UnDying Attempt

(I'm wondering if this would make a good novella, or perhaps even a novel. Let me know what you think.)





William Golden awakes to yet another morning.

He'd once tried to count the number of mornings he'd awoken to. A silly exercise, perhaps, but when you'd spent as ungodly an amount of time on this earth as he has, even silly exercises can amuse you for a time.

It had worked out to some crazy number like six hundred thousand, but he's long ago given up counting. All he can do now is pray that the count will end.

Damn, but he's tired! Not physically, for he had slept the sleep of the dead last night; the three quarter bottle of gin had seen to that.

No, he is world-weary, or perhaps life-weary is the proper term. I'm probably the first being in history to have had that thought and meant it, he thinks wryly. And why wouldn’t he mean it? He has been walking this Earth for over two thousand years now. And he is tired.

His body has become a prison to him, holding his soul captive in this world when all he longs to do, all he hopes and prays will happen, is to finally break the chains of this immortal existence and move on to the next plateau.

He's sick of watching his loved ones die before him, growing old and fading away in his arms as he watches helplessly, as young and unchanged as ever.

He is sick of being scared to love anymore . . . it has been too long since he has let himself care for anyone.

Sighing, he throws the covers back and swings himself out of bed. There has to be a way! he thinks, the same thought that he has began every day with since the night his Agnes died. Everyone dies, sooner or later, he tells himself . . .his father, his mother, Agnes . . . everyone he’s ever known or loved. And still, he survives. There has to be a way to end it all . . . I just need to find it!


Each day is the same now. Get out of bed . . .attempt to kill himself; attempt to end this ongoing prison of life.

What shall it be today? He wonders. He'd bought a new gun yesterday from a shady character on Seventh Ave. Perhaps blowing his brains out will work today.

Or perhaps throwing himself in front of a subway train; he hasn't gotten around to that one yet. Possibly the combination of the electrical jolt and the impact of the train will work where other methods have failed.

As he performs his morning routine, he stares at the bleary-eyed reflection in the cracked mirror than hangs above a dirty bathroom sink. For two millennia that image has stared back at him, never changing, the same middle-aged face that had mysteriously ceased to age one day, the same face that now seems to taunt him, as if to say 'You and me are in it forever bub, . . .fuh-evah.'

And that is the kicker. The immortality that had seemed such a blessing in the beginning is now a Hell he can't escape. There is nothing left for him to do in this world, and he aches with a burning desire to be allowed to cross over to the next.

He washes away the last traces of sleep from his eyes, and begins to get dressed, donning his favorite suit. In fact, his only suit, the same thing he puts on every morning; a dark black three-piece suitable to the funeral his life has become.

Going to over to the bed, he removes the gun he has stored in the night table, and disengages the safety. Sitting atop the night table, where it always sits, is the four thousand page manuscript he adds to every night as his suicide attempts fail, one after another.

Someday someone will find this, along with his cold, dead body, he hopes. It tells the story of a life that has spanned the centuries, one man's perspective on a history he has witnessed, on events no other living human can boast having seen.

The destruction of Pompeii, in 79 A.D, he had been there. With a shudder, he remembers the searing of his flesh as the molten lava rained down upon the city. Remembers awakening from death to find all his loved ones dead and himself left to carry on. That death had been his first, the first of many.

The Crusades? He'd been there, as Pope Urban II presided over the council of Clermont and called the first crusade into being in 1096. He had marched from Anatolia to Nicea and cheered as the heretic Muslims surrendered.

He'd been there to witness the end of the Hundred Years War as the Burgundians turned upon their English allies and helped drive the English from France. And the War of the Roses that began a few years later? He'd been there as well.

There’d been so many wars. The Spanish Revolution, the Boer War, the Battle of Colluden, the World Wars; he'd been at them all, perhaps looking for death even then, but of course he had survived them all. He had seen more death and destruction than any man should ever have to bear.

And now, at the end of it, there is only one war left; the war to end this miserable existence.

He puts the cocked gun to his head and recites a prayer. 'Lord, forgive me for this, but your servant can take no more."
Suicide is a mortal sin, he knows. But even Hell is preferable to one more day, he thinks, and he pulls the trigger.

*

Piercing light tries valiantly to dig it's way beneath eyelids that Golden keeps closed, squeezing them desperately tight. Maybe if I keep them closed, the light will go away, he hopes, knowing full well it won't. Attempt number 242, he thinks wryly, a dismal failure like the rest.

Giving in to the inevitable, he opens his eyes and gets up to clean the mess that is, as usual, the only evidence of his attempt. Not even a headache remains, after a slug through the temple.

Oh well, he thinks resignedly as he mops up the sticky blood marring the linoleum finish of the kitchen floor. Tomorrow's another day, and there's always the subway.