The Crystal Child (26 page)

“Not very much,” Julia said.  “My practice — when I was in practice — was with the very old.  Few of them were willing to change their diet.  Indeed, many were undernourished.  But I did try it myself for a few years.”

“Yes?  And how well did you succeed?”

“I got down to 1100 calories a day for several months.”

The doctor lifted his eyebrows in surprise, then nodded with approval.  “Very good!  Myself, I have managed to reach 900 calories for the last four years.”

That explained his cadaverous look.  “Nine hundred calories?  I don’t see how you could survive on that.”

He gave a low chuckle.  “I visualize gourmet dinners.  Mental nutrition.  I must show you my diet some time.  All totally raw, totally organic.”  He lifted the wine glass before him as if in a toast.  The liquid in the glass, obviously not wine, was a viscous green with small dark particles floating in it.  “The seaweed from the Bay of Inez is an undiscovered treasure.”  He took a sip of the green fluid and smacked his lips.  “You have heard perhaps of the Kafka wing of the Caloric Restriction Society.”

“I’m also a member of CRS,” Julia said.  “Or at least I once was.  But I haven’t heard of the Kafka wing.”

“There is a story by Franz Kafka.  ‘The Hunger Artist.’  We have playfully appropriated the name.  We are a group of very healthy but very hungry people.  I am a founding member.  I no longer experience hunger myself, though for the first ten years, I admit it was a struggle.”  When he turned back to the table, it was difficult to tell if he was fully awake.

DeLeon’s voice arrived before the man. A loud hooting laugh two rooms away and an uproarious explosion of language.  He was more than a little drunk.  “Why, then, I told him, ‘Just tear the fucking thing out by the roots.’  You should have seen the look.  I thought he’d shit his pants.”  He entered, backing into the room, his arm around Isobe’s neck in what looked more like a wrestling grip than a friendly embrace.  Julia was relieved to see that neither man was dressed for dinner.  Quite the opposite.  Isobe entered wearing a rumpled smock; DeLeon a baggy sweatshirt, jeans, and muddy boots, which he pulled off at the door and dropped where he stood.  His socks were both out at the toe.  This was a very different Peter DeLeon, a man who clearly had no interest in being either dapper or courteous.  He went at once to Sylvana to offer a fond and noisy kiss, then, turning to Julia at the other end of the table, he shuffled over to her wearing a face that beamed with surprise and delight.  “So glad you can join us,” he boomed.  “Have I kept you waiting?  Please, please, dig right in.”  Taking the seat across from Julia, he explained, “The master builder and I have been pacing off the new wing.  Our differences seem irreconcilable.  He wants to tunnel deeper into the mountain; I want to go up another story. Which shall it be?  Closer to hell or to heaven?”

Isobe took the seat at Julia’s left.  “The house is already too big.”  He spoke in a hushed tone as if he were trying to lower DeLeon’s volume.  “We should hide more of it inside mountain.  I told Peter house is becoming ominous.”

“Nonsense!” DeLeon blurted out.  “I want air, light, the heavens.  For God’s sake, I’m not ashamed of my home.”  As the food arrived, DeLeon emitted a heavy sigh.  “Oh God, how good it is to be dining
tête-a-tête
.  Last night we must have had thirty people around this table.  What a circus!”  Most of the rich foods that were laid before them — especially those served in heavy sauces — seemed to be DeLeon’s favorites.  Others took small servings or waved them off; DeLeon was more than willing to spoon what remained on to his plate.  With each new course — the creamed vegetables and fatty meats —- he made insincere apologies to Julia for his appetite.  “Not exactly healthy cuisine, I know.  I am of the opinion that intense living, living with maximum concentration on one’s objectives, burns away all excess calories.  This is a point of some contention between Dr. Horvath and myself.  Or shall I say a rather meatless bone of contention?  The good doctor, as you see, will eat none of my wicked grub.  Seaweed and grass seem to be all he needs.”

“It is our ancestral diet,” Horvath replied.

“Only if you trace your ancestry back to sea slugs and anemone,” DeLeon roared back. “And you, Julia, what do you think? Am I digging my grave with my teeth?”

“As you know, calories aren’t the main problem,” she answered, brushing his question aside.  “It’s the saturated fat that kills you.  I’d say you’re eating enough of that to bury three men your age.”

