James did not expect such a response. She was glad to find him? He thought of himself as pathetic. He was tall but did not weigh very much, a battle he had fought with his mother and then girlfriends throughout his life: why be with such a skinny boy? Even when he worked out, he would end up burning through muscle faster than he could produce it. He had nothing that was of interest to anyone, he thought. Especially not an immortal.

“I don’t understand, why did you choose me?” he asked. It was the question at the heart of so many of his decisions. He did not think he was worthy of much of the benefits in life. He had lived his life through easy decisions that left him in easy places. He never worked hard and never felt worthy of the successes he had throughout his life.

Immortality, that was a dream he had as a child. Like being tall or successful, it was something he always wanted. It seemed silly for him to think of it that way. He knew living forever was something every one wanted, at least in the abstract. What made it concrete for him, what made him fall in love with the idea through movies and books and television, was his father’s death when he was young. It changed so much about him, and to have yet another wish fulfilled so easily and with no effort. He could not understand why the world was set up as it was.

“Everyone asks that question,” Tomlin said. She looked thoughtfully across the table and put down her fork. “What if I was to tell you that it was not me that chose you? What if I told you that there is a spark in potentials that sets them apart from others. That if I tried to teach someone without that spark the spells that give us our long life, that I would likely fail. What if I was to tell you that you were special in some way that we immortals don’t understand, any more than we understand why a great athlete is great even before they put in all that hard work?”

“Are you telling me that? Is that true?” For a moment James Pleasant imagined that he was that special, that the world had been put together to fulfill his wishes. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to think that this was all for his benefit, that he was the center of the world. He knew it for what it was: his imagination. His ego run amok. He was self-aware to know that it wasn’t true. Not of it was true. He was who he was through accident or randomness, certainly not through any choices he had made. He just did not make good enough choices to warrant such attention.

Tomlin laughed. James was taken aback at first until he looked into her face. She was not laughing at him, as he first thought. She was laughing at his bumbling logic. Even he could see it from where he sat. She saw right through his thoughts. She understood him like nobody before did. “You are such a broken man,” she said, wiping a tear from the laughter from the corner of her eyelid. She popped open a makeup case and checked to see if she had done any damage to her eyeliner.

“Even immortals are vain,” James observed.

“We’re even worse than you can imagine.” Tomlin snapped the lid of her makeup case closed and looked across the table at James, studying him. “You don’t have to imagine, though. I want you in our world. What I said about the spark before, it’s not necessary. I can teach anyone off the street what I want to teach you. That’s why what Frankie Names did was such potentially revolutionary. Can you imagine a world where people can choose to live forever?”

“Why is that such a bad world?” James asked.

“If it was as simple as that—if the answer was that they really could live forever, I’d be all for it. I would be broadcasting the spell, paying for infomercials, dropping pamphlets on third world countries. The works. It’s just not as simple as that. The fight I had, the one with the sword guy in the parking lot, do you remember what I told you about him? Why we fought?”

“You said he was soulless.”

“Good, you do listen,” Tomlin said. “You certainly listened during class, but ever since that night, I wasn’t sure if you heard anything I said anymore. It worried me because your training was going to get much more difficult. But I don’t want to get ahead here. It’s the age: when we’re taught the spell, there are caveats. It’s a very simple spell, you’ll be able to cast it tomorrow morning if we begin tonight. There is a limitation, though. There’s an understanding about the spell: if you cast it on yourself on your one hundred twentieth birthday, you cast it on a body that no loses its soul.”

James remembered that Tomlin and the Sword Guy spoke about numbers before they fought. Their conversation, which had seared itself into his brain along with the memory of Tomlin slicing him in two, started to make more sense. “So he made the wrong choice and you had to fight him?”

Tomlin chewed at the end of the straw to her water glass. She seemed deep in thought as if what he said puzzled her, or she had not thought through the ramifications. “It’s more complicated than that. Magic in this world has a price. And like I started to explain last week, magic is different than you think. The world is built on top of many dimensions. What we see is just the lowest dimension in a series leading upward. We don’t know what’s on top, but through the teachings, we can access the higher dimensions, which have a direct influence on the dimensions on worlds below the higher ones. The higher you go up in dimensions, the greater the influence on the lower dimension.

“For example, if you’re only one dimension higher, then a small effect only has a slightly larger effect on this dimension. But if you’re five dimensions higher, then a small effect has a huge effect on this dimension.

“Most magicians cannot access more than one or two worlds beyond this one. If you reach too far or too quickly, you can lose yourself.”

