Today is another ordinary day. And Pedro begins his day with the climax, an erection. He does this by committing suicide. You see, this isn't his first time to die--it's his sixty-eighth. Call it endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, what have you. The chemicals in his brain give him the high in adrenaline thrills, striking arousal.

Last night, Pedro failed an erection again. He met a girl named Rina, who works as a grocery cashier at Waltermart, two buildings away from where he's standing. Maybe it's middle-age crisis, erectile dysfunction, or just ennui, but Pedro doesn't find sex in the bedroom exciting any more.

He's lived 214 years and life doesn't get any more fun than killing his immortal body. Pedro doesn't believe in the soul. Beyond death, it's just a frottage of earthworms and maggots having a rave party on decaying flesh.

So today he decides to jump off a building, blowing himself in the process. The building is a thirty-five storey condominium crammed with the middle-class. But Pedro doesn't live here. He lives in the shanties thirty-five stories below behind this building. This is the building where he sneaks into to dip in the pool right here at the roof top.

The pool is a few feet behind him, filled with rainwater, piss, sex discharge, and microorganisms. Beside it is a jacuzzi that never works.

At the ledge Pedro is standing with a bulging threadbare trench coat with nothing but explosives inside. And the sun right in front of him is peeking out the horizon to humiliate his day. Perhaps this could be his last day, perhaps not. It doesn't matter. If his charred body parts reassembles on the pavement and he walks away without a scratch, he'd just walk back to his little shanty, where Rina is asleep, naked. Then he'd begin another dull day at the airport where he works.

In the airport he works as a janitor. He doesn't like to be a janitor but that's the closest thing he could ever get to an airplane. Before this he pasted stamps in the post office. Before that he sold vibrating slimming belts door to door. And before that, you wouldn't want to know.

At the ledge he looks down below and his palms and armpits begin to trickle sweat. Layers of tiny floating rectangles speed by left and right thirty floors below him. Didn't I tell you this is the future? Nothing much changed really, except for the less traffic. Dots of black heads pass by the lane he imagines he'd smack into. He can faintly hear a sweeper cleaning the street with his hard broom. The sound is like a fingernail scratching on dry skin. In his vertigo, he feels a novel kind of high. And his flaccid member twitches in its early sign of life.

He takes a lighter from his coat pocket, strips the coat off, and tosses it behind him. When you see him, he isn't really naked. His skin is covered with a mixture of vaseline and gasoline. The explosives strapped on his arms, torso, and legs, they look like his body's all covered up. Except that behind you see the butt cleavage, and in front, the penis. Not yet so alive.

Let me tell you something about his penis. I warn you this is graphic. If you're under eighteen, you stop reading this and wait until your eighteenth birthday.

Good. You're still here.

His penis is just as dark as his elbows. This is the first time his penis sees the sun. This is the first time Pedro ever gets naked killing himself. His penis is covered with wrinkled skin bunched up together. On some sides there are veins. There on the underside of his shaft is the thickest vein, which distributes blood straight to the head. At the bottom half of the head is a tiny piss slit. The peep hole where his urine and semen pass. Inside that peep hole is a throbbing sound. His heart is pumping the first spew of blood to this organ. And his balls, they don't get much attention, really.

His penis has penetrated exactly three women in his life; the first vaginal, second anal, third oral. There's also the fourth, but given the failed hand job and failed blow job, it doesn't count. The first woman is a virgin named Portia. She is young and stupid, and she grew old and died near the mountains still stupid. The second is Corinne, a giddy call center reject in Bataan. The third, the fourth, they're all the same, some lowlife drunk enough to take to bed with. The fifth, Rina. Oh my Rina, another failed project. He stimulated her with his tongue and fingers instead.

Down below someone shrieks, arm stretched, finger pointing ninety-two degrees at the black-covered man, save for his penis. Pedro's first instinct is to step down, cover up and go home, but he thinks against it. The complete attention of one, two, three persons isn't so bad. He looks at them and he exposes his crooked teeth in a smile.

