Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  He was spotted orange like a rust Dalmatian now, but he still looked determined. If nothing else, this was one dog that wouldn’t be eaten by a flying tiger.

  Home now was on the third floor of what had once been a college dorm. The only positive to it was that there were books there, stacks of them, that had been just left behind when the school closed. When no one could see me I’d smuggle the books into my room and read them, though it took me forever to puzzle through all the words.

  Usually the dorm smelled like feet, or worse, but that day as soon as I got into the ground floor lobby I smelled food I couldn’t even describe. I mean, I don’t think in my whole life I saw food like I did that day. The lobby was crowded with all the people who lived in the building, former shanty-dwellers like mom and me. They’d pushed a bunch of folding tables from the dorm’s student center together to hold a feast. Just offhand I saw three plates of roasted meat, fruit salad, deviled eggs, and what looked like pies — I wasn’t sure, because I couldn’t recall ever seeing one before. There was no fish.

  I spotted mom as she came out of the crowd toward me. She was holding a plate in one hand and a fork in the other, and — my favorite part — she was smiling. “You won’t believe it,” she said, hugging me without setting down either her plate or her fork. “The city came today and they finally installed our rooftop garden.” She was ushering me toward the tables now, gesturing with the fork. “There’s no veg, ‘cause they have to grow. But all the trees are mature. So there’s beef, pork, chicken, eggs . . . well, you see. It’s like a miracle. They installed the wire cage and the water system too.”

  I nodded, looking at the spread. Our neighbors must have been cooking all evening. “Way to go, fish-dude,” I said. I hadn’t thought he could do it.

  Mom looked at me funny then, her eyes narrowing and forehead wrinkling up like she was looking straight into my thoughts. “Fish-dude?”

  I laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” She was serious then. Motherly. Her look was like a dare.

  Still I tried to shrug it off, speaking as casually as I could. “I let a magic fish go today, and I guess this food is my reward.”

  Mom just nodded. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not, and I didn’t know which thought worried me more.

  #

  I woke up to mom sitting over my bed like a fucking gargoyle, and nearly shit myself. “Fuck,” I said, rubbing sleep out of my eyes and sitting up against the wall. “What the hell, mom?”

  She was holding a cup of real coffee and smoking a factory-rolled cigarette. For real, something was up. I got really suspicious, though, when she handed both luxuries to me.

  “I want you to go back to the fish.”

  “What?” I asked. Coffee and adrenaline aside, I really wasn’t awake yet.

  Mom looked at me with her firm teacher look. She’d been a teacher once, before the Pox. I’d been a student. When she spoke again she enunciated slowly and clearly. “I want you to go back to the fish, and ask for a better home for us.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Look,” she said, “you saved the fish’s life, right? And he offered you a reward. Now just because you didn’t think of it at the time doesn’t mean we should miss out on what we deserve.” Mom fidgeted. I thought she was regretting handing me the cigarette. “Don’t you want anything?” she asked, but she didn’t wait to hear. “I want to live in one of the monoliths.” She went to my window. I couldn’t see out of it from where I sat, but I knew the view: alley and cinderblock wall. “In the penthouse.”

  “I dunno. That seems — ”

  “Don’t you remember the stories I used to tell you? How if you worked hard you’d be rewarded?”

  I nodded, but she was still turned to the window and couldn’t see me. “Yes,” I answered.

  “And haven’t we worked hard? Don’t we deserve something nice?”

  She turned back to me then, and it was with such a look of sadness and sternness covering a lurking threat that I didn’t see that I had any choice. The fish would have to be asked.

  What I did have were priorities that momentarily outweighed mom’s nagging. As soon as she went back to her own room I threw the previous day’s clothes back on, still a little crunchy from dried lakewater. By then I was feeling clear enough to get out there and sling the seventeen CyBeans I had tucked into the seam of my vintage denim jacket. With the cash I’d been stowing in my hollow boot heels, if I sold these I’d just be able to afford a base-level body mod, like T-Rex’s spikes or some horns or maybe luminescent hair, if I could haggle the Doc down. Any of these would be a hit with the other slingers and basically a must if I ever wanted to get a promotion from T-Rex. I was still nowhere near affording the plug-ins I really wanted, though, the ones that would make me smart enough for a real career.

  In the daytime people came out of their homes, and the marina and shantytown was almost a busy place. Even Grant Park had people in it that day, clean-looking people who walked dogs on leashes but were flanked by serious-looking men with rifles. I thought about flying tigers and giggled. Oorf! There was one kid about my age playing Frisbee with a Golden Retriever. His clothes looked like mine, denim with patches and shit, but I could tell he was a phony; the holes in his jeans had square edges. So I sold him two CyBeans for a third over shanty price.

  So I’d sold all the Beans by the time the sun was overhead, and I was feeling pretty good. I killed a little time in the shanty, putting off mom’s errand, but finally there was nothing for it but to go.

