by Jake Wolff
He goes upstairs to his bedroom, which is across the hall from his parents’ bedroom. Don is in there with the door closed, not to be disturbed. Sammy’s own room stays clean because of the housekeeper who comes once a week, but it is also cramped with his bed and bookshelf and homework desk and neon-colored beanbags, the fabric of which develops a weird film in summer. The walls are white, with a hint of yellow, and he’s covered them in glossy posters of the Ferrari Testarossa, a fast and flat car. This is one of those things he can’t explain. He has no interest in driving this car—no interest in driving, period—but something about its pancake geometry, its simplicity of form, excites him.
He goes to the window, opens it, and looks out at the neighborhood boys, still playing. The strange man is gone. The air smells of gasoline and heat. All of the cars parked in front of his house, he notices from above, are the same shade of blue. One of the boys makes a violent motion with the ball, and the tallest boy says, “Hey, no spikesies!,” and an argument ensues. The bleached limbs of the coffee trees cast fingered shadows over all of this, and it is pretty—actually, so pretty—and just one more reason for Sammy to go on living, to take pleasure from this good city, this good house, his good parents. What was it the man said?
The world needs beauty.
Sammy jumps out of the window.
* * *
Several weeks later, on a Thursday evening, Don takes Sammy to his first meeting of the New York Society of Numismatics. Sammy’s arm is still in a cast, his left arm—broken right where that strange man, the photographer, had grabbed him. It wasn’t the man who broke it—that was the fall, four and a half Sammies to the sidewalk. When he landed, the world went white with pain. Sometimes he thinks he never left that world, the pain world, as though his jumping flipped some switch on the universe. But still, the two events—the man grabbing him, the jump—have become linked in Sammy’s mind.
And not just his. Don and Leena have tried to convince him that he didn’t jump, exactly—the man scared him, and he ran, and he fell out of the window. An accident. Sammy is not convinced by this, nor is the psychiatrist he now visits once a week: Dr. Gillian Huang, an interesting woman—interesting because she seems to watch people, including his parents, with an intensity he recognizes as his own. She has black hair with heavy, side-parted bangs and thick-rimmed glasses that she adjusts constantly, forward and back. She does not buy the panic theory, but she did agree (reluctantly?) to consider his fall an act of “self-harm,” rather than a “suicide attempt,” considering his young age and the short distance from the window to the street. (It would take a drop of seven or eight Sammies, he’s since calculated, to ensure a fatal outcome.)
Dr. Huang did echo his parents on one central issue: hobbies. “You need some,” she said to him, and in their first group meeting, Dr. Huang suggested that each of them—Sammy, herself, and his parents—propose one such hobby. He would be allowed to veto one of these proposals; the others, he would have to try.
Sammy suggested reading. He was already doing it anyway.
Dr. Huang suggested journaling. Every day he would need to write about his life: what he did, how he was feeling. This didn’t sound so bad to Sammy, relative to his mother’s suggestion.
Leena said he should join a basketball team. VETOED.
When the needle landed on Don, he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, bereft of ideas in a way that seemed embarrassing—what kind of psychiatrist was he?
“How about this,” Dr. Huang said patiently. “Why don’t you tell Sam some of the hobbies you enjoy.”
“He collects coins!” Leena said, relieved to break the tension. She was sitting between Don and Sammy on the small couch that faced Dr. Huang’s chair. The office was carpeted, clean, and slightly too warm. A well-manicured-but-dehydrated ficus tree sat potted in the corner, the tips of its leaves pointing to the ground.
“Good.” Dr. Huang’s voice had a liquid quality that contrasted with the dry air and produced, in Sammy, a pleasurable hum. “Does his coin collection interest you, Sam?”
“He doesn’t let me near it.” It made Sammy feel good to say this to her, in front of them.
Don lifted his chin, defensive, but Leena interjected before he had the chance to explain himself. “Maybe you could take him to one of your coin meetings?”
“The New York Society of Numismatics,” Don clarified, in response to a single raised eyebrow from Dr. Huang. He clenched his teeth. “That’s a good idea,” he said, chewing the words.
