by Jake Wolff
procaine
March 12
Totally. Crazy. Day.
Woke up early to meet Bogdi. “It’s going to be tough,” S said, since Bogdi is on the other side of the city in something called Sector 4. “Sector 4, malfunction,” said C in a robot voice, and they laughed together. As we left the hotel, the doorman swung the wide, heavy doors open for us but raised his eyebrows while he did it, as if to say, Are you sure you want to leave?
Outside, a couple of cabdrivers had lined up their cars to block access to a side road. Someone in a moving van was shouting at them and laying on the horn. S led us away and made a call on his cell phone. Above us, on the small balcony of an apartment complex, an older couple was slow dancing to the cacophony of the street noise.
“Bogdi knows someone who lives right here,” S said. “He’ll give us a ride.”
We waited. It was a nice day, sunny but with wind. C was wearing a tank top. She burns and then tans, which isn’t good for you, but it’s what she does.
We heard a short, trumpety honk, but a honk directed at us this time, not at traffic. (How could we tell the difference? I don’t know, but all three of us did at once, turning our heads to the sound as if our names had been called.) Bogdi’s friend arrived in a pickup truck with flames on the side and a large, wooden utility trailer. The door opened, and a heavily bearded, heavily gloved man popped out.
“Yo, yo. Friends of Bogdi?” He was wearing a black T-shirt with white lettering that said BIKES, BITCHES.
“That’s us,” said S. “Thanks for your help.”
The man waved this off and moved to the back of the truck. He opened the gate of the utility trailer, slid the ramp down, and hopped inside. I was worried that he expected us to ride in the trailer like that, but the reality was worse. One by one, Bogdi’s friend removed three single-speed bicycles from the back of the truck. He lined them up in front of us and clapped his hands together, the way people do when their job is done.
“They are small but very good,” said Bogdi’s friend, misinterpreting our expressions. “New tires on all three.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” said S, “but we thought you’d be driving us.”
The man gave him the crook eye. “I mean, by car, with traffic and roads closed, we’re talking maybe three hours? By bike, thirty minutes no problem. Straight shot.”
I’m proud to say that it was not C, not S, but me, of all people, who first grabbed one of the bikes and took it for a test spin. I rode a quick lap around the street sign. I hadn’t been on a bike since I was ten, eleven years old? I wobbled and almost fell as I navigated the curb. The old couple on the balcony were watching me now, and as I came to a stop near my friends, they applauded me in a way that was both friendly and insulting.
“There you go!” said Bogdi’s friend. He gave us the directions quickly and without further discussion. It was not a straight shot, as he’d promised; rather, he unfolded a map and drew on it what appeared to be a whirlpool. When he accidentally guided his pen the wrong way down a street, he chuckled to himself, crossed that line out, and drew a skull and crossbones next to it.
“We’re actually doing this?” asked S, as the three of us retied and double-knotted our sneakers.
We lined up like ducklings, me in front, and pedaled our way toward Sector 4. As we made our first right, I experienced a brief moment of confidence: a freshly painted bike lane emerged from the curb like a red carpet. We rode it for half a mile before it disappeared, unceremoniously and without warning. I slammed on my brakes. C crashed into me, S into her. I tipped over and skinned my elbow bloody on the deckled surface of a concrete planter.
We persevered despite the rocky start and despite the bloodstains that were already coating the sleeve of my shirt. As we neared Sector 4, the road congestion began to clear, just enough for the streets to feel more dangerous. We came to a multilane roundabout, a spiral of chaos and screeching brakes. We tried repeatedly to time our entry into the road, failed, and in this failure left ourselves vulnerable: neither on the sidewalk nor moving in the right direction.
I was about to cry when I heard a whistle from behind us. A police officer was beckoning us over. The whistle hung from his mouth. We walked our bikes over to him like schoolchildren about to be scolded.
He stashed the whistle in his front pocket and put his hands on his hips. “This is not good. You are going to die.”
“What should we do?” I asked.
