The Immortalists (2 page)

Richard Draman pressed a button on the remote, creating a deep green glow in the room.

“This is a normal cell nucleus,” he said, pointing to the well-defined circle projected on the screen behind him. Another click of the button plunged the room into darkness for a moment before the next slide came up. Instead of being round, the cell it depicted was twisted and deformed—a shape that, despite his years as a scientist, he’d come to associate with evil. A demon’s wing. The tattered cape of a vampire.

“This is from a child suffering from Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome—more commonly known as progeria.”

The four faces staring out from behind the table in front of him reflected little but the light of the diseased cell, as impassive now as they had been when he arrived.

Maybe he’d pushed too hard for the meeting. Hell, he was almost certain of it. But he didn’t have the luxury of being subtle. He hadn’t for a long time.

“The disease is caused by a genetic defect that essentially causes its victim to age at a wildly accelerated rate.” He clicked to a photo of what at first glance seemed to be a frail old man standing amid a group of towering grade school children. Most of his bald head was hidden by a baseball cap, but his bony arms, patterned with bulging veins, were clearly visible where they emerged from the sleeves of a Green Day T-shirt. His nose was hawklike, protruding from a round, wrinkled face, made even starker by the wide smile full of uneven teeth.

“Jack here lives just outside of Atlanta. He’s a great kid with a real aptitude for math and a love for camping and fishing. He’s only seven years old.”

His audience’s expressions shifted subtly, a little less dispassionate as they examined the sick child, trying to imagine what it would be like to be born with such a cruel disease. What wouldn’t Jack give to have the things they took for granted—a life that stretched out ahead of them for decades and an imperceptibly slow physical decline that came balanced by wisdom, family, and friendship.

“Children like Jack only show some aspects of aging. They don’t suffer from senility, for instance. They also have no predisposition to cancer, like most people do as they get older. The first thing that strikes people is that they’re just kids. They get scared and excited and curious about things, just like we all did at that age. What’s different, though, is that they have an extremely high risk of hardening of the arteries—which can lead to heart attack and stroke.”

“How long can they survive with current medical technology?” one of the people behind the table asked.

Richard took in a slow breath that seemed to get more difficult every time he had to say the number aloud. “Most don’t live longer than thirteen years.”

Their grave nods made shadows play across their faces in a way that was strangely unnerving, and he chased away the darkness by clicking to a picture of his lab. It was modest by most standards and becoming more so every day. Many of the people bustling around in the photo were gone now, working for government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and universities on three continents.

“I like to think I run the most cost-effective research facility in the country. We get a lot of volunteer help from the parents of the kids as well as other people who understand the seriousness of the disease. Every dollar we bring in goes directly to finding a cure.”

Another press of the button, and a slide of a group of kids suffering from progeria appeared on the screen. Despite their appearance, it was actually easy to forget their illness for a moment. They were holding balloons, clowning around, grinning broadly—doing the things kids should be doing.

“In many ways, we’re like a family. We try to get together every few years, and people from all over the world come. The kids have an opportunity to spend time with other children like them, and parents get to talk to each other about things that no one else could possibly understand. A lot of the kids form friendships that go on…” his voice faltered for a moment, “for their entire lives.”

Richard stepped partially into the projector’s beam, putting himself center stage. It was a position he’d never been comfortable with, despite the fact that he’d been told he cut an imposing figure. His broad shoulders were a holdover from growing up on a farm, and his height and shaggy blond hair were what remained of his mother’s Scandinavian ancestors. The beard covering his jaw was more the product of admitting he couldn’t remember to shave than a fashion statement. He’d carefully trimmed it before leaving the house, aware that when it got long he tended to look like he was applying for a job as the Minnesota Vikings’ mascot.

“I’ve dedicated my life to eradicating this disease, and as I’m sure you read in the information I sent you, my team has made more progress in the last five years than all the researchers before us combined. So here I am, hoping that your foundation will grant me the twenty-five thousand dollars I need to continue pursuing a cure.”

