The Chosen Read online

  Eve had gone to remarkable lengths to hide herself, dressing in the filthiest rags she could find and apparently taking a daily bath in the sewers for good measure. Her face was charwoman dirty, and the stench hovered around her like a cloud of hungry flies. She was, of all ridiculous things, playing a recorder on the steps of the theatre.

  “This isn’t Hamlin,” I said as I stopped just outside ground zero of her odor.

  “Bugger off.”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  “I wasn’t jokin’. Bugger off. I’m spending quality time with my friends. And they don’t like you.” At that point, I realized that maybe Eve had spent a little time with that Pied Piper fellow after all, since there were a dozen or so rats starting to gather. Most of them were the size of large mice, but a couple looked like small cats, and one reached nearly as high as my knee when it reared up on its back legs and hissed a warning at me. If it had been a few hundred years later, a witty remark about Mrs. Frisby might have come to mind, but at the time I just kicked it in the guts.

  “Why’d you do that?” Eve screeched as her “friends” scattered back into the shadows and sewers.

  “I don’t like vermin.”

  “Really? And here I thought rats of a feather and all that.”

  “Eve, what are you doing here?”

  “Don’t call me that! And I’m doing what I please. Just like you, doing what you please, in your little chalet, or whatever you call it, up on your little mountain. Why’d you come down here bothering me anyway?”

  “I heard about a crazy rat woman who goes into the deepest plague pits and comes out none the worse for the wear. I thought it might be you. I guess they missed that ‘worse for wear’ part, but I did find you.”

  “Like you been lookin’.”

  “I have, Eve. I looked for you for thirty years after you left me in China.”

  “Well, now you found me. What. Do. You. Want?” She spoke slowly, precisely, as though to a mental deficient. Which, in her eyes, I probably was.

  “You. Me. Us. I want us back.”

  “There hasn’t been an us in a few thousand years, and there won’t be an us for another thousand. Now bugger off and leave me to my friends!” She played another shrill tune on her pipe, and rats streamed out of the sewers toward us like a roiling tide of furry, smelly water.

  I couldn’t hold my footing and was swept along with the rats out of town and across the bridge. All I needed was Green Day in the background, and it would have been classic crowd surfing, except I was rat surfing. And they wouldn’t be born for another couple of centuries.

  There I stood, on the outskirts of London, watching helplessly as thousands of city rats took a holiday. That cleared out most of the Plague from the town, but with the unfortunate side result of spreading it throughout the English countryside. I probably should have felt guilty, but they were going to die anyway, so did when really matter that much? Sometimes taking the long view of things could make one seem a little heartless.

  I headed back up my mountain and spent the better part of three decades learning to ski and paint landscapes. I had lost track of Eve again, and when I hopped a ship to the New Country, I figured either she’d find me someday or she wouldn’t.

  But now, I knew I had to find her, even though I didn’t know why. I just knew that if we weren’t together the next time I ran into Lucky, it was going to be very bad for us. If I didn’t classify what happened to us the first time we both hung out with Lucky as “very bad,” even I was a little nervous about what this time might bring.

  Chapter 4

  I crashed in El Paso for the night, then rolled east the next morning. I’d always been a morning person. It had been my favorite time in the Garden, and nothing had happened in a few thousand years to change that. Something fresh about mornings, when the promise of the day hadn’t been spoiled by having to deal with other people yet, made me look at the world with a little lighter eye. So I rolled east into the sunrise. I knew I’d eventually start to feel where Eve was. We could all always find each other—me, Lucky, Eve, Cain.

  Yeah, Cain’s still around, too. I tend to steer pretty clear of my firstborn son, not because I haven’t gotten over what he did to Abel, but because he hasn’t. He and Eve stay in better contact with each other than with me. I guess they feel like they both carry a burden I can’t understand. Families are like that.

  I had no hint of Eve, Cain, or Lucky at the moment. I headed east because I’d been living in the West for so many years, I assumed Eve would be somewhere far away. The last I knew, she was in America a dozen or so years ago. I was in Los Angeles, and I felt her. She never made contact, and I knew better than to try. I figured she’d probably stayed pretty close to the east coast since then. It had more big cities, and Eve had done a pretty good job of losing herself among people for a while.

  I love America, with its wide expanses of country. Europe has nothing like Texas, where the whole world seems flat. Some parts of Africa are similar, yet not. America has a vibration all its own, a youthfulness that carries across, even though the land is no older or younger than any other piece of dirt. You see, a country tends to take on the characteristics of its inhabitants, and Americans are quick, vibrant types, always impatient, like kids. So the country feels young. I like it; it makes me feel like I’m only two thousand again.

  I got hungry around Odessa and swung into a little diner I’d visited once a couple of dozen years before. The same tinny bell rang as I walked through the door, and the same old men—or more likely so similar to be interchangeable—looked up from their places at the counter as I strolled in. My boots clicked across the same checkerboard linoleum, tracks worn colorless near the door and in front of the cash register. I nodded to the cook behind the counter as I crossed the room. Knocking the road dust off my jeans, I made my way to a booth near the jukebox.

