Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “I’ll ask them to give you a morphine drip, and that’ll help you through the worst of this,” Jasmine said, hurting deeply inside when her father groaned.

  “I don’t know why they bother with us, hell I’m ready to go. So was your mother. This pain thing is really hell,” he said again.

  “Another few days and most of the pain will be gone. These new hip replacements don’t take long to heal,” Jasmine said, reassuringly.

  “Oh bullshit, they take months to heal up right, you know that, and I don’t heal worth a damn anymore, and I don’t much care about anything, either,” Herbert said, his voice trailing off.

  “You care about me and Malia, don’t you father?” Jasmine asked, recognizing the early signs of depression.

  “Yeah, I do, and I feel bad being such a drain on everyone. I just plain don’t damn like it,” he said, confusing his words a little.

  “Do you want me to read to you?” Jasmine asked softly.

  “No, just, just help me get through this damn thing. Then I’ll be out of your hair, I promise. I’ll hire a kid to help me out, until I, I… can’t, or what the hell!” he said in a sudden burst of anger.

  “It’s OK, Father,” Jasmine said meekly.

  “This getting old thing is for the birds! I can’t do a God damn thing! What the hell is the point?” He had worked himself up into a fit of anger and his face was beet red. Jasmine saw the terrible frustration of a fiercely independent man reduced to a heaving blur of pain and frustration.

  On the way home, she cried a little. She was suddenly tired of the strain of the past few months. Maybe they could take Herbert to Hawaii for a few weeks when he got better.

  Charge everyone’s batteries as he used to say when the kids asked him why people took vacations. Jasmine desperately needed a rest, but the circumstances were moving so fast all around her.

  She pulled into the garage completely preoccupied with the vision of her helpless father and crunched the washer and drier. As she backed up, she realized the dent was too big to pull out this time. Earl was out on the deck and didn’t hear the crash.

  “They accepted our offer!” Earl jumped in the air twice on the deck, pumping his fists in the air, finally putting the phone down. “They accepted five-hundred and forty-nine-thousand wonderful dollars! Farr Fifty Pilothouse, here we come!

  The trial sail lasted all afternoon. Out into San Francisco Bay, and under the Golden Gate with the tide, a breathtaking close-hauled charge past Point Bonita and a beautiful reach back under the bridge, in the late afternoon light. Earl was a born sail trimmer and had the boat perfectly balanced. He held her into the wind with one finger on the wheel, smiling broadly to Jasmine. “Farr,” he said, “a shorter spelling of magic.”

  There really wasn’t much to decide. The price was high, but not out of range. “Now we’ll have a little much needed diversion,” Earl said, quickly dialing their accountant to arrange for the purchase.

  “We’ll have to take a nice overnighter when Father gets out of the hospital,” Jasmine said.

  “Yeah, maybe do the Monterey race!” Earl said, still smiling.

  Spring was just beginning to approach now, and Jasmine thought about all the great races they could enter, and the superbly fun trips down the coast to Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. Briefly, she felt the ennui reach up for her, quietly begging her to let go, give in, and pass up the fight.

  “Let’s go home,” Jasmine said quietly. “I want to stop by Marjorie’s house on the way and look at her work.”

  The winding steps to Marjorie’s front door were so overgrown with Hydrangea Jasmine had to push them out of the way to stay on the fractured and mossy concrete steps. Marjorie had hung a small blue hand painted sign next to the door that read, Martha Stewart Doesn’t Live Here.

  “Congratulations on your new boat, Jasmine! Bill would have been your foredeck crew, for sure. He loved Bruce Farr’s boats!” Marjorie said, sitting in her living room, surrounded by boxes, and a little red fish in a fishbowl. “Rammy called today. He said the first half of my run is finished, and he’s bringing up the data for me to look at tomorrow. He says he’ll be finished in about a week, if the cookie supply stays constant,” Marjorie said giggling.

  “What’s this cookie thing all about?” Jasmine asked.

  “Rammy is a man of many desires,” Marjorie said.

  “You and…,” Jasmine said utterly shocked.

