The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t.” Then she climbed the stairs and ran out with her copy of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” still drying in her hand.

  Now, at the meeting, Jackson asks permission to read a poem he composed that morning by stitching together outtakes from the bomber’s manifesto. Before anyone can object, he unfolds a sheet of yellow legal paper from the pocket of his denim shirt. “The Madman Is Sometimes Not Mad,” the poet intones. Five minutes later, he reaches the concluding stanza: “Pain is no longer pain. Pain is the failure of pharmaceuticals. Work is no longer suffering. Work is no longer work.” Everyone starts to argue. Even if Jackson agrees with the bomber’s cracked ideology, does he truly believe those ends justify the blood-soaked means? Maxine doesn’t join the discussion. She needs to prepare to teach her next class. Will these men never stop their speechifying? She suddenly feels so desperate to get to her office and read the manifesto she can’t breathe. Why does she think it is up to her to protect the bomber’s next victim? Worse, why does she believe the victim might be someone she knows and loves? Or maybe the bomber is the one she knows?

  The fluorescent lights flicker as if an inmate at the other end of the basement is being electrocuted.

  No, it’s only Rosa snapping the light switch on and off. “Mick, you have five minutes before Bill Moyers is calling you for an interview.”

  Mick leaps from his chair. “Rosa, my dear, whatever would I do without you!” For a moment, Maxine thinks he might kiss Rosa on the mouth.

  Everyone except Jackson files out. This is the first time he and Maxine have been alone since their encounter in his basement.

  “Any chance I can persuade you to join me for lunch?” Jackson asks. “That last time … I apologize if I moved too quickly.”

  Too quickly? As lonely as she is, she would tear off Jackson’s clothes right here if only … If only what? If he didn’t insist on writing his poetry with a fountain pen? If he weren’t limping toward seventy and likely to die before she did?

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t. I’m teaching a class at one.” Although what she really can’t do is survive another husband’s death.

  … Reads a Manifesto

  Her office is as drab and poorly lit as the conference room. The plaster and paint buckle and crack to reveal the moisture and mold beneath. The only furnishings consist of two gray metal chairs, a metal desk, and metal bookshelves crammed with books. The chemical tang from the industrial, metal-gray carpet no doubt adds carcinogens to the air. If only the sun in the poster on the wall were real. Or the bright blue photograph of planet Earth where a window would have been if her office had windows. Or the image of the Milky Way, viewed head on, like a pinwheel. When she is feeling overwhelmed by bureaucratic details, these posters provide perspective. Even if she spends her remaining years sitting in this dreary underground warren, responding to memos, applying for grants, editing jargon-ridden reports on tenure and promotion, she is helping her fellow humans see beyond the next meal they cook, the next diaper they change, the next meeting or corporate retreat they survive, into the next millennium.

  Her first priority should be to read her email. But logging in is as appealing as opening a can of bees. She hasn’t checked since the day before. Swatting away the sixty or seventy bellicose insects that come swarming out would take hours, if not the entire day. Her students message her with requests no student in Maxine’s day would have considered making. “Hey!” they start. Or: “Dear Miss Sayers, ” as if she is their second-grade teacher (Sam’s students addressed him as “Professor,” or “Doctor,” unless they called him “Sam”). They send her messages at three a.m., demanding extensions on papers due that day. They email to ask what font they should use to print those papers. She even receives messages from her students’ parents, complaining about their children’s grades.

  So why not stop using email? Because typing a few lines and hitting “send” requires less effort than finding an envelope, buying a stamp, filling out an address, walking to the corner mailbox, then waiting days, if not weeks, for a reply. Because email allows her to send a message to the dean without the anxiety of a face-to-face appointment. Human beings aren’t stupid enough to mindlessly accept innovations that destroy their humanity.

  Well, maybe they are. But she can resist answering her email for just one morning. She pulls the newspaper from her pack. Already the pages have the brittle, faded feel of a historical document.

