“Depends on where you are,” he reprimanded.
“And where you’re measuring it from,” I countered.
“It’s all interrelated,” Nic mused, clearly comfortable inhabiting enigmatic utterances. “It all corresponds, it all just is. It is all only one moment.”
He asked if I’d come across the teachings of Mony Vital, PhD, a California-based breatharian who leads seminars on becoming a physical immortal. His book Ageless Living: Freedom from the Culture of Death contends that people just need to stop believing in death for death to become unreal. “To start with, you have to discard all death beliefs from your body. You have to deprogram your body: physically, mentally, and emotionally. You have to get the beliefs of death out of every cell.”
I asked Nic if his “books and film” company had approached Mony Vital.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nic answered, gazing into the distance.
“But the company you work for is developing an immortality story?”
“No. Maybe. The company I work for is thinking of taking a TV-audience perspective on it.”
“So maybe it’s for television?” I said sarcastically.
“We don’t do television.” He folded his arms, relishing the confusion.
“But you just said—”
“It’s an expression,” he snapped. “I said a TV audience. See the difference? Not TV—for a TV audience.”
“So whatever it is we’re speaking about is aimed at a mass audience?”
“You could say that, sure.”
“Moving pictures?” I attempted, not quite sure how this conversation had gotten so convoluted.
“Perhaps. Moving audio maybe.”
At that point I lost patience. “Man, what a mindfuck.”
Nic threw an arm around my shoulders and yelled out, “Yes!” as though someone else had finally understood. He then spoke about death as a belief. “The only reason I have to believe that I have an expiration date is that I’ve been told so. Other than that, how do we know that we’ll die? We don’t. We believe that we’ll die.”
“Does this relate to the work you do with your company?”
“No, my interest in immortality is personal. What we do at the company . . . It’s about changing people’s beliefs. Thoughts-to-feelings-to-beliefs is the underlying thing motivating us as people. And what’s the ultimate dead belief? Death. That’s the hardest one to uproot. Other than gravity.”
He told me a story about how he knows immortality is real, a certainty stemming from in utero memories. “I remember being in the womb,” as he put it. “It’s like a memory or a reoccurring dream. That’s the only way I can compare it to anything.”
“What was it like in the womb?”
“Scaleless.”
“Scaleless?”
“There was no scale for anything, no sensation of scale. There was no way of saying how to get from here to there. I remember a wheeling sensation. Everything moving: a scaleless, motionless motion.”
He’d practiced meditation techniques that allow him to get back to that sensation. “Have you ever done Holosync?” he asked, pausing briefly for me to shake my head. “It’s specially modulated drones of white noise. When you listen to it, it alters your brain waves to a subtle body frequency. Doing Holosync meditation made me feel the sensations of . . . that.”
We drank more. Nic started doing coin tricks at the table. As the night drew to a close, I asked him if he believed that statement he’d made about death being a “dead belief.”
“It was just something I said,” he replied. “I don’t know if it’s a statement. I don’t know if I believe it.”
* * *
The following morning, I checked my e-mail and found a note from Mark Collins: “A coincidence, being introduced to you in a crowded intersection.” He’d also sent a link to a press release about the Glenn Foundation’s grant of $5 million to the Salk Institute. In the PDF, Collins himself spoke of wanting answers to “one of the most elusive questions in biology: is there a defined biological process of aging?” The scientists at the Salk would be studying stem cells’ capacity to self-renew and differentiate into functioning cells, and why that activity decreases dramatically during aging. “The biology of aging underlies all the major human diseases,” Collins was quoted as saying. “To understand the fundamental aging process and to intervene is to delay the onset of disease, to extend the healthful years of life and reduce costs to society.”
“I think I see the unassailable parts in that press release,” I responded, via e-mail. “PS Where’s my clue?”
