The Art of Living Forever
by Matthew Schuele

I think I left my voice box on the cliff.
Hell.
And there he is, they’re drudging our hero out of the water, and he looks as if maybe he drowned. No, no. He’s breathing. This time, he is.
I’m still breathing, and heavily. Funny how you can take that sort of thing for granted when it’s not too difficult. I can kind of gurgle a bit, make a hollow noise, but all it does is hurt when I try to speak.
I went numb and then ice-cold the second he cut me. My head was still attached, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Then I could feel the wet, warm slick, pouring down my neck, onto and into my uniform and it hurt so much, at least it let me know that I was still alive.
Laguna’s breathing. Not conscious. Kiros is breathing, barely conscious.
There’s a moment in which I wonder what death is like, if this is death, the heaviness on my eyelids and the fading into a sort of serene peace...
The end, then.
And while it’s more than sleep, it’s less than death, and I gradually feel myself go unconscious.

I’ve been relocated indefinitely to the desert prison... funny, I noted in approaching it, that it was shaped like a giant screw. I was fairly sure it was a bad omen. The army didn’t want me around any more, didn’t want to pay the medical bills any longer than they had to.
The doctor has told me that I’ll never speak again. That’s the least of my abilities to lose, at least. I can still hear the rustling of leaves, the soft morning wind, the rain against the window. I can still see the faces of the people around me, the cold soldiers and guards interspersed with the faces of the prisoners and the slaves, the Moombas.... I can still feel the cold steel they made this place out of, the wooden broom handle, the artificial, plastic bucket, the layer of grime that coats everything here.
I can feel many other things, too. I often I wish I could not.

The others were discharged as well. No word of them.
I’m cleaning up the floors on Level 7, like I do every day at this time. Every day, the mop swirls around in the water and applies the water in layers to the floor. I’m not convinced that the water is less dirty than the floors. Everything gets a layer of grime here, after a few weeks. Nothing leaves clean, nothing untouched.
Every day. It might be the weekend; I don’t know. In prison, for the staff as much as for the inmates, time is divided into work and sleep. The lights do not go off.
Every day.

One month.
The mop swirls around in the dirty water, conjuring up a cloud of smoky brown, and I go to sleep thinking about it.
The smoky brown swirls around in my mind, until it formulates itself into the remainder of an explosion, a cloud of charred debris after the blast. Kiros and I are waiting on one side of the door, Laguna on the other. Esthar gunfire pours through the opening, cutting tiny chinks in the luminous green stone floor and in the metal walkways. Laguna steps out to fire a burst, eyes narrowed to slits, thin eyebrows cut to 45-degree angles on a forehead knotted with tension. Metallic clangs, then heavy thuds as a few bullets pierce armor and hit flesh. Some of the gunfire falls silent. Laguna’s spun around by a hit to the shoulder, and curses his way to the floor.
“Agh! Kiros--”
The thin, dark man’s on it before he finishes the sentence. Kiros leaps through the door into the fray, twin Katal flashing as he takes on two Esthar soldiers at once. I leap into action, as a third soldier comes up from behind Kiros, saber drawn. I throw the lance, javelin-like, impaling him where he stands. Kiros has left the other two dead or unconscious. The soft blue glow behind me tells me that Laguna’s healing his wound with magic.
Five have fallen. We stand, outnumbered before, but nevertheless alive, and subjected to great tension, but nevertheless the best of friends.

Two months.
“Dumb jackass.” A grizzled old prisoner shoves me aside in the cafeteria line. I’m not in line. Mopping the floors, rather, from a fight a few nights ago. Many people have gone in within my lifetime. I haven’t seen very many leave.
A guard shoves him back. Nightstick discipline. I don’t like either group of people. The prisoner kicks out at me, striking a glancing blow under the ribs.
I look at him, mournfully. He says nothing, and a moment later is turned away. I am not sure whether I’d speak, if I could.

