The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  “Well, go on.” Annie squints at the computer with one hand on the mouse, the other holding a half-eaten Luna bar. “Don’t leave him alone too long with the marmosets. He’ll start to think all our monkeys are that cute.”

  Varya squeezes her temples. “Why can’t I send you?”

  “Mr. Van Galder was very clear.” Annie doesn’t take her eyes off the computer screen, but she grins. “You’re the lead. You’re the one with the fancy findings. He doesn’t want me.”

  • • •

  When Varya gets out of the elevator, she finds the man facing the marmoset pen. The pen is the lab’s only public exhibit. It’s nine feet tall by eight wide, with walls made of stiff mesh and encased in glass. The man does not immediately turn around, which gives Varya the opportunity to observe him from behind. He’s perhaps six feet, with a dense shrubbery of blond curls, and wears clothes better suited to hiking than to a laboratory tour: some sort of nylon technical pant with a windbreaker and a complicated-looking backpack.

  The marmosets crowd against the mesh. There are nine: two parents and their children, all but one of the latter fraternal twins. Fully grown, they measure roughly seven inches long, sixteen if you include their striped, expressive tails. The monkeys’ faces are the size of walnut shells but extraordinarily detailed, as if designed on a larger scale and perfectly shrunk: their nostrils the size of pinheads, their black eyes slanted teardrops. One squats on a length of cardboard tubing at a forty-five-degree angle. Its feet are turned out and its round thighs cloaked in hair, which give it the impression of a genie. It emits a piercing whistle that is only slightly blunted by the glass. Ten years ago, when Varya began work at the lab, she mistook the marmosets’ calls for alarms sounding in some hallway deep inside the building.

  “They do that,” she says, stepping forward. “It isn’t what it sounds like.”

  “Abject terror?”

  When the man turns, she is surprised by how young he looks. He’s lean as a whippet, with a face that lags behind a large and probing nose. But his lips are full, and when he smiles, his face splits into expected handsomeness. There’s a slight, boyish gap between his front teeth. Behind silver-rimmed glasses his eyes are a hazel color that reminds her of Frida’s.

  “It’s a contact call,” she says. “The marmosets use it to communicate across long distances and greet newcomers. Rhesus monkeys, you don’t want to stare at them. They’re territorial and they become threatened. But marmosets are curious, and more submissive.”

  It’s true that marmosets are less aggressive than the other monkeys, but this open-mouthed whistle is a call of distress. Varya is not sure what possessed her to lie so immediately, and about something of such little consequence. Perhaps it was the intensity of the man’s gaze, an intensity he now applies to her.

  “You must be Dr. Gold,” he says.

  “Mr. Van Galder.” Varya does not reach for his hand in the hope he won’t hers, but he does and so she brings herself to shake. Immediately she marks the hand in her mind, her right.

  “Please. Luke is fine.”

  Varya nods. “Until your TB results come through I won’t be able to take you into the lab. So I thought today I’d show you the main campus.”

  “You don’t waste time,” Luke says.

  His teasing makes Varya anxious. This is what journalists do: they create a false sense of intimacy, ingratiating themselves until you become comfortable enough to tell them things you’d otherwise have the good sense not to. The last journalist they allowed in the lab was a TV reporter whose footage caused such a frenzy among donors that the Drake built a new play area for the monkeys to placate them. Of course, that reporter elected to include only the most damning B-roll, the rhesus monkeys shaking the cage bars and barking as if they had not just been fed.

  Varya leads Luke to the entrance vestibule, where a heavyset man sits behind a security desk, reading the paper. “You’ll have met Clyde.”

  “Sure. We’re old friends. I was just hearing about his mother’s birthday.”

  “She turned a hundred and one last month,” Clyde says, setting the paper down. “So my brothers and me, we went to Daly City and threw her a party. She can’t leave the house, so we paid the choir from her old church to come sing to her. She still knows all the words.”

