The History of Living Forever

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by Jake Wolff


  I felt powerless—and angry, too, to have found myself once again at risk of losing someone I loved. Case history was not a phrase I wanted associated with my husband. Sitting there in the dark woods, I thought of Sammy, of the year I turned sixteen, of everything that had happened. When I first began to tell Sammy’s story, it had become clear to me right away that I would need to go deeper, further—to Ge Hong, to Trithemius, to all of the people who had stoked the fires of Sammy’s mind long before I met him, who had walked, even briefly, the same path. But that was a world of sickness and pain and self-destructive pursuits. I didn’t want my husband anywhere near that world.

  “I called my mother,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. He held up a hand before I could say anything. “I couldn’t not tell her. She’s coming to visit.”

  I stared into my soup. “Did you know that an anagram for mother-in-law is Hitler woman?”

  “It wasn’t worth arguing with her.”

  I could see him direct all of his energy into being patient with me. It made me wonder, as I sometimes did, if I was much too selfish to deserve my husband. I remembered the bartender I met in college who let me drink for free all night. When I rolled off him sometime around two in the morning, sweaty and satisfied, he’d fixed me with his narrow green eyes and said, “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”

  14

  Necropsy

  The day after my visit with my father, I asked RJ to meet me in the lab. Even with Sammy gone, I had my run of the place. The substitute hired last-minute to replace him would literally sprint out the door when the final bell rang, and though no one said this, I believe some of the other teachers felt uncomfortable in there—it was like wearing a dead man’s clothes. While I waited for RJ, I petted and fed Number 5, Number 7, Number 37, and Number 42. They squeaked and chewed and cuddled my finger.

  Time was moving strangely. Between LHS’s acts of remembrance (our glee club sang Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” over the intercom) and the suicide prevention assembly, I’d become accustomed to hearing Sammy spoken of in the past tense. Yet if I stood by his desk in the little office that abutted the laboratory, I could still smell him, and I could still see the little chocolate thumbprint he’d left on the computer monitor the day we ate grocery-store brownies. He was present.

  RJ arrived. He was the only kid in school who wore, instead of a backpack, a messenger bag, and he removed it not by lifting the strap over his head but by simply unclasping the strap and catching the bag by its handle. He was known for this, and he did it now, throwing the bag onto the table.

  “So here’s the deal,” I said. “We may not have the Appetizer, but we’re going to run some tests on Sammy’s Entrée. If we’re going to figure out what was missing and give this stuff to Stephanie and my dad, we need to learn as much as we can.” I was also thinking of Sadiq’s arrival. When he landed in Littlefield, I didn’t want to look like a child playing with his teacher’s toys.

  For RJ, Stephanie’s safety was more than enough justification for this after-school workload. He nodded once—agreed—and we set about unpacking the box from the storage unit and organizing our materials. As RJ removed the CATHERINE medicine, he tapped the vial and frowned. “There’s hardly any left.”

  I took it from him. “It’s not enough for a person. But it’s enough for a rat.”

  * * *

  RJ picked up Number 37 the same way Sammy used to pick up his grade book: as if it might bite him. It was Friday evening. Almost everyone else had gone home. The sun was still out, but we had the lights off in the lab, and it was dry and cool. Three days had passed since I’d pressed RJ into service as my lab assistant. He was a leader by nature, but he played his new role gamely, fetching me ingredients when I called for them, transcribing our data in his juvenile jock penmanship. I’d taught him how to hold the rats, how to feed them, how to clean their cages. It was nice sharing this side of my life with him, but it was also strange, watching RJ interact with the rats. It was like having two different groups of friends meet.

  The first day, we’d done baseline measurements. These were compromised by the rats’ participation in my now-aborted study with Sammy, but compromised would have to do. Watching Number 37 swim his directionless laps, RJ had the same reaction as I first did, beginning with amusement before giving way to pity. The metaphors were too obvious to acknowledge: Number 37, swimming in circles, finding the platform, and immediately forgetting it; RJ and I, searching through the ruins of Sammy’s life, always a step behind, completely unsure what we were chasing or who was chasing us.

