The Immortalists

  She clasps Varya’s upper arms. “You look different.”

  Varya leans down to kiss her mother’s delicate, velvety cheek. For most of her life, Varya hid her nose by keeping her hair long. But now her hair has gone silver, and last week, she had it cropped close to her skull.

  “Why the black clothing?” Gertie asks. “Why the hair like Rosie’s Baby?”

  “Rosemary’s Baby?” Varya frowns. “She was blond.”

  A light knock on the door, and a nurse enters to bring Gertie dinner: chopped salad; a chicken breast in a gelatinous yellow membrane; a small roll of bread with a pat of butter, the latter wrapped in gold foil.

  Gertie climbs in bed to eat, activating a robotic arm that unfolds to become a small table. In the beginning, she hated the facility. She called it that—“the facility,” instead of Varya’s preferred term, “the home”—and weekly she tried to escape from it. Eighteen months ago—after she called Don Dorfman’s Auto Emporium and set in motion plans to purchase a Volvo S40, giving Don Dorfman the number of a long-defunct credit card once owned by Saul—Gertie was prescribed an antidepressant, and her circumstances improved. Now she attends continuing education classes on subjects like Battles of the Second World War and the popular Presidential Affairs (Not of State). She plays mah-jongg with a group of boisterous widows. She makes use of the library and even the pool, where she bobs atop an inflatable lounger like a celebrity on a parade float, calling to whomever is in shouting distance.

  “I don’t know why you won’t come to the dining hall,” she tells Varya when the nurse leaves. “We could sit at the table and socialize. Maybe you’d even eat something.”

  But Gertie’s new friends make Varya uncomfortable. They gossip constantly about whose son is due to visit, whose granddaughter has just given birth. They responded with shock, then pity, after learning that Varya is both childless and unmarried. And they showed little interest in her longevity research, which aims, after all, to help people like them.

  “But no children?” they persisted, as if Varya might have lied the first time. “No one to share your life with? What a shame.”

  Now Varya pauses at Gertie’s bedside, standing. “I come here to see you. I don’t need to socialize with anyone else. And I’ve told you, Ma, that I never eat this early. Not before—”

  “—seven thirty. I know.”

  Gertie’s face is both defiant and doleful. She knows Varya better than anyone else, knows her deepest secret and has probably guessed plenty of others, and lately Varya’s visits have provoked these power struggles—times when Gertie pushes against Varya’s carefully assembled exterior and Varya pushes the wooden thing back, insisting on its legitimacy.

  “I brought you something,” Varya says.

  She walks to a small, square table by the window and begins to unload a care package from a brown paper bag. There is a book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, which she found at a library sale; a jar of Milwaukee’s dill pickles, in honor of Saul; and lilacs, which she brings into Gertie’s small bathroom. She cuts the stems over a trash can, fills a tall glass with tap water, and carries them back to the table by the window.

  “If you’d stop walking back and forth like that,” Gertie says.

  “I brought you flowers.”

  “So stop and look at them.”

  Varya does. The glass is too short. One flower keels dumbly over the side. They won’t be alive much longer.

  “Very pretty,” says Gertie. “Thank you.”

  And when Varya takes in the bland plastic table and the window felted with dust, the hospital-like bed across which Gertie has laid a faded afghan Saul’s mother crocheted, she can see why Gertie thinks so. In these surroundings, the flowers stand out, so colorful they almost look neon.

  Varya pulls a metal folding chair from the card table at the window to Gertie’s bedside. The armchair is closer to the bed, but its fabric is nubby and stained and Varya has no way of knowing who’s sat on it.

  Gertie peels back the foil around the butter and digs inside with a plastic knife. “Did you bring me a photo?”

