Summary

Chapter 4 - "Cake-batter mixes are one of the great food innovations of the past sixty years"

In this chapter the protagonist started viewing the implications of a prolonged life if everyone on the planet were to take the cure. He ran population projections and contemplated Death. He wrote that thinking about death made him very irritable. Deciding that he needed an outside opinion, aside from Katy's, he went to see his father in Connecticut. The reader learned that the protagonist's mother died when he was only 15.

The protagonist wrote that he told his father about taking the cure, and while his father was supportive and happy for him, he refused it for himself when the protagonist offered to give him 'his guy' for the cure. He told the protagonist that he would be ready to go when his time arrived because...