February 2031.

Something about her immortality remained a question she longed to have answered but what answer was there for her? She could not age, that much was true. Nor could she ever be diseased or afflicted in any way with an illness as to make her so. She had never had so much as a cold, never taken a day away from school or work with the flu or something more serious. Could never get the same cancer that plagued her family. Nothing of the sort. But what of her mind? The persistence of that conundrum lingered. She remembered everything that ever happened to her in her life. In ninety years she could remember so far back as to envision the way of the world before cars were not a commodity but a luxury or before the internet or phones or anything other than the radio by which she would sit at only eight years of age and listen to reports of the North coming down across the peninsula and the soldiers fighting at the border. Each moment seemed to hold some small portion of her sense. Like patterns seared into the branding of her conscious and what will she could muster to remove them was impossible, a herculean task beyond her or anyone. Each could be pieced by the others like a jigsaw, a snapshot into the pages of her troubled life. And they would remain. Always they would remain.

So what of those and their existence? Were they not, in some insensible way, a form of disease, a sickness that afflicted her much like the wounds cast upon her body or the parasites inside of her? Those memories of torment that served only as windows into the pain of her past. She would sit sometimes and think on her mother and father and her sister and of the fate of the very few she had called friends and cry at how they had all turned out, how they had ended where she had not. As if she deserved to be amongst them. As if it were some unspeakable crime to not be dead and buried as they were. As if she were stealing from the very world itself some essence of sacred normality, breaking the laws of some hidden coda thought to be impossible to navigate.

Whenever she thought on those memories she did so with great pain in her heart, in her soul. So were they not the same as the physical evidence of grievous wrongdoings but from another angle, another manifestation of the same thing? And if so, why did they not heal themselves as her physical wounds did? Why did they not close up the torrid sutures of her thoughts, put a stop entirely to her longing for the past, longing for some change to events that could not ever be changed. Why did they remain in place of anything else? If she were truly immortal then why was she so cursed with the wickedness of a changing mind, one that did not regenerate itself as the rest of her did. And how far could that deterioration go before there was nothing left of her that was human anymore? How far could she take it? How long would it take? Ten more years? A hundred? Ten thousand? Who knew.

*  *  *

She sat watching the slow decline of the world out the rainswept shimmer of the window while their food was being prepared. In the soft light of the evening the streets looked almost as if caught in some stage of decomposition, almost as if they were melting. She watched light seep through the holes in the rain like candle wax and cars parked up the avenue and by the curb and people passing under umbrellas and tucked into the hoods of their coats and passing on cold and solitary and silent in the mimeshow locomotion of the lonely night. The restaurant was quiet and not particularly busy and she turned and over the table smiled at Irene and Irene smiled back at her.

‘What?’ Irene said.

‘Nothing.’

‘Doesn’t look like nothing.’

She smiled again. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You should wear a badge.’

‘Do they do badges for forty-year olds?’

‘Of course they do. They do badges for any age.’

‘It’d just make me feel old.’

‘You are old.’

‘You can talk.’

Seulgi shrugged. The waitress came out with their food on two blue chinaplates and set them down with their coffee and they thanked her and ate in peace. It was an old American-style diner and they ordered sausages and peas with mash and biscuits and a big helping of meat gravy in little silver boats and the waitress passed them a small plate of wheatbread and steaming butter rolls and when they were finished they drank their coffee watching the cold and desolate world beyond the window seep away like light from the universe. ‘You know, my mum told me when I was like eight that rain on your birthday means bad luck,’ Irene said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Took me about ten years to realise how dumb that actually was.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then millions of people would have bad luck every day. Statistically it’s just super likely.’

‘Well.’

‘Well what?’

Seulgi shrugged. She set her coffee down and blew away the coiled steam and sat straight up. ‘Well maybe everyone’s got bad luck then,’ she said.

‘You think so?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘I’d like to think everyone had good luck more than bad.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Yeah. Everyone. What?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

But Seulgi just sat there watching Irene and soon they were both silent again.

*  *  *

‘I kind of want to go to New York.’

Seulgi turned to her, laying there in the hammock under the hanging tree by the end of the garden, one arm draped over her forehead, wincing against the copper tint of the oblique sun. In that extant twilight she looked like something fashioned out of bronze. ‘Why?’ Seulgi said.

‘I don’t know. I’ve just got this itch for New York.’

‘Any particular reason for there and not any other American city?’

‘No. I guess just because it’s the most popular. And I’ve never been before. Have you?’

‘Have I what? Ever been to New York?’

‘Yeah.’

Seulgi closed her book and pushed it across the table and took a cigarette and lit it. She sat for a minute savouring the taste and the sun there against her upturned face. ‘A long time ago,’ she said. ‘Just once.’

