The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  “We should go,” Radkin said to Bucky. “Sadiq thinks we’re getting the first crack at Lorenzo, but who knows what the Chile people have been up to.”

  Two airports in the world offered flights to Rapa Nui—one in Tahiti, to the west, one in Chile, to the east. Most of the scientists stayed in one of those two countries. There was no real meaning to it. But still, it was hard, in a juvenile way, not to think of the two groups as opposing teams in a contest. There was the Tahiti side, and there was the Chile side, and only one could win.

  * * *

  Catherine arrived in Chile with her boss, an entrepreneur with the temperament of a five-year-old, and Theo Charles Knoll, her actual five-year-old. The entrepreneur, Keenan DeCosta, owned a minor league baseball team, a health spa chain, and the company Catherine worked for, HeyO DayO, a line of all-natural energy drinks.

  “It’s not an energy drink,” Keenan said to the cabdriver, who hadn’t asked and barely spoke English. “It’s a nutritional drink.”

  “Keenan, give it a rest,” Catherine said. “Theo Charles, don’t unbuckle your seat belt.”

  “But!” they whined.

  “Enough.” Catherine turned in her seat and watched as nonnative bottle palms whipped by the window, their long leaves curved and bushy like an arched eyebrow. Keenan had hired her straight out of graduate school, which she had stretched to nine full years. She kept waiting for the academic job market to improve, but it never did, and least of all for anthropology. When Catherine searched the job listings, her queries returned either no results or visiting positions at schools she’d never heard of and which sounded, frankly, made up: Southwestern Alabama College of the Environment, Goblintown Community College. She could adjunct at NYU for $6,000 per semester. That might just be enough, she explained to her cooing, oblivious toddler, to pay for their bankruptcy attorney. She’d never been good with money, she would admit that, but the really hard part, the thing that made her skin feel raw if she forced herself to think about it, was that Sam had always encouraged her to be bad with money. “Just buy it,” he would say. “I’ll take care of you.”

  When he proposed—something she’d never pressured him to do—it simply stopped occurring to her that the future might be something she’d face alone.

  And then he had sex with a man and became a cocaine smuggler.

  At least it was an unbeatable breakup story. She’d be the envy of all her girlfriends, if she had time for girlfriends, which she didn’t. All she’d needed to forgive him was a promise: No more Sadiq, no more Bogdi, no more Dor. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask, and Sam agreed so quickly to cut Sadiq from his life that she felt wounded on Sadiq’s behalf. But even though Sam claimed to love her, too, he wouldn’t give up Bogdi and the Underground.

  When she realized she was pregnant, that the knot in her stomach wasn’t grief but a baby, she didn’t tell him. Not right away. She made a temporary arrangement with herself. She needed to know what she wanted first. When she decided to keep the baby, she still didn’t tell him because, well, they spent all their time arguing. Soon she would have to move her stuff out of his apartment, and that would be a better time. She would tell him in person. She nursed the obvious fantasy: she would tell him, and he would beg her to stay.

  Instead, when she showed up with the moving van, Sam was not there. She called him three times before letting herself in. She found a note from him on the counter, saying goodbye. It was one sentence long.

  So she took her stuff and her embryo and moved into a new apartment she shared with two master’s students from her department. Her roommates were both straight out of college. She took energy from their youthful, stress-free happiness, and they seemed to appreciate her presence as a cautionary, worst-case scenario. She called Sam every day, and every day his phone went straight to voice mail.

  At seventeen weeks, when the baby was four inches long, she gave up on calling and wrote him an e-mail explaining the whole situation. She attached a picture of the first ultrasound. Five seconds later, her in-box dinged: message returned undelivered. Sam had either deleted his e-mail account or blocked her from reaching him. At thirty weeks, when she was well and truly fat, she decided to go see him. She arrived at his building and was forced to wait in humiliated silence as the doorman tried to recognize her. When he did, he said, “Sorry, sweetie, Mr. Sam moved weeks ago.” She asked for a forwarding address, and the doorman went to get the super, who came out in his bathrobe.

