“I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I can’t go against the wishes of my faculty.” Although for all she knows, her faculty would readily accept a contract from whoever puts up the cash. She thinks of placating the provost with an overly optimistic report on the institute’s fundraiser. Maybe she should pitch her new focus on Immortality Studies. Then again, feeling the way she feels, she can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend a day longer than necessary on this planet.
Loneliness. That’s what they ought to be studying. The loneliness of a widow who has lost a beloved spouse. A parent who has lost a child. A child who has lost a parent. The loneliness of the adolescent white male who can’t measure up to his parents’ expectations, whose classmates bully him and beat him up, who is seething with desire but whose every encounter with the opposite sex is greeted by humiliation. All those geniuses in Silicon Valley keep inventing gadgets to distract themselves from their pain. They don bionic exoskeletons to show off their superhuman powers when what they really want is to avoid opening the clasp on their hearts and confronting whatever emotional snakes and shrapnel come bursting out.
That’s when she starts to shake. She might have been blown up. By her son. Or by the crazy terrorist to whom she introduced him.
Perpetua notices how distraught she is. “I’m sorry, Maxine. Ever since Sam’s death … I know you haven’t had the same energy. Maybe it would be better to disband the institute. You would still have your appointment at the Residential College. Everyone on your faculty would have his or her home department to return to.”
Even in her nauseated state, it occurs to her this isn’t true. “Not Mick. Mick doesn’t have any other appointments.”
Perpetua looks abashed. “But Professor Mickelthwaite just celebrated his seventieth-third birthday. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind accepting the very generous retirement package we would offer him. And I’m equally certain no one on your faculty would mind losing an office in that smelly old basement. We haven’t released the plans for the new Thomas and Betsy Winkelmann Center for Entrepreneurial Research, but we would be happy to set aside a floor for your institute, if only you reconsider changing your focus to the more entrepreneurial aspects of Future Studies.”
So that has been their strategy. If the university dragged its feet in getting rid of the mold, if they starved the institute of funding, then the faculty would give in and accept corporate contracts.
The outrage registers dully. All Maxine wants is to exit the office without vomiting on the hideous maize-and-blue rug.
She makes it to the door, then stops to say she does have one request. If the institute closes, might HR find a suitable new position for her chief administrative officer, Rosa Romanczuk?
Perpetua purses her lips. “That depends on her skill set.” She rattles off a list of spreadsheet formats and bookkeeping applications whose acronyms mean nothing to Maxine and will mean even less to Rosa. Maybe none of that matters. Mick must have savings socked away. He can pay the tuition for Rosa’s sons. He and Rosa will be able to devote their energy to looking after Mick’s granddaughter.
Maxine shakes her head. “Rosa’s skill set is of entirely different order. A skill set you seem to have no idea how to value.” Then she hurries past the receptionist, down the stairs, and across the Diag to the garage. She locates the Buick and tries to focus on guiding it down the ramp. As the gate swings open, she drives out without looking and nearly runs down a student. Motioning she is sorry, she drives across town and crosses the mist-shrouded Huron River to Sunrise Hills.
She signs in, then waits for the elevator. Across the hall, a troupe of elderly tai chi students move at a glacial rate, as if, by slowing their motion, they might stretch out the final few moments of their lives.
“Hello! Hello!” This from an old man sitting to one side of a potted plant. An aide in flowered scrubs waits behind him. At his feet lie matching pink suitcases. Tied to the armrest of his wheelchair is a yellow balloon printed with a giant smile. The old man—she needs a moment to place him as Arnold Schlechter’s father—beams up at her as if he expects her to pat him on his head and take him home.
“You’re my Arnie’s friend! From the university! Maxine, isn’t that your name? Today is the day! My Arnie is coming to get me! He said he wouldn’t be here until nine, but I am rather eager to be sprung from this chicken coop.” He looks up at the woman whose dark hands rest on his chair. “Not that I haven’t received the most excellent attention. Only, as they say, there is never any other place like home. Or rather, the home I am going to be making with my son and his darling family, who have been generous enough to take me in.”