  The second day, we made and administered the Entrée. I adjusted the doses for the rats’ weight, and we set about following Sammy’s instructions. I used a mortar and pestle to grind the B. rossica into powder until the air was fragrant with the smell of chocolate and pine. In a Griffin-form beaker, I used a glass stir rod to mix the powder with the P. cupana extract and the tribal medicine, whose heavy green coloring, even in such small quantities, quickly overtook the other ingredients. Finally, I added the quicksilver, which provided a mineral sheen to what previously looked like vegetable soup.

  I had been prepared to force-feed this concoction to Number 37, but rats are opportunists, and when I placed the mixture in his cage on a plastic spoon, he devoured it instantly, then went back to sleep. I felt a twinge of guilt, but I reminded myself of the image of Number 50, brought back to health.

  My guilt was further soothed the next morning, when we found Number 37 still napping and pooping and going about his lazy day as usual. He appeared entirely unchanged. Only as RJ carried Number 37 to the water maze did I begin to notice a difference in him. Although I’d previously teased RJ for his tentativeness with the rats, Number 37 did look more on edge—his eyes showed an alertness that contrasted with his usual oblivious good nature. Healthy rats will scan the environment as you carry them, searching for markers they can use to orient themselves in the water maze. This had never been Number 37’s strength. If he was doing it after just one dose of Sammy’s elixir, then it might be working. Number 37’s escape latency would still be slow this time, but the next day … that could be interesting.

  I’d added fresh paint to the maze that morning, so the water had a slightly synthetic, balloonlike smell. I took a seat beside the pool and made sure the timer was reset to zero. When I was ready, I nodded to RJ, and he lowered Number 37 into the water.

  With no hesitation, Number 37 churned his muscular legs and rocketed to the platform. Escape latency: three seconds.

  “Holy shit.” I was so startled that I forgot to turn off the stopwatch. The numbers ticked upward.

  “Hell yeah!” RJ pumped his fist. “That’s good, right?”

  Number 37 sat still on the platform, his ribs expanding just slightly with shallow, easy breaths. For him to do so well in the water maze, this quickly, meant he wasn’t just making new memories. He was reclaiming old ones—memories he’d lost. I smiled at RJ. Yes, this was good.

  * * *

  The next morning, Number 37 was dead. He’d collapsed onto his side near the water bottle, his eyes open and empty. His little pale feet were limp. His tail curved out and away from his body, the tip of it protruding just a millimeter out of the cage. His mouth was slightly open, revealing his uneven teeth and the wide, flat pink of his tongue. In the opposite corner of the cage, Number 5, Number 7, and Number 42 stood close together watching his body, not moving at all, not even when they saw me. On Number 37’s stomach, I could see the slightly slick patches where they’d groomed him after he died. I had interrupted a funeral.

  “What happened to him?” RJ asked.

  “What does it look like?” For the moment I allowed myself to blame RJ, to pretend that I was only doing this for him.

  RJ cast furtive glances around the laboratory and lowered his voice. “Do you think someone did this to him?” he whispered. “The same people who destroyed his apartment?”

  I stared at RJ in disbelief. “Someo
ne? We killed him.”

  * * *

  We returned to the lab during last period, when the room was free. RJ was done for the day, but I was skipping class—trig, maybe—despite Captain Carson’s warning. I had in front of me the body of Number 37, a pair of stainless steel medical scissors, tweezers, and a scalpel. I’d asked RJ to swipe some pliers from the Tech Ed workshop, and he deposited those onto the table with the rest of the instruments.

  “What are we doing? Like, an autopsy?”

  “Necropsy,” I corrected. “An autopsy is for people.”

  RJ puffed his cheeks. He could be surprisingly squeamish about this kind of stuff. The day we dissected frogs our sophomore year, he’d stayed home sick.

  “You don’t have to be here.”

  “No, I’m in.” But as I put on the latex gloves, he added, “I might not look.”

