The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  Still, she can see how a visitor could get the wrong impression. The cages are stacked against the walls, leaving a narrow center aisle for Varya and Luke. The animals face them, splayed against the mesh like geckos. Their pink bellies are stretched long, fingers hooked through the open squares. The dominant monkeys stare silently with their mouths open and their long, yellow teeth bared; the less dominant ones grimace and scream. They do the same thing to the Drake’s new CEO, a man who visits the lab once or twice a year for as little time as possible.

  In her first year, the monkeys also reacted this way to Varya. It took all her self-control not to flee. But she did not flee, and though the former CEO had been right—most of Varya’s time is spent at her desk—she forces herself to visit the vivarium once daily, usually to administer breakfast. She does not touch the animals, but she likes to know how they are doing, likes to see the evidence of her success. She brings Luke’s attention to the calorie-restricted monkeys and then to the control monkeys, who eat as much as they please. Luke takes photos of each group. The flash makes them scream louder. Some of the monkeys have begun to shake the bars of their cages, so Varya shouts to explain that the controls are more prone to early-onset diabetes and that their risk of disease is almost three times higher than that of the restricted group. The restricted group even looks younger: their oldest members have lush, auburn fur while the controls are wrinkled and balding, their red rumps showing through.

  This is the midpoint of the study, so it’s too soon to assess total life span. Still, it’s clear that the results are promising, that they suggest Varya’s thesis is likely to be proven, and in sharing this she feels such pride that she can ignore the screaming, the scrabbling, the scent, and face the monkeys, her subjects, with pleasure.

  • • •

  When Luke has left, she retrieves Frida.

  Earlier today, she asked Annie to move her into the isolation chamber. Frida is her favorite monkey, but Frida is bad PR—Frida of the broad, flat brow, her golden eyes rimmed in black as if by kohl. As a baby, her ears were overlarge, her fingers long and pink. She arrived in California one week after Varya herself. That morning, Annie had received a shipment of new monkeys, but there was one held up due to a snowstorm, a baby who had been bred at a research center in Georgia. Annie had to leave, so Varya stayed. At nine thirty p.m. an unmarked white van trundled up the hill and stopped outside of the primate lab. Out climbed an unshaven boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty and who had Varya sign a receipt, as if for a pizza. He seemed to have no interest in his cargo, or perhaps he had grown sick of it: when he retrieved the cage, which was covered by a blanket, it emitted such horrible screeching that Varya instinctively backed away.

  But the animal was her responsibility now. She wore full protective clothing, though this did nothing to dim the sounds that came from the cage as the driver handed it over. He wiped his face with relief and jogged back to the van. Then he drove down the hill far faster than he had driven up, leaving Varya and the screaming cage alone.

  The cage was the size of a microwave. They would not introduce Frida to the other animals until tomorrow, so Varya brought the cage to an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet, and set it down. Her arms were already aching and her heartbeat flapped with terror. Why had she ever agreed to this? She had not even done the hardest part, which was the physical transition from old cage to new, and which required Varya to touch the animal inside.

  The cage was still covered by what Varya now saw was a baby blanket, patterned with yellow rattles. She peeled back a corner of the blanket, and the animal’s cries grew louder. Varya sat back on her heels. Her anxiety was ballooning—she knew she had to do the transition now or she would not be able to do it at all—so she hefted the small transport cage until its opening aligned with the door of the lab cage. Inhaling, she removed the blanket. The carrier was barely bigger than the monkey itself, but the animal began to revolve, turning circles while grasping the bars. Varya reached for the lock as Annie had shown her, but her hands shook—the monkey’s confusion and fear were unbearable—and before she could steady herself, the carrier slid to one side.

  Out shot the baby, as if from a cannon. It did not land in the larger cage but on Varya’s chest. She could not help it: she screamed, too, and fell back from her knees to her rear. She thought the monkey meant to hurt her, but it wrapped its slender arms around her back and clung, pressing its face to her breast.

  Who was more terrified? Varya had images of amebiasis and hepatitis B, all the diseases of which she dreamed nightly and feared she would die, all the reasons she had not wanted to take this job in the first place. But pressing back against that fear was another living creature. The baby’s body was heavy, so much denser than a human baby’s that it made the latter seem hollow. She did not know how long they stayed that way, Varya rocking back on her heels as the monkey cried. It was three weeks old. Varya knew it had been taken from its mother at two weeks, that it was the mother’s first child, and that the mother, whose name was Songlin—she had been transported from a breeding center in Guangxi, China—had been so distressed that she was tranquilized in the midst of that process.

