by Jake Wolff
“What on earth do you need this for?” I asked Bogdi.
“Nothing yet. But you never know.”
We were interrupted by the appearance of Livia, who emerged from behind us and threw her arms around Bogdi’s thin waist.
“Hey, baby,” she said, eyelids heavy.
“My love! Now I can show them your hard work.”
For this we returned to the first warehouse. I felt like a kid being taken from the toy store. Bogdi marched us back to the shelving units and removed a narrow blue box of sparklers. He set it on the ground, and we stood in a circle around it as if we were about to start praying.
“I should probably, you know, prepare you for this,” he said. “So you don’t think I’m crazy.”
It’s a truly terrifying thing when someone such as Bogdi is nervous that you’ll judge him for what he’s about to show you.
“You’ve seen Rejuvitol,” Bogdi said, “so you get, like, the basic idea. Our product is called Dor, which is a Romanian word. Impossible to translate.”
“It’s impossible,” Gavril added, as though we’d challenged Bogdi.
“So for today let’s think of it, like, Super Rejuvitol. We’ve pushed Constantin’s ideas to the next level.”
“I take it there’s more than sparklers in that box,” said S.
Bogdi looked at me. “At the center, it became clear right away that procaine is too weak. It is medicine for babies. So I asked myself, ‘Bogdi, what is like procaine but stronger than procaine?’”
Bogdi removed a sparkler, ripped it in half, and out fell a stream of white powder.
S took a step back. “Is that cocaine? Say that’s not cocaine.”
“No, it’s Dor!” Bogdi twirled his hands theatrically. “Which, yes, includes quite a bit of cocaine.”
“Okay,” said C. “Time to go.”
“Aww,” Bogdi said. “Don’t overreact.”
C ignored him. “Time to go,” she said to me.
But I couldn’t. Not yet. “How do you get it?” I asked. From the corner of my eye, I could see C staring daggers at me.
“I’m an army brat,” Livia said.
Bogdi squeezed Livia’s hand. “So she gets all the stuff. Some we use for the Dor, some we sell to fund the Dor.”
“You’re drug dealers,” said S. “Boggers, what’s happened to you?”
Bogdi stared at the floor. “It is not awesome, from an ethical perspective. But this feels like an ends-justify-the-means situation?”
“Well, thanks for having us,” said C.
S bit his lip. “She might be right,” he said to me. “Maybe we should go.”
Instead of protesting, Bogdi adopted a stance of indifference. “Okay, go home and discuss. If you want, come back tomorrow. You can try some.”
C actually gasped. “Try some?”
Bogdi shrugged: Why not?
“What’s in this for you?” C asked him. “If you’re drug dealers, and so secretive and all that, why would you even want to be in his book?”
“His … book.” Bogdi had forgotten about this stupid lie. To cover his uncertainty, he altered his performance. “Look, you guys, like, came to me.”
Feeling suddenly exposed, I coordinated a swift exit. Back in the hotel room, C and I played our roles perfectly.
Me: It’s been a long day. Can we talk about this tomorrow?
C: Tomorrow? Before or after you’ve done cocaine with a drug dealer?
Me: [trying to joke] After?
C: [not amused] You would agree that I’ve been extremely supportive of you, even through some pretty dicey stuff.
Me: Of course.
C: You would agree that I’ve never held our relationship hostage to make you do something or not do something.
Me: I agree.
C: You would agree that I don’t get upset easily, and that I don’t sound the alarms for no reason.
Me: Yes.
C: Then I hope I’ve earned some credit in your eyes when it comes to giving me my way, in this particular situation.
Me: [silent, a coward]
C: I’m telling you: this might be a deal breaker.
Me: It’s not like that. Bogdi has two Ph.D.s. I’m talking about trying his medicine just once. I might learn something.
C: Medicine. Really.
Me: Yes, really.
C: Do you understand what I’m telling you?
Me: Nothing bad will happen. I promise.
C: You’re really going to do this? It’s worth more to you than me?
