The History of Living Forever

by Jake Wolff

  As I exited the hospital, I zipped up my jacket. The air was chilled, the stars muted by clouds. All of the light came from streetlamps. Sadiq and RJ were waiting for me by the entrance, hands stuffed in their pockets. As I approached, they looked up from their feet, their eyes questioning.

  “Is your father okay?” Sadiq had been to the hospital himself, for his wound. He was still wearing the bracelet.

  “Did it work?” RJ added.

  “Maybe,” I said to both questions. I told them about the surgery, about the Wilson’s disease. I told them it looked as if my father would recover.

  Sadiq looked up at the sky. “Thank God for that. I’m very sorry for what I’ve done, Conrad. I wanted to protect you, but that should have meant stopping you. You could have been killed, and I led you right into the line of fire.”

  “Don’t apologize. You helped me.”

  “No. Catherine was right. It was the wrong thing to do.” Sadiq laughed at the self-evidence of that. “Sammy left me a long time ago, but I’m still trying to please him.”

  I told him to go back to the motel, get some sleep. He gave me a one-armed hug and departed. RJ was watching me with an uncharacteristically guarded expression. Part of him must have known something was wrong.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Was it working or not?”

  I wanted to tell him that it was all, definitely, a hoax. That it did nothing, and that without the surgery, my father would be dead. But I owed him the truth: “I’m not sure. He seemed better.”

  “Awesome.” A heartbreaking smile spread across RJ’s face. “When can we do it for Steph?”

  I forced myself to meet his eyes. “Hey. Thank you for helping me.”

  “Psh, I’ll steal drugs for you anytime.”

  Among teenage boys, it doesn’t get much sweeter. “I love you,” I said. I can only hope, even now, that he understood all the ways that I meant it.

  He grimaced, because of course. “You’re so girlie.”

  I was glad I told him how I felt about him, but don’t mistake that moment for a selfless act, or a kind one. It was selfishness. Because I knew that would be our last conversation. “We can’t do anything for Stephanie. I don’t have any more.”

  RJ scrunched up his face. “What?”

  I confessed everything: Bogdi and Livia, the single sparkler.

  “You didn’t even tell me? You just took it?”

  There was nothing to say but “I’m sorry.”

  He was squinting as if he couldn’t see me, as if I were disappearing to him. I could see his sister in his face. “How could you do this?”

  There was so much I could say, but only one thing that mattered: “He’s my dad.”

  What happened next was exactly what I deserved. RJ swore at me, insulted me. He threatened to tell all of my secrets, though he must have known this threat was empty—no one would believe him. I watched all of this happen from above my body. When someone you love begins to hate you, it’s like one of the cords tying you to earth has been severed.

  When he finally wore himself out, he turned away and left me standing there alone. Eight months later we would graduate, and once, during the ceremony, I would look over and see him staring at me, his eyes as full of hurt and anger as they’d been that night, wishing me dead as the principal said, “Conrad Aybinder,” and I rose to the sounds of my family cheering my name.

  * * *

  I returned to the waiting room and slept until someone woke me—Dana, placing a cool hand on the back of my neck. “You can see him. He’s awake.”

  I stretched and stood and followed her down one hallway, then another, to my father’s room. She opened the door for me.

  Inside, it was dark. The sky outside his window was pure black, and only a soft, yellow light came from a desk lamp near his feet, leaving most of him in shadow. It took my eyes a second to adjust, to find him. When I did, he was squinting at me, his own eyes adapting to the brighter light of the hallway.

  “Dad?” I stepped forward.

  His hand extended for me. “Kiddo. Come in.”

  23

  My Husband’s Surgery

  The morning of my husband’s surgery, I call my father to wish him a happy birthday. I’ve barely slept, and to avoid disrupting my husband’s rest, I spent much of the night on the couch. Now I’m sitting on a stool in the kitchen, watching the sun rise through the patio doors. I can hear Kimberly stirring in the guest bedroom, applying her makeup, coughing into the crook of her elbow.

