36 Arguments for the Existence of God (14 page)

Cass steps onto his front porch to retrieve his newspaper and is startled by the gentleness of the day. He sniffs exultantly. The air carries the fragrance of ethereality that Cass still associates with Pascale’s billowing dark tresses. Now he can inhale that mysterious essence without the familiar clutch around his heart. Love for Lucinda has finally lifted mourning for Pascale.

He had spoken with Lucinda last night, and New England’s overnight thaw seems an appropriate response. He’d think he was dreaming if not for the persuasive detail of a sodden
New York Times
that he pulls out of an ankle-deep puddle of melted snow.

Their connection hadn’t been long, but it had been wonderful. He reached her as she was walking back to her hotel, and it had been like walking beside her. She was coming from a small Italian restaurant where she’d dined with some game theorists, who had all gone silly on choice bottles of 1997 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, compliments of Apostolos Pappadopoulos, whom everyone calls Pappa. Pappa is the organizer of Lucinda’s conference, and he’s famous for his expansive good spirits. Everybody wants to get invited to the conferences that Pappa runs.

“Only it’s such a bore to be the only sober head at a table,” Lucinda had remarked good-naturedly. “I was the only one who could tell that the jokes weren’t really all that funny.” She hadn’t been able to indulge like the others, since she still wanted to get in some work, polishing up her talk. Lucinda hasn’t wanted to talk about the contents of her talk, only telling Cass that she’ll be presenting some new ideas. Cass can sense how much she has riding on the reception.

They’d spoken mostly about the conference, as she walked back from
the restaurant in balmy Santa Barbara—“Poor you,” she had sympathized, “freezing in Cambridge!”—Lucinda rattling off names that didn’t mean anything to him and reporting on how good or bad she judged their delivered papers to have been. “And did you fang any of them?”

She had laughed.

“I think I might have left bicuspid imprints on a few. You know, these game theorists are a tough crowd. They’re not wussy psychologists. Wus-sologists!” She’d laughed in that adorable way she has of relishing her own humor. “I hope Pappa celebrates again in the same style after my talk. Then I can get silly on hundred-dollar bottles and laugh uproariously at bad jokes. I want to knock some major socks off these people.”

“You will, Lucinda. I get happy just thinking of all those argyles flying in the air, the game theorists scrambling to pair up their mixed-up garters after the Q & A.”

She laughed with almost as much enjoyment as if she had made the joke, but then her mood quickly modulated.

“Rishi’s giving the keynote,” she said evenly.

Rishi Chandrakar had been her colleague at Princeton, where Lucinda had far outshone him. She doesn’t understand, she had told Cass repeatedly, why Pappa would ask Rishi rather than her to deliver the keynote.

“Rishi won’t deliver the keynote. He’ll deliver the anticlimax.” And Cass had meant it, too. He doesn’t know the first thing about Rishi Chandraker, but he knows Lucinda Mandelbaum.

“That’s sweet of you to say,” she said. “Cass, you’re sweet. Tell me what’s going on at your end. Anything new?”

“An old friend from way back when showed up in Cambridge, an incredible character. I’ll tell you all about it when you get home. It would take me too long to describe over the phone.”

“One of those crazies from those cults you study?”

“Cults like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?” He laughed.

“Yeah, like that.” She laughed back. “Did I ever tell you that when I first got to Harvard as an undergraduate I just couldn’t understand how there could be a Department of Religion? Why not departments of astrology and alchemy and chiromancy and necromancy? And then I found
out Harvard actually had a Divinity School. How could they live with that and still claim
Veritas
as their motto?”

“I’ll never achieve your level of tough-mindedness,” he said. William James had distinguished between minds that are tough and tender. Their tone had returned to breezy.

“That’s because you’re the atheist with a soul. I don’t come so burdened.”

“But I’ve gazed into your soul, Lucinda.”

“That would make you the first to do that, including me. May I ask what you saw in there?”

“That would also take me too long to describe over the phone.”

