Episode 17

(Washington, D.C., March 11, 1995)

Denish Pavrit’s desk wasn’t a stately mahogany centerpiece, projecting wealth and influence. Nor was it the utilitarian metal box of a bureaucrat. At first glance, it was a simple table of modest size and devoid of superfluous detail. However, even to the untrained eye its quality was clear. There could be no doubt that it was made from wood of the highest grade, meticulously crafted to meet the exacting standards of its owner, and finished with evocatively unassuming grace. The desk was a masterpiece of subtle elegance, as was its occupant.

Pavrit wore a perfectly fitted suit, unadorned with gaudy labels or fashionable accoutrements. It was classic, bespoke, and flowed with his body as if partnered from birth. He had little patience for the ostentatious. In his experience, that was the major difference between old wealth and new wealth. To surround himself with perfection was quite different from being perceived as doing so, and the two almost never were compatible. A choice had to be made. Old wealth chose correctly, new wealth did not. And Pavrit came from very old wealth.

Despite this, his demeanor was as quietly unassuming as his trappings. This was not by accident. Like his peers, Pavrit had gone through almost every conceivable phase. At times, he even had flaunted his wealth. Though he only had done so on a few occasions and long ago, he still recalled those episodes with chagrin. Experience had taught him early on that the easiest way to lose wealth was to expose it.

From what he had seen, his peers had taken longer to learn this lesson. It was not hard to acquire money for one such as himself, at least in most times and places. Keeping it was a bigger challenge. Having been bred to wealth, Pavrit was intimately cognizant of its dangers and limitations.

He didn’t fault others for their excesses. With only two blessings, Pavrit had reason to be careful. Those with four could afford to be less circumspect. He even had heard of some with more than four, but he put little stock in such rumors. He did not resent being on the low end. Two blessings were better than none, as his many years could attest. However, blessings were not the only reason for his longevity. The other essential ingredient was caution.

This was why Pavrit grimaced at stories about superheroes. The obsession with these was a recent trend, and he hoped it would pass before someone stumbled on the truth. This possibility did not worry him much, though. The authors of such fare routinely dispensed with even basic logic, and the proliferation of these tales was fodder for derision rather than concern.

Pavrit’s biggest objection was that real people simply did not behave as portrayed. He supposed it was natural to assume that an indestructible man would gravitate toward pursuits in which such a quality would be advantageous. War or crime or heroism or extreme sports or exploration. Perhaps he would rule the local mafia or free-dive for treasure or play rugby.

However, this overlooked a fundamental truth. An indestructible man still was a man. Unless born to power, he became who he was while soft, pink, and very vulnerable. His fears and beliefs were cemented by that mortality. The prospect of pain and death made him what he was and lent character to an otherwise unremarkable being, separating coward from hero from philosopher.

As far as Pavrit could tell, this was reflected in the choice of blessings immortals made if given one. He had not been, nor had any of his two-blessing peers. The few four-blessing immortals he had met were reticent about the details, which was both unsurprising and prudent. From what little Pavrit had gathered, most of them had been given a choice. Assuming they shared his own two blessings, each would have been able to pick at most two others. Perhaps there was a menu to choose from.

The choice probably reflected each individual’s personality. Someone afraid of pain would seek protection from it, someone afraid of death would seek broad additional protections from harm, and someone afraid of a specific threat would seek protection from that. Pavrit wondered how diverse the blessings were. Could they be tailored to the individual? The notion of a bespoke blessing appealed to him. Even in the times he had been poor, he appreciated the beauty of another’s well-tailored suit. Why should blessings be any different?