He greeted her words with exaggerated laughter.  “Excellent answer.  Professional and to the point.  However,” he forked in another mouthful of lobster,  “… how better to test the Immortalist Method than to break the rules now and then?  But do please note the garnish of goji berries.”  He pointed to a dish of what looked like a jellied fruit, dipped in a spoon and gulped down a mouthful.   “What do you say, Julia?  Are we close enough to understanding the secret of eternal youth to afford a bit of self-indulgence?”

Julia gave a bored shrug.  “Eat as you please.”

“Ah!  I shall make the most of your dispensation.  But do tell her, Sylvana, how diligent I am about my physique.”

“Peter does two total fasts every year,” Sylvana told her.  “Total — not even water for ten days.”

“Like Moses on the mountain.  Forty days without food or drink.  Easily takes fifty pounds off of me,” DeLeon boasted, raising his shirt to slap his ample belly.  “Everything you see me eating here — it will all be off me by September.  I’ll be lean as an Indian
fakir
.”

“That’s not particularly healthy,” Julia commented.  “You may just be losing weight by dehydration.”

“Health has nothing to do with it,” DeLeon explained.  “I fast to train the will.  The man who can hold out against thirst and starvation can withstand any ordeal.  He can stare death in the face.”

To Julia’s relief, the conversation soon drifted away from medicine to other topics, mainly to plans for extending the house.  On this Isobe and DeLeon seemed radically at odds.  DeLeon was after a major extension of Tlaloc, a vast earth-moving project.  The table talk began to fragment into two-person conversations.  Isobe leaned to have a private word with Julia.  “Worst kind of architecture.  To fight with land.  House was not designed to go higher.  Designed to emerge from mountain like growing thing.”  While he spoke, Julia noticed — there was no way not to notice — DeLeon openly flirting with Freda, who seemed flattered by his attention.  His hands freely wandered to her arms, her shoulders, her knees.  Bland, lithe, and little more than twenty-five, Freda responded with broad smiles and polite banter, affecting a practiced vulnerability. Clearly, DeLeon regarded himself as the sort of lady’s man whose every word and gesture gratified.  When they left the table, he looped his arm around Freda’s hip and escorted her toward the living room, all the while whispering in her ear.

Was she finished, Julia wondered.  Could she regard herself as dismissed?  She hoped so.  The meal, even though she had only picked at her food, lay heavy inside her.  She had washed it down with enough wine to leave her light-headed.  She rose last from the table, hoping to slip away unnoticed.  But before she could reach the stairs, she felt a hand on her arm.  “You see?  Ominous house, ominous food.”  It was Isobe, guiding her from the room, but not toward wherever DeLeon and the others were headed. Instead, he moved her away toward a terrace that led off the dining room.  In the moonless night the crowded stars of the galaxy swept across the sky like a silver river.

“You get on well with Peter?” Isobe asked, looking out across the mountains toward the sea.  He took out cigarettes and offered her the chance to refuse a smoke, then lit one for himself.

“I’ve been here only a few weeks,” she said.  “He and I have hardly talked at all.”

“And …?”

“And?”

“You like his company?”

How did she know she could trust this man?  “He’s my host,” she answered.

He gave her a sly smile.  “I too, I also find him impossible.  Pompous, very pompous.  And a bully, if you let him.”  After a moment he asked, “His method — it works?”

“Do you mean his life-extension potions — and all that?  No, they don’t work.”

“So I am right that he is fraud.  Is that the word?”

“I’d call him a sort of hoaxster.”

“But you stay with him here?”

“I think you know that I have no choice.  In any case, I’m not here to approve or disapprove of Peter DeLeon.”

“He talks of you all the time.  Before, it was Aaron, Aaron, Aaron.  Now, it is Julia, Julia, Julia.  Like you are a new possession. An
objet
.  You don’t want to be an
objet
, do you?”

“I’m not — whatever he may think.”

“Good.”  They stood a long while not speaking, gazing into the dark.  She found his silence comforting, a wordless pledge of friendship.  He finished his cigarette, then escorted Julia back into the house.  Before he sent her on her way, he drew something out of his pocket.  “For Aaron,” he said.  He was holding out a small black box.  “For his collection.  From Australia, the big cavern there — as he requested.”  She took the box, wished him good-night, and made her way back to her rooms.

