The Professor of Immortality Read online

  By the time her mother figured out that her late husband’s so-called friends had swindled her, they had taken their millions and retired to Florida and Arizona. Enraged, Maxine’s mother harassed her husband’s cousin Joel, a bespectacled lawyer who worked for the Department of Taxation in Albany, into suing. Over the years, Cousin Joel had become even more obsessed with obtaining a settlement than Maxine’s mother. Of the three original defendants, Dr. Simon and Dr. Vincent had passed away. Maxine is sure her father’s war buddy, Spider Macalvoy, is only waiting for her mother—and Cousin Joel—to kick off so he can enjoy his ill-gotten gains in peace.

  “I’ll be there at five,” Maxine says. “I’ll look for the letter then.”

  Her mother sighs the sigh Maxine has been hearing all her life. “Remember to bring those tweezers. The ones with the pointed tips. And the tissues. The ones with the lotion in them.” She coughs so violently Maxine is afraid her mother will choke to death while she sits there listening. “My hair appointment is ten tomorrow morning. But the time zone in the basement is an hour earlier. If you’re not here by eight forty-five, don’t bother coming.”

  That a woman as rational as her mother can think time varies according to which floor of a building you are on proves no mind is independent of the body it inhabits. If her mother is so wacked out because the dopamine in her brain is a little off, imagine how much more wacked out she would be if the AI guys uploaded her consciousness into a computer. “Don’t worry,” Maxine says. “I’ll get there in time. I promise.”

  “Never mind that!” her mother says. “I keep forgetting. It’s about Zach.”

  “What about him?” Given how unlikely it is that her mother knows Zach’s whereabouts, Maxine’s terror makes little sense.

  “I saw him. On the news.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stop yelling! I didn’t see Zach. I saw the other one. The one he used to play with. The one who blows people up.”

  Maxine should be relieved. Her mother must have seen a report on TV and conflated the terrorist in the news with Zach’s childhood friend, Norm Fishburn, who often got Zach in trouble. “I’ll see you at five,” she says, then hangs up before her mother can reveal anything that makes her think the comment about Zach being friends with the bomber is any more than a hallucination.

  … Teaches a Class

  Maybe because she is nagged by the suspicion a former student wrote the manifesto she just read, Maxine enters her Intro to Future Studies class thinking it isn’t always easy to tell which of her students merely are experiencing the turmoil of adolescence and which are so troubled they might do harm to themselves or others. For that matter, it isn’t always easy to guess much about her students just by looking.

  Take Yvonne Switalski. Face willfully blank, body swelling from a dress she might have sewn in the 4-H Club in her tiny town in Michigan’s so-called Thumb (Maxine’s colleagues make fun of the kids who hold up their palms to demonstrate where in the state they come from, but Maxine loves when her students do this), Yvonne speaks only when called on. But if Maxine does require Yvonne’s opinion, Yvonne mumbles the answer Maxine has been holding in reserve so she can startle the class with her own superior professorial insight.

  Or Patti Querk. Chinless, pale, she is treated as invisible by the sorority girls who come to class in tight black pants and slouchy sheepskin boots so hideous only women as confident as these could carry them off. And yet, the papers Patti hands in are so imaginative Maxine urged her to apply to graduate school, a suggestion Patti met with a suspicious glare, that’s how rarely anyone had praised her.

  Then there’s Obayo Stevens, who huddles in the back of the room, Tigers cap pulled so low Maxine wouldn’t recognize him outside class except by his whispery mustache and the giant cross that depends from his stovepipe neck. Everyone assumes Obayo must be at Michigan to play football. But he is pursuing an engineering degree. The papers he turns in leave something to be desired in terms of spelling (he writes “aks” instead of “ask”). But their content shows an intimidating boldness of mind, as well as a Wikipedia breadth of knowledge, material he must have picked up on his own, given that the library at the high school he attended in Detroit is bare of books.

