The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  Cu+ + H2O2 → Cu2+ + •OH + −OH

  Let’s call it the Copper Code. The human body produces data like this all the time—most of us just don’t recognize it. We certainly didn’t for my father. The chemical balance of the body is always the slightest glitch away from disaster. It’s a small thing, but also big. So many of his problems started with that simple string of symbols, and with transport protein ATP7B2.

  * * *

  Hanukkah 2005. The year I turned eleven. My father took me to dinner at the only restaurant within two hundred miles that served latkes. He’d started on antidepressants after he tried and failed to return to work, but I’d still come home from school to find him crying into the couch cushions, his eyes open and blank. It was his first time out of the house in weeks.

  The restaurant, coincidentally, was called Little Ned’s.

  “Big Ned is here,” my dad said as we came through the door.

  We sat at a booth near the window with a view of the Penobscot River. This was Bangor, Maine, and we’d driven three hours to get there. The teenaged waiter came for our drink orders.

  My dad put on his reading glasses. “Everything here is kosher, right?”

  The waiter leaned forward. “Like, is everything here good?”

  “Coke, please,” I said.

  My dad ordered a glass of pinot noir.

  The waiter fled. I watched my dad fuss with his napkin. I’d had this idea that he was going to drive me all the way out here, get me into the restaurant, and sprint back to the car and abandon me like an unwanted dog.

  “We don’t even keep kosher,” I said.

  My dad laughed. “Just trying to provide some hashgacha. I’m the closest this place has to a rabbi.”

  I didn’t know what that word meant, but said nothing. Lately he’d been using a lot of words I didn’t know.

  “Hey,” my dad said. “A Frenchman walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, ‘Hey, that’s cool. Where’d ya get it?’ The parrot says, ‘France.’”

  “That’s funny.”

  The waiter came back with the drinks, and we ordered our latkes. We were alone in the restaurant, and I remember feeling bad that we had only given the chef one dish to make.

  “Do you have any paper?” my dad asked me.

  I didn’t, but our tablecloth was paper. My dad ripped off the corner and began to draw on it with the red pen he always kept in his breast pocket, even though he hadn’t graded a test in months. I looked around to make sure no one had seen him. It was upside down to me, but I could tell that he was making a line graph. The x-axis said Age. The y-axis said Death.

  “Did you know,” he said as he drew, “that an anagram for a decimal point is I’m a dot in place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course you did,” he muttered, and this was a new feeling: that my intelligence annoyed him.

  He polished off his wine, and the latkes came. We tasted them and looked at each other. These were nothing like what my mom used to make. They were ropy and strange. The applesauce was pure sugar.

  My dad flagged down the waiter.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  The waiter came. My dad pointed to our food with his middle finger. “These are pretty disturbing.”

  “Oh, man,” said the waiter.

  “I was just going to eat them anyway, but my son demanded we speak to the chef.”

  “I didn’t!” I said.

  The waiter gathered our plates. “Okay. One sec.” He disappeared into the kitchen.

  I refused to look at my father.

  “Hey. Lighten up.” He reached across the table and grabbed my wrist. He spun his line graph around to face me. “Look.”

  I did. The graph showed the risk of dying according to age.

  “When you’re first born, your odds of dying are about one in two hundred. At your mother’s age they were one in four thousand. At your age, they’re one in eight thousand.” He traced his finger along the line. “But look. By the time you’re a teenager, your chance of dying goes all the way up to one in two thousand. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m saying lighten up. You’ll never be safer than you are for the next two years. Do whatever you want. Drink, smoke, fight. Take up hitchhiking. Be mean to waiters. Send back your shitty latkes.”

  “Okay. Jeez.”

  The waiter returned with the chef, an older guy, gray hair, maybe in his sixties. Odds of death: one in a hundred.

  “Latkes no good?” he said.

  “The Force was not strong in them,” my dad answered.

  “I’ll be honest. I don’t really know how to make them. There’s an old couple down the street who eats here like three times a week, and they asked us to put them on the menu.”

