Goodnight, man. Go home, or go find yourself another dive, lots of places still open. I’m closing up. That’s life, Henry, and it’s short. Even shorter for your generation. But that’s how it’s always been for you, so maybe you don’t notice. 

285, Henry. I’m 285 years old.  

But don’t get me started on that forever shit. They got us good. Used to sell forever to us in little bottles, shelves like the ones behind me stacked floor-to-ceiling with their stupid vials. Elixir my ass. I’ll be lucky if I make it another two decs. I know I don’t look much older than you, Henry, but trust me: you’ll be around long after I’m gone.  

Lots of people I know, still walking around like they’re never going to nix it. Maybe that was me, at some point, if I’m being honest. But I think I always had some doubts, way in the back of my head. Too many sharp objects out there, and these bodies of ours, these small, squishy things, they were never meant to last this long.  

I ever tell you about my knee? Fucked it up when I was in my fourth dec, just a few years after Velk’s elixir. Could’ve tried surgery, but I got spooked by the knife, so I’ve been waking up with this pain for damn near 250 years. Take care of your body, Henry. It’s a perfect instrument till one thing breaks, then everything starts falling apart. 

It wasn’t fun the whole time, no. We did all kinds of dumb shit when we started drinking elixir, but by the end of it we forgot how to live. I’d start shaking sometimes, just trying to cross a busy street. It’s one thing, getting hit by a bus when you’ve only got a few years or decs left on the clock—but when you have forever, any little thing might take it away. We got scared, all of us drinkers. The only person who had any sense was an old ex of mine, and she’s dead now. 

Yeah Henry, she died. Nix. Finité. Curtains. But you don’t have anyone like that, Henry, so maybe that makes you lucky.   

Her name was Brynn. California girl. Beach girl from Santa Barbara, two hours north of L.A. I lived there with her for two-and-a-half decs, and I still wonder if I didn’t just hallucinate the whole thing. Cheap sex and cheap beer, all those kids dancing in the ocean, something not quite real about the whole place. 

It’s a long story, better we pick it up some other time. Go home, man. I swear you’re more stubborn than me when I was your age. 

Fine then, what the hell. One last round. One. And only because I like you. 

I remember when you were born, Henry. An actual baby, kicking and screaming, the first kid I’d seen in years. I hadn’t seen a real kid since the population capped at ten billion. But then your uncle drowned in the Hudson, and they let you come along and take his place. Man, sometimes I can’t wrap my head around how young you are. 

You don’t even remember, do you, the day the drinkers died? Doubt your mom and dad said anything to you. Most folks don’t like to talk about it. 

Started twelve years ago. Business was better, back then. I’d just finished up a long shift, right here behind this counter. Clocked out, went up those steps, out into summer and Friday night on the Lower East Side, you know the drill: rats eating the garbage, kids running on ketamine, all these young people with their neon smiles and their cigarette laughter. Young-looking, at least. A lot of them born just a dec or two after me, but on Friday nights it makes all the difference, whether you started drinking elixir at 30 or 40. 

I didn’t mind it so much, back then, knew how to move through those bodies even if I’d never join them. Don’t stop mid-stride, someone’s coming up behind you. They say Manhattan always changes, but nothing ever really changes. Even back then, even when we had all the time in the world, we’d still get pissed off at the guy in front of us walking too slow. 

Anyway. I’m getting some pizza from this overlit hole on Essex, lots of people in tank tops shouting for no reason, and the speakers are blasting this godawful 200-year-old dubstep, the bass thumping in my skull, and then everyone’s screens light up at the same time. And that’s how we learn that Ambrexia’s gone bankrupt. Elixir’s gone kaput, the end.  

Everything got real quiet all of a sudden. All these people turn and look at each other, confused and kinda worried, wondering. But I don’t think anyone believed it yet, right then, right when the news broke.  

And then there’s some more mumbling, and everyone remembers they’re still sloshed. And the voices all come back louder, and by the time I finish my slice the music’s thumping again.  

Friday night, elixir be damned.  

I figured it was a nice joke, some satire piece or performance art trick that had gotten out of hand. It’s not like I felt any different, without elixir. Business as usual for me the next day. But other people were freaking the fuck out. 

You remember those first weeks, Henry? People kneeling in front of the statues of Velk, worshiping at the pharmacies, praying for Ambrexia. It’s any fool’s guess when it all started to go to shit—maybe we’d already been aging for months, maybe it’s just that no one noticed till that Friday night. But ​​after that night, we started seeing the new wrinkles and white hairs in our mirrors. And pretty soon after that, we started to call it the Graying. 

