“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
Not the first time I’d gotten that warning. Probably wouldn’t be the last. He couldn’t understand. Every other face I’ve ever known eventually aged, sagged, and died. Jerry’s would, too. But the first time I’d gazed at the red-haired woman with the haunting blue eyes was over ten thousand years ago. Human or not, she was the only other immortal I’d ever seen.
Chapter 3
The thing in the cell next to mine is definitely not human. It’s much too strong.
I’ve been hearing this deep pounding noise every night since I got here. Kind of like the sound of distant artillery. Never knew what it was until this morning, when Ringo took me on my daily walk to the lab. We strayed a bit closer than usual to the second building, and whatever’s in there attacked the door. I swear, the door nearly buckled. Which is pretty amazing since just a cursory glance would tell you the whole structure is reinforced with steel.
More tellingly, Ringo flinched. It takes some kind of big ugly to make a thing as nasty as Ringo flinch.
They don’t let it out. At all. Or feed it. I think they’re just waiting for it to die of starvation.
I just might know what it is.
* * *
I was in America the last time I saw the red-haired woman.
It was 1922, and I’d ended up in Chicago at the height of Prohibition. (Why anyone in their right minds would want to ban alcohol is beyond me. What I was doing in a country that banned it… well, that’s a story for another time.) I was dating a girl named Irma, who fancied herself a “flapper.” Irma was a college girl, technically, but hardly spent any time in classes, which came as a bit of a shock to her moderately well-off, stoic Protestant parents when they got around to looking at her grades. She’d discovered illegal booze, short skirts, and heavy petting sometime around her freshman year and said, bring it on. Which was what I liked about her.
I do date, in case you were wondering. I am also—and this I consider a welcome byproduct of my immortality—completely sterile. Imagine if I wasn’t. Between my direct descendants and their offspring, we could people an entire continent. I think about these things.
But yes, I do see women. Men too, at one time. I spent about a century and a half as a homosexual. It ended up being far too much work, so I didn’t keep it up. (You never really appreciate women until you’ve tried pleasing another man. Just trust me.)
My relationships don’t last very long, mainly because it’s hard to grow old with someone when you don’t grow old. Consequently, I’m often the Courtier, Secret Lover, or more recently, the Transitional Boyfriend. Most of the women tend to be fairly young from a societal standpoint (“young” meaning something different depending on which century we’re discussing) and in the exploratory phase of their sexual lives.
Okay, and I like younger girls. Sue me.
It was a Saturday night, and we were in a speakeasy called Looie’s. You wouldn’t know it was a club by looking at it because Looie’s was in the basement of a former fish market in a run-down neighborhood on the edge of Lake Michigan. It was an ugly, dark place that always smelled of cod and human sweat. The cement floor was covered in sawdust and on Saturdays, there was a live jazz band that was nearly impossible to hear because so many people came to dance there that the sound of scuffling shoes over the sawdust and cement made a rasping sound that drowned out almost everything else, and because the amplifier hadn’t been invented yet. The bar—a crude, wooden table hastily erected by Looie himself—only served bathtub gin and sacramental wine, neither of which tasted particularly good.
I loved the place.
I began that memorable evening standing at the end of the bar, watching the Saturday night masses bump each other on the dance floor, and watching Irma. She was standing in front of me bouncing up and down with the kind of effortless grace I always admired and never had. (Immortal and utterly without rhythm, that’s me.)
“Come on, Rocky, I wanna dance!” she pleaded. I was calling myself Rocky at the time.
“You are dancing,” I pointed out.
“With you, stupid!” She undulated her way over to me and rubbed up against my side, which made me think of doing something with her other than dance.
I looked into her eyes and smiled. She really was beautiful. Maybe today she’d be something less than special, what with almost no chest to speak of and a figure that could be described as boyish. But her legs were long, her eyes were a fascinating green, and she had a nose that was nearly as perfect as Cleopatra’s. (Or so I’ve heard. Never met Cleopatra.) Her brown hair was cut in what might be called, fifty years later, a Dorothy Hamill style. I gave her a decent kiss, which she deserved.
“You go dance,” I said. “I just want to watch you.”
She put on a pouty face, pecked me on the cheek and sashayed away, all beads and feathers and silk.
I really miss her.
“Hit me, Looie,” I requested of the bartender and owner in his own language. Looie was a first generation Italian. He spoke with a heavy Northern accent and, despite having lived most of his life on the south side of Chicago, was far more comfortable in his family’s native tongue.
I’m fluent in about a hundred different languages, most of which are no longer of any use to anybody. Aramaic, for instance, isn’t doing me any good anymore. Someone once suggested I had the “gift of tongues” but that’s not true. I’ve just been around long enough to gain fluency everywhere I’ve been. Since language changes far more quickly than I do, I try to practice as much as possible, to pick up on any modern nuances that might have come about since I’d last visited a particular region.
“More the same, Rocky?” he asked, in Italian.
“Do I have a choice?”
He winked at me. “Just a moment.” He ducked under the counter and resurfaced a moment later with a new glass for me. I took a sip.
“Scotch!” I exclaimed. Twelve-year-old scotch, at least. Made the bathtub gin taste like piss water by comparison.
“Not for most,” he said. “Just for friends.”
“I thank you,” I said sincerely.
“It is no problem.”
This is another good reason to be fluent. I’d known Looie for only about six months, but the minute I first greeted him in Italian I was his favorite customer.
Plus, I did do him a favor once. Looie’s sacramental wine came via the usual channels (i.e., a faux Rabbi with an imaginary constituency. The Rabbi’s name was Frank and he was about as Jewish as I am) but the bathtub gin was a homemade affair. When Looie first opened his little nightspot, a nephew named Santino was his mad scientist, and Santino mixed a pretty fine concoction. So fine, he was stolen by a local family for their own string of illicit bars, and Looie was forced to shut down temporarily because he knew nothing about making his own alcohol. So, I gave him a few tips. Actually, I built a still for him, a slightly modern version of what an alchemist named Aloysius showed me back before the Enlightenment. Except where Aloysius used sheep intestines, I used rubber tubing.
“Where did you get the scotch?” I asked him.
“I made some new friends,” he said mischievously, giving me a sly wink.
That could have meant anything. In Chicago, in the Twenties, it almost never meant anything good.
On the dance floor, all race and class distinctions had broken down completely. I saw that Irma was swinging with two very limber black men and a white woman wearing a fur stole that looked, to my somewhat trained eye, to be genuine sable. Nobody cared anymore who they were dancing with, which undoubtedly would have had the idiot Puritans who authored the alcohol ban in the first place pitching fits, had any of them been there.