FOREVER MAN:

-SHORT STORY: Diary of an Immortal Man (Richard Dooling, May 1999, Esquire)

1994

March 30: Today I turn forty. I am officially protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If I had an employer, I could now sue him if he discriminated against me because of my, ulp, age. Until now, I've half believed in one of Vladimir Nabokov's elegant syllogisms: Other men die, but I am not other men; therefore, I'll not die. Nabokov died in 1977. Every time I look in the bathroom mirror, I see Death, the Eternal Footman (looking quite proud), standing in the shadows behind me, holding my coat, snickering. I live with my family in my hometown of Omaha. My selfish genes have managed an immortality of sorts by getting themselves into four delightful children, who are still too young to turn on me. My wife and I have enjoyed nine years of marriage, what Robert Louis Stevenson called "a friendship recognized by the police." I'm Catholic, so as mortality looms on the far side of the middle-age horizon, I seek consolation in my Christian faith and one of its central tenets: belief in the immortality of my soul. But the lawyer in me also highlights the usual caveats and provisos. According to the Scriptures, my quality of life after death may depend on my ability to love my fellow man. This is a big problem. I forgot to mention that in addition to being a practicing Catholic, I'm also a practicing misanthrope. As I see it, my only chance of avoiding eternal damnation is to stay alive until I learn to love other people. Or until some future pope issues an encyclical providing spiritual guidance for misanthropic Catholics. November 16: My second novel, White Man's Grave, is a finalist for the National Book Award. For at least a day or two, I wonder if I might be able to achieve immortality by writing great literature. My wife and I fly to the awards ceremony in New York City, where William Gaddis wins the National Book Award in Fiction for A Frolic of His Own.

We return to Omaha, where, instead of reading the Scriptures or A Frolic of His Own, I read Woody Allen, who said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

1997

February 23: I am in the Sheep's Head Tavern in east London, banging my flagon, bending my elbow, when the evening news comes on the telly over the bar and I learn that Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland has cloned a sheep named Dolly. I am not personally acquainted with or fond of any sheep that I would like to see multiplied like loaves and fishes. Most of what I know about sheep I learned in crowded taverns like this one, banging my flagon, bending my elbow, and listening to off-color bestiality jokes. I fail to appreciate the significance of Dolly for my own personal immortality. Flagon. Elbow.

March 30: Birthdays seem to be coming every other month or so. I'm now forty-three years old. Still in Omaha; still a novelist. At my back, I hear the AARP's silver-chariot specials drawing near.

August 4: My wife and I reform our diets and take up a fitness regimen to shed pounds and replenish our dwindling reserves of vim and vigor.

We hire a sitter for the kids, then jog for almost an hour, and we eat nothing but kale and soybeans for dinner. We are starving and sore, stretched out in bed and watching the news, when we learn that the world's oldest living person, Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France, died today at 122 years of age. Jeanne reportedly soaked her food in olive oil at every meal and also rubbed olive oil on her skin every day; she loved port wine and ate two pounds of chocolate per week; she smoked cigarettes until she was 120 years old. August 5: We have quit jogging. The cupboards of our modest Omaha home are lined with bottles of Bertolli extra-virgin olive oil, and UPS brings Godiva chocolates twice a week. My wife and I begin to experiment with tobacco products. [...]

2079

February 3: I receive a letter, rather, a communique, from my son, who is dying, simply because he will not accept telomerase or organ transplants. I didn't raise him to be mortal, but he just won't listen to me. Instead, he wants me to stop taking telo-merase and rejoin the "natural human race." My daughter and my son are both "older," relatively speaking, than my wife and I, and they have all the crotchets and personality disorders that come with natural aging. What pains in the ass!

My daughter travels around the country giving speeches to activists and neo-Luddite groups who forswear telomerase and artificial-implant technologies and boycott all artworks created with the aid of artificial intelligence. Her political party, Natural Way, espouses the belief that mortality is the true human condition and that carbon-based thoughts are better than thoughts created or augmented by electronic or photonic implants. Global resources are rapidly vanishing, even though Con Archer is successfully creating and marketing artificial foods consisting of nano-engineered proteins. Darwin's Army and the Sons of Ted K. now have members in the House of Representatives, and several senators, when pressed, confess they used to belong to these organizations, but only to fight for the nutritional rights of the oppressed. Youth rallies are all over the media channels. Young people claim to have heightened awareness and ecstatic visions inspired by the natural condition of mortality.