by Jake Wolff
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Lesley
One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
It is impossible for a thinking being to imagine his own nonexistence; in this way, every man carries the proof of immortality inside himself.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
—Miss Alabama, 1994
Author’s Note
In the late 1970s, the first edition of a Woman’s Day cookbook shipped with an error: its recipe for custard instructed readers to place a sealed can of condensed milk into a Crock-Pot for four hours. Chemists, anarchists, and experienced chefs will immediately see the problem—long before those four hours elapse, the can will explode, raining Crock-Pot shrapnel throughout the home kitchen.
The novel you are about to read is not a cookbook but a work of fiction. Still, you will find within its pages a number of recipes, all of which seem to promise great benefits to your health and well-being. To repeat: this is a work of fiction. Every recipe in this book, if ingested, will kill you. Every single one.
In this case, that old cliché proves useful: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. And even when it comes to actual cookbooks, maybe wait for the second edition.
Yours in longevity,
Jake Wolff
Notable Moments in Self-Experimentation
1727
Isaac Newton drinks mercury (the taste: “strong, sourish, ungrateful”) while searching for the philosopher’s stone. Dies of mercury poisoning.
1801
Johann Ritter, the first to identify ultraviolet radiation, tests the effect of electricity on every part of his body, including the eyes and genitals. Dies young, his body ravaged.
1885
Daniel Alcides Carrión, a medical student, injects himself with the pus of verruga peruana to investigate the cause of the illness. Dies of the disease.
1924
Dr. Alexander Bogdanov undergoes nearly a dozen blood transfusions over several years, claiming to have cured his baldness and reduced the physical symptoms of aging. Dies of malaria contracted via transfusion.
1929
Dr. Werner Forssmann performs cardiac catheterization—the first in humans—on himself. Wins Nobel Prize.
1936
Proctologist Edwin Katskee takes cocaine and attempts to record his clinical reaction. Dies of overdose.
1984
Dr. Barry Marshall drinks a broth containing the bacterium Helicobacter pylori to prove its role in gastritis. Wins Nobel Prize.
2011
Ralph Steinman uses dendritic cells, which he discovered decades prior, to develop experimental treatments for his own pancreatic cancer. Dies of cancer, wins Nobel Prize.
Prologue
At 4:00 a.m. on the first day of my senior year, my chemistry teacher overdosed in the parking lot behind United Methodist. He was known by his students as Mr. Tampari, but that summer, to me, he had become something different: Sammy, my first love.
He died in early September—Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year. A month before that, my father collapsed in the produce section at Shop ’n Save after his liver shut off and turned copper-hard like an old penny. He pitched face forward into the avocado display, his skin a similar shade of sullen green. Avocados everywhere. You could judge their ripeness by the sound they made as they struck the checkerboard floor. My dad survived the fall, but he was unlikely, the doctors told us, to survive the winter.
The day before Sammy’s death, I asked him how I had earned such rotten luck. I’d lost my mother to a house fire when I was ten years old, so if my dad died, I’d truly be an orphan. Sammy and I were scientists, and he offered me a cold kind of comfort—the statistics. Every two minutes someone dies of liver failure. Every three days someone dies in a fire caused by a cigarette. More people die by overdose, every year, than were killed in the Vietnam War. You look at those numbers and you think, how is anyone alive?
When I turned twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, I imagined myself growing into Sammy, the way a child grows into a new pair of shoes. When I’m his age, I thought, I’ll know exactly why he did what he did. But Sammy died at thirty, I’ve just turned forty, and I have long stopped believing that answers come with age.
Still, I find myself hoping that if I tell his story, and mine, I’ll discover something that explains our relationship and the ways it changed us both. When I first slept with Sammy, I believed it was the most reckless thing I’d ever do. I assumed he felt the same. Only later did I realize I was part of a much longer, larger experiment—chemical, alchemical, psychological—that would transform me into someone new. Someone who would investigate Sammy’s death despite warnings from the police, who would build a functioning chem lab in a roadside motel, who would administer a home-brewed immortality potion to a dying man strapped to a dentist’s chair. All by the end of the year.
But I want to go back to that morning, the first day of my senior year, as I stood love-blind in the shower, dreaming of Sammy. Look at me, back then: lean and mean, happy and guilty. A boy with a secret. I was sixteen and ready for anything.
1
A Contradiction of Sandpipers
My cousin Emmett pounded on the bathroom door. He was two years older than me and knocked like a man, with the side of his fist: thud, thud, thud.
“Conrad!” he yelled. “It’s time to go.”
I’d come to Littlefield, Maine, at the beginning of middle school, after my mother died and my dad drove his car into a tanning salon. He’d blown a 0.12 and made the local news, and since then I’d lived with my aunt. When I first moved in, I had expected Emmett to resent me for a million reasons—here I was, occupying his house, sapping his parents’ attention, barging into his grade despite being two years younger. But right away he’d seen the benefits. He asked me for feedback on his drawings and stories, and I helped him pass his tougher classes, which conveniently were my strongest: chemistry, bio—basically anything in a lab.
