He Who Cannot Die

by Dan Pearce

  I began searching the corpses for water when I remembered Annia’s stone. I looked all around me for any sign of its glow but saw nothing. The missing stone was, for some reason, much more traumatic in that moment than anything that had just occurred. My despair grew as I continued searching and decided that a fucking bird must have carried the necklace away also.

  In my anger, I violently kicked the torso of Duga. My toes were met with a hardened and lifeless thump. I kicked her again and again, as if it would somehow help me feel better. Somewhere in the process of my mindless and pointless retribution, my foot sloshed through the gelatinous blood which had so recently flowed out of me. A dim blue glow appeared in one of my footprints, so faint I nearly missed it. My heart fluttered with hurried excitement as I bent and snatched the necklace up. “My Annia,” I said as if the necklace meant I hadn’t lost her completely.

  But I had lost her completely. For some reason, I admitted to myself in that weird moment that I had lost her. And that was when I finally let myself feel it. That was when I finally cried.

  It was no simple cry.

  I wailed.

  As if all the despair in the world had to make its way out of me right then and there, I hyperventilated, and howled, and sobbed, and moaned so loud and so long that anyone within half a mile could not have escaped hearing it. The more attempts I made at reigning it in and controlling it, the more intense the wailing became. Being fully dehydrated made the crying so painful as my body attempted to produce the necessary tears that should accompany such an event. Eventually the wailing would stop, then pick back up again. This happened quite a few times until I let out one final giant sob, and in the briefest moment I felt disconcertingly fine once more.

  I took several deep and long breaths as I looked around me at all the corpses and at all the blood. Those bitches had tried to kill me over a fucking necklace.

  And they couldn’t do it.

  This was the first time the reality of the protection granted me by my curse hit me.

  A strange and ironic pride began to fill me until I realized I was standing there, caked nearly head to toe in dried blood, holding that glowing stone like a fucking champion atop an Olympic podium, expecting to receive my well-earned medal. That weird and abrupt sense of pride pushed the start of a triumphant smile, which soon turned into a much too comfortable laugh. Once the laughing started, it also could not be stopped. I laughed and whooped until the back of my head throbbed with discomfort, and then I laughed a while longer. I promise any who read this that nothing about any of it was funny. Just as I had an irrepressible physiological need to cry that mighty cry, my body also needed to laugh that mighty laugh.

  My hooting waned into nothing soon enough, and I felt a passive and healing balance begin to exist again between my heart and mind.

  “The Mighty Duga,” I finally said matter-of-factly as I stood gazing upon the group’s dead leader.

  With nothing but sheer will power to speak my next words clearly, I summoned moisture to my mouth from saliva glands that had all but withered up. I rocked her head back and forth slightly with the heel of my foot, as if to assure myself just how wonderfully dead she actually was.

  “You wanted to know my name, Duga, and now you know it,” I portentously said to her unimpressed carcass. “I am Cain. I am he who cannot die.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I don’t expect that any other person will ever read my story. I do wonder, however, if it does somehow end up in the hands of another… Will that person pause and contemplate just how much time passed in so few words? My history – up to that moment when I stood above Duga – covered a span of centuries. That is a long fucking time.

  A future span of time has a way of extending out much longer in thought than any span of time from the past ever does. Most people get so caught up in their minutes and their hours and their days, that the months and years and eventually decades become sudden shadows of a recent memory when time, it seemed, would never actually run out. Rare is the person who gets to the end of their aged life and feels that she got anywhere near enough of it. The greatest struggles and challenges of life have a way of making weeks feel more like years, while years feel like seconds when they exist only as memories.

  The science of this phenomenon is simple. People see the past spliced out one tiny frame at a time. They see one specific memory, one reminiscence, one emotion tied to one specific event. They simply cannot see or remember everything at once, and so it all feels so impossibly small and quick, compared to say, thoughts of the future.

  The future is so different. Since people don’t have to retrieve any specific bit of stored data to think of the future, they are able to invent, imagine, and dream of what might someday be. New thoughts, both exciting and dreadful, can flood them at an incredible pace. Because of this, the idea of the future seems vast, open, and long. Time in the future feels as if it will stretch out and elongate itself for them. Time in the past feels as if it has scrunched itself together completely, and it becomes a jumbled composite, which people can only pick at as they search for useable pieces.

  There are those who speak of living in the present, but that’s an impossible thing for the human mind to achieve when one really thinks about it. What is happening right now? Nobody actually knows. People only ever know what happened in the past, even if the past was a fraction of a microsecond ago. It takes time, even if not much, for information to circulate through neurons and form thoughts. It takes more time to formulate those thoughts into something utilizable. This means not one person has ever known anything besides what already has transpired. All people are living in the past, whether they like it or not. They just have to decide how far back they want their thoughts taking up residence. In my experience, those who live in the very near past are they who accomplish incredible things. Those who live in a more distant past are they who struggle to ever do much that is notable at all.

