Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) (3 page)

“There you are, Stanley!” He greeted, waving me forward.  His throne was on the second floor of the store, in the back, at the end of a series of decorative arrow signs.  The signs directed shoppers—mothers with children in this case—down a non-straight path to the Father Christmas corner, passing nearly every perfume counter, kitchen appliance, cleaning product and toy the store had to offer.  By the time I reached him I smelled like flowers and was thinking about buying a vacuum cleaner. 

Santa was between kids.  A modest line of mothers with their children had formed twenty feet away, behind a “Line starts here” sign and some velvet ropes.  There weren’t any elfish helpers and the chair he was in was essentially a lounge chair from the furniture department with a few bows attached.  It didn’t look like anybody much bothered to make it look like the North Pole.  I didn’t even see a photographer.

“There’s a chair…” Santa said, looking around behind him.  A closed lawn chair was propped up on the wall behind him.  I grabbed it and sat down.  “Did you have any trouble finding your way?” he asked.

“You are literally the only person in this building that it’s impossible to not know the location of,” I said.

Well, I guess that’s true, isn’t it?  Come on, smile: it’s Christmas!”  He turned to the line.  “Who’s ready for Santa?”

*   *   *

I spent the whole day there, as apparently I really did have nothing else to do.  We talked between children, who were content to wait for a while to see him even when there wasn’t anybody on his lap.  The pace was surprisingly honorable and stately, and something one doesn’t see now.  Although nowadays there are Santas are all over the place, which probably has something to do with it.  People tend to have more respect for the unique.

“How long have you been calling yourself Santa?” I asked him during one break between kids.

“Oh, always, although the name itself is new to my generation.  My father was one of the Father Christmases, and I have an uncle and two cousins who went by Sinterklaas.  There are even a couple of Yule Goats in the family.  My great grandfather was Jodin Longbeard.  One of the first of the Santa line.”

“But you’re all Santas now.”

“Of course, just like your friends the Silenii.”

“I don’t know that I would call them friends.”

“If you are who you claim, Silenus actually worshipped you, so perhaps you’re correct.  Friend is not an adequate word.”

That wasn’t what I meant, but I didn’t have an interest in pressing the point.  My history with Silenus and his sons was complicated by a number of factors, including the perhaps accidental founding of a religious cult.  It’s a long story, and I didn’t want to get into it with Santa, not in the middle of another religious cult’s holiday.  But then he was calling up the next child and I didn’t have to elaborate.

“Ho ho!  What’s your name, young man?”

The degree of patience and genuine interest Santa had in the things the children said was honestly impressive, especially to someone like me.  I am resolutely terrible with kids, partly because I spend almost no time around them.  This is for a number of reasons, the first being that I can’t have them, so far as I know.  This became a topic of conversation as well, in a roundabout sort of way.

“Why am I here?”

“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?” Santa asked.

“I neither am nor am not. I’m mostly puzzled by all of this.”

He laughed.  “Puzzled, you say!”

He called up another child and went through his routine, which consisted of asking about the child’s day, life, and wishes for Christmas.  Whether those wishes were capitalistic or aspirational didn’t much matter.  The
have you been good this year
question never came up.  Maybe the Macy’s Santa was more concerned with good versus evil, but this one mostly assumed the best.

“Why puzzled?” he asked as soon as the boy jumped down on his own. 

“Maybe puzzled is the wrong word,” I said.  “I’ve been alive for a lot of different traditional festivals and celebrations, all with their peculiarities.  Right now I feel like I’m watching the birth of a new tradition.”

“People have been celebrating gift-giving holidays for century upon century.  Perhaps as far back as Saint Nicholas himself.”

“Was he one of you?”

“Oh, oh no, I don’t think so.  Not of my line, at least.”

A little girl came up with a long story about a doll she had to have and a second one on the perils of her brother’s hand-me-down tricycle, and how chocolate ice cream is good but nobody in the whole entire world likes strawberry.

“The celebration of a saint’s day isn’t new,” I agreed, once the girl had left.  “Neither were the old harvest celebrations, or Yule day.  But this seems unconnected to all of that.”

“You become far too analytical when sober.  Relax and enjoy the spirit of the holiday, I say.”

“What spirit is that?”

“Look around!  Happy children, happy adults, people spending time with family and giving each other things… it’s jollity at its finest!”

“I see advantageously leveraged commerce preying on buyers who already have all they need in order to survive.”

He shot me a look.  “You’re trying to be sour intentionally.”

“Probably.  I’m usually drinking by now.”

“Well if you’re looking for an answer to the question, this is why you’re here.  You need to be more connected to the world!  Especially during Christmas.”

“What kind of connection did you have in mind?”

He called another little girl up.  This one also said she wanted a doll, and then told Santa about a boy named Billy who pulled her hair in school.  She wanted to make it very clear that Billy had not been nice, and should therefore not get what he wants for Christmas.  She was just the right kind of annoying to make me glad I wasn’t often around children.  I was sympathetic to Billy’s urge to pull her hair, certainly.

“Oh I don’t know,” Santa said.  “Get involved!  Do something nice for someone, just for the holidays.  Give a gift to a person deserving of a gift.  You have no children, I gather.”

“I have no family at all.”

“Then find someone else.  Just one person, but one nobody has on their list.  One person in need of that one gift they can’t get for themselves.”

Mostly, this sounded like a good way to get a girl into bed, but this seemed like a terrible place to say that aloud.

“How would I know where to find this one person?”

“I don’t know, Stanley.  But I know you aren’t looking for them right now.  So this is my charge to you, Santa to Santa’s helper.  Find that someone.  You have only seven days until Christmas.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“It will cheer you up!”

