Immortality Project

I’ve always wanted to be famous. There’s no point to life unless you leave something behind for people to remember you by, above the soil you’re buried under.

When I was 13, I read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. He wrote that the only way for humans to cope with their mortality is with the pursuit of ‘immortality projects’, ensuring that our existence on this godforsaken Earth survives as more than a line on the government’s register.

Twenty years later, I finally committed to my immortality project. I wanted to do something high-stakes, but relatively easy. So I decided to bomb the Vatican.

My plan was this: dress up as a priest with an ugly backpack slung behind my back and sneak into the Basilica. A nerdy little priest, wearing a nerdy little backpack, with a not-so-little bomb inside it. Nobody would suspect a thing.

I arrived in Rome on Thursday night, and as I weaved through Bernini’s columns, I planned my innocent itinerary for the next day. It seemed that everything would go according to plan. I could already picture all the newspapers on the edicole with my face splattered on them.

The next day, at 8:55am, I scurried across Piazza San Pietro with a long priest’s dress swishing at my ankles. Good thing my (now dead) uncle was a clergyman.

At the entrance to the Basilica, I insisted that the guards let me in quickly, as mass was about to start in five minutes. One of them looked at me suspiciously, and nudged me back behind the scanners, knocking me into one of the machines. My backpack slid off my shoulder and fell onto the ground. There was an explosion and everything went black.

In the hospital, I managed to get hold of a newspaper. On the third page, it said that the bomb had gone off, but not fully, and the guard and I lost two legs and an arm combined.

Tragically, there wasn’t a single front page with my face on it. It turns out that exactly seven minutes after the explosion, the Pope decided to die of natural causes.

So now, here I am, sitting in prison, missing a limb, and the Vatican still immortal.