The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  She looks at Greenglass for a clue, but his face betrays nothing. Greenglass is probably furious at Zach for lying to him. For allowing him to be bushwhacked by his client in the presence of the FBI. Will Greenglass give up on them? This can’t be the first time a client hasn’t told him the entire truth. But if Greenglass washes his hands of them, who will she find to represent her son, now that he truly needs representing?

  “Are you arresting him?” she says. Crazily, she tries to come up with a way to implicate herself. To get thrown in prison instead of her son, or with him. “Are you keeping him for further questioning?”

  Shauntz clears his throat. Their eyes meet. She refuses to turn away.

  “No,” he says. “I’m trusting my instincts here. Your son seems to have a propensity to … well, you’re his mother. There’s nothing I can tell you about your son you don’t already know.”

  Does she? Know her son? Does any mother? He has a propensity to do what? Lie? Run away? Maybe what he has is a propensity to run towards. Where others sit and talk about the injustices of the world, her son rushes off to right them. And yes, he lies. But is that so unusual for a boy his age? Except, at twenty-four, he no longer is a boy. Maybe she is deluded, but she can’t help thinking he is lying to protect her. To protect Thaddy. To protect everyone but himself.

  “I’m not sure I can trust your son,” Shauntz says. “But I am going to trust you. To not let him run off. Or lie to us. Again. Or hide what he knows.”

  She nods. She says she promises.

  And, strangely, that’s all it takes. Greenglass looks at Shauntz. Shauntz nods. All four of them, including Burdock, get to their feet. Shauntz accompanies Maxine to the waiting room and repeats what Greenglass told her earlier: stay in town; remain available; no talking to the press; no talking to anyone except your lawyer. He tells her that his agents will be keeping an eye on her house. Greenglass is deciding whether the FBI can tap her phone, screen her mail, monitor her and Zach’s use of the Internet, or whether he will require the government to obtain a warrant.

  “Oh,” Shauntz says. “One more thing.” He lowers his voice, although Greenglass no doubt can hear him. “You may want to kill your son but please don’t. We need him. I’m sorry if we were more aggressive in our interactions than we needed to be. We are very appreciative that you and your son have come forward. I’ll be in touch. One way or the other.”

  He lifts his meaty hand and salutes her in a gesture she finds corny and endearing. Just before she follows Greenglass to the lobby, where, she has been told, Zach will be waiting, she turns and sees Shauntz lift one corner of his mouth, wink, and make that clucking sound detectives like Humphrey Bogart used to make to signal to a dame they liked her. What she doesn’t know, not actually being gifted with the ability to predict the future, is this will be the last time she sees Supervisory Special Agent Roland Shauntz, and from now on, every time she thinks of him, which will happen at least once a day for the remainder of her life, she will remember that wink, and again hear him make that ridiculous clucking sound with his mouth.

  … Looks in a Place She Already Looked

  When she sees her son, she runs across the lobby. But instead of embracing him, she hits him. Hard. With her fist. So hard his sternum gives beneath her knuckles. She hurts her fist worse than she hurts his chest, but she hits him again, harder, on his arm. Then with both fists, pummeling him wherever she can reach. She has never hit her son. Would have hurled herself at anyone who tried to hurt him, no matter how threatening the attacker. Given the difference in their height and weight, she could hit Zach with as much force as she could muster and he would barely flinch. But she wishes she could summon the strength to make him crumple to the ground and beg forgiveness. For lying. For disappearing. For putting her through the nauseating fear to which he has subjected her.

  He follows her to the car. On the ride home, he sits quietly, knees propped against the glove box. In the old days, after Sam died, this was the only way she could get him to talk. The two of them making the sad, lonely pilgrimage to see Zach’s grandmother in Chicago. Something about sitting side by side, staring straight ahead instead of at each other, relieved the stress of talking about his feelings.