“Who said I needed cheering up?”

“You’re an immortal man, of course you need cheering.  Especially with no family to call your own.”

“How about you?” I asked.  “Where’s your family of Santas?”

“This is our busy time, obviously.”

“Yes, but any sons for you?” 

I didn’t know how old he was and hadn’t asked, but I got the sense he was nearing the end of his career.  It was the way he winced a little every time he leaned down to lift the next kid onto his knee.  It seemed a reasonable assumption that he had a son learning to follow him, or who was already an adult Santa somewhere else.

He faltered for just a second.  “It’s a good story,” he said.  “I’ll tell you some other time.” 

Then he called out for the next child.

*   *   *

Santa broke for lunch at just past noon.  Lunch was a couple of sandwiches in the store’s commissary, and soda pop.

“So what do you do?” Santa asked.  “For money, I mean?  I gather you don’t hold down a job or you wouldn’t have been able to spend the day here.”

“Day’s not over yet,” I said, eyeing my sandwich with some suspicion.  The food was provided for the staff by the store, and was just exactly edible enough to keep me from leaving the premises for a burger, yet inedible enough to guarantee I would never willingly take a job that involved deliberately consuming such a thing in the future.

“I’m between jobs,” I said.  “I was a bartender for a while, though.  Good, steady gig, twenty years back.”

“Are you rich?”

“I don’t know.  I might be.  I’m not sure what the definition of rich is.”

I wasn’t really kidding.  I had money sitting in a Swiss account.  At the time of this conversation the account was nearly a hundred years old, yet the bank was still taking my calls.  Or they did the last time I contacted them, which was in 1952.  That year, I had them wire funds to the nearest financial institution in the name I was using at the time, and then I took out the funds as cash.  It was evidently a lot of cash, because the bank took a while to get all of it to me and because I’d been living off of it ever since.

I had no idea what the overall balance in the Swiss account was.  I only knew every sum I had asked for up to that point had been sent, no questions asked.  One day I would have to get a full accounting, but I find it very difficult to do math and also to drink a lot.  Plus, again, monetary figures don’t mean all that much to me.  If you’ve ever gone to a foreign country that uses a base cash value that isn’t 1:1 with the currency of your own country, you’ve experienced something like this.  With me, that’s all currencies all the time.

“The definition of rich,” Santa said, “is never having to worry about where your next meal is coming from or where you’re going to sleep.”

“That’s a pretty low standard.”

“And being happy.”

“Now you’ve gone off in the opposite direction.”

“One can measure wealth in friendships, no?”

“I believe it’s possible to measure wealth in terms of influence and power, but I’m reasonably sure that isn’t what you’re talking about.”

“It isn’t, but it’s close.  A calculation that isn’t based on money is what I’m aiming for.  Right here is where my riches are, in the smiles I get from these children, and the joy I feel when I hear their stories.”

“Well, you’re an imp.  You live for stories, don’t you?”

“I do indeed.  I do indeed.”

“And the roof over your head?”

“The roof is in an uptown penthouse.  My riches are also very monetarily real.”

Things picked up in the afternoon.  The line got longer and the time between each child a little shorter, possibly because Santa was thinking about the same beer I was.  Mercifully, at six PM someone closed the back of the line.  That should have compelled him to perhaps hurry things along, but of course it didn’t.  He didn’t get to that final child until nearly seven.

“And what’s your name, young man?” Santa asked of the aforementioned final child, lifting the kid onto his knees.  He’d done this a hundred times already, and was perhaps not as frail from age as I’d taken him to be.  If I had to do that all day I’d probably have dropped two or three children by now.

“Davey,” the boy said.  He looked about ten.  He was dressed in old clothing that was a little too big for him.  I had always taken ill-fitting clothing as a sign of poverty, but having occupied a seat next to Santa for a full day I could now say that a large portion of the mother-child population of New York City wore clothes that didn’t really fit.  If it was an indicator of poverty, the new affluence I’d been hearing about hadn’t reached clothing yet.  Or perhaps all the tailors in New York had died due to some kind of tailor-plague.

“And what can Santa do for you Davey?  Do you have a special thing in mind for Christmas this year?”

The boy nodded, and looked around.  “Yeah but not for me.  For my ma… I want you to get something for her.”

There was nobody else in line.  All day long kids had been coming up with one or both parents beside them, or standing within line-of-sight.

“That’s very nice of you, Davey.  Is she not here?” Santa asked, conspiratorially.

“Nu-unh,” Davey said.  Implied was that she was shopping in another part of the store, only because the notion that he had come all the way downtown alone was far-fetched.  It was not unusual to see unattended children playing in public—far less common today—but this was in the middle of the city, after dark, in a place without a swing set.

“Ah, it’s a secret, then!” Santa said.  He was also looking around for her.  “Well you must tell Santa before she comes back.”

Davey smiled.  “Yeah… a secret.”

“So what can we get your mother for Christmas, Davey?”

“A flower vase,” the boy said.

“A
vase
?  What an interesting idea!”

“Not
just
a vase, right?  Not none of the stuff they have here.  A special vase.”

Santa looked at me.  There was a sparkle in his eyes that I understood to mean he could tell he was approaching a good story.

“And what makes this
particular
vase special, Davey?”

Davey’s eyes fell.  He looked embarrassed.  “I got sick.”

“You were sick?”

“Uh-huh, last Christmas.  And ma, she didn’t have the money to pay for doctors so she hocked it.  And it was her favorite thing.  She used to tell me, Mr. Santa, about how when she came here from the old country, how she kept this vase wrapped up in all her clothes so it wouldn’t get broke.  It’s been in the family a real long time.  She called it a… airy something.”