The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  And what about her and Sam, driving to the cabin that first time, all the way from Boston? After thirty-six hours in Sam’s trash-laden VW bug, they had stripped off their clothing and raced to the secluded beach, where they jumped in, shouting and splashing, and made love right there in the water. Sam had been insatiable in his desire. They made love on every surface that held their weight. Once, he spread her on the rickety table above the shore, as if she were a picnic. They even made love in the outhouse, Sam yanking down her shorts and kissing her as they inhaled the sweet, tangy stench of being human.

  After Sam died, she couldn’t bear the thought of going back. If not for Zach, she would have abandoned the cabin, left it to decay with everything they owned inside. The local teenagers would have broken in and gotten high. They would have made love on the saggy bed on which Sam had ravished her so many times. She would have deeded the property to her son. Maybe Zach would have sold it. Or spent vacations there with his family. If Zach ever had a family. But she would never again have driven up of her own volition.

  She pulls off at the diner where she and Sam used to stop because Zach loved the tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. “Why can’t you make grilled cheese with soft white bread like this, Mom?” he used to beg. “Why do you always use that dark, hard, crusty stuff?”

  In Zach’s honor, Maxine orders the grilled cheese and tomato soup, with three cups of burnt black coffee. She gets back on the road and turns on the radio. For a few minutes, she loses herself in an interview with a woman who recovered from her husband’s abuse by living on an isolated farm and writing poetry. But as the station fades, Maxine hears a staticky report about a professor at MIT who has been targeted by an exploding package. She twists the knob to turn up the volume. When the reporter says the victim’s name—Dr. Gordon Hertz—Maxine needs a moment to jog her memory. Yes, Dr. Hertz is the professor with whom Zach had a run-in freshman year. She remembers because it had seemed so appropriate that a professor at MIT should share his name with the discoverer of electromagnetic waves. The extent of Dr. Hertz’s injuries isn’t clear. But he is in critical condition at the same Boston hospital to which Sam transported Maxine when she broke her ankle.

  Two of the Buick’s tires skid off the shoulder. Maxine opens the door and throws up in a ditch. The sandwich. The tomato soup. The bile from three cups of coffee. Ten or twenty minutes go by before she feels well enough to drive. She pulls over at a convenience store and sits shivering beside a dog run. As a freshman, Zach signed up for a computer class, then balked at turning in the project his professor assigned because it was related to Hertz’s own attempt to develop more accurate systems of facial-recognition software. “I can’t do it, Mom,” Zach had pleaded with her on the phone. “If these guys have their way, we’ll end up living in a police state straight out of Orwell. The government will be able to keep track of everywhere we travel, everyone we meet, everything we use a credit card to buy.” Maxine had advised Zach to talk to his professor and ask if he couldn’t get assigned to some other project. But Hertz had only grown more adamant. Facial-recognition software would be a deterrent to crime, he claimed. A face, unlike a password, couldn’t be hacked. Zach had argued and argued until Hertz had demanded Zach leave his office. If Zach didn’t turn in his assignment, Hertz said, he would fail the class.

  Maxine offered to intervene, but Zach told her if she so much as picked up the phone he would never speak to her again. He accepted the failing grade, then went silent. Maxine had been afraid he would drop out altogether. But then, to her relief, Zach called to say he had enrolled in a course in solar engineering, and the professor—a great guy, really, one of the most innovative thinkers in the field—had invited Zach to spend the summer working at some solar research facility out West, on a reservation. Later, this professor agreed to take Zach on as his thesis student. At graduation, Zach seemed childishly excited to introduce her to this adviser, a heavyset Navajo almost as tall as Zach, with long black braids. She remembers Zach pointing to Professor Hertz and telling her that he was tempted to go over and give the man a piece of his mind, not only for continuing to work on a system that could be put to such nefarious use but for trying to bully an undergraduate into being an accomplice to his crime. Could Zach still harbor a grudge? She tries to convince herself Thaddy acted on his own, choosing his latest target based on some grievance Zach expressed to him years before. She feels sick she didn’t notify the FBI the minute she suspected Thaddy. The agents wouldn’t have had time to stop him. But she would have done everything in her power to prevent this bombing.

