by Jake Wolff
Catherine stood in the middle of the room. “What I should really be doing is figuring out who’s responsible for you and telling them everything you’re up to.”
I gave her a panicked look.
She waved it away. “I’m not going to do that. I’m also not going to try to convince you that Sam was crazy, which he was, or that the elixir is make-believe, which it is. I’m really sorry that instead of doing those things, all I’m doing is making this deal with you. But I’m tired, Conrad, and I’ve been living with Sam, in one way or another, for many years. All I want is to do what he asked me and go home to my son.”
I imagined handing her Sammy’s journals, and it was as if I’d be giving her my soul. But she was right: Why were any of us here? Because none of us could say no to him. I had pushed myself up from the floor when my phone reported a text message from RJ. The school day had ended, and I assumed he was asking where I was.
Instead, the text said, 911!
* * *
Sadiq and Catherine dropped me off at RJ’s just after two in the afternoon. I was in the backseat, and Sadiq turned to face me. “We’ll go back to the motel and wait for you to call.”
“I leave for my flight at nine,” Catherine added, facing forward, and I knew what she meant: the clock was ticking.
I walked from the car to RJ’s front porch and rang the doorbell, pressing hard, my fingers trembling. From inside, I heard the echo of the bell, the barking response of the dog, and the sound of the dog being scolded. I listened to the hum of Sadiq’s rental car as he pulled away from the curb. I remembered what Radkin said, reported by Sammy, about how aging is a loss of information. That’s not how growing up felt to me. If anything, my life had been an accumulation of painful details—one after the other, or one contained within another, like nesting dolls. There was so much information I wished I didn’t have.
The door swung open, and it was not RJ, but his father, who greeted me. RJ’s dad was smallish—shorter than his son—but sturdy and solid-looking, like a wrestler. He was dressed in a light, thin sweater and earth-tone cardigan, with all of the color in his outfit centered, in an un-American way, on the pants. His slacks were green.
“Come in,” he said, his voice friendly but purposeful.
I followed him out of the foyer and into the living room. There, I found three other people waiting for me: RJ, looking dejected and apologetic; a fortysomething man standing at attention like a bodyguard behind the sofa; and an older man I didn’t recognize—not at first, not until he rose to greet me, and I saw the two sets of glasses around his neck and the outline of shin pads behind the pants of his suit, and then he shook my hand, smiled, and called himself Joseph Radkin.
20
Immortalists at War
I was sitting in an armchair, as scared as I’ve ever been, trying to process the sound of Radkin’s words. He spoke in a voice that was both monotone and insistent, like the horn of a car, and he had a gift for sustained, focused eye contact that I’ve come to associate with guidance counselors, car salesmen, and sociopaths. It was a trap.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Radkin was saying, “though I was expecting someone considerably older.”
I stared at him, my lips and throat dry. He was a small, gray scientist—smaller even than Sammy had described him—but he was too fastidious to be taken lightly. His peppery beard was shaved in sharp, straight lines, and his dress shirt was so pressed and clean he would have looked almost mannequin-like if not for the heavy wrinkles around his eyes and the way his hands, which he kept folded in his lap, had the leathery quality of a belt. His shirt was yellow, almost bronze. He reminded me of an antique sword.
“You’re not in trouble,” said RJ’s dad, though I’m not sure everyone in the room agreed with him. “Dr. Radkin thinks you and RJ have some materials that belonged to Mr. Tampari.”
“That belong to me,” Radkin corrected.
“Right, okay,” said RJ’s dad, too relentlessly good-natured to realize he was participating in a shakedown.
Behind Radkin, the man I’d been thinking of as his bodyguard shifted on his feet. He was dressed in black trousers and a red turtleneck, but I could see, poking just above the top of his collar, part of a tattoo: mouse ears. I remembered something from Sammy’s journals.
“Gavril?” I said.
He recoiled at this, his dark eyes registering surprise. “How do you—?”
Radkin held up a hand, silencing him. “It doesn’t matter.”
