by Jake Wolff
“Who’s that?” Kimberly asked, annoyed, as though Bruce Banner were a friend of mine who, like my husband, I had lured to northern Maine and deliberately given brain cancer.
“A physicist,” I said.
I let Kimberly push him through the doors while I ran ahead to get the car. When I pulled up, my husband stood and waved us off, but we helped him into the passenger seat anyway. As I drove, I put my hand in his lap, and he put his hand over mine. Then Kimberly leaned forward from the backseat and put her hand over his, as if we were in the huddle, moments before the big game.
“Let’s get you home fast,” Kimberly said, and her message to me was clear: Step on it, sister.
So I stepped on it. We sped like teenagers through Wallagrass and along Eagle Lake.
“Which direction are we traveling?” Kimberly asked.
“South,” I answered.
“Hm.” Her tone was skeptical, as if to say, You’re telling me you can go farther north than Winterville?
My husband was sleepy when we came home, so I put him to bed and lay next to him, staring at the back of his head.
Four hours later he rolled over. “Ugh. I can’t wake up.”
At first I smiled, relieved. It was a familiar line: “I can’t wake up.” He said it practically every morning. I always laughed to myself because even as he said it, he was checking his e-mail, sending text messages, planning his day. I started to ask him how he was feeling, but when I looked back down at him, he was fast asleep, his mouth open. He really couldn’t wake up. I put my face close to his face, felt the reassuring puff of breath on my lips. I watched him sleep and wondered if our doctor’s prophecy was true—if somehow, this quickly, my husband’s eyelids had already stopped working.
18
The Rapamycin Trials; or, Sammy’s Betrayal
Sammy and Sadiq, kissing in a tree.
It was late fall 2008, in Puna’auia, Tahiti. Sammy and Sadiq lay in bed in their tree-house cabana, watching the sun rise. Big-bellied moths fluttered against the mosquito net, their wings shiny and damp from the sea air. Sammy and Sadiq had been a couple for five years, give or take. They had forged a severe, committed, battle-tested love. They had survived Bucharest and breakups and Bogdi, with whom Sammy was now well and truly mixed up. They had the kind of love that could arrive at a tree house and see the toilet, which sat in the middle of the bedroom, with no walls around it, and say, “Well, who needs secrets?”
They weren’t perfect. If Sadiq was being honest, their relationship could, at times, seem so dreadfully serious. He considered himself a funny person, so why, when he made the joke about the chemist who had to quit school (he was out of his element), did Sammy rub his eyes and stare into the middle distance? It was supposed to be stupid, Sadiq wanted to say. That’s the joke! And if Sammy was being honest, he could have used an extra five to six hours of alone time per week, just to decompress. Sadiq was not quiet, and sometimes Sammy dreamed of earplugs. Plus, and he wasn’t sure when or how this had happened, but Sadiq had become kind of religious.
Still, if you saw them there, shirtless in the humidity, you could mistake them for perfection. Even Sadiq’s mother, who had accepted Sadiq’s sexuality the way one accepts a cancer diagnosis, displayed a picture of the couple in a prominent position on her mantel and once, for reasons unclear, e-mailed Sadiq a photograph of herself posing with the picture. There was Sammy, obsessive and depressive, always ready to retreat inside himself, and there was Sadiq, warmhearted and expansive, like a planet, using his gravity to pull Sammy back out.
“I should get up,” Sadiq said, stretching. “I have to meet Radkin in half an hour.”
“Same. Bogdi.”
Normally this was a place for beach bodies, but that year, Tahiti was filled with scientists. You could walk the beach and see nothing but middle-aged researchers, their faces painted white with sunscreen, dressed in a uniform of khaki shorts and sandals with socks. Earlier that year, a group of biologists at the University of Wisconsin had published a groundbreaking study in Nature. Their research showed that rapamycin, a macrolide typically used to prevent transplant patients from rejecting their new organs, slowed aging in a large sample of mice. When treated with the drug, the mice lived as much as 38 percent longer. For the first time in history a pharmacological treatment had extended the maximum life span of a mammal. The study would have made waves in any scenario, but rapamycin had a uniquely alluring mythology: it was first discovered, forty years prior, in the soil of Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island.
