Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

“Oh, no, darlin', none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.”

At that, even the rain backed away.

Things were quiet for a while, what with the slack in the weather and a conversational pause. After a bit, Wiggs took her nipple in his lips, applying a rubbery, rolling pressure, like Captain Queeg worrying those steel peas in his fingers during the Caine Mutiny Court Martial . Boing! The little pink pea stiffened with pleasure, much as an aged veteran will sometimes stiffen with patriotism. Pris was beginning to experience a resurgence of powerful urges in her loins when all at once there was a thumping noise from the floor above them.

“What's that?” she asked.

Wiggs spat out the nipple. “Morgenstern. I hope he doesn't wake Huxley Anne.”

“What's he doing up there?”

“Oh, 'tis a dance that he does, a dance against dying.”

“Wiggs, what is going on in this nuthouse? I mean, you don't have a laboratory on the whole blessed premises, but you've got a Nobel chemist dancing with himself at three in the morning — or is he dancing with a full-grown kangaroo? It sounds like it — and do you actually believe you're going to live forever? Tell me you don't believe it. Please.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You don't?” She sounded relieved.

“No, I don't believe that Wiggs Dannyboy will be livin' forever, but future generations will, Huxley Anne quite likely will, and even so, I expect to outlast me detractors. I could see me hundred-and-twentieth birthday, I could easily.”

“But how? And why? Is this some sort of grandiose and rococo midlife crisis? Are you that afraid of getting old? Aging is the most natural thing in the world.”

He snorted. “Sure and there's where you're bloody mistaken, me darlin'. There's where you're as wrong as garters on a nun.” He snorted again, and his knuckle began rapping at his eye patch like a mongoloid woodpecker drilling for worms in a poker chip. “Agin' is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a hell of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. 'Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust.”

“Rust? I don't—”

“I'm talkin' about the degeneration o' cells. I'm talkin' about the gumming up o' cells with superoxide free radicals and toxins, I'm talkin' about the gradual breakdown o' healthy cell reproduction due to progressive deterioration o' nucleic acids. 'Tis all a form o' rustin'.”

“And it can be prevented?”

“It can.”

“Why don't doctors know about it then?”

“You might as well ask why didn't mariners in the Middle Ages know the world was round?”

“A few did.”

“Sure and a few doctors today know the truth of agin'.” He paused, gazing into the fire. Eventually, he smiled and said, “Your man, Alobar, he knew the world was round way back then. And in his own fashion, he knows the truth about age.”

“Ah, yes, Alobar: the janitor who never rusts.”

“Well, until recently he didn't. I should be gettin' back to me story.”

“That's for sure.”

“A kiss first.”

“Mmm.”

At Concord, Dr. Dannyboy had cleared his cubicle of journals and papers relating to his erstwhile (and some said, alleged) profession, only to gradually replace them with material relating to gerontology, genetics, and life extension. From prison, he became privy to the latest longevity research at universities in North America, Europe, and Japan, and at private institutions such as the Bjorksten Research Foundation, Montesano Laboratories, the Menninger Clinic, and the Institute of Experimental Morphology in Soviet Georgia. Allowed one telephone call per week, he found himself, guiltily, dialing a biologist at Cornell or a gerontologist at the University of Nebraska Medical School, rather than his wife and infant daughter in nearby Boston.

It was far from easy, keeping pace with the leading edge of some of the most esoteric science, but Dr. Dannyboy was resourceful and, despite his unfashionable address, charming. What he learned encouraged and delighted him. To be sure, it also frustrated him in the saddest way that there wasn't more effort and money behind rejuvenation research. With an immense national effort, such as the project that brought us the atomic bomb, we could add fifty years to the average life span in no time at all, he was convinced of that. Wiggs also was depressed by the fact that he was unable to benefit personally from the information that he was accumulating. Nutrition was one area, for example, where he might have done some immediately salubrious work, but, alas, there were few diets on Earth so perfect for rusting out the machinery as the starch-and-sugar blizzard, the fatty acid monsoon of prison fare.

Wiggs began to fall prey to wide swings in mood. One day, brightened by the latest report from the UCLA Medical Center or some such place, he would be as optimistic as a newborn fly in a Mexican restaurant (an insect that might have its own vision of “the perfect taco"), but the next day, crushed by the realities of the slowness of underfunded research and the deadlines of prison life, he'd be aboard that nickel submarine that is anchored at the bottom of the Black Lagoon.

Then, late one evening, as Wiggs whispered coarse curses at the Capital of Adjectives — the moon — there was an explosion across Middlesex County at MIT, at one of the very laboratories that Wiggs was monitoring; and about three months later, as if in slow motion or delayed reaction, that blast blew into Concord Prison a new inmate named Al Barr, who would soon have incandescent beet leaves curling out of the eye of Dannyboy's periscope.

When he first learned about the bombing of the MIT lab, Wiggs was irate. A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus. While other experts in the field spoke of “the challenges presented by the mysterious and implacable process called aging,” scientists in the MIT experiment talked about slowing down aging as if that feat were already possible, and they stated publicly that in the future, “society might be able to abolish death from natural causes entirely.” Dannyboy admired people who could rescue themselves from modest objectives.

He had expected the “middle-aged” janitor convicted of destroying the lab to be a fundamentalist Christian fanatic, a sexually repressed lout driven loony as an outhouse rat by charlatan evangelists and the ambiguous poetry of the Bible; a knife-nosed, tight-lipped, lost-eyed ignoramus on a self-appointed mission to punish scientists for playing God, like those peasants who burn down the mad doctor's castle at the conclusion of countless monster movies.

When Wiggs thought of lodging with this yahoo under a common roof, the green Spanish worm of revenge began to turn in his heart.

Therefore he was not only surprised but a bit abashed when Al Barr proved to be the most dignified prisoner in Concord. Straight of spine and sapphirine of eye, Barr appeared poised, intelligent, and master of a certain smile. Whereas Wiggs, on his good days, had a smile that snipped the tense prison air like musical scissors, Barr's smile was on the order of those stone-cut enigmas that, wired to a heroic nerve, grace the faces of classical statues. He wore an air of mystery and some very interesting scars.

Having decided that this chap was no ordinary janitor (although it was known that he had swabbed the tiles of Boston's Turkish Bath House for years), and having become increasingly curious about the motives for the vandalism at MIT, and, further, having had little luck in generating conversation with Barr in the exercise yard (where the new inmate was occupied with a strange kind of yoga), Wiggs pulled some strings (had Wiggs been Geppetto, Pinocchio never would have left home) and arranged for Barr to become his cellmate.