  Back on the highway, she drives as fast as she dares. Spring has arrived early in Ann Arbor, but this far north the countryside is still a dull yellowish brown. Summers are so short here little can grow except potatoes. Most of the mines have closed. The landscape exerts a harsh, windswept charm. But even if you enjoy hunting, ice fishing, and riding your snowmobile, it can’t be easy getting through the bleak winter nights, when there is little to do except drink and watch TV.

  Then, suddenly, she is on the outskirts of Manistique. When she and Sam started coming here, the only motel was the Gray Wolf Lodge. Now she notes a Quality Inn, a Comfort Inn, an Econo Lodge. She passes the ranger station. Foodmart. Hardee’s. Burger King. Pizza Hut. Do Zach and Thaddy, tired of getting by on whatever food they manage to scrounge, come to town to split a pizza? Or would that violate some code of Thaddy’s? The road crosses the mouth of the Manistique River, then rounds a sharp curve. And there he is, towering above the information booth, handsome in his flannel shirt and massive boots, axe cradled across his arms—Paul Bunyan.

  She turns off onto Little Harbor Road. The sun is low. Mist rises from the lake. The pine trees seem grateful to have survived the winter. With the engine off, she can hear the waves lapping the shore. Even here, the air is bizarrely tropical. The rear of the cabin is a soft, weathered gray, the roof so mossy it blends with its surroundings. She steps to the side of the house, where Sam’s old VW bug—not the one he drove at MIT, but two VWs after that—has been pulled beneath the trees, as if to camouflage it from anyone who might drive past or fly over it in a helicopter. Someone has been digging a garden in the flat expanse of land above the septic system. A shovel stands jabbed in the newly turned soil.

  A scream travels up from the lake. Too high-pitched to be her son’s.

  Too late. Neither of the people who appear between the trees is wearing clothes. She hasn’t seen her son naked since he was ten. She should look away. But she finds she can’t. Zach is thin to the point of emaciation. But he is as muscular as a god compared to the much frailer, shorter woman clinging to his side. She holds her wrist at an awkward angle. She walks at an ungainly pace, Zach matching his gait to hers.

  As a scientist, Maxine isn’t given to literary allusions. But she can’t help but be reminded of the first woman and man on earth. Not yet aged or weighed down by sorrow. Still thrilled by each other’s bodies. Not yet tired of repeating the act to which they were introduced by eating the forbidden fruit. A sequence of events she is able to deduce by noting this Eve is pregnant, too.

  … Learns about a Lie

  “Oh, shit,” Zach says. “Mom! No. No. Get out of here!”By then she has turned away, holding her palm behind her. “I’m sorry! I’ll wait in the car! Go, get some clothes on.”

  As embarrassed as she is, as soon as she is out of sight she crumples to the rutted road and offers a prayer of gratitude. Because even though her son is guilty of being caught naked with this woman, his sins don’t seem to be the sins of someone who raised his hand to his fellow man. His sins are the sins of Adam, not Cain.

  “Mom! You can come back now.”

  When she returns to the clearing, Zach is zipping his jeans. But he is still shirtless. Thin as he is, his arms seem extremely powerful. He must have spent the winter chopping wood. But that doesn’t explain why he is standing so much straighter. Why
he seems so much prouder and happier to be alive. He pulls on a threadbare BOYCOTT GRAPES T-shirt he must have snagged from his father’s drawer and kept as a memento.

  The woman—head bent, long wet hair hiding her face—pulls on an ankle-length flowered skirt that stretches to contain her belly. (A boy. That’s what Maxine’s mother would predict. If Angelina were carrying a girl, the bump would be lower.) She struggles to button her swollen breasts into a blue cardigan Maxine recognizes as a Hanukah gift she bought Zach his first winter at MIT. Buttons buttoned, the girl lifts her head. How could Maxine have thought Zach was dating her only to prove he is above the prejudice most men would have against dating someone handicapped? Or because he eroticized her disability? She is a beautiful woman. Gentle. Kind. Of course he loves her.

