"250"

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping
for that which has been your delight. ~Kahlil Gibran

The room was silent. Outside the window a slow snow had begun to fall. The giant flakes floated
lazily through the air, piling between the blades of still green grass like the cottony seeds of the
poplars in summer. The windows of the study were shut tight, stopping the cool damp air from
coming in. It made the air inside heavy, drenched in the smell of old books and dusty lamps.
Cole sat near the fireplace on the floor, leaning against the side of a large brown loveseat. There
was a book lying open on the floor, Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, and a notebook in his
hand, he was writing something.

Dierdre sat across the room in a large armchair, her arms neatly folded in her lap – motionless.
She watched Cole write, and then moved only her eyes to the window, staring blankly at the
snow that gathered along the sill.

The day in the lab had been long. The professor was running various tests, as usual, involving
the physical capacities of two 108 year olds. Also, as usual but also most unusual, both Cole and
Dierdre performed the same as average 30 year olds.

Dierdre glanced at her arms, the blood turning purple beneath her pale skin from where the
sharps pushed into her veins – blood tests – endless blood tests. The professor would tell
them what he was looking for. Cole would nod, understanding – thinking, but Dierdre didn’t
understand. The hormonal chemical cocktails of her body were a faraway place, and the
professor spoke in a foreign language.

Although they were tested every day for physical fitness – the professor very rarely asked about
how they felt emotionally. Any close family and friends had died long ago and the grief they had
felt for their loss was much like any textbook human experience. There were books written about
grief, loss, about seemingly all human experience, but there were no books written on being 108
years old. There was never a question of the actual feeling of being so old; indeed, it seemed that
both the professor and Cole didn’t find importance in it at all.

Dierdre felt it, something similar to isolation – and the knowledge of her massive stockpile of memories
surrounded her. They pushed at her heart and dragged her away from the world. Why didn’t Cole feel this
way?

As the years passed it seemed they experienced their ages so differently. Cole had an endless fascination
with facts, science, and theory. He would spend his days devouring material on time, physics, space, the
universe, religion.

All Dierdre wished was that he would find his answers in her somehow – that he would see that eternal
existence could not simply be explained by their physical makeup – that there was something deeper,
something much more important.

She could feel it – but it was so hard to see amidst her heavy memory. It was like trying to read a book
while the television hollered advertisements in the background. She was so damned distracted. All day
were moments in memory time – the face of her mother, a forest at night, the smell of Indian food on
asphalt. How could she communicate to Cole that amidst all the pictures – the universe kept telling her
something important?

Sometimes Dierdre tried to tell Cole. She would ask him if he remembered something. He would often
give her a puzzled look, his eyes searching. “No, I can’t really remember that” he would say, or “yeah I
think I remember, but it was so LONG ago”

Why did he not see the way she did? Why didn’t he feel the suffocating presence of a long meandering
story with no direction? Her life events lined themselves up neatly in time – but they were chaotic to her,
their consecutive places only confused her and made her anxious.

And Cole just kept writing – kept studying. She could remember a time when Cole only wrote poetry,
philosophy, stories; such beautiful things. Now it was science, theory, the professor. She didn’t
understand it, she tried, but all she was met with was a profound feeling of emptiness and all she saw was
Cole scribbling in his notebook, writing further away from her.

The window made a popping sound, the wood and glass moving with the changes in temperature. Dierdre
started and then fell back to watching Cole who was writing out a list in point form, looking back at page
132, following the words with his finger.

Dierdre stood up briskly from her chair and crossed the room towards Cole. She stood above him and
reached down for his notebook, snatching it from his hands. Cole looked up, his deep blue eyes turning
bright in the daylight from the window.

“Dierdre…what…?”

She turned to the fireplace and threw the book into the flames. It sent little tiny sparks flying in all
directions, a burst of fiery insects disturbed from their resting place.

“Jesus…Dierdre, what the fuck?” Cole looked more confused than angry; his hands lay open as if the
notebook was still there.

