The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  The rest of the ingredients made varying amounts of sense. Quicksilver I knew, but I knew it, like most people, as poison. The tribal medicine could have been anything, and how annoying that he’d used such a generic name! B. rossica, a Web search revealed, was a rare parasitic plant native to China and Alaska. Rapamycin was an antibiotic discovered, in all places, on Easter Island.

  Compared to the previous recipe, Sammy’s final elixir contained two changes: a dramatic increase in the amount of quicksilver, and the addition of P. cupana—the extract we’d been studying all summer. Apparently, I’d been part of this for longer than I realized, but part of what, exactly? I stared at that final note, with its frustrating, frustrated question: still not strong enough. what’s missing?

  What’s missing, I told him, is you.

  “Conrad!” Dana called, startling me. “Dinner!”

  Before she could send Emmett to get me, I slid Sammy’s box under the bed, straightened my shirt, and reentered the world of the living.

  Dana and Emmett were already seated at the table, taking turns lifting salad out of a large wooden bowl. She passed him the French dressing, its top open, and placed the cap by his plate so he could refasten it when he was finished. In return, he handed her the ketchup for what appeared to be homemade veggie burgers. My uncle had built the table and installed the laminate floors, and they were both cheap, ugly, and perfectly crafted—my uncle, a man with bad taste and steady hands. The whole scene had a workmanlike quality: the work of being a family. I was surprised by the part of me that wanted to enter the room by telling them everything, by revealing every secret. Instead, I entered silently.

  “Nice to see you,” Emmett said, sarcasm adding a jaggedness to his words. RJ and I had driven to Sammy’s apartment without alerting him. “Where did you guys go?”

  “Just here,” I said softly, in some impossible hope that Dana would not hear this conversation despite being seated at the same table, in a quiet room.

  “Well, thanks for the heads-up,” Emmett said. “I looked for you.”

  “What’s happening?” Dana asked. “You didn’t go back to school?”

  Emmett looked at me with annoyance. “She doesn’t know?” He waited for me to answer and, when I didn’t, put down his fork. “Mr. Tampari died today.”

  “Your teacher with the rats?” Dana asked. “Oh, Conrad.”

  To brace myself against the questions and condolences to come, I let my mind drift to Sammy’s elixir. P. cupana was the one thing that contained even an ounce of familiarity. I’d seen him hold it, test it, administer it to a sick patient. To understand his elixir, I would need to understand the recipe in relation to the life he’d been living. The recipe book was a code, and his journals were the method to break it.

  “How sad,” Dana was saying. “What a sad thing.”

  Emmett poured himself more soda. “The whole day was weird. Like a fake day.”

  My aunt put a comforting hand on my arm, and I managed to smile vaguely in the direction of that hand. Already I felt closer to Sammy, as if I were tugging back on the rope he’d used to descend into whatever depths had claimed him.

  * * *

  It was close to 10:00 p.m. when my aunt went to bed. If I pulled an all-nighter, I’d have eight hours with the journals before my alarm clock rang and I needed to shower for school. Dana had offered me a “mental health day” after Emmett broke the news, but a part of me felt that the safest option was to go about my normal life. Nothing in the recipe book explained the ravaged state of Sammy’s apartment—if someone other than Sammy was responsible for the destruction, that person might have been looking for the very materials he’d given me. This sense of danger added voltage to my grief; it was like holding a funeral on an active volcano.

  I went to my bookshelf and removed a toxicology textbook I’d received from my father the year I turned twelve. It hadn’t been a gift meant kindly. Not long after he surrendered me to my aunt, my father briefly became convinced that the real cause of his decline was not drinking but poisoning, by some unseen enemy. The textbook contained an entire chapter on mercury intoxication.

  Quicksilver was the one constant in all of Sammy’s elixirs; it appeared, in some quantity, in all 101 recipes. He didn’t doubt the toxicity of mercury; his use of the element was based on that toxicity. Scanning the first few journals for mention of the elixir, I found this, written by Sammy when he was only twelve years old:

  There is nothing more valuable to the life cycle of a forest than fire—through destruction, it creates the conditions for life. Mercury is the same. I don’t know what the elixir of life will be, but I do know this: it won’t be Superman, hands on his hips as the bullets bounce off his chest. It will be the snake who sheds his skin and slithers on. It will be the lizard who loses his tail and grows another.

