Who Wants To Live Forever?
“…years later, standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn’t there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, I learned a terrible thing: sometimes there is no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”
-Paul Edgecombe, The Green Mile
“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars—points of light and reason…and then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire, everything was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone…my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.
I can’t live in a world where you don’t exist.”
-Edward Cullen, New Moon
(from the Twilight series)
Paul Edgecombe, head prison guard at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary, treads the green-tiled floor of Death Row your average guy. Just a Joe Prison Guard who accidentally peeks behind life’s curtain and sees a reality that, for him, had been the stuff of campfire stories. That reality alters him forever, and gives him a chance to change the world. At least, his humble corner of it.
What you need to know about Paul to understand why he’s lamenting his “salvation” is that some supernatural power from behind that curtain healed him of a disease while he was still on the rich side of the train tracks of middle age. What’s more, the residual effects of the healing kept him incredibly, impossibly young. Paul was blessed with a miraculously long life, the gift that kept on giving.
In fact, it gave until it hurt.Now, I’m in my thirties, old enough to wish that Life would put on the brakes, a member of the “where does the time go?!” support group. The thought of being healed from disease, protected from sickness and enjoying unnaturally long life seems at first like a dream. It’s only years down the road that those extra years lose their luster.
For vampires, Everlasting Life is one of the curses, not the blessings, of undeath. Just ask the Cullens, the loveable family of bloodsuckers from the Twilight series. Edward, two-hundred-year old teen heartthrob, has been around the block a few thousand times. Frankly, he’s bored. What do vampires with hundreds of years to kill (sorry) do, exactly? Apparently they play baseball, learn the piano, and repeat high school every ten years or so. Not the dream life we’ve all imagined. Vampire or not, high school sucks (again, sorry).
Edward’s SO over it; life for him had become unbearably mundane. And for Paul Edgecombe, it turned damnably cruel.
