The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the Appetizer, the Dor. “You said you don’t know what this is, but the instructions say you have to inject it. And cocaine…”

  He was right. While I was silently scolding myself for missing this, RJ was opening the Web browser on the computer. On the search bar, he entered Dor + cocaine.

  The results came back, most of which were irrelevant: Indiana’s Department of Revenue, for instance, had a section on its website about “drugs of abuse.” But a few were interesting. The addition of cocaine as a search term had revealed a definition for the acronym DOR that I had missed: “delta-opioid receptor”—a member of the brain’s opioid system heavily involved in its response to cocaine.

  “Is this something?” RJ asked.

  “Maybe. But if Dor is cocaine, why not just call it that?”

  RJ moved the cursor back to the search bar and modified his terms: Dor + Cocaine + Tampari. “What the hell, right?” He clicked the mouse.

  The results came back: one hit.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  The lone website had a strange address, a long string of seemingly random numbers and letters. That website is long gone, but it looked something like this: www.btlfiud23rbgy83.ro. There was no description or summary of the link, just the address itself. In a separate browser, we searched for .ro and discovered it to be the country code domain for Romania. I recalled another of those definitions of dor: the Romanian word for “nostalgia.”

  RJ clicked the link. A website with a black background began to load, slowly, but before we could see any of its contents, a command prompt appeared on the screen: Enter Password.

  “Awesome,” RJ said, but I felt a jolt of frustration. Why did everything have to be so difficult?

  RJ scooted over, allowing me to man the keyboard. I stared at the empty box, thinking. Lines from Sammy’s journals and recipe book danced through my mind, creating a mental word cloud: elixir, quicksilver, Catherine, brain burn. I knew nothing, and I knew too much. After a moment, one careful letter at a time, I typed, Tampari.

  After a flicker, a message box appeared. The first line of the message was in a foreign language that I assumed to be Romanian. The second line, helpfully, contained the English translation: Nice try, fuckface!

  Instinctively, I tried to click away from the website, not wanting the study hall monitor to see those words on the screen. But no matter how feverishly I clicked, the browser wouldn’t close, and fifteen painful seconds later, the entire monitor went blue. The website had crashed the computer.

  * * *

  When the day was over, RJ and I met in the chem lab. I stood by the window, where the reception was better, and entered the number Sammy had given me into my phone. The Romanian website hadn’t just frozen the computer—it had completely fried it, hard drive and all. It was so fried, thankfully, that no one knew we’d been the last to log in.

  “Put it on speaker,” RJ said.

  I can see this more clearly than a photograph. RJ was standing near the fume hood, dressed in black slacks, a button-down shirt, and a loosely knotted skinny tie that lay crooked on his flat stomach. He’d had a presentation earlier that day in College Prep History, and his parents made him dress up for it. The lab tables had black tops, but the surfaces near the window had bleached a little in the sun. I watched through the window as my schoolmates maneuvered their parents’ oversize cars through the narrow corridor of the exit.

  It may seem strange that I would remember it so well, among all the other, more interesting things that had happened. But not long after I dialed that number, I would do a bad thing, and it helps me forgive myself to remember that I was just a kid, a sixteen-year-old boy, who had never so much as placed an international call.

  I pressed the green button and waited. I heard the soft static of the call being answered.

  “Hello?” said a man.

  I deepened my voice. “Hello.”

  There was a pause. “Who’s calling, please?” He sounded like a British diplomat.

  “My name is Conrad. I was a friend of Sammy Tampari’s.”

  I could hear his breathing stop. “Has something happened to him?”

  I wasn’t ready to speak the answer, not over the phone to a stranger. “He gave me your number. Who is this?”

  So he told me his name, only now Sadiq’s voice had lost its European authority—he spoke with the high-pitched urgency of someone pleading for information. He told me his name, then he said again, “Has something happened to Sam?”

  10

  Aposematism

  The circular room was sort of doughnut-shaped, with the doughnut hole being the central podium where the Belgian stood, lecturing. The conference center was located on the border of Chinatown and Little Italy, and Sammy could smell this confusion wafting through the large overhead vents: spicy cumin lamb, gnocchi alla romana. He took a slow, quiet breath and decided he would find pleasure in these smells, even though it did not work that way. All those years ago, the man had said, “The world needs beauty,” and he had meant that the world is not, itself, beautiful.

  The Belgian paced the edges of the podium, saying, “All the rats lived. Every. Single. One.”

  That day on the street, the man had also meant that Sammy was physically beautiful, that his beauty enriched the world around him. Empirically, yes, he was beautiful—his whole life had been evidence of this, including the woman, right then, who kept glancing back at him from the row below, hoping to start a conversation—but no one was better off for it. No one had been enriched.

  Just ask Catherine. She was stuck with a sulky grad school dropout who had literally tried to kill her. That happened. Yes, he was beautiful. But so were the poison dart frog and blue-ringed octopus, and their beauty was a message: don’t touch me, or you’ll die. Aposematism. Warning coloration. In the animal kingdom, predators heeded this warning. So why did Catherine come back to him, time and again, no matter how much he stung her?

