The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  “He’ll listen if we’re with him,” Livia said, pointing her chin toward Celebrity Client.

  “We read an interview,” Bogdi explained. “Bucky Baker’s favorite movie is Trigger Finger 2.”

  Celebrity Client nodded as though this fact were inevitable.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sammy said, “because we’re not doing any of that.”

  “I hear you,” Bogdi said, “but I don’t agree.”

  Bogdi and Sammy stared at each other. The two of them were no strangers to arguing, but that was about formulas, chemical equations; it was like two computers barking at each other in binary code. This time—and Sammy had seen this exact phrase on one of Celebrity Client’s movie posters—it was personal.

  * * *

  On the way to Lorenzo’s house, Sadiq received a text message from Lorenzo: No, don’t go to my house. Meet me at the University. So Sadiq gave the new instructions to their driver and explained the change to Radkin and Bucky, Sadiq’s anxiety rising in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

  He’d been the sole liaison between Lorenzo and the AGE—Radkin had never even spoken to him—and that was the start of the problem. Anything that went wrong would fall squarely on Sadiq’s shoulders. He had spent much of the last decade asking people for things—most often, access to their dying bodies—and so considered himself skilled in identifying the needs in people. Some wanted to be made to feel important, as if the future of human life hinged on their cooperation, and Sadiq would tell them, yes, you’re important—the most important! It really was that unsubtle. Others wanted favors: cash, medical treatment, scholarships for their grandchildren to prestigious American schools. Others, such as Lorenzo, just wanted a friend.

  But rather than welcoming the three of them into his home—where he lived with the grandmother—Lorenzo wanted to meet them alone in the cold confines of a university laboratory. Had Sadiq read him wrong?

  When the driver first pulled onto the university campus, Sadiq thought he’d taken them by accident to the airport. But then he saw the university signage and realized, no, the campus was only airportlike, with long, industrial outbuildings and what really, really looked like an air traffic control tower. From the car, he spotted Lorenzo waving to them outside the science building. They walked the ten or so meters to meet him, and he waved the whole time, as if they might lose sight of him on the way. They shook hands and introduced themselves. Lorenzo was light skinned, short, and broad chested. In America, he would likely be mistaken for Hawaiian, though a barista in Houston once asked Sadiq if he spoke Japanese, so you never knew.

  “Is everything okay?” Sadiq asked. “We were worried the change of venue might mean your grandmother had taken a turn.”

  Sadiq saw Radkin give him a look, as if to say, We were?

  Lorenzo shook his head. “Honestly, my mémère took that turn many months ago. But I do have some difficult news. I’ve decided to work with the University of Wisconsin people.”

  Next to Sadiq, Radkin’s body went stiff, and Bucky’s hands formed into fists.

  “You’ve been very kind. UW just has better … resources.”

  Sadiq knew what this meant: they’d offered Lorenzo something. How had Sadiq read him so wrong? For some people, any offer of payment was an insult, the quickest way to lose them. He had thought Lorenzo was one of those.

  Bucky was breathing hard. “Now, okay, we can always negotiate—”

  “I’m sorry. I signed all the papers.”

  “A phone call to us would have sufficed,” Radkin said, his voice low.

  “I wanted to tell you in person,” Lorenzo said, offended by the very idea. “It was the honorable thing.”

  Lorenzo took his leave, and Bucky stormed back to the car, muttering to himself. Sadiq had the urge to run and hide, as if he were a little boy who’d broken something.

  Radkin stood close, with his arms crossed. “Well?”

  “Lorenzo misled me.” Sadiq wasn’t sure that was true. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “How about your job? Which is to not put me in situations like this one, where my time is wasted.”

  “We’ve followed bad leads before.” Sadiq didn’t know why he was arguing. It was his fault.

  “Your head isn’t here. Not since him.” Radkin walked to the car, where they had a long drive ahead.

