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Kendall strokes out while Roman is in the building, which is funny because one moment Roman’s negging some bitchy news anchor and the next someone is putting a hand on his elbow and walking him into a side room and saying stupid shit like, “It’s your brother,” and “Please just come with me,” which makes Roman feel like he’s twelve years old getting brought to the principal’s office the first time Kendall tried to snort enough to make his heart explode. But he’s not twelve; he’s forty-nine, and when Connor flies in, he doesn’t smile or ruffle Roman’s hair. He just stands in the corner of the hospital room like a gaunt old-man ghost.
It becomes a bit of a family hobby, standing around and watching Kendall die. It’s like every other year of Roman’s life, except Kendall is fixed in place, gray and mute with tubes down his throat. Shiv blows into town once a month or so, makes some quip about Kendall’s nonexistent brain activity looking normal, pretends not to cry in the bathroom, and jets back off to suck more Euro dick. She’s a fucking consultant now, the ruthless American cunt who tells German chocolate factories to pay their Oompa Loompas less or whatever. Roman calls her a heartless bitch and spends hours in Kendall’s suite going over spreadsheets and reports, like having Kendall’s semi-corpse breathing shallowly in the same room is going to stop ATN advertisers from spooking at the latest round of not-quite-racism.
Rava flutters around the edges, the ex-wife moth to the flame that is her continued status as primary beneficiary of Kendall’s drawn-out death. She’s as pinched and practical as ever, and every time she discovers Roman hunched on the couch in the suite, she looks at him with this horrible, pitying expression, like he’s a disemboweled puppy gasping its last on the side of the road: grotesque, messy, tragic. Three months in, she hands him a pamphlet on coma patient organ donation with crisp, matter-of-fact finality, and Roman loses his fucking mind.
Because really, they grow that shit in vats now; he doesn’t care that synthetic organs wear out faster. No slutty wino from under a bridge gets to have Kendall’s liver. The poor thing’s had enough abuse already, for fuck’s sake. It’s the heart that makes Roman feel the most sick and weird, the most like tearing Rava’s loathsome little pamphlet down the middle and screaming bloody murder. Kendall’s heart thumping away in someone else’s fat, stupid chest. He calls her a gold-digging whore and almost means it. She never stops looking at him like he’s getting his intestines all over the asphalt.
It's not Roman’s decision in the end, clearly. He manages to get himself unbanned from the funeral by making a plea to Sophie, who’s always been a bit of a pushover. She still likes him, miraculously, still sends him pointedly gift-wrapped books on structural injustice. Obviously, Roman doesn’t read them (who reads?), but he puts them on display in his office because they confuse people.
“I thought for sure he’d get his own place,” Shiv says after the service. “Like a pyramid. A really weird, ugly pyramid.” She pets a hand over the stone of the mausoleum, like she’s smoothing hair off someone’s feverish forehead.
They’re standing in the shadow of the tomb, sweating in black in the May heat. Party of three: all that remains.
“Is Kendall better or worse at dying than Dad?” Roman asks.
“Rome,” says Connor, tired and thin and chastising. Every time Roman tries to look at him directly, his eyes skip. Connor’s a void, bent shoulders and white hair and cane, like he’s fucking Ewan. Geriatric. Roman’s mouth is dry with fear.
“Worse,” says Shiv decisively. She’s sucking on a cigarette with her eyes narrowed, like acting cool now is going to make them forget the way she blubbered through her incoherent eulogy. “Took him way longer. Soft on deadlines.”
“Hey,” says Roman, “Dad’s first attempt was a huge flop.” It comes out less funny than he intends, and helicopter blades cut through his thoughts and fill up his ears with an atemporal roar.