  Varya has not exchanged more than daily greetings with Clyde in the ten years she’s worked at the lab. She reaches for the heavy steel door and punches Annie’s latest code into the keypad beside it. “Your mother’s one hundred and one?”

  “You bet,” Clyde says. “You should really be pricking her instead of those monkeys.”

  • • •

  The Drake Institute for Research on Aging is a series of angular, white buildings nestled within the perpetually green slopes of Mount Burdell. Its property—nearly five hundred acres—lies two miles south of Olompali State Historic Park and two miles north of Skywalker Ranch, almost all of it untouched countryside. The campus is confined to a plateau halfway down the mountain where great hulks of limestone sit amidst the bay trees and chaparral like an alien encampment. To Varya, the mountainside has always seemed unsightly in its lack of grooming—the shrubs tangled and thorny, the bays drooping like overgrown beards—but Luke Van Galder reaches his arms above his head and sighs.

  “My God,” he says. “To work in such a place. Seventy degrees in March. You can hike in a state park during lunch.”

  Varya reaches for her sunglasses. “I’m afraid that doesn’t ever happen. I’m at work by seven in the morning. Very often I have no idea what the weather is like until I leave that evening. See that building?” she says, pointing. “That’s the main research facility. It was designed by Leoh Chen. He’s known for his geometric elements—you must have parked in the visitor’s lot, so you’ll have seen that the building is a semicircle. There are windows on all sides. From here they look small, but they’re really floor-to-ceiling.” She halts, fifty paces from the primate lab and a quarter mile from the main facility. “Do you have a notebook?”

  “I’m listening. I can fact-check later.”

  “If that seems to you the best sequence of events.”

  “I’m getting my bearings. I’ll be here all week.” Luke raises his eyebrows and smiles. “I figured we might sit down.”

  “Certainly, we’ll sit down,” says Varya, “at some point. But I don’t usually meet with journalists and I trust you’ll understand if certain pieces of information are relayed in transit. Given the study design, it’s important that I spend as little time away from the lab as possible.”

  At five ten, she stands almost at eye level with Luke. His face, as seen through her sunglasses, is subdued in color and dimension, but she can still see surprise play across it. Why? Because she is brisk, impersonal? Surely Luke would not be surprised if the lab were run by a man who displayed these qualities. What guilt she feels at her terseness is replaced by self-assurance. She is, in the world of primate research, establishing dominance.

  Luke swings his backpack around to the front and retrieves a black tape recorder. “Okay?”

  “Fine,” says Varya. Luke depresses the Record button, and she begins to walk again. “How long have you worked at the Chronicle?”

  A peace offering, this bit of dreaded small chat, as they transition to the wider, paved paths that surround the main facility. The path to the primate lab is no more than a repurposed dirt trail. “They like to keep us tucked away,” said Annie once, “the savages,” and Varya laughed, though she didn’t know whether Annie was referring to the monkeys or the two of them.

  “I don’t,” Luke says. “I’m a freelancer. This is the first piece I’ve done for them. I work out of Chicago; usually I write for the Tribune. You didn’t see my pitch?”

  Varya shakes her head. “Dr. Kim deals with those things.”

  Though Annie is a researcher, not a public info
rmation officer, she has taken on the latter role with ease. Varya is constantly grateful for Annie’s media savvy, so she consented when Annie suggested they take this week’s interview, which will be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The primate lab is ten years into a twenty-year study. This year, they’ll apply for a second round of competitive funding. Officially, publicity has no bearing on research grants. Unofficially, the foundations that support the Drake like to feel they’re enabling something important, something that has garnered both public excitement and—in the case of primate research—public approval.

  “Have you worked in a newsroom before?” she asks.

  “In college. I was the paper’s editor in chief.”

  Varya nearly laughs. Annie knew exactly what she was doing. Luke Van Galder is a kid.

  “It must be an exciting job. Lots of travel. No two assignments the same,” she says, though in truth these things do not excite her at all. “What did you study in college?”