  Maxine’s specialty is encouraging students like Patti and Obayo. But she is equally proud of the way she handles disgruntled white male geniuses like Russell Charnow. At the beginning of term, Russell took a seat in the first row, grimacing and groaning at whatever Maxine said. And yet, she welcomes young men like Russell. A few weeks into term, she invites them to visit during office hours. In they shuffle, expecting her to harangue them, the way their mothers always do. Sit up straight. Stop playing those awful video games and go outside. Ask that nice Miller girl to the prom. She doesn’t criticize their behavior. Instead, she tells them she is sorry they are bored in her class. Is there anything I can do to make the semester more challenging? Come talk to me anytime. I’m interested in what you’re thinking. Dazed by all this good will, the young men become her fiercest defenders. At the very least, they stop confronting her with so much belligerence.

  “Miz Sayers?”

  The hand in the third row, if she follows the length of the arm to which it is attached, belongs to Luther van Dyke, whose father is a state rep from a conservative district to the west. Luther wears a large rubber ring inside each earlobe. One lanky arm is tattooed with a raven; along the other arm runs FOREVERMORE. Maxine has given up trying to deduce what political statement the rubber rings and tattoos convey. Or what arguments must transpire between father and son over Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Miz Sayers? You know that manifesto thing in today’s newspaper? My dad asked me to ask you, are you on the same side as that nut job?” Luther blushes. “Those are my father’s words, not mine. He called and told me I had to ask.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up.” Even though she isn’t. “The problems the Technobomber describes do need discussing. But you can assure your father I would never allow anyone to distort what I teach into an ideology that advocates violence.”

  Luther lets down his tattooed arm. Few other students seem to have read the manifesto. But Luther’s question awakens whatever objections have been slumbering in his classmates’ consciousness all term. Or they sense an opportunity to stall the group reports they are due to present that day.

  “I’m premed,” announces pouty Narissa Hymes. “And my anatomy professor told me it’s ridiculous to think anyone will live forever.”

  The trick is never to let your students sense your fear. “Your professor is probably right,” Maxine says. “But the human lifetime is going to be significantly extended.” Here, she cites the research of a biologist who proved that altering a single gene in a roundworm’s chromosomes will double its lifespan. And the findings of her institute’s own Gavin Reinhardt, who works on preventing the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes from unraveling. (With his hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, Gavin could pose for the prophet Ezekiel crossing the Valley of Dry Bones, shouting about the evils of fat and calories and promising a deathless life to anyone who follows the dietary commandments his god laid down. The one time Gavin and Maxine went out for dinner, he consumed nothing but a few celery sticks and pomegranate tea. He confided he was into Tantric sex. But who wanted to spend thousands of years being brought nearly to orgasm but never climaxing?)

  Maybe scientists will never be able to replace every organ with its lab-grown equivalent, Maxine tells her class. But biophysicists will add decades to our lives by perfecting artificial livers, lungs, kidneys, hearts, eyes, and exoskeletons. Even if we only end up living an extra two or three hundred years, we will need to radically rethink our culture. “Besides,” she says, “contemplating our responses to immortality is a good philosophical exercise.”

  “For what?” Narissa asks.

  “For examining why we value
what we value. Thinking about what life is for.” Maxine laughs one of those professorial laughs she hopes won’t sound stagy. “I want you to think critically about all these new technologies and not accept them blindly.”

  “Don’t worry,” someone says. “Whatever it is, I’m already sick of it.”

  “Oh my God,” another student moans. “If I can’t find my phone for, like, five seconds, I feel like I’m going to die. And all these stupid games! Yesterday I missed my psych lab because I couldn’t stop popping bubbles so Snoopy could rescue Woodstock.”

  “Yeah. Can somebody please decree that Facebook is already dead? We all know it’s going to be over eventually. Can’t someone just end the pain?”

