The Professor of Immortality Page 6

  In front of a rental along Packard Avenue a dozen students celebrate the sunny weather by tossing a beanbag through a hole in a board. If a player misses, he or she must take a drink. One of the young men—tall, with a narrow waist—reminds her of her son. Not that Zach would waste his time drinking and playing cornhole.

  She stops behind the elementary school. The children in aftercare play on the ceramic turtles and plastic slides that have taken the place of the metal climbing structures that populated the schoolyard when she and Sam moved to Ann Arbor. In first grade, Zach lost his grip and plummeted from the monkey bars, breaking his wrist. Still, Maxine was dismayed when the new principal replaced the jungle gym with a wooden pirate ship whose only intriguing feature was the rope ladder by which a child could ascend the prow. The principal, Mrs. Greer, prohibited the children from playing any game that involved a ball, the theory being this would protect children who weren’t adept at sports from bullying. Rather than banning Field Day, she decreed none of the activities could involve keeping score. Not long after—Zach must have been eleven—someone set fire to the pirate ship, a crime whose details Maxine learned from Zach’s friend, Norm Fishburn, while Norm was eating dinner at their house.

  “We heard the fire engines,” Norm said, bits of vegetarian meatloaf flying from his mouth. “You could see the flames from my bedroom. All that was left was this pile of soggy black crud. And the fake cannon. Except the fire melted the cannon into this really crazy shape.”

  Sam asked if the boys knew who set fire to the ship. She was surprised he suspected arson. Her own hunch was teenagers must have been smoking dope and gotten careless.

  “I don’t know,” Zach said. “But whoever burned it did us a big favor. Why did Mrs. Greer have to name it the SS Friendship? Why take a vote if you’re not going to do what the vote tells you to do?” When Mrs. Greer asked the students to suggest names, everyone thought hard and put some really good names in the suggestion box. “We knew she wasn’t going to let us call it anything with Death in the title. Or Killer. Or Destroyer. But we figured she would let us use the Jolly Roger. Or even the SS Recess. One of the girls thought that one up, and it would have been better than SS Friendship.” He spit out the name Friendship as if he had discovered a piece of gristle in the fake meatloaf he was chewing. “How dweeby is that? You can’t make people be friends. Nobody is going to be sad somebody splashed stuff on the boat and burned it down.”

  Sam shot Maxine a meaningful glance. “And how do you know someone splashed gasoline on the boat?”

  Norm darted his eyes toward Zach.

  Zach sat straight up, as if he had nothing to be ashamed of. “I’ve seen you try to light the grill, Dad. Even charcoal won’t catch fire unless you squirt that stuff from the can.”

  “Zach,” Sam said, “if you and Norm know who set fire to that ship, you’d better tell us. Someone might have gotten hurt. The whole school could have caught fire.”

  Zach moved his jaw and scowled, arguing in his head. “It was the middle of the night,” he said finally. “And the school is made of bricks. Bricks are even harder to set on fire than wood.”

  Clearly, Zach knew more than he was telling. But did Sam honestly think their son set fire to that ship? His bedroom was on the second floor; she would have heard if he tried to sneak down the creaky stairs in the middle of the night. Across the dinner table, she could see Sam decide if he should press Zach to reveal the name of whoever set the fire. When he let the question drop, she was so relieved she asked if anyone wanted to walk to Dairy Queen for dessert.

  The case of the SS Friendship was never solved. Within a week, workmen had put up a plastic version of the ship, much smaller, minus the cannon and ladder. The entire play area was cushioned with rubber pads. The kids playing on the playground now will never know children once climbed to the very top of a metal structure, hooked their knees, and dangled far above the macadam. The only ball in sight is tethered to a pole, as if it otherwise might escape.