He moved out of the light, allowing his audience to take in the screen full of smiling kids who refused to have their childhood stolen from them without a fight. A fight that two in the photo had already lost.

He clicked over to the next slide and continued. “The disease wasn’t well understood until—”

“Please have a seat, Dr. Draman.”

He fell silent, acutely aware of the sensation of his saliva suddenly drying up. He’d barely finished his introduction—the full presentation went on for almost forty-five minutes, covering the history of the disease, its biology, and details of his lab’s breakthroughs. “Excuse me, but I have—”

“Please, Dr. Draman. Sit.”

It had happened before. Sometimes presentations were only a formality and donors had made a decision to give him money based on his written submission. And sometimes not.

There was a quiet hum as the shades at the back of the room began to rise, revealing a skyline of glass towers reflecting a cloudless sky.

Who would have ever thought he’d end up here? He’d almost been held back as a high school sophomore, the same year his friends snuck a page into the yearbook naming him Most Likely to Be Indicted on a Federal Level. For the thousandth time, his hard-working, salt-of-the-earth parents had been beside themselves. But now he was making up for his past, and these soul-crushing meetings were part of his well-deserved penance.

“Can we get you something to drink? A glass of water? Soft drink?”

Richard shook his head. It was the man in the center talking. A plump white executive of about sixty. Nice suit. Shiny shoes.

“Richard…can I call you Richard?”

“Please do,” he said, trying to beat back the urge to grab the man by his feet and shake him until the change fell from his pockets. He despised this part of his job—it made him feel like a particularly unattractive union between a mugger and a beggar. A megger. A bugger. A—

“Doctor?”

Richard realized he’d let his face go blank, and he conjured a polite smile as the man began to speak.

“First, let me say that this is a horrible disease that deserves far more financial resources than it gets. Sometimes it’s hard for us to believe what money gets spent on—by the average person, by the government. I like to say that every childhood disease in the world could be cured in a matter of a few years if we all just gave up big-screen TVs.”

It was hard not to notice that this little speech sounded a bit canned.

“I know I speak for all of us when I say that there should be no limits on the spending for progeria. That we wish
we
didn’t have any limits.”

Richard kept the smile going, though he suspected that the longer he held it the more he looked like a used car salesman from Southern California.

“Second, let me say that we understand your position, and we sympathize. More than you probably imagine. And, finally, your reputation as a brilliant and responsible scientist precedes you. We would very much like to work with you.”

The man fell silent, seeming uncertain how to continue and letting the woman to his right take up the thought.

“Let me ask you a question, Doctor. How many children are suffering from this progeria right now?”

“I don’t think it’s a question of how many, ma’am…”

“I disagree. What you mean to say is that it
shouldn’t
be a matter of how many. Are there fifty worldwide?”

He’d been down this road many times and still had never been able to devise an escape. “Almost.”

“Almost,” she repeated. “One in eight million children suffer from this syndrome, isn’t that correct?”

“Something like that. Yes.”

“And there’s no real chance of it spreading because—and I’m very sorry for this—these children don’t grow old enough to have children of their own.”

He nodded, feeling the sweat forming at his hairline. Maybe because the sun streaming through the windows had confused the air conditioner. Or maybe it was the man to the far right who hadn’t made so much as a sound yet. He just sat there. Staring.

“You understand that I’m not trying to belittle the plight of these children,” she continued. “Of course I’m not. But during your presentation, more children died of malaria than have died of progeria in the history of modern medicine.”

The man on the right finally came to life, leaning forward over the table. “And we’re talking about a genetic disease that’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to cure or even to manage. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s true,” Richard said, deciding it was time for a borderline dishonest change in tactics. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. “But the applications of a progeria cure could be incredibly widespread. It could have a bearing on the general problems associated with aging that affect—”

The man in the center held up a hand, silencing him. “There are other forces involved in that fight, Richard. Our foundation deals exclusively with childhood disease. And every single one deserves our attention and funding. Unfortunately, both of those resources are finite.”

