IMMORTALIS
By Kyle Simonsen

It was on a Tuesday night that I met an immortal. He was tactless. Not socially naïve, just intentionally tactless. Strutting about a small apartment, his, wreathed in various statuettes and idols depicting monkeys in various stances, monkeys at various tasks. He talked way too much, both in the sense that what was said was said with an intense pseudo-depth that jarred the relaxed mind and also that you just wanted him to shut the fuck up, most times.

There were other people there, other players in the evening's drama, but none of them have lines of dialogue. Two guys in small chairs in opposite corners of the room were getting high. He had a girl somewhere in a back room who never made an appearance all night. No one actually said she was in there, but when her name was mentioned, eyes flickered like fireflies towards a door in the hall.

When he shook my hand, his grip was firm.

His first words: "How you doin'? Want a beer? Wait. You don't look like you drink beer. Are you one of those straightedge pussies?"

I assured him I was not and suckled at the dark glass nipple.

"Let me tell you something." Sits down. Runs his hands through his hair, maybe tweaking. Lights and smokes a cigarette, holds it like a fucking woman. This guy, big guy, asshole, holds his cigarette like a fucking wanker. "I'm probably going to piss you off while you are here." I can see how that is becoming likely, but I avoid saying as much. Instead, he fills the void again with his own wheezings. "I want to let you know, it's not your fault. I just get personal satisfaction from degrading others."

Well. At least he was honest about it.

He talked a lot. He talked about a lot of things before he got around to his own immortality. Let me tell you this: I can't remember every arrogance uttered during this period, but suffice it to say that they were many, they were rambling, and they actually gave credit to the possibility that this guy, forearms resting across his knees, leaning forward and ashing his cigarette in a monkey ashtray, was a true blue immortal. Impervious to anything I could do. Which may  be good. Because the more shit he talks, the more interested I am in doing something.

"We own reality." He was telling me. Like the guru of suburbia. "We simply limit ourselves to the common understandings and mechanical heuristics of the so-called 'laws of nature'. All laws are man-made structures intended to keep order, and things like gravity and relativity and finitude are all simply facets of that fucking cubic zirconia, man."

I blink in his general direction.

"Didn't understand a word I said, huh, Sissy?"

This to me.

"No, I follow." I said.

"Obviously," he replied. "I can tell from those poser fucking shoes you are wearing. Way to be just like every other baggy-pants skater that smears their fucking butt-grease onto my couch."

Now, I no longer follow. He's left me well behind. I think long and hard about smashing him in the face with a monkey statue near my left hand, but then I decide not to take that path either.

"I can stop bullets. I can alter my reality. Do you hear that? Fucking shoot me."

"Shoot you?"

"Yeah. For real, for serious. Do you have a gun?"

"What makes you think I have a gun?"

"I knew you didn't. Fucking nerd. Get some sun. And a gun. Then you could shoot some bullets at me and I could stop them and show you how dumb you fuckers are."

I take a rather large drink.

I hear a soft moan from the back room and wonder what exactly is going on in there. What the girl looks like. What her favorite color is.

When I decide to open the chakra, it is opened. The concussion from my finger pulling the trigger is loud and unexpected in the tiny room. Violence leaves a third eye open, gaping and gory in the forehead of this fallen immortal. His cocky grimace as permanent now as it was in life, no more and no less. The mess is less than one would expect, however. Not as much to splash onto the walls as one would think.

And he's stopped breathing, so it appears he was wrong after all.

But however I hate to admit it, I can feel my own perspective growing, my own third eye's pupil dilating, adjusting to the darkness of neverending life. You don't even know my name, but his story is getting told.