  “Do you know where he went?” the super asked her. “He owes me money.”

  “That makes two of us,” Catherine said, and left.

  So that was that. She was a single mother, as her own mom had been. Her mother said she should hire a private investigator to track Sam down, sue him for child support. She was obviously within her rights to do so. But it hurt too much to think about, how completely he’d vanished. Did she even want him in her baby’s life?

  She took this question with her into the hospital, where she squeezed her mother’s hand and delivered a giant, screaming baby, who arrived facedown and with his arms above his head, as if he were diving out of the womb. She named him Theo Charles, after her grandfather. He was a smart, sunny, unpredictable child: crawled late, talked early, could walk backward at fourteen months but wouldn’t try stairs, even with help, until twenty. When he turned two, and her job search was at its most hopeless, she took him for his first trip home to North Carolina. He slept the whole flight, so Catherine was in a good mood as they deplaned and rode the escalator down to arrivals. Her mother, waiting for them at the bottom, quickly spoiled it.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” her mom said into Catherine’s ear, after hugging Theo hello. “He looks just like Sam.”

  Yes, he was Sam’s son: blond hair, slanted smile, long, womanly eyelashes offset by a jaw growing in strong and square. He sometimes reminded her of photographs she’d seen of old Russian generals—but, like, a nice Russian general. The Russian general who says, “Comrades, we will catch more flies with honey.”

  She spent the rest of their visit anxious. Her mother took them to the Blue Ridge Mountains, to a place where the ground was soft like mud but also somehow dry. Catherine watched Theo face-plant onto the spongy surface and come up laughing, but she couldn’t laugh with him. Her mind was with Sam. Yes, she’d tried to reach him. But whenever Theo started to ask about his father, could she look him in the eye and say she’d tried her very best to find him?

  So she and her mother searched the internet for a private investigator. Catherine imagined a man in a trench coat snapping pictures with a huge telephoto lens, but the PI—who looked like a dentist, or a vice principal—only needed thirty minutes to find Sam through the computer. Sam lived in Houston.

  “Houston?” Catherine repeated.

  The man nodded. “It’s in Texas.”

  She booked her flight and left Theo in North Carolina. She didn’t know what she would find or even what she was planning to say. You have a son; want to meet him? You have a son; you can write to him, if you’re clean? You have a son; go fuck yourself?

  In Houston, she followed the emotionless instructions of her rental car’s GPS. The satellite street view of Sam’s address showed a large, Spanish-style building offset from the road. She had to admit that it looked nice, so she was prepared for the possibility that Sam was doing better than she’d imagined.

  She was not prepared for what she saw when she pulled to the side of the road across from his mailbox: Sam drinking a cocktail on the porch, and next to him, Sadiq. They lived together. This was their home. Sam leaned back and draped a leg over Sadiq’s knee, and Sadiq pretended to eat it like a baby back rib. They clinked glasses and drank. Sam looked thin and slightly translucent; Sadiq looked fat and happy, like a squirrel in the suburbs. She dreamed back to the night of their drug-induced hookup, the way she crumpled in the hallway and forced herself to listen to them—first to the sounds of Sam coming, and then to the louder sounds of Sadiq. It was the worst night of h
er life, but she had never considered, not once, that the two of them would have a real relationship. Sam had promised her: no more Sadiq. These two idiots had betrayed her love and her friendship, fine, but they weren’t supposed to build a life together.

  Catherine opened the car door and stepped out. Her legs were weak, as though she were returning from space. On the porch, Sam stood and shielded his eyes from the sun. Was he looking at her? Did he recognize her so soon? No, he hadn’t—he was watching as a postal van rumbled down the road and turned into his gravel driveway. The driver had a package for them, and Sam stepped off the porch to retrieve it.