There used to be this big bronze statue outside City Hall. Dr. Thomas Velk, larger-than-life in that turtleneck under his whitecoat, holding up his elixir like Lady Liberty’s torch. Velk, the First Immortal, Father of Ambrexia. You remember? A month after all the praying started, some clown went and tagged the word ‘immortal’ with red paint, an apostrophe and a slash. All the news channels had this picture going around with Velk’s statue and under it, ‘I’m/mortal’.  

They could’ve just scrubbed out the graffiti, but the city went and took down the whole statue instead. You ask me, that’s when the Graying really began. 

And the cancers started kicking in again.   

I was afraid to call Brynn, but when they took that statue down, I knew I couldn’t wait much longer. They had her over at the Velk Center in Santa Barbara, hooked up to a thousand machines. She’s younger than me, but man, she looked tired. Older. That was the first time I’d thought that about anyone in 200 years. I remember looking down at her face in my phone, her tiny face, and I could see her skull poking through. She had half her head shaved, and the yellow hair that was left looked like it wasn’t attached to her scalp. 

First thing she does is give me this snippet from a poem, Dickinson, I still remember it. It goes, Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The Carriage held but just Ourselves / And Immortality.  

And I go, I’m too old for poetry. 

And Brynn goes, Don’t lie to yourself, Terry. 

And I made some crack about how she always had to be the teacher, couldn’t quit to save her life, and she told me she already did. Coughed up blood the day after we got the news about the Graying, put in her two-weeks’ notice. She went through her list of people, started calling numbers right away, but she skipped me. Said she wasn’t sure whether I’d care to know or not. 

I say to her, I can’t believe you’re fucking dying again. 

And Brynn laughs and says she’s glad I called. Says it’s not as bad as back then, pre-elixir. Says something about how she’s ready for it, this time around. But I could see her eyes, and they were like these two blue flames, shivering, and I knew she wasn’t ready. 

Then she starts to sound sleepy, so I hang up. And then I feel really alone in my room. I turn on the TV and try watching a show about this old couple, scuba diving off the ruins of Venice, but that makes me feel even lonelier and old. And I remember I lay awake in bed all night, wondering about Brynn, waiting for the sky to turn light again. 

That was the first time I talked to her in years, maybe decs. Sometimes I forget if things happened fifteen or fifty years ago, it all blurs together. 

I was about your age, Henry, when I met her. Everyone I knew had already graduated from college, but I hadn’t even started. My old man thought I had too much time, so he sent me to Santa Barbara to take care of my great-aunt, who wasn’t doing too hot. She nixed it before anyone ever heard of Velk, but I don’t think she would’ve taken elixir if she could have. Some folks were weird like that. 

Anyway. My great-aunt would see me with a book in my face all the time, and she told me to go check out this career fair at the college. So I went to the big, squared-off bell tower made of concrete, right in the middle of campus, you could see it from anywhere in Santa Barbara. Funded by some last-millennium millionaire named Storke, this old dude who wanted people to remember his name after he nixed it. 

I got to the career fair late, but there were some newspaper kids still there, throwing a party in the offices under the tower. Brynn was an editor there. I remember seeing her in a corduroy jacket sipping a can of cider, and I thought she looked too smart for me. But I went up to her and said, Is this the career fair at Storke Tower?  

And she goes, This was the career fair at Storke Tower. Now it’s the afterparty at Storke’s Last Erection. 

We were stupid kids. 

She was an English major who had this thing for poetry. And I’d read a lot of Bukowski and Dickinson, so we got to talking, and that week she brought me to one of the open mics on Pardall. And all the parties after. We started hanging out every day, and pretty soon I was teaching her how to ride a skateboard. We used to bring our boards up to the top of this parking garage and do these bomb runs, skate our way down all five floors. We’d practice our ollies and cruise around at night when the whole campus was our own empty playground. Always felt like we were going to get in trouble, but we never did. 

Me and Brynn, we were together for twenty-five years. You know someone for so long, you think you have forever with them. Maybe that’s why I didn’t miss her too much after we split—I figured she would always be around. Just give her a ring, and she’d pick up.  

But now, seeing her face in my phone, I knew she was on her way out for good. And I fucking missed her. 

