Thanks for the Trouble

  “Gross.”

  “You could also argue that bacteria are immortal,” Danny said. “They divide into perfect copies of themselves indefinitely. But as for people . . . it’s a no go.”

  “I believe that is only a matter of time,” Narun said. He was maybe the most humorless person in Chess & War, and he got really angry whenever he lost a game. “My father says that soon we will all upload our brains into the cloud.”

  “What will our brains do in the clouds?” Zelda asked.

  Everyone laughed, thinking she was joking. The cloud means computers, I wrote. Like the Internet and stuff.

  “Actually, I don’t even know why people age,” Maya said. “I mean, it seems pretty stupid, from an evolutionary perspective.”

  “Nobody knows for sure,” Danny said.

  Really? I signed. No one?

  “There are theories.”

  “I’ve heard them all,” Zelda said, “as you would expect, given that I’m immortal.” Another laugh, though this time it was everybody else who didn’t get the joke. “A biologist named Peter Medawar believed that nature was so brutal, there’d be no reason for animals to have the genes for immortality, because they’d inevitably be eaten anyway. But that makes no sense, because aging causes a lot of animals to be eaten.”

  “My grandmother’s slow as shit,” Tom said. “Why hasn’t anyone eaten her?”

  “Shut up, Tom,” Maya said. “Zelda, please continue.”

  “After Medawar, the prevailing theory was that there must be some advantage granted by genes that make us age, and we simply haven’t figured out what it is. But we’ve found a lot of genes associated with aging, and many don’t have any corresponding benefit. Another theory is that the body is meant to be disposable, just a means of transmitting genetic material between generations, so it purposely devotes most of its resources to making babies, instead of taking care of itself.”

  “That makes sense,” Narun said.

  “In theory. But studies show that when people eat less, they end up living longer, which means excess resources still don’t increase longevity.”

  Tom paused with his pizza slice halfway to his mouth. “So if I eat this, I’m gonna die sooner?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Fuck it.” He took a bite, then talked with his mouth full. “Live fast, die young, eat pepperoni. That’s my motto.”

  So what’s the answer? I wrote.

  “Danny is right,” Zelda said. “No one knows. Aging flies in the face of everything we know about evolution, but all the research points to the idea that it serves a purpose.”

  “God,” Gabrielle said.

  There was a collective groan from the assembly of scientists-in-training.

  “What?” Gabrielle said defensively. “God and science are not incompatible. And Zelda just said it herself. Nothing adds up unless you consider God.”

  “Which God?” Narun said.

  “Oh, don’t get all political on me. It doesn’t matter. Kali. Buddha. Freaking Cthulhu if that’s your jam. I’m just saying we all know the real reason why people get old and die. Because if life went on forever and ever, it would suck. And only some sort of god could reason that out.”

  I could already see the direction the conversation was going: this was exactly what I didn’t want Zelda to have to think about.

  Can we change the subject? I signed to Danny, but he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Why do you say that living forever would suck?” Zelda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gabrielle said. “It’s just—I spend most of my life thinking about the future, right? It’s the whole reason I do everything I do. But if I knew the future was going to go on forever, suddenly there’d be no reason to try. Why would I even bother getting out of bed in the morning?”

  “Yeah,” Danny said. “And just think of your friends and your family. You’d have to go to about a million funerals.”

  “It’s like when someone buys you flowers,” Alana said. “You’re expected to stand around and watch them die. If you lived forever, you’d have to do that with people. It would be, like, a nonstop death parade.”

  Everyone at the table was quiet for a moment, recognizing that the discussion had taken a pretty dark turn. I think Narun was trying to lighten the mood when he turned things back to Zelda. “So is it true?”

  “Is what true?” she asked.

  “Well, you’re the immortal here. Is that what it’s like? A nonstop death parade?”

