Elixir. Part 3

The parking lot was beginning to fill up. In the eastern sky, trees had lost their leaves and made scraggly patterns against the street lights. As she stared she was suddenly in a wooden backyard swing set on Brown Street in Canton's south end. He was beside her, smiling that silly crooked smile. And those Stardust eyes. He was saying something about going to college and becoming a scientist someday, and how the next moment he was kissing her.

It came back to her in such a rush she felt faint.

She went back inside, crossed through the kitchen. Freddie asked her something, but she dismissed him with her hand and went into the staff toilet. Inside she fixed her hair and put fresh lipstick on. The face in the mirror looked at best five years this side of its age. And he looked like a kid.

It couldn't be him. So why was she shaking all of a sudden and fixing her face and gargling with mouth-wash?

This was nuts!

She pa.s.sed through the service door.

He had finished his meal, but was still sitting there and facing her. The same eyes. Same cleft in the chin. Same scar. She felt a strange fright, because it didn't make any sense. He looked half her age. While she tried to find the right words, she spotted something in his hand.

Then she realized that he wasn't smiling. And his eyes were huge and round. His mouth opened and a string of saliva poured oud onto his shirt. And rising from his throat was a deep wet groan. Suddenly his chest began to heave.

Karen's first thought was he was choking, that he couldn't catch his breath, that she had to apply the Heimlich maneuver because his face was draining of color.

But then his body began to convulse as if experiencing electric shock. In a clean sweep of his hands, the dishes scattered to the floor, as his feet kicked in some awful reflex. But what made Karen scream was how his face tensed in agony and his head jerked back as if trying to free itself from his neck.

"Somebody get a doctor. Hurry."

My G.o.d! she thought, he's having a heart attack. She shouted to one of the waiters to call an ambulance.

Instantly the place was in a commotion, people shouting and jumping up to help, one man saying he was a physician.

While people swirled around her and the doctor tried to loosen the man's tie, Karen was frozen in place. Something was happening to the man's face.

As he weaved and bobbed his head, Karen could swear that the skin of his face was changing, shifting, beginning to darken with splotches. But more than that, it appeared to be moving, buckling, as if loosening from the inside-as if there were suddenly too much skin to cover his skull.

At first she couldn't believe what she was seeing, all too distracted by the convulsions and gurgling from his chest. Then she noticed his hands. The skin was changing-wrinkling and withering as if the flesh inside were dissolving, leaving a translucent parchment through which veins made long blue vees across the backs of his hands. Others noticed also, and their voices hushed as they stopped to take in the spectacle. Then people began to scream, calling for the doctor to do something.

But this was not a heart attack, nor a stroke, nor an aneurysm, nor anything else Karen could imagine. Nor anything any of the others who pressed against her could imagine, including the doctor. Futilely he had loosened the man's tie, knowing he was witnessing nothing he had seen before, nothing that his medical texts ever prepared him for-nothing that had anything to do with normal human pathology. What disease could reduce a human body to such a stage of debilitation and with such brutal virulence? No virus, bacteria, or plague he knew of. Whatever had struck the man had blitzed his cells at the DNA level.

While others gasped and shouted, Karen stood nailed to the floor, a scream bulbed in her throat as she watched the man age half-a-century before her eyes, simultaneously fleshing out and withering into a bloated mummy of his former self. Just minutes ago he had sat here a big handsome young guy. Now he was collapsed into the corner of the booth, his shoulders hunched forward, neck sunk into his frame, sightless rheumy eyes gaping at the onlookers, his mouth rimmed with cracked flesh frozen in a silent scream.

Then a long thin cry rose from Karen's lungs as she plied open the withered claw clutched around the black-and-white photograph he had brought her-one she knew so well, a bit faded and cracked but not enough to conceal the image of them in tuxedo and gown at their junior prom, "Stardust Night-1948"-a duplicate of which she had in her sc.r.a.pbook at home with the inscription on the back: With love forever, Dexter.

3.

DECEMBER 13, 1986.

BOSTON.

Half-consciously Chris Bacon plucked a white hair from his eyebrow in the rearview mirror. "How old would you say you are if you didn't know how old you are?"

"Is this some kind of trick question?" his wife Wendy asked.

"No."

"Well, some days I feel about ninety," she chuckled.

"You know what I mean."

"I don't know, honey... Thirty-something, I suppose." Today was her forty-second birthday, although she looked at least ten years younger. She was slim and attractive, and her skin was smooth and fair. She had shiny chestnut-colored hair and large intelligent eyes of almost the same color. Her full expressive mouth, high cheekbones, and V-shaped chin gave her a regal quality that helped preserve her youthfulness. It also helped that Wendy took good care of herself and jogged regularly. "Why?"

"What if you could feel thirty-something the rest of your life?"

"I guess it depends on how long the rest of my life is."

"What if you could live, say, another hundred years and still feel thirty?"

Something in Wendy's expression said she was becoming uncomfortable with the subject. "But that's not going to happen."

"Let's say it could."

Wendy thought for a moment. Then she said, "Why would I want to live another hundred years?"

"Why? You mean you'd prefer three score and ten instead of twice that?"

