The First Immortal

by James L. Halperin

  So far as he knew, he’d never been taught this methodology. (His mother knew differently.) It was… well, just an obvious choice; the most efficient path to success. He understood that this approach was rare among his friends. It was as if any sight or sound or flight of fancy could distract them, and for them to return to the immediate task required considerable will, or the guiding hand of another. He understood, yes, but only as an observer. He had no idea how it felt to have such a response.

  Ben expected to go to whatever college he chose. From there he would attend medical school and become a doctor specializing in whichever field offered him the greatest potential for achievement. He would make his parents proud.

  He scanned the room. His time could just as well have been spent reading the paperback copy of We the Living stuffed into his hip pocket. But he knew everyone in the room, and Sam and Alice Smith had taught him a self-aware respect for others.

  The bell rang, sparing Ben a sixth reread just as he’d become certain that no power in the universe could prevent him from drumming his fingers. He stretched his lean, six-foot frame and took a last look around the room. As his blue-green eyes passed over the faces, he could tell which students did well and which had choked. He sympathized with the latter, sometimes wondering what would happen to them in the real world.

  Over the previous three years, America had stumbled toward a tenuous recovery from the Great Depression. Most of his classmates worried that the day’s relative prosperity was temporary. The general expectation was that Fortress Britain would eventually fall to the Nazis, and their Canadian neighbors would be forced to seek annexation by the U.S., probably costing America’s economy more than it could afford.

  But Ben harbored no such fears or consequent xenophobia. He regarded himself as a neo-immigrant, not with embarrassment, but with a self-assured dignity. His own family’s circumstances, though still modest, had steadily risen over the years, and he trusted that, given time, life would continue to improve. He dreaded no new addition to the “melting pot,” begrudged no rival for the American dream. There was plenty for anyone willing to work for it. Another of Alice’s lessons which Ben had been unaware of being taught.

  He left the classroom and hurried through the halls. Overhead hung newly installed fluorescent lights, a recent innovation, radiating a pale, stingy luminescence. Several of the tubes announced their impending expiration by casting an annoying flicker. Ben absorbed the ambience as metaphor: the new already fading into anachronism.

  As he walked toward the street, he lost himself in reflection about his future; an exciting world, where science would progress at an exponential rate. In fact it was his optimism that drew him to the field of medicine. He believed medical researchers would eventually discover cures for smallpox, polio, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, possibly aging itself. People would live longer and healthier lives, and in the distant future might not die at all.

  How distant? Ben pondered. Maybe in time for his grandchildren, or even his own generation.

  He walked the few blocks separating Wakefield High School from downtown. A tall ladder leaned against Alfred’s Men’s Store; every pedestrian circled around it, but Ben decided to take his chances. Sometimes delights were found in the smallest defiances.

  Several people stared, wondering if the boy had maybe lost his mind. What would he do next? Follow a black cat?

  He arrived at the Colonial Spa ice cream parlor, the usual gathering place for his friends.

  He smiled as he made his way through the after-school crowd to join his girlfriend, Margaret Callahan, and their mutual best friend, Tobias Fiske. It was odd—“peculiar,” was the word most of his friends would employ—in 1941 for a girl to count a male not as her “boyfriend,” but as her best friend. Yet Ben found he enjoyed the raised eyebrows Marge and Toby’s buddy-relationship occasioned.

  As Ben joined them, Marge raised her head, smiling in acknowledgment and welcome. To her, this well-proportioned, fair-haired boy’s body personified the spirit it housed. She admired and trusted his ability and dedication, trademarks of her own father’s character. This emotional context carried an old-shoe familiarity, and she nestled comfortably within it. But there was more; a newer, more compelling feeling, which deliciously seasoned her response to Ben.

  “Hey,” he said, taking a seat and joining the now-completed foursome. Marge covered his hand with her own.

