The Live-Forever Machine (11 page)

“He didn’t recognize me at first. I had to call him by his birth name, speak of Alexandria and the library. Then he remembered. How he paled! He thought I was a ghost! But he slowly came to realize there must have been another copy of the live-forever machine.”

They reached a landing with a door, but Alexander hurried Eric past it.

“I told him that he had destroyed only my working papers in the fire. I told him as well that he had missed one very important piece of the machine—the mechanism that enables a
person to unmake himself or others. I warned him that if he did not cease his wanton destruction, I would cast him into the abyss of time.”

“Could you really do that?” Eric asked. His mind was beginning to cloud. It was too much all at once, too much to keep straight.

“Yes. If you drown a second time, you are unmade.”

“That’s it?”

“No, it’s not that simple. It must be done beneath the same moon under which you made yourself immortal.”

“What do you mean, the same moon?”

“I mean within the same three-day period of the yearly lunar cycle.”

“Did you try to unmake him then?”

Alexander was silent for a moment, casting his gaze down to the sodden wooden steps. “No,” he said awkwardly. “The time was not right, and he fled immediately.

“Several centuries streamed by before I saw him again. He tracked me to Charlemagne’s scriptorium and tried to steal the live-forever machine. He wanted the secret of unmaking so he could do away with me. The scroll was well hidden, but in his anger he cut a swath of destruction through the library’s vaults. The three days when I could have unmade him had passed. From then on, he dogged my steps
around the world, heedless of my warning. I suppose he thought my threat had been an idle one.

“The most curious thing about Coyle was that he was vastly changed each time I saw him. He was so obsessed with his vision of the future that he would forget everything about the last age in which he had lived: the language, the customs, the knowledge. He was a perfect chameleon. Every year, it seemed, he would learn everything anew. Scarcely a fragment of the past clung to his consciousness except the memory of the live-forever machine, and his drive to unmake me.”

They had reached a high door at the bottom of the rotting staircase. Alexander fumbled in his coveralls for his ring of keys.

“The last time I saw him before now was at the Louvre. I trapped him in one of great galleries, and had him taken down to one of the dungeon vaults that hadn’t been used since the building’s days as a royal residence. I sealed him in, hoping never to see him again. He must have remained there for the better part of a century, smouldering with hatred in the dark. I have no idea how he finally got out. Perhaps an unwitting labourer released him. Now he has come back into the world.”

Alexander turned the key in the lock and pushed the door wide open.

“Go in—go,” he said.

Eric gasped.

Pirate’s treasure, toy shop, art gallery, museum, junkyard. The lantern’s light played across smooth marble busts and crude clay statuettes, the canvases of oil paintings, a stone sarcophagus inlaid with lapis lazuli and red limestone, teetering piles of books, a Bull’s head plated in gold, a bronze helmet. It was all stacked up against the walls of the cave-like chamber, covering antique tables and bureaus, sprawled out across the floor on Persian rugs. Trunks and strongboxes lay open, filled to the brink with fabulous baubles.

“This isn’t part of the museum’s collection, is it?” Eric said.

“Oh no,” said Alexander, shaking his head. “No, this is mine. My private collection, things I have gathered through time. No one sees these but me. And now you.”

Eric no longer noticed the rank smell of the cellars. He felt suddenly like a child again, going through the museum for the first time. There was so much to see here, so many wonderful things. His eyes slipped over the vast array: tapered storage jars, an ivory horn, a jewel-encrusted clock, dagger blades, a silver ladle with a dolphin handle, a stone oil lamp. He
wanted to hold them all. He paused at an ornate mechanical hen with a wind-up key in its side, reached out to touch it.

“No!” Alexander shouted, and Eric snatched back his hand.

“Sorry,” he replied automatically.

“Don’t touch anything,” Alexander said, and there was a fanatical glint in his eyes. “Please don’t touch anything here.”

Eric rammed his hands into his pockets. These things were centuries old. Alexander didn’t want them hurt. Made perfect sense.

But as he moved through the subterranean museum, looking more closely, he began to notice the decay. Ancient cobwebs trailed from the damp walls. A ghostly film of dust had settled over everything. Tarnish had coated pieces of metalwork. Some of the books scattered across the floor were wet, and the bindings looked as if they’d been gnawed at.