  “Biology.”

  “So did I. Where at?”

  “St. Olaf. Small liberal arts college outside of Minneapolis. I’m from a farming town in Wisconsin. It was close enough to home.”

  Varya’s outfit is appropriate for the lab, which is devoid of natural light and always cold, but not for the outdoors. The heat is making her sweat, so she’s relieved when they reach the main facility, where the grass is manicured and the trees newly planted. Varya leads Luke across a circular driveway and through a revolving door.

  “Holy crap,” Luke says when they emerge indoors.

  The lobby of the Drake is palatial, with two-story ceilings and limestone tree planters the size of kiddie pools. Its floors are made of imported white marble and stretch as wide as a high school cafeteria. One tour group huddles around the western wall, where videos and interactive exhibits play on flat screens. A second group is being led toward the elevators. The elevators are spectacular—modern glass and chrome cubes that look out over the San Pablo Bay—but the only staff member who uses them is a seventy-two-year-old researcher, wheelchair-bound due to rheumatoid arthritis, who studies the nematode worm C. elegans. Everyone else takes the stairs unless ill or injured, even those who work on the eighth floor.

  “This way,” says Varya. “We can talk in the atrium.”

  Luke lags behind her, staring. The atrium, modeled after the Louvre, is a glass triangle that faces the Pacific Ocean and Mount Tamalpais. It also functions as a café, with round tables and a juice bar whose line is already ten tourists long. Varya stops at the farthest table and sits, hooking her purse over one of the chair’s arms.

  “It isn’t always this crowded,” she says. “We hold tours for the public on Monday mornings.”

  She keels slightly forward so that only her lower back touches the fabric: a balancing act, threat offset by constant vigilance, as though discomfort is the price she pays for safety. There was a time, as a child, that she lay in her top bunk and propped one dirty foot on the ceiling, just to see how it felt. Her sole left a dark impression on the paint. That night, she feared that tiny particles of dirt would drift down onto her face as she slept, so she stayed awake, watching. She never saw the dirt fall, which meant it hadn’t. If she had fallen asleep—if she hadn’t kept watch—it might have.

  “There must be intense public interest in this place,” says Luke, sitting, too. He peels off his windbreaker, which is bright orange, like that of a crossing guard, and tosses it over the back of the chair. “How many people work here?”

  “There are twenty-two labs. Each one is run by a faculty lead and has at least three additional members, sometimes up to ten: staff scientists, professors, research associates, lab and animal techs, postdocs and masters students and fellows. The larger ones have administrative assistants, like the Dunham lab—she’s studying nerve cell signaling in Alzheimer’s. Of course, that’s not to mention the facilities and janitorial staff. Total? About one hundred and seventy employees, most of them scientists.”

  “And all of you are doing antiaging research?”

  “We prefer the term longevity.” Varya squints: though she chose a shaded portion of the atrium, the sun has moved, and the surface of their metal table beams. “You say antiaging and people think of science fiction, cryonics and whole-brain emulation. But the Holy Grail, for us, is not just to enhance life span. It’s to enhance health span—the quality of late life. Dr. Bhattacharya is developing a new drug for Parkinson’s, for example. Dr. Cabrillo is attempting to prove that age is the single greatest risk factor for developing cancer. And Dr. Zhang has been able to reverse heart disease in elderly mice.”

  “You must have your detractors—people who think the human life span is already long enough. People who point to the inevitability of food shortages, overpopulation, disease. Which is not to mention the economics of increased life span, or the politics of who is most likely to benefit from it.”

  Varya is prepared for this line of questioning, for there have always been detractors. Once, at a dinner party, an environmental lawyer asked why, if Varya was so concerned about the preservation of life, she did not work in conservation. In this day and age, he argued, countless ecosystems, vegetation, and animal species are on the brink of extinction. Was it not more pressing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions or save the blue whale than it was to tack another ten years on to the human life span? Besides, his wife added—she was an economist—increased life expectancy would cause Social Security and Medicare costs to balloon, putting the country even deeper in dept. What did Varya think about that?

