Luke Alden: Happy Birthday Eternity

I try to recall how I got here.

Nothing.

I keep walking.

Logic dictates that if I walk long enough I will get somewhere.

My mouth is dry.

My gut is aching.

Birds are flying overhead.

The grass, the trees, the fresh air. I forgot that they existed. I haven’t been out of the city in two hundred years.

A car drives by.

I’m waving and yelling. They don’t slow down.

Eventually I come to a run-down shack of a house at the end of a driveway. The windows are opaque with mold and my hands are aching for reasons that I can’t explain.

No one seems to be home.

I knock on the door.

Another knock.

No answer.

All I want is water.

All I want is food.

All I want is the easiest path back to the way things used to be.

Around to the back of the house. There’s no one, only an open field. Only two cars that are so old they may actually still run on gasoline.

‘Hello?’

My voice barely registers as a yell. My throat is aching. My teeth are grinding and causing my gums to bleed.

Around the house is nothing. Fields. Empty fields where animals used to graze. Empty fields where children used to play and people used to harvest. Now there is nothing but overgrown foliage. Wheat that has grown past its prime. Weeds that have long since taken over.

The air. The grass. The pollen.

I sneeze.

Another sneeze and it turns into a fit and my eyes get red and my throat starts to itch.

Still itching, I knock on the door again, pound, plead, yell. Nothing. No one is going to answer.

Maybe there’s a phone inside.

I turn the knob. It’s unlocked.

Inside the house is a thick layer of dust. Cobwebs. This house is old. It’s been a long time since anyone has lived here.

‘Anyone home?’

The floor creaks beneath my feet.

Evaline and I used to watch ancient scary movies. The kinds with ghosts and cobwebs and special effects that seem scary when you don’t think about them at all.

My heart tumbles as I take another step.

Another creaking sound.

On the table is a picture of a family. It’s old and there’s dust so thick that I can barely even tell it’s a picture at first.

In my hands and after I’ve blown the dust off of the picture, the family is smiling and looking happy. Four people. Two girls and two boys. They all have brown hair and big smiles and tan skin and they all look vaguely the same age. It’s a family.

You can’t tell they’re family by looking at them, because everyone has the same sort of surgical glow to them. You can’t tell they’re family, so I’m just assuming that they are.

I’m studying who I assume to be the parents. They’re holding hands, they’re smiling. They look ideal. They look like the map that’s in my head, the map that tells me what a happy relationship is.

Pictures only say what you want them to say.

I think back to all of my pictures. Evaline and me, the same pose with the same smiles. The only thing that changes is our clothes.

I put the picture of this family down and keep walking.

More creaking.

A nauseous feeling in my gut.

The draining of blood from my face.

I’m stumbling and stammering with no one to stumble and stammer to.

My knuckles would clench if I had the strength.

Instead I feel like I’ve been hit in the face with a brick.

In front of me.

In the living room.

A dead body.

But that’s not what bothers me the most, what bothers me is the feeling in my gut that says my being here isn’t an accident.

You never forget the first time you see a dead body.

Especially if you’re over 2000 years old.

And sure the body was nothing more than a dusty skeleton, collapsed on the floor and gnawed on by the weight of time, but it’s stuck in my head like some sort of disease. Burned into the back of my eyelids. Slowly making an intangible fantasy into a tangible reality.

Death: A symbol for a lesson we keep forgetting to learn.

If only I knew what the lesson was.

Franklin has two black eyes.

We’re sitting in his living room.

I’m describing my adventure. The drunken night that neither of us remember. The field. The walking. The house. The body.

He laughs.

My face is flush. My mouth is shut. I’m waiting for something to happen. I’ve been waiting the last thousand years. Because that’s what life is; going through the motions with the expectation that something will happen.

The expectation that things will move themselves.

We’re way past the point of accountability.

The conversation strays quickly.

To Franklin. To the girl he fucked. To the perfect tits and the perfect lips and the shapely ass. He’s making motions with his hands. He tells the story and grows more and more excited with each sentence he shares.

‘I don’t care.’

I’m an asshole.

Franklin looks at me. It’s my duty to care. As a friend. As a co-worker.

In his eyes there’s a palpable stinging where his ego has just been bruised. He looks like a beaten dog.

I’m usually more affable.

Or maybe we’re all just too sensitive.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know, I just feel like I’ve got bigger things to worry about than whether or not the latest conquest in your ongoing marital infidelity has a bleached asshole.’

A pause, a breath, a nervous twisting of nervous fingers.

‘So what do you worry about?’

‘Death. Evaline.’

‘Eh, things will turn out fine.’

I shrug.

My brow is furrowed as I run my hand along a wooden table in Franklin’s living room. I’m older than the tree this table was made from.

I pull my hand back and lean into Franklin’s leather couch. I look him in the eyes.

I used to have more friends.

I used to have dozens of friends.

People I could count on and laugh with and get drunk with and not care with.

They got lost along the way.

It was a slow drift, just like everything in my life.

Slowly drifting.

And in my stomach, there’s a pit.

I excuse myself to the bathroom. Navigating the hall, I look at pictures along the way. There is one picture of Franklin and his wife in the entire house.

There only needs to be one picture.

They’re not going to age. They’re not going to divorce. No one is going to die and the changing of fashions and trends died with youth. There is no need for anything more.

But when have we ever been satisfied with only having what we need?

And so I go to the bathroom.

When I’m done Franklin asks if I want to go get coffee with him.

I do.

We drive.

We end up at the same coffee shop we always go to. The same coffee shop where we see the same people that we always see.

We’ve been going here for centuries. We still don’t know the names of the other familiar faces.

Across the coffee shop is a new face. He’s staring at me.

I make eye contact. He looks away.

I order my drink, go sit down with Franklin, we start to talk. Out of the corner of my eye I can see this guy listening to us.

The conversation carries on.

About life.

About the past.

‘I’m not too sure where I’m going to work now, I’ve got some money saved up, so I don’t have to work for the next hundred years or so, but I’d like to get back out there sooner than later.’

When death ended, so did retirement.

I’m not even thinking about working. I feel as if I’m in a state of perpetual fog. Something’s missing but I don’t know what.

‘I’ll get a job when I can get myself together.’

Franklin nods. Sips his drink. Looks at the ceiling and the floor.

‘Hey, Franklin,’ I’m whispering, ‘someone’s listening to us.’ I gesture towards the man that had been staring at me. The new face with curly brown hair and a lanky body.