The Long Run

‘The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.’

Grayson Walker was prone to regurgitating these words whenever the opportunity arose. At 150 years old, it was taken as an ironic boast by those who knew him; valetudinarian self-pity by those who didn’t.

Nobody had ever cared to ask him what he had meant by it until today.

‘I don’t get it,’ asked Sonia, Grayson’s maid, a winsome, wide-eyed brunette of twenty-seven, furrowing her brow with the circumspect intrigue befitting a servant. 'What does it mean?'

‘You know,’ said Grayson, propping himself up uneasily on the chaise longue, ‘you’re the first person to ask me that in over a century. Christ, I am old.’

Here he broke into an open-mouthed grin, his veneers a blinding, incongruous white set against the peeling lips and charry gums.

‘Well, in a word,’ Grayson continued, assuming the oracular tone he took with anyone under seventy, ‘Keynes.’

‘Keynes?’ Sonia repeated, failing to conceal her disappointment. Perhaps he’s just a senile coot, she thought.

‘Indeed,’ Grayson said, waving her away gently. ‘Elderflower water and The Wall Street Journal please, Sonia.’

‘Of course, sir.’

*

Grayson lay in bed, sleepless for the third night in a row. The insomnia had begun last Christmas, shortly after his grandson Harvey’s untimely passing.

‘Dead at 78. He was just a young man,’ he had lamented without a hint of mockery, more aggrieved than the widow of the deceased herself. ‘He should have come to me!’

He knew now what Leona, Harvey’s wife, had known then. Harvey had no shortage of cash; he had been prudent with his inheritance, diligent in his own career, secure to the very end.

No, it had come out at one boozy lunch, Leona hissing her words with gin-scented disgust.

‘I really just don’t understand why he didn’t come to me, Leona; I would have -’ he had begun for the umpteenth time, dissecting an artichoke with a steak knife, his elbow cocked almost above his head.

‘He could afford the treatment, Grayson. Not everyone wants to live forever.’

Grayson froze, his arm an isosceles against his supple frame.

‘What sort of a man would leave his wife widowed? His sons fatherless? By choice!’

‘He was nearly eighty! His sons - our sons -’ Leona paused, lowering her voice as her nails burrowed into the tablecloth, ‘are both over fifty. What sort of a man sticks around forever, long after he’s wanted, taking and taking and fucking taking?’

Grayson had thought about that scene every day since. He had tried not to let it bother him but somehow it kept bubbling up in his conscience, an irrepressible froth of self loathing and outrage.

Whenever he ate, he thought of his arms akimbo, hacking at the artichoke like a raving invalid. Whenever he read the obituary of some freshly centenarian acquaintance, the words long after he’s wanted whirled through his mind. And just before bed, the thoughts always reached their awful crescendo, so that he feared dozing off and not dying almost as much as the alternative.

*

The morning came, and with it, Sonia.

‘Mr Walker? Mr Walker!’

Grayson started. It had become their routine; Grayson, somnambulant and terrified, Sonia thinking he was dead, then the gruff assurance that he was merely tired and in need of his coffee.

‘Are you sure you should be drinking coffee? It might be keeping you up, and besides I read a study that said -’

Grayson tuned her out. He had read the study, was well aware that the telomere lengthening he underwent religiously could stave of apoptosis of the cells, mitigate a legion of ailments from dermatitis to dementia, but was surprisingly useless against cardiovascular mileage.

‘An extra shot today, if anything,’ Grayson purred. Even after one hundred and thirty years he retained the patrician air of his New England upbringing, Phillips Exeter and, inevitably, Harvard.

‘Whatever you say, sir,’ Sonia replied. She knew he was at his most affected when he was afraid, imperious in the face of frailty. She wondered if it was because he was very rich or very old, possibly both.

Sonia returned with Grayson’s coffee which, despite her obliging tones, contained no more caffeine than usual. He would never know: at one hundred and fifty, Grayson’s palate left a lot to be desired. Besides, she didn’t want to be responsible for the manslaughter of the 17th richest man in North America.

‘Thank you,’ Grayson said, softly now. ‘Did you look into what I said yesterday?’

‘Oh, yeah, I did actually,’ Sonia replied, slightly flustered. Although she dared challenge Grayson more than anyone besides, say, Leona, she still had an awkward reverence for his seniority. Or his wealth. Perhaps both, Grayson wondered …

‘Keynes, John Maynard Keynes. He was an economist like two hundred years ago. He said it in his book, uh, hold on,’ Sonia pulled out her phone and flicked onto her Notes app. ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform?’

Grayson clapped, and for a moment his eyes had a youthful gleam.

‘Bravo. Now what does it mean, Sonia?’

‘I mean … I still don’t know, Mr Walker.’

‘You will, one day. Elderflower, please.’

And with that, Sonia knew their chat had drawn to a close. She hovered towards the kitchen, only for Grayson to call after her moments later.

‘One last thing, do me a favour and take tomorrow off. I have some relatives coming down. I’ll be in safe hands.’

‘Are you sure? I promise I wouldn’t intrude Mr. -’

Grayson raised his forefinger with an inarguable finality.

‘It’s an order, Sonia,’ he said, half smiling.

*

Sonia had done as she was told, spending her day off - if you could call it that - running errands for her emphysemic mother around the city, a weary $2 pizza at the bodega her solitary treat before catching the subway back to the Bronx.

Returning to Grayson’s penthouse that Friday morning, she expected the usual to and fro, the impossibly old man stirring uncertainly before demanding breakfast and the papers.

And so, on entering to the unmistakable aroma of freshly brewed coffee, she immediately began to worry.

‘Mr Walker! Mr Walker, I’m so sorry,’ Sonia started hysterically. She wondered, the thought rapid and crystalline as any produced by panic, if she was going to be fired.

‘Mr Walker?’

Grayson lay outstretched in his sprawling four poster, a leaking cafetiere clutched in his leathery fingers.

He was dead.

*

Dear Sonia,

I trust this letter finds you well.

‘The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.’ I cannot tell you what these words mean; only what they mean to me.

In my humble opinion, it posits a close but opposing relationship between the present, ‘current affairs’, and the long run, ‘death.’ Of course, it is wry in the way all the Bloomsbury lot were, an economist of genius mocking at our need to measure, to plan, to control; but it was also serious.

My dear Sonia, it is time for me to go, to stop this childish pursuit of immortality, this misleading guide. The longer I have lived, the more miserable and aimless my present has become.

I have bequeathed to you a quarter of my assets, with the remnant to go to Leona and the boys (so strange to think Keynes died at 62; scarcely older than Leona’s oldest!)

Learn from my mistakes, which is to say, accept death when it comes. Greet it as an estranged mother, an invisible father, a long-forgotten friend. Although at 27, you may as well be immortal!

Love,

Grayson

Reading Grayson’s note with a teary smile, Sonia couldn’t help but think the old man was gone too soon …