The Professor of Immortality

by Eileen Pollack

  “Did you ever invoke your right to counsel last night?” the lawyer asks Zach.

  Zach purses his lips. “I didn’t think I had anything to hide.”

  Greenglass cackles. “If I laid end to end all the people who thought they had nothing to hide …” He slaps his palms against each other, as if rubbing off whatever damage might have accrued. “Done is done.” But Zach is finished talking to the cops until Greenglass has the chance to review the facts and evaluate his client’s potential jeopardy.

  “I’m sorry,” Maxine says. “I can’t live through another day of this. I can’t have it on my conscience if the bomber sends out another bomb and another innocent person gets hurt or killed. If Zach and I were going to incriminate ourselves, we already did.”

  But Greenglass refuses to represent either of them unless they spend at least a few hours discussing Zach’s testimony. He pulls out his phone and dials. “Shauntz? Greenglass. Give my boy a couple of hours. Can you do that?” He listens. Grunts. “We’ve got two hours,” he tells Maxine. “Assuming I have no reason to convince you not to show up at all.”

  The appointment leaves little chance to get back to Greenglass’s office. The streets around the Federal Building are stark, with nowhere to eat except the Rosa Parks Transportation Center, a futuristic mess with sails and what appears to be a satellite antenna, as if a space station has spiraled to a crash landing in downtown Detroit. The People Mover floats above the station on its monorail, making endless circuits around the nearly empty city, the giant Michelin tire man plastered across its side like a grinning ghost.

  The three of them cross the trash-strewn intersection and enter a bus station that, despite being named for the champion of integration, is so segregated that Maxine and Zach comprise one hundred percent of the Caucasians present. A sign forbids loitering, but many in the throng appear to have been waiting at the station for hours, if not weeks. Never mind the future; these Detroiters are waiting for amenities their fellow citizens have taken for granted for fifty years. They wait and wait, and no one sees fit to announce that the future they are waiting for isn’t coming.

  Maxine excuses herself to use the restroom. A broken changing table dangles from the wall. The toilets in three of the stalls are fetid. After waiting to use the fourth, Maxine emerges to find the woman who used the stall before her waving her hands to dry them—the facility hasn’t been provided with paper towels or a working blower.

  Back in the lobby, she follows Greenglass up a set of metal stairs to what a hand-lettered sign advertises as the FOOD COURT. An old man naps with his head on one of the three steel tables. A second table is festooned with a pair of soiled green undershorts. The only functioning eatery offers Louisiana Creole takeout; the décor consists of a painted wooden alligator on a serving cart, as if the staff might be preparing to carve up the scaly beast for the lunchtime crowd. Greenglass makes a trip to the counter and brings back a sack of biscuits and three cups of coffee. He removes his overcoat. Takes out a pen. Asks Maxine to repeat, from the very beginning, everything she told the FBI. She drags out copies of Thaddy’s papers. Greenglass takes copious notes. “Is that all?” he keeps asking. “Is there anything else?”

  When she finishes, he looks Zach hard in the eyes. “All right, young man. I want every single detail, no matter how minute, about your interactions with this Thaddeus Rapaczynski.”

  Zach puts his palms to the table, scowls, and moves his lips, as if, should he say what he has to say, his words might lay waste to all around him. (“Look out,” Sam used to whisper. “He’s making his Ralph Nader face again.”) Her son’s only crime is being overly earnest in the pursuit of purity. But the lawyer might get the impression Zach is a rageful young man who has something to hide.

  Zach scowls a while longer. Then he stammers an explanation of his relationship to his mother’s former student. First as an adolescent. Then as an undergraduate at MIT, where Thaddy wrote him letters. Later still, as an employee at the company where Zach worked until Thaddy showed up and insisted on camping on the sofa in Zach’s apartment. For a week. Maybe it was ten days. Maybe longer.

  “He stayed a week?” Maxine says. Her impression had been that Thaddy put in a brief appearance before his failed attempt to persuade Zach to run off with him to Montana.