  Mercury’s toxicity comes with a special power: it can bypass the blood-brain barrier. This is important. To understand Sammy’s elixir of life, you must understand this small but essential part of our biology.

  The blood-brain barrier is a membrane that protects the brain and central nervous system from the blood that circulates throughout our bodies. Why would the brain need protection from our own blood? Because lots of bad stuff can get in there—pathogens and toxins that can destroy the delicate and complex systems of the brain. The blood-brain barrier works a bit like a moat and a bit like a greenhouse, maintaining a steady, constant environment to protect the organisms inside.

  It also causes problems. Sometimes doctors do need to send medicine to the brain, but the blood-brain barrier is so effective that it makes delivering these drugs difficult. For Sammy, this was a challenge to be solved.

  His answer was mercury. As it nears the blood-brain barrier, mercury pretends to be an amino acid and sneaks its way into the central nervous system. Sammy aimed to use mercury as a kind of cargo ship; if he could load it up with a bunch of helpful agents, the mercury could smuggle them into the fluids of the brain.

  I set the book down, trying to square my sense of Sammy as a genius with the recklessness of this idea. It was no surprise that his first attempt had nearly killed him, and it was no surprise his final attempt, which used even higher doses of mercury, had finished the job. Using mercury as a transport was like sending food supplies to an impoverished country—but strapping those supplies to a nuclear bomb.

  He’d left me in an impossible position: what’s missing? If Sammy couldn’t figure that out—if he’d died trying—how on earth was I supposed to do it?

  * * *

  That next morning at school, we had a classwide assembly to honor Sammy. We filtered into the oddly shaped gym—too long and too narrow, like a basketball court stuffed in a hallway. I hadn’t slept at all. I was bleary-eyed, sick to my stomach, and seeing Sammy everywhere: in doorways, in the bleachers, in the blond hair of a classmate with his back to me. I wasn’t in denial—he was dead, and I knew this—but I’d also just spent the night with him, with his words. Our story wasn’t over.

  Principal Dee stood with the microphone near the three-point line, the student council fanned out behind her. We took our seats in the bleachers. To my left, Emmett hid his phone between his legs and swiped along the screen, playing some game where a musclebound avatar killed a demon with a Viking sword. To my right, RJ tried to whisper to me about Sammy, but I shook my head hard and fast. Not here. I’d told RJ about the package, briefly, before homeroom, but as much as I wanted to tell him everything, we didn’t have long to speak: Number 5, Number 7, Number 37, and Number 42 needed to be fed. Even with Sammy gone, the rats were my responsibility, and they, too, had lost someone. As I refilled their little bowls, I couldn’t help but feel they were looking up at me with their tired red eyes and asking, Where is Number 50? Where is our brother?

  Principal Dee tapped the microphone and congratulated us for how well we’d handled the tragedy yesterday, and during the first day of school no less. “Give yourselves a round of applause,” she said,
which a few students did, sarcastically. Principal Dee talked about how Sammy’s death underscored the way shared grief can bring a community together. “It’s what Mr. Tampari would want us to learn from his death.” The irony of the whole display was that Sammy hated assemblies, hated any gathering of more than fifteen people, including in his own classroom.

  “No one will ever,” he said to me once, “and I mean ever, say anything important to a large group of people.” He pointed to me and then pointed to himself. “This is where everything of value happens. Between people who are sitting so close they could kiss.”

  The principal explained that there would be a slideshow as well as a student speaker. First, though, she handed the microphone to Captain James Carson from the Littlefield Police Department. The newspaper that morning had run a story on Sammy’s death, including a statement from the LPD. They were treating the case as a “suspicious death” but “likely suicide” and were waiting on a report from the coroner. The article said nothing about the state of his apartment.

  Captain Carson took the microphone and said good morning. For years, he’d been the police representative for school assemblies on drinking and driving, bomb threats, domestic abuse—the usual small-town issues. He was an older guy, midfifties. The rumor at LHS was that he’d been shot in his younger days and spent the rest of his career doing desk duty, trainings, and, well, this kind of stuff.