  She no longer feels guilty that she betrayed him by thinking he was more implicated than he let on. But she feels even guiltier for preferring her innocence to his guilt. He might be sent to prison for lying to the FBI. Or withholding evidence. Or even—she can’t bear to say the phrase—being an “accessory to the crime.” How could she have paid so little attention to all the warning signs? What was so wrong with her that her son couldn’t confide he wanted to drop out of college? What did he accuse her of at the cabin? That she and Sam wanted him to care, but not care too much? That they had trained him to change the world, but without incurring the slightest risk to himself or others? Maybe she had neglected him after his father’s death. And then, to overcompensate, she had become too intrusive, too protective. Or maybe Zach had been overly protective of her. Maybe he had tried to spare his grieving, overworked, widowed mother his own troubles, his own confusion.

  Or maybe none of this was her fault. Mothers never knew their sons. But they took the blame for whatever went wrong in their children’s lives.

  “I hated it,” Zach says. “That whole first year. I hated everything about MIT.”

  She keeps driving. Waits for Zach to tell her about the summer he spent with Thaddy. Although how can she believe what he is telling her, even now?

  “You have no idea how many arrogant assholes they can pack into a place like that. So many of my professors were working on weapons for the military. And yeah, Professor Hertz and his fucking facial-recognition software.

  “And the sexism! You wouldn’t believe what they said about women, especially when the women weren’t there. Let alone how they treated them. I hated my dorm—it was like living in a concrete bunker. The buildings had numbers instead of names. All anyone cared about was plotting these elaborate stupid pranks.

  “And Thaddy … he kept writing me about how scientists were egotistical jerks who were ruining the planet. Ruining the way we lived. Millions and millions of people were going to die. Entire countries—poor countries no one gave a fuck about—were going to be underwater. The ice caps were melting. And no one was doing a damn thing about any of it. If you believe—if you know—millions of your fellow humans are going to die, if entire species are going to go extinct, aren’t you obliged to act?

  “And the way Thaddy described this idyllic life he was living in Montana, I wanted to drop out right then, in the middle of the semester. But how could I tell you? I knew how much you and Dad loved MIT. That’s where you guys met. All those stories about the smoots … I just had to get away. And I didn’t want to spend the summer sitting around Ann Arbor playing video games with Norm.

  “So I cut out. One of the guys from my dorm was driving cross-country and said he’d drop me off near Helena. I made up some random shit about Professor Begay offering me that internship. I barely knew Curt. I’d taken a class with him, and he seemed great. You know, this Navajo guy with long hair, up there on the stage in a floppy hat and beads? But it was this huge lecture course. I barely got up the nerve to go up after class and ask a question. I told you whatever popped in my head. He did have this solar project he’d started on the reservation. Maybe I told you what I wished could be true, that he’d picked me to be his intern. I packed a duffel bag. I stowed the rest of my stuff in some basement at the dorm. I didn’t have the guts to drop out. Not officially. I just left.

  “Which was a good thing, because the minute I got there, I knew I’d fucked up. The minute I saw Thaddy on that bike … I don’t think any two parts came from the same machine. He must have thought I had piles of money, because he kept asking me to buy all this stuff he needed. Groceries. Hardware. I got the feeling he invited me out there so he could use me
as a sort of moneybags.

  “And that cabin! It was clean enough. Thaddy was obsessive about being neat. But it was barely big enough to fit one person, let alone two. Thaddy put a sleeping bag on the floor for me, but it smelled all moldy, and mice kept running over me all night. There was a stream nearby, and he piped water so you could take a shower from these bottles hanging in the trees, but the two of us got plenty stale. And there wasn’t an outhouse. Thaddy would save his shit and use it to fertilize the garden, which didn’t make me want to eat those vegetables.

  “Some of it, I admit, was pretty neat. Like I was Huck Finn and Thaddy was … not Jim, some older guy who was teaching me to survive on my own. How to catch fish and lay out traps. I wasn’t big on shooting and gutting deer, but at least we weren’t eating meat from some huge industrial cow-factory. And one whole wall of the cabin was books. It could have been a great summer, Mom. Hanging out in Montana, reading Nietzsche and Camus and books on Roman history.