  “I shouldn’t have let him hang around that long,” Zach says. “My roommates were totally pissed. Thaddy got in this really ugly argument with my friend Jordan,” Jordan being Zach’s African-American roommate from MIT, who also had found a job in Silicon Valley. “Jordan is already pretty high up at Facebook, and Thaddy went on and on about how the company is keeping tabs on everything we buy or click on and is selling the data to corporations and to the government. Thaddy hammered Jordan that he shouldn’t let himself get co-opted into becoming a slave to the new technology. Thaddy thinks liberals are only facilitating the transformation of the black and Hispanic underclass into capitalist drones.” Unexpectedly, Zach laughs. “Thaddy kept trying to act all cool and hip with Jordan, but it was pretty painful to watch. ‘Man,’ Thaddy said, ‘you’re too human to let yourself become a cog in the white man’s machine. Man, you’ve got too much soul for that.’ Jordan just rolled his eyes. Then Thaddy got under his skin and Jordan really let Thaddy have it. That’s when I told Thaddy he had to go.”

  Maybe Greenglass will like her son more now that he knows Zach had a black roommate. Maybe he will see Zach as less humorless, less stiff. But Greenglass closes one eye and stares sideways at Zach. “Are you sure you’re the one who asked Rapaczynski to leave? It wasn’t this roommate of yours, this Jordan? And you asked him to leave because of political or ideological differences in your points of view?”

  Which leads Maxine to wonder, if not for this nominal difference in their ideologies, would Zach have run off with Thaddy?

  And the answer is yes. How could she have been so dense? As alienated as Zach was from his job in Silicon Valley. As impressionable as he has always been. As inclined to the hermit-martyr’s withdrawal from society. Zach would have been appalled when he discovered what Thaddy was doing in that cabin. When Thaddy asked for help in designing a better bomb. But would Zach have ratted Thaddy out? Yes, Maxine thinks. Of course. Trying to convince herself that he would have.

  “It wasn’t only the politics,” Zach says. “He was furious I was even thinking of getting married. He made some awful comment about how Angelina only loves me because she’s a cripple and no other man would have her. If you want the truth, that’s as much why I asked him to leave as he was driving Jordan nuts.”

  What he doesn’t say is that this is also why he has been avoiding his mother—because, like Thaddy, she once implied the only reason Zach would be dating the woman he loves is that he pities her.

  Greenglass tilts his pen toward Zach. “Something fishy is going on. I think you became more involved with your house-guest than you are willing to admit. Maybe you went with him to his cabin. Where was it, in Montana? And that’s why you know the name of the town. Maybe these were plans you and he made together. To wage a campaign of fear against those you regarded as despoiling the environment. For you, those plans were mostly fanciful. Once you realized your partner was actually carrying out those plans, you developed cold feet.”

  On he goes, needling Zach, trying to satisfy himself that his client isn’t hiding some involvement in the bombings. Or to make sure Zach can refrain from losing his composure under the aggressive questioning that will come after the agents have analyzed the sleep-starved statements he gave them last night.

  The coffee grows cold. The biscuits have left greasy blotches on the cardboard plates. Greenglass emphasizes that both of them need to tell the truth. The agency will want them to remain available for any follow-up. They mustn’t discuss the case—not with a best friend, not with a cousin, not with a nosey neighbor, not with a sympathetic girlfriend. Above all, they mustn’t
speak to anyone from the press. “Neither of you seems the type to go calling Oprah, but I don’t care if it’s what’s-her-name, Nina Totenberg from NPR, you say, ‘I’m very sorry, but I am not at liberty to comment right now.’ And you hang up or you shut the door.”

  Greenglass caps his pen and clips it to his pad. He rises from his seat and puts on his coat. Then he says, “Tell me again, Professor Sayers, why you didn’t go directly to the FBI. Why you drove all those many hundreds of miles, way up north, to your family’s cabin. It wasn’t because you suspected someone else might be up there, hiding with your son?” Before she can answer, Greenglass zips his coat. “No. Of course that wasn’t the case. You waited because you wanted Zachary here to corroborate your suspicions. You didn’t want to go off half-cocked and get your former student in trouble if your suspicions might prove incorrect.” Greenglass nods at his own assessment. “Yes. That account makes perfect sense. As I have advised you both, whatever you are asked, you tell the truth. I don’t think the government is going to look to bring charges against the persons who help them solve a series of crimes they have been attempting to solve without success for, what, six or seven years? But here’s the deal: You don’t lie. You never have to talk to an officer of the law. But lying to one is a felony.”

