The Most Beautiful of All Possible Worlds
Don’t tell me life is short. With the benefit of my considerable experience, or should I say in spite of it, I’m still willing to buy that life is beautiful if you dress it up right, that people are basically good, or that love can save you. I still want to believe. Tell me that life is meaningful, and you’ve got my ear. Tell me that life is a journey, and I’ll nod in agreement. But try convincing me that said journey is short, and you’ve lost me; that’s one cliché I can’t abide. If you think life is short, just wait. One of these days it might not end for you; it’ll just keep going and going and you’ll see that life is not a breathless sprint to the grave, gone in a heartbeat, but an odyssey that stretches on and on into eternity. Once it starts, it never ends, not even if you want it to. I should know.
I have gone by other names: Euric, Pietro, Kiri, Amura, York, and Whiskers. Currently I answer to the name of Eugene, though the attendants here at Desert Greens call me Mr. Miles. In August, I turn 106 years old. Wow, you’ll say, what a full life! Impressive! What’s your secret? But the fact is, I’m ready to die. There is nothing holding me here. I only hope that I am not born again, for I don’t think I could endure another loveless existence.
As far as I know, I first came to live on the Iberian Peninsula in the town of Seville, or Ishbiliyah as it was then known, during the golden age of Abd al-Rahman III in al-Andalus. If you’ve read your history, you probably know something about Spain under the Moors: how it was a global seat of wisdom, a paradise for scholars and poets and artists, philosophers, historians, and musicians, how Arabic was the language of science—mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. You’ve likely heard about the wondrous architecture of the mosques with their flowing arabesques and honeycombed vaults, their domed tops echoing the hypnotic suras of the Quran. You’ve probably heard about the great walled alcazabas, and the splendor of the riads and gardens. That is where the story of Euric and Gaya begins.
Of all my lives, this has been the longest, at turns the most re- warding and the most fruitless, the most satisfying and the most trying, and, accounting for the enduring awareness and attendant weight of all my previous follies and failures, the most exhausting. So don’t tell me life is short. But I digress.
Now I live here at Desert Greens, an eldercare facility in Lucerne Valley. I’ve been here for twelve years. It’s a nice enough place, I suppose, though there exist no actual “greens” on the premises, unless you count the blighted buffalo grass on the west end of the facility. There are a few picnic tables—four, to be exact—out there amidst the thirsty palms, which, depending on the direction you choose to face, confer views of the Ord, Granite, or San Bernardino Mountains, the craggy Ords and Granites brown most of the year. It’s a stark landscape, yes, but a beautiful one; timeless, like me.
I still get around well enough. I can go to the bathroom on my own, or walk down the corridor to the common area, or the cafeteria, or the aforementioned “greens,” where a more sociable soul than myself might find a game of dominoes, or even chess, if he were so inclined. Were it my wish to learn to paint landscapes, or achieve computer competency, I could do that, too, here at Desert Greens. But I don’t.
Though there is no denying a slight antiseptic air here at the Greens, don’t imagine it as a hospital or an institution exactly. I have my own quarters, albeit small, populated with my own things, though if eleven centuries have taught me anything it’s how to travel light. Thus, I possess comparatively little next to most of the ten- ants: two shelves’ worth of cherished books, from Virgil to Proust to O’Connor, and of course my dear Oscar; a few dozen history texts, ranging from the Greeks to the Romans to the Moors to the Americans; and an old Gideons Bible swiped decades before from the Oviatt Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (not by any means to be confused with the lavish Oviatt Building on Olive Street), along with a dozen jigsaw puzzles at any given time and a shoebox half- full of keepsakes, including my tags and medals from the war, a typed letter from one of my high school history students twenty years after I taught her, and the bone-handled jackknife my war buddy Johnny Brooks gave me. Then there’s my paperweight on the dresser, a walnut-sized spherical rock I found along the Oregon coast on my honeymoon with Gladys. Oh, what a beautiful wed- ding it was! Oh, what a lovely time we had in Cannon Beach!
Evenly spaced atop the dresser I keep three framed photographs of my beloved Gladys (or Gaya, if you will), gone these eight years. Still not a day goes by that I do not gaze at these photographs and think of her. In the first picture, a black and white portrait, Gladys is but a young woman of nineteen or twenty, many years before I’d found my way back to her. She looks at once delicate and formidable with her dark, intelligent eyes and her generous lips. She’s not smiling in the photo; rather her face is at rest for the occasion, her hands folded neatly in her lap.
