Futures Near and Far (10 page)

“What’s so funny?” Neil demanded.

“Those hormones are pumping now, Gramps. You’re feeling what
I felt, two months ago.”

Neil pursed his lips. “Maybe,” he said, temporarily closing
the subject.

o0o

Boxes of Neil’s possessions, full of a century’s worth of
packrat accumulations, lay stacked willy-nilly all over the guest bedroom of
Matthew’s apartment. Neil clicked his tongue, estimated the capacity of the
empty shelves, and tried to imagine his collection of photographs and prints
against the robin’s egg blue of the walls. He’d forgotten the magnitude of
moving into a new place.

Neil began by shifting aside boxes in order to unroll his
treasured Afghan carpet. As he did, his hand skimmed the edge of a flap,
slicing his skin open.

Wincing, Neil rushed to the bathroom to wash and bandage the
paper-cut. With his injured hand over the sink and the other on the faucet
handle, he paused. The ribbon of blood along his wrist and forearm reversed its
flow, defying gravity to return to the vessels from which it had sprung. That
done, the slice closed, weaving together with an itchiness that made Neil feel
as if ants were suturing him up with minuscule needles and thread.

Not ants. They were called nanodocs. Within three minutes
they had completed their job. Neil ran his finger along unblemished, unscarred
flesh. He shuddered. Next thing he knew, the Feynman Institute would come up
with a means to revive the dead.

Perhaps they had. Lifting his glance to the mirror, he
stared at a man from a previous century. The athletic lines of his reflection
matched those in the track team photo from his senior year of college. The
thick, brown hair was the same glorious mop his June Cleaver mother hounded him
to cut, all the while editorializing about the corrupting influence of Those
Beatles Fellows.

The last time he’d looked like this, he’d been twenty-three
years old.

Even his perspiration evoked an earlier time, when exertion
brought out a crisp, pheromonal incense, not the reek of ancient glands. Neil
tensed his neck. The muscles bulged, taut and corded — no more sagging jowls.
He tugged off his shirt, and tapped his firm, lightly rippled abdomen.

This was how he’d been before he’d developed that annoying
tire around his waist. Before he’d become a father. Before all those years at a
desk job. Neil Corbin — lean, mean track star.

Except he was even better
this time around. As requested, the nose he’d had surgically
straightened at age thirty-nine was still straight; the appendectomy scar, from
age seventeen, was gone as if it had never existed. The promise of
nanotechnology had blossomed. A year ago, nano-assemblers, despite all their
useful applications, could only augment other types of medical care. Now they
coursed, self-guided, through every cell of Neil’s body, reining in free
radicals, disassembling invasive microbes, healing damage as it occurred.

And, of course, restoring youth. Permanently.

Neil turned this way and that in the mirror, unable to
resist the visual feast, the sensual kiss of fabric against hard muscle and
supple skin. Was this him?

An unfamiliar sensation started low in his torso, grew
stronger, and finally demanded attention. He opened his fly and there it was, a
physiological event as effortless as breathing or blinking. His groin hummed
like a violin string drawn tight over the bridge, its music amplified by the
sweet ache from his bladder.

“Incredible,” Neil murmured.

He hadn’t had erections for thirty years, yet this was
already the fourth in half a day. He made no attempt to produce them; they just
happened, as they had every day of his adolescence.

This wasn’t like the inoculation with the Ponce de Leon
Vaccine, which had halted his aging sixteen years ago, but kept him looking and
feeling no better off than a healthy one-hundred-four-year-old. The mass media
hoopla of the last six months came back to him like some sort of electronic
echo, but the dreamlike impossibility of the reports was gone. He’d followed
the lead already taken by three-quarters of the world’s population. He was
young again.

Then why did it still feel as if his soul hung poised over
the abyss of death? He turned away from the mirror, no longer able to look.

His body seemed oblivious to any anxiety his mind could
muster. He could have used his penis as a towel rack.