The little book burst into flames, its pages of writing curled inward and turned black – its cover blistered.
Cole stared at the flames and was silent; it was as if the book had fallen into the fire on its own. Dierdre
could see how far away he was from her. In those little books she was not there. How could such an
ever present aspect of his life be so invisible? Did he even see her anymore or had she just become a
habituated presence, a part of him, like an arm, or a foot?

This thought hurt Dierdre. She turned to the shelves of little books, identical to the one Cole had been
writing in. There were probably over 100 little notebooks full of Cole’s theories, each one written
meticulously in his sharp print.

Dierdre grabbed one off the shelf and threw it in the fire. Cole stood up, “Dierdre what’s going on?” but
he didn’t say more, Dierdre knew he’d never seen her act so strangely. Dierdre was always quiet – not
one to act out.

She grabbed another book, and another, she threw them into the fire. Then she grabbed three at a time and
tossed them into the flames, she started maniacally ripping the little books off the shelves and throwing
them into the fireplace. Cole stood in shock – he watched her but didn’t stop her.

The little books burned, they burned and the fire grew and it was coming out of the fireplace now, across
the black slate floor, threatening the life of the nearby area rug. Thick black smoke rose in tendrils out
over the mantle and up to the ceiling. It gathered there and then floated towards the closed door.

Most of the little books from the shelf were in the fire now – a few lay helpless on the floor, open and
facing down, their little pages smashed against the rug, folded and crumpled. Dierdre stood and stared at
the fire and then she kneeled.

“Dee…what have you done?” Cole stammered his voice barely a whisper.

In the hallway the fire alarm began to scream.

The professor flew through the door.

“What the hell is going on; what happened!?” The professor’s eyes rested on the vacant book case for a
moment, and then moved to the fire.

“Your books Cole!” he yelled and then “Come on we have the get out of here!”

The smoke was starting to fill the room, it’s black, acrid smell took over the musty scent of the old books.

Cole stepped towards Dierdre and put his hand on her arm to pull her up.

“Dee, we have to leave now”

She looked up at him, her face covered in moisture, the heat from the fire sat heavy on her skin.

Outside the window, the long wail of fire trucks could be heard as they turned onto the street that crossed
the campus.

Dierdre stood up as she looked back at the fire, her face still shining, reflecting the flames, her eyes full of
sadness.

It was then that she realized Cole couldn’t tell she was crying – he’d forgotten what she looked like when
she cried.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us

-Oscar Wilde

What is a memory? What constitutes its physical existence, and does it even have that? Are there tiny electrical pulses with shape, dimension, that travel down some synaptic path and end in an explosion of little bolts of lightning. Can it be fabricated? Can it be replicated? As Tesla harnessed and recreated the energy of the electrical pulse, so can we harness that energy similarly in the brain? And if we can, then what constitutes ‘real’ memory, the fact of experience? And why can fake memories become real memories, why, for example, can someone who experiences intense delusion still form and maintain in memory the events of that delusion long after whatever created that state has been eradicated? Does it not, then, make it a reality the same as the reality that I can remember the frumpy red dresses my Aunt used to wear when I was 5 years old? Is it not fact? OR are all memories simply a fiction, a story with influence but carrying no more accuracy than any other story?

For me, the memories I carry with me weigh heavier than most. I am…different…I still carry the intensity of the world on my shoulders much like any person does. However, mine is far more extensive, and I mean that in a strictly objective way. I am 250 years old, and within my mind I carry the memory of 3 lifetimes. I have seen birth and death and rebirth, I have known, loved, lost. The world in which I exist is designed only for those who average 80 years old.

For me, the past holds all the weight. The future no longer requires thought. As the years flow forward, the seasons pass faster. Indeed it seems now that the snow has only just begun to fall when it melts again. Thinking of the future is irrelevant when by the time you form the image of it, the time has arrived. In every day the feeling of time shrinks for me – at 10 years old, a year constituted 10% of my lifetime, at 250 years old, that percentage has shrunk to .004%.  The patience I required at a younger age has no purpose now, and it is hard for me to distinguish between what is present and what is future. The only clear pathway I can see is my past, is memory and just as the time slips away faster and faster with each passing moment, so does my memory grow exponentially, and I am powerless to stop it.

