The Professor of Immortality
Page 26
She takes the elevator to the first floor. She is hurrying out when the guard shouts: “Ma’am! Ma’am!”
Stifling her anger—the woman can’t know her mother just died—Maxine goes all the way around the revolving door and returns to find the page in the logbook where she signed herself in five hours earlier. The space in which Zach and Angelina ought to have signed themselves out is blank. Maxine fills in the time of their departure and, in the appropriate box, her own.
Then she rips the page from the binder. Balls it in her fist. Considers throwing it at the woman behind the desk. Rushes out before the guard can get up and follow her. In the Buick, she curses and tosses the balled-up paper in the back seat, where, weeks later, installing a car seat for her grandson, she will find it, wonder what it is, unfold the sheet, and be assaulted by a flock of memories that will cause her to smooth the page and keep it as a reminder of the day something terrible happened, and something wonderful happened, although no system of mathematics provides her with a method for subtracting the losses from the gains and calculating the remainder.
By the time she arrives at the hospital, her grandson is seven hours old. The nurses have wrapped him in a flannel blanket printed with bunnies and sheep. His tiny, vulnerable head is being warmed by a yellow cap.
“It’s a boy!” Angelina announces, her skin velvety against the stark white linen of her bed. “My milk hasn’t come in yet.” She pouts, handing their son to Zach. “But I guess my body didn’t have much warning.”
Maxine tries to see the baby’s face, but Zach cradles him against his chest. “Mom,” he says, “you haven’t asked what we’re calling him.”
How odd, the question hadn’t even occurred to her.
“I’ll give you a hint. We’re naming him for someone who was really smart and died too young.”
For a horrible moment, she thinks he is going to say they named her grandchild Thaddy.
“Samuel,” he says. “Sammy. Little Sam.”
“After your father?” she asks stupidly, as if some other Sam might be involved.
“Don’t you want to hold him?”
He places the newborn in her arms. Staring at the perfectly contented face, Maxine imagines everything they will do together. When she used to take Zach to the playground, she felt she was stealing pleasure from the lectures she needed to plan, the articles and books she needed to write, the tasks she needed to accomplish so her life wouldn’t be considered a waste—by whoever was keeping track. Now, she imagines the bliss of swinging this baby on a swing. Pushing the pointy end of a straw into the small silver hole on the top of a juice box, then watching this rosebud of a mouth close on the straw and sip. Here she had been, if not eager to die, then willing. The possibility she might not live to see this fresh, sweet little human grow up—find out what he becomes, whom he marries, what children he and his partner give birth to—strikes her as intolerable. She wants to keep living forever.
Which means she is overcome by her old fear of dying. It’s as if she has dragged herself to the finish line of a marathon, only to learn she is being forced to run another. She will need to continue worrying about global warming. The effects of technology on malleable young minds. The accumulation of microscopically small beads of plastic, mercury, and carbon dioxide in the oceans. The extinction of tigers, polar bears, elephants, and so many other species.
The child wriggles and yawns. Sam, she says. My dearest little Sammy. Love explodes from her very being. Ripple after ripple, like a thermonuclear wave expanding outward from a blast. Maxine expands outward with those waves, until, from a telescopic distance, she looks back at her grandson. Who, she now realizes, like all swaddled infants, is shaped like a figure eight. Like the mathematical symbol for infinity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although The Professor of Immortality is entirely a work of fiction, in writing it I have drawn heavily on the story of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Michigan, where I taught for a quarter of a century. Excerpts from Thaddeus Rapaczynski’s fictional manifesto are quoted or paraphrased from Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, which was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995; similarly, the Technobomber’s letter to Arnold Schlechter is a paraphrase of a similar letter Kaczynski sent to one of his victims, a Yale computer science professor named David Gelernter. The quotation about there being a little of the Technobomber in most of us is a twist on a similar quotation from an essay by Robert Wright published in Time magazine on June 24, 2001.
Although I have taken many liberties with Kaczynski’s life and crimes, as well as the FBI’s pursuit of the Unabomber, I am much indebted to the background provided by two nonfiction books: A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism, by Alston Chase, and Unabomber: On the Trail of America’s Most-Wanted Serial Killer, by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
The excerpt from “Aubade” is from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett, copyright (c) 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the Canadian rights to that excerpt are granted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The lines from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which appears in his Collected Poems 1947-1980, copyright (c) 1955 by Allen Ginsberg, are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Some of the material in this book was published in a slightly different form in my story “The Professor of Immortality Goes Swing Dancing,” which appeared in Harvard Review, No. 53, 2019.
For invaluable information about legal and procedural issues, I am deeply grateful to Bruce C. Judge, Assistant United States Attorney, Eastern District of Michigan, and Jill Washburn, the media coordinator and public affairs specialist for the FBI’s Detroit division.
For general encouragement and background details, my thanks to Jess Carroll and Marian and Marek Krzyzowski. For the hours they spent reading my manuscript and advising me on revisions, my heartfelt appreciation to Suzanne Berne, Leonard Post, Maxine Rodburg, Therese Stanton, Marian Thurm, and Douglas Trevor, as well as my wonderful agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler, and my brilliant editor at Delphinium Books, Joe Olshan.
To Joe and Lori and everyone at Delphinium: Bless you for giving me such a warm and welcome homecoming.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eileen Pollack graduated with a BS in physics from Yale and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York, the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her novella “The Bris” was chosen to appear in Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King; two other stories have been awarded Pushcart Prizes, and her essay “Pigeons” was selected by Cheryl Strayed for Best American Essays 2013. Formerly the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives in New York City.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Eileen Pollack
Cover design by Colin Dockrill
978-1-504
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Published in 2019 by Delphinium Books, Inc.
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EILEEN POLLACK
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