Sammy had begun to experiment with the drug in his elixir. An enzyme in the body known as a kinase acts as a sort of negotiator: it mediates the transfer of a hostage—a phosphate group—from a high-energy molecule to a substrate. One of these kinases, mTOR, mediates growth and helps the body navigate changes in nutrients and stress. For this reason, mTOR is essential to a young, growing body—it helps turn children into adults. But even after the body reaches adulthood, mTOR just keeps working, and people keep aging. If Sammy could capitalize on rapamycin’s ability to inhibit mTOR, it would help make his elixir stronger and longer lasting.
Soon after the article appeared, the science community descended on Rapa Nui. There were medical researchers and biologists, such as Sadiq and Radkin, who hoped to study the descendants of the Rapa Nui people, some of whom still lived there, while others had moved to Chile or Tahiti. Some of these communities had been claiming for decades to have members as old as 140. There were fringe groups, such as the Immortalist Underground, and there were all manner of businessmen and entrepreneurs, including the owner of an all-natural-energy-drink company, who recognized a moneymaking opportunity when they saw one. There were amateur scientists and detectives—this, perhaps, being the largest group—who had always wanted to go to Easter Island, it seemed like a cool place, and what better time than now?
Sadiq stood to pee. He could see the waves crashing outside and then, a second later, hear the sound of them.
“Why do you stand to the side of the toilet?” Sammy asked. “That’s so weird.”
Sadiq flushed. “Our flat growing up had a very narrow bathroom. Eventually we moved to a bigger place, but the habit stuck.”
“This is illuminating. You do this at home?”
“I suppose.”
Sammy rolled out of bed and beat Sadiq to the small kitchen sink, the only place to brush their teeth. They didn’t have a shower, but it was too hot to matter. The minute Sammy dressed he would start to sweat through his clothes. From the sink, he could see the line of tree houses stretched along the coast. In one of those, Bogdi and Livia were likely still asleep.
Sammy spit and rinsed. Sadiq took his place, already dressed in his khaki shorts and wrinkled, collared shirt. In the sunlight, Sadiq’s big shoulders seemed impossibly broad; at his neck, his skin was so smooth Sammy wanted to tackle him then and there. Instead, Sammy put on his jeans and the T-shirt Sadiq had bought him when they first moved to Houston. It had a picture of a waffle in the shape of Texas, and on the back it said TEXAS BREAKFAST.
Sadiq turned and frowned at him. “You should really wear shorts.”
“You didn’t pack me any shorts.”
“That’s because you don’t own any.”
Sammy tied his sneakers, and Sadiq watched him with the same ache in his stomach he always felt when Sam went somewhere without him. Even though Sadiq would never say this to Sam—it would be cruel and hypocritical—Sadiq always worried that what had happened to Catherine might someday happen to him. She let Sam out of her sight, and Sadiq had taken him.
“Be safe today,” Sadiq said. Please, God, take care of him.
“No worries,” Sam said, and was gone.
* * *
Sammy walked the beach toward Bogdi and Livia’s. He didn’t look forward to seeing them. He preferred them in Romania, himself in Houston, with the Atlantic between them. Even worse, they’d arrived in Tahiti with a Celebrity Client, who referred to Sammy, always and without exception, as “Sam
ster,” or “the Samster.”
The sun was fully up and cooking him. He walked near the water, where the ocean cooled the sand. Some dorky children of scientists were trying to skimboard, unsuccessfully, in the shallow foam. They were sunburned and bruised. This reminded him of Catherine, who never understood that the skin needs thirty minutes to properly absorb the lotion. And if they were somewhere with mosquitoes, he would say, “Are you using bug spray? If you are, you should apply a sunscreen that’s at least fifteen SPF stronger than normal.” And she would look at him as if he were very, very far away and say, “I love you, but maybe it’s time you returned to your home planet.”
Thinking of this made him wonder, as he often did, how Catherine was doing, and where she was. When he first returned from Bucharest, she had already flown home to North Carolina. They talked every day on the phone, sometimes for so long his voice would grow hoarse, and she would hear this change and think he was angry, when he was just tired. She made three demands if he wanted to be with her: no more Sadiq, no more Bogdi, no more Dor.
A secret: it wasn’t Sadiq, but Bogdi, that Sammy wouldn’t give up.
