Unchanged

Marcus clattered the last of the dinner dishes into the sink. He winced, paused with an ear turned to the dark hallway. He heaved a grateful sigh when he heard no sign of George stirring. But behind him, Justina continued rocketing around the kitchen, pulling open drawers and cupboards, riffling through the fridge.

"What are you even doing?" he asked her. She looked at him the way she looked at George when at his most obstreperous - a mixture of harried exasperation and loving pity.

"Getting a head start on Georgie's lunch, of course," she said. "I won't have time in the morning."

"But tomorrow's Saturday. I may not be a top chef, but I can certainly handle a ham and cheese sandwich for a toddler."

Justina short-circuited, stood still with a mayo-covered knife hovering over a piece of white bread.

"Oh my god," she laughed. "Of course it is." She hurried to scrape the mayo into its container and stuff the bread into its bag. "I'm all mixed up."

"Nervous about the visit?"

Justina said nothing in reply, so Marcus turned back to the sink.

Later, on the couch, he crooked a finger over the edge of her book and pulled it away from her eyes.

"We could come with you," he offered. She shook his hand off the book, an old collection of Bradbury stories, and shot a look she reserved only for him: an eye-bagged tiredness, a scream of her soul.

"That's a terrible idea."

"For moral support. I won't even bring George in, we'll just romp around the garden. And afterwards we can do something nice, the three of us. Go to the beach."

"Where I can fill my pockets with stones and walk into the sea? Another terrible idea." She lifted the book to block her face, flipped a page, then peered around the cover at Marcus. "But I could be talked into drowning my sorrows with a milkshake."

He smiled. "I should have known to lead with a sweet treat."

"But I'm serious, Marcus. You keep George outside. I don't want him anywhere near that place."

"I know. I get it."

"No, you don't. How could you?" she asked, and there again were the lines around her hard-set mouth, a prelude to the changes her face would undergo in the decades to come. "Your ancestors all died as they should have."

A low blow. Its impact rippled through the next morning, introducing a frosty tension to the hour-long drive that even George's relentlessly cheery nursery rhyme playlist couldn't break. When they reached the Manor, Justina hopped out of the car before Marcus turned the engine off. She blew George a kiss and told him to be good.

"You play outside with Daddy," she said. She looked at Marcus. "Outside," she repeated, her voice suddenly taut.

"Yeah, I heard," he grunted. She slammed her door shut.

Marcus tried, he really did. But as soon as Justina disappeared within the grand double doors of the Manor, George kicked off into a tantrum. He would not be distracted by rocks or flowers, would not sit still and listen to music in his car seat, wouldn't even be bribed into complacency with the promise of a new toy.

The toddler rocketed up the stone pathway to the Manor's entry, Marcus hot on his heels. He reached the handsome wooden door just before George and leaned heavily against its carved surface, panting as George tugged at the handle.

"Mommy inside!" he wailed, throwing his small body entirely into his fruitless pulling. "I want Mommy!"

"She can't hear you," Marcus said.

George fit his face against the door's seam and screamed even louder for his mother. The door jerked. George leapt back from its surface and reached for his father.

"The dragon moved," he whimpered.

"What? What dragon?"

The door jerked again. Marcus stepped away, pulling George up into his arms. He realized what George meant: from the right distance, the geometric decoration on the door resolved into a snarling, angular dragon with a lamb clenched in its jaws. His mouth grew inexplicably dry, goosebumps popping all over his body despite the sun on his back and the warm child in his arms.

The door creaked open to reveal a thick-middled elderly woman, her rosy face framed with a halo of frizzy white curls.

"Is that a baby?" she called in a musical voice. "I thought I heard a baby!"

George went silent. Marcus tried to reply, but his throat was still too dry. The woman strolled over to stroke George's hair.

"Oh, I knew it. How sweet. Are you here to visit us? It's been so long since we saw a baby."

Marcus coughed.

"My wife. She's here to visit."

"Well, what are you doing out here, then?" The woman laughed. "Come on in. We'll have some tea and cookies."

"Cookies!" George twisted out of Marcus's arms. Before Marcus could recapture him, the boy was following the old woman.