  “I’m here to reassure you that we have no reason to think there’s any danger to anyone,” he was saying. “That said, if any of you have any information about Mr. Tampari that you think we might want to know, I’m here to listen.”

  I could feel RJ making a concerted effort not to look at me. I stared forward, eyes on Captain Carson, trying to avoid the mistake bad students always make when they don’t want to be called on by the teacher: looking away. I knew I should tell the police, or someone, about my relationship with Sammy, but no way was I going to do that. Not ever. I imagined the breathless articles that would run in the newspaper. How long would it take before the story went viral? Headlines swirled in my head:

  Small-Town Teacher Overdoses After Molesting Student

  Sex, Drugs, Suicide? Pervert Chemistry Teacher Kills Himself at Church

  Report: Gay Student Fucks Teacher … to DEATH!

  I imagined my father reading those things. When we lived in Winterville, in the good days, he used to read me the headlines from the local paper, laughing at the trials and tribulations of small-town Maine. Once, a moose interrupted an outdoor hockey game and ate the puck—that was the front page. Another day, a police officer dropped the keys to his cruiser in the snow and, when he couldn’t find them, nearly froze to death walking back to the station. My dad would mock these things, and it was mean, but I was inside that meanness. It was a joke that included me.

  As Captain Carson finished his remarks, Principal Dee signaled to someone, and the slideshow began, projected onto a large screen they typically rolled out for graduation. Music began to play from the speakers: a pop song about saying goodbye. I’d been wondering how they managed to find enough pictures of Sammy, from his one year at the school, to fill a slideshow of any length. The answer was that they hadn’t. The first picture was the one Sammy had taken for the yearbook; it was him and the rest of the science department standing shoulder to shoulder in the lab. Sammy was on the far right, wearing a peach-colored button-down.

  But after that, whoever put the slideshow together had to get creative. Someone had made a poster with Sammy’s name written in calligraphy and surrounded by flowers, and there were two photographs of this, with a fade-in, fade-out effect. The next picture was an up-close, low-resolution photo of Sammy’s face. His eyes were a blur of pixels. I suspected that this photo had been taken at an assembly like this one, with Sammy in the background, and they’d simply zoomed and cropped the image.

  The rest of the brief slideshow continued this way, with a mix of bad images of Sammy and bad images not of Sammy. But as the song reached its coda, and the final photo appeared, I felt all of my blood rush to my head. The last picture was of us—Sammy and me. We were in the hallway talking to each other. We were standing close. Sammy was gesturing with his hand, and it appeared, maybe, as if he was touching my arm. I was gazing up at him with a look that seemed, from where I was sitting, to be a completely transparent expression of love. And it wasn’t just me: Sammy was beaming. It was a picture of two soon-to-be lovers, and I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing it any other way.

  I cast nervous glances around the gym, expecting everyone to be staring at me. But other than RJ, who was watching me out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to register the photo at all. Emmett was still swiping at his phone. As the music faded out, I hoped I was in the clear, that the picture was only interesting if you knew what I knew. But then I saw Captain Carson take a step toward the screen, and I thought, Uh-oh.

  Just like that, the image was gone, the lights were up, and Principal Dee was saying, “I’d like to introduce our student speaker. One of your student council representatives, Natalie Domney, has offered to share her experiences with you today.”

  This elicited some genuine murmurs of interest. Natalie Domney was famous for trying to slit her wrists on a band saw at the end of her freshman year. Since her return to school, she was always finding some odd way to embarrass herself in class—tripping, farting, calling the teacher “Mom.” Everyone had a Natalie Domney story.

  Prompted by the principal, she stepped forward, her shaking hands visible even from our spot in the bleachers. She was a plain, round-faced girl, dressed in a knee-length skirt and a thin black shirt that covered her arms to the wrists. She took the microphone from Principal Dee and breathed loudly into it. Any of us could have told the principal that this was a bad idea: you don’t shine a spotlight on Natalie Domney.

  “She’s gonna pee her tights,” someone said behind me.

