The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  They returned to the laboratory. Together, they injected the herb’s ethanol extract into lab rats and examined the results in the department’s ESR spectrometer. Almost immediately, the herb made the rats act younger, healthier, more vibrant.

  The key to this improvement was the herb’s scavenging of a type of atom called a free radical. In simple terms, free radicals are bullies. They’re missing an electron, so they go around stealing electrons from other cells. This interrupts the function of those cells and, worse, converts them into free radicals themselves (as I said: bullies). Sammy believed that the accumulation of free radicals in the body was synonymous with a common phrase: growing old. This is known as the Free Radical Theory of Aging. Sammy and Lee discovered that B. rossica hunts these free radicals and eliminates them before they can do further damage.

  A year later, Lee published the results of their study. He couldn’t give Sammy full credit for his contributions—Sammy wasn’t authorized for scientific research in China—so the brief note in the acknowledgments was all he could offer.

  * * *

  “Con?” my dad said. “Pay attention. Everything I’m telling you is going to be on the quiz.”

  We returned to the main group. People were gathering around the picnic tables, claiming seats, pouring soda into tiny paper cups. The director had taken control of the grill; he worked the spatula as if he were in a race with someone.

  “The more you flip the burgers, the better they taste,” he was telling another counselor. “That’s just science.”

  My dad pulled up on the periphery of all this commotion. I recognized his hesitation. He didn’t have any friends, and he was scared to go to the cafeteria.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s the end of the tour. Not sure what else to say.”

  Dana brushed the pine needles out from beneath my collar. “You could start by asking Conrad about his life.”

  My dad checked his watch. “Sorry about that, kiddo. I’ve been distracted by my imminent death.” He led us to one of the picnic tables and sat on the outer edge of the bench, forcing me to act as a buffer between him and the other adults. I didn’t see too many kids there, just a lot of tired grown-ups. A thirtysomething couple was holding hands near my dad’s second-favorite log. The woman laid her head on the man’s shoulder. Tattoos of much-sexier women snaked up his arm and disappeared into the sleeves of his shirt. His girlfriend traced these with her finger. They were the kind of people who had been through a lot of shit together and were trying, every day, to make that into a strength rather than a weakness.

  My dad poured me some soda and pulled a bowl of potato chips over to our side of the table. “Dana told me about your science teacher. You didn’t even get a day off?”

  I stiffened. “It’s fine.”

  Dana rubbed between my shoulder blades. “This is where you tell Conrad he can call you whenever he needs to talk.”

  “Sure, what the hell,” my dad said. “Day or night, any hour. It doesn’t have to be an emergency.”

  I tried to remember what I’d read on the website. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  My dad considered this. “Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure it is.” He closed his eyes, thinking. “I know I’ve heard the phone ringing when I’m trying to sleep.”

  “We’ll ask them,” Dana said. “It’s not something we have to wonder about.”

  The director banged the side of the grill with a metal spoon. “Food’s ready! If you haven’t started eating, you’re doing it wrong.”

  We lined up in silence and carried our plates back to the table. Aunt Dana used the hot dog toppings to make a salad for herself and pushed it around the plate until it looked half-eaten. My father ate nothing and refused to try. He said it would come right back up, and at a place such as this, one act of vomiting can lead to another, like dominoes falling.

  After a minute of silence, my dad said, “I bet you’re glad you came.”

  “Great food,” I said. “Worth the drive.”

  He laughed and turned to Dana. “I don’t know why you make us do this. Skyping with him is awkward enough.”

  She made a small, exasperated noise. “I don’t make you do anything. I thought you might want to see your son, who loves you.”

  “You know what I’m saying,” he said to me. He thought I was an ally in this line of attack. “I don’t mind seeing you. But you’re better off in Littlefield, even if Dana is still doing the depressed-widow thing.”

  Dana’s breath caught in her throat. I could see a shudder run through her. She wasn’t an angry person, and when my father made her into one, her body tried to reject it. “Don’t take this out on us,” she said. “Everything that’s happening is your fault. It’s a result of your behavior.”

