Lacking in Death

My name is Aubrey Winston and I am not a big fan of hospitals, but I find myself at this particular one as a result of a job I am meant to do. I am in the employ of an elite group of individuals that call themselves The Pantheon, but more on them and the nature of my business a bit later. They have expressed some interest in a man by the name of Charles Jameson who is due to be discharged any moment now. I look at my watch and see that only 5 minutes have passed since I arrived so I run to the convenience store across the street and buy a soda. I normally don’t drink soda but I was feeling uneasy. Perhaps I was feeling anxiety over the fact that this would be my last job working directly for The Pantheon.

Walking out I see a panhandler asking for change in the street. He looks to be around 65 years old and he holds out his hand towards me, not even looking me in the eyes. But I recognize him even if he doesn’t. I run back in the store and ask for a paper bag. I hand the beggar the paper bag with a few hundred dollar bills inside and run back across the street and sit on the hood of my taxi. Well, technically it’s only mine for this particular fare. The automatic doors of the emergency room outpatient doors swing open and a whoosh of that sterile hospital smell greets me. A nurse rolls out a wheelchair carrying an old man who seems to be in his 90’s but I know to be a bit older than that. This is Charles Jameson.

“You call for the taxi?” I ask the nurse.

“I’m perfectly capable of taking it from here, nurse.” Mr. Jameson said, smiling. “Thank you, though.”

“Hospital policy, Mr. Jameson,” the nurse responded to him. She looked up at me and said, “He’s nearly 100 years old so please drive extra carefully.”

“Will do, miss,” I answer. I remember when it was difficult for me to act younger than people I knew to be older than. But I eventually grew used to it. I had to. People looked at me weird when I spoke like their grandfather.

Mr. Jameson got up out of the wheelchair of his own accord before the nurse could secure the brakes to both wheels. She smiles at me and nods her head dismissively at the old man who put on his coat and tipped his hat to the nurse before putting it on his head.

“You be careful now, Mr. Jameson,” the nurse said as she went back through the automatic doors. I opened the door for the man and he got inside the cab but not without looking at me suspiciously for a split second. Hopping into the driver’s seat I drove off.

It was silent for perhaps only two minutes before anything was said but that silence spoke volumes. I could feel his stare burning through the partition but paid it no mind until he knocked loudly on it. I looked at him, annoyed, through the rearview mirror. He raised his eyebrows at me as if I was the one who had knocked on the partition. I didn’t respond. I didn’t feel obligated to at least not until he slid the partition open as if to invite me to speak first.

“Well,” he said.

“Sir?” I asked.

“Who are you? And what do you want from me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Cabbies don’t open the doors for me. Hell, they don’t even get out of their taxi to greet the nurse. We’ve been driving for almost 10 minutes. You never asked me where I was going and I never told you what direction to drive so I’m going to ask you again. Who are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Son, you don’t know what kind of life I’ve led so don’t presume to know what I would and wouldn’t believe. Now, don’t insult me. Who are you? And what do you want from me?”

There was nothing I could say. This guy was pretty sharp. It’s not surprising as he did used to be a detective until he retired several years ago.

“The truth is, Mr. Jameson,” I finally answered, “I don’t want anything from you. But my employers would like to extend a welcome to our tight knit society. And I know exactly what kind of life you have led, Mr. Jameson.”

“What does that mean?”

“A long one, an unusually long life; is that right, Mr. Jameson? You’re papers at the hospital say you’re 88 years old but we both know you weren’t a little boy during the war. We both know you fought in it. A commanding officer if I remember properly.”

There was only silence coming from behind the partition.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Quite the contrary, Mr. Jameson. I--”

“Chuck.”

“I’m sorry?”

“If you’re not going to kill me, then at least you can call me Chuck.”

“Of course, and you may call me Aubrey. Or Winston if you so desire but since we’re on a first name basis Aubrey will do nicely, Chuck. Now where was I? Oh yes, I’ve been asked to tell you about the rest of us. There are 7 billion people on this planet and only 50,000 known that are like you and I.”

“What do you mean?”

“How old would you think I am?”

“I don’t know. About the same age as my great grandson, maybe? He’s about 38.”

“You’re too kind. In truth I’m actually older than you.” I pull over into a parking lot and look back at Chuck in the eyes. I turn on the light in the car so he can get a better look at me. “You know me from somewhere, don’t you?”

