Mr. Eternity Read Online Free Page B

vogue.Predigested protein, calorie restriction, raw food, brain exercises, the Okinawa diet, a positive attitude, an extract made from deer antler velvet. There’s no wrong way to live forever. The ancient mariner had known a man in Lisbon who drank potable gold from the body of a clock, and it might have worked, who knows, but he was hauled before the Inquisition and burned alive.
    And there was the ancient mariner himself, salted by the sea air and dried in the tropic sun, and now, for all I knew, he was incorruptible. He was like a strip of rawhide.
    What would it mean to live five hundred and sixty years? If I myself lived so long, what would I live to see? Would there be responsible land management and 2.1 children per woman? Would gas stations be replaced by solar charging stations? I had been a man with a clipboard, ostensibly a believer in collective enterprise, but the experience of wandering around New York encouraging people to unplug their chargers and meditate on the inundation of their city had not filled me with optimism. There would be no solar charging stations. Instead there would be extreme weather and high heat. There would be avocado trees in Washington, D.C., Spanish moss in Boston, wineries in Greenland. Key West would be underwater, and New Orleans and Miami and Lower Manhattan as well. There would be no more plastic bags. No more social media. No more lightbulbs or cheap underwear or reliable weather forecasting. No one would remember how to make asphalt or super glue or sunblock or cortisone cream. We would no longer be able to fly. The world would be like it used to be, years and years ago, except that it would be entirely different.

    For breakfast the ancient mariner fried sweet plantains in the kitchen shed at the back of the yard. There was no coffee, but he offered us a thick milky liquid called po, which he said was much stronger. Azar drank some out of a little tin cup and professed himself a changed man. I had a little sip, just a sip, and I felt like an angel had sneezed in my face. We were at a loss.
    “Well,” said Azar. “Do you remember the invention of chewing gum?”
    “First only clove-flavored gum,” said the ancient mariner, “and then cinnamon. Spices! But you have to understand what they meant to us. We sailed around the world, half of us were murdered by Turks, and all for these spices. Today no one remembers and gum comes in a bright envelope that you close with a little flap. You buy it for a nickel or I don’t know, fifty dollars, and you chew it and you stroll around and you feel like the Soldan of Aden.”
    “The Soldan of Aden,” I repeated.
    “And pepper is so cheap that they give it away in paper packets!”
    He gestured forcefully as he spoke. He jerked his head around and bounced on his heels. He had enormous hands, teeth like old ivory, a smile that creased up his face like a baseball mitt. From certain angles he was still a handsome man.
    “If you could take one item back with you to the sixteenth century,” Azar said, setting the camera on the table in front of him, “what would it be? Would you take malaria medication?”
    “I had malaria for a hundred years,” said the ancient mariner, “all through the seventeenth century. But I’ll tell you what I’d bring back with me. I’d bring back some cotton T-shirts. Soft as a breath of wind and no more expensive than a loaf of bread. When I was stationed at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, up on the east coast of British Florida, we had woolen uniforms, twenty pounds of uniform, thirty pounds even, and this in the summer when the coquina walls of the fort were hot to the touch and you’d see the Indians at the market in nothing but little beaded loincloths and you’d say to yourself, Obviously. But of course there were mosquitoes in those days that would turn a pink-cheeked British boy to leather in twenty minutes, so when I celebrate the cotton T-shirt I am also celebrating the vanishing of the