The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  Met an anthropology student studying ancient medicine. Catherine said the Ngäbe-Buglé don’t believe that any medicine, even the elixir of life, can actually cure diseases. “They don’t believe the elixir itself heals the body,” she told me. “They believe it gives the mind the strength to heal the body.” How great is that?? She said they’d take the elixir not only when they were sick, but also when they became jealous or angry or sad. I asked her to dinner, and she accepted.

  Never in his life had he spent so much time out of the house. Catherine held his hand and blew on his neck during brunch at Cafe Mogador. Catherine took him to a nightclub in Alphabet City, where the strobe lights hit her sandy hair and gave him a new kind of brain burn. Catherine leaned against him and laughed as he waved helplessly at passing taxis along Avenue C. Where did this woman come from? That some other self, some self he’d forgotten, had initiated their romance cast a semimagical, semistrange sheen over their time together. It was like being set up on a date by a mutual friend, only the mutual friend is yourself.

  The first time he took her back to his apartment, Sammy removed her coat and threw it with his over the arm of the sofa. He gave her the grand tour—the living room, with the leather sectional he’d bought from the previous tenant; the kitchen, which seemed fifteen degrees hotter despite its distance from the radiator; the bedroom, where the bed was. The contrast between Sammy and his apartment baffled her. She wondered to herself where this money came from, how he could afford such a nice place but wear such terrible clothes. He couldn’t even offer her wine or a cocktail, only ice water served in a coffee cup. But when you date a man who forgets you a week after asking you out, there’s no obvious place to draw a line. She didn’t know it then, but she would keep pushing that line back, redrawing it, until her heart was broken.

  They met at the foot of the bed. Sammy was a twenty-year-old virgin. He kissed her, openmouthed and awkward. She chewed on his lip, shoved him a little, challenged him to loosen up. He let her push him to the bed and then pulled her down, too, onto the brown-and-kiwi comforter. He gathered the edge of it and yanked it over them both, buried them in blankets. There, the darkness excused his clumsiness. He could paw at her bra like an idiot and it only meant he was blind, not inexperienced. Once their clothes were off and piled high on the carpet, she lay on her side with her spine against his chest and her left leg raised and curled back across his thigh. But the geometry of this was too advanced, too complicated, so he turned her around to face him. It was now or never. He positioned himself on top of her, pressed his face against her clavicle, and hoped for the best.

  * * *

  The next morning, when she woke with her hand pinned under his back, Catherine rose and searched Sam’s refrigerator for something to drink. There, alongside an empty bottle of orange juice, a hugely expired carton of milk, and two eggs sitting loose in the butter compartment, was the tribal medicine she’d smuggled from Panama. Smuggled was overdramatic; she just liked the way it sounded. In truth she had all the paperwork, but when the customs people asked her if she had anything to declare, it was three in the morning, and she hadn’t slept at all on the plane.

  She stretched her back and took in the sight of his apartment for the first time in daylight. The floors were dark natural wood, extending from the bedroom to the living room before turning to speckled slate in the kitchen. The counters were marble, white, smooth. She could see straight into the bedroom from where she was standing. Sammy was asleep in there, and he was a quiet sleeper, which surprised her. He seemed too anxious for easy dreams. Last night, she’d texted a girlfriend from the bathroom: I think he’s rich?! And the girlfriend was, like, cha-ching! But Catherine didn’t care about that—she was just taken aback. Only in the clearer light of day did it seem less strange. Erratic behavior such as Sam’s was, in its own way, a kind of privilege. Not everyone could afford it.

  She took the vial from the fridge. Almost all of it was gone.

  “Good morning,” Sam said from behind her, still in bed, and she turned, still holding the vial. He’d arranged the sheets carefully over his groin, but his torso was exposed, and she wanted him again. He had not been very good, but it took a long time for him to come. He apologized for that, but she wasn’t complaining.

  “Good morning, darling,” she said, making it clear in her voice that darling was used ironically. She showed him the vial. “What happened to this?”