Pedro is biologically twenty years old. It just means that given his age, he has the body of a young adult. There's nothing remarkable about him except for his perfect nose and perfect skin, which he acquired from his father.

His father, Pedro doesn't know much about his father. All he knows is he was a bioengineer in some big time university in Los Angeles. It just so happens that Pedro's mother worked for him as a housemaid two centuries back. His father, his last name Richardson, he did something that could cause a revolution. He's done it on a jellyfish. He's done it on a rat, a dog, a chimp. Now he's done it on a human being. And the test tube subject was Pedro's mother.

Pedro has managed to attract a small crowd of about thirty people, all gawking at him heavenward. The height alone makes him feel like a heavenly being, a bird, an angel, something up in the sky. He feels the adrenaline with the people face up moving around. His penis stiffens and climbs an inch from where it's limping.

Prior to this he nosedived off a cliff in Mount Maculot. The cliff is unwittingly called Parrot's Beak, and it is hanging over jagged rocks. Before that, Pedro jumped off the San Juanico Bridge. He just smacked his body on the water surface, head then hitting the riverbed, and woke up on the shore gasping for air but stopped, realizing there was nobody around. Way before that, he jammed a utensil in a wall outlet. And before that, he choked himself with hairball, and left a death note saying his pet Fluffy killed him in his sleep. That was pretty creative, only that the one who read the note was himself. You don't want to get to the root of this, do you?

One car skidded off the main road, and parked somewhere near and elevated to watch Pedro's fall. Unlike in other countries, the cars here cannot fly beyond sixty feet high. And unlike in the past where there was the Speed Limit, now we only have the FHL or the Flight Height Limit. Cars crashing against each other is no longer a problem. Thank you, Newton. Thank you, magnetism.

The driver in the parked car, he steps out wearing reflective sunshades and climbs up the hood of his vehicle. He takes a cigarette, lights it up, and rings a smoke in the air.

Nothing's more pathetic than a naked man with not so much of a manhood in him. But the explosives make an excellent entertainment.

Pedro studies the man. The man has one knee bent, one elbow supporting his weight. With a cigarette in between his fingers he waves at Pedro in a retro peace-sign kind of way. Pedro smirks and waits for more people to form into an ant colony.

He has deprived himself of the fruits of science that promise longer lifespans. Next to Charles Darwin, one theoretical scientist has made it to the hall of fame by developing molecular and cellular rejuvenation. His name, Aubrey de Grey. It is this scientific giant who's led man's rise to immortality. Food has been enhanced to delay the process of aging. All disease and sickness has been terminated by medicine and technology. Man can live to as long as one hundred and fifty years and soon, longer. Without cryonics, the only disease left that separates man from immortality is senescence, the metabolic process of aging and dying eventually.

But Pedro's case is a different banana altogether. He can live for thousands, even millions of years if he wants to, and die only from the cosmic explosion of the sun.

The people below have gathered to about a hundred. Some are standing, looking skyward, others darting back and forth, touching antennas and exchanging bits of information. Surrounding the parked car are six more cars. No one has bothered to call the authorities just yet.

Pedro raises a foot forward and the crowd gasps collectively. All this attention, it's better than all the years of his life combined. All those two hundred years, much of it is just blah, like some vague dream.

It appears to him that newer memories replaced the older ones, given the limited space in his brain. The earliest memory he could think of is him with his mother in Cagayan where he grew up. He was slicing an apple in half and cut his palm in the process. To his surprise, not a single drop of blood oozed out. The blood vessels contracted quickly, and the layers of skin regenerated. Seconds later, it left no trace he thought he was hallucinating.

Pedro's genetic makeup is his father's underground laboratory experiment. His father inseminated the spliced regenerative genetic code of a hydra and a salamander into an artificially fertilized human zygote (his father's sperm and his mother's egg on a petri dish), and injected the zygote back into his mother's fallopian tube. His mother agreed to this in exchange for an enormous amount of dollars. Enough money for his mother to run away and go back to her native land.