  “Oh no, not that, I’m just able, in a tiny way, to help him relax,” she said, ever the impish prankster. She opened a round cookie tin and showed Jasmine some purple brownies. “He just can’t seem to learn to bake, so he brings me the ingredients, and I bake these for him. We’ve had this little secret for a very long time,” she said, giggling again.

  “Marjorie Cunningham, and the world thinks you’re a straight-laced molecular biologist,” Jasmine was surprised.

  “If that surprises you, take a look at my new toy. I finally found out what it feels like to spend real money,” she said, leading Jasmine down the stairs to the basement. “They haven’t hooked it up yet, but I can see pretty much what I need to see with this.”

  Two six-foot tall black computer servers stood in the corner of the room, cabled together. There were three large flat panel displays on the walls; an unfinished console with two keyboards and two large track balls were sitting in their boxes.

  “When I get Rammy’s constructs I can check for errors here and run several routines. Not all, mind you, but most of what I need to see. I think I’ll have Roy’s treatment ready by the time Will has his stem cells cooked up,” she said, beaming.

  “What did the mini cost?” Jasmine asked.

  “It cost a hundred and sixty-thousand, that’s all. I could have leased it or financed it, but I just wrote them a check,” Marjorie said. “It’s almost ridiculous. Even a few years ago, a computer like that would have cost a least a million, maybe more. I totaled up all the lab equipment I need, and it’s nothing!”

  Jasmine picked up a copy of BIOTECH NEWS, and noticed all the circled ads. “You can get all this lab work done now?” Jasmine asked, surprised.

  “And that’s just in this country! I have some directories coming from the UK, Israel, and of course, Singapore. You send the samples, they run the procedures, and email the data. It’s a dream come true,” she said.

  “And you just do science,” Jasmine said, thinking about Will.

  “And you just do science,” Marjorie beamed.

  “I wonder if Roy will survive,” Jasmine said in a nasty jag of anxiety.

  “I think he will, because your modeling is just so very good, and we know a lot about Progeria, largely because of Earl’s work. Hard to say how he’ll develop, but we can watch his hormone levels and help him along there with growth factors as well,” Marjorie declared.

  “I saw Father yesterday,” Jasmine said solemnly.

  “How is he?” Marjorie asked, softly.

  “He’s in a lot of pain. I had a few words with his doctor. Father’s not much of a model patient in that he’s very frustrated with being immobile. He’s not responding well to the aging process!” Jasmine revealed.

  “Advanced human aging is unnatural,” Marjorie remarked, rolling her hand over the big trackball.

  “Unnatural?” Jasmine asked.

  “Of course, in the natural world, before the sixteenth-century, hardly anyone ever lived beyond fifty, which is when aging really starts to bite a little. Before that, the top age was about forty. People died from infections mostly. Pneumonia was a big one, appendix bursts were popular, but for anyone to live beyond sixty was news,” Marjorie stated.

  “I never really thought about it. I mean, aging being unnatural; an artifact of civilization,” Jasmine uttered thoughtfully.

  “It was like birth control,” Marjorie added.

  “What?” Jasmine asked, struggling.

  “Birth control was a huge change for human beings. Jasmine, we were the first generation to grow up wi
th any measure of control over our bodies and our own biology. After that, no one really noticed that we are living in a time when we can control our own biology.” Marjorie’s point slowly sank in. “We’ve extended life spans thirty-five percent already, and that’s just with medicine. I don’t see anyone complaining about that.”

  “I guess you’re right, as always,” Jasmine distantly concluded.

  “Seventy-million people in this country are kept alive by pharmaceuticals and heart surgery. There’s only one problem,” she said, humming a Beatles song.

  “We’re kept alive in an old state,” Jasmine concluded.

  “That’s it exactly! It’s poor planning,” Marjorie continued. “What does your father talk about?”

  “He said last night he was ready to go and was tired of the struggle, which shocked me,” Jasmine said sadly.

