For the next two weeks, Mary and Thomas took care of him. No one thought it would happen so fast. Forty-five of the promised one hundred and eighty-two days, and it was all pretty much over. Albert went to bed the night they arrived and never really got up again. Mary kept him clean. Thomas oversaw his treatment. He called the hospital and took over the procedures. Albert had made a decision they had to respect. A nurse came on May 20, in the afternoon, to make sure everything was going smoothly, though those weren’t the exact words she used. She smiled at Thomas and Mary, on her way in, and went up to the next floor. She talked about the house, couldn’t help herself, it was beautiful, she had always dreamed of having a house like this, with a giant yard and a balcony and those little flourishes on the front columns. She was young, with the bloodshot eyes of someone arriving from outside, where it was still chilly along the river. As Mary listened to her she thought about the growing age gap between her and Thomas. Whenever she brought it up he was reassuring, he tried to make it clear that she was still pretty, he still wanted her. Mary didn’t talk about it much anymore, refused to let it turn into an obsession. It’s true that she was pretty, heads turned when she went to town to buy fruit or meat at the grocery store, she didn’t go unnoticed. Her hair hadn’t turned grey yet, she had never worn much makeup.
They took care of Albert as best they could, affectionately and patiently. His health started going downhill around the time they arrived. Mary parked the car and he waited, leaning against the doorframe, Thomas could see that he’d lost weight, but then he knew he’d started losing weight the moment the diagnosis came in. Already, the year before, he remembered noticing that Albert had lost his appetite. He got out of the car and his father came toward him. After dinner, he went to bed early. His plate had barely been touched. For two weeks, they took turns sitting beside him, to make sure he had everything he needed.
Before he died, Albert asked Thomas to indulge in one last flight of fancy, one final inside joke between father and son: Tell me the story of Aimé Bolduc, the leap-year man, the one who didn’t age like the others because his soul was in phase with different planets, because he’d been forgotten at the Council of Trent. Albert’s eyes were glassy, he wanted Thomas to tell him one more time about eminent mathematicians and theologians who had solved the problem of the revolution of the earth back in the sixteenth century. Thomas knew Albert’s notebook inside out. He took his father’s hand and told him about when Aimé met Jeanne, their clandestine trysts on borrowed time, the years of wealth and wandering, confidential letters delivered to Montreal into the hand of Ben Franklin himself, the time the Devil made an appearance on the banks of the Hudson, at a remote trading post somewhere in the Appalachians, deep in the night; he told the story of the Headlight Sun and the Order of Twentyniners, and of Aimé’s many and sundry inventions, none of which he’d bothered to patent. Thomas had been talking to himself for several minutes. But that too was a form of listening.
A few hours after Albert closed his eyes for the last time, on the morning of May 28, Thomas’s phone vibrated on the white commode in the hallway. They were sitting at the kitchen table, in silence. Mary was boiling water for coffee. Thomas got up and went to answer. The chair scraped on the floor. Sunlight poured in through every window at once, from both east and west, exposing the ancestral dust dancing throughout this old house. The light was almost liquid, as if you could burn it for fuel.
His father had been dead two hours, his mother for many years, he was thirty-three and everyone said he was ageing well, without even an inkling of what that might mean. He had nice features. A good personality. Intelligence and something else, a certain sensitivity. The lab number was flashing on his phone. His feelings were mixed up with those of Mary, who knew it was an important call. He pushed the button with his thumb to talk. He heard the click of the electric kettle, boiling water, and the voice of Pierre, Dr. Monette, his colleague, skipping the small talk and telling him that the analyses were all complete. Blood, cells, muscles: the results were in. His tone was professional but excited, like a boy who can’t wait to tell you about what he found, his treasure, a gold coin found under a tree in the yard, a gold Louis from colonial times, perfectly preserved, impervious to the years.
Pierre spoke quickly. There was no doubt, the curves were clear, the data robust, they’d observed the behaviour of the telomeres.