As I opened the door, he was already walking away. “Your dad is here,” he said. “I’ll be in the car.”
I tried to hurry, but I also needed to look my best. Sammy and I had somehow gone the whole summer without discussing this day—the day we’d return to school, student and teacher, knowing what we’d done. “You’re sexy,” he once said to me, and it made my heart beat so fast that I had to sit on the edge of his bed while he laid a cold washcloth over my neck. Would he still feel that way when he saw me squeezed into one of those stupid writing desks with my three-subject notebook and my five-color pen? I studied my face in the mirror, disappointed to find only my usual self: handsome enough but goofy looking, like a sidekick. My tawny eyes were too small to be pretty, my Jewish curls always too long or too short. I dyed those curls blond for one week in middle school, and my civics teacher told me I looked like Art Garfunkel. Although I hated to admit it, I saw my father in the mirror, too. When I was little, my mother would say, “You have your dad’s nose,�
�� and my father would grab his face, panicked. “Give it back!” he’d cry.
I found my dad in the kitchen working on a bowl of Froot Loops. He’d shaved his beard and looked so much like my grandfather he might as well as have been wearing a Halloween mask. His skin hung loose on his face.
“Why are you here?” I asked, searching the cabinets for a granola bar.
He didn’t look up. “They do let us out, occasionally.”
After his fall, he’d booked into a twelve-week alcohol rehab facility near Forest Lake. He needed to finish the program before he could make it onto the transplant list, but the doctors didn’t believe he’d live that long. Even after the car crash, my father maintained that he did not, in fact, have a drinking problem. I wondered without asking whether he’d used my first day of school as an excuse to escape for the morning.
The cereal had stained his milk a radioactive shade of green. “I don’t know how you eat that stuff,” I said.
He stirred the milk. “You should see the color of my pee.”
“Pass.” I headed for the door.
He reached for my arm, and I saw the gauntness of his waxen limbs. He’d lost at least forty pounds from his heaviest, at least ten since his fall. He drowned in his denim shirt like a child playing dress-up. His wrists, delicate like bird bones, were visible past the fabric of his sleeves, and I could see his veins, blue and bloated, beneath the vitreous skin of his hands.
“I thought you’d have visited by now,” he said.
I’d spent the summer with Sammy working on my science-fair project—an experiment on memory-impaired rats—or curled up in his bed, testing actions and reactions of a different sort. But even when I wasn’t with Sammy, I was too busy thinking about him to do much else. Sometimes, as a dare to myself, I’d pretend that I would be the first to lose interest. Sorry, Sammy, but I can’t be tied down. Sure, I loved him, but the summer was over. I was a senior, two years ahead of schedule, and soon I’d be applying to college. At this rate, by the time the year ended I’d be forty, with a job and a dog and a fixed-interest mortgage. By the time the year ended, Sammy would be too young for me. He’d be a good story, nothing more. “You won’t believe what I did when I was sixteen,” I’d tell my dog.
My father was watching me through jaundiced eyes.
“I’ve been busy with friends,” I said. “One of us still has them.”
He laughed, holding up his hands to signal surrender. “Hey, it’s no skin off my back if you turn out mean.”
Standing this close to his face, I could smell the dimethyl sulfide in his breath mixing badly with the modified starch of his breakfast. This was portal hypertension—the pressure building in his veins, the stink of his diseased body. The same thiols in a skunk’s spray were gathering in my dad’s lungs, bubbling to the surface like swamp gas. There’s a name for this odor—this sulfurous, rotten-egg smell. They call it the breath of the dead.
I left without saying goodbye and ran out the door to find Emmett waiting in his beat-up station wagon. He’d spent the previous afternoon polishing the hatchback as if it were some vintage muscle car, and the tan paint glistened under the sun like wet skin. He revved the engine, and the feeble sound was still loud enough to chase the sandpipers out of the bird feeder.
* * *
My mother once told me that a flock of sandpipers is known as a contradiction. A contradiction of sandpipers. She had always been a bird person. She worked part-time at a youth reform camp in far-northern Maine, just outside our hometown of Winterville, leading hiking and bird-watching tours for the crazy, messed-up boys who dealt drugs or did drugs or called in bomb threats to their schools. When I was little, I hated thinking of her being around those kids. Another youth camp was along the bus route to my elementary school, this one to help little gay boys turn straight. Confronted by the sight of it every morning and every afternoon, I hardened myself against the possibility of change in people. It was self-preservation—I knew I was just like them. If I couldn’t change, how would my mother’s troubled boys? They were dangerous, plain and simple, and trying to help them would only cause her pain.
* * *
At school, Emmett disappeared to find his theater club friends, but I went straight to Mr. Foster’s homeroom, as though going there early would make time move faster. I wanted desperately to see Sammy, but I would have to wait until I could steal a few minutes before first-period English. I told myself to be patient, but our secret was a firework inside me, already lit.