So I take two weeks off and fly out to Santa Barbara. Soon as I come out of that metal corridor into the airport terminal, the men in whitecoats walk up to me, flashing their shiny cards, Department of Anti-Aging Research. This slick-haired babyface guy looking at me with big, hawk-brown eyes. 

Terrence? he says. And I say yes, and the three of them take me aside. Take me in a van to the nearest test center, and I get a lot of blood taken out of me. Then to a sad old motel, even further out of town than the airport. All these new rules that the Department had made up for travelers, because of the Graying. 

Babyface’s name is Solis. He tells me I can’t get anywhere near Brynn till my test results come in. Whatever it is that’s going around, they don’t want it spreading.  

I go, Cancer’s not contagious.  

He shakes his head. Says it’s airborne, the virus that made the elixir stop working, and I’d infect Brynn, the entire hospital staff, if I had it. It was also pure bullshit. He and those whitecoats weren’t ever going to find a real explanation for the Graying, but at that point they weren’t about to admit it. 

So I play along. I ask how long I have to wait in the motel. And Babyface Solis gives me this huge stack of papers, stuff I couldn’t fill out without calling up my insurance, my doctor, the DMV for some reason. Endless bureaucracy.  

I look at him and go, This will take forever. 

And he goes, Relax. There will be time. 

Then he hands me this tablet with a strip of light at the top, a heart-reader. The light blinks green, it means Brynn’s sleeping. Solid green, it means Brynn’s awake, and I can turn on the screen to chat with her.  

Sure, you can always use your phone, Solis says. But the heart-reader’s designed for doctors, state-of-the-art. One quick glance at the light, and you can see how the patient is holding up, don’t have to get anxious about checking on them 24/7. It’s almost like having them in the room with you.  

I didn’t need another portal to Brynn’s wasting face. I’d already been talking to her just fine, 2,000 miles away on the other side of the country. But now, I wasn’t even twenty miles away, and they wouldn’t let me go and see her. 

So I decide instead of pulling her up on the screen, I’ll just wait till they clear my tests, make it a nice surprise when I show up in person. I slip the tablet in a backpack, figure maybe I’ll check up on her later. 

I do the next best thing and I meet up with Brynn’s sister. Emmeline was the older one, but she’s one of those people who’ll never really get old. She does the weather channel, has to keep up her looks. Just keeps adding more plastic every year.  

When I saw her twelve years ago, back in Santa Barbara, Em didn’t have much plastic yet. She was wearing this white denim miniskirt, and she shouted my name when I got off the bus on State Street, and we hugged for the first time in something like 150 years. She looked a lot like Brynn—only more alive, more than a face on a screen, at least. 

I shake hands with her husband, this hedge fund manager type named Whitfield Hart. Brynn used to call him the Whit-less Wonder, sometimes to his face. He had muscles bulging under a t-shirt that said, Hope You’re Feelin’ Lucky, Pal. 

 They’d come down the coast from Carmel, almost got in a wreck when this deer jumped onto the highway, right into their lane. You could have nixed us both, Whit keeps saying to Em, because she’d been the one driving his Porsche. And she was probably distracted because she’d noticed this new mole on her shoulder the night before.  

You’re making a mountain out of that stupid mole, Whit says. We’re aging again, so what? Long as you weren’t sick before the elixir, like Brynn was, you’ll be fine. 

And they’re still bickering when we spot a dozen or so people kneeling in front of this boarded-up Walgreens, hands cupped and raised up to the sky. All of them wearing Velk-coats, like the doctors’ whitecoats, but with these big green collars, the colors of their church. The Sons and Daughters of Velk. You’ve seen them around. Basically a cult, and it’s really funny to me, how they’re still praying for the elixir to work again, even today. But I guess we all need to believe in something, don’t we, Henry? 

So Em starts walking, wants to get away from those cult people, quick. And she starts going on about how they’re all in league with the Anti-Aging Research Department, all these whitecoat creeps, and fuck what Velk thinks, no one’s heard a word from him since the Graying started. She says a lot of things, but she doesn’t mention her sister once.  

We walk for a little bit downtown, past all the Spanish tiles and palm trees and kids riding beach cruisers. It’s nice out, not too warm with that breeze coming off the Pacific. Kinda spooky how it all looks exactly the same as it was when I lived there. We stop for dinner at a fancy place, lobster tacos and margaritas with the pink Himalayan salt. And Em takes a bunch of polaroid pics, and anyone who saw them would think we were all on some great vacation. They wouldn’t think there was anyone missing. 

