Promise Me Eternity

by Ian Fox

  “Listen, Jerry. Patterson’s always like that. I have never yet seen him laugh. Talk to him. Ask him how it is that you’ve been an assistant now for over six years. It’s high time you became an associate.”

  He opened a bottle of orange soda and poured it into a glass. He started eating and then said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. What if I’m really not ready for it yet?”

  “Of course you’re ready,” Dr. Carter stated. “You were ready long ago. I know what’s going on here. They’re trying to cut costs in all areas, including with you. If you were an associate, they’d have to raise your salary. Which they don’t want to do.”

  He said nothing in reply.

  “If you don’t talk to him, I will.”

  He put down his knife and fork. “Are you crazy? How could you even think of doing anything like that?”

  “Keep it down,” Dr. Carter quickly whispered. “Esther, Rosanna, and Leon are coming this way.”

  “So I guess we’re done operating today?” Esther Green said to Leon.

  Leon Whitman replied, “Yes, definitely. Time always flies by whenever Patterson operates. At least that’s how it feels to me.”

  Jerry threw him an annoyed look, then picked up the tray with his food, which he had barely touched, and lifted it. “Well, I’ve got work to do. See you all tomorrow.”

  Everyone said good-bye and turned to their meal—everyone except Anita, who watched him with concern as he left the cafeteria. She loved him, but at the same time she often found his apathetic behavior exasperating.

  Chapter 4

  _______________________

  Dr. Simon Patterson peered anxiously at Dorothy the white rabbit, who sat motionless inside her old metal cage. It seemed to him she lacked energy. I hope it’s not because of the vaccine, he thought. She should be feeling better, not worse.

  He decided to give her an injection of vitamins. He got up from his chair and walked over to the old oak cabinet. It had been a tough day. He could relax now, since his wife, Helen, wasn’t home yet. He didn’t have the energy to fight with her.

  Dr. Patterson had set up a large private laboratory in his basement where he could devote himself to his beloved research. Every day after work he could hardly wait to go down there, where he’d often stay until 1:00 a.m., and then silently crawl into bed.

  From a bowl on the cabinet he took a small carrot and offered it to the rabbit. She slowly bit off a tiny piece and gnawed a few sharp ruts into it. The rest of the carrot she left untouched. This really isn’t like her. She hardly ever turns down a carrot. She eats dozens. So what’s going on with her?

  The laboratory was approximately 430 square feet. The walls were gray concrete and in places one could see the gleam of moisture. It of course reeked of dampness. The single window had been pasted over with cardboard from milk cartons so as to keep the neighborhood kids from spying on him. A few dusty light bulbs provided the room with all the light he needed.

  Arranged on long wooden tables were the various instruments and gadgets essential to his experiments: a sterilizer, scales, water distiller, coolers, various centrifuges, layering chambers, and incubating equipment, as well as other small laboratory devices such as a whirling mixer, magnetic mixer with heating, homogenizer, sonicator, and so on. He had purchased all these things from various resellers, and in some cases from hospitals that were upgrading their equipment. Only the microscope had cost him a huge sum of money—an investment he had never regretted.

  If I succeed, I’ll be able to sell my vaccine and become rich, he often repeated to himself. Then I can buy myself an amazing house and a fantastic car. I’ll buy one for Helen too. And I can devote all my time to research. He thought about this a lot.

  For more than ten years Dr. Patterson had been researching the aging process in animals. His great aspiration was to find a way to stop the aging process, or at least slow it down. To think that he might really be the one to do this took his breath away. This hope drove him forward and set his blood racing.

  A month earlier he had injected Dorothy with a dose of the latest version of his antiaging vaccine and was hoping it would stop the process of aging in her.

  “Simon!”

  The voice caused a shudder through his body.

  “I hope you’re coming up to eat. Unless you’d rather stay down there with your darling rats and rabbits.”

  He ignored her sarcastic remark and picked up the hypodermic needle. He stuck it into Dorothy’s leg.

  “There you go, sweetie. These vitamins will make you feel better. I’ll be back to visit you later.” He closed the cage and, with a dark expression on his face, went up the stairs.

  “I really don’t know how you can spend hours and hours down there in that dusty basement. It would drive me crazy,” Helen Patterson said.

  She was four years younger than he, slender, with shiny blond hair reaching to the middle of her neck. Her dark-blue eyes sparkled as if made of glass when she looked at him angrily.

  He didn’t see the point in responding. He sat down at the table in the dining room and looked at what she had fixed for supper. Spaghetti with Bolognese sauce again. He must have eaten it at least six times in the last month alone. Resigning himself to his fate, he let out a deep sigh.

  “It’s a good thing you have me to look after you. If I didn’t cook supper for you, you’d have probably died from malnutrition a long time ago. I don’t understand how you can get so busy at work that you’re not even hungry.” With her hands on her hips, she looked him up and down. “Seems to me you’ve lost another three or four pounds.”

  “Well, you know I try, but sometimes—”

  “That’s no excuse. It’s important to have regular lunchtimes. And that doesn’t mean three or four o’clock in the afternoon, but at one. Do you understand? At one o’clock.”