Me: You’ll see. I’ll go, I’ll come back, no problem. We’ll enjoy the rest of the weekend.
C: [her heart breaking, you fucking idiot, you’ve finally done it] I’m going to bed.
Now it’s time to lie down. Tomorrow is March 13: the day Sam Tampari, the King of Idiots, does cocaine.
Good night.
March 15
April 1
Back in NY. It’s late, or early. Four in the morning. C came home yesterday and moved out. I haven’t written since I left Romania. No energy for it, and it’s taken a while for the memories to crystallize. Every day they grow sharper and more painful. It’s as if my life has been cut in half—one side of the fridge is stocked; the other side, her side, is empty.
Here’s what happened:
Slept in late on the thirteenth. Woke up on the floor. I showered and dressed, but C stayed in bed with her back to the room, clearly awake but not moving. I didn’t say anything when it was time to go. Just left. Met S in the lobby. He looked like British fucking royalty, Prince William on vacation. White slacks ironed to a perfect sheen, tight blue polo shirt that hugged his strong arms.
Outside: lovely. Like the day after a storm. The strike ended overnight, a compromise reached, and suddenly there were too many taxis to choose from. When S stood on the curb and signaled, two cabbies came at once, and I expected them to argue for us. Instead it was all:
“You take them, Mihail!”
“They are all yours, Radu!”
To the point where I wondered if both of them might leave without us. On the way, I asked S how he first met Bogdi. They didn’t seem to have much in common.
“Oh, that’s a long story,” S said, pretending he didn’t want to tell it.
In the early 1990s, S was a student at the Imperial College London. The AIDS crisis dominated the news. In a press release, Freddie Mercury announced he had the disease and died twenty-four hours later. S studied HIV/AIDS during the day, held candlelight vigils all evening, and practiced safe sex at night with two students from his intramural racquetball club. When he was only nineteen, he published his first study: “Protective Role of Progesterone in HIV Vulnerability and Progression.” He could diagram the structure of HIV by memory, the nucleocapsids arranged like question marks in a floral wreath of docking glycoproteins.
He graduated at the top of his class and moved to America for graduate school. That’s where he met Bogdi—a doctoral student who seemed to be an expert on everything. Soon after S’s arrival, they coauthored a short editorial in Medical Hypotheses in which they posited the need for drug therapies that could interfere with the interaction between HIV and C-C chemokine receptor type 5. Without much fanfare, they had predicted the CCR5 antagonists of the future, an achievement that went mostly unrecognized, except by an older, acclaimed molecular biologist who had spent the last several years exploring the relationship between levels of gene expression and aging. Joseph Radkin invited them to join his research team at the University of Oregon. Working for Radkin would mean S distancing himself from AIDS research, and his attachment to that project was serious. He’d seen his friends fall ill, grow paper-thin and paper-colored, including one of those racquetball boys, who had recently made headlines in England by filling an art gallery with time-stamped Polaroids of his own shrinking face.
“But Radkin had the money and the prestige,” S told me with a heavy sigh. “It was a postdoc many of my classmates would have killed for. I told mys
elf it was a stepping-stone, that in the long term my own research would benefit. That it was better to work within the system than outside it. Bogdi, well … he went another way.”
Another way indeed. When we arrived at the warehouse, Bogdi was there, and Livia and Gavril. The sofas were arranged more coherently, the floors swept of trash and bodies. The warehouse had skylight windows—had I not noticed them before, or were they covered?—and Bogdi sat in a spotlight of warm sun. Livia was awake. Her jean jacket had been replaced with a brown leather one, but the Reeboks were the same. Her pants had holes at the knees.
Bogdi asked after C, and when I said she wasn’t coming, he clapped. “So can we stop pretending you’re writing a fucking book?”
With a silent apology to C, I told him we could. We followed them to the other warehouse, the better warehouse. It was emptier of people than the day before—the running girl was gone—but the equipment was still there. Bogdi was all business: striding purposefully down the corridors, pausing to snag folders and printouts. This was a side of him we hadn’t seen yesterday.