  I walked all the way out to the water cribs before I realized I didn’t know how to get ahold of the goldfish. I mean, it wasn’t like he had a cell phone. “Hello, mister fish?” I called, feeling insecure about it. Thankfully, my voice didn’t echo. “Fish-dude? Oh, mister magical fish?” It turns out there was a faster way to feel like a ‘tard. I picked up a flat lake rock and skipped it out over the water. It bounced eight times before sinking into the small waves. Finally, in a quiet, questioning tone: “Here, fishy-fishy?”

  He popped up out of the water right in front of me like he’d been there all along, waiting for the magic words.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, but I’m not sure he heard me.

  “What’s up, bro?” the fish asked. He looked at me with his right eye, then adjusted in the water a little to use the left. Both seemed deep and dark.

  I didn’t know what to say so I picked up another stone and flicked it underhand out past the goldfish. Ten skips. He ducked underwater and swam in a little circle before looking at me with the right eye again. “I’m sorry to bug you,” I said.

  I don’t know if fish can shrug, but if they can that’s what he did. He waved one pectoral fin at me dismissively.

  “And thank you for the food. You totally outdid yourself. I mean, I only asked for dinner, and you gave us the whole garden. It’s like that saying that if you give a man a fish . . . well, you know.” The fish’s eyes didn’t have pupils, so it was hard for me to read his expressions. I tried to explain. “It’s just a saying mom always used to say, about — ”

  “I know the expression,” said the fish.

  “Okay, right, cool. Anyway, thanks a lot.”

  “No problem,” he said. “No scales off my tail.”

  I picked up another stone and tried to skip it, but it just fell into the lake.

  “What’s wrong?” the fish asked. He swam a few yards out on his back, watching me select the next flat stone.

  “It’s my mom,” I said, winding up. “She wants to live in a fancy apartment. A penthouse, she says. She wanted me to ask you.” I looked the fish in the eye and let the stone fly. It skipped six times before the fish stopped it with his fin. I didn’t see how he was holding it without any thumbs or anything, but that fish somehow managed to skip the stone right back to me. It landed at my feet on the shore.

  “No worries, kid. Go on home — it’s 1030 North State S
treet now, top floor. Your mom’ll be there.”

  “For real?”

  The sun glinted off the fish’s golden scales as he bobbed in the water. “For real. Anything else?”

  Again I thought of the colleges, the illegal college prep plug-in mod that I figured was the only way I’d get there. I’m still not sure why I didn’t ask, but I know mom’s greyhound stories were on my mind, and not in the way she’d used them that morning. He’d never needed magic. “Naw,” I said. “You’ve done enough, little fish. Thanks a billion.”

  Again he waved his fin at me and flipped away into the lake.

  #

  The penthouse was fucking boosted. I can categorically say that I’d never been in a home that big, never even thought they could exist. It was bigger than the elementary school I went to before the Pox, an entire floor of a monolith. We had our own kitchen, bigger than both our rooms in the dorm put together. We had a whole room stocked with food. We not only had our own bathroom, there were three of them, and they had bathtubs made from polished stone. There were two rooms for each of us. The floors were made of shiny strips of wood laced together in a pattern, and the ceiling was so high I couldn’t touch it even with a running jump. There were windows on every wall, more window than wall, and they looked out so high above the city that it felt like no one else lived in it.

  Mom was there when I got home, and she was dancing with joy. Literally. She had on a long black dress and some wobbly-looking shoes that tapped on the wood floor, and she held a tulip-shaped glass by its stem in one hand, and a factory-rolled cigarette in the other. I mean, the apartment had come stocked.

  “Check it out,” she said when I came in. She tripped over to a wall and flipped a switch, and the clusters of sconces hanging from the ceiling — which I’d taken for candleholders — lit up with warm, yellowish light. “Electric light.”

  I stared, feeling like a yokel for being so impressed. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d never seen a lightbulb before. Of course we hadn’t been wired in the greyhound bus in the shanty town, but the dorm had a generator, and even used it on really special occasions.

  “It works all the time,” mom said, a reverent hush in her voice. “And so does the elevator. The building’s communal garden is right above us on the roof, and let me show you this.” She stubbed her cigarette out in a green glass dish, still with a half inch of tobacco left, and pulled me by the wrist down the hall. The room we entered was full of books; books from floor to ceiling, so high that the room came with a wooden ladder that slid on a track. The room even smelled of books, dry and papery and just a little musty.

  “So?” I said. “Like I care about books.”

  Mom looked up at me then with her eyes clear and seeing. “Yeah,” she said. “Of course you don’t.”

  #

  So mom was pretty happy for a while. We had all the food we wanted from the meat and fruit trees and the other communal plants on the roof, and mom was really happy with the new neighbors. Sure, she still didn’t have a job, and I was still slinging for T-Rex, but the other folks in the building didn’t know that, and they treated us like we were just like them — business people and bio-designers and lawyers and doctors. Educated. Owners of things. Mom went to all their parties and drank wine and flirted with professional men. She dated some, but always decided that the man wasn’t good enough. “Oh well,” she’d say, tossing a string of pearls over her shoulder. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

  It was an expression, I knew, but it threw me off every time. I thought of one fish. I thought of a lake.