  It was late afternoon, and the sunlight streaming through the dirty windows had taken on a golden-amber tone as that big ball settled low in the sky, just starting to tinge the horizon with fire. I turned to slide across the cracked red pleather seat and heard a gasp and the crash of broken crockery.

  “Shit, Myra! What the hell’s the matter with you?” the cook yelled. A woman stood stock still in the middle of the floor with coffee spilling all over her feet. I took one look at her, and my heart sank a little. I knew her. Biblically, as they say. And if anyone was qualified to use that term, it would be me. She was older, of course. The blond hair that once spun gold out of that afternoon sunlight was now a dishwater-bland with more than a few streaks of gray shot through it. The little crinkles that used to appear in the corners of her mouth had become permanent lines, and she didn’t seem to float across the floor as she used to. She was a little heavier than when we last met, but not fat, just a woman’s body, not a girl any longer. She hadn’t been a girl for a long time, I supposed. Her eyes were the same, though. The eyes never really changed. As long as there was still a person in there, the eyes were the same.

  And her eyes held more than just a spark of recognition; they held an entire bonfire. They burned into me with twenty-five years worth of questions, answers, speculations, loss, love, forgiveness, and more than a little pain, but oddly enough, not a hint of regret. I was glad for that. I didn’t want her to regret anything about our time together. I certainly didn’t. Of course, I had known it was fleeting, and she had obviously waited for me to come back. Then when I did, it was two decades later, and I still looked exactly like I had the day I left that little diner, intending never to return in her lifetime.

  That’s the key to being who we are, to living as we do. The key is to know when the connection with another person has to be severed, for both our sakes. It would be impossible to live with someone who doesn’t age without growing to resent them as your youthful vigor fades. Love can turn to hate very easily, and there’s nothing worse than being hated by someone who once loved you as if you were the only two people on Earth.

&n
bsp; Just trust me on that one. I’ve got a little perspective.

  It’s just as hard on us, giving our hearts to someone we know will die in what is just an eye-blink to our lifespan. So, we hold back. We can’t give ourselves completely to a mortal, and that’s the kind of thing perceptive lovers tended to pick up on. After a few millennium of walking the Earth, you’re not interested in dating rocks anymore, so you’re going to have perceptive lovers.

  Therefore, we make brief, soul-touching connections. Then, we sever them before somebody gets hurt. We hope. Sometimes we miss, and the person we leave is in stasis for the rest of their lives, hoping we’ll come back. Dad, I hope that’s not what happened to Myra.

  So I sat there, and I looked at her, while she looked back at me. I looked at her some more, and after a minute, she seemed to convince herself that I wasn’t really me. That was the logical choice, after all. Who lived through twenty-five years and still looked as though they were in their twenties? After an eternity that couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds, Myra ran to the back, where I heard her ask someone to “cover for me.” Seconds later, I heard the back screen door slam, then I could just barely hear the sound of someone sitting on the back stoop, striking a match, and taking the first long drag from a cigarette.

  “Boy, mister, you got her wound up tighter than a clock spring at midnight. What’s the deal? She know you? Cause I’ve never seen you before, and I’d remember you.” The voice came from my elbow, and as I looked up the arm from the coffeepot, I saw a nametag that read “Emily,” an apron over a uniform, and the pretty face of a twenty-something blond-haired girl with a pixie smile and a cute upturned nose. Then, I saw her eyes. More to the point, I saw my eyes in her face, and I knew my life had just gotten a little more complicated.

  “Yeah. I think she knows me. Or at least, I think she thinks she knows me. Or thinks she knew me. Or something like that.”

  Just for the record, I’m never flustered. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve had a kid. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve found out sometime after the fact that I’ve had a kid. This is, however, the first time I’ve been inexplicably drawn to a diner in the middle of Monkey’s Nut, Texas, while en route to find my estranged wife of some innumerable number of centuries, only to be confronted with the unmistakable evidence of a past indiscretion. Therefore, I might have been a little more rattle-prone than normal.

  “Well, how does she know you? ‘Cause I don’t know you, and it ain’t like this is that big a town, and really, I’d remember anybody as close to my age as you, who looks like you, if you’d come through any time recent.”

  Yeah, that whole immortality thing? I look like I’m about twenty-eight. Forever. It has its advantages, like never having to worry about Grecian formula, but one of the drawbacks is that if you see the same person with a ridiculous amount of time between visits, you look the same as the last time they saw you. This becomes somewhat inconvenient when you’d rather the mother of your most recent offspring not drop a cup of coffee into the middle of the floor upon your arrival.

  “It’s a long story. Look, here’s a buck for the coffee. I gotta roll.” I stood up to head for the door, except, of course, there was a problem with that. There was always a problem. It was just the way things worked.

