by Jake Wolff
* * *
That evening, Catherine came home with a bag of groceries tucked in one arm and a wide, flat package in the other—Sam’s master’s degree, which he’d earned before dropping out of the doctoral program. NYU had sent it when he ignored his department’s e-mails to pick it up. The package said DO NOT BEND, but their mailman had bent it, twice over, before shoving it into their tiny mailbox.
Sam was sunken into the couch, so low she didn’t see him when she came into the apartment. He was lying on his back, and he tilted his head up to look at her, so that his face was upside down.
She tossed the package onto his stomach. “Your diploma.”
She’d recently turned twenty-four, Sam was twenty-one, and that made it easier, this current phase. She hadn’t realized he was so young when they first met, that he’d once been a sixteen-year-old college student. If she examined it from that perspective, he was currently the age most people are when just finishing their bachelor’s. He had time.
He examined the creases in the box, but he didn’t open it. “How was class?” She’d been TA-ing an introductory course on endangered languages.
She shrugged. “A student asked if he could write his paper on pig latin. How was the symposium?”
“A lot of weirdos.”
“Can you help with the groceries?” She didn’t need help, just wanted him to get up. She could handle the mood swings, but she didn’t like this version of Sam: the sunken couch guy. Anger, sadness, cruelty—okay. Just get off the couch.
He did, yawning and stretching. It was late evening, but the bright city lights lit up the living room and gave him an electric glow. There he was, her Sam. She kissed him as he padded barefoot into the kitchen, and he put his arm around her waist, and, yes, there he was. Everything was fine. He’d dropped out of school, and he wasn’t telling her something, but everything was fine.
Sammy began to stack the cans of garbanzo beans in the bottom cabinet, one on top of another. Catherine grabbed two of her gigantic anthropology textbooks from the bedroom and took out the diploma, laying it on the kitchen island and stacking the textbooks on top.
“Did you meet the Belgian?” She was torn on that guy. What he had done with the bacterium was irresponsible, but he hadn’t given up his job to do it. She hoped Sam could see that this so-called outsider science didn’t actually require being outside. For sure, write a book about immortality. But first, get tenure.
“I did.”
The period at the end of that sentence felt, to Catherine, like a heavy one. He was dressed in a sweater she’d never seen—an uncharacteristically bright color, with orange stripes. She felt that he was slipping away from her, so she reached out for the sleeve of that sweater and pulled him close. He smelled of curry and the fabric cleaner she used on the sofa.
“Hey. You wouldn’t do what the Belgian did, would you? You wouldn’t do anything stupid?”
“Of course not,” he said, heeding the Belgian’s advice. A true obsession is always a secret, always withheld, no matter how much we try to explain it. He couldn’t bring himself to drive Catherine away. But he’d also dressed that day in orange and black, warning colors, the banded pattern of the coral snake, and he hoped, as Catherine regarded him with fear and love, that she would see how dangerous he could be—and run.
CASE HISTORY
Leopold Turck Describes His Antiaging Machine
Paris, France, AD 1850
It is snowing in Paris. Dr. Leopold Turck watches through the window as the snowfall dusts the street. He has not left the window since he woke, but he decides he’d better check the little mailbox again, just to be certain he did not miss a letter. He opens the front door, still in his bare feet. The ironwork box is empty. He closes the door, shivering, and this is how sane men know they are sane: they cannot endure the cold. Leopold has seen lunatics run naked through a Norwegian blizzard and then, when offered a warm blanket upon their return to the asylum, say, “What for?”
He returns to the window. He lives alone with his dying father on a street that has no name but does receive mail, he has confirmed this. He mailed himself a letter, and it arrived six days later, which is an extraordinary wait but hardly any time at all compared to the six long months he has waited for a response from the London Journal of Medicine. It was summer, and the sky was blue and round like the egg of a starling, when Leopold submitted to the journal his most recent article, “Immortality and the Electricity Machine.”
The journal’s response to his article will determine whether his father lives or dies.