  “Oh.” He gathered the sheets around his chest, which seemed unfair—she’d put her underwear on, but she was topless in the morning sun and the almost-definitely unflattering light of the refrigerator. “I’ll have those results for you soon.”

  “No rush. But what happened? Did you spill it or did you drink it?” This, she thought, was a joke.

  Sam didn’t laugh. She would learn that though he was capable, sometimes, of laughter, it was rare. He was not even a smiler, though when he smiled, it was as if she were a girl again, and her mother—who was kind but strict—was allowing her, once a year, to have ice cream for dinner. It was an important lesson she learned from her mother, who raised her alone: anything withheld is the best thing.

  Sammy stared at her, his face slack. “You asked me for a favor,” he said sharply. “I had better things to do, but I did it.”

  “I know. I wasn’t…” She didn’t know how to finish that sentence. She didn’t even know what he thought she was doing.

  He had taken some for himself, locked it away in a cooler in the storage unit where he still had (unbeknownst to Leena) the rest of the quicksilver. He wasn’t planning to do anything with it, necessarily, it was just … a rainy-day fund, a fire extinguisher secured behind glass. Break in case of emergency. “I used what I had to use,” he lied, “and I only bothered to help because I felt so bad for forgetting you. I still don’t remember asking you out, by the way. I’m just taking your word for it that I did. For all I know you’ve tricked me into this.”

  Catherine put the vial back into the fridge, closed the door, and moved stiffly into the bedroom, hands over her breasts. At the foot of the bed, she knelt to hunt for her clothes, which was hard to do, kneeling while covering her chest. But she wouldn’t cry. Not for this prick.

  She found her bra and her tank top and was trying to put them on, still crouched at the foot of the bed, when she felt his hand on her still-bare shoulder.

  “I’m sorry.”

  When she looked up at him, so much sadness was in his face she wanted instantly to rescue him from it. He was lying stomach down, reaching for her, and God, where, all her life, had this lust been hiding? She’d never wanted anyone else the way she wanted him.

  “That was awful,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said immediately. “I get like that. Maybe it’s good you know.”

  She made a noise that was kind of like Hmm, as if she were deciding whether to get up, dress, and leave, as if she hadn’t already decided to stay.

  “Come to bed,” he said, “and I’ll tell you how wonderful you are and how I’m falling in love with you.”

  So rather than leaving, she went to him, felt his long arms encircle her waist. I’m falling in love with you. She felt as if she were drowning, only it was good. This was something her mother couldn’t teach her: a bit of cruelty makes love taste sweeter, and it’s always the not-cruel people who suffer for this, who feel, most acutely, the hypnotic effect of the pendulum as it swings from cruelty to love.

  CASE HISTORY

  On His Deathbed, Trithemius Dictates the Elixir of Life

  Würzburg, Germany, AD 1516

  The abbot says black-tailed night birds are born with their eyes open. “Very unusual for birds,” he tells us. “They require hardly any care and leave the nest early.” We don’t say anything out of respect for the abbot, who is dying, but secretly we’re thinking, Why is he talking about birds? According to Brother Marcus, the abbot’s mind is gone: “The abbot thinks he’s ten years old and delivering a report on birds to his schoolteacher
.” According to Brother Fridl, who heard from Brother Dietmar, the abbot spent the whole night singing an inappropriate song in his sleep. Brother Fridl would only repeat ten words of this song, but we bargained him up to fifteen:

  The tits of a cow are like the tits of a woman, ready for the

  We first met the abbot when he arrived at St. James’s Abbey in the spring of 1506. It was a warm spring, and we’d spent much of the season outdoors, tending to the gardens, chopping wood. We’d gone unsupervised since our last abbot died of ergotism (his skin turned black and fell off his bones). We prayed, but we prayed right there in the fields, on our knees in the freshly tilled soil. The Benedictine Order is no place for softness. Joining the brotherhood is like opening a heavy door—you have to lean your whole body into it, keep pushing and pushing until it gives.