  “I can’t eat in the middle of an operation. Or should I just leave the patient lying there with his head open?” He sucked in the spaghetti with a slurping sound.

  Helen covered her ears with her hands. “Simon, stop slurping the spaghetti, for God’s sake! If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times. It drives me mad.”

  He bit into the strand of spaghetti that was hanging out of his mouth. “Of course I’d like to have lunch at one, but that’s not how it works in my profession. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough surgeons. You’d understand if you worked at a hospital. You can’t let people—”

  “It’s because you work like a dog. Nothing will ever change. When was the last time you were on vacation? Last year you took a grand total of two weeks. And even then, they made you postpone it twice.”

  “It was bad luck last year.”

  “There’s something every year and it’ll never get any better.”

  Another fight. They didn’t know anymore how to have a normal conversation. Whatever happened to those times when we were in love and rarely had fights? He remembered the years after they married, when they had enjoyed life and each other. They had a more or less perfect marriage. Helen wasn’t merely beautiful, but could also be honest, simple, and direct, and used to laugh frequently. That’s what he really liked about her. She only had one bad habit: she liked spending money, while Simon was the opposite. He liked saving more than spending. But Helen was persistent and persuasive and not a week went by without her coming up with some new wish. She had so many clothes that she didn’t have to wear the same thing more than three times a year. Though she had at least fifty pairs of shoes, her true passion was suits. Simon was earning a good salary as a surgeon, but because of Helen’s spending, his bank account was always in the red by the end of the month. However, since he was good-hearted and didn’t want to argue, he accepted her as she was. And they did well—until the accident.

  He shivered at the thought of the huge amount he’d had to pay in damages. Especially since it was his own fault. He’d had an idea to decorate a Christmas tree in front of the house, and Helen was very much
against it. And luck would have it that the wiring was old, it short-circuited, and the Christmas tree caught fire. To make things worse, it happened in the middle of the night so that no one noticed the fire slowly spreading to another tree in the yard next door and then to the next tree, until it reached the house. He was both lucky and unlucky that the neighbors were not at home that night, but, unfortunately, by the time the firefighters arrived there was nothing much to save.

  And since the neighbors’ house had not been insured, the next day Simon was forced to take another mortgage on his own house so that he could pay for a new house to be built for his neighbors and then furnish it. After that, not much was left from his salary, and Helen was never able to come to terms with this.

  “Last year was especially hard. You know that Dr. Langston resigned right before our vacation. That’s why everything had to be rescheduled.”

  “And what about the year before? Who resigned that year, Simon? I’m fed up with all your damned excuses. Every year someone quits the hospital and then everyone else has to suffer. It’ll never change!”

  “I can’t help it, Helen. Medford’s just a small Oregon town. All the good surgeons run off to Washington State or some big city. Hospitals pay better there.”

  Now he had really set her off. She grabbed an empty glass, filled it with water, and drank it down in one go. “And who asked you to stay in Medford?”

  “But you were born in Medford, and I’m not used to living in a big city, either.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You’ve told me a hundred times. I always wanted to live in New York, but no, you insist on staying here in Medford. It’s so much more peaceful, you said, we’ll have more time for ourselves. Well, damn it, Simon. Do we really have more time?”

  “Listen, Helen. Why can’t we have a normal conversation anymore? Why do we always have to argue?”

  “Who’s arguing? I’m not. We’re having a conversation.” She lowered her voice. “I only wanted to tell you that it’s not like you said it would be. You said we’d have more time and more money. But where’s the money, Simon? We’re still paying for that stupid idea of yours …”

  Just a little longer, he thought. He dove into the spaghetti, eating as fast as he could. He couldn’t wait to get back to the basement. He said to her, “My dear, I’m on the brink of an incredible discovery. If it works, I’ll be the richest man in the world. I need a few more months.”

  She brushed back the hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. “You said the same thing five years ago when you bought that microscope. We could have bought another car, but no, you had to blow the money on a microscope.” She let out a silly laugh. “You promised to take me on wonderful trips, you promised me a carefree life. … So tell me, Simon, why should I have to take the bus to work?”

  There was no point in saying anything. His wife had no grasp of science. He looked at her face and wondered when she had become so old. When she yelled at him, the lines around her mouth became even more pronounced, as if she wanted to use her jaw muscles to underscore her resentment. Nevertheless, he still found her very beautiful.

  Helen worked at a beauty salon called Sophia, in downtown Medford. She was an excellent stylist and her customers kept coming back to her. She especially liked the wealthy ones, who boasted about their luxurious lifestyle, but this of course only made her more bitter and resentful toward Simon, who when they were young had promised to give her all sorts of wonderful things.

  Simon had become accustomed to ignoring her constant complaining. Over the years he learned to shut her out and let his thoughts take him somewhere else. Why isn’t Dorothy feeling well? What could I have done wrong? He decided to review all his notes one more time. I must have slipped up somewhere. Unless this is a reaction?

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  He pushed his empty plate away and stood up from the table. “I have to go. My work is waiting for me.”

  “You’re not having more?”

