The Professor of Immortality Page 2

  Every morning, the three of them would make their way to Zach’s elementary school, she and Sam cheered by the round yellow Pokémon character on their son’s backpack as he bobbed before them, as if leading them in a song. A block from school, Zach allowed them to kiss his hatted head, then scampered the rest of the way himself. Now, when she sees the other mothers kissing their sons, she needs to avert her eyes.

  She drags herself up the hill to campus. It’s the middle of April, but already her neighbors’ tulips have bloomed and turned brown; the lilacs droop like bridesmaids who are wrinkled and drunk before the bride walks down the aisle. She ought to be alarmed. But since Sam died, she hasn’t been able to muster much concern about global warming. A futurist who doesn’t care about global warming! Ordinary people might be excused for their inability to comprehend the devastation that four—let alone six—degrees of elevated temperature will wreak on the planet. But a scientist ought to be doing everything in her power to raise the alarm. Is she truly that selfish? Apparently, she is. She is too dispirited to keep up with the new technologies. The future has left her behind, and she can’t summon the energy or concern to follow it.

  Panting now, sweating, she considers removing her jacket, but her backpack would make the required contortions too daunting. She passes a fraternity house, the muddy front yard bloody with red plastic Solo cups that will survive by centuries the students who chugged their contents. The institute she directs is housed in the basement of what used to be the business school until a billionaire alum donated the money to erect the concrete-and-steel monstrosity her husband dubbed the Death Star. This allowed the Institute for Future Studies to occupy the moldy subterranean floor of a building so outmoded that anyone who plugs in a laptop and a coffeepot at the same time risks plunging everyone into the Dark Ages. At the start, the provost provided the IFS with ten years of funding. But that decade soon is up, and if the institute doesn’t develop additional sources of revenue, it will be forced to shut down. The obvious place to turn is the Department of Defense. But the faculty would be required to devote their energies to inventing shinier, more lethal weapons, or predicting the next outbreak of geopolitical chaos. They could rake in millions by hiring out their economists to predict whether consumers who live hundreds of years will be likelier to buy adult diapers or memberships at golf clubs in the Bahamas. But if they allow themselves to be seduced by consulting fees, won’t the payments influence their predictions? As she pushes open the frosted glass door stenciled with the university’s maize-and-blue logo, she feels inclined to accept the most obvious prediction concerning the program she founded and directs: namely, that it is doomed.

  Then she sees her friend and chief administrative officer, Rosa Romanczuk, who, at sixty-three, might never find another position at the university, certainly not at a level that will allow her to continue paying her sons’ tuition at MSU, and Maxine knows she needs to continue struggling. Rosa is as curious about the future as Maxine. But Rosa believes less in the powers of the medical establishment to extend human life than in the certainties of reincarnation. Maxine would never have hired Rosa if she had known. People have a low enough opinion of her institute without discovering that its chief administrator believes in casting horoscopes.

  And, until she met Rosa, Maxine pitied anyone who believed the position of the stars could affect our lives. By what mechanism might such an influence be conveyed? How could the soul survive the body? In what vessel might it hover until it found another being to inhabit? What Maxine never realized was that people like Rosa pitied people like her for being narrow-minded. Scientists thought only the weakest, most ignorant minds fell prey to the supernatural. But in knowing Rosa, Maxine has come to see that only the most deluded believe in pure reality. Our senses can detect the merest shadow of what is out there. When electromagnetic waves were the latest theory, none other than Pierre Curie pronounced this method of transmitting energy the means by which we might communicate with the dead. He turned out to be wrong. But Maxine continues to be amazed that electromagnetic waves exist. Or that beings on other planets might use these invisible waves to signal they are out there. Entire new worlds might lie curled up within dimensions beyond the four we humans are able to experience. We are like cartoon creatures who, when a hand reaches down to penetrate our flat-paper world, perceive five mysterious black holes through which we are unable to travel. We come up with equations that describe their impenetrability. Then we congratulate ourselves on knowing everything there is to know about the universe. Maxine might not believe in reincarnation. But her colleagues study the possibility of uploading a human mind into a computer and allowing that consciousness to survive its body’s death. Isn’t it a matter of time before we are able to transmit our thoughts from a chip in one person’s brain to a chip in someone else’s? To maneuver a car by thinking? How would such displays have been interpreted by our ancestors if not as telepathy and telekinesis?

