The Man That Would Live Forever

When you have lived as long as I, you have ample time to plan the perfect suicide.

My head a swirl of the most inane things there as I settle into the bathtub. I thought this moment would make me sad but it doesn’t.

The cocktail of medication has numbed me beyond the point of recognizing the freezing clutches of the tub’s slushy water as painful or unbearable, though it is a slow descent into submersion and not wholly without discomfort as I hear in some distant world a scream though I am alone.

My eyes shut and I am led into a movie theatre by a sinister and shapeless presence that is neither visible nor invisible. Save for us the theatre is empty and we choose the middle row smack dab in the centre and I don 3D glasses. I ask the presence why it does not wear a pair but it has not eyes or even a face. And so the movie begins in flickering black and white: my childhood rushing by, family and friends all dead and gone now. Pets. Birthday parties. Tears and laughter, success and failure, pride and shame. Mostly shame. It rolls through my adult years, the operation, my brother’s murder, and my escape. Decades spent alone, constantly in a state of arrival or departure, never allowing myself to fall in love or even care about another person except one. Her, the love of my life, where this horrible film pauses and shudders and she is stopped in a red summer dress with white flowers and the grass bright green beneath her. Suddenly the film is in the crispest of colours. I cannot remember this day and I want to, I want to more than anything. Where were we? What was she laughing at?

“Turn it off,” I beg the ghost. “I can’t bear it, I can’t.” I am shaking in cold.

And the film lurches into not the past but the future when Bill, the superintendent of the building, is alerted by complaints from tenants that an alarm has sounded in apartment 211 and will not cease. He knocks on my door and shouts his arrival but I am gone. The alarm sounds throughout the day and into the evening and finally Bill opens my apartment door with his key—he has no choice. This is no clock radio alarm. This is an alarm that makes your skin crawl and your ears bleed. Bill finds the source quickly enough there on the floor outside the bathroom and I’ve labelled the mute button so he can stop the ringing as quickly as he is inclined.

Bill disables the alarm with a sigh of relief and his eyes lift and settle on my note taped to the door.

It reads: This door is unlocked, however I advise you not to open it as I am dead inside and have been dead 12 hours prior to the beginning of this alarm’s call. So bursting in will not save me and only serve to scar your psyche with the sight of a dead body. Spare yourself and alert the authorities. Thank you.

Bill’s trembling hand touches the doorknob but he rethinks it and rushes out, wondering why he’s running to the phone and why he can’t stop shaking.

The police arrive and open the door. The cold falls out in a breath of death. They find my naked corpse in the tub where I left it, the portable air conditioner blasting away next to the vanity cupboard and the icy water up to my white chin, my organs all perfectly preserved for whomever may need them. Apart from the dark of my eyebrows and hair I am near indistinguishable, so pale am I against the frozen water and my porcelain tomb.

In another version I’ve left behind a manuscript of my confessions, or the story of my life: The man that would live forever except that he did this to himself.

The film has ended and the theatre is dark and still. “Are you ashamed of me?” I ask the silence, but the shame I sense is only that of my own as this ghost next to me does not judge. “Wake me up then,” I say. “Wake me up!” I shout and shout it.

The theatre crumbles around me and the dark there is consumed by a winter’s grey light. A bitter cold wind and a wall of snow rumbles forth from all sides and an azure tidal wave of the coldest glacial oceans erupts among the avalanche, breaking it into icy chunks that meet above me, casting a shadow over me as it all pauses there meeting in slow motion and falls.

I awake from the tub with a gasp, clutching at whatever my hands find. Smooth surfaces. The shower curtain. I seize it to pull myself out but the rings snap and the curtain tears and suddenly I am engulfed in the water and the plastic and writhing beneath it like a snake shedding skin.

I need to focus. I throw my arm over the edge of the tub and lift my leg out and with all my strength I heave myself from this sub-zero grave and topple onto the floor gasping for breath and coughing up water, amazed at how violently a freezing body will shake.

My hand gropes for the power cord of the air conditioner and I give it a good pull and the room becomes suddenly quiet. I pull myself then, a soldier in the grass, to the bathroom door. I climb it and turn the knob and fall out like a tumbling skeleton onto the alarm. I disengage it, half in and half out of the bathroom. I lay there for a long while just shaking and breathing like a squirrel until finally I begin my inching struggle to the bedroom. Before long I am at the foot of my bed. I pull myself from the floor onto the mattress and I work my way under the covers. I pull them tight around me and over my head like a cocoon and fall to sleep slightly warmer with the thought that in time I will emerge to a much brighter day, my pilgrimage awarded with flight on wings of gold and glory.