Stop me if you've heard this one...

My pal, Michael, and I, have taken to writing something every week and sharing it on our Friday lunch break. This short vignette is the latest in short shorts I've been hacking away at.

A man walks into a bar, and sits next to an immortal.

The man, Al, had just gotten off of work, another mindless day of number crunching, cubicle-wall staring, e-mail checking, deadlines, people in shirts and ties blowing their tops, and broken printers.

Al didn’t come in for a daily drink, until he started this job. After all, the pub was right down the block from the office. Sometimes he wondered which one begat the other.

But then he’d get distracted and stop wracking his already atrophied brain.

There was nothing particularly noticeable about Al; truth be told, he was rather boring and plain. Light khaki pants with a coffee stain on the knee from a morning mishap, thin white dress shirt with a white tank top showing from beneath, frayed blue tie hanging lifelessly from the loosened collar…the typical uniform of a corporate slave. His sleeves were rolled up to the middle of his pudgy arms, fine red hairs curling back against his forearms. His face was puffy, curly red hair framing the burnt-out expression on his mug, once-bright blue eyes staring out listlessly from tired sockets.

The bar was always full of the lost puppies of the corporate world, the cubicle raiders chasing pointless windmills, the gearless cogs meting out a meager existence over a cheap beer afforded with their minimal disposable income.

The immortal was dressed in black slacks and a collared shirt, unbuttoned at the collarbone, revealing dark curly chest hairs with an Adam’s apple suspended a few inches over the top buttoned button. He was bone thin and pale, with a hawkish Sherlock Holmes look to him, and was slowly tapping the well-trimmed fingernails of his right hand against the pocked-up bar while slowly and absently twirling a scotch on the rocks with his left. He belonged in a martini bar, or some high-class upscale joint with cloth napkins and waiters who called you “sir” with oil pushing their hair back in an antiquated way.

Not this pub, this old pub with walls littered with cheap picture frames bearing tattered and faded photographs and news clippings, barely a spot of old wall showing between. This pub with the barrel-chested owner, Jake, tending the bar, the word “Dotty” tattooed across his left forearm, and a bald head hints of hair emerging on the sides.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said to Al, but more towards the glass of scotch as he lifted it to his thin lips. “But I doubt you realize this establishment has been here far longer than you realize, or that it has changed so much in that time frame.”

“Uh,” Al stammered. “I didn’t say—“

“Oh, that’s quite fine,” the immortal had the air of someone not-fully upper crust, slightly rough edges were probably hiding underneath all that refinement. “Last time I was here, so long ago, there were mill workers and rather uncouth regulars crowding the bar, not soft corporate desk jockeys.

“Present company accepted,” he turned to Al for a minute and smirked, a glean emerging from his dark eyes.

“Thanks, I guess,” Al stared at the bottles behind the bar, blankly. Jake stood opposite him across the bar, and looked at him quizzically, a bushy eyebrow arched.

“Get my new friend whatever it is he desires,” the immortal nodded to Jake, and then returned to his scotch. “He already deserves something for my odd reminisces.”

Al looked at Jake, sheepishly. It had been a long day, and some strange immortal man (how he knew, he couldn’t peg…he just did) buy him a drink at the pub that he’s never been comfortable coming into. Al ordered a cheap domestic beer in a chipped glass stein, staring at the foam after Jake set it down in front of him.

“Thanks for the beer,” he stammered out to the immortal, but the immortal was too busy staring at the melting ice cubes in the small puddle of scotch at the bottom of his glass, his eyes narrowed intently on them. “Are you okay, man?”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” the immortal glanced sidewise at Al. “I’m hanging out at an old pub with a new friend.”

The immortal straightened up on his barstool.

“Thank you for asking. But I’m fine…just, well – Do you understand the curse of a photographic memory?”

“I think so,” Al felt a shiver when he noticed how dark the other man’s eyes were, and he turned his gaze to the man’s chin. “Like when I saw a really bad car accident when I was eight; the person stuck in it, they didn’t make it out in one piece, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I think I do. What happened to him?”

“He, um, his head was crushed. Geez, I was only eight, but I remember seeing it still. Even the smells, the burnt rubber and the smoke from the cars, that kind of gunpowder smell that comes out of an airbag? And the blood.”

