The Endless Man

by Maria Poulatha

Johannes Plenio

1781

He dreams of a single helix made of crystal and he walks up the spiral steps and up the steps and up and up and up. There is no end to up. He is lighter than a leaf without a tree.

1784

Like all great accidents that birth invention, the giant model helix is struck by lightning the moment he steps onto it. Thinking “failure and ridicule” and eating peas drenched in cyanide, he had decided to end it. But then it begins.

1786

It’s true, he tells his wife. Hydrogen cyanide under just the right voltage delivered through a piezoelectric crystal has made me invincible! He does a handstand on the balcony railing.

Clown! she chortles.

Look at your goldfish, he says, goldfish do not live for three years. Join me!

Nosferatu! She screams. It is unnatural. Unholy.

But the children? Surely you want the children to live forever!

She gives each of the children a loaf of bread, a potato and a sock full of liras and chases them down the road with a horsewhip. After they scatter like chickens, she throws herself off a bridge into a frozen stream.

1812

He has sizzled 128 goldfish, 56 mice and 32 cats. The voltage is always too little or too great.

1832

His friends have all died slow, humiliating deaths. He decides to climb the Alps.

1846

The Alps are full of snow and he is out of money. The greatest discovery of mankind is profitless unless it can be packaged. He sets up a shop repairing clocks.

1855

Clocks need repairing all around the world. He falls in love with a Parisian seamstress, a Venetian opera singer and a Chinese acrobat. He flees the day he sees the first shadow of a wrinkle between their eyes. All around him he smells decay.

1866

He learns Arabic. In a souk he meets a young woman with five moles between her breasts in the shape of Cassiopeia. They make love under a date tree amongst scorpions and she confesses that she is 1,053 years old. They plan to marry but then he meets her parents. How old are you? he asks them. 42, they say. 38. We’re sorry, but our daughter is deeply ill. Her clocks are broken, beyond repair.

1879

He creates the “Mechanical Husband,” a four-foot high assemblage of belts and hinges that can hammer, milk, chop wood, dig holes for 18 hours and at the end of the day, climax with the emission of a gaseous miasma. He is pricey to feed and too many women die from tetanus.

1882

He joins a circus in Romania. He rides horses backwards and makes them dive into tiny pools of water. He grows sick of the smell of manure. Soon his horse needs to be shot and the fat man grows skinny.

1887

He makes a friend in Italy. The friend has a long mustache and a short gun. Help me, says the endless man, so the friend shoots him 25 times. When the gun fails to terminate him, the Italian skewers him, poisons him, boils him, seals his openings with wax, drags him behind a fishing boat for eight hours, leaves him overnight in a vat of milk, ties him to a train track and drops him, on fire, from the tower of the Doge Palace in Venice. The man’s suit is in tatters and he has dyspepsia from the arsenic but he is up for a game of tennis by noon. The Italian beats him five matches in a row and then treats him to drinks.

1898

He has many children. Some are pink like raw fish, some are brown but most are beige like lightly baked crusts of bread. One is purple and veiny and stops breathing too soon. But so do all of them. Too soon.

1903

He can describe the face of God. It is blue in the morning, black at night. He did not need to climb a mountain to see it. He did not need to starve himself or rock back and forth like a man rowing a boat against a current. He speaks the truth and people follow until they are too stiff, too slow, too transparent. Some begin to notice that he is endless. He is invited to Rome by the Pope but he goes to Libya instead and installs himself in a cave. There is a place to sleep and a place for waste and a chair whittled from cactus root. It took him three years to make a coat out of the skins of mice. It is hideous. He loves the desert but he misses art.

1912

He invents roller skates with an internal combustion engine that stay on your feet with straps and suspenders that go up to your shoulders. You steer with wooden ski poles as they propel you uphill and frighten away stray dogs. Every fashionable woman who also smokes cigarettes owns a set. With the increasing popularity of the car, they begin to look ridiculous.