Richard clutched the platter as his wife piled it with sausages from the rusty grill centered in their backyard. It had been up against the house until a few months ago when they’d noticed the glossy mauve paint exfoliating into their food. He probably should have done a little more prep work before, in a moment of weakness, he’d agreed to let his daughter attack the warped siding with “any color in the whole world.”

The sun settled into the horizon, softening the lines of his listing fence, the cracked kitchen window, and the litter blowing around mid-eighties sedans in the street. Not exactly what he’d pictured when he left Stanford with two PhDs in the glove box and a beautiful, talented young woman in the passenger seat.

But it could have been worse. The rent was free—an ongoing gift from a sympathetic man whose son had died of a genetic disease unrelated to progeria. The truth was that one terminal disease wasn’t all that different from any other. The result was the same, as were the people forced to watch their loved ones fade away.

His gaze shifted to a towering pile of dog shit on his overgrown lawn. That was a somewhat less benevolent but similarly perpetual gift—this time from his chronically unemployed neighbor’s horse-sized pet.

“Richard?” Carly said, flipping another sausage onto the plate. “Stop it.”

“What?” he said looking up at her.

“Fixating on the dog poop.”

“I wasn’t fixating. I was just thinking.”

“About?”

“The fact that Susie plays out here. And that maybe a good old-fashioned ass kicking is what Harvey needs to understand that.”

She laughed. “I think you may be getting a little long in the tooth for that kind of behavior, Dr. Draman.”

“Hey, I’m not even forty yet. And he’s—”

“A grossly overweight man with a heart condition and an alcohol problem?”

“Just makes my job easier…”

The smoke twisted up her athletic body, clinging briefly to her red hair before shattering in the breeze. She was wearing the sunflower print apron he’d bought her when she graduated from culinary school, now faded and worn through in places. She told everyone that she kept it for sentimental reasons, and there was truth to that. It wasn’t the whole truth, though. Somewhere in her incredibly complex subconscious, money played a part. And he hated that. She deserved more. She deserved everything.

Carly tapped the platter in his hands. “They’re your favorite.”

“What?”

“Earth to Richard. The sausages. They’re the chipotle ones you told me you liked so much.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, pretending to remember. “Those things were amazing.”

He wasn’t sure he’d convinced her, but she loaded the last one and started for the house with him in tow.

“Chris!” she shouted as they stepped inside. “Soup’s on! Everyone ready?”

Chris Graden appeared a moment later holding what was undoubtedly the only five-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to ever grace the neighborhood. He’d been a big deal before his retirement, running one of the world’s largest and most profitable pharmaceutical companies. Now he spent his time playing golf, sailing, and directing a little foundation that funded medical research—things that kept his seventy-year-old stomach flat and his exuberance level somewhere between the Energizer Bunny and a puppy with a new ball.

“Everything smells fantastic, Carly.”

“It’s nothing fancy, but I think you’ll like it.”

“Hell, I’d eat a shoe if you cooked it,” he said, dumping some wine in their glasses and plopping expectantly into one of the mismatched chairs surrounding the kitchen table.

“I feel kind of bad, though. I know you work your ass—” He looked around guiltily at the use of the word before continuing. “I know you work hard all day at the restaurant, and I hate that you come home and cook for me. You should have let me take you out.”

“I like doing it,” she said. “You know, alone in your own kitchen. It’s like meditation.” She turned toward a low archway that led to the living room. “Susie! Did you hear me, young lady? Dinner!”

“How’s the restaurant doing?” Graden asked.

“Great—we’ve had a terrific year.”

Graden stabbed a sausage and dropped it on his plate, knowing that Carly didn’t stand on ceremony. She just wanted to see people enjoy what she cooked.