That’s when I reach into my bag and pull out that tablet. Only the blinking green light, though—no Brynn. 

Em sees it and she goes, Why do you have a heart-reader with you? 

And Whit goes, Yeah, why’d you bring your backpack? You look like a student or something. 

And then, feeling kinda dumb, I go, They won’t let me see Brynn in person.  

Turns out the whitecoats at the Velk Center wouldn’t let Em see her sister, either. You’d think it would be easier for blood relations, but she had to go through all the same red tape as me. And the thing is, she didn’t seem to mind.  

I’ll send her some pictures, Em says, all cheerful. Smile! 

But I put my hand up and go, I don’t want her to know I’m here yet—I want to surprise her. 

Em just shrugs and holds up her camera for a selfie with Whit. 

And I go, Aren’t you worried about her?  

And Em goes, We’ve had an extra 250 years to see each other, right? 

But she wasn’t looking at me as she said it. And I didn’t feel like arguing with Em, that ageless blonde. Or Whit, with those big veins popping out against his pale skin. I was just their shadow, dark-haired and built like a toothpick, like a member of some other species. So I didn’t argue either when we piled into the Porsche and headed toward the college. 

We pull up in I.V. after sundown—Isla Vista, where all those forever-21 students lived, just off-campus. World’s greatest shithole. ​It was July and all the kids were out of school, but they were still hanging around. Party school. Lots of parties, elixir or no elixir, no one in much of a hurry to get back to the suburbs for the summer. They were raging all day out on the cliffs, all along this new metal railing. Those cliffs were eroding, fast. It got so bad about a century ago, two whole blocks of apartments full of students fell into the water. Like all those old houses in Venice, just gone the next morning. 

The students didn’t give a shit. It only added to the thrill of living there, in I.V. And I knew that feeling—it was exactly like that when I lived there with Brynn. But man, I didn’t like being back with Em and Whit. I couldn’t stand it, being there and not being young.  

Soon as we get out of the car, Whit goes, Yo, let’s do the Loop. 

And I go, Fuck no. 

But Em goes, Let’s do it. For old times’ sake. 

So we do it. The Loop changes with the bars every year, but the end goal’s the same: you map out every spot in I.V. that serves booze, and you make all the stops. Red solo cup shit. I.V.’s a tiny place, not even two square miles, but there’s booze for days, and Em and Whit are living it up like they always do. And my gut can’t take all those Pacificos and tequila shots, not anymore, so I’m just stumbling along behind them from one spot to the next.  

And the drinks keep on coming. I manage not to think about Brynn for a little while, until we end up in this ancient dive called The Study Hall, great name for a terrible bar, and I couldn’t take another sip of anything. So I start fumbling with the heart-reader, one-handed, and I’ve still got a bottle in my other hand, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I spill my beer and then the tablet slips through my fingers, hits the tile floor hard. The tablet’s fine, though, just this slab of med-grade glass, not a scratch. 

And the light’s still doing its slow, green blink. 

I remember going outside for some air, and this skater kid comes zipping by, almost knocks me flat on my ass. And I see these two girls, maybe sisters, covered in glitter, sitting on the sidewalk with a puddle of vomit between them. One of them goes, Dude, I don’t understand why I am this fucked up.  

And I’m trying to remember all the times Brynn and Em ended up shitfaced like that when they were students here. Brynn’s skinny but she’s mostly pretty good at holding her liquor. I was pretty good too, way back in those days. 

I couldn’t believe I was back there again, some 200 years later. I was limping all over the place because I’d forgotten to bring this cream that my doc prescribed, to help with my knee. My knee gets all swollen when I’ve been walking around too long. I’m 285 and I don’t always remember it, but every time I hear skateboard wheels rattling on pavement, man, Henry, I feel old. 

I brought some elixir with me to Santa Barbara, kept a few vials on the nightstand in the motel room. I didn’t drink any of it, but I slept better at night just having it there. Everyone’s a little superstitious. And besides, what if everything changed again, what if Brynn needed it all of a sudden? The FDA banned elixir a week after ​Ambrexia went bankrupt, so people were hoarding the stuff now. The Sons and Daughters of Velk, the uber-religious types, they were still taking little sips of it during their prayers to Velk. Once-weekly Ambrexia. For Health. For Life. Forever.  