  “Of course,” she says to Luke. “And that’s exactly why it’s so important for the Drake to be transparent. It’s why we host tours every week, why we allow journalists like you in our labs—because the public keeps us honest. But the fact is this: any decision you make, any study you do, there are going to be certain groups that benefit from it and certain groups that don’t. You have to choose your allegiance. And my allegiance lies with human beings.”

  “Some would say that’s self-interested.”

  “Some would. But let’s follow that argument to its logical conclusion. Should we stop searching for cancer cures? Should we not treat HIV? Should we cut off access to health care for the elderly, dooming them to whatever comes their way? Your points are valid in theory, but everybody who’s lost a father to heart disease or a spouse to Alzheimer’s—you ask any of those people, before and after, whether they would support our research, and I guarantee you that what they would say afterward is yes.”

  “Ah.” Luke leans forward and clasps his hands, resting them on the table. One of his jacket sleeves droops to brush the floor. “So it’s personal.”

  “We aim to reduce human suffering. Is that not as much a moral imperative as saving the whales?” This is her trump card, the line that silences acquaintances at cocktail parties and the inevitable argumentative question asker at each public lecture. “Your jacket,” she says, flinching.

  “What?”

  “Your jacket is on the floor.”

  “Oh,” says Luke, and shrugs, leaving it right where it is.

  29.

  The sky is powdery with dusk by the time Varya leaves the lab. When she is halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, the main cable lights prick to life. She arcs through Land’s End, past the Legion of Honor and the mansions of Seacliff, and pulls into visitor parking on Geary. Then she signs in at reception and walks the outdoor path to Gertie’s building.

  Gertie has been a resident at Helping Hands for two years. In the months after Daniel’s death, she stayed in Kingston while Mira and Varya discussed options. But in May of 2007, Mira returned from work to find Gertie facedown in the backyard, having collapsed on her way from the garden. Gertie’s left cheek was pressed to the dirt, a glassy circle of drool beside her chin. There was blood on her right arm from where she’d scraped the chicken wire fence. Mira screamed, but she soon
discovered Gertie could stand on her own and even walk. After a CT scan and a blood test, doctors labeled the incident a stroke.

  Varya was furious. There was no other word for it; there was barely even sadness—just rage so blinding she felt dizzy as soon as she finally heard Gertie’s voice.

  “Why,” Varya demanded, “didn’t you call Mira? You could stand. You could walk. So why didn’t you go inside and call Mira—and if not Mira, then me?”

  She pressed her cell phone to her ear. She was dragging her suitcase through SFO, soon to board the plane that would take her to Kingston.

  “I thought I was dying,” Gertie said.

  “You must have soon realized you weren’t.”

  Silence stretched on, and in it Varya heard what she already knew to be true, the source of her rage in the first place. I hoped I was. I wanted to. Gertie didn’t have to say it. Varya knew. She also knew why—of course, she knew why—and yet it seemed unbearably cruel to think of Gertie leaving her now, of her own volition, when they were the only two left.

  Within weeks, Gertie experienced complications. She became easily confused. Her left arm went numb, and her balance was worse. For six months, she lived in Varya’s condo, but a series of dangerous falls convinced Varya she needed round-the-clock care. They toured three different facilities before deciding on Helping Hands, which Gertie liked because the building—painted cream and robin’s egg blue, with yellow awnings over each balcony—reminded her of the beach house the Golds used to rent in New Jersey. Also, it has a library.

  When Varya enters her mother’s room, Gertie stands from a faded armchair and wobbles to the door on her soft ankles. The staff at Helping Hands suggested she use a wheelchair at all times, but Gertie detests the contraption and finds any excuse to get rid of it, like a teenager leaving her parents behind in a crowd.