Rava tries to invite him to some freak zombie party the next summer, something about meeting all the people upon whom she inflicted Kendall’s coke-riddled organs. Her email says a lot about closure and forgiveness, two concepts with which Roman is not currently fucking. He forwards the link to Shiv with the tagline, “Do you think anyone got his dick?” The reply comes within seconds, the easy punchline to his clear set-up: “They only take working organs, Rome,” and that’s good enough for a cheap laugh.
“Your lungs are in some Broadway fag,” he says to the single photo of Kendall he has in the office, the one from Dundee of Kendall in that stupid rap outfit with a dopey grin on his face. Photo-Kendall just keeps smiling, blissful in the afterglow of choking on their dad’s cock in front of hundreds of people. Unreachable. Dead.
Roman’s a five-year solo CEO by the time Connor tries to tell him that he’s dying of an old man disease, one of the bad ones. Roman doesn’t know which because every time Connor starts saying things like treatment plan and anticipated outcome, he shuts his eyes very tightly and sings “God Save the King” in his head until Connor finishes talking and says, “Rome? Romey? Are you still there?”
And then Roman manages some grunting noises and spews some bullshit about visiting soon and hangs up and dials into the Shanghai call about shutting down the international parks and says important business things and does not once think about what kind of backwater, pathetic medical care Connor must be getting in New Mexico and for fuck’s sake, why doesn’t he move to New York when he has their dad’s goddamn haunted apartment?
Connor doesn’t move, though; he just keeps cheerfully wasting away in the desert while Roman shutters parks and cuts down cruises. Too much severe weather. Trim the fat.
Towards the end, Connor starts sending him lurid, dire articles about wanting his body burned on a pyre or set out on a pillar for birds to pick apart, every single one of which makes Roman bolt for the bathroom to dry heave. Nothing comes up because he’s stopped eating except for on occasion in the evenings, one last-ditch effort to stop his waist measurements from creeping up and up alongside his age.
Willa answers when he calls one night, alone and drunk on hundred-year-old whiskey that Connor gave him for his fiftieth.
Roman slurs, “What about the cryogenics? What happened to the fucking – the fucking dead guy freezer?” and hates himself for it. Cryogenics is a fucking scam; everyone knows it by now, but the image of dead Connor sedate and frozen is vastly preferable to the image of dead Connor with his skin melting off his bones or his liver being devoured by an eagle. To the extent that any image of dead Connor is preferable, which it is not.
“Well,” Willa says in that placating, measured way of hers, like she’s speaking with a crazed zoo animal, “he’s in a lot of pain, Roman. He’s – he’s been asking for you. Are you coming out soon?”
Roman smashes the bottle on the kitchen floor and hangs up on her.
Shiv retrieves him in the early, stormy days of November, shows up sopping wet in his office like some kind of idiot without a private car service and someone to hold her thousand-dollar umbrella.
“They moved Connor home,” she says, like Roman’s supposed to know that means that their single remaining older brother is on the fast track to becoming worm food. He does know that’s what it means. But it’s a stupid way to say it.
So then they’re all at fucking Austerlitz, and by all, he means himself and Willa and Shiv and fucking Tom. His sister’s sham marriage is in an unexpected period of nicey-nice playhouse vow renewal, likely induced by their kid losing her marbles and trying to ditch Dartmouth with one semester to go. Roman doesn’t give a shit whether or not this temporary united front results in successful degree completion; he’s just pissed that Tom is bumbling around the place.
Tom’s voice is too loud, he’s too big, his footsteps fall like hammers. If Roman were trying to die in peace, the very last thing he would want is Tom getting his Wambsgans everywhere. Tom has caviar and Veuve Clicquot and oysters flown in and jovially calls it Connor’s last hurrah. The food festers on the kitchen island, seeping and untouched, making everything reek of the ocean. Roman starts to picture killing Tom with a corkscrew to soothe himself in the evenings, when the morphine stops doing its job and he can hear Connor moaning even if he’s sitting at the bottom of the pool.