"Well, only because everybody else I ever knew would be dead. I'd be a living anachronism. What kind of a life would that be?"

"How about if everybody had the same privilege?"

"Wouldn't that be worse? By the end of the century, there'd be ten billion people on the planet."

"What if it weren't accessible to everybody? I mean, just the people you love."

Wendy shifted restlessly in her seat. "Chris, can we please change the subject? None of what you're asking can happen."

"Honey, just pretend for the sake of argument: If you had the option to add another, say, fifty years onto your lifespan without aging, with me and your sister..."

"And how would you explain it to your neighbors when they grew old and you didn't?"

"We'd just move someplace else."

She started to laugh. "You mean every ten or fifteen years while everybody else is turning gray, we just pack up and go to another city?"

"Something like that."

"We'd be living like fugitives."

"Say we moved to your family place in the Adirondacks?"

"You mean live the last eighty years of our lives hiding in the woods? Frankly, I think I'd rather die young."

They were on their way to Logan airport to pick up Wendy's sister Jenny and her new baby who were visiting for the weekend. While they were in for Wendy's birthday, Chris was privately celebrating the birthday of a mouse.

Not Mickey. That was two years ago-and, Wendy swore, never again. No, this was a real mouse.

Although mus musuclus s.e.xtonis could be mistaken for any other laboratory rodent, it was a rare mutant with the dubious distinction of being the shortest-lived mouse-a mere eleven months compared to twenty-three for most others. Located at a breeder in Maine, Chris had ordered some five hundred of the animals over the years. Of the original batch, over 60 percent had defied their DNA clock by a factor of four. And one, a slender albino agouti male with pink eyes, had outlived them all as the sole survivor of years of secret experimentation-the one Chris had named Methuselah because he had exceeded his life expectancy by a factor of six, and today was celebrating his sixty-sixth month.

The best-laid plans of mice and men had not gone awry: Iwati's flower had worked!

Chris had been as good as his vow. For six years only one other person at Darby Pharms knew of his research. They had worked on the sly-nights and weekends-isolating, purifying, synthesizing, then testing the flower extract. And Chris got away with it because as senior researcher he had complete autonomy in the lab and could mask requisitions for material and animals. No one else from top management down had any inkling that during downtime on the apricot toxogen Chris was at work on the tabukari elixir. To the casual observer Dr. Christopher Bacon was the ideal employee-a man dedicated to his science, his company, and his fellow human beings.

Like the apricot toxogen, synthesis of tabukari was a complex process, but unlike Veratox the yield was very high. The active ingredient contained forty-six molecules, including a slight molecular variation of a steroid, fluoxymesterone, a hormonelike compound which Chris had never seen in a plant before-what he named tabulone.

In addition to testing tabulone on mice, Chris also applied it to cell cultures with astounding effects. From the medical literature he knew that normal, noncancerous animal cells reproduced a finite number of times between birth and death. For mice, it was an average of six replications; for chickens, twenty-five; for elephants, one hundred ten. For humans, about fifty. In a Petri dish four years ago, Chris had made a breakthrough discovery. He had taken two different batches of mouse brain tissue. One he treated with fluid nutrients and a nontoxic blue stain and incubated the mixture at body temperature. He did the same with the other but added tabulone. After five days, the first batch went through its full six replications, then died. Under the microscope, the walls of the cells had deteriorated to let the blue stain seep through. However, the cell batch treated with tabulone remained perfectly clear and healthy as on Day One. For all practical purposes, tabulone had stopped the biological clock. Today those same cells were still alive and thriving.

Somehow, tabulone had produced a protective shield around the test cells. Chris didn't understand what was happening on the molecular level, and he wished he could consult a geneticist. But six years and three hundred mice later he knew he had developed the closest thing to biological perpetuity. What started out as a quest for the perfect human birth control had, ironically, produced an eternal mouse. And Darby Pharms Inc. never knew. Nor would he tell them until he had worked out some nasty limitations of the compound.

Even then Chris was not sure. What staggered his mind was the magnitude of the implication: If tabulone could work the same for humans, he was at the threshold of the most astounding breakthrough in medical science-one that would redefine the very concept of life.

"You mean they don't die?" Wendy asked.

"No, they'll die eventually, but not from diseases a.s.sociated with age-kidney failure, heart and liver diseases. Theoretically they could go on for a few more lifetimes."

"But a few mice outliving their life span doesn't mean you've discovered the fountain of youth for humans. You're a scientist, Chris. You know better than to make wild speculations."

"What about Iwati?"

"You want me to believe that some New Guinea bush-man who claims to be a hundred and twenty three and doesn't look a day over thirty? Give me a break."

"What if he is?"

"Then I'd pity him because he'd be forced go on long after the people he loved grew old and died. He'd be a freak alone with his secret."

A freak alone with his secret.

The phrase stuck in Chris's mind like a thorn.