“It’s so nice to see you again,” Maxine says, wishing the elevator would come. How can she face Arnold Schlechter, knowing the identity of the man who blinded him and refusing to divulge it to the FBI?
“Tell me,” the old man says. “You and my Arnie, you see each other socially? I know he isn’t an easy man to get along with. But he has always been good to me and, when she was living, to his mother.” He lifts one palsied finger and uses it to push up his owlish glasses, which are slipping off his nose. “I am his father. But even a father can see his child is something of a know-it-all. ‘Arnie,’ I used to say, ‘you know more than the other children. But just because you know more doesn’t mean you need to point out the other person’s ignorance.’” The elder Schlechter shakes his head. “If he has a lovely woman such as yourself as his friend, perhaps he has softened his edges? Perhaps you and your husband will join my son and his darling wife for dinner some evening?”
From the corner of her eye, she glimpses Schlechter and his wife step into the revolving door. “Of course!” she lies. “I hope to see you again—both of you—very soon!”
The elevator comes and Maxine escapes. On the fifth floor, she hurries past the residents in their wheelchairs.
“Maxine!”
She has passed her own mother without recognizing her.
“I knew you would be late.”
“Late? It’s only a few minutes past eight-thirty.”
“But I told you! They are in a different time zone in the basement!”
“All right, Mom. But this hasn’t been the best day of my life. Okay?” She signs her mother out. In the basement, she follows the arrows to the beauty salon. A tiny woman nearly as old as her mother, hair orange as a troll’s, waits beside a sink.
“Ah, there’s my girlfriend now!” the woman croons with an Irish lilt. She spins Maxine’s mother’s wheelchair so it backs up to the sink, twirls a black vinyl cape, and fastens it around her mother’s stringy neck. “I know how Miz Sayers here likes to get her hair done before any of the other women, because once they start coming in we do tend to fall a bit behind, don’t we, dear. And it isn’t comfortable for her, waiting in that chair. And all the hairspray isn’t easy on her breathing. So we have our own special arrangement. Don’t we, dearie. We call it a ten o’clock appointment, but I try to get here an hour early and finish Miz Sayers before my real ten o’clock lady comes down.” She tests the temperature of the spray against her wrist. “We have our own way of measuring time down here. A lady forgets her appointment and wanders down at the wrong hour, or even on the wrong day, and Theresa finds a way to squirrel her ladies in.” She squirts a thimbleful of shampoo in her palm, then rubs it across Maxine’s mother’s paper-thin scalp. She wets the downy hair. Works up a lather. Sprays away the soap. “There you go. That feels ever so nice, doesn’t it, dearie.”
Maxine’s mother lies with her head tilted back at an unnatural angle, eyes closed, cheeks sunken, mouth agape. This is what she will look like as a corpse. It hits Maxine: her mother will soon be dead. After that, she won’t see either of her parents, ever again. She never really cared about the future. She only wanted to bring about the Age of the Messiah because she imagined her father would be there, waiting at the Messiah’s
side.
The hairdresser shifts Maxine’s mother so she is sitting upright. Then the tiny woman picks up a blower so big she needs to use both hands to hold it; careful not to burn the tops of Maxine’s mother’s ears, she blows her hair dry. Pats the fluffy white curls. Covers her mother’s face with a cloth and sprays some hairspray.
“There you go!” She unfurls the cape. “Aren’t you the most beautiful lady at Sunrise Hills! A teenager would be proud to have such clear, smooth skin. Did you bring your makeup, dearie?”
With difficulty, Maxine’s mother retrieves a cloth bag from the side of her chair and takes out the mascara Maxine bought. She tips up her face, and the hairdresser strokes her lashes with the wand. The hairdresser uncaps a lipstick and twists the tube as Maxine’s mother makes a fish face. The hairdresser inks the bottom lip, then the top, then produces a tissue so her mother can kiss and blot it. “There!” The hairdresser holds up a mirror. “At our age, we all need a little help from Mr. Makeup. You look lovely, dearie. Not a day over seventy.”
