Gary Braver - Elixir

"Look, Vince, please… It's all the red tape with money transfers. I swear on my life."

"Your life doesn't have weight." He pointed to the dark upper corner of the house. "Just behind that 'TotFinder' sticker is a pretty pink bedroom with a pretty pink bed where your pretty pink daughter Robyn is asleep." Before Quentin could ask, Vince handed him three photographs, all of Robyn: at her bedroom window that morning, being dropped off at school, at recess.

"Listen, Vince-" he began.

Vince clamped his gloved hand on Quentin's jaw. "No, you listen." He pressed his face so close that Quentin could smell garlic on his breath from his dinner. In a feather-smooth voice he said, "You have until Friday. Understand? The day after tomorrow. If you renege again I look bad, and that I can't live with. Neither can your daughter." He squeezed so hard Quentin's jaw felt crushed. "Two days. Two-point-five million dollars. Plus another two hundred thousand visitation fee which you'll wire to another account. The number's on the back." And he stuffed one of his business cards into Quentin's pocket.

Quentin started to protest, but thought better. He grunted that he understood, and Vince snapped his face away. In dead silence they drove back to the Emerson, as Quentin massaged his jaw and wondered how to manipulate Darby funds, thinking how his daughter's life hung in the balance.

"This is me here," Quentin said as they rolled by his Mercedes. But they continued all the way to the emergency room. "But I'm back there."

When Vince stopped the car, he extended his gloved hand. Quentin took it, gratified that it would end with a gesture of civility. Except that Vince didn't let go. Instead, his other hand closed over Quentin's.

"This is closer."

"I don't follow."

Still holding Quentin's hand, Vince said, "You're going to need to see a doctor."

"What?"

Vince then clamped one hand onto his index finger and bent it all the way back until it broke at the joint with a sickening crack. Quentin jolted in place with a hectoring scream which Vince instantly caught in his glove. Pain jagged through Quentin like a bolt of lightning, searing nerve endings from his hand to his crown and through his genitals to the soles of his feet.

While Quentin yelled and squirmed in his seat, Vince kept his viselike grip on Quentin's mouth. For several minutes he held him until the cries subsided to whimpers.

Quentin's hand had swollen to twice its size, while his finger hung at a crazy angle like a dead root.

Vince then opened the passenger door, and in the same silky voice he said, "The next time it will be your daughter's neck."

And he shoved him out and drove off.

The morning after Jenny and Abigail returned home, Wendy stood naked before the full-length mirror and felt her heart slump. She looked all of forty-two. In her younger days she was a slender size six, and 120 pounds. Now she was two sizes and fifteen pounds heavier. Her waist and thighs were getting that thick puddingly look. Crows' feet were starting to spread around her eyes and mouth, and the smiles lines were becoming permanently etched.

Worse still, she could see herself as an old woman: a hunched and wrinkled thing with flabby skin, thinning hair, teeth chipped and gray, creasing eyes, a neck sunken into the widow's hunch of osteoporosis, her legs whitened sticks road-mapped with varicose veins, her hands patched and knobbed. It was the image of her mother staring back at her, a woman who had died of breast cancer at sixty-eight yet who looked fifteen years older because of a crippling stroke. The image was jolting.

While she had come to accept the grim inevitability, it was no less shocking to apprehend it in her own face. What Chris had dubbed the death gene-that nasty little DNA switch that never failed to click on the long slide to the grave.

But, damn it! Wendy told herself, Jenny was right: Forty-two is still young. And she was still healthy. What benefit was there to wasting the good years left wringing her hands over mortality? No, she couldn't reverse gravity or cellular decay, but she could at least slow the progress.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Chris's phrase hummed in her mind.

Feeling a surge, she put on her running suit and sneakers. A few minutes later she was pounding the pavement around Mystic Lake and debating with herself. You're forty-two years old. Twenty years from now you'll be sixty-two. In thirty years, seventy-two. It didn't make sense, not at her age.

But why not? And why not her?

She splashed through shafts of sunlight, thinking that the choices she made now would determine how she lived out the rest of her life: Her grief from Ricky's death would never leave her, but it was time to end the habit of mourning.

Half-consciously she rubbed her hand across her breast as she jogged along. As Jenny said, women over forty had babies all the time.

It was her visit that had done it-seeing Jenny's unequivocal joy. And hearing a baby in the house again-sounds that took her back to happier days. Jenny had given Wendy a pair of earrings, but the real birthday gift was leaving Wendy yearning for the same joy and feeling almost startled into the hope of it. Why not? She was still healthy.

"The wine is sweet whenever you drink it."

Yes! she told herself. YES! And she glided down the path thinking of baby names.

That night Chris peered through the eyepiece of his microscope and saw the landscape of eternity. And it took his breath away.

He was looking at the cells of his own body-cells that contained all the information that made him Christopher Bacon. Cells that should be turning bright blue, dying under his eye-but were thriving.

Eight weeks ago, he had scraped off some flesh from the inside of his cheek. He liquefied the sample and divided it into equal batches, one treated with nutrients-growth factors, hormones, vitamins, insulin, and a lot of other stuff-that sped up replication, collapsing the remaining life of his own forty-two-year-old cells into two weeks. The other he treated with the same nutrients plus tabulone. Within twenty-four hours the surface of each dish was covered with newly replicated cells. From those batches he made subcultures. He kept that up for four weeks until the untreated cells stopped subdividing and died. Meanwhile, the tabulone-treated cells continued to thrive. Two months later they were still replicating. If he had kept that up, he would have produced endless tons of his own cells.

The realization was staggering: The cells of his own flesh were reproducing indefinitely.

That could only mean that human death was not programmed in the genes but the result of a program of cell divisions-a finite process that climaxed in the eventual breakdown of cell walls. In other words, we lived as long as our cells kept replicating. But why did they stop at fifty?

He did not understand the genetics, but it confirmed his suspicion that aging had no clear evolutionary purpose. Traditional textbook reasoning about making room for the next generation made no sense since most animals never made it to old age. They were eaten by predators or died from disease. There was no reason for natural selection to genetically favor demise, Chris told himself. No purpose served.

His eye fell on the wall clock as the second hand made its circuit. Like all his clocks and watches, it was set ten minutes fast, a silly little habit to allow himself to pretend that it wasn't as late as it was-that he had a few more minutes free of charge.

While the radio played softly in the background, Chris watched the clock move inexorably around its course.

And he thought: During the next hour, ten thousand people would die-some by fire, some by floods, some by famine, some by accident, some by another's hand. But most deaths would be from "natural causes" brought on by aging-people over sixty-five. And nobody over 112. But who was to say that the upper limits couldn't be pushed? Or that people shouldn't die but by accident alone?