THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE SEA AND TIME

Everyone talks about their lives in stages, whether they know it or not. Oh, that, that was childhood. I was a teenager then. My twenties… Middle-age. My twilight years. I stopped doing that somewhere around my centenary, but not because I chose to, it was because I couldn’t keep track any longer. 

Things still loomed large in my mind, of course. The wars. The dissolution of the later days. The raids and the hunters and the close calls. The books and the money and the…song. Those were like spires of rock rising above the oblivion of immortality; and as more and more time passes, that water-line creeps. It slides up, rubbing memory smooth and removing the divots and indents of perception with the mute, pure, calm of infinity. 

It takes time to come to grips with immortality. People and places come and go, and as you travel through time, blameless, they run like wax. At first you play people games. Lust. Love. Commitment. But soon you find yourself ill-suited for such shackles. You are a puzzle piece that does not belong on the table…you have too many connections and they are all too complex. Nothing fits you. 

This is not to say that it is all bad. While the people have bled into an ever flowing tide of color streaming through the channels of time, the world has contracted, pulling in on itself. Machines have spanned it. Vehicles have plied it. People have been flung throughout it. I have travelled too. 

People today seem to think I’m German. I suppose I look it and just yesterday on a trolley a man called me “young woman.” I’ve found that life is about these little moments of humor

Though I am technically an American (but there is no way to claim this without questions), I was born on Tofol in the Pacific in 1816. My name is Agnes Eliot and I am 203 years old this October, and I’ve waited to be called home for a long, long, time. My father left me there and I never knew him. By the time we had heard of the place in New England, many of the original crew that visited the island were dead or had gone to sea. In any case, he left us.  

My mama told me that I was special. That Eliot’s blood and her blood had made a flower the likes of which the island had never seen. I grew up there, in paradise, and though I was accepted, I never felt I was one of them. Mama hired a German woman from Ponape as a governess and she taught me the ways of the west. It was only right, she said. 

She paid that woman in gold that was later recovered from a ship-wreck off Ant Atoll by my cousins. 

The children there on the island, they were not like me, they were all called back to the sea, growing stranger each year, one by one. The last, Peter, left in 1889. Then mama in 1920. I stayed, for a time on my own. But then I took the gold and made my way into the world. It was what mama told me the call had said to her. I don’t miss her, not really, because I know she’s still down there, thinking of me even now. I will see her again, in time, when my work here is done.

Today, I go where the call sends me. For a time I was in New England. Another time, in France. Another, in Nicaragua. Gold is a great equalizer and can make amazing things happen. Immortality also grants boons. A far-reaching sight and a level of planning unknown to anything crammed into 70 brief years of life. I have banked. I have spread my inheritance around the globe. I have nine passports and as many identities. I have agents and servants and companies and all that comes with it. In this world of machines my reach is complete. 

And now, I am home. 99 years later. Gulf Stream G5 to Gabert airfield. Then to the resort. The storm set in two hours after we landed under pristine skies. Now, it's like a typhoon out of season. Roaring wind. Rain. And I stand here, smiling, looking out the window as it comes down. And I look out at the place the call has sent me, finally, and I think, all that remains of the world this island once was is myself, the sea, and time.

Then the voice — small and still and whispering — finally tells me what is coming next.