by Danny Tobey
The shy little librarian passed by, pushing his cart. He must have been on night owl reshelving duty. He took books from empty carrels and placed them on his cart. He grabbed two books off my desk.
“Um, excuse me,” I called after him. “I still need those.”
He stopped, made a big production of turning around and rolling over to me. He set the books back on my desk and rolled the cart away.
There was a piece of paper sticking out from one of the books. It hadn’t been there before.
I pulled it out and looked at it.
It was an article. The word DRAFT was typed across the top. Someone had written in pencil below: Come on, can’t you make me sound a little more impressive? —HJM.
I was surprised to see a picture of the man I met at the first V&D event, the retired lawyer with the bad red toupee. The one who wanted to talk about my grandfather, then blindsided me by knowing all about me.
The picture showed the same face: friendly, a thick rug of hair slightly off-kilter.
I read the text below the picture and froze. I felt my blood run cold. I looked for the librarian, but he was gone.
I was alone on the floor.
Below the picture, the article began:
Henry James Morton, retired law professor and
chief White House counsel under presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, passed away peacefully
in his sleep on November 20, 2006.
November 20, 2006.
That was in two days.
17
Shock was my first reaction. A draft obituary, predicting an exact date of death. And the soon-to-be-dead-man, completely on board. What did it mean? What was the V&D up to?
Very quickly, a new thought shot through my mind like a lightning bolt:
I can hurt them.
I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But in some way, this information was valuable. Someone wanted me to see the obituary. I knew better than to ask the librarian. There was an etiquette to these things, a code. I’d picked up that much. Someone shared my anger. Or maybe they just wanted to use me toward some common goal. Either way, fine by me. The big shots push the little guys around. If you let them.
There was only one person to talk to, of course.
I banged on Miles’s door. His apartment was a disaster, covered with laundry and papers, dishes piled up in the small kitchen. His beard, normally woolly, was now edging—in its length and curliness—away from philosopher toward holy man. Miles caught me staring.
“I need money for razors.”
He must have been disappointed by my reaction; he shrugged and said, “I have a chapter due Monday.” Then he pointed a giant finger at me. “I called you, you know. A couple weeks ago.”
“I know.”
“Didn’t hear back.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Miles.”
“No need. I’ve got lots of friends.” He inclined his head toward the empty apartment in proof. “So, what’s new?”
The simplicity, the sheer banality of the question stumped me.
But Miles was studying my face. His eyebrows knitted together, then they relaxed and raised. He spoke to me in a calm voice, like he had all the time in the world.
“Okay. Tell me what’s wrong.”
I told him everything, except the obituary.
“I’m very sorry, Jeremy. I know how badly you wanted it.”
He clapped his large hands.
“Now, on to your more pressing problems. It’s time to rebuild. You can’t pass these courses now. It’s too much material. You’ll take a leave of absence and start fresh in the spring.”
“And have Incompletes on my transcript? Go through three years of law school, then wonder why no one wants to hire me? No way.”
“It’s your best option.”
“Not necessarily.”
He looked at me, confused and maybe a little wary.
“What are you saying?”
“What if I’m not ready to give up?”
“Give up on what? On them?”
I nodded.
He shook his head.
“Let it go, Jer. You came a hell of a lot closer than most people ever will. Closer than I ever did.”
“Miles, I think that’s worse.”
He gave me a look that said Enough.
“Time to rebuild.”
I ignored him.
“What if there’s a way?”
“What do you mean, a way?”
“What if I had something . . . a piece of information . . . that might make the V and D reconsider? They can take four people one year. Why not? Then I’m back on track.”
Until this moment, Miles had been serious, but he never lost his basic good humor. But now, he spoke very slowly, all the color gone from his voice.
“Tell me exactly what you mean.”
I pulled out the obituary. I showed him the picture and explained the story.
His voice sounded strange.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Miles—all six foot seven of him—was nervous.
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“No. Nobody.”
He looked at me hard, then nodded.
“There’s someone you need to meet.”
Miles and I walked side by side through the university, a cold wind moving in from the north, hands deep in our pockets. The fresh air seemed to lighten his mood.
“Who are we going to see?” I asked again.
“Chance Worthington,” Miles repeated.
“Who is Chance Worthington? Is he a student?”
“Not exactly.”
“How can you not exactly be a student?”
“Chance’s status with the university is unclear.”
Miles laughed and slapped my back.
It turned out Chance had been on campus as long as Miles, without collecting a single degree. This was a rare feat, considering Miles had done undergrad, law school, and now part of his PhD here. Chance was an on-again, off-again reporter for the campus paper and for whoever else would publish his articles: alternative weeklies, alien-invasion tabloids, ranting socialist leaflets. Unlike most college reporters, Miles explained, Chance wasn’t satisfied with covering can drives and campus protests over the plight of the penguins. He’d taken numerous leaves of absence to travel around the world, to places with violent conflicts or exceptionally pure weed. He had a pile of letters from the administration that he was afraid to open, but they were still cashing his checks.