  Besides, Maxine can forgive anyone who has lost someone she loves for believing the loved one isn’t gone. When she got the call Sam had fallen prey to the West Nile virus, Rosa helped arrange the funeral. When Sam’s mother accused Maxine of not being a good enough wife to keep her husband home where he wouldn’t have been susceptible to a rare tropical disease, all that prevented her from grabbing her mother-in-law by her withered throat was the look Rosa shot her across the room. This woman has lost the same dear man you lost. This woman has lost her son.

  Rosa didn’t try to convince Maxine time would heal her wounds. What she said was that at some point, the torture would become more bearable. When other well-meaning people said this, Maxine could disregard their platitudes. But here was a woman who had suffered the same agonies Maxine was suffering. The night after the funeral, while Rosa was putting away leftover platters of turkey and cheese, she told Maxine she had been married to a businessman who, while negotiating a deal in Los Angeles, had gone for an evening jog. Fevered and confused, he had been taken to an emergency room. Misdiagnosed as a homeless black drunk, he had been left raving in his bed until the bacterial meningitis was so severe he couldn’t be saved.

  Absurdly, Maxine asked Rosa how she could continue to believe in astrology if she hadn’t been able to predict her husband’s death.

  “Oh, honey,” Rosa said. “Death is too much of a mystery, even for me. There isn’t just this one future, and I see it, and I tell you what’s going to happen. Living that way would ruin your life. You would always be walking with your eyes around the next curve. All I can predict is the next transition. That’s what you scientists are always studying, isn’t it? One particle becomes two other particles, and those particles become two others. All this being and becoming.” Rosa flapped her multiringed hands. “I knew some very big change was coming for my Celestine. But I thought he was going to give up trying to revive black businesses in Detroit. I thought he was going to buy a chain of Burger Kings and ask me to move with him to the suburbs.”

  Rosa tore off a swatch of plastic wrap and used it to cover a tray of smoked salmon. “I can’t say you will ever recover from this. But one day, you might not feel you are betraying Sam because you enjoy something he is never going to enjoy. You won’t be kicking yourself for whatever mean thing you said to him. For not allowing him to make love to you that last morning you saw him alive, before he flew away on his travels. For not being there beside him as he lay dying, lonely and delirious. You will still be very sad. But you will understand how lucky you are compared to all the people who never were loved by a man the way you were loved by the man you loved.”

  Rosa, thank God, never offered to read Maxine’s Tarot cards. But in the months that followed Sam’s death, Maxine was tempted to ask. It was remarkable how quickly she became a convert to the supernatural. In the middle of the night, when she couldn’t stand the loneliness a moment longer, she would get up from her bed and google Sam’s profile, which was still on his department website. T
hen she googled the video of him speaking at a symposium on low-cost technologies to prevent premature infant deaths. Then the guestbook Sam’s mother had set up through the funeral home. She listened to an interview Sam had given for a radio show in Minneapolis. The intelligent rasp of his voice (a synthesis of innovative materials will allow the purification of water even in the harshest environment …) allowed her to believe she might break in to the interview and ask her dead husband questions. After all, once someone achieved nonmateriality, what prevented him from traveling around the ether, putting in appearances at will? When Maxine found an article about a project Sam had funded in Rwanda and read how the solar-powered lights allowed commerce to flourish even at night, lowering the rates of rape and theft, she enlarged the photo of the newly lit market, hoping to learn that Sam, instead of dying, had migrated to this new locale.

