Eternal Life

by Dara Horn

  “Elazar, why—” she heard herself say.

  “I divorced my wife,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She was barren. The High Court says a man can divorce his wife after ten years, if they have no children. I waited ten years.”

  “You waited for what?”

  “For you. I waited for you.”

  He stepped toward her. She could smell the sweetness of his breath. He reached a hand toward the doorpost, and touched his fingers to hers. Ten years drained through a crack in the floor beneath her feet.

  “I waited,” he said again. “I waited ten years, but I couldn’t wait forever. Every night and every day for ten years I was thinking of you. And I kept my promise to you. That’s why I did it. I can’t imagine you weren’t thinking of me the same way.”

  Rachel slid her hand off the doorpost. Elazar’s hand fell away from hers, suspended in midair. “What did you do, Elazar?”

  Elazar’s face turned dark.

  The deputy high priest, Rachel thought, in Zakkai’s voice. They have plans. They want me to join them. She stared at him.

  “What did you do, Elazar? WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

  “Rachel, don’t you understand? We can get married now! You and I and Yochanan can—”

  “You’re a murderer, Elazar! A murderer!”

  “I’m a murderer? I’m not the one who showed up at the procurator’s house with a knife.”

  “You murdered him!”

  “Rachel, please listen to me. There are people in this city with daggers hidden under their cloaks, looking for Roman officials to kill. They think they’re endangering the Romans, but they’re actually endangering us. Do you know what could happen if the Romans decided to retaliate? They could destroy the city. They could burn the Temple. If that happened, it would be the end of this entire people, forever. Do you understand that? We need to find these crazed zealots before they find each other.”

  But Rachel was screaming now, wailing. “He was innocent, Elazar! Absolutely innocent! He thought there was a plan, but the only plan was yours!”

  “I was only thinking of you, Rachel.”

  “Of me?”

  “I only did for you what I would have wanted you to do for me,” Elazar said. He tried to take her hands in his, but she beat them away. “You would have done the same for me, wouldn’t you? I would have been grateful to you forever if you had done the same for me. I couldn’t wait anymore, Rachel. I know you couldn’t either.”

  Rachel couldn’t answer; she was gasping for air as though she were drowning. Before she caught her breath, she heard a voice behind her.

  “Mother?”

  She looked over her shoulder and saw Yochanan.

  He stood narrow and thin, still in his sackcloth robe from the night before, his feet still bare. His hair hung in dirty knots around his childlike face. With his eyebrows raised, he resembled his father.

  “Yochanan,” Elazar said.

  Rachel turned back to Elazar. Her body became an immovable rock. “Go away, Elazar,” she hissed. “I never want to see you again.”

  “Please, at least let me say goodbye to him,” he begged.

  Her voice seared the air. “Leave. Immediately. Don’t say goodbye.” She closed the door in his face. Then she turned and sank to the floor.

  Through a fog she felt her son approach her. Suddenly his body was beside hers on the floor, her hand in his.

  “That man was right,” Yochanan said softly.

  “What do you mean,” Rachel said, though she could not make it a question. She was sobbing, with her back against the door.

  “He was right,” Yochanan repeated. Rachel had never heard her son’s voice so low. He almost sounded like a man. “If Father had actually done it, we all would have been killed or enslaved. Maybe they would have burnt down the city and the Temple too. And Father would have done it. That man was right.” He paused, a gap in time that contained his entire childhood. “Who is he, Mother?”

  Rachel swallowed salt and thought of how to answer. The only man I ever loved. The man who saved your life. The man who murdered your father. Your father. “A person who lives in the past,” she said.

  “How did he know my name?”

  RACHEL DID HER BEST to live in the future. Within a year she married again, and soon she had babies again—four little sisters for Yochanan, girls who grew up to give him many nephews to raise and teach when Yochanan’s only son died, of the same illness Yochanan once had. Rachel didn’t see Elazar again for many years, not until Yochanan had become the greatest sage of his generation, a leader, a master, an elder, a venerated old man—so old that he was lying in a coffin, being carried out of the besieged city by his nephews and disciples, with Elazar ushering him through the city gate. Because Rachel still needed Elazar, though she didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER

  11

  DEATH-FLAVORED

  SMOOTHIE

  . . .