  “She’s freezing, Zach.” Maxine wants to put her arms around the girl and rub her. “What were you thinking, letting her go in the lake!”

  Zach frowns. “Letting her? We got so hot digging the garden, we dared each other to jump in.”

  Angelina hobbles to the tree where she leaned her braces; like a fencer arming herself for a joust, she slips each forearm into a cuff. “It’s very nice to see you again,” she tells Maxine, holding out her hand, which, when Maxine takes it, turns out to be very cold, from the lake. Maxine wants to tell Angelina she is happy to see her, too. But she still is too confused to know if she is or isn’t.

  At the cabin’s threshold, Maxine hesitates. But the one-room interior doesn’t smell as musty as she expected it would smell. For one thing, the cabin hasn’t been locked up all winter. The smoky scent of the stove permeates the braided wool rugs and ratty tweed sofa, with the added scent of what must be a woman’s shampoo or soap. Zach puts on the kettle for tea, then brings out a tin of brownies Angelina baked.

  “I’m glad they didn’t burn,” she tells Maxine. “I needed a month to get used to cooking on a stove that has no settings.”

  Maxine is so ravenous and the taste of the brownie so chocolatey and rich she wishes she could pretend the occasion is nothing more than a mother meeting her son’s girlfriend and complimenting her on her baking skills.

  “It was Norm, wasn’t it,” Zach says.

  “Norm? No. Norm said he didn’t know where you were. He said … Are you serious? Norm knew the whole time?”

  “Mom,” Zach says, “guys don’t rat each other out. They just don’t.”

  Even now, she wants to demand Zach divulge the name of whoever set fire to that pirate ship. “Your grandmother figured it out.”

  “Grandmom?”

  Maxine shrugs, unwilling to admit her mother knows her son better than she does. The water in the kettle boils. She is afraid Zach will serve her tea made from dried grass or weeds from the lake, but the tag on the bag says Lipton.

  “It’s just …” Zach says. “When Angie told me she was pregnant, I knew you wouldn’t approve.”

  Of course. The one truly insensitive remark Maxine ever made. She had apologized and apologized. But still, how could Zach forget? “You’ve been seeing each other this whole time? Since high school?” It occurs to her Zach must have told Angelina what she said.

  “Not the whole time,” Zach says. “When I decided to move to the West Coast, we had a huge fight. Except I really missed Angie. I came home for a few days. We had, well, a nice reunion. Then I went home to California.”

  “I never would have made him come back,” Angelina interrupts. “You have to understand. I am not the kind of woman who tries to trap a man. But when I didn’t get, you know, my monthly?”

  “We were really surprised,” Zach says. “It’s not as if … We’re not idiots, Mom.”

  “I needed to tell Zach,” Angelina says. “I felt it was his right to know.”

  “I appreciate that,” Maxine says. “But couldn’t you have told me, too? I’m not …” She wants to say “judgmental.” But she did judge Angelina. Without ever really knowing her.

  “If we decided not to keep the pregnancy, Angie’s parents would have had a fit. And if we did keep it, there was no way they weren’t going to expect us to get married. So I had the brainstorm of spending a month up here to see how well we got along and figure out what to do.”

  “You quit your job?” Maxine says.

  “I didn’t want him to,” Angelina says. “Professor Sayers, this was Zach’s decision. The part about quitting his job and coming here.”

  “I hated it.” Zach’s face goes rigid, the way it used to when he was arguing with his father. “I hated the whole Silicon Valley start-up thing. Everybody acting so pleased with themselves. All they’re trying to do is make a killing and retire at thirty and spend the rest of their lives playing with their toys.” If people really wanted to head off global warming, Zach said, we could switch to solar and wind tomorrow. Did Maxine know how much energy those tech companies soaked up with their servers? His father was right. What you really wanted to do was use the cheapest, simplest technology to make people’s lives better. Basic stuff. Like clean water. Cooking fuel. Low-tech medical care. High-energy, super-efficient stoves that didn’t explode.