  “You know how smart he is, Mom. And Thaddy could be nice. If he wanted to be. He listened. He seemed to care. He sure went through a lot worse than I did, at Harvard. Did he ever tell you about that experiment? The one where he was a guinea pig? God, if I had been through shit like that, I might be a bomber, too.

  “But Thaddy was even more arrogant than my professors. With Thaddy, everything was either right or it was wrong, and only he knew which was which. He talked big, but most of what he did seemed, I don’t know, kid-like. Petty. He was angry at all the military jets flying over the wilderness, making so much noise. But shooting at them? What was that going to accomplish? We used to sneak around and slash tires on ATVs, put sugar in the tourists’ gas tanks, bury the loggers’ chainsaws. How was that going to change anyone’s mind about the direction civilization was going?

  “And you and Dad … he couldn’t stop talking about how fucked up you both were. How everything you taught me was crap. His own parents, he blamed them for everything. Okay, they pushed him to do well in school. To be a ‘good boy.’ But lots of parents treat their kids that way. I can’t figure out why he had it in for you and Dad. I mean Dad, okay, he was bringing technology to the masses. But you? What did you ever do to him except be really, really kind?”

  Zach turns to look at her, and even though she is driving, she looks back. His eyes are clouded by the frustration she saw when he was a little boy who couldn’t find the words to express his sadness. Will she ever tell him how badly she failed Thaddy? How Thaddy had come to her at his most desperate and she had been too timid, too preoccupied, to get him the help he needed?

  Eventually. Not now. That her son spent six weeks living with Thaddy, listening to him rant against her and Sam, so infuriates her that she finds herself taking satisfaction in the image of the police leading Thaddy away in handcuffs. Or maybe it’s her son who is being led away.

  “You lied to me,” she says. “Over and over.” What did Shauntz tell her? Most teenage boys lie to their mothers? But not about things like this. If she didn’t need to keep her hands on the steering wheel, she would hit him again.

  “Okay,” he says. “I lied. Out of, I don’t know, sheer instinct. To protect my friend. He might be fucked up, but he’s my friend. Or he was my friend. I lied because I’m about to become a father and I didn’t want to spend the first who-knows-how-many years of my kid’s life in prison. To leave Angie alone with a mess like that. I guess you did what you needed to do. But you didn’t trust me, Mom. You didn’t trust me to take care of what needed to be taken care of. You turned me in. To the FBI. You blew up my life. You blew it all the fuck up.”

  No, she thinks. She is not about to let him sidetrack her. Not again. “You knew,” she says. “You knew what Thaddy was doing in that cabin.” The sun, setting to the west, spears her in the eyes. “You knew,” she says. “How could you live there and not know?”

  Zach seems to crumple in his seat. His anger dissipates. “It took me a long time,” he admits. “A guy keeps a few extra batteries around his cabin, so what. But not as many as Thaddy was stockpiling. A few extra boxes of matches, okay. But whole cartons? Whole crates of wires and switches, even though the cabin isn’t hooked up for electricity? And why keep your notebooks in code? Why put three locks on the door when there isn’t a single thing worth stealing? Then I found these weird shoes—they had an extra pair of soles taped to the bottom, I guess so he could leave a different set of footprints from the real ones. And he had, I don’t know, disguises?

  “I knew he was guilty of something. But I hadn’t followed much about the bombings. And Thaddy could be such a great guy. There was this old couple who lived next door. Well, not next door, but a few miles down the road. Thaddy used to play pinochle with the husband, but then the old guy died, and Thaddy and I would take potatoes and turnips to the widow. And this other woman? She lived in town. She was Thaddy’s age. Thaddy tutored her son in math. And Jesus, Mom, his neighbors seemed a whole lot more dangerous than Thaddy did.”

  “Neighbors?” she says. “Thaddy had neighbors?”