  “I hope she shits them,” said another. “She ratted me out last year.”

  “Stop, you guys,” said someone kind.

  Natalie lifted the microphone back to her lips. “It’s very—” she started to say, but then sneezed, with no windup, all over the microphone. The noise reverberated throughout the auditorium like a thunderclap. Natalie stared at the microphone in obvious, abject horror. Later, reports from the first row of the bleachers would clarify what she’d seen: Natalie Domney had just sneezed blood all over the microphone. It was slippery with the stuff, and she lost her grip on it. The microphone dropped from her hands and cracked against the hard court, its plastic casing shattering into pieces. Feedback whistled through the air. Natalie took two steps back, her footing unsure, and collapsed in a heap of limbs under the basket.

  Chaos. The teachers screamed at us to remain in our seats, but forget it, we were already up. We stampeded. Some of us went for the doors—school, for those students, was over for the day—and some went for center court, just hoping to stay part of the action. RJ and Emmett wanted to stay and watch, but I was thinking of that photograph, of Captain Carson, and I wanted to get away. I forced them out of the gym and into the parking lot. It was still early morning, and the lemony sun was low and warm.

  RJ shook his head. “What’s going on in this place?” What he meant was, how could two bad things happen so close together?

  I loved RJ, but his life had been easy.

  Eventually, we would learn what had happened to Natalie: deep vein thrombosis. A blood clot formed in the anterior tibial vein of her left leg and traveled upward to her heart and lungs. In the 1700s, doctors believed this condition was caused by the accumulation of milk in the legs of lactating women and prescribed frequent breast-feeding as the only method of prevention. If we’d lived in the eighteenth century, Natalie would certainly have died, and her medical chart would have listed the cause of death as Milk Leg.

  As it was in 2010, Natalie lived, and at my insistence, RJ, Emmett, and I finished out the school day. Looking back, the image that sticks
with me most is not Natalie’s body or even the photograph of Sammy and me—though I wish I had that picture—but something I saw as we followed the herd out of the gym. Only a few yards from the principal, standing under the 2002 BOYS’ LACROSSE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP banner, Tracy Bean-Upshaw lit a cigarette. She was a senior, a tiny thing, with sand-colored hair and a fondness for diet iced tea. She was a straight-A student, captain of the debate club, and despite the opportunities this gave her, I’d never, not once, seen her break a rule. But that day, as thirty or forty people simultaneously called 911, and as Principal Dee sat on her knees in front of Natalie, crying into the crook of her elbow, Tracy lit a cigarette and smoked it for at least as long as it took me to leave the building. For all I know, she had time to finish it before anyone noticed. I don’t know why I remember this so clearly; I suppose it struck me as incredibly brave. Maybe it reminded me of something I shouldn’t have forgotten, something my father taught me years ago and Sammy was teaching me again: no matter what you may think, you never really know anyone.

  * * *

  That night, after everyone was in bed, I caved. I thought of Captain Carson, of the photograph, of Natalie’s bloody sneeze. I abandoned my methodical approach to the journals and skipped to the most recent volume—to the summer Sammy and I spent together.

  I didn’t pretend this was a proper part of the investigation. I left my legal pad on the desk, shut off my computer, turned off the overhead light. I lay in bed with the journal and a reading light, which shined a wide whitish glow. Rationally, I was prepared that I might not see much of myself in these entries. Even in a private journal kept in a locked drawer, it would be risky for Sammy to commit our affair to print. My own papers and e-mails certainly made no mention of what we’d done. In my heart, he was Sammy, but everywhere else, he was still Mr. Tampari.

  I was not prepared for what I did find: no mention of me at all. Not one. No reference, even, to an unnamed student, an advisee with special promise. If all you had was Sammy’s journals, you wouldn’t even know I existed. What was I to make of this? There were thousands of pages of journals, a recipe book, a MELD score, a phone number, a key. I was important enough to receive them but not to trust with them while he lived. I believed he was trying to help me, but damn him: he was doing it in the least helpful way possible. He’d left me, and with what? An “elixir of life” that probably killed him. An apartment torn to shreds. A secret too big to keep, an “I love you” he would never say back.