  My father looked away from the table. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he said. Everyone heard him. “Once, when I was drunk, I caused a problem. That is not the same thing.”

  Silence fell over the dinner. No one moved.

  “Ned,” said the director from behind the grill, “how does it help you to say that? How does that bring you closer to your family?”

  My father started to argue, but the director stared him down. The director had the spatula in one hand and tongs in the other. He was wearing an apron that said I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS.

  Everyone was looking at us. Dana smiled at them. “We’re sorry. Please don’t stop eating.” She was crying.

  The director waved her off. “The first month is tough. Really tough. It gets better. And then worse. And then better. And then worse…” He moved the spatula back and forth as if he were flipping imaginary burgers. A few people laughed at this.

  My father stood up, his knees knocking against the table and disrupting people’s food.

  “Ned,” the director said, “do you want to go talk somewhere?”

  My dad snorted. “No, thank you, I’m fine. I mean, I feel like puking all the time and I’ll probably die here surrounded by these fucking drunks.”

  I waited for someone to be insulted. Nothing. Everyone there had heard much worse about themselves. My father stormed down the path and disappeared into his bungalow. Dana and I sat there like idiots, humiliated, until she gathered herself, took my arm, and pulled me from the table. We walked down to the shore and stood side by side on the dock. In the middle of the lake, two old men were baitfishing from a canoe. Their yellow slip bobbers danced in the ripples of the water.

  “I know I’ve said this before,” Dana said, “but I’m sorry about your father. I’m probably not always easy to be around, but I’ll never act toward you like he’s acting.”

  “I know.”

  She shook her head. “We should say goodbye.”

  So we walked back up and headed for his room. Along the way, I received a handshake from the director and several consoling glances from the other campers. This was not a group of people you wanted to pity you, but I tried to be polite, to smile through their expressions of solidarity.

  Eventually we made it to my father’s door, and he opened it immediately. He’d been standing right there waiting for us. “Next time we’ll eat out.”

  Dana balled her fists as if she were going to sock him. I would have paid to see it. “If you want him to visit again,” she said, “you’ll have to do better than that.”

  My dad began to respond but lost the strength for it. Even the jaundice seemed to drain from his face. He moaned and pressed his forehead against the doorframe. His feet stomped the floor. I could see him trying and failing to relax his breathing, to take control of the pain. His hands reached out, grasping at air.

  All I wanted to do was abandon him the way he’d abandoned me, to leave him here, hurting. Maybe, if walking away meant returning to the summer, to Sammy’s open arms, I would have done it. But the summer was over. Sammy was gone. And here was my dad, still alive, still reaching for me. In spite of myself, I took my father’s hand.

  He gripped hard. “Ouch.” His voice was barel
y audible.

  “Ned?” Dana said. “Do you need me to get someone?”

  “Just give me a second.”

  So we waited together. I imagined what was next for him, how much worse it might get. His skin was yellow, but without a new liver it would soon turn blue and then purple. The darkness would start at his fingertips and spread inward, like a lake freezing in winter, until it reached his neck, his face, his lips. His spleen would triple in size—a man’s fist transformed into an agave heart. His stomach would swell like a pregnant woman’s. More migraines, more nausea, more nosebleeds. Engorged veins would crisscross his distended belly like the root system of a diseased tree. If I didn’t save him, he would die.

  But that day, my father recovered from the attack and wiped the cold sweat from his face with his sleeve. Dana told him to lie down and disappeared into the bathroom to pour him a glass of water. He reclined on the bed with his eyes closed, and Dana took off his shoes, folded the blanket over his legs. He didn’t thank her, that asshole, but the whole time, he also didn’t let go of my hand.

  12

  Autopsy

  Sammy and Catherine arrived in Belize City in the spring of 2002. Ostensibly, they were there for a chapter in Sammy’s book on supercentenarians—people who live past the age of 110. He’d arranged to witness the autopsy of Anna Flowers Magaña, a native Belizean who had, before her death, claimed to be 123 years old.