  “I think we torture the very old, trying to keep them alive, long past the time nature has lost interest,” Marjorie said. “When we were looking at collagen gene expression in very old people, I went to the nursing home to pick up blood samples, and I went along on the rounds. It was heartbreaking to hear them cry out in pain when their blood was drawn. It went right through me and it really scared me.”

  Jasmine looked at her friend, suddenly realizing she was serious. She was afraid of old age, afraid of the pain and the slow motion imprisonment, afraid of the torture, and afraid of the long goodbye.

  Jasmine suddenly panicked at the thought of the dilemma she would someday face in becoming frail and in constant pain, or in treating herself. “I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get there.”

  “This brings me to another area of interest in your work,” Marjorie recalled. “I missed a few contact sports when I was a sweet young thing,” she said, bursting out in a long laugh.

  “Are you, I mean do you think you would?”

  “Treat myself?” Marjorie asked.

  “Would you?”

  “Jasmine, add it up on your fingers. I left a prestigious teaching job at the most desirable university in the world. In doing so, I left a wonderful lab, I gave up publishing, speaking and the rest. Why would I do that?

  I only fear one thing, and that is dying of old age.”

  Jasmine looked at her friend, and saw a strange secret in her round, happy face.

  “I worked out carefully, the optimum age at which aging reversal would be the most effective. Take a guess what that age was.”

  “Sixty-two,” Jasmine said, suddenly realizing that Marjorie was driven by age more than anything.

  “Sixty-four, so let’s get busy!” she said, jumping up from the console.

  “Marjorie, I never, I mean, I didn’t think you were interested in treating yourself in all this,” Jasmine said.

  “I want to live long enough to bury the last conservative,” she said climbing the stairs.

  “And how long is that?” Jasmine asked, chuckling.

  “Not long! Their nature is to resist change, so many of them are going to die resisting this one. Maybe we can engineer a secret gene that will check their political persuasion genes for conservative indicators, and then activate an apoptosis mine after their checks have cleared!” Marjorie was almost yelling down the stairs now.

  “We could hide it on chromosome eleven in the introns. They’d never find it!” Jasmine said, laughing heartily.

  They both sat in the living room for a few minutes, as the humor wore off from what they were saying. Using this technology as a weapon had never occurred to them before, even in humor. Suddenly they both became very introspective.

  “I guess it’s easy to forget there have been a few instances where people took good work and used it for bad work,” Marjorie said.

  “I wonder where all this will end up?” Jasmine said, feeling the enormity of the consequences of their work.

  “I don’t know, but I do know this. If we don’t do this work, someone will. At least this way we get a shot at trying to keep it in the hands of the good group, for a little while, anyway,” Marjorie said with deep concern.

  “I hope so,” Jasmine said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” Marjorie said as the plane pulled up to the gate.

  “And what happens to what stays in Vegas? Jasmine asked.

  “They sell it at the Adult Video Show in October!” The passenger behind her shouted. The whole plane laughed.

  As they lined up in the aisle, Jasmine looked at Earl and Roy. Roy had picked up blackjack very quickly. “Hit me!” he shouted in his thin little voice, as Earl dealt him his cards. “I’m busted!” he would scream, laughing hysterically. Jasmine realized she had never seen a Progeric child laugh. The bolt of hope passed through her quickly. His tiny body so saturated with cell damage, but when she looked at his brave little face, it all seemed worthwhile.

  The night in Vegas went by in a blur. Roy asked a thousand questions about gambling, slot machines, and the Roulette table fascinated him. He would eerily call out the winning number twice in a row. The security people asked Earl to move away from the tables. The hard edge of Vegas was still just below the surface, Jasmine thought.

  They especially enjoyed the Cirque du Soleil, and had excellent seats by the hotel when the ticket agent saw Roy. Most people assumed it was cancer, but a few had to ask, and the answer stunned them.

  “You mean he’s actually an old man?”

  “How can a child be old?” The questions blurted out, and Roy heard most of them.

  They had to take Roy into the show in a wheelchair, as he was too weak to walk. When the breathtaking trapeze flyers landed in the thunderous finale, Roy pulled Jasmine’s ear down to him and said, “I would do that and be a fisherman too, if I was going to grow up,” he said weakly.