It takes Connor three days to die, and every night, Roman has the same dream: he wakes up in the dark, lying on a slab of stone. Gradually, he feels them: a stiff, besuited shoulder pressed up against his own, an icy, familiar hand locked around his wrist, the dead weight of a hangdog head in his lap. Beyond the wall of darkness, something moves. Something big.
On the second day, he brings himself to ask about the mausoleum, staring resolutely out the window to avoid looking at Connor and hardly able to form words. Maybe Connor’s decided that he wants himself and Willa buried in a shallow pioneer grave, one sad little mound with a half-assed wooden cross sticking out of the top and their skeletons all tangled together, ready to be dug up and gnawed on by coyotes. Maybe Connor’s decided to be packed into an urn and shot into space, into burning, black freedom. Maybe Connor’s decided that he does want to be pumped full of chemicals and stuck in a freezer vat next to Walt Disney after all.
Instead, Connor lets out a long, rattling breath, and says, “I can’t leave Kenny alone in there.”
Connor dies with the sunrise, which would be poetic and beautiful and picturesque, except that there’s a little bit of dried vomit on his shirt, and it looks like he’s already been dead for several centuries. He makes an odd noise, and all the air goes out of the room just like that. Roman drinks two bottles of Veuve Clicquot, eats every last scrap of food in the refrigerator, and throws up in the pool.
“What do you think, sis?” he asks Shiv when she comes out to pull him off the pavement and onto a deck chair. “Suicide pact?”
“You wish,” she says flatly, graying hair lit up like a halo in the evening light.
In the end, Connor is not sent up in flames, nor disemboweled by birds; in fact, he’s probably interred even more intact than Kendall was, considering the whole dissection-for-the-common-good bullshit that Rava pulled. Willa has his brain frozen, but she says several things about the delicate nature of the ordeal that Roman translates as too many gross tumors to do anything at all with, really.
“I think I’ll marry Willa,” Roman proclaims when all is said and done, when he and Shiv are sitting next to each other in metal chairs again and staring up at the crypt. It’s mocking him, he thinks, unchanged from year to year, steadfast against blue winter skies. The chair is making his back hurt.
“Good luck,” says Shiv drily, watching their sister-in-law weep grotesquely into a silk handkerchief. “Her pussy just made her a billionaire.”
“I made her a billionaire,” Roman snaps. He did. He’s the one who took Willa and her shitty extensions and thinspo cokewhore body and big, needy slut eyes and introduced her to his sad sack brother in the first place. If he wants to marry Willa, he’ll damn well marry Willa.
He shows up at the apartment that night with a ring, one of the ugly blood diamonds he inherited from his mother. Willa is in black silk pajamas, wide-eyed with surprise and half-drunk. When he asks, she looks at him with pity in every line of her face and says, “Oh, Rome,” and she sounds so much like Connor that he’s fleeing for the elevator before she can say anything else.
Roman sells WayStar the same year that Tom kicks the bucket. They’re going to try to push him out if he stays, new school bozos with their total fucking faith in neuralinks and AI, so Roman says fuck it and slits his own throat. He keeps his board seat and shows up at meetings when he can be bothered, stalking through the hallways while underlings scatter into cubicles. Privately, he’s pretty sure that this is less because they find him intimidating and more because he’s old and awful and just generally melting into a loose pile of horrible elderly goo. He doesn’t remember his father looking nearly this terrible.
Shiv plays the widow at Tom’s funeral, sporting the world’s most ostentatious black hat and huge sunglasses. She’s a grandmother now, which is hilarious, and she wears it about as well as their mother did, which is to say that she’s getting a lot of facelifts and pretending that she isn’t.
“Back on the market, huh?” he says, like Shiv hasn’t been sucking and fucking her way around the globe for decades while Tom wept into his cheese curds and pretended to enjoy his post-ATN banishment to the boards of various sleazy non-profits. “Want to elope? We can consummate in the family home.”
The mausoleum crouches over them, an unpleasant third in their conversation.
