The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  “The real question is whether you want your father to live.”

  I recoiled as if he’d slapped me. “What?”

  “You said yourself he doesn’t love you,” Sammy answered plainly, not realizing how much it hurt to have these words—which, yes, were my own—reflected back at me.

  “That doesn’t mean I want him dead. He’s still my dad.” I didn’t say that it was partially Sammy himself who made the idea of losing my father so real. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I felt that I could see Sammy’s loneliness, as if it were some distant island that came into view in calm weather. He had no mother, no father, no siblings, no friends. It meant he was all mine, but it also frightened me.

  “Okay. He’s your dad.”

  I said nothing, and there was nothing I could say. Sammy wasn’t apologizing. That I still wanted a father was simply information Sammy had processed, which was somehow enough for me—to be learned about by this man.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I can’t believe the summer is over.” Real sadness was in his voice, and maybe he was just mourning the end of warm weather, of the vacation from school, but his sadness produced an ache in me, one that dissolved any lingering anger like a solvent. I wanted the summer to last forever.

  I said, “I love you.”

  I had never said this before, and I could see the words pass through Sammy like an electric current. A long second passed, then another. I was humiliated, searching for ways to take back what I’d said, but then Sammy stood up, and it was as though a switch had been flipped. Without a word, he peeled off his shirt and tossed it overhand to the hamper, where it caught the lip and hung off the side, half in and half out. He put his hands on my face and kissed me, hard, as his hand slid below the waist of my jeans.

  I knew he was dodging my declaration of love, but I was also sixteen, and I spent every hour with him in constant agitation. The sight of his bare chest and the feel of his hand pushed all thoughts from my head.

  I reached for him. But even though he leaned his head back as though seized by pleasure, he was soft and unresponsive. “Sorry,” he said after a minute of effort.

  “No rush,” I said, even though there was a rush—I needed him.

  “It might not be in the cards.”

  “Just relax.”

  “Seriously. This isn’t helping.”

  “It will,” I said, because it had to.

  “Stop!” He pushed me away, standing, pulling up his plaid boxer briefs. “Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry.” Then, foolishly, I said again, “I love you.”

  He threw a cardigan over his bare shoulders and began to jimmy his tight jeans over his legs. “I’m going outside.” His voice was needlessly loud. He was searching his desk in a tizzy, and I knew, from how he lifted papers and pulled drawers, that he was looking for his phone.

  “It’s in your pocket.”

  “Oh.” He was too upset to say thank you or even to be embarrassed. He stuffed his bare feet into his sneakers and marched to the door, shoes untied, like a child. He opened the door. Over his shoulder, I could see the sun setting into the woods behind the widow’s house, the birch trees filtering the light and sending speckled shadows onto the porch.

  In the doorway, Sammy paused. “I’m not angry at you,” he said angrily, and shut the door.

  I stood up and went to the window, watched him descend the stairs and stand in front of the woods with his hands on his hips, as if he were scolding the trees. His spine was straight, his posture infallible—a habit drilled into him from boyhood by his father, who told him the brain sags when the body does. Under the low, pink sun, his blond hair was orange. I couldn’t see it, but I knew the face he was making, his eyebrows gathered together, his mouth pinched.

  I dragged a chair to the window and sat. Sammy’s face glowed in the light of his phone; he stared at the lambent screen and put it to his ear. Whomever he’d called had answered. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Sammy paced along the tree line, gesticulating with his free hand. He was animated but not angry. It was something other than an argument. Sammy spoke with his head down, his chin almost in his chest. He toed the sod with his still-unlaced sneakers. His mannerisms were all apology—someone else was getting the sorry that belonged to me.

  Who was that someone? What was Sammy saying to him? I would have given anything in the world to know. They talked for long enough—at least twenty minutes—that Sammy grew tired of pacing and leaned against the railing of the stairs. He surveyed the sky, which was turning cinereal silver, like granite, and seemed to track with his eyes the path the sun had taken into the trees. It reminded him of something—me, perhaps—and he checked his big, expensive watch. He glanced at the window, and I ducked and returned to the bed. As I heard his footsteps thudding toward the door, I rearranged myself on the mattress, pretended to be engaged with my own phone. The doorknob turned, my stomach with it.

  He opened the door. “Sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

  I had steeled myself to stay angry, but his voice was a snakebite. Happiness filled me like venom. “Are you okay?”

  In answer, he kissed me. “I’m ready now.”

  And when I pulled him onto the bed, my legs circling his waist, my heels on his back, he was.

  * * *

  Emmett came home from school around four, but I stayed in my room with Sammy’s notebooks until Dana called us to dinner. I ran my fingers over the earliest journals and tried to resist the urge to just dive in, to consume his life uncritically. Before he died, he had left me this gift, and to understand it I would need to approach the journals as he would have—as a scientist first.

  On the outside, each journal was identical to the last. The front and back covers were made of fine full-grain leather with an aubergine suede interior. They were secured with a metal clasp and a nude leather tie. Inside, Sammy wrote single-spaced and mostly in print. As a child, his preferred writing instrument was a black pen, but as I thumbed through a journal from his teenage years, I saw more randomness in his choices. One entry from college was written in crayon.

