The Crystal Child (30 page)

Julia was growing impatient with what seemed like a far-fetched line of thought.  “There couldn’t be a society of prepubescent children.  Nobody would be able to reproduce.”

“Obviously.  And we take reproduction very seriously.  Because when you live
in time
, with less and less time ahead of you with every passing hour, making babies to live on after us is the only way we can imagine human life surviving.  Why?  Because we expect everybody to die.  So there must be a next generation.  Freud almost got that right.  Eros
is
linked to the death instinct.  Eros, meaning sex, is how we hope to pass human life along.  We get frenzied over sex because it’s our way of escaping annihilation.   But in order to have sex, we sink deeper into physical existence and all that comes with it.  Think how much more … well,
bodily
we become when sex takes over our lives.  And isn’t that curious?  Have you ever thought about it deeply?  Why should life have such a jarring discontinuity built into it?  As if we got off on the wrong foot at birth.  Adolescence is like the beginning of a second life.  Suddenly things that were precious to the child become meaningless.  At thirteen, we find ourselves living in an entirely new world.  But if that can happen at thirteen, why can’t it happen again?  Why have doctors never recognized the possibility of a transition into still another stage of life?  A transition not of the body, but of something that uses the body,
rides
the body — a point at which an entirely new range of possibilities opens up, things we never expected and know nothing about because no one has ever reached that point.  I say ‘no one,’ but I’ve begun to doubt that I’m alone in experiencing this change.  I think there have been others who got close to knowing and passed on, people we call saints or prophets, people who knew there’s something like adolescence at the other end of life, a zone we can also pass through.  What if adulthood isn’t the final stage of life?  How would we regard someone who went beyond adulthood into another stage?”

“We’d probably see him as abnormal.”

“Right.  We’d say he had a disease.”

She rubbed at her temples.  “This is all too fanciful.  Medical science is based on what we know of the human life span: three score years and ten — give or take.  What could we know of the stage you’re speaking of?”

“ ‘We?’  If you mean you and everybody else, the answer is nothing.  You’re the population of the blind.  But then there’s me.”  He was growing more agitated, as if he had been waiting to tell her what he had to say and now could not hold back.  “Remember that game I used to play?  Kong?  The idea was for Kong to leap across great spaces.  That’s what happened to me.  I worked up enough speed to make the leap.  You saw that as accelerated aging.  Well, it was.  It was speed, the speed I needed to carry me across.  I was building up a kind of physiological momentum.  Only my leap was into the dark.  I had no idea where I was headed.  I had no idea I’d land safely, but I did.  I found someplace on the other side of old age.  I recall being fascinated by games that involved getting across to some distant point — like the last row in a checkers game.  If you could simply keep moving forward, you got there — all the way there.  That’s the sense in which you cured me.  You kept me alive long enough to get up that much speed.  You boosted my morale; you kept my mind alert and working.   You gave me hope, Julia.  And the hope turned into momentum.”

“But what does it mean to say you found someplace on the other side of old age?”

He paused over the question.  “That’s harder to explain. You’ve heard of the sound barrier.  It’s as if aging is that kind of barrier. As we approach it, we encounter increasing resistance like the air that builds up in front of an airplane as it flies faster.  The resistance wears us down.  That’s called ‘getting old.’   The barrier has a name. We call it ‘time.’  Time is what resists us, resists life.  Time is the enemy.  And when we’re up against time and can’t get any older, we die.  But suppose there was a way to break through that barrier and continue.”

“Continue?”

“That’s where we are now, Julia.  We … or rather
I’m
continuing.  I can feel that — a sense of incompletion.  I’m moving toward something greater.”

“Moving?  For how long?”

“I can’t tell you.  But I know I’m near a point of climax, like a supersaturated solution that suddenly transforms.”

“Into what?”

He offered her a troubled smile.  “I’m as curious as you.”

***

“How long?” she wants to know.  And that I can’t tell her.  When I try to see ahead, everything flakes away into confusion — as if I were trying to make out the shapes in a house of mirrors.  I see panels of glass shifting and sliding, catching the light — the brightness behind them that’s too fierce to see.  Blinded by the light.  I’m feeling my way forward, working from intuition.

At first I thought the brightness was of the mind, changes of perception, judgement, understanding.  But no.  Mind is too slow.  Mind must find words, must make sense. It is an asker and answerer of questions.  Mind is a hair-splitter and a logic-chopper.  No use when you are riding the whirlwind.  I am beyond what mind can grasp.