  Toby’s latest girlfriend, number four of the school year by Ben and Marge’s count, was a pretty blond classmate named Sally Nowicki. She seemed bright and lively and was clearly sweet on Toby, but Ben knew the courtship had a less than even chance of ringing in the new year. The two were engrossed in a random flow of airy conversation and light, playful petting; a replay of the previous week, except the girl’s name had been Lydia Gabrielson. And Denise Vroman a few weeks before that.

  Toby Fiske, compact, dark-complexioned, and nimble of mind and body, was a brilliant young man, but as Marge had once observed, “Toby’s about as disciplined as a ten-week-old puppy.” Because Toby’s parents considered him overly susceptible to the influence of others, they were pleased that their son had fallen under Ben Smith’s tutelage; it was one of the few things upon which Theodore and Constance Fiske actually agreed.

  Ben knew how it felt to be the recipient of subtle feminine overtures; it was always pleasant and flattering, but to him, after the day he met Marge in the spring of 1940, utterly resistible. She was his only and first serious girlfriend.

  Marge was a natural beauty; straight brown hair, brown eyes, delicate features, and flawless skin; five feet seven inches tall, with long, perfectly shaped legs and a lean yet curvaceous figure.

  Ben lifted her hand and kissed it.

  “How’d your exam go?” she asked.

  “I was ready for it,” he told her. “How was yours?”

  “Okay, I think, but I doubt it’ll be enough to get into Radcliffe.”

  “You’ll get in,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Or Wellesley at least.” Marge was probably just being modest, he thought.

  Ben hated even to think about separate schools. Wellesley was ten miles from Harvard, and that was too far. He looked at her beautiful, serious, intelligent face and knew she was the only girl he would ever love; as Marge had told Ben that he was the one with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

  Suddenly the image popped into his mind, as it often did, of their most recent evening together, kissing passionately, then touching, first everywhere, but eventually just there. Harder and harder until the urge became irresistible, and finally, ecstatic relief.

  In a biblical sense, Ben and Marge had never consummated their love, although recently they had not left each other unsatisfied. Their hands knew many secrets.

  “Hey, Toby,” Ben called across the table, “what time ya con-tin’ over tonight?”

  It took his friend a few seconds to extricate himself from Sally and regain his composure. “Tonight? Oh. After dinner, I guess. That okay?”

  “Sure thing. Should only take a couple of hours, if I can keep your brain switch at the on position.”

  Toby chuckled good-naturedly. “It’d take all night if we tried to study at my place.”

  “Parents fighting again?”

  “When don’t they?”

  “Well, it’s not like they beat each other up or throw dishes or anything,” Ben said. “They just like to argue is all. Some couples are like that.”

  “Mine sure are,” Sally interjected.

  “Yeah, but at least your parents like each other,” Toby said. “My parents must’ve, too, once. But now they’re each convinced they married the Antichrist!”

  “But they love you,” Ben said. “You’re the reason they’re still together.” In fact their religion forbade divorce under virtually all circumstances. But such a notion was foreign to Ben, whose parents, though devout, embraced religion mostly as an expression of gratitude for their lives.

  “Yeah, some conso
lation,” Toby said. “Don’t know if I’ll ever get married myself. Too damn risky.”

  Ben noticed Sally’s face clouding. “But wouldn’t it be worse,” he asked, “to spend your old age alone?”

  “Not from where I sit. Alone seems a lot better than living the next forty years with somebody you can’t stand.”

  Sally recovered quickly. “Then where do you imagine yourself in forty years?”

  Toby laughed. “Cemetery, probably, pushing up daisies.”

  “Y’know,” Ben said seriously, “I was thinking we might all be around longer than we realize. What if you could live forever? Wouldn’t you want to?”

  “No way,” Toby said. “Heaven’s gotta be a whole lot better than Wakefield.”

  “Who said you’re going to heaven?” Marge cracked.

  “Good point. Actually, hell might be better than Wakefield. But just hypothetically, Ben, are you asking if I’d want everyone to live forever, or just me?”

  “Everyone, I suppose.”