  We knew all about the abbot. We knew everything there was to know. When he was assigned to Würzburg, the other monasteries were merciless:

  “Oh, Trithemius will be your abbot? Good luck with that.”

  “I heard he reads in the nude!”

  We soon discovered the abbot reads fully clothed—but the books he reads! Tomes on alchemy and medicine and magic crystals. Brother Fridl lifted the cover of one such book and saw a naked man on the first page, with arrows pointing to all his secret places.

  We’d probably be celebrating if it weren’t for Brother Georg, who is heartbroken over the abbot’s poor health. Brother Georg stands in the corner, near the fire, crying into his robes. We love Brother Georg, who is an orphan of Sponheim. He is sixteen and easily startled. If you touch him on his shoulder, he jumps right out of his skin and says in a high-pitched voice, “Praise God!”

  We don’t hold his affection for the abbot against him. He was so young when he came to St. James’s. He didn’t know any better than to bond with Trithemius, whose avuncular fatness does have its charms. When Brother Georg calls the abbot “father,” it has a different sound than when we say it. For Brother Georg, it has two meanings.

  The abbot moans and sweats onto his pillow. We stand in the doorway and study our sunburned feet. Before he lost his mind, the abbot diagnosed his own disease as a fever of the Sensual Spirit. There are four spirits, he told us. The Sensual Spirit lives in the brain. The liver and kidneys house the Natural Spirit. The groin shelters the Generative Spirit. The Brutal Spirit belongs to the heart.

  Brother Georg nurses a weakness of the Brutal Spirit. He loves too strongly and without self-preservation. Brother Marcus says Georg never learned to protect his heart. Brother Fridl says only God’s love is safe. Brother Heinrich, who is so old he sleeps standing up, says, “Look, life is hard. There’s no one way to get through it.”

  * * *

  The abbot’s last words are a recipe:

  One cup quicksilver

  One-half nutmeg and mace

  Two handfuls aniseed

  One gentian root

  Copious cream of tartar

  Oil of three spikenard plants

  Lots of good cinnamon

  Slag of iron

  Brother Zobeslaus writes down the recipe, and we all know what it is: the elixir of life. The abbot has been working on the elixir since before he came to Würzburg. His second year at St. James’s, he consumed a hallucinatory dose of black henbane and nearly killed Brother Heinrich with a chair.

  Later, after we’ve buried the abbot, Brother Zobeslaus holds up the recipe. “So who wants to go first?”

  We don’t laugh out loud because of the abbot, but it’s a pretty good joke.

  “Elixir of life from a dying man,” says Brother Marcus. “That’s rich.”

  But later, when Brother Marcus gathers the abbot’s papers for the archive, he can’t find the recipe anywhere.

  * * *

  After the abbot died, we had two days of quiet before Brother Bartilmebis complained of noises from the basement—smoky sounds, he said, like liquids coming to a boil and solids burning to ash. When Brother Marcus caught Brother Georg sneaking from his bedroom in the early hours of blackness, Brother Georg shouted, “Praise God!,” and dropped an armful of spikenard plants onto the cold stone of the hallway.

  Brother Donat says Georg will kill himself making the elixir, but Brother Fridl, who is Brother Donat’s actual brother, says Georg is only mourning and won’t do anything foolish. We aren’t so sure. We say, “Isn’t mourning the kind of thing that makes you foolish? Isn’t grief, in large quantities, a kind of madness?”

  * * *

  The day before the arrival of our new abbot, we find Brother Georg on the roof of the stables. He has a goblet of elixir in his shaking hands. We gather below and stare up into the sun. It is early morning, and there is no wind.

  “Easy there,” says Brother Oswald, as if he were talking to a horse.

  Brother Georg is crying so much it’s hard to hear him. “He’s dead!” he shouts, as though this were new information.

  A bit of the elixir sloshes over the side of the cup. We gag when we see it. There is the smell of cinnamon and ash and melted horseshoes. Brother Georg says the abbot was touched by God and makes a long speech about geniuses who went unrecognized in their own time. “It’s a test of faith,” he says. Snot runs from his nose. He’s using a lot of words to make his point, but all any of us can hear is “I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone.”