Go ahead, laugh. You think we’re real dumbasses, don’t you, Henry? Us old drinkers—we’ve been around for so many decs, our time feels cheap to us, cheap enough to waste. You’re lucky you’re not like us, Henry. Least your time still means something to you. 

The last thing I remember from that night is coming down the street after The Study Hall, all three of us, trashed. Whit trips over his feet and starts crawling along, and he goes, I don’t care, I still feel immortal. 

And Em goes, Yeah, well all the bars are closed. 

We didn’t finish the Loop, barely got through half of it, and I don’t remember how I got back up to my room. I just remember lying there in bed, shutting my eyes against the moonlight, and in my head I’m going Fuck you Dr. Velk, you fucker, first you give us all the time in the world, now you’re just taking it away? 

Maybe I was lucky to be alive for so long, but I sure didn’t feel lucky. I missed my old life, pre-elixir. I was happy with Brynn back then, except she was getting sicker each year, this slow-burning lung cancer. Not a whole lot I could do for her. I thought we should get married, at one point, but she told me No, because she knew she didn’t have long.  

Then we heard about these clinical trials for Ambrexia, for people who had Stage 4 cancer. They gave some of it to Brynn, and at first she couldn’t believe it was working. But then they stopped her chemo, and slowly her hair grew back in, she could taste her food again. She walked out of the hospital and started crying, she was so happy, just being able to breathe the air.  

She knew the cancer was still in her, frozen, and it would come back without Velk’s elixir. So she knew she couldn’t take it for granted.  

Other drinkers, though, not so smart. I knew guys who were wrecking their cars in street races and ODing on Ambrexia, mixing those vials into their cocktails on a dare. As if living forever meant they could be teenagers again, get away with anything. Lots of their asses wound up in the hospital before they started getting serious. 

And Brynn was telling me I couldn’t be like them, couldn’t afford to live carelessly, and of course I didn’t listen to her. I drank elixir and started fucking things up left and right. I’d been practicing this backside tailslide trick at the skatepark, and one day I landed bad on my knee, couldn’t walk for weeks. Years of PT exercises, and I still couldn’t get it back to how it was before. I didn’t skate anymore after that. 

The years were starting to bleed into each other. Brynn taught English lit over at the college, and I did odd jobs, most of them in bars. Day in, day out, just the two of us. We couldn’t have kids because of the population cap. I thought Ambrexia had given us back our future, but all of a sudden I had a lot of time, and didn’t know what to do with it. I was getting bored in Santa Barbara, nothing new except the names of the bars. I thought I just needed a change of scenery, but really I needed a whole new life.  

I didn’t bring up marriage again. I was out with Brynn one day, walking along the beach, and I realized, I’ll be honest, I was bored with her, too. That’s the thing, you’re either growing closer to someone, or you’re growing apart. And I hated myself for it, but the thought of being with Brynn every day, waking up to the same face, the exact same face, for the rest of my life—it scared me. What if there was someone I loved more than her, waiting for me somewhere else? 

So I told her I wanted to start seeing other people. And I moved back to New York. And I think it was the dumbest thing I ever did. 

She’d known for years, the way I wasn’t holding her or looking at her like I did when she was sick. She said she didn’t hate me for it—she had a good heart, better than mine. But I still wondered if maybe she didn’t hate me just a little.  

And I still called her, sometimes while I was making dinner or laying alone in bed, just to make sure she was doing alright. But pretty soon we were only talking once a year, and then not even that. Time turned us into strangers again. 

I found other people. Plenty of other fish in the sea, even after they capped us at ten billion. I had my share of flings, and some of them I’ve had around most of my life, just a phone call away. But they never stick around in the morning. And I ask myself sometimes, Why are people like this? Why am I like this? 

It’s inertia, Henry. People just tend to do the easy thing. People who’ve been single awhile just tend to stay single. I used to lose sleep thinking about all the ones who could’ve been the one, but that was years and decs ago, and now I guess I’ve gotten too used to living on my own. I don’t ever really think about Brynn or Santa Barbara, most days, not unless I’m talking to people like you. You remind me of me sometimes, y’know that? 

Okay, Henry, one more round. Then you have to get the hell out of here, and I mean it.  

Cheers. 

So I still had that heart-reader tablet, propped up next to my Ambrexia vials in the motel room, and I was afraid to use it. But I started noticing that green light more, because it was blinking more than it used to. Finally, after a few days, I notice it’s solid green, and I turn it on. 