  Zelda took her time answering, long enough that I could sense everyone starting to get a little nervous. It wasn’t as if they actually believed she was immortal, but we were really just talking about death, and no one could be sure how much Zelda knew about that subject. Whether you’re twelve or eighty or two hundred, no one can ever tell what you’ve been through just by looking at you. Only boxers and junkies wear their scars where people can see them.

  “Parker and I went to see a Seurat exhibit yesterday,” she finally said. “You know him?”

  “The dots guy,” Steven said.

  “Exactly. The dots guy. I’ve always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You’re born, and that’s when you’re standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There’s just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that’s when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective. But when you live forever . . . that is, if you were to live forever, you would have to keep backing away, and pretty soon the painting would just be a square of brightness way off in the distance. You could still remember what it looked like when you were closer, but you wouldn’t really be seeing it anymore. And then you’d keep moving away from it, until you couldn’t even make out color anymore, until the painting was just this single point of light. And then it would be swallowed up in the darkness around it, like a star winking out. The grief would be so huge, don’t you think? Not just because you’d lose the people you love—we all have to do that—but because you’d have so much perspective. You’d see the terrible sweep of history, repeating its tragedies over and over again. You’d sink under all that time like a scuttled ship.”

  After Zelda finished speaking, the only sound in the restaurant was the cheesy Italian music piped through the speakers.

  “Fuck me,” Tom eventually said. “I think I’d just kill myself.”

  I stood up from the table. We should go, I signed.

  “Already?” Danny said. “We were going to go back to the computer lab for some more Call of Duty.”

  Zelda and I have somewhere to be.

  I didn’t bother saying more than that, just took hold of Zelda’s hand and helped her out of her seat.

  “It was a pleasure meeting all of you,” she said. “Have wonderful lives.”

  “You too,” Danny said, confused.

  Outside, a light rain was falling, and the sky looked like an enormous gray balloon that would drench the whole city if you could get at it with a pin. Zelda’s eyes were far away, just like they’d been when I’d first seen her in the Palace Hotel, as still and sorrowful as an old statue in an empty square.

  S-o-r-r-y, I finger spelled.

  “Why? It’s just the truth.”

  I shook my head.

  “It is, though.”

  I shook my head again, more emphatically this time, and I hated that shaking my head was all I had. Why couldn’t I scream “No!” at the top of my lungs, like a normal person?

  “Yes it is, Parker! I know it and you know it and even your friends know it.”

  I opened up my journal again and filled up a whole page with that one word—No—but it was just a word on a piece of paper, silent as a gravestone. I turned to the next page. I’m still going to prove to you that life is worth living. Just tell me what you want. I’ll do anything.

  Zelda made a little scream of exasperation. “What about you? What do you want, Parker
?”

  I want to make you happy.

  For some reason, this answer made Zelda even angrier. She knocked the journal out of my hands. One of my expensive new pens clattered onto the pavement and rolled into a storm drain.

  “You say you want to convince me that life is worth living? Then you’ll have to tell me what it is that makes you want to live. Because as far as I can see, it’s nothing.” She spat this last word out. “All these young people I’ve met in the past couple of days, the ones who ought to be your friends—they’re meeting you the same way they’re meeting me. But they’ve known you for years. So where have you been, Parker? How have you managed to hide out right in the middle of your own life?”

  I could only shrug.

  “There it is again. You shrug.” She shoved me. “Who knows?” She shoved me again. “Who cares?” She shoved me again, so that I stumbled off the curb and ended up in the middle of the road. “Why don’t you stay right there? Pretty soon a car’ll come along and finish the job for you.” I took a step in Zelda’s direction, and she put out her hands to block me. “No! Don’t you come back here unless you’re ready to be a person. A real person, I mean—the kind who feels things and tries things and wants things. Can you do that? Because if you can’t, then you should just throw in the towel right now. Both of us should.”

  I knew she was right. For such a long time, I hadn’t let myself want anything, or nothing important anyway. It felt safer that way. But the truth is I did want things now: I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to speak, and I wanted Zelda to stay with me. And maybe more than anything, I wanted to tell her that I wanted her. And I couldn’t hide behind not having words, because I didn’t need words for this.