Miles was one of those people who collected odd friends. In high school, you could count on him to know every lost soul in the Ol’ South Pancake House, our twenty-four-hour hangout after debate matches. He knew the quiet truckers and the self-titled lesbian cowgirls. He knew the Vietnam vets and the old hippies who still occasionally yelled at each other across the room. He knew the black debutantes, who always arrived in gowns from a glittery circuit of events we’d never see. I pretty much kept to my friends at Ol’ South, with my coffee and my German pancakes, out of shyness. But Miles could sit down at any booth and talk and laugh for hours.
“You guys are gonna love each other.” Miles grinned, warming to the event.
We met at Chance’s place, an off-campus “co-op,” which was basically a hippie dorm where you cooked your own food and didn’t have to shower.
Chance Worthington took a long drag off his joint and passed it to Miles. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair moved in wild curls. He tapped his middle finger nonstop on the table. He bit at a nail, then started tapping again.
Finally, he stopped tapping. He took another quick hit, passed it to Miles, and relaxed back into his chair.
“So, whad’ya have for me?”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You guys are gonna love each other,” Miles said again, examining the glowing tip of the joint. He laughed and started coughing. “What Chance means, I think, is start at the beginning.” Miles offered me the joint. I wave
d it off.
“Well, I got this invitation—”
“Skip to something interesting,” Chance interrupted.
“What?”
“I don’t want to hear any tea party crap. Give me something new.”
I looked at Miles. He nodded, then wiggled his eyebrows.
“Okay . . .” I said. I thought about my tour of Mr. Bones’s house. “How about the Capuchin Crypt?”
“Commissioned by Pope Urban the Eighth’s brother in 1631, creepy bones and so forth, blah, blah, blah. What else?”
This guy was getting under my skin.
“I saw a map to a place called Bimini.”
“Do you even know where Bimini is?”
I had a hint of a memory, something out of elementary school adventure books, but then it was gone.
“No,” I said.
Chance made a big show of sighing.
“In the Bahamas, supposedly.” He smiled. “But they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Ah, but you were supposed to tell me something new. I’m not your teacher.”
“Fine. What about King’s water?”
“What about it?”
“Well, you know, the Nazis were coming. They dissolved the Nobel Prizes . . .”
“That’s what you know about King’s water?”
“It’s not true?”
“Of course it’s true. The story’s on the Nobel Prize website, for crap’s sake. You’re not exactly through the looking glass here.”
I gave Miles a who is this guy look. Miles smiled and turned to Chance.
“The story does relate to passing through.”
“But the money’s on transmutation.”
“All right, c’mon guys,” I said, “you know I don’t speak Pot.”
Chance looked at me. He stopped tapping his finger. He sighed and shook his head.
“You raise an interesting topic. It’s just that King’s water has a long history. Much longer than World War Two.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“Well, aqua regia—King’s water, as you call it—was invented around ad 800 by a Persian alchemist named Jabir ibn Hayyan. The same man who discovered hydrochloric acid.”
Chance lit a cigarette and blew a sour cloud between us.
“What do you know about the alchemists?” he asked me, his face drifting in the smoke.
“Not much. They were sort of New Age scientists, but from the Middle Ages.”
“In a sense. They were the first chemists. They invented gunpowder. Metalwork. They made inks and dyes and alcohol. They were also philosophers, physicists, mystics, astrologers, you name it. This wasn’t exactly an era of specialization. You can trace alchemy back to ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Greece, India, Arabia. Their motto was Solve et Coagula: ‘Separate and Join Together.’”
“Okay. So that’s King’s water, right? Separate and join together? They did it.”
“Sadly, no. Hayyan saw King’s water as part of a much larger quest; in fact, the central quest of alchemy. The transmutation of metals.”
“Turning lead into gold.”
“Exactly. King’s water was like an ancient attempt at reverse engineering. If you could dissolve gold, maybe you could figure out how to build gold . . . The alchemists, including Hayyan, were searching for what they called the Philosopher’s Stone: a substance that would turn something worthless into something precious.”
“So this is all about money?”
“Ha! Never underestimate money. I can crack almost any story by asking: ‘Who profits from this?’ But, no, in this case I think there is something more.
“The alchemists survived a long time. Thousands of years. They survived the fall of Rome and Greece. They survived the Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. Some people think it’s because they were clever about hiding their true intentions.”
“Which were?”
I leaned in. It was all hocus-pocus bullshit, but the guy could tell a story. Even Miles was quiet now, a half-smile on his face.
“The alchemists’ texts are dense. Some of them don’t even have words, just symbols. And nothing ever means just one thing. There are whole alchemy books dedicated to decoding alchemy books.
