The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  He sat down on a black leather sofa. He knew why he’d been summoned, what they were going to tell him. Aimé had chosen him, named him. Aimé wanted to make contact with him. The entire enigma was encapsulated in this one idea that was so quick to formulate but slow to penetrate. He pictured his father and felt sick to his stomach, a sort of violent stab of uncontrollable joy and nervous excitement. His father had been gone six years. He’d left it all behind in exchange for a healthy relationship with his son: said goodbye to his obsession, abandoned his quest, moved on to something else. In his jacket pocket, under his winter coat, he’d brought Albert’s notebook, not to show Kreiser, but to have with him, like a lucky charm. He always carried it with him, and touched it, like a reflex. It reminded him of his father, of course, that was only natural, but also of longevity, of what people called longevity, life’s boundless elasticity, the possibility of stretching life out and regenerating it ad infinitum, it reminded him what he was working for, why he went on with his research. The light was nicely dimmed, the bulbs silent. He heard the receptionist’s Nano Pen gliding over a paper. As at the research centre, large golden letters mounted on the back wall displayed the firm’s name against a dark wood backdrop.

  Allan Kreiser, Attorney-at-Law, came silently out of the hallway. The soles of his shoes glided over noise-dampening carpet. Thomas stood up. Kreiser was a big, clean-shaven man. He was smiling. Thomas could see the skin on his neck pulled tight by his shirt collar. They shook hands and Kreiser asked Thomas to please follow him. The receptionist nodded her head as they passed by, as if giving her blessing. It was much warmer inside Kreiser’s spacious office, and Thomas took off his coat and was shown a series of hooks on the wall behind him. Kresier sat down and set his elbows on the armrests of the swivelling office chair, and waited for Thomas to join him. Through a massive window you could see downtown in black-and-white, the winding frozen river, the vast blue sky, and the horizon beyond where the sun would soon go down. Only a few moments of daylight remained. Just before Kreiser began speaking, Thomas became aware of two other people in opposite corners of the room. They approached slowly, as if summoned by a signal.

  “So. Doctor Langlois. As I’ve already mentioned, we’re here today to discuss the last will and testament of Mr. Kenneth B. Simons. You are his sole beneficiary. Let me first introduce Mr. Goldstein, to my right. He’s an intern, and he’ll be taking the minutes of our meeting. And this is Ms. Cartwright, the firm’s notary, who can answer any specific questions you may have, at any time. We also require legal supervision for the reading of the will and listing of the bequeathed assets.”

  Thomas got up, holding his tie, to shake hands with these two new, no-nonsense members of their party. Goldstein looked barely twenty-one. Cartwright was sitting on an antique chair, slightly off in the background. Thomas sat back down. Kreiser continued:

  “We made an appointment with you today, Dr. Langlois, to inform you that you are, let me say it again, the sole beneficiary of the fortune, property, stocks, and dividends of Mr. Kenneth B. Simons, whose will we recently received by mail. No one else is mentioned in the text, which was signed in December 1987 by Mr. Simons, and certified on the same day by Willmore, a Kansas City law firm. We successfully authenticated the document on March 12. We are now ready to proceed with the official reading of the will, which is why you are here.

  “Did Mr. Simons just pass away?”

  “No, he didn’t just pass away, but we only just received the documents.”

  He gave Ms. Cartwright, the notary, a look from the corner of his eye, and proceeded:

  “We don’t fully understand exactly what transpired, but here we are. The papers arrived at our office in early March, and we immediately took steps to find you.”

  “Do you know the date of his death?”

  “Not for the moment. All we know is that he didn’t commit suicide, as the text might lead us to believe, since his body was never found. The documents list an address on the outskirts of Pittsburg — a small town in northeastern Kansas, not the Pittsburgh you’re surely thinking of. But this address ceased to exist in the late 1990s.”