  As Tobin hinted, the bomber has prefaced his screed with an epigraph from a novel Maxine has taught for years, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. “The sacrosanct fetish of today is science,” the quotation reads. Conrad was ahead of his time in predicting society’s dependence on—and revulsion toward—mechanization and surveillance. Yet she sympathizes with her students, who complain that the novel’s characters creep them out. There is corpulent Mr. Verloc, the owner of a Victorian porn shop, who pretends to be a revolutionary while snitching on his comrades to the London police; the Professor, who stalks the streets with a chemical apparatus snaked up his sleeve such that, if anyone attempts his capture, he can blow them all up; and various officers of the law who try to keep the anarchists in line, unless they are manipulating those same anarchists for their own ends. But the novel remains on Maxine’s reading list because its author envisioned a time when people might rebel against the very progress that was bringing them prosperity and longer lives.

  That a terrorist has the same taste in literature as she does makes Maxine so queasy she can barely move on to the first paragraph of the manifesto:

  The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those who live in “advanced” countries, but they have made those same lives unfulfilling and inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

  She finds little to object to in that paragraph. Or in the pages that follow. How can she disagree that industrialization has cut us off from nature, fettered us with far too many forms to fill out, appointments to keep, an addiction to the new technologies? Governments monitor our every move. The medical-entertainment complex has convinced us that if only we consume the right medicines, eat the right foods, and undergo the prescribed medical procedures we might retain our beauty and fitness ad infinitum. To reap such benefits, all we need do is conform to the system. From a young age, children are “buttonholed” into slots (“buttonholed” being the terrorist’s word), forced to spend hours studying for exams, only to be labeled hyperactive if they can’t conform to such inhuman demands, drugged, pressured to follow ever-lengthier regimes of training to equip them for employment. If any adult becomes too anxious or depressed to keep up, they need to be medicated and/or confined.

  The Technobomber scoffs at the fear that machines might take us over by force. Rather, human beings will become ever more dependent on complex digital systems as fewer and fewer technocrats understand how such programs work. Unlike primitive man, who was able to see and fight his predators, modern man lives with a floating dread he might be exterminated by an atomic blast, the malfunction of a worldwide computer system, or decisions made by businessmen and politicians whose judgment has been corrupted by greed and self-interest.

  Humankind, the bomber writes, “finds itself at the crossings road.” A core of dedicated revolutionaries needs to lead their fellow citizens in destroying their computers, disabling nuclear and coal-fired power plants, dismantling the industrial farms that supply our obesity-inducing food, blowing up the nerve centers of government surveillance and high-tech laboratories. The bomber calls on everyone to tear themselves away from pornography and violent video games (this from a man who mailed bombs to sixteen victims!) and force themselves to go outdoors. Everyone needs to throw away the drugs that mask an unhappiness generated by a society whose insanities no longer will be tolerated. With each of us engaged in the very real goals of
growing our own food, hunting, educating our children, and creating shelter for our families, we won’t need artificial ways to consume our time or create false meaning in our lives.

  Such a revolution will, “in one felt swoop,” return humankind to its natural state. Better to die now than live under the government’s watchful eye, hemmed in by rules, cut off from the essence of our humanity. The gains of a revolution will far outweigh the dangers. “Mankind cannot be eating his cake and having it, too,” the bomber writes. This is why, if he doesn’t see signs his demands are being met, he will continue to mail his packages.

  Something about the writer’s voice causes the hairs on the back of Maxine’s neck to stand up. “Buttonholed,” he has written. “In one felt swoop.” “Eating his cake and having it, too.” Hasn’t she circled these same misused phrases on her students’ essays? Unless she is only imagining she knows the author. In her many decades teaching, she has come upon dozens of such warped locutions. For all intense and porpoises. Toad the line. I am appealing to common cents. The reader should bare her mind. The ideas the writer of the manifesto discusses are obvious. Stop anyone in Ann Arbor and you might hear these same complaints. For that matter, you could have heard them when Maxine and her husband and son sat arguing over breakfast.

