"Fuck me like your life depended on it."

She said. There should be a "she said" there. It's important.

I did my best. I wasn't always able to do the things she said, but there was never a question of not trying.

Later, not much later mind you, me spent and lying atop a shadow of my own sweat, her lighting a cigarette (I hated that she smoked, but what could I say? Then, I mean.), she said:

"Do you think we're immortal?"

No. In the long run I chase a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of twelve peso mescal for no better reason than not having anything else to do (but what better, really?) and you blow your head off with that Smith and Wesson (that you get off on pretending you don't get off on having) after learning you have lung cancer. It doesn't take a reader of entrails to see the by-their-own-hand mark on us. So we'd better hope we've no immortal soul; I can't think of a god-spinner out there that looks too terrible kind on suicides. Not since that comet anyway, and I'm pretty sure it's another couple of thousand years before that boat comes in again.

But she doesn't ask me questions to hear what I think, so I said:

"I don't know. What do you think?"

And she said:

"I think we're meant to be."

That was new. Meant by who? Who is it that she thinks intends these things? I suspect that, after the layers are peeled off, the only one doing any meaning here is her. I made the "go on, I'm listening" noise. And she said:

"Where are you? Is this body you? Are you here?" And she grabbed my limp cock for emphasis. "No. None of this is you. I can't touch you because you aren't the same sort of thing as this bed, as a hamburger, as any of this fucking stuff. You aren't even the few functioning neurons still firing in your pickled brain."

And she said:

"You and I, buddy, are just bunches of data. Sure, we're data tied up in a mess of meaty neurons. Now. But there's no manifest reason it has to stay that way."

Science fiction. She never went to college. I don't think she even finished high school. Hell, I don't know if she finished elementary. But she loved to read. She read with a deadly drive and an unshakable half understanding. She particularly loved to read my books, knowing that I had read less than half of more than half of them. Information theory, modern philosophy, cognitive science, too much bad science fiction and not enough good; she pulled it from my shelves while I was at class or work and tore through it all with equal vigour. And sometimes she needs to be reminded that there are still some things I understand better than she does. And so I said:

"Science fiction."

She sneered at me and said:

"Now maybe, but not always. There are plenty of things that may never be possible. But this isn't time travel, this isn't even space travel. There's only so much room inside our heads for bits. And it's only a matter of time before we can pull those bits out of there and put them somewhere safer. Don't you see, for as long as people have existed, death has been the one great certainty. But death isn't a necessary part of us; it's just a cruel trick of DNA."

And then from nowhere she was holding the S & W. She never did have a good understanding of the rules of polite discourse. I know full well that the reason I was so fascinated by her was that she scared the shit out of me, but there is such a thing as taking things too far. And so I said:

"Put that fucking thing away!"

She didn't. Instead she pointed it at me and said:

"If i put a bullet through your head, it's game over. You had a good run, but that's it. Flash in the pan, a few ups and downs, and then you're gone and all that's left is a soiled piece of meat in a ratty bed. No rhyme. No reason. Tell me, what sense does that make?"

And I said:

"Who says it has to make sense? It's the only hand anyone's ever been dealt. You live your life and then... And then nothing. But that's the closest we can get to meaning. If we weren't constantly being towards death, there would be no weight to anything."

That was a mistake. She hit me across the head with the pistol. It hurt more than I would have imagined. And, as I felt my temple for blood, she said:

"Fuck you and fuck Heidegger! Self pitying bullshit dressed up in fancy clothes. Everyone keeps dropping dead, and you're all so scared to look it in the face, that you drape a few five dollar words and German philosophers over it and call it noble. Fuck that."

And she said:

"It's coming, we're on the cusp. A hundred years. No more than a hundred and fifty and then, one day, it just stops. Can you imagine? People just stop dying. Take away your fucking being-towards-death and start being-towards-being. The children of the future will look back on today and everything that came before it as an ongoing holocaust to horrible to imagine."

And she said:

"Just think. We may be the last generation to ever die."

And she still had that gun pointed at me, so I said:

Absolutely nothing.

And she said:

"I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. We're not going to make it, you and I. But our children might."

She reached for my dick again. With her left hand, gun still cocked in the right. And she said:

"I stopped taking my pill five weeks ago."

And she said:

"Now fuck me. Your life depends on it."

And it's only really been about fifteen minutes. I never have been that fast on the rebound. But as sick and terrified as I feel, I have to admit:

She knows how to turn me on.