“Friend,” I said as I spotted John, as a greeting. I had just
stepped out of the door after walking up a short flight of stairs on floor one
hundred and thirty to get onto the roof.
John was my best friend in the whole world, as well as my lover, so I
always greeted him as such if I’d been away for a while. We’d fallen in love together
and after being married for over two hundred and fifty years we’d been through
a lot together. Now he was stood on the ledge of the roof of our home of the
past fifty-or-so-years, he looking just as handsome and youthful as when I
first met him and fell in love.
We were high-school footballers back then, we joke to this day that
it’s impossible to kiss with a helmet on. We met after a match where my team
beat his so badly, and I was so funny with him when we met afterwards that even
though he lived in another city he asked me on a date. New York and Los Angeles
were only five or ten minutes on the train, so I went to him, just a little cafe near his home in LA, and so even until we left college and
move together we weren’t that far apart.
He had his back to me when I walked up the stairs but turned when he heard my
voice. My heart stopped as he turned, and I realised he was right on the edge of the roof. He had a strong face, and he hadn’t been shaving whilst I was away, which
further defined his jaw with dark stubble, but it was also not strong - I could see his hair was a
mess from where he’d been tugging at it and his grey-blue eyes were red-rimmed.
“Ben,” He smiled, and then sniffed “How was the operation?”
A few weeks ago I’d fallen three stories from my post van and landed
badly on my arm. It was a miracle that I’d come out of the accident so well, but
the arm I landed on was so badly broken that the doctors decided to grow me a
new one instead of waiting to see if it healed alright, so I’d had to go up to
a surgery in the metropolis to get the old arm removed and the new one attached.
I lifted my new arm and waved at John with my new fingers, wriggling
them about a bit. I didn't know what John was doing there, on the ledge, he'd never done it before. There was a note on the table when I got in, 'On the roof', it said. I didn't know what he was doing, but I wanted to get him down. I had to be careful though, because I wanted him to come down towards me instead of falling down behind him, all one hundred and thirty stories down to the pavement.
“Works fine,” I said, and took two slow, tentative paces towards John.
It was nighttime and the stars were all very bright from the rooftop
space. The space was about the size of a football pitch (the building tapered
towards the top so as to be architecturally appealing, it was much wider at the base), with an area in the
middle given over to a few allotments and a sitting area with some trees and a pretty little stream, a children’s play
park. The breeze was slight at one hundred and thirty stories up, but even so
the swings creaked as they were blown slightly to and fro.
“Will you come on the ledge with me?”
“No John, why don’t you come down here with me?” and took a few more steps tentatively closer.
John dragged one hand through his hair, wiped his right eye with the
other and took an unsteady step backwards, perilously closer to the edge.
“Why is it always when you’re away, Ben?”
It was always when I was away, I'd come back and he'd be like this, hair a mess and eyes red, mad. I tried phoning as much as possible when I had to go away, but it made no difference when I got back. It hurt me every time to see him like it.
“I don’t know, I can’t be here all the time, I'm sorry. And it isn’t always,
it isn't always bad, and I’m here now, everything’s fine. Come back here to me.”
I didn’t know what he was doing on the ledge, but if he wasn’t
careful he was going to fall. I took another step forwards, just one this time,
in case he backed away again.
And then I saw, in a glint of starlight, something
I hadn’t seen in an awfully long time – a gun, lying on its side at the bottom
of the ledge. I presumed it to be a gun, but I couldn’t quite remember what they looked like, it’d
been two hundred and thirty years since I’d really seen one last, there was no
use for them anymore.
We waited through high school and college, John and I, faithful as
mated swans. We sent messages and letters in the term time when the
trans-continental bullet-trains were too expensive for students, and saw each
other at summer, Christmas and semester break. We both graduated within a year of
each other, I in business and he in social science, and, after three years of
living together in New York City, we got married at a church near my family’s old ranch-house
upstate - beautiful natural upstate New York, a few miles down-stream on the Niagara River from the famous falls themselves. We honeymooned in India, and had the time of our life. When we came back, aged twenty-six, the
governments of the west were just instituting compulsory immortality. We found out the news the moment we got off the plane and right there in the airport we cried with happiness and hugged. We were
going to spend our forever together.
