By the time you’re 95, you’re getting a little worried. You celebrate your birthday alone, hands trembling, as you light the candles on a cake you baked yourself. You eat little and decide to share the rest with your loved ones. Your “finished business” is not nearly close to being finished; you’re wrinkled and shaky, but the muscles under your skin burn with a healthy vigor that makes the long walk to and from the cemetery easy breezy.
By next year, you and your six degrees will have cured two more types of cancer, birthed a new modern art movement, and successfully brokered a tentative peace between two warring nations. And about thirty other incredible things.
You make your usual journey to the cemetery on strong limbs.
By the time you’re 150, you’re a bit of a weirdo. A couple of people at work joke about you getting your own article or news story. They say nice things, like that they’re glad you’re here and that you’re doing good in the world, and if anyone deserves a good rest? It’s you.
By the end of the day they wish you well and go back to homes filled with people they haven’t had a chance to outlive yet.
By the time you’re 200, you’re a phenomenon. Someone’s been shoving their nose where it doesn’t belong, because one morning there’s a crowd of reporters outside your door. You beat them off your late mother’s porch with your late father’s favorite broom.
You’re a little bitter (who wouldn’t be?) but you crack the teeniest smirk when a special headline greets you the next morning: “DERANGED ELDERLY PERSON ATTACKS NEWS CREW.” You grill yourself a steak for breakfast and wonder if they’re going to cry to some law firm about suing you.
You and your attorney’s license want to see them fucking try.
By the time you’re 1000, you’re old news. You’ve traveled around the world exactly 671 times. You’ve been to the moon. You’ve done everything imaginable, donned every hat possible. Math, art, history, science, English, foreign language—at one point you just kept flipping coins and going back to school and trying to reinvent your life in new, interesting directions. At 1000 years old, you’re the jack of all trades and you hold the world record for most world records. Which includes the world record for “Oldest Person Alive.”
You wonder where you went wrong. Was this payback for trying to feed your twin mud when you were six? Or that time you belly-flopped onto Mom’s pristine IKEA table? (You were eight—you hadn’t known tables could break, for God’s sake.) Or that time when you were twelve and accidentally almost ran over a rabbit with your bike back when your family used to go camping, or that time you drew a dick on the tag of your twin’s mustard yellow graduation gown when they weren’t looking, or—
You should have enough memories of your family to fill a book, but memory lane pitters off sooner than it should. It scares you enough to quit work. You’re practically filthy rich from all your past endeavors, so you spend a year at your desk on your laptop, remembering.
You make the #1 best sellers list the following year. A movie is put into production. You recoil from the thought of unfamiliar faces acting out the things and words your loved ones used to say and do, so you swear off cinema for the next hundred years. Just to be safe.
(The movie generates more attention to the book. The book makes you even more money. You decide to set up another charity organization, because what the heck. Maybe this one will finally let you die already.)
(One hundred and ones years later, you stumble across a cheap digital copy of the movie. You buy it and crush it under a hydraulic press out of spite.)
By the time you’re 1003 years old, you have a revolutionary thought. Maybe your purpose in life is to be bad. To be a god awful person. To be the scum of the earth.
You don’t want to rush into anything all willy-nilly, so you start small. You go out to eat a simple restaurant, finish a delicious meal, and leave without tipping the waitress.
You come back exactly five minutes later, blubbering, blank check in hand to pay off their student loans.
You bring ice cream cake to the cemetery that year.
At 10,000 years old, you are officially Never Going To Die. You aren’t religious, but if there’s a great big somewhere in the sky where all the people you’ve ever loved are living it up, you are never going to reach it.
You’re bored and maybe a little more than slightly clinically depressed, but you’ve learned to accept this.
At this point you’ve disappeared under a new alias again and again. You spend one “life time” doing simple, mundane things, working simple, mundane jobs. You pretend you’re insignificant and avoid conversation. You fake your own death in what you hope are increasingly amusing scenarios to whatever sick fuck in the sky plopped you down on this miserable planet. You stop baking cake.
One day, on your way back from your thirtieth job as a librarian in a row, you see a young person leaning over a large, famous bridge like they’re contemplating a quick, painless jump. This annoys the crap out of you because (1) any idiot knows they can’t die until they fulfill their “purpose” and (2) you know from firsthand experience that that shit hurts like hell.
You swing your bag and clock them in the face.
Then you run because you realize you just clocked a random person in the face. What the hell. Why do you do the things you do.
The youth finds you, because karma is a bitch and it doesn’t matter how many puppy mills you’ve shut down.
You think spite is probably their prime motive for staying in rather pristine health (they are freshly showered and lack any obvious bandages and casts) up until you see the look on their face. You have no idea how or why, but they look at you with recognition shining in their tired eyes.