  He cups Maxine’s elbow and leads her to the steel staircase, motioning Zach to go down before them. “You will have my retainer agreement this afternoon,” he tells Maxine. “I want you both to sign it. I promise to go as easy on you as I can, but I am going to need a check for ten thousand dollars by tomorrow afternoon. As a down payment. Can you do that for me?”

  Ten thousand dollars? And that’s only the beginning. “I can do that,” she says. If he asked her to drain her retirement account and sell her house, she would answer in the affirmative.

  They are only a few minutes late arriving at the Federal Building, but Shauntz and three men Maxine doesn’t recognize already seem impatient. Shauntz and Greenglass shake hands. Then Shauntz extends his hand to Zach, who regards it as if it were a grenade that might go off before he shakes it carefully. They pass through security. Shauntz and the other agents lead Zach to the offices beyond the door. Maxine wants badly to go in with them, the way she did when Zach had an appointment with his pediatrician, until kindly Dr. Harutyunyan suggested Zach was old enough to go through his checkup without his mother. And Zach, all of eleven, said, “Yeah, Mom. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but even last year, I would rather have gone in alone.” To which she lied and said, “My feelings aren’t hurt. Of course you should go in without me.”

  At least Greenglass is allowed to enter. What can she do but trust Zach’s essential goodness will shine through his overly serious exterior? Trust her son will realize he no longer has any loyalty to a childhood friend who has been mailing explosives to innocent victims, one of whom was Zach’s professor at MIT?

  She hasn’t brought a book. She wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway. A cue-ball-headed white man shares the waiting area; when he gets up to go inside, he offers her his copy of the Free Press. She searches for any mention of the bomber. Government officials are quoted as saying as many as twenty thousand tips have poured in on various hotlines. The authorities are pursuing leads they are confident will pay off soon. As she reads, Maxine feels her throat constrict, as if the authorities are closing in on her rather than on Thaddy. On the op-ed page, a reader disputes the decision to give a national platform to the bomber’s rant, but a columnist expresses his view that as much as he deplores the bomber’s violence, society needs to examine the ways technology is robbing us of our privacy. The bomber, this columnist writes, has tapped into a larger malaise in which citizens are “consumed with widespread feelings of helplessness and inferiority, beaten down by an excessive expectation of conformity to societal rules and norms, living lives far too abstract and complex and divorced from nature and reality to be satisfying.” The truth, this columnist writes, is that “there is a little of the Technobomber in each and every one of us.”

  Maybe Thaddy has hit a nerve. Maybe he has sparked an outbreak of dissatisfaction. But one op-ed piece does not a revolution make. As she pages through the paper, she guesses most Detroiters are more concerned with the Red Wings’ chances of staying alive in the playoffs, or the wild fluctuations in that spring’s temperatures, or even Ted Nugent’s threat that if Obama gets reelected he, Ted Nugent, will either be dead or in jail, presumably because he gunned down the president.

  By three, her son has yet to reappear. She forces herself to read an article in the business section about a project to employ recovering addicts by hiring them to raise fish in fiberglass tanks in a vacant industrial lot—surely, Zach and Angelina will be interested. In Norway, a right-wing terrorist proudly proclaims that if time allowed, he would have gunned down more than the seventy-seven teenagers he managed to execute at their summer camp. In Iraq, a suicide bomber has blown up another thirty civilians. Next to these cold-blooded mass-murderers, what is Thaddy but a posturing intellectual?

  Still no Zach. In the obituary section, she reads that an Ann Arborite two years her junior has died of a heart attack; she never met the man, but she knows his wife. On the comics page, she is shocked to discover that Beetle Bailey, Sergeant Snorkel, and Miss Buxley are still carrying on in ways Maxine didn’t find funny even when her father explained the jokes.

