Not in My Lifetime

Though I cannot not recall the exact date, I do remember that it was cold for March in the small Central Mexican town in which I was living. Many years ago, I moved there to escape the United States. I was trying to remember the exact words of my guests in the affair I had hosted so many years ago. There were two guests. That much I could remember. They had engaged me in a conversation that I do not want to remember but, alas, I do. We had talked well into the night, that evening so long ago, about what would become of America. In the words and view of my two guests, life in America as we presently knew it would come to an end.

“No, no, no!” I said to one of my guests. “We will never see in America such a depth of change from upright morals. That sort of nonsense, no, sickness, has been going on forever but it will never take hold here. Never! It is an anomaly in cultures. But it has never ruled the day!!”

“Moral, nonsense, sickness?” One of my guests stood to draw closer to the fire, “Is that what you see it as? Some would say, in fact many will come to say, that it is as natural and common as being born with brown hair.”

One of my guests looked young and very pale. His skin was virtually colorless. What his age really was, well, it was anyone’s guess. I came to believe in all my many talks with these gentlemen, lo these many years, that they might even be ageless. My pale, young guest joined in the conversation,

“America will degenerate into a mass of people who accept that which we now regard as perversion. They will eschew that which we regard as right, acceptable, and moral.”

A discourse of intense urgency ensued, one in which the three of us had never, at least up to this point in our relationship, experienced. I wasn’t sure what was on the minds of my guests. It was as though they knew something I did not. The one who had been seated joined his comrade at the fire and spoke,

“America will not just degenerate into accepting a standard of moral thinking that we find appalling but will actively and eagerly promote such ethical degradation. You wait, you will see, it will happen!”

I can still feel the utter consternation I felt at that time as though it happened yesterday. I did not accept what my guests were telling me. I rebelled. I lashed out in anger,

“No! You are wrong. Americans would never, in 200 years, give into what you are saying. This is not possible. Not for America and her people!”

I paced the floor of my small Mexican apartment trying to keep warm on this unusually cold March evening. “How could they have been so right and how could I have so missed the mark?” I pondered. They had been right. My strange and unearthly-looking guests had been right on the mark

I had met these men when I was a child living in the States. My parents had introduced us. Even after my folks had passed I continued to receive these two men as visitors in my home. I never turned them away. I thrived on the discussion, the companionship, the warmth. Even though I knew so little of where they came from and who they really were, I loved their company. They were always invited. How I wish they would come once more.

“Never in 200 years you say?” One of my guests repeated my exasperated declaration concerning their supposition of America’s downfall.

“That’s right,” I protested even more loudly. “Never in 200 years will you see even an inkling of Americans accepting what the two of you are implying.”

My friends looked at each other sadly. They returned to their seats in the living room. They sat in silence so I took that opportunity to press the issue.

“Just what proof do you have? How do you know that America will devolve into such a cesspool? What can you tell me that would convince me?”

The guest who was slightly larger and darker-skinned began,

“There is that ‘God is dead’ business.”

“Surely you are not saying that some silly philosopher of so long ago will have a destructive influence on America?”

“Is having, don’t you mean?”

“No,” I countered, “not now or ever. What are you, a conspiracy theorist?”

The two of them just stared at me and said nothing. In fact, the three of us said nothing. I wondered what these two mysterious men were thinking.

I really knew so little about them. They kept showing up at the door after my parents died. They didn’t call. They just showed up. If I was entertaining other guests, I would invite them in to join us, but they would always decline. They would keep coming back until I could see them alone. I used to think it strange. They did the same thing when my parents were living. Only now it was I, alone, they came to see.

“What is happening,” one them finally breaking the silence and my train of thought, “when a society forgets the God who made them and sustains them?”

“There you go, ‘is’ happening.”

“What is happening is the wholesale abandonment of any sort of normative ethics.”

I thought briefly before responding, “There have always been violators of ethics. There have always been those to push the limits of hearth and home.”

“Do you notice that women and men are producing more and more children without being married? They no longer care for the normative ethic of marriage. They have no ethic of marriage,” said the man of slighter build.

“Do you mean that having children out wedlock is something new? Why that sort of peccadillo has been happening sinceâÂ?¦”

They both suddenly stiffened and with widening eyes.

“âÂ?¦since the Smyth’s daughter just down the block from here had a baby out of wedlock.” I wondered what it was they began reacting to. They usually spoke without any emotion at all and never showed any sort of reaction to anything I’d ever said to them.

“We do not mean that.”

That was the first time they referred to one another as ‘We’.

“What we mean is the wholesale abandonment of normative ethics on a societal scale. Where educators, doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians, parents, and children forget any prescriptive norm to govern their behavior.”

“Well,” I replied, “that would be chaos. We are not even close to seeing such a thing. And, as I said, we would not see such a thing in 200 years. Or, I should say, I would never see such a thing in my lifetime.”

I was 50 years old. I had had memories of these mysterious guests since I was five years old. It was then my parents allowed me to sit in on their sessions with these two men. I did not understand anything of their collective conversation but I thought them odd and otherworldly-looking. I almost always left the room to go play five minutes into the discussion. I was always forbidden to talk about them to my friends. I always obeyed my parent’s desire in that regard. But, what I did understand then as I did now, was that there was never anything other than flat affect registered in their voices or on their faces.

Now, it was different.

They both leapt to their feet from the chairs they always sat in. Both were talking frantically and at the same time. I was frightened. I became especially scared in thinking how I didn’t really know anything about them, not even their names. And lo, after these many years, I let what now seemed to be two madmen into my house. I always did let them in.

“Never in my lifetime or 200 yearsâÂ?¦” they both screamed over and over like two mad parrots. It was as though they could say nothing else.

Suddenly, as quickly as they began their joint tirade, they stopped. The flat affect returned to both of their faces. They said nothing, just gathered their black coats and hats. They said nothing as they walked through my home to the foyer. They said nothing as they put on and buttoned their coats. Then, for the first time in my memory, they offered me their hands. Their skin felt cold-both of them. Shaking hands firmly, they said nothing and left.

I thought it strange that I could recall with uncanny precision the exact date those men left my home that evening. After all to do so, two hundred years later, was a feat not to be expected of a man more than 250 years old.

They left my home on the evening of December 25, 1805. I was never to see them again.

Here I was, some two hundred years later, staring at my reflection in the window of my small one-bedroom Central Mexican apartment. It was 8:45 p.m. and fully dark. Staring at my forming reflection, I marveled and shuddered at how I looked no older than I did the evening when my two otherworldly guests left me never to return.

How they did it? I have no idea, even to this day.

I walked into the bedroom where I kept what came to be called a ‘computer’ in the 20th century. I turned it on and waited for it ‘to boot’. What an odd and silly term to call the process by which this machine came to life but it was what it was.

I activated the information network that they called ‘The Internet’. I speak of ‘they’ because I still cannot, after now more than two hundred years, bring myself to consider myself a part of their world. I am from another world-another time. I am now ‘other worldly’.

The news headline on the news web site read,

“Homosexual marriages now mandated as law by U.S. Congress.”

I just stared for a while at the screen.

“Not in my lifetime or 200 years,” is what gently flowed into my mind.

I rose from the computer to fetch my black coat and hat. I thought to myself,

“This is what I will discuss this evening with my new charge. I wonder if I should tell him my name?”

I was looking rather pale that evening.