Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  I was unfamiliar with the term, and said so. She explained, “VCs look for places to put their money, basically. All they really care about is if an idea can turn into something they can make money off of. Although there’s also something to be said for an idea that sounds good but doesn’t work out, because tax write-offs are sometimes just as valuable. I did a term paper on this stuff if you want to read it.”

  “Another time,” I said. “So they’re like patricians?”

  “Kind of. Except a patrician might support an artist for the sake of art. These guys are definitely in it for the money.”

  “Can anybody be a venture capitalist?”

  “Anybody with gobs of hard money, sure. Do you know of anyone?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Can I use your phone?”

  * * *

  An hour later, I had a new best friend in a Swiss banker named Heintz, and a workable plan. Heintz would be spending the next day or two trying to find out what Grindel’s latest investment vehicle was—preferably without spending any of my money first. While Heintz was doing this, I planned to be on a fast plane heading straight out of this hemisphere. This last part didn’t sit well with Clara.

  “Look,” I explained to her, “You said yourself he doesn’t have the money for this bounty on his own. That’s his weakness. If he can’t get me, he can’t maintain the bounty, because the investors will pull out.”

  “It’s a stupid idea,” she insisted. “You don’t even know for sure if he’s who you think he is. Or where he is.”

  “Yeah, but I just need to know where his money is. And who else could it be? We know it’s someone connected with Securidot. You think a low-level programmer has the money to do this when the CEO doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” she said. “I think the only way to be sure is to find him. We can do it together.”

  “Oh, for Baal’s sake, we cannot. And for five million he doesn’t want to just have a chat.”

  “What if he doesn’t even have it?” she asked. “What if the money is a bluff?”

  I shook my head. “You don’t hire these kinds of people with bluff money. Not if you want to live through the experience.”

  Clara pouted. My death-proof, long-term, but capture-free plan wasn’t flying with her. I couldn’t imagine why. My keeping out of his clutches should—if I was reading this correctly—bankrupt him fairly quickly. And if I had to I could invest directly myself and take him apart from the inside. It was a good plan.

  “Which part of this don’t you like?” I asked. “The bloodless part or the part where I run off?”

  “It just seems cowardly,” she said after a time.

  “Oh, please,” I said. “A word like coward doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does brave or valorous. They’re what you use to describe a dead person. ‘Oh, so-and-so acted bravely when he charged that crowd of Huns armed with only a half-sword and a pair of sandals. Sure he’s dead now, but what valor!’ Well, maybe the dead guy charging the Huns did it to inspire the men he fought with, or maybe he just realized he was already dead and decided to take out as many of his enemies as he could first. And maybe the coward who ran away warned the people behind him that the Huns were coming, and at the end of the day saved more lives for it. Call it cowardice all you want, but I’ll still be breathing when it’s done, and that’s my favorite kind of plan.”

  “He’ll keep chasing you,” she said quietly. I’d raised my voice a bit, which I think scared her. The word coward annoys me for some reason. Not that she could have known that.

  “Let him,” I said. “I’ll outlive him.”

  She looked defeated.

  “I didn’t think… when I offered to help, I didn’t think it would be helping you to get away from me. I’m not ready to say good-bye to you yet, Adam,” she admitted.

  And there it was, the root of our argument. I had been hanging out, enjoying some good sex, trying to decide when would be the best time to disappear for a century or two. She had apparently been working from a different agenda.

  Not to say that women fall in love with me routinely or even that I’m particularly easy to fall in love with, but this has happened before. Even arguing that only one out of ten women with whom I’ve been intimate also fell in love with me at some point, you’d still be looking at decent numbers. The only way to prevent it was to swear off female companionship altogether. I just can’t do that.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I wasn’t planning to stay for much longer anyway.” True, now that I had a strategy to work with, it was time to go. I had been holding out for good-bye sex, but it didn’t sound like that was going to happen once I was finished breaking her heart. Ah well.

  She wasn’t buying. “You expect me to believe I don’t mean anything to you?”

  “You can believe what you want,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, but… I just needed a place to stay.”

  I tried to sound convincing and, well, it was half true in that even if I hadn’t been sleeping with the host, I still would have stayed. But I did have feelings for her. Was love one of those feelings? Hard to say. It was possible I simply no longer remembered what love felt like. What I did remember is what losing someone I loved felt like, and that memory was strong enough to get me heading for the door whenever I found myself in this situation. Like I said—intimacy issues.

  “You still can’t trust me, can you?” she asked.

  “No, I trust you.” Also true.

  We suffered through a lengthy silence.

  “Look,” I said finally, “I have to get going.” I couldn’t even look at her when I said this.

  “Now?”

  “I think it has to be now, don’t you?”

  She looked down and wiped a tear. I’m not entirely heartless. This was killing me. “I guess you do,” she said quietly. She reopened her laptop. “Where do you want to go?”