  Him. The word hung in the air like smog. Maybe things weren’t perfect with Sam, maybe accepting his work with the elixir, the dangers of it, had been easier to do in theory than it was in practice. There was the day, last year, when Sadiq helped Sammy take a brain scan and run blood work on himself immediately before and immediately after a dose of the elixir. In the afterimage, Sadiq watched Sammy’s brain glow green and red with happiness: the prolactin, serotonin, and endorphins lighting up the twilight blue of his mind like fireworks. This should have been a good thing: Sammy and Bogdi’s elixir was working, was getting stronger by the day. But since then, whenever the elixir wore off and Sammy’s eyes went dull, Sadiq would picture those happy colors draining from his lover’s mind like bathwater.

  Still: they loved each other. Sadiq felt this love in the deepest part of his heart. He reminded himself of something his mother once told him: “There’s no point in looking for the badness in goodness. You’ll always find it, and what then?”

  * * *

  They landed on the island sometime before noon. Catherine checked her watch. Counting their connecting flights, they’d flown over six thousand miles to reach Easter Island, yet, after all that effort, the time difference between here and New York was only an hour. She felt betrayed by this, and saddened—time had followed her.

  As she stepped onto the sidewalk, the cool air of the island hit her face. It smelled of mud and meadows and gasoline. With no planes landing or taking off, she could hear the screechy, whistling broadcast of hawks circling. Their airplane had rattled like a cold body the entire flight, breathing its icy, pressurized air onto her bare arms. On their descent, she’d seen the yellow grass of the island, the pockets of rock near the coastline. From the sky, the island had a thirsty look. But at ground level, she could appreciate the greenness of the grass, flat as paper near the parking lot but rolling upward into hills on the horizon. Near the exit, one of the moai stared back at her with big googly eyes.

  She scanned the parking lot until she recognized the logo of their rental car company. “There,” she said to Keenan, and he led them toward it. He was wearing a backward baseball cap and carrying a huge bag of photography equipment around his shoulder. On her trips with Sam, Catherine had been the photographer. She wasn’t an expert, but she liked lining things up, and it became a challenge for her, to take a picture that could make Sam smile, or, better yet, a picture of Sam smiling.

  She gave their name to the man at the outdoor reservation kiosk.

  “Hmm,” he said, in a heavily accented baritone. “I have you here for car and mountain bikes. Which you want?”

  “Right,” she said. “Both.”

  “Hmm. The island is small, like this.” He used his index finger and thumb to indicate a space roughly the size of a black bean. “No need for both.”

  They wanted the car and the bikes for a silly reason—with time constraints, and with Theo, they needed to drive, but in the photographs for the website, they needed to be on mountain bikes. It was part of their brand.

  But how to explain this to the rental guy? So she said, “I know it’s crazy, but we’re Americans.”

  They followed the road away from the airport, driving along the ocean. A man she’d seen on the airplane had beaten them to the water on his rented ATV, and he was unfolding a collapsible kayak near the cliffs, which was so cool, Catherine thought, like a big piece of origami. She would love to do something like that, but it would mean leaving Theo on the shore and watching him shrink into a pinprick as the ocean carried her out. The thought of that made her want to scream herself awake, like from a bad dream.

  It wasn’t
long until the road brought them near an ahu, a stone platform, with a row of moai facing inward with their backs to the water, as if they were bracing themselves against the wind. She stopped the car. Keenan unpacked his camera, whistling. Theo unlocked his own seat belt. Catherine told him to stay near the car as she unloaded the bikes from the rear-mounted bike rack. By the time she was finished, Keenan was on his knees in front of the moai, snapping pictures, though it looked from behind as if he were praying to them. Catherine wheeled the bikes into place. A few hundred feet down the road, two men were drinking beer in the back of their jeep, and she thought they might be laughing at her. She did feel ridiculous, swinging her leg over the bike for the first time, tousling her hair to create an appropriately windswept coif. She had never expected to become such a visual part of the company. What kind of person reads the websites of corporations? Weirdos, she guessed, and maybe business majors at poorly ranked schools.

  Keenan was already snapping pictures. He looked up from the viewfinder. “Theo, buddy, can you stay out of the frame for just a second?… Good.… Lean back a little, Cat. Wow. How many years have we known each other? How have you not aged?”

