Nathaniel's Wish

When Nathaniel was seven, he would pick up rocks in the schoolyard, and, when no one was looking, whisper in his quietest voice, “I want to live forever.”

            When Nathaniel was seventeen, he would pretend to caress his girlfriend, and instead reach for her emerald necklace, mouthing the words subtly on her neck, “I want to live forever.”

            When Nathaniel was thirty-seven, he would lay a brick, and in the least noticeable corner in the tiniest lettering, write with a red sharpie, “I want to live forever.”

            When Nathaniel was sixty-seven, he would visit the bridge he designed and carve into the underside of its great stone surface with his finest pen knife, “I want to live forever.”

            When Nathaniel was eighty-seven, he would, with his arthritic fingers, arrange the pebbles in his garden like an S.O.S. to the stars, spelling, “I want to live forever.”

            When Nathaniel was a hundred and seven, wheezing in his death bed, his prayers were answered.

            Above his bed, Nathaniel had placed an elliptical sheet of quartz, polished so intensely that he could vaguely see his own reflection. The point was, in this loneliest hour, that he could look to the sky and believe he was not alone. He would see his reflection in the rose hues of the quartz, an ethereal projection that seemed to come from paradise, as though he were an angel gazing down upon himself. Every time he saw his reflection, he made sure he was looking at the quartz with the most promising, reassuring eyes he could muster. Then, Angel Nathaniel would be forced to fill his promises.

            On this particular occasion, Angel Nathaniel didn’t reflect the same expression Real Nathaniel was wearing. Instead, the Angels’ eyes drooped, the kind of dropping one feels when observing something very sad and a little painful. Nathaniel thought,”I must have either pushed my senility to its breaking point or I’m dead.” The Angel chuckled faintly.

            “You’re not dead yet. But you should be dead in twenty minutes. Your heart is about to fail.”

            Nathaniel, already shocked, went into a shock about a thousand times deeper when he heard he was about to die.

            “Don’t let your heart race like that- it’ll just speed up the process,” the Angel said. If he was joking, his voice was much too hollow to convey it correctly.

            “If you’re an angel, why don’t you stop it?!” Nathaniel shouted hurriedly and furiously. The Angel cocked his head and blinked a few times, as though trying to comprehend the extreme fluctuations of human emotion while knowing all too well how Nathaniel was feeling.

            “I can’t stop death,” he answered, adding insult to injury. Nathaniel steadily fell deeper down the sharp decline of his despair. In a very serious and reluctant tone, the Angel added, “But I can convert it.”

Nathaniel’s eyes lit up with hope.

 “It isn’t something you want to play with. Converting states of life is a very heavy matter with irreversible consequences.”

Had this been what Nathaniel had dreamt of all his life? Ever since he was a school boy whispering to rocks, he had wished fervently for an angel to come and grant him eternal life. He sent messages to the heavens through stones- stones, the creatures Nathaniel envied desperately, lived when everyone else was gone, lived immortally. Angels, the other eternal creatures, would hear their Earth brothers sending Nathaniel’s message. He decided, the matter was so crucially important that he could wait for however long the message would take, even a lifetime.

And while he waited for his prayers to reach the angels, he made a bargain. He devoted his entire existence, giving away his own will and spirit, to the well being of the stones. He created eternal structures with them- laid bricks, built bridges- and beautified them, praising them with the glory they deserved. In exchange for committing all the time he was given to these stones, he would get one wish from the angels. At least, that’s how the bargain was planned. It was, of course, by chance that it would actually work. Maybe, Nathaniel thought, if the angels saw how much of a risk he was taking, they would feel obligated to give him his wish.

The visitation of this angel seemed so perfectly set up, it had to be an answer to his prayers. He was lying on his death bed after willing away his entire life to a bargain. It seemed appropriate that the angel would come now, like the climax in a symphony, to grant Nathaniel’s wish. Endorphins released in his fragile body like a memory of excited youth. Yes, he could taste it, he was already young again.

“You’ve come to grant my wish,” Nathaniel stated. It was a fact, not a question.

“Yes,” the Angel answered solemnly, nodding his head and increasing the weight of his stare.

“How much time do I have?”

“Seventeen minutes.”