“I didn’t see you two at Annette Chevalier’s funeral,” he said.

Richard reached for his wineglass. “We wanted to go, but last-minute plane tickets are insanely expensive, and it’s hard to put Susie in a car seat for a drive that long. Honestly, I hadn’t spoken to her in more than a year, and we’ve never met her family. How are they doing?”

“Crappy. They’re doing crappy. Can you imagine finding her like that?”

“She had demons,” Richard said.

“So many of the brilliant ones do. Fortunately, you’re an exception.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that mine are real.”

“Susie!” Carly shouted again, obviously not happy with where the conversation was going. “I’m counting to ten!”

Their daughter appeared a moment later, wearing a pink sweat suit they’d found on sale the week before. The top fell unnaturally from her bony shoulders, descending almost to her knees before the baggy pants appeared and piled around her tennis shoes.

It hadn’t been long after she was born that Richard noticed her baby fat suspiciously disappearing and veins becoming visible through her skin. At the time, he’d been working in cancer research and hadn’t known anything about progeria beyond what he’d read in a few offhand paragraphs during school.

“Go give your Uncle Chris a hug,” Carly said.

Graden returned her embrace, looking down at the top of her bald head with an affectionate smile that contained just a hint of discomfort. Neither Carly nor Susie noticed, but Richard had developed radar over six years working with the victims of the disease. There was something about seeing these children turn old that hit people on a fundamental level—mortality distilled to an intensity that made almost everyone want to turn away.

“Where have you been all night?” Graden said. “I haven’t heard a peep out of you.”

“She finally beat Richard down, and he bought her one of those Nintendos,” Carly said, not bothering to hide her disapproval.

“It’s an Xbox, Mom!”

“A crack box, more like.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Susie protested. “You haven’t even tried it!”

“And that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

“Can I take my dinner in the living room and play?”

“Susie, you’re going to rot your eyes out with that thing. Not to mention your brain. You’ll be sitting at the table.”

“Please, Mom? I’m almost at level ten. I know I can get there before bedtime.”

“Ask your father.”

Susie looked up at him expectantly, and as always, he caved.

“Level ten? Wow. I’m still stuck on that bridge in level six.”

She took that as a yes, filling her plate in less than five seconds and taking an extra helping of vegetables as a peace offering to her mother.

“Medication!” he called as she rushed off, but she’d already disappeared.

“I swear to God,” Carly grumbled, chasing after her with the elaborate pillbox containing their daughter’s myriad prescriptions.

When she was gone, Richard took a long pull on his wine and watched his friend tear gleefully into the pear salad before moving on to the sausages.

“I’ve got bills piling up, Chris.”

Graden put down his fork and leaned back in his chair. “I wondered to what I owed the honor of this invitation.”

“That’s not fair, we—”

“It was a joke, Richard. Jesus. Try to relax, OK?”

“I’m sorry. But it’s a little hard, you know? We’ve put everything into the lab—into my research. If it weren’t for leftovers from the restaurant, we’d have to stop eating.”

Graden grabbed a stalk of asparagus with his fingers and began gnawing thoughtfully on it.

“I had to let a guy go yesterday, Chris. He was a solid scientist, but I just don’t have the money to pay him.”

“I know you want me to say I’ll fix it. But I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“Your foundation gives away millions every year. Don’t you think this is a good cause?”

“Come on, Richard. You know damn well I think it’s a good cause. Just like you know damn well it’s not
my
foundation.”

“You run it.”

“Don’t try to send me on a guilt trip here. We’ve given you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and every time I go to bat for you with the board, I leave bloodied.”

Richard opened his mouth to speak, but Graden jabbed what was left of the asparagus in his direction. “Look, everybody admires what you’ve managed to build with the Progeria Project. But the foundation I work for isn’t focused on just one disease. I understand your position, but how many kids—”

“Don’t start, Chris. I got the needs-of-the-many and big-screen-TV crap from the Pearner Foundation yesterday. I
hate
those speeches.”