  The first journal was in good condition, with only slight creasing of the suede and a few ripped pages demonstrating its age. Had anyone other than Sammy ever seen a word of it, before me? I opened to the first entry:

  My name is Samuel Tampari, and I am eight years old. I will try to write clean, but my arm is broken. Dr. Huang said I should start right away, even though my arm is broken. Don and Leena took me to her because of what happened with my arm, when I jumped out the window. I will tell what happened, and then I will tell more about my life.

  I read to the end of this first long passage, as he described his encounter with the creepy photographer and the jump from his bedroom window. The next day, he talked more about his parents: their work, their personalities. He knew he was not like other boys. I don’t think I have met anyone like me. Who is always pretending. But maybe I have and didn’t know.

  It was his second week with the journal when he attended the numismatics meeting with his father. This received a long and descriptive account; his slanted prose showed the excitement I’d seen in him when we worked together in the lab. The coin collectors don’t talk about coins! he wrote, using his first exclamation point in twenty-odd pages. They talk about the “elixir of life.”

  On a legal pad, I jotted down the formula Sammy had received from the old numismatist during that initial meeting:

  HgS + O2 → Hg + SO2

  I didn’t share Sammy’s gift for memorization, but I did know the periodic table the way he, at that age, knew the free-throw percentage for every player on the Knicks. I put names to the symbols right away.

  HgS + O2 → Hg + SO2

  cinnabar [heat] mercury

  Chemistry 101. Mercury, also known as quicksilver (quick, from the Old English cwic: “living, alive”), is the stuff you find in old thermometers, the stuff—if the thermometer breaks—your mom tells you not to touch. It comes from a mineral ore known as cinna
bar, which is a red, evil-looking rock found in only a handful of places. The formula Sammy received from the numismatists—let’s call it the Mercury Formula—described how to extract liquid mercury, quicksilver, from cinnabar.

  Quicksilver was discovered by an ancient Chinese alchemist known as Ge Hong. When Ge Hong applied heat to the quicksilver, it produced a red powder known as mercuric oxide. This compound is remarkable because just as heated quicksilver produces mercuric oxide, heated mercuric oxide turns right back into quicksilver. It’s an endless loop of production and reproduction, of blood-red stone to living silver and back again. No matter how much Ge Hong burned mercury, he could not destroy it.

  For this reason, Ge Hong identified mercury as the key to immortality. By giving the Mercury Formula to Sammy, the numismatists were inviting him into the earliest traditions of alchemy, chemistry, and the search for the elixir of life.

  * * *

  Eventually I began to hear the sounds of Dana in the kitchen. She was on a health kick, and I could smell the sweet potatoes roasting on the stove, hear the static hiss of millet poured into a cast-iron pot. She was not a confident cook, and she would do this work nervously, always keeping one hand on the large, glossy spread of some vegetarian cookbook, holding the pages flat.

  In this way, that evening, we were alike. I had just received a cookbook of my own.

  ELIXIR OF LIFE #1

  Yield: 100 pills

  INGREDIENTS

  Quicksilver (8 g)

  Licorice root powder (4 g)

  Honey (1 g)

  Sugar (7 g)

  Rose water (2 g)

  PREPARATION

  Combine honey, sugar, and rose water and stir until smooth. Combine mixture with quicksilver and stir until silvery globules are invisible. Add licorice root powder. Pound until solid, cut into yield.

  HOW DID IT TASTE?

  almost died.

  According to the date in the top right corner, Sammy had written this first recipe when he was only thirteen years old: not an “elixir” at all, but a pill. Along with its lists of ingredients and instructions, the book provided a section for notes after each recipe, titled “How did it taste?” Sammy’s use of these spaces left little doubt that he’d been ingesting the concoctions himself: felt good but briefly, said one of his notes; slept all day, said another. And that alarmingly casual first review: almost died.

  There were just over a hundred of these recipes, each modifying the last. As I flipped through them, I felt a rising nausea, as though I had left Earth entirely and found myself subject to unfamiliar gravity. I was on a brand-new planet, one on which the man I loved had been searching for something out of a bad fantasy novel: the great panacea. It had begun as the desperate quest of a troubled, suicidal boy—that, I could understand—but it had continued, and continued, until he was gone. I felt as if the box of journals had been dropped on my head rather than delivered to my doorstep.

  There is no such thing as an elixir of life! I would have shouted if I weren’t so afraid of Dana’s hearing me. For people such as Sammy and me, scientific truth is a heartbeat, a bass line—it is the rhythm by which we walk and breathe and live. Sammy’s death felt like a betrayal—he’d left me—but the recipe book was itself an infidelity. Behind my back, he had abandoned reason. As I turned the pages, I was surprised to find my hands trembling; even in the worst of times, I could usually rely on them. It felt like a silly thought, in light of everything that was happening, but I kept thinking it: I don’t want my boyfriend to have been crazy.

