Bander, 1 of 3

Bander, 1 of 3 - a short story about the world's oldest man; his notes on filling eternity.

Most stories of this nature, I've discovered through my occassional tenuous foray into the world of Literature, begin with some sort of half-hearted metaphor, some excursion into tepid poetic sentiments that add nothing but take up some space, as though they were paid by the word.

My story begins, by contrast, with a handy piece of general advice.

Never kill anyone in a bar; it's a total chore.

I could tell, of course. One can always tell. The intent to murder has a signature so distinct I'd almost call it a smell. It wafts from the human brain like the stench of some ghastly cheese that is the specialty of some place no self-respecting tourist would ever want to go.

When people are out to murder you, why, it's even easier. Without taking my eyes off my drinking companion, who talked endlessly about smoking weed or philosophy finals or pokemon, to show how much I was paying attention, I flicked casually through the fetid brain behind me. I could smell the faintest trace of gunpowder from where I sat, under the unwashed clothes and scent of unwashed man.

Oh goody. A lowlife, this one. How droll. I remember in the good old days when, if people wanted to assassinate me, they at least had the decency to hire a first-rate professional. Now it seems like the only people gunning for me are posers with knives they don't know how to use them or mulleted forty-somethings like the blue-collar washout behind me. Go unload an Uzi in a burger place, idiot. Maybe that'll get you somewhere.

Oh well.

I nodded in the right places, and smiled, too. My companion could scarcely imagine how little of my attention she had, just at that moment. But it is devastating, my smile, broad and toothy and with just enough of the casual menace that contemporary men and women see so seldom in a well-dressed man. I am many different kinds of man, as I make my way through this world. But I am always well-dressed.

Kill you.

This from the person behind me, staring at the spot directly between my broad shoulders as though his bleary heated glance was the bolt of a crossbow. Giving the girl another five-alarm smile that caused a tiresomely predictable dribble of lust to ooze out of her skull, I probed a little deeper. 45, single, desperately single, alcoholic, gun fancier, one of those peculiar middle-aged men who hover perpetually between the potential for serial murder or pedophilia. There is three thousand dollars in used twenties in his pocket.

Three grand? Jesus Christ. You'd think they were sending him to whack some junkie twit in a stockyard.

I make my excuses, rising to leave. The girl tries to give me her address, her phone number. I don't own a telephone. I don't have a home. I had idly debated for the preceeding half an hour taking her up on her inevitable offer, but I could see her house in my mind. From the set of her jaw and the bundle of attitudes inside her head I could tell exactly how she'd be in bed.

Lousy, if you're taking notes. Full of sound and fury signifying too much time spent watching the wrong kind of movies. Ultimately? Nothing.

I walked past the man on my way out. Dismal, really, the circumstances to which I had been reduced. He wasn't quite wearing a “Hooters” souvenir novelty tee, but let me tell you, it was a close thing.

I stepped out into the alley behind the restaurant vaguely aware of the sweating pleibian's footsteps behind me. Pain blossomed along my arm as I took a step to the side; he was faster than I'd thought. Sloppy of me.

With some half-hearted approximation of a feral growl, he charged at me, brandishing the bloodied switchblade like a sword. Silly man. A close-quarters weapon belongs to anyone who wants it badly enough. I caught him by the wrist, rather easily, and flexed a bit of extra mojo down my arm.

Presently the bones in his wrist shattered into a fine powder. The bones in the rest of his arm splintered into gravel, and nothing sounds like a collarbone as it cracks. I reflected on how long it had been since a fight had been truly satisfying as I drove my elbow into his throat. The begginings of his howl of agony was nicely drowned out in the crunch and slow, despairing gurgle.

I set him down gently on the ground. I examined his knife. Spring action, plain steel. Not even silver. In the olden days, the blade would have been forged by a master, coated in poison, impregnated with a dire enchantment. Or at the very least covered in jewels I could pry out and hawk for booze and smile money.

Still, the dead asshole at my feet didn't bode particularly well. As I often do in times of trouble, I pulled a small notebook out of my jacket pocket, and jotted down some questions for later.

-Who knew I was in town?

-Who, exactly, among my countless enemies, is still alive?

-What was I going to do about it?

Eternity can be tough to fill. I relished the beginning of a new chapter. Hopefully, this would eat up some time. God knows I couldn't ask for anything more.

Giving the dead man on the ground a look of vague and passing gratitude, I replaced the notebook, and tried to locate a payphone.

Damn you people. You know that? After three thousand years of smoke signals and carrier pigeons, you just have to keep going further and further, don't you? I spent entirely too much time walking down the dreary and nondescript downtown looking for a place to exchange coins for communication. Bastards. But I found one, and it was a phone booth, like one that Superman would change in. Quaint, droll, quite unexpected, and smelling, perhaps inevitably, of human urine.

Sigh.

