Page 96 of We Were Eternal Once

Perhaps this is what kept me from dying. My plans were always delayed by some invention or discovery.

Once I understand how to travel by train, I will find a stake and drive it through my heart.

Once I fly in an aeroplane, I will compel a human to remove my head.

It took several months of constant feeding for my ability to coerce to return. I moved through the French countryside into Germany, killing and eating indiscriminately. Then I overheard someone mention the string of disappearances along the countryside, and I migrated to a larger city.

Berlin is divided by a wall that separates it into East and West. I’ve never seen something like it before. I long to investigate it, but that risks being shot. Not that it would kill me, but it would be suspicious if I walked away from that.

I learned of the wars that fed me. Battles happened in my field, the blood of the dead children the countries sent to fight for them keeping me alive.

I knew war. I was alive during the time of Roman conquest, of the rise of Christianity, of the countless left dead at the feet of others’ ambition. But I did not understand the scale of a war with guns and bombs and aeroplanes. No wonder the earth shook me awake. No wonder the blood was so despondent.

Humans moved forward in time but backward in civility.

“They’ve been saying that for years,” grumbles another man.

“Half a million people in Alexanderplatz is nothing to grumble at,” says the first. “And Honecker resigned.”

“So? They replace one man just so another can do the same thing,” the second scoffs.

“Hey! Turn up Tagesschau!” calls a man, pointing to the television. All the bars have them, though they typically play humorous TV shows. Sometimes they keep the news on, like now.

“This 9 November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone. The gates in the Wall stand open wide,” the news anchor proclaims.

The bar erupts in too much noise, I have to leave.

I walk through the streets of West Berlin as the news spreads. All around me, the humans celebrate in the streets, raising their alcohol high into the air and cheering. It is hard not to become infected by their joy.

I sit atop a building near the wall, watching the crowds pulse and surge through the checkpoint. People dance in the street, others throw their arms around the humans they’d been separated from.

Would it last? Would it be as the man at the bar said, and nothing will change?

I could stay and watch.

Or I could move on.

I could do anything I wanted, and that was terrifying. Before, I would have to tiptoe around the suggestion of relocating. It had to be your idea, it had to be an area you found pleasing. There was much to maneuver when deciding where to go and why.

But you aren’t here. It is just me that needs convincing.

And that makes it all the harder.

Budapest, 1994

The music that pours from the building does not match its exterior. The building is old, perhaps erected before I buried myself alive, and it crumbles with ill repair. The entire city is this way, with bullet holes in aged stone structures, next to neon signs advertising western products.

After the Wall fell, I headed east to see what lay on that side of the world, a world everyone said was collapsing. It was strange to walk through the graveyard of a civilization I did not know. When Greece and Rome and the Caliphate fell, I was there to see it. When the Christians rose from slavery and destroyed all that came before them, I knew what was lost.

I learned so much by listening, by wandering through bars and cities. I learned of television, but that most of what I saw was not real. Sitcoms, they were called. A group of people living in New York City, talking of their relationship problems. A man who sat on a couch and hated the woman he married. These were from the west, from a country that did not exist when I tried to die.

It was in a bar that I met Réka. She had short hair she colored blue and metal in her lip and eyebrow. She wore old black clothes and military grade boots she found secondhand. She cursed loudly and openly.

She was a whirlwind of a woman, like nothing I’d ever seen before.

She saw me sitting at a bar without a drink and climbed onto the stool next to me. Her breath was warm with liquor, but her words were confident.

“New to city?” she asked in English.