  At one point she looked up and saw their reflection in the mirror mounted to the outside of the cage. What came to her then was Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey. Varya did not look like Kahlo—she was not as strong, she was not as defiant—and the lab, with its beige concrete walls, could not be further from Kahlo’s yucca and large, glossy leaves. But there was the monkey in Varya’s arms, her eyes dark and enormous as blackberries; there were the two of them, equally fearful, equally alone, staring into the mirror together.

  31.

  Three and a half years ago, when Varya arrived in Kingston after Daniel’s death, Mira brought her into the guest room and shut the door.

  “There’s something I need to show you,” she said.

  Mira sat on the edge of the bed, a laptop on her thighs. With her legs taut and her toes grasping the carpet, she showed Varya a series of cached webpages: Google searches about the Rom, a screenshot of Bruna Costello on the FBI’s Most Wanted site. Varya recognized the woman immediately. At once, she felt a head rush: dizzying, silver confetti. She nearly slid to the floor.

  “This is the woman Daniel decided to pursue. He took our gun from the shed and drove to West Milton, where she was living. And I called the agent who shot him,” said Mira; her voice bent like a reed. “Why, Varya? Why did Daniel do it?”

  So Varya told Mira the story of the woman. Her voice was raspy, the words flaking like rust, but she forced them until they ran faster, clearer. She was desperate to help Mira understand. When she finished, though, Mira looked even more bewildered.

  “But that was so long ago,” she said. “So deep in the past.”

  “It wasn’t, for him.” Varya’s tears ran freely; she wiped her cheeks with her fingers.

  “But it should have been. It should be.” Mira’s eyes were bloodshot, her throat scarlet. “Goddammit, Varya. My God! If only he had let it go.”

  They strategized about what to tell Gertie. Varya wanted to say that Daniel had become fixated on a local woman’s crimes after his suspension—that the notion of justice gave him something to work for, to believe in. Mira wanted to be honest.

  “What does it matter whether we tell her the truth?” she asked. “The story isn’t going to bring Daniel back. It won’t change how he died.”

  But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations. The truth might change Gertie’s perception of her children, children who weren’t alive to defend themselves. It would almost certainly ca
use her more pain.

  That night, while Mira and Gertie slept, Varya climbed out of the guest bed and walked to the study. Specks of Daniel were everywhere—comforting in their familiarity, agonizing in their superficiality. Beside the computer was a paperweight in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Varya purchased at SFO when she was a harried postdoc, en route to Kingston for Hanukkah, and realized she’d forgotten gifts. She’d hoped Daniel would mistake it for a piece of art. He didn’t. “An airport tchotchke?” he hooted, swatting her. Now, the gold plating had turned a coppery green; she had not known he’d kept it all these years.

  She sat in his chair and tipped her head back. She had not gone to Amsterdam over Thanksgiving, as she’d told him; there was no conference. She had defrosted a bag of chopped vegetables, sautéed them in olive oil, and ate the sloppy pile at the kitchen table by herself. That fall, her anxiety about Daniel’s date had become acute. She did not know what would happen that day, did not think she could stand to witness it—or perhaps it was that, if she were there, she would feel responsible. She still feared she might catch or transmit something terrible, as though her luck was both bad and contagious. The best thing she could do for Daniel was stay away.

  But by nine in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, her heart had begun to palpitate. She was sweating so profusely that a cold shower provided only a temporary reprieve. Varya did what she’d sworn she wouldn’t and called him. He made some remark about finding the fortune teller, something she thought was flip and hadn’t believed. Then came the old guilt trip, Daniel’s voice becoming gnawing and childlike—It would have been nice to have you here yesterday—and she felt an irritation suffused with self-hatred. There were times she deleted his voice mails without listening to them so that she did not have to hear this tone of voice, a maddening and indefatigable woundedness, as if he was content to be let down over and over again. Why did he keep trying? He had Mira, after all. The sooner he realized that Varya had nothing to offer, that she would only continue to fail him, the sooner he would be happy, free of her, and the sooner Varya would be released by him.

  A dry-cleaning receipt, previously pinned down by the paperweight, fluttered next to the computer. Daniel’s neat, boxy handwriting bled through from the other side.

  Varya turned it over. Our language is our strength, he’d written. Beneath that was a second phrase, one Daniel had traced over so many times that it seemed to rise, three-dimensionally, from the page: Thoughts have wings.

  • • •

  She knew exactly what it meant. Once, in graduate school, she tried to explain this phenomenon to her first therapist.

  “It’s not a question of seeing something is clean,” she said. “It’s a question of feeling it’s clean.”