Leopold discovered the cure to death during his studies in Strasbourg. When he returned home—beckoned by his father’s declining health—he proposed the treatment to his father, who received the proposal with the same disdain he typically reserves for Gypsies.
“I do not understand this rubbish you are speaking,” his father had said, when Leopold explained the procedure. “What is this rubbish?”
“Papa”—Leopold always calls his father Papa, even though Leopold is no longer a boy but a man of middle age—“what evidence do you need beyond the word of your son, who is a doctor of medicine?”
“But how can this be? That you are the only doctor in Paris, in the world, who knows the cure for all disease, and only you possess this knowledge, and no one else? Where are the accolades that would accompany such a discovery? Where is the medical textbook that says, ‘Throw away all previous editions! Dr. Leopold Turck has conquered death!’”
Eventually, they reached an agreement. If Leopold could publish his theories in a reputable scientific publication, his father would consent to the treatment. Otherwise, and on this outcome they found no disagreement, he would die.
Leopold watches a horse clop past his window. Zoology has much to teach us about the life span of the mammal. The African elephant can live for a hundred years, and the females remain fertile for the entirety of their lives. Hippopotami, it is believed, can live 150 years and are immune to all diseases found in nature. A large breed of arctic whale has a life span of over two centuries. What do these beasts share, beyond their long lives? Not climate, not diet, neither temperament nor size. No, they share only an epidermis of unusual thickness—the skin!
“Imagine a house,” he told his father. The exterior of the house has crumbled, and the inside has fallen to ruins: the floors are swollen from rain; the unchecked sun has bleached the furniture; all manner of critters have staked claims. There would be no use in solving these interior problems if you didn’t also rebuild the walls.
When Leopold returned from his medical studies, he was startled most by the change in his father’s appearance. Gone was the strapping, olive-skinned man of Leopold’s youth, replaced by a pale, wrinkled figure. As the skin ages it becomes dry and unelastic, and this allows the veins to expand. When the external pressure on the blood reduces, the blood moves more slowly and leaves the organs dehydrated. In turn, the skin loses its power to control the secretion and retention of the electricity needed to power the bodily functions.
Electricity! If the ancients had known the wonders of Electricity, they would have built temples to Him—they would have worshipped Him as the most powerful of the gods. There is only one way to restore the proper electrical balance of the body, and this is what he proposed to his father. This is Leopold’s life’s work.
The immortality machine:
His father would be submerged to the neck in water in a bathtub. Leopold would run positive electrical currents through the base of the tub. The tepid water would soften the epidermis, allowing the excess negative electricity to escape, while simultaneously restoring the positive electricity required for healthy organs. Leopold did not mince words: his father would need to enter this bath for days, weeks, possibly months, at a time. Leopold could not promise that much of the remainder of his father’s life would not be spent in water.
Leopold finds himself so lost in thought that he nearly misses the arrival of the postman, who slide
s an envelope into the mailbox. Through some odd impulse of bashfulness, Leopold waits until the man is out of sight, then hurries to extract the letter from the box. It is from the London Journal of Medicine.
Leopold takes the letter to the kitchen, where he sits at the table with his back to the stairs. He breaks the seal of the envelope and removes the single sheet of paper. The letter begins, Dear Dr. Leopold Turck, and he skims the rest, picking up words and phrases that piece together, in mosaic, the overall tenor of their response:
… shocked by the barbarism of your approach …
… these treatments, as you call them, are tortures, and wretched …
… quarrelling with your “evidence” is like boxing with a shadow …
When he is finished, Leopold folds the letter neatly and places it back inside the envelope. He sits for some time—long enough for his father to descend the stairs and snatch the letter before Leopold thinks to destroy it. He watches his father read: We reject your article, and we reject all premises upon which you have based your conclusions.
Leopold’s father takes a seat across from his son and says, with infuriating tenderness, “Leopold, I was half your age when my father died. I promise you, life goes on.”
