A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (74)
“If I choose to believe your story. How is it that you live in the world and don’t know such basic 2024 things, like GPS?”
“I been around a long time,” he explained. “When I was a boy, elevators were the wave of the future. Zippers were the latest invention. When you’ve seen it all, you get innovation overload. So you pick and choose what you deal with.
“I like vinyl, so I didn’t evolve past record players. Not a fan of Google. If I had my druthers, I’d only research in libraries. But I do enjoy Alexa telling me the weather every morning. Washing machines, AC, photocopiers, and LASIK surgery? A-plus inventions. Tinder, automatic transmission, Roombas, CGI? Dumb.” He shrugged. “I’m not that impressed by freezers. They made milkmen obsolete. I miss hearing them deliver those glass bottles at the crack of dawn; it signals a new day has started!” he exclaimed. “Social media? None of my business. Websites frustrate me, mostly. What are these cookies I’m always being asked to accept? TV’s probably my favorite twentieth-century development. I always have the newest model, and these days, it’s all so good: prestige, reality, sitcoms, cartoons. I mean, have you seen Succession? P-Valley? And, obviously, I keep up with music. All kinds. Good music’s good music; genre’s just the bag you carry it in.”
Ricki’s eyes were anime wide. For want of anything else to say, she sputtered, “I just… But… you say all of this like it’s so normal.”
“It isn’t normal,” he conceded. “But it is my life.”
She gestured vaguely as she tried to formulate a response, shut her mouth, then tried again. “There’s so much I don’t get. You really look like a twenty-eight-year-old dude. Like someone I could’ve known in college. And you’re always beautifully dressed, so current. How does a one-hundred-and-twenty-four-year-old man even know about the Virgil Abloh Jordans?”
Grinning, he glanced down at his feet and back at her. “You noticed.”
Ricki noticed everything about him. “I’d think fashion would be one of the things too exhausting to keep up with.”
“Look at Ms. Della.” He paused, remembering that she was Adelaide. Baby Adelaide. He shook his head a bit and reset. “She’s over ninety with pink hair. Style is innate.”
“I have to ask, how do you afford to shop? Travel? Do Perennials even need money?”
“Good question.” Clunkily, he tried to change the subject. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even get a chance to ask you, can I get you some coffee?”
He tried to get up from the table.
“Stop! Don’t you dare move,” ordered Ricki. Then her voice softened. “Please stay. Talk to me. I want to believe you, but I need the whole story. How do you sustain yourself?”
Ezra fidgeted in his seat. Raw melancholy darkened his expression. He’d spent decades not talking about himself to anyone but Dr. Arroyo-Abril. It was a hard habit to break. And how would he start? How does a creaky relic explain his life and times to a woman fortunate enough to be born into a relatively sane world? How could he describe the way living through so many eras, generational resets, and rewrites of social norms set off a low panic in him before he spoke to people, worried that he’d forget what the appropriate customs of the day were? How could he relay his fascination with walking Target or CVS aisles and just… gawking at all the options, especially for shit that didn’t exist when he was a kid, like mosquito spray, lint rollers, and ibuprofen? How could he describe the feeling of skipping over time, catapulting over generations, only to end up in the same place every leap year?
He was a battle-scarred time traveler in hiding. And nothing about his life was relatable.
Ricki waited patiently. Generic Starbucks music played in the background, something soft and reggae-adjacent, as the two sat in silence. Finally, Ezra sighed, his shoulders slumping in silent resignation. And he spoke.
“How do I sustain myself? It’s a complicated story, Ricki. I just… come from a different time. Not just in terms of the date, but in terms of life. In the 1910s, Fallon County was Jim Crow in a way that folks today can’t understand. You see black-and-white photos of unsmiling sharecroppers wearing dusty rags, and it feels like people from another world. We were real people, with real dreams, full identities, talents. It’s probably a gift from the ancestors that stories of the casual brutality are lost to time.
“We were terrorized. Sometimes it was like you could predict violence by holding your pointer finger up to the wind to track the weather. Other times, you couldn’t. I saw monstrous, inhuman things. I’d rather not go into it.
“My family was killed in a church fire set by the Klan. My cousin Sonny was the only survivor. An overdose killed him in ’31, but he’d been dying for years.” Ezra took a pause, fingering the shirt button at his wrist. “Church terrorism isn’t unique; I mean, it happened all the time, and it still does, doesn’t it?” Ezra let out a hollow, mirthless laugh. He was struggling to continue.
“Anyway, the sheriff ordered this one. Sheriff Rourke was from a moneyed, influential South Carolina family. One of his brothers was the governor; another was a White House wonk. Now, we all knew that this sheriff had Black babies. But white people didn’t. And down there, back then, it would’ve sunk his entire family if it ever came out. They would’ve lost everything. Fortune, political power, everything gone.