Three months.
These fantasies are rapidly becoming all that’s left to give me any hope. These dreams.
A moth flits about toward the light, back and forth, back and forth...
Tonight we’re piloting a shuttle.
“Dive, Kiros!” I shout. The ship shoots downward as we blaze through Esthar, enemy fighters closing all about us. Laguna mans the starboard mounted gun, blasting away at them with a chorus of war whoops. I pick off enemy fighters at a rapid rate from the port mounted gun, the wind whipping past my face, the scenery streaking by. The shuttle flits about toward the enemy base, back and forth, back and forth...
Kiros banks sharply to avoid a volley of enemy gunfire from both directions. The base’s missiles take out a few of the ships, the ships’ blasts leave pock-marks on the base. With Kiros at the helm, our ship swoops about swiftly, with great agility.
“Locked on target!” yells Laguna. He fires a special explosive charge, knocking in a section of the base’s roof. As the ship circles, the port side begins to face their base. The gleaming energy battery’s exposed. Slowly, calmly, I switch the firing mode to explosive shells, take aim, and accounting for our speed and direction, fire. The base explodes like a Sorceress’ Parade fireworks show.
We all three yell congratulations and shouts of victory as we speed away, easily evading enemy fighters. We could live forever.

Four months.
They are supposed to have different blocks for the men and women, but prisons have become overcrowded under Deling. I once believed he would make Galbadia great. Now I realize that he will, absolutely, but at the cost of the future of the rest of the continent... perhaps the rest of the world. I don’t know.
I knew that from the beginning, actually. I didn’t think much of foreigners. But here in this place, this desert prison, I can’t tell Galbadia from Timber from Dollet from Balamb from Esthar. Not by their faces, their eyes, their desperate voices. Their crying in the night.
I haven’t really slept in weeks, which I know is not normal and probably should not be possible. I’ve eaten very little. Too dependent on the dreams, I needed a way out. I’m reading now, and I have taken a fuller view of the world thanks to these few books lying around... biographies, a few novels, Evelion’s famous Knight. I’ve built a much larger vocabulary, ironically. I spend my nights running a finger across my scarred face in the artificial light of this prison at nighttime, listening to them crying. I don’t cry, aloud.

Five months.
The last thing I heard was crying, and I’m back on a mission. Human wailing has become that of an alarm, and bright red lights glare as we run from the missile base. Almost out, almost out...
A hail of bullets speed past us, sparking against the wall with the door in it. In a single fluid motion I turn and throw the harpoon, and Laguna fires a return burst. I pull the harpoon back by a attached chain. Kiros throws a Firaga that ignites some spilled fuel, keeping some distance between the soldiers and us. They no longer have a nationality in my mind. They are the enemy.
A few more bullets hit the walls around us, but that’s no matter-- we run. Faster, lighter than I’ve ever run before, I lead the charge out into the flat desert, the warm sun and the cracked soil and a the glaring daylight. Laguna pitches a grenade back in their direction as we pile into the ATV. Laguna climbs to the top, swinging himself up the rungs of the ladder and fires away as we escape. I drive; Kiros observes. A moment later Laguna swings back down into the seat beside me and slams the door heavily. The base explodes, and the shock of the impact kicks the ATV up on two wheels. I remember my training as I steer into the fall, leveling out the tires and putting the other two back onto the ground.
For a moment, all is silent as we speed away. It doesn’t last long. We high-five and elate appropriately.

Six months.
It’s a stupor now, if anything.
I’ve read the Knight far too many times. Each reading brings out another subtle nuance, another hidden layer of meaning. I have read the voices, followed the stage directions around my small room, just like the cells but for that I have the key. Once in a while, someone will look in the tiny window and see me walking about, reading from the Knight, silently reading the lines, lips moving quietly.
They never say a thing. A few think I’m crazy. I don’t care, particularly. One day they will find me dead of a stroke in my room, likely enough. An inauspicious burial in the prison graveyard on the lowest floor, and back to business as usual.
I am heartsick beyond belief for Kiros and Laguna, my closest friends in the world. Once, maybe. They are not coming back.

