Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) (2 page)

They can also drink.  Aside from iffrits—and women—imps are probably my favorite sort of drinking companion.  The reason I don’t spend more time with them may be partly due to imps being very rare, but more likely because whenever I spend a lot of time with one I end up in danger for some reason.

*   *   *

“You’re
how
old?” he asked.  This was a little while later, after we compared stories about how we’d ended up in this particular pub, and also after two more rounds apiece.  We had relocated to a table away from the bar.  It was in a corner against the storeroom wall, where we were pretty sure nobody would overhear.

“Old enough so I couldn’t say for sure how old I am.”

“And you knew the Silenii?  I’m deeply impressed, my friend.  They’re an old line.  Died off, I’m pretty certain.  The last Silenus I ever heard tell of was a victim of the inquisition purges.”

Of all the creatures on the planet—other than perhaps vampires—imps are probably the most likely to take me at my word when I tell them I’m immortal.  It goes back to the whole question of truth versus fact.  To an imp, my truth is that I’m an immortal man, and that’s good enough for them to believe it too.  As I said, this sort of thing can blow up in your face quickly if you aren’t careful.

“Those must have been difficult times for an imp,” I said.

“Oh, it was!  In Europe especially!  For a thousand years you couldn’t tell a single good story without it involving Jesus somehow.  The clever ones figured out ways, but the Silenii… they were too proud, if you must know.  Pride and stubbornness and inflexibility of mind are a dangerous combination.  It’s a pity, they had so many stories.”

Another thing about imp lineage is the elders teach the young all of the same tales, so a line of imps is an unbroken chain of oral history.  The stories mutate over time, as they have to, but generally at the discretion of the teller.  It’s been said the mind of an imp is the mind of his ancestors, and implicit in that definition is that any change made by any generation to any story is sanctioned by the historic originator of that story.  It’s a bit too mystical of an interpretation for me, but I could understand the appeal, especially for the imp who’s changing a story.

What Santa meant, then, was when the Silenii died off so did their stories, because they belonged to nobody else.  I wasn’t terribly broken up about this since, again, I was in a whole bunch of those stories.

Something occurred to me.  “Does that mean the whole Santa thing is a survival technique?”

“You could say so!  And, as good stories involving Jesus go, it’s not so terrible.”

By the way, asking him if he was the “real” Santa would have been useless, for the same reason he had no problem with my immortality.  And if the whole Santa thing began as an imp family story, he had a better claim on the title than anybody else around.  If he said he was
the
Santa, I would have had a time disputing it.

This was not to say Santa is real, in the sense that there was anyone—imp or otherwise—living at the North Pole and delivering toys.  But that was exactly the kind of fantastic tale I’d come to expect from his kind.

“What are you doing in New York?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve lived here for years.  Nobody needs Santa year-round, of course, but I keep busy.  How about you?  What’s an immortal man doing in the city?  Should I take your presence here as proof this is indeed the greatest city on Earth?”

“I’m sure you have a story or two to back up that claim.”

“Oh, I
do
!  Would you like to hear one?”

“Not right now.  And that’s not why.  I guess the question is, what’s an immortal man doing anywhere?  This seemed like a good place to stop over and have a drink for a while.  I don’t have more of a story than that.” 

This was true, but really more accurately described my time in the whole country.  And more generally, my approach to life.

Emotionally speaking, the twentieth century was not a good time for me.  I suffered a loss twenty years in, and spend most of the next eighty years or so in mourning, which in my case meant trying to maintain a high degree of non-sobriety.  When I ran into Santa I was only thirty years in on that eighty-year jag, and pretty bitter.

If it isn’t already obvious, I tend to handle my problems by drinking more than I really should.

“Where
wouldn’t
an immortal man go?”  Santa said.  “I don’t have the gift of
your
longevity, but I’m thankful every day to have been granted an extended time on Earth.  Think of all the stories I would miss otherwise!”

I smiled.  Imps are always looking for a better story.  It’s what drives them.  I never had anything so simple to live for.  “Is that what Santa is doing in New York?  Collecting stories?”

“Why not?  This is my favorite time of year, Stanley.  I spend my days at Gimbel’s, listening to the stories of children and making them happy, and my evenings in bars like this.”

“Listening to the stories of drunks.”

“And making them happy.  You know, a child and a drunkard share a similar fondness for unconventional storytelling.  Ask a sober soul to tell you a story, and they’ll furrow their brow and work through the steps of the thing.  First this happened, then that, and then most reasonably, of course, the other thing happened as a consequence of it all.  They’re terribly, terribly boring most of the time.  But a child’s perspective is untethered by the rational.  And a drunkard, well… they will just speak, and whatever words come out of their mouths only so often pass an internal inspection.”

“The honesty of the irrational.”

“You have it, yes.”

“It’s been said the only honest man in a king’s court is the jester.”

Santa laughed.  “That’s marvelous!  What a story
that
must make!”

“Sorry, it’s just an observation.  It doesn’t come with a story.”

“Well.  I shall have to compose one.  Or you will.  I’m sure you have a storyteller inside of you somewhere.  An immortal man… the tales you must have!”

I
do
have a jester story, but it doesn’t have a happy ending and I didn’t feel like telling it.  A lot of my stories—and he wasn’t wrong in assuming I have quite a few—end in ways that make them either not worth retelling, or retelling only in the interest of depressing or frightening those assembled.  I am an aggregator of cautionary tales.

