The Immortalists

“What are you looking for?” Varya asks.

“Your character. Ever heard of Heraclitus?” Varya shakes her head. “Greek philosopher. Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”

Robert paces the apartment. “We need to stay here,” he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.

But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears—the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other—that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.

At dinner that evening, he told the story of the near-drowning with pomp, but inside, he glowed with renewed attachment to his family. For the rest of the vacation, he forgave Varya her most sustained sleep-babbling. He let Klara take the first shower when they returned from the beach, even though her showers took so long that Gertie once banged on the door to ask why, if she needed this much water, Klara did not bring a bar of soap into the ocean. Years later, when Simon and Klara left home—and after that, when even Varya pulled away from him—Daniel could not understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation, and the bliss of being returned. He waited.

After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us. But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.

When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.

Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.

She no longer believed that Daniel died of a bullet meant for the pelvis but which entered his thigh, rupturing the femoral artery, so that all his blood was lost in less than ten minutes. His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary—to the fact that thoughts have wings.

“Because I’m sad,” says Luke, thickly. “Because to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost?”

“The thought that you could die from sex,” Varya says, haltingly. “You weren’t terrified?”

“No, not then. Because it didn’t feel that way. When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.”

“l think I might like to teach,” she says. In graduate school, she taught undergrads in exchange for tuition remission. She hadn’t thought she could do such a thing—before her first class, she vomited in a sink in the women’s restroom, unable to reach the toilet—she soon found it invigorating: all those upturned faces, waiting to see what she had up her sleeve. Of course, some of the faces were not upturned but sleeping, and secretly, those were the ones she liked best. She was determined to wake them up.