ELIXIR (13 page)

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Authors: Gary Braver

BOOK: ELIXIR
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DECEMBER 9
T
he morning was appropriately cold and raw. It was the day Jimbo would die.
Phase One of the testing had been completed. With no standard procedures to guide them, Chris and his team had worked out the minimum dosage-to-body weight ratios to maintain a steady state for the animals—levels where chemistry and behavior plateaued, where test-culture cells replicated indefinitely, and where Elixir maxed out, the excesses passing through their systems unabsorbed.
Phase Two was withdrawal—the stage everybody hated because it meant sacrificing animals they had become attached to.
First to go had been Fred, age twenty-three. They had weaned him off Elixir for a period of two weeks. At first, the effects were imperceptible—loss of appetite and lethargy. Then one day he curled up in a corner, occasionally whining in pain. He remained that way for two days, then died. The postmortem indicated kidney failure. A twenty-one-year-old female named Georgette was next. After two days she came down with a high fever. After a day of fitful shakes, she lapsed into a comatose sleep and died of heart failure. The only noticeable sign of senescence was that her heart had swollen by 30 percent. Four more animals were sacrificed—all dying within a few days, all by causes attributed to age: kidney failure, heart failure, brain strokes, liver dysfunction. Except for slight withering, most showed no overt signs of senescence.
The night before they withdrew Jimbo, Chris visited him alone. He was the oldest monkey and the one whose death Chris dreaded the most. Over the months, he had come to love him like a favorite pet. More than
that, Jimbo was a kind of soulmate—an alter self across the evolutionary divide.
His cage was three times the size of other singles—a special seniorcitizen perk. Chris found Jimbo curled up on an old L. L. Bean cushion. Because he was a light sleeper, he awoke when Chris approached. He moved to the bars and pushed his fingers through. Chris locked on to them and wondered if Jimbo was aware of the wonderful changes that had taken place in him over the months. Did he know he was younger, stronger, more alert? Did he remember being old? Could he gauge the difference? Chris hoped so, but thought probably not. Self-awareness and awe were capacities unique to humans.
“You’re a miracle, big guy, and you don’t know it.”
Jimbo gazed up with those flat black rainforest eyes. Chris’s heart squeezed. “Sorry, my friend.”
His mind shifted to a room in Rose Hill Nursing home in West Hartford where last week Chris held the fingers of his father who lay confused by most everything in his waking day. There was more self-awareness in an old rhesus monkey.
Chris fed Jimbo his last supper, then went home and cried.
The mood was somber the next morning when Chris and his team had gathered. Quentin Cross showed up uninvited. As with the other animals, two video recorders would capture the entire process—which they estimated would take four days. Following that, an extensive postmortem analysis would be done on his vital organs.
Elixir was administered to the animals’ systems through minipumps connected to refillable implants under the skin. These worked best because needles were traumatic. Jimbo’s last refill would have been at nine A.M. Based on the other animals, signs of degeneration were not expected to show for at least twelve hours.
It was a little after one when Chris got a call from Vartan that Jimbo was acting oddly. He could hear his shrieks even before he reached the lab. All the others had assembled around the cage. “He’s experiencing some kind of trauma,” Vartan said.
Jimbo was at the top of his climbing structure, trembling and clutching it with both hands. His eyes were full of terror and he was shrieking as if plagued by phantoms.
“He looks possessed,” Betsy said, watching in frightened awe.
When Jimbo spotted Chris he fell silent, gaping at him, his ears flattened against his head, a terrified grin on his face, his lips retracted so his huge canines were fully exposed. Then, without warning, he flew at Chris with a shrill screech. Had there been no bars, Chris was certain Jimbo would have torn open his face.
Suddenly Jimbo dropped to the floor and began running in circles, defecating and making yakking sounds nobody had heard before, his tail up like a female presenting out of sheer terror. His face was a scramble of expressions, running the gamut of fight/flight programs. He came to an abrupt stop. His eyes, large and opaque, settled on Chris. His mouth opened in a huge O as if comprehending some gross truth.
The next moment, he began to convulse. He flopped to the floor among his own waste matter. His limbs began to twitch as if he were being electrocuted. Then, slowly at first, his face and torso began to wither, the fur buckling as if there were too much of it to cover him. Betsy let out a gasp of horror as Jimbo’s skin lumped and crawled as if small creatures were moving under it. She rushed to give him a mercy-killing shot, but stopped, realizing it would make no difference. Jimbo was dead by the time she filled the needle.
What happened next defied belief, but made horrifying sense. Without the prophylactic protection of Elixir, the telomerase genes in the cells of Jimbo’s body suddenly switched on, triggering a mad cascade. Multiplying at lightning speed, cancer cells oozed in bright red tissue mass from the orifices of Jimbo’s body—ears, nose, mouth, and anus. From his penis a thin red worm extruded out of the urethra, coiling onto his belly. Simultaneously, a pulsing gorge swelled out of Jimbo’s throat and enveloped his head.
Within minutes, cancer cells made up for months of forced dormancy. Cells that continued to grow and multiply long after the animal had died flowed like lava across his limbs and torso until any semblance of his original form was lost to a grotesque and throbbing red mass.
When it was over, Betsy turned to Chris and Quentin. “Are you satisfied now?” she shouted. “What we are doing is wrong, and that hideous spectacle was a warning. This is bad science.
Bad!
”
She then turned and left the lab.
DECEMBER 11
“What do you mean a
technical snag?”
“Well, a kind of … you know, side-effect.”
“What kind of side-effect?”
