The SenidadeParker McIntosh
4200 words “You’ve never taken the Senidade?” Alicia stares over the small restaurant table at her date, feasting on his face. His cheeks are smooth without a single groove of wrinkle. His skin is pale and supple. It speaks to careful attention to sun exposure. Alicia’s own skin, while still technically that of a twenty-nine-year-old, has more leathery mottling than she would like. The waiter stops by their table to drop off their dinner plates. He lights the candle between them. Maybe he has heard her because he double takes at Onyx before slipping away. Onyx looks down at his food and smiles. Alicia doesn’t even register her own plate, or what is on his. A few freckles do spot his nose, Alicia sees. He doesn’t cover them up like so many of the men do these days. There is a single, white scar that bisects his left eyebrow. It looks ornamental, maybe intentional. She can see the little bump of skin, the raised mark that makes her think it is authentic. But it is his eyes that really convince her. They are wide, unjaded, and earnest. They are the eyes of the young. “Never? Not one single pill?” Onyx shakes his head and grins at her. It is a childish grin, and it disarms her. Alicia smiles back. “So, when you say you’re only twenty-five, you’re…” Onyx nods. “Really twenty-five.” He rolls his eyes like he gets this reaction a lot. Alicia thinks he probably does get it a lot. It is remarkable to meet someone so young. To be on a date with one … the anticipation makes her shiver. She almost forgets how odd his running into her outside her office felt when it happened. “I’m sorry to sound so surprised. It’s just you don’t meet someone your age every day.” Onyx rolls his eyes again. He bobs his head from side to side and rocks in his chair. He uses so much energy just sitting in the chair that it makes Alicia tired. Her body has settled with the years. Her movements are deliberate. She feels her heart rate increase a few beats per minute, matching Onyx’s rocking. “That’s ok,” Onyx says. “I used to get frustrated by all the attention. Now, well, you can imagine it isn’t the worst thing in the world to be fawned over.” He smirks, and Alicia imagines that Onyx is more than a little popular just by nature of his age. Though, now that she thinks about it, she feels a little unsettled sitting on a date with a young man over a thousand years younger than she is. Onyx continues before she can ruminate on it too long. “Anyway, I’ve found it really advantageous. Oh God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?” Onyx laughs. It is a loud, carefree laugh that attracts more than a few eyeballs from the surrounding tables. Alicia wonders if she’s made an expression that made him laugh. That his statement was crass registered immediately, but she thought she had better control of the muscles in her face than that. She has spent decades perfecting the contraction of each and every one of them. “I only mean that it has helped me learn a lot, and rather quickly. About what things were like before, so I can understand what they’ll be like after. It hasn’t been easy, you know. Tracking down the oldies.” Onyx takes a bite, some kind of fish in cream sauce, Alicia thinks, and he winks and Alicia doesn’t know how to respond. What does he mean by “before” and “after?” What is he trying to understand? What she asks is: “What do you mean by oldies?” Onyx’s face drains of color. His mouth drops open and he sputters. “I didn’t mean … I thought it was a compliment … wait, are you one of the originals?” The stuttering is a nice touch, but Alicia has known too many liars to be taken in. He knows that she is among the oldest humans alive. That much is clear. This also affirms her suspicion that his accidental bumping into her was no accident. To confirm she says simply, “No,” and watches his reaction. Onyx struggles to speak again. He swallows and then looks at her arched eyebrows. He squints and looks into her face and Alicia can’t help a sharp feeling of self-consciousness that, despite centuries, won’t dull. She has looked at the face he is studying so carefully for a total of some decades. She knows every single line and splotch. She knows about the tiny mole on her left eyelid that’s only visible when her face flushes. The asymmetrical wrinkle between her right eye and cheekbone that folds when she laughs because she smiles a little harder on that side. She knows this personal real estate better than anyone, and she has expert control over it. Alicia flexes her nostrils slightly, to let Onyx know that she is not amused by his surreptitious reaction. He swallows. She is touched to see a sparkle of fear in his eyes. They are green, flickering