Slade House

by David Mitchell

Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

I twist the pointy bit into the cork and think carnal thoughts until the cork goes Pop! “I love that sound,” says Chloe. “Don’t you? Wine Nazis say that you let these heavy reds breathe for a quarter of an hour, but I say life’s too short.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

Death’s life’s only guarantee, yes? We all know it, yet we’re hardwired to dread it. That dread’s our survival instinct and it serves us well enough when we’re young, but it’s a curse when you’re older.”

“It’s why religion got invented and it’s why religion stays invented. What else matters more than not dying? Power? Gold? Sex? A million quid? A billion? A trillion? Really? They won’t buy you an extra minute when your number’s up. No, cheating death, cheating aging, cheating the care home, cheating the mirror and the dug-up corpse’s face like mine that you’ll see in your mirror too, Miss Timms, and sooner than you think: That’s a prize worth the hunting, the taking. That’s the only prize worth hunting. And what we want, we dream of. The stage props change down the ages, but the dream stays the same: philosophers’ stones; magic fountains in lost Tibetan valleys; lichens that slow the decay of our cells; tanks of liquid whatever that’ll freeze us for a few centuries; computers that’ll store our personalities as ones and zeroes for the rest of time. To call a spade a spade: immortality.”

“ ‘Bombadil’?” says Jonah. “Not the Green Man leprechauny one from The Lord of the Rings? What a bizarre alias.”