The rapamycin—the drug RJ had asked his father to get—had revealed me to Radkin. He explained this, lying through his teeth. Sammy had stolen his research, he claimed, fled to Littlefield, and killed himself, and Radkin was merely trying to recover his property. RJ’s dad had requested a sample of rapamycin from the company that controlled its market in the United States, and this company—Radkin said with a hint of embarrassment—is where he worked. Radkin, for all his menace, had a nine to five.
RJ was sitting on the same couch as Radkin, on the opposite side. “Sorry, Con,” RJ said, his voice as defeated as I’d ever heard it.
“Whoa,” said his dad, surprised by the despair on his son’s face. “No one needs to be apologizing for anything.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” RJ said, and without waiting for a response, he was gone. I watched him leave with my eyes wide and wounded. How could he desert me? My only relief was that I knew, finally, who’d been working against me this whole time. My enemy had a face. “You’re the one who broke into his apartment?” I asked Radkin.
“What?” said RJ’s dad, startled.
Radkin’s mouth twitched. “I don’t consider it breaking in when I was seeking my own property.”
“And the storage unit?”
Radkin turned to Gavril with annoyance on his face. “Apparently there’s a storage unit.”
Gavril hung his head.
I didn’t know what it meant, that Radkin had done one and not the other. “Have you been following me?”
Radkin’s face showed real surprise. “I told you: I just learned about you this morning.”
“I don’t understand. Why come now? He lived here for a year.”
Radkin threw up his hands. “We came because he told us to come. He said he had something to give me. And then I came all this way to find him dead and his apartment full of high school tests and paperbacks.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, but I really meant that I didn’t want to believe. Sammy had killed himself, and before he did, he called Sadiq and Catherine and Radkin. He’d engineered all of this.
“Oh, no,” Radkin said, his voice deadpan. “You don’t believe me.”
I sat back in my chair, and the room seemed to grow quiet. Again, the final recipe came to me, and it was as if, if I just reached, reached, a little further …
Radkin was watching me with a cryptic expression, but before he could say any more, RJ’s father intervened.
He’d finally realized that there was more to this story, so he ended the conversation by literally placing himself in the middle of the room. “Okay. I made a mistake. I should have called Conrad’s aunt before we had this discussion.”
For obvious reasons, this outcome was not desirable to me. “It’s fine.” I leaned around him to speak to Radkin. “I’ll give you everything.”
“Are you sure?” said RJ’s dad.
“Perfect.” Radkin clapped his hands, not waiting for me to change my mind.
We stood, and Radkin approached me for a handshake. He gave me his phone number and the address of his hotel, which was less than a mile from Sadiq’s.
Before he released me, he leaned in to whisper in my ear. “If I don’t hear from you tonight, I’m calling the police.”
I knew he wasn’t bluffing. Whom would they believe—me or him? I pulled my hand away. I didn’t even wait for RJ to reemerge; I bolted out the door, without any plan other than to start walking home and call Sadiq on the way. Instead—I shoul
d have known better than to discount him—I found RJ waiting in his car, parked across the street, waving me over.
I hopped in the passenger seat. I was so happy to see him that I felt my eyes go damp, and he mistook this for sadness.
“It’s okay. Check this out.” He held up a clear plastic bag filled with cylindrical pills.
“Is that the rapamycin?” I asked, hope returning to my body.
He grinned. “Where to?”
I considered this. “Dana’s.”
* * *
When I pushed through the front door and into the living room, I found, in a bizarre reenactment of the scene I’d just fled, Dana, Emmett, and Captain Carson waiting for me in the living room.
“Honey, we need to talk,” Dana said.
Captain Carson was on the couch, and he shrugged his eyebrows, like, I told you not to keep skipping. Emmett wouldn’t look at me, but I knew he was angry from the way he picked at his cuticles. RJ was still outside, the car running, and I had texted Sadiq about the developments with Radkin. We were headed to meet him and Catherine.