  Varya has, though every week she hopes Gertie will forget to ask. Ten years ago, she made the mistake of photographing Frida with the camera on her new cell phone. Frida had just arrived at the Drake after a three-day journey from a primate lab in Georgia. She was two weeks old: her pink face wrinkled and pear shaped, her thumbs in her mouth. That year, Gertie was still living alone, and the thought of her isolation compelled Varya to send a photo by e-mail. Immediately she realized her error. She had joined the Drake one month before, at which point she signed an uncompromising confidentiality policy. But Gertie responded to the photo with such glee that Varya soon found herself sending another—this one of Frida wrapped in a teal blanket while being fed by bottle.

  Why didn’t she stop? For two reasons: because the photos were a way to share her research with Gertie, who had never fully understood it—previously, Varya had worked with yeast and drosophila, organisms so small and uncharismatic that Gertie could not fathom how Varya might discover anything of use to human beings—and because they brought Gertie delight; because Varya brought Gertie delight.

  “Better,” says Varya now. “A video.”

  Gertie’s face is a mask of anticipation. Her hands, thickened and gnarled by arthritis, reach for the cell phone, as if Varya has brought news of a grandchild. Varya helps Gertie hold the phone and press Play. In the video, Frida is grooming herself while looking into the mirror that hangs outside of her cage. The mirror is a source of enrichment, like the puzzle feeders and the classical music played in the vivarium each afternoon. By reaching their fingers through the bars, the monkeys can manipulate the mirrors, using them to look at themselves as well as the rest of the cages.

  “Oh!” said Gertie, holding the screen close to her face. “Look at that.”

  The video is two years old. Varya has taken to recycling old material during these visits, for Frida looks very different now. She smiles, remembering Frida at this age, but Gertie’s face is darkening. In the three years since her stroke, these moments have become more frequent. Varya knows what will happen before the transformation has finished: a vacancy in the eyes, a slackness of the mouth, as Gertie’s new disorientation asserts itself.

  Now she looks from the phone to Varya with accusation. “But why do you keep her in a cage?”

  30.

  There are two major theories about how to stop aging,” Varya says. “The first is that you should suppress the reproductive system.”

  “The reproductive system,” repeats Luke. His head is bowed over a small black notebook, which he brought today in addition to the tape recorder.

  Varya nods. She met Luke in the atrium this morning, and now he follows her down the dirt trail to the primate lab. “A biologist named Thomas Kirkwood suggested that we sacrifice ourselves in order to pass genes along to our offspring, and that tissues with no role in reproduction—the brain, for example; the heart—endure damage in order to protect the reproductive organs. This has been proven in the lab: there are two cells in worms that give rise to its entire reproductive system, and when you use a laser to destroy them, the worm lives sixty percent longer.”

  A pause before she hears Luke’s voice behind her. “And the second theory?”

  “The second theory is that you should suppress caloric intake.” She punches a new key code—Annie changed it last night—into the pad beside the door with the knuckle of her right pointer finger. “Which is what I’m doing.”

  The light turns green, and Varya opens the door as it beeps. Inside, she nods hello to Clyde and glances at the marmosets—today, all nine of them lie in the same hammock, indistinguishable except for their small metal tags—while using her elbow to press the elevator button for the second floor.

  “And that works how?” asks Luke.

  “We think it has to do w
ith a gene called DAF-16, which is involved in the molecular signaling pathway initiated by the insulin receptor.” The door opens, and out walks an animal technician in blue scrubs; Varya and Luke take her place. “When you block this pathway in C. elegans, for instance, you can more than double its life span.”

  Luke looks at her. “In English?”

  Rarely does Varya discuss her work with non-scientists. All the more reason to take this interview, said Annie: to bring their work to the Chronicle’s wide audience.

  “I’ll give you an example,” she says as the elevator door opens. “The people of Okinawa have the highest life expectancy in the world. I studied the Okinawan diet in graduate school and what’s clear is that while it’s very nutritious, it’s also very low in calories.” She turns left, into a long hallway. “We eat food to produce energy. But energy production also creates chemicals that harm the body, because they cause cells to become stressed. Now, here’s the interesting part: when you’re on a restricted diet, like the Okinawans, you’re actually causing the system more stress. But this is what allows the body to live longer: it’s continuously dealing with a low level of stress, and this teaches it how to deal with stress in the long-term.”