  Catherine began to cross the street. It was good if Sam had his life together. It was a good thing. She imagined introducing Theo to “Uncle Sadiq,” and then she started to laugh, like a crazy woman, in the middle of the road. She stepped onto the sidewalk and was almost to their driveway—almost past the point of no return—when Sam tore open the packaging to reveal a narrow blue box. Catherine froze in place with a suddenness that surprised even her. Why was she having déjà vu? About a box?

  The answer came from the same wounded place in her memory where the image of Sam kissing the back of Sadiq’s neck still resided. The answer came from the Immortalist Underground, from the stale, cavernous air of Bogdi’s warehouse. She pictured the six of them—herself, Sam, Sadiq, Bogdi, Livia, and that other one—what was his name? Gavin or something—standing over a box of sparklers, and inside it, the cocaine she and Sam would fight about until she was too tired to keep her eyes open. Well, her eyes were open, and she was staring at that same box of sparklers.

  She watched as Sam surrounded the box with his long, skinny arms and carried it up the stairs to the porch. Any doubts she had left about the contents of that box were erased by Sadiq and his reaction to seeing it. As Sam passed him on the porch, Sadiq’s face darkened, and he downed the last of his drink.

  And then she was walking back to her car, getting into it, and driving straight to the airport. When she returned the car, the guy in the garage said, “You didn’t refill the gas?” And she said, “Nope!” and paid the exorbitant service charge with a smile. Anything to get out of there faster. Anything to get home to Theo, her beautiful boy, who did not have a father and never would.

  * * *

  Keenan DeCosta arrived in New York only two or three months later. Catherine was on campus, holding her perpetually unattended office hours, when she received a phone call from the program administrator saying a man was there to see her about a job.

  As she walked down the hall to the main office, she imagined a wizened anthropologist waiting for her, someone who looked like Clifford Geertz, with white, windswept hair and an avuncular beard. Instead, there was Keenan: goatee, cargo shorts, sport sandals. Only the sandals truly shocked her, and she tried to avoid looking at them the same way she avoided staring at people with prosthetic limbs.

  “Can I help you?”

  Keenan stared at her. “Let me answer your question with a question. When was the last time you had a smoothie?”

  Catherine was too confused to do anything but answer sincerely. “Last weekend?”

  “Exactly. In twenty years, no one will be eating solid food. Liquid diets are the future.”

  From this improbable premise, Keenan pitched his new company: a line of all-natural nutritional drinks based on tribal and folkloric medicines from around the world. They would take goji berries from Tibet, and Sango coral from Japan, and anything else Catherine wanted, and mix them all up in the world’s first health beverage system. Before she could blink, he was telling her about the trips they would take, all over the world and at his expense. “It’s called HeyO DayO.”

  “HeyO DayO.”

  “It’s like you’re saying hello to the day,” he said. “The day-o,” he clarified.

  Three years later, as they rode in the cab to their Santiago business hotel, she was pretty much rich. She still couldn’t believe it. She hadn’t flown coach since that trip to Houston, but she would sometimes walk right past her first-class seat and keep walking, deep into the plane, until Theo tugged her hand and said, “Mommy, you said 3B. This is not 3B. We are lost!”

  Her thoughts of Theo were interrupted by Theo, who was trying to start a slap fight with Keenan. She had been worried, in the early days, that Theo would come to see Keenan as a father figure, but instead they were something like brothers.

  “Could this hotel be any farther from the airport?” Keenan asked as he grappled with Theo.

  “It’s been twenty minutes,” Catherine said.

  “It’s been twenty minutes,” Theo said, in perfect imitation of her voice, then laughed so hard he lost the slap fight.

  Their goals for the week were simple, as usual. The University of Wisconsin study had created a lot of buzz, and HeyO DayO needed some photographs of Catherine and Keenan, but especially Catherine, in front of the moai, the stone statues. They also had a meeting with someone named Lorenzo, who had positioned himself as a kind of Rapa Nui historian, the keeper of records. She hoped he would have some good stories that they could use in their TV spots or on the website. In truth, none of their drinks would undergo any actual changes. Several of them already included ingredients from Chile and French Polynesia, and these would be highlighted more prominently for as long as the excitement lasted. For obvious reasons, they could never add rapamycin to an energy drink available at gas stations.

