by Janis Ian
He leaps up. He stands panting by the window in terror. But her terror has darkened and grown still.
"I suppose," she says, "it will all go eventually."
"Then—what about us?"
"No," she says. "I think not us."
How do you know, Hester?
Hester moves slightly away from Drew.
"At least, we're together now," he says. He sounds smug, even in his fear. Of course, he can rely on her wanting him. Hadn't she told him often enough? He puts his arm around her. Presently she moves right away. She thinks how men are said to call out, when dying, for their mothers…
She hears the intake of his breath and sees too, what he is seeing, another mountain dissolving like a pillar of salt.
~~~~~
All that day, if it's day, or night, if it is, they stand or sit, watching the mountains vanish one by one, into the now visible silence.
Drew sobs.
Hester thinks how she cried for Drew, night after night when nights were nights and days, days.
She doesn't cry now.
Time, if there is time, passes.
The mountains sail off into nothingness.
In the end, there's only one mountain left, balancing there in the void that isn't dark or light. This is the hour drew wants to make love to her.
They had found a bottle of bourbon, they'd drunk some. With the last mountain still there, he had gently pulled her to him.
She doesn't want this.
What she wants—
What are you going to do, Hester?
She goes outside and sits on the barren earth, and observes the last mountain, as, like a glacier, it melts.
Does she want Drew, or the mountain? Drew or the world? Today, or forever? Well?
That's when some other voice, calling wild and low within the silence, too absolute, as usual, to be heard, becomes known to her. She doesn't know what it says. It doesn't matter what it says—only that it's there.
Then the silence is there again instead, hissing in her ears Hsstrr, Hssrr—
When she walks from the cabin, down the path, gets in her car, Drew appears, charging across the ridge. Behind him, the cabin looks like a stage set. He acts badly, waving the whiskey, shouting, as she did when he left her. She sees his dislike of her, even now, all he really has to offer her. The car jumps forward down the track.
Turning her back on the melting mountain, does she sense it hesitate? Hester, don't look behind you to see. She isn't looking back. She's driving headlong forward, away from Drew, away into the emptiness which is all that's left—or all there ever was.
~~~~~
Atropos is not sitting by the road. No good-bad fairy waves her wand. Nevertheless.
~~~~~
The world returns somewhere on the highway. It's like—what's it like?—like driving straight out of the skin of a bursting grey balloon.
The light and sound, the sunlight, daylight, trees, the harsh hard surface of the road, reel about her. She careens straight off the highway, almost wraps the car around a pine. Around a pine.
Hester sits laughing. She's probably there, doing that off and on, for hours. The sun (the sun) sails over, and now and then, cars—cars—monotonously pass. Bird and animal scrambling, shining like sunflakes, through undergrowth, rummage through leaves and needles, swing from boughs, hilarious acrobats, sometimes alarmed by her applauding cries. A squirrel, seriously miffed, sits staring at her, out on a limb. It's as though she never saw a squirrel in her life. Did she? The play of its muscles, every sun-tipped hair on its back.
When the blood-gold sky begins to cool, Hester calls Drew's number on her mobile without difficulty. He answers. "Good evening, sir. Can I acquaint you with our new Three Minute Pizza Service?" "No, thanks," says Drew. He cuts the line away from her. He didn't know her. But then, she no longer knows him either. After this she rings the cabin. The answerphone message comes on, spic and span. She listens to the recorded voices of her friends. Which is a perfect prologue to calling them in New York. "Hi! How are you? Oh, honey, I'm glad—sure—see you then."
Mountains crowd around the road, above the woods, and as the light goes out, they alter to opaque lilac marble, good for another million years, and crowned by immortal stars.
When Hester drives into the neon-lit gas station, the dog lurks with its evil head wagging. She sees it as if never before had she seen a dog. Then she drops the unwrapped chocolate bar between its paws. As the dog snaps it up, the old man shoulders out on her. "Hey, what you doing?" he bellows. Filling the tank, she laughs at him. "Crazy bitch," he tells her, and the choco-salivating dog snarls. Music—it's music to her ears.
2. THE FIDDLE PLAYS UNTIL IT ACHES
Can you hear the wind begin to howl
Too late, too late to turn back now
And the fiddle plays until it aches
and fills her resting place
~ from Forever Young by Janis Ian
1890
I killed her. I will tell you why.
~~~~~
The day I first met her, my future wife, I thought her fallen from the sun above—her golden hair, her eyes of dark amber and skin clear as clean water, her rose-red mouth. Our courtship was swift. She loved me and I her. I have heard other men complain that they found no passion in their wives, but in her was all the passion of Woman. I dare say, the passion of angels, if angels lived in mortal guise.
Did I mention, we were both young? I was, as is often the case, a little older than she, but not so much. I am a tall man, straight and strong. I could lift her up in my arms, she weighed so lightly, her heavy golden hair the heaviest part of her, I think. I asked her if, like the birds, her bones were hollow. We were happy, gladsome, like the First Two in the Garden. It seems from all Gardens we are, at last pushed forth, for some transgression we do not understand.