He knew he’d lost Catherine forever when she returned to New York but still wouldn’t see him. She wanted only to stay on the phone and narrate her disappointment. But after nearly a month of this, he’d begun to wonder if her sole objective was to punish him for as long as he would take it. It’s possible her insults were meant to soften him, like the bludgeoning action of a meat tenderizer, until he agreed to her demands. But all they did was harden him against her, until his love for her was like a bullet, small and painful, in his heart. When you’re shot and bleeding, there’s only one thing to do: take the bullet out.
So when she said she was coming to move the last of her stuff out of his apartment, he left her a goodbye note—as nice as he could possibly muster—and hid on the roof until he saw the moving van drive away. When he climbed back down the fire escape, he was unprepared for how different the apartment looked. It was like a shadowy version of its old self; everything appeared suddenly flat. One morning, he woke up and could see his own body plummeting by the window. He blinked away this image, but it kept coming, again and again: just a flash of himself, falling to his death from the roof. He could see it so clearly (and hear the impact it made, like a sopping-wet towel dropped into an empty tub) that he climbed back onto the roof to re-create it. As he stood on the lip of his building and looked down at the street below—plenty Sammies high enough to kill him—a woman saw him from the sidewalk and screamed. She pointed at him until several other people joined her. Humiliated, Sammy ran out of view, down the stairs, and back into bed. He found his phone and considered calling for help, but when he turned it on, the home screen reported fifteen missed calls from Catherine, and fifteen voice mails. He deleted them.
One afternoon, he dragged himself out of bed to buy coffee filters, and when he returned, there was Sadiq on the sidewalk. It was as if the sun had come out. Sammy cried, and some amount of time passed, and they made love again. Radkin received a job offer at Rice University, and Sadiq asked Sammy to move. To Houston. In Texas.
“Fuck it,” Sammy said. “Maybe that’s just what I need.”
* * *
Over the sound of the ocean, he heard someone calling his name, or a version of his name. “Samster! Ahoy!”
Celebrity Client was reclining on the ramp to Bogdi and Livia’s tree house. He claimed to be twenty-eight years old—same as Sammy—but Sammy wasn’t sure he believed him. His sunglasses and vacation beard covered his tan, tight skin, which was swollen around the eyes from Botox injections. He waved at Sammy and smiled, and his skin pulled tight against his skull.
“Are they in there?” Sammy asked.
Celebrity Client shrugged. “I knocked twenty minutes ago. I’m gonna peace the fuck out of here if they don’t show up soon.”
Sammy climbed the ramp and hammered the door with his fist. “Open up! Police!”
“That’s not funny!” came the immediate reply.
Behind Sammy, Celebrity Client groaned. “They were in there the whole time?”
The door opened and Bogdi appeared, dressed in only a towel. He grimaced at them. “I love both of you very much, but it’s, like, seven in the morning.”
“It’s noon,” Sammy said.
“Past noon,” said Celebrity Client.
Bogdi rolled his eyes. “Okay, so you’re both on time.”
* * *
Sadiq took a cab to the hotel, where he would meet Radkin as well as the AGE’s special guest: Bucky Baker, Jr., an oil magnate and chairman of the board of trustees at Rice University. It would be a long day for Sadiq, trying to impress them both. It’s not that he didn’t like Bucky, who often found ways to surprise him—your stereotypical oilman in some ways but not in others. He had a gay daughter, for instance, and his acceptance of her had softened his cold, conservative heart. The way he said LGBT made Sadiq smile, every letter emphasized so distinctly, so as not to forget one. It reminded him of Keanu Reeves in his favorite American movie: “I am an F-B-I agent!” Sadiq’s favorite thing about Americans was how they never shied from putting two completely random ideas together. Surfer? Bank robber? Yes, okay. In the end, Keanu throws his badge into the ocean.
Sadiq, too, sometimes thought about quitting. The move to Rice had come with better pay, but also an intense, unyielding pressure. Bucky had lobbied the university to make Radkin a godfather offer. The funding was insane; the facilities, brand-new. Before the move, Radkin had been supportive of Sadiq’s efforts to devote some of his research to HIV/AIDS, but after, Radkin said, “I need you totally with me.”