  When the woman supervising the children begins walking toward Maxine, she forces herself to move on. Really, how can she object to making a playground safe? She passes a vine-shrouded Tudor she has always coveted. A weathered but elegant three-story Victorian. A blue-shuttered Cape Cod. Sure, the parents in Burns Park wish they had a few more hours each day to hang out with their families. To read a book. To take a hike in the Arboretum. They have too many passwords to remember. Too many soccer games and ballet classes to get the children to on time. But who would trade the rigors of a middle-class life for subsistence farming?

  Then again, if the children of Burns Park are so blessed, why did they set fire to the SS Friendship? Why are they so obsessed with zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other narratives of mass destruction? If zombies ate your parents, sure, you would be upset. But you wouldn’t need to keep answering their texts about how you had done on your biology exam or whether you had practiced your violin. What frightens these children more—that a nuclear war might wipe out this paradise in which they were lucky enough to be born? Or that they might grow up to become their parents and end up living here?

  She turns down the street to her house. Garbage cans stand lined up along the driveways. She dragged out her own can that morning. But she didn’t bother to take out the recycling bin. The truth is, she has been tossing the bottles and cans in the trash. If only Sam would return from the dead and scold her.

  Her backyard is enclosed by a fence. Not until she unlatches the gate does she notice a ladder leaning against the rear wall of her house and a man in a hoodie climbing to Zach’s old bedroom.

  “Excuse me?” she shouts up at the thief.

  The man turns and looks down. He is young, with a bushy Afro and a wild brown beard. A wasp buzzes, and he swats it in childish panic that brings to mind Zach and Norm horsing around at the Dairy Queen, their Blizzards attracting bees.

  “Norm?” she says.

  “Uh, hi, Professor Sayers.”

  “What are you doing up there?” Like her own son, Norm stands six foot three inches tall, so thin that when he and Zach used to hug each other you couldn’t help but wish they would meld to form one normal-weight boy. As kids, Norm and Zach bonded over their love of computer games. But when Zach moved on to other passions, Norm remained reluctant to commit to becoming an adult. He enlisted Zach’s help in inventing ridiculously complex board games. After the SS Friendship burned, Norm began designing fantastical playgrounds where children could climb a tower, jump off, and coast to the ground on gliders. Or burrow through hills of clay. Or roll like marbles through gigantic Rube Goldberg contraptions. In high school, Norm had drawn up plans for a playground to be constructed in a nearby park using nothing but tree stumps, boulders, and a stream already on the site. When the city refused, Norm and Zach constructed the playground on their own, although the city undid their efforts.

  Even though Norm has an off-the-charts IQ, he refused to apply to college. It was as if, from his great height, he had looked around and foreseen that the usual career paths wouldn’t appeal to him. Instead, he took the occasional carpentry class at the community college and supported himself caring for a disabled child. Maxine hasn’t run into him in months. At least, she doesn’t think she has. Maybe the hair and beard have kept her from recognizing him.

  “Um, sorry, Professor Sayers.” Norm backs down the ladder, which, Maxine realizes, came from her own garage. “I guess you could say I was breaking into Zach’s old bedroom.”

  “In broad daylight?” How can he not realize a black man in a hoodie climbing a ladder to break into a white person’s house runs the risk of being shot?

  “Zach asked me to do it.”

  “You heard from Zach?” She grabs his hoodie and pulls him down the last few rungs. “You weren’t going to tell me?”

  “He made me swear not to. But, um, I wanted you to know. I guess that’s
why I waited until you might be coming home.”

  Even on the ground, he towers above her. She can smell his sweat, so like her son’s she wants to wrap herself in the hoodie with him. “Is he all right? Please, Norm! I’ve been worried sick!”

  “He called me,” Norm says. “But it didn’t say his name on the caller ID. I thought it might be a spam thing.”

  “Do you remember the area code?” Zach is alive. He is healthy and sane enough to find a phone and call his friend.

  “He said somebody came to see him in California, and he went away with that person, and he can’t be in contact by email or phone, not with anyone, even by regular mail. But he needs money. He has all these savings bonds socked away from his bar mitzvah. They’re behind that panel in the wall next to his bed. I’m supposed to go in and find them, then wait until he tells me where to send them.”