He replied with a photograph of the reading room at Thornbury Castle, a paneled chamber with two baronial chairs upholstered in red velvet and gold trim. Bound books lined the library shelves. “Look here,” Collins wrote. “Volume XIII, p. 5931.” Unfortunately, the castle was located in Gloucestershire, England. But he made an offer a little closer by: Was I available to meet Paul, at his home? “And if I can be of help with introductions to scientists seeking to understand the biology of aging, I’d be happy to.”
Through him, a direct path led into the inner fields of scientific longevity research. I wrote that I’d gratefully take him up on Paul and those introductions.
I met Collins at his home, a large bungalow perched on a craggy hillside overlooking the ocean, so that we could drive to Paul Glenn’s place together. The first thing I noticed upon entering was a sculpture of a torso in the living room. The house was full of flowers. Strains of classical music wafted through the air. “I leave the radio on to keep the flowers company,” Collins said. Even though he’d just separated from his wife, he seemed in high spirits.
On the table lay a copy of The Wine Advocate magazine, with the Glenn Foundation–funded biology sensation David Sinclair on the cover. Sinclair’s research into resveratrol at Harvard had led to the widely reported media story about red wine’s being a source of longevity. The issue of The Wine Advocate had just come out that week, explained Collins, clicking through his iPhone to find me a text message from Sinclair. “Guess what’s next?” Sinclair had written. “The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.”
Collins’s bookshelves were heavy with nonfiction hardcovers, as well as knickknacks, such as a leather hippopotamus and an abalone-shell bottle opener. He walked through the house, joking and openly discussing his own story as well as the world of longevity research. I’d never encountered such a peculiar blend of honesty and avuncularity in a subject before.
As we spoke about the previous night, it became apparent that he wasn’t a fan of The Secret—“a lie on stilts,” as he characterized it. “Marketing geniuses are sometimes rapacious cross-dressers, indistinguishable from altruists,” he aphorized. It struck me then that Nicole had said something about his being a marketing person before he’d started working at the Glenn Foundation.
Collins then shared a quote from Mark Twain about the one serious purpose of writing: “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.” He owned a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s high school yearbook (Shortridge High School, Indianapolis, class of 1940) and had even gotten it inscribed by the famous author: Mark: charming rascal, sure to go far—Kurt Vonnegut. The full name under Vonnegut’s yearbook photo was Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut. “To snarf,” Collins elucidated, “means to sniff a bicycle seat.”
Framed on the wall was a business card from Collins’s dad’s butcher store, DON’S FINE MEATS AND ART GALLERY. The shop’s motto read “Where meat cutting is an art.” “My father was a nut and so am I,” explained Collins. “He was always writing letters to the postmaster general, to utilities companies, to politicians. He was constantly doing odd things, so I think I must have gotten his ‘do odd things’ gene.”
To illustrate this, he told me how one of the main activities of the Glenn Foundation was handing out unsolicited $60,000 grants to scientists investigating the biology of aging. “Applications are not accepted for
the award,” he declared imperiously. “We just give them to unsuspecting nominees doing what our committee considers to be important work.”
“How do the scientists react?”
“They’re always astounded and happy and grateful. It’s totally unexpected and kind of magical to have sixty thousand dollars just arrive into your world. We’ve given out forty-two so far, and we plan to give out many more. How could we not do something so fun and useful? Beneficiaries can double down. Just because you’ve gotten one, we can still give you another. And Paul, much to my pleasure, loves breaking rules. Meaning I can bypass the committee with awards. I just call Paul and see what he thinks. And then he says, ‘Sure, go for it.’”
“I don’t suppose you support writers investigating the science of immortality?” I hinted, pointing a thumb at myself.
“Not unless your biology lab’s results are peer-reviewed,” he answered firmly. But he did offer to show me one of the awards, and we went upstairs to his study, which abutted the bedroom. The sole object on top of the chest of drawers next to his bed was a crystal ball. I peered into its fathoms. All it revealed was the room upside down: the ceiling’s reflection flipped over the table, an interplay of windows and lamps, layers of curved glasswork folded into diaphanous opacity. “It’s important for aesthetic reasons,” he clarified. “Not magical ones.”
