Kevin Hearne - Hammered

“It’s not about hurting me. They’re going to want to stay young too. And then their friends and relatives will, and before you know it the tabloids will get hold of the story and latch on like seven puppies after six tits.”

“And then the government will get involved, because having someone live that long is eventually going to raise flags at the IRS and the Social Security Administration. Her driver’s license picture won’t match her face. All sorts of questions are going to be asked.”

“The widow by herself would be worth the trouble. But I can’t confine it to her. Still, let’s say I did. She gets to start life over at forty while her kids all continue to age and die. Would she thank me for her youth when she’s standing over the grave of her son? Or the graves of her grandchildren?”

“Good. I’ve been in that position, Oberon, far too many times. I’ve buried my children and their children and so on. It carves away a piece of you.”

“Sure I have. It’s how I learned all the stuff I just told you—the painful way. And I learned that some people become distanced from humanity, severely troubled, and reclusive when they live too long. Sort of like vampires tend to do, only without the bloodsucking. If their minds aren’t trained like a Druid’s, they gradually collect neuroses over time, like sunbathers collect wrinkles. Immortali-Tea can’t fix batshit insanity.”

“Yep. That’s why eventually I stopped offering.”

“Not soon. Need to be in a place where I can settle down. And this isn’t that place. I need to talk to you about that, actually.”

I explained to him that we needed to move out of Tempe. “I’ll have to go back to Asgard soon, and it’ll be a longer trip than the first one. It might be forever, because I might not come back, and if that’s what happens, then you need to be good to Mrs. MacDonagh. But if I do return, we’ll be leaving right away.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Heh! I never thought of it that way.” I smiled. “But now that you’ve clarified my thinking, I wonder why they don’t list those amenities in real estate ads. It seems criminally negligent.”

“I care, buddy. I believe you to be remarkably wise.”

I laughed. “Perhaps when we are safely settled elsewhere.”

“I cannot promise you, Oberon,” I said, regret tingeing my voice, and I could tell he was disappointed. “But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with your friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.”

Oberon chuffed, his version of human laughter.

Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.

On Saturday night, the day after my return from Asgard, I heard about a new life-changing invention (for some): the salad spinner.

“I seriously love my salad spinner,” Granuaile confided. “It’s changed my life.” She said this in her kitchen, where she was busy making me the dinner she owed me for guessing wrong about Ratatosk’s size and the ability to enter Asgard via Yggdrasil.

“Excuse me for just a moment,” I said, and I exited the kitchen for the living room, where her laptop had access to Wi-Fi in the building. I Googled “salad spinner changed my life” and got more than six thousand hits. There was also a Salad Spinner Appreciation Society on Facebook. It wasn’t what I’d call a cultural revolution, but it had potential, and I was willing to find out more. I returned to the kitchen and said, “Sorry about that. Please explain how your salad spinner has changed your life.”

“Oh.” Granuaile’s eyes flicked down, perhaps with a shade of embarrassment. “Well, when you wash lettuce it’s tough to get the leaves dry without wasting paper towels and spending all your time patting them dry. If you just leave them wet, then your dressing dilutes and alters the taste you’re aiming for. Oil and water don’t mix, right? But now,” and her voice deepened into a mockery of a Nitro Funny Car drag-race commercial on the radio, “I can use the raw unbridled power of a SALAD SPINNERRR!” Her voice rose at the end of the sentence in maniacal excitement. Her hand plunged down to the handle of her spinner and she worked it furiously, continuing in the same frenzied voice. “SEE the centrifugal force work its MAGIC on the WATERRR! Red leaf, green leaf, spinach, or arugula, it DOESN’T MATTERRR! Just put your wet greens in the spinner and crank that mother ’til ALL the moisture’s GONE! SUPER! DRY! SALAD!” Here Granuaile balled her fists at her sides and thrust her hips forward lewdly. “GET SOME!”

That was when I lost it. Up to that point my mouth was hanging open in shock, but when she whipped out the pelvic thrust for nothing more than a salad , well, that brought on an epic fit of the giggles. Her performance began looping in my mind’s eye, and the absurdity of it kept tickling me so that I couldn’t stop. Paroxysms shook me until I fell off my chair, and that made it worse. Tears came to my eyes and I gasped for breath as I slapped the wood laminate of her floor. Granuaile’s face turned bright red and she sank down laughing too, laughing both at herself and at my reaction.

Eventually we got around to eating that salad, but not before our stomachs ached from extended merriment. It was succulence itself: spinach and red leaf lettuce tossed with jicama, white onion, mandarin oranges, and candied walnut pieces. The dressing was a homemade citrus vinaigrette.

This, however, was merely a side. Chef Granuaile MacTiernan set a broiled orange roughy fillet on top of a wild-rice pilaf, then placed on top of that a flash-broiled portobello mushroom that had been marinated in a Beaujolais red wine. Several spears of lightly salted asparagus drizzled with olive oil complemented the fish, and a bottle of pinot noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains did all those snooty and delicious things in our mouths that wine connoisseurs go on about.

“Outstanding,” I said, chewing appreciatively. “Truly fantastic.”

“I always settle accounts,” Granuaile said, and quirked an eyebrow at me.

“That’s good to know. I’m the same way. There are a lot of people who would like to settle accounts with me, however, and we should probably speak of it.”