  She knows the hiding place. She once needed to call the plumber to fix the shower. The pipes were accessible only through the panel behind Zach’s bed. When the plumber pried it off, a bag of marijuana fell out, along with a bong fashioned from a Diet Coke can. Zach refused to affirm or deny the pot was his. But Sam said, “It’s Norm’s, isn’t it. You were hiding it for Norm?” And Zach hadn’t denied he was. Sam had grabbed the baggie. “You tell your friend to hide his drugs at his own house.” He took the bag and scattered the contents behind the garage. Maxine steals a glance at that weedy patch, half expecting to see a secret garden of marijuana.

  “It wouldn’t be like I was stealing from you,” Norm says. “Zach said the savings bonds are made out to him.”

  “Norm,” she says, “if Zach wants his money, he can have it. But the only people who can cash those savings bonds are Zach and me. When Zach gets back in touch, I’ll give you the proceeds. And I won’t ask any questions. As long as you promise to tell Zach I’ve been really, really worried. If he’s in trouble, he can come to me for help. Tell him I won’t yell at him. Or judge him in any way.” She hopes Norm won’t see her crying. Then she thinks: Let him see. Maybe he will tell Zach he made his mother cry. “Are you sure you don’t know anything else and you’re just not telling me?”

  Norm shakes his head. “Zach said if he told me anything else, you’d get it out of me.” He pats her on the shoulder. “I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff to worry my parents. But I never did anything as bad as the shit Zach pulled on you.” He hooks the ladder across his arm. “The window to Zach’s room never did close all the way.”

  “No,” she says. “It never did.”

  After he leaves, she tries to make sense of what Norm just told her. Her son is alive. He isn’t in jail. But why does he need his bar mitzvah money? Who is this person who came to see him? Why did whoever it was demand Zach quit his job, give away his belongings, and drop out of sight?

  She grabs a snack, then heads to the garage to get the car. Please, she prays. Don’t let my mother ask if I heard from Zach. Don’t let her say she saw her grandson on the news and Zach has some connection to that crazy bomber.

  … Feeds Her Mother

  As a girl, Maxine looked down on her mother for devoting her life to cleaning their house, cooking, fussing about her appearance, and pestering her daughter to do the same. She vowed to become anything but a housewife. Whenever a dispute arose, she sided with her father.

  Now, she wonders how she could have missed that her mother was the victim of a system that denied her an education or any sense of worth except what she could acquire by snaring a talented, ambitious husband. Maxine’s father joined the army and received training in radar and electronics. What assets did her mother have except her straight blonde hair, her chiseled nose, her fair complexion, and her belief she was entitled to more than might be expected for the daughter of an illiterate Jewish poultry farmer in upstate New York? Her mother’s father died when Maxine’s mother was in high school, leaving nothing except an evil-smelling chicken house. She took a job at the one emporium for women’s clothes in Fenstead, where she zipped her former classmates’ zippers and knelt with pins in her mouth to tack up their hems. How could she not develop an obsession with her appearance? Her only hope of rising from her knees was attracting a better class of husband.

  The first time Maxine’s mother and father met, Lennie Sayers was traveling door-to-door, carrying frozen foods. But a year later, when her mother ventured into his appliance store to replace the icebox, she was more favorably impressed with the store’s proprietor. Stunned by her beauty, Maxine’s father offered her a special price on a Frigidaire. After they married, he built his wife a split-level ranch equipped with the most up-to-date conveniences. When his widowed mother-in-law showed signs of what in those days was called “senility,” he invited her to move in upstairs.