But body! 
This
body, this gem-like structure — it is taking light into itself, becoming the brightness.   It holds me like a loving presence that knows its purpose better than I could frame in words, guides me, draws me. Body has become a hive of restless bees, every cell alert and impatient to take wing.  Time to gather together and leave, as the bees do when they sense the need of a new home.  Maybe this is what migratory animals experience as they rush toward their destination, drawn forward, obeying.  The joy of it! The joy of surrendering to something older, wiser, relentless.  And orgiastic.  Yes, that’s what I feel.  In every inch of my body, an excitement like the approach of sexual climax.  It’s what I felt with Julia, with Jason, with Paulette — my brief catalogue of lovers, all of them bringing me so much less than this, mere samples and glimpses.

“I was an Inward Sphere of Light.”  That line from Julia’s book.  The poet knew.  I’m in the sphere.  And the sphere is growing.  The sphere is my world, an expanding world.  A city of light, expanding because it is drawn by a force outside of it.  Don’t they all know this city?  Don’t they all want to enter and live here?  But for others, there is only so much time — not enough time, and at last the sphere collapses, the city is buried.  The end of life.  But I am passing beyond the domain of time.  The sphere is growing, infusing my body with light, turning me into a creature of light. Or rather
re
turning me.  To what?  What I once was.  The original splendor.  And then?  What happens then?  How will it end?

No!
  It won’t end.  Always something greater.  The sphere will empty itself.  It will pour its light into something else, into a kind of death.  Like death, still and mute and mindless — and yet exactly the opposite.

That’s what I fear.  Forrester, DeLeon, even Julia.  They want to extend life.  They want more time.  Another year and another and another.  Forrester believes life is just
not dying
.  They don’t understand. 
Time is the enemy.  Time is the devil.

After the police visited, Forrester wondered if he had — technically speaking — broken the law.  He had not given false answers to any direct question asked by the police, but he had left things unsaid.  Whatever he had first peripherally perceived in the phrase “Kong Effect,” he had kept to himself.  What he knew about Julia’s first visit to San Lazaro several years in the past, he had also left unmentioned.  Why?  He was not ready to say why, not even in his private thoughts.

For the next month he did nothing out of the ordinary.  For all he knew, the police might be keeping him under surveillance.  The very thought made him furtive.  Was his phone bugged, was his mail being searched and copied as Julia’s had been in prison?  How foolish!  Surely the police did not take parole violation that seriously, especially in Julia’s case — a harmless, professional woman.  Even so, he opted for caution, which meant keeping to his regular schedule, adapting his course of action to normal activities.  In late August he was scheduled to do some fund-raising in Los Angeles, a three day stint.  A few lunches and dinners, a lecture at Cal Tech.  When the time came to make his travel and hotel reservations, he extended the trip into a ten-day visit, alluding vaguely to colleagues he would be meeting to follow up on research.  Not quite a lie by any strict standard — though he did not mention that the research would take him well outside Los Angeles.  That would give him at least five days of free time.  More than enough to decide the matter one way or another.

Laying his plans with such meticulous care, rehearsing the cover story he would tell, Forrester realized how high the fires of desperation must be banked inside his mind.  He was forty-four years old, a gray-beard elder by the youthful standards of his profession, and still as far from the great achievement he expected of himself.  Promising lines of inquiry that once kept him hard at work through the night had turned out to be dead ends, projects that had taken him away from home for weeks at a time to pursue what looked like major breakthroughs had faded into nothing special.  The landscapes of science were studded with such mirages, glowing theories that promised high acclaim, but which turned into barren sand.  He had no doubt in his own capacities; he was a gifted mind, well-educated, devoted to his calling.  He could be a workhorse when he had to be, capable of driving himself around the clock.  He published regularly, but more frequently now as part of various teams in which younger members were known to have made the most important contributions.  With each passing, unproductive year, his colleagues regarded him less as a practicing scientist and more as a source of funding or employment, an entrepreneur who structured deals and pinned down contracts. He was appointed to official commissions and served on  committees that opened doors for bright young talent.  In a recent
Newsweek
feature, he had been identified as an “elder statesman” of science, a polite way of saying he was over the hill.

When despair was full upon him, it was like sexual impotence.  It brought a sense of humiliating weakness, as if he were about to fall from a dizzy height.  Inwardly he tore at himself for his failures.  He worked longer and harder, to the point of exhaustion, until his mind went numb and forced him into basic mistakes.  “I think you got this wrong,” a colleague had told him with a wry smile just a few months back.  “Are you sure you checked this?” another asked of one of his calculations.  He was working too fast, skipping over fundamental procedures and safeguards, on more than one occasion badly embarrassing himself. Worse still, he was leaning on younger hires at GT to handle details or provide calculations.  Last year, he had asked a newcomer to the lab to comment on an article he was submitting for publication.  She returned it with notes that very nearly rewrote the paper by way of correcting it.  He made a jocular excuse, then buried the article, unwilling to submit work that was not his own.