  Now Ms. Cartwright spoke:

  “According to the municipal archives, all we’ve been able to access for the moment, the land was appropriated and dezoned in 1999. In the coming months, as our investigation proceeds, we’ll be able to tell you more about several points of legal interest, Dr. Langlois. There’s a chance that other assets may be added to the list that will be provided to you shortly. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Exactly,” said Kreiser. “For now, our focus is of course on verifying and validating the assets listed in the will, those that are known to us. That’s why we insisted that you come as quickly as possible, so we could get the process started without delay.”

  “So you don’t know when he died.”

  “The fact is, if I may speak frankly, this will is only valid because we have no later document to invalidate it. Given how old it is, and certain irregularities concerning the circumstances of —”

  “What irregularities?”

  “As I mentioned, in his will, written and signed in 1987, Mr. Simons states that he will end his own life on his sixty-fifth birthday, on February 29, 2020 — it’s a leap year — which is to say, just two days before the documents arrived here, on March 2. He specifies the means he intended to use to end his life, and the place where the authorities would find his body. We have no idea who sent these documents. Everything concerning the act itself is crystal clear, but, again, neither his body nor the weapon was found in the specified place, and we are looking into the possibility that, in fact, he had been dead for years, through circumstances beyond his control.”

  “What kind of circumstances?”

  “Oh, it could be anything, Dr. Langlois. A car accident, a hunting accident, a fall while hiking in the Jura, where he owned property. He could have been lost at sea, on one of his boats. There’s no way to be sure, it’s all guesswork. One thing is certain though: the date of transfer of property, when the estate passes from his hands to yours, is of primary importance, and we’re still trying to —”

  “It’s my birthday.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was born on February 29, 1980.”

  Thomas didn’t say another word. His mind was made up. Kreiser, Goldstein, and Cartwright didn’t need to know anything further, about him or about Aimé, or Albert and his research. He focused on what was coming next, stayed calm and breathed deeply.

  “Interesting. Very interesting.”

  Goldstein was taking notes on a tablet, his hands gently tapping on the screen, using complex stenographic shorthand. His eyes stared intently at Thomas’s face, he didn’t have to look at the screen to see what he was doing. He wasn’t wearing glasses, none of them were. The sun had set, the lighting was gentle and even.

  “Happy belated birthday, Dr. Langlois.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Before we begin the reading, if I may, do you think you could tell us your connection with the deceased, Dr. Langlois?”

  “I don’t know him. I’ve never heard his name. In fact, I have no idea what I’m doing here with you today. What about you? What is your connection with him? How can you be sure he’s actually dead?”

  Kreiser experienced a moment of distrust and hesitation, before regaining his composure.

  “I’ve made inquiries. Mr. Simons was a client of my grandfather’s, who founded the firm in 1975. No one remembers him, but his name appears several times in our files. As for his death, it is confirmed by multiple declarations with financial and fiduciary institutions, and verified, since our agents have made contact with the institutions where Mr. Simon’s assets were held. The 2016 federal law stipulates that dormant assets can be liberated to the estate after a period of fourteen years with no contact with the depositor.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t worry, Dr. Langlois. Mr. Simons is absolutely dead,” said Ms. Cartwright, placing her hand on her other wrist and playing with it. Her golden bracelet tinkled. Kreiser looked down, following her hands, then looked up again, along her arm, to the shoulder, then her chin. He sighed, confused, and looked calmly at Thomas’s inscrutable face. Kreiser’s look was piercing, as if he were trying to recognize the man standing before him, trying to remember him. As if, by searching his memory, perhaps he might manage to place him in context, in a family story that went back to his own ancestor. He put the palms of his hands on the sheets in front of him. Thomas stared at him, perfectly still, waiting to get rich.

  “Let’s begin.”