  I reached out and pulled her down into the roadway with me. I looked into those ocean eyes, and pushed her silver hair back over her ears. And then I kissed her, a kiss that went on and on until she couldn’t misinterpret what it was I wanted. And when she finally pulled away, she didn’t laugh or smile. It freaked me out, actually, how utterly serious she looked.

  “So take me home, Parker.”

  SAUDADE

  DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on the fucking birds and the bees. Like, why would we teach kids about sex that way? I assume you already know this, but it still blows my mind that when people talk about that shit, they’re not actually talking about birds having flappy beaky sex with other birds, or bees having buzzy stingy sex with other bees. They’re talking about how birds and bees help flowers have sex by unintentionally picking up pollen on their bodies when they’re flying around collecting nectar. As far as I know, that is not how people do it.

  My mom on sex: “Try to do it mostly with people you love. Use protection. Don’t be an asshole.”

  My dad on sex (from an article he wrote in some magazine): “Having sex is twenty times easier than writing about it.”

  D’Angelo on sex: “My darling/You aren’t the average kind/You need the comfort of my lovin’/To bring out the best in you.”

  So what to do? Writing about what happened between me and Zelda seems like the very definition of TMI. But wouldn’t passing over it completely be a pretty serious (dare I say it?) anticlimax? I mean, people say they like stories where boy meets girl and then boy gets girl. But I think people don’t care so much about the “get” part as long as there’s a “gets it on with” part. And I promised at the beginning of this whole saga that I wasn’t going to pretend sex didn’t exist just because I’m who I am and you’re who you are. So let’s just take it nice and slow. Don’t be nervous. I know you aren’t the average kind.

  When we got back to the house, I saw my mom’s car in the driveway, which was bad news. I’d either have to totally ignore her, or else hash out the fight all over again. But I got lucky (pun entirely intended): the house was empty. I didn’t know where my mom was, and honestly, I didn’t care. Zelda and I went straight up to my room and sat down on the bed, and I thought about how less than two days ago we’d been right here and she’d said, “I’m not going to have sex with you tonight,” and there was a part of me that wished she’d say it again, because the moment of truth was coming and I was terrified of it. But she didn’t. I started to take off my shirt, but Zelda stopped me.

  “Let me do that. It’s always better to be undressed than to undress yourself.”

  I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my face, so I just sat there, still as a mannequin, while she unbuttoned the shirt she’d bought for me. It flashed through my head that this girl was actually older than my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother would’ve been. And was it weird that I wasn’t more weirded out by that fact?

  “Hey,” Zelda said. “Get out of your head. I’m right here.”

  Yes, she was. We finished undressing each other and got into bed. The house was just cold enough that it felt really good under the covers, skin to skin. And then we were kissing, and then it was happening, and I’ll just leave the gory details to your imagination, if that’s okay by you.

  Afterward, Zelda lay next to me with her eyes closed. “I’ve missed this,” she said. “And I didn’t even know it. Fancy that.” She slid her head up into the curve of my neck. I remember thinking how amazing it was, all the million ways that human bodies fit together. “Nathaniel and I stopped sleeping together when he turned fifty. It was his decision. He said it felt wrong to be like that with me. For a while after that, he treated me like a daughter. Then, as his health began to fail, I started treating him like a son. It’s all very strange.” I laughed. That was the understatement of the fucking century. “Anyway, it’s all in the past now. There’s no need to discuss it. Really, we should be napping. You haven’t learned this yet, but the afterglow is the absolute best time for napping.”

  I lay there watching her, as her breath deepened and her face relaxed. There’s a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade. It’s the sadness you feel for something that isn’t gone yet, but will be. The sadness of lost causes. The sadness of being alive.