Ten years went by. I paid them little heed. We lived well and had no wants, save for each other. That no children had come to us was by our own design. I had no wish to remake myself in that way, and she had told me, early on, she was afraid to submit to the processes of pregnancy and labor. I did not mean to put her in harm's way, and took the best care, since I have seen plenty of women lost in that fashion. Death is jealous of the living. But—there is another more jealous even than death.
It was that very night she confessed to me her fear of becoming a mother, that she confided also the other terror in her heart. "You'll think me foolish, as I am yet quite young—but oh, how I fear growing old!"
"Dearest, is it dying you mean to say?"
"Oh, no," she cried, smiling at me in the candledim, "death is nothing. There is a shining world beyond that gate. I have always known it. Partly, sometimes, it seems to me I remember it. There, there's nothing ever bad, only joy ever-lasting. That is why it is a sin to throw away one's life here. One must wait for this reward."
What she said did not surprise me. I have told you, I thought her fallen from the sun. Perhaps she had dropped farther, from Heaven itself.
But she continued, "I am only afraid of age. I've seen so often what it does. It wrecks and ruins and spoils, it takes away our vitality and our beauty, making us unrecognizable to ourselves and others. It cripples and deforms. We are instruments, well-tuned. We play so sweetly, but then the wood warps, the strings break. Pain and misery and humiliation end our songs. Age is a torturer," she added with an awful sadness, resigned even in her distress, "and time is jealous and rushes us where we dread to go."
I safeguarded her then from her first fear, that of childbirth, but from the second I could not, of course. I hoped, I think, she would grow less to mind her fate, which is the fate of all who persist in life.
She did not.
The ten years elapsed, then another six. Had I noticed by that time any of those changes and spoilings she had mooted? No, not in her. In myself maybe, but one shrugs off these unavoidable affronts. There is no choice.
I began, however, to find my wife, who, like cer
tain of the most beautiful women, had no vanity at all, spending long hours before her mirror. Indeed, she requested a better one, that she might chart more ably the process, as she now began to term it, of the Disease of Time—old age.
She was not yet old. Her years were less than five and thirty. But I too, seeing her at her pitiless, frightened self-regard, I too began to be afraid.
I tried to tempt her from her apprehensions. We took trips here and there, traveled even into foreign places, where always she was feted and adored, as she deserved. It was in Italy, that peach-warm, languid clime, that the initial and real barb was thrust into her. At our hotel, an American girl of about seventeen or eighteen was looking for hr mother and, misunderstanding, some Italian gentlemen escorted her to my wife. The girl laughed and explained that, although all of us were from the same country, we were not related. My wife behaved charmingly, as always she did. When they were gone again, I saw the shadow dark as a blush of shame across her face. "What is it, my dearest?" I thought, I believe, for one moment, she had come to regret the fact that she might not genuinely claim some young woman as her child. But my love replied slowly, in a little voice, "I am now seen to be old enough to have a full-grown daughter. Now they see what you will not." Then, before I could speak, she rose and went away. It was in Italy too, after that first barb had been thrust home, that she took her first lover. She made no secret of what she did. He was younger than she. She was embarrassed by it, made worse afraid, yet every night she went to him. And when this lover tired of her, she said, "He sees I'm too old." And then she took another.
So it went on. On our return, my wife was able always to find for herself young men. It came to my notice presently that she paid for them—yes, paid, in dreadful "proper" ways, by "lending" them money and giving them extravagant gifts.
And I, what do you think of me, who permitted himself to be so used and cuckolded, and, by her, made banker to these reprobates? Think what you will. I do not tell you this to ask for judgment, for already I am judged, and soon enough a higher Judge will look into my crime. I tell you only that you may know the truth.
More years passed. Each one brought, for her, further physical catastrophes. I too now saw—she made me see—the grey hairs that she ripped from her gold, the dye she had recourse to, that was never good enough to match her own wondrous hair, the tonics, pills, cosmetics. She made me note the stiffness that now settled in her back, she spoke of the pains in her feet, and on and on of a tooth which had decayed, and another which broke and had to be pulled. She was never angry. Oh God—she never railed against this destiny as many do. No, she cowered. She lay down, a victim, trembling in abject horror. She, who did not even fear death and hoped for Heaven. It was this she feared, and fear was on her now, day and night.
So arrived that evening, a month ago. Winter was flying low above the land, lighting white lamps of frost. That day we drove to dine in town. She had made of herself the best, as she saw it, although to me she seemed older, a painted caricature of all she had been—was. But we made merry and drank wine, and she flirted with other men. When we came home, I held her in my arms. "I have been a poor and unworthy wife to you," she said. I answered, "You have been my only love and always you will be that, to and beyond the gates of eternity." She slept soon from the draught I had added to her tea. And as she slept I smothered her with the pillow. It did not take long. Our last embrace, when she was dead, was sharper than the razor's edge. I cut her free of chains with it, and it is I that bleed.
I was tried and found guilty of her murder, committed, they said, out of rank jealousy at her unfaithfulness, but it is time who is jealous, and death who garners all.