like emeralds in the candlelight. She takes her first bite of food, maintaining eye contact, chews, and swallows without tasting a thing. “Ok, you got me.” He puts both his hands up like he’s being robbed and bites his lower lip. Alicia has to remind her mouth not to smile. He is more charming than he has any right to be. Maybe that’s something that got lost over the centuries, Alicia thinks. Innocence traded in for cunning and control. “I knew you were on the older end of the spectrum. And I mean that as a compliment!” He puts his hands out again, trying to reassure her. “Eleven hundred years?” His voice is low, and his pitch rises with the question. He also raises his eyebrows, wrinkling his forehead. Alicia wants to shout at him to smooth his skin, to protect it. If he isn’t taking the Senidade pills yet, those wrinkles might stick. “One thousand, one hundred, sixty-five,” she says, as much to get him to relax his wrinkles than anything. She has spent so much of her life focused on self-preservation, on maintaining the elasticity of her body, that to see him emote so wantonly is like watching something naughty. “Wow. You really are one of the originals.” This time, Onyx’s awe is genuine. It makes Alicia feel good. Loved, or at least adulated. She basks in the feeling for a moment before disappointing him. “Not quite. My parents were the originals. The first generation to extend their lives with Senidade pills before old age caught up with them. I was born when they were young. Before the pills were available to the public. Before they became a human right. And before the population controls were in place.” Onyx has just taken another bite. He raises his hands to cover his mouth. Alicia relishes every second of it. You didn’t meet someone as young as Onyx every day, but neither did you meet someone who remembered when having a child was a choice, and not up to the lottery, or how many accidental deaths occurred in the prior year. “Your parents. Are they still alive?” “No.” Alicia gives a short laugh. She wonders if he had thought about asking her for her mother’s phone number, and it makes her smile. “They thought they were invincible. They died bungee jumping off some bridge in Asia. They didn’t even make it to the end of their natural lives.” Alicia pushes food around her plate, remembering the phone call with the news that her parents were dead. She had just started taking the Senidade herself at that point. She and her mother could have passed as sisters. “There were a lot of accidental deaths like that back then.” Onyx looks perplexed. “Didn’t they have a sense of self-preservation? How could they squander life so frivolously?” Alicia shakes her head. “People didn’t think that way back then. Accidental deaths were an abnormal way to die, not the only one. Old age hung like a guillotine above us all. With that sharp weight lifted,” she raises her hand and flutters her fingers, “it was like nothing could kill us. People drove their cars too fast like they were in a hurry to see everything. They died in fiery wrecks, ski accidents, attempting world-record ocean swims, even trying to fly around the world in hot air balloons. We thought we had conquered death, but for a while, more people died than ever before.” Onyx stares at her with wide, feasting eyes. This is what he sought her out for. This reliving of the past. Alicia doesn’t know why he is so eager to hear it from her. There are newsreels online that show what it was like back then. There were whole books dedicated to each decade until that grew too tiresome and they shifted to chronicling the centuries instead. He seems to be enjoying her retelling though, and she hasn’t thought about life back then in a long, long time. “It’s hard to describe the feeling of living through it. They dubbed the middle of the twenty-first century the ‘Diamond Decades’ but that doesn’t do it justice. We really thought we had turned a corner in how people would live their lives.” “You did though.” Onyx looks taken aback by her bitterness. “You abolished old age. All the statistics say that the most suffering in a lifetime occurs when the body breaks down. The pills stripped that away from the human experience.” Alicia nods slowly. He doesn’t understand and she can’t blame him. He wasn’t there. “Old age is the most obvious sort of suffering to put a body through, but it isn’t the only one. You see, when we started taking the Senidade pills, when our bodies froze in time, we expected everything else to improve, too. We thought we were headed towards a utopia where everyone could live comfortable lives on a few hours work. We thought about how much we would get to enjoy retirement when it never ended. We didn’t