  Chapter 20

  Here’s what I don’t get. I’ve been listening to these guys talk and talk about how my body works, but whenever I bring up the next step they get all vague with me, using phrases like “transformational genetic event,” which doesn’t sound like anything with which I am familiar. I do know that whatever this “event” is, it has something to do with a virus. Beyond that? No idea. But I am wondering if it has to do with what’s in the reinforced building next to mine.

  I need to think about it some more. I’ve got time. I can figure this out.

  * * *

  After much thought, we decided I should take a flight from JFK to Heathrow and pick my destination from there. Clara wanted to know where I was going to end up, but she also didn’t. Something about lots of beer and daddy’s credit card and having a weak moment. I tried to sympathize without sounding like I wanted her to come with me. (I did sort of want her to come with me.) And I didn’t actually know where I was going to go once I reached London, although it crossed my mind to visit my money in Switzerland. Or to return to Amsterdam. Have I mentioned how much I love Amsterdam?

  I actually thought it would be a miracle if I made it on the plane, but I didn’t tell her that. With the demon out of the way, all I had to worry about was ingenuity on the part of my human pursuers, or simply luck smiling on the wrong person at the wrong moment, and that seemed like pretty good odds when I thought about it in the abstract. But now that I was actually going out into the world, in a more-or-less mad dash for the border, I was beginning to have my doubts. And since I’d already done a fabulous job of burning my bridge with Clara, I couldn’t stay any longer either.

  Clara reserved a ticket for me under one of the passports I hadn’t used lately, meaning I had to brush up on my Spanish as I was going to have to be Gaspar Esperanzo for a little while. This is not as easy as it sounds, not when you’re fluent in almost every European dialect there ever was. I had to look up some Spanish-language web sites to get my head in the right century. I also had to give Clara some cash since it was t
he aforementioned daddy’s credit card that bought my ticket. (It’s surprisingly difficult to buy a ticket online with cash.)

  Three in the morning with large portions of the city sleeping, it was time to say good-bye. Significantly, she’d managed to put on some clothes for the occasion.

  “Will you let me know you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I will,” I said, although I probably wouldn’t. It was unspoken, but while making the formal arrangements for my departure, a sense of resignation had imposed itself on the proceedings. She’d stopped arguing, and I had stopped forcing myself to be so callous. “I think it would be best if you tried to get on with your life,” I added helpfully. “And maybe I’ll catch up with you someday. When you’re married and insanely happy.”

  She hugged me, and I hugged her back. “I don’t think that will ever happen,” she said.

  “It always does.” I kissed her on the forehead. A paternal gesture. Appropriate, given our age difference.

  She kissed her finger and touched my cheek with it. “I’ve about figured out this immortality thing,” she said with a smile that managed to look sad. “All I have to do is stop getting older.”

  “That’s all there is to it,” I agreed.

  “When I get that down, I’ll look you up.”

  I smiled. “It’s not as fun as it sounds.”

  “Nothing ever is.”

  We hugged tighter, and then I left.

  * * *

  The flight wasn’t until ten in the morning, but I didn’t want anybody to see me leaving Clara’s apartment during the day, so to throw off the scent I snuck out during the night and descended into the pit of hell itself. The subway.

  Like just about everything else conjured up in the past century, the underground subway system of the modern city is an unfathomable engineering miracle covered in several inches of filth, urine, and spray paint. Despite being a certified member of the human race, I’ll never fully understand why miracles of this magnitude are treated so casually.

  For the first couple of hours on the train, I expounded at length on that point with a drunk named Lester, who heartily agreed with me. Lester also let me in on important secrets about what the government is putting in the drinking water and how all communists are homosexuals and vice versa. Lester was a sharp guy, in a “wow, you’re nuts” sort of way. It was like speaking to outtakes from Dr. Strangelove.

  Lester also had a bottle, which he offered kindly to share. I declined, for an odd reason—I didn’t want to disappoint Clara. I reminded myself I never planned to see her again, but this didn’t help.

  Sometime in the third hour, Lester suddenly decided we were at “his stop”—although we’d been by it four times—and wandered off. I think he sobered up enough to wonder if maybe I was a homosexual communist government operative checking up on him. Could have been the tape recorder I suddenly pulled out of my pocket that gave him that impression. Yeah, it was sort of cruel, but he was starting to bore me.

  Alone again, I got my hands on an abandoned early edition of the Times, and out of curiosity flipped through the pages to see if there were any new messages in Latin waiting for me. I found it on page seventeen. It was another full pager—must have cost a fortune—and it said pretty much exactly the same thing.

  For the Eternal Man

  You have nothing to fear from us. We will not hurt you. Your health is the most important thing. If you stop running, you will realize we have much to discuss. Wait where you are.

  I had to think that somewhere in New York was a very confused Latin professor with a Times subscription.

  I stayed underground for all of rush hour, which was a startling contrast to me and Lester alone in a car. Calling them sardines in business suits would be a bit cliché and besides which, inaccurate. More like a perpetual feeding frenzy. Or the way we used to bring down big game back in the day—everyone charge.