“I don’t want to come down,” He said, and let out a breath that had obviously been held for a long time because it became
slightly raggedy towards the end “It’s cool on the edge here, with the wind. You’d like it.”
I tried to ignore the gun for the moment – I didn't even know what it was doing there or what purpose it could be there for – it was out of John’s
reach for the moment, and I had to get him back down: if he fell he could be a
long time in hospital and the fees could mean we had to come out of retirement
for longer.
“I wouldn’t like it, I don’t like heights, you know I just had an
operation. I’d prefer it if you came here and give me big hug.”
“I love you Ben.”
They did it. Over two hundred years ago they finally did it, they finally worked out how to stop people dying. You
just live forever, and you don’t go through any of the degeneration associated
with age: you really live forever.
And you don't just live forever – you don't die. You can't die. Impervious to disease, recovering from any injury, surviving any wound. I try and try to forgive myself for not thinking anything of the gun or the ledge, having no reaction, not realising that it meant danger... to me it didn't.
All the same, ignorance is no consolation.
The surgery’s cheap, free even, so to ensure equality everyone had to have it, hence 'compulsory' immortality.
Some people resisted, religious groups and hippies as far as I remember, the 'mortals' we called them, and ignored them. They’re long gone two
hundred and fifty years later, the cult of mortality died in the first
generation, because their children wanted to live forever just like everyone
else.
John and I didn’t have any objections. We had beds side-by-side at
the hospital. John had his operation slightly before mine. When I woke up I
felt so alive, I almost took the drip out of my arm myself, not realising it was still infusing my blood with the operation's vital solution. I just wanted to run out of the hospital and sprint to Japan or fly to the moon or write a symphony or learn a language, I was bursting with life. I was just fiddling with the needle when John, lying next to
me, caught my eye and winked. He probably saved my life then, in a subtle way. I remember his words, I have them tattooed on my
memory – Wait, sweetie, we have enough time for that. We have enough time for
everything.
“I love you too. Right from the start – my John. I’ll keep you safe.
Come here, I’ll give you a hug.”
“I want to die, Ben.” and a tear appeared for a second before getting
lost in his stubble.
There was something wrong with John. Not as a person, I loved him
then, as I love him now and as I loved him ever, but there was something wrong
with his head. Something that came out of genes when he was forty, and the
doctors thought they’d cured, but came back when he was a hundred and twenty
and lurked in his skull ever since. If I went away I’d come back and he’d be
like this, he’d been tugging his hair, forgetting to shave or eat or sleep, or
just not sleeping because he’d been crying about nothing. I’d come home after
visiting my parents (say he was off retirement or couldn’t come) and hug him
and we’d watch a movie and I’d tell him I’m still here and then cuddle the
night, and by the time we wake up he’d have stopped shivering. But it was just
the same next time I came back.
It lurked in his skull and it showed through his eyes sometimes when it came out. It took over him and I'd learnt to recognise the madness in his eyes, the darkness that, for no reason other than to have something to hate, made him hate himself and his world. He said that when it happened, when he felt like that, his vision, the world, it was so sharp, the lines, he said he felt like he could cut glass with his mind just by looking at it.
It was sharp enough to cut me when he looked at me like that.
“You can’t die. You can’t, it’s not possible… and you can’t, I need
you.”
“Who says I can’t?” his voice wasn’t angry, he was just asking a
question.
“Your body, remember? It’s a long time ago but I still remember,
remember what you said? ‘We have enough time for everything’, because of that
day.”
“No.” He said simply, and then jumped down from the ledge onto the
roof and apparent safety. But I was still afraid, because though he was away
from the edge, that look in his eyes, the inflection revealing that something
in his head was very dark and very much at odds with the person whose head it was,
was still there, trying to cut his world in half.