  * * *

  Five miles to the west, back toward the airport, Sammy and Sadiq were standing on the lip of the Rano Kau crater lake. Earlier, Sammy had been cold, but the volcano had its own climate, separate from the island’s, and so he removed his cardigan and slung it over his shoulder. The sky was still gray, speckled with streaks of sun. The heavy clouds, matched in color by the basalt at ground level, looked augite and agitable. The whole place, and he realized this was foolish to think about a volcano, being much too obvious, had an overcooked appearance. He wondered about that name, Rano Kau, and he dreamed a translation: Bowl of Mud.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “I wonder how deep it is.” Sadiq didn’t actually care. It was just something to say. On a better day, he could have found beauty in the way the waves struck the outer edges of the Rano Kau, and how, like a hand cupping wet clay, you could see exactly how they’d shaped this place over thousands and thousands of years. If she were here, his mother would have said, “God is great, God is so good,” and Sadiq liked that about her, how in the way she said it, she privileged goodness over greatness. But today was awful, and this whole trip was so awful.

  “You’ve been a complete waste since we came to Rice,” Radkin had said over the phone yesterday morning, while Sadiq waited with Sam for their flight to Rapa Nui. “You’re distracted, and I need to know why. Is it Sam?”

  “I don’t agree with your premise that I’m distracted,” Sadiq replied, though he didn’t know what he believed. It was true, for example, that the last monthly report he’d written for the AGE newsletter had contained an unusual amount of typographical errors, including an omitted comma that implied, mistakenly, that a symptom of Guillain-Barré syndrome was being unable to eat diarrhea. Was Sam to blame? Sadiq spent so much time worried about Sam that he did sometimes forget to perform basic self-care, such as toothbrushing or toenail maintenance. Some months ago, he’d called his doctor to ask about something to help him sleep, and the receptionist—or was it the nurse?—said, “He’ll want to see you first.” Sadiq had felt a rush of warmth at those words—he’ll want to see you—as though the doctor simply wanted the pleasure of his company. Such was the depth of his need to be loved: it made him gullible. When the woman said what she said, he let out a small, involuntary coo. Hearing this, the woman said, “Um,” and he was so embarrassed that he never went in for the sleeping pills.

  He watched Sam step closer to the edge, too close, and felt his stomach tighten. Sadiq asked, “Should we head back to the bikes?” They’d left them near the road, at the bottom of the trail.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s why I asked, because it’s what I want.”

  Sam looked over his shoulder with a boyish, wounded expression. “Why are you snapping at me?” He’d feel bad, Sammy thought, if he knew I’ve spent this entire trip protecting him. Bogdi had been steadfast in his plan to sabotage the AGE’s relationship with Bucky Baker, Jr., and so Sammy had gone to work on Livia, who, despite her meanness, was more logical and could be reasoned with.

  “Okay, fine,” she’d said after two days of pestering. “God, you’re such a pussy.”

  Sammy reached the bottom of the volcano, and the bikes came into view, held upright by their kickstands. He stood with his hand on the vinyl saddle while he waited for Sadiq to catch up. The dirt road split in the distance, one way leading to the airport, the other hugging the coast. A group of tourists on horseback crested the nearest hill—six people on five horses, all of the horses plump and long-legged, with tawny, dappled coats, like sunlight breaking through a screen door. He watched a gust of wind push the grass in his direction, then the wind hit him, and he was cold. He put his cardigan back on and immediately began to sweat.

  Sadiq arrived, and they mounted their bikes in clumsy, angry silence. The man at the rental place told them the island was small and dense with things to look at. “You can’t go wrong,” he’d said. “Every road leads somewhere good.”

  They set off, the wind beating against them. To their right, a man was kayaking in the rough water, pushing his boat through the choppy ocean. The man waved at them, and Sammy knew that Sadiq must have waved first, probably to make sure he was okay. The moai stared at Sammy, stone-faced, and he remembered his trip to Puerto Rico, a vacation he’d taken with Catherine early in their relationship. They had gone to a beautiful white sand beach, but they couldn’t decide where to set up their umbrella—she wanted to be close to the public restrooms; he wanted to be far from people—and an older man, a native, had called to them, “What are you arguing for? You’re in paradise!” Even then, Sammy had known: This moment will never leave me. I’ll have this man in my head, judging me, forever.

