True Immortals

His post will appear shortly. He’s already posted a few comments here and there. – Flyss

P.S. I see that Installment 13 is now up. Another long one.

I just read through installment 12 a second time, and this time I didn’t let all the sexy stuff distract me. As much.

Janice sure seems to be dropping a lot of hints that she’s and Immortal. But she has an incredibly sordid lifestyle! Would an Immortal really live like that? — Flyss

You might have found installment 12 unbearably beautiful, but, shallow me, I found it almost unbearably sexy.

Instead of a black hoody, she now had on a black cotton shirt that could have been worn by a man, but was unbuttoned far enough to show the top of a lacy black bra. Around her neck, she wore a thin strip of leather like an evaporated dog collar. She’d ruffled her hair and it showed a hint of curl. Though rounded, she wasn’t heavy. Along with the nose stud and the bars in her ears, she now had a ring through her lower lip. She wore red pants that reached a few inches beneath the knees, and on one calf a long tattoo in the shape of a dragon extended down to her ankle. Her feet were naked in brown sandals. He thought she might be wearing clear lipstick.

Yeeii. — Flyss

The photo Blair can’t take his eyes off is of what’s called a corset piercing. Here’s an example I found online. It’s not exactly the same as what Blair describes, but in case you’ve never seen one at all it’ll give you a sense of what they’re like. (Corset piercings are generally temporary. FYI: They’re popular in the bondage community.)

Well here’s an unexpected wrinkle.

In the very first paragraph of the first installment of the The Immortal Blair, he writes,

In the distance, the red lights of a refinery or fertilizer factory hung in the sky like ephemeral constellations.

The same phrase reappears in installment 8, and it soon becomes clear that Blair is on his way into Fort Collins.

Now here’s the interesting part. I’d driven into Fort Collins from the south, and so I missed it. But Strattera was exploring other approaches, and she discovered that if you arrive from the north east (which fits just as well considering Blair’s erratic route out of Kansas City), you see these in the distance:

Look familiar? They should. On her hurried way up to Cheyenne, Speed Demon paused for a considerable time right beneath those same red lights.

This can’t be a coincidence! –Flyss

P.S. Yes, I’d even used my images of those lights to decorate the Immortal Blair web page. But I was just fooling around trying to create something mysterious looking. I hadn’t expected any actual connection.

In installment 10, Blair is running in terror from Menniss, who’s found him at the motel. He manages to get away, but finds himself in a really sketchy neighborhood. Then he sees a possible refuge ahead.

The back of the supermarket rose high ahead of him, red and gray fake brick. Off to the left, after a gap, he saw the rear side of a strip mall that stretched off for hundreds of yards, a long wall neatly divided by blue doors. Each door had its own matching dumpster illuminated by a bright yellow insect light.

I found the supermarket, and the spot he’s talking about.

He ends up hiding in the loading dock behind the store, feeling a bit too intimate with dumpsters. I checked it out. It’s a truly scuzzy place. It must have been truly humiliating for him to have to hide there.

Then, in installment 11, he looks out from his hiding place, and sees Janice walking across the back parking lot. Here’s the actual view.

She walks through this gap,

and he follows after her.

I’ll have more to say about their meeting in my next post. — Flyss

I followed Blair’s route into the outskirts of the city. Here’s how he described it in installment 9.

The blocky rectangular form of a bowling alley pushed its yellow shoulders out toward the street, and he imagined the thunder of bowling balls, the friendly clatter of pins. Perhaps he’d go bowling. But not tonight. He passed the auto parts stores, labor agencies, used car lots, all-night liquor stores, pay day loan sharks, thrift shops, pawnshops, downscale strip malls, tattoo parlors, the typical flora at the edge of a city. He loved places like these, so full of gaps, of broken areas to hide in.

I found the city pretty much like that. Here’s the bowling alley, pushing its shoulders out into the street as advertised:

Here’s the auto parts store,

the labor agency,

the cash advance joint,

and the street as a whole:

“So full of gaps, of broken areas to hide in.” — Flyss

In this very long new installment of The Immortal Blair, our guy finally arrives somewhere. Strangely, though, where he lands is a disgusting fleabag motel. (It’s in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I’ll shortly be visiting there to photograph the actual sites where this narrative takes place.)