“You’re XXXXX XXXXX,” they breathe.
You flinch at the first mention of your real name in centuries.
Maybe you should have gotten that plastic surgery a while back, because after that they keep hounding you with their questions. You mix up your route back to your apartment because they keep magically finding you, but then one day you come home to them dozing off on your doormat with their half-finished calculus homework.
(“What’s it like, to live for so long?” They ask.
(“Did you really pay off a stranger’s student loans?” They ask, maybe a little hopefully.
“Shut up,” you snap, and help them through another problem.)
At one point there’s a hurricane. The city is untouched, but you all evacuated anyway and now everything’s a mess—including plane tickets and holiday plans. The youth doesn’t get to go home for Thanksgiving, so they pop up at your door like a stray cat. But you’re anticipating that, so you set up a proper meal like the ones your parents used to make.
You think it’d be appreciated, so you bake cake.
(As it turns out, they hate cake but try to hide it. You shove a container of it at them as they walk out the door anyway.)
You swear you don’t care and don’t mean to, but you learn a lot about the youth anyway. Like how they’re in their freshman year, or how they’re an entire coast away from home. Or like how they don’t know what to major in and how they struggle to make friends.
(“I guess I’m just weird,” they say, picking at their food.
“You’re absolutely right,” you agree. “I’m glad we can agree on something.”)
Sometimes their questions are easy.
(“How many bones are in the human body again?”
(“I’m worried,” they admit. “That I won’t make something of myself. That I’ll live and die as nothing.”
You pause from feeding the virtual cats on your phone, frowning. “Don’t be,” you say very helpfully. You try again, “You’ll be something.”)
Sometimes, they’re not even questions.
Sometimes, you don’t really know what to say. Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re helping or hindering.
(“Life really sucks, doesn’t it?”)
They keep coming back anyway. Somewhere along the way, you find yourself not minding.
At 10,001 years old, you open the front door on your birthday and are greeted by the most horrendously misshapen cake you’ve ever laid eyes on.
You don’t cry. You swear, swear, you don’t cry. But you do laugh and give them a noogie.
After they leave, you realize too late that they’ve stuffed the leftovers in your refrigerator when you weren’t looking.
At 10,002 years old, you’re exchanging holiday cards and gifts, too. They send you a nice blue sweater with the letters “WALKING DEAD” in giant, neon, comic sans lettering. You send them a box of cake mix.
At 10,003 year old, it feels like just yesterday you were just smacking the shit out of the kid who wanted to jump.
You feel like a proud parent when they receive their diploma, which is ridiculous because you’re sitting right by their bawling parents, offering them tissues.
You’ve been to over a hundred of your own college graduations, but when they punch the air in triumph you agree that this is probably the most special.
(As smart as you know they are, they’re still a little thick-headed. It takes them a year to notice the cake doodle you scribbled into the tag of their graduation gown.)
When the ceremony is done and over, you hug them with all your might because as far as you know, this may be the last time you see them. People grow up, get jobs, sometimes even build whole families. And people need to be let go of, to be free, to get the breathing space to do any of that.
“Don’t disappear off the face of the earth anytime soon, okay?” They ask you earnestly, like they’re already thinking ten steps ahead of you. “Or, at least tell me about it first, ‘Leslie Smith.’”
It is not your most creative alias, you will admit. You say theatrically, “Don’t worry. My next identity will be flashier. ‘Beyoncé’ or ‘John Lennon,’ maybe.”
They give you a blank stare that reminds you exactly how old you really are. It makes you laugh.
One long-winded dinner in a nice restaurant later, after you and their parents trade silly story after silly story about the dumb stuff you’ve collectively seen the youth do (and after a lot of dramatic groaning on their part), you part ways. Home is conveniently a short walk away so you refuse their offer for a ride. You’ve been in near perfect health for thousands of years anyway.
(Not like their parents know that.)
(“Thank you,” the youth says intently, eyes shining with something you can’t place. You smile instinctively, because someone important is thanking you even though you don’t know why. You ruffle their hair one last time.)
By the time you reach the little apartment that’s come to almost resemble something like “home” in your eyes, your breath is a little heavier than it should be. Your limbs, a little more tired than they should be.
And maybe you don’t recognize the signs for what they are right away. Maybe you shrug them off for a few days until they persist, neither growing worse or better, but calling your attention and annoyance all the same. And maybe you nearly topple when you do realize what’s going on. Maybe you feel like the whole world’s spinning at speeds impossible. Maybe you overexert yourself just to be sure, just to see if you are a little weaker than you were some days before, that you may, that you might—that you could finally—it feels…
…like the smallest hint of progress.