  “It doesn’t sound very enjoyable.” Luke wears a pair of technical pants with a zip-up hoodie. A pair of sunglasses is stuck in his hair, held in place by the curls.

  Varya fits her key in the office door and pushes it open with her hip. “Hedonists don’t tend to live very long.”

  “But they have fun while they’re doing it.” Luke follows her into the office. Her side is immaculate, while Annie’s is littered with PowerBar wrappers and water bottles and disheveled stacks of academic journals. “It sounds like you’re saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.”

  Varya hands him a stack of facility clothing. “Protective gear.”

  He takes the bundle in his arms and sets his backpack down. The pants are almost too short; Luke’s legs are long and thin, and without warning Varya sees Daniel’s legs, Daniel’s face. She turns away from him to steady herself. For years after his death, she had no episodes at all. But one Monday, four months ago, her coffeemaker broke, so she went to Peet’s and stood in a long line of customers. The music was hideous—a jazzy Christmas compilation, though it was barely Thanksgiving—and something about this and the crowds and the dense, suppressive smell of coffee grinding and the accompanying screech made Varya feel as though she were choking. By the time she reached the cashier, she could see that the employee’s mouth was moving but she could not hear what it said. She stared, watching the mouth as if from one end of a telescope, until it spoke more sharply—“Ma’am? Are you all right?”—and the telescope clattered to the ground.

  When she turns around, Luke is already suited up, and he is staring at her.

  “How long have you been working here?” he asks, which is different than what she thought he would say—Are you all right?—and for this she is grateful.

  “Ten years.”

  “And before that?”

  Varya crouches to slip on her shoe covers. “I’m sure you’ve done your research.”

  “You graduated from Vassar with your BS in 1978. By 1983 you were in graduate school at NYU, which you finished in ’88. You stayed on as a research assistant for another two years, and then you took a fellowship at Columbia. In ’93 you published a study on yeast—‘Extreme life span extension in yeast mutants: age-dependent mutations increase at slower pace in organisms with CR-activated Sir2,’ if I’m not mistaken—which was groundbreaking enough to be covered by some of the popular science magazines, and then the Times.”

  Varya stands, surprised. The information he’s cited is available on the Drake’s website, but she had not given him so much credit as to expect he had it memorized.

  “I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight,” Luke adds. His voice is muffled by the mask, but his eyes, as seen through the face shield, look slightly sheepish.

  “You do.”

  “So why the leap to primates?” He holds the office door open for her, and she locks it from the outside.

  She had been used to organisms so tiny they could only be properly viewed through a microscope: laboratory yeast, shipped in vacuum-sealed containers from a supply company in North Carolina, and fruit flies bred for human study, with miniature wings too small for flight. Varya was forty-four when the Drake’s CEO—then a stern older woman who warned Varya that an opportunity like this would not come her way again—invited her to run a caloric-restriction study in primates. When they hung up, Varya laughed in fear. She had enough trouble going to the doctor’s office; to spend her days in close proximity to rhesus monkeys, from which she could catch tuberculosis and herpes B, was inconceivable.

  What’s more, she was baffled. She hadn’t worked with primates, or even with mice, but this, said the CEO, was the source of their interest: the Drake wanted not to promote a low-calorie lifestyle for human beings—“Imagine how successful that would be,” the woman said, wryly—but to develop a drug that would have the same effect. They needed someone who was well versed in genetics, someone who could analyze their findings on a molecular level. And she was quick to assure Varya that her daily tasks would have little to do with the animals. They had technicians and a veterinarian for that. Most of Varya’s time would be spent on conference calls, in meetings, or at her desk: reading and reviewing papers, writing grants, assessing data, preparing presentations. Really, if she preferred, she could have no contact with the animals at all.