  Thomas sat back in his first-class seat. A flight attendant approached with a glass of champagne. She placed her hand on the back of the seat and leaned toward him. Her skin was like Mary’s, the same dark brown, like a young Mary with a New York accent. Thomas took the glass. He was much richer than he’d imagined, than he ever could have imagined in his wildest dreams. After liquidating Aimé’s European properties and real estate holdings around the United States, Thomas Langlois’s fortune would amount to $50 million. Everything had appreciated, like wine, Kreiser had said, and now he was on his way home to the love of his life, who would listen to his very long story, and if anyone was able to understand the intricate clockwork making this story turn, he thought, it was surely Mary. She would be patient and attentive, as she listened, at the kitchen table, in their little house in Saint-Jean-Baptiste in the centre of Quebec City. He’d show her the notebook, she would get right to the bottom of this story, and they would remember Albert, he’d come back and envelop them in his contagious laughter once again.

  He drank his champagne and was asleep a few minutes later, his head full of the laughter of his parents, and his grandparents, and Keysha-Ann, all grown up and happily getting on with her life, and another laugh, Minnie’s, with her whiskers, when she put her face up to the glass of the cage to brush against the outstretched finger of a superstitious scientist.

  He carried an old compass with wandering hands in his suitcase that had been given to him by the lawyer and notary before he left. It had been part of the package of Mr. Simons’s documents they received. It must have belonged to him, this rusted metal object that didn’t seem to work, or whose works were jammed, at any rate. When he opened the front cover he couldn’t make out north or south, not one of the four cardinal points, just a series of symbols and four unmoving needles, pointing every which way, a sort of buried, secret truth, or perhaps the very last thought that ran through Aimé Bolduc’s mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  OCTOBER 2047

  QUEBEC CITY, QC

  Thomas came in through the visitors’ entrance. They let him come and go as he pleased, he was a regular. He still looked like a forty-year-old. People greeted him like a youthful prodigy, star researcher, a genius. Why not? Wasn’t he already running a national research centre? His hair and carefully trimmed beard were blond again, ash blond with red highlights here and there, almost the colour of his childhood hair. Its texture had changed too, his hair was finer, like when he was a kid. He didn’t need to comb it, it fell on his temples and neck without a hint of waves or knots. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he noticed certain long-forgotten features coming back, like high cheekbones quick to blush, reminding him how violently embarrassed he would get as a teenager. It resurfaced in waves, flashed back before his eyes, memories written on skin still elastic despite the sixty-seventh birthday he’d celebrated in February.

  He walked quickly down a dim hallway, lit sparingly with subtle accent lighting. The guards greeted him with a nod. As always he carried a briefcase with important reports he had no use for. He’d been hired as a consultant. He saw himself reflected in the large panes of glass to his left and right. He thought he looked like his maternal grandfather, Wright Howells. If he looked like anyone, it was Wright. But at the same time that was mere speculation. There was no predicting the very long-term effects.

  It wasn’t just when he passed a mirror. He didn’t have to see himself to experience this feeling, a falling back into his past, now that everyone who had been close to him was dead, he had lost wife and friends and was all alone in a world whose course he had fundamentally altered, among people he had, in a sense, saved. He’d been granted eight honorary doctorates in the last two decades, and been received with great pomp by foreign governments. His name had gone down in the annals of science. A university building was named after him in Chattanooga, his hometown. Sometimes the mere act of closing his eyes for a moment, or focusing on an everyday object, was enough to send him hurtling back in time: there he was on a Tennessee summer day, between his mother and his father, out hiking on Mount Lookout or walking the rails of the old railway, keeping his balance, arms outstretched so he wouldn’t tumble and land in the stinging nettles. He’d had freckles then. Now, in the sun, they were coming back. Sometimes he could even see his parents kissing, pictured them together, with himself not very far away: a family. It was rare but it happened.

  On the other side of the picture windows, holographic projections showed static or moving scenes, narrative reconstructions of the various stages of human evolution. In ultra-fast forward, an oxygen atom chipped away at iron over a thousand-year period. Cyanobacteria bored into pyrite, building up geological strata before your eyes. Trilobites swam in the Paleozoic ocean, with bronze highlights, full of mercury. Thomas walked against the current of visitors wearing immersion devices, slipping between families pointing fingers and holding out hands, as if to catch a modelled molecule or electron.