You will see me sent into the dark as her body is lowered into the dark and frosty ground. She buried under the hill, I buried alive within my prison cell, till death the lover remits me too. Then I must face the verdict of One who, understanding all, will yet judge me mercilessly in His mercy. Thus perhaps, even in the lands beyond the world, never again shall I see her. But this I know, and shall know always, through my act she is now fearless, and forever young.
(Back to TOC)
Immortality
Robert J. Sawyer
Baby, I’m only society’s child
When we’re older, things may change
But for now this is the way they must remain
~ from Society's Child by Janis Ian
Author’s Note: Janis Ian dropped out of Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art in 1966—so whoever the heck graduated from Cedar Valley High in 1963, it certainly wasn’t her.
Sixty years.
Sweet Jesus, had it been that long?
But of course it had. The year was now 2023, and then—
Then it had been 1963.
The year of the march on Washington.
The year JFK had been assassinated.
The year I—
No, no, I didn’t want to think about that. After all, I’m sure he never thinks about it ... or about me.
I’d been seventeen in 1963. And I’d thought of myself as ugly, an unpardonable sin for a young woman.
Now, though ...
Now, I was seventy-seven. And I was no longer homely. Not that I’d had any work done, but there was no such thing as a homely—or a beautiful—woman of seventy-seven, at least not one who had never had treatments. The only adjective people applied to an unmodified woman of seventy-seven was old.
My sixtieth high-school reunion.
For some, there would be a seventieth, and an eightieth, a ninetieth, and doubtless a mega-bash for the hundredth. For those who had money—real money, the kind of money I’d once had at the height of my career—there were pharmaceuticals and gene therapies and cloned organs and bodily implants, all granting the gift of synthetic youth, the gift of time.
I’d skipped the previous reunions, and I wasn’t fool enough to think I’d be alive for the next one. This would be it, my one, my only, my last. Although I’d once, briefly, been rich, I didn’t have the kind of money anymore that could buy literal immortality. I would have to be content knowing that my songs would exist after I was gone.
And yet, today’s young people, children of the third millennium, couldn’t relate to socially conscious lyrics written so long ago. Still, the recordings would exist, although ...
Although if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a recording—digitized, copied from medium to medium as technologies and standards endlessly change—isn’t listened to, does the song still exist? Does the pain it chronicled still continue?
I sighed.
Sixty years since high-school graduation.
Sixty years since all those swirling hormones and clashing emotions.
Sixty years since Devon.
~~~~~
It wasn’t the high school I remembered. My Cedar Valley High had been a brown-and-red brick structure, two stories tall, with large fields to the east and north, and a tiny staff parking lot.
That building had long since been torn down—asbestos in its walls, poor insulation, no fiber-optic infrastructure. The replacement, larger, beige, thermally efficient, bore the same name but that was its only resemblance. And the field to the east had become a parking lot, since every seventeen-year-old had his or her own car these days.
Things change.
Walls come down.
Time passes.
I went inside.
~~~~~
"Hello," I said. "My name is ..." and I spoke it, then spelled the last name—the one I’d had back when I’d been a student here, the one that had been my stage name, the one that pre-dated my ex-husbands.
The man sitting behind the desk was in his late forties; other classes were celebrating their whole-decade anniversaries as well. I suspected he had no trouble guessing to which year each arrival belonged, but I supplied it anyway: "Class of Sixty-Three."
The man consulted a tablet computer. "Ah, yes," he said. "Come a long way,
have we? Well, it’s good to see you." A badge appeared, printed instantly and silently, bearing my name. He handed it to me, along with two drink tickets. "Your class is meeting in Gymnasium Four. It’s down that corridor. Just follow everyone else."
~~~~~
They’d done their best to capture the spirit of the era. There was a US flag with just fifty stars—easy to recognize because of the staggered rows. And there were photos on the walls of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and a Mercury space capsule bobbing in the Pacific, and Sandy Koufax with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Someone had even dug up movie posters for the hits of that year, Dr. No and Cleopatra. Two video monitors were silently playing The Beverly Hillbillies and Bonanza. And "Easier Said Than Done" was coming softly out of the detachable speakers belonging to a portable stereo.
I looked around the large room at the dozens of people. I had no idea who most of them were—not at a glance. They were just old folks, like me: wrinkled, with gray or white hair, some noticeably stooped, one using a walker.
But that man, over there ...
There had only been one black person in my class. I hadn’t seen Devon Smith in the sixty years since, but this had to be him. Back then, he’d had a full head of curly hair, buzzed short. Now, most of it was gone, and his face was deeply lined.
My heart was pounding harder than it had in years; indeed, I hadn’t thought the old thing had that much life left in it.
Devon Smith.
We hadn’t talked, not since that hot June evening in ’63 when I’d told him I couldn’t see him anymore. Our senior prom had only been a week away, but my parents had demanded I break up with him. They’d seen governor George Wallace on the news, personally blocking black students—"coloreds," we called them back then—from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Mom and Dad said their edict was for my own safety, and I went along with it, doing what society wanted.
Truth be told, part of me was relieved. I’d grown tired of the stares, the whispered comments. I’d even overheard two of our teachers making jokes about us, despite all their posturing about the changing times during class.