And then, in the midst of this suffocating cloud of self-doubt, a light had appeared in the most unlikely quarter.  Julia Stein, a conventional physician poorly grounded in genetics, had chanced upon the rarest of cases, a progeric child whose disease she had reversed.  The kid had stopped growing old.  She had taken the credit for his cure, though she knew as well as Forrester that she had achieved nothing fundamental.  The result might have been an autonomous remission that had nothing to do with anything she had done.  All she had to offer was an anecdotal account of the boy’s treatment: diet, New Age herbs, odd, untested medications, high morale.  Mumbo jumbo.  Her cure might have been an illusion; she admitted as much.  But the boy was real; his genes were real.  Forrester had seen them and tested them.  When it came to the hard core of the boy’s condition, nobody knew more than he did, not even Julia.  He had the lab results, the blood work, the genetic analysis.  Everything but the boy, the living proof that there was an ageless human — or as close to that as anybody had ever come outside the pages of science fiction.  Somewhere in the depths of that boy’s chemistry lurked the secret of conquering age and, if he dared to think it, death.  It might be a single anomaly along one of Aaron Lacey’s chromosomes.  A longevity gene.  What if it could be cultured and transplanted?  That would make every kind of medicine besides fixing sprained ankles and black eyes, obsolete.  And what if that gene could be patented?

By now, Forrester knew, he should have involved his colleagues in his research. His first several visits with Aaron had been far too casual — an extracurricular favor for a friend.  Not that he doubted the evidence of his own eyes, but it was crucial to have peers to confirm they had seen what he had seen.  True, he had records of his work, but he had to confess nothing was as impressive as seeing the boy himself, glowing with health.  Aaron looked exactly like what he was: a boy blessed with eternal youth.  There was no substitute for having him available for study, not even Julia’s photographic record.  Like all the evidence he might present, that too would be suspect in the absence of the boy, all the more so since Aaron’s case was connected with Julia Stein, the sex-offender who had gone to prison for unprofessional conduct. Without Aaron Forrester had nothing but a traveler’s tale.  No question but that he had waited too long, hoping to score some major success on his own.  He had wanted the boy to be his talisman, his flag of triumph.  Every time he recalled Aaron’s resistance, a wave of anger washed over him.  Julia’s behavior made him even angrier.  She, after all, was an adult and a fellow scientist.  What right did she and the boy have to block his way? To run off and leave him without the proof he needed?  He would not let that happen again, even if he had to cross the bright line between innocence and guilt.

***

Julia entered a darkened room spangled with rainbows.  The walls, ceiling, floor were painted with vibrant colors, an extravaganza of light.  At his desk Aaron sat arranging several small halogen lamps, each emitting a bright, needle-sharp beam that fell across a collection of glittering objects.  Prism crystals of many sizes.  Since she came to Tlaloc, Julia had often seen Aaron handling one or another of the stones, playing with them she assumed.  He was rarely without a crystal as he moved through the day.  He kept one in his hand, caressing it.  But she had never seen an array of gems like this.

Julia came closer to the table to examine the stones.  She spotted one among them that she recognized: the elegant rock crystal Isobe had asked her to give Aaron.   “So this is your collection,” she said.  “It’s beautiful.”

“The one thing Sylvana has my thanks for,” Aaron said.  “She’s been willing to lay out a decent amount of money for some of these.”  Julia turned to take in the remarkable display that filled the room.  This explained the magazines she had seen lying about the house.  Mail-order catalogues for precious gems and crystals.

Aaron carefully repositioned some of the crystals. The colors that lay spread across the walls blurred, then assumed a new pattern.  This time the spectrum fell across Aaron’s face like a mask of many hues.   “My one entertainment,” he said.  “Setting them in exactly the right configuration is the trick.”  He motioned Julia to come sit beside him.  For a long while, they said nothing as they watched the mesmerizing play of colors that moved across the walls and ceiling.  At last Aaron said.  “Beth Soames got me started.”

“Beth?  How?”

He tugged at the fine silver chain he wore around his neck.  The little pendant Beth had bequeathed to him came into view.  “I started with snowflakes.  Airborne crystals.  And then those that hide in the Earth, buried in caves, in dark places where the light cannot reach them — as if they were waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves.  How strange that is.  Why should such beauty be so hidden away?  Maybe we aren’t ready to see it.”   Then, after several minutes of silence, he said, “It’s not merely a game.  This is my future.”  Julia glanced at him with a blank stare, letting him know she did not understand.  “Well, not quite.  They point to my future.  Beautiful as they are, these are merely mineral crystals, so commonplace that they’re valued less than precious gems.  But at least for me they symbolize the way forward.”