Dr. Huang smiled, indifferent to his obvious displeasure, and focused her eyes on Sammy. “Reading, journals, coins.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Showing up is half the battle.”
* * *
The coin is gold, or at least the color of gold, and the size of a half-dollar. The side of the coin that Sammy would call heads—though he now knows it’s called the obverse—shows a man standing on a pedestal, striking a pose that reminds Sammy of the ballet dancers he can see through the window of the studio near his house, their heads lifted, arms raised, fingers and toes extended. The man has wings like an angel, but he wears a hat that also has wings, and so do his boots. This, Don says, is a poetic redundancy. The man is actually a god, Mercury, and below him an inscription reads Arte de Industria—“art by industry.”
The tails (“The reverse,” Don corrects) is nothing but text, a full paragraph but circular, coiling around the coin like a sleeping snake. But now the coin collectors have lost interest in walking Sammy through his first close reading of a coin, and they only summarize it for him. “It basically says mankind can make stuff that is just as beautiful as found in nature,” says a much-older man, whom Sammy has identified as the leader of this group, even though he was not introduced this way. They are sitting in a circle, maybe twenty of them, but everyone’s chair—including Don’s—points toward this ancient fellow.
They are in the library of a house on the Upper East Side—whose house, Sammy isn’t sure. No one seems to be acting as host, the way his mother does at home, arranging seating, fixing drinks (or telling someone else to do those things). The air is thick with dust and wine (which everyone is drinking) and the smell of old books and old people. Sammy wouldn’t call it stuffy, exactly—the room is quite large—but there is a sense of permanence, of objects and people that either don’t move at all or move slowly. There are three walls of books, floor to ceiling, and their age gives them a uniformity of color, just as many of the men, even the Asian one, share an ashy, faded complexion. (Don is one of the youngest.) In the middle of the circle is a table, and on it are more books, several bottles of wine, and a sign-in sheet with a pen attached by string to a clipboard.
What there isn’t much of, surprisingly, is coins. “There’s a bit more to it than that,” Don says when Sammy remarks on this, and even the gold coin he now holds between his forefinger and thumb was produced offhandedly and without much interest. “Does anyone have something he can look at?” Don had said, and now Sammy feels the way he does at a restaurant when the waiter hands him a children’s menu.
“We approach the subject of coins obliquely,” the ancient man explains, and Sammy likes that he uses this word: obliquely. It’s clear he does not speak often to children. “We approach the subject … alchemically.”
“Alchemy,” Sammy says. “Like chemistry?” At home, he has a chemistry set. It’s just a toy—used to make volcanoes or monsters that foam at the mouth—but Sammy has hacked it to test the paint in his house for lead. So far: negative.
Apparently his question was loaded because all of the adults, except Don, begin to laugh.
“There’s no difference between alchemy and chemistry,” the ancient man says quickly, as though to immediately curb debate.
He’s not fast enough. The Asian man clears his throat. “The continued existence of the two words—alchemy and chemistry—suggests there is a difference.”
The ancient man throws up his hands, but the subject has broken loose.
“For me,” says another man to Sammy, “chemistry is more practical, while alchemy is more thinky.”
Don leans forward in his seat, fingers caged, and Sammy wonders if this is how he talks to his patients. Sammy’s gut says the answer is no, that the way Don is acting is a performance for Sammy’s benefit. But why? “I believe you’re referring,” Don says in a low voice, “to what Goltz calls the science of matter versus the philosophy of matter.”
“Alchemy is a subset of chemistry,” says the only woman in the room, a white-haired wrinkle-face (that’s what Leena calls old women) with a faint Long Island accent. “Alchemy is chemistry with a specific purpose.”
“What purpose?” Sammy asks, his interest piqued by the dissent.
He is startled when several of the coin collectors answer this question at once, in unplanned unison: “The elixir of life.” This word, elixir, makes no impression on Sammy, but it clearly means a lot to these people. He picks at his cast.
