The Immortal

Today was Sam Stookey's two hundred seventy third birthday, and many swore he looked in his early fortys. In fact, for the last two hundred thirty six years, he's been thirty seven years old. Except he doesn't know exactly how old he is. He noticed something was wrong when he turned fifty nine, and then sixty five, then seventy eight, and he looked the same as those pictures from back in the day.

Sam Stookey was, short of words, immortal. He had something of an idea as to his age, having spent summers and winters thinking back in his life to what event had caused it. After he turned a year older than Jeanne Calment, who croaked back in '97, scientist hooked on to him like lampreys, assuming it had some genetic cause.

So they took a sample of his blood, sperm, hair, bone, nail, poop, skin, and whatever else science and the balck market could get their hands on. Some people went to strange and awful extremes in their pursuit... Someone, for example, caught his breath in a jar to sell on ebay for about less than the jar cost at the thrift store for no one believed it was actually Stookey's breath.

Someone faked a nurse outfit and managed to get a clip of one of his daughter's umbilical cord. Another nurse took the placenta home like someone takes the leftover cake at an office birthday celebration.

A dentist removed a tooth that had nothing wrong with it and kept some plaque in a vial. However, despite all the efforts at finding a biological reason for his immortality, they found as much reason to believe in that as one would in, say, Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East.

It all became clear as he saw his first and second wives wither away in age, followed by his children and grandchildren. Sperm Banks stopped sending bottles with checks for six digit amounts including within the day his second grandson Jules Verne Stookey passed at age 64.

If you only knew, they wrote him so many checks for so long to sell for tons to so many surrogate mothers curious to give birth to the next Immortal. All of them and their little Stookey's eventually croaked with their hopes still hanging like socks set to dry on the rope of Destiny.

Some way the sperm banks found out much earlier than the consumers how short-lived the Stookey progeny would be. However, they were making so much money from the demand that they kept on mailing Sam the vials, the checks for tons of money, and the newest and most popular adult videos. 

When the supply notably failed to provide what it promised- i.e. immortality- the fathers, mothers, children and their grand children, all  who had invested in the concept of mocking death and who were now bound to die, while still living, sued the sperm banks to such depths that no vial holding the right-handed (sometimes left-handed) effort of sultry afternoons ever made its way back to the banks because no vial nor check ever arrived in the hands of some chipper postal worker. 

Despite the ability and capacity to, as Sicilians would say, spread the seed, Sam Stookey decided to stop fool around with love about seventy five years ago. It's not that he didn't enjoy the act of making children or the curling up on the couch to watch movies or the shedding of tears together at some nostalgic point in life.

It's that he carried the weight of burial in his eyes, hands, and memory. He had planted to many kisses faded on lips that dried in coffins. He had replaced too many dry wreathes on the family plot. It's that underneath the smile in the pictures was the fleeting memory of time, the eyes like cups once full of life now empty shot glasses in a bar where Death is that one customer that never leaves.

In all those years that fate granted him he sought to answer this mystery that only he had ever faced. What is life when living is all you've left to do? He gained appreciation for the dying. "Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale" (Bless'd thou, my Lord, for our sister physical Death) he pondered under his breath, mimicking St. Francis humble words, one of the earliest poems in Italian.

And as he saw the fear, respect, and envy pooling in the eyes of those around him, in the shallow smiles formed by toothless gums in his great great great great grand children, he realized that, like Bilbo Baggins in a book he read a long ass time ago, he must flee to the ever more populated mountains, or to the depths of the sea.

The morning after he turned 273 years old, looking in his early forties, as planned, he boarded his favorite plane, a tiny Grumman hydroplane he called Grace after his eighth wife, who left him for a half-French half-Peruvian and sixteenth Cherokee named Jean Pedro Almand-Gutierrez.

He flew it down to what had once been the Amazon rainforest, but had, in the first century of the second western millenia, been turned into soy bean fields, and which was now, in the year 2211 ce of the Former Gregorian Calendar and Chinese Year of the Pig, one big-ass favela stretching all the way up to New Orleans.

Needless to say, as the sun rose in the velvet East, and as the universe gravitates towards cliches, Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" played on the tape deck of the plane as it faded into the horizon heading South beyond the sharp line of the Sierra Madre...