He looked at her again and again saw that she did not understand.  He switched off the lights on his desk, all except one.  The crystals went dim.  “Let’s talk standard medicine for a while.  There’s a genetic theory about aging you’re familiar with.  It has to do with delayed-action genes.”

“Yes, I know,”

“What does the theory say?  That we are condemned to get sicker as we get older.  Why?  Because there must be all sorts of bad genes we’ve picked up in the course of human evolution, harmful mutations that have been getting passed along for thousands of years.  Those genes are there, but most of them never had the chance to be triggered.  If they ever did, they’d weaken us or even kill us.  We have no idea how many diseases like that there may be; we may not even have a name for them because they only strike when we’re very old.  They’re like time bombs that are set to go off well along in life, like Huntington’s disease or Alzheimer’s.  If diseases like that struck us down early in life, we’d never have a chance to reproduce, which means that the gene carrying the disease would be eliminated; nobody would ever inherit it.  But these other genes, delayed-action genes, only strike after we’ve had all the children we’re going to have.  We might have dozens of genes like that in us that have never had the opportunity to activate.  But if we live long enough, they show up.  Then we get sick and we die.  By the time we know the bad genes are there, we’ve already passed them along to all the children we had when we were young and healthy. So our children inherit the same bad genes and pass them along.  Until a lot of people live a lot longer and fall victim to those diseases, we can’t know they exist. Am I right so far?”

Julia nodded.  She was familiar with the theory.  It was one of the dark clouds hanging over gerontology, the possibility that longevity would bring an endless succession of old-age illnesses that might make life unbearable.  There were those who predicted that a world of long-lived elders would become a population of zombies, frail, sickly, demented, and hopelessly dependent.  In that bleak future the principal task of the young would be caring for the incompetent old.  As dismal as that scenario might be, it made perfect evolutionary sense.  “Yes, you’re right,” she said. “I try never to think about that.  It makes everything I’ve ever done seem like a lost cause.”

“But what about another possibility?” Aaron continued, his voice brightening now.  “What if there are delayed-action genes that are
good,
genes that make us healthier and smarter, genes that give us powers we only find in fairy-tales and myths — like intuition or second sight?  Think of all the stories we have about wise old wizards and cunning sages.  Where do those tales come from?  Why are they so precious?  Why do they never stop being told?  Wishful thinking, you might say.  But there’s another possibility.  Prescience.  They anticipate our future.  Of course, that’s as close as most people get to the real meaning.   But the myths betoken.  They arise from something in us that senses greater possibilities, a buried life that has yet to emerge.  The trouble is: people die before that can happen.”

Julia felt the power of the idea.  But she had doubts.  “If this were true, wouldn’t we be able to identify those genes in the genome, even if they have not activated?”

“Why?  We might have no idea what they code for.  You know what it’s like trying to explain sexuality to a five-year-old.  Little kids can’t cope with the concept.  But once they reach puberty, they don’t need any help understanding sex.  It comes to them naturally; it has to.  They find all they need to know in their glands.  Well, what if something like that, a radical change of life, is waiting for us out there beyond the age of, say, 150?  Maybe it’s a gene, even a master gene that never had the chance to blossom. Until now.  Until I came along and made the great leap.  But now, thanks to what we’re playfully calling the Kong Effect, I’ve passed  beyond anything that can kill me or make me sick.  All the germs on earth that came into existence to strike at weak, old creatures can’t catch me.  I’ve outdistanced them.  You see, that’s what the evolutionary experts have overlooked.  How can there be deadly genes designed for very, very old humans? There haven’t been such humans.  Think of me as the gazelle who has outrun the lion.  Why aren’t there lions and pumas that can run a hundred miles an hour?  Because there are no gazelles that can run ninety-nine miles an hour.  Sure, there are late-onset diseases.  But there’s an even later-onset state of health.  Physically, it probably has to do with changes in the immune system.  After a certain time, all the bacteria, all the viruses that living things were ever vulnerable to have done their worst.  The immune system grows invincible, simply because it has no more enemies to guard against. Why would there be diseases for humans aged two-hundred if no human ever reaches two hundred?”  He came to sit down beside her, his eyes shining with exuberance.  “When I came to you, I wasn’t suffering from accelerated aging. I was undergoing accelerated
living
.  And I haven’t finished.”