  Another student snaps his fingers—apparently, this is a new method of signaling agreement. “No matter whether you wear it on your glasses, or implant it in your eyeball, whatever new thing Google comes up with is just going to turn you into a jerk. And that telepathy thing we were talking about the other day? Why would anyone want texts coming at them inside their brains?”

  Maxine feels her faith in the human race affirmed. Young people might be ignorant. Moody. Self-centered. Prone to drinking and getting high. But they aren’t as easily duped as the Technobomber seems to believe.

  “Okay,” she says. “Enough time-wasting. First group up: Marcos, Amina, Seth.”

  To lead the discussion about the effects of immortality on religion, Maxine has selected a Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew. Or maybe she has crafted the setup for a joke. The three students shamble to the front of the room. Then sloe-eyed Marcos Costello puts forth the theory that if the human race does achieve immortality, any religion that depends on heaven or resurrection will be in trouble.

  Luther raises his hand. “So you’re saying, like, Christianity might be obsolete?”

  She reminds herself she has tenure and can’t be dismissed even if the students complain their professor taught them that Christianity is on its way out.

  “I don’t know about the whole religion,” Marcos says. “But yeah, the part about making you be afraid you might burn in hell, that part won’t work.”

  “But Judaism was never that big on hell in the first place,” Seth chimes in. “What I like most is where you say a prayer to appreciate the small, good things in life. Like eating bread. Or drinking wine.” He imitates chugging a glass; his classmates titter appreciatively. “Or, you know, seeing a rainbow.”

  “Except, dude,” Marcos says, “would you really keep appreciating all those rainbows if you had been seeing them for a million years?”

  Amina elbows her way between Marcos and Seth. “I think Buddhism might still be useful. No one would care about getting reincarnated. But everyone would still need to learn to live with suffering and desire. Because even if you have all the food you can eat, and a nice house, you’ll still suffer about something.”

  Maxine thanks the religion group. Then she summons the students assigned to the effects of immortality on art. With his chiseled cheekbones and black hair drawn up in a contemporary version of a Samurai topknot, Hideyo Suzuki looks the part of the Hollywood filmmaker he hopes to be. Hideyo kicks off his group’s presentation with a quote from Woody Allen to the effect that he doesn’t want to achieve immortality through his work, he wants to achieve it through not dying. Maxine guesses few students know who Woody Allen is, other than some creepy old man who married his girlfriend’s adopted daughter.

  “What the Woodman is saying,” Hideyo explains, “is if people make art only to be remembered, and you can be remembered by not dying, will anyone bother to keep making art?”

  “Sure they will,” says another member of Hideyo’s group. “With so much time on everyone’s hands, the demand for art is going to explode through the roof.”

  “Nah,” says a kid at the back of the room. “People are just going to keep putting everything off. Worse. Because in the future, they’ll have forever.”

  “Yeah,” says another boy. “I took philosophy freshman year. I was blown away by the stuff we read. But do I want to sit around reading philosophy books? I could be seven hundred years old, and I’ll still be looking at those philosophy books and thinking, ‘Someday I’ll get around to rereading that shit.’”

  This provides a natural segue to the group assigned to discuss the effects of immortality on education. If people live hundreds of years, will they go to school only for the first two decades? Will they work only one job their entire life? Will there be any work left for them to do?

  Which leads to the marriage group debating how long people will screw around before they settle down. If science can rejuvenate any organ, might a woman give birth at any age? And if you do stay married to one person for hundreds of years, imagine how devastated you will be if they get run over by a car. Or if your kid dies young and you and your spouse spend centuries mourning him or her.

  But wait. Will people even be having kids? If so few people die, will the planet have room for more? And if people have kids when they’re young, and then they have grandkids, and great-grandkids, and great-great-great-grandkids, will the old people remember their grandkids’ birthdays? Will any of the grandkids feel special, the way grandkids feel today?