He shook his head slowly. “What,” he asked his erection, “am
I supposed to do with you?”

o0o

Mild Indian summer radiance stretched down the canyons of
downtown buildings as Neil and Matthew joined the flow of pedestrians. Young
face after young face ambled by, nearly all on attractive, physically-fit
bodies. A few children played, a few middle-aged types promenaded, trying to
look distinguished; otherwise, everyone seemed to be in their late teens to
early thirties.

A month after his visit to the clinic, Neil had almost grown
used to the absence of sagging flesh and rheumy eyes around him, despite all
the decades spent in retirement communities, hospitals, and other abodes of the
elderly. It reminded him of college — another equally unreal part of his adult
life.

“Do I really have to do this?” Neil asked.

“Humor me,” Matthew said meaningfully. “You have to get out
and about sooner or later.”

“I’ve been busy. Architecture’s changed a bit since I last
generated a set of blueprints.” Back then, such things were still duplicated on
paper and were still sometimes blue.

“Gramps . . .”

Neil sighed. He’d never shared a home with Matthew before
these past few weeks. He’d been surprised to learn that his grandson could be
just as stubborn as he.

This time, Neil had conceded defeat, if only because the kid
was right. Neil
had
been a hermit,
and despite his excuses, all too little of his time had been spent at his
interface studying to resume his career. For the most part he simply sat in his
room.

Matthew at least had the good grace not to lecture. Dr.
Rosen had already done enough of that. All that talk about how the very old — and
Neil was about as old as anyone on the planet — didn’t always adapt to the
installation of nanodocs. They exhibited “a reluctance to engage in life,” as
if those who had fought the war against age were now suffering a kind of post-traumatic
stress syndrome. Some had gone as far as suicide.

That was their prerogative, Neil thought. Who said that a
person had to act young just because he looked it? Who said a person had to
embrace immortality?

“You’ll enjoy it out here,” Matthew said.

“You keep telling me that.”

“Trust me. This part of town did wonders for me just after I
had my nanodocs installed.”

They turned a corner, arriving at their destination.

“My god,” Neil whispered.

The area was nothing like he remembered. The dingy gray concrete,
blacked-out windows, and peeling paint had become a panoply of clean, bright
façades with an abundance of glass, proudly displaying the interiors. Gone were
the hawkers and the girls lounging like
slung beef on the curbsides, replaced by stylish registration desks,
openly displayed lists of services, and comfortable parlors for interviews
between clients and artists.

The paint on the remodelled apartment house across the
street rolled its molecules, shifting from an off-white to a deep beige that
reflected the sun less harshly. The last time Neil had seen that building, its
bottom floor had been festooned with handbills warning of
aids.
Those posters would be collector’s
items now that nanodocs rendered any and all venereal diseases a part of the
past, along with unintentional pregnancy.

The crowds of prospective clientele, still mostly male,
wandered past the establishments like children at an amusement park. Joy soaked the air, a carefree piquancy that slid in with each inhalation, caressing taste buds
on its way past the tongue like a fine, dry wine. Neil followed his
grandson’s lead like a marionette, with his jaw slack and eyes numbed by some
new sight almost every instant. Matthew plunged ahead, clearly gripped by an
aphrodisiacal contact high.

Two female artists chatted on the steps of a coffeehouse,
taking a break during the lull between the morning rush of patrons and the traditional evening barrage. One
of the women noticed Matthew’s
attentiveness and turned slightly, providing both men with a view of a cleavage
in which a banker could lose small change forever, if banks still used coins.

“Let’s go in here,” Matthew suggested.

Neil resisted the tug on his sleeve. “No. I’d like to look
around a bit more.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow and tilted his head toward the
buxom artist. “You sure about that, Gramps?”

“Yes. Maybe I’ll drop in later. If not, meet you at seven by
the fountain.”

Matthew shrugged. “Okay. See you then.”

Neil wandered. In its new
incarnation, the redlight district stretched far past its old confines.
One place of business after another washed past him. None held his interest
more than a few seconds. He thought he understood why Matthew had chosen to
bring him here. Sex certainly was the epitome of “engaging in life.” And he
could well believe all the therapeutic effect Matthew had personally derived
from visits here. Matthew was seventy-two, and thanks to the vaccine had
stopped aging at fifty-four. He’d never been old enough for sex to lose its
allure.

