Before us an image, the metaphorical camera in our mind’s eye pulls back from a vibrant and verdant pedestrian thoroughfare, full of chattering people in bright, flowing, colourific robes and togas strolling, or standing, or sitting on benches, or ledges, or on the ground in the shade of a stand of calabash trees. The broad avenue is run through with the ubiquitous walk-bands which whisk yet more people from one end of the jungle city to another. Slowly we rise from the level of mundane life, sweeping out and up and over; the whole of Mpohor City condenses below us and reveals a series of concentric circles centred on a bullseye of tall buildings. Each walk-band-separated ring beyond this central circle contains a tangle of well-kept footpaths strolling gently between the tidy residential plots of small stucco houses painted in a thousand different shades of tropical pastel—each camouflaged by a thick overgrowth of jungle creepers.

At the director’s signal the camera begins to descend, and we swoop and dive down between buildings and trees, into and then through the bustling foot traffic of another street full of lively, cheerful pedestrians; and without really noticing when he first appeared, we recognise Jacob, riding the walk-band, looking around at his new-old neighbourhood with guarded familiarity.

To have lived for some 800-ish years entails by definition a rather high minimum of repetition, but it had been a long time since he had last returned to this neighbourhood he had thought never to see again.

Their relationship had from the beginning been contentious and laden with layers of avoidance and passive-aggression, mostly on his part, if he was honest with himself—and he had shrouded himself in a cowl of sarcasm and irony, proffering this weak and cowardly form of humour as a sort of apology to Delaney; from whom—by nature of the intimacy of the very relationship which caused it—he could never wholly mask his contempt. He knew and had known that Delaney had done nothing to earn this contempt except be earnest and engaged in the events of her life and the activities with which she passed her time. He knew even at the start of their courtship that it had been a mistake, but he had been drawn to her by a sort of conceptual attraction, the appeal of that very engaged-ness her life and in her world.

She was far from stupid, but she wasted no time analysing the components of her experience and arranging them into abstract conceptual systems. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Delaney had demonstrated to Jacob on an inarticulable visceral level just how distant he held himself from world around him; and he had taken up with her in the secret hope that some of her directness would rub off on him—that by some magical osmosis he would also become able to just do, to just live. Thus his contempt was, in fact, not only a thinly veiled and lonely jealousy of her ability to live without wondering how to do it correctly, but also a projection of his deep disappointment in himself and his own failure to change.

And as he looked around at his old neighbourhood, so much the same and yet so different, he wondered if he was repeating the old pattern all over again. Was he ending an unhappy and unhealthy incompatible relationship, or had he simply proved yet again his own inability to adapt and expand and learn how to exist in the world like a normal human being?

Behind him, not far off, he felt the looming knowledge that, yes, indeed: what he was describing to himself as a pragmatic, adult decision (ending their relationship) was in reality a bare-faced rationalization of a childish desire (to run away from something that frustrated him, that sacred him).

It scared him further that this recapitulation of childish fears might not be a turning point, but simply another turn of the wheel in a too-long life, which he could reasonably expect to continue for another thousand years at least. The prospect of this eternity swooped down upon him and pulled a veil across the sun. An eternal life of frustration and disappointment, of loneliness and isolation, stranded on an island of his own making.

He heard without hearing, Robert’s pleasantly authoritative voice in the back of his head.

— Hello Mister J, you are approaching your stop. Please exit at the next opportunity.

Lost in thought and responding automatically, Jacob stepped onto the exit lane of the walk-band, which brought him down to walking speed. He stepped off, turned abruptly, and cut off a surprised fellow pedestrian, of whom he took no notice at all.