In the study, Mark brought out a glass cube with the words THE GLENN AWARD FOR RESEARCH IN THE BIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS OF AGING etched into its base. A three-dimensional, laser-cut image of the Glenn logo—four horizontally stacked disks of varying thickness and diameter topped with curved lines and trails of dots—was imprinted within the transparent cube. “People look at it and say, ‘Oh, a fountain of youth,’” confided Collins. “That’s their first reaction.” To me, it resembled a jester’s hat on top of a stubby Grecian column.
He then showed me a photo of a pretty young blond woman pouring heart-shaped ice cubes into a cup. “That’s Lauren,” he said fondly. “She’s twenty-one.” Collins, recently separated from his wife,2 specified that Lauren and he had become “intimate friends who can sleep together in a bed without making wooga-wooga. She asked me to go to the doctor’s office with her.” He smiled broadly, his left eye twitching ever so lightly. “I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
He picked up a first edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “It’s number one hundred of two hundred and fifty copies signed by Oscar Wilde. To be bequeathed to Lauren.” She was in university, he added, where she was researching the nature of secrets. “Secrets are the uncirculated currency of gossip,” Mark intoned, repeating a line he’d certainly already come up with. “Once circulated, their value drops to zero.”
“What’s up with Santa Barbara and secrets?” I puzzled.
“Lauren might know. She’s been sending out e-mails asking people what secrets mean to them. Everybody ends up responding with their own secrets. Let’s find out, shall we?” He dialed Lauren’s number.
As they spoke about her gleanings into the secretive, I flipped through a book of Oscar Wilde’s quotes and came across the section “The Secret of Life.” In 1893, Wilde felt there was no such secret. “Life’s aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations.” But then, a few years later, in prison, he revised his position: “The secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything.”
Collins put his hand over the mouthpiece and paraphrased Lauren’s current research, which involved understanding the effects of writing secrets down on paper. “She says that looking at a secret from a distance allows people to separate it from themselves. Also, she’s wondering if you, as a writer, would be open to answering a few questions by e-mail?”
“Of course,” I assented, thinking of Nietzsche’s aphorism about how when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
* * *
Heading to Paul Glenn’s home, Collins drove us through serpentining streets lined with purple jacaranda in full bloom, their fallen blossoms dusting the pavement like periwinkle snow. Collins wore vintage mirrored shades, small and circular. The mood was chatty, the day sunny. He pointed out establishments frequented in a prior career, when he did marketing. He said something about a cosmetic-surgery company that specialized in breast implants. He called breasts djibobis, his own Vonnegutesque, made-up word.
“Part of being human is the fantasy that we can improve ourselves beyond our limits,” he asserted. “Whether it’s bolt-on djibobis or the idea of immortality or any other utopian notions.”
I asked him what he, Mark Collins the person—not the foundation’s president—thought about the notion of death as an elective.
“It’s a bad idea,” he exclaimed.
“For example, does growing old bother you?” I pressed.
“Not really.”
“How about Paul Glenn? How does he feel about it?”
“You can ask him yourself. And he’ll decide how he wants to answer. Paul has earned the right to not do anything he doesn’t want to.”
The two of them got to know each other when Glenn owned shares in a company where Collins worked, he noted, as the vice president of marketing.3 Their professional relationship began in 1986, when Collins mailed Glenn a postcard of a Tupperware party.
“What was the message?” I asked innocuously, although the similarity between bowls of plastic Tupperware and silicone implants did spring to mind.
“I wrote him something polite and funny,” Collins replied, waving the question away. “I forget what exactly.” Regardless of its contents, that fateful postcard spurred Glenn to offer Collins a consulting job. They’d been working together ever since. “I always try to figure out why he keeps me around, and I suspect it’s my sense of humor,” Mark admitted, peering at me through his spectacles. “There are so many people better suited to this job. I think he prefers funny over adequate.”