‘Really? When?’

‘Nineteen eighty-three.’

‘No .’

‘No .’

‘For business? Or for pleasure?’

Seulgi laughed. ‘You sound like something from a James Bond film.’

‘Pleasure then, Mr Bond.’

‘You’re such an idiot sometimes.’

Irene sat up and swung her legs off the hammock and turned to Seulgi with a smile on her face so bright it felt almost unnatural in the cooling eve, in what remained of the russet light. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Why’d you go?’

‘For a holiday.’

‘Why New York?’

‘Same reason as you I guess,’ said Seulgi.

‘I don’t have a reason.’

‘Exactly. Neither did I.’

‘Was it any good?’

‘It was alright.’

‘Doesn’t really tell me much.’

‘There wasn’t much for me to do. And this was a long time ago. I can barely remember it anymore.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

A silence fell between them. Seulgi sat there smoking, Irene with her hands in her lap watching her until Seulgi turned and looked back down the garden at her. She looked for a minute much older than she was. Or perhaps looked truly her age. In so long Seulgi had become sure that in some strange and indescribable manner she had fashioned for herself some vision of Irene that was unchanging, much like herself, or changing at a much slower rate than Irene really was. That when she would look at Irene most of the time she would see her as she once was, ten or fifteen years ago, or perhaps when they had first met at university, when they had first fallen in love, first touched each other, first fallen asleep in the other’s embrace. And not as the forty-year-old woman she had become. She was still beautiful. Always would be. But she was older, her skin a slight darker and more worn, the first faint impression of age visible in the thinnest of wrinkles about her forehead, her eyes lacking the same immense volume of clear youth, the sharp lines of her jaw and her nose softened a little. She no longer wore the same clothes or liked the same foods or read the same books. She had changed as all people do. As all but Seulgi.

‘What?’ Seulgi said.

‘What?’

‘You’re looking at me funny again.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. You want to say something, don’t you?’

When Irene didn’t respond Seulgi pressed her. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘You said a long time ago that you remember everything,’ Irene said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you really?’

‘No.’

‘So were you lying back then?’

‘Not really. I still remember most things.’

‘You said you don’t remember much of New York.’

‘It was beautiful, I know that. And really peaceful, in a sort of weird way. Like a new world, you know? Somewhere away from what I was used to. Like I found tranquillity in this new place where they shouldn’t be any. I suppose it’s the same anywhere, really. You feel an intense love or hatred for a place knowing later on you’ll come to feel a certain feeling for it again. Nostalgia, regret, disdain. Whatever. I guess in some ways it was the same thing. I loved it so much because I knew I’d look back on it down the line as an experience, as something very different in my life. And it was.’

‘Then how come you can’t remember the rest of it then?’

‘Because I read something a long time ago that still rings very true to me.’

‘What is it?’

‘You forget what you want to remember, and remember what you want to forget.’

‘But you remember most things that have ever happened to you.’

Seulgi smiled sadly. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I do.’

*  *  *

It was a cool and dry night in July when Irene asked her the question for the first time and she didn’t know really how to answer it. She brought out two cold beers from the fridge and popped the lids with a pocketknife and handed one over and they drank against the scarlet smile of the dying sun and as Seulgi drank Irene shifted up in her chair and said softly, ‘Do you think immortality is a curse? Or a blessing?’

Seulgi looked at her. ‘What?’ she said.

‘What do you think of it? If you’ve ever even thought about it at all.’

‘I have.’

‘Then.’

She motioned for Seulgi to say anything but for a long time she was just silent. As if formulating a proper answer but what answer could be given to that? As well try and draw similar reason from a stone or from water because what truly could be said, and be accurate? Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘No?’

‘No. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve thought it about far more than I’d care to admit, really. And I’ve never really come up with an answer and you know what? I think that’s good. Because deep down, in the darkest part of my heart, I think I do really know what I’d say. I know how I’d answer that. But it’s too awful to bear. I don’t think I could. So I don’t ever come to that conclusion. Whenever I get close I just bury it, or forget it, or talk about something else. Because the truth is worse than whatever ignorance I could throw on myself, whatever false pretence I could live under.’

‘Why’s that?’

She tipped up the neck of her bottle and drank deep and set it back in her lap. ‘Because I’d have to live with the truth forever,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s something I could actually live with, but I’d have to. I’d have no other choice. I had that choice removed a long time ago. Maybe I never even had it at all.’

‘You think aging’s a good thing?’ Irene said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well I seem to be doing alright so far, at least.’

She laughed. Seulgi could only force a brief smile. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, you do.’