  Rosa sticks her head in the door. Maxine isn’t sure why but she feels the urge to hide the manifesto.

  “So, how did that pizza date go last night?” Rosa asks.

  Maxine sighs. “You should have seen the skid marks.”

  Rosa snaps her heavily ringed, green-nailed fingers. “You think men don’t want to go out with a woman scientist. But I know a poet who is very sweet on you.”

  Maxine hasn’t told Rosa about the kiss in Jackson’s basement—Rosa would scold her for spurning his advances. “Did you come in to give me a hard time about my love life? If you did, we’re going to have a very short conversation.”

  “No,” Rosa says. “I came to find out what am I supposed to do when I am projecting our expenses beyond the point at which we have money to pay them.”

  “I have that meeting first thing tomorrow with the new provost,” she reminds Rosa. “I’ll ask her to tide us over until after the fundraiser.”

  Rosa curls her lips to indicate they both know the provost was hired with the sole purpose of whipping the university into better financial shape by making it run like a corporation. The accounting metrics Rosa has been required to learn almost drove her from the job. “While you are down on your knees, perhaps you could beg Provost Bell to pay for the Velociraptors and, what is it called, this Turing Test?”

  “Here’s what you do,” she tells Rosa. “Drain everything from the director’s emergency fund.”

  “The whole account? What if we have an emergency?”

  Just as Maxine’s mother can’t comprehend she is really dying, Rosa seems not to understand that unless this long shot pays off, they won’t need to worry about emergencies.

  Rosa points to the manifesto. “Is that going to be as much trouble as I think?”

  Again, Maxine feels accused. “The commotion should die down soon,” she tells Rosa. “Just let Mick handle the reporters.”

  Rosa hands Maxine a leftover sesame bagel slathered with the honey-walnut cream cheese Maxine loves. “Just be careful,” Rosa says. “It is easier than you think to be swept up in a revolution.”

  For a moment, Maxine can’t figure out what revolution Rosa means. Then she remembers Rosa was caught up with SDS in the 1960s, or maybe it was the Panthers. “I am not starting a revolution,” Maxine promises. “Or even joining one.”

  Rosa waggles her head, as if Maxine might yet find herself at the barricades, breast bared, holding a tyrant’s bloody head.

  Maxine thanks Rosa for the bagel—she won’t have time for lunch. But Rosa hovers as if she, too, expects the manifesto might blow up in Maxine’s hands. When Maxine asks her to shut the door on her way out, Rosa fixes her with a glare so stern Maxine wonders what Rosa suspects she intends to do in the privacy of her office.

  Never mind. She picks up the manifesto and finds where she left off. “Within a few decades,” the bomber writes, “with the increased use of robots, 3-D printers, manufactured housing, and an abundance of super-calorific foods, most people will be freed from want.” This might be fun, for a while, he says. But pleasure will give way to boredom. Whereas early humans needed to expend their energy to assure survival, those who live in the future will occupy their time with hobbies, video games, ultrareal pornography, a feigned interest in “literature” or “art,” and the frenzied acquisition of whatever possessions the advertising-entertainment complex convinces them to acquire. Already we need to invent reasons to move our bodies, “running” and “cycling” on tracks that accomplish nothing and get us nowhere.

  The artificial nature of most jobs can be demonstrated by the fact that few people would work if guaranteed the necessities. How many of us are born with a desire to study calculus? Scientists don’t pursue their experiments for the good of humankind. If they did, they wouldn’t devote their lives to perfecting weapons, or products whose manufacture spews carcinogens in the air, or pharmaceuticals that have more side effects than benefits.