  “So would I,” Jasmine said, holding his tiny cold hand.

  Jasmine called Marjorie to arrange for breakfast, but she was not in her room. They headed down to checkout when she called.

  “I’m going to spend another night here, and uh, rest up. I’ll rent a car and see you in Lake Havasu tomorrow, or the next day,” she announced.

  “Marjorie, are you okay?” Jasmine asked, somewhat concerned as they had planned to drive the two hours to Lake Havasu in one car.

  “Oh, more, much more than okay!” she said in her best impish voice. “I want to find out what stays in Vegas! See you in a day or so!”

  Roy had never seen a real desert before and he kept asking why there were no trees in the desert. “Did the trees blow away? Where is the grass? How can a rabbit live where there is no grass? Where did the dirt go?” The questions went on and on.

  Finally, Earl told him there was nothing out there but coyotes and rattlesnakes. “Rattlesnakes? Can we go find a rattlesnake? How big are they? I could kill one with my knife! Can I get a real knife here? My mommy gave me money for a real knife! I better buy one right away!” he said, the excitement of childhood coming through his weak, squeaky voice.

  “Mars,” Jasmine said quietly, as they drove the last few miles into Lake Havasu. “It looks just like the pictures of Mars.” The naked burnt red pinnacles slowly gave way to a view of the long, dark green lake. The merciless desert wind blew long clouds of dust over the flat plain behind the lake.

  “It does look like Mars,” Earl added. “They even threw in the dust storms.”

  “There it is, every single block,” Jasmine replied, still amazed at the big bridge, with its beautiful Roman arches and fluttering flags.

  “I still don’t quite believe it,” Earl commented, when they turned off the busy highway into the parking lot of the London Bridge Hotel.

  “Is that an old bridge, like me?” Roy asked.

  The question hung in the air for an awkward moment. “It’s an old bridge, but, you’re…,” Earl stammered.

  “You’re a fine young boy, who just needs the right medicine,” Jasmine said softly, fiddling with the adjustment on his hat.

  They walked over
the London Bridge and felt the warm dry wind blow across them. For the first time in a long time, Jasmine felt some of the tension leave her. It was like those first few minutes on the beach in Hawaii, she thought, when the balmy winds blow across your skin, and you hear the wind in the coconut trees. The bridge, beautifully sited, on a small channel in the big lake. They stood looking at the big cigarette boats slowly idling through the channel. The dry wind flapped the British and American flags softly. The beaches, beautifully landscaped with tall palms on each side, had a huge empty golf course on the east side. They watched two white haired golfers slowly walk across the big green.

  “I could do that,” Earl said.

  “So could I,” Jasmine said, thinking about retirement for the first time.

  Earl finally took Roy to the hardware store to buy a penknife, to stab rattlesnakes, while Jasmine took a nap with the window open and the dry wind blowing through the room. She slept so soundly that there was not a wrinkle on the bed when Earl and Roy returned.

  “I can stab rattlesnakes now!” Roy proudly announced, rapidly opening and closing the little penknife.

  “That’s quite a knife, Roy,” Jasmine said, smiling at his unconquerable spirit. Jasmine could see the deterioration in him just in the last few weeks, but the twinkle had not left his pale blue eyes, and he still said some funny things. “What stays in Vegas plays in Vegas!” he said, out of the blue, opening and closing his knife over and over.

  The last few weeks had gone extraordinarily well, Jasmine thought. Marjorie and Rammy worked a four-day session in Santa Cruz and finished the initial treatment that would restore Roy’s heart and circulatory system. The key was finding a gene that would turn on the telomerase inducer in the lining of the blood vessels, and would not turn it on in the rest of the body. Marjorie was able to prepare the IV treatment in her old lab on a three-day weekend, and even mix a few of the buffers in her ‘White Greenhouse’ as she called her lab in the basement.

  “Shugrue’s, at seven; yeah that works,” Will said on the phone. “Hey Jasmine, an interesting guy just showed up and he has been dying to meet you,” he cheerfully mentioned.