The original note, as written at the time
A world where every one has regenerative abilities until the age of thirty. No one can die or kill himself until the age of thirty. However, pain and sickness and distress are all possible. What would be the general psychology of such a world?
Ongoing development
The boy fell from the water tank when he was nineteen and everyone waited for him to stop screaming, and then they waited for him to be dead, and he was not dead, and by the evening he was walking with a limp and by the following week the limp was gone.
I was there. I want to be clear that I was there, because everybody in this district tells it now as though they saw it, and the versions have grown. What I saw was a boy on his back in the dust with his arm in a shape arms do not go into, and I saw the bone move under the skin while he screamed, and I saw it settle. It took most of an hour. Nobody called anybody, because there was nothing to call and no reason to. He was not going to die. He was only going to hurt.
That is the thing the outsiders never understand about the years before thirty. They think it must be wonderful, a world without death. And it is, in the way that a room without a door is a room without a draught. What it actually means is that nothing you do to your body is ever finished.
My mother is forty-one and she has begun to grey, and she has begun to be careful. There is a way that people past thirty walk, up here, a kind of deliberation, because they know now that the agreement is over and the body has been keeping a record all along. She looks at my brother the way you look at a dog that has run into a road and come back.
My brother is twenty-four. He has broken both legs, a wrist, four ribs, and something in his neck that made him speak differently for a month. He is not brave. He is not reckless. He simply has the arithmetic of a person who knows he cannot be spent, and there is no way to teach him otherwise without standing over him with a knife.
I have started to be afraid of the seventh month before the birthday. Everyone does. You get careful around then. You do not say it, but you notice who is about to turn, and you look at them differently, the way you look at somebody boarding a boat.
The boy from the water tank turned thirty in April. I saw him in May, at the market, and he was moving like a man carrying a full cup, and I understood for the first time that everything he had ever survived had been given back to him, and now he was going to have to pay.