Mr. Eternity Read Online Free

handsome and there were lights in his eyes, but his chief appeal and the reason for my father’s interest in him was that he was said to be one thousand years old. This was not impossible if you considered that he came from the desert. In very dry air, with abundant sun, meat will cure before it spoils, and therefore a human being, which is made of meat, could theoretically live forever. The marked contrast was that in St. Louis, which was frequently ravaged by pestilences like Nevada fever, even rich people lived only fifty or sixty years. Poor people were lucky to survive into their thirties.
    “If he’s as old as he says,” my father instructed, “he would have known the glory of the United States.”
    He was speaking Modern English, and it was an astonishment when Daniel Defoe responded in the same language. His accent was untraceable. He said, “Don’t talk to me about glory. Those people were out oftheir minds. They only cared about whale oil. They lived in tents called wigwams. Their method of gardening was to explode chemical bombs, which killed everything.”
    My father said, “We know about oil. We have books and prospectuses in the palace.” But I knew he had not read a prospectus in years.
    “It wasn’t only whale oil. It was fossilized oil too. They pumped it out of the earth and drank it like it was banana beer. They pumped so much out of the ground that the land began to sink, and that’s why it seemed like the seas were rising. They also made a special train oil from the fat of a seabird called the great auk, which was the national bird of the United States. Train oil made the economy boom, but it also caused global warming because it released all the heat that would otherwise have stayed inside the auks, which were arctic birds, and very warm inside, and anyway extremely numerous.”
    This was not true. It was a feast of lies. However, my father devoured it, and I think this marked the sea change for him. He had lacked an adviser to ratify and affirm his ideas. Now he had one.
    “We’ve got to find some of these great auks,” he said quietly. “We won’t burn so many to cause global warming. Only enough to make our economy boom.”

2016
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    Azar was up, or rather he had crawled out of his tent. He was on all fours, breathing heavily, disoriented by shocking dreams. I told him there was no coffee yet and no food and our host was involved in pagan rituals on deck, and he lifted his head and groaned, a soft and mournful sound.
    “We have to figure out what we’re doing here,” I said.
    “We’re making a documentary. Remember we have to be firm about this.”
    “But we don’t know anything about it. What’s our approach? Do we do it self-conscious and formal, like Errol Morris, or do we follow him around, candid moments, regular life, et cetera?”
    “These aren’t the things you have to decide at first. For now we shoot lots of stuff and then we cut it together later. We’ve only been here half a day. First we find some coffee.”
    “It’s a movie about a very old person,” I said, “but it’s also about today, our society, in which here we are, two privileged young men without any skills applicable beyond the framework of that society.”
    “It’s not about us, that’s one thing. No one gives a shit about us. I certainly don’t.”
    “I don’t mean us as in us, I mean us as in now, our world, Generation Credit Debt, the Age of Irony and climate disaster. And the ancient mariner belongs to a different time. The last survivor.”
    We pondered this, or we pretended to. Really I was too tired from a night in the sand to do much pondering. Azar stared into space like he’d been hypnotized.
    “But five hundred and sixty years old?” I said.
    “It doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to proceed skeptically. The movieis better if we take him at his word. Otherwise we’re cynics. I’m tired of being a cynic.”
    “Maybe the movie is about trying to substantiate his