We reached a sort of conference room—as much of a conference room as I could have expected in the Immortalist Underground. There was a square table, a projector pointed at a blank wall, a large conference phone. But the strangeness of the place was not entirely absent. I’m not sure the phone was plugged into anything, and while half of the chairs were standard black rollers, the other half, amazingly, were beanbags.
Bogdi indicated for us to sit, gesturing at a chair and a beanbag as if he were a waiter offering us a table or booth. When we were seated, he nodded to Gavril, who pressed a series of buttons on a small silvery remote. The lights in the room dimmed, and the projector whirred into function.
An image appeared on the wall, a mammogram of a woman’s breast. The calcifications and fibrous tissues speckled the image with white. Near the nipple was a bright, branching lesion, maybe 1 cm in width. Its irregular shape and architectural distortion suggested it was malignant—as did Bogdi’s showing it to us. This woman had breast cancer.
“This is from a year ago,” he explained. “But you saw her yesterday, on the treadmill.”
“With the pink hair,” I said.
Gavril pressed a button, and a second mammogram appeared alongside the first. The tumor was gone.
“We all know what we’re seeing.” Bogdi slid a folder across the table to me, and it was interesting that he did not have a second folder for S. It was only me he was trying to convince.
I opened the folder and spread the stack of papers in front of me. Like the mammograms, they were before-and-after, but these were tables and charts and tall lists of numbers. The data showed the results of an extensive series of blood tests, measuring the quantities of various cells in the running girl’s blood. The first page compared the number of lymphocytes before and after one year of treatment. The second page, her monocytes; the third, her B cells; and it went on this way, page after page: T cells, NK cells, gamma globulins. These cells were further subdivided into categories—for B cells: CD45, CD19, CD21low.
“Measurements of her immune system,” I said to S, keeping him in the loop. “After treatment, she has one of the strongest I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s, like, the beauty of Dor.” Bogdi’s wide, gummy smile announced his pride. “Dor didn’t kill the cancer. Her own immune system killed the cancer. We just gave it a little boost.”
“A big boost,” Gavril said, failing to grasp ironic understatement.
“And for what it’s worth?” Bogdi continued. “She’s also lost forty pounds and can run a five-minute mile.”
“Okay,” I said, “so how are you doing this?”
Gavril clicked again, and a digital line-drawing of a needle appeared on the screen. The needle was filled with colors in different amounts, with labels identifying each substance. It was a kind of pie chart—a needle chart—showing the composition of Dor. Except at the top of the image, it said, PARTIAL List of Ingredients, and then, in parentheses: For Non-Members.
Even in this incomplete format, the list of ingredients was long, complicated, and highly syllabic. Compared to my elixir, it was like looking at the ingredients of processed food versus organic. There was deoxycholic acid, ipilimumab, brentuximab vedotin, sipuleucel-T. There were items even I didn’t recognize, some natural, some synthetic. Still, I got the gist: Dor was a cocktail of immunostimulants, designed to trigger the body’s natural defense systems. To synthesize all of these things into a single intervention would require an incredible amount of expertise and an incredible amount of money.
“How many treatments of Dor did the running girl receive?” I asked.
Bogdi grunted like someone who has just eaten a large meal. “Many, many, many. Close to a million dollars’ worth. This is one of the problems: to make it so a single dose will do.”
“I don’t understand,” S said, speaking for the first time since the presentation began. “How does the cocaine factor in?”
Gavril clicked to an animated GIF of the human body, which cycled through that body’s response to an injection of Dor. The cartoon figure lit up with bright reds and blues as it coursed through his veins.
“I don’t need to tell you about cocaine’s effect on the blood-brain barrier,” Bogdi said, as the animation showed the BBB growing porous and thin as the cocaine entered the central nervous system. “We want the Dor hitting the brain like a high-speed train, and the cocaine clears the tracks.”
As the drug circulated through the figure, the animation began to glow redder and redder: the body temperature was rising. “Another side effect of cocaine that we use to our advantage,” Bogdi said. “What happens when the temperature in the body rises?”
