My father the adjunct physics professor and experimental scientist was dying and I had one final request. I had been thinking it over for a while. My husband sat beside me, our sleeping son in his arms. My daughter ran through the corridors of the hospital looking for sweets to steal and I did not have the heart to stop her.
“What more do you want from me, greedy girl?” Papa said.
“I want to be immortal,” I told him.
Papa managed to laugh. “One lifetime is more than anyone should suffer.”
“I want to live forever. To travel through deserts and jungles and uncharted lands. To see the world in all its tragedy and glory,” I said. This did not take, so I added, “Pretty please?”
Papa sighed existentially. “I have never done anything like that before.”
My husband shook his head. “Forever?” He wiped drool from our son’s mouth.
Papa closed his eyes. I could see he was not dying but thinking. “You will have to do it all on your own,” he said. He told me what to do. I had to make the concoction in his moldy basement. Before I drank it, I needed to meditate on what immortality meant to me. “But do not go until I tell you,” Papa said. On our fourth day by his side, he gave me the nod. “Get out of here, silly fool. Just leave a few drops for me, all right?”
I drove to his dreary apartment complex by the university. A sleep-deprived graduate student was eating tacos in the parking lot. In the basement, I found that though Papa had mostly packed up his creations, the hologram of my mother still floated in the air, above a glass bust of my grandmother. Mama waved at me, her teeth as white as the meringues of my childhood. I waved back and shattered the bust of my grandmother. I swept the glass into a plastic tub. Then I stirred the ingredients in a bowl: a few dog hairs, a pinch of sea salt, two birch branches, a green icy liquid. I pondered immortality sitting on the damp floor.
Not long after Mama died, Papa let me ditch high school to drive across the country. One fall evening, we stopped at a mountain in Wisconsin, of all places. The trees were luminous and fiery. The clouds were tufts of heaven. The creek below flowed by like a daydream. Even the endless field was beguiling. Papa cracked open two beers and put an arm around me as we regarded the landscape. He turned to me as if to expound on nature’s soothing effect on the soul.
“Now you must push me off this mountain,” he said. “I am ready for oblivion. I lack the courage to jump. Tell everyone it was an accident.”
“Oblivion?”
“You will live with your grandmother in Kiev. It will be lovely. I miss your mother too much and I cannot grade any more exams,” he said, desperation filling his voice.
I regarded my father and took a long sip of beer. I saw him reading Mayakovsky by Mama’s grave, hair slick with grease. Leaving office hours reeking of vodka. Singing Soviet ballads under the stars on his balcony, longing for the Motherland. No, this would not do.
I decided I loved him enough to put him out of his misery. I stepped behind him and prepared for the big shove. But the sun began to set right then, filling the landscape with a fierce golden light—it was the most beautiful thing. Papa lifted a hand to stop me. He said, “All right, then. We keep driving.” We finished our beers and chucked them into the void.
That was what immortality meant to me, feeling infinite on top of that mountain.
My throat sizzled as the potion went down. I had swallowed a tiny piece of glass and choked a little. I left a few drops in the bowl. Mama stuck her tongue out at me as I was leaving.
Back at the hospital, I found my husband standing outside Papa’s room holding my son with a blank face. My daughter was finally still, sucking on a lollipop by his side, and I knew what it meant. My sly father had sent me away so I would not see him die. He had left me a note. I hope forever suits you. Sprinkle leftover potion on my grave. Kiev cake for you in the freezer.
We buried him the next day and I sprinkled the remaining liquid over the soil.
I put the contents of Papa’s basement in a storage unit and cleaned out his rented apartment. Gave his stained patchy furniture to the desperate grad students nearby. I never learned to make Kiev cake the way Papa did. There were too many steps.
I grew older, older, older, then old. My children were grown. They had children too, well-meaning brats who even seemed to care for me on occasion. I died before my husband. I felt my body receding and a crystal sharpness filled my marrow. A flash of light and I was alive again.
I didn’t quite get what I asked for, but who does? I returned as an enormous glass head and shoulders on top of my beloved mountain. The view was electric. People from all over the world and my family members flocked to see me. I was hollow and you could enter me through my left shoulder. The first time my husband walked in, I felt like I ate ice cream too fast.
“You could never leave well enough alone,” he said, shaking his head. “We didn’t have an extravagant life, but we had a good one. The children wore decent clothes to school. Summers in Florida. It wasn’t nothing. It was enough.”
I wished I could tell him I loved him. I wished I could feel it when he put a hand on the inside of my throat.
He died a few years later, but my children continued to visit. The world changed quickly. They were putting fur on airplanes, for some reason. Steely skyscrapers loomed on the horizon. In the space around me, my visitors tossed pennies, which I gathered had become obsolete. They glimmered in the sunlight. The view still killed me but my favorite part was when the thunderstorms lit up the sky with their veiny electricity.
Sometimes, Papa’s disapproving face would hover above me like a toxic cloud.
“You got what you wanted, little fool,” he’d say, before fading.
My children died too, though my grandchildren kept coming. They were reasonably well-adjusted, all things considered. Then my grandchildren died. Then my great-grandchildren. The great-greats still visited, but I didn’t feel close to them. We did not have much in common.
I was beginning to have regrets. The sunsets wore me out. The skyscrapers blocked more and more of my view. The air grew heavy with smoke. The pennies had all rusted. I longed for the abyss. When the thunder raged, I begged for it to shatter me. But it kept clapping on. Papa’s visits grew less frequent.
Though I felt more and more distant from my progeny, I fell in love with my stubborn great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter. The girl was a riot. She shoved handfuls of candy in her mouth and loved stealing my pennies. Eventually, the lightning did strike me, but it only filled me with its mad energy and gave me the power to speak.
I waited to make my move. I told my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter what to do when her parents weren’t listening.
“You sure?” she said.
“I have not had a dessert or an orgasm in three hundred years,” I said. “It’s time.”
She shrugged and agreed, little idiot. Shoved pennies into her bulging pockets. Grabbed a rock and launched it at my temple. I shattered wildly. I had blood again and it was shivering. I felt lovely and cool. This was the real most beautiful thing. I thought that would be the end.
That was a few generations ago. My shards are scattered all over the mountain now. Nobody could bear to punish my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter for what she had done. It was too hard to clean up my pieces. Some are slowly melting into the earth, which hurts a bit. I see the world from all the shards at once, as if I had settled inside the guts of a manic piano. I have noted a change in my father’s tone during his rare visits.
“I should have forced you to listen,” he tells me. “I should not have given you so many sweets when you were a girl. But who could resist you?”
One of my shards got snatched up by a squirrel and dropped along the creek at the foot of the mountain. I hear the trout swimming and the trees rustling and, on occasion, a fisherman arrives and I feel less lonely as he hums his ancient song. Another shard was picked up by a child who abandoned it outside a grove of wildflowers. Sometimes teenagers park by the field and make love on a blanket beside me, and I am soothed by their savage moans.
My family has scattered, like my shards, so they almost never visit my pieces. But I feel them around me, like the stars shining down on me, the sun baking me, the wind making me sing like a wine glass whose rim is tenderly stroked. This maddening world! I will never get to the bottom of it. It wrecks me and thrills me so much it burns. So much that I want it to break me all over again. I would let it if it could.
Maria Kuznetsova’s first novel, Oksana, Behave!, will be published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in 2019. Her fiction appears in McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