"Oh, very good," she said, assisting George over the threshold. The door swung shut behind them, leaving Marcus alone on the porch.

"Fuck."

The dragon stared at him. There was nothing left to do but follow his son inside.

Marcus sat uneasily in the opulent parlor. A dozen or so people mingled in small groups. Many were conspicuously bald. Marcus's skin crawled. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a room with more than one of the unchanging, let alone a majority. He couldn't see Justina in the dozen or so people around, but he could already hear her cold fury.

I gave you one instruction, Marcus. What was it?

Mentally, he mustered his defence. He wasn't doing anything wrong. George was fine, munching happily on a cookie, enjoying the scrub-wearing woman's attention. Not just hers. Others, too, were approaching George on the settee and smiling wistfully. The toddler was like a flame to moths.

"And how old are you?" asked a bald man. He'd been sitting by the hearth when they arrived. Now, he approached their table. His round face looked no older than 25, but he wore a swishy, old-fashioned knit set that harkened back to the 2070s.

George held up three cookie-crumbed fingers.

"What a good age!" Another woman said, reaching out to pinch George's cheek. She looked like a nymph from an ancient painting, Marcus thought, draped in a white linen shift with a tumble of dark hair down her back. "Oh, it goes so fast, doesn't it?" she asked Marcus. "I remember when my son... my son... when he..." She trailed off and turned to the elderly woman. "Katerina, where is my son?"

"He's fine, Penny, just fine," Katerina answered. She pushed another cookie into George's hand.

"But where did he go?" Penny asked. Her hands went to her belly, then her head. She gripped her lustrous hair at the scalp, pulling the wig off to wring it in her hands. "Oh my god, where is he?" She turned and fled the room like a hound chased her.

Katerina smiled sadly at Marcus.

"Dead eighty years, of course, but it does no good to remind her. I never met him, no, gone before my time, but apparently he was quite a nice fellow. Historian, I believe, specializing in the Online Era. Visited every day, my predecessor told me..."

She rambled on about Penny's dead son. Marcus checked his watch. Justina's visits usually lasted no longer than a half hour, and already fifteen minutes were gone. If he had any hope of this breach remaining a secret, he'd have to get George out soon. But before he could think of a convenient excuse to drag George back outside, a woman's blood-curdling scream sounded from the floor above.

"Mommy?" said George, dropping his cookie.

"Oh, god, what now?" Katerina said, heaving herself up from the couch.

But Marcus was already running from the parlor, into the dark entryway, up the spiral staircase. Because, like George, he knew the sound of his wife's voice anywhere. And he knew what she sounded like in pain, too.

The second floor was full of bald, beautiful people peering from their rooms for the source of the sound.

"Where is she?" Marcus shouted from the mouth of the stairwell. They recoiled from him. "Where is the screaming?"

One man pointed down the hall to the right. His silk robe fell open, revealing a toned, hairless chest. But Justina's screaming started again, and now Marcus could tell it was coming from behind him, the opposite direction to where the man had pointed him.

"Sir?" called Katerina from behind him, huffing up the stairs. "I've called for security. Sir, please wait."

He ricocheted along the left hallway, throwing open closed doors as he went. Some rooms were empty of inhabitants, full of their owners' priceless objets d'art: fabergé eggs, silk tapestries, gilded silver mirrors. In one room, a couple lay naked on the bed, passionately fondling one another. In others, people sat listlessly on spindle-legged antique furniture, staring out windows, seeing nothing. Not even turning at Marcus's interruption. Empty shells.

Finally, he burst into the last room of the hall and found Justina. A young man held her against the wall by the neck, his biceps bulging under the sleeves of his white cotton tee. Justina's face was purple, her eyes wheeling in panic. She struggled. She scratched at his hands, his face, the back of his neck, but could not shake him. With each rake of her fingers she smeared blood across his skin - broken, now unbroken, no damage lasting longer than a second before his unchanging nature knitted him back together.

"Let me see it, you bitch," he roared. "It's my birthday and I want to see it!"

Adrenaline coursed through Marcus's body, electrifying him. He seized the man's collar and threw him to the side, hardly caring where he ended up as long as Justina was safe. She fell to the floor, hauling air into her lungs in ragged gasps.