Glenn isn’t the biggest donor in the longevity field, although he’s up there. The founder of Oracle software, Larry Ellison, has a foundation that gives out $30 million a year, six times more than Glenn’s average of $5 million, a number certain to rise when Glenn’s estate passes over to his foundation.
“What’ll happen to you at that point?” I asked Collins.
“I hope to stay around. I want to keep doing what I’m doing for many more years. I don’t mind being a public nutcase. I once left a huge sign on the lectern after introducing Paul saying, ‘Your fly is wide-open.’ He didn’t miss a beat.”
For a moment, then, Collins grew serious and brought up “certain sensitivities” and apprehensions he had about our meeting with Mr. Glenn. I assured him that if they didn’t want me to write about his personal life, I wouldn’t.
“It’s not that,” Collins attempted. “He’ll say whatever he wants to say, but part of my job is to oversee his legacy. I want to ensure that you don’t make him seem . . . foolish. Because he isn’t. He’s a very intelligent, discerning man. You can make me seem like as much of a nut job as you want as long as you don’t make him look foolish.”
“No problem.” I nodded.
Collins then said something that I subsequently thought of frequently: “Each one of us is responsible for their actions and what they say.”
Moments later, a text came in from Lauren: “Love is everything.”
He burst out laughing. “This is absolute insanity!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I’m sixty-five. And not yet divorced. And people here really disapprove of us being friends. Did I mention that we’re going to Paris together?” Collins elaborated on the journey. They were going to fly first class on Air France. He’d booked an absurdly expensive suite at the Plaza Athénée. They’d conceived of the trip as a one-week wedding ceremony. “I’m going to be bringing bags of confetti and tiaras,” he said, then paused. “I’m looking forward to a tragic ending.”
“What?! Why a tragic ending?”
“It’ll be tragic beca
use I’ll have to make her move on. We’re on a schedule. It’s necessarily brief because I’m so much older and she needs to have her life.”
Collins said they were planning on getting identical tattoos while in Paris. Lauren had chosen the symbol: three straight lines. I asked whether they were going to be horizontal or vertical. “Horizontal seems natural to me,” Collins answered, after considering it momentarily. “Anyways, this is our ‘secret’ that we’re telling you. . . . You will be free to unwrap it for your tale, if you wish.”
I looked out at the petal-strewn streets, wondering why he’d chosen to divulge all of this. Lauren’s essay on secrets. The Secret of secrets. To conceal and to reveal, to hide and to want. Our innermost desires are for love and a way out of death. Collins clearly didn’t care about living forever, yet I couldn’t help acknowledging that his openness had something to do with a desire to be preserved, in book form, for posterity. And perhaps that was the part of the reason I, too, had landed in this car heading toward the home of Paul Glenn, whom Aubrey de Grey deemed “by far the world’s oldest private philanthropic supporter of biogerontology research.”
* * *
Glenn’s home was tastefully and, given his magnificent wealth, not at all ostentatiously appointed. On the coffee table lay a book entitled Reversing Human Aging.
“How do you feel about the idea of reversing human aging?” I asked.
“I’m of the anything-is-possible school,” Glenn answered jauntily, putting on a brown ivy cap. On the edge of eighty, with a gentle stoop, Glenn came across as sharp, jovial, keen witted, and not foolish in the least. He wore a large houndstooth shirt, corduroy pants, and loafers. The red turtleneck under his shirt unintentionally drew my attention to the wattle dangling off his chin. Given Collins’s request to observe sensitivities, I felt merely noticing it was ungracious, yet the flappy neck was the most prominent detail of his physique. While I jotted uncertainly in my notebook, Glenn turned to me and said, “Would you like to see my Euphorbia ingens?”
Book of Immortality Page 40
