The Immortalists Quotes

“What are you looking for?” Varya asks.

“Your character. Ever heard of Heraclitus?” Varya shakes her head. “Greek philosopher. Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”

All the while, something loomed larger, closer, until Simon was forced to see it in all its terrible majesty: his future. Daniel had always planned to be a doctor, which left one son—Simon, impatient and uncomfortable in his skin, let alone in a double-breasted suit. By the time he was a teenager, the women’s clothing bored him and the wools made him itch. He resented the tenuousness of Saul’s attention, which he sensed would not last his departure from the business, if such a thing were even possible.

In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.

What can Simon tell her? It’s mysterious to him, too, how something he thought nothing of before, something that makes him feel pain and exhaustion and quite frequently embarrassment, has turned out to be a gateway to another thing entirely. When he points his foot, his leg grows by inches. During leaps, he hovers midair for minutes, as if he’s sprouted wings.

It occurs to Simon that he would like to have a life like this: a career, a house, a partner. He’s always assumed that these things are not for him—that he’s designed for something less lucky, less straight. In truth, it is not only Simon’s gayness that makes him feel this way. It’s the prophecy, too, something he would very much like to forget but has instead dragged behind him all these years. He hates the woman for giving it to him, and he hates himself for believing her. If the prophecy is a ball, his belief is its chain; it is the voice in his head that says Hurry, says Faster, says Run.

In the final piece, The Myth of Icarus, Simon will perform his first starring role: he is Icarus, and Robert is the Sun.

On opening night, he soars around Robert. He orbits closer. He wears a pair of large wings, made of wax and feathers, like those Daedalus fashioned for Icarus. The physics of dancing with twenty pounds on his back compounds his dizziness, so he is grateful when Robert removes them, even though this means that they have melted, and that Simon, as Icarus, will die.

Robert paces the apartment. “We need to stay here,” he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.

But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears—the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other—that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.

“I wish—I wish…”

“Don’t wish it. Look what she gave me.”

“This!” says Klara, looking at the lesions on his arms, his sharp ribs. Even his blond mane has thinned: after an aide helps him bathe, the drain is matted with curls.

“No,” says Simon, “this,” and he points at the window. “I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.”

Years later, in school, Klara learned of a phenomenon called red tide: algae blooms multiply, making coastal waters toxic and discolored. This knowledge made her feel curiously empty. She no longer had reason to wonder about the red sea or marvel at its mystery. She recognized that something had been given to her, but something else—the magic of transformation—had been taken away.

When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility.

In Hebrew school, she loved the stories. Miriam, embittered prophet, whose rolling rock provided water during forty years of wandering! Daniel, unharmed in the lions’ den! They suggested that she could do anything…

Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed: Mastering her first coin trick at eight, pulling quarters from Simon’s ears while he giggled. Nights when they crawled down the fire escape to go dancing in the hot, packed clubs of the Village—nights when she saw him looking at men, when he let her see him looking.

Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too. After all, if magic exists alongside reality—two faces gazing in different directions, like the head of Janus—then Klara can’t be the only one able to access it. If she doubts the woman, then she has to doubt herself. And if she doubts herself, she must doubt everything she believes, including Simon’s knocks.

“It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.” She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. “It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.” When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. “It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams—our faith.” She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. “Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate”—she puts the cup down—“reality”—she makes a fist—“is.”

When she opens her fist, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.

Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.

And then it comes.

Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.

“Ma’am?”

Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause.

In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.

At dinner that evening, he told the story of the near-drowning with pomp, but inside, he glowed with renewed attachment to his family. For the rest of the vacation, he forgave Varya her most sustained sleep-babbling. He let Klara take the first shower when they returned from the beach, even though her showers took so long that Gertie once banged on the door to ask why, if she needed this much water, Klara did not bring a bar of soap into the ocean. Years later, when Simon and Klara left home—and after that, when even Varya pulled away from him—Daniel could not understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation, and the bliss of being returned. He waited.

After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us. But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.

He could not bear to contemplate his return to work on Monday, and what might happen if he holds his ground when it comes to the waivers. Days earlier, he submitted a request to review his case with the Local Area Defense Counsel, a military attorney who provides representation for accused service members. He knows that Mira is right—it’s best to be aware of what options he has to defend himself—but the request alone was humiliating. Without a job, who would he be? Someone who sat on a bath mat with his back against the toilet, reading about his brother-in-law’s solarium, he thought—an image terrible enough to force him to bed, so that he could fall asleep and stop seeing it.

He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain. By this logic, Eddie’s theory makes perfect sense: Klara and Simon believed they had taken pills with the power to change their lives, not knowing they had taken a placebo—not knowing that the consequences originated in their own minds.

…Bruna is looking at him with a dubiousness that suggests another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.

No. Simon and Klara were pulled magnetically, unconsciously; Daniel is in full possession of his faculties. Still, the two narratives float like an optical illusion—a vase or two faces?—each as convincing as the other, one perspective sliding out of prominence as soon as he relaxes his hold on it.

When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.

Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.

She no longer believed that Daniel died of a bullet meant for the pelvis but which entered his thigh, rupturing the femoral artery, so that all his blood was lost in less than ten minutes. His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary—to the fact that thoughts have wings.

“Because I’m sad,” says Luke, thickly. “Because to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost?”

“The thought that you could die from sex,” Varya says, haltingly. “You weren’t terrified?”

“No, not then. Because it didn’t feel that way. When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.”

“l think I might like to teach,” she says. In graduate school, she taught undergrads in exchange for tuition remission. She hadn’t thought she could do such a thing—before her first class, she vomited in a sink in the women’s restroom, unable to reach the toilet—she soon found it invigorating: all those upturned faces, waiting to see what she had up her sleeve. Of course, some of the faces were not upturned but sleeping, and secretly, those were the ones she liked best. She was determined to wake them up.