There, she opened the box — he had not said she shouldn’t.  Inside was a highly polished crystal as long as her thumb.  It was cut in the shape of a five-sided rod.  Even by lamp light, the gem displayed an extravagant array of hues.  It occurred to her that she had seen Aaron toying with a stone like this.  He kept it with him through the day, passing it from hand to hand, polishing it with his fingers, holding it to the light.  A habit she did not recall from their time together at the clinic.  “For his collection,” Isobe had said.  Did he have more of these?  When she asked, Aaron waved her off with a smile.  “Just a hobby,” he said.

“I believe in calling a spade a spade,” DeLeon said.  “You, my dear, are an outlaw.  Do you mind me saying so?”

“Not at all.  Why would I?”

“And a very charming outlaw at that.  Suffering often brings something of the soul to the surface.  I believe prison has done that with you.  It has left you beautifully wounded.”

With each passing week, DeLeon’s manner with Julia grew more presumptuous.  The overly polite, almost obsequious manner he often assumed on first meeting was being steadily replaced by a more formidable personality, harder to anticipate, harder to fend off.   Now that she was helplessly in his debt — a fugitive with no place else to turn — he was pressing his advantage more and more insistently.  When he was staying at Tlaloc, it had become his practice to invite, if not order her to his study at sunset for drinks.  She accepted his summons, fearing it would aggravate him if she shunned him too often.  He was, after all, her host.

The room, spacious and well-appointed, looked out across the mountains toward the coast of Mexico beyond the haze line.  Across the ravine that fell away beneath the eastern windows a narrow waterfall erupted through the pines, tumbling down the mountain and out of sight.  As Julia might have expected, in the privacy of his own quarters, DeLeon was becoming as flirtatious with her as he was with the women he invited to spend time with him at Tlaloc.  Seduction seemed to be an uncontrollable reflex for him.  But his technique was heavy-handed: exaggerated flattery, the occasional friendly touch at the arm, and liquor, a great deal of liquor.  Once again this evening Julia was being plied with expensive Scotch.  But she would not follow him beyond a second drink.  She heard him out patiently but waved his compliments aside as if they were intrusive insects buzzing at her ear.  A
charming
outlaw.  She could not recall when she last cared about being charming.  If she ever had, her prison ordeal put an end to that.  In her mind’s eye she saw herself as haggard and drab, a woman who had long since opted out of the sexual game. To her annoyance, DeLeon showed no sign whatever of recognizing her indifference. Instead he seemed supremely pleased with himself as he reached to pour her another drink.  When she drew her glass away, he poured out even more for himself and quickly drank it off as if to prove he had no fear of holding his liquor.

“So then — a charming fugitive from justice has come knocking at my door seeking sanctuary.  Well, let me give you my personal assurance that you are safe here. Your secret is safe with me, Doctor.  Why should I be willing to shelter an outlaw?  Because, as I think you know, I too am an outlaw, a far greater one than you. I think of it as my calling in life — to live beyond the limits in every respect — physiologically, intellectually, legally.”  He paused for the proper theatrical effect.  “Morally too.  Does that sound threatening to you?”

She nodded, but with just the trace of an amused smile.  “A bit — as all megalomania does.”

He burst out laughing.  “But you misunderstand.  The pursuit of longevity leaves morality behind.  Of necessity.  Suppose you were to live five-hundred years.  What moral code would you be bound to obey?  The code of your childhood?  Of your first hundred years?  Or your second hundred years?  You would see moral inhibitions streaking by like so many fashions in dress, coming and going, none of them permanent.  Think back to the world of your grandparents.  What did right and wrong mean to them?  They would have regarded it as a sin for a woman to show her ankle, for lovers to live together out of marriage.  They would have condemned contraception.  Haven’t we outlived their mores?  Of course we have — just as our grandchildren will outlive our quaint notions of good and evil.  This is a point even Nietzsche overlooked.  Longevity is the road to the superman, the man who outlives the ephemeral and transient.  What rules can he be expected to honor?”

“Then how can I depend on you to keep your word to me?”

“About what?”

“That you’ll protect me?  And Aaron?  That you’ll keep our presence here a secret?”

