For 400 years, Jawson Darnsdale ate nothing but sawdust and drank nothing but engine grease. He swelled to a vast size – similar to a circus tent stuffed to the brim with elephants. He coughed a lot. His diet wasn't the healthiest, after all. The doctors told him so. He wouldn't listen. “I'm going to eat this sawdust until my dying breath,” he said.
And he probably did. No-one quite knows. The real truth is lost to history. What is known, however, is that Jawson outlived several of his doctors. Most of them only lasted the usual 70-to-90-year human lifespan. The longest-living of his doctors, a woman named Briangela, died at the impressive age of 103. But Jawson just kept on going. He kept on eating sawdust, large heaps of it, and grease by the barrelful. His body stubbornly refused to die. Briangela in particular, who'd done her best to live a healthy lifestyle – eating mostly vegetables, exercising every day, avoiding processed junk food – was quite pissed off on her deathbed, when it began to look like Jawson was going to outlive her.
“How do you do it?” asked Briangela in a scratchy voice. Her own doctor, Rochelle Borntakov, had given Briangela three days to live. She lay in bed, propped up by a lumpy pillow. Boy, was she unhappy. “I don't understand. You eat this crap, this total crap… You never exercise. Barely leave the house. You just sit there in that barn of yours, perched on a mound of sawdust you've moulded into an armchair, chugging pints of engine fluid… And it doesn't kill you. How does it not kill you?”
“I'm not sure what you mean,” replied Jawson.
“Mr Darnsdale,” – she paused to cough – “you should be dead. Everything I've ever read… Everything I know says you should be dead. I say you should be dead.”
“But here I am.”
“Here you are.”
“Well, I suppose, you could try this if you like...” said Jawson. He handed her a mug filled with a strange, blotchy fluid. It had flakes floating on its surface, which looked at first like oats. But Briangela knew, of course, it was his famous grease-shake. Two parts engine grease, one part sawdust, swirled together with a used lollipop stick. God knows where he got all those lollipop sticks – he never ate lollipops, she was sure of it.
“No thank you,” rasped the woman. She batted away the mug with a frail left hand. It wouldn't be long now.
“Can I get you anything? A glass of -”
“Just get out.”
Briangela died three days later. Jawson did, apparently, attend the funeral, but nothing I found in my research was able to confirm if he gave any kind of speech, or indeed said anything to anyone. It is just known, vaguely, that he was there. He probably cared about her, but that is speculation.
Who knows, really, what it was like to eat those foul-tasting things and continue living while everyone he loved died around him? By the age of 400, he'd probably had enough. But there are no records of this final phase of his life. After the first few centuries of hearing about a seemingly-immortal man who ate nothing but grease and sawdust, the excitement must have worn off. Perhaps he would have lived that long no matter what he ate, and it was just coincidence that he happened to adopt such a peculiar diet. Perhaps not.
At some point, Jawson Darnsdale did finally die, but, try as I might, I couldn't find out where or how. I did find out the date it happened – but somehow that information seems useless on its own, without the rest to flesh it out. Still, here it is, in case you're curious: the 23rd of April, 2392.