I squirmed in my seat within seconds of sitting down. When I first moved to Littlefield, we only went to homeroom to get our report cards, but after the Virginia Tech massacre we spent half an hour there each morning. We’d sit in a circle and talk about the Issue of the Day. Usually it was something benign—the dangers of sex, the dangers of soda—but we knew the deal: our teachers were keeping tabs, monitoring our mental health for signs of violence. We conspired against this system like criminals trying to pass a polygraph. Relax, we’d tell each other. Say a little, but not a lot. It’s normal to be sad; it’s abnormal to be very sad. Feel, but do not feel strongly. This was the language of a sound mind: the elimination of adverbs.
The small details of that room have stayed with me: an enormous snake plant in the northwest corner, just under the window and the light of the sun; on the ceiling, a brown water stain in the shape of Australia. Littlefield was bursting with money from summer tourism, but all of the rich families sent their children to private school and then made it a kind of hobby to vote down the public school budget. As a result, LHS looked from the outside like an abandoned warehouse. My biology textbook that year was twice my age and had its own water stain bleeding through the inside cover. Someone had circled it with a Sharpie and provided a label: MR. HASKELL’S SEMEN.
Mr. Foster sat behind his desk, tapping his armrest with the eraser end of a no. 2 pencil. He was one of those thick, ruddy time-warp teachers. You could put him in any classroom in the twentieth century and he’d fit in fine: thin hair, the perfectly round belly of the perpetually seated. A fifty-pound mustache.
RJ slid into the desk next to mine. He was my closest friend—my only friend if you disqualified Emmett for being family. Like all of my classmates, RJ was older than me, and you could see this difference in the way he carried himself. He was not classically good-looking, but I always liked looking at him: his face had a strong, narrow shape and an evenness of expression that I found reassuring. He was difficult to surprise.
RJ’s family had moved to Littlefield from France—he was the only black kid in our school. Sophomore year, he was joined briefly by an Ethiopian boy who could swear in eight languages. I heard the boy’s father was some sort of prince, or war criminal, or spy. Whatever he was, he moved his son to private school before the end of the first semester. RJ’s family had money, too. His dad worked in pharmaceuticals for a company that manufactured the stupidest drugs: one that made your eyelashes thicker, one that made your knees smoother and sometimes, as a side effect, triggered spontaneous orgasms. But I remember RJ’s father arguing with his mother, a retired catalog model, about the value of a public school education.
“You spend your whole life in public,” his dad said. “Better to start early. Private school is for assholes.”
RJ’s mom shook a carton of orange juice. “Have you seen their textbooks?”
We’d met in eighth grade after being paired together in Home Economics. We baked brownies and wrote a children’s book together for our final project. It was a little domestic partnership, and I was so, so in love with him. But RJ thought about nothing but girls.
“Who’s hotter,” he once asked, “Bryce or Amanda?”
I shrugged, my brow furrowed. “It’s too hard to say.”
He nodded gravely. I’d spoken a deep truth.
For the first year of our friendship he was clueless about my sexuality. He forced me to join the baseball team, taught me to spit the juice of my shredded bubble gum in a lon
g, masculine stream. At the end of freshman year, we were hooked on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One night when we came to the scene where Frank-N-Furter fucks Brad on a canopied bed, RJ nudged me and pointed at the screen. “That’s you, right?”
I froze. I had an erection, and it made lying seem impossible. “That’s not me. That’s Tim Curry.”
RJ snorted. “No crap it is. I mean, you’d do it with a guy.”
“I’m not doing it with anyone. Ever.” I stared straight ahead.
“I don’t care,” RJ said. “My sister said you were gay and that I should talk to you about it because gay people need lots of support.”
RJ’s older sister, Stephanie, was a pretty, bug-eyed girl with a rare form of muscular dystrophy known as Emery-Dreifuss. I went through a period of hating her for telling him, but it was a good lesson on life in the closet. I could play baseball, I could talk about breasts and the things I’d do to them, but no matter what, I was always one weirdly intuitive sister away from being outed. It’s hard to explain the importance of this. We treat lies differently, the more delicate they are.
The bell rang. In came the final wave of chatter and seat-picking, the great spectacle of teenagers in heat. Emmett pushed through the doorway and frowned when he saw RJ and me slouched near the front of the room. He liked the back, where he could read Tolkien and draw without anyone noticing.
“Senior year!” he said, flashing his fakest smile. Behind him, Mr. Foster was writing something about grief counseling on the blackboard.
“Have you seen the freshmen?” asked RJ. “They don’t look right. I really think there’s something wrong with them.”
Emmett turned his head toward the hallway and did a thousand-yard stare. God, was he handsome, and it had happened so fast. The usual story: braces came off, acne cleared up, face filled in. Voilà, duckling becomes swan. But I loved watching the girls try to cope with this change in him. Here was a nerd of the highest order—the kind of boy who kept his charcoal pencils in a sheath on his belt, like Elven daggers—yet they wanted him so badly I’d once seen a group of them puzzling over Lord of the Rings, glancing furtively from the book to Emmett, as though one might explain the other.