1916

He goes to war. He claims to be a photographer and is sent to the desert to document grand explosions and miniscule implosions. He uses the military’s high-speed air-driven cameras to photograph detonated lizards and wet erupting succulents. As punishment, he is sent on a train then a ship then by foot to Mesopotamia. He kills many men. He feels little remorse because he knows they will die soon anyway.

1940

He goes to war. He kills no men because he knows they will die soon anyway. He learns to fly and soars over Victoria Falls because he has never been there before. It truly is “The Smoke that Thunders.” He settles into The Victoria Falls Hotel and sips gin and tonics beneath the spray of the second gorge until he is captured by the army and taken as a prisoner to Egypt. In jail, he learns backgammon and carves wooden game boards with a delicate marquetry of ebony and abalone that earns him a reputation from Paris to St. Petersburg. Stalin invites him to Russia where the man beats him in 86 consecutive games over 38 days. He is sent to a Gulag. He learns Russian.

1950

He treks further north and weds a plump Yupik woman who brushes his hair with a fishbone. He cannot tolerate the cold, so for five unending winters he remains within the yaranga and breeds three hardy Yupiks. He does not hunt for whale or walrus and is chased out of the tent one night by a well-trained pack of dogs.

1960

He crosses over to Canada and down to America where he becomes a spy for the Russians. He purchases an automobile and drives from coast to coast with actresses and dancers and soft-moral intellectuals. He finds secret intelligence to be useless. The Russians find him to be useless. They take away his car.

1968

He becomes a spy for the Americans. He infiltrates the Russian space program and is eventually accepted to train as a cosmonaut. He can repair docks, build sustainers and create fine Florentine needlepoint while compressed, weightless and inverted. The Americans land on the moon before them and the expedition is cancelled. He volunteers for a Mars landing. But you may never return, they tell him.

I will wait for someone to come get me, he says. I can wait.

1969

At a rock festival, he chews a gamy mushroom then gapes down the sleeve of time. Follow me! cries the mushroom. I know the way out. He follows.

1981

He cuts his hair and disbands a small but peaceful community in New Mexico that cultivates cacti and calls its members Cousin Jeff. He scuttles away in the night on a moped with nothing but an extra shirt and a basket full of prickly pears. He loves the desert but he misses roads.

2005

One of the two living Yupik sons tracks him down through the help of the Internet, GPS and indiscreet neighbors. When he sees his father’s face, smooth as an unripe peach, the son says, I’m sorry, Sir. There must be a mistake.

No problem, Son. He serves hot coffee and hands him a gift before he leaves: an original engraving by William Blake depicting a naked man arched high above hell-fire. Yaqulpak, the Yupik son, leaves the dreary image tucked into the airplane magazine.

2018

He has forgotten the face of his first wife, except for an approximate configuration of a dozen brown moles. He tries to connect the dots that he recalls he thought beautiful, but instead recreates the face of his oldest daughter, Anna, who’s skin was as smooth as the desert after a storm. His heart grows heavy with the picture of his first child so he disassembles the image and reconnects the dots to form a bear balancing on one foot.

2026

He drinks too much tequila one night and decides to become a woman. She covers herself with rouges, perfumes and sparkling fabrics. She is an ugly woman but she is ogled and fondled nonetheless. The attention is at once exciting and unbearable. People look more and listen less. Three years later, she grows a beard.

2039

He is tired. He can count only on human greed and the poison of progress for dissolution. Humans will tear apart humanity, piece by piece, like an orange. But humans get better and better every day.

2048

He is finally accepted for the Mars landing. At night the red planet is black like everything else. He was allowed to take the voice of his Venetian opera singer with him and he listens to her and dreams of the cool surface of her white cheek, translucent and smooth as a wobbly egg. He stares at the blue-green orb that is the size of a fish’s eye from here, and for the first time in 150 years, he feels the bottomless, gravity-thick pull of longing. He smiles. I am still alive.

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Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly (finalist for the Grand Micro contest), Copper Nickel and Gordon Square Review.