“You should stop doing this,” he pleaded. “Be reasonable.”
“It’s not illegal to ride a bike,” said C sharply.
The officer only shook his head. “It makes me very sad to watch what you’re doing.”
“We need to get here.” I showed him our crazy map.
The officer gestured to his car. “I can take you, but you’d have to lose the bikes.”
We debated this. We were only halfway to Bogdi and had nearly killed ourselves. On the other hand, abandoning the bikes on the street would be a supremely shitty thing to do.
“The bicycles belong to you?” asked the officer.
“A friend,” said S.
The cop made a face, recognizing the moral quandary in which we found ourselves. “A good friend?”
So we ditched the bikes. We left them unlocked at a bike rack outside a pharmacy and jumped happily into the police car as if we were arresting ourselves. The officer punched on his siren to ease his reentry into traffic, then turned it off and guided the car expertly down side streets, alleys, and once or twice through parking lots as a shortcut. The three of us sat in the back with our knees and elbows touching.
We arrived at Bogdi’s address, which was a packing warehouse within spitting distance of Tineretului Park. The officer pointed to the metro station we would have used had the metro been operational—a fifteen-minute ride from our hotel. Out on the water, parents and children were paddleboating from one end of the lake to the other. I could hear the sounds of klezmer music, kids laughing, and underinflated soccer balls being thwacked by cleated shoes. The wind carried the oily smell of fried dough.
We thanked the officer and stared up at the warehouse. The building was unmarked and without windows, the kind of place Batman might go to fight the Joker. It was an industrial district, and several much larger warehouses surrounded Bogdi’s, with hardly any space between them. A metal chain hung outside the roll-up door. I remembered Bogdi’s booby-trapped website and wondered if, when we pulled that chain, a piano would fall on our heads. But S tugged the chain, and I heard a bell resonate deep inside the warehouse. Thirty seconds later, the door mechanism began to whir and the door lifted slowly open. I exchanged a look with C, positioned myself defensively behind S, and entered the headquarters of the Immortalist Underground.
Imagine a college dorm room occupied by freshman boys. Posters cover the walls: athletes in motion, terrible rock bands, a scantily clad woman holding a stack of textbooks under her breasts, and beneath those, a jokey line: I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE.
Now take that dorm room and double it in size. Then double it again, and again, until it’s roughly the size of a Romanian packing warehouse. At first glance, the Immortalist Underground comprised approximately eighteen people, seventeen of whom were asleep. Their bodies littered the sofas and the floor. One of them was literally sleeping under newspaper. Bogdi sat front and center with his legs stretched out on a plastic jug he was using as a footstool. A small, mousy brunette lay with her head on his lap, dressed in a jean jacket and old-school, pump-up Reeboks. Like the rest of them, she was asleep.
“Sadiq and pals!” Bogdi shouted at us from across the cavern, with no regard for the naps taking place around and on top of him. “It’s soooo crazy to see you!” He looked long and hyperskinny, with an elasticity to his arms that suggested double joints. (Later, to show off, he would twist his legs up over his head and walk around on his hands, like a sentient pretzel.) His face was clean shaven and not unattractive, if a lit
tle gaunt. He wore a backward baseball cap with sunglasses resting on the rim. I guessed he was around thirty-five years old.
“Boggers, my friend!” S called as we navigated the mess. “When does your decorator graduate from primary school?”
Bogdi tipped his head back and laughed silently. “Whatever, whatever.” His voice was high-pitched and slightly feminine, accentuated by his way of speaking, like an American Valley girl. He struck me immediately as someone who was so intelligent, and so assured in his intelligence, that he adopted zero of the typical affectations of intelligent people.
Bogdi asked if we had any trouble finding the place. As we explained about our ill-fated bike ride, I expected two reactions from Bogdi: (1) “Oh, boo hoo, you spoiled American babies, bicycling here is not that dangerous”; followed by (2) “You left my friend’s bikes in the streets? You dicks!”