  Maxine checks the clock. As long as she stands here listening to these young people contemplate a world in which no one dies, she can postpone visiting the nursing home where she will need to spoon soup into the mouth of her own bitter, dying mother. Wearily, she summons Yvonne Switalski and Patti Querk, along with Tommy Bruce, a baseball player who otherwise might never spend a minute contemplating the status of women’s rights in the coming centuries, or even this one.

  “So,” Tommy says. “Our group was assigned women. And how it might affect, you know, sexism. We—I mean, Yvonne here, and, um, um, Patti—we were talking about this last night, when we met at Starbucks. Whether women could keep having babies even when they get really, really old. But that already got talked about by the other group, so I don’t know what else to say.”

  Patti steps forward and in a voice double her normal volume says, “What Yvonne and I came up with is women might have time to raise their kids, then get back in the workforce and spend hundreds of years catching up, so they might reach a point where they aren’t being penalized for getting pregnant. Maybe women will finally end up earning as much as men who do the same job.”

  “Except, if the guys start out earning more,” Yvonne says, “maybe the gap will grow even bigger?”

  “Are you kidding me?” groans Gothed-out Margo Korck. “In whatever century we’re talking about, women are still going to be getting paid less than men?”

  “You know what else?” says Narissa Hymes. “Women are going to need to spend that many more centuries staying in shape and not letting their faces and tits go saggy.”

  The last panel of the day, on racism, takes the same direction. While Mindy Gasparian puts forth the idea that increased longevity might allow black people to overcome the effects of poverty and inferior schools, Obayo Stevens, from beneath the rim of his cap, blows a noise that signals his disagreement. “White people live hundreds of years, just going to give them more time to get farther ahead. They’ll leave the rest of us in the dust. When they do die, they’ll leave all that much more money to their kids.”

  “So things are going to get worse?” Mindy asks. “I thought if no one died we’d end up living in, what did you call it, Mrs. Sayers, a utopia?”

  “I think about dying all the time,” Patti blurts. “I am so scared of dying I can’t breathe. But dying makes me think everything I do with my life is important. Would I care so much if I knew I had forever to make something of myself?”

  “Yeah,” says Tommy Bruce. “My mom died when I was, like, seven? And I don’t ever want to make my kids feel as sad as I felt then. Or as sad as I still feel, whenever I think about my mom.” He puts his wr
ist to his eye, but he can’t keep from crying.

  Class ends. Not a student moves. Patti lays a palm onTommy’s shoulder and whispers something in his ear. He nods. Yes, thank you, he’s okay.

  The spell breaks. They all pull out their phones (Hideyo’s is shaped like a cartoon cat). Maxine can’t blame them for not wanting to be alone with their thoughts. Given the choice, wouldn’t she pull out her own phone and talk to her husband, or her son?

  Only Russell Charnow lingers. Russell’s group presented its findings last week, although Russell disdained adding his comments to his groupmates’. Maybe he wants to share those insights now?

  “Russell?” she says. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “No,” he says flatly. “Teachers like you, you always think there’s something you can do. And there sure as shit is not.”

  He turns and hurries out. On another day, Maxine might have hurried after him, or she might have called the campus police, or the dean of students, or a psychologist at the counseling service. But with everything weighing her down, she can’t find the energy. Besides, didn’t Russell just say there’s nothing she can do to help? She has been fooling herself to think she has made any difference in the lives of the angry young white men she has mentored. Maybe she saved a few. Most likely, she failed them all.

  … Foils a Break-In

  Walking home, she manages to shake off her apprehension. It’s only mid-April, but she doesn’t need to put on her jacket. Sometimes she thinks Midwesterners are secretly in favor of global warming. Winters will be less severe. The Great Lakes will provide water to withstand a drought. New Yorkers and Californians will get their comeuppance for thinking they are superior. Who cares if all those blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and homosexuals get washed to sea? Even Maxine catches herself welcoming the unseasonal warmth. It’s like receiving a tax refund you know is the result of a computer glitch; you will need to return the money, but how can you not enjoy spending it in the meantime?