Brynn looks even worse than last time. Lost almost all her hair, and her eyes have this washed-out look to them. She spends most of her days zonked out, hasn’t had any fresh air in weeks, and it’s fucking unfair, I say to her. 

I’m one of the lucky ones, she says. You were there when the doctors told me I only had a few weeks left. The elixir came along and gave me an extra 249 years. 

Still, I say. None of this should be happening at all. How did that poem go? The carriage carried us to immortality? 

She smiles. Says, Come visit me. Don’t you miss Santa Barbara? Remember all those summer nights in I.V., drunk dancing down Pardall? 

That’s when I notice one of the picture frames next to her bed, and it’s her with her parents and Em at graduation, this scorching day by the campus lagoon, and I only recognize the picture because I’m the one who took it. All those decs ago. 

We’re not young anymore, I say. 

I know, she says. They won’t let me drink anymore. But you can still come and have a couple for me, Terry. 

And I don’t know why I didn’t tell her I was already there, except it felt like I was worlds away. 

I will, I tell her. 

Some people, all they need is a room with a comfy bed and a big screen. But after talking to Brynn, I kept trying to fill up that motel room with sound, switching through all the radio stations and TV channels. I even tried playing some porn movies in the background, real quiet, just so I could pretend that there was someone next door. I couldn’t stand it, being there all by myself. 

Solis comes around to check on me that afternoon, still in his whitecoat, skin glowing like he just got back from vacation. I know he can’t be much younger than me, but I’m sick of his face, the smoothness of it and those big brown eyes. 

Listen, I say to him. I can’t keep on doing this, chatting with Brynn on your little heart-reader screen. 

We can always get you a bigger screen, Solis says.  

He says it like it’s funny. I could have smashed his perfectly smooth face with that tablet.  

Look, I tell him, I didn’t come all this way to be stuck in a motel room. If I knew it was going to be like this, I would’ve stayed in New York, saved myself a plane ride. 

He goes, It’s the rules. He goes on about the virus again. Trying to sound all official, even though he was as confused as any of us. I knew he was just stalling. I wasn’t going to eat any more of his BS. 

And I go, She’s not doing good. I’ve got to see her before it’s too late, do you understand? I spent twenty-five years of my life with this woman. 

But either he didn’t hear me, or two-and-a-half decs didn’t seem like much time to him, in the grand scheme of things. 

There will be time, he says to me, and then he’s gone. 

Then I see all the elixir on my nightstand, those little gold vials, and suddenly I can’t stand the sight of them. I don’t even care that I brought them for Brynn. I dump all my Ambrexia down the sink. I go back to surfing channels, and it’s just a bunch of news about the local Velk worshippers with their picket signs, Death is real! Pray the Gray away! I remember I ordered a cheeseburger that I didn’t even touch, and then I fall asleep, and just like that, a whole week goes by. 

But Solis must have pulled some strings for me, because one morning, there’s an envelope sticking out under my door. I’ve got my badge, all the papers I need, right there in my hands. I can go see Brynn. 

I change into this sky-blue button-up shirt that I picked up, that I knew she would like. Put on a new pair of jeans. I’m figuring out what to do with my hair, and then I get a good look at myself in the mirror, this weird wrinkled face and lanky body.  

And that’s when I realize, I’m scared to go. I’m scared to see her in person.  

On the tablet, I could still pretend she was someone else, almost like the Brynn behind the screen wasn’t the real Brynn I knew in Santa Barbara, the girl who kept me sharp with her poetry and her jokes. The girl I missed. But if I walked into her hospital room, and I saw what she looked like now, more bones than flesh—what if that was how I always pictured her from now on? And what if I had to say goodbye to her like that? 

I glance over at the tablet, the solid green light. Brynn, awake. 

That’s when I get the call from Em. Just two rings, and then she leaves a message. 

Terry, she says. Come over to Goleta beach. Near campus gate. Come quick! 

I used to go to that beach all the time. There was black tar all up and down the sand from the offshore drilling, and the stuff took weeks to come off. Used to get it all over my feet. I spent lots of afternoons running shitfaced through the seaweed, sending up clouds of sand fleas. Lots of long-gone nights when I’d come out by myself to hear the water against the sand, to see the stars and feel the weight of it all. Shit, I hate getting all sad and talking poetry, but something about that place has always made me see the world different.  

That beach, that was where I broke up with Brynn.  