Shiv half-smiles. “Only if you brought lube.”
“We can use tears,” Roman says earnestly, and they both laugh so loudly that Shiv’s uptight freak of a daughter tells them to stop because they’re scaring her children.
When Roman hits eighty, he starts asking “Am I dying?” every time he sees a doctor. They all react the same way, tip their heads back and laugh politely, like there was a class in medical school on how to react with the proper amount of glee and merriment to appease wealthy patients who think they’re funny. Every call from Shiv makes his heart climb into his throat, because surely it’s going to be all metastasis or dementia or toxic uterus or whatever happens to old women.
It never is. He gets the bad call from her daughter through his assistant because he doesn’t have her number and it rings through as spam.
Shiv’s a fucking show-off, so it’s a helicopter crash, and it dominates the news cycle for a whopping four hours, a slurry of gory details and dead European business leaders. Some sick fuck leaks the autopsy reports, sketches of his baby sister with her body all wrong and words like lethal blunt force trauma typed out in cold black-and-white.
Within hours, he’s dumped all her emails and texts and voicemails into the most expensive simulator the markets can provide, and she’s shimmering in front of him in his living room: a phantasmal, ghostly hologram with his sister’s smile and voice.
But it’s not right, because sim-Shiv doesn’t correct him, doesn’t remember things differently, doesn’t remember some things at all. He can’t touch her, can’t slap her, can’t feel her teeth in his arm or smell her gross, unisex perfume or feel the warmth of her body. Sim-Shiv is a wretched, vapid revenant, intangible and unaware that she’s really lying scattered in a morgue in Switzerland. Real Shiv would fucking hate lying scattered in a morgue in Switzerland. It would show too much weakness. Real Shiv would call Roman a creepy pervert for even making her a simulation.
So Roman does the reasonable thing and buys the stupid simulation company and guts it for parts and pawns it off on Stewy, who is somehow still terrorizing the economy despite pushing ninety. Then he shows up late to the funeral and ignores everyone in attendance, including his obnoxious, weepy niece, who has giant blue eyes and a sad, clever face, and he just can’t fucking look at her, okay? It’s not like he can do anything for her.
The speeches are long and florid, mostly bullshit and nothing new. At one point, the priest calls Shiv a devoted wife, which is probably the funniest thing that Roman has heard since the idiot officiating Kendall’s hit them with the old attentive father. Of course, there’s no one to share the joke with now.
Everything ends at the cemetery, as funerals are wont to do. The sun is low when Roman enters his tomb for the first time.
There they all are. Connor Logan Roy, first of his name, doomed to usurpation. The pre-carved stone for Willa Ferreyra Roy, hollow and waiting. Kendall Logan Roy, probably just bones by now because he’s an early quitter and kind of a coward. Thomas John Wambsgans, which, ugh. Eternity with Tom. Siobhan Caroline Rose St. John Roy, trapped in there right next to her chosen oaf. Gregory Stuart Hirsch, tucked down in the corner.
Roman stares at this last name for a moment, uncomprehending. Cousin fucking Greg has cuckoo birded his way into Roman’s family crypt. Moreover, Cousin fucking Greg has managed to die with no one noticing, presumably in a freak decapitation incident involving a river barge tour and a bridge that didn’t lift in time. It’s too bizarre to be infuriating. He wonders if Greg’s entire eight-foot frame fit in there intact. Maybe they had to bend him into his coffin like a lecherous pipe cleaner.
At least Tom will have someone else to bother.
The last drops of sunlight slip off the entry step, leaving Roman alone in the shadows. He feels them then: light pressure on his shoulder, cold fingers on his wrist. A weight in his chest.
The stone sarcophagus lurks in at the corner of his eye, the core of a dead star sucking him towards it. Roman takes one step, then another. Reaches out a shaking, liver-spotted hand. Touches his father.
He has his name carved beneath Shiv’s within a week.