“I know you want me to stay, but it’s hurting me, Ben. I can’t cope
with all this. Existing forever, I can’t do it, don’t you think I’ve had enough
time?”
I stared at him without replying, because the shock was hitting me.
Was that why he was stood on the ledge? He was mad, madder than I'd known him before, that was insane thinking: people have fallen from higher
places and survived, he knew that. He had to have known that. The concept of
dying died out while we were in our nineties. We were well into our two
hundreds now, and things had changed since then. Death as a subject was taboo – illegal, even, in the correct circumstances. Normally ‘life-threatening’ surgery
would get you a stay in a prison-hospital to remind you not to do it again, and
no one talked about it anymore.
I’d been alive so long, I couldn’t even remember how people died,
the idea was ridiculous. Drowning? You get your lungs pumped. Burning? Grow
some new skin. Cancer? I can’t even remember what that is. I knew it was deadly
back when, but there wasn’t any information about it at the library, that’s
assuming I was even looking.
And here he was, my John, for the first time in two hundred and
thirty years, talking about death. And not like we would back then, like we had
so much to do before it happened, a way which infused him with life and energy because he knew he had a deadline. No, this was a new way that frightened me because
I’d never heard it before – like it was something he wanted to happen to him.
Maybe I’d just been away at the wrong time. This was a stressful
time, we were six months into our non-retired cycle, and the strains of the knowledge that
you had another fifty-odd years of work before you retired again were showing on
everyone our age, and this was the first time I'd left John alone this cycle. I'd been careful of it, I made sure this time.
But since I had been with him all the time for the past six months –
no.
Maybe he’d been thinking about all this when I was with him, and
when I’d went away it had all caught up on him and that’s why we were where we
were. A wave of helplessness surged over me and I let out a sob and covered my eyes with my hand.
“It’s alright Ben, I’m here.”
There he was comforting me. I removed my hand to look at him and then I was terrified again. The look in his eye had gone. He was John again, my John. The monster in his head had gone away, he was my John again, and yet he hadn't taken back what he'd said just a few minutes ago.
“You can’t die!” I repeated, and John smiled softly.
His eyes were losing their redness and he wiped a hand over his hair
to tidy it a little. The crazy man about to hurt himself on a ledge was turning
into my John and I loved him and I didn’t want him to die even if he wanted to
prove that he could.
“Do you know where I got a job?”
“The Citizen’s Logistics Department. Six months ago. All your people
stuff I don’t understand. John, please!”
“Do you know where I really got a job?”
I swallowed a word and I don’t know what it was, the start of a
sentence which got eaten by fear and surprise. “No.”
“A prison hospital.” John hadn’t moved from where he was but his
face had opened up, and he seemed a lot closer to me. “We aren’t invalid, we
never will be, but my degree isn’t worth what it was. Everyone lives forever,
nothing changes, social science is… worked out. We know how people work now.
I’m a guard, Ben, a warden in a prison hospital, and I never told you because
I’m embarrassed.”
“That’s alright. You’re telling me now, I don’t mind if you lied.
Come back. Come back inside.” This all came out very quickly, a rush of urgent words, and when I finished I whipped around my right shoulder desperately pointing behind me to the door with the stairs back to reality. But when I turned around John hadn't moved.
John heard those words, but knew that I knew that he wasn’t coming
inside just yet. He was telling me something and it was important.
“Embarrassed, yes, but ashamed. Ben I’ve seen horrible things in
there. I’m on top floor. The worst cases. God, Ben it’s awful, it’s hell.
People who’ve fallen out of space planes, caught in explosions, things like
that, but they’re still alive. We have to watch them heal,” John swallowed as
if he were about to be sick “Push their bones and muscles around so they get
built back in the right place. It’s a nightmare. But that’s not the worst bit.
They have a room worse than the rest. God, Ben I should be telling everyone.
But it’s all kept tight, if we told anyone it’d happen to us.”
John took a sudden deep breath, his chest heaving. The look returned
to his eyes, he was terrified and suddenly very animated. “I should tell
everyone, get it out! If they know then…” He visibly sagged “No, I’m the only
one aren’t I?”