realize that we’d extended the average age of retirement indefinitely. That wealth inequality would continue to grow and resources around the planet would grow scarcer, even though the number of people on it stabilized.” Onyx scoffs around a mouthful of fish. “That’s a bit idealistic, isn’t it?” “Sure, but it felt that way.” Alicia leans forward and squints into Onyx’s young eyes, trying to make him understand. “You don’t know what it’s like to go from having a finite amount of time to a limitless one. We were invincible. We could do anything. We expected to eradicate disease.” “You did. They found cures for HIV and most cancers before the next generation was born.” “And dozens of new diseases popped up. There’s a prion for everything now. The same number of healthy adults die from disease today as did in 2050. We thought we would eliminate menial jobs.” “You did that too! AI got rid of so much data entry and manipulation. Combined with robots we hardly have any manual labor.” “Now everyone is reviewing. Reviewing things they’ve never done so who can really say if it’s right, or just the same amount of wrong as usual? I’ve been reviewing the same contract language produced by machines for corporations for nine hundred, eighty-seven years. They say when I get to a thousand, they’ll let me retire with a pension. They said that about five hundred, too, before they restructured. Now that old age doesn’t slow us down, I’ll work until an accident or some new prion kills me.” Alicia looks down at her hardly touched plate. She is suddenly very tired. Looking back over all those years reminds her just how much she has forgotten about the life she lived. How many lifetimes she spent in worthless drudgery. Wasted scrolling, first on her computer, then her tablet, and now in her implanted cataract lens screens. She remembers what it felt like when the medical world opened with possibility. The frameshift in what was feasible. “It felt like there should have been more.” “More?” Onyx asks, softly. Alicia waves her hand, gesturing at everything. “Do you know why these candles exist?” she asks him. The teal-colored candle is half melted between them. It is a simple stick. Elegant and lightly fragranced. It disappears into the background almost instantly. Onyx shakes his head. “It’s because of the Lost Decade. Do they teach you about that in school? Of course not. “Somewhere around five hundred years ago, I don’t know for sure because it’s still hazy, we noticed something strange happening. People sort of nodded off at random. They’d sit down and just forget to move again. It was the strangest sensation.” Alicia stares into the tiny candle flame and leaves her mind empty for a moment. “It became a big problem. No one was showing up for work. People were falling into these fugue states outside in inclement weather. I remember a lot of noise about deaths by exposure, though I don’t remember anyone personally who died of it. “The strange thing was it seemed to affect everyone around the same time. It wasn’t just the oldest going through some unknown Senidade side effect. It happened to people who were born that generation, too.” She pauses again. She lost whole weeks to the phantom fugue states. Sometimes she was so weak when she woke up that it was all she could do to find a sip of water. She hasn’t thought about those years in such a long time. It has been nearly five centuries since her last fugue state. Her mind wanders until her eyes settle on the little flame and it shocks her back to reality. The wax is still long, so she hasn’t been out of sorts for much time. “They did a lot of research on it. They studied people’s brains and the drug looking for any possible connections. In the end, they determined it was all in our heads.” She looks at Onyx and raises her eyebrows without wrinkling her forehead. “Eventually, the problem disappeared. No real explanation. No promise it won’t come back.” Onyx is nodding slowly, looking at the candle. “Oh, the candle. Right. Even afterwards, people had a tendency to drift off. Time stopped meaning so much. It was a huge problem for restaurants. People sat down for a cocktail and left five hours later without finishing it, let alone ordering anything else. Restaurants realized it didn’t happen at tables with candles. Real ones, with real flames, not electric facsimiles. Something about the impermanent and dancing nature of fire keeps us grounded in time.” She smiles at him. “It’s good manners to leave before the candle melts completely, too.” Onyx is still nodding. His eyes are hazy, and Alicia thinks he might be experiencing a kind of fugue state himself. She takes the moment to appreciate his youth. His skin is full and