  Leave. Immediately. Don’t say goodbye.

  Rachel would have, except that it was impossible. What made it impossible was Meirav, who had started sleeping at her house.

  The move was subtle enough that when it happened Rachel hardly noticed it. Rocky stayed out late, which was a pleasure at first, because it meant he slept through the mornings, staying out of Rachel’s way. A habit of centuries led Rachel to rise each morning at dawn, and the early morning hours were her private time with the past. So it was with slight alarm that Rachel went down to her kitchen one dim morning to find Rocky and Meirav, both fully dressed, throwing fruit into a blender. Rachel hung back by the kitchen threshold and observed them in silence.

  “I don’t see the appeal of a smoothie,” Rocky was saying over the blender’s roar. To Rachel’s astonishment, he had shaved. “You’re outsourcing your stomach’s job to a machine. Who wants to drink pre-chewed cud?”

  “Millions of people love pre-chewed cud,” Meirav informed him when the blender stopped. Meirav’s dark hair sprang out in wild uncombed curls. Her movements were sure and calm, commanding the room. Rachel watched with an uneasy pleasure. Could it be this simple?

  “It’s not just your stomach you’re giving up on. It’s your teeth too,” Rocky insisted, and waved a spoon with intense energy. “It’s like you’re anticipating your future as a decrepit toothless invalid. If you’re pre-masticating food, why not go all the way and just administer it intravenously? I mean, is the goal to eliminate various bodily functions until there’s nothing left for people to do on their own but die? If you ask me, smoothies are a foretaste of death.”

  Meirav laughed. “You’re very morbid before breakfast.”

  “I’m very morbid all day long,” Rocky replied, and poured her a tall glass of something thick and purple. “Enjoy the taste of mortality,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. Then he noticed Rachel in the doorway.

  She expected him to cringe. Instead he sang, “Good morning, Mom. We made you breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” Rachel said. “I’d love a death-flavored smoothie.”

  Rocky looked startled, but then noticed Meirav’s smile. “Sorry, I gave you yogurt instead,” he said. “For a long life.” He pulled out a kitchen chair for Rachel in front of an elaborately layered yogurt parfait. Rachel stared at him as she cautiously lowered herself into the seat. Meirav plopped down beside her, slurping through a straw. Rachel listened to the sucking sounds from Meirav’s mouth and entered an aural gallery, a tunnel of noises that burrowed through centuries, every disgusting bubble and gurgle and burp and churn and squirt and gasp and trickle and pant that resounded through mortal bodies at every moment, a never-ending flow like cool water across Rachel’s feet as she remained still. The vibrations from Meirav’s slurping filled the little kitchen as though Meirav herself were pure bottled energy, a quivering liquid barely contained inside her suntanned skin. It was how Rachel had often thought of Rocky, a thick boy’s body full to bursting. Rachel glanced at her smiling wrinkled son, then
listened as he drummed four fingers on the table, trying to wiggle his way out of his skin. Meirav belched, and she and Rocky burst out laughing.

  “You’re taking the train to the city, aren’t you?” Meirav asked Rachel. “We could go together. I’m catching the 7:45.”

  “Meirav has her own company,” Rocky explained, with awe in his voice. “She does contract work for cybersecurity.”

  Maybe she does, Rachel thought. Or maybe you’re a chump. “I usually take the 8:50,” she demurred.

  Meirav rested a bangled hand on Rachel’s wrist. “What are you going to do, sit around for another hour with this clown?” she asked, and shot Rocky a smile. “Before you know it, you’ll be drinking the smoothie of death.”

  Rachel glanced at Rocky. To her surprise, he was laughing again. “Don’t try saying no to this lady,” he told her. “You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

  “And think how long that life will be, if you’re not drinking Rocky’s smoothies,” Meirav added.