“They got younger, Thomas. I can confirm it: the cells got younger.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MARCH 2020
QUEBEC CITY, QC—WICHITA, KS
It started with an encrypted file in his professional inbox. He thought it might be a prank, but the information was accurate, there were no spelling mistakes, the English was perfect, and there was an office phone number and address in Kansas to confirm that it was a legitimate message. Dr. Thomas Langlois was cordially requested to contact Allan Kreiser, Attorney-at-Law, as soon as possible, regarding the dormant assets of a certain Kenneth Bolduc Simons. A document was attached.
It was the other name that made him react, more than his own: their two names side by side. He leaned into the screen, then backed up, skeptical. The email was barely three lines long. He printed a copy, on which the watermark of Kreiser, Littell & Moore, LLP appeared, and placed it in his personal cubby, in his office at the lab.
Beside his computer screen, at face height, Thomas kept a plant he watered once a week. Everything was normal, there was nothing especially strange or hard to believe going on around him. His life was structured around a series of self-evident facts that didn’t leave him time to think about how the equipment that surrounded him might be interesting in itself. He lived among it, worked in an environment precisely determined by their functions, each was in its place. One morning a week he spoke to his colleagues in Auckland on his retinal screen, to share both surprising and expected results.
He still walked to the lab every day of the week. He and Mary had never moved. They’d bought the building they lived in, and then another, a touch further north on Rue de la Tourelle. Mary drove an electric car, recharged it at night. In the narrow neighbourhood streets you could hear the hum of private charging stations, a sound that helped them sleep, that had been engineered with that in mind. Thomas watered his plant and looked out the window, onto the boulevard, a few floors below. He lived life at a normal pace, it wasn’t exhausting or out of control, though his work had changed the shape of history, the nature of things, the course of human life and its meaning and ultimate purpose. He owned several different coloured ties, some by the best brands. He and Mary enjoyed choosing his outfit in the morning, to match the day’s weather. She worked at the university campus. They didn’t have children, it would have been surprising if they did.
Every day for fifteen years he’d left the upper town and walked down the same staircase. Sometimes he recognized his own footprints on the steps the following day, as if no one else had walked up or down in the last twenty-four hours. When he got to work he slipped on his lab coat, passed through several sterile rooms, opening doors by swiping the touch sensors with his finger. It was a professional but friendly workplace, the kind of place where people would stop and say “Hi” in the hallway. He was well known, the head of a team active on two continents. Leading international scholarly journals cited him. Respectful smiles greeted him wherever he went. He spoke several languages. He was a top authority in his field.
Sometimes, before work, he’d take a walk by the river, a few blocks further north, where it was all winding curves, and then retrace his steps, counting each one as he went. It was an unconscious reflex, a ritual he’d never tried to analyze, and never talked about with Mary. Why would he have? It was something he did for no reason and without a second thought. It wasn’t anyone’s business but his own. He’d watch the river’s current for a moment, no longer, the wind in the reeds, the big willow tree, and then head back downtown. He thought about the names of birds he hea
rd, the names of trees. Sometimes, staring at the water in perpetual movement, it occurred to him that his mother would be proud of him, of what he had accomplished, of what he had done with his life, and he felt an inarticulate despair. But he would smile right after, and the smile and the despair were one and the same, two emotions fused into one in his mind.
Low-altitude drones flew above the surface of the water, transmitting live data on flora and fauna and residual pollution. In winter the wind blew so fiercely it was hard to keep your eyes open, it spiralled all around him, freezing everything in his path. All alone on the river bank, with the bike path behind him, he would spend a moment in silent reflection, appreciating the life he now enjoyed, moved by the past he now missed in ways he couldn’t name. And then he’d come back, retrace his footsteps and go back to work. The whole process took just five minutes of his time, barely five minutes.