  More recently, she had taken to googling Zach. She checked his friends’ Facebook pages in case one of them tagged her son. She typed in every combination of phrases that might lead to Zach’s mug shot. Or, God forbid, his obituary. She sent emails to the company where Zach worked before he quit. Because the messages didn’t bounce back, she fooled herself into thinking they might have reached him.

  Which is to say that even if Rosa Romanczuk purported to tell the future by studying the vertebrae of dead cats, Maxine would be grateful for her presence behind the front desk this morning. The institute’s receptionist is on maternity leave, and Rosa is taking her place, talking on the phone while tick-tocking her elaborately scarved head to signal her impatience with whoever is on the line.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Rosa says. “The Washington Post is a very important newspaper. Even here in the Midwest, we know that. Yes. I know what a deadline is. But Professor Mickelthwaite is speaking to a reporter from NPR, which isn’t such small potatoes either. I promise, he will call you as soon as he hangs up from this other gentleman.” She jots a number on her pad and circles it in pink ink, each circuit lessening the probability the number will be conveyed to Professor Mickelthwaite.

  Rosa hangs up. “You are not offended?” she asks Maxine. “I could have waited until you got in, but the calls were piling up.” She lets fall a rainbow of neon-colored Post-its, each embossed with its own pink-gelled number and a name.

  “No, no,” Maxine says. “I’m fine with Mick fielding the reporters.” She hates talking to the press. And to deprive John Sebastian Mickelthwaite of the opportunity to respond to a journalist’s request for an interview would be like dining on a bloody steak in front of an emaciated old lion.

  As it happens, her colleague does wear his abundant white mane in the same leonine manner of such well-known hucksters as Buffalo Bill Cody, Mark Twain, and Colonel Sanders. Maxine has never seen him without a colorful cravat. Each spring, he trades his fedora for a woven panama. He drives a low-slung sports car he assembled from a kit. (The vanity plate reads THWAITE, so anyone behind him might think the owner is lisping a command to sit patiently while he proceeds down Main Street at whatever ceremonial pace he likes.) He earned his degree from Yale in an era when all you needed to gain admission was a name like John Sebastian Mickelthwaite. You could graduate with a degree in the Philosophy of Science without knowing much about either subject, qualify for a Rhodes by lettering in squash, then spend the rest of your life elocuting in plummy tones, as if your vocal cords had contracted a chill in the damp halls of Oxford and you never shook it off.

  In his early years, Mickelthwaite had written a tome called The Birth of the Modern World, which every book club selected as that month’s offering. Radio and television hosts invited the author to speak to the anxiety of an age in which the atomic miracle that powered America’s cities might turn those same cities into ruins. Such celebrity earned Mickelthwaite the role of scientific advisor to a roster of presidents that included Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and the elder George Bush.

  But times have changed. As deferential as the presidents of Harvard and MIT once were, only Michigan will employ him now. Even here, Mick has been consigned to teach an introductory course filled with freshmen more impressed by their professor’s flowing white locks and ability to relate anecdotes about “Jack” and “Tricky Dick” (whom they grow less able to identify as the years go on) than any insights he might offer as to the epistemology of scientific knowledge. Beneath his bluster, Mick must know he has sunk below whatever regally appointed office he occupied as adviser to so many presidents. He leaves his door open so everyone can hear him talking about the million-dollar consulting fees he has been offered. The invitations to fly to Stockholm or Berlin. The solicitations of advice from monarchs whose kingdoms he can’t reveal. But Rosa has told Maxine that whenever such conversations appear to be taking place, no buttons on the switchboard light up.