He heard a rustling sound, and turned quickly to see a rat’s tail disappearing into one of the mounds of artifacts.

Eric looked to see if Alexander had noticed.

He was gently brushing dust from a Greek statuette, mumbling to himself.

“Pro memoria,”
he said.

Eric silently watched Alexander, surrounded
by his Aladdin’s treasure. He wondered if the man was a little crazy. What would it be like to live that long. It was almost impossible to imagine. What would it do to you, knowing that you would never die? You wouldn’t think the same way as regular people. It would change the whole way you thought, wouldn’t it?

Alexander seemed to have forgotten there was anyone else in the room. He turned to an oil painting of a man in a brilliant red turban.

“In perpetuum.”

Alexander was letting his bony fingers trail across the heavy parchment of an open book.

“Semper idem,”
he intoned.

Eric suddenly thought of their own living room, unchanged for thirteen years. Always the same. Anger flickered inside him. Dad kept everything the same so he’d never forget her.

Alexander stooped to pick up a brass medallion from the floor and polished it against his coveralls.

“You’re right on the main storm drain,” Eric told him. “That’s why it’s so wet here.”

Alexander started at the sound of Eric’s voice.

“Yes, yes, I realize that,” he said, turning. “It’s not an ideal location—no, by no means ideal—but it’s the safest I could find, and these things must stay hidden.” He cast a possessive eye
around the chamber. “No one must see them. And
he
musn’t find it.”

There was something almost grotesque about this massive hoard. Why wouldn’t someone like Alexander take better care of these things? He loved these things. Why would he put them in a damp cellar? It was crazy.

“Now,” said Alexander. “Let me show you.”

He made his way back towards a far corner of the room, where there was a huge wooden bureau covered with elaborate carvings and more drawers and cupboards than Eric had ever seen. He watched as Alexander selected a key from his ring, unlocked a narrow set of doors and reached deep inside the bureau. He could hear the sounds of latches being released, unoiled hinges faintly squeaking.

When Alexander drew back his arm, he held a long white canister with a leather handle at one end.

“It has never been opened,” he said. “It was sealed without air, to keep the parchment from disintegrating. It’s as immortal as the secret it holds. Our lunar cycle is fast approaching,” he went on, and there was a hint of hysteria in his hoarse voice. “If he steals the machine, he will discover the secret of unmaking, and it will be the perfect time. I am at my most vulnerable. Take it.”

“I don’t get it,” Eric said. “You can unmak
him
then, too.”

Alexander turned away and was silent for a long time.

“You can’t imagine the loneliness of centuries,” he said, dusting his fingertips over a marble bust.

“For more than sixteen hundred years I’ve watched those around me fall under Time’s scythe while I remain unchanged. I made a promise never to reveal my secret, and I learned to distance myself from people, not to draw too near, not to rely on them. Only once did I lapse.”

“Gabriella della Signatura,” Eric said, almost without thinking. “She knew.”

“Yes. I was foolish enough to fall in love with her. It’s ridiculous, is it not—a man of a thousand, falling in love with a girl who had barely reached her twentieth year?”

Alexander’s voice had a bitter sting to it. Eric took a few awkward steps around the huge chamber, waiting for him to go on. He felt a tightening in his stomach, and had a sudden mental flash of his father sitting slouched on the sofa at home, brooding about her.

“Did you know that I even offered her immortality? Doubly foolish was I. I’m not sure
if she ever believed my story, but she refused. The arrogance of her! She allowed me only to have her painted in miniature. That, she said, would have to suffice for eternity.”

Eric thought of the explosive defiance in her eyes, and understood now. It was as if she’d been saying, Look! Look at me! How can you not believe I’ll be beautiful and young forever!

“She could have had true immortality,” Alexander said. “But she spurned it. She succumbed to fever. I will never forgive her.”

Eric winced. His father’s words.

“All are snatched away,” Alexander said. “Coyle is the only one keeping pace with me through time, my only companion. Sometimes … sometimes I think I must be mad or that I’m dreaming it all—he is my only proof that I’m sane, do you see? I couldn’t unmake him.”