Nathaniel laughed, causing his body to shake with the full force of his glee. It had been a joke. He didn’t care what time it was. He had never cared. All his life, his expectation had been that, after his wish, it would never matter what time it was. Why should he ever pay any attention to time?

“You don’t get it, do you?” Nathaniel asked, a twitching smirk lingering on his lips. “I don’t care about time. I never have. I don’t even own any clocks.”

“Yes, I know,” The Angel said, his grave expression unchanging.

“You don’t have much of a sense of humor, do you? Do angels ever laugh?” Nathaniel sighed, and then giggled shamelessly like a giddy girl. “I always laugh at a good joke. When I’m an angel, I’ll always laugh.”

Much to Nathaniel’s surprise, his remark caused that the Angel to burst in good-natured, hearty laughter. As spontaneously as it erupted, it stopped. The Angel’s face froze back to solemnity and pity.

“You won’t be an angel, Nathaniel.”

“Whatever. Angel’s live for eternity, I’ll live for eternity- same thing. Eternity is what I want, you know that.”  

“I do know that. But, Nathaniel, I want you to really think before you answer me- are you sure that is what you want?”

Nathaniel knew he was going to ask this question. In his fantasies, he had reviewed the answer he was about to give and the reasons why he would give it too many times to count. Eternity was exactly what he wanted. In every story he had ever heard about immortality, some idiot naively wished for everlasting life, unknowingly inflicting a terrible, inescapable consequence. That was the difference between those idiots and Nathaniel- they were naïve. Nathaniel, on the other hand, had considered eternity and its repercussions endlessly, preparing meticulously so he could milk all the benefits from a life that defied death. He made all the right choices. He trained himself persistently to find interesting things to occupy his mind, perpetually restocking his ideas as a habit, so he would never run out of things to do when eternity came along. He never became attached to a single human being beside himself- he didn’t need anyone else, he was convinced- so that he would never be hurt by his friends or loved ones dying. He also made a list of dreams, unachievable goals that no individual mortal could accomplish, so he could spend the many lives he was afforded by immortality single-handedly completing them. He would be the greatest man to ever walk the Earth, and the best part was, he would never have to leave it. Death was the enemy. After death, there was nothing, nothing but stones and angels. And he would never be an angel.

“Yes,” Nathaniel said breathlessly, preserving his breath for the peak of the moment, “that’s what I want. I want to live forever.”

He relaxed his old body, allowing the angel to mold him at his most vulnerable state. In that single, timeless moment, he was more ready to meet eternity than ever.

“Nathaniel, let me ask you- do angels live forever?” The Angel uttered slowly, enunciating every word like a question to a child. Nathaniel knew it was a test. Thank heavens he also knew the correct answer.

“Yes, they do.”

As though no time had passed, because time hadn’t passed, a change overcame Nathaniel. He was motionless, blank, and lifeless. But no, he was not dead. In fact, he was the opposite of dead, he was alive- alive for all of eternity. His body was frozen, converted into a smooth sculpture of quartz, bordering between a statue and a coffin.

The Angel seeped from his ceiling encasement like a pearly raindrop. In his full, fluid form, now standing up straight, he walked over to Nathaniel and knelt down. He pitied the poor, wretched creature. He didn’t want to teach Nathaniel his lesson this way, but some people wait there entire lives to learn one lesson. This was exactly how Nathaniel had requested it. This still, lifeless human was stone now. He was eternity. He had resisted the passage of time his entire life, wasting away every moment that was being measured by life’s greatest unit of measurement. The passage of time was exactly what Nathaniel had feared. He feared what happened when time stopped. And yet, with all that thinking and consideration, he had never stumbled across one simple but direly important connection: his most longed for wish was his most fatal contradiction. The stopping of time is eternity.

“No, we don’t,” the Angel whispered in Nathaniel’s unhearing stone ear. “We don’t live forever. We just live without dying.”

 

Reviews

[Destinee]

this is so brilliant. i can't even begin to describe all of the emotions i lived through while reading this. there are so many parts of this that just keep repeating in my head.
When Nathaniel was eighty-seven, he would, with his arthritic fingers, arrange the pebbles in his garden like an S.O.S. to the stars, spelling, “I want to live forever.”
An S.O.S. to the stars. gorgeous.
and the final words: "We don't live forever. We just live without dying."
Talk about a paradox.