  “Kiddo,” my dad says, answering the phone.

  I lay my spoon into my empty bowl of granola. “Happy birthday.”

  He snorts into the receiver. “Forget that. Tell me what’s up.”

  I give him the timeline: surgery this morning, recovery this evening, no real news until the next day, when more tests will be done. The prognosis is still good, but the likelihood of success, according to the medical chip, no longer starts with a nine but an eight.

  “I’m sorry I’m not there.”

  “It’s okay,” I promise. My dad has never returned to Winterville, and I understand why he can’t. When we visit him in Littlefield, where he lives with his wife—a retired real estate agent—he is a good, attentive host. It’s enough.

  “Anyway, he’ll be fine. It’s not like it’s brain surgery.”

  He’s made that joke before, but I smile regardless. “Actually…”

  In the background, I hear his wife ask if it’s me on the phone. My dad tells her it is.

  I shut my eyes. “I’m scared.”

  “Me, too. I’m the one who told you he was a keeper.”

  This is true. Around month four, I called my dad with some petty, minor complaint: “He doesn’t share food. I like when a date says, ‘Try this,’ and gives me a forkful of his dessert. With him, it’s like we’re at two separate tables.”

  My dad took a long pause, though I don’t remember if it was before or after he laughed at me. “Con,” he said finally, “this guy sounds like a keeper.”

  Upstairs, the shower turns on, and the pipes under the kitchen sink begin to hum. Everything is connected. My husband is awake.

  “I was thinking about the day of your surgery,” I say.

  “Mm.” We’ve never discussed this day; we’ve never remembered it together. I’m not sure he understands what happened or what he allowed me to do. It’s hard to know where forgetting ends and pretending to forget begins. I don’t push it, even though a part of me, sometimes, feels entitled to more gratitude.

  He changes the subject. “Is Kimberly still there?”

  “Yeah.” We both laugh. “I should probably go.”

  “Call me when it’s over, or when you want to.”

  I tell him I will and that I love him, and he tells me good luck and that he loves me. I climb the stairs to watch my husband getting dressed. When I get there, he’s still in the bathroom, and Kimberly has somehow sneaked past me and is laying out clothes for him on the bed. As she unfolds his shirt and spreads it on the mattress, she touches the fabric of the collar, her hands lingering in a way that is, to me, inappropriately mournful, as though he were already dead.

  “Good morning,” I say. “Can I get you anything? Breakfast?”

  “I just thought I’d pick out some warmer clothes for him.”

  She is so small; it seems inconceivable that she produced my husband, who despite the weight loss still has twenty pounds on me. As Kimberly moves about the bedroom, her body hunched over the bed, she reminds me of a praying mantis.

  The bathroom door opens, and my husband emerges with a towel wrapped around his waist. “Oh. Everyone’s here.”

  “I was just offering your mom some breakfast,” I say, letting him know that I tried, unsuccessfully, to get her out of the room.

  “Ma, you should eat.” He looks good with a shaved head, though a little monochromatic and weirdly shaped, like a pencil with a perfectly round eraser.

  She’s laid out so many clo
thes on the bed you can’t see the bedspread. “I had some trail mix in the bedroom.”

  “What?” my husband asks. “Where did you get trail mix?”

  “I brought it. I know you don’t usually have any.”

  My husband throws up his hands, and I think, Well, at least she’s distracted him.

  * * *

  In the waiting room at the hospital, a nurse appears from behind a doorway and says my husband’s name. She’s big, dressed in white and blue, and my husband waves to her in a way that suggests they’ve met before. I’ve never seen her, and I don’t like to be reminded that a whole world is behind those doors—a world he is traveling to without me.

  We stand. Kimberly positions herself to be hugged first, and so she is, my husband’s long arms encircling her twiggy frame. She tells him good luck, and he says, “You, too,” which he can never stop himself from doing.

