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performance. He stopped at the doorway.
    “Hey, what the hell is she, anyway?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I don’t think she’s human, bud. Seriously. Not that I give a shit about your ass, but I’d do everything I could to stay the fuck away from her.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
    Not the first time I’d gotten that warning. Probably wouldn’t be the last. He couldn’t understand. Every other face I’ve ever known eventually aged, sagged, and died. Jerry’s would, too. But the first time I’d gazed at the red-haired woman with the haunting blue eyes was over ten thousand years ago. Human or not, she was the only other immortal I’d ever seen.

The thing in the cell next to mine is definitely not human. It’s much too strong.
        I’ve been hearing this deep pounding noise every night since I got here. Kind of like the sound of distant artillery. Never knew what it was until this morning, when Ringo took me on my daily walk to the lab. We strayed a bit closer than usual to the second building, and whatever’s in there attacked the door. I swear, the door nearly buckled. Which is pretty amazing since just a cursory glance would tell you the whole structure is reinforced with steel.
    More tellingly, Ringo flinched. It takes some kind of big ugly to make a thing as nasty as Ringo flinch.
    They don’t let it out. At all. Or feed it. I think they’re just waiting for it to die of starvation.
    I just might know what it is.

    *   *   *

    I was in America the last time I saw the red-haired woman.
    It was 1922, and I’d ended up in Chicago at the height of Prohibition. (Why anyone in their right minds would want to ban alcohol is beyond me. What I was doing in a country that banned it . . . well, that’s a story for another time.) I was dating a girl named Irma, who fancied herself a “flapper.” Irma was a college girl, technically, but hardly spent any time in classes, which came as a bit of a shock to her moderately well-off, stoic Protestant parents when they got around to looking at her grades. She’d discovered illegal booze, short skirts, and heavy petting sometime around her freshman year and said, bring it on. Which was what I liked about her.
    I do date, in case you were wondering. I am also—and this I consider a welcome byproduct of my immortality—completely sterile. Imagine if I wasn’t. Between my direct descendants and their offspring, we could people an entire continent. I think about these things.
    But yes, I do see women. Men too, at one time. I spent about a century and a half as a homosexual. It ended up being far too much work, so I didn’t keep it up. (You never really appreciate women until you’ve tried pleasing another man. Just trust me.)
    My relationships don’t last very long, mainly because it’s hard to grow old with someone when you don’t grow old. Consequently, I’m often the Courtier, Secret Lover, or more recently, the Transitional Boyfriend. Most of the women tend to be fairly young from a societal standpoint (“young” meaning something different depending on which century we’re discussing) and in the exploratory phase of their sexual lives.
    Okay, and I like younger girls. Sue me.
    It was a Saturday night, and we were in a speakeasy called Looie’s. You wouldn’t know it was a club by looking at it because Looie’s was in the basement of a former fish market in a run-down neighborhood on the edge of Lake Michigan. It was an ugly, dark place that always smelled of cod and human sweat. The cement floor was covered in sawdust and on Saturdays, there was a live jazz band that was nearly impossible to hear because so many people came to dance there that the sound of scuffling shoes over the sawdust and cement made a rasping sound that drowned out almost everything else, and because the amplifier hadn’t been invented yet. The bar—a crude, wooden table hastily erected by Looie himself—only served bathtub gin and sacramental wine,