The conversation, so sweet and silly, made him feel guilty for holding out on her about the Harvard offer, especially since the topic of Harvard had come up, and especially since he had spilled the beans earlier that evening over dinner with Roz, who had extravagantly congratulated him, leaning across the little candlelit table they were sharing, making sure to keep her hair from getting singed in the flames, and placing both her palms on his cheeks to draw him in for a smooch. Roz had never learned how to kiss halfway.

They had been sitting in a darkened romantic nook in the Spanish restaurant Dalí. The eccentric little restaurant was a post-kitsch composition of romantic grottoes, arched doorways, beaded curtains, golden tiles, embossed copper ceilings, mosaics, sunflowers, hanging hams, and other Spanish tchotchkes. It had been Roz’s favorite restaurant back when they’d been together, though they had rarely been able to afford it. She had certainly dressed up for the occasion. Cambridge was in deepfreeze, but she was showing a lot of skin in a slinky sleeveless black silk dress that had a red ruffle-flower at the right shoulder and another at the left hip. She was looking good, so good that Cass kept his eyes steadily away from her décolletage, out of loyalty to Lucinda. When he’d complimented her on the dress, remarking on its Dalí-esque appropriateness, she grinned in a way that made him wonder whether she’d known all along she was going to get him to bring her here.

He hadn’t really wanted to go out to dinner, since he has a lot of homework if he’s going to surprise Lucinda with his mastery of the Mandelbaum
Equilibrium when she returns on Friday night, but Roz had wheedled him into it.

After some expert flirting with their waiter, Roz got down to business, asking Cass for names of people she could approach as potential donors to the Immortality Foundation.

“As a matter of fact, I do happen to know some people who might be interested. Do you know Luke Nanovitch?”

Cass had met Nanovitch at one of Sy Auerbach’s high-powered dinners, held at the Rialto in Cambridge, where Nanovitch had held forth to the assembled scientists and techies. Nanovitch, an inventor and futurist, has been proved right so many times when announcing what impossible thing he planned to invent next that he’s given up noticing when people don’t buy his prophecies. “Improvements to our genetic decoding will be downloaded via the Internet,” he had announced, his tone of voice the same as if he were predicting that the waiter would soon appear to take their orders. “We won’t even need a heart. The trick is to keep yourself alive for two decades more. It would be beyond ironic to die just short of the singularity that’s just around the corner.” Cass would have thought Nanovitch was mad if he hadn’t met him at an Auerbach-orchestrated dinner. He has faith in his agent’s shrewdness.

“Only by reputation, but I’d love to meet him!” Roz exclaimed now. “Nanovitch is one of my heroes!”

“Yes, I can see why. I heard him talking about your very own cause. Before that, the only thing I’d ever heard along these lines was the idea of flash-freezing corpses….”

“Cryogenics, the human Popsicle! Cryogenics is for crackpots!”

“Ah yes.”

“Don’t give me that smile, Cass. I’m not a crackpot! And if you don’t accept that on faith—though I’m a bit miffed that you don’t—then consider Nanovitch, one of the visionaries of our day. You’re not going to call Nanovitch a crackpot. More like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“Contemplation of one’s mortality can addle even the clearest of thinkers. It’s a bit like religion in that way. In fact, it
is
religion.”

When Cass had dared to suggest something along similar lines to
Nanovitch, the man had serenely smiled and said, “It’s not religion. It’s molecular biology.”

“By which you mean,” said Roz now, “that fear of death gives a lot of wishful oomph to the God hypothesis.”

“Exactly.”

“All the more reason to try and cure our mortality with scientific advances. If we succeed, we’ll deprive the heaven-mongers of their cruel false promises.”

“The afterlife of the skeptics,” Cass said, smiling.

“Which is all the afterlife that we need! This!” And she threw her glass of Rioja back like a pro, taking the opportunity to remind Cass, after she swallowed, to “drink plenty of red wine. The resveratrol promotes longevity. Which reminds me.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a baggy bursting with pills and capsules: gelatin globules filled with yellow viscous fluid or reddish oils, shiny black pellets and lozenges of mahogany brown, and then some homemade-looking capsules with powders ranging from white to sandy tan to mocha brown. There must have been twenty-five in all.