  The body of Number 37 was lying stomach down on the table. In death, his pink ears looked slightly darker, and they were low and flat against his head. His eyes were red, empty slits. I told myself that there was no real tragedy. We would have put down all of the rats at the end of our study—lab rats are not like racing horses or show dogs; they don’t “retire”—so Number 37’s death by elixir was only a slightly earlier death than scheduled. Still, I felt bad.

  I picked up the scissors and gave them a couple of quick test clips to make sure the mechanism was smooth. I’d read about how to do this in the books Sammy gave me at the beginning of summer, but I could have done it without them. Taking apart a body is not difficult. The tricky stuff is purely psychological—the realization that everything that holds us together, that keeps our insides on the inside, can be so easily dismantled.

  I pinched Number 37’s head and brought the tip of the inner blade to the pale pink fur between his eyes. I pressed just enough to pierce the thin skin and cut a straight line to between the ears. I placed my index fingers on either side of this wound and tugged gently until the skin spread apart and I could see the rounded top of the skull. There was a little bit of sound as the skin gave way, and I could see RJ wince.

  “The next part is probably the worst.”

  “Cool.” He stared straight ahead. “Do your thing.”

  I picked up the pliers. They were light, needle-nosed, and scuffed from the friction of the wires in the workshop. I placed them against Number 37’s head and squeezed until the bones of the eye sockets crunched and cracked. Reaching Number 37’s brain was now just a matter of using the tweezers to poke, tug, and remove the broken bones of the skull and braincase. I did this quickly, even carelessly—I wasn’t going to be graded. Soon, I exposed the brain. It was red and blue and gray, slightly snail-like. I slid the tweezers to the bottom of the brain cavity and popped the brain out, laid it gently on a paper towel beside the body.

  RJ sensed this moment of accomplishment and peeked through his fingers. “That’s it?”

  I tapped the front and back of the brain with the scalpel. “This is what we’re interested in the most. The cerebrum and cerebellum.”

  If I were in RJ’s shoes, I would have asked more questions, but his curiosity did not extend that way. He wanted to help, and when he couldn’t, he stayed out of it. I used the scalpel to cut small disks from these areas of interest, no thicker than a fingernail. I had expected I would need to plate them and examine them under the microscope, but it was immediately clear that the naked eye would do.

  I must have made a frustrated sound, because RJ said, “Everything okay?”

  “Look.” I directed his attention to the biopsies, but he couldn’t see, at first, what I was seeing. “The dark spots. That’s the quicksilver.” It had accumulated in the brain right where it always does. It had suffocated the tissues. The necropsy wasn’t finished, but I was ready to make my ruling: Number 37 died of mercury poisoning.

  Despite his disgust, RJ leaned in to where I was pointing. “This is bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because you didn’t expect it?”

  “Because it’s exactly what I expected.”

  I sank onto one of the uncomfortable lab stools and asked RJ to get me a box of rat food from the supply closet. When he returned, I emptied the packets from the box and began to line it with tissues. RJ sat next to me, and for the fifteen minutes we had left until the final bell rang, we made a casket for Number 37.

  CASE HISTORY

  Andres J. Fisher Attends His First Meeting of the New York Society of Numismatics

  New York, AD 1911

  Andres J. Fisher sits on the floor of the bathroom, watching his father bleed from the nose. It is night. His father has his head tipped back, and the blood is a blooming rose in his nostrils. He is tall and lean—leaner now than ever—and he has a face like a shut window in December, square and dark, with blue eyes so cold they are gray. For all of Andres’s young life, his father’s aloofness has seemed impenetrable, like a very long book. But as the sickness takes him, it is like an opening of the window, a turning of the page. Andres is eight years old and not at all frightened.

  When the bleeding stops, his father readies himself for the meeting of the New York Society of Numismatics, of which he is chairman. He packs his robes, which are long, silk, and the color of a copper penny. He shaves and puts on his shoes. In every room there is a window, and the last light of the day turns purple as it suffocates under the grip of the borough. Andres likes to read the paper after his father discards it, and this morning’s edition of the New York World said there are, every minute, twelve new Americans.

  “Well, come on then,” says his father.

  “Yes, sir,” Andres says, and his mother fetches his coat.

