I still remember that day. I had just bought a used mobile phone for my desk at home. It was not even a working phone. Once, someone might have found it useful, but the batteries were not only dead but lost. I needed a paperweight, and this looked like the right thing with a somewhat unusual appealing design, which I had not seen before of a brand I did not know. I put it on a pile of papers, and it fulfilled its purpose, keeping the sheets in place in spite of a soft breeze through the open window. I tried to sit down and waste my time with some unreliable news sites, but I was unable to concentrate because of the reflections from the phone. In the end I decided to cover the screen with masking tape. I carefully attached two strips of tape to cover the screen, but a tiny slit was still free, so I had to add a third strip. With utmost care, to avoid any unseemly wrinkles, I slowly dragged my finger over the tape. Just when I got to the last pixel of the screen, the entire room began to tremble, and an inexplicable darkness covered the windows. I could see that the sun was still shining outside, but the light did not penetrate through the black velvet curtains. All the light in the room came from my newly purchased phone, penetrating the masking tape, as if it had been a stage light, and from the phone rose a rapidly growing figure in a purple turban and a long pink robe.
“I am the genie of the phone,” thundered his voice. “I have been locked in that device by an evil magician, not less than a fortnight ago. I’ll never go to that secondhand market again,” he mumbled. “By covering the screen, you broke the spell. I will now fulfil three of your most ardent wishes.”
“Gee!” I replied. I did not come to think of anything better to say.
“But think carefully,” he roared. “Many are the fools who have wrecked their lives with silly wishes.”
“I want to live forever!”
“What?”
“I want to become immortal. Never die, you know. Quite a downer, most funerals. Wouldn’t like to impose that on others.”
“You have heard of Tithonos?”
“The guy who got eternal life but not eternal youth? Yea. Sure.”
“So you want eternal youth as well?”
“Oh, no. No need for that. I never liked being young anyhow. Uncertain future and all that.”
“You sound like a fool to me.”
“Well, you haven’t lived forever yourself, have you? You cannot really tell what it is like.”
“So be it. I grant you…” There was a fanfare in a jazz chord as if played by three bagpipes. “… eternal life!”
“Thanks. Dashed decent of you. Actually, it does not feel any different. Is that normal?”
“It will feel different in the years to come. Very different. What is your next wish?”
“I want a mind that is able to handle eternity without any pain.”
“Oh… Perhaps, you are not such a fool after all. Well, here it is, the wisdom you perhaps should have asked for as your first wish.” Some chords as from a string quartet that was so beautiful that Poulenc might have written it sounded across the room.
“Weeeee! Yes, that feels different. Let me just think… No, of course not. I’m too clever to need any time to think.”
“So what’s your third and last wish?”
“A really bad memory.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want a really bad memory.”
“You want to forget everything that has happened?”
“No, no, no. Just an average bad memory you know. I’ll remember some things, but forget many. When I walk into another room, I will quite often forget what I intended to do. That kind of thing.”
“Oh, mortal…!”
“Not any longer!”
“Right… Oh, little idiot!”
“That’s better.”
“I will grant you…” Timpani and trombones and triangles accompanied his last words: “… an average Bad Memory!”
And the genie disappeared in a puff of smoke. At least I imagine he did. I do not remember any longer. It doesn’t really matter. I remember some things, but most of the past is just a haze for me.
Then I began my earthly preparations. I bought interesting books and ripped out all the sheets. I downloaded the most beautiful pictures I could find on commercial websites. Some of them I printed out on paper. Some of them I had carved into stone. I added a fairly large number of statues of wood and stone and put them all in a storage room.
After a few hundred years, human technology had come so far that I could ask a company to send it all out in space together with myself, far away from anything.
A few billion years later, the sun exploded far behind me. The earth was annihilated. Our galaxy collided with another galaxy. Time went on.
The stars went out, one by one. The galaxies dissolved. Some of them were sucked into black holes that then radiated back out into the empty space and faded away.
Once, I was sucked into a black hole myself. It could do me no harm, of course. I was immortal. I was old and weak. I had lost my hair. My skin was dry and wrinkly. My body had gone through a huge number of different kinds of cancer. But I was immortal. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I was sucked into a black hole. I don’t remember. It was nothing exciting, I guess.
Space was big and dark. Very rarely I was aware of any matter, except my own rocket, which to a normal human eye was as dark as anything anyone has ever been unable to see. The books, the sculptures, the paintings, I had assembled them all into a big ring that slowly rotated. I was sitting still in space, and saw the ring rotate. I saw the Guernica pass by. I read Finnegan’s Wake, page by page as they floated past me. And very soon, I had forgotten all about them. Years passed. Centuries. And all the time, new art, new books passed me on that ring. I knew I must have seen them before, as the ring was finite, but in eternity, one forgets what one has seen, so I could each time enjoy them as much as I had done the previous thousand times I had read or seen them.
It was all dark, but every now and then, a pair of photons would spontaneously form in the vacuum, and every now and then, one of them would hit a painting and then be reflected onto me. It was not often compared to a mortal human’s life. But it was more than enough for a truly immortal experience.
Why I wrote this down? I do not remember. But I assume I have read it thousands of times, and I’m as surprised every time I learn the story of my life.