6: Leroy establishes a routine

fe⋅lo-de-se
1. a person who commits suicide or commits an unlawful malicious act resulting in his or her own death.
2. the act of suicide.

By the sixteenth time Leroy Thavish killed himself, he was fully aware of the unlikelihood that any further assault on his corpus would do him in. His tendency to suicide took on the flavour of an obsession. Despite fairly humble beginnings, Leroy Thavish developed a fascination with death.

In the year 2036, he embarked upon a competition with the elements, to see how far his creative genius would be able to take him. He meant to experience death by a different means each and every day. Leroy overdosed on every drug, legal and prescribed, and swallowed every different poison, until he could tell the almond tang of cyanide from the hearty spice of arsenic by the smallest sip. He threw himself from buildings, bridges, planes, a glacier, the lip of an active volcano. He subjected himself to the hottest, coldest, and dryest enviroments. He trespassed on foot into police states. He walked on land mines. He held up a bank and walked out into a street full of cops, carrying an assault rifle. Later, he used the funds he'd acquired in the heist to pay for a private ride on the space shuttle, where he overrode the safety precautions and threw himself out of an airlock. He considered deliberately contracting AIDS, but realized it would not kill him quickly enough for him to succeed in his goal.

On July 14th, he sat outside of a cafe in Israel with a reporter from a tabloid that had grown up in the ashes of the Weekly World News. Kayla Joncas fixed him with a vibrant stare across the table. She was a beautiful woman of thirty or so in a short-cut power suit. She had chased him across continents.

"What do you get out of it?" Kayla asked him as an Arab waiter smiled and lay a hand-crafted porcelain mug in front of her.

"Routine, perhaps," he said. He hadn't ordered anything. "It's odd, but I almost feel as if it gives me something to live for. I have the certainty that no one has ever done before what I am doing right now. That no one alive has ever experienced the things I have."

She blinked and lifted her mocha to take a sip. She set it down again when she realized her hands were shaking. "What happened to your family?" she asked.

"My parents died happily of old age half a century ago," he replied. "The world forgot them."

"No siblings? Cousins?"

"Siblings, no. Cousins, probably."

It was about midday. The market around them was filled with people and mingling food smells. The architecture of this quarter was still old; everything had the feeling of intransigent history, of a place trapped in a pocket of still time while the eons flowed past it. Pigeons plucked at the ground nearby.

"How did you come to be like this?"

"Morbid?" he asked with a smirk.

"Immortal," she replied.

"I have no idea," he said. He leaned back in the delicately ornamented chair.

In the cobblestone street, a child ran between the cars into the road, while his mother yelled at him to come back. A slow moving sedan in the traffic lurched to a stop while the child stared at the driver over the hood. His mother ran out into the street and dragged the child back into the sidewalk throng, her expression both apologetic and tyrannical simultaneously. Life resumed as normal.

Leroy watched in impassive silence.

Kayla looked at her list of questions and bit her lower lip nervously. They were fairly banal. She had been relying on him to provide something worth writing about. She decided, abruptly, to skip to the end. "And what happens when you die?" she inquired.

He smiled at her, graciously, full of - sympathy? "Nothing," he said.

She opened her mouth to say something else, before realizing the import of his answer. She repeated the gesture, and then began fiddling with the recording device pinned to her shirt. Leroy chuckled politely.

Inside the cafe, the owner was shouting something at his customers in Yiddish. A coffee cup fell to the floor and broke.

Leroy looked at his watch. "You should be going now," he said.

In unison, the cafe's customers stood and moved to the exit. It had an air of panic about it, though the exodus was orderly and there was only a muted murmur. The owner was still shouting above the sounds of shoes scuffing for the exit.

Kayla's face fell. "I still have more questions. Do you know how long I've chased - "

"In two minutes, a bomb will go off in the back of the cafe, and if you are still here, you will die with me."

On the terrace, couples and old men looked about in confusion. Two of the waiters were going from table to table, explaining the situation.

Kayla, horrified, began to frantically collect her jacket and purse. "Did you...?"

"I died three times in order to discover the location of this attack, and twice more to convince my informant to call ahead and warn the occupants. Actually, it was an interesting experience; by the end of it I had Mahmoud convinced I was a prophet of Allah." He reached across the table, pulled her untouched mocha to him, sipped it, and set it back on the saucer. "I haven't yet been killed in an explosion."

As she stood next to the table in the now empty cafe, her jacket ruffled, a lock of hair fell out of the tight bun behind her head and revealed that it was naturally curly. Again she opened her mouth to say something to him, and found nothing.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'm sure we'll meet again."

Kayla cocked her head to the side, heaved an exasperated snarl through gritted teeth, and stomped off.

Leroy sat alone on the terrace, sipping the reporter's mocha, while the crowd formed a semicircle around the cafe at what they deemed was a safe distance. No one approached him, though the cafe's owner continued to scream pleadingly to him from atop a car parked in the street.