  Myra had made it back into the diner and was headed my way, an inscrutable look on her face. It was almost a cliché the way she ran into my arms, grabbed me by the back of the neck, and kissed me as though she were checking for recent dental work. Then, she pulled back, hands on my elbows, and hauled off and slapped the ever-loving shit outta me. I saw it coming, figured it was coming from the moment she dropped the coffee cup really, but I didn’t bother trying to stop it. I just took it.

  Let me tell you, a woman who’s spent a couple decades slinging hash at a roadside diner in Texas knows how to lay one on a guy. In every sense of the phrase.

  “I deserved that,” I said, whipping a little trickle of blood from my lips.

  Yes, we can bleed. We can be hurt; we just don’t die from it. You don’t want to know exactly how exhaustive some of our testing of that fact has been. The details are a little disturbing, and the memories of those times a little embarrassing.

  “You’re goddamned right you did,” Myra said, drawing back to lay another on me as I turned the other cheek. I didn’t turn the other cheek out of some retarded sense of pacifism; that was just what naturally happened when somebody slapped the piss out of me. I caught her hand before the blow landed and did the only thing I thought might defuse the situation: I kissed her.

  Chapter 5

  In the mid-eighties, I’d gotten pretty tired of the New York music scene, what with all the pretty boys and androgyny going around. I’d never looked very good in neon clothes, and while I didn’t mind the earrings, it had always been important to me to be able to tell the boys from the girls. So I headed to the one place where New Wave hadn’t gotten much of a foothold: Texas.

  I rode into Odessa on a Saturday afternoon, and when I saw a diner and a bar right next to each other with a motel across the street, I thought I was almost back in the Garden. I decided to hit the diner first for a little buffer against the alcohol I intended to consume later on in the evening. I stopped cold in the middle of the doorway.

  She was ridiculously pretty, in that kind of self-conscious way that women have when they go through high school, not being cheerleader pretty, but more like cute. She had outgrown cute a few years ago, but it didn’t look like anyone had bothered to tell her that. When I first saw her, she was pouring a refill of some fat trucker’s coffee, and she gave me a smile that I knew I wanted to see more of.

  “Sit anywhere you like, I’ll be with you in just a minute.” I could only hope that were true. I picked a booth near the front window and pretended to care about the menu, but it was really just an excuse to stare at her over the top of it.

  It’s funny. No matter how old I get, and I get pretty old some days, I never fall for the centerfold types. I guess it goes back to Eve, who despite her plain outward looks, was more beautiful to me than anything I’ve seen since. And I’ve seen a lot.

  She made her way over to me with a bounce in her step that seemed out of place in a Texas roadside diner at what had to be the end of a long shift, but I wasn’t complaining. Her nametag read “Myra,” and she slid into the booth across from me.

  “What can I get for you?” she asked.

  “I’ll have a BLT, easy on the mayo, a slice of cherry pie, and your phone number,” I replied with what I hoped passed for a cheeky smile in Texas. I noticed there wasn’t a ring of any type on her left hand, so I knew I wasn’t jumping anyone’s claim, so to speak.

  “I’ll get that right up for you. We’ve got rhubarb today, and… what?” She looked surprised and started to get up. I reached out and lightly took her hand. She glanced around the dining room, then settled back down.

  I leaned in close on the off chance that someone was listening. “I think you’re beautiful, and I’d love a chance to take you next door to that little dive bar and have you teach me how to dance.” Of course, I knew how to dance. I’d forgotten more courtly dances than that little cutie had ever learned, but a little vulnerability could go a long way to unbuttoning a pair of denim shorts, and I was an immortal on a mission.

  Leave me alone, I’m only human. Okay, really, really old, but still human. And she was really pretty.

  Anyway, I got what I wanted out of it: a smile.

  She grinned. “Well, since I’m slinging beer over there as soon as we close up shop here, I might be able to take a spin around the dance floor with you. If you eat your pie fast enough so I’m not late for work, that is.” She got up and headed to the counter to put in my order and get me a piece of pie.

  I ate quickly, and we walked across the parking lot together. I found out that she actually lived in a little apartment behind the bar and that she owned both bar and diner since her father had left them to h
er when he died. She had been down in Austin studying for a history degree when her dad had been diagnosed with leukemia, so she came home to take care of him. She didn’t say anything about a mom, and I didn’t ask.

  “When he passed, I couldn’t bear to part with the diner and the bar. I mean, it’s where I grew up, and the idea of somebody else running things, not doing half as good a job of it as Daddy did, just tore me up. So, I didn’t go back to school. I tied on the apron and took over. Virgil stayed on at the diner cooking, and Jeff runs the bar, so it’s not too bad on me most of the time.”

  “Except for your social life,” I put in mildly.

  “What social life? Look, mister, if I didn’t already know you weren’t from around here, that woulda been a dead giveaway right there. The only things around Odessa are burned-out football players and oilrig monkeys, and don’t neither one of those appeal to me much. So, I serve my slices of pie, and I pass around pitchers of beer, and then I go home. Alone. And I like that just fine.” Somewhere in her eyes was the girl who’d left that little town to go away to college and been cruelly dragged back by her father’s illness.