Mr. Eternity (3 page)

My father did not care a sesame seed for my troubles, but we did share one fascination in common, which was the transformations and legacies of history. We had only a limited selection of books in the palace, but we knew which side the world was buttered on. We knew that we were opulent people in an impoverished time. We knew that our country was just a subsistence nation of millet and goats and camels. The ruins of great days fringed and ringed the city in a huge periphery and we knew that our own St. Louis was only a tiny particle of the St. Louis that had existed in ancient bygone imperial days. The difference was that while I sat in the library striving to learn all I could about the true and established facts of the world, my father hardly read anything anymore, and instead he preoccupied himself with thoughts of his own place in history. His great ambition was to unite all the nations of North America under one flag, as they’d been united in freedom and democracy under the empire of the United States. He also wanted to revitalize culture and
learning. I often heard him say things like, “It is time we remodernized this ragbag old country.”

He had mandated that we speak only Modern English at home, the language of American scholars, and I wasn’t allowed to speak Mississippi Spanish at all until I was ten years old, but other than this he did nothing, for he didn’t know how to commence the effort of remodernization. Maybe, in an alternative reality, he would never have been catalyzed into action at all, but it happened that one night, when I myself was already twenty-six and my father had long since begun to feel the pinch of years, he bought an old slave named Daniel Defoe from some people who came in off the desert. It was a night of shining rain and cicadas, which I know because I chanced to be there. I was just returning from dinner and fornications with Anthony Fucking Corvette, and my father was out by the front gate, and when he saw me he said, “Oh, it’s you,” as if he had just recollected my existence. “Then come along and I’ll show you something.”

We issued into the camel pen and there was Daniel Defoe. It was the first time I cast eyes on him. He had a superannuated cat named Christopher Smart, who was like a gray carpet with teeth, and he was handsome and there were lights in his eyes, but his chief appeal and the reason for my father’s interest in him was that he was said to be one thousand years old. This was not impossible if you considered that he came from the desert. In very dry air, with abundant sun, meat will cure before it spoils, and therefore a human being, which is made of meat, could theoretically live forever. The marked contrast was that in St. Louis, which was frequently ravaged by pestilences like Nevada fever, even rich people lived only fifty or sixty years. Poor people were lucky to survive into their thirties.

“If he’s as old as he says,” my father instructed, “he would have known the glory of the United States.”

He was speaking Modern English, and it was an astonishment when Daniel Defoe responded in the same language. His accent was untraceable. He said, “Don’t talk to me about glory. Those people were out of
their minds. They only cared about whale oil. They lived in tents called wigwams. Their method of gardening was to explode chemical bombs, which killed everything.”

My father said, “We know about oil. We have books and prospectuses in the palace.” But I knew he had not read a prospectus in years.

“It wasn’t only whale oil. It was fossilized oil too. They pumped it out of the earth and drank it like it was banana beer. They pumped so much out of the ground that the land began to sink, and that’s why it seemed like the seas were rising. They also made a special train oil from the fat of a seabird called the great auk, which was the national bird of the United States. Train oil made the economy boom, but it also caused global warming because it released all the heat that would otherwise have stayed inside the auks, which were arctic birds, and very warm inside, and anyway extremely numerous.”

This was not true. It was a feast of lies. However, my father devoured it, and I think this marked the sea change for him. He had lacked an adviser to ratify and affirm his ideas. Now he had one.

“We’ve got to find some of these great auks,” he said quietly. “We won’t burn so many to cause global warming. Only enough to make our economy boom.”

Azar was up, or rather he had crawled out of his tent. He was on all fours, breathing heavily, disoriented by shocking dreams. I told him there was no coffee yet and no food and our host was involved in pagan rituals on deck, and he lifted his head and groaned, a soft and mournful sound.

“We have to figure out what we’re doing here,” I said.

“We’re making a documentary. Remember we have to be firm about this.”

“But we don’t know anything about it. What’s our approach? Do we do it self-conscious and formal, like Errol Morris, or do we follow him around, candid moments, regular life, et cetera?”

“These aren’t the things you have to decide at first. For now we shoot lots of stuff and then we cut it together later. We’ve only been here half a day. First we find some coffee.”