“Ah, well, as to that.  The one rule even I must honor. 
Quid pro quo
.  I think you know why I value having you here.”

“I know, but I can’t be of any help.  My ignorance is real.  I have no idea how I restored Aaron Lacey’s youth.  I believe it was an inexplicable remission that had nothing to do with what I did.”

He was studying her, weighing every word as if she were testifying in court. “But Aaron thinks differently.  He tells me you are responsible for saving him from a terrible fate.”

“Aaron may be stringing you along. Hasn’t that occurred to you?”

“It has.  But Aaron, as you well know, is no fool.  He may know something you don’t about his treatment.”  He bent closer.  “He listens to his body.  Listens to his genes.  You may have no idea how deeply you altered him.”

He was beginning to unnerve her.  “I know exactly what I did — and what I didn’t do.”

“Ah, but
do
you?  Perhaps in time he will tell you something that might amaze you.  He has no right to keep what he knows a secret.  Do you agree?”

“I don’t see where ‘rights’ enter into it.  Except that he has a right to privacy.  All patients do.”

He settled back in his chair.  “I ask only that you keep an open mind.  When Aaron finally decides to let us in on his secret, do please consider that it may be a medical breakthrough in which the human race should share.”

She rubbed wearily at her temples.  “I’m afraid I’ll be a terrible disappointment to you.”

“I’m prepared to wait and see.  I have a gambler’s patience with long odds.  You’ve been through a hideous ordeal.  You need the chance to rest and regain your confidence. Above all, you need the chance to renew your relationship with Aaron.  If nothing else, you may be the one sure connection we have with him.  He plays games with the rest of us — with Sylvana, with Dr. Horvath, with me.  I know that.  He treats us with a certain contempt.  But you clearly have a different status in his eyes.  I can’t believe he wants to make a fool of you.  Be with him, my dear.  Just be with him.  Isn’t that the one thing you want?  To be at his side? Tell the truth.”

DeLeon leaned forward to take her hand. He was looking at her with a strangely penetrating gaze.  “Yes,” she answered.

A satisfied calm came over him, as if he had gained a valuable admission.  “There’s more to Aaron than meets the eye, more than an angelic face, a flawless body.  He hasn’t simply regained his youth; he has taken on depth.  I think you know that too.  In every respect besides his looks, Aaron isn’t young at all.  When he and I talk, I sometimes feel I’m in the company of someone as old as the hills and rivers.  He tries not to let that show. I realize that he’s covering up, playing dumb to throw me off.  Rest assured: I didn’t become as rich as I am without having a sixth sense about people.  I know when a man is bluffing and when he is not.  Aaron is keeping a secret.  And now, since I’ve met you, I’m more certain than ever where that secret lies.”

His air of self-assurance was growing more unsettling.  “What do you mean?” she asked, doing her best to sound no more than casually interested.

He settled back in his chair, sipping at his drink.  “Remember what I said about good and evil?  In the eyes of the world — today’s world, the world whose morality will one day be as musty and defunct as Victorian fastidiousness — your love for Aaron is a crime, a sin.  That’s all they see, people blinded by the current fashion in respectability. But I know that what happened between you and this boy wasn’t simply some kind of frivolous adventure on your part.  You’re not the woman for that.  Believe me when I say I have a certain instinct for feminine sexuality, almost a sense of smell.  Take these women who come visiting from the Institute.  Ladies of great wealth and reputation, many of them, but ready to fall into bed with me at the snap of my fingers.  I do not exaggerate.  My life is filled with easy marks, rich sluts, poor sluts, they’re all the same.  But you — you are another story, Doctor.  I can tell your sexuality is kept under iron discipline — which, of course, makes you all the more intriguing to the sort of man who enjoys a challenge.  And yet, if I were boorish enough to make the attempt, I would not stand the ghost of a chance with you.  You find me too male, I’m sure.”

“There are many ways to be male, Peter.”

