He Who Cannot Die

by Dan Pearce

  He sighed heavily and then seemed to mumble to himself more than to me. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think real happiness actually exists?”

  I thought for a moment about this topic which had consumed my thoughts thousands of times before. “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “Yes. I definitely do.”

  CHAPTER 19

  After I pulled myself from the freezing river, I sat on the bank violently shivering, rubbing my own limbs until I was warm enough to stand and walk. I was still far too disturbed at my own drowning to begin mourning the loss of Mila, and so I walked back toward our village, numb for the moment both physically and mentally.

  I only got close enough to our home to make sure Dishon had gotten Mila there safely. A crowd made-up of curious neighbors had formed outside to listen as Dishon told the sad tale of my tangled foot leading to my sudden disappearance under the surface of the river. Mila sat against the outer wall of our home in silence, wrapped in a thick blanket made from the hide of a buffalo we had hunted together a few years before. She watched the ground in complete silence, rocking slightly, shaking her head in disbelief every now and then.

  The pain of seeing her there was too much for me, so I whispered goodbye to my Mila from the darkness using a voice so quiet she would never possibly hear it, and I disappeared into the woods where I had stashed a few skins, a food supply, some basic hunting tools, and my book. Everything else that I owned or had built was left behind for Mila. I would be able to find water and build weapons for hunting easily enough.

  The plan had been to meet Dishon the next morning at the oak tree which stood tall and alone along the road which connected his village to mine. I arrived at the oak as the sun had begun to lower in the sky, but some driving heaviness would not allow me to remain there. Something had broken my spirit in the river that day, and my desire to find the witch had seemingly all but evaporated. I needed to be alone, and I needed to feel the weight of everything that had happened without the voice of a friend by my side. I found a large piece of dead bark and scratched a message to Dishon on the inside of it explaining my need to leave and my gratitude for his friendship and for his help with Mila. I left the bark leaning against the oak and abandoned the road in a direction I hadn’t traveled in at least a millennium. I knew it would be some time before I saw my friend again, and I only hoped he would somehow understand.

  I purposefully remained alone in the wilderness for the next few years and let myself contemplate my existence more fully. I became so deeply lost in thoughts surrounding my life, my past, and my future. I greatly longed to somehow know what it was like to live a single human lifetime; to be born; to age; to die. An average human life, it seemed, followed a specific equation. People are meant to know nothing, then to learn and absorb, then to grow and mature, and then to eventually teach others and to die. Biology and sexual drive take care of population replacement without much help from any of us. What we learn after we’re born is greatly dependent on those who raise us. What we absorb as we’re taught greatly depends on the environmental forces surrounding us. Our maturity is dependent on the mistakes we make and what we do afterwards. What we teach others greatly depends on the angle from which we have viewed our lives. How we age and when we die is just a culmination of all these things.

  This is what human life is. It’s what it is supposed to be. We are born so that we can live. We live so that we can die. If we fuck up our lives as humans, we eventually get to die and forget our many mistakes. If we live incredible and full lives, we eventually get to die and finally take a rest from the kind of effort that goes into that. Me… I don’t get to die. That privilege was taken from me. I will be forced to live with my biggest mistakes hanging over me forever, and I will never get that permanent rest from trying to do continual good in this world.

  As far back as I could remember, I always desired to be a good man of sound morals, and that shit has a way of becoming exhausting. People often get hurt. Good intentions often lead to terrible outcomes. Love always leads to heartache. Honesty often leaves the door open to being deceived by others. Why I still strived for continual goodness, even when goodness so often stripped me of all energy or motivation, started becoming lost on me in those woods. Putting others first had done very little for me to that point, it seemed. I could not shake the thought that I was going to live forever as nothing but used-up and sad and indigent.

  While I lived in the wilderness those many years, I talked myself into the idea that my needs needed to finally be more important to me than those of anyone else. I convinced myself that the only way I would ever be happy would be to let go of everything I had been and done to that point and develop my own definition of what was good and right for the benefit of my own life. It was in this mindset that I left the woods to find undiscovered civilization again and eventually ended up in the city of Vim.

  Vim was as prospering and well-infrastructured a city as I had ever encountered. Its people, which numbered in the hundreds, were well-taken care of by one another, and its storehouses were full. Opportunities seemed to abound in Vim, and armed with my lifetime of skills and knowledge, along with my fluency in any language, I became the wealthiest man in the city within just four years. A year after that, I had accumulated more wealth than any man in the region. I just understood the economy and the way people’s minds seemed to work, and more than anything I began putting my own wants and desires ahead of anyone else’s. It was almost absurd just how easy it was for me to go from nothing to wealthy almost overnight.

  I commissioned beautiful art and incredible structures to be built. I purchased the loyalty of the rich and poor alike by funding that which was important to them or by using my wealth to influence others who could make imperative things happen. I built a system that would make others dependent on me for their own survival whenever a harsh winter or a long draught hit the land, which was often. I had seemingly endless food stores and alcohol. I had a region of people who sought to trade with me and gain with me, which just let me build more for myself more quickly.