  “They’re really wealthy,” explained the waiter.

  My dad scratched his head. “You just described a plutocracy.”

  “I’ll make something new up for you,” the chef said. “Drinks on the house while you wait.”

  So we waited, and my dad drank for free. I forget how many glasses he had. By the time we left, I could see he was unsteady on his feet. By the time we pulled out of the parking lot, I could see he wasn’t fit to drive. By the time he careened off the road and into a tanning salon, I could see that my father, as I’d always known him, was gone.

  Christmas lights and police lights. Everything lit up in the night. My father was charged with driving under the influence. This would be bad for him later. When your liver fails and you have a DUI on your record, no one is inclined to believe you when you say alcohol isn’t to blame. Here’s that clue again, the Copper Code:

  Cu+ + H2O2 → Cu2+ + •OH + −OH

  I gave the police my aunt’s phone number, and she drove all the way up to spend the night with me in Winterville. The next morning, she told my dad that she was taking me to Littlefield to live with her. I didn’t hear the conversation—they went into his bedroom and spoke in hushed voices—but it didn’t last long, and my aunt emerged looking no worse for wear. I don’t think my dad fought for me, and one thing’s for sure: he never asked for me back.

  * * *

  My fortieth birthday party ended at 11:00 p.m.—by my standards, practically an all-nighter. As the last of our guests filtered out, I collapsed onto the sofa and moaned into the cushions. My husband laughed and rubbed my back until I stopped complaining.

  “You had fun,” he said, not a question. He had told me, early in our courtship, that I was out of touch with my feelings. Out of touch. This was a common phrase even when I was a teenager, but now we say it all the time, and more seriously. More literally. It’s easier today to live a life without touching—even technology doesn’t have to be touched. But my husband meant it in the old-fashioned way, the figurative way. “You’re happy to see me,” he’d say when he came home from work and I didn’t do enough to acknowledge him. When he annoyed me and I retreated into silence, he’d cast a rope and pull me back out: “You’re mad. You’re mad at me right now.” And I’d say, “Yes, of course I’m mad,” as if I didn’t need him to tell me.

  “Come on,” he said now. “Let’s go to bed.”

  I followed him upstairs, and we lay down in bed, him on his back and me basically on top of him. He smelled like a birthday party in Maine—beer and smoke and blueberry frosting.

  We’d bought this house together. We had been living in New York City, where I’d completed a graduate degree in science writing. I had written an article on Ge Hong for a monthly magazine about life extension. It did well, so I wrote another piece on the history of immortality research, and then another, and then another. I even appeared on TV once, as a talking head for a PBS special on the Fountain of Youth. After a year or two of this, I thought, You know, I could do this from anywhere.

  I huddled against my husband in bed, pulled the blanket up over my face. Soon I was asleep. I still dream of Sammy. I’m always the age I was then—sixteen, skinny
, love struck. We don’t have sex, but the dreams are sexual, with a hot, liquid quality. My therapist says someday I’ll be an adult in these dreams, and apparently that will mean something.

  In the middle of the night an alarm sounded. I assumed it was my phone, telling me to wake up. But then I sat up in bed and saw my husband staring at the underside of his forearm, just below the elbow. His medical chip had activated.

  “Keep sleeping. It’s probably just my cholesterol.”

  I burrowed my face into the side of his leg. “I told you not to eat so much cake.”

  He took his phone with him into the bathroom. I saw the light go on beneath the door. He would scan the chip and get the report. It would tell him what was wrong and what to do about it. We laughed at the chips when they first came out. Medical chips were for nerds and hypochondriacs, we told ourselves, even though I was both. But ten years later, almost everyone had a chip.

  The bathroom door opened, and I waited for the comforting feel of my husband sliding into bed, looping a leg over mine, and breathing warm air onto the back of my neck. But moments passed and I was still in bed alone. I rolled over and opened my eyes. He was standing motionless like a ghost in the light of the doorway.