  * * *

  Outside, the air is thin and dry, the sky a cloudy darkness. Andres holds his father’s hand. Until the year prior, Andres had a horse, and his name was Lancelot. When Lancelot fell sick with influenza, he lathered and cried and chewed the air. When they shot him, there was the haze of black powder, the shine of his wet coat under the sun, and a deafening noise that stained the dirt red. Through these things, Andres saw Lancelot’s soul depart his body, and it was the shape of a horse—but smaller, like a glass miniature. It was only an illusion. It was only the powder and the lather and the dizzying report of the pistol. But every night, he imagines he will someday ride Lancelot into heaven.

  * * *

  First it was the porcelain mantel clock Andres’s mother had inherited from an uncle. Then it was the eighteen-karat-gold French candlesticks that had sat, for all of Andres’s life, in the center of the dining room table. Finally his father sold his wedding band, along with Andres’s mother’s, to a jeweler only two blocks from their home. At night, Andres hears them argue.

  “I have to walk past my own wedding ring!” his mother complained. “He has it right in the window!”

  Whatever money his family once had, Andres’s father has spent it. Andres has pieced together the story through his parents’ late-night quarrels, the tale of his father’s selfishness leaching through the walls like mold.

  Several months after his father’s diagnosis, a dealer approached the society with a rare set of ancient Egyptian coins—rare precisely because ancient Egyptians were not known to use coins. The dealer allowed the society to authenticate the first in the series. A younger member, an Egyptologist, spent a week with the coin and returned with a translation of the glyphs on the reverse: “Here is the way to cure any disease of the body.”

  Last week, his father bought the coins for an enormous sum. “The society said I would be a fool if I didn’t!” Andres heard him say.

  “You’ve been a fool all your life,” his mother replied.

  Since the purchase, the Egyptologist has been hard at work finishing the translation. Tonight, he announces the result, and Andres’s father will learn whether he lives or dies.

  * * *

  When Andres and his father arrive, several men are arranged in a circle, all in their robes. Most of the chairs remain empty. It is no
t what Andres imagined. The meeting hall is not even a hall, but simply the back room of a library—a library Andres has seen hundreds of times from the street. The chairs are mismatched and cheap. The men are just men; he recognizes the watchmaker who always eats pears. The only interesting thing is Andres’s father’s face—the expression of it. His father is disappointed, too. This is not what he expected.

  “Where is everyone?” his father asks.

  The watchmaker comes near. “Most of them didn’t have the stomach,” he whispers.

  His father is confused, but all at once, Andres understands: despite his father’s claims, no one wanted him to buy these coins. Andres would guess they begged him not to. What the watchmaker means is that not everyone has the stomach to see his father humiliated.

  The few of them in attendance take their seats, and the young Egyptologist makes his way to the head of the room. He is small and plain and, to compensate, wears a large pince-nez of unusual brightness. In his left hand, he holds one of the coins. It is dark, nearly black—the blackest coin Andres has ever seen. It is so darkly colored he finds it hard to believe it contains any readable material at all. It would be like trying to discern a man’s thoughts solely from the contents of his pupils.

  “As you know,” the man says, “the coins originate from the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt, circa 1550 BC. The obverse contains the cartouche of Khamudi, the last Hyksos ruler.”

  “What of the recipe?” Andres’s father demands.

  The young Egyptologist nods in a capitulating way. “The coins do contain a recipe. It is a lotion of fenugreek oil that eradicates liver spots on the skin.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s moisturizer. My wife uses something just like it.”

  Andres’s father stands and leaves the room. Everyone looks at Andres, waiting, as though his father were already dead and the society were a kingdom he inherited. Andres knows he should weep for his father—just as, when Lancelot’s heavy head went limp on the autumn earth, the man who shot him said, “There’s no shame in crying.” But all Andres can think of is that black sphere, an empty sun, held between the fingers of the man still at the head of the room. A darkness that is the shape of a common thing—a coin—but its darkness makes it strange. He imagines all kinds of objects blotted this way: a black watch, a black pear, a black wedding band held behind black glass. He thinks, That’s my heart. A thing that is not the thing it looks like.

 

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