About 220 years

About 220 years is the span Eli gives for her life, but it does not describe two centuries of continuous waking experience. Her account makes time feel divided between long disappearances and shorter periods of living, with age, sleep, and vulnerability all operating differently for her than they do for an ordinary person.

Birth and Interrupted Time

Eli tells Oskar that she was born about 220 years ago, then qualifies what that age means: she has slept for about half of that time. The distinction matters. Her chronological age is immense, but her life has not unfolded as an uninterrupted sequence of years; long stretches have passed while she was absent from ordinary activity.

She explains that sleep can mean months at a time without getting up, followed by a few months in which she lives. Even during those active periods, she rests in the daytime. Her rhythm is therefore not simply a long lifespan extended across the calendar: it is a recurring alternation between prolonged dormancy and limited periods of wakeful life.

Waking Young and Needing Help

Eli says that when she wakes, she is little again and weak. At that point she needs help, a condition she tentatively connects to her survival: her smallness makes people want to help her, though not always for the same reasons. The account links the duration of her existence to a repeated return to dependence, rather than to steady accumulation of strength or experience.

Friendship and the Other Infected

The same long span has shaped Eli’s social life. In speaking with Oskar, she admits that she has not had a normal friendship with anyone for about two hundred years. The disclosure gives their conversation unusual weight: a relationship that is new to Oskar is, for Eli, a rare break in a prolonged absence of ordinary companionship.

Eli also recalls meeting only one other infected person after her own infection: a grown woman she describes as cynical and hollow, like the man with a wig. That encounter gave Eli an answer to a question that had been troubling her about whether there were many others, although the answer itself is not included in the available account. The episode establishes the meeting as rare in Eli’s experience without specifying how numerous the infected are.