Free Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier

“He’s joking.”
    “He’s joking?” said the ancient mariner.
    “He was never a slave in Jamaica.”
    “Oh. I get it. Haha! Do I get it?”
    “It’s not a good joke,” said Azar. “There’s nothing to get.”
    “Well, anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad. Killing people is not an agreeable experience. It gets easier, of course. Everything does. As for Magellan, he was a tyrant. We drew straws.”
    “Okay,” said Azar, adjusting the camera and peering into the viewfinder. “But maybe now you could repeat what you said about Columbus, so we have it on film?”
    My phone began to buzz and I squeezed it until it stopped. Our walk had spoiled my mood. It was all obesity and disposable packaging out there, and not a solar panel to be seen, and this was Florida, where there was enough sunlight to power the whole corrupt enterprise three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
    “What do you think of our culture of consumption?” I asked.
    The ancient mariner beamed, but he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”
    “It’s nothing,” said Azar. “Forget about it. Tell us about Columbus.”
    “He had a lazy eye.”
    “No,” I said. “Azar, listen. If he’s six hundred years old or something, he can help us put all of this in perspective.” I turned to the ancient mariner again. “I’m asking about plastic, for example.”
    “Plastic is a marvel.”
    “I mean disposable packaging. You use it and you throw it out, like the plastic bags they give you at the grocery store. A plastic container of blueberries in a plastic bag.”
    “Okay.”
    “But where do the blueberries come from? The whole point of fruit is that it’s seasonal! Are we kings that we have to have blueberries every day of the year?”
    “Kings?” said the ancient mariner.
    “It’s economies of scale or something.”
    “What is?”
    “It’s cheaper to destroy the world than it is to save it!”
    “Listen,” said Azar, “slow down and take a breath. No one wants to destroy the world. It’s just that who doesn’t enjoy a handful of blueberries?”
    “When you were young,” I said to the ancient mariner, “there was no plastic, no landfills, no blueberries in the winter.”
    “There was sewage in the streets,” he said. “It got all over you.”
    “But the cost now is that the seas are rising! The earth is heating up!”
    “Oh yes, I believe you, but it’s wonderful to be able to throw things out. Modern sanitation is a miracle. You put it out by the curb and it’s gone. Isn’t this a sign of progress? You should have smelled the old cities.”
    We could hear the parakeets again. The sun was shining. It was still a beautiful world. The spirit went out of me.
    “I’m trying so hard to be less gloomy,” I said, “and suddenly I’m talking about trash and plastic again, like always.”
    Azar sat down next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Very gently, he said, “You’re kind of fucked up, huh?”
    I started to say, “I feel,” but how did I feel? I felt painfully out of step with the world I lived in. I longed for a place and time in which there were fewer people, fewer cars, less garbage. At the same time I took hot showers and flew on airplanes and drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I was complicit. And I knew perfectly well that if I’d been born into another time, I’d have found another thing to grieve over. There was something wrong with me.
    “I actually think you’re doing better than you were,” Azar said. “This is just a small relapse. A few months ago it was all garbage all the time. Remember?”
    I hung my head like a sad cartoon man in an antidepressant commercial. I had never taken antidepressants but I was addicted to anxiety medication. I would have been addicted to painkillers too if it were easier for me to get them. I was addicted to bad news. Maybe I was also addicted to cynicism and gloom! Sometimes I worried that my tongue would swell up and choke me in the