I punched in a number, from memory.

On the ninth ring, she picked up.

“...Hello?”

“Hashers, my sweet,” I said, smiling at the suspicion in her voice. As though she had anything to worry about “and how is my merry wanderer of the ages?”

“Who is this?” She didn't recognize my voice. Naturally, twit. I can be so stupid sometimes. I hadn't called her in close to four years, and that was three changes ago.

“It's Bander.”

A long pause; what was running through her mind I couldn't possibly say. Not only was she far, far away, but her I could never read. One of the many things that made her unique.

“Hello,” she responded, carefully noncommittal “it's been awhile.”

Four years? Awhile? “Yes. Yes it has.”

Another, longer pause.

“What do you want?”

“Some fool just tried to knife me behind a bar. What's going on, Hashers?”

“Where are you?”

“West coast. I'd prefer not to say.”

“You're in San Diego. Caller I.D.”

“Goddamnit, girl.”

“I don't know of anything happening in that town. Besides, who's trying to kill you anymore?”

“That Benedictine fellow tried. For awhile.”

“Bander, that was four hundred and fifty years ago.”

I blinked. My, how the time flies.

“So you don't know anything,” I said, slightly crestfallen. I was hoping I could get a lead from phone call. Now I was going to have to talk to people who didn't owe me favors, hardly a prospect I relished.

“No. Although there's been some...scattered events around the west coast. Some deaths. But Bander, I can't even think of anyone besides me who knows you're alive. Much less the nature of your-”

“Yes yes,” I replied “Tell me, who lives in this place?”

“Besides ten to fifteen million people?”

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, trying to get my attention. I turned to snarl I'll be off in a minute, bitch when I realized she was an altogether more irritating distraction.

“Sir, you're bleeding!”

I glanced down at my arm. Huh. He'd gashed it down to the bone. Nicked the damn thing, too.

“Oh,” I said “yes. I know. All the cool kids are doing it.”

The good samaritan walked off, a little confused. When she was gone, I pulled a little more from the body I was riding, and the gash slid closed. Slowly, though. Running low. Time for another change, soon. Today, certainly tomorrow.

“Bander?”

“Yes, I'm still here. Who lives here, Hashers? Don't waste my time with the vamps. They're a dime a dozen.”

“The Piltdown Woman lives in San Francisco. I live in Marin County. I'm pretty sure Dr. Josephus is in San Diego teaching english, somewhere, under the name Smith, I believe.”

I stared at the phone with some hostility “Dr. Josephus? Emmanuel Josephus?”

“The one and only.”

“Hmm,” I said, after a moment “he's still alive.”

“Did you expect him not to be?”

Since my last encounter with that meddling old necromantic wannabe had involved a dagger through the kidneys, a firm push, and a four hundred foot drop into an echoing chasm, yes, I sort of expected him not to be alive. Damn it. Or had it been an automatic weapon, a windowless room, and several emptied clips? I rarely leave things to chance when I decide to murder someone.

“Well, that's my first step. Thank you, my lady Ahauseurus.”

“You're welcome, Bander.”

“Perhaps I'll see you, during my time in the Sunshine State.”

“Don't.”

“Hugs and kisses to you too.”

I hung up. Damn, damn, damn.

I turned and walked down the street, wondering where I needed to begin, relishing the prospect, as always, of a new experience to be had.

<><><>

I think, on reflection, that I was -am- a human being.

It was so long ago, so many thousands of thousands of changes. I remember a beetle-browed, square-jawed woman with a scantly discernible forehead who I think, in my fancy, is my mother. I remember the warmth of her breasts, her rough affection with me and my brothers. I remember when, squalling and red-faced, my mother died, squeezing out a lump of dead flesh. Of my siblings, I can remember a few of their faces, though I remember none of their names.

But human, absolutely. Though evidence for my being somehow unique, a seperate species, some sort of human-specific parasite.

In all these long stretches of time, I am the only changer I know.

Reflection is overrated. It rarely tells you anything you don't already want to know.

<><><>

So, as a handy narrative segue, do you know how many goddamn Professors Smith are teaching on San Diego campuses?

I was sitting in an internet cafe, some hours later, with a short, curly-haired college student who I had bribed with a fifty dollar bill and the promise of free muffins. Computers I simply cannot abide; when one has reached my age, an age of (so far as I know) unsurpassed venerability, one has the right, I think, to be a crotchety old man about something.

“There's like, ninety of them.”

“Find one who is old,” I said testily, watching as his fingers skittered across the keyboard like terrified crabs “find one who is considered venerable.”

He gave me The Look. The Look that young people give other people who do not understand something they, the young person, takes for granted. The look that made me want to jam my fist down his throat and tie his entrails into a knot.

Too short, too hairy. Not right at all. He was young, exceptionally, ludicrously young, and he had some skills it probably wouldn't hurt me to learn, but nonetheless.