“I can’t right now,” I said.
Emmett scoffed, his face red. “See?” he said to Dana. “I told you.”
“Huh?” I said.
Dana gestured for everyone to calm down. “Just sit, please. You’re not in trouble.”
It was a big day for me not being in trouble. “Fine,” I said. “Just let me change.”
Dana agreed to this, and I went to my bedroom. There, Number 5, Number 7, and Number 42 were resting in their cage. After Number 37 died, I’d taken them home with Dana’s permission, though I’d told her it was only temporary. In reality, I planned to keep them as long as they lived—their lab days were over. I knelt down to their level and promised I would come back as soon as I could. I refilled their food and water, retrieved Sammy’s journals from under my bed, and escaped through the window.
* * *
By the time RJ and I arrived at Sadiq’s motel, Catherine had parked her rental car right outside his room, like a threat. I knocked on the door, and Sadiq answered.
“We don’t have much time,” I said, hurrying past him.
He closed the door and locked it behind him. “Conrad,” he said, speaking slowly, “The game is up. Even if we had everything we needed, there’s no way for us to work with Radkin breathing down our necks.”
“No. We keep going.”
A kind of calmness had settled over me. still not strong enough. what’s missing? It’s a common sensation, when a word is on the tip of your tongue, but I’ve always found two different versions of that feeling. In one, you know no matter how hard you think, how tightly you shut your eyes, the word isn’t going to come, not then, not ever. And in the other version, yes, it’s right there.
I turned to Catherine, who was watching me and RJ with a sad, curious expression. I think she was experiencing, or reexperiencing, the shock of my age. It’s an observable phenomenon: the more teenagers you put together in a room, the younger they look.
I held up the journals, which I had placed in a canvas supermarket bag. I felt as if I was carrying Sammy’s remains. I handed them to her, and she slid her hands through the loops of the handles, her arm staggering a little under the weight. They were hers to carry, and I wondered if she was trying to imagine a day when she could give them to her son. She must have been because she said, “How bad are they, honestly? What am I in for?”
It was an impossible question to answer. “He’s harder on himself than we could ever be.”
She hesitated, and I realized what it was she really wanted to know—needed to know, if she could even conceive of showing them to Theo.
“There’s nothing about me in there,” I promised.
Her face betrayed a flash of guilt for having made me say this, but all she said was “Thank you,” and she produced from her coat a one-quart plastic container half-filled with what looked like green batter, or a thick pea soup.
Sadiq was at my side, inspecting the liquid with me. “Is it still good?”
“I don’t know, Sadie. There’s no expiration date.” She looked up at us, and she must have seen in our faces how much we had at stake. So she added, “Keep it cold, I guess.”
Before she could say goodbye, I hugged her. Behind me, Sadiq and RJ were silent. Catherine put a hand on my shoulder, patted twice, and withdrew.
“I really am sorry for everything you’ve been through,” she said. “Nice to meet you,” she said to RJ, who repeated those words back to her. To Sadiq, she gave a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t be a shithead. Talk him out of this.”
“Catherine,” I said as she opened the door, and she must have thought I had changed my mind because her grip tightened on the bag. “He really killed himself?”
“Sweetheart, if it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else. If it wasn’t me, if it wasn’t Sadie…” She gestured with her free hand to all of us, then she shrugged—What can you do?—and was gone.
* * *
“Don’t despair,” Sadiq said, after the door closed. “I was able to reach Bogdi.”
Sadiq had barely finished this sentence when his laptop began to chime with a message: Incoming call: Boggers.
We gathered around the laptop, trying to fit ourselves into the tiny box that showed our faces. Sadiq occupied the middle of the frame, with me on his left and RJ to the right. In comparison to the two of them, I was struck immediately by how awful I looked—greasy, pale as birch, almost corpselike in the blue-white glow of the screen.