“True, true.  For my own part I think of myself as gladiatorial.  Never turn from a good fight, even with the odds against me.  In my business life, I battle with Titans every day.  And I rarely lose.  But you prefer our young Adonis upstairs.  Soft, effeminate, one might almost say presexual.  Yet this child succeeded in breaking down your defenses, and probably without trying very hard — at the expense of your marriage, your career.”   He drew his chair closer to hers as if to dominate her attention.  “Will you believe me if I say I understand why?   I can feel it in the air around me when I’m with him, a sensuality that has nothing to do with petty human fucking.  He concentrates love the way gold concentrates value.  That’s what lies at the heart of his agelessness, a quality so remote, so esoteric we have no words to speak of it.  Something utterly, totally … lost.  Yes, lost.  But thanks to you, that quality has been reborn in him — an eroticism that few can do more than dimly appreciate. Am I right about this?  Tell me I am.  It will mean I’ve finally found what my wealth could never have purchased.”

He was leaning in, letting her know he would not allow her leave until she answered his question.  He was so close to the truth that she felt violated by his question, as much so as if he had forced himself upon her.  It was more than she wanted him to know, but finally, looking away, she offered him just the slightest nod of the head.  Then quickly she held out her glass asking for another drink.  She downed it at once and rose to leave.

DeLeon struggled awkwardly out of his chair to accompany her to the door. He was unsteady on his legs — the evening’s drinking was getting to him — but his face was glowing with satisfaction, as if the acknowledgement he had gained from her ranked as a triumph. “I’m so glad you were willing to share this with me.  It shows perhaps — does it? — a modicum of trust.  You think of me as a mercenary rogue, don’t you?  Well, I am, I admit it.  But I try to remind myself of what my money is really worth.  May I, before you leave …?”  He went to his desk and brought back a book, a slender, leather bound volume that looked quite old.  “This is as close as I come to having a credo.”  He handed her the book, a leather and gold-foil bookmark slipped into its pages. 
The Poems of Anacreon, a
translation that dated to 1754.  She opened the book to the page that was marked and read.

“Look at me now,” he said when she finished.  “Paunchy, balding, old.  I may be obsessed with finding the secret of youth, but I have no illusions.  I may have passed the point of no return.  My life is slipping away, minute by minute.  Heart and lungs in excellent condition, but my muscle tone is fading, my dentition deteriorates, the liver spots multiply.  In the clear light of day I grow less and less physically attractive by the hour, though, let me add, I remain sexually agile.  In that respect, the Lord of Longevity has never failed to please.  But if I cannot bribe death with a golden sovereign, I’m as poor as any beggar in the streets.”

***

You prefer our young Adonis upstairs,
DeLeon had said, not knowing, apparently, that Adonis had shunned the love offered him from all sides — even the love of voluptuous Aphrodite.  Beauty — pristine beauty — can be elusive, as if it fears being sullied.  And it becomes all the more enchanting as it grows more elusive, more forbidden.

In her copy of Yarborough’s mythology, Adonis appeared as another thinly-masked symbol of infant eroticism. He was a luscious youth, the son of an incestuous union between the King of Cyprus and his daughter Myrhha.  Julia had always pictured the famous beauty as a youth of high-school age, but the poor boy had women all over him from the day he was born.  Aphrodite wanted him, Persephone too.  He was so beautiful no woman could resist him.  Julia was reminded of how the women on her staff at the clinic had flocked to Aaron’s care during his dramatic recovery, eager to attend to his every need — to the point of suffocating him with affectionate attention.

Julia wondered as she pondered the myth.  Was it possible that what mothers feel for their young is not always mother love but a kind of guilty lust?  There is, after all, something inherently sensual about the glowing vitality of the infant body.  And if you add innocence and helplessness …  Maybe mother love is not quite as virtuous as we are pleased to think it is.  The baby Adonis, as it turned out, was too good for this world.  Ageless and beyond all corruptions of the flesh, he nevertheless met a bad end.  Killed in the flower of his manhood, gored in the groin by a wild boar — for which read castration and sterility.  Another version of the many spring and winter myths, the seasonal death-and-resurrection of the crops that has become poetically entangled with the human aspiration for rebirth.  In the lovely youth’s death, all nature swoons.  But then Aphrodite, goddess of all-restoring love, goes looking for her lover in the underworld and brings him back with love and kisses — but only for as long as the grain might grow in the fields.

So what was it all these love-lorn females longed for in their pursuit of the enticing Adonis? 
Life, life, life unending
.  Once again the realm of myth presented her with the same triad.  Divinity, immortality, sexuality.