garden, staring out at the street, and about 49 percent of me was ready to bolt. Luckily, 51 percent of me wasn’t a total idiot.
When I got back, Zelda was sitting on the bench with the journal closed on her lap, watching a couple canoodle on the grass down by the stream.
She looked up at me. “That was the deep stuff, Parker. Thank you.”
I took the journal back. Why is it that the bad shit in our lives always seems to take up so much more mental space than the good stuff? I wrote. Is that part of being a person, or just part of being me?
“I think about that question all the time.”
Do you have an answer?
“I don’t think questions like that have answers. An optimistic person would probably say the bad things stick out because they’re not as common as the good things.”
Are you an optimistic person?
“No.”
But you’re not serious about the Golden Gate Bridge, are you?
“We had a deal, Parker. You were going to believe everything I said.”
But why would you want to kill yourself? I mean, I hate pretty much everyone and everything, and I’m still not suicidal.
“I’m not suicidal. I’m just”—she struggled to find the words—“tired out.”
With what?
“Life.”
How can you be tired out with all of life?
“After a quarter of a millennia, the real question would be how could I not be tired out. It’s just too much time, Parker. Why else do you think elderly people aren’t constantly complaining about their imminent deaths? It’s because they’re ready, just like I am. Can’t you understand that? Have you ever really thought about what it would be like to live forever?”
I hesitated, pen over the paper. Sure I’d thought about it, the same way I’d thought about being invisible or telepathic or able to fly. And I’d concluded that it would be awesome. All the things you could see and the people you could meet and the places you could go. All the time you’d have to learn how to play the guitar and to break dance, to act up and fuck up and hook up. All the days and months and years and decades, stretching out in front of you, like a highway running through an endless, desolate city . . .
You’re right, I wrote. It sounds kinda shitty.
Zelda smiled. “Why?”
How to say it? Because life sucked a lot of the time. Because it already seemed long enough. Because I could remember visiting my dad’s mom when she was dying of throat cancer in a hospital bed in a town outside of Bogotá, surrounded by dirty orange tiles and all those flickering fluorescent lights humming like bored orderlies, and how she kept saying ya basta whenever anyone asked how she was. Sometimes it was a joke, and sometimes it was so serious it made her cry. Ya basta. No doy más.
So we shared a popcorn yesterday, I wrote.
“That’s true,” Zelda said. “And your point is . . . ?”
The funny thing about popcorn is that you’ve really only got two options. There’s the small, which has about six kernels of popcorn in it and costs $6.49 or something. And then you’ve got the medium and the large, which are both just ridiculously huge. A starving family couldn’t eat that much popcorn in a week. But they only cost a few cents more than the small. I guess the theater is hoping you’ll just think, like, fuck it, right? Fifty cents for a shit-ton more popcorn? Might as well. But the problem is that if you get the massive popcorn, you end up feeling gross, because it’s too much. It doesn’t leave you wanting more. And you can really only enjoy something if it leaves you wanting more, don’t you think?
When Zelda finished reading my little essay, she let her head fall onto my shoulder. “I do, Parker. I really do.”
We sat there in silence for a while, and I figured it didn’t really matter if she was crazy, or depressed, or a compulsive liar, or all three at once. Something was wrong with her. Something was eating away at her from the inside. And I was going to save her from it. Like Mario saved Princess Peach. Like Link saved Zelda.
Okay, immortal girl, I wrote, you say you’re tired out with life, right? Well, I’m going to untire you. I’m going to make you want to live.
“That’s a tall order, Parker Santé.”
I’m a tall guy.
She laughed, probably because I’m actually not very tall, and then