  Yet something else, too, added to my dizziness: relief. The boy in the hallway had asked, “Was it on purpose?” I forced myself to imagine that the answer was yes. I forced myself to picture Sammy saying goodbye to me our last night together, the last night of summer. How could he not have been thinking of everything we’d shared? I had told him I loved him: that was the truth I left behind when I kissed him good-night and said, “See you tomorrow.” If his death held even the slightest bit of intention, it meant he had looked at everything I offered him and said, No, I’d rather die. It meant I was irrevocably, fatally, not enough. I could only think these thoughts for so long because I couldn’t catch my breath when I thought them. I had to choose between believing he’d killed himself and breathing.

  The recipe book, as crazy as it was, offered me what I desperately needed: a way of understanding Sammy’s death that did not involve his deliberately discarding the love we shared. My boyfriend wasn’t crazy. He was sick, and it seemed he had tried for a long, long time to find a cure for that sickness. Sammy had “almost died” once pursuing an elixir of life, so it stood to reason that he may have done it again, only this time he’d really done it. But he would also have known, from experience, the risk he was taking. Thus the package, hand-delivered to the back porch in the middle of the night. And the note, which I imagined him scribbling hastily in his car, closing his eyes to calculate my father’s MELD score.

  “Sweetheart,” he’d said, when he treated me badly, “I’m sorry.”

  Yes, Beth Dennis was right: Sammy overdosed. But it wasn’t on purpose, not if the recipe book could be trusted. Sammy didn’t kill himself. He tried to live forever.

  * * *

  The year before I met him, when I conducted my experiment on liver scarring, my hypothesis had been that treatment using the fruit of the Ardisia elliptica would show the greatest beneficial effects. Ultimately, though, the data steered me away from A. elliptica and toward the soursop, which consistently proved more effective. I found no reason for soursop to be the better treatment. It just was.

  Only science could offer such a thing: unexpectedness without disorder. There were surprises, always, but they led you somewhere. A new point of data could emerge in a place you weren’t looking, but once it did, it shined a light on the next point, and the one after that, until these points formed a kind of constellation, revealing a picture, a shape, that held meaning. At the time, I would have explained my love for science as the product of aptitude: science was hard, and I was good at it, and those two in combination gave me pleasure. But it was also the feeling of losing control of the truth and then regaining it, over and over, that made me feel more at home in a lab than I did in any house since my mother’s death—a true act of randomness that took no shape and held no meaning.

  So even though the information in the recipe book ran counter to my understanding of Sammy, I remained attuned to the pressure building in my ears, guiding me another way. The Way of an Investigator said that the goal of scientific investigation is to learn whether facts can be established that will be recognized as facts by others. This was a fact, as I saw it: Sammy had been in search of an elixir of life, and in delivering his notebooks to my doorstep, he had passed this search on to me. This was a thrilling revelation—what mattered most to him, his life’s work, he’d gifted to me. But my natural skepticism crashed headlong into this knowledge.

  I glanced at the note, with my father’s MELD score. A MELD score that said, Your father will be dead before winter.

  “Okay,” he had said, the last time I saw him. “He’s your dad.”

  Sammy was telling me to use the recipe book to save my father.

  It was a truth both electrifying and nonconductive—like being hit by lightning while in a rubber suit. Sammy wanted to help my father, but Sammy was also dead, which meant his final experiment had failed. In that way, I told myself, what he had done was heroic: Sammy experimented on himself before involving me or my father. All I had to do to accept that version of events was rearrange my entire understanding of the world. I had already done exactly that, several times over, since the day I met Sammy. But when I imagined leaving the confines of my bedroom and explaining this to someone, even to RJ, I found no way to do it without sounding insane.

  The day Sammy first pitched me the rat study, his voice carried a persistence that seemed to come from some foreign place, from a room in his mind he normally kept locked. I had felt confusion t
hen, but also a bright, hot need to be part of that place, to be invited inside and allowed to stay. I hadn’t realized it, but he was showing me the path to be with him. Reading this strange book, I didn’t know what to believe. I did know, as I had always known, what I would do: whatever he asked of me.

  ELIXIR OF LIFE #101

  Yield: 1

  INGREDIENTS

  THE APPETIZER

  1. Dor (1 sp)

  THE ENTRÉE

  1. Quicksilver (200 ml)

  2. Tribal medicine (100 ml)

  3. B. rossica (3 oz)

  4. Rapamycin (15 mg)

  5. P. cupana (100 mg)

  PREPARATION

  Inject Appetizer. Combine Entrée and drink.

  HOW DID IT TASTE?

  still not strong enough. what’s missing?

  Sammy’s final recipe made even less sense to me than the first. In a cheeky nod to the recipe book’s true function—a cheekiness that struck me as totally unlike him—Sammy had split the ingredients for his final recipe into two stages: the Appetizer, an injectable, and the Entrée, an ingestible. The Appetizer was a substance Sammy called Dor, but I’d never heard of such a thing, and the recipe book offered no help. I checked the internet, but it, too, revealed nothing useful: Dor was the word for a flying insect that buzzes, it was the acronym for the Department of Revenue, it was the Romanian word for “nostalgia” and the Portuguese word for “pain.” I could not find a single result that had anything to do with a substance a person could inject into his veins. Even the dosage made no sense: 1 sp. The only unit of measure I could think of with that abbreviation was screen pixels.