  I held out a hand to him.

  He didn’t move. He was still staring at his phone. “Cancerous tissue.”

  His words registered and did not register. I sat up and straightened my T-shirt. I could feel my toes tingling under the covers, waking up too fast as my heart began to beat. “Where?”

  He touched the screen. “My brain.” He looked up at me, lost. “It says I have brain cancer.”

  7

  Brain Burn

  Sammy sat in a circle of numismatists, falling asleep. He liked to do simple math as he drifted off—his version of counting sheep—and as he began to multiply the ages of all members present, he perceived a strange phenomenon. Although society meetings had no assigned seats, his fellow members had arranged themselves perfectly in order of age. As the youngest member, Sammy was sitting next to the second youngest on his right and the oldest on his left. Was this the first time it had happened, or only the first time he’d noticed?

  “Samuel, are we boring you?” asked Andres, the chairman of the society.

  “Yes, a little.” Sammy was thirteen years old.

  He’d joined the society after that first trip with his father, when he realized the numismatists had much wider interests than the collection of rare currency. But sometimes the group actually wanted to talk about coins. The following week, Sotheby’s was auctioning a pair of silver half-dollars believed to have been placed over Abraham Lincoln’s eyes following his assassination. The numismatists were debating the value of these coins. They were of obvious historical significance, but they were also damaged: to keep the coins together, someone had drilled holes into them and connected them via a black silk ribbon.

  Sammy wasn’t sleeping on purpose. His antidepressants made him tired, and when there was nothing to occupy his mind, he would rest. In school—where he was a high school upperclassman, having skipped two grades—this made the long days of class an endurance test. In the feedback for one of his English papers, his teacher wrote, You’re as smart as you are sleepy.

  In the first couple of years after his jump out of the window, Don and Leena pushed hard for him to be medicated. Dr. Huang held them off for as long as she could, arguing that he was too young to abandon nonpharmaceutical approaches. But by the time he was thirteen, he’d been dosed with combinations of imipramine, amitriptyline, nortriptyline, and desipramine. When those didn’t work: phenelzine, tranylcypromine, isocarboxazid. What’s wrong with me? His parents’ answer was that he was depressed. But if the tools used to treat depression had no effect on Sammy, then eventually the word must lose its meaning. This is one of those secrets you learn when happiness eludes you: a lot of the words people use don’t mean anything.

  “We can’t cure mental illness,” Dr. Huang had told him. “We’re trying to determine the best path to palliative care.” This was an example of what she called “brutal honesty,” but where, Sammy wondered, was the honesty in the palliative? (Palliative, from the Latin palliare—“to cloak, to disguise.”)

  “Well,” Andres was saying, “I’m ninety years old, and I manage to stay awake.”

  “That’s because you decide what we talk about,” Sammy said. “And when you get bored, you change the subject.”

  The numismatists made eye contact with one another. It had been less than a year since Don stopped attending, and though no one said out loud the reason for this, everyone knew it: Don’s interest began to wane because of Sammy’s interest.

  The numismatists continued their discussion of the Lincoln half-dollars, and Sammy tried to keep his eyes open. If he offended them too badly, they would avoid the topics that interested him out of spite. Well, the topic that interested him. In his bedroom, he’d replaced the car posters and beanbags with bookshelves, and these held many of the books that once belonged to his father, locked up in the coin cave: Leopold Turck’s Aging as a Disease; Trithemius’s Immortal Liquor; Alkahest, of Philalethes; Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents.

  He often tried to explain this fascination to himself, to make sense of it. Don said it was natural to be afraid of death, that Sammy took comfort in the idea of an elixir of life the way some children took comfort in night-lights. But Sammy knew that wasn’t it. Death, to him, was like an obligation, a dentist appointment—it was a thing you sometimes wanted to put off and sometimes wanted to just get over with. Dr. Huang said the elixir represented hope for Sammy, hope of a cure for the incurable condition of his mind. That was closer, maybe, though hope was one of those words that held no smell or flavor—he knew the definition, but he’d been born without the receptors to feel that quickening of the pulse, that rising of the hairs, when someone “gets his hopes up.”