  Maxine is pained to remember how dismissive she was of everything her mother valued. But how could makeup tips or schemes to redecorate the living room compete with her father’s eagerness to enlist her in his campaign to bring about the Age of the Messiah? Not that her father believed in God. For Leonard Sayers, the Age of the Messiah would come about when human beings brought it. “Our end of the bargain,” he used to say—and by “our” he meant scientists and engineers—was to come up with new methods of agriculture to keep people from starving, robots to prevent workers from wasting their days in drudgery, medical treatments to stave off illness and death. The Messiah might cajole the remaining tyrants into abdicating their thrones and consigning their arsenals to the sea. But the Kingdom of Heaven would be attained only by dreamers and doers who used their brains and hands to harness the mysterious yet tamable forces of magnetism, gravity, and electricity.

  Maxine reified her father’s memory. When anyone asked how she had come up with the idea of studying the future, she described riding on her father’s shoulders as he skipped them from exhibit to exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing. “Mark my words,” her father said. “In your very own lifetime, Maxie, human beings will be living on the moon. Maybe even in my lifetime,” he added wistfully, not knowing he wouldn’t live to see his daughter graduate from junior high.

  Even then, the word “lifetime” had given Maxine pause. Contemplating the length of a person’s life was like arriving at the fair in the morning, wide-eyed and full of energy, and thinking how tired she would be at the end of the day, trudging back through the parking lot to the car. She would walk and walk, trusting that when she no longer could take another step, her father would whisk her in his arms and carry her.

  If Leonard Sayers ever placed his faith in his father’s god, his harrowing encounters with death during World War II had replaced any lingering religiosity with a faith in science. When Maxine watched her father dig a grave for the family cat, he told her if she were to return with a shovel later, she would find nothing but bones and claws. But she couldn’t accept that the universe would go to all the trouble of creating a cat, let alone a child, and adults would go to even more trouble teaching a child everything she needed to learn to become a grown-up, if, after a number of years even Maxine could understand wasn’t very long, she would be buried and stop existing.

  One day, she would discover a way to stave off death. Hadn’t she heard her father’s salesman, Spider Macalvoy, extoll the powers of their new casket-sized freezers? Once, Spider had gathered some frogs from behind his house, then popped them in an Amana. He took these frogsicles out and set them on a towel. Maxine sat spellbound, watching the crystalline eyes defrost, the rubbery legs unfold, and the throats resume their pulsing, until the frogs looked blandly at their new surroundings, hopped off the display counter, and set Maxine hopping after them. A human being wasn’t a frog. But if all went well, before she was scheduled to die of old age, she could ask to be frozen, with a request that she be chipped out and defrosted a century later, allowed to look around and see what wonderful new inventions had been invented, whether life on other planets had been detected, and what those
civilizations might be like.

  Because that was her other obsession: whether humans would make contact with intelligent beings in the universe. Once, at a sleepover party, she made the mistake of asking her friends if they believed there was life in outer space. The voices from the other sleeping bags rose to such a crescendo of scorn—“Aliens!” “Outer space!”—she might as well have been an alien herself. Only her father enjoyed discussing such possibilities. She loved the hours she spent at his shop, sitting on a high stool surrounded by television sets in various stages of disrepair, oscilloscopes, tube testers, pliers, screwdrivers, soldering irons, capacitors, resistors, fuses, and knobs, learning the difference between an RCA Victor CTC, a Zenith 25CC50, and a Motorola Quasar 2. She can still smell the dust from inside the cases. The scorch of the burnt-out tubes. The Windex her father sprayed on each screen before he fitted it back inside its box. She can hear her father’s Brooklyn twang urging her to examine the appliances and diagnose what was ailing them.

  “Don’t jump right in, Maxie,” he would say. “Look, sweetheart. Think. Visualize what connects to what. You can’t make even the smallest repair without understanding how the entire apparatus works.” He trained her to see from an inventor’s point of view. “How did Alexander Graham Bell get a voice to travel along a wire? What is sound made of? What might be used to record a human voice?” She loved when her father demonstrated the latest product some manufacturer’s representative had brought to the store. “Maxie,” he said, “someday, in your very own lifetime, you will be sitting in your living room, and the characters on your favorite television show will act out their parts, not on the TV screen, but right in front of you!”