Pavrit doubted that blessings could be revised once granted. Any choice probably had to be made at the time the blessing was bestowed. As such, it would mirror the particular fears and priorities of the recipient at that moment. Few had the foresight to realize the things they feared rarely were the things they should fear. Pavrit liked to imagine he would have chosen wisely if given the opportunity, though he wondered about his younger self. He always had been a staid individual, but he also had been afraid of quite a few things. Not as many as now, and not the same things. Perhaps he would have chosen poorly. At least he would not have wasted any blessings on silliness like avoiding pain. During his cloistered youth he had little experience with real pain, so he would have not feared it at the time of his ascension. It never was clear to Pavrit what his young self would have chosen. It was an academic question, but one Pavrit never tired of considering.

What he had observed was that the blessings did not confer courage. A timid man remained timid despite his immortality. Sure, he could embrace the world of new possibilities that suddenly had opened, could rush out in search of adventure and excitement, could do all the things he previously only dreamed of but now were available free of worry and danger. He could do all those things but, as far as Pavrit could tell, nobody ever did. Blessings or no, there always was worry and danger. The unforeseen was limitless, as was the fear it could beget. To Pavrit’s mind, such a man was not a coward, just cautious. What if his blessings suddenly vanished or he unwittingly exceeded their scope?

A prudent man would be content to deflect the danger that chance threw his way every so often, without seeking it out on his own. His indestructibility was insurance, nothing more. If particularly wise, the man would see his blessings themselves as perilous. If revealed, society would seek to destroy him or use him or study him. If there was a chink in his armor, a concerted effort by myriad sentient beings would discover it far more effectively than chance ever could. A sensible immortal would be content to quietly endure, seeking nothing more than comfort and safety. And Pavrit considered himself a sensible immortal.

In fact, he had concluded that it behooved a vulnerable immortal to be even more careful than a mortal. A mortal would live at most a hundred years, so it did not really matter whether he died young or old. The difference in years was minuscule, and his potential was limited. But if a man who could live forever died, that was a true tragedy. Something eternal had been culled, its lost potential incalculable. Pavrit accepted that he was not truly immortal. No vulnerable “immortal” was. Statistics was an adversary he could not forever hope to evade.

Even the quietest life was not entirely uneventful, especially if it could last an eternity. In the natural course of things, danger would find him. Danger his blessings would not protect against. At some point, something would kill him. But it would not be time itself. This was his main advantage over a mortal. Time was uncompromising, but statistics could be negotiated with. Pavrit could delay the inevitable by avoiding or overcoming each existential threat as it arose. The proof was in the pudding. Most of his two-blessing peers had perished over the years. That Pavrit had not was the best and only vindication of his approach. Nor could his survival be ascribed to mere luck.

Through so many existences in so many societies it was unavoidable that Pavrit’s immortality occasionally would be revealed, and he always prepared for this eventuality. To his knowledge, he had been “detected” 228 separate times. He kept careful count, turning the number over in his head regularly. He did this both as a reminder of the importance of unbroken vigilance and because it was his nature to constantly relive past failures.

Pavrit’s self-flagellation was not subconscious. Nor did he regard it as a weakness, neurosis, or nuisance. All the immortals he knew exhibited the same proclivity, in one form or another. Their dwelling on the past wasn’t a form of nostalgia or emblematic of an inability to adapt, though surely there was a smattering of those in some cases.

In an eternal life, reminiscence furnished something with which to reliably occupy the mind. There were good reasons to favor dwelling on failure rather than success. Reliving successes was the wont of braggarts and heroes, and it tarnished them. After enough retellings, their motives seemed less pure, their actions less bold, and their truths less unassailable. Doubt crept in. It was self-doubt, just as the retellings were internal, but this made it all the more insidious. The pillars on which such a man’s worth rested crumbled one by one. After that, he would forever regard himself as a fraud. Pavrit had seen this happen more than once.

On the other hand, the man who relived his failures started from a point of weakness. Those failures could only be ennobled in the retelling, embellished, deconstructed, and reconstructed. Lofty motives emerged, extenuating factors materialized, a greater good ensued. The man who fled was no longer a coward. He did so from fear of unleashing his true strength, from wisdom, from the realization that he had been deceived into fighting for an unjust cause. Rubbish was the foundation of many a fine palace, and this man now had pillars which would endure until the end of time.

