advice. I eventually did connect with an eighty-two-year old man who told me he had “absolutely no clue” why he survived. I asked him what behaviors he had changed. His answer was extremely surprising and worrisome to me. His answer was “Actually, very little.” What the actual fuck.

You might think that you could avoid death by hiding very well on your expiration date. But it doesn’t work like that. The Stopping Institute rarely kills you on that date. They’re deviously patient. That’s just the date when your final, irreversible sentence is passed. They kill at varying intervals after that date. People sometimes miss the real horror of this fact. This means your death sentence either was or wasn’t applied. Either you receive a final notice that you have passed soon after that, or you don’t. This is the absolute worst and most trying period. Sometimes your absolution might arrive very late, depending on the mail service. Each day that passes just pulls your soul further out of your body like taffy. Not a few people choose suicide in this terrible interval.

I was three days away from my expiration date when an explosion in the street sent me into a panic attack. It turned out it was just a droid blowing up a neighboring house in which a wanted criminal had taken shelter. Whew.

But it brought home how little time I had left. And something in me snapped. I just stopped caring. I made my peace with death and just stopped worrying. I began to resume behaviors I had stopped. If it really was a moral project the Institute was enforcing on humanity, it was dumb. Fake. And my changes in my behavior had been fake. On the last day, I bought a big chocolate cake and ate it in my underwear while watching Seinfeld reruns. Fuck the Institute.

Six days later, I saw the envelope in my mail. Blank return address. I opened it and read:

THANK YOU FOR STOPPING.
HAVE A NICE DAY.

That was it. I would be lying if I say I didn’t feel the expected elation. I knew I could “out myself” to the press if I wanted a shit ton of attention as a survivor who had played the game and won (clueless as I was about it all). But it just seemed like another waste of time. Like the game itself. But wait. I’m not telling you the best part yet.

I had only told a few friends what I was going through during this terrible time. I did end up losing my job, but that was typical for this sort of thing. Many relationships and families had been broken apart by the stress the challenge brings to bear upon people. My horrible ex had even been very sympathetic during this time, offering me advice and even physical comfort, should I want it. I had even taken her up on this a few times, although it would have been the last thing I would have done, pre-Stopping. She had even suggested that we probably should get married while the challenge was ongoing. Maybe bachelorhood, she said, was the thing to stop. The day I got my absolution card she proposed to me again. She said it would be the perfect way to celebrate the long life I would now live. But we didn’t tie that Gordian knot. It just wasn’t in the cards.

About a year later, long after we had gone cold again, her sister was feuding with her and instant-messaged me on one of my socials to tell me that The Stopping invite I had received had not actually been a real one. “My bitch sister did that to you. I just wanted you to know,” she typed. And then a laughing emoji followed by a horned devil emoji. A black market of fake invites had arisen. My ex had put me on one of those lists, she said. She paid just under a hundred to torture me back into her clutches. I tried to investigate it, but looking at my card and comparing it with those online it seemed real enough. It had the electronic component on the back. But so did the fakes. I couldn’t even bring myself to get back into contact with her, to make the accusation. I was worried it would dangerously heat up and break out into a total conflagration. Who cares at this point. It could be her sister fucking with me. That whole family is so messed up. All the sisters in that family are just hot Gorgons, really. And usually at each other’s throats.

So I did a quick Google and learned Stopping Institute verification services have popped up. Of course, they have. Because “It’s important to know if the threat on your life is real…or just a cheap trick.” And you too can find out for only $499 (in three easy installments). I decided I would let the mystery stand. Either I did nor didn’t survive the modern Illuminati. The grilled cheese sandwich I’m eating right now tastes the same, either way. I’m going to stop thinking so much about these things. And I’m never opening junk mail again. I have a little bonfire in my backyard every few months. I feed it the stray dog letters. May all the cordial invitations of this world burn in hell.