elastic. His lips don’t look damaged at all. “When will you start to take the pills?” Onyx jerks like he’s been woken from a dream. He wipes his face with his hand and takes a deep breath. He smiles and licks his lips. “This year? Next? Thirty? Don’t tell me you’d let yourself age beyond thirty-five?” Onyx keeps smiling. Alicia narrows her eyes and feels her face start to flush. She never got the hang of controlling her blush reaction and the unwanted heat in her cheeks just makes her angrier. “You’re already taking it. How old are you then? Come on, out with it. You can’t be too old, or you’d look a bit more weathered in the eyes.” She’s angry. She hasn’t been duped by someone in, well, she can’t remember the last person to pull a fast one on her. Here she was, waxing nostalgic about the past and he was probably laughing the whole time. Onyx puts up his hands. “I haven’t. I swear.” Alicia stares into his eyes and can’t see deception. She’s not convinced though, and she lets him know. “No. It isn’t anything like that. It’s just, well, I don’t think I’m going to take them. Ever.” Alicia pulls back like she’s been slapped. To not take the Senidade pills is beyond scandalous. She tries to frame a question but she is too dumbstruck. “I know. Wild, right?” Onyx smiles and leans back in his chair. He looks like a teenager bragging about a particularly idiotic stunt that he barely survived. Only, if he’s serious, he won’t survive this one. “It’s something a lot of us are thinking about. The youth, that is. We want to experience life, not linger through it.” Realization hits her like a returning tide and Alicia fights back a sneer. She leans back and shakes her head. “It’s a fad.” “No, we’re serious. There are whole groups of us, spread around the country. We’re organizing. We’re thinking about starting a political party. If we can earn the right to procreate, as long as we aren’t taking the pills we think there’s a good chance we’ll win that fight, we think a lot of people will join us. Life is too important not to share. It shouldn’t be a festering existence. It should be fleeting and wonderous.” Onyx is looking at a spot above Alicia now and she resists the urge to turn and look. She knows he is looking at some romantic future; picturing a life with someone; growing old with them; caring for their children and then one another as they age. And he thought she was being idealistic. “I say it’s a fad because you are hardly original. There have been at least three, no, definitely four times over the years where a desire to live mortal lives sweeps the Earth’s youth. The first time the rejection of the Senidade pills emerged, it put governments around the world in a tizzy. They spoke about moral degeneration and an ignorant youth, but they couldn’t really fight any of the arguments that were being made. The same ones you’re alluding to. The court cases were fought, and the governments lost. And you know what happened? A few of those organizers started getting old. Their wrinkles set in, and they got arthritis. Their hair turned white or started falling out or started growing where they didn’t want it to grow. And then the whole thing just disappeared. The organization’s members dispersed or dried up. Oh, I’m sure a few idealogues went through with the exercise of getting old and dying. The end for them wasn’t noble. They didn’t die as martyrs. There were no romantic poems written to commemorate their sacrifices. They were forgotten. As we are all doomed to be forgotten. Do you know any of their names? Does your political party celebrate them as figureheads? No. The governments don’t even fight it anymore. They just let you do what you will, knowing it will die out, soon enough. The court cases, precedent, even the names of the leaders are available for anyone willing to look. Some of us would like to hold on to as much life as we can because once it’s over, it’s over.” Onyx looks like a deflated balloon. He has fallen into a slump in his chair and his face doesn’t have enough discipline to hide his emotions. He wears them like a badge. Alicia wonders if her diatribe was too harsh. She didn’t mean to hurt him, though it did feel good to knock him down a peg. He was starting to sound a little high and mighty for her liking. “We really mean it, though,” Onyx says. His voice is quiet, but steady. “Isn’t there more to life than just waiting around for the next big thing? Don’t you want to enjoy things? Like your fish. It’s delicious.” Onyx pauses and Alicia looks at his plate. He has nearly licked it clean. Her own filet sits with one tiny bite removed, cooling in a pool of white sauce. She doesn’t remember ordering it. She doesn’t remember what it tastes like. “Living forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you aren’t really living. Don’t you want to enjoy things? Did you expect to have to work almost a thousand years with no end in sight? I don’t want to end up like that.” Alicia considers him. She looks at his perfect face, his immaculate clothes, his manicured hands. He has no idea what kind of black hole exists in front of him. He doesn’t know what it will be like to face his body’s failings knowing that there could be a better future just a few decades away. Still…she looks down at her plate again. She can’t remember the last time she enjoyed a meal. “None of us thought we’d be in this situation,” Alicia says carefully. “It isn’t ideal, but that doesn’t mean tomorrow won’t be better. I intend to be around tomorrow to find out if it is. Your ideal is romantic. I’ll give you that.” She pauses and narrows her eyes. “For what it’s worth, I give you until your first permanent wrinkle before you consider taking the pills. Maybe your first gray hair until you actually start.” They consider each other in silence and the candle, which has burned very low, sputters and drowns in melted wax. The waiter appears, clears their plates, and invites them to leave. Outside, a thin layer of snow covers the sidewalk. Alicia shivers and wraps her arms around her coated body. She looks along the deserted street for a cab and when she turns back, she catches Onyx looking up and smiling. “Pretty,” he says. It isn’t for her benefit. He looks at her and smiles again. She feels like she’s kicked a puppy who has come back to lick her hand. “I don’t mean to discourage you,” she says. Onyx waves his hand like he can make the last two hours disappear. “You haven’t. And I was getting a little insufferable in there, wasn’t I?” The self-awareness makes Alicia wonder again if he really is as young as he claims. That kind of third-person perspective usually takes a few centuries to kick in. He raises his eyebrows at her. “So. Do you want to come back?” “To the restaurant?” Alicia turns and looks at the frosted glass door and the little light glowing through the window. She still can’t remember enough to opine on the food. It was a reasonable place to talk but nothing more. She turns back and catches Onyx’s surprised face. “Oh,” she says. Her bones are suddenly tired. She will probably later kick herself for the lost opportunity. “Not tonight.” Onyx shrugs. “Until next time, oldie.” “Goodbye, Onyx.” She knows there won’t be a next time, and watches him walk away. It takes a long time to find a cab running in the snow. While she is searching, Alicia doesn’t think about anything. She’s gotten very good at this kind of clear-mindedness. It is only when she is in the cab itself that she wonders if it is her generation that is the reason these ideas are still around. Kids find out that there are people alive who grew up believing that life had an expiration date, and it makes them dream. She wonders if this is a good thing and can’t make up her mind. She has also gotten very good at letting these kinds of unanswerable questions go without letting them bother her. Back at home, Alicia gets ready for bed. She showers, dries herself, dresses in cozy sweatpants and a concert tee shirt that has somehow survived two centuries, and opens her plastic pharmaceutical bottle filled with Senidade pills. She pauses with one tiny green oblong pill resting on her palm. The Senidade pill is such a small thing, and yet her hand begins to tremble beneath its weight. Compressed into its form are more than the chemicals and binding that give it shape. There is her thousandth year of employment. Countless meals she’ll forget before she even takes a bite. Endless hours of whiling away empty time all for a few brief moments of excitement at some new medical discovery only to realize that it won’t change her life at all. Is she just waiting for the right prion to lodge itself in her brainstem and make the decision for her? Alicia looks into the mirror. The freckle on her eyelid was aggravated during dinner and its ghost is still visible when she half-closes her eyes. The sight of it is enough to make her reflexively lift her palm and the pill to her mouth and she freezes again. Her reflection in the mirror distorts. The motion reminds her of tossing popcorn into her mouth as a kid, and for the first time since she doesn’t know when, she salivates. Alicia thinks about the wax dripping from the candle at dinner. About snow falling in Onyx’s footsteps as he walked away from her. She swallows, drops the pill back into its bottle, and before she can look at her reflection again, she turns out the light. |
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