  A driver was waiting for them outside the airport. He was big, bordering on fat, and maybe of Indian descent, maybe Middle Eastern. He took Catherine’s bags and handed her a Tupperware container filled with oatmeal cookies. “Thank you for arranging all of this,” the driver said to Sammy. His accent was British, his voice slightly too high for his size. He looked like a bass but sounded more like a tenor. He wore khaki pants with sandals, a cotton button-down with several buttons open. His eyelashes were very long.

  “Thanks for the cookies,” Sammy said.

  In the car, Sammy and Catherine sat close together in the backseat. They drove west out of the city toward the Cayo District, but the driver didn’t know where he was going. At Princess Margaret Drive, he rode the roundabout three full times before picking a turn at random.

  “Sorry,” the driver said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow.”

  “You drive like it,” Catherine said.

  “You work with Dr. Radkin?” Sammy asked.

  “Yes. I don’t even own a car.”

  Sammy had paid for Joseph Radkin to conduct the autopsy. As the leading expert in the field of gerontology, Radkin had made a lot of money promoting himself as the man most likely to defeat aging. He traveled the world conducting autopsies of supercentenarians with his research group, the Association for Gerontology Exploration.

  The driver pulled onto Central American Boulevard and straight into a police checkpoint. They waited in a row of cars. The driver watched Sammy and Catherine in the rearview. “Do either of you have a watch?”

  Catherine held up her wrist. “Are we about to bribe someone? Because I would be okay with that.”

  The driver laughed. “I just want you to time something.”

  They pulled up to the gate. A policeman in sunglasses approached the car, hand on hip.

  “Either he’ll wave us through immediately,” the driver said, “or he’ll stare at us in silence for exactly thirty seconds and then wave us through. Time it. You’ll see.”

  Sammy and Catherine exchanged a look. In his journal, Sammy would complain that Radkin had sent a moron to pick them up. The policeman walked to the driver’s side window. He waved them on immediately.

  “Damn. You would have been impressed if he’d waited the thirty seconds, yeah?”

  “We can circle around and do it again,” Catherine offered.

  “I’m sorry,” Sammy said. “Who are you, again?”

  The driver turned half in his seat to smile at Sammy. “Sadiq.”

  * * *

  Sammy, Catherine, and Sadiq arrived after sundown at their resort hotel—an upscale lodge along Privassion Creek. Radkin would only fund these trips himself if the deceased’s date of birth could be supported with valid documentation, but Anna Flowers Magaña didn’t have anything like that. So Sammy lured Radkin to Belize with a free rain-forest vacation. The resort was situated in a pocket of the Maya Mountains, at the edge of a forest preserve. Palm trees and kraabu shrubs lined the gravel driveway. A row of thatched-roof cottages horseshoed the infinity pool. Catherine and Sammy would be staying in the Honeymoon Cabana.

  Sadiq led them to the main lodge. There, in the dining room, Radkin was holding court for a wide circle of resort staff. It was Sammy’s first sight of him in person. He was short and thin, dressed in khaki shorts and a powder-blue polo shirt. He wore one pair of glasses on his nose, another perched on his head, and yet a third hooked in the pocket of his button-down. His graying beard couldn’t quite hide the craters of severe childhood acne, and his mouth seemed always to be moving, regardless of whether he was speaking.

  “I want you to imagine,” he was telling his audience, “that your body is a book. And here is the first line of your book, listen close: ‘Year after year and night on night I keep / On the Atreidæ’s roof, like house-dog true, / My weary watch and scan the host of heaven— / Bright powers that shine along the sky.’” Radkin surveyed his audience and switched out one pair of glasses for another. “I trust that someone recognizes this passage?”

  No one spoke.

  “Correct. Your body’s book was written by Aeschylus. But we know what happens to a book over time. First you spill some coffee on the pages, and the stain blots out one of the words. Instead of ‘on the Atreidæ’s roof’ we now have only ‘on the roof.’ No biggie, okay? That word is hard to say and no one’s going to miss it.