The installment is titled The Woman at the Desk, and I don’t think I’m giving anything way by pointing out that she’s obviously Janice.

The fact is, I don’t know who the heck Janice is, except that Oxadrenals and Saul have spent an inordinate amount of  time doing things for her, she’s the first-person-author of narratives 3, 5 and 7, and she’s sexy as heck.  Oh, and also she’s central to the entire Immortality Project. God knows why. — Flyss

In Kathryn, the sixth installment of the The Immortal Blair, Menniss is terribly cruel. But he uses that cruelty to cut through to Blair’s humanity.

Menniss shows him a photo of Kathryn, the woman Blair married when he lived in Australia in the late ’50s and the early ’60s, and then abandoned by pretending to die in the outback.

“She still misses you,” Menniss says.  “After half a century.  Isn’t that pathetic? ” Blair cradled the photo in his hands and stared at the image: a terribly old woman.  A woman dying of age.

Dying of age! Age as a murderer. Because that’s what it is.

And then Blair makes this heartbreaking vow:

He’d made the resolution many times before, and always broken it, but he made it again: No more relationships.  No wives, no lovers, no friends, no children.  He would live entirely alone, keep company with none but the one companion he never had to betray, never needed to abandon: his perfect, timeless body.  – Flyss

Oh God, he left his dog to die. And he really doesn’t care?

Installment 5. The Work of a Master
in The Immortal Blair

I don’t believe he doesn’t care. I disagree with what you wrote, Kate. I don’t think he’s totally narcissistic by nature. It think it’s a reaction to how much he’s lost. He can’t bear it, so he shuts down his feelings. But they’re there.

He’s so terribly lonely. He’s been listening to all the things Menniss has found out by essentially stalking him (things that I’d found out too, by the way) and instead of just being horrified he has this reaction:

Blair found this third-person analysis of his life inordinately pleasurable; it had been more than a hundred years since he’d spoken with anyone who knew he was immortal.

Imagine it: No one knows who he really is. And has to leave everyone to die. — Flyss

The second installment (“The Letter”) of The Immortal Blair touched a nerve.

“Blair” is seriously into seduction. This is the same sensitive fellow who marries women over and over, even though he knows he’s going to have to disappear after about fifteen years, when his immortality starts to show.

But I think he’s going to get his. Here’s the last paragraph of this installment:

He drove on small country roads, using various tricks he’d seen in movies: doubling back, making sudden turns, hiding his car out of sight. When he felt confident no one could be following him, he took to the freeway. He drove all night and somewhat at random, with no fixed destination other than leaving Texas behind. At dawn, he found himself at the outskirts of Kansas City. The geographic circle of his possible overnight travel now covered thousands of square miles. Menniss couldn’t possibly find him. He was anonymous again. He was hidden and safe.

Somehow I don’t think that he’s going to be as safe as he expects to be. – Flyss

P.S. The letter in “The Letter” is pretty cool.

P.P.S. As an aside, the quote from Saul in the The Letter is almost, though not quite, word for word the same as in The Hafeem Saul.

I get it that we rushed to start posting the story because we wanted to help protect Oxadrenals’ physical immortality project from attack by the Immortal Illuminati. And I also get it that Kate is releasing the story in small bits so as to influence Alexandros and crew without directly threatening them.

But the first installments of The Immortal Blair are so far removed from all that, it’s hard to concentrate on it.

Still, I remember how much trouble I had switching gears to read the Hafeem Saul, and how much I ended up loving it once I did, that I’m going to try.

So here I go, pitching in:

In the first installment, The Crown Jewel of Creation (which was mislinked before — it’s fixed now) you can already see the narcissism of the guy. Definitely reminds me of the Aussie, and from all the context I assume that’s who “Blair” actually is. But it’s weird to think that having an immortal body is a bit of a curse, in a way.

Not like being a vampire is a curse. We already know that True Immortals can die. It’s more like the kind of responsibility that falls on you when you have custody of something precious.

Like the Queen’s Crown Jewels, for example. — Flyss