  Before Rachel knew it, she was boarding the train with Meirav.

  By the time they slid into their seats Meirav was already on the phone, leaking a groan as she glanced at the phone’s screen before propping it against her ear. The call was in Hebrew—the new Hebrew, which Rachel only haltingly understood, though she knew who Meirav was talking to.

  “Your mother?” Rachel asked when Meirav finally put down the phone.

  Meirav sighed. “Yes. Not everyone my age still has one, so I should be grateful. But it isn’t easy. There’s a strange time when you become the parent and the parent becomes the child.” She smiled at Rachel. “You and Rocky are so lucky. It’s not often that you see such a healthy relationship.”

  Rachel ground her teeth together. Now Meirav was scrutinizing her, examining the sun-worn creases in Rachel’s face as though she were peering into a mirror. At last Meirav leaned back, satisfied with what she saw, and said, “I want to know some things about Rocky.”

  Rachel narrowed her eyes and remembered her fears. “I’m sure Rocky would be happy to answer all your questions.”

  Meirav glanced at her phone again, then slipped it into her bag. The phone’s disappearance made Rachel nervous. Now Meirav was facing her, her angled body closing off the route to the aisle. Rachel looked down at Meirav’s knees and felt trapped.

  “Maybe, or maybe not,” Meirav parried. “I just wondered if there’s anything I ought to know about him.”

  Rachel bristled. “And you think I’m going to tell you.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Rachel braced herself against the vinyl seat. Twenty centuries flooded within her, carrying every soldier, officer, agent, enforcer, spy, and thug who had ever turned up at her door, searching for one of her sons.

  “I’m not that kind of mother,” Rachel said.

  Meirav squinted at her. Then, to Rachel’s surprise, she smiled and said, “You just told me everything I need to know.”

  Rachel breathed, sipping air through a narrow straw. It was becoming clearer to her why Meirav was here. Something Rocky was doing online was illegal, or more than illegal—bad enough that he couldn’t merely be indicted or arrested, but rather had to be cultivated, manipulated, turned. And now Rachel was becoming a protector, an accomplice. She had no idea where this lure was leading, but it was clear she had to extricate herself immediately, and that was exactly what she couldn’t do. Suddenly she thought of Rocky as a little boy, dragging himself home from school with a bloody nose and a swollen lip; she felt herself falling upon him, covering his little body with hers, choking on rage and regret. Now she avoided Meirav’s glance as an old sorrow welled up within her, brimming at her eyes. How had she raised such a person—so smart, yet so deeply, deeply stupid? What had she done wrong?

  “I know a lot about Rocky already,” Meirav said. “The arrests, the divorces, the patent litigations, the bankruptcy filings—”

  “He told you all that?”

  Meirav smiled. “They’re public records. He didn’t lie about any of it when I asked him. And I didn’t lie to him about myself either.”

  Rachel eyed her. Was that normal, hunting through public records? Rachel often had trouble keeping track of what was normal. Of all the things that changed, nothing changed more than what was normal. But what was this about Meirav not lying? “What do you mean, about yourself?” Rachel asked.

  Meirav sighed. “I don’t want to bore you,” she said, with a gentle roll of her eyes. “Ask Rocky if you like. But let’s just say he and I are very similar. People like Rocky and I aren’t like other people, and we keep getting punished for it.”

  Rachel examined Meirav, her bangles and her wrinkled skin and her wild hair. The woman radiated an unearthly confidence, a luminous quality that made Rachel lean back, afraid of being burned.

  “I’ve looked at the protocol he’s building on the blockchain,” Meirav was saying.

  Blockchain, blockchain, Rachel thought. It sounded familiar, but from what? Something Rocky had tried to explain? Long ago, she used to work hard at remembering the details of what her children were doing and dreaming, but after too many years of trying to keep up with the four elements and the bodily humors and the luminiferous ether and the music of the spheres, she had finally understood that all details expire, that none of it mattered, except that it mattered to her child. Rachel nodded, pretending to care.