  Now Varya leads Luke toward a large steel door. “We share about ninety-three percent of our genes with rhesus monkeys. I was more comfortable working with yeast. But I realized that what I was doing with yeast would never matter as much to human beings—could never matter as much, biologically speaking—as a study in primates.”

  What she does not say is that the year 2000, when she was approached by the Drake, was almost ten years after Klara’s death and twenty after Simon’s. “Think about it,” the CEO said, and Varya said she would, while calculating how much time would reasonably pass if she were to do such a thing so that she knew how long to wait before declining. But when she returned to her lab at Columbia, where she was running a new study on yeast, she felt not satisfaction or pride but worthlessness. When Varya was in graduate school, her research had been groundbreaking, but these days, any postdoc knew how to extend the life span of a fly or a worm. In five years, what would she have to show for herself? Likely no partner, certainly no children, but this, ideally: a major finding. A different sort of contribution to the world.

  She took the job for another reason, too. Varya had always told herself that she did her research out of love—love for life, for science, and for her siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to reach old age—but at heart, she worried that her primary motivation was fear. Fear that she had no control, that life slipped through one’s fingers no matter what. Fear that Simon and Klara and Daniel had, at least, lived in the world, while Varya lived in her research, in her books, in her head. The job at the Drake felt like her last chance. If she could push herself to do this, in spite of what misery it would cause her, she could chip away at her guilt, that debt her survival had engendered.

  “Your gloves,” she says, stopping outside the door to the vivarium. “Don’t take them off, either pair.”

  Luke holds up his hands. His camera hangs around his neck from a strap; he’s left his notebook and tape recorder in the office. Varya opens the rubber-sealed door of Vivarium 1, another door opened only by a key code that Annie changes each month, and leads Luke into the blinding midday roar.

  • • •

  Vivarium, in Latin, means “place of life.” In science it refers to an enclosure where living animals are kept in conditions that simulate their natural environment. What is the natural environment of the rhesus monkey? Human beings are the only p
rimate more broadly distributed across the globe than the rhesus macaque, these nomads who have traveled across land and over water, who can live as well on a four-thousand-foot mountain as in a tropical forest or a mangrove swamp. From Puerto Rico to Afghanistan the monkey thrives, making homes of temples and canal banks and railway stations. They eat insects and leaves along with what food they can scavenge from humans: fried bread, peanuts, bananas, ice cream. Every day, they travel miles.

  None of this is easy to simulate in the lab, but the Drake has tried. Because macaques are social creatures, they are caged in pairs, and each cage has the ability to open up into the next, creating a column the width of the vivarium. Enrichment activities ensure that the monkeys are stimulated: psychologically, via the puzzle feeders and mirrors as well as plastic balls and videos viewed on iPads (though recently the iPads were removed because the monkeys so frequently broke the screens) and jungle sounds played through overhead speakers. The lab is visited annually by a representative from the federal Department of Agriculture, who ensures their compliance with the Animal Welfare Act, and last year this person recommended that staff occasionally enter the vivarium wearing different clothing—hats or gloves in exciting patterns—to intrigue and entertain the animals, which they now do as well.

  Varya is not deluded. Of course, the monkeys would rather be outdoors. Behind the vivarium is a larger caged area where the monkeys can play with tires or ropes and swing on netting, though in truth it should be larger, and each monkey receives only a couple of hours there each week. But the point is that her study seeks not to test new drugs or research SIV but to keep the animals alive for as long as possible. Where is the fault in that?

  She turns to Luke and shares the talking points that Annie prepared. Without primate research, countless viruses would not have been discovered. Countless vaccines would not have been developed, and countless therapies would not have been proven safe for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and AIDS. Then there is the fact that life in the outside world is no picnic, full of predators and potential starvation. Nobody but a sadist, and perhaps Harry Harlow, likes the sight of a monkey in a cage, but at least, at the Drake, they are cared for and protected.