  “Everyone? Interesting.” Toby paused. “But then, what’d keep us from abusing each other? I mean, if we all knew we’d live forever, never having to face God’s judgment for our sins, well, aren’t most people crazy enough as it is?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Marge offered. “People who expected to live forever might be nicer. After all, if you never died, whatever you did to others would eventually come back to you one way or another.”

  “Exactly,” Ben agreed. “Any act of kindness, or spite, is sorta like a stone pitched into an endless sea. Y’know how ripples spread from the impact? If you plan to sail those waters forever, you might be more careful about what you toss into ‘em.”

  “What do you mean?” Sally asked. “Like, for example?”

  “Well, most everyone claims to believe in heaven and hell, but some people obviously don’t. So how do you set penalties to fit the crime? For instance, suppose some despot who only pretends to believe in God enslaves a million people for twenty years. What’s the worst punishment he’d expect? Maybe if he gets unlucky, his life gets shortened by a decade or two. He’d probably figure it’s worth the gamble; dictators usually think they’re invincible, anyway.”

  “Yeah?” Toby asked. “And how does death enter into it?”

  “See, if that same man had the potential to live forever, he might become more interested in building up goodwill; helping society improve. He could still be amoral, but only really deranged people do things they know they’ll be punished for. Maybe he’d decide that fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years from now, he’d be better off if he suppressed his impulses now.”

  “Yeah, that’s possible, I guess,” Toby conceded. “But still, it’s natural to die.”

  “Oh, it’s natural all right,” Ben said. “Just like hurricanes, floods, and diseases are natural. Earthquakes and ice ages, too. Some even say war is natural. Maybe we should think of nature as an adversary.”

  Marge offered no opinion, but Sally did: “I think nature’s wonderful and we should respect it. When it’s my time to go, I’ll be ready.”

  “Nature is wonderful, if you’re dealing with it successfully,” Ben argued. “Yeah, looking at it, or contesting it with a fishing rod or a test tube. It’s easy to say you’ll be ready to give in to it, too. That you’ll be ready to go when it’s time, until the time approaches, then you’ll fight against it, that’s for sure.” His voice was calm, serious, without a trace of mockery.

  “I won’t fight it,” Sally insisted. “Not when my time comes.”

  “And if you caught some fatal infection tomorrow? Would you refuse medical treatment to save your life?”

  “No, of course not.” Sally appeared somewhat uncomfortable with the contradiction in her answer.

  “Even if the treatment isn’t ‘natural’?”

  “Okay. I get the point,” she said with a flash of defiance. “But still, when I’m sixty, sixty-five, that’ll be plenty for me.”

  “So let’s pretend you’re sixty,” Ben pressed on. “What if they invent a serum that would give you, say, another twenty-five years of vigorous health?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess that’d be nice.”

  “So your time could come at eighty-five just as easily as sixty?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “See? Nobody really wants to die, but we make believe it’s perfectly okay. We keep up the pretense, not only to others, even to ourselves, because right now, dying after six or eight decades is almost a certainty. But don’t feel bad. Used to be the same way myself, till just recently.”

  Sally’s face brightened slightly.

  “What about evolution?” Toby argued. “Without death, how can the human race develop?”

  “I thought you rejected the premise of evolution,” Ben said.

  Toby was raised as an Evangelical Lutheran and had been told, ever since he was a small child, that God created heaven and earth about seven thousand years ago.

  “Lately, I’m agnostic,” Toby said. “But you believe in evolution.”

  “Actually, one doesn’t believe in it so much as accept the evidence for it. Which I’d say is overwhelming. But evolution’s the cruelest thing about nature; if it stopped today, I wouldn’t miss it a bit. Think of the countless millions of prehumanoids who suffered horrible deaths just so you could hit that triple yesterday.”

  Toby smiled. “So if a few thousand more of my ancestors had sacrificed themselves, it would’ve been a home run?”