"Are you ok?" he asked, dropping to his knees and lifting her face. "Can you breathe? Can you talk?"

She nodded, but her bloodshot eyes widened in panic over his shoulder.

"Grandpa, no!" she whispered.

It was the only warning Marcus got before stars exploded in his skull, pain blooming bright over his left ear.

The lawyer shuffled papers in his hands, plucking out two sheets and handing one to each Marcus and Justina.

"The Trustees have elected to award you both a bonus this year, in light of the, er, incident. We hope this will smooth any ruffled feathers."

Marcus didn't even look at the number on his paper. He didn't feel smoothed -- certainly not with the bandages taped to his hair, tugging painfully around the wound left by Justina's grandfather's Swarovski crystal paperweight.

He looked at Justina sitting up in her hospital bed, still looking shellshocked in her neck brace. She stared at the paper in her lap for a long moment, clicking her ballpoint pen in and out, in and out. Finally, she signed and shoved it back at the lawyer. Marcus followed her lead.

"Excellent," the lawyer smiled, relieved. "Your accounts should register the balance by Monday." He buckled his briefcase and stood to leave.

"When will it end?" Justina rasped.

"Excuse me?" asked the lawyer, caught off guard.

"When can I stop visiting?"

"Anytime you like. But then, you understand, the money would stop as well."

"But he's not in there anymore. He... he looks the same, but he's gone. There's nothing in his head but ghosts."

"The terms of his living trust are quite clear. As long as he remains, he requires a descendant's visit on his birthday. And next year, Wellspring Manor has assured me their security will be--"

"Next year?" Marcus sputtered. "No, there won't be a next year."

The lawyer shrugged.

"Well, you have a full year to decide. Good evening."

He left. Marcus, his head pounding, chuckled.

"Next year. As if."

But Justina didn't reply.

Back home on Sunday, Marcus watched Justina and George laze on the couch. The light of the late afternoon was golden, bathing them in warmth. Already, these cozy moments were growing rare. George was always on the go, hardly ever in the mood for a cuddle. For an instant, Marcus wished he could freeze this moment -- freeze his sleeping son -- and keep it all forever, unchanged, always young and golden.

A cloud crossed the sun. The quiet in the living room lost its peace.

Justina broke the silence. Her voice was still jagged.

"He wanted to see what it was like. Death. He wanted to watch me die so he could understand." She shivered. Outside, a church bell tolled the hour. "Would you do it?"

Marcus didn't have to ask what she meant. He knew she meant the scan, the obliteration of a body's possibility for change or death.

"No."

"I mean, if you knew it would be ok. If you knew your brain wouldn't turn to mush. If money wasn't an issue. If you could even keep your hair."

"Still no. It was a mistake. We have no business messing with that stuff. If yesterday wasn't enough to convince you, then I don't know what would."

Justina raised her head to the ceiling. He could see tears welling in her eyes.

"God help me, I think I'd get the scan. I thought I was going to die in there, and all I wanted was more time."

"That's different."

"No, I don't think it is. I think that's how everyone feels when they get down to it. To dying, I mean."

Marcus shrugged.

"Good thing it's banned, then."

"There are still ways, they say. A swiss clinic --"

"Come on, Justina, be serious. Even if that clinic existed, you know your genetic risk. You know what the scan did to your own grandfather."

"I am being serious."

"You'd really want to spend the rest of your long, long life committed to that asylum?" Her jaw tensed. "Have at it, then. But you won't get a penny from me to get the scan, so I guess you have many visits ahead to figure out if it's worth it."

George stirred. Marcus realized just how loud he was speaking. He needed a drink. He needed to get out of this room before he screamed at his beautiful, hurting wife. He sighed and stood to leave.

"Maybe next time you'll keep him safe, like you said you would," Justina hissed at his back.

"Why bother?" he asked, not turning. "He'd have to get used to visiting you there, after all. You and your grandpa both."

They didn't speak on the matter again. They aged with grace and good humor. But near the end, Marcus watched death draw in on Justina first. He regretted. He understood.