  One of the first changes he noticed was the size and shape of his ears. He’d noted this in the encrypted file where he recorded precise details and developments about the potential for rejection. He’d discovered a softness of the lobe, a flexibility in the auricle that he’d lost as he neared fifty. His hearing had improved as well, but that had taken longer, and he’d noticed the external physical details first. His ears had grown slightly, but not like an old man’s, more like the kid who gets made fun of in the schoolyard.

  His body reacted extremely well, it was almost shocking in the early phases. He’d lost twenty pounds in just a few months. The age spots on his skin disappeared. His nostril hair thinned. His appetite was healthy as ever, and he started eating meat again. In the official reports, where everything was expressed in curves and in numbers, they repeatedly mentioned this general and pervasive feeling of health, from head to toe, as if large amounts of endorphins were being released continuously. His mind was always sharp, constantly alert, he was eager to discover new things.

  Thomas had injected the serum years earlier, as the experiment’s first human subject. He’d acted out of scientific duty and methodological rigour, with the approval of colleagues all over the world, in a closely supervised operation in the Quebec City laboratory where he’d remained under observation for several weeks. Sometimes they put him to sleep, at other times they woke him up. They’d open his eyelids and ask him to blow into tubes. He felt a little like a lab rat, but also uniquely blessed; that seemed an apt description of his life, up to now and as a whole. As if finding himself there, lying down, held in place by electrodes, nicely summed up something about him, the series of steps that had made him who he was, the people he had loved and who had now left him behind, each and every one.

  Minnie had lived with him for years in the house on Île d’Orléans. He’d built the tunnels he’d been dreaming of for so long, so she could be free to move about as she wished, without visible restrictions or the feeling of being shut up in a cage. Days would go by without seeing her, she hid her food in the secret passageways that not even he knew about. And she would come back after long excursions, same as ever, young and good natured. They understood each other.

  His skin was healthy, the sun no longer affected it as it had before. Most of
the time, always really, he felt himself imbued with a heightened self-confidence. It was as if the strange and heavy sense of guilt that had clung to him since childhood had evaporated, he’d seen it slipping out through his chest, a ball of flesh the size of his skull that exploded before his eyes. Now when he breathed in and out or saw the world around him in all its splendour, the vineyards and strawberry fields and faraway circular mountains, and took a deep breath, his lungs filled up with a renewed ardour.

  He walked around the reception desk, where the line of visitors was getting longer. In front of him, behind a series of reinforced windows, was the grand hall’s main attraction, a triceratops with blunted horns. He stopped for a few seconds to think about it. The blood flowing through his veins was at once old and new. When they took samples, the results showed that the white blood cells had regenerated, there was no trace of the beginnings of sclerosis detected a decade earlier.

  Of course, he had only Minnie by his side to enjoy the island’s cool days and colourful sunsets with him. He lived slowly, according to a new rhythm, but was happy all the same. He didn’t really talk to anyone anymore, except a few vague acquaintances whose names escaped him.

  It almost never rained except when they needed it to.

  Mary had died right before they developed the elixir, as it was informally known at the research centre. She had died just as she began to grow old, from a heart attack in her garden, one morning in July 2042, while Thomas was at work. As she leaned over to pick a vegetable in her garden she fell to her knees and never got up again. The service was at City Hall, with a moving eulogy from the mayor himself, who talked about Mary’s contribution to the community. The bells rang and Thomas came back home to put her affairs in order. He saw to certain urgent matters, and then went through her boxes, where he found things he’d forgotten all about. There were boxes of souvenirs, photos from the early 2000s, postcards, old tapes they used to listen to with Thomas’s mother, books she’d loved, South American musical instruments, knick-knacks, Aimé’s old compass.