Leopold stares at his hands. “Papa,” he says, his voice soft.
“Enough. Enough now.”
But there will never be enough, not of time. It is enough to make a man laugh. The skin is the body’s largest organ, its most visible, and for that reason its most overlooked.
How very hard it can be!—to see what is right in front of you.
11
Family Night
The Monday after I called Sadiq, Dana drove me an hour north to Cumberland. It was Family Night at the St. Matthias Rehab Alternative.
Dana and I left Littlefield shortly after four. The day was warm, but with wind, and it carried the salty smell of the ocean into the cul-de-sac. We’d been warned about the mosquitoes where my dad was staying, so we were dressed in jeans and long-sleeved shirts—mine a dark shade of blue, hers a lighter one. We followed the same route, at first, that RJ and I had taken to the storage unit.
While Dana drove, my thoughts turned to Sammy and his relationship with his father. “We’re both orphans,” he told me once as we lay in bed, and I loved that we shared so much and hated that he would talk about my father as if he were already dead. I’d reached the year 2001 in Sammy’s journals—the year he dropped out of NYU to pursue the elixir full-time. On his twenty-first birthday, he wrote:
The first present I remember receiving from Don was a chessboard, for my sixth birthday. I’d seen him play with his friends, but I didn’t even know how the pieces moved. He showed me in his usual way: quickly, with the assumption that I would either catch up or fall behind.
My mother came into the room and shook her head. “I don’t know why you’re playing board games when you could be outside, practicing your jump shot in the actual sun.”
“The boy doesn’t want to play basketball,” Don said. “No, Samuel, don’t treat your queen like she’s fine china. She’s a killer, see?”
I did see. But I was more drawn to the little horse, which moved in a strange, herky-jerky pattern, not like a horse at all. I moved it up and over, as my dad had shown me.
“Okay,” he said, disapproving. “I can see how much you favor the knight, and that gives me an advantage.”
“Oh, Don.” Leena watched with her brow furrowed as he swept my horse off the table with his pawn. “Let him keep it.”
“Why?” He seemed genuinely curious.
“It’s an interesting lesson that liking something is a weakness because your father will take it from you.”
Once she was gone, my father earned checkmate and showed me again how to reset the board. We played another game, and this time he beat me so quickly that most of my pieces were right where they’d started.
As we neared Cumberland, the air lost its brine and grew drier, pine-scented. We turned onto one of those little Maine roads that’s two-way only in name: when you meet another car, it’s a game of chicken, and someone has to pull over. We passed a sign that said HIDDEN DRIVE, and there it was, the long dirt driveway that led to St. Matthias. I listened to the crunch of rocks under the tires as Dana steered the car at five miles per hour to the wide, unpaved lot. She parked between two pickups, one of them painted a bright shade of army camouflage. My dad had described the place as some sort of prison camp, but all I saw as we stepped out of the car was an adorable stucco Cotswold cottage flanked by a few rectangular bungalows. I could smell food cooking on the grill, but I couldn’t see it, only the smoke rising in a narrow column into the trees.
We followed a walkway lined with wood chips to the backyard, where we found my dad waiting for us near an empty firepit. He waved us over. In the dying light of the evening, his skin was gray and green. He gestured to our new surroundings, his hand gripped around a can of sugarless soda. “What do you think?”
“Nice,” said Dana.
“It’s literally the opposite of how you described it,” I said.
My dad held up his free hand. “We have the whole night to bicker. Let’s pace ourselves.”
The smoke from the grill rode a fresh current directly into our eyes. St. Matthias owned a good four acres of shoreline along Forest Lake and loved nothing more than to barbecue. Down by the water, a fleet of kayaks lay belly up on the dock. I heard splashing behind a fence of trees, the sound of grown men playing, of water sports. Therapeutic water sports—everything for that purpose. Therapeutic kayaks. Therapeutic hot dogs. A raft was tethered fifty yards or so into the lake.