“The only one?” I implored, desperately.
John fixated on me despairingly for
a second, wondering how he could explain what it was he needed to explain. Then he froze, remembering something. He looked around us furtively,
suddenly tense, then dipped down to his haunches.
Then did the worst thing he could possibly
have done – reaching around behind himself to pick up the gun lying on the roof by
the bottom of the ledge. It was then, when he brought it out into the light and
closer to eye level, that I realized it only looked like a gun. I couldn’t
quite remember what a gun looked like, but this was definitely something that
looked like one and not an actual one. It had something to hold it by, but
there were two of them, one in front of the other, and there was a button
between the two. What should have been the barrel was cylindrical instead of
boxy, and instead of a hole at the firing end there was a cup-shaped apparatus
made of silicon, about as big as a hand. John held out the gun for me to
inspect for a second, then dropped his arms, cradling the thing at his hips,
the silicon bit pointing away to his left so it wasn’t directed at either of
us.
“It’s got to do with this, this thing. I stole it last night, from
the prison, top floor. Ben I… I want to kill myself.”
“You what?!” I didn’t mean to shout, I wasn’t angry – of course I
wasn’t angry. It was alarming and stupid and scary and impossible and I
couldn’t do anything other than shout, “Kill yourself?” What does that mean?!
“What are you talking about? How can
you? How could you?”
The concept was so alien to me I had no idea how to react. I regret
that I couldn’t have said something better, or acted in a certain way, but I
had no idea. In two hundred years I hadn’t heard of something so ridiculous.
“They have this room you see,” John snapped his head left and right,
like a twitch, as if afraid someone might be listening in, “It’s the worst
room. Because it’s where the worst people go. It’s against all the rules and
all the laws and all the regulations but the wardens there call them ‘the
dead’. It’s because of the policy, the next bit – every single one of them, after they go
through the pain of coming back from the dead, we put to death… we kill them,
with one of these,” and he shook the gun in his arms to indicate he was
referring to it.
I didn’t offer any reply straight away, I just stood very still. My
lovely John was holding in his hands something impossible yet real, something
with the ability to end a life.
“But it’s against the law,” came my feeble defence, “You said people
go in that room because they almost died, and then they’re killed, that’s
because it’s against the law right? You can’t do it then.”
“That’s wrong, Ben. They shouldn’t have the power to stop me dying.
They don’t. I have this,” again, he indicated the gun. He was smiling faintly
now. He moved closer to me until there was only the gun between us, like we
were neighbors talking over a fence. His voice grew softer now he was closer.
“Most of the people in there… they’re mad. They’re actually getting punished,
because they’re thinking mad things. They don’t want to live forever, they want
to die, they’ve had enough. I have to talk to them, Ben, when I do my job, some of them have been there a while, they get to talk amongst themselves. There's a word for it, what they do, it's called suicide. I asked the chief what it means and I got a strike on my record just like that.
"But
they’re all just like me. Life isn’t particularly bad, no, it’s good when I’m
with you, and I love you, but there’s just too much. I’m not bored or fed up,
but I want an end, y’know?”
I slapped him, kissed him violently and then started running away,
tears streaming in denial like a little girl, but he caught my hand and turned
me around.
“I need you to know I’m saying goodbye, Ben, and I don’t want you to
come with me.”
My mind had been whirring through his speech and at those words it
stopped. The cogs in my mind had been gnashing at each other in every way had
worn their teeth smooth and my mind could no longer turn.
“Okay.”
There was nothing I
could say to keep my love alive.
He put down the gun and kissed me, tender and long. His lips were
already cold and blue and when we pulled away his eyes were puffy and wet. He
bit his lip, looked at the ground and swallowed.
“I’m going to need your help with this, it’s a two man job.”
I figured that crying is weakness and I figured I needed to be strong for John so I looked
away then and rubbed my eyes a few times. Still, I had tears in my eyes when I
turned back to look at him to ask, “How does it work?”