Though cognizant of its allure, Pavrit had not yet traveled far down this path. He had a more practical motive for reflection. Learning from the past could help prolong his future. Much of his time was spent analyzing those 228 past detections for common elements, warning signs, and mistakes.

Of course, not all of those exposures had led to danger. Some had been easily dealt with or proved uneventful, and only a few dozen culminated in actual threats to Pavrit’s life. Nonetheless, every instance offered potential insight into how to avoid future detection. Nor were exposures the only past events he studied. There had been many other types of threat to his life over the years, and protecting against such things was important as well. However, Pavrit had a strong reason to view detection as his paramount concern.

As the world grew denser and more technological, it was squeezing the interstitial spaces in which he could hide. There was a progression toward control and surveillance, and this only could bode ill for one such as him. Pavrit realized that it just was a matter of time before he would be exposed to the modern world, disastrously and irrevocably. Technology had changed everything. In a world with poor communication and slow travel, detection had been manageable. Once the immediate danger passed, time and distance attenuated knowledge. Eyewitness accounts transformed into discredited rumors or hyperbolic tales.

In superstitious times, reports of an immortal were attributed to pious fervor and lumped in with countless other tall tales of demons and witches. In more rational times, they were dismissed as the fruits of ignorance and gullibility. Pavrit had learned to accelerate the process in both climates by seeding numerous inconsistent stories and laughing off any legitimate ones. The tactic was tedious but effective, and he had deployed it successfully many times over the past few centuries.

However, the world wasn’t like that anymore and those methods no longer worked. Rumors persisted indefinitely, reemerging periodically from their slumber at the behest of some bored fool or sometimes entirely on their own. Worse, there was photographic permanence. Images endured. As the evidence accumulated, even skeptics would begin to wonder. There was no shortage of troublesome busybodies who would make it their life’s work to solve such a mystery.

Nor could this growing risk easily be mitigated. The countermeasures were themselves high-risk, and the medicine could do more harm than the illness. This was particularly frustrating to Pavrit, who understood the nature of risk better than most. He was an accountant, and had been one (or the equivalent) most of his life. It struck him as perverse that a profession which drew those most averse to risk would drill into them the impossibility of expunging it. To him, finance was a microcosm of existence. What was not possible financially was not possible at all. Even if the perfect financial hedge existed in theory, phenomena such as asymmetric government taxation would destroy its efficacy. As always, society created risk.

The palliative methods Pavrit adopted when detected evolved over time as well. In the past, he simply had removed a small number of witnesses before word could spread. In 12 cases, he had failed to do so but the witnesses were not believed for various reasons. Several had been committed to asylums when they persisted in their delusions, and one of the more recent cases had been lobotomized. Pavrit felt bad for her. He was fairly certain that such a horror could not be perpetrated on his own person, but shuddered at the thought of enduring in such a state. Pavrit’s moral aversion to its practices aside, psychiatry had been one of his greatest allies over the last half century. He even had considered switching professions but deemed it too high profile. Nevertheless, he was grateful for this new religion — the first to serve rather than hinder him.

In modern times, Pavrit found that the best way to deal with eyewitness accounts was simply not to answer them. The belief system of society now was on his side. In the past, he could have been interrogated or burnt, and evasive action would have been necessary. Pavrit had in fact been tortured on two occasions, burnt on one, and imprisoned for lengthy periods on six. The burning was more of an issue than the torture, though both had been exceedingly unpleasant.

Incarceration could be perilous too. During one forty-year stint he almost had starved to death. Seventeenth-century France did not treat its prisoners well. Fortunately, he was protected from disease and poison. This allowed him to find sustenance in ways which would have been hazardous for an ordinary man. He did not like to recall the things he had eaten. Sometimes, he still could taste them in his dreams.