Episode 101

[Author’s Note: This episode takes place a little over a month after the events of episode 100.]

(San Bernardino, September 13, 2019)

Old habits died hard, and Finn was a very old habit. Alana honestly didn’t know why she still had feelings for him. Every few decades, they ran into one another — more often than not through some contrivance of his — and then shacked up for as long as they could stand one another. Or, more precisely, as long as she could stand him. This usually amounted to a year or two, though they did have one very nice run of seven years. On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes she stayed only a few days.

Their time together didn’t necessarily end in a fight. She’d awaken one morning with a bad taste in her mouth and wondering what the hell she was doing with her life. When that happened, Alana simply would rub her eyes, get up, and leave. Apparently, Finn had come to expect this; he never complained or even brought it up. Vanishing like this felt selfish to her, but nothing about their relationship could be viewed any other way.

Each time the two found one another, Alana adopted Finn’s cause du jour, they fucked and killed a lot, and then they went their separate ways. On her own she did much the same, but with less fucking and killing, and for very different causes. Environmental sustainability was her latest, though she never called it a “cause”. Alana felt it would be disingenuous to do so. She only relished the affectation of a cause, and openly admitted this. To her, there was little difference between the two. All causes were affectations.

She pursued such things not from vanity or a desire to fit in or to broadcast her virtue. She just wanted to pretend she cared about something. Causes were no different than the dolls she had played with as a child, and they too revealed themselves hollow and lifeless once removed from the fantastical imaginings of their exponent.

Alana had long ago given up trying for anything more. The urgency of this or that particular issue was lost on an immortal. When one’s portion of the world was small and short, everything seemed imminent and momentous. Hers was not. Having seen quite a bit more, Alana found nothing to be either imminent or momentous. The sky never fell, however gloomy its aspect on a given day. And what appeared the defining struggle of humanity to those living in a given time and place inevitably turned out to be of mere passing interest, just another in the endless sequence of minor political and philosophical skirmishes which comprised history. This lofty view was of little consolation to those under the guillotine of the moment, but no guillotine could harm Alana and she had the luxury of a broader perspective.

This is not to say that she ignored change or eschewed social convention. Alana tried her best to swim with the social current of each era, even if her stroke more often than not proved both ungainly and ill-timed. This neither frustrated nor deterred her. It was the effort that mattered, the desire to adhere to the human fabric, however tenuously.

She credited Finn for this. Even if their tastes and motives differed, the very idea of engaging in this way came from him. Whatever zeal Alana did show for certain causes, tepid and superficial though it may be, was his doing. Though she never openly admitted it, she found his enthusiasm inspiring. His zeal was genuine. Mercurial, but genuine. She envied him this. That he could bring himself to care about something, even if just for a time. It was part of why they invariably ended up together again. The other part was that he tracked her down when he got bored or lonely or just plain horny. Sometimes she wondered if he was still aware of the existence of other women. If he hadn’t noticed them by now, he probably never would. The thought tickled her.

For the last few years, Finn had been “walking the earth”: doing good, righting wrongs, and so on and so forth. Alana was pretty sure he had gotten this from a movie. Whatever the source, his desire to be a hero was real. There were plenty of sad losers out there who pretended to be superheroes or fantasized about it. Yet, for all the cultural hype, there were few real heroes — even ordinary ones. There was a reason for this, as Alana was acutely aware. Heroes made ordinary people feel ashamed of themselves, and people didn’t want to feel ashamed.

Those who tried to be heroes ended up dead or imprisoned or worse. Heroism always had been a risky venture that rarely ended well, but in the current world things were much worse. Modern life simply didn’t have room for heroism. Justice and war were administered institutionally, not individually. There was no space for greatness — or for vigilantes. Most real heroes were accidental ones, and they often found themselves prosecuted for their trouble. As for ‘superheroes’ — whatever that meant — only an immortal could have any hope of being one, and there were strong arguments against trying.

Nonetheless, Alana embraced Finn’s hobby of the century. She did so not just from genuine curiosity as to what he would do, but also to fill a marked void of purpose. The last fifty years had been dull ones for various reasons, and she felt singularly uninspired. Finn furnished a certain vitality. His seemingly bottomless font was plentiful enough to sustain them both, as often and as long as she cared to drink from it.

However, Alana also had another important reason to accommodate Finn’s present conceit. She wanted to support her brother’s enthusiasm. It was her duty as a sister to buoy her little brother, not drag him down with cynical pragmatism or reflections on the banality of existence. He was the reason her life was not banal, and a reliable one at that. She would be damned if she repaid this by “curing” him. Where would that leave her? In Alana’s experience, the only path to happiness was insanity. If she couldn’t muster her own, she’d have to borrow some of his.

Nonetheless, Finn’s present superhero aspiration did seem a bit absurd. Why would an immortal embrace the ethics of some particular group? He was punishing people for doing things which nobody sensible would take exception to, just because a few lawyers had declared them illegal in this particular time and place. Who cared if some idiots poisoned themselves with this or that “drug,” or provided others with the means to do so? Who cared if a person was a member of some group of thugs who spent their time fighting another group of thugs? Let them sort it out. Alana just hoped his next phase wouldn’t be as a “supervillain,” another word he’d been sporting recently. If he pulled that sort of about-face she’d definitely smack him around a bit. Then she’d fuck him a lot, help kill a lot of “innocent” people, and leave. That’s just was the way things went.