In the second photograph, Gladys is in the prime of her life, 1948, flanked by her two girls, Donna and Nancy, six and eight years old respectively, the three of them clad in bathing suits and floppy sun hats, waving at the camera from Pismo Beach or some other California seaside retreat. I didn’t know Gladys then, either. Our fateful reunion was still twenty years in the future. Had I known it was coming, I might have done more with my life. If you look close enough at the photo, you’ll see that Gladys is still wearing the wedding ring from her first husband, Richard, who lost his life at Guadalcanal years before the photo was taken.
The final photograph depicts Gladys and me in midlife. It would have been the late-1970s, not long after we bought the house in Hesperia. There’s nothing particularly memorable about this instant frozen in perpetuity, no special occasion or importance attached to it. The photo was snapped by a busboy upon my request. Gladys and I are sitting at a table at King George’s Smorgasbord, wineglasses half-full, our dinner plates clean, both of us smiling, although Gladys cannot disguise a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights look, as though she wasn’t expecting the photograph. God, we were happy; for the whole of our thirty-five years together it seemed we were happy every step of the way; through every peak and valley our love abided surely and steadily. And why not? Our reunion was, after all, eleven hundred years in coming. And never once did we take it for granted.
But again, I digress.
The attendants here at Desert Greens are invariably cheerful, though most of them speak to me with that cloying condescension of the sort one might employ with a toddler or a puppy. I play along with them to some degree, though despite my vintage I am still “quite sharp,” an observation staff members share with me weekly. They are all very professional, which is to say attentive, even- tempered, if not consistently measured in their distance. While the others are fastidiously unyielding in their professionalism, which is fine by me, the one called Marguerite has been known to harmlessly flirt with me on occasion, a kindness I oblige as if it flatters me, though in truth nothing could arouse my ardor at this point, not with Gladys dead and gone. Aside from Marguerite’s occasional playful antics, the rest of the staff here at Desert Greens maintain a polite deference and patient disposition that never quite achieves warmth.
When Gladys died, there was nothing left for me to lose. Had I believed for one minute that it would’ve relieved my suffering, I would have taken my own life without question. But I knew that any such merciful conclusion was beyond my reach. Chances were, I would only be reborn one step further removed from Gladys, one more lifetime distant from Gaya.
After the memorial service, my slide into decrepitude was sudden and sweeping. It seemed I aged twenty years in a matter of weeks. The dishes piled up. The phone went unanswered. I stopped eating beyond the bare minimum, stopped bathing, and I hardly got out of bed. The mail piled up and the bills went unpaid. Neighbors’ casseroles were left untouched, until they eventually stopped coming around. Gladys’s daughters dropped by on occasion, invariably attempting to roust me out of my isolation for a meal in town or a walk in the park, but even Donna and Nancy gave up eventually. I was unreachable. A normal person would have given up the will to live and followed Gladys to her grave, but I was a preternaturally hearty physical specimen for any age, and besides, I knew that such a notion was futile. I’d been lucky enough to find my true love twice, but surely lightning would not strike thrice.
And so, I languished, holed up in my house, resigned to my isolation. To be honest, it was only the grubby state of the house, and the constant upkeep required to render it barely habitable, that finally drove me to Desert Greens.
From AGAIN AND AGAIN by Jonathan Evison, to be published in paperback on December 10th by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jonathan Evison.
Eugene “Geno” Miles is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his new nursing assistant, Angel, who is understandably skeptical of Geno’s insistence on having lived not just one life but many—all the way back to medieval Spain, where, as a petty thief, he first lucked upon true love only to lose it, and spend the next thousand years trying to recapture it.
Who is Geno? A lonely old man clinging to his delusions and rehearsing his fantasies, or a legitimate anomaly, a thousand-year-old man who continues to search for the love he lost so long ago?
As Angel comes to learn the truth about Geno, so, too, does the reader, and as his miraculous story comes to a head, so does the biggest truth of all: that love—timeless, often elusive—is sometimes right in front of us.
Literature and Fiction | Fiction Family Life [Dutton, On Sale: December 10, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593184165 / ]
Jonathan Evison is the author of four novels, including The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, West of Here, and All About Lulu. He lives on the coast of Washington State with his wife and two children.
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