And really, her mother does look much younger. Why is Maxine so stingy with her compliments? She kneels so their faces line up in the mirror—her mother’s face, gaunt and fair, Maxine’s own, squarer, like her father’s, her hair dark and straight like his. “She’s right. You do look pretty.”
Her mother crooks her head as if she can only now take in her daughter. “And you look terrible. What’s wrong? Is it Zach?”
Maxine gives the hairdresser a twenty-dollar tip, then wheels her mother to an alcove beside the laundry room. “You were right, Mom. That student? Thaddy? I should never have let Zach hang around with him. It’s my fault. Everything! It’s all my fault!”
“I was right?” Her mother seems stunned.
“I need to find Zach. Right away. And I haven’t got the slightest idea where to look.”
Her mother blinks. Her hands fly around her face. “He always did love that cabin. Sam’s cabin? On the lake?”
Of course! How could she not have thought of the cabin? When Zach was young, he used to cross off the days until their vacations there. He loved planning which toys to bring. Loved packing snacks for the road and deciding whether they should take the time to visit the Call of the Wild Museum in Gaylord, or the Mystery Spot in St. Ignace, or the colonial fort in Mackinaw City. One time, Zach played a role in a reenactment of the lacrosse game in which the Ojibwas fooled the British into opening the gates, at which the Ojibwa team captured the fort and massacred the invaders.
The ride took six or seven hours, depending on how often they stopped. Zach was always the first to spot the statue of Paul Bunyan—like many lumber towns, Manistique claimed to be Bunyan’s home, a boast Sam joked was mixed liberally with the excretions of Paul’s giant blue ox, Babe. Zach would turn up his nose at the cabin’s musty smell. Sam complained about having to unlock the shutters and turn on the pump. Maxine bitched about sweeping up all the dead flies and chasing the mice from the cabin’s closets. They debated whether the animal crackers from the summer before were edible, whether the porcupines truly would eat the rubber tires on the car if Zach forgot to go out before bedtime and sprinkle pepper. But these were the chores and arguments that marked them as a family, that reminded them who they were.
At the cabin, Sam turned off his hyperactive social conscience. The one store in Manistique didn’t carry The New York Times. The television wasn’t hooked up to any channels. When they felt sated with the beach, they might take a trip to Tahquamenon Falls or hike through the Hiawatha National Forest (Maxine had been astonished to learn Hiawatha was a real person, and Gitchee Gumee was the Ojibwa name for Lake Superior). Sam took Zach fishing for walleye, which they cooked on the beach; afterward, they would sit around the fire making ghostly sounds between their thumbs to see if any of the loons on the lake would answer. Every autumn, they drove up to see the leaves. They braved more than one blizzard so they could build a fire in the fireplace and sip hot chocolate made with the fudge they picked up in Mackinaw.
Where else would Zach have spent the winter? She remembers now—he had asked if she ever planned on going back, and she said no, she couldn’t bear to be up there without his father. She hasn’t received a bill from the electric company, but Zach might have switched the account to his own name and be paying it electronically. He could be using the wood stove for heat, and the kerosene lanterns for light. Still, it couldn’t have been easy, getting through the long, dark winter on his own. She imagines him growing a beard. Despite everything, the image makes her smile.
She stops smiling when she realizes he probably hasn’t been living there alone.
“Oh, Mom,” she says. “I need to drive up to Manistique right away!” If it were summer, she might call one of the other families on the lake and ask them to check if Zach is living there. But this early in the year, the place will be deserted. And she doesn’t want to alert the sheriff, not until she knows who might be hiding in that cabin.
Back on the fifth floor, she signs her mother in at the nurses’ station. “Do you want me to leave you here so you can have some company?”
“No!” her mother barks. “I hate sitting here with all these cabbages!”