  This was the secret to his fascination, one he would not admit to anyone but himself: he expected to die pursuing it. Don and Leena and Dr. Huang said he needed a hobby. Well, he’d found one. It was like falling, falling, falling, out of the window—a thing you do until you hit the ground.

  “You know,” said the chairman, and his condescending tone meant the you referred to Sammy, “Lincoln actually has ties to the elixir of life.”

  “Blue mass,” said someone in the circle, and the chairman frowned—he’d wanted to build to the reveal.

  “Blue mass?” Sammy repeated.

  “Lincoln was a depressive,” Andres said. “Henry Clay Whitney wrote of Lincoln’s tendency to enter the ‘Cave of Gloom.’”

  “Blue mass was an antidepressant that derived from experiments in search of an elixir,” said another member. “A combination of mercury, licorice root, and … other stuff. Does anyone remember?”

  “I don’t. Arny’s Principles of Pharmacy has one recipe.” The chairman gestured toward the walls of bookshelves behind him. “It’s around here somewhere.”

  “It’s there.” Sammy pointed to the bottom shelf of the second bookshelf on the left wall. His first year as a member, when Don would shush him if he spoke, he’d spent each meeting on the floor or atop the stepladder, mentally cataloging every book in the room.

  “You can take it home,” Andres said dismissively. “It’s not rare.”

  Sammy thanked him and, two hours later, sat in his bedroom with the book. Don and Leena were downstairs, finishing their dinner and watching the Knicks on the thirty-six-inch Zenith Smart Set. When he was six years old, Sammy and his mother were at Madison Square Garden to see a rookie named Patrick Ewing put up thirty-seven points against the Bulls. They had courtside seats for that one, and the TV cameras caught them over and over. Leena had a tape of the game and liked to watch it when there wasn’t anything live. The best shot of them came near the end of the first quarter, when Ewing backed down the Bulls’ center beneath the rim. Little Sammy was watching them collide with his face upturned, lips pursed. His white
-and-orange team sweatshirt was two sizes too big for him. He could have been just Jell-O under there. Next to him, Leena was up on her feet, fist pumping. She was wearing a yellow top and had insane, gravity-defying hair.

  Sammy was remembering this—not the game itself, but the moment afterward when Leena dragged him to the TV and showed him the footage, as happy as he’d ever seen her—when one of his thoughts came to him: How much would it cost, today, to buy mercury?

  * * *

  Several months later, after a two-day stay, Sammy came home from the hospital. It was November, and the air was dense with cold. From the street, his bedroom window was a pane of ice.

  His memories of the overdose were hazy, but Don and Leena had returned from a charity dinner to find him slumped on the floor of his room, tongue out, a long line of drool bisecting his shirt. His skin had turned stygian gray. He did remember waking up in the ambulance with a mouthful of charcoal. His mother rode alongside him, exhausted in formal wear, listing all the things he had left to live for: a college degree, the chance to finally beat his father at chess, a Knicks championship. Sammy smiled weakly at his mother through charcoal-blackened lips. He could still taste the blue mass. He’d swallowed the pills whole, but his tongue registered the flavor, and it was bitter and stannic and sweet, like candied metal.

  “I already beat Don at chess,” he murmured, but Leena didn’t hear him.

  Dr. Huang visited him in the hospital, along with the hospital psychologist. Sammy knew there would be consequences—more therapy, more meds. The worst was the judgment handed down by his mother: Sammy was no longer a member of the Numismatics Society. It was an unhealthy influence, Leena said, and Sammy needed to spend time among boys his own age. The irony was that when Sammy jumped out of the window, he was trying to hurt himself, but his parents refused to see it that way. When he took the blue mass, he was trying to help himself, but this, they decided, was a suicide attempt. He just wished he could remember how much he’d taken; he would need to be more careful in the future.