“It’s a movie about a very old person,” I said, “but it’s also about today, our society, in which here we are, two privileged young men without any skills applicable beyond the framework of that society.”

“It’s not about us, that’s one thing. No one gives a shit about us. I certainly don’t.”

“I don’t mean us as in us, I mean us as in now, our world, Generation Credit Debt, the Age of Irony and climate disaster. And the ancient mariner belongs to a different time. The last survivor.”

We pondered this, or we pretended to. Really I was too tired from a night in the sand to do much pondering. Azar stared into space like he’d been hypnotized.

“But five hundred and sixty years old?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to proceed skeptically. The movie
is better if we take him at his word. Otherwise we’re cynics. I’m tired of being a cynic.”

“Maybe the movie is about trying to substantiate his claim,” I said, “and then gradually we show that it doesn’t matter what the truth is. He’s ancient in other ways. In outlook and orientation. A metaphor develops. Something about the boat. I don’t know what the metaphor is but it develops and that’s the movie.”

“Fine, good. As long as you understand that in essence the whole thing for me is that I don’t want to be a cynic.”

“Why are you talking about cynicism?”

“I had an epiphany about this because I finally tried kombucha. It’s delicious! I’ve been making fun of everyone for drinking it, but if I’d been less cynical I could have been enjoying it this whole time.”

He rolled onto his back and stared into the sky. The yard was filling up with light. Palm trees stirred in the soft breeze, a sound like rain, and it was very peaceful, very peaceful.

“So he comes from the fifteenth century,” he said. “In actual fact or in spirit. It’s a compelling thought. He must think he remembers the discovery of America. He must think he remembers the invention of chewing gum.”

He closed his eyes. There were banana plants growing against the fence, quail grass and okra and Indian lettuce and callaloo, squash and beans, a sapodilla tree and a mango tree and other trees I didn’t recognize. There were strange mushrooms growing under an ixora bush, where the ancient mariner told me he’d planted Tylenol capsules. The yard was stuffed with plants. It was good for the spirit to grow food, he told us, even though he didn’t eat much any longer. He could make do with one thimble of honey each week, a teaspoon of tamarind pulp, a sniff of lemon blossom.

I noticed that there was a column of red ants on Azar’s chest. I wondered if I should warn him. But if they were biting ants, they would bite him whether I warned him or not, and if they were harmless it was better not to frighten him. Then he screamed and leapt to his
feet and I ran forward to brush them off. He stood there with his arms raised and his face twisted in pain. There were already welts on his soft belly.

“You have to understand,” he said, “that if somehow we could prove he’s telling the truth, it would be more than a world-historical medical discovery. It would also make a difference for me on a personal level.”

We learned that the oldest person with documents to substantiate her claim was Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who lived to the age of 122. She drank port and ate two pounds of chocolate a week. She’d quit smoking when she was 117.

But there were other claims. Old Tom Parr was supposed to have lived to the age of 152 on a diet of rancid cheese and milk, hard coarse bread, a little booze, a little whey. Henry Jenkins, a destitute Yorkshireman, lived to be 169. Li Ching-Yuen was either 197 or 256 at his death in 1933. There’s a tradition that for the first forty years of his life he lived on rice wine, goji berries, and herbs. He was seven feet tall, long fingernails, a ruddy complexion. When he was 130 he met a 500-year-old hermit who taught him to breathe. He outlived twenty-three wives and died in the arms of a twenty-fourth.

Trailanga Swami, the walking Shiva of Varanasi, lived to be 280 or 358. He could levitate and he could breathe underwater. He fasted for months and broke his fasts with buckets of clabbered milk. He never wore clothes.

At the upper end, wild hearsay shades into mythology. Methuselah and Jared and Noah and Adam and the rest. The Persian shah Zahhak lived 1,000 years, and the kings of ancient Sumer lived for millennia. En-men-lu-na is supposed to have reigned for 43,200 years.

What’s the secret? Li Ching-Yuen had four rules: Tranquil mind, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, sleep like a dog. I learned that some people have success with long-lasting substances like jade, hematite, gold, and cinnabar. The logic is that if you ingest these things, you acquire some of their own properties. Everything has its vogue.
Predigested protein, calorie restriction, raw food, brain exercises, the Okinawa diet, a positive attitude, an extract made from deer antler velvet. There’s no wrong way to live forever. The ancient mariner had known a man in Lisbon who drank potable gold from the body of a clock, and it might have worked, who knows, but he was hauled before the Inquisition and burned alive.

