You there! By the side of the road! Yes, you! In the tattered garments! Be you man or be you mirage?
Please, sheath your weapon. I mean you no harm. But it’s been weeks since I’ve encountered another human being along this arid and miserable path, and it would do my heart good to converse with you for a few moments. Cardiac health is so important, even—nay, especially—in times like these.
Have I any food? I do. It is a meager assortment of nuts, but you are welcome to partake. I shall not be joining you since I am intermittently fasting. I only eat during an eight-hour window, from when the sun is high in the sky until it reaches a certain point above the horizon. It triggers metabolic switching, which burns fat at a higher rate, helping me maintain an ideal BMI for increased longevity.
Yes… perhaps you have seen me before. My visage is familiar to many I encounter. Even after what some call the apocalypse, I have maintained an exactness of countenance that you remember from photographs. For you see, in the before times, when the oceans had not yet swallowed the coastline and brought society to its knees, magazines ran a new profile story about me, I don’t know, every week or two. Yes, it is I, that one guy who lived every moment in the service of staving off his own mortality. Did it work? Well, seventy years after the last nuclear reactor on Earth melted down, resulting in calamitous environmental devastation, I’m still here traversing the wasteland that remains. So you tell me!
From photos, I know it could be hard to tell if I was a sixty-year-old man who has smoothed his natural wrinkles with a hot iron, or if I was a fourteen-year-old boy who has spent his entire life eating nothing but rat poison sandwiches. Now I am 133 years old, and I retain my appearance of an old lady’s elbow skin stretched taut over an adult human skull. It’s called “peak physical condition.” In the event that you stumble across a long-neglected library and its books remain intact and unmoldered… look it up, Einstein.
Do you mind if I run in place as we talk? I spend my days wandering this barely habitable hellscape in search of sustenance and shelter, but if I don’t get my pulse up to 140 beats per minute for an hour every day, I can feel the icy fingers of death scrambling to gain purchase around my throat.
But there I go again prattling on. I just have so little companionship these days. Everyone I knew in the before times perished like fools years ago after failing to adhere to my strict nutritional and biomedical regimen. And the traveling party I joined afterward cast me out for using one of our supplies of batteries to power my infrared LED face mask. Just because the landscape is cracked and desolate, closer to the surface of Mars than the verdant Earth we used to know, doesn’t mean my T-zone has to be. But our nomadic tribe’s fury at my battery misappropriation was a mere flickering candle compared to the inferno of rage that ignited around me when I revealed that I had absconded with a second battery to power my infrared LED penis mask. Thanks to my rigorous schedule of penis-health treatments, I still have the pore size and erectile capacity of a teen boy. Of course, there are no teen boys, since all of Earth’s sperm, including my own, have been fully denatured by the ambient radiation years ago. But if they hadn’t, I would be hard at work repopulating the planet with any woman I could find with an optimal waist-to-hip ratio for childbirth.
What do you mean my “whole deal sounds off-putting and time-consuming”? That’s ridiculous. I’m not “running from something.” As I told you before, I am running in place for cardiac health. Excuse me? I’m “obsessed with death, even for someone living amid horrors the Bible could not have anticipated?” Obsessed with death? Hardly. I am planning never to die at all.
Wait. Where are you going? Have I said something that offended? I will surely apologize if you tell me what I’ve done. Please, good stranger! Come back! Oh dear. Be careful near the edge of that cliff, lest you—
Good lord, he’s jumped. Certainly, the embers of life have been snuffed from his corporeal form after such a fall. I hope his bodily wounds are not especially grievous. I could really use an infusion of fresh blood to keep my own platelets infused with oxygen.
Some people just have no interest in taking care of themselves, I guess.