  I was eventually able to outsource nearly every menial and major task in my day to day. More than half the village was at least somewhat in my employee, and whether someone was in my employ or not, nearly everyone owed me something. I kept it this way quite purposefully, calling-in favors whenever the timing advanced my agenda. Those favors consisted of everything from protection to labor to debt collection, which I became ruthless with. If the people of Vim wanted to stay in my good graces, they did what I asked when I asked, and they didn’t question me.

  I really wasn’t a good person at all during my time in Vim. I arrived to that city bitter and determined to try living a different and greedier way. I spent quite some time there, outliving the entire growing population at least twice. My wealth only grew with time, and I had such a handle on the people and the economy that little could happen without it being brought to my attention. I built and maintained just the right amount of fear into the people. I protected them just enough from outside forces. And I built a crude government of a few politicians who made rules and guidelines that kept the village, and the trade economy, running exactly how I desired.

  In all those decades, I had no interest in companionship or any sort of loving relationship. I had no interest in keeping a harem or in constantly having frivolous sex. I allowed only an occasional prostitute, usually a desperate mother or widow, into my bed. The desire for continually more power and even more wealth consumed my every move and thought, and if I’m being honest… Somewhere, always in the back of my mind, was the memory of love lost so many times. I never wanted to be anywhere near love again, and I never wanted to feel the excruciating stab of a broken heart again, either. So long as I never got too close to any woman, I knew that would never happen.

  In time, wealth and power became somewhat boring and their fruits were mostly hollow. Oh, it was easy enough to convince myself each night that I was important, a
nd justified in all my actions for the day, but I felt hollow. There really is no other word to accurately describe it. Something that had always filled a big part of me was missing, and I kept taking new actions and new courses to try and somehow fill that void.

  I filled that void, at least in temporary spurts, with fame and popularity. I eventually wanted to be known for more than my money or my things or my power, and so I began hosting feasts to which I invited the Who’s Who of Vim and of many villages, near and far. I made sure my name was known throughout all the region, and word of my extravagant feasts spread far and fast. I excluded all common people as well as eminent people whom I deemed weren’t important enough. I came to thrive on the power of exclusivity, and I waved that flag in the face of others often. Any leader of a village or city who wasn’t invited to my feasts was a nobody and might as well have been put on a blacklist for trade and commerce.

  My feasts were annual parties, held every summer, and could sometimes last for days. I brought in entertainers and magicians and musicians from every corner of the region. I supplied beautiful prostitutes and gigolos to my guests. The booze flowed freely. Grand gifts were given to all who attended, so long as they stayed until whatever day and hour I decided the party was over.

  To add to the spectacle, I held a contest on the eve of every feast which gave any uninvited person who desired entrance their chance to attend. Any person, of any social standing, could win the contest. Winners were also given a seat at my table and enough wealth and food to last his family the next ten winters at least. I called the contest “An Eye for New Life,” as a marketing ploy to attract the poor and desperate.

  Instead of hunting and killing the wild boars to have served at my feast, I ordered them captured and caged for the contest. A large pit was dug near my home, and the orneriest of the boars was lowered into the pit for the contest.

  The rules were simple. Any woman who could fully pluck the eye from a boar without killing it, and before the boar could wound her beyond a simple scratch, won her entrance and the riches that came with it. Men had to pluck out both the boar’s eyes, also without being wounded or killing the animal. Boars in the wild were dangerous enough with their fearless and irritable personalities attached to their razor-sharp tusks; put a boar into a hole with a frantic person wanting to dig his eyes out, and the things just got pissed-off. Many there were who willingly entered the pits in hopes of bettering their lives.

  Few there were who achieved it, but it happened just often enough that people still tried. Most were injured and pulled from the pit. Many of those people spent the remainders of their lives limping or crippled. Some died. Two feasts never passed when someone didn’t get killed in the pit or from infection in the weeks that followed.

  I don’t even know where I got the idea for the boars. I think I was just bored of life being too easy and too predictable. I enjoyed seeing the lengths others would go to when they thought they could better their own stations in life or they thought they might find a new life with a more popular crowd. I remember standing above those pits, surrounded by the most famous and popular people in the land. We laughed. We always laughed. The more brutal the contests got, the more desensitized we became, and the louder our laughs grew as if we were trying to convince ourselves that this was indeed excellent entertainment. I remember enjoying it, but I don’t remember whether I actually did.

  I do remember the summer that I realized what a mirage fame and popularity really was. I remember the summer I found myself looking around at all the laughing men and the few laughing women who surrounded me and realizing the degree to which none of them meant a damned thing to me. It was that summer day I became suddenly aware just how big the disparity had become between the wealthy and the poor in Vim since the day I first arrived there. It was that summer day I realized how alone I really was even while surrounded by so many people. It was that day I realized how much I had lost myself and my desire for goodness completely. It was that day, that summer, when Sisha died in the pit.