  When my turn comes, I kiss him twice on the lips, not caring that his breath has a stale, hungry smell, the result of his presurgical fasting. He orders me not to worry, and I agree there is no need. Eighty-seven percent is, still, a very high number. He gives my hand a final squeeze, blows a kiss to his mother, and disappears behind the door with the nurse.

  I sit down. Kimberly flips noisily through a women’s magazine, practically tearing the pages as she turns them. It is loud enough that people look up. Ten other people are in the waiting room—two couples, both Kimberly’s age, and what looks like a family of six, including a young boy, maybe five years old, who has been driven mad by waiting and is bouncing in his seat, making crazy faces at no one.

  I check my e-mails. Not surprisingly, I have one from Dana, who is so reliably supportive you can set your watch to her notes of encouragement. After my dad’s surgery, she did exactly as she had promised, bullying her way into my life in the best possible way. She drove me to therapy every week, monitored my social life as if I were on parole, made sure my college applications were finished and sent. Never in all these years since has there been a week that I haven’t heard from her. Today’s e-mail says she is thinking of me. She says that once Kimberly leaves and there is room in the house, she will visit and take care of us. Reading this, I close my eyes in relief. Even after all she did for me, it took me a long time, much too long, to realize that in every possible way except one Dana was my mother. When I finally did and asked her if I could call her that, her face lit up like a lantern, and we cried.

  I hear less often from Emmett, who is now a storyboard artist for a pretty bad, successful cartoon show in Los Angeles. Over time, I think he began to doubt the veracity of his own story about me—it did sound absurd, after all, his talk of drugs and potions and strangers from the Middle East—and he began to see it as Dana did, as the product of a jealous, imaginative teen. He never brings it up, never presses for a resolution. But whenever we’re together, a thin sheet of ice is between us, and I recognize it as a lack of trust.

  I never told him the truth—that Sadiq is not only real but a friend. He has a house outside London, a husband who is locally known for his skills as a gardener. I’ve visited him there twice, and he came to meet us once in Cape Cod for a shared vacation. My husband loves him, and Sadiq loves everyone. He doesn’t like to talk about Sammy.

  Catherine I’ve never seen again. When she left Littlefield, she said she didn’t want to hear from me. But whenever I do write to her, she responds, often in long, hurried e-mails that read like prose poems. In her letters to me she sounds lonely, but I suspect my letters sound lonely, and that doesn’t mean my life isn’t good. Theo, she told me, is not much like his father, and I know what this means: he’s happy.

  Then there’s RJ. The day we graduated from Littlefield High is the last time I saw him. I never went to him, never begged his forgiveness. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. A fantasy—that’s what Dana called it, when Emmett told her my sins. It feels that way now more than ever. How, as an adult, do you say, “I’m sorry I withheld the elixir of life from your sister”? How do you find forgiveness in a dream?

  Still, I should have apologized again, and again, and kept apologizing. I should have fought for that friendship and spent my whole life repaying the debt I owed him. I’ve tried to keep track of him. I know he lives in Philadelphia and makes enough money to have bought a car whose top comes down. After grad school, I learned online that RJ had married Jennifer Smith, and I had a moment of panic. RJ and I had gone to high school with Jenny Smith, and she was known to eat at lunch what she called “licorice sandwiches.” But then I saw a picture of RJ’s wife, and it was a different woman, just with the same name—a coincidence. Ten years ago, his sister died.

  * * *

  An hour after the nurse took my husband, she reemerges to tell us his surgery has begun. I thank her and start the timer on my watch—in four hours, I can see him again. The little boy on the other side of the room is throwing his action figures on the floor and then, when their little limbs pop off, acting as if he hadn’t intended for that outcome.

  His mother smiles apologetically at the couple sitting across from her. “We’ve been here a long time.”

  “How old is he?” the older man asks her, which is the only thing you can say to someone who is apologizing for a child’s behavior.

  “Five,” the woman says, her eyes wide, as though she never expected such a number.

