SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Each year after the law passed, the prescriptions ran out by the end of January.

After spending the weekend trying to come up with a new experiment, Vivian arrived at her lab feeling defeated. Her current idea didn’t feel promising, but she couldn’t give up. Too many people depended on her. She wanted to find a cure. She needed to find a cure. She had to.

For the last decade, an awful word kept fighting to escape her subconscious. Vivian expended a lot of energy suppressing it, but today it crept up on her. A word she’d never uttered aloud filled her thoughts.

Hopeless.

Now that the unspoken word had escaped, Vivian thought about the Death House, someplace you could check in and never check out.

On that dismal note, she began working on what she hoped would be the cure with her mantra echoing inside her head: This is it, this is it. Its answer was the terrible word she’d let out: Hopeless.

Waiting for her computer to analyze her data, Vivian experienced conflicted feelings about the speed of getting results. Testing that used to take weeks was now completed in hours. That would be wonderful if her results were positive, but for her, it meant failure being thrown in her face every day. It became a lodestone. The weight of her failure dragged her further into a state of depression.

“Good morning, Keri. Large coffee with cream, please.”

“Yes, Vivian.”

“I’m running the new experiment. Think this one is a winner?”

“I remain ever hopeful for you, Vivian. Your coffee is ready as ordered.”

Vivian walked over to the coffee machine and shouted. “Do you have any opinions on ANYTHING?”

“That question does not make sense to me.”

“Do you care if I ever develop a mortality serum?”

“I remain ever hopeful for you.”

Screaming in frustration, Vivian turned off the machine, then returned to her desk, trying to calm down. The result would be ready in thirty minutes. She got up to pace for a while, then settled again at her desk.

Sipping her coffee, Vivian awaited the inevitable bad news.

Jenna decided to take Tujin for a walk. Pretending he needed to exercise maintained the illusion her pet was real. She passed other dog owners, nodding to them as they walked by. Some of the people walking their dogs complimented Jenna on her pet, and she returned the favor. Everyone helped one another maintain a communal dream.

Today’s destination was the care home for a visit to her grandmother. She stopped by weekly to hold her nana’s hand and read to her. Under her arm was an eReader loaded with a copy of Our Perfect World. Jenna wanted to read a particular passage to her nana about the town called Bliss. She wondered if her grandmother would be interested in hearing about her dream to live there.

Rotating books made the visits fresh, staving off boredom for Jenna. She remained hopeful her grandmother wasn’t bored. She never asked, not wanting to know the true answer. Not that it mattered, since her grandmother couldn’t reply. But Jenna remained convinced that the visits helped her grandmother cope with her state of purgatory. She felt helpless without any other way to comfort her.

From the doorway of her grandmother’s small, ascetic room, Jenna watched the aide prepare her nana for a visit. He propped her up in a semi-upright position, adjusting her head to look forward, and finished up by folding her hands. Turning to Jenna, he nodded, then left the room.

“Hi, Nana, it’s me. It’s Jenna.”

No response. But she hadn’t expected one.

“It’s been a long time since I read Our Perfect World to you. Last night I found a passage I thought you’d like.”

Jenna stared into her grandmother’s blank face, trying as she always did to see some flicker of the woman she had been. In answer to Jenna’s offer to read, her grandmother blinked once. Her way of communicating: one blink for ‘yes,’ two blinks for ‘no.’ At least, that’s what Jenna told herself.

“OK, here goes…Chapter Four. Bliss.”

She read two chapters, her favorite ones, about a happy couple about to have their first child. Jenna had marked the passage about the couple naming the baby. They’d chosen the name Emma. She liked that, and fantasized that her daughter would have the same name. Her mother told her the story about deciding what to name her. ‘Jenna’ had been her grandmother’s choice. She wished she could ask her nana why.

Certain her grandmother was asleep, Jenna left the room and stopped by the nurses’ station to chat with the staff. They were always ready to chat and gossip. Jenna thought they might be a good diversion for her.

“Hey, did you hear there might be fewer death prescriptions granted next year? I wish I could convince my mother to let my nana put her name on the list.”

As she always did, Nurse Becker listened with empathy before she answered. Jenna could see the truth on her face before she said anything.

“You’re forgetting, Jenna, your grandmother can’t get a prescription. Since she’s unable to communicate, there’s no way for the psychiatrist to interview her. I know it’s sad. I think she’d be better off if she could die, but that’s the law.”

Jenna’s eyes filled with tears of frustration. Nurse Becker tried to hug her, but Jenna shook her off.

Until the government changed the law to include non-verbal replies, her grandmother was stuck in a loophole. She knew that. But hearing it from someone as kind as Nurse Becker made it hurt more somehow.

“I’m sorry, Jenna. We all feel for your grandmother. Please believe me, we do whatever we can to keep her comfortable. We bring her to the common room every day so she won’t feel alone. I remember your mother telling us she had a favorite soap opera. Since your grandmother’s admission, she’s never missed an episode. I’m sure she enjoys watching it.”

“But she can communicate! She can blink yes and no! Why doesn’t that count? If I went back in the room and asked her if she wanted to die, I bet she’d blink once. For yes. I know she would.”

“I know, honey,” Nurse Becker said. “But it’s the law.”

Another year passed without a successful mortality serum. Finally, Vivian made the decision to accept defeat and tell her superiors her time was being wasted. She wanted to concentrate on something else and vanquish the feeling of failure that constantly surrounded her. Realizing the irony in the statement ‘a waste of time,’ she still felt moving on would be the best decision for her.

After arguing her point for several hours, she couldn’t convince her superiors at the lab to release her from the experiment. They gave her an ultimatum: keep working on the serum or leave. So she went back to her lab to think about her future.

Vivian looked through the failed experiments, each one a monument to her disappointment. She thought about the wasted years, the futility of her efforts. Bit by bit, her confidence left her. Resisting the urge to wreck her lab, she made another decision. It was time to do something else with her life. She had no idea what, but deciding to leave gave her some relief.

As she exited her second home of eighty-six years, she turned and waved good-bye to Keri the coffee machine.

Riding the subway home, Vivian watched the immortals surrounding her. These people weren’t young and beautiful. They looked like an average cross-section of society. All sorts were represented: young, old, fat, skinny, beautiful, ugly. The only thing they had in common was their inability to die a natural death.

Walking the few blocks to her home, Vivian reflected on her decision to quit her life’s work. She couldn’t change her mind. Just this one time, she would trust her instincts. She worried about disappointing Jenna, but knew her daughter would respect her decision.