  I shifted with the business-clad tide for a while, hopping off at stops here and there and basically making life miserable for anybody who might be following me. Then, with two hours to go before my flight, I popped back up to the surface and hailed a cab for JFK. Thus ended the easiest part of my day.

  * * *

  In the cab my thoughts drifted somewhat predictably back to Clara and how much I was expecting to miss her.

  It would be easier if I didn’t care about anybody. I’ve met men like that, and none of them had immortality going for them. Me, I’ve got a ready-made excuse to be a serial dater. Yet, every time I leave someone behind, I feel pangs of regret followed by years of “hey, that looks sort of like…” sightings, until I either convince myself to go back and find the girl I abandoned or until I do the math and figure out she’s been dead for a while. Which is always a profoundly depressing revelation.

  I wish I could say I’d never met anyone like her—meaning Clara the person, not Clara the uniquely attractive woman—but the tragedy of memory precludes such considerations. Yes, she reminded me of other women, women I’ve slept with and women I’ve simply known fairly well. One might think that takes the wonder out of romance. In a way it does, but in its place is the cozy familiarity of seeing someone again after a long time apart. It’s thoughts like these that make me wonder if there is such a thing as reincarnation.

  Anyway, I’d miss her, just like I miss all of them.

  My cab driver was a lunatic named Mohammed who seemed to show equal amounts of disdain for all the other cars on the road and for all the traffic laws. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was trying to kill me. But he wasn’t. He liked me. I always get along well with cab drivers because I always speak their language, whatever language that might be. Mohammed’s was Arabic. I entertained the prospect of telling him I’d met the original Mohammed, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t believe me. (Nice guy, old Mohammed was. A tad zealous and more than a bit touched in the head, but otherwise all right. He and Lester the subway drunk would have gotten along well.)

  We arrived at the curb with a little over an hour to spare before my flight. It looked like my luck had held. All I had to do was make it to the gate and I was home free. I figured the best anyone could do once I was inside was try and talk me into going with them, seeing as how they’d never get a gun past the metal detectors. And if the woman I was sleeping with couldn’t convince me to go to Grindel, what chance did anyone else have?

  After tipping Mohammed, I stepped past a man pushing a baby stroller and nearly made it through the sliding doors leading inside when I heard a familiar voice.

  “That’s him.”

  I should have run straight for the gate. Instead, I turned around and found myself staring at the barrel of a gun. It was wrapped up in a receiving blanket so nobody but me could see it. The man with the stroller smiled. “Don’t move,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked. “You going to shoot me here, in front of the skycaps? You think I’m stupid?”

  The happy faux father was still smiling. He was dressed in generic upper-middle class, looked to be about six feet tall and decently muscular, in a daily jogging yuppie kind of way. Probably knew a bit about hand-to-hand combat. I could take him.

  “No,” he answered. “I know you are not stupid.” Trace of a German accent.

  He held up his other hand, the hand that had been holding the baby stroller. In it was an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of Clara. Clara tied up and gagged with electrical tape.

  “Hah! Shit, Adam, you should see your face!” It wasn’t the man with the gun who said that. It was the familiar voice that had caused me to turn around in the first place. It was the baby. I looked down.

  “Hello, Jerry,” I said. “You make one ugly baby, you know that?”

  Chapter 21

  Clara finally managed to get a map through to me. I’m guessing since she was able to draw it, she also has a good deal more freedom than anything I’m working with. I’m wondering
again if maybe she’s not even a prisoner at all. That would be a nettlesome complication. Especially if she tells anyone about my escape plan, which has plenty of holes in it already and certainly won’t need her help to go horribly wrong.

  And even if it goes exactly the way it’s supposed to, I don’t expect I’ll be surviving it. The best I can reasonably hope for is to take out as many people when I go as I can.

  * * *

  An hour later I was in the backseat of a minivan and taking in the less scenic portions of northern New Jersey. (The snow covering helped, from a beautification standpoint, but only marginally.) Beside me, in a baby’s car seat, was Jerry. I can’t even begin to tell you how funny this looked. My captor—who introduced himself as John—was handling the driving. He was doing the limit with a fresh-faced all-American smile on his face. Joe Anybody on a Sunday afternoon jaunt. Which made me the brother-in-law, just in from the airport. Or the other half of a gay couple, depending on who asked.

  At my feet was my bag. John hadn’t bothered to search it, which was just as well. I didn’t have anything I could use in there. I’d left the gun in the park, and it would take hours to kill John with Tchekhy’s tape recorder. The only thing I’d rather they didn’t know I had was the satellite phone. Of course, they had one of their own.

  It had been assumed from the outset that I would be going quietly. Seemed like a reasonable assumption, as they had my girlfriend hostage and I was supposedly the chivalrous sort and all. And really, you had to give them credit for thinking of getting a hostage since we all know I’m not an easy guy to forcibly transport. They were pretty close to being right about the chivalry part, but that was about it. I certainly wasn’t going peacefully.

  “So where are we headed?” I asked John No-Last-Name.

  “To see my employer,” he said with a smile one reserves for friendly chats about the weather.