Eternal Sonata
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The movement is so slight it hardly even registers. But I’m watching Toni’s face like a hawk, and nothing is going to get by me.
“I think her eye just twitched,” I say excitedly to Elizabeth and Owen. I put my mouth close to her ear. “Baby, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t move. The computer has been slowly decreasing her level of anesthetic for the past two hours.
“It’s me, Rich. I’m here with your parents.”
Nothing.
“I just spoke with Nayiri. She and Maya and my mom … they all send their love.”
I stare at her desperately. “I really think I saw something, a flutter.”
Elizabeth Hewitt places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Maybe it will take a little time.”
My nervousness doesn’t allow for such patience. “Baby,” I whisper again, “I just—”
Toni’s eyelids flutter, then open gently halfway. I feel the surge of blood pumping through my heart as her eyelids battle the array of drugs and bodily forces pulling them closed. Her powers of wakefulness struggle to gain the upper hand.
Her eyes pull partly open.
They are not the sharp green eyes I know so well but foggy and glassy, unfocused.
“Baby, it’s me,” I say, trying to stay calm. “I’m here with you in the hospital. Your parents are here with me.”
Her pupils shift toward me without locking. A strange look of confusion crosses her face. My anxiety begins to swell.
Who ultimately knows what a human is made of? Maybe it’s just carbon and a spark of electricity. Toni’s cells have been hacked and re-hacked, even her memories perhaps erased along with the neurons in her brain. A lost toenail can grow back, but what happens to a lost memory?
I take her hand. “Just relax, sweetheart, breathe. You’ve been through a lot.”
Her eyes betray no awareness. Her pupils drift fleetingly around the room, not seeming to recognize anything or anyone.
Images of our history together flash through my mind. Meeting at the Jazzoo Gala, our first date to Union Station, our trip to watch the prairie grasses burn in Cottonwood Falls, racing out of Rapture Ranch in Waco, fighting for our lives in the trashy hotel room in Oklahoma, pushing to get in front of each other during our video calls with Nayiri, eating chocolate mint ice cream out of the container while resting lazily on her couch. Maybe our histories exist in some objective realm because they actually happened, but what can they mean beyond their being recorded in another person? What remains of a life if the memory of it is erased?
“Toni,” I say desperately, “can you hear me?”
Silence permeates the room.
My mind darts to the Israeli doctor’s warning of an unknown outcome.
Her unfocused pupils drift lazily toward her eyelids.
I fight the panic overtaking me, the horror of history, memory, love, life, identity being sucked into the black hole of loss. With every moment, the possibility increases that a piece of her, our life together, has been lost.
Then, in an instant, her eyes widen. Her retinas lock on mine.
“Rich?” she says hoarsely.
I feel every ounce of my being rising, something old yet new being reborn. “Baby,” I say through my tears.
There will be time, I now know, to tell Toni the full story of what’s happened. There will be time to tell her how the world has spun, the oceans have rolled, how I boarded a giant ship to track down the secrets of immortality and protect the one thing I now fully realize I value most in the world—all since she dropped by the OB/GYN ward two weeks ago. There will be time to tell her that as far as we know the vials of Heller’s catalytic compound are used up or lost, that whatever Heller might have told her in a dark room at a time she may never remember might end up being the key to transcending the mortality of our species. There will even be time to tell her I am ready for a life together.
But that time is not now.
For now, the only immortality I seek is the transcendence of this one feeling.
Toni looks up at me with a strange, beatific smile. It’s a smile I’ve only seen once before. I stare back at her, bursting with wonder, then interrupt the thought.
Hope springs eternal, I think, gazing deeply into Toni’s awakening eyes, but love is forever.
Acknowledgements
Writing can be a solo pursuit, but it takes a proverbial village to transform words and ideas into a book. I am grateful to the many special people who provided helpful comments on all or part of earlier drafts of Eternal Sonata. Thank you to Cori Bargmann, Mallika Bhargava, Jim Lovgren, Deborah Devedjian, Houman Hemmati, Zachary Kaufman, Kurt Metzl, Marilyn Metzl, Caren Meyers, Lindsey Meyers, Judy Sternlight, Bill Swersey, and Vinai Trichur. An extra special thank you to my dear and brilliant friend Rakhi Varma, who read the manuscript twice and provided invaluable suggestions for improvement. The final version is significantly better because of her. (I keep telling Rakhi she should become a professional editor, but she is shy. Let this be her first advertisement.) Thank you to my tireless agent, Jill Marsal, my excellent and extremely conscientious editors at Arcade, Cal Barksdale and Chelsey Emmelhainz, and to the Skyhorse publicity team, including Lauren Jackson and Bri Scharfenberg. I dedicate this book to my family (including my grandfather George, who always called himself a “recycled teenager”), to my friend and mentor Richard Clarke, to Rita and Irwin Blitt, and to the loving memory of Tyler Preston.
About the Author
Jamie Metzl is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, novelist, blogger, syndicated columnist, media commentator, and expert in international affairs and biotechnology policy. He previously served as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society, Deputy Staff Director of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senior Coordinator for International Public Information at the US State Department, Director for Multilateral Affairs on the National Security Council, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia. He is a former partner and current Advisory Board member of a global investment firm, was chief strategy officer for a biotechnology company, and in 2004 ran unsuccessfully for the US House of Representatives from Missouri’s Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City. He has served as an election monitor in Afghanistan and the Philippines, advised the government of North Korea on the establishment of Special Economic Zones, and is the Honorary Ambassador to North America of the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy.
Jamie appears regularly in national and international media, and his syndicated columns and other writing on Asian affairs, genetics, virtual reality, and other topics are featured regularly in publications around the world. He has testified before Congress outlining emergency preparedness recommendations after 9/11 and the national security implications of the biotechnology and genomics revolutions. In addition to Eternal Sonata, Jamie is the author of a history of the Cambodian genocide and the novels The Depths of the Sea and Genesis Code.
A founder and co-chair of the national security organization Partnership for a Secure America, Jamie is a board member of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the American University in Mongolia, a member of the advisory boards of the Brandeis International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life and of 92Y’s Center for Innovation and Social Impact, and a former board member of Park University and of the Jewish refugee agency HIAS. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, Jamie holds a PhD in Asian history from Oxford, a JD from Harvard Law School, and is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. He has completed thirteen Ironman triathlons, thirty marathons, and eleven ultramarathons.
Jamie speaks frequently to corporate, nonprofit, and academic audiences.
www.jamiemetzl.com
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