“Oh my, God! That’s impossible! I fought alongside you at Pelelieu . You were in that other battalion! How? How?!”

“We’re Immortals, Chuck. You and I are Immortals.”

I get out of the cab and light a cigarette. I take the smoke in my lungs and breathe it out feeling the fire shoot out of my throat as I wait for Chuck to get out of the car.

“You must be hungry.” I say as he looked at me wide eyed and slack jawed. We walk into a diner where we continue our conversation while waiting for our food to arrive.

“What do you mean by immortal? I can’t die?”

“You’re 113 years old, aren’t you? And yet you’re as spry as 65 year old and perhaps still as clever as you were when you were in your 30’s. We have people in hospitals everywhere investigating the possibility of new immortals. We take blood samples and perform tests on them, grueling tests. Normal humans’ blood cells would be destroyed with our tests. Their bodies simply replace them with new cells. Our cells regenerate from the particulate matter, reforming back into itself. That healing factor is what makes us immortal, so to speak.”

“But how are you still young? And how come I’m old?”

“Some immortals have stronger healing factors than others. Take my employers for example: a group of immortals who call themselves The Pantheon. The oldest actually has the appearance of a 12 year old girl. But she’s been around longer than any of us. I prefer the mystery but she claims to be the only one who knows how or why Stonehenge was built. The Pantheon pull the strings of this crazy world, practically run every government in the planet. Because none of them can be killed by any traditional methods, they have often been mistaken as gods. Hence their group’s moniker which, to be honest, is more tongue-in-cheek than anything.”

“This is unbelievable,” Chuck said as the food arrived.

“Immortality sneaks up on you like old age, ironically. Your blood was slow to regenerate but it did eventually. That’s why you stopped aging at a later date than I did. And when they (The Pantheon) found that out they sent me to ask you seeing as how we know each other. Slow healers like you used to be called low immortals but that sounded insulting so we call your lot ‘The Aged’ for obvious reasons. In fact many of us envy you.”

“Why’s that?”

“You lived an entire life without knowing what you are. You never had to hide. Those who loved you didn’t leave you when you didn’t age the way they did. Others never called you a freak.” The enthusiasm in my voice escaped me when I uttered those words. We sat in silence eating the rest of our respective meals.

“If I’m immortal, I can live forever?”

“Not technically. You can still be killed. If I remember back in the war you nearly were. The wounds that would instantly kill other men left you with a scar.”

“On my thigh, yeah. So if that one grenade hadn’t been a dud…?”

“Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Your wife would have gotten those medals instead of you and she’d tell stories of her husband’s heroic dive to save his men from not one but two live grenades.”

I paid the check, despite Chuck’s protestations. After all, we were war buddies doing some catching up and he just got out of the hospital.

“What are you then, Aubrey? If I’m one of ‘The Aged’ and there is ‘The Pantheon’ then where does that put you?”

“I was offered a seat in The Pantheon but turned it down. I was never a managerial type. But to answer your question, they call me a ‘Demi.’”

“A ‘Demi?’”

“As in Demigod. My healing abilities are nowhere near that of anyone in The Pantheon and obviously I didn’t age as much as you did. But I had done some jobs for them that earned me their favor. And I respectfully declined. I’m somewhere in between the gods and the mortals: a demigod.”

I took the wrapped up leftovers and we headed out of the diner.  We walked down two blocks to a dark alley that was dimly lit by a humming floodlight that barely lit an unassuming spot behind a large dumpster.

“Wait here,” I said to Chuck as I walked towards the dumpster. The tall brick walls seemed to insulate the sounds of the city from this narrow pathway. There was a pile of clothe lumped lifelessly by the dumpster and I stooped down to reveal a woman in her 40’s underneath them. She was breathing shallowly and was obviously tired so I just left the food beside her where she could find it when she woke up.

“Who was that?” Chuck asked.

“Just paying old debts,” I respond. I stop at a flower shop on the way back to the taxi and buy two bouquets of flowers.

“Who are those for?” Chuck asked.

“One is for my one true love. I never married again after she died.”

“And the other bouquet?”

“She’s buried at Saint Richard’s.”

