“‘I am twenty, I am twenty-two, I am thirty,’ we said, at tea, or drinking in a bar, but the truth was not there.
We had been born during Victoria’s reign, or when Lincoln was shot, or as Henry VIII laid his queen’s head on the chopping block. It took many years for the truth to rise, one here, two there, until our real births were revealed. ‘Good Lord,’ we cried. ‘We are Time’s twins.
You ninety-five, yes, and I one hundred and ten.’ And we searched each other’s face, as in mirrors, and saw soft-showered April and sun-filled May instead of raining October, dark November, and Christmas with no lights. We wept.
And when the weeping stopped we compared long-lost childhoods and the bullies who had tormented us for being different, and not knowing why. Friends abandoned us when suddenly the friends were fifty and sixty and we still looked fresh out of high school. Marriages failed and the grave shut out all the rest.
And we were left stranded in a great mausoleum that echoed with the laughter of school chums now incinerated or, if still alive, wielding crutches and piloting wheelchairs.
Soon we found, by instinct, that it was best to keep moving, on to new towns to take up new lives, old souls in new bodies, lying about our past. We were not happy, then. We became happy. How? The rumor, after centuries, of a new town reached us.
The myth held that a man on horseback crossing a great desert got off in emptiness, built a hut, and waited for others to arrive. He placed an ad in a magazine that extolled the young weather, fresh times, new circumstances.
It contained multitudinous hints that might be unraveled by similar freaks in Oswego and Peoria, fellow lonely ones who watched the fall of friends all around and heard the earth thunder on too many coffin lids. They felt their limbs, still as limber as on graduation day, and wondered about their desolation. They read and reread the strange travel ad that promised a haven, a new place, as yet unnamed.
A town that was small, but growing. Only twenty-one-year-olds need apply. Well, there, you see? Hints! No direct pronouncements. But lonelies everywhere, from Deadfall, Dakota, and Wintershade, England, felt the hair rise on their necks and packed their bags.
Maybe, they thought, it would be worth the time and travel. And what was once a roadside bypass became a post office, a Pony Express standby, and then a jerkwater train stop, where strangers scanned each other’s faces and found yesterday’s sunrise instead of tomorrow’s midnight.
They were driven by more than birthright. They were driven by one final terrible fact: at last, none could give or produce children.”
“It came to that?” whispered Cardiff.
“Yes, it finally happened. We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none. So, year by year, strangers got off the train, one way, or rode up on horseback or walked the long walk and never looked back.
By 1900 Summerton had its crops planted, its gardens full, its gazebos built, its social life established, and world communications running out but not in. No radios, no TVs, no newspapers, well, almost none.
There was and is the Culpepper Summerton News, with not much news, for no one was born and almost no one died. Occasionally someone fell down a flight of stairs, or off a ladder, but we tend to mend fast. No cars, so no fatalities. But we were all busy, busy raising food, socializing, writing, dreaming. And then, of course, there were romances.
For while we could not propagate, we could still enact passion. A perfect population, assembled from the four corners of creation, a jigsaw beautifully fitted with no rough edges. Everyone had a job, some wrote poems, others novels, all got published in far places, fantasies mainly of cities beyond belief, whose readers thought the tales mere figments of wild imagination, but we were living it. So there it is. Here it is. Perfect weather, perfect town, perfect lives. Long lives. Most of us shook hands with Lincoln, attended the obsequies at Grant’s tomb, and now…”
“Now?” said Cardiff.
“You are a messenger of doom, come to destroy it all.”
“I am not the message, Nef. I do deliver it, yes.”
“I know,” said Nef, quietly. “But how I wish you could go off and come back with some better truth.”
“If I could, so help me God, Nef, I’d gladly bring it to you.”
“Go,” she said. “Please. Find it and bring it here.”
But he could only sit on the evergreen grass of eternal summer and let the tears run down his cheeks.
CHAPTER 27
“And now,” said Nef.
“Now?” said Cardiff.
“I must prove that I do not wish to kill the bearer of bad news. Come.”
And she led him across the lawn where the picnic blankets still lay as after a storm, tossed and half-furled, and some few dogs had arrived with the army ants while several cats waited for the beasts to leave, and Nef walked among them and opened the front door of the Egyptian View Arms and, ducking his head, blushing, Cardiff stepped in swiftly, but she was already at the stairs and halfway up before he touched the first riser, and then they were in her tower room and he looked and saw that her vast bed had been stripped and the windows thrown open wide with their wind-tossed curtains and the town clock was striking four in the afternoon as Nef lifted her arms and a great soft bloom of sheet rose in a summer cloud over the bed and he seized his half and with her gentled it down in a field of white over the bed to cover its face.
And they stood back and watched the late afternoon exhale and fill the lace and blow the curtains inward toward the bed, like a fall of never-arriving snow, and there was a glass of lemonade on either bedside table, and his questioning look caused her to laugh and shake her head. Only lemonade, nothing more.
“Because,” she said, “I will inebriate you.”
It was a long fall to the bed. She arrived an eternity later. He sank under white sheets of snow and recalled his whole life, in a whiplash of memory.
“Say it,” he heard her cry, a long way off.
“Oh, Nef, Nef,” he cried. “I love you!”
It was twilight. The lace curtains continued to move in a white snowfall above them. The Chinese wind crystals on the porch chimed. They lay hand in hand, dear chums most dearly met, eyes shut, drinking the silence, dressed only by the late sunlight and the weather, and at last she said: “How would you like to live a few hundred years? Or,” she added, “forever, whichever comes first.”
“Forever, I think,” he said.
“Good.” Her hand tightened on his. “Trust me?”
“Yes. No. Yes.”
“Which?”
“I’m confused,” he said. “I’m not one of your miraculous longtime historical ‘sports.’ Can you make me one?”
“You came to us, remember.”
“But for two reasons. To see your town before it was buried under cement. And I was carrying the news of your destruction, which you didn’t know, and I had to tell. Two reasons.”
“Three,” she said. “There was a sense in you, as in most of us, like a homing pigeon, a thing printed in your blood or behind your face, a ghost in your head. And why not? A ghost of a need, just as our ghosts moved us, let us recognize each other when we met on street corners or in passing trains.
Your third reason for coming here was as natural as breathing. You came here looking for the right place, but you couldn’t admit it, so you gave other reasons. You’re like us, or almost like us. You have the inclination, the grammar printed in your genes, to let you live to four times the age you are now. We can only encourage you with our company and, of course, the weather, food, and wine.”
“Is the fountain of youth bottled, then?”
“No, no.” She laughed quietly. “There is no such medicine, no cure. We only supplement what God gave you first. Some people never have colds, never break bones, don’t get headaches, drink without getting hangovers, climb mountains without having to stop to rest, remain passionate beyond belief, all God-given.
Our gift from Darwin’s God or God’s Darwin is simply being part of a moveable feast of inheritance moving upstream against death. Oh, Lord.” She laughed quietly. “How can moveable feasts swim upstream? But you know my meaning. You refuse that dark tide that sinks down into night. Otherwise you would not be here, listening to a fool.”
“Beloved fool, crazed lady, beautiful lunatic,” he murmured.
“Now, let me give you the final explanation for myself and all the friends whom you have met here. The great ‘medicine’ was finding that we were alive and loving it. We have celebrated every day of our lives. The celebration, the exhilaration, of worshipping the gift, has kept us young. Does that sound impossible?
By simply knowing you’re alive and looking at the sun and enjoying the weather and speaking it every moment of your existence, this ensures our longevity. We live every moment