  Living with one’s thoughts in the far future is also strange, as it seems to be the quickest way to watch the future become the past in a hurry. It seems half the people who live with their thoughts residing in the future dream their lives away one thought at a time and wake up one day in sudden dismay as they realize how little time they actually have left to go and make shit happen. By the time they finally start paying more attention to what they perceive is the present, the past and the future have both become discouraging, and all because of this thing called time; all because we as people know that the amount of time we have is limited. The other half of those people wake up one day and wonder how the hell their dreams and visions of the future brought them to somewhere completely different from where they somehow ended up.

  When it comes to time, the most content people I have known are those who dreamt of the future, but never for too long, and they think back to the past, but they bring those thoughts back as quickly as possible. They are the ones who wake up every day and acknowledge that they are where the past has brought them, good things in the future would be nice, now let’s get busy and stay busy. They intrinsically understand that one cannot actually experience the present, so they tip toe on both sides of the line, in and out, over and across, tiny little hops until their lives are full, and rich, and satisfying. These are they who often end up where their dreams of the future dared venture.

  Most humans will eventually come to this intrinsic understanding all on their own, but it is something most people will need to learn through trial and error many times throughout their lives as they become anxious, traveling way too far into the future, and depressed, traveling way too far into the past.

  The biggest part of the biggest reason I am finally writing my story is so that I can more fully release myself from my past, without running the risk of my past disappearing should I someday cease to exist. I want my past to somehow always endure, and so I am writing those parts of it which steal me away from what I perceive to be the present far too often.

  I am no different than any oth
er person when it comes to time and perception. I have lived the equivalent of nearly two hundred lifetimes, yet I still can only look back at any one past memory in any one thought at a time. Even though I could fill two full libraries with what I have seen and witnessed, I would still have to recall it all and write it all out; one memory, one word, one tiny spliced frame at a time.

  The full twelve thousand years, as I attempt to contemplate them all, feel no different to me than the couple hundred I have already covered. Twelve thousand years, if it is possible, feel like they could fit into the same-sized box as the last month of my life. As I look toward my own future, knowing I will live long after the grandchildren’s grandchildren of my friends and neighbors are gone, it seems so impossibly prolonged. Ten years in the future seems it will be further away than eight hundred years was in my past, yet I know differently. So, instead of thinking about it constantly, I remind myself to continually hop across the present line in an attempt to remain fulfilled and satisfied today.

  Time. It is a concept I have had endless reasons to ponder. People tell stories to each other and they discuss three days here, seven months there, five years here, twenty years there. We verbally spew statements concerning the past, no matter how much of it has passed, like it was nothing.

  What I’ve shared thus far covered the span of hundreds of years, and so I suppose I hope that anyone who ever does reads this, pauses for at least a moment and thinks about what that actually might have been like for me. I hope he thinks about what a person who lived hundreds of years certainly must have seen and experienced and observed in that much time, most of which only he will ever know for himself.

  When another person flaccidly mentions a significant measurement of time from their own lives, I tend not to dismiss the thought into thin air. I have come to respect it and linger on the idea for at least a moment, as I know they are actually sharing something much more important and intricate than a simple and meaningless statement.

  And now that I’ve had a chance to share my troubled thoughts on this topic, I suppose I feel better continuing with my story, and I can again write the line I first wrote, but quickly deleted. I now feel like what I am about to say might get at least a tiny sliver of the fucking thought it deserves. That’s my hope.

  More than two thousand years passed between the time Annia died and I happened upon Dishon once more.

  Perhaps now one can understand why that is difficult to just write and move on like it was nothing. Poof. Just like that, two thousand years reduced to 18 words. Two thousand years.

  Of course, the nature of one’s personal written history is that generally only the most dramatic, saddest, hardest, happiest, and most notable events make the cut.

  In those two missing millennia, I watched the entire world, and the people in it, drastically change sixty times over. I witnessed villages born, and burned, and reborn, and then wiped-out again. I witnessed evolution in people’s ability to logically think and reason. Brute mentality was still the norm, but it was less so by the end. New ideas turned into new inventions, which led to more new ideas, which led to more prosperity and safety for everyone. Fewer people fell prey to the elements because of it. The ice age ended during that time, and more land slowly opened up, bringing more resources and more opportunity for the growth of civilization.