And there was the ancient mariner himself, salted by the sea air and dried in the tropic sun, and now, for all I knew, he was incorruptible. He was like a strip of rawhide.

What would it mean to live five hundred and sixty years? If I myself lived so long, what would I live to see? Would there be responsible land management and 2.1 children per woman? Would gas stations be replaced by solar charging stations? I had been a man with a clipboard, ostensibly a believer in collective enterprise, but the experience of wandering around New York encouraging people to unplug their chargers and meditate on the inundation of their city had not filled me with optimism. There would be no solar charging stations. Instead there would be extreme weather and high heat. There would be avocado trees in Washington, D.C., Spanish moss in Boston, wineries in Greenland. Key West would be underwater, and New Orleans and Miami and Lower Manhattan as well. There would be no more plastic bags. No more social media. No more lightbulbs or cheap underwear or reliable weather forecasting. No one would remember how to make asphalt or super glue or sunblock or cortisone cream. We would no longer be able to fly. The world would be like it used to be, years and years ago, except that it would be entirely different.

For breakfast the ancient mariner fried sweet plantains in the kitchen shed at the back of the yard. There was no coffee, but he offered us a thick milky liquid called po, which he said was much stronger. Azar drank some out of a little tin cup and professed himself a changed man. I had a little sip, just a sip, and I felt like an angel had sneezed in my face. We were at a loss.

“Well,” said Azar. “Do you remember the invention of chewing gum?”

“First only clove-flavored gum,” said the ancient mariner, “and then cinnamon. Spices! But you have to understand what they meant to us. We sailed around the world, half of us were murdered by Turks, and all for these spices. Today no one remembers and gum comes in a bright envelope that you close with a little flap. You buy it for a nickel or I don’t know, fifty dollars, and you chew it and you stroll around and you feel like the Soldan of Aden.”

“The Soldan of Aden,” I repeated.

“And pepper is so cheap that they give it away in paper packets!”

He gestured forcefully as he spoke. He jerked his head around and bounced on his heels. He had enormous hands, teeth like old ivory, a smile that creased up his face like a baseball mitt. From certain angles he was still a handsome man.

“If you could take one item back with you to the sixteenth century,” Azar said, setting the camera on the table in front of him, “what would it be? Would you take malaria medication?”

“I had malaria for a hundred years,” said the ancient mariner, “all through the seventeenth century. But I’ll tell you what I’d bring back with me. I’d bring back some cotton T-shirts. Soft as a breath of wind and no more expensive than a loaf of bread. When I was stationed at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, up on the east coast of British Florida, we had woolen uniforms, twenty pounds of uniform, thirty pounds even, and this in the summer when the coquina walls of the fort were hot to the touch and you’d see the Indians at the market in nothing but little beaded loincloths and you’d say to yourself, Obviously. But of course there were mosquitoes in those days that would turn a pink-cheeked British boy to leather in twenty minutes, so when I celebrate the cotton T-shirt I am also celebrating the vanishing of the mosquitoes, wherever they went.”

“You’d take a T-shirt back with you?” I said. “A T-shirt, of all things?”

“A light cotton T-shirt,” he said.

“But look,” said Azar, tugging at his own shirt collar. “This T-shirt is actually made from merino wool. It’s a lightweight blend. It wicks away perspiration and it has natural antimicrobial properties to combat odor. Plus it hangs better. Cotton is terrible in the heat.”

“A merino wool T-shirt, then, or rubber-soled shoes,” said the ancient mariner. “Or an assault rifle and lots of ammunition. Or a trunk of peppercorns. I’d fill it up at the store here in the twenty-first century and take it back and I’d buy huge parcels of land. I’d be a king. I was going to say penicillin, because once on the Mississippi River I was bitten by an enormous glowing ant, like a lobster, and my foot got infected and had to be cut off by some Indians, but in the end they also had a medicine that made it grow back, so I wouldn’t have needed penicillin after all. It would have saved me some grief but I wouldn’t have needed it.”