Maybe that was why Iwati had returned to the bush. It was the one place where time didn't move, where he could live to a hundred and fifty or more and never feel the press of change. In Port Moresby or Sydney or any other city, the future was happening by the moment. But in the Stone Age Papuan highlands, he had found indefinite life and exalted status. He was the Tifalmin's Constant Healer, dispensing balms for this ailment and that while keeping to himself the ultimate balm-the taboo to which only his offspring would be privy. And the ultimate bequest of a father to his firstborn son.

"Chris, death is what makes us human," Wendy said. "I want to live only long enough to become old."

They emerged from the Callahan tunnel to a line of traffic and turned right, toward the entrance of Logan Airport.

"Wendy, most of the people in these cars won't be here in thirty years. They'd kill to double or triple their stay. You're an English teacher: Imagine what Shakespeare could have created had he lived another fifty years. Or Michelangelo or da Vinci or Einstein. The mind boggles. Just imagine how much more writing you could do, how much more life you could enjoy."

"'Death is the mother of beauty,'" she quoted. Her voice was now flat, the earlier efforts to play along had vanished.

"Maybe, except that Wallace Stevens saw no alternative."

"Chris, we die for a reason. You're tampering with Nature-with processes refined over billions of years. And there's something dangerous in that. Besides, have you considered any of the social problems if the stuff actually worked on people-such as who could afford it? Or the population nightmare? Or if the stuff fell into the hands of criminals or a Hitler? The good thing about death is that it gets the bad guys too."

Chris made a dismissive gesture with his hand. "Precautions could be taken against all that. The point is, I like being alive. I like the moments of my life. And in thirty years I'll be dead forever. You know what forever means? It means never being conscious again. It means never waking up the next morning and seeing the world, of thinking, of being aware of colors and sounds. It means never seeing you again, and that sickens me."

"You've got at least another forty years ahead of you, maybe fifty given the way you take care of yourself."

It was true that he ate healthily and worked out regularly, jogging three miles each morning before going to work. And he had been doing that since his days at Yale where he competed on the wrestling team. At forty-two, and with a full head of sandy hair, he looked like a man ten years his junior-a young Nick Nolte, Wendy had once remarked. But his athletic good looks would pa.s.s sooner than later, and, at the moment, he refused to be placated.

As they continued into Logan, Chris asked, "What if Ricky could have been saved?"

Instantly Wendy's voice turned to gravel. "He wasn't!"

"No, but if he had been, you'd feel a lot different, right?"

"But he wasn't. And I don't want to talk about this anymore." Her voice began to crack.

They rode in p.r.i.c.kly silence. Chris had opened that dreadful black box again. He hadn't wanted to, but he couldn't stop himself. He had to know. And as he drove into the airport with his wife trying to recompose herself, he thought of how he had multiplied the lifespan of a G.o.dd.a.m.n mouse but he couldn't save his own son by a day.

Mickey. The other mouse, and Ricky's favorite companion.

Mickey had been with him the day he died, along with Chris and Wendy who had sat on either side of his bed in Boston's Children's Hospital, each holding a hand. It was how he had left them. For two years they had tried everything including bone marrow transplants from Chris and a battery of experimental drugs. It was what kept Chris working on Veratox-hoping for a successful synthesis, hoping for a breakthrough that would win FDA approval and save his son before cancer cells claimed him.

It was what kept Chris going on tabulone. But time ran out. Ricky had died at the actuarial prime of life-the age when the fewest people in the nation die. The age when the statistical likelihood of living another day is higher than at any other time of human life: five years, eight months. Eaten by cannibals-minute and immortal.

When it was clear that no hope was left but life in a state of suspended decay, they asked that the respirator be removed so Ricky could pa.s.s away on his own. It took less than two hours. At his death, he had as much hair as he had at birth. But unlike his birth hair, this was wispy and dead looking, and his scalp was scaly, his face emaciated, his eyes sunken and slitted open and frozen in a blank stare. The cancer had ravished his little system, reducing him to a shriveled, bird-faced old man. They didn't know if at the end he was aware of their presence, but Wendy kept whispering in his ear that the angels would take care of him in heaven.

Three years later, the pain still throbbed, but they had grown hard around it. They both went through a period of anger-at the universe, at death for having claimed their baby. At G.o.d. Wendy, who had been brought up Roman Catholic, could not forgive Him on this one. After two miscarriages and Ricky's death, He had killed her will to ever have another child.

Chris pulled onto the United ramp thinking about Ricky and Wendy and Methuselah.

Thinking about the bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper and the Pee Wee League trophy Ricky had won and the preschool cla.s.s pictures on his bureau, Ricky's cherubic face beaming at the camera. How Wendy could not get herself to enter his room for weeks. How in a fit she tore the place apart, packed what she couldn't part with, gave clothes to Goodwill, and stripped the walls of every reminder of the son who would never grow up.

Thinking about his father in a Connecticut nursing home withered by arthritis and Alzheimer's disease. Thinking how that cruel predisposition might be etched in his own genes.

Thinking about Methuselah full of life-eating, drinking, running his wheels and mazes like Mighty Mouse, a perpetual motion machine.

Thinking how he had the keys to the kingdom.

"When are you going to tell them?" Wendy asked. "I mean, it's been six years you've been skulking around the lab."

"I'm not sure I am."