The traffic slogs forward. Some people poke their heads out their windows to take a glimpse of the naked spectacle. A police car hovers a hundred feet above a ground opposite the street. That's the FHL police cars can get. The two policemen lower their windows, the one on the driver's seat talking to a radio wired elsewhere.

Pedro flicks the lighter, sparks, but no flame appears. He flicks it again. A flame shows momentarily, but the wind snuffs it out. Then he hears a voice.

"Pedro," the voice says.

Pedro turns around, exposing his butt cheeks to the spectators, who clap and hoot distantly away.

"Rina," says Pedro, somewhat surprised. The girl she picked up on the street. Out here under the broad daylight, she really isn't that pretty as last night. All right, she's butt ugly. No, she's hideous. The color washed out from her face, eyes half way out their sockets, the over-overbite, and the chin almost nonexistent. She looks like a different life form that crash-landed from outer space. Who is this woman?

Surprised herself, Rina looks at his half-erected member.

"What are you doing?" Rina looks at her watch and continues, "It's six in the morning." Wrapped around her shoulder is the flimsy blanket they covered their bodies with last night. It's cold out, the sun just warming things up. "I woke up alone, and thought I'd find you here."

Pedro shouldn't have asked her to swim in the pool with him last night.

She walks toward the ledge chest-level and looks down below.

"I'm just playing around," Pedro says, grinning stupidly.

"Playing," Rina snorts. "You know you can get arrested for this." Her hair is flowing in waves at the side of her head.

"I want to die," Pedro begins.

"Come on," she says, offering a hand. "Let's go home."

"I want to die," Pedro says again.

"Then jump off already," Rina says. She looks up to him as he inches his heel to the edge.

"Don't do this right now, Pedro," Rina says. "Just because you can't make me come doesn't mean I hate you."

The crowd outside is booing and hooting for him to face front.

"It's not that," he says. Actually, it's partly that. "It's just that I have nothing to lose in this place." One hand cupping the flame, he flicks the lighter on.

"Look at this," Pedro says.

Rina steps in front of him, ignoring his penis.

Pedro burns the palm of his hand and his penis rises a notch.

"Pedro stop," says Rina. Then her eyes widen, seeing the burnt palm, the layers of skin, the bones underneath. His palm is healing itself. She looks at his penis, eyes wider still, then back at the palm.

"Rina," he says. "I think I'm a mutant." A mutant. Pedro's genes is part human, part salamander, part hydra. The salamander is the only animal that can repair itself and regrow body parts--including bones, tissues, nerves, skin--perfectly on its own throughout its lifetime. While the hydra is the only animal that never ages. Given both elements, Pedro is indestructible and unaging.

"What do you mean?" she says.

"Remember when I told you I like airplanes?" he says. "That was a lie."

"It doesn't matter."

"What I really want is I want to go to America," he says. He says this in a far fetched sort of way that Rina closes her eyes in disgust. Then he continues, "I want to visit my father's grave and find out all about this stuff that I'm capable of doing."

"Where's your mother, Pedro?" Rina says.

"She's in Cagayan," he replies. "She's dead too. Just before she died many, many years back, she said, she said the closest thing that I'll ever get into an airplane is if I'm the janitor."

"And your family?"

"They're all rotting underground," says Pedro.

Rina wraps the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

"Rina, I don't die," he confesses. "I mean, my body. It just heals itself."

She looks at him like she doesn't believe it.

"I'm two hundred and twelve years old," he says. "That's why I can't get a better job. My birth certificate isn't credible. And my anal records show I'm already dead."

"Dead? Like a zombie dead?"

"Something like that," he says. It was years back when he garroted himself on a flagpole. With nobody to claim his body, he was crammed into a morgue drawer. Next day the body was gone, walked away.

Pedro glances behind him, and finds the ant colony dispersing.

Looking back to Rina, he stretches an arm and says, "Come on up here. I want to show you something."