I wanted to go back. It was the easiest thing to do. 

I show up there still in jeans because Em said come quick, and way in the back of my head, where nothing made sense, I thought Brynn would be there too. 

But when I get to the beach, it’s just Em in a neon pink bikini picking something out of a cooler full of wine and vodka bottles. Whit’s shirtless, got one massive arm around her waist. They’re surrounded by a lot of people who look like them, all of them giggling. Someone’s brought a big speaker, and I swear it’s playing the same dubstep song from the pizza place, that night we all learned about the end of the elixir. 

Partytime, Terry, she says, and it sounds like she’s already four or five drinks deep. She goes, Why are you wearing pants? 

And I go, You called me out for this? 

And that just makes her laugh even harder. Her limp fingers tugging at the leg of my jeans. 

Take them off, she goes. Come into the water with me. 

And I see this flash of Brynn across her face, just for a second. But Em’s face has too much symmetry, like something a factory spit out, and that’s always been a little creepy to me. So I blink a few times and shake my head until I can get her face to look like Em’s again.   

I stay for a drink, because what the hell. There will be time, right?  

And I have another couple drinks even though I’d rather be anywhere else. Hell, I’m starting to miss Downtown Manhattan and its crush of bodies. I already have tar stuck to the bottom of my shoes, and all I’ve done is lay there on a blanket with the sun heavy on my face, and I’d rather take a nap than talk to anyone. 

I keep getting these looks from Whit, like he could feel what I was thinking, and he didn’t want me to be there either. Or maybe he was looking at me that way because he saw me looking over at Em, because I kept seeing Brynn’s face there. But Brynn had never laughed the way her sister did now, with her whole face stretched wide and stupid.  

What the fuck are you doing here? I think, as if Em will hear me think it. They’ve got your sister in the hospital with the cancer about to nix her, and you’re out here partytime-ing on the beach? 

I watch Whit shotgun a Pacifico, one yellow can followed by another, while the other partytimers cheer him on. I watch Em walk out to the water with a funny spring in her steps. I watch a seagull turn slow circles in the big blue-gray above… 

When I open my eyes again, the sun’s red and dipping itself into the ocean behind the oil rig. And the music’s gone slow and tranquil and kinda nice. And my head is swimming, my eyes are sort of misted over, and there’s this figure coming toward me from the water. Exactly who I think it is.  

She looks like one of those goddesses stepping out of a Renaissance painting with a full head of hair, glowing. And nothing can touch her, not even cancer or time. I can’t help it. I laugh out loud and I almost jump up and run over to her. 

Then Whit’s silhouette slinks in, and it all comes apart.  

It’s his arms around her chest, feeling her up, like he wants me to watch. Like he saw something in my eyes, some sort of desire that wasn’t there—not the way he figured it, anyway. No. I never wanted anything to do with Emmeline. What I wanted was what she and him had, together, those two-and-a-half centuries. 

She pushes and he pretends to fall. Then she’s on top of him. They damn near start doing it right in front of me. Soon as Whit starts wiggling out of his trunks, I have to get out of there.  

And my bad knee’s gotten real bad again. I only notice it when I start walking. My jeans are all soaked, and I have some foggy memory of knocking over the cooler, before I fell asleep on the blanket. The cold’s gotten into my knee, and the way it creaks now, I keep thinking the whole joint’s about to snap. I’m all sorts of messed up. Somehow I call a car to pick me up, and I get back up to my room and I puke in the sink. Then I sit on the bathroom floor, in the dark, dripping with cold sweat. I sit there for a long time. I don’t know how long it is before I finally get back on my feet, and I look over at the heart-reader on my nightstand.  

And the light’s gone out.  

I turn on the screen and I see Brynn’s hospital bed, empty, no pillows, no blankets, nothing. All those pictures by her bed, gone.  

I give the tablet a shake and then I drop it on the floor. I pick it up. I bring it up against my knee, the bad one, and I slam the thing so hard, the whole screen shatters, glass everywhere. I sit there on my bed, and I’ve got pain in places I forgot I could feel pain, and I cry like a fucking baby till the sun comes back up.  

I couldn’t stand it, being there without Brynn. I couldn’t stand it there. 

Fuck it, man. I’ll just say this: keep one or two good people around. You hear me, Henry? You don’t have at least one good person in your life, you feel old no matter how old you are.  

Now wait with me while I close up, will you? 

 

 

JASON R. CHUN