  “Years pass. Now the ink begins to fade, hastened perhaps by the acids in that coffee accident you’ve long forgotten. Now we lose ‘like house-dog true.’ It’s unreadable. And we’re a little sad at this point because that’s a lovely phrase, a lovely analogy for a man who feels affection but lacks true freedom of affection. C’est la vie. The sentence still makes sense.

  “We’re getting older now. ‘Weary watch’ fades to ‘watch,’ and those ‘bright powers’ lose their brightness. You’re ninety years old—a good long life—and all that’s left, basically, of that long, poetic sentence, is ‘I am on the roof.’ And you’re just waiting for any of those last five words to disappear and for the sentence to lose its meaning. That’s my nice way of saying time’s up, curtains, you’re dead.

  “And here’s the amazing thing. Whenever that last word does fade away—let’s say you’re in the hospital and you spill some Jell-O on it—the doctors will say that’s how you died. Cause of death: spilled his Jell-O. But we know better. We know that the final spill was just the last in a long series of spills that started with that hot cup of coffee.

  “My friends and I, my friends who are doctors, call this informational entropy. That’s just a fancy way of saying that aging is a loss of information. Right now you lovely young people are like a very complicated, very beautiful sentence—a sentence written by Aeschylus, by Melville, by Walter Abish. As you get to be my age, that sentence becomes simpler and simpler—if you want the truth, we’re talking not about sentences but intricate physiologic processes—until one small accident, an accident you would hardly notice as a twenty-year-old, up and kills you as a ninety-year-old. What we’re trying to do, myself and the AGE, is figure out how to restore those words as you lose them, how to retrace those missing words with new, fresh ink.”

  Radkin’s assistants initiated a polite round of applause. The resort staff eyed the doors. They had horses to feed and cabanas to restock with champagne. Lizards the color of pool water climbed the walls and puffed their necks at one another. Sadiq led Sammy and Catherine through the tables and caught Radkin’s attention with a raised hand. Radkin grabbed a glass of wine from his table and moved to meet them halfway. As he neared,
Sammy could see that he was wearing, below his shorts, a set of midnight-blue shin pads.

  Radkin clasped Sammy’s hand and said, “I hope you have strong stomachs. Tomorrow is going to be gross.”

  * * *

  Sadiq opened the hatch of the cooler and pulled out the corpse of Anna Flowers Magaña. He wheeled the body bag to the autopsy table, where Sammy, Catherine, and Radkin were waiting in scrubs and protective masks. The city morgue had just been renovated, and it sparkled in stainless steel like a new American kitchen. The renovations came after a lawsuit in which a woman claimed her husband’s body had been stored in the same unit as another corpse, their unripe faces pressed together in a sallow kiss.

  Sammy scribbled notes on a legal pad as Sadiq unzipped the body bag. Catherine watched through her fingers. Anna’s face appeared first, her eyes and mouth closed beneath a curly bob of chalk-white hair. Her thin lips, unsupported by teeth, had collapsed inward and left her cheeks hollow. Photographs of Anna as a young woman showed a dark-haired, fair-skinned Belizean, the daughter of a white mother and a father who, before his retirement, had been the only trained fireman on Caye Caulker.

  Sadiq pulled the zipper down to her toes, exposing her body. Her arms were hairless and thin; they finished at the shoulder in a knotted mass of bone. Her breasts lay small and flat across her chest. Her hands had been taken by arthritis. The pinkies bent inward toward the thumbs, pulling all of the other fingers down with them. To ease the pain of this, for the past three decades Anna had kept her hands balled in a fist.

  Radkin turned on a digital voice recorder and announced the start of the autopsy. As he did, Sadiq slid his arms under the body, with one arm at the buttocks and the other at the base of the neck. He grunted, lifted with his knees, and dumped the body with a thud onto the autopsy table.