I write, I write each memory down in little notebooks. It is all I carry with me and when the pages are filled and my hand aches, I burn it. I set it on fire and watch the flames consume it completely. It is a ritual which offers comfort, but it does little to destroy the world the lives within my mind. And in irony, it only serves up a new memory, the act of watching thousands of little notebooks turned to ashes.

There is a very specific problem that unites the behavior of every single human mind, far beyond recorded history, deep into the reaches of the timeless and formless intelligence that animates every cell. To understand death is to understand life.

They were afraid, you know, these intrepid scientists that began my wife and I on this long voyage. They were afraid of the implications. They were afraid of exposure. Too afraid to test it, too afraid to announce it, they had to look for certainty, for someone or something to depend upon.

And how to test it in any case? How to announce it? Just how does one measure the immeasurable moments, the uncharted developments, the actual effect of such a completely new thing. There would surely be such experiences as cannot be named or related to.

They could wonder, of course, just as you or anyone might, what it feels like to be in my situation, or my wife’s. There would be errors of grandiose overestimations, and realizations of unimaginable powers and potential the likes of which separate gods and men. The great feat of visualizing the realities that come with this kind of advancement are almost as demanding as the discovery itself.

Today my wife and I head into the country where this began, by train. A sort of end awaits us there, perhaps, though I am afraid I am even more miserably incapable of seriously entertaining that idea as when I was a young man of twenty. Death was far from my mind then, as it is now.

I am just a man, my wife but a woman, though admittedly our rare hearts are the graveyards of secrets.

I sit upon a train and ponder the implications, the future, the meaning, but in appearances I am an anonymous fellow just like anyone else, really. Except, I am two hundred and fifty years old, and while circumstance may yet kill me… time never will.

Opened are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts
Clouds darken the sky
The stars reign down
The Constellations stagger
The bones of the hell hounds tremble
The porters are silent
When they see this king
Dawning as a soul
Men fall
Their name is not
Seize thou this king by his arm
Take this king to the sky
That he die not on earth
Among men
He flies who flies
This king flies away from you, Ye mortals
He is not of the earth
He is of the sky
He flaps his wings like a zeret bird
He goes to the sky
He goes to the sky
On the Wind.

-Akhnaten, Philip Glass

Chapter One

The dim mercury lights buzz in the silence of an empty train station, their orange glow casts small circles on the tracks, surrounded by shadow. Steam rises into cold air from the chimneys of the large brick building and mixes with the faintest trace of snow, which swirls chaotically through the air, before lightly touching down on the cement platform. The sky echoes with the sound of ice, a sign of more snow to come. It is late January; or perhaps early February, and the long darkness of winter is still strong.

Two figures sit beside each other on a bench in a dark shadow created by the contrast of black night air and the warm indoor light falling from a window. One sits motionless as his clear, blue eyes follow the tiny flakes of snow that spiral before him. The other scribbles hurriedly in a small leather bound notebook, slightly hunched over as she writes in the dim light. Not a word is exchanged between them and they are strange. The quiet one, a man, looks, objectively, no older than 35, but his watchful gaze creates a much different impression. It is almost as though he possesses the demeanor of an old tree, that his physical form has been rooted to this earth for a very long time. His companion is a young woman, again, physically no older than he, and she carries a nervous air that seems to vibrate through her wispy frame. She stops writing for a moment and looks up at her partner, her dark, liquid eyes search him for a moment, and the expression on her face shows evidence of many long years and a heavy past. She looks back down at her notebook.

Almost as soon as she looks away, the man shifts his weight slightly and glances towards her, his breath rising slowly between them. He reaches a pale hand to her arm and lays it there gently. The woman closes her notebook slowly and slips it beneath her heavy black coat. She leans back into the bench, but does not look at him. His eyes turn back to the falling snow, but his hand remains on her arm. A faint rumbling sound becomes audible and moments later the low whistle of a train flows through the darkness. The two figures rise from the bench simultaneously and walk towards the tracks, the man’s hand slipping from the woman’s arm to grasp her hand lightly.