“How old are you?”

It’s a question that Rahab has been hearing a lot recently. In the twentieth century, people in the West suddenly started to realize that it might be damaging to have sex with girls who were too young to understand and process what was being done to them. They have handled this complex and nuanced issue by choosing a number and pretending that, the moment before a girl passes this age, she’s a child who must be protected at all costs and, the moment she reaches that sacred number, she is free to be as wanton as men want her to be, devoid of any protections at all.

She sips her drink, leaving lipstick on her straw. “Old enough ... older than you think. I finished school and I’ve been traveling for the last few years, just seeing what the world has to offer. I have a travel blog.”

All of these things are true after a fashion. Rahab has sought education many times in her very long life. Sometimes, she’s seen a formal course of study through to the end and been granted recognition for doing so. She never kept the paper records of that recognition for long. Even if she had, they wouldn’t have her current name on them. She changes her identity every few years before people start to notice that she perpetually looks like a woman somewhere between the edge of seventeen and the cusp of twenty. It’s getting harder. The world is getting better at keeping track of people. She hopes that people’s ability to change their faces catches up with the machines’ worrying ability to recognize them. Right now, even the most state-of-the-art techniques carry a whiff of barbarism with them, requiring cutting and reshaping, removing flesh and injecting foreign substances. As much as she would like to avoid having her face sliced open, she is also wary of having to answer the questions that would come up when a woman of her apparent age and conforming with the current standards of beauty wanted to look like someone else. She has learned to be leery of extended close scrutiny. She doesn’t know if whatever the Adversary did to make her immortal can be detected, but she would rather not find out the hard way.

“Maybe I should check it out,” her date suggests. She hands him a card with all the information about where to find her content on the Internet. She really does have a travel blog and maintains content across all the major platforms. It has tens of thousands of followers, but not close to six digits. It’s enough to generate a small income and qualify her as a social media influencer. Companies send her things and vacation spots offer her food and a place to stay in the hopes that whatever they’re trying to sell will show up in her content.

It’s a strange business, but it’s not the first strange business she’s been in. She’s lived more lives than she can remember, more than a hundred at least. She’s done most of the jobs the demimonde could offer over time. She’s been a thief, a hustler, an assassin, a smuggler, a spy, a wilderness guide, and a first-rate riverboat poker dealer. She hasn’t sold sex since first leaving Jericho. She’s saving that for the end. She is the once-and-future whore.

Even so, she didn’t have to call herself a harlot, a whore, or any of the thousand names men had invented for the women they paid to have sex with for those same men to assume that any woman traveling without another man threatening violence on her behalf was fair game. Some took from her what she wouldn’t offer. A few left money behind afterwards. She’d learned to keep that money as she would a purse found in the street. The coins spent the same regardless.

That sort of thing happened a lot less frequently these days and Rahab was glad for it. She preferred the ever-more-viable option of choosing the times and places she had sex and who she had sex with. Unable to stay in one place for too long and unwilling to attach herself too closely to someone with only a handful of decades to live, she kept to brief encounters with men who were also looking to avoid entanglements. It often fulfilled the needs of her body, which were often the only needs she felt she could afford to entertain.

Modern technology has been an enormous affordance in this pursuit. There was an app on her phone that allowed her to come to a place like San Pedro where she knew no one and select potential lovers with a flick of her finger in one direction or the other. Sometimes, when she scrolled through the seemingly endless collection of faces and entreaties, she felt a bit like one of the Caesars giving a thumbs up or thumbs down at the Coliseum. She’d spent so many lives faced with only the options she was chosen for, it was nice to do half the choosing herself.

She’d chosen tonight’s date first because he wasn’t a local. His profile listed his home as being in North Carolina in the United States. That was far enough away from this tourist bar in Belize and farther still from her own listed address in Brindizi for him to harbor ideas of anything long-term. He was young and probably in college. The photo he’d chosen for his profile showed an honest, open smile and the profile read more like a job application than an attempt at seduction. Rahab knows that all of these things can be faked. Her maybe-friend Loki says that this is the age of the trickster and he would certainly know. Still, the face he’s presented her so far is consistent with her initial impression. He is by all appearances a relatively-wholesome young American student looking for a hook up while on vacation. Right now, he’s flipping through the various platforms that Rahab hosts her content on and whistles, “You’ve actually got a nice little social media empire there, Ray. I didn’t realize you were a celebrity.”

“I’m not a celebrity, Ryan. I’m just a content creator.” Rahab laughs lightly as she imagines she would if she actually were Ray, a carefree young woman traveling the world for as long as she can get away with before life catches up with her and forces her to stay in one place. It’s not entirely an affectation. She’s far from carefree, but her body still feels young. She still likes flattery. And she is traveling around while she waits for her responsibilities to catch up with her even as she increasingly suspects Armageddon has been indefinitely postponed. She’s seen the ruins of Hammaurabi’s city, so feared by the writers of Revelations that they assigned its name to her. It’s a place of ghosts and insects that would be lost under the sands if not for its value as a tourist attraction. She may still be waiting to be called when the sun goes dark.

She puts aside this gloomy thought to admire the very charming smile Ryan gives her. He asks, “Is that why you’re in Belize - to produce content?”