"Oh no, you're not making me come up there." She begins to step back towards the rain-piss-and-sperm infested pool.

"We're not going to jump, I promise," Pedro says.

Rina takes his hand and Pedro lifts her up, both of them about to topple and fall, but they're alright. They stand up on the ledge, hands together, and the crowd hoots and claps, goes back to their places.

The police car at the other side of the street, the policeman just talks forever into his radio.

"You see all these little people," Pedro begins. "We're one of these little people."

Rina inhales and exhales heavily, nose flaring and showing her nose hair.

"Little people thinking little thoughts, living little lives," he continues. "Just a face in the crowd, an occupied seat in the bus, a nobody. When I'm gone, no one will even notice."

Rina looks at him with a sour grimace on her face. "You're even more pathetic than I thought you were."

"But this." Both hands cutting through the air, Pedro exposes his hairy, unwashed armpits. "This is a fifteen-minute glory." The crowd howls at him, worshipping a god as if in a communal celebration.

"I don't care none of this bullshit, really," Rina says. "If you wanna die just go ahead and do it."

"I did," he says. "A lot of times. But none of them worked."

"Then this is your big day."

"To a mortal," he says, "those in between being born and being dead, it's just a list of things to do."

"Alright, I'm going home." Rina turns around but Pedro holds her back.

"But to me," he continues, "life is a long procrastination to the grave."

Rina scrunches her butt on the ledge anyway and steps down.

"You know what?" she says smiling. "You're a big time fucked up loser." With that she swivels around, and Pedro follows her with his eyes as she disappears into the door towards the elevator.

Back to the crowd, Pedro raises his arms like Jesus and stretches his lips far back to expose all his plaques and crooked teeth. This is the greatest day of his life.

In a distance, two more police sirens come wailing above the layers of other cars below. Still in a distance, the media men crammed in a van inch forward to catch a sight of Pedro. A video camera is jutting out its window, recording his big leap.

Pedro raises a foot, and the crowd cheers in unison. His penis jerks. He withdraws his foot back.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!" someone says faintly from below. The police sirens gain volume. The crowd picks up the chant and altogether they stomp their feet in succession, saying, "Jump! Jump! Jump!"

The wind still, he ignites the ligher.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

One inch, his hand moves forward his chest. His penis distends and rises a notch higher.

Pedro indulges himself in amusement, thinking about wasting all these people's time on some superficial event.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

Few inches more, the light is almost there. His member elongates and thickens, blood surging up the head.

He thinks about how this jump will grant him fame, his big leap broadcasted in every viral video network, his name printed and preserved on paper.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

His hand perspiring, the lighter is two inches away. All the wrinkles around the shaft smoothen out. The head pulls its skin taut.

In a flash is his immortality, his name on every news coverage shown in every television, every computer screen, in every known corner of the planet.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

Palm all drenched with sweat, almost there. His penis is sticking out like a lever, hard and engorged in its full glory.

He has never felt the god that he really is until this moment.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

There, a tiny space in between the flame and his chest. A drop of sticky fluid seeps out his piss slit.

The sun blazing in full view, he squints his eyes almost shut.

"Jump! Jump! Jump!"

With one twitch, the light touches the vaseline and gasoline on his skin, and he jumps off the building. The flame quickly spreads throughout his body, licking every inch of his skin, including his balls and penis, licking every explosive. Half-way down, boom, his body explodes and a fireworks display of body parts pelts on the fleeing onlookers, smacking them with bloody pieces of charred flesh.

The crowd goes into a rampage. A blasted cave entrance has formed on the side of the building. But nobody's hurt, save for a few who's incurred shallow burns. An hour later, the traffic flows normally, and everybody resumes their jobs.

Just an ordinary day. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

His body parts are collected in a box, jiggling, but fortunately, lifeless.

Word Up

alcholick
12.05.09 - 21:40

jump pedro jump see pedro walk to mother see pedro jump :D

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