Instead, Bogdi seemed even more shocked by our misadventures than we had been. “Omigod!” He punched his girlfriend on the shoulder, waking her up. She moaned and hissed something at him in Romanian. “Dumitru tried to kill these guys!” he told her.
She looked at us. “Again?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant.
“He was just trying to help,” said S.
Bogdi scrunched up his face. “Um, no. It’s all about his stupid organization. What’s it called?” He snapped at his girlfriend, but she wasn’t listening.
I remembered the T-shirt. “Bikes, Bitches?”
“Right! They are activists for bicycles. They want the city to make, like, bike lanes and other such conveniences. The mayor will not do it! He says Romanian drivers are too uncivilized to coexist with bikes.”
“What does this have to do with us?” asked C.
Bogdi sat forward, serious now. “Because you have a resource more powerful than gold, than oil, than weapons-grade plutonium. You have American blood. Can you imagine if it spilled on the spokes of a bike in Romania? Bikes, Bitches would go straight to ProTV News and say, ‘See? This is why we must have bike lanes!’”
“Jesus,” I said. We had taken seats on foldout chairs and pulled them close to Bogdi.
He surprised me by reaching across and taking my hand. “You gotta believe me. I told him to drive you. I would never give a bicycle to someone I care about.”
I told him it was fine. Reassured, Bogdi began to toss loose change at one of the sleeping bodies on the floor.
The little coins pinged off the man’s back and head until he stirred and shot an angry look at Bogdi. “Tâmpit!” Motherfucker.
Bogdi ignored the insult. “Where did you put the refrigerator?”
“Under the Toyota. I’ve shown you a hundred times.”
“Do we have any American beer left?”
The man stood and shuffled off in the direction of what was likely, once, a foreman’s office, but now seemed to be a graveyard for rusted automobile equipment. “We have only American beer,” he said as he went.
“We have a friend who’s, like, big shit at Michelob,” Bogdi explained. “He pays us in beer.”
“Pays you for what?” I asked.
Bogdi indicated the space of the warehouse, as though that were an answer. “Poor guy has Huntington’s disease.”
“What happened at the Constantin, Boggers?” S asked. “It’s a bit strange in here.”
Upon hearing the name of the center, Bogdi curled his lip. “You went there already?”
“A few days ago,” I said.
“Okay, so, like, why are you asking? The center is where old people go to play lawn darts until they die.”
“So you … upgraded … to this?” S asked.
“Don’t be such a downer! Wait till I show you.”
The other man returned with the beer. He introduced himself as Gavril and popped the tops off the bottles with a cigarette lighter. Gavril’s face would have been unremarkable—brown hair, brown eyes, fortysomething—except for a tattoo of Mickey Mouse that crossed from his neck to his face, with just the tops of Mickey’s ears peaking above the jawline. Bogdi’s girlfriend had fallen back asleep, but he poked at her until she woke and said her name, eyes half-open: Livia.
Bogdi held her beer and offered her sips like a baby goat. “She’s as important as she is lazy. She’s the key to the whole thing.”
One thing was for sure: something was happening here. “We’re eager to hear about it,” I said.
Bogdi’s face grew serious. “Sadiq calls me out of the blue and says he has a friend interested in my work. Remind me what I said, Sadie?”
“I believe you told me to go fuck myself.”
Gavril laughed. “That sounds like you.”
Bogdi shrugged: guilty as charged. “Gav had Parkinson’s when I met him. Now he has, like, a clean bill of health. That’s the kind of results we’re talking about.” Bogdi paused for dramatic effect. “You’d be protective, too?”
“Sure,” I said, “but from Sadiq?”
“Sadie is an angel, but he works for a devil.”
“Radkin?” I waited for S to say something, but he didn’t, so I continued, “I don’t care for him either, but what does he matter to you?”
“Anyone who isn’t us is an enemy,” Gavril said.