“Did they want to turn lead into gold? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But what if that was just a cover for something else?”
“Like . . .”
“See Paracelsus. Alchemical Catechism. ‘When the Philosophers speak of gold and silver, from which they extract their matter, are we to suppose that they refer to the vulgar gold and silver? By no means; vulgar silver and gold are dead, while those of the Philosophers are full of life.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Many people believe ‘lead and gold’ were metaphors for ‘vice and virtue.’ What if the Philosopher’s Stone wasn’t about material transmutation? What if it was about something immaterial, metaphysical even?”
“A substance that would make evil people good?”
“That’s one theory.”
“Why would they need to hide that? Who wouldn’t want everyone to be good?”
“Soulcraft, at that time, was the domain of powerful institutions. The Church. The King. To lose that kind of authority . . . But . . .” Chance used his cigarette to light another. He ground the butt out on the table. “Maybe you’re more right than you know. Maybe virtue and vice were just another layer of metaphor, in a quest for something even more sought after. What if the Philosopher’s Stone actually turned weak, vulnerable, sinful flesh into . . .”
The memory clicked. I knew what Bimini was.
“. . . into something that never dies,” I said. I smiled. “Bimini. Ships in the Bahamas . . .”
“Ponce de León.” Miles nodded.
“ ‘Peter Martyr saith that there is in Bimini a continual spring of running water of such marvellous virtue that the water thereof, being drunk, maketh old men young.’”
Chance recited it from memory, his eyes stoned, half-closed.
“‘Let us go where we can bathe in those enchanted waters and be young once more,’” Miles replied. “‘I need it, and you will need it ere long.’”
“Peter Martyr was secretary of the prothonotary under Pope Innocent the Eighth, archpriest of Ocana under Pope Adrian the Sixth,” Chance added. “Friend of Columbus and Ponce de León.”
I felt the disconnected pieces swirling, snapping into place.
“What about amaranth?” I asked. “She quoted Milton.”
“ ‘Immortal amarant, a flower which once, in paradise, fast by the tree of life, began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence, to heaven removed.’”
For man’s offense. Adam and Eve—they ate from the forbidden tree: virtue fell to vice, and man was cast from Paradise and became mortal.
“The ancient Greeks ground up amaranth petals to treat infections,” Miles said. “Across the world, the ancient Chinese did too.”
Immortality . . . to beat death . . .
The obituary!
Were things like this really possible?
I pulled it out and pointed to the picture. To the man who apparently knew the precise date he was going to die and didn’t seem terribly concerned about it. What if he didn’t plan on dying in two days? What if his “death”—the obituary—was just a cover story, because he had no intention of going anywhere, ever . . .
“What if . . .” I said. “What if the V and D found a way . . .”
“ ‘What we are now, you will be,’ said the skeleton.” Chance smirked.
“What’s this ‘we’ stuff, white man?” Miles replied.
Chance grinned.
“We lost our immortality when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge—and we’ve been trying to use knowledge to get it back ever since. Kind of ironic, eh?”
He collapsed back into his chair. It had been a masterful performance, weaving together clues from ancient China to modern New England and everywhere in be
tween. And now he was visibly tired. I, in contrast, was filled with new life, a new sense of opportunity—when only a couple of hours ago, it had seemed like every door was closed to me.
“This,” I said, pointing to the obituary. “We could use this to get to them.”
Chance and Miles exchanged glances.
“I doubt,” Chance said slowly, “that the obituary means very much.”
“But the stuff you just told me. Bimini . . .”
Chance shook his head.
“There was nothing there. The Spaniards went to Florida next. Guess where they claimed to find the Fountain of Youth? Green Cove Springs on the Saint Johns River. Know how many old people retire to Florida every year? My grandparents included? How many of them live forever?”
“What about amaranth? You said the Greeks used it to cure diseases.”
“Check out the Journal of Toxicology, March 2003, volume seven,” Miles said. “They use amaranth as a dye in manufacturing. Turns out it’s poisonous. Great way to live forever, huh?”
“Maybe they found another way—”
“Jeremy, do you know about seer’s salt?”
“No.”
“Feast of the Blue Boy?”
“No.”
“Samsara? Astral charts? Infinite wave functions? The Uhrglass?”
“No, no, no, no.”
“Do you know when the V and D formed?”
“No.”
“Do you know where they meet?”
“Do you?”
“Five years ago I found a clue. A margin note in a book we stole. It said the location was in Creighton versus Worley.”
“Those are buildings on campus.”
“Yes.”
“You checked the buildings?”
“Over months. We even went down into the steam tunnels connecting the buildings. Nothing.”
“But the language. Creighton versus Worley. It sounds like a court case.”
“It does.”
“Does the case exist?”