James enjoyed listening to Tomlin speak. She had a calm way of explaining things. She was patient and while she used simple words and tones, it never felt like she was talking down to her students. It was one of things he really liked about her, one of the things that attracted him to her, beyond just a teacher student relationship. He knew it was wrong to think this way, particularly because of what he witnesses the previous week. But it being wrong did not change how even the gibberish she spoke to him now excited him in a way that he was not comfortable. He wanted to hear more—and not just hear more because he wanted the powers she spoke. He just wanted to listen to her because she was a beautiful, intelligent, and powerful woman.

“What does this, this ‘dimensionality’ have to do with losing your soul?” James asked.

“Your soul is what lets you travel through those dimensions. There is no real sense of body beyond this world.”

“I don’t understand, if you lose your soul, then you lose your magic also. Didn’t you explain that magic was about moving through the different dimensions? And then you just said that applying effort in different dimensions was what you called magic.”

“You are certainly a quick study.”

“I always knew my philosophy major would be good for something.”

“I tell you this by way of background. We actually do not know what the soul has to do with the spell. The people who wrote the book—and I mean that literally—told us that there is an upper limit of one hundred twenty years that the body houses the soul. Once that deadline is hit, the soul leaves the body, and what’s left—and this we do have experience with—what’s left if a monster.”

“What type of evidence do you have?”

“Evidence? Everyone always talks about evidence. I have known many people who have passed that threshold.”

“Anyone I would know?” James asked, only half joking. He could see world events coalescing around these great immortals. Maybe there was a cabal of people out there with experience, money, and power beyond imagining. Imagine a world where Hitler was immortal, where he developed his theories and power through countless years.

“No, likely not. The immortals don’t care as much about this world as you would think. That’s why I was describing the dimensions. What happens on this world, for the most part, does not change much on the other dimensions. If we continue with my example, a small change in this world only makes the tiniest of changes on the higher dimensions. Those dimensions do not care as much about money or power or even living as the world down here does. The dimensions are much more spiritual.”

“Are you saying that these other dimensions have to do with religion?”

“In a sense. Each immortal, when they’re taught this system, apply it to the world vision they were taught. Some find those religions fit within this understanding, others disagree. The great churches of the world at some point understood this. Some of them might have been founded under this belief system. But we are where we are without their influence, at least amongst the people I know.”

“You keep speaking of ‘we’ when you talk about that world. Who is this ‘we’?”

“I think we’ve had enough pancake talk for one day. We have to get you home and get your training started in earnest tomorrow. There will be plenty of time for you to learn about this world. Time enough to satisfy even your raging curiosity.”

Craig Stevens had not yet recovered from the broadcast of the last Good Show. He was still fielding calls from his agent about the success of the show. Everyone wanted to know what went on during the whispering. He had received more offers and more money during that time than ever. The producers of the Good Show were even planning a special episode where he could be the interviewee. They wanted him to explain what happened, analyze the events, milk the event for as much as possible.

Frankie Names had not been heard from since the end of the show. While some of the world’s audience was very interested in what he had to say, there were many that were already calling him a fraud. Craig’s publicity people wanted to play up on this. They wanted to claim that it had been Craig Stevens who had once again shown the world that the skeptics would always bring truth to the world. But Craig’s heart wasn’t in it.

That first night, and for each night afterwards, Craig had spoken the incantation that was burned into his mind. It was as if Frankie had written the letters on top of his eyelids. With just a thought, the words would appear in front of him and he could pronounce the strange letters and incantations. He had tried to avoid it, to forget it the first day. But every evening since, they had appeared almost as if unbidden and he had chanted the words.

He did not feel much different. He looked in the mirror each morning and saw the same perfect teeth and tired eyes. There was no special glow or realization that he was more than he had been before the show. His girlfriend did not see anything different. He had seen her the day after the show, but he had asked her to leave, and had not called her since then. She left him messages and mails, but he ignored them, like he ignored everything from the outside world. His agent had stopped by every day to deliver the mail and messages. Craig let him in—his incessant knocking had forced it upon Craig—but did not talk much with him. The agent wanted to know his plans. He was fielding so many calls, all of them good. And yet Craig was not ready to answer any of them.

It was why he was walking down the dark street passed midnight. He needed to get away. He needed to think. Only an hour before he had again chanted the symbols that appeared in his head. He had seen more this time. Each time he opened that window in his head, more things started to come down that opening. He did not understand what he was seeing or what was happening. The scientist in him kept quiet. That was the worst part: the scientist made him the cynic who he was. For it to be suddenly silent with this evidence in front of him left him feeling cold. He did not know what any of it meant.

The streets were deserted in his neighborhood.

Daily word count: 2,223.

Words remaining: 28,164 (21,836).

I wrote a tremendous amount of exposition today. I’m not proud, but it did eat up lots of words and set the story back on track. Well, sort of.