Neil drifted by a palatial bordello with a statue of Lily
St. Cyr out front, continuing on even though the receptionist, in her elegant
woman’s tuxedo, flashed him a wonderful smile. He ignored a tidy hotel with its
rooms where, so the marquee claimed, the virtual whores were Custom Programmed
by Maestro Roberto Niezca Himself. He even skipped the old-fashioned video
arcades, something familiar from episodes of youthful curiosity or loneliness.

Finally he came to a three-story Victorian. “Gallery of
Erotica” it read in Romanesque letters above the door. Few people seemed to be entering, and in their
expressions passion rode serenely, absent the frantic urgency of most
passersby.

Neil pressed the handpad, letting the gallery debit his
account. The sibilant noises of the street vanished as the door swung shut
behind him.

He meandered down an aisle filled with sculptures of
bacchanalian orgies. In an alcove, a female mannequin wore lingerie that
mutated at nano-levels through the fashions of many eras, from Colonial-era teddies to the brass inauguration
bra made famous by Erotic Artists Guild president Elaine Agoura. Finally he
came to a small section devoted to framed centerfolds from mid-20th century
cheesecake magazines.

His glance lit on one he thought he recognized. He and Toby
Wyckoff had found a cast-off
Playboy
once in a dumpster. The model had the same intensely black hair as that issue’s
Playmate. Her breasts, naturally shapely — as opposed to the silicone balloons
featured in later decades — pointed outward at an angle designed to knock
teenage boys’ eyeballs out of their sockets. A bedsheet denied the viewer a
glimpse of her pubic hair — a forbidden zone for the camera in that day and
age.

Neil wiped his palms on
his shirt. How easily the memory bubbled up. Had he truly been that adolescent,
crouched breathless in an alley behind a dumpster, acknowledging for the first
time the undeniable tropism of sexuality?

Yes. He had.

An hour later, emerging from the gallery, he drank in the
ambience of the street with senses newly tuned. The redolent musk of sweat and
arousal that wafted from open upper-story windows made him heady. A thousand
night’s worth of gasps, sighs, and moans seemed to pour out of the walls of
every building on the street.

Maybe Matthew had been right to bring him here. It had
awakened something. Perhaps it wasn’t so unreasonable to explore the feeling.

But not in this rain of fire. Despite all the changes, one
thing about this part of town was the same: here, sex was a commodity. It was
for jaded palates, looking for something
new, something quick, something uncomplicated.

Neil’s palate was not jaded. He’d been out of the game so
long he was like a virgin. He couldn’t start with a business transaction. He’d
have to do things his way.

He headed for the fountain to wait for his grandson,
treading like a snow leopard across the Himalayas, knowing a mate must be
somewhere up there among the alpenglow and mist.

o0o

The party scene was the same backwater it had always been,
with the same fish caught in its eddies, lacking the vitality to dare the rapids to the spawning pools. Neil endured it until,
at a housewarming for a neighbor of Matthew’s, he met Thea.

Thea was long and statuesque, with a deep ebony complexion
that may or may not have been her birth color — did it matter these days? She
came up to him as he sat, alone, on the patio retaining wall.

“Hello, you must be Neil,” she said.

Avoiding eye contact, he gestured indoors at the petite
blonde Thea had arrived with. “Your spouse seems to be the hit of the night in
there.”

“Oh, she’s not my spouse. Just my roommate.”

His cheeks reddened. “Whoops,” he said. She laughed in a way
that told him both that she’d taken no offense, and that she thought it
hilarious that anyone would characterize her as homosexual.

“What do you . . . um, do?” Neil asked.

“I’m in household
ai
sales. Tell me, sir, do you want your door guard program to growl at Jehovah’s
Witnesses or to politely tell them to fuck off and leave you alone?”

Neil snorted into his beer.

Thea kept talking. She was easy to listen to. The stiffness
leaked from his shoulders and spine. He stopped compulsively running his hands
up and down the handle of his mug. Thea filled the dreaded long pauses when he
couldn’t think of a thing to say. Yet she listened when he did manage to stutter
out a phrase. She laughed at his jokes.