  Occasionally I witnessed massive heaps of dead bodies cremated after terrible diseases wiped out significant chunks of the population. Most of those diseases would have been easily treated had we had access to today’s advancements in medicine. Death by infection was common, and while still primitive, herbal medicines and drastic medical procedures had begun finding new ways to stave that off, too. Healing by witches was still often the best option for the critically ill, and over time there seemed to be a witch within a few day’s journey for most people. Not all witches could do what the greater witches could, and those witches who possessed greater abilities couldn’t possibly heal everyone, and so there were times when people did die en masse.

  When that span of two thousand years began, romantic love was still extremely rare and unknown. By the end, I rarely found a village that didn’t have at least one couple who had fallen in love. The bigger villages had the most lovers, by far. Most onlookers still didn’t understand why two people would walk hand-in-hand and deeply commit themselves to one another, but in general more people became curious about it until the idea of love was discussed openly by many.

  As for me, I don’t pretend to tell anyone that I spent two thousand years mourning the loss of Annia. I didn’t wander the Earth eternally depressed by it. I did wander in quite heavy depression for some time after her death, but I am programmed as much as anyone else to cope, to find closure, and to eventually move on.

  Most of that span was spent quite happy and busy, surrounded by friends and neighbors in villages that dotted much of the continent. My curse didn’t seem to have any power to push friends from my life after any amount of time, and I found great contentment and deep connections with many whom I stayed close with until they died, or until I had to move on. About half of my friends died at an old age, which was usually only twenty or thirty years older than I was, so never did they really notice me not growing older alongside them. Others died of injury or illness, as so many did back then. In the end, every friend always died.

  One close friend, his name was Telig, met the same death as did Annia and Racheele. Having assumed that my curse applied only to the women I loved, I learned the very painful way that I could not tell of my curse to any person lest they also meet the same fate. The loss of Telig was painful, but I had already seen the entirety of the Earth’s population die many times over, and so death had stopped affecting me the way it perhaps should have.

  I did find and fall in love fourteen different times throughout those two thousand years. Mostly I was able to make a real enough excuse to leave just before the curse displaced me from those women. Twice the woman I loved died or was killed before it ever had to reach that point. Never again did I let my careless actions bring a sudden death to any woman I loved. Of course, a portrait of each of them was added to my book.

  That span of time was mostly good, but it was far from being depleted of challenge. At one point, I was severely burned when my village was raided, and the ravagers set my hut afire. Third degree burns covered much of my body, and it took much longer to fully heal from those than most other injuries. Healing from such burns hit its most painful moments once my nerves began to restore and the consuming pain kept me from doing much of anything. I couldn’t lay down, lean against anything, sit, or sleep until I healed enough for the pain to subside. I couldn’t feel too much self-pity as I went through that, though, since I was able to lift myself from the ashes and walk away while the bunt corpses of others sizzled and smoked beneath the next morning’s blue sky.

  In a different village, my left hand was almost fully severed after I stumbled upon a mother jaguar in her den. She latched onto me by the wrist, and drug me quite some distance before I finally jabbed my free thumb into her eye, and she released and abandoned me. I was a bloody mess when I walked back into town, with a hand barely attached to my arm. Knowing that it would heal itself, I refused the aid of neighbors who wanted to be helpful and finish cutting the thing off. The next morning my hand had almost completely healed itself, and by that afternoon I was whole once more. This caused great rumor and alarm, which ultimately led to my kidnapping by a group of intrigued medicine men.

  They gagged me, tied me, and tortured me repeatedly, fascinated at my body’s ability to heal. Bound for weeks, unable to speak, and often unconscious, I was overly thankful when one of them got it in his head that he’d like to see if I could recover from a more terminal injury. The curious medicine men tore open my throat with a sharp stone and stood back to spectate whether I could heal from such a lethal wound. I lost consciousness fairly quickly, and my focus in those last moments was only on the shocking sight of my own blood dumping
ferociously onto my lap. Once I came to, I was surrounded by dead medicine men who had each suffered the same fate as Duga and her Neanderthals. It took another two days to find a way to free myself from my restraints. I finally did, and my thirst was so crippling at that point, I could have drained the water of any well.

  I wasn’t accident prone or anything. Two thousand years is just a long time, and shit is inevitably going to happen to any person.

  It was almost always the aftermath of serious injury that caused me to have no choice but to pack up and move on. Once neighbors knew I could be healed quickly from serious wounds, everything always changed, and never for the better. I had to leave the Village Ker after the people became agitated and demanded answers for a healed compound femur fracture. Being able to walk a day after my thigh snapped in two didn’t sit well with them. I was fairly new to that village, so it wasn’t terribly heartbreaking. I was happy to take up residence elsewhere, in a new place where nobody knew I was different.