onto the bed. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep.
I woke up to sunlight streaming into the room through the un-curtained windows. I was under the blankets and evidently no longer fully clothed. Underwear, yes. Pants, no. Shirt, no. I had no memory of arriving in that state on my own. I looked around and spied my pants and shirt neatly folded atop my bag in the corner where there had been a stack of pizza boxes the night before. And not only the boxes were missing; the whole room had been picked up, revealing a previously obscured hardwood floor.
I could see Clara over the half wall in the half kitchen, whisking something in a bowl. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail—which complemented her high cheekbones nicely—and was wearing a sleeveless half shirt with no evidence of a bra. This complemented her nicely, too.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up and smiled. “Hey! You eat eggs? Scrambled okay?”
“Sure.”
“Great, that’s the only kind of egg I can make.” After fiddling for a second, she got a frying pan heated and the eggs into the pan and then stepped around the half wall, at which point I discovered she was practically naked, wearing only a pair of pink bikini briefs. The rest was long tan legs and a lovely midriff. My goodness.
About the tan. I’ve never been able to understand this. Some women just have tans somehow. And this has always been true, well before tanning salons and whatnot, even at times when tan skin wasn’t the slightest bit in vogue. (For a time, pale skin was the It Look. It meant the woman in question was wealthy enough to never have to go outside without something covering her, like a parasol. It also meant they were generally unathletic, near- starved, and possibly suffering from consumption. Yes, people found that attractive.) My point is Clara lived in New York City, which is not exactly a beach town. And it was early December. So where in the hell did the tan come from? Not that I was complaining in the slightest bit. I was always the guy snapping up the hot-blooded, deeply tanned servant girl in the cupboard while the lady of the house complained of vapors and slept all day.
Clara announced, “It’ll be done in a minute,” acting totally ignorant of her own near-nakedness. “You slept well?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. It’s been a long couple of days.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she chimed.
I sat up. “Um… we didn’t…”
“No, silly.” She returned to the stove. “I mean I could have taken advantage of you, I guess. You were out cold. I did take some pictures for my web site. Hope that was okay.”
“You what?”
“Kidding. But I picked up.”
How to give an immortal a heart attack. “I noticed,” I said. “I was wondering where you hid all the clothes.”
“Stacked in the closet,” she said, pointing to the small closet near the front door. “I wouldn’t recommend opening it. Could be very dangerous.”
She emerged from the kitchen with a plate full of eggs and handed it over. I went at them eagerly, as I was apparently rather hungry. She sat down on the bed and watched me eat.
“What time is it?” I asked, mouth full of eggs. All sorts of dining proprieties go out the window when you and your host are both almost naked.
“Around two,” she said.
“Guess I was pretty tired.”
“Yeah… I’ve been up for hours. I’m not real big on sleep.” I would have told her to expect that to change in another seven or eight years, but I was too busy stuffing my face. Can’t imagine that was a pretty sight, but she didn’t seem to mind all that much.
It took me all of thirty seconds to finish off the eggs. She swept the plate off to the kitchen.
“So what do you do?” I asked, because that seemed like a good question, better than
“Grad student. NYU,” she clarified, dumping the plate unceremoniously into the sink and returning to the bed. “Economics.”
“That’s interesting.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Okay, no it’s not.”
She smiled. I smiled back. Long smiling pause.
“That was pretty amazing, last night,” she said.
“Which part?”
“All of it. The demon thing and all.” The early morning encounter we shared still had her blood pumping. “Was that the first time you ever…”
“What, killed one? Or met one?”
“I dunno. Either,” she said, her hands fiddling with the sheet. Nervous tic. I made her nervous? “I gotta admit the whole ‘immortal’ thing is kinda hard to get my mind around. It’s like I have to use a whole different vocabulary to get it right. I mean, is there
“Well, seen demons before. Mostly from a distance, which is usually the best way to meet one. It’s the first time I ever killed one, or even figured out exactly how. I expected one of those helpful, heavily armed fellows to do it for me.”
“Yeah, who were they? You said something about a bounty.”
“Someone put a price on my head recently. They were there to collect.”
Her expression clouded with something that looked like concern. “And the MUD… you said that has something to do with all of this?”
“It does. I think whoever set it up, did so to keep track of me. To make me easier to find for the people he hired.”
“God… I feel terrible.”
“Don’t. It’s not your fault.” Although I admit, complex Internet role-playing games didn’t sound too healthy to me. Must be a generational thing.
“I guess… I mean, most of them? Most of them think it’s just a joke, or… another make-believe world and all. There are a few of us who had our suspicions. You know, that maybe it wasn’t so pretend, that maybe there was such a thing as an actual immortal man. Especially when that photo turned up.”
“You mean one of those digital images?”
“No, not those. Someone found an old photograph in a book from 1892 and scanned it. Pretty much everyone figured it was a fake, because, you know, you can do a lot with photos nowadays. But I know the girl who posted it, and she swore it was legit.”
I thought about it. “That was… oh, the Chicago World’s Fair.”
“Yeah, exactly!”
It was the first time I’d seen a portable camera, and I didn’t quite believe someone could capture an image with it. Foolishly—and after having had quite a bit to drink at the German pavilion—I dared the photographer to prove it to me. Interesting how a mistake over a hundred years ago could come back to haunt me like that. I’ve since been very careful to avoid cameras. (In hindsight, I should have avoided beer, too.) Or, careful up until I became a wanted man and MUD geeks started hunting me with digital cameras. But short of walking around with a veil on, that was pretty much unavoidable.
“So there are a few of you who took the whole thing seriously.”
“Sort of seriously. I mean, we never thought we were putting you in any danger or anything. It was all just for fun. We even started up a little mini-group within the MUD.”
“Really.”
She blushed slightly. “We call it the Cult of the Immortal.”
I grinned. “You’re kidding.”
“No, but it was just for fun! None of us ever expected to actually meet you one day.”