“But he’d unmake you!”

“Oh, yes, he would, but I cannot do the same to him. I will not. It would be unforgivable. He is as venerable as these things around us. Coyle is like me, a living artifact.”

Eric looked away in confusion and disgust. How could Alexander feel any kind of kinship with Coyle—someone who would eagerly kill him? Like Dad, he thought, you’ll cling and cling until it destroys you. Pathetic.

“Will you take it, Eric?”

“You should ask my father. He’d do it.” Flinging out the words.

“No, no, it’s you. You’re the one. I’ve watched you.”

“You made a mistake.”

“If Coyle takes the scroll, I’ll be cast into the abyss of time, and you will watch all this burn. All these things that have given you so much pleasure. What will you be left with?” he scoffed. “Outside these walls, what is there? Flickering televisions with their promises of happiness and wealth, new malls with everything useless under the heavens, towers of steel and glass that blot out the sun. Here, Eric, here there’s a whole world. But once Coyle’s found the scroll, he’ll raze it to the ground.” His voice had become frantic, pleading. “The precious past will disintegrate before your eyes.”

The precious past, Eric thought acidly. All he could see was his father being pulled down by the past, being suffocated by it: the photographs and the tombstone and the perfect, videotape memories. What good was it when you wasted away in unhappiness, always lonely and dissatisfied and restless, ignoring and hurting the people around you, who might help if only you’d let them? What good was the past?

“You can do it yourself,” Eric told him
fiercely. “Why should I take it? You’ve been watching me, studying me like I’m some kind of guinea pig, lying to me. I don’t even think you wanted to tell me who you really were. You just wanted to unload this thing on me. Just as long as I’d bring it back. That’s all that mattered. You’re just using me. And you don’t even care, do you? Coyle would kill me for this, wouldn’t he? Well, wouldn’t he, if he wants it so badly? Maybe it’s almost impossible for you to be killed, but it isn’t for
me.
Forget it.
You
could do it if you wanted.”

“I can’t,” the ancient librarian said. “It’s not possible.”

Eric snorted. The anger burned inside him, in his stomach and chest, encircling his heart. He felt suddenly caged in by a decaying junk heap, sickened by the stink of the cellars.

“Look at all this stuff!” he raged. “You’re just letting it rot. My father takes better care of his paperbacks! This is just greed! Things that only you’re allowed to touch! To hell with it.”

“Take it,” Alexander said, holding out the canister. “Help me.”

Eric felt an unwanted stab of pity. Don’t buckle, he cautioned himself.

“Take care of it yourself.” He moved towards the doorway. “He’d never find it down here anyway.”

“No proof,” Chris said again.

“You’re right,” Eric agreed, a little too eagerly. Come on, he thought, convince me, make me believe it was all lies, all made up.

It was already starting to fade a little in his mind. Once he’d left the darkness of the cellars and reached the busy city street, it had all become vaguely unreal, like some prolonged and particularly vivid dream. Alexander, whispering, whispering; the gargantuan, rotting treasure in the damp cellar; the live-forever machine gleaming in its white canister. How could any of that be true once he’d stepped out onto the street? The cars, the people, the noise, the heat. Concentrate on that.

When Chris had dropped by, Eric was glad. He needed to talk it out with someone. Chris had listened, squinting, shaking his head in disbelief. Eric encouraged him, trying to make it all seem as outrageous as possible.

“I mean, he says he’s sixteen—almost seventeen hundred years old or whatever it is,” Chris said. “But so what? Nice story! What’s to stop me from telling you I’ve been alive for five hundred years?”

“You’re right,” Eric said again. “It’s ridiculous. None of it can be proven.”

Chris shifted in the dilapidated armchair. He wasn’t used to having Eric agree with him so easily. It made him nervous. He tried again.

“So he’s good at history and can list off all these dates. So what? Show me a photo of him in 1905, looking exactly the same. Then maybe I’d think about it.”

Eric just nodded, hungrily storing Chris’s arguments. Keep going. Don’t stop now.

“And this live-forever machine; don’t make me laugh! What is it—just some old paper! You didn’t even really see it, did you? Hocus-pocus crap!”