  As if to practice what he has just preached, Zach gets up and strikes a match—all these years since he threatened to set fire to that bully and he still needs three tries—and uses it to light a lamp. The scruff on his cheeks makes him seem older and more masculine than the last time she saw him, in Ann Arbor. Where she saw him overlaid by the reflections of the child he used to be.

  “I guess this means …” Maxine glances at Angelina’s belly.

  Angelina smiles shyly. “When we tell my mother, we can lie and say she’s the first to know. Otherwise, she would be very hurt.”

  “We haven’t set a date,” Zach says. “But, yeah, we’re going to get married.”

  “Married!” She wants to tell them how happy she is. For both of them. And she is happy. All those years she worried Zach would end up like so many angry, politically extreme young men. Worried he would end up like Thaddy. But here he is engaged to a warm, intelligent, sensible, good-hearted woman. If only Sam were here to witness what she is witnessing. If only she could tell her father.

  But she is sick at the prospect of ruining their joy with everything she has to tell them. It’s all she can do not to keep the news about Thaddy to herself. To share a meal with her son and future daughter-in-law, catch a few hours of sleep on the sofa, then head back to Ann Arbor without revealing what she knows.

  “Are you going to stay up here all year?” she asks. “You can’t grow everything you need to eat. And you’ll need health insurance. You can’t have a baby and not have health insurance.”

  In half an hour she has gone from puking with fear that her son will get shot by government agents to nagging him about health insurance. Two years earlier, when she helped Zach load his VW for California, she numbed him with reminders to drive carefully, to make sure to change the oil and rotate the tires, to find a dentist and get his teeth checked, to sign up for the retirement package at his job and start socking away the maximum the plan allowed. Wasn’t that what mothers were for? If you had a kid who went on a hunger strike, how could you help but hope he grew up to be a normally selfish adult who got a job and met a nice young woman and settled down to lead a normally selfish life? But when he did, how could you not be disappointed he was going to waste his life tending to the minutiae of middle-class existence?

  Zach scowls his familiar scowl. “We only intended to stay up here until we figured out what to do. To save our money. Figure out the next step.” He looks at Angelina, as if seeking permission to reveal what that next step might be. From now on, Maxine realizes, this will be the woman whose approval her son will seek.

  Angelina nods, and the two of them launch into a description of a scheme in which they will find the money to buy a derelict building in Detroit. The soil has been so badly
contaminated by the incinerator that has been belching soot across the city for decades they will need to gut and refit the structure with hydroponic tanks in which to grow spinach, arugula, wheatgrass, basil, and, yes, kale, to sell to local restaurants and farmers’ markets. They plan to install solar panels on the roof and a geothermal heating system in the basement. If they can do so economically, they will also raise shrimp and culture mushrooms. They are hiring Norm to help them rehab the building. After that, Norm will start his own business, designing and building urban playscapes from scavenged wood and other recycled materials. Eventually, they will rent their leftover space to bakers, brewers, and makers of artisan cheese.

  “We’ll be like … urban pioneers,” Zach says, as if they will be breaking sod on a virgin prairie instead of moving into a city already inhabited by hundreds of thousands of long-time residents. Is Detroit’s future to be turned back to farmland? Will people who once earned their living manufacturing automobiles, airplanes, tanks, and tires settle for herding sheep and raising kale? If anyone else were relating such a plan, Maxine would dismiss it as well-intentioned foolishness. But how can she not respect her son for giving up a six-figure salary so he can move to a falling-down factory in Detroit and raise fresh produce in a city where there isn’t a single decent grocery store for miles? Why should she discourage him from a plan that will ensure that he and her future grandchild live less than an hour from Ann Arbor?

  She expresses as much enthusiasm as she can muster. But she can’t help asking if Angelina has seen a doctor. Has she gotten her blood pressure checked? Has anyone done an ultrasound? Are they sure she is eating properly?

  “Mom!” Zach says. “Do you really think I would let the mother of my baby starve?” Angelina has visited a clinic in Mackinaw City. She takes iron pills and vitamins. They eat plenty of nutritious food. Zach’s savings are running low—that’s why he asked Norm to send those savings bonds—but he and Angelina can last the summer, especially with eggs from the chickens they recently bought and vegetables they will be planting in their garden.