To my right, a man emerged from a thicket of trees with a stack of wet towels draped over his shoulder. The weight of them turned him lopsided, forced a hitch into his gait. I recognized him from the website as the director of the program. He wore several layers of flannel, and they gave him, like the pickup truck, a kind of camouflage. He was hard to follow with your eyes.
“I hope you’re hungry,” the director said to me. “We make enough food for everyone’s family, even those who aren’t quite ready to come.” Something about this made him laugh. “We make an optimistic amount of food.” He adjusted the towels to his other shoulder and limped away from us. Before he went, he gave my father a fast thumbs-up.
“That means I did well on the piss test,” my father explained. “It’s a pass/fail situation.”
I watched as the director entered the main house. It was about the size of my childhood home. The last time Dana, my father, and I had been in Winterville together was the day Dana came to get me.
My father began the grand tour. He pointed to one of the bungalows. “That’s where I sleep, but I e-mail you from the main house.” He led us around the firepit. “Over here is my second-favorite log.”
“Great,” I said. “I like it.”
“I’d show you my first favorite, but it’s very hard to get to.”
“Another time,” I said.
He continued on. His sneakers crunched against the pine needles. “I refuse to swim here because I can tell the lake has leeches. Do you remember when we were camping and your mother found that leech in her armpit?”
I did remember.
My dad shrugged. “I also forgot to bring a bathing suit. But the dock is a good place to contemplate my poor life choices.”
“Ned,” Dana said, and she sounded so much like my mother that my dad and I both stopped short, abandoned the game we were playing, and stared at her like lost children.
Chastised, my father grew quiet. We followed the carpet of wood chips around the perimeter of the retreat. As we walked, I could hear the sounds of other people’s sicknesses echoing across the camp. Wet, troubled coughs reported from inside the bungalows; labored breathing mingled with the sound of the lake water hitting the shore. Cigarette butts lay squashed like bugs along the path—one addiction exchanged for another. Dana lagged behind, slowed by allergies, by the molds of t
he balsam fir: aspergillus, penicillium, Cladosporium, Alternaria. They call it Christmas tree syndrome. In the woods of southern Maine, it’s year-round.
* * *
We circled back to the grill. I walked alongside my father, counting both my steps and the seconds, eager to get back to my research. Sadiq had not said much on the phone—“We should speak in person,” he told me—and before I even knew what was happening, we were discussing his trip to Littlefield.
The ground was littered with pinecones, and their chocolaty scales reminded me of the B. rossica. I’d found, in Sammy’s journals, the entry that explained his appearance in the acknowledgments section of that article. Soon after he dropped out of NYU, Sammy had traveled to China, to the villages surrounding Longkou, along the Laizhou Bay, to investigate stories of the elixir of life spread among the descendants of the alchemist Ge Hong. Sammy had arranged in advance to meet with a student from the Life Sciences Department at Shandong University, Lee Xianming, to act as Sammy’s guide and translator. I found Lee Xianming online and wrote to him about Sammy, asking if he could tell me what they talked about. To my surprise and disappointment, he responded immediately but ignored my requests for insight: I took Mr. Tampari to Bianqiao was all he wrote. I am very saddened to learn of his passing.
He attached a picture. In it, Sammy stood in front of a battleship-gray tricar factory, bundled in a black-and-blue winter coat that gave him a clumsy, top-heavy appearance. He wasn’t smiling. Next to him, Lee stood with his hands in his pockets, and he was laughing—a big, open laugh. The picture was taken at a distance, from across a narrow road that runs through the center of the photograph. The round edges of a frozen lake extended beyond the factory.
Lee drove Sammy to a small house at the base of Mount Feng. There, Lee introduced him to an older woman who claimed to have been saved from stomach cancer, as a child, by an elixir of life prepared by a traveling healer. She dictated the recipe to Lee: quicksilver, morning dew collected near the lakeshore, and an herb the healer gathered from the mountainside. She gave them some of this dried herb, which still grew along Mount Feng. Sammy didn’t recognize it and neither did Lee.