  So we tell him he is not alone. He has a house full of brothers who love him. We promise to always watch out for him, like a big bunch of dads.

  He seems to consider this, but every one of us can see what’s happened: His mind is already gone. His brutal heart is elsewhere.

  “Don’t,” we say.

  But he does.

  * * *

  We bury Brother Georg next to the abbot. It’s against the rules, but who’s going to know? Our new abbot was supposed to arrive a week ago, but there is no one, and we are alone. Brother Bartilmebis received a letter from Brother Arnold of St. John’s, which said he heard from Brother Goswin of St. Stephen’s that our new abbot died of swamp fever on his way to Würzburg. If this is true, they’ll send another. If that one dies, they’ll send another. We’re interchangeable, we brothers. We don’t all wear the same clothes because it’s fun.

  Still, we miss Brother Georg. We try to remember him as he lived, but for now it is impossible to forget how he died. The way he coughed blood through his swollen, ulcerated lips. The way the skin of his hands peeled off his bones like banana rinds. The way he cried for a father who abandoned him. Brother Donat says Brother Fridl has been waking up screaming, his mind filled with nightmares.

  “Don’t gossip,” we tell him. “There’s no comfort in that.”

  8

  Problems in Living

  In an entry from his first year in college, Sammy discussed his conception of the elixir’s purpose:

  This morning, my psych professor started class by announcing that everyone’s greatest desire—greater than love, money, power, anything—is to be bitten by a vampire. We thought he was joking, but then he wrote “vampire” on the whiteboard, double-underlined, and we stopped laughing. He explained that humans, by nature, are afraid of death, and yet, paradoxically, research has shown that people respond negatively to the idea of living forever. According to a study at Yale, if such an option were available, an overwhelming majority of people said they wouldn’t take it. Their reasons were typically moral: to live forever is against the laws of nature or God, to wish for it hubris, to attain it would mean watching those you love grow old and die. (No one ever mentions that you’d find new people to love.)

  This was the crux of his Vampire Theory, that human beings want to live forever but regard choosing to live forever as a moral or spiritual failing. If those things are true, then the ultimate fantasy is vampiric embrace: to have immortality forced upon you, to live forever but be spared the guilt of choosing.

  When class ended, I had ten minutes to get to Origins of Literature. We’re reading Gilgamesh. The professor spent
almost all of class focused on a single passage from Tablet IX, in which Gilgamesh begins his search for immortality after the death of a comrade:

  Gilgamesh for Enkidu, his friend,

  Weeps bitterly and roams over the desert.

  “When I die, shall I not be like unto Enkidu?

  Sorrow has entered my heart.

  I am afraid of death and roam over the desert.”

  Gilgamesh misses Enkidu, but what pains him most is the realization that he, too, will die. The professor argued that this is the moment—as Gilgamesh learns to fear death—in which he becomes fully human. I sat there in the back of the room, wondering, “What does that make me?”

  Next, I had my appointment with Dr. Huang. She asked me today if I really believe in immortality, if I believe true agelessness is an attainable goal. We were in her office, but I’d only just sat down. She was wearing these blue eyeglasses. They must be new, or at least she’s never worn them in front of me. She does this on purpose: small surprises, unexpected questions asked at unexpected times. There was no “How are you?” or “How are you feeling?” Just: “I want to ask you about immortality.”

  Here’s what I told her: I don’t believe in immortality, of course, and my interest in the elixir of life is purely theoretical.

  Here’s what I really believe: Everything in our body is connected. We learn this from our earliest encounters with anatomy. I’m thinking of that childhood song: the thighbone connects to the hip bone, the hip bone connects to the …

  If everything is connected, it follows that there is some way to treat everything at once. I’m talking about what the Greeks called panakeia, the all-healing. My goal is not to live forever but to live happily—to figure out what happiness even means. Can it be done? I don’t know. At least it keeps me busy. An old colleague of my father used to say that the only true panacea is work.