9

From the beginning, the toll of time has been an important consideration in the CCverse. In other superhero franchises, the characters have long histories, but once they have reached adulthood, they tend not to age. The CC Four decided early on that this would not be the case for Cosmos and his loved ones. He and the people around him get older at the rate of “one second per second,” as MacKenzie likes to say. They age in real time. In time, they will die.

In the first issue, Cosmos was twenty-three. Now he’s thirty. His thirtieth birthday was the occasion for a special double issue, a huge party in which all the people he’d helped arrived by the hundreds—nay, by the thousands—to cheer him on and wish him well. The party filled the Keyhole football stadium, overflowed onto the streets, and lasted for days, a combination of Mardi Gras, the Fourth of July, and Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party.

Naturally, the Emperor was there, too, a constellation-studded darkness looming over the crowd. “Carpe diem, indeed,” he intoned. “Party while ye may, for in the end, I will win, whatever you do. I always win. Mine is the last face you will see.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Cosmos, wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt. He was a little tipsy on his third beer. “And what of you, esteemed opponent? How old are you?”

“I am as old as the universe, puny mortal. I will live as long as time itself. When all you have done and all you have loved are dust, when their descendants to the fiftieth generation are dust, I will still move throughout the galaxies. I dwell in eternity, and my garb is creation, and—”

“And you’re damnably long-winded,” Cosmos said with a hiccup, taking another swig of beer. “Let me rephrase the question. When’s your birthday, O Emperor?”

“I was born when the first molecules—”

“Oh, pshaw,” Cosmos said, and belched. “Nobody knows when that is, do they?” He grabbed a microphone connected to the stadium’s PA system. “Hey, everybody! The Emperor doesn’t know when his birthday is!”

A huge “awwwww” of feigned sympathy filled the stadium.

“He’s never had a birthday cake!”

“Awwwwww!”

“And if he did, he wouldn’t invite anybody to share it!”

“Booooo!”

“He outlives everybody, like a vampire, so he’s afraid to get close to them! The Emperor doesn’t have any friends, only Minions!”

“Awwwwww!”

Cosmos waved his beer bottle over his head, burped again, and said into the microphone, “I’m feeling generous, Emperor, so I’ll give you a present. From now on, my birthday’s yours, too. We can eat cake together. You’re always welcome to my party.”

“I am always present, mortal, welcome or not. I am always with you. I—”

“Yeah,” said Cosmos, “but now you’re invited.” The thought balloon above his head read, Like a vampire.

“That makes no difference, mortal.”

“Sure it does. It means that I’m not clinging to time I can’t keep, that I’m not fetishizing my lost youth, that I accept the inevitability of aging and death. The difference between us, Emperor, is that my Comrades love me. Your Minions only fear you, or acquiesce to you, or think it’s amusing to adopt nihilistic stances. That’s why you’ve never had a birthday cake. Nihilists don’t bake.”

“My Minions accept the inevitability—”

“Your Minions are boring,” Cosmos said, “and they need to get lives while they still can. Sure, we’ll all be dust before long, except lonely old you, watching everybody crumble. Why hurry the process? Hey, everybody, let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the Emperor!”

So the crowd sang, and cheered, and the Emperor tried to harummph and cackle but instead only loomed, looking nonplussed and decidedly annoyed. For form’s sake, he created a blast of chaos that blew bottles and balloons and bunting, frosting and ribbons and ice-cream bowls, all over Keyhole, but Cosmos led the assembled masses in an impromptu reggae version of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and they got the mess cleaned up in no time.

Many commentaries on this issue point out that Cosmos’s offer to share a birthday with EE is, in fact, simply another illustration of his promise to respect his own mortality. We all share birthdays with EE: he has not one birthday, but an infinite number. His birthday is every moment, for in every moment something is born, and at that moment begins to die.

And so it has become the custom of the CCverse to invite EE to all birthday and anniversary celebrations, to explicitly acknowledge his presence. He is there every year, wearing a party hat, when CC cuts his cake and when Roger has his annual bowling birthday bash. He sits in the corner when Cosmos feeds his sister Vanessa the lemon ice she loves on her own birthday, and when he and his father watch Star Trek reruns on Charlie’s birthday. He is the acknowledged guest of honor every year on Anelda’s birthday, which the family observes by putting flowers on her grave in the Keyhole Memorial Cemetery and by lighting a candle at home.

Issue number 76 narrated the poignant story of a woman who, although she called herself a Comrade, refused to invite EE to her son’s birthday party. The spindly boy was three but looked much younger, a pincushion of IVs, as thickly festooned with lines as a ship’s rigging. He had just been diagnosed with leukemia. “He can’t die,” she said, bringing presents and candy to little Johnny’s hospital room even though, wretchedly ill from chemotherapy, he couldn’t enjoy any of it. “I won’t let him. I won’t acknowledge death. My child will, must, outlive me.”

When Johnny grew worse, she kidnapped him from the hospital, removing the needles from his arms and carrying him the ten blocks to Cosmos’s doorway. The doorbell interrupted Vanessa and Charlie’s dinner, and Cosmos, spoon of baby food in hand, discovered the sobbing mother and her limp child on his front porch. “Please,” she said. “Please, you have to save him.”

“I can’t. If the doctors can’t, I can’t either. That isn’t how it works.”

“Save him!”

“I wish I could. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll do anything, anything, just name your price—”

“I’d do anything, too,” Cosmos said sadly, “if there were anything to do.”

“He hates the hospital. He hates the needles.”

“Let him die at home, then.” And Cosmos brought them inside and sat them down and called Zeldine, with whom he’s still on good terms, to arrange home hospice care, which he knew would include grief support for the mother.

“It’s his birthday! How can I plan his death on his birthday?”

“You aren’t planning his death,” Cosmos said, placing his hand gently on Johnny’s bald head. “You’re planning the rest of his life. Spend it with him. Let him decide what it should look like. The hospice people will help you.”

The mother, wild-eyed, said, “This is unbearable.”

“Yes.”

“How will I survive it?”

“By breathing. By eating. Let your body tell you what it needs to survive.” And Cosmos and the mother wept together, while the child slept and while the Emperor, the darkness at one end of the room, stretched out his arms to embrace them all.

Cosmos’s hair is a little thinner than it was when we first met him, a little grayer. Although he is still young, his face is more lined and his eyes more troubled. In his bedroom he keeps a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, which Anelda read to him when he was a little boy. Sometimes he reads it to himself. Sometimes he reads it to Vanessa and Charlie. What the story means to him is that wearing out—feeling threadbare, exhausted, done in—is proof of having been greatly cherished.

The book itself is falling apart, but he won’t replace it. His mother’s hands held it once.