  “And what if you don’t?” the therapist asked. “Feel something’s clean?”

  Varya paused. The truth was that she did not know exactly what would happen; she simply felt a constant foreboding, the sense that ruin loomed behind her like a shadow, and that the rituals could continue to forestall it.

  “Then something bad will happen,” she said.

  When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.

  Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.

  She was thirteen and a half when it occurred to her that avoiding cracks in the sidewalk could prevent the woman’s prediction from coming true for Klara. At her fourteenth birthday, it felt imperative to blow out all her candles as quickly as possible, because something awful would happen to Simon if she didn’t. She missed three candles and Simon, eight years old, blew out the rest. Varya yelled at him, knowing it made her seem selfish, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Simon’s act had ruined her attempt to protect him.

  She was not diagnosed until the age of thirty. These days, every child has an acronym to explain what’s wrong with them, but when Varya was young, the compulsions seemed like nothing but her own secret burden. They became worse after Simon’s death. Still, not until graduate school did it occur to her that she might want to try therapy, and not until her therapist mentioned OCD did it occur to her that there was a name for the constant hand-washing, the toothbrushing, the avoidance of public restrooms and Laundromats and hospitals and touching doors and subway seats and other people’s hands, all the rituals that safeguarded every hour, every day, every month, every year.

  Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t.

  “So give me some examples,” said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list.

  Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car cash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Varya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen. Plane crashes—sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS—really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.

  At her next appointment, Varya read the list aloud. When she finished, the therapist leaned back in her chair.

  “Okay,” she said. “But what are you really afraid of?”

  Varya laughed at the purity of the question. It was loss, of course. Loss of life; loss of the people she loved.

  “But you’ve already been through that,” the therapist said. “You lost your father and all your siblings—more familial loss than some people ever endure by middle age. And you’re still standing. Sitting,” she added, smiling at the couch.

  Yes, Varya was still sitting, but it wasn’t that simple. She had lost parts of herself as she lost her siblings. It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others. Certain modes of bravery—emotional bravery—and desire. The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.

  There was a time before she understood this. She was twenty-seven years old and taking a graduate course in the physics department. The course was taught by a visiting professor from Edinburgh who had studied with a researcher named Peter Higgs.

  “Plenty of people don’t believe Dr. Higgs,” he told Varya. “But they’re wrong.”

  They sat in an Italian restaurant in Midtown. The professor said that Dr. Higgs had postulated the existence of something called the Higgs boson, which imbues particles with mass. He said it could be the key to our understanding of the universe, that it was a linchpin of modern physics even though no one had ever seen it. He said it pointed to a universe ruled by symmetry but in which the most exciting developments—like human beings—are aberrations, products of the brief moments when symmetry fails.

  Some of Varya’s friends were shocked by their own missed periods, but Varya knew instantly: she woke up one morning no longer herself. Three days before, she had slept with the professor on a twin bed in his campus apartment. When he nestled his face between her legs and moved his tongue, she orgasmed for the first time. Soon after, he became civil and distant, and she did not hear from him again. Now she imagined the new cell
s in her body and thought: You will undo me. You’ll ground me forever. You will make the world so vivid, so real, that I won’t be able to forget my pain for an instant. She was afraid of aberration, which could not be controlled; she preferred the safe consistency of symmetry. When she made an appointment to have her uterus emptied at the Bleecker Street Planned Parenthood, she saw the aberration disappear as if between two elevator doors, so cleanly it might never have been there.

  Other people speak of the ecstasy to be found in sex and the more complicated joy of parenthood, but for Varya, there is no greater pleasure than relief—the relief of realizing that what she fears does not exist. Even so, it’s temporary: a blustery, wind-swept pleasure, hysterical as laughter—What was I thinking?—followed by the slow erosion of that certainty, the creeping in of doubt, which requires another check in the rearview mirror, another shower, another doorknob cleaned.

  Varya has had enough therapy to know that she’s telling herself stories. She knows her faith—that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune—is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it? Her deeper secret, the reason she doesn’t think she’ll ever be rid of the disorder, is that on some days she doesn’t think it’s a disorder. On some days, she doesn’t think it’s absurd to believe that a thought can make something come true.

  In May of 2007, six months after Daniel’s death, Mira called Varya in hysterics.

  “They’ve cleared Eddie O’Donoghue,” she said: an internal review had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

  Varya did not cry. She felt fury enter her body and settle there, like a child. She no longer believed that Daniel died of a bullet meant for the pelvis but which entered his thigh, rupturing the femoral artery, so that all his blood was lost in less than ten minutes. His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary—to the fact that thoughts have wings.