After Maxine settles her mother in her room, she asks if there is anything she needs. Maxine hopes her mother will say, “Nothing, dear,” or “A glass of water.” In her mind, she already is driving north.
“You could look for the envelope from Cousin Joel.”
“I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I have to get up there right away. But the next time, I promise, I’ll turn this place upside down.”
Her mother nods. With the back of a crooked wrist, she rubs her eyes, smearing the mascara the hairdresser just applied. “Go!” her mother orders. “Neither of us could survive another tragedy.”
… Revisits Eden
Which is how she has come to be traveling to the Upper Peninsula in the middle of a foggy Tuesday in April. Not having slept more than an hour the night before. Driving the enormous mint-green Buick she inherited from her mother. Tempted, so very tempted, to take a nap.
She cranks open the window and focuses on crossing the beautiful five-mile bridge that, in her twenty-six years of living in Michigan, she has learned to pronounce as Mackinaw rather than Mackinack. Then exhaustion sets in again. Her body keeps trying to convince her mind everything will be fine if she closes her eyes. Just for a minute. Although some other part of that same brain is fully aware that dozing off, no matter for how short a time, will result in her careening off the highway into the nearly invisible forest that lies beyond.
No one but her mother knows where she is. If she dies—by driving off the road, or by pulling off on the narrow shoulder and getting plowed into by a semi—her friends will wrack their memories as to why she might have fled in the middle of a school week to drive to this charmless expanse of what is known in their state, and largely unknown in the rest of the country, as the Upper Peninsula. Thank God she is teaching only one course this term. Tomorrow is, what, Wednesday? She doesn’t need to teach again until Monday. Surely all this craziness will be settled by then.
She has another two hours’ drive to her family’s cabin, where she might or might not find her son. After that, she will need to drive straight back to Ann Arbor and visit the police, stinking the way she does, wearing the same sweat-stained silk blouse and wrinkled gray skirt she has been wearing since the day before, and tell them everything she knows, or thinks she knows, about the young man whose hatred of technology has resulted in so many maimings and deaths. And, if he carries through on this latest threat, will result in so many others. She will do this even if it means implicating her son in the madman’s crimes. And confessing her own role in helping to shape his ideology.
Is she being too hard on herself? Or not hard enough? She should have recognized that her student’s anger, his self-righteousness, might push him
toward violence. She was blinded by how much she liked him. How responsible she felt for helping him channel all that rage into more productive ways of staving off the catastrophe they both agreed was menacing humankind.
But she never should have introduced such a troubled young man to her son. Zach hadn’t needed an older brother. He needed her. And she had been too busy struggling to survive her husband’s death—putting food on the table, keeping up with her teaching and research, repairing the roof—to prevent her son from getting sucked into his own maelstrom of guilt and loss. She had been so obsessed with the future she blinded herself to the present. Well, she can see everything she has been ignoring catching up in her rearview mirror.
She passes a sign for Gaylord. She ought to pull off and call the authorities. Not the Ann Arbor police. What do they know except how to handle drunken fraternity parties and the occasional break-in on Main Street? What she needs to do is find the number for the FBI. Although whoever picks up the phone might dismiss her as yet another crank calling because she has read the manifesto and thinks she knows who wrote it. She needs to stop by their offices in person and show them the documents that support her claim. Once she emerges from this wilderness—and by “wilderness” she means the Land That Has No Wi-Fi—she can use her phone to google the bureau’s offices in Detroit. If she owned a later-model car she could pose this question to thin air and a pleasantly mechanical voice would tell her. One day, people will ask such questions of the computers implanted in their retinas. But Maxine will go to her grave arguing with her colleagues in AI and Robotics that the questions most worth asking will never be answered, in that way or any other.
Again, she fights the urge to close her eyes. If only she had a driverless car. Better yet: the ability to map her route on GPS, point and click and transport herself instantaneously from start to finish. Although if such technology had existed when Zach was young, he wouldn’t have grown up enjoying the family ritual of driving north.
The Professor of Immortality Page 13