  Five. I was that same age when we moved to Winterville—the decision that has come, in my mind, to be the catalyst for everything that followed. If we had never moved to Winterville, my mother would never have taken a job at a camp for troubled teens. If she hadn’t died there, my father would never have started drinking, and when the Wilson’s disease came, any doctor with a brain would have seen it. I would never have moved to Littlefield, I would never have met Sammy, and maybe—though I don’t know—he’d still be alive.

  It’s a question I’ll never answer: Why did Sammy kill himself when he believed he’d finally solved the elixir? Was it our relationship that drove him over the edge, or was our affair a bit of last-night-on-earth recklessness, the act of a man who had already decided? Perhaps that had been the plan all along—to discover the elixir of life and then vanish, leaving others to benefit. Was he driven mad by the mercury? Was it fear of the brain burn? Or was it simply the everyday load of mental illness, which so many people live with, until they don’t?

  So much could have gone differently. But if I follow that thread to its logical conclusion, I’m a completely different person on the other side, and I never meet my husband.

  My husband! He is tall, and he scrunches his nose when he smiles, like a Midwesterner. When his beard grows in, a touch of gray is near the chin, and it makes him self-conscious. He tries to cover it with his hand. When I want to see him blush, which is all the time, I point out this habit to him. To friends, I describe the color of his eyes as autumn, by which I mean they remind me of the woods outside our home, the leaves cooked by the sun and then frozen stiff after sunset, so that when I find them on the porch in the morning, they are smooth and bright. He can channel his love for me into those eyes, so that I can see it, and if you meet someone who can do this, keep him.

  * * *

  Two hours have passed. Somewhere, in a room I can’t see, they have cut into my husband’s skull, exposed the most vulnerable part of him to air. When I think of losing him, I can feel the place in my body where I will carry that loss. My fear of pain is carving out the space for it. I remember the day, not long after I proposed, when the justice of the peace we’d hired to perform the ceremony asked me why I wanted to spend my life with this man. “Because I love him,” I said, which had seemed like a tautology, or at least a stupid answer. But now I don’t know. Isn’t that what love is? A stupid answer to a difficult question?

  Here’s another question, one I’ve asked myself a thousand times: Could I re-create the elixir for my husband? Could I do for him what I did for my father? I would need to reach Bogdi and Livia, if they’re still
out there, if there’s even a single sparkler left. I would need Catherine’s help, without anything to offer in return. Finally, I would need to convince my husband to take it. He knows my interest in the history of immortality comes from Sammy, but it’s the one secret I’ve kept: how real that interest became. I honestly don’t know how he’d react.

  Would it work? Part of me wants to say that the elixir, in the end, was just a figment of my imagination, and before that, of Sammy’s, and before that, of the countless men and women who have died in pursuit of a solution to death and illness—because saying that excuses my inaction. It allows me to say that my time is better spent with my husband, caring for him, savoring whatever minutes, months, years, we have left.

  Since that day in Winterville, my father has aged the same as everyone else—slowly, and then quickly, so that you notice the changes all at once, and they surprise you. And yet, I saw the look in his eyes when he woke up from the brain burn, and that’s the memory, all these years later, I can’t shake. I’d lost my father, he was gone, and then he woke up, and he was back. It was him.

  Sammy wrote that people see the elixir of life as against the laws of nature—to wish for it is amoral, to search for it is hubris. But I have wished for it, and I have searched for it, and here’s the closest I’ve come to a revelation: In hindsight, searching for Sammy’s elixir felt no different from searching for a job, for a boyfriend, for a house that’s big enough (but small enough) to call home. It’s just another thing I’ve wanted, among many other things, at some point in my life.

  I did selfish things after Sammy died. As a result, I lost RJ, and I hurt Emmett, and I could have lost Dana, too, if she didn’t love me with a strength drawn from both her own heart and my mother’s. I could just as easily have killed my father as saved him. I try to remind myself of this. A selfish act can seem small and local, like a tick bite, but the balance of your life is at stake—your world is at stake.