Chapter 1
Time is a funny thing. The tick, tick of the clock has been meaningless for so long now. What good is its meticulous measuring of seconds, minutes, hours to someone who has lived as long as I have?
I roll out of bed.
The darkness outside my window tells me it is still night, but that doesn’t matter.
I find some clothes in the closet and head out to the bridge overlooking the city’s wide river. Lately it’s the only place I can go when I need to listen to the voices uninterrupted.
The air is cool outside. It feels no different than it did last century, or the century before, but I enjoy it all the same.
The buildings are different, of course. They change every decade or so, and I notice parts of the bridge wearing away if I look closely—but I don’t look closely, not on these darkened walks when the world that is usually so familiar to me is softened by the dim light of the stars.
I stay on the bridge watching the small waves of the river lap up and down their path until the sun begins to rise. The sky becomes a soft coral color, and I marvel in spite of myself at how unique each sunrise is. Somehow the daily reminder that the world can still surprise me is enough to awaken my hope each time, and I wonder if that might also be why I’ve kept up these late night walks for so long.
Sometimes I worry about forgetting when I was born—it was so long ago. I should have died many times by now. I also still have moments of guilt during which I wonder how many unfortunate people could have fit their shortened lifetimes into mine. The eternal span of years walk behind me and before me, reminding me of how much I’ve seen and have yet to see, and of how much others are missing.
Several years, or perhaps decades, ago I went to anyone I could find for some kind of answers: doctors, priests, shaman, fortune-tellers, and even Satanists when I’d been convinced my infinite lifespan was the result of some kind of black magic. No one could tell me anything definitive, but some became suspicious when I returned to them year after year, never aging as they looked at me from increasingly wrinkled faces. I learned to move from city to city then, to hide myself and my agelessness until I was sure everyone who’d once known me had died. Sometimes I’d come back to certain cities, and then after awhile I couldn’t remember if I had even been to those places, or if I had been so many places in so many times that nothing was new anymore.
Once I realized that not only was I immortal but also invincible, I began experimenting. I fell in with daredevils who were addicted to death-defying stunts and watched many of them cripple themselves or die while I easily survived risk after risk. I shot up during the drug crazes. I joined more wars than I can count without regard for side or principle. I became a hit man for the mob several times. They say time heals all, and I used to think that referred to wrongs done to you by others, but now I know time can also make you immune to even morality. I’ve been subject to so much time that it seems all the things I’ve done were actually done by someone else—maybe someone very close to me, like a younger brother. I have the luxury of knowing all those things happened so long ago that it may as well not have been me at all.
After I had outdone even myself with these adventures, I began wondering about the workings of the world around me again. I learned several languages and later forgot most of them. I did scientific experiments, hoping that mere time would provide some development of genius, perhaps a priceless invention or two. Failing that, I moved on to quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, cellular biology, and many other pursuits that hardly suited me at all. The arts and humanities didn’t interest me, but I taught myself a few instruments and did some successful oil painting. During my fortune-teller phase I learned how to read Tarot cards and palms. Looking back, as I often do, I realize I’ve learned many things in my time.
How to hear ghosts has become one of them.
