Juan bundled up Eddie’s hair and put it in his jacket pocket. Then he reached out a hand to help me. I sat down on the floor. What did you do? I asked him. You couldn’t do that before. Juan shrugged. I’ve learned a lot of things since you’ve been gone. I wanted to tell you about some of them over the phone, but you asked me not to talk about it, so I didn’t. Other things I kept for myself. No one taught me to display like that. I practiced on Tali. She hates it. It made me tired at first, but not so much now. But I don’t know if it’s good for you. For other people. I’m going to keep this—he pointed to his pocket—for when you want to know more about Eddie.
I crossed my legs and a shadow of worry flitted across Juan’s forehead. Do I scare you? Never, I told him. I’m surprised. And I’m cold.
That tends to happen, he said.
Florence invited us for a goodbye lunch. I had class that day, but I skipped it because I thought the meeting was important. Juan had been in London for three weeks, and he was past the critical stage of his recovery. In fact, he spent all his time walking around the city with Laura while I studied. They’d become friends once she managed to overcome her reluctance to meet him, the sacred respect she felt for him, and sometimes they stayed out late, which annoyed Florence.
We drank beer while we ate and Florence talked about the Book, about the progress made, and she gave me two volumes as gifts: Tell My Horse, by an anthropologist I admire, and The Palm-Wine Drinkard. She was very friendly in spite of her anxiousness—because more than anything, what she wanted was for Juan to return to Misiones and for the Ceremonials to continue. But she agreed to give us a kind of vacation. It’s just that the Revelation is very near, she said, and I feel that pressure, but I’ve realized that a break can also be beneficial.
Since I was a little drunk, I asked her why she thought the Darkness would give us that revelation, and what it would be in exchange for. What were the terms of the trade? We feed it in the Ceremonials, I said. All gods, in every culture, ask for and receive offerings of food. But is that worth immortality? I feel like we’re giving very little.
She got uncomfortable and said it wasn’t the right time for that conversation. I knew she was going dodge my questions and avoid explanations. Talking about all of that in front of Juan, in any case, was delicate, because it always meant talking about him, because the Order depends on his sick body for the Revelation. He can’t run away. If he did, they might return to the traditional method, the one Mercedes supports: use him more often, treat him as a mere messenger or slave, and let him live as long as his body endures, which would not be long.
I need you to be happy, Juan, she told him suddenly, and he was caught off guard, but only for a second. He has the inexpressiveness of a statue, when he wants. Florence took him by the hands. All of this is yours. Nothing would be possible without your help. Sometimes we have disagreements, sometimes you’ll feel like a prisoner. That’s to be expected. Your situation is unique. The world will be everlasting, and it will be ours, Juan. I often say that mortals are the past, and I believe it. I can never thank you enough. Or the others, the ones who came before, and who suffered so. I want you to have a different life. I won’t let a medium suffer like that ever again. I myself fell into that trap, the trap of suffering, and with my own son. Do you like your life, Juan? It’s the one I can give you.
Juan didn’t let go of her hands or lower his head. Then he spoke more than I ever heard him talk to Florence in my life. I’m going to tell you what I want, he told her. I want to live with Rosario, near the sea. Here or somewhere else, it’s best if it’s warm, so I can swim. I want to wait for Rosario to come back from school or work, I want to learn how to cook. I want to reach old age. If Rosario agrees, I want to have a child. I don’t think you understand what it is to have nothing: a child would be mine, the only thing of mine. And I want to be able to open the Darkness when I feel like it, no dates, no obligations, no fear of dying every time. I don’t want bodyguards, I don’t want surveillance. You can’t give me that and I understand, but don’t ask me if I like my life or if I’m happy. I’m poor and I’m sick. I have no education, no family, no money. I don’t think I’m capable of working. I need the help you all offer me. I am a servant.
Only then did he pull away from her hands.
I didn’t know what to say at first. Juan stood up and apologized, then left. I apologized to Florence too, and I followed him.
Stephen and Laura were waiting for us in our room. In the hallway we passed Genesis and Crimson, the couple who used genderless names and had begun sex-change operations in order to take the idea of magical androgynes as far as possible. Crimson has breasts now, Stephen told me. They’ve just shown me, you two missed it. They turned out really nice.
The surgeries are done in the same hospital where Juan was operated on. If the British citizens ever knew that the Heart Hospital and so many other NHS clinics are infiltrated by the Order, it would be a real scandal.
What did my mother talk to you about? asked Stephen, and he put on an album. Beggars Banquet. Did she give you the old saw about how we’re the future and mortals are the past? Frankenstein’s monster could say the same thing, of course, if the monster were capable of thought.
Something like that, said Juan, and he pushed Stephen over to make room on the bed. She’ll let me live at your house for a while.
I have a story about a woman who lived forever, said Laura, excited. She stood on the bed and opened her arms wide, to declaim like in a play. There once was a woman who ate and drank happily, and she had everything the heart could long for and she wished to live forever. For the first hundred years all went well, but then she started to hunch over and wrinkle up, until she couldn’t walk or stand or eat or drink. But neither could she die. At first, they fed her like she was a child, but then she got so tiny that they stuck her into a glass bottle and hung her up in a church. She’s still there. She’s the size of a rat and she moves once a year.
From the way he laughed at that story, which was much more macabre than funny, I realized Stephen had taken acid. She moves once a year, he repeated, and then lit his marijuana pipe. While they talked and laughed, I thought that if immortality was really possible, I wanted to share it with them. Not with the old people. If only Juan could control the Darkness to get rid of the others.
The first weeks were beautiful. Stephen left the house to give us time alone, and Juan and I didn’t separate even for breakfast. We were together in bed and in the bath and in the beautiful winter garden, talking in low voices. Buying fruit and chocolates, the surprise of discovering he could sleep through the night without waking up coughing. The surgery had helped him a lot, especially with the dyspnoea; he wasn’t cyanotic anymore, his fingers weren’t blue, and he looked at them in astonishment and also studied his lips in the mirror every morning, as if he expected the color of death to return. I watched him sleep with his legs tangled in the sheets in our room, which stank of sex and salt. We spent whole days in bed and I caressed him in silence, the golden hair on his legs, his broad, mistreated chest, his sunken belly, the scars, the veins of his arms dark gray under his pale skin, his long hair that gave him the look not of a Viking or a rock and roller or a hippie, but rather of something that was only visiting in the present, something savage and desolate.