  Sadiq watched Sam pedal, the back of his neck glistening, and thought, If Sam is a distraction, so be it.

  Sammy heard the sound of an automobile and saw a large luxury SUV approaching. He moved off the road to make room for it. As it neared, he could see a woman in the driver’s seat, and in the passenger seat, a man. As it passed, he saw a child in the backseat, face pressed to the window. It was an unremarkable sight, except that less than a second after the car drove by, Sammy heard the sound of its brakes being applied, hard and fast, as if in distress. He stopped his bike and turned. Sadiq had stopped as well, and so had the car. One at a time, three of the car doors opened—the car was still sitting there right in the middle of the road—and three people emerged. One was a boy, blond haired and handsome. One was a man, in sport sandals and baggy shorts. One, the last, was Catherine.

  * * *

  How long did it take Catherine to recognize Sam, there on the side of the road, his skinny arms rattling on the handlebars—three seconds, five? You could actually calculate this, she thought as she sat in the car, her door open, Keenan and Theo already outside. You would have to know how fast she was going, and you would have to measure the distance from when she first saw him to when she stopped. She had been driving, probably too fast, when she saw two men on bicycles, one leading the other. She had thought, That guy looks a lot like Sam.

  Even after stopping, which was involuntary, she might never have left the car were it not for Theo. In her side-view mirror, she saw that he was running loose and headed toward the cliffs. So she hopped out of the car and caught him by his sleeve, swinging him into her arms and releasing him back in the direction of the car. He charged at Keenan like a bull, and Keenan, her sweet idiot boss, knelt to receive him. She almost smiled, but then she remembered herself and what was happening. Just a few yards away, Sadiq—Sadiq—was off his bike and closing the distance between them. Behind him, Sam had not moved a muscle. He was frozen in place like a moai, staring at her as if she’d beamed down to Earth from a spaceship. She did feel alien, in her own way. The girl they’d known, all those years ago, wa
s gone. She’d been abducted by time.

  Sadiq drew close and took both her hands, squeezed them. He was big and beautiful, like a tree. “Catherine,” he said, not really looking at her. He was watching Theo with a pained, sickly expression, and she knew right away that he knew. Maybe he’d already known. This thought hurt her and dazed her, like a blow to the head. Did Sam know, too?

  “Hi, Sadie,” she said to him, surprising herself at this use of his nickname.

  He looked back at her, his eyes grateful. He must have been having a bad day.

  Theo had found something to occupy him in the grass, so Keenan left his side and shook Sadiq’s hand. They introduced themselves, and Catherine said something about having worked with Sadiq in the past. Keenan just smiled and nodded, not really caring. In the distance, she could hear the ocean hitting the rocks, attacking and retreating. Sadiq made an awkward, throat-clearing sound, and the three of them stood there and stared at Sam, waiting for him to do the human thing and come over. He took a long time dismounting his bike, lowering the kickstand, and looping his messenger bag around the handles. She studied his face as he pretended to be busy with these simple tasks. He was still the man she remembered. Blushing lips, pale blue eyes the color of forget-me-nots. People are so pretty when they’re embarrassed, and Sam was embarrassed by everything. If she was less stunned by him than she used to be—which she was, or so she told herself—it was not because he’d aged but only because she saw him more clearly. Time had explained him to her. All those years ago, when she loved him, she believed she did so in spite of his unhappiness, which had seemed to her soundless, unknowable. Now, and perhaps because she’d watched a child grow, their child, from a speck of cells to a boy, she could see the shape and size of his sadness—she could measure it, same as she could the movement from seeing a man you don’t know, biking on the side of the road, to realizing, Yes, I do know him—it’s him. And the shape of his sadness was this: his body, every inch of it, head to toe. This whole time, that’s what she’d loved in him. That’s what she’d missed. He was like a shadow box, where the darkness and depth makes everything on the surface more beautiful.