Seven months. Another dream.
Of course, we have won again; of course, celebratory measures are in order. This time we defended an allied power generator-- just the three of us, against an army of them. Victorious again.
We’re in Deling City’s famous plaza movie theater. On the far left, Julia. Next is Laguna, holding her hand. Myself, then Kiros.
The movie is a film production of Evelion’s Knight. Laguna plays the knight, onscreen, battling against a fierce Ruby Dragon. Unlike the script I read before, two other knights accompany him-- played, of course, by Kiros and I. And in the movie, we win. Of course. Laguna and Julia kiss, and everything is perfect.

Sometime thereafter, I came to the realization that I had spent a certain amount of time in prison asleep and dreaming, but I wasn’t sure how long it had been, or which incidents in my life here had been part of the dreams, and couldn’t really ask. I am sure now that some of the time I was not sleeping, I was sleeping, and perhaps even faded in and out of dreams without realizing it.
One thing I do know with some clarity-- when I walked into an empty cell to clean it one day, I found three transparent people. I approached them, curiously, and one of the two who were unconscious-- a young man with unkempt blonde hair and a the edge of a large, abstract black tattoo forming a half-circle around one of his eyes-- opened his eyes, which drifted lazily toward me and then opened wide in shock a few moments after stopping on my face. Then I went unconscious, and woke up sometime later, unless I am still dreaming. I don’t know what this means-- I’m sure it’s something
of some significance, but it’s probably best not to dwell on it.
As I said, they don’t separate the male and the female prisoners anymore. The prison in its entirety is falling apart in every sense of the word, and it won’t be long now... not long at all...
There’s a fairly young female prisoner around now whose name I don’t know. Her hair is brown and stringy and cut off in places, and half of her face is as near ideal as I have ever seen and the other half is thoroughly marked and scarred and deformed. I don’t know her crime, if there was any. Truth be told, everyone who goes into this place is a prisoner, one way or another.

I had read about a Sorceress Parade before, and I’m seeing one now. Beautiful fireworks, music, images... all indistinct, yes, but I can tell what they are enough to know they’re beautiful. Kiros is here, and Laguna with Julia, and so am I, with the scarred girl, who’s no longer scarred in my dream.

I do not know her name, and I cannot talk with her, but the morning I woke up from the dream I was deeply saddened to know that I had fallen in a strange sort of love with the scarred girl. It’s not a practical love and probably not the deepest love, but it is an immediate and undeniable connection. And I could never say the words...
...all the times worked out in my mind, the things I’d say and the things I’d do, and I have fairly successfully deluded myself into thinking on some level that things would be much better if I could talk, and perfect if the two of us could be together. On a more rational level, I know that this could not be true.
But damn if I don’t think about it anyway.
And I make a point of smiling at her, and treating her kindly, which I had never done to anyone else at the prison, and she seems to appreciate it and smiles back. I wonder what she’s done to be here, as she certainly seems a nice enough person.
Earlier today I asked the registration office in writing: “SCARRED GIRL’S CRIME?”
She found information for Anarchist Monthly, I learned. I did not ask her name, stupidly, and I don’t want to bother them again today-- anyway, it’s unlikely that they’d answer a second question in a day. I have been here for at least a year, and I should have known better than to fall in love, if that’s what I did.

Tonight I’m dreaming of her again, but not as before.
The scarred mess only goes down to her collarbone on that side, I learn, which I suspect is true. It’s a dream more clear and more real than any I’ve ever had, and I almost want to ask her in the morning if she dreamed of the same thing. I stole a pad of paper and a pen from the materials office, so I can do that a bit now.
And in some ways, I almost know it’s a dream-- holding her in my arms, skin on skin all over, and I can speak, and everything is perfect, but I’ve been through too much to suppose that anything’s ever perfect. Nothing is ever really flawless...
At one point she whispers my name, though in life she doesn’t know it. And I whisper her name back, and though I know I won’t be able to remember it afterwards, as I speak it I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s her true name.