As Alana surveyed the drug den, she suddenly grew sad. Here was something which gave so many people such joy but was denied her. Sex had ruined countless lives, alcohol and gluttony had cut short many more. Yet these paled next to modern drugs. There was a terrible aspect to the walking corpses they created. It reminded her of a disease. Though she was immune, the plagues Alana had lived through left her with an incomparable revulsion to their savagery. But something else was mingled with her disgust.

In the back of her mind, Alana couldn’t shake a slight doubt. It wasn’t entirely inconceivable that something could penetrate her defenses. Perhaps she wasn’t immune to everything out there. Maybe a vicious enough pestilence could overwhelm her protections, especially if she blithely exposed herself for long enough.

Diseases emerged in unimagined ways. What if her protections were incomplete in similarly unimagined ways? In a world of possibility, it would be unwise to assume. The longer a plague lasted, the more she feared crossing that dreadful threshold. Then, she would be the one gurgling and gasping and convulsing. Maybe the disease would find immortal purchase in her immortal frame, and she would be gurgling and gasping and convulsing forever.

Each epidemic eventually passed, and with it her doubts. What remained was a lingering distaste for the monstrosities she had seen. It wasn’t just the dead, but the dying. The mere thought of those wasted carcasses, once human, still moving. That was a profanity. The gods would not have abided it, though Alana had grown less certain of them over the years. After all, it was the gods who wrought such things. But what they abided or did not abide were no longer her concern. She had been severed from the gods long ago, a proper dessert for her many iniquities. She accepted this but had never made peace with it.

Drugs recalled such horrors all too vividly, though Alana was certain the gods had little to do with these ones. These were the agency of man, what he did to himself when left unattended for the shortest time. But it wasn’t disgust or hatred or pity which moved Alana at the moment. It was envy. As dangerous as these drugs were to mortals, they still took them. They knew what would happen. They could see the price in all its grotesque stages around them. They understood what they unfailingly would become, yet they still elected this destiny.

The plague victims had no such choice. They had not embraced their fate. Quite the contrary, they had made every conceivable attempt — even veering into lunacy — to avoid it. This was different. These people chose the scourge. That was how desirable these drugs must be. Alana could only imagine what delights they must offer. Delights she would never know. That choice was denied her, as were so many others. Sometimes the protections which had kept her alive all these years felt like an overbearing chaperone.

A strung-out skank once told Alana that cocaine was better than sex. She’d said this as if it were some sort of revelation. Alana could list many things that were better than sex. Otherwise, she would have spent every waking moment having sex. Nonetheless, the sublime look on that woman’s face had intrigued her. This emaciated addict, with at best a year or two of life remaining and who stooped to heaven-knew-what degradation to fund her habit, seemed happy.

This made Alana wonder. Was it really a wrong choice? If the world offered nothing but misery every moment of every day, would trading most of those days for a few moments of happiness be unwise? She decided it did not matter. The wisdom of such a thing could not be arrived at through sober reasoning. It had to be inferred from the choices those individuals made and by scenes like the one before her.

Well, perhaps not quite like the scene before her at this particular moment. It had been adulterated. But that didn’t mean the envy or temptation was gone. Here she was, in a room full of the stuff. None of the thirteen newly minted corpses would protest if Alana snorted her fill. Not that she needed to; the air in the room was thick with it.

For no good reason, she poured a bag of cocaine over her head anyway. Nope, nothing. She may as well have stuck her face in three kilos of talcum powder. She vaguely remembered reading that talcum powder had turned out to be carcinogenic. Was there anything that wasn’t bad for mortals? It just didn’t seem fair. The lowliest crack whore had something which she never could.

Finn sighed, as if in sympathy, and slumped onto the couch. A cracking sound announced that some drug paraphernalia had shattered under his weight.

“Aw shit. Did it mess up my pants?” He stood and twisted his head around to try to see. Alana couldn’t suppress a giggle.

“It only could improve them.” she replied.

“Cops shouldn’t be here for a while,” Finn announced.

In this part of San Bernardino, the cops probably wouldn’t show up at all. Alana wasn’t sure why Finn cared enough to mention it. If the cops did show up, the two of them would just have to make a few more corpses. That wouldn’t fit in well with his superhero image, she supposed. If he was worried about that sort of thing, why were they sticking around?

Finn started to take off his shirt. “May as well.”

“Here? Really? With all the needles and glass?” So, that was why he cared about cops. Alana feigned revulsion, but had to admit that the idea turned her on.

“It’s not like it matters. They may even make it more fun. Don’t tell me you’ve never tried putting broken glass up there. You can’t deny it, can you?”

Alana gave him a long hard stare. “No.”

“No you didn’t do it or no you don’t deny it?”

“How about I put some up there now, and we can see how you like what happens next?”

Finn shrugged. “Suits me fine. That way I’ll know for sure you did do it.”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, maybe some will get in there anyway.” Finn grinned. “C’mon, what’s the worst that can happen?”

Well, why not? Alana had just begun to unbutton her blouse, when they heard the front door open.

“Anybody home?” a female voice called out.