“That’s really unfortunate,” the immortal added. “Are you sure that’s the only thing you’d like to forget?”

“Well, no,” Al admitted. “There was that one time my grandfather was in the hospital, right before he died, with all the tubes hanging out of him.”

“I’ve seen quite a bit in my life,” he set his empty glass on the counter, and motioned to Jake. “May I have another, please?”

The immortal was archaically polite. It was odd that manners had started to become something to be so easily noticed when in action, perhaps because they’d become so rare.

“Thank you, very much,” the immortal said to Jake before he shifted the glass to his lips, took a sip, and continued. “I can tell you see me for what I am.”

Al was taken aback, but the immortal seemed harmless. He’d never seen one before, so wasn’t sure what to think.

“I think so,” Al admitted. “Though I don’t know how I know, I just do.”

“No matter,” the immortal said. “That’s not important. Just know that I’ve voluntarily seen three wars and more than my own share of crushed skulls and dialysis machines. Those aren’t what bother me every day of my long-winded existence.”

“You volunteered to fight? Why’d you want to do that?”

“Do you know,” he arched an eyebrow as he looked squarely at Al. “How boring a long life can become? When you know that you can’t die, you still have the desire to test your mortality. Even in a war.

“But that’s not what bothers me. Actually, that’s the least of it.

“Normal people rue the horrible things that happen to them, accepting that the great things aren’t going to change but so much…when they do, they still focus on the horrors and vileness they’ve seen in their short lives.”

The bar started to fill up as more people were grabbing barstools and booths. A leggy redhead sat next to the immortal, but he didn’t even notice her, much to her chagrin.

He kept talking, his eyes narrowing again, eyebrows furrowing to the bridge of his nose, as he continued thinking, pulling his mind back in time.

“But, when you can live forever, those horrible things are mere pings on a very large radar. Those wonderful things that happen? The loved ones, the great jobs, the beautiful homes? Well, you could argue that I can have those over and over again so many different times, but that’s really the tragedy of it all.”

“I don’t get it,” Al confessed as Jake slid another beer in front of him. “Wouldn’t it be worth living more if you knew you could always get those things, and you had all the time in the world?”

“Or wouldn’t it be worse knowing that it will always end and you’ll have nothing more than a damned accurate photographic memory of the best ones? How many times do you think you can fall in love before it becomes something routine?”

The immortal paused, setting the glass down with finality and half the scotch still intact, pushing it away from him.

“How long do you think it is before you just can’t fall in love anymore? And then before even the physical holds no more appeal, before even pleasure is a musty old memory?”

“I…don’t know.”

“A long time for you, not long for someone like me.”

“So,” Al looked at the bottom of his beer glass. “You’ve been in love, then? How long ago?”

“Oh, not long enough,” the immortal straightened himself out. “Probably never long enough for my own sake. Romantics should never live forever: they’ll spend it all in a state of discontent.”

“I think I’ve been in love,” Al offered up. “Once, maybe.”

“Maybe? You’re not sure?”

“Who ever is? I’m not. How do I know I won’t find something better? I mean, I guess it makes me naïve, or something?”

“I like you,” the immortal stood up. “You’re aware of your limitations, yet still hopeful…in an almost hopeless way.”

He set $40 (in two crisp $20 bills on the bar) nodded towards Al with a wink.

And then he was gone. Perhaps he disappeared in the slowly growing crowd of patrons, the shift change from off-shift worker drones to single women hoping for love and skirt-chasing men.

Perhaps he just wished himself away.

“Get a load of that guy, Al?” Jake asked Al as he snagged up the cash. “Did I hear him say he’d lived forever?”

“Well, at least close enough,” Al said as he navigated his way off his barstool, nearly bumping into a wiry guy in a blue button-down shirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As Al was heading near the door, something caught his eye, and he found himself gravitating towards a black and white picture on the far wall, resting in a dusty old wooden frame.

A familiar man with hawkish features stood with a pretty blond woman at a New Year’s Eve party in a world of graytones.

1932.

Al grinned weakly and headed for the door.

Somehow he wasn’t surprised.