They took the scarred girl out in a body bag this morning, and buried her in the makeshift graveyard on the lowest level of the prison.
I knew that nothing could come of my feelings for her, but now I’m weighing my reasons for living and suddenly, there don’t seem to be any more. There is the faint hope, perhaps, that I may see Laguna again, which is not impossible. But it is as unlikely as any of my other dreams, and I don’t have enough hope to warrant pinning it all on that tiny chance.
As she was being tortured for information, her heart simply stopped. I did not see her, but can well imagine her body hanging limp, crucified on the torture chamber’s electrical cross.
I took the stolen pen and notepad, again, and wrote it out, as whether it was ever true or not in the real sense of the word, it needed to be said. “I LOVE YOU.” The note is most likely still on the grave marked only with a metal plate giving only prisoner number and dates of birth and death, as I cannot think of a reason anyone would have moved it (no one goes down there if not required to.) I still do not know her name.
I’ve taken the necessary length of cable, and have determined that the light fixture will hold long enough. At this point, I would like little more than to be with friends, with loved ones. If there is an afterlife, I hope that I will be able to speak with her there. If not, then nothing will at least be better than pain.

Light fixture snapped, but it put me out for some days anyway. There was no more damage to be done to my throat, in all honesty, short of snapping my neck. This did not occur, and all I suffered was mild oxygen deprivation for a short period of time.
Barely awake, I think I heard one of the prison doctors recommend letting me die, not wanting to waste the state’s money. I am not sure whether I’m glad to be alive or not.

Too long.
It has been more than a year, much more than a year... how much more, I do not know. I do not look significantly older than I did upon entering, though much less healthy. Everything gets a layer of grime on it here, and nothing leaves unchanged. I do not have anything left in the world, and I cannot tell when one day ends and the next begins, though I sleep when it’s necessary. I can talk to no one, and no one wants to talk to me.
I feel as if I’ve been alive, and in this place, forever.
I don’t care anymore, and though not suicidal I do not have a particular desire to live, either. There is no hope in this place. I’ve seen innumerable prisoners come, and some go, but .
The director’s shouting in his office, about how “he has a steady income here” and “he doesn’t want to go back into the danger” and “this request is no different from your others” and “I can’t fire him against his will” and if it’s any break in the monotony, well, the room could most probably use cleaning. I open the door and wheel the equipment in--
and it’s...
them...
And the whole conversation becomes clear to me, and the awful deception and lies I’ve been laboring under these past years. And I take from a pocket the pen and notepad I stole long ago, and used but those few times.
“I QUIT.”
When the mute speak, one has no choice but to listen, and Laguna, Kiros, and I walk out.

We sit awkwardly in the car. Laguna has explained to me how he’s become a traveling writer for Timber Maniacs. He found Kiros some time ago, and every once in a while he’s come to the prison to ask for my release, or at least to talk to me. He has been turned down every time. I suppose the director realized that no one would willingly fill my position were I to leave. But Laguna and Kiros and I sit in the car, having greeted each other in such capacity as we could, and there’s nothing to say.
“Well, how have you been?” Kiros manages.
“HELL,” I write.
“Yeah... well...”
A few more moments pass in silence. And finally:
“Damn, but I’m glad to see you again!”
And I start crying, just barely, for the first time in recent memory, and manage a smile, a feeling that has been foreign to me for a long time. We begin to drive down the highway, toward the horizon. I hadn’t seen the sky in so long... and it’s so beautiful...
“Days like this,” says Laguna, “I dunno... I feel like I could live forever.”
Once again, and for the first time in years, I am with my friends, and we have the whole world ahead of us.

[end]