It was definitely time for a change. I turned my senses inward, and I felt death in the corners of my body, hiding in the fingertips, maybe, like the beginnings of leprosy. Yes, definitely time. The strain of my presence, the energy I spent so wantonly to do the things I do, it wears a body out. Yes, definitely time.

“Dude.”

I wrenched my attention back to the matter at hand. Sloppy, very sloppy. Get with the program, old man.

“There's one,” he pointed to something on his screen. As though that were meant to mean something to me.

“Explain,” I replied, a shade testily.

“Professor Johan Smith,” the boy said, pointing at the screen “age listed as eighty seven.”

Couldn't hurt. Not like I had any better ideas.

I got the address, and was jotting it down in my notebook along with the name and listed phone number, when the one I'd been waiting for walked in.

A little older than usual, but he was tall and finely made, with the gym-sculpted body that reminded me of Ancient Greece. Good run of bodies, in Athens long ago. Long blond hair and an exquistitely pointed beard, well dressed in a coat of caramel leather. His vanity shown about him like an errant sun. I could smell it from where I sat, his self-love, his power as a man.

Perfect.

The silly computer boy was droning on about some other things, some things I couldn't have possibly cared less about. The body I was in was too worn out to be ready in the way of a man, but I felt desire, clean and hot and annihilating, rushing through my mind. This is how a predator feels. I looked at him, Warren Percival Johnson, 38, rich, rich, so very rich, and thought to myself, mine.

“Dude, are you okay?” the boy looked concerned. I was pale, sweating, breathing hard, ragged gasps. Why are people always asking me that? In the olden days they could discern the years behind me like a cloak of splendor. Of course I am okay, 'dude'. I am the only true ancient of days you are ever likely to meet.

But I digress: Warren Percival Johnson was about to die.

As he walked by the table where I sat, shuddering and dry-mouthed with lust, I snatched at his wrist with one hand, faster than he could have possibly avoided.

All it took was the touch.

“Excuse me-” Warren Percival Johnson began, but by then it was far too late.

I was caught, then, in the exquisite strata of his flesh, as I leaped from the old shell, 25 outside but shuddering to a stop on the inside. The old body screamed as it was suddenly free of me, for a moment, before the heart that had so recently been mine burst like a supernova in a rush of blood, killing the brain a moment later.

Blood flowing from the eyes, the ears.

I was there. Oh, the fresh, hot life beneath me! All around me! How could I live so long, without this? How could I forget, every time, how sweet it was to find this again!

Behind me the old body crashed headlong into death, and I could feel the gnashing teeth of the reaper at my neck. Sorry, old man! This round is lost.

One tendril of myself, of Bander, struck into the keening, pathetic infant soul of Warren Percival Johnson, wrenched it loose, struck the coils of myself down into the space left behind. I hit the brain like a cloud of inky black fog, and a gutteral moan escaped his/my lips as I smothered the tiny sparks I found there.

Warren Percival Johnson closed his eyes.

I opened them.

I pried my new wrist loose from the dead shell at my feet, rubbing at it to restore circulation. So strong, this body. So tall and powerful. I reached down and took the notebook from the corpse's jacket pocket, and put it in my own. The silly boy was gaping.

“Oh, goodness me,” I said, miming elaborate surprise “this man has died.”

I left, and the eternal commotion began.

So exciting to have a change of pace.

<><><>

It's hard, looking back. Even radiocarbon only takes you back 40,000 years or so, reliably.

Think back to your earliest memory. See if it's perfect. Of course it isn't – and the mechanism of my mind is no different than yours. I carry things with me, when I take a leap. My soul has grown strong and glutted over the years, and no-one can stand against me if I choose to strike. Your souls are fragile things made of light and airy glass, while mine is old and torpid, full of stolen life and stolen years, and I am irresistable. I am a force of nature. I am an avalanche. But I am fallible.

My mind has filled in the gaps of my memory with lies, with half-memories, with falsehoods cribbed from books and tales and memories still mine but of a different era, a different life.

But so what? They feel real.

I think, at the beginning, that I was a priest, a leader. A Shaman. There was a word for it, in a language of which I speak not one word, save my name. I think I told the rains when to fall, told the beasts to stay away.

The price for that foolishness has always been the same, of course. Pulling the power from your body and soul has brought many a fledgling wizard to his doom, or at least it did back then. The ways of power, I've found, bear as much resemblance today to what they were then as a knife chiseled from flint bears to a suitcase nuke.

I was scarcely twenty years of age when it caught up with me. The fires started with a glance, the calling of the antelope, they had drained my body of youth and energy and vitality. I had sprinkled my life like rain down my people's thirsty throats, and all it brought me was an early death.

Better, then, to take a leap. Easier perhaps when one has nothing to lose.

Little point then, to stopping.