Plus Sadiq had to convince Sam to move to Texas, and, holy hell, could he be stubborn. Once, when Sadiq asked him to use soy milk in his coffee, just to try it, he had said, “I’d rather die.” Sadiq’s heart had just about stopped. Did Sam mean it? With Sam, you never knew. Being with him was like that feeling you get when you see someone standing near the edge of a cliff. It’s a kind of vertigo via empathy—a feeling that you are falling, because he might. Do you rush forward and pull him away from the edge? By moving so suddenly, you risk startling him, and you will see the surprise in his face as he plummets. Or, worse, by approaching him you force him into a decision: now or never. If he jumps, you will blame yourself: if only you could have lived with the vertigo, the constant fear, then he would still be alive.
In the end, Sam agreed so quickly that Sadiq became suspicious. He even began to search the internet for information about Catherine, whom Sadiq hadn’t seen since Romania. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, exactly. He hoped to see her married, maybe, or living somewhere far away, such as Siberia. The last time he looked, he found her working for a company that made all-natural energy drinks. Her name appeared not in academic papers, as he’d imagined, but in press releases and corporate profiles. She had become, he realized with a laugh, filthy stinking rich. She was not married, but she did have a son. Sadiq began to do the math, calculating the boy’s age against when Catherine last saw Sam, but Sadiq did not like where this equation was taking him, so he put it out of his mind without ever solving for x. If the boy had anything to do with Sam, Catherine would have said so.
Sadiq tipped the cabdriver and walked across the courtyard to the hotel. The sun was high and hot, the color of orange sherbet. Radkin and Bucky were waiting for him in the lobby. Bucky was wearing a baseball cap with the logo of the Houston Texans and a tight black T-shirt that showed, at the biceps, a hint of his old navy tattoos.
“Sadiq-o-saurus Rex!” said Bucky, rising. “We were just talking about you.”
“If you were wondering if I’ll accept a pay raise, the answer is yes.”
“Ha ha,” said Bucky. “It’s good to laugh. No one in this place has a sense of humor.”
Sadiq wondered what awful things Bucky had been saying to the hotel staff.
“We’re meeting Lorenzo in an hour,” Radkin said, his voice c
ool. Sometimes when he spoke, Sadiq imagined his words coming out of an air conditioner.
Lorenzo was a descendant of the Rapa Nui who lived with his grandmother in Māhina, on Tahiti’s northern side. The grandmother, Lorenzo claimed, was 132 years old. She was also dying, and the point of today’s visit was twofold: (1) secure the rights to her autopsy before someone else did, and (2) document Lorenzo’s preparation of the rapamycin tincture his grandmother credited for her long life. Radkin had been studying the drug, tangentially, since the late 1990s, when one of the supercentenarians he’d autopsied had a rapamycin-coated coronary stent, and whose tissues, in the area of the stent, showed surprising vitality. Over the next decade, Radkin had made occasional, brief mention of the drug in his work, suggesting it might have benefits as an antiaging therapy or as a treatment for autoimmune disease.
This last point had attracted the attention of Bucky Baker, Jr., whose gay daughter had adopted a son with a rare autoimmune disease known as Canale-Smith syndrome. In a few scattered case reports, drug therapies using rapamycin had shown some progress in treating the disease. But the research never went anywhere. Pharmaceutical companies weren’t going to spend billions of dollars to develop medicine for a disease that only affects a few hundred patients worldwide. There is a name for treatments that go unexplored due to a lack of corporate interest: orphan drugs.
So the AGE came to Houston with a clear understanding: they would continue to pursue antiaging therapies, but they would also devote some of their energies to rapamycin and Canale-Smith. Sadiq had not participated in any of the rapamycin trials—Radkin said he wanted Sadiq focused on their “real work”—but Radkin’s team reported promising results with the drug, and Bucky was happy. And then those twats at the University of Wisconsin published their study in Nature.
When Bucky sent Radkin and Sadiq an e-mail with the Nature article attached (as if they weren’t aware of it already), his question was obvious: Why, if I’m donating millions of dollars to Rice University, is a research team at a school that isn’t Rice University getting the scoop on rapamycin? His e-mail didn’t actually say any of that, of course. It said only, Interesting. —BB Jr. But when Radkin decided to go to Rapa Nui, and Bucky invited himself along, it didn’t take a mind reader to know that he was checking on his investment.