“You swallow all that?”

She answered by getting them all down with amazing dispatch, using her water, and then taking a long swig of resveratrol as a chaser.

“This is nothing! You should see what I swallow in the morning!”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Do any of us?”

“But you’re doing something extreme here. You could be doing yourself more harm than good.”

“Look, we all know what’s going to happen if nature is allowed to take its course. This is what strong intervention looks like. That’s what I’m interested in. Strong intervention.”

“You take even more than that in the morning?”

“I take vitamins, antioxidants, and hormones three times a day. The biggest dose is in the morning. The smallest dose is what you just saw.”

“What are you trying to do to yourself, Roz?”

“Live a very long time.”

“You could be killing yourself.”

“Have a little faith. I’m not doing this blindly. I consult with molecular biologists and gerontologists.”

“Do they know what they’re doing? How much real science is this based on?”

“The science is incomplete, sure. It always is. If we wait around to get it, we’ll never live to see it gotten. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Life isn’t a randomized, double-blind, peer-reviewed clinical trial. Big gains require big risks, and we’re after the biggest gain of all.”

Cass decided to say no more about Roz’s experiments on her body. She always was a risk-taker and she always will be one.

“Have you thought about the other high-tech way to cheat death?” Cass was thinking of the position advocated by another participant at Auerbach’s Rialto dinner, a philosopher named Nicholas Duffy. Duffy had been the only one to challenge Nanovitch at all, though he was more or less on the same wavelength. “If you could reverse-engineer the neural program that constitutes a person’s mind, you could upload it to a less-vulnerable physical medium,” Cass said to Roz. “There could even be multiple backups, in case of a power failure or a nuclear attack.”

“You mean just backing up our software, and throwing away this beautiful hardware platform we call my body? Are you
kidding
, Cass? I don’t want to look into the mirror and see a rectangular screen! I don’t want to run my virtual fingers across your shivering keyboard or have you uploading into me for a virtual roll in the hay! Give me my body or give me death!”

This was turning into one of the conversations with Roz when Cass wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to be laughing quite as much as he was. Meanwhile, the tapas had started to arrive, with their waiter theatrically reciting the names of the nine dishes as he balanced them expertly around the candlelit table.

“This question of preserving our software or our hardware reminds me of those ancient Judeo-Christian debates on whether an immaterial soul survives the death of the body, or the body itself is resurrected when the Messiah comes,” Cass said, watching Roz tuck into the tapas as if
there were no tomorrow, even though she was betting on several centuries’ worth of them.

“What did the ancient rabbis say?”

“They’re pretty much on your side on this one. They choose the body over the disembodied soul.”

“Glad to hear it. Anyway, Cass,” she continued, washing down a green-lipped mussel with some more Rioja, “the sooner you get me in touch with Nanovitch while I’m here in Cambridge, the better. And what about that agent of yours?”

“Sy Auerbach? What do you want with Sy Auerbach?” It occurred to Cass that maybe Roz had a book she had written or was planning to write. Everybody has written or is planning to write a book.

“Auerbach strikes me as the kind who’d want in on immortality. I read that blog of his. He’s our kind of guy!”

“Okay, I’ll give you his coordinates. He’s in New York, of course.”

“I’m on my way to New York! Maybe he’d want to meet me personally! I’d love to be one of the regulars on his blog.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Cass. You know, it’s wonderful that you’ve come up so much in the world, and it’s wonderful that you’re willing to be so generous and help me with connections, and it would be wonderful, too, if
you
became a friend of the Immortality Foundation. Even if you didn’t want to be a
major
financial donor, but just enough to indicate that you support what I do.”

“Well, actually, Roz, I’m not sure that I do.”

“You think it’s unrealistic, right? You think it’s science on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors! But it’s not! Some of the biologists that my foundation is supporting have results that are going to make the possibility of radically extending life a reality. I’m talking
radically
radically!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Roz, I’m just not altogether convinced that radically radically is such a good idea.”

“Huh?”

“Well, obviously, adding a few years or even decades to our normal life spans would be terrific; nobody would want to go back to the days when forty was considered a ripe old age….”