A Year of Stories (Collection Three)

The Man Who Never Dies

Omar's Pub is one of the best places to spend a night in all of Mid-City, and has been for as long as I can remember.

Which, given my memory, is a pretty long time.

The food is garbage, the drinks are mostly water, and the bar itself looks like Aladdin's lamp threw up all over a motorcycle catalog. Even so, it has two very important things going for it.

The first is staying power,a quality that I appreciate. I've seen people in this place that I knew back when they were barely tall enough to see over the bar. It's not that Omar is a particularly good businessman, its just that in a city where people fly and make bargains with hedge gods, Omar's is a bastion of relative sanity.

The second is the probable cause of the first – it's an unwritten rule in Omar's Pub that you keep your story to yourself. People come here to eat bad food, and drink away bad memories, not to make friends.

Which begs the question, why is there a pudgy man in a beat up Stetson, and what may or may not be drummer's gloves with the fingers sewn back on, sitting at my table.

"Who are you and what can I do to make you leave?"

"You're Aldous, aren't you?"

"Answer my question first, nice gloves by the way..."

"Thanks!"

"Don't thank me, I was lying."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"No, but you can leave."

"First, tell me if you're Aldous."

"I'm Aldous, happy?"

"I can't believe it, I found you!"

"I'm very happy for you, now, if you don't mind..."

"You're ... you're like, my hero! You completely changed my life."

"That seems unlikely, and if I did, I'm sorry."

"I'm serious! You're a hero man! Aldous Summers, 'the Man Who Never Dies,' you're why I've done...well, everything!"

That's right, I'm Aldous Summers, who many lifetimes ago went by the moniker, "The Man Who Never Dies." The reason, if it isn't abundantly clear, is because you can't kill me. Sometime around my thirty-fifth birthday, I stopped aging, and never bothered to start again. A few dozen years later, I tried to shoot myself, several times in fact, until I realized it wouldn't take.

Since then I've been set of fire, poisoned, drowned, run over by a speeding semi-truck filled with dynamite, and in one memorable instance – had my internal organs rearranged by an Accounts Receivables Specialist over at Ashfert Partners, who I can only describe as a giant, ambulatory ball of knives.