In one of the lab’s common rooms the wine and beer glasses were still lying out from the previous night’s party. After office hours the champagne had started flowing. The federal government grant had been renewed for three more years. They were almost there, that was the talk in the hallways throughout the building. Six years after the recovery of the creature affectionately nicknamed Minnie, and officially designated 34-3B, after successfully regenerating the brain cells and cortex of this first and original subject, several others like her had also responded positively to treatment. Minnie was still alive, in a ventilated glass cage at the opening of the inside laboratory room, in an elegant corner alcove. She had the sharp look of a perfectly healthy adolescent mouse. Regular testing had been carried out on her organs and muscles, to make sure they were still viable and to detect any trace of compromised health, but for the most part she was left alone, no one bothered her. Some of the researchers would stop by for a chat on their way in, it might have been a superstition, they’d stop by her cage, wait for her to appear and press her nose against the glass, and then say a few words, kind words, and sincerely apologize for the pain they’d inflicted on her over the years. They’d thank her for her dedication and place a finger on the cage, which she’d pretend to feel, with alert whiskers and pointed ears.
In the early years they’d injected Minnie with various viruses and bacteria, both common ones and rare specimens procured in Norway and shipped in top secret containers with the convoluted paperwork required under international treaties and scientific protocols. In these early years she had contracted twelve different virulent forms of cancer. They broke her limbs, pierced her eardrum, ripped off her tail. And here she was today, at peace, free of scars and unpleasant memories, alive and well. In the lab she had a reputation, of course, they loved her, there was something special about her, she would be famous one day, even if no information about her had been made public yet.
In a meeting one day, Thomas suggested they build tunnels in the walls, so Minnie could circulate more freely. Everyone agreed. Nothing had been done yet, but it was still on the agenda, an item that came up in meetings now and again. The other mice were all white with red eyes. They lived in a series of numbered cages in another space reserved for growth and observation. This was where the daily experiments were performed.
It was a small team, much smaller than that of their collaborators in New Zealand who had managed to isolate a component that hadn’t been rejected by human skin samples in January. Over here they were still testing exclusively on animals, but it didn’t make a difference at the end of the day: it was their project, Thomas was lead researcher, everyone reported to him. He’d travelled several times to meet his colleagues in person. He’d loved the plant life in Auckland, the lush smells of greenery on the other side of the world, unknown constellations in an upside-down sky. Over there they were working on human skin cells, and had created the ideal conditions for isolating and eliminating undesirable variables. The climate made a difference, somehow. Over here, Thomas and his team had managed, after years of work, to make six hundred and twenty-two mice grow younger. They had been kept alive, without harm or side effects, in a fixed state where their bodies, membranes, cartilage, and nerves were developmentally frozen and did not age.
Thomas’s office was in a restricted area, so there were very few people around to witness his astonishment and excitement. He got up from his chair and headed for the exit, crossed the hallway and got in the elevator, then went through the lobby where the research centre’s name was written in large golden letters on the back wall, and where the cell-phone waves wouldn’t interfere with scientific research. He dialled the number that had been stored in his head for a long time, and somewhere in the distance a friendly voice informed him that he had reached the right place. This confirmation made him blink. A man walked in front of him and talked to the receptionist. Was Allan Kreiser available? Doctor Langlois. Mr. Kreiser wrote to me and asked me to call him as soon as possible, it’s about . . . He was asked to wait a moment, music played. His eyes were dry, he blinked a few times, and focused on various spots around him, the sliding doors, the snowflakes outside, and then he heard the voice that must be Kreiser’s, confident and friendly:
“Doctor Langlois, yes, hi! What a relief it is to finally reach you.”
“What do you mean, finally?”
“We’ve been looking for you for weeks. Search is over.”
“Yes. It seems so.”
“Well, this is your lucky day.”
“My lucky day?”
“Sir, we have to talk. When can you come to Kansas?”