“This leads us back to our proper subject,” continues the old man, trying to end the unwelcome digression. “Last week we examined the manuscript that claims to be the fourth volume of the Steganographia, proposing a fuller recipe for the elixir than that described in Trithemius’s other work. Do we have thoughts on the veracity of this manuscript?”
“The recipe’s use of spikenard root is consistent with Trithemius’s research,” Don says, glancing sidelong at Sammy in a way that seems—though this can’t be true—almost shy. Sammy’s thoughts keep being pulled to his cast, which is so itchy he could scream, but something in Don’s voice, a smallness, moves Sammy to alertness. In spite of himself, he’s drawn to it, the same way a distant plane, a fleck of white against a blue sky, makes him stand on his tiptoes. He wants to see that shyness again.
So he says, “I don’t get what this has to do with coins, even obliquely.”
Don’s face goes red—there it is!—but the white-haired wrinkle-face laughs. “There’s a centuries-old bond between alchemy and numismatics,” she explains.
“Look again at the coin you’re holding,” says the ancient man, so Sammy does. “‘Art by industry.’ The coin commemorates the supposed transmutation of mercury into gold.”
“It’s all fiction, of course,” Don says quickly, his face still bright. Seeing this, Sammy feels as if he were lighter than air, as if, if he jumped out of his window now, he would rise.
“So you talk about the history?” Sammy asks.
“Not history in a general sense,” says the Asian man. “The history of the elixir.”
“It’s just for fun,” Don says. “A thought experiment.”
The ancient man has been writing something on a slip of paper torn from the sign-in sheet. He holds it out to Sammy, who has to stand and cross the circle to take it with his one good arm. “There’s your homework. Next time, you can tell us why this is important.”
The paper says:
HgS + O2 → Hg + SO2
Sammy takes the formula to his chair. Everyone is staring at him, but not seriously—to them, he’s just a kid. A baby historian. “What is the elixir of life?” he asks. “Something that makes you immortal?”
“That depends on whom you ask,” says the ancient man, “and when they lived. But in most modern cultures, true immortality is not the objective. Do you know the word panacea?”
Sammy does know the word. “So if there was something wrong with someone, even if you didn’t know what it was, the elixir would make them feel better?”
Don is watching Sammy hard. “It’s all just stories. A hobby, remember? Don’t get excited.”
Sammy nods, but one of his thoughts comes to him, as hot and urgent as fire.
It’s a Trap.
4
Assembly
Number 50 was a Wistar rat, and as far as rats go, Wistars are some of the cutest. They’re albinos, with soft, white coats. They have pale-pink noses, like the inside of a strawberry. Their ears, which are the same color, tend to be slightly asymmetrical, giving them an eager, attentive appearance. Their eyes are red, but they are too small and offset to seem sinister; the rats look, each day, as if they’ve just woken up with a cold.
But on Sammy’s last day alive, Number 50 really did get sick. I’d gone to the chem lab to gather data for our experiment, but I found Number 50 huddled in the corner of his cage, lethargic, hardly lifting his head as I reached for him. I held him up to the light and inspected him for any obvious wounds. Nothing. He looked at me with his red, tired eyes, and I felt the truth of that look in my chest: Number 50 was dying.
I put him back in his cage and called Sammy once, twice, three times, without answer. I debated what to do. The right thing was to leave him in the lab, where Sammy could examine him in the morning, but I wasn’t convinced he would live that long. The other option was to bring him right away to Sammy, who had much more experience with lab rats. I hated the idea of being judged for this, but I hated even more the thought of losing Number 50. I began to prepare his travel cage, and as I did, he started to sneeze—four or five sneezes in succession, so hard his little legs were shaking.
Before I left, I texted my aunt that I was going to RJ’s. I didn’t always lie to Dana about the time I spent with Sammy, but it was a lot of time, and a few weeks prior, when I was headed to see him for the third morning in a row, Dana looked up from her toast and said, “Tell me again what you’re working on?”
I carried Number 50 downstairs, strapped his cage to the handlebars of my bike using electrical tape, and then I rode, like Elliott carrying E.T., the mile and a half to Sammy’s apartment.