“The suction cup. Back of the head, it slips straight on. It
reverses the operation. I won’t feel a thing. You just push the button.”
I flopped forwards onto him and he held me. “Shhhh… it’s alright.” I
was properly crying then, a man in his two hundred and fifties broken at the
thought of losing his immortal husband. The fear and guilt and sadness and loss
hung like deep black throes all around me, but in his arms I could see a
shining nugget of golden light through it all – it’s what he wants. It was tiny though.
My body turned to steel and weighed a hundred times its ordinary
weight.
“I don’t want to lose you John.”
“I don’t want to lose you Ben.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
“Because you can’t stand seeing me like this.”
“I can’t live without you.”
“You’ll live forever.”
“I love you.”
“I love you."
We paused after he said this, because I couldn't think of anything to say. I couldn't fit the billions of potential words together in any way in this short time, how could I possibly end two hundred and thirty years with any words more eloquent and wholesome than "I love you" and "Goodbye"?
John waited for a few seconds and the silence spoke my mind. Then, as all things must come to an end, he broke that silence
“Kill me Ben.”
At this he took my hand in his and kissed it, and since we were
facing each other it reminded me of our wedding day, the golden sunlight came
pouring through the church’s great windows and lit up his face, two hundred
years younger and no less or more wonderful than it was that night.
“I do.”
He brought my hand down and walked me to the little park on the
rooftop. The sunlight from the dream was still with me and it lit up the little
stream in the little park iridescently and turned the grass and the leaves of
the trees a rich emerald green in the faint starlight of the lonesome nighttime
rooftop. The stream went over a number of pretty little cascades, and the
tinkling of the water as it tumbled into itself sounded like a chorus of
sopranos singing ‘Ave Maria’, John led us to the bench facing the stream.
Sometimes we went up there on that roof for a picnic if we couldn’t
be bothered to go out. Our flat was near the middle of the building, so we
could have gone to one of the other recreation areas the two storey tall ones, but there’s something
special about the air up there, in the open, the freedom. Being so high up, you were in the sky, and all
you could see for miles around were all the other shining white incredibly tall
towers of the rest of the city. In the sunlight of my dream they glistened like
candles.
John knelt down in a bed of daisies, which instantly became sweet
smelling roses in my grief hallucination. He turned his upper body to face my
while his lower body still faced the stream, his knees a pace away from the
artificial bank.
“You remember that day, huh.” it was a statement not a question.
“Yeah.” Though I was used to the altitude, I was finding it hard to breath suddenly and my replies were sluggish, as though my mind, everything below
my consciousness, was falling asleep from beneath me.
“When we got the operation? You remember what I said.”
“'Wait, sweetie, we have enough time for that'.”
“'We have enough time for everything',” he corrected – “Don’t you
think he have?”
“Time?”
“Everything.”
“Oh.”
And we had. John and I, we’d visited every country on the planet in
our time. We’d volunteered for innumerable charities (before poverty died out a
hundred years ago), been to space once and loved for two hundred and thirty years.
I stood up involuntarily and went to stand behind John. He turned his upper body out to line up with his knees,
out to face the stream. He had worked it out so that after getting the shot his
head would land under the water, though I guessed by then that he’d be dead
before he hit it.
I crouched down, turned his head by the chin and kissed him one more
time. Then as I stood up again, picked up the gun and pushed the suction cup
onto the back of his head. It fit perfectly.
“I love you Ben,” he said.
“I love you John,” I said.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
“I love you, goodbye.”
“Goodbye, I love you.”
“I’m happy.”
I couldn’t reply because a lump hit my throat and tears welled up. I
cleared my throat, put one hand on John’s head a gently depressed the button on
the gun. I looked up just in time to not miss the needle sliding through the
silicon cup on his skull. John’s body didn’t tense up, it just relaxed
completely.
“I’m happy too.”
And then the heavens erupted with a splash and all the light of my
dream was sucked into the stream, blackened with his blood, and I folded from
where I was standing, curled up like a baby in the daisy patch feeling no
warmth beside me and the throes of darkness from before smothering any light in me.