“The immune system activates,” I answered.
The blue blood of the figure began to pulse, faster and faster. “Cocaine also raises the heart rate,” Bogdi said, “along with the blood pressure.”
I could see it: the Dor was speeding through the circulatory system, unimpeded, screaming and shouting and waking up every immunoresponse in the body.
“To cure all sicknesses,” Bogdi concluded, “we need all of the alarms sounding at once.”
My mind signaled caution, but I felt the same sensation as when I attended my first meeting of the numismatists: Finally, I have found my people. I had more questions for Bogdi—thousands of them—but he held up a hand. “If you want to know more, you join us.”
“So that means you want me to join you?”
Bogdi sat down. “Sadie has told me about your work. What you’re doing with mercury is, like, cousins with our research, albeit much more barbaric.”
“Different approaches to a similar problem,” I said as diplomatically as I could.
“There’s no shame in how far behind us you are.” Bogdi indicated the expanse of the warehouse. “You don’t have Livia.”
From her beanbag, Livia made a jerk-off motion with her hand.
“I definitely don’t have Livia.”
“Of course, if you join us,” Bogdi said, “you quit with the mercury and focus on Dor.”
I could feel S’s eyes on me. “Actually,” I said, “I’m thinking of the two in combination. Dor could be a valuable appetizer, increasing the permeability—”
Bogdi cut me off with a laugh, loud and long. “No, no, no, no. No, no. Dor is not an appetizer. Dor is the whole meal, it is dessert, it is breakfast the next morning. It is your mama picking out your undies and your papa driving you to school.”
“With respect,” I said, “that’s shortsighted. Your approach relies on the immune system being able to recognize threats, to identify targets. Not every disease makes itself visible.” What’s wrong with me?
“And mercury is the answer? That’s, like, some medieval, flat-earth shit. Your elixir will create the healthiest, most vitamin-rich corpses in all the world.”
“Do I look like a corpse to you?”
“You two are like long-lost brothers!
” Gavril said, which he meant as a compliment but is easily one of the scariest things anyone has ever said to me.
The appeal to family seemed to have a mollifying effect on Bogdi. He lowered his voice. “Okay, maybe for now, we agree to disagree?”
“Let’s say I do want to join. What’s next?”
This time, Livia answered. She hopped up from her beanbag. “Next, we get high.” She waved us on, already halfway out of the room.
“Wait. If it’s so expensive, why spend a dose on us?”
“Ugh, bro.” Bogdi drew out the words. He did not like being distrusted; he took it personally. This was a weakness, but one that made him more dangerous, not less. “Yes, we want something from you. You cracked the case. Can we show you our work now, please?”
Livia snapped her fingers. “It’s Dor time, bitches!”
* * *
Back in the first warehouse, Gavril appeared with the Dor—no joke—on a silver platter. There was a needle for each of us. Bogdi tried to explain the sensations in store. It would “knock you right out,” he said, “and when you wake up, you’ll have so much energy you’ll go around looking for heavy things to pick up.” But then he gave me a hard look. “You have to be careful. Even in Dor, cocaine is still cocaine. Too much will kill you.”
Somehow, I thought, he knows about my childhood overdose, maybe even my fall. He knows I live on the sill of the window, looking down.
“Ready?” Gavril asked.
I closed my eyes as Livia slapped my forearm. I felt S’s hand on my shoulder, warm and damp. He was nervous, too. Livia flicked the needle and brought it to my skin. Pinch. Ouch. Hum.
“Prepare to get your bell rung,” said Livia.
My bell rang. Next thing I knew I was lying on the couch with my feet in S’s lap. He was staring up at the skylight. Bogdi and Livia were on the couch across from me. They were sitting like Catholic-school students: spines straight, hands folded in laps. Gavril was facedown on the floor, mumbling into the cement. Dark spots crowded the edge of my vision and occasionally launched themselves in front of me, as though my right eye and left eye were playing a spirited game of Pong.