There’s no contempt in or behind his words. Ryan’s presentation in person is refreshingly close to what he projects in his profile. Additionally, he clearly knows the protocols for this high-speed time-boxed modern courtship ritual, but not so well that he treats it like a checklist he must complete in order to proceed. He makes frequent eye contact, smiles a lot, and asks her questions more than he talks about himself. It’s formulaic, but there’s much to recommend a potential lover willing to follow the established protocols. It suggests he recognizes her agency in this matter and will continue to treat her well even once they’re alone together. He might even be genuinely sweet. Genuinely sweet young men are her favorite hookups. She imagines them thinking wistfully of her in their old age.

So, she nods at his question and skips the planned preamble in which she says she always wanted to see Belize, but came now because she had an opportunity to mix business and pleasure. “I got a bunch of offers from resorts in the area and they were just enough to almost make it worth the trip out. Then, I managed to dig up a few more names and some of them offered me a free stay. It took me like a year to set the whole thing up.” She emphasizes the word “year” like it’s a long time. Also, I got this jewelry company to pay for some things if I wore their stuff in some videos and I needed a place to wear them.”

She holds out her wrist to show him the gold bracelet set with purple and scarlet semiprecious stones and at the same time, arches her back to show him the matching necklace and a bit more of her tanned skin. In addition to the stones matching those in her bracelet, the necklace has a single large pearl that hangs directly above her cleavage. In truth, there is no jewelry maker behind these pieces and there is a risk both in wearing the colors and stones prescribed to her in the Bible and in keeping these particular pieces for almost a hundred years now, bringing them with her from life to life. But, those risks have never been realized and she likes this small bit of identity that she can keep as her name changes.

Ryan takes her hand first and turns her arm over to look at the bracelet. Then, when she leans even further forward, he reaches towards her and, while he doesn’t ask for permission to touch her as some men now do, he does pause for a moment in his intention, allowing her a moment to pull back if she doesn’t mean to be touched. Then, he slides his hand beneath the setting on her necklace, resting his knuckles against the upper swell of her breasts. He examines the setting and undoubtedly her chest for a moment before withdrawing his touch. He says, “You must be super-organized to pull together something like that. I wasn’t sure I was even coming to Belize until last week.”

Rahab relaxes her spine, but continues to lean forward so they can speak at a lower volume. They’re in a tourist bar that caters to men and women around Ryan’s age. They’re not the only couple pairing off for the first time. The unpaired patrons flow around them like a river passing over rapids and make a similar din as they pass. Snippets of a dozen other courtship rituals in progress rise out of the noise as a hundred choices are made. The whole place bubbles with sexual vitality, youthful enthusiasm, and alcohol. Rahab likes the energy.

“Can I ask where you’re from? I don’t recognize the accent. Is it ... Middle Eastern? You don’t look Middle Eastern.” Ryan looks at her like she’s a puzzle.

Rahab laughs and flips her hair back. In truth, she does look Middle Eastern, but her honey-blonde hair draws attention away from her features that people now call Semitic. “Good ear. I actually grew up in Jericho. My family’s in the hotel business, so I’ve been traveling around forever. Blogging about it was an obvious choice for me.”

“So, where’s your family from originally?” Ryan persists.

Rahab pushes her hair back behind her ear, a little sign to remind Ryan why they’re here. “My father’s Jordanian and my mother was kind of from all over. At least, that’s the impression I got when I could get my father to talk about her. I’m pretty sure she lived in Rome for a while, but I don’t know if that’s where she was from or not.”

She glances down with a flicker of the real sadness she still feels about her early family life. Ryan leans in closer. “It sounds like they’re not around anymore.”

Rahab shakes her head. “They’re not. My mother died before I was old enough to remember her and my father and I have never been close. But, that’s all ancient history at this point. And I’m sure you didn’t swipe right on me to hear about my daddy issues.” She takes a sip of her beer and surreptitiously watches Ryan’s reaction to the term “daddy issues.” Different men react to it differently and, in that reaction, sometimes warn her of their true nature in ways that their words and immediate actions don’t reveal. She doesn’t really understand why this is or even what the phrase is supposed to mean. What woman doesn’t relate to her father over a vast gap of age and gender?

Ryan doesn’t react to the phrase at all. “I wanted to meet you because you didn’t sound like anybody I already know. You’re not from anywhere I’ve ever been and you sounded like you live a very different life from mine. Also, you looked hot in your profile picture.”

Rahab smiles and looks down for a moment like his compliment has made her shy. “You’re pretty hot too ... and I don’t actually know a lot of Americans very well. It’s always fun to meet new people, right?”

Ryan doesn’t question her absurd statement about meeting new people. He’s young enough that he might even believe it to be true. Instead, he moves on to another line of questions. He has a lot of questions, but Rahab doesn’t mind. She likes that, after they’ve parted, he will remember her as more than the set of holes she let him penetrate and the pretty flesh she held against him. When he tells his friends about her, she will be more than just “this hot girl he met in Belize.” He will recount details of the life she has described to him. Many of them are even true after a fashion. She tells very few outright lies about herself. This practice can be a lot of work sometimes, but it’s worth it to Rahab. The old “wham-bam and out the door without even a word of thanks” is simpler, but this gives her more of a feeling of real human contact, which is part of what she’s looking for here.