  Everyone laughed, especially Ben. “Strange concept, I admit. But someday medical scientists should figure out how to analyze sperm cells and ova, and predict which combinations can produce the most desirable traits.”

  Marge grinned at Ben. “I just want our kids to do their homework and show up for piano lessons.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Ben said. “If we get to choose our offspring’s traits, we could have all the benefits of evolution, even if nobody ever died. It’s called eugenics; surely you’ve read something on the subject.”

  “Yes, but it’s not natural,” Sally said.

  “Good! Like I said, nature is our adversary. Fact is, a natural life expectancy for us may only be fifteen or twenty years.”

  “Really?” Marge asked.

  “That’s about how long they think the average caveman lived,” he explained, “before there were medicines and doctors. You have to remember, we’re talking a truly all-natural life span, when lots of us died from being eaten!”

  “Are you saying there’s no difference between saving yourself from a cave lion by using a spear, and saving yourself from a disease using medicine?” Marge asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Ben said, “they’re plenty different all right, but fundamentally speaking, isn’t the effect the same?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “So how can anyone say that even a hundred years is enough?” Ben asked. “If a long life is good, and good life can be long, why isn’t victory over death even better?”

  December 7, 1941

  In a desperate need to escape the household fireworks, Toby had told his parents he was going to church with Ben. Because it was Ben, he knew they’d allow it. There was just one problem of which Mr. and Mrs. Fiske remained blissfully unaware: Ben rarely went to church.

  Instead the two boys passed time on Ben’s back stoop, talking and listening to the radio music blaring through an open kitchen window. It was really too cool to sit outside, but too sunny not to. They’d been talking since gobbling down the chicken sandwiches Alice Smith had made them.

  The music suddenly stopped, and the airwaves filled with static. Without knowing why, Ben glanced at his watch: 1:25 P.M.; a time that would be imprinted in his memory. Then a voice came on with astonishing clarity:

  “At 7:55 A.M. local Hawaiian time, just a half hour ago, the Imperial Japanese armed forces attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. The attack is ongoing. While specific battle reports are not yet available, it appears we h
ave sustained significant losses. We will bring you more as it becomes available. God bless America.”

  The two boys sat staring at each other as the music resumed. Now it was martial, not band, music, which faded again within seconds.

  “The President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt…”

  Ben had never heard of Pearl Harbor, but grasped what the attack meant to him.

  FDR, in his poetic style and nasal, grandfatherly voice, briefly addressed the American public. The reception was poor, punctuated with static. The two boys strained in silence to capture the words. By the time the President finished, Ben had made his decision.

  “The Japs made a big mistake,” he said to his friend. “That bombing’s gonna unite this country, get everyone in America solidly behind this war. I guess college’ll have to wait awhile, for me, anyway. Next month I turn seventeen; I’ll volunteer for the Navy.”

  January 14, 1942

  Toby grasped the push bar and swaggered into the Colonial Spa. He plunked himself onto the stool beside Ben at the lunch counter. Outwardly, his manner was that of a man full of confident anticipation. But beneath, a frightened child trembled.

  “Sorry I’m late. So much to do, you know.”

  “You’re not late,” Ben told him evenly. He stirred his coffee, a recently acquired taste. Although this was Ben’s seventeenth birthday, his mood hardly seemed festive.

  Tomorrow Ben would enlist; Toby already had, weeks ago. Over the last several days, the two boys had found no time for each other. It felt as if the world as they knew it had spun out of their grasp. Most of the adult population of North America viewed the times with similar impotent apprehension.

  “Can’t stay long,” Toby said. Ben nodded stoically.

  “I know it’s your birthday,” Toby continued, “but I have to tell my parents today, and that could be a real pisser.”

  “Tell your parents what?”

  “Huh? That I’m going in the Army, of course,” Toby said. “Oh hell, Ben,” he blurted, “this really is one pisser of a day. I can’t believe I never told you: I, uh, signed my father’s name to my enlistment papers. Traced it right off one of his canceled checks.”