  Nor can technological advances, once unleashed, be dismantled. Take the transportation system. In the old days, if a man wanted to get from here to there, he walked. The method was slow. But he didn’t need to work long hours at a job he loathed to buy a car. Everyone has been brainwashed into believing capitalism is a superior way of life. (“Holy robots! The world might fly off its orbit if the Japanese sell more cars than we do!”) Most scientists are egomaniacs, the bomber charges. They believe they can solve whatever problems their inventions create, even as they keep creating newer and deadlier problems.

  Maxine can’t help but feel accused. Plenty of scientists are egomaniacs. But not everyone needs to be coerced into studying physics or math, the way the bomber apparently was forced to do. Would Sam have sacrificed his life to conquer malaria if his altruism weren’t real? The world the bomber is trying to reconstruct sounds like one of those reality shows in which the contestants are left to survive a winter in Plimoth Village. Wouldn’t it be better to figure out how to use all that free time productively rather than force everyone to return to a miserably short existence in which they need to gather wood, draw water, hoe weeds, and fight off predators?

  She isn’t surprised to find herself arguing with the manifesto. That’s how academics spend their days. But she has the feeling she inscribed these same arguments in the margins of some student’s paper. She remembers shaking her head at the corniness of “Holy robots!” Unless that’s an expression every hacker uses? In her old office at the Residential College—an office she rarely visits—she has a stack of essays her students never bothered picking up. Maybe those essays can jog her memory. But she needs to teach her class, after which she needs to rush home, get her car, and drive to the nursing home to feed her mother.

  Then again, if the bomber is threatening to send another bomb, isn’t it her duty to find the time?

  The landline rings. Why does she think it’s the bomber calling?

  “Hello?” Maxine hears labored breathing. “Mom? Is that you?”

  “Something terrible,” her mother croaks, “has happened.”

  Even before the Parkinson’s slowed her voice, her mother spoke with the put-upon whine of a woman who believes she has been singled out for more than her fair share of punishment. The tone bothers Maxine, especially when she hears it creeping into her own voice when she complains to Rosa.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll be there for dinner. Nothing terrible is going to happen between now and five o’clock.”

  “The letter!” her mother says. “I put it in my drawer. And it isn’t there!”

  For decades, her mother has been carrying on a lawsuit a
gainst Maxine’s father’s former business associates. Not that her mother doesn’t have grounds to sue. Maxine’s father built his business from nothing, then died just as the rewards were coming in. His own father had peddled trinkets to the tourists at Saratoga Springs, so disheveled and inept that Maxine’s father had sneaked away and joined the army to escape the humiliation of being his son. Trained as a radar specialist, her father had returned from the war to discover his father trying to interest the housewives of upstate New York in frozen vegetables to stock the freezers just coming into vogue. After a few days helping schlep soggy bags of melting green beans door to door, her father decided the real money lay in selling the freezers and leaving the vegetables to A&P. He found a vacant store in a town north of Saratoga and used his GI loan to stock it with the latest refrigerators, washing machines, radios, toasters, and television sets. When these appliances began to break down, he added a repair shop. As his customers complained of the lousy reception they were getting on their new Motorolas, GEs, and RCAs, he borrowed several thousand dollars from a war buddy named Spider Macalvoy, whom he had hired to work in the appliance store and charm his customers, along with Drs. Simon and Vincent across the street. He used the borrowed funds to build towers on the mountains around town. Then he strung cables to his customers’ houses, charging them a monthly fee for the three major channels, plus a few they hadn’t been able to pick up before.

  At the time, Maxine had been too young to appreciate her father’s entrepreneurial genius. Inventing cable television made less of an impression than her father’s talent in repairing any machine a customer brought in to have fixed. She had been twelve when he died. How could she have known to caution her mother, addled by grief and her fear of poverty, that she shouldn’t accept the offer from her late husband’s partners to buy out his share for fifty-thousand dollars, an offer that seemed generous unless you knew that Leonard Sayers had been in the midst of negotiations to sell his cable television company to a conglomerate that eventually became Time Warner.