  “No. No, thanks.”

  And in a flash, he darted off to the laboratory.

  As he looked through his notes, he kept glancing at the rabbit. She sat there peacefully, twitching her long ears. The carrot lay in front of her, untouched.

  He could feel himself succumbing to depression, and he knew this was a mistake. He should not let himself get attached to the animals he used for experiments. He shouldn’t even have given them names. But he had been sure the vaccine would work this time.

  Previously, he had always done his experiments on rats, which eventually died. Some of them lived only a few days, others a month or so, but none of them had lived longer than three months. When he gave them the previous version of the vaccine, he thought they seemed much livelier, and the initial data indicated that the aging process had stopped. He waited three months and decided it was time to try the vaccine on Dorothy. The idea was that he would give her eternal life.

  He stared at his notebook for three hours, making endless calculations. He wanted to be sure there were no mistakes in his figures. The percentages of the individual components were crucial, and it was here that there could be a slip-up.

  He then picked up a large needle and opened the metal cage. “There, there,” he told her, “this is going to hurt only a little.”

  Using a biopsy needle with a diameter of more than a millimeter, he took a sample of muscle tissue. He placed it on a small rectangular piece of clear glass and pressed another piece of glass on top of it.

  “Hmm. … Now, that’s strange. Not very encouraging.” He didn’t like what he saw. He looked at the rabbit sadly and hoped everything would be alright. Then, stretching his arms, he decided it was time for bed.

  Chapter 5

  _______________________

  Jerry Duncan spent more than an hour prepping and cooking supper. He then went into the bedroom and took off his T-shirt and pants and placed them in the closet. He glanced in the mirror on the closet door, checking the fat around his waist. Concerned about his looks, Jerry tried to run the track at a nearby sports field at least twice a week. He saw a slim young man with a strong build and he smiled with satisfaction.

  Grabbing a fresh pair of underwear and a towel, he slipped into the bathroom to take a shower. He had just lathered up when he heard the front door closing. He quickly rinsed the soap off and patted himself down with the towel.

  “Hi there, baby,” he said, meeting Anita in the kitchen, and planted a wet kiss on her lips. He had wrapped the cotton towel around his waist, and a few drops of water still glistened on his back.

  “Hi,” she replied as she lifted the lids off the pots. “What did you fix us tonight?”

  “Veal with rice and veggies.”

  She sniffed the steam whirling in the air and nodded in satisfaction. “Smells good. I’m going to use the bathroom now. I’ll be about ten minutes.”

  “You go ahead, and I’ll put some clothes on.” He was already in the bedroom, where he pulled on a pair of blue sweat pants and a white T-shirt. He looked in the mirror one more time and gave himself a confident wink. How lucky he was to have met Anita, the woman of his dreams.

  This had happened about a year ago. Before that, he would never have imagined himself falling in love with a co-worker. He’d had a firm rule about keeping his private life separate from work. But now he felt differently. It made him so happy that they could wake up together in the morning, drive to the hospital in the same car, and even work in the same operating room. It felt as if Anita Carter had become a part of him, he loved her so much.

  “I say, let’s eat. You agree, dear?” She wore a bathrobe and her long black hair was gathered into a ponytail.

  Glowing with happiness, Jerry took two plates and placed them on the round table in the dining room, followed by the silverware, two glasses, and a bottle of wine. On each plate he placed a veal steak and added a fist-sized mound of rice.

  Anita sat down at the table, but her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Jerr
y, too, sat down and picked up his fork, saying, “Bon appétit.”

  “Bon appétit,” she replied. “You forgot the saltshaker. You know I always add a little salt to my meat.”

  He immediately put down the fork and ran to the kitchen. When he came back, he said, “Here you go.”

  “You’re so sweet. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He poured them each a glass of red wine.

  He had just sat down when she said, “Honey, since you’re up, could you hand me the dishcloth? I spilled a little wine.”

  Again he stood up and went to get the dishcloth, which lay on top of the sideboard in the kitchen. He stood there a moment. “Need anything else?”

  “No, dear, that’s all. You should sit down and eat. Your supper’s getting cold.”

  He nodded obediently and sat down opposite her. He cut off a piece of meat and lifted it toward his mouth.

  “There’s something we have to talk about.”

  “Oh?” He put the fork down on his plate. “What’s that?”

  “What we were talking about today at lunch.”

  Glumly, he started chewing the meat. “Oh, that.”

  “I really think you need to talk to Patterson. You can’t be an assistant forever. Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know. Patterson’s so rough on me. I always have the feeling—”

  “That’s only because you let him treat you like that. You don’t believe in yourself enough, that’s all. You need to assert yourself. Talk to him.”

  “I’d rather let it wait a while. Maybe another year.”

  “Oh, no, no! That’s a big mistake. Listen to what I’m saying. Where’s the harm in talking to him? At least then you’ll know where you stand. They can’t keep leading you by the nose forever. Besides, they need you. You know better than anyone, there aren’t enough surgeons in the hospital, let alone neurosurgeons. They can’t afford to lose you. All you need to do is threaten a little that you might leave ….”