  Meirav said, “It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know, but it’s—well, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, and it’s also a work of art. If he can complete what he’s doing, it’s going to change a lot of industries.”

  This was implausible, except as a lure. “I thought he was mining money,” Rachel tried.

  “Yes,” Meirav replied. “But while he was trying to mine more efficiently, he figured out something else, a way to embed information into this permanent record of transactions, with an interface anyone can use. It’s got some bugs, but if it works, it could be a hack-proof way of creating a permanent digital record.” Meirav took a breath, and glanced at the ceiling of the train. “My father used to work on archaeological digs,” she said. “He wasn’t an archaeologist, he was just a building contractor, but every building contractor in Israel has to report on remains they find when they dig, and he had a real sense of where to find things. He made some major discoveries, even if the professors got the credit. But in the future, the records aren’t going to be underground like that. They’re going to be digital, and we need ways to preserve them, ways that don’t rely on governments or other institutions that might not be here in five hundred years. That’s what Rocky’s working on, even if he thinks he’s just working on currency. It’s breathtaking, really. It’s like he figured out a way for information to never die.”

  Rachel wondered if this was supposed to be a good thing, then wondered if it wasn’t simply a variation on what her father was already doing two thousand years earlier. But now Meirav had her hand on Rachel’s wrist. Meirav’s fingers warmed her skin, a heat that frightened her. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” Meirav said.

  “What does this have to do with me?” Rachel asked, although she knew the unspeakable answer: everything.

  “Because I want to buy Rocky’s idea,” Meirav announced. “I have some investors who would love it, and I want him as a partner.”

  This was deeply absurd. After thirty years of being ripped off, according to his own count, was Rocky really dumb enough to be ripped off again? Of course he was. “As a partner in your company?”

  Meirav drew in her breath. “As a partner in everything,” she said softly. Then she forced a grin. “Now is the part where you tell me that I’m making an enormous mistake.”

  Rachel hesitated. She looked hard at Meirav before answering. “No, but maybe Rocky is.”

  Meirav lowered her eyes. With quick movements she pulled her bag up from beneath the seat and slipped her phone out again, shivering a finger over its screen. It was a show, Rachel knew. M
eirav’s teeth dug into her lip. Suddenly Meirav looked up again, steadying herself against the seat. “I’m getting off at the next stop, to take the ferry downtown,” she announced. A change of plans, Rachel thought, and enjoyed the brief frisson of triumph. “But I have one more question for you.”

  Before Rachel could refuse, Meirav asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  Rachel was dumbfounded. Crazy children! “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Because it affects what I think of Rocky,” Meirav said.

  No, this woman definitely wasn’t like other people, Rachel thought. Or at least not other people alive right now. “It’s a stupid question,” Rachel finally answered. “Why would God care if anyone believed in him?”

  Meirav laughed out loud, and rose to her feet. “See you soon,” she sang, and sprinted for the door.

  Rachel remained on the train, utterly bewildered. The conversation was so surreal that for a moment she wondered if she had dreamed it. Everything Meirav said about Rocky was impossible, far too good to be true—which meant that whatever danger she posed was likely immediate, and immense. Rachel leaned back and watched the tunnel blurring past her as she entered the bowels of the city. Rachel rarely prayed anymore; hundreds of years of evidence had demonstrated its pointlessness. But now she closed her eyes and whispered beneath the tunnel’s roar: Please, please protect my child. Her phone buzzed, an answer.

  You are almost out of time, it read. Come now.

  Like a woman in a trance, she got off the train, hailed a cab, and returned to the unfinished tunnel.

  ELAZAR WAS LUMINOUS, a glowing candle in the dark. He had shed his coat and wore a loose white buttoned shirt, and as he opened the tunnel’s door for her, he was the same boy he had once been: a boy in a white robe with thin bristling wrists and hopeful eyes, waiting in moist darkness, luring her underground to a place where time stopped. He seized her arm, and her breath caught in her throat.