  The Belgian—that’s what he called himself—said, “Medical ethics don’t apply to the self. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t apply to the self.”

  Sammy was thinking about the smell of food because of the test he used to run—an experiment to gauge his happiness. A tea shop was across from his apartment (“Our apartment,” Catherine often reminded him), just a little place, locally owned, with a deep green awning and a tall, wide window that allowed you to watch from the street as the little Lebanese woman who owned the shop brewed loose-leaf teas in big bullet-shaped vats. If Sammy lingered outside the door, the smell of those teas would hit him like a gust of wind: mint truffle, blueberry merlot, lemon vervain. On his dark days, the feel of this was like smelling a stack of printer paper. But on certain days, the smell of those teas made him feel like Dumbo with the feather—smiling, stupid, about to take flight. Then he would know the brain burn had worked.

  The day it happened, sure enough, he had grinned at the woman through the window and floated up to his apartment. The elevator opened with a ding, and he held his key out in front of him as if it were leading him to the lock. He swung the door open, humming to himself, dropping his bag. He was so thirsty he drank out of the faucet with cupped hands, watching the cold water gather in the grooves of his fingers, feeling the wetness on the ends of his nerves. He splashed his face and used his T-shirt to dry his forehead. When he opened his eyes, a woman was standing in front of him, someone he’d never seen before.

  “Hey,” she said.

  What happened next Sammy could not remember—he had it told to him, first by the police, then by the woman.

  “Are you okay?” the woman said, seeing the confusion in his face.

  Sammy stepped away from the faucet and stared at her with his back to the refrigerator. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “What?”

  Sammy ran to the living room and began to rummage through his couch. He was looking for his cell phone, though the woman didn’t know this, o
r why he wanted it.

  “Sam?”

  His breath caught. Something in having a stranger know your name, in having a stranger say your name, with such confidence, in your own home, is uniquely terrifying.

  His voice rising, Sammy said again, “Who are you?”

  Catherine realized that Sam wasn’t playing, wasn’t doing a bit. It was just like the day in the lab, only back then he’d only met her once. Only known her for a week. Now they’d been a couple for a year. They lived together, said “I love you” before bed, fucked in the morning, ordered stationery with both their names—and he’d forgotten her. Again.

  Sammy found his phone—it wasn’t in the couch cushions, but in his pocket—and dialed 911. Catherine would later blame herself (it amazed him, her endless reserves of self-recrimination) and say that she should have let him call—that’s what he should do if he finds himself disoriented and scared. But she also said that when someone is calling the police on you, and you haven’t done anything wrong, your instinct is to intervene. She ran to Sammy and tried to take the phone from his hand, to explain: Sam, it’s me.

  Even if her name would have meant anything to him then, he was too panicked to understand it. He wrestled with her over the phone. He pushed her against the wall, and because the human brain shows no mercy, this he does remember: the sound of her head hitting the wall, the look on her face—pain, horror, and, worst of all, love—and the way doing more violence to her seemed so real a possibility, so easy a one, like turning up the burner on a stove. With one hand holding her to the wall, he raised his other hand, and they would argue about this later: she would say his hand was open; he would say his fist was closed. Catherine wrenched herself from his grasp. In the struggle, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, hard, the coffee table leaving a long, dark bruise on the underside of her arm. Imagine what could have happened if instead of her arm it had been her head, her neck, her delicate face. He did imagine this. He imagined it and imagined it and imagined it, sharpening the idea until it was a fiery-hot poker in his mind.

  It didn’t take long, once the police arrived, to sort things out. Sammy’s memories began to return, and Catherine explained everything. He knew it right then and there, before he even fully remembered his life with Catherine: he would never, under any circumstances, subject himself to another brain burn.

  There was no telling why the ECT affected his memory so badly. Sometimes he wondered if his earlier experiments with the elixir, when he was just a boy, had damaged his brain in some permanent way, made him more vulnerable to the negative consequences of electricity. He preferred that explanation to the one that felt, in his heart, more true: that he was simply broken, as he’d always believed, and nothing that worked for others would ever work for him. He was incompatible with the world.

  That very night—while Catherine stayed at a friend’s house—he tore up his bedroom until he found his long disused recipe book. He took a trip to the storage unit where he kept his mercury and that old sample of Catherine’s tribal medicine. The search for the elixir of life was back on.

  The Belgian said, “So if the rats could survive it, I decided to see if I could, too.”

  Something stirred in Sammy: the warm feeling of not being alone. The Belgian—a medical doctor and molecular biologist—had recently admitted to injecting himself with a bacterium being studied at his home university. They’d discovered the bacterium in the permafrost of Siberia, and in preliminary trials, it had shown rejuvenating effects on sick and aging rats. The Belgian’s willingness to experiment on himself had made him a cult figure, and he was the keynote speaker at this, the Symposium for Outsider Science.

  After the incident with Catherine, Sammy dropped more than the brain burn: he was no longer a Ph.D. student at NYU. His doctoral studies were too much of a distraction. To Catherine, he told a half-truth: he wanted to write a book—one for regular people, not for the stuffy academics in the lab—on the past, present, and future of immortality research.

