The Lucky One

On the morning they told me I would never die, I was on my knees fixing a toilet in the mayor's guest bathroom.

My name is Elwood Pike. I was forty-one, an assistant plumber with a bad back and a wife named Clara who was kinder than I had any right to expect. The man from the Bureau of Perpetuity found me with my arm down the tank. He wore a gray suit and carried himself like someone delivering flowers to the wrong address.

"Mr. Pike," he said, "you have been selected."

Here is how it works. Every thirty years the government gives away exactly one dose of the serum. That is the law, and the law is proud of itself. One citizen per generation is permitted to live forever. Everyone is entered at birth, whether they want to be or not. The odds are worse than getting struck by lightning while a shark bites your leg. But somebody has to win. That year it was a plumber with a bad back.

Lucky me.

They put me in a tuxedo I did not own. The President shook my hand on a stage, and there was a cake with my face on it in frosting, and a marching band played a song written for the occasion called "Forever, Friend." Clara stood in the front row in a borrowed dress and cried, and at the time I thought she was crying from happiness. Later I understood she was smarter than the whole marching band put together.

The serum tasted like flat soda. I waited to feel eternal. I felt like a plumber in a tuxedo.

And so on.

Afterward they took me to meet the others. They call themselves the Everlasting Fellowship, which is a grand name for four tired people in a room that smells of furniture polish. One per generation, going back, so there were only a handful of us left from all the years the program had run.

There was Mrs. Adeline Frost, who won ninety years before me. She had been a schoolteacher. She had read every book ever written, she told me, and was now reading them all a second time, in case she had missed something. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman looking for an exit in a room with no doors.

There was a man named Cortez who had won thirty years before her and had not spoken a full sentence in decades. He sat by the window and watched the traffic. Traffic was the thing he had decided to be interested in. It was as good a thing as any.

"You'll want to pick something," Mrs. Frost told me. "Something to be interested in. It has to last."

I told her I was interested in going home to my wife.

She smiled the way you smile at a child who does not yet know what a hospital is.

Clara and I had a son. We named him Dennis. I would like to tell you about Dennis, but there is not enough room in any story for a whole person, so I will tell you only the important part.

He got old.

That is the part they leave off the cake. Your boy is born, and you teach him to ride a bicycle, and you blink, and he is a gray man with your wife's eyes and a cough he can't shake. I sat by Dennis's bed when he was eighty-three and I was still forty-one, and he held my hand and called me Dad, and then he was gone, and I was the youngest-looking man at my own son's funeral.

Clara went four years after that. She made me promise to keep the porch light working. She said a house with a dark porch looks like nobody loves it. Then she squeezed my hand and stopped.

I have kept the porch light working for a very long time now.

Lucky me.

The Fellowship met once a year, every year, forever. We stopped celebrating. Mostly we counted. We counted the ones we had outlived — the wives, the husbands, the sons, the presidents, the countries. Adeline Frost kept the list in a ledger. When one ledger filled, she started another. She had a whole shelf of them. She said the list was the only thing that still felt alive, because it was the only thing that kept moving.

I understood her by then. It had only taken me a hundred years.

The lottery went on giving away its one dose every thirty years, and every thirty years a new stranger in a borrowed tuxedo joined us, glowing, certain he had won something. We stopped trying to explain. It seemed unkind, and besides, they never believed us. You cannot describe drowning to a man who has just been handed the whole ocean and told it is his.

And so on.

Then one year the country simply stopped.

Not the country — the program. A new government decided the lottery was cruel. There were studies. There were hearings. A young senator with excellent teeth stood up and said it was inhumane to sentence a human being to forever, and everyone applauded, and he was right, and it did us no good whatsoever. They ended the lottery. No more winners. They were very proud of themselves. The law was proud of itself again.

What they could not do was take back the doses already given.

So there is no next generation coming. There is only us — the leftover stock of a product they discontinued, sitting on the shelf past the date stamped on the bottom. Adeline reads her books a third time. Cortez watches the traffic, which is thinner now. And I keep the porch light working on a house where no one has lived for two hundred years, because I promised a woman I loved that I would, and a promise is the last machine I know of that still runs.

They gave forever to the one man who least wanted it, and kept it from the billions who prayed for it, and called that a lottery, and called me lucky.

I would give it back today. I would hand it to you, gladly, if the handing were allowed.

It is not.

The porch light is on. Come by, if you're ever passing. I'll be there.

I'll always be there.