Gary Braver - Elixir

As Wally peered through the zoom, it all rushed back as if he were looking at a kinescope through a time warp.

While he told himself that the guy just looked like a young Chris Bacon, that he was somebody else completely, Wally felt himself flush with emotions, as if trying to hold onto a make-believe moment-not wanting the guy in the viewfinder to be anyone other than Chris Bacon of 1970. It was irrational and pathetic, but for one shimmering moment Wally slipped through the lens to a greener day.

A buzzer went off, and he was back in the gym.

He moved to the wall where the elimination matches were posted. On the 135 weight-class sheet, Todd's final opponent was listed: BRETT GLOVER, Pierson Prep.

Glover, not Bacon.

Wally's heart sank. Not Chris Bacon, but, God, what a resemblance!

He made his way to the knot of green uniforms. "Great job out there."

The Glover boy thanked him.

At the same time, the boy's father glanced over his shoulder. And Wally's mind jogged in reflex. Chris Bacon!

"That was my son he just pinned." His held out his hand. "Wally Olafsson. By the way, you look very familiar."

"Roger Glover," he said. "I don't believe we've met before." But something flitted across his eyes.

"You didn't, by any chance, do a post-doc at Harvard, did you?"

"Nope."

"…or date a girl named Wendy?"

"Sorry, wrong guy." Glover made a move to get away.

Too young-tight smooth face, no wrinkles, no eye pouches, no paunch overhanging his belt, no thinning hair or receding forehead. None of the assaults of time and gravity that made Wally look his fifty-seven years.

But Mother of God! It was uncanny - like looking through a tear in the time-space continuum.

The wrong guy, Wally told himself.

(Those eyes. Something about those eyes.)

wrong guy

coincidence

"Guess not." Wally apologized. "Your son knows some good moves. Hell of a wrestler. Congratulations." He mumbled, feeling foolish.

Glover nodded and turned his back.

But Wally was transfixed, his mind still stuck on details long forgotten. Like stumbling on your first Little League glove decades later, amazing how it all comes back-the leathery smell, the way the shiny rawhide ends curled, the company logo magically incised on the wrist strap, your name proudly lettered in ballpoint. Little lost oddities that rush into place at first glimpse. The same with faces. The set of the mouth, the widow's peak, the way the nostrils flare, the slightly asymmetrical eyebrows.

Coincidence, he told himself.

(The eyes.)

Just a resemblance.

As Glover moved off with his son, Wally could not suppress a dumb impulse. "Hey, Chris!" he shouted.

The man did not flinch or even peer over his shoulder.

A childish test, and the guy had passed, leaving Wally wondering what he would have done had the man looked back.

Imperfect memory, Wally told himself, born out of nostalgia and an aging mind. And I made a thundering asshole out of myself to boot.

Later that evening after he had driven Todd back to his mother's place and returned home, Wally lay in bed and replayed the encounter over in his head, fixing as best he could the look that flitted across Roger Glover's eyes at the moment he saw Wally.

Yes, it was fast and nearly imperceptible, but for one split instant Wally would have sworn that what he saw in Roger Glover's eyes was recognition.

"He recognized me."

"How do you know?"

"I introduced myself as Roger Glover, but he called me Chris as I walked away. He didn't believe me."

Laura's expression froze. "What did you do?"

"Nothing. I kept walking."

"Then he'll conclude it's a case of mistaken identity."

"Let's hope."

They had considered plastic surgery, but back then his face was too recognizable to risk walking into a surgeon's office. Nor could he leave the country with their photographs at every immigration checkpoint. So he had dyed his hair, grown a beard, and wore tinted contact lenses which combined with the initial rejuvenation created a sufficient cover until Brett reached the age to ask questions. By then they had moved to Eau Claire where nobody knew their faces. Chris kept the beard and hair, but put away the tinted contacts.

What Chris had not counted on was stumbling into somebody from his deep past. And, yet, it was a possibility that had sat in the back of their minds for thirteen years.

He stood at the mirror touching up his beard and sideburns with whitening makeup. Laura was in her nightgown ready for bed, her face glistening with her nightly cold cream. "Besides, you look half your age even with the gray."

"That's what bothers me." In college his hair was sandy, not black, and he didn't have a beard.

"Honey, it's been thirty years. I can barely remember what my roommate looked like from college, let alone some guy downstairs," Laura said. "Christopher Bacon is dead, so is Wendy."

After thirteen years that was the virtual truth.

All they had wanted was to become normal people again-to blend into the scenery, to remake themselves so nobody thought twice. So, early on they had engaged in regular psychodramas, playing out the deaths of their former selves until they were nearly convinced they had always been the Glovers. For hours on end, day after day, they recited their new names, dates of birth, and social security numbers like mantras, writing them out until they were second nature. They always addressed themselves as Roger and Laura, resorting to sneak tests until they had conditioned away all the old reflexes. They even took trips to Wichita and Duluth to visit the neighborhoods and schools of Roger and Laura. It was difficult, but like immigrants desperate to learn English, they eventually strip-mined their old identities until they fell for the artifice.

"I know that. But Wally Olafsson doesn't," Roger said. "I look more like I did in 1970 than 1988."

Silence filled the room as they considered the risks.

"I'm not about to drop our lives and go into hiding again," she said. "I'll stop him first if he tries anything. I swear to God I will."

Roger could feel the heat of her conviction. They had been wrongly convicted by the media of monstrous crimes, and nobody had risen to their defense. Nobody! Short of murder, Laura Glover would not allow Brett's life to be upset. It was what a dozen years of meticulous fabrication and maternal love had produced-a good, happy life for their son and the protective instinct of a mother bear.

Roger folded his makeup kit. "Laura, Wally was an old friend."

"So was Wendy Bacon," she said, and snapped off the light.

The dark silence of the bedroom took Roger Glover back. Back before his wife was Laura Glover, mother of Brett Glover and owner of Laura's Flower Shop on South Street in Eau Claire, and he was Roger Glover, co-owner.

Chris Bacon did not age and die that night in the Adirondack woods. On the contrary, Elixir not only had frozen his cellular clock but created restorative effects that had stabilized at a level where even with the beard he looked no more than thirty-twelve years less than his age when he first injected himself, and twenty-five years less than the number of years he had been alive. And the reason why his body did not waste away and his mind did not gum up was diabetes.

It took him some time to work out the logic, but he concluded that the tabulone steroid had attached itself to a hitherto unknown receptor in his cell makeup-one of the dozens of "orphan" receptors whose purpose science still did not understand. As Betsy Watson had long ago explained, once attached the new shape caused the manufacture of a protein which turned off the telomerase aging effects. It had also turned off other inhibitors that disrupt normal regulation of enzymes so that one would fast-forward die once off tabulone.