A few hours later, Thomas had intentionally lied to Mary for the first time in his life, for a few different reasons but mostly because it would take far too long to explain, especially in the state he was in. He was more nervous than he’d been since his father’s death and the myriad events it set in motion. He could still hear Albert’s voice in his head, a tale winding like a river, whose ramifications got lost in the realms of conjecture. He and Albert had spent full nights discussing Aimé and his life. How could he hope to explain all that to Mary before leaving? He had ended his conversation with Kreiser with a promise to be in his Wichita office the next day. He’d be on the next flight out, he promised. They’d pay for it, the lawyer said. Fly first class. They’d meet him with a car at the airport.
He’d explain everything when he got back, of course, he’d have time, later, when he got back, to explain and make everything clear, he might even have some answers for Mary. A few hours after the end of his phone call he’d booked a seat on a flight, with two stopovers. He told Mary something had come up and he had to go to the States, to the University of Wichita, where a scientific panel was holding an emergency meeting on ethics: they’d reanimated a lemur, seven minutes after death. His presence was required, as an authority on youthing. But his work had nothing to do with resuscitation, Mary said. It was totally different. And he’d said yes, he knew, that was exactly why they needed him, they needed an outside perspective, the point of view of a researcher in a related field.
High above the mountains, so high overhead he was impervious to their influence, Thomas began to imagine what this meeting with Kreiser might entail, what he could expect from this lawyer in charge of the “dormant assets” of Aimé Bolduc, of Kenneth B. Simons, of William Van Ness, his forefather and the founder of his family line. He’d refused to believe the evidence before his eyes, imprinted on his retina when he’d seen the two names written side by side on the computer screen. It wasn’t possible. He spent the hours of his flight, his flights, looking out the window, as the continent grew smaller and smaller and at the same time took on its full scope and vertiginous size.
Between New York and Wichita he almost fell asleep, from all the thinking, about the mice and the fabricated lemur and Mary who didn’t suspect a thing. He never understood why, but every time the flight attendant came to offer him a glass of wine or rum, she mentioned that it was compliments of Kreiser, Littell & Moore. Thomas thanked her with old,
familiar stock phrases and smiled, realizing he was happy to speak English again, he and Mary had stopped doing so a long time ago, by choice. When he got back he’d explain everything to her, and they would simultaneously understand what he was doing on this plane, today, somewhere over the Great Plains.
As promised, a car was waiting for him at the airport, and he got in after the chauffeur opened the back door. He didn’t say anything. He put on his sunglasses; the oppressive March sun provided no heat. The city was frozen, at the mercy of the cold wind sweeping along the river and gathering force in the wind tunnels formed by buildings. On the highway between the airport and downtown, the car drove fast, and Thomas stared at the chauffeur’s hands clenching the wheel, struggling to stay in his lane. He heard the wind outside, buffeting the car windows and metal body, clawing its way into any conceivable opening. It was as cold as Quebec, maybe colder. These were the same winds, alternating north and south, they gathered strength over the Great Lakes before they unleashed on the Prairies.
He didn’t say a word during the drive. He wasn’t there to talk, he understood, but to be driven, transported from one point in the city to another, to meet people who would reveal something he had been unwittingly waiting for. He kept his hands in his coat pockets, unable to fully warm up. It was four in the afternoon, the sky was clear and full of colour, dark, even through the windows. Thomas had just turned forty.
The car stopped in front of a building and he got out on his own, without waiting. The door shut with a dull, muffled sound. People walked past without noticing him. In the opulent lobby, a man in uniform indicated the correct floor. In the elevator another man pushed the corresponding button. On the sixth floor, the elevator doors opened and he got out, thanking this other man with a nod of his head. The woman he had spoken to the day before stared at him for a moment, with a welcoming look, she smiled with lips pressed together. Thomas did the same, and started to say his name. He was nervous. When she spoke, each languorous elongated syllable flowed the length of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Doctor Langlois! Please take a seat, Mr. Kreiser will see you in a moment.
The Longest Year Page 27