I didn’t often share them, though, at least not at the time Santa and I were talking. I had found that keeping my own counsel was the best strategy for survival.  That said, there have been a few periods in history where I wrote some of my life out, mostly in situations where nobody could take me seriously.  Epic poetry, once it was invented, was a decent outlet, although I wasn’t what anybody would call a decent poet.  Fiction prose writing, as a form, has also proven to be decent cover for my autobiographical writings.

Telling stories aloud was a skill I excelled at once too, a millennium ago, when traveling storytelling was in vogue.  But that was only rarely about my own life, unless there was drink involved.  As Santa had already observed, men talk more freely when plied with alcohol.  I’m certainly not an exception.

“I think,” Santa said, “you should come to Gimbel’s with me tomorrow.” 

He said it in a way that indicated this was already a settled decision.

“Why would I do that?  Do you need someone to dress up as an elf?  I think I may be too tall.”

There are real elves, incidentally.  They’re nearly indistinguishable from humans in every way, including height.  However, the child-sized elves of the Santa mythology are
not
real.

“You can be a helper!  No costume needed, just dress normally.  If any of the staff asks, I can explain you’re there from the agency to… I don’t know, to inspect matters or some such thing.”

“There’s an agency?”

“They think there is.  I’m the only one who shows up, but they believe I’m part of a team of Santas that all look alike.  The store has another agency on call if I’m unavailable.”

“Well, Santa
is
supposed to always look the same, isn’t he?”

“Tell that to Macy’s!  So what do you say?”

“I can’t think of a single reason to do this.”

“Excellent!  Then I’ll see you in the store.  I begin at 10.”

*   *   *

The 1950’s were a little odd.  With hindsight it’s possible to look on the era and see things that appear entirely normal and familiar from a modern perspective, but in the moment those things were new and innovative.  And odd. 

It was in the fifties that Americans figured out living in cities can suck, and the suburbs became a thing.  That was only possible because of affordable cars and more widely available public transportation, two new realities that featured prominently in the disagreement in the bar.  Not discussed at the bar but also a relatively new thing: everyone suddenly had a television.  This was in part because TV reached the same level of affordability, need and utility that made radio mandatory some thirty years earlier, and partly because the whole country seemed to be enjoying an immoderate level of affluence, with no new war to spend it on.

Americans needed to spend all of that new money, and television had advertisements for products that they could spend their money on, so all they needed to know was where to go to get the things being advertised.

Thus: department stores.  People would get in their new cars and drive from their new suburban homes over the new bridges built for them, to go to the nearest department store and buy the new things they saw featured on their new televisions.

I am generally an enormous fan of innovation.  Legitimately new things are exceedingly rare, and when I come across them I am more often than not dazzled.  The wheel, for instance, was a fantastic idea.  So were toilets, and so was television, and more recently, the Internet.

But department stores aren’t new innovations.  They’re more annoying versions of the street bazaar, which is a very, very old idea.

I like street bazaars.  Sure, they’re noisy and smelly and crowded, but they’re also held outside, which is nice.  And I know how they work. I probably have more experience as a consumer than any man alive, so I know how to find a bargain and how to negotiate one.  But department stores are not designed for someone with my talents in mind.  Specifically, when I went into one for the first time—I believe I was purchasing a shirt—I attempted to haggle.

Haggling is a wonderful thing that nobody does any more unless they’re buying a car.  When I asked the salesman what the price of the shirt was and he told me, I naturally assumed the price was too high, and then counter-offered a price I thought was much too low.  What should have happened was that he—after a lengthy discursion on the subject of the remarkable quality of the shirt, no doubt—would give me a lower price.  I would then insult the shirt and the salesman’s mother, and counter with a slightly higher offer. 

Eventually, we would arrive at a price we were both willing to accept, I would give him the coins and get the shirt, and that would be that.  I’d walk away feeling I had gotten a good bargain, and the merchant would feel satisfied that he had made a sale that preserved a decent profit margin. 

This is how the world is supposed to work.

But in the department store—this strange indoor bazaar, just as crowded only now enclosed in a suffocating fluorescent nightmare—the price of the shirt was the price of the shirt.  The salesman had no say in the price, because he didn’t own the shirt and had no authority to negotiate.  He also had no idea what was happening when I counter-offered, and I had to leave the store before security got involved.  I also had to buy the shirt.

This is a terrible arrangement.  I’m sure it’s nice for the conflict-averse—not everyone enjoys haggling as much as I do—but as far as I’m concerned a non-negotiable cost is the same thing as accepting the outrageous initially-quoted price in a street bazaar.  Instead of me—the consumer who is looking to purchase X number of shirts with Y number of coins—having some direct say in the value of shirts, the only pressure the seller feels is from the other guy selling similar shirts down the street.  I realize both shirt sellers should have an economic interest in outselling each other, but I don’t know if the two guys selling shirts aren’t also working together to determine a minimum shirt value of some kind.

Anyway, I like haggling, and I’m good at it, and it’s a skill I wish I could use more often.

Also, if that hasn’t been made clear yet, I don’t like department stores, so I was at a loss to explain why I went to Gimbel’s the following morning to meet up with Santa.  Maybe it was that I had nothing better to do, although this sort of described the entire millennium.  It could also have been the Christmas miracle of waking up without a hangover, or just the novelty of discovering an imp in New York City calling himself Santa.

Whatever it was, I put on my suit, the shirt I paid too much for, and a tie, and headed downtown.  (This did not mean I dressed up.  Everyone wore a suit and a tie unless they were at the beach or on their way from the bed to the bathroom.  We didn’t get t-shirts until the sixties.)  Santa wasn’t surprised to see me.