  “But can’t you stay in school and do that?” she’d asked. “Wouldn’t staying in school help you do that?”

  “It’s not that kind of book. No one in the program would take me seriously.” That was true.

  Catherine scrunched her nose. “So it’s a general-audience kind of thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s it called?”

  Sammy considered this question for the first time. “The History of Living Forever.”

  The audience began to applaud, alerting Sammy to the end of the Belgian’s lecture. Sammy stood with the crowd, arching his tired back until it cracked. He expected the Belgian to be mobbed with admirers, but a free lunch was in the cafeteria. Sammy had to stand in a line only three people deep before he found himself face-to-face with the man, who was pale and thin but also square at the shoulders, unusually so, which gave him a grounded, perpendicular appearance. Sammy shook the Belgian’s hand and introduced himself.

  A flash of recognition passed across the Belgian’s face. “You’re the potion guy,” he said in perfect English. “The alchemist.”

  “You read my letter.”

  Sammy had written to the Belgian soon after the news broke about his bacterial injection. In truth, Sammy didn’t see much potential in the bacterium. It hadn’t killed the Belgian, but it hadn’t helped him, either. The rats, yes—the old rats started fucking one another as if they were five months old. But foreign bacteria can stimulate host responses that seem temporarily beneficial, and the rats didn’t live any longer than they would have otherwise. They fucked and died.

  No, Sammy’s interest in the Belgian was more psychological than biological. If Sammy confessed his self-experiments to Catherine, she would leave him, and if he confessed to his parents, they would have him committed. But the Belgian had done it! And he still had his job and his wife. Here was someone who could understand. Sammy had written to him with a simple question: Should I tell the truth?

  * * *

  Sammy took the subway to his secret apartment. It was actually his parents’ apartment—his mother sometimes used it as a gallery space—but no one knew he was using it. The sixteen Wistar rats he kept there were a secret, too, in the sense that they were stolen. He’d lifted them from NYU’s biology department the day he dropped out.

  Sammy threw the key on the empty kitchen counter and heard the rats stir. They knew this sound meant food. He checked on them every day, and he hadn’t been entirely successful in hiding this activity from Catherine. She’d asked him the other day if he was cheating on her, and he said no. But how true was this? Recently he’d made his own contact in Panama, and he’d been importing small quantities of the tribal medicine for his own use. Was this worse or better than sleeping with someone else?

  Catherine knew he was finished with the brain burns, but not that he’d returned to flushing his antidepressants down the toilet of their small, windowless bathroom. As in his teenage years, he was supported only by his elixir. Most people would laugh, but for Sammy, this was his way of taking responsibility, of taking ownership of his own mind. So far, the elixir was just barely enough. His moods were unstable, and importing the ingredients was difficult and costly. He was like a man trapped in a cave, quenching his thirst on a drop of water that falls once every hour.

  The Belgian had said, “I don’t think a potion alone will do it.” (Sammy hated that the man kept calling it a potion!) The Belgian had said, “I think you’ll need an injectable to go along with your ingestible. An appetizer to your entrée.”

  Thinking of the recipe book, Sammy had almost laughed out loud at the Belgian’s choice of words. He had no idea how appropriate that was. And how right. An appetizer, an entrée. Of course.

  “Good afternoon, Number Eighty,” Sammy said, crouched down in front of the first cage. Prior to their relocation, the rats had been used in a study of H. pylori, a bacterium causing gastritis and ulcers. These were rats with upset stomachs, and Sammy had been treating them wit
h his elixir. Number 80 had received the heaviest dose, and he was looking good, with a bright white coat, alert eyes, and clear, pink ears. Sammy was monitoring the rats’ digestive health based on their fecal output, but he would eventually have to kill them and study their stomachs up close.

  He scooped Number 80 out of the cage and checked his skin, his feet, his tail. He’d been treated with the elixir over two weeks prior, and he still seemed cured of the H. pylori infection. The effects of the elixir on Sammy’s mood never lasted for more than a week, which meant the elixir was acting more powerfully—as the Belgian suspected—on the stomach than on the brain. Only a fraction of the elixir was getting past the blood-brain barrier, but when Sammy had tried adding more quicksilver, his rat subjects had died from mercury poisoning.

  This made him remember the Mayans and their phrase for death: white wind withered. The Mayans made no distinction between the atmosphere and themselves—the same forces that rustled the leaves of the uva de playa also animated the human form. When the rain stopped, your crops died. When the wind stopped, your body died. Sammy wished we could return to this way of thinking, this connectedness. But when he’d told Don about it, his father only waved his hand in dismissal: “Yeah, yeah. All foreign cultures will seem more beautiful than your own. Don’t be covetous.”

  Sammy returned the rat to his cage. The role of H. pylori in gastritis had been discovered by an Australian physician who drank a sample of the bacteria to test its effect on his own body. For this, they gave him the Nobel Prize. So what was the difference between him and Sammy and the Belgian? Was it that Sammy and the Belgian were trying to make themselves stronger, while the Australian was deliberately causing himself pain? What did it say about the world that one was valued over the other?