  * * *

  Sammy became suspicious when, at 1:00 p.m., Bogdi was still wearing the towel. His ribs appeared every time he laughed at something, his skeleton flexing against his skin like gills. Livia was dressed but in no hurry; she reclined on the bed with her sneakers on the pillows and her head in Celebrity Client’s lap. Sammy watched as Celebrity Client ran his fingers through her uneven bangs and wondered if the poor fool was in love with her.

  “Shouldn’t we get going?” Sammy said for the third or fourth time. According to Bogdi, the Underground had made contact with a Tahitian pharmacist who was using rapamycin-loaded nanoparticles to effectively, but illegally, treat children with muscular dystrophy.

  “You gotta relax,” Bogdi said. “This is, like, island life. We’re on island time.”

  Sammy closed his eyes. “Please stop saying ‘island time.’”

  “It would be nice to get some sun,” added Celebrity Client, trying to be helpful, but Sammy could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Earlier, they’d been allies, but with Livia in his lap his impatience had mysteriously faded.

  “It would be nice if everyone stopped bitching,” Livia said. “You two are like my sisters.”

  “I didn’t know you had sisters,” said Celebrity Client. He’d been a member of the Underground since early in his career, when he came to Romania to shoot a low-budget adaptation of a video game about a World War II soldier with swords for arms.

  “Okay, seriously,” Sammy said. “What’s going on?”

  Bogdi and Livia shared a look.

  “Listen,” Bogdi said. “The pharmacist didn’t check out.”

  Sammy stared at him. “What does that mean?”

  “It means he was on the crazy side. His e-mails were actually pretty funny.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Livia twisted her head so that she was looking at Sammy upside down. “Hey, dickhead, we told you not to come.”

  “I—” Sammy stopped. She was right. They said it wasn’t worth the trip, that they knew flying made him anxious. He had thought they were just trying to be nice. “I don’t understand. What are we doing here?”

  “You aren’t doing shit,” Livia said.

  “Bucky Baker, Jr.,” said Bogdi.

  “Bucky Baker, Jr.,” Sammy repeated.

  “We know something you don’t know,” Livia said in a singsong voice.

  Bogdi explained. The Underground had acquired the results of Radkin’s research into rapamycin as a treatment for Canale-Smith syndrome. The results were not encouraging: None of Radkin�
��s trials had shown that the drug had anything but a slight ameliorative effect on the disease. According to Bogdi, Radkin had hidden these results from Bucky Baker, Jr., in the fear that Bucky, when he learned of them, would withdraw his considerable financial support from the AGE. Bogdi was hoping he would do just that when he and Livia showed him the results. And maybe, if all went well, they could help him find a new outlet for his wealth.

  “We want that American oil money!” Bogdi said. “We’re gonna swim in it like your Scrooge McDuck.”

  “How did you get these results?” Sammy asked. “You stole them?”

  Bogdi shrugged. “We steal from him, he steals from us. It’s, like, the nature of the game.”

  “I seriously doubt Joseph Radkin has ever stolen anything from you.”

  “You’re more naïve than my sisters,” Livia said.

  “She’s right,” Bogdi said. “You’re too horny for Sadie to see the kind of man he works for.”

  “Seriously, how did you get this information?”

  Livia rolled her eyes so hard she actually flipped over on the bed, with her chin now hooked over Celebrity Client’s thigh. “If I say ‘computer hacking,’ will that shut you up?”

  Sammy curled his lip. If she’d said “computer hacking” it absolutely would have shut him up. “You know I can’t let you do anything that would hurt Sadie.”

  “Sure,” Bogdi said. “That’s why we didn’t want you to come.”

  “Even if I let you do this, which I won’t, there’s no way someone like Bucky Baker, Jr., will listen to you.”