“Because they can’t be trusted,” Bogdi finished. “Radkin is a snake in scientist clothes. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for money. Steal our research, sabotage our operations. He could, like, send someone who works for him, but whom I consider a friend, to see what we’re up to.” Bogdi looked pointedly at Sadiq.
“Securing research funds is part of the work we all do,” S said, “and Radkin does not apologize for being good at it.” It sounded like an argument S often made to himself. “Honestly, though, and no offense, he couldn’t be less interested in what you are doing.”
Bogdi shook his head, more sad than disbelieving. “You are both naïve. Never trust anyone driven by greed.”
As we talked, I’d been taking in more of the warehouse. Along with the sleeping bodies, the warehouse contained several dozen pallets and one wall of tall metal shelving. Many of the boxes resting on these things were either unlabeled or labeled in Romanian, and the boxes I could read did little to explain the work being done here: several boxes of baby aspirin, gallons and gallons of lye, enough sparklers to host a large Fourth of July party. I tried to combine the ingredients in my head, to make recipes from them that had something, anything, to do with the elixir of life. But all of my recipes, every single one, produced a weapon: acid bombs, poison gas, maybe even a crude sort of napalm. I began to seriously worry for our safety.
C wasn’t impressed by any of this and certainly wasn’t in the mood to see S or me interrogated. “So what’s your motive?” she said. “American beer?”
Bogdi’s eyes lit up. “You’re just like Livia!” He nudged his girlfriend, but she only burrowed deeper into the couch. “Not American beer, though that’s funny.”
“What then?” S asked. “Pure scientific curiosity?”
Bogdi opened another beer. “Let me ask you a question: Why did Cristina Constantin pursue immortality?”
“From what I’ve seen,” I said, “Rejuvitol is first and foremost a business.”
Bogdi made an incorrect buzzer sound, like from a game show. “I’m talking about when the real experiments happened.”
“She didn’t have much of a choice,” S said. “Ceaușescu.”
Bogdi sat up in his seat. “Bingo! Some people search because they want riches and power. And some people search because a rich, powerful person told them to.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re working for someone?”
Bogdi touched his nose. “We’re all working for someone.”
“Uh-oh,” said C, catching on before I did.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Bogdi pointed up at the ceiling.
“Oh, Jesus,” said S.
“Oh, Jesus, exactly!” Bogdi said. “I have spoken to God.”
/>
I began to fear, in light of the bomb-making equipment, that the Immortalist Underground was not a rogue scientific community but a divinely inspired terrorist organization.
S grunted, the muscles in his jaw beating like a pulse. “Boggers, you’re making me nervous. Was it a mistake for us to come here?”
Bogdi closed his eyes. What S said seemed to actually hurt his feelings. “It’s only in your countries that science and religion are enemies. Everywhere else they are BFFs.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“Okay, follow me.” Bogdi stood and led us toward a side door. “I used to search for the elixir because of money, like Radkin, and maybe also fame. I wanted everyone to know my name the way they know Constantin’s.”
“What changed?” S asked.
“I had a religious experience,” Bogdi answered, as though it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. Then he opened the door.
We gaped. The door led not to the outside, as I’d guessed, but to a whole other warehouse.
“Holy shit,” I said. The building contained everything I’d hoped to see at the Constantin. From the outside, it looked like a warehouse, but inside, Bogdi had built a fully functioning medical center. To my right, a svelte, pink-haired woman was running a treadmill stress test, electrodes suctioned above her sports bra. An IV dangled from her lean, muscular arms. She nodded at us, completely unfazed, as the EKG tracked her vitals. A gamma camera sat in the corner, which meant the woman had radioactive dye coursing through her veins, ready for nuclear imaging.
Every room contained something fun and expensive: an eighteen-liter console lyophilizer, an electrosurgery unit, an X-ray generator. This glorious and seemingly random collection of equipment was so random it could only be used for one purpose: the elixir. In one room I recognized a 1960s, frighteningly analog ECT machine. I hadn’t seen one of these devices since the day I nearly killed C. I could feel my face go white, and C put a comforting hand on my arm.