  Rosa motions Maxine to wait. “With all the reporters, I forgot to tell you, your mother also called. She wanted me to remind you she has an appointment to get her hair washed and set tomorrow morning at ten, but you need to get her there by nine because the time zone in the basement is different. And you need to bring the tweezers with the fine point, not the blunt end. And the shade of mascara she keeps telling you to buy. And the tissues with the lotion already in them—the regular tissues make her nose rough and red.” Rosa consults a second Post-it. “Oh, and she’s gotten some very good news about the lawsuit. She can’t find the letter, but she wants you to look for it when you come.”

  Maxine takes the Post-its, careful not to betray her impatience with her mother. Poor Rosa. Her father, a runner for the Polish mob in Detroit, disappeared when Rosa was five, after which her mother abandoned her to a cadre of undependable aunts before jumping down an elevator shaft. If Rosa hadn’t developed such exquisite intuition as to which grown-ups she could trust, she wouldn’t have survived her childhood. How can Maxine begrudge the need to tweeze a few stiff hairs from her mother’s chin?

  Besides, Maxine is terrified her mother will die. No one loved Maxine’s father as much as Maxine and her mother loved him. No one loves Maxine’s son with nearly the same intensity as Maxine’s mother. What will she do when her mother succumbs to Parkinson’s? To whom will she turn when another month passes with no word from Zach? For that matter, who will bother to comment that Maxine might find more success attracting a second husband if she put more effort into styling her hair, wore more figure-flattering dresses, and bought a brighter, more seductive shade of lipstick?

  Strangely, her mother seems unaware she is dying. She can’t get out of bed. She is in danger of choking on her own saliva. Yet she frets that she will outlive her money and be tossed out in the street. “Mom,” Maxine assures her, “I would never allow that to happen. If worse comes to worst, you can come live with me.” But how can anyone be so oblivious to her own demise?

  Then again, hasn’t Maxine fooled herself into believing scientists will soon confer on the human race—at least, those rich enough to afford it—the benefits of immortality?

  “What ho, fair damsels!” Mick stands beside them, glowing with the satisfaction of a man whose ego, for once, has been sufficiently fed. “I might advise you two young ladies to exercise especial caution not to open any packages about whose provenance you are not absolutely sure.”

  The concern on his face is real. As long as a woman demonstrates the deference he considers his due, Mick will roar and bare his claws if anyone dares to harm her. Add to that his kindly heart, which had been pierced by a loss so sharp it would make even the most courageous beast roar in pain, and Maxine warms to her pretentious colleague. A decade ago, Mick, who already had lost his wife to cancer, lost their only child to delusions and paranoia. Despite the finest care, his daughter had left home and pinballed around the country until she was found battered to death in a Cleveland alley.

  About a month after Sam’s death, Mick had parked his sportscar in front of Maxine’s house, then waited while she pulled a sweatshirt over her pa
jamas. “Come,” he ordered. “I will brook no excuse.” When she protested she couldn’t leave Zach alone, he assured her a boy of sixteen would be only too glad to spend an hour in his house alone. Reluctantly, she accompanied him to his car. There, she discovered the human animal is incapable of despair while being driven in a convertible whose top-of-the-line stereo is blasting into the crisp October air the sublime and soaring chords of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending. They stopped at the cider mill in Dexter for hot, fresh donuts, which they ate beside the river, wasps zinging around their heads. When this reminded her of the time she and Sam and Zach had sat on this same log, nibbling donuts and sipping cider, her colleague allowed her to lean against his stiff Harris tweed jacket and have a good cry.

  If that weren’t enough, after Zach departed for MIT, Mick showed up wearing a multipocketed J. Peterman coat and leather gloves and set about raking the leaves Zach would have raked if he’d still been home. When the first snow fell and Maxine glumly went out to shovel the walk, she found Mick finishing a path to the garage. The thought crossed her mind that he was buying her affections. But Mick never cashed in on his favors. When he passed Maxine in the hall, he lifted one bushy eyebrow, as if to inquire whether her son had seen fit to provide evidence of his existence. When she shook her head no, Mick took her hand and gave it an optimistic squeeze.