  Finally, the men come out—without Zach. Maxine jumps up—it’s as if Dr. Harutyunyan had come back to the waiting room not with her son but with a team of surgeons and oncologists. “What’s wrong? Where’s Zach?” But Greenglass avoids her gaze. Given that she is paying his fees, shouldn’t he report what went on?

  Shauntz motions her inside. Greenglass follows. She expects Shauntz to lead her to Zach. But the room is empty except for Burdock. Greenglass takes a seat and motions Maxine to do the same. Then Shauntz asks her to repeat and clarify certain aspects of her statements from the day before. Did Rapaczynski grow close to any other professor on campus? Does she have reason to suspect he was a homosexual? No? Did he ever mention a girlfriend? Any other females with whom he might have engaged in a sexual relationship? Shauntz’s persistence makes her think he suspects she and Thaddy engaged in some sort of romance. She still hasn’t told anyone but Rosa about Thaddy’s screwed-up plan to become a woman. If she manages to convey how starved he was for female companionship, how he was driven to despair by the sounds of his neighbors’ lovemaking, that might save him from the death penalty. More likely, any such revelation will cause Thaddy to curse her. Who will represent him? Might she ask Greenglass to act as Thaddy’s counsel? But who would pay the fee?

  No, she tells Shauntz. They weren’t romantically involved, but she doubts any professor had a closer friendship with Thaddy than she did. She repeats the story about the Korean graduate student Thaddy followed to Ypsilanti. The agents quiz her endlessly about the details of that encounter. Then, abruptly, Shauntz asks if she has any reason to believe Rapaczynski and her son were, at any point, lovers.

  “Excuse me? My son was fourteen. If anything sexual happened between them, you can’t believe my son …”

  Shauntz makes a lowering motion with his hands. “Not when he was fourteen. When your son was an undergraduate at MIT.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Maxine says. “When Zach was at MIT, Thaddy was a professor at Berkeley. Or he was living in Montana. As far as I know, Thaddy was never in Massachusetts. At least not after he graduated from Harvard.”

  Greenglass sighs. “I’m afraid Zach just gave us some additional information. Something he forgot to mention last night. Apparently, he spent the entire summer between his freshman and sophomore years living in Montana. With Mr. Rapaczynski.”

  Maxine feels the floor give way. “But that was the summer Zach had his internship with his adviser!”

  Shauntz puts on the universal expression of anyone who
has ever raised a teenager. “I hate to say this, but young men have been known to lie to their mothers about their whereabouts. And your son seems to have been extremely unhappy his first few terms of college. He was put off by how many of his professors were working for the military. How little concern anyone showed for the sorts of projects he thought scientists of their caliber ought to be turning their minds to. He was especially outraged at Professor Hertz for his work on facial-recognition software. They argued. The professor failed your son. As you might recall, this is the same Gordon Hertz who was the most recent recipient of a package from your son’s friend. All this while, Mr. Rapaczynski was hectoring your son with letters and phone calls, describing the life they might be living out there in his rural utopia. Your son hitchhiked west and joined him.”

  Maxine tries to take this in. That was the summer Zach told her his professor had invited him to spend six weeks on the Navajo reservation, collecting data from an array of solar panels constructed from some new material. She has the postcards Zach sent, one showing the Grand Canyon, another the rock formations at Monument Valley, with Zach’s childish printing on the back assuring her that his experiments were going well. Then again, he could have found those postcards anywhere.

  Her heart pounds in her throat. Zach didn’t have any knowledge of Thaddy’s activities. Did he? Had Thaddy been building bombs even then? Six weeks was a long time to keep an activity like that hidden. In a cabin that small. No, she thinks. The two of them hunted and fished and toasted marshmallows until Zach grew tired of living in the woods and returned to MIT. She wants to ask Greenglass exactly what Zach confessed to. But she is afraid to open her mouth. She is balanced on the thinnest precipice, and if she takes a single wrong step, she is going to topple into a bottomless chasm, and take Zach and Thaddy with her.