  I didn’t know Sisha well. I had seen her in the neighboring village from time to time selling her clay jewelry and homemade dishes to support herself and her children. It was only after she died that I learned her husband was fatally wounded in the boar pit three years earlier, leaving her to work for the continued survival of her three small children. Her little family had close to nothing. Any person who entered that pit was a person who had close to nothing; I knew that. Only desperation could drive a person there. Only the greatest and most consuming of all desperations could drive a mother with small children to enter my pit.

  I tried not to notice or care too much as I watched her tearfully hug each of her small children who stood near the edge of the pit in tears brought-on in response to their mother’s quiet crying. “We cannot survive another winter if I do not make it to the feast,” she told her eldest son, who couldn’t have been older than seven-years-old. “If something happens, you must take care of your sisters…”

  I didn’t want to hear the rest of what she told that boy or to feel anything toward her or her situation, so I subconsciously turned my attention and conversation elsewhere.

  Moments later, two men held Sisha by the arms and lowered her down. Her daughter cried out, but her shouts were absorbed by the eruption of the excited crowd. Down in the pit, the boar stood watching Sisha cautiously, and had become more visibly anxious and defensive with the sudden roaring of the throngs. Sisha didn’t come anywhere close to victory in the pit that day. She made a run for the boar, hands extended in front of her, and found herself toppling backwards as the boar rammed his right tusk firmly into her shin. Once down, the boar repeatedly speared her in the chest, neck, and belly while she at first screamed-out in agony, then with gargled screams, as blood filled her trachea.

  I couldn’t bring myself to laugh as I usually did. I couldn’t laugh as I watched her helpless children reach-out to their mother and cry out while she died. I couldn’t laugh as I watched the boar bring a permanent end to the threat he knew that the woman was to him.

  Sisha just stared helplessly at her youngest daughter as if to apologize for her own stupidity and for the difficult life her daughter would now face. Sisha died quickly after that, and the boar pulled its tusk from her neck one final time. Her head flopped lifelessly forward, her eyes wide and full of the terror the woman had experienced. Her dead gaze seemed to center straight on me, asking me why life had to get so hard that she was forced to take such a monumental risk just to feed her children.

  Those eyes. Those widened, horrified, accusing eyes of hers. They wouldn’t stop looking at me and I stood in dismay above her, unable to look away. The crowds cheered. The mother’s children cried and wailed. Loud laughter drowned out their sadness. The woman. Her children. Their mother was dead. Her children’s lives had just been shattered. What had I done? How had I gotten to that point?

  How had I become so cold toward the value of human life that I didn’t just allow this happen, but invented this contest and encouraged it? How had I become so disconnected from human need that I saw no problem with my vast mostly unusable wealth while others starved? How had I lost the ability to feel human connection so fully that I no longer felt love, respect, or compassion for others? How had I become such a frigid monster of absolute nothingness when I had once been a much better man?

  A voice I knew very well, but which I hadn’t heard in a very long time suddenly cut through the mayhem. “Cain, I thought you were not like any man. Does goodness no longer flow within you?” Dread filled me. It was Tashibag. My attention jerked away from the dead eyes of Sisha toward the witch’s voice. She wasn’t there. I looked around frantically. She wasn’t anywhere. I looked back into the pit where it was my dead Annia that now somehow lay. “It seems your heart is not soft after all,” this time the witch’s voice came from behind me. Again I jerked my attention toward the source only to find she wasn’t there. “It seems darkness does flow within you, Cain,” the voice ca
me again. I spun around again, Tashibag was nowhere. I looked back into the pit. It wasn’t my Annia. Sisha, sole providing mother-of-three, was there; still asking me the impossible question why with those haunting dead eyes of hers.

  No other person seemed to be aware of Tashibag’s voice, but I would have sworn to anyone that I heard it as clearly as if she had been standing with her cheek against my own.

  “Send her body back to the Earth where it may finally bring some goodness to us all,” another woman’s voice cut-in. I knew that voice. I knew those words. It was my mother’s voice. I looked around. She also was not there. I grabbed my ears to push the voices out. “Tell me. Did this have to be, Cain?” my father’s voice quietly said in a whisper so powerful it drowned out the crowd for me completely. I pressed my hands to my head and fell to my knees. “Quiet!” I demanded through gritting teeth.

  “Cain, does something trouble you?” an entertainer known by the name Grub said as he suddenly appeared in my vision. “What is wrong, dear friend?”

  “I killed her,” I told him as I considered his concerned eyes. I barely knew the man. “You are not my friend. Are any of you actually my friends?”

  The crowd quickly silenced. “Of course, we are friends,” the man said. “Something has taken over you. This woman’s death is one of many you have seen in these pits. Why would it trouble you any differently now?”