“In that case let me pay for those. And can I change them to the daisies?” Chuck said to the man behind the counter. We got our bouquets and headed to the taxi. I drove to the cemetery and we walked to see Chuck’s wife’s plot.

“She was beautiful. You only hear it in the movies but it’s no exaggeration when I tell you that as soon as I laid my eyes on her I knew I was going to marry her. She was already engaged when we met but I knew that that was just a minor setback.” Chuck sighed and looked at the bouquet of daisies before a single tear rolled down his cheek. “I couldn’t afford to buy her flowers back then so whenever I would visit her at the bank where she worked I would pick a flower from some random house and say I picked it just for her. Every day I did that! And that’s how I found out she liked daisies. So every day I’d go to that same house and pluck one daisy to give to her until later that week she was in a bad mood. Boy, you’ve never seen a young woman so angry.”

“What happened?”

“She found out that her fiancée had gotten her then best friend pregnant. She took it out on me at first, yelling and screaming. I gave her the daisy and said I hoped it cheered her up. She had a good cry and hugged me and said it was perfect, the daisy was just perfect.”

“Why’s that?”

“Turns out, she told me, that some jerk kid had been picking at the daisies at her aunt’s house who lives just down the street from where. I didn’t tell her that the daisies I was giving her were her aunt’s until our last anniversary. She just laughed. God, I’ve led a good life. Beautiful wife, wonderful children. Do you have children?”

“When you lived as long as I have, you have many children. But not many of them can I call family.”

“So what’s your guys’ deal? Why so secretive? Why even make this secret society to begin with?”

“At the turn of the 20^th century, more people began to view the world in a more pragmatic, scientific light. There was less need for gods and demigods and much more use for medicines; medicines that can be used, say, to increase a human’s longevity.”

“They did experiments on you?”

“We did it to our own kind in the hopes of extending the lives of those we loved and a select few thought they could develop treatments that would give them power and fortune. Half of us ignored the obvious ethical questions of testing on our own and the other half opposed testing vehemently.”

“What happened?”

“There was in-fighting and war.”

“Which side won?”

I didn’t answer because I wasn’t proud of the side I took.

“I see.”

“We have to live with what we’ve done, some of us feeling guiltier than others about having to kill our own kind. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to kill an Immortal? On the bloodied and battered corpses of my brethren, I helped The Pantheon recreate ourselves so that all of us Immortals had someone to turn to for help: If you needed money, or to get out of trouble with the mafia or government. Had we known about you then, you could have come to us about a liver transplant for your wife.”

He turned to me and punched me in the gut. I fell to my knees. No one has laid a punch on me that hard in long, long time.

“How dare you look through my wife’s records!”

“I was researching you.”

“I don’t care. You leave her out of this, even if she is dead. Knowing you could have saved her is not going to convince me to join you. Do I miss her? Yes. At the time, would I have given my own life to save hers? You’re goddamn right I would have! You said so yourself that none of you are gods! And here you are playing god. If you want to have a network where all of us ‘immortals’ can help each other that’s one thing. But to play favorites with who you can and cannot save is an abuse of power. If I was around I would have picked the losing side. Because at least they were on the right side of the argument.”

“I know that now. And I have to live with the blood of all those people I killed in the name of peace. Every time I say it, it makes less and less sense to me. This was my last job for The Pantheon then I’m on my own. I want to spend a few years repaying debts to those lives I’ve ruined.”

“That homeless woman in the alley?”

“She was the daughter of someone I killed. The trauma of witnessing such brutality at a young age has a lasting impression and I’ve found that my past sins have resulted in a lot of the homeless population in the city.”

“Can you kill me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve lived an entire life not knowing what I was. And now I have to possibly live the hell of watching my great grandkids wither and die before I do. I’ve already lived. I don’t need to keep doing that, especially without my wife. My kids are all grown up with families of their own. I just want it to end, I’ve deserved that.”

While I didn’t agree to be the one who kills him, I give Chuck a name that will lead him to a formula that may eradicate his healing factor long enough for him to pass away as if he were just a mortal. He was right. He had lived a full life and deserved to see it that book close for not only his own sake but the sake of his family who he would have to hide from to keep immortality a secret. I, however, still have my debts to pay. I place the roses on my wife’s grave and head back to the taxi. After all, there are more people to visit today.