  I intertwined my legs with Zelda’s legs, my arms with her arms, as if I could hold on to her just by holding on to her. We fell asleep wrapped up in each other like a couple of tangled cables, the kind that are so knotted up in so many places that the only way you could separate them would be with a pair of scissors. And that would ruin one of them for good. Maybe even both of them.

  I woke up an hour later, with the sun framed perfectly in the window, a yellow corona of light suspended in the white fog like an egg yolk.

  I grabbed my journal off the side table and sat up in bed.

  Zelda mumbled some gibberish in her sleep, or maybe something in a foreign tongue. I started to write.

  STORY #3: BRAVERY

  AFTER THE BATTLE OF CROSSED eyes, the greatest warriors of the tribe were brought before King Uthor to receive prizes for their valor. First came Christos, also called the Limb Collector, because he kept a collection of his enemies’ severed arms and legs in a pile outside his hut. His prize was a fine ax of wrought gold. Next came Boris, also called Ironskin, who was seven feet tall and the same around, who wore no armor because his body was his armor, who had been wounded so many times that any new injury he sustained was likely just the opening of an old scar. His gift was a fine black stallion, as he’d broken the back of his previous mount when attempting to leap onto it during the battle. Finally the greatest warrior of the tribe was brought forward. His name was Klaus, though most everyone called him the Dragon’s Head because, like the fearsome fire-breathing head of a dragon, he led every charge.

  King Uthor was effusive in his praise, as everyone in the tribe knew that the day would’ve been lost if not for Klaus. The queen could only blush when the great warrior knelt at her feet and kissed her hand (in truth, she had always carried a flame for Klaus, who risked his brawny, beautiful body day after day, while her husband, though a good king, had grown soft and flabby over the years). For his bravery, Klaus was granted an enorm
ous bronze bathing tub, built to be heated over a flame like a cooking pot, along with the usual spoils of a war well-waged: gold and gems, slaves and such.

  Now it came to pass that around this time, a mystic was said to be wandering the outskirts of the tribe’s territories. Reports of her physical aspect varied. Some said she was a wizened crone, hunched over like the top of a shepherd’s crook, leading an equally wizened donkey behind her. Others said she was a young woman of uncommon beauty, raven-haired but for a single streak of silver that fell across her forehead like a lightning bolt, and riding a fine white horse. It was in this latter guise that she was discovered a few days later by two of the tribe’s scouts. She had just been attacked by bandits, and surely would’ve been killed had the scouts not come to her aid.

  In gratitude, she told them to send a message to their king. She would make camp in the glade of her salvation for three days. During that time, she would provide a free reading for one person each night, at precisely midnight. But her message didn’t end there. She told the scouts to warn their king that a reading was a gift, but it could also be a curse.

  “The truth,” she said, “is not for the pusillanimous.”

  When King Uthor received this message, he was overjoyed. Lately he’d worried that his time as king had rendered him feeble and fainthearted. He couldn’t help but notice that his wife, the queen, didn’t seem as excited by him as she’d once been. In the beginning, just after he’d first won her hand for his brave acts during the Battle of Ardor’s Fall, she’d been an insatiable lover. Now her only insatiable desires were for plums and sleep.

  And so, the very next night, he set off for the glade in which the mystic had made camp. There was a strange silence in the forest, and the king was reminded of his younger days, back when he was just a warrior himself, before he’d been elected king by the tribe’s council of elders. He remembered how he would be sick with fear before every great battle, certain he would not return. That dread returned to him now, as he moved through the dark and forbidding forest. Every owl’s hoot and twig’s crack was a presentiment of his own death. He was shaking with terror by the time he caught sight of a torch flickering between the branches of the trees. The mystic sat cross-legged before a smooth stump on which various painted cards were laid out. She was neither an old crone nor a beautiful young woman. In fact, she appeared exactly as Uthor’s mother had, back when the king was just a little boy inventing great battles for himself, playing alone in the forest. He went to her and fell weeping into her arms.