“You hate them because you know there’s some truth there.”

“Look, I’m not a communist. If someone goes out and makes a billion dollars and they want to spend it on a fleet of private jets stuffed with supermodels, I’m not going to begrudge them. But it’s hard not to think about the fact that if everyone in that category settled for five jets and regular models, there wouldn’t be a sick kid on the entire planet.”

“Let’s be realistic, Richard. If Susie didn’t have progeria, you’d be happily running some massive cancer program and would never have given these kids a second thought. And that’s not because you’re an evil or uncaring man. It’s because cancer kills millions of people every year.”

“What do you want me to do, Chris? Quit? Go back to my old job and buy myself a mansion while Susie…” His voice trailed off for a moment, and he leaned farther over the table. “She’s getting weaker, Chris. I can see it happening. Do you have any idea what it’s like to go into her room every morning to get her up for school and wonder if this is the morning? The morning she doesn’t wake up?”

“No. I don’t know. I’ll never know.”

The silence between them stretched out for almost a minute before Graden finally broke it. “I’m worried about you. Sometimes it seems like this has become a personal battle between you and God. This is hard for me to say, but what if God wins? Have you thought about that?”

“God’s not going to win.”

Graden flopped back in his chair. “Screw it. I give up.”

Richard unfolded a magazine photo and laid it on the table between them. It depicted a decrepit old man in a wheelchair being pushed toward a limousine.

“What about him?” Richard said as a deep frown spread across his friend’s face.

“Andreas Xander? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“He just put another two hundred and fifty million dollars into an expansion of his aging research center. That’s a quarter of a billion—”

“I know how much two hundred and fifty million is, Richard.”

“I should be getting some of that money.”

Graden set his wine down on the table and tapped absently on the cheap glass. “I hear you have to include a virgin for him to sacrifice along with your grant proposal.”

“I’m serious, Chris.”

“So am I. Do you know why Xander’s one of the richest men in the world?”

“Because he’s a good businessman?”

“No, because he’s the nastiest, most ruthless son of a bitch on the planet. If being a mean-spirited snake were an Olympic event, this guy’d be Mark Spitz. Did you know that his mother died in some run-down state nursing home in Alabama, and when they started going through her assets, they found out Xander still owed her the fifteen grand she’d lent him for college? That guy’s never given a rat’s ass about anything but money and power his whole life. Then, a few years back, he realizes that he has to die, just like all those dirty little poor people he’s always hated. So now he’s throwing a bunch of money at any researcher willing to tell him they can put a straitjacket on the grim reaper.”

“Then tell him I’m in the straitjacket business.”

“Me? Why me? I don’t know that asshole. And he’s impossible to get to. I mean, I’ve done pretty well in life, but Xander’s a whole other level.”

“You must know people who have access to him.”

“Look, Richard. Let’s be serious here. He finances closely controlled research into things that directly benefit him. He’d drink Susie’s blood if someone told him it would extend his life ten minutes.”

“I need the money.”

“Deals with the devil never work out, Richard. It’s kind of a cosmic theme, you know?”

“I don’t have a lot of alternatives at this point.”

Graden sighed quietly and produced a checkbook from his back pocket. “Twenty-five thousand, right? Isn’t that what the Pearners turned you down for?”

Richard nodded, unable to tear his eyes from the checkbook. It was hard to believe that such a tiny, common thing could mean so much—to Susie, to the other children.

Graden filled out a check and held it across the table.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Chris. Please thank the people at the—” He looked down at it and fell silent. “This is a personal check.”

“I can’t go back to the foundation again for this.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I think we both know that’s bullshit.”

Richard just sat there for a few moments, feeling the sensation of the paper between his fingers. When he spoke again, it sounded like someone else talking. “Thank you for this, Chris. But it’s not a long-term solution. Help me get to Xander. You know people. You can do it.”