  I didn’t have to go noodling anymore, so I didn’t. T-Rex and Koan went a few more times, but I guess it got old when they couldn’t make me feel like a loser for not catching anything. I was glad when they stopped, because the thought of T-Rex snagging my fish with his spikes made me sick. I thought he might kill the fish, even if he was offered wishes. But on the other hand, I thought he might wish for something seriously messed up.

  I kept checking the Docs’ storefront, but the prices for plug-in mods stayed high: a high-school education plug was almost twenty grand, or another 3,461 sold CyBeans. And after that I’d still have to think about upgrades, synapse boosting, and of course tuition. And then maybe I still wouldn’t be good enough to be a bio-engineer. It depressed me when I thought about it, so I mostly didn’t.

  Sometimes I thought about asking the goldfish for some money, but I always decided not to. When I really thought about getting mods my stomach twisted up like the time I drank lakewater.

  Meanwhile, while mom was out on dates I read books. Our library had a lot of things that I’d need for the GED, and it also had an Internet link. Sometimes I’d download vids on my phone to show T-Rex and Koan, though I never found anything quite as classic as the one of the dog getting eaten.

  I thought living at the top of a monolith I’d finally see some flying tigers, but I never did. I did see lots of flying housecats, though. They’d come up to our windows and I could get them to chase my fingers. They’d hang on the mesh of our deck with their claws, mewling. I wanted to get a better look at them, so one time I brought one inside, a tabby, mottled wings flapping in my face. It scratched me and I let it go, and then I spent the rest of the day chasing the fucker around the apartment to get it out again. Mom was mad. Lots of the glass and ceramic what-nots the apartment had come with broke that day.

  So things were good, but still I wasn’t surprised when mom told me to go back to the fish. “Ask him to give me a man,” she said. She stood at the window looking out, I presumed, on the dark city beyond.

  “I dunno if the fish can do that,” I said.

  “Of course he can.” From way up where we were we could hardly see any light, save a few fires on the lakeshore and the occasional light in a monolith window. And of course the moon and stars.

  “Well then, I don’t know if it’s right.”

  She didn’t turn from the window, though I wasn’t sure she could see anything in it but the reflection of us and our electric light. I could see her face reflected there, a look in her eyes that she used to have when she’d tell me about her and my dad back before I was born and everything went wrong. It was an expression as dark as the night outside. For a second I actually thought she might cry. But then her face hardened. “What the fuck do you know anyway?” she said quietly.

  I thought about that question for a while. One thing I sure as shit didn’t know was how to answer it.

  “Ask him for a man,” she repeated.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “No more fish in the sea?”

  #

  The goldfish was waiting for me when I got to the cribs. “Yo,” he said, “what’s happenin’?”

  I sat in the shade of one of the huge round towers, taking off my boots and socks and rolling up my trouser legs. It was still morning, but already hot and muggy. “I dunno. Not much I guess. How are you?”

  The goldfish wiggled in the water. “Can’t complain.” As I waded in he lifted a pectoral fin to me like he wanted a high five. I hesitated. “Don’t leave me hanging,” the fish said.

  I touched his fin with my hand, and he swam in a little circle. He looked like he really enjoyed being a fish. I picked up a flat stone and gestured to the fish. “Go long.”

  We skipped stones to each other in silence for a while. Finally the fish swam back over to me. “Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

  “What I want?” I looked up at the sky, the towers of the cribs. “Mom wants you to give her a man.”

  “Oh,” said the fish, and his mouth reflected the O perfectly. Fish always kinda look surprised, but right then he really did.

  “Tell me you can’t do it,” I said.

  “I can do it.”

  “Oh.” I sat down in the water, suddenly unconcerned with getting my clothes wet.

  “This makes you sad,” he said, swimming close to my lap. I loved the way his tailfin moved, like flames in the water.

&nbs
p; I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “You really want me to do it?”

  I thought for a while. The fish waited. “Yeah, I guess I do. Mom seems sad, you know?”

  “Think this’ll fix it?”

  “What the fuck do I know?” I said. It was so quiet, I’m not sure the fish heard it. When I looked down, though, I saw that my hand rested on his flank, just in front of his dorsal fin.

  “Okay then,” he said, his mouth barely out of the water. “No worries, kid. Go on home and he’ll be there.”

  I took a long walk home, wandering around Northwestern’s Chicago campus for a long-ass time. It didn’t look like much, especially since it was summer and classes were out. I sat on a bench in a plaza and looked up at the tall buildings — they were just like the monoliths, actually, but covered in ivy instead of the climbing supervines that strangled the low-end monoliths and the garden plants that hung from the posh ones. I stayed for hours.

  I got back to the apartment as mom was getting ready to leave. A man sat in the front room. He was tall and thin, but not in a starved way, and he wore glasses with wire rims. He stood when I came in, and offered me his hand.

  “This is Lloyd,” mom said from another room. I could envision her putting on jewelry or make-up or something in her enormous closet-room. I still thought it was weird that this was something she did now, but I’d gotten used to it. She’d dated a lot of fish.

  As they left, she smiled and whispered in my ear, “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”