  “Not like you have in Burns Park. But he wasn’t a hermit. Or maybe it was just that there were a lot of other hermits in the same woods. Militia types. Survivalists. KKK types. Vietnam vets. Ex-hippies. And you’d be surprised, all these mansions are going up there. Thaddy hated those the most. The bankers. The movie stars. The loggers. I figured he was planning to do worse than slash someone’s tires. But bombs? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to get him arrested on some stupid hunch. Now I have everything on my conscience. Not the ones he hurt before I got out there. But after? I could have stopped him. Especially Hertz. Thaddy probably only mailed that bomb to Hertz to show me we were still on the same side. To get back at this professor he thought I hated. How am I going to live with any of that? How? How am I going to live with any of that on my conscience?”

  He leans forward, pounds his forehead with his fists. Seeing him hit himself brings back her maternal instincts. But she is still so angry she resists the urge to comfort him.

  By now, they are back in Ann Arbor. Zach goes upstairs to tell Angelina about his inquisition at FBI headquarters. Does Angelina know about the summer Zach spent with Thaddy? Does he tell the truth to her? Given they spent an entire winter cooped up in that cabin, he probably told Angelina more than he told Maxine. And yet, Angelina has such a strong moral compass, if Zach told her he suspected Thaddy of building bombs, surely she would have convinced him to tell the authorities what he knew. Is Maxine fooling herself to think her son loves her? To believe he wasn’t involved in Thaddy’s acts of terrorism? Did Zach really do no worse than slash tires or put sugar in gas tanks, which she once would have considered bad enough?

  Angelina and Zach are upstairs a long time; clearly, there is much Zach feels the need to tell her. Maxine finds a can of tuna in the cupboard but worries the mercury might poison the fetus. She salvages a few leaves of spinach, mushrooms, a slice of Swiss cheese, and makes yet another omelet, which she and Zach only pick at but Angelina devours in ravenous bites. Maxine brews tea and they take their cups to the living room to watch the news. It’s too soon for the FBI to have acted on the information she and Zach provided, but she dreads seeing a video of her former student stepping from his wretched cabin. Aged now. Bedraggled. Hands above his head as he surrenders.

  The anchor signs off. But Thaddy’s reprieve is only temporary. He will get into bed not knowing this might be his last good night of sleep. Quick! she wants to warn him. Get out of that bed and run!

  At nine, she leaves Zach and Angelina on the sofa and climbs the stairs. There is no one she can call. She is not willing to confess, even to Rosa, that her son spent six weeks in a terrorist’s cabin and failed to turn him in. The government has taken her computer so she uses her phone to check her email. Are the agents monitoring what she writes? She answers a few of her students’ messages. Tomorrow is Friday. She ought to be able to focus enou
gh to teach on Monday. She has never missed a class, not even when she gave birth to Zach.

  She gets into bed and turns on the radio. Listening to the same news being broadcast over and over—the same weather report, the same interview with the conductor of the local symphony—acts as a soporific. When she awakes, she assumes Zach and Angelina will still be sleeping. But there they are, bleary-eyed, in their clothes from the night before. Did they ever go to bed? Did they have a fight? Angelina seems unusually detached—she is staring out at the trampoline in a neighbor’s yard while Zach sits in an armchair, studying her back.

  Maxine tiptoes past them, makes regular coffee for herself and Zach and decaf for Angelina. After breakfast, Zach suddenly recalls he has a grandmother.

  “You’d better prepare yourself,” Maxine warns him. “She’s taken a real nosedive since the last time you saw her.” She regrets having twisted the knife. But why are young people so concerned with showering kindness on everyone except those who love them?

  “Do you think she’ll be okay about …” Zach gestures toward Angelina, who is still staring out the window.

  Maxine shrugs. “She didn’t make a fuss when I married someone who wasn’t Jewish.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Ever since I was in, like, seventh grade, she’s given me lectures about not ruining my future by getting some girl pregnant. I thought she was nuts. Like any girl would want to have sex with me.”

  Maxine doesn’t have the heart to say his grandmother might not have the strength to express her displeasure. Besides, if he is old enough to be a father, he is old enough not to cringe in fear of his grandmother’s lecture on responsibility.

  An hour later, they pull up to Sunrise Hills. Maxine signs the logbook. But as they head to the elevator, the guard summons them back.