The video hiccupped in a burst of pixels, and there was Bogdi. He blinked at us as though he’d been sleeping for years. He was not at all like Sammy had described him—a science prodigy dressed as a frat boy. Instead, his hair was long and lawless, jutting off his head and disappearing at the top of the screen. He had a thick, Cold War mustache. His eyes were small and dull. He had placed himself close, unusually close, to the camera. He seemed to huddle over the screen, and his haggard appearance made me think that either he was afraid of being overheard or that he needed the laptop for warmth.
I tried to identify his location, but few of his surroundings were visible. I could see a dark gray wall behind him, right up against his back, and my first thought was prison cell. The light on his face was bright but low, and strangely angled, as though he’d placed a flashlight just out of the frame. What sort of prison allows its inmates to video chat?
“S … Sadiq?” Bogdi’s voice was thin. “Is that you, old friend?”
Sadiq was shaking his head in disbelief. “Boggers. My God. Are you all right?”
Bogdi’s voice, too, was nothing like I expected. Gone was the Americanized, Valley girl lilt of Sammy’s journals, replaced with a heavily accented, raw-throated weariness. “Don’t worry about me,” he said unconvincingly. “Winters are hard, that’s all.” He closed his eyes. “Winters are hard.”
“Where are you?” Sadiq asked.
Bogdi looked around suspiciously, licking his lips. “I can’t tell you that. It wouldn’t be safe for either of us.”
Sadiq was too stunned to speak, so I said, “I’m Conrad. This is RJ. We were friends of Sammy.”
“I’m sorry for your hardships. I know what it’s like to feel loss.”
“Had you already heard?” I asked.
Bogdi bit his lip as though fighting back tears. “Yes. No matter where I go, bad news finds me.”
In the awkward silence that followed, it was hard to know if the connection was still stable. Bogdi’s wan face watched us from the other side, barely moving.
Sadiq cleared his throat. “We were going to ask for your help, but maybe you’re the one who needs it.”
“No one can help me.” Bogdi’s voice was hard and tinny. “Tell me your troubles.”
Hesitantly, Sadiq told him our troubles. “We need Dor. We thought you and Livia might be able to help us.”
Bogdi’s eyes went wide with hurt, as though he’d been struck with a bullet of
fscreen. “Livia is dead,” he whispered, his voice this close to breaking.
“Oh, Boggers,” said Sadiq. “How? When?”
“There was an accident. She was in—I don’t know your American word for it. A … dirge … a floating…” Bogdi’s hand appeared, miming the act of something taking off, flying away.
“A dirigible?” I said.
Bogdi nodded, his mouth twitching. “Yes.”
Sadiq leaned into the camera, covering my face with his own. “Livia died in a blimp?”
Hearing this, Bogdi burst into hysterics, and it took me a moment—a good five seconds, maybe more—to realize he was laughing. “Yes,” he was trying to say, but the game was up. He leaned back, grinning, and the gray background pulled away in a disorienting act of showmanship. It wasn’t a prison wall, I realized, but a gray piece of what looked like poster board that someone had been manning behind him. I could guess who that someone might be.
Bogdi held his computer at arm’s length, and a woman appeared over his shoulder, howling with laughter. Livia. They were on a bed—I could see the headboard and pillows—and she was rolling around so fast she became a blur of images: a long, dark ponytail, a jangle of hoop earrings. Bogdi contributed to the pandemonium by shaking the camera, and I saw a flash of Livia’s bare feet and the briefest glimpse of her face—delicate nose, rounded chin. She was a wild, adorable thing.
“You fucking dorks,” she said. “You thought I died in a blimp!”
“You scared me,” Sadiq said. “God, you scared me.”
Livia stopped writhing and joined Bogdi in the frame. His eyes were shut with laughter. “Poor baby,” Livia said to Sadiq. “Poor sweetie.”
RJ was looking at me, like, What?
“Where are you, really?” I said.
Bogdi angled the computer toward a tall window, but all I could see was his reflection and Livia’s. She was wrapped around him like a vine.
“Welcome to the Hilton Hotel of Boston, America!”