The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

But something else created the atmosphere required for this pilgrimage: they are siblings, this summer, in a way they will never be again.

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.”

Simon is still crying. He leans against the counter. “Sy?” Simon wipes his cheeks with his palms. Gently, he hangs up.

What you’re doing right now, I don’t know what the hell will happen to you. And neither do you.” “But that’s the thing. I’m fine with not knowing. I’d rather not know.”

I care about family. There are things you do for the people who did them for you.” “And there’s things you do for yourself.”

He hates the woman for giving it to him, and he hates himself for believing her. If the prophecy is a ball, his belief is its chain; it is the voice in his head that says Hurry, says Faster, says Run.

The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.

“I always knew I’d die young. That’s why I did what I did.”

“No,” says Simon, “this,” and he points at the window. “I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.”

For so long, he hated the woman, too. How, he wondered, could she give such a terrible fortune to a child? But now he thinks of her differently, like a second mother or a god, she who showed him the door and said: Go.

What she cannot do—what she will never stop trying to do—is bring her brother back.

She could not recall each of their meanings, but she knew they connected the dead, Simon and Saul, to the living: Klara and Varya, Gertie and Daniel. In the words of the prayer, no one was missing. In the words of the prayer, the Golds gathered together.

And if Klara hadn’t urged Simon to go, would he still be alive? She was the one who believed in the prophecies; she was the one who managed his trajectory, nudging until it canted and turned left. And no matter how many times she recalled Simon’s words in the hospital—how he squeezed her hand, how he thanked her—she couldn’t help but feel that things would have been different if they’d gone to Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia, if she’d kept her goddamn beliefs to herself.

“Oh, Simon. Forgive me,” she whispered. Her knees shook. Outside the window, the sun was just beginning to rise, and she wept for it, for all the suns that Simon, her bright one, would never see. “Forgive me, Simon. It’s my fault, my fault, I know it. Forgive me, my son.”

Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him.

“Life isn’t just about defying death,” Raj says, his voice coming through the speakers on either side of the television. “It’s also about defying yourself, about insisting on transformation. As long as you can transform, my friends, you cannot die.

Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too.

“Why? ’Cause they didn’t live till ninety? Think about what they had while they were here. People like me, on the other hand—we hang on by our teeth,

Their family of three. Already they feel like ghosts, like people she used to know. She thinks of the days—they feel so long ago—when she thought Raj could give her everything she wanted.

Warmth seeps through Klara like ink. A new member of the family. She knows why they’re celebrating, why it means so much. “That’s wonderful,” she says. “That’s so, so wonderful.” When she hangs up, the suite feels cold and abandoned, like a party everyone has just vacated. But she won’t be alone for long. • • •

“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.”

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.

even if the world stops producing pavement, even if we stop using cars, what’s the one thing that’ll be around as long as human beings? Our desire to know. And we’ll pay anything for it.

Yes, the fortune teller was right, but only because Klara chose to believe her. There’s no mystery in that.”

Look—this susceptibility you’re talking about? Think of it like a gene. The fortune teller may have been the environmental factor that triggered it. Or maybe she noticed it in Klara. Maybe she preyed on it.”

Maybe the prophecy did plant inside him like a germ. Maybe it incited him to be rash—to live dangerously.

He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo—not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.

If they know when they’ll die, they can live.”

Which would you rather? Going now, or never knowing when? Waiting, waiting, walking on tiptoes—looking over your shoulder every fucking day, sticking around while everyone around you dies and you wonder whether it should’ve been you, and hating yourself because—”

another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.

Varya had always told herself that she did her research out of love—love for life, for science, and for her siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to reach old age—but at heart, she worried that her primary motivation was fear. Fear that she had no control, that life slipped through one’s fingers no matter what. Fear that Simon and Klara and Daniel had, at least, lived in the world, while Varya lived in her research, in her books, in her head.

“And how should I go about my life? Should I live like Simon, who cared for no one but himself? Should I live in a fantasy world, like Klara?”

If they had only been smarter, more cautious. If they had shown self-awareness, shown humility—if they had shown patience! If they had not lived as though life were a mad dash toward some unearned climax; if they had walked instead of fucking run.

The worst has happened, and amidst the hollowing loss is the thought that now there is much less to fear.

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.”

She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.

What if I change? she asked the fortune teller, all those years ago, sure that knowledge could save her from bad luck and tragedy. Most people don’t, the woman said.

What she gave her children, Varya sees: the freedom of uncertainty. The freedom of an unsure fate.