Once I arrived, I knocked for a minute before letting myself in. I kicked off my shoes and set Number 50 on the bed. Fading light through the lean casement windows turned the white walls the color of corn silk. Sammy was standing in the kitchen with his head in the freezer. I wasn’t sure if he knew I was there, but then he said, “Sorry, my head is killing me!” without turning around, his voice echoing out of the freezer.
“Did you take some Tylenol?” I stepped around the bed.
“No! I mean, yes! I mean, I took something else!”
“Okay, good.” I was right behind him.
He turned, startled. “Sorry for shouting. My head is killing me.”
“I heard.” I kissed him.
He put his arms around me and held me in this kiss before pulling away. His eyes were big and bright like headlights. I was caught in them like a deer. Before I could look away, he tightened his arms and hoisted me up over his shoulder. “You’re so light!” He laughed and carried me around the room.
I grabbed the back of his shirt and held on. “You’re in a weird mood.” My words came out in a breathy staccato as I bounced against his body.
He set me down and clapped his hands together. “I haven’t eaten,” he said, as though that explained anything.
“Do you want me to make you something?” I asked, eager for the chance to take care of him.
“I want you to relax, and to always be happy when you’re here.”
“I am,” I promised. “Is something wrong?”
“Not at all. I actually had a really good talk with my parents today.”
“What?” Sammy’s parents were dead.
“Oh. Not like that. Don’t you ever talk to your mom?”
“Sometimes.” I would lie in bed at night and tell her what life was like in Littlefield. I would picture our life in Winterville, me in the living room, cooking myself in front of the pellet stove, my mom trudging in from the snow with several big bags of groceries, her body wrapped in soft, puffy layers of winter coats and snow pants. She looked like a purple synthetic snowman, and it always made me smile. Then she would remove those layers and become my mother—my skinny, strong, quick-tempered mother—and tell me to get off my butt and help put away the food. I would say, “Did you get me anything special?” And she would say, “That depends. Is kale special?”
Sammy was watching me, waiting for
me to come back to him. “So”—I gestured to Number 50—“I could use your help.”
Sammy followed my finger to the cage, and upon seeing Number 50, he had a strange, singultus reaction, like a hiccup. I was certain that he was angry. His eyes were all pupils, the sky on a starless night. Behind me, on the wall, was a framed print of Joseph Wright’s The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorous, and behind that, hidden like a safe, was the hole Sammy had punched into the wall earlier that summer. He was older and wiser, but of the two of us he was also the more intrinsically delicate; I imagined his heart as a little glass flute and, inside it, a hummingbird.
He knelt in front of the cage and poked one finger through, tousling the spiky hair between the rat’s ears.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have—”
“I told you not to get attached.” To my great relief, Sammy didn’t sound angry. “I’ll keep an eye on him tonight.”
Sammy placed the cage on the love seat and sat next to me on the bed. Our elbows were almost touching. I was going to kiss him again when my phone buzzed with a message, a text from my father, the screenshot with the results from his last round of blood work: bilirubin, creatinine, INR. Appended to the image, my dad had written, Hasta la vista, baby.
In response to a questioning look from Sammy, I handed him the phone, and only a slight twitch of his lips betrayed his understanding of my father’s bleak future. Part of me wanted Sammy to tell me that everything would be okay; part of me loved that he would never say such a thing when it wasn’t true. Still, between my mother, my father, and now Number 50, I was feeling sorry for myself and asked, “What did I do to deserve this?”
Sammy took this question seriously, and rather than saying, “Nothing, you did nothing,” he talked to me about the terrible odds of survival. The ash from a troubled teenager’s cigarette catches the curtains of a closed window, killing my mother on the second floor, and this happens so often that there are people keeping track of it, creating graphs and charts to map its every occurrence: Deaths by Fires Caused by Cigarettes of Underage Smokers. Every second we’re speaking, he said, two people die. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. For a boy of sixteen to lose both his parents was truly, cosmically unstrange.