Quentin was sweating, but trying to remain cool. “Well, the stuff kills the animals in withdrawal. I don’t understand it—something at the DNA level.”
Vince Lucas listened without expression and sipped his tea. He was dressed elegantly in a gray flannel sport coat, white shirt, and silk paisley tie. A fat gold Rolex peered out from his wrist. With his slick black hair and tan, he looked like an Italian movie star.
“We’re working on it, but unless we eliminate it, it’ll never be marketed.”
They were sitting in the lounge of Boston’s new Four Seasons Hotel. Seven months from now Quentin was scheduled to pay Vince Lucas the first $2 million he owed him for his loan—and his life—the same amount to be paid the following July 1. That was on top of the $5 million he had already wired Antoine for the apricots. Nine million dollars in debt and nothing to show but some hideous monkey carcasses.
“But I think there’s something we can do.”
Vince looked at him with those unreadable black eyes. “I’m listening.”
“But it’s not legal.”
“Now we’re home.”
The waiter came with a second Chivas. Quentin took sip then explained. “I’m thinking a deep-pocket clientele would pay serious money for an endless supply of Elixir. People who like their privacy.”
“Howard Hughes is dead.”
“I mean your Consortium.”
The suggestion hung in the air. Vince sipped his tea patiently.
“Well, I’m thinking that maybe you and Antoine can approach them with the idea … a chance to live indefinitely, and what they would pay for it.”
Vince lay his glass on the table. “The Consortium is not a club for rich hermits,” he said. “What happens when the kid who used to drive your limo meets you twenty years later and he’s forty-five and you’re the same? You tell him you’re taking some secret youth potion?”
“By then we’ll have worked the bugs out, and the stuff would be on the market. I mean in the meantime. Like, you know, now.”
Vince thought that over. “How long to get the bugs out?”
“Three years, four the most.”
“Sounds like a trap, if you ask me.”
“How’s it a trap?”
“Say the Consortium is interested. They’ll want a guarantee they can still get the stuff without any hitches or sudden price inflation.”
“We’ll give them written guarantees.”
“Enforced by what authorities?”
Quentin looked at him without an answer.
“Another thing: Say you run out of raw materials again, or the Feds find out you’re dealing in illegal pharmaceuticals and shut you down. What happens to your clientele? It’s not like some junkie’s supplier runs dry and they can tap another. People want peace of mind.”
“We can work out some foolproof trust.”
“No such thing.” Vince removed a single almond from the dish of nuts and chewed it, all the while turning something over in his head. “You say Elixir still works on the primates as long as they get a constant supply?”
“Yes.”
“Before you go looking for takers, you might want to see if it works on real human beings. Otherwise nobody’s interested.”
“That’s the problem. We can’t just walk into a clinic and ask who wants to volunteer for a longevity study that ends in death.”
“Volunteers can be appointed.”
Quentin looked at him blankly as the words sunk in. “I see.”
“The real problem is at your end—getting people to make the stuff without the FDA finding out.”
“Subcontractors,” Quentin said. He had already worked that out. Outside jobbers would manufacture the compound—and nobody would know its purpose, and nobody would ask questions. And no worry about protocol.
Vince nodded as Quentin explained. “What about your lab people? Any problems there?”
Quentin finished his drink and ordered a third. “That’s something I think we should talk about.”
Adam blew a bubble, and Wendy laughed joyously.
It was two days before Christmas, and she was bathing him in the kitchen sink, thinking how full of love she was for her baby boy, who was giddy with laughter as she rubbed the washcloth across his pink little body.
It was a small moment among the millions of her life but one she wished she could freeze forever.
She knew, of course, the notion was silly. If you could freeze such moments, how would they remain blissful? Joy was an experience defined by contrasts to lesser moments. Besides, there would be others.
As she dressed Adam for bed, she felt Elixir coil around her mind like a snake. At moments like these, she understood its allure.
She could hear Chris’s words: “
The trouble with life is that it’s 100 percent fatal
.”
And:
“I’ve never died before, Wendy, and I don’t want to learn how.”
And: “
Think how many books you could write if you had another fifty or hundred years. You could be the Dorothy Sayers of the twenty-first century.
There was almost no escaping it. One night a few weeks ago, they watched a rerun of
The Philadelphia Story
. Before a commercial break, a young, handsome Jimmy Stewart turned to twenty-two-year-old Katherine Hepburn and said, “There’s a magnificence in you, Tracy. That comes out of your eyes and your voice and the way you stand there and the way you walk. You’re lit from within … .” While Chris got up for another beer, he wondered aloud how painful it must be for the eighty-year-old Hepburn, now wrinkled and palsied, to see herself in reruns. She probably didn’t watch them, he concluded. Wendy’s response was that Kate Hepburn was supposed to grow old and die. Painful as it was, she had no doubt accepted that. As we all must.
It was a good response, like her usual caveats about tampering with Nature, or her old standby: “
‘Death is the mother of Beauty.’”
With Adam in her arms, Wendy felt that the Stevens line never made better sense. Such moments were beautiful because they
didn’t
freeze. Besides, all the animals had died from withdrawal, which meant it would be years before human testing, maybe never. She could only hope.
The telephone rang, jarring her out of the moment. Her first thought was Chris. He was at a two-day conference on cell biology in Philadelphia. But it was Quentin Cross.
“Chris said you were having trouble landing accommodations in the Caribbean.”
“That’s what happens when you make plans at the last minute,” Wendy said. “Everything’s been booked for months.”
“Well, coincidentally, we’ve got a time-sharing condo at La Palmas on the east coast of Puerto Rico that’s free for the first two weeks in February, if that interests you. Margaret and I go down every year, but with Ross’s
retirement and all the things going on, we’re going to have to pass this time around. But you guys can go in our place,” he said.

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