Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Please. Luke is fine.’

Varya nods. ‘Until your TB results come through I won’t be able to take you into the lab. So I thought today I’d show you the main campus.’

‘You don’t waste time,’ Luke says.

His teasing makes Varya anxious. This is what journalists do: they create a false sense of intimacy, ingratiating themselves until you become comfortable enough to tell them things you’d otherwise have the good sense not to. The last journalist they allowed in the lab was a TV reporter whose footage caused such a frenzy among donors that the Drake built a new play area for the monkeys to placate them. Of course, that reporter elected to include only the most damning B-roll, the rhesus monkeys shaking the cage bars and barking as if they had not just been fed.

Varya leads Luke to the entrance vestibule, where a heavyset man sits behind a security desk, reading the paper. ‘You’ll have met Clyde.’

‘Sure. We’re old friends. I was just hearing about his mother’s birthday.’

‘She turned a hundred and one last month,’ Clyde says, setting the paper down. ‘So my brothers and me, we went to Daly City and threw her a party. She can’t leave the house, so we paid the choir from her old church to come sing to her. She still knows all the words.’

Varya has not exchanged more than daily greetings with Clyde in the ten years she’s worked at the lab. She reaches for the heavy steel door and punches Annie’s latest code into the keypad beside it. ‘Your mother’s one hundred and one?’

‘You bet,’ Clyde says. ‘You should really be pricking her instead of those monkeys.’

The Drake Institute for Research on Aging is a series of angular, white buildings nestled within the perpetually green slopes of Mount Burdell. Its property – nearly five hundred acres – lies two miles south of Olompali State Historic Park and two miles north of Skywalker Ranch, almost all of it untouched countryside. The campus is confined to a plateau halfway down the mountain where great hulks of limestone sit amidst the bay trees and chaparral like an alien encampment. To Varya, the mountainside has always seemed unsightly in its lack of grooming – the shrubs tangled and thorny, the bays drooping like overgrown beards – but Luke Van Galder reaches his arms above his head and sighs.

‘My God,’ he says. ‘To work in such a place. Seventy degrees in March. You can hike in a state park during lunch.’

Varya reaches for her sunglasses. ‘I’m afraid that doesn’t ever happen. I’m at work by seven in the morning. Very often I have no idea what the weather is like until I leave that evening. See that building?’ she says, pointing. ‘That’s the main research facility. It was designed by Leoh Chen. He’s known for his geometric elements – you must have parked in the visitor’s lot, so you’ll have seen that the building is a semicircle. There are windows on all sides. From here they look small, but they’re really floor-to-ceiling.’ She halts, fifty paces from the primate lab and a quarter mile from the main facility. ‘Do you have a notebook?’

‘I’m listening. I can fact-check later.’

‘If that seems to you the best sequence of events.’

‘I’m getting my bearings. I’ll be here all week.’ Luke raises his eyebrows and smiles. ‘I figured we might sit down.’

‘Certainly, we’ll sit down,’ says Varya, ‘at some point. But I don’t usually meet with journalists and I trust you’ll understand if certain pieces of information are relayed in transit. Given the study design, it’s important that I spend as little time away from the lab as possible.’

At five ten, she stands almost at eye level with Luke. His face, as seen through her sunglasses, is subdued in color and dimension, but she can still see surprise play across it. Why? Because she is brisk, impersonal? Surely Luke would not be surprised if the lab were run by a man who displayed these qualities. What guilt she feels at her terseness is replaced by self-assurance. She is, in the world of primate research, establishing dominance.

Luke swings his backpack around to the front and retrieves a black tape recorder. ‘Okay?’

‘Fine,’ says Varya. Luke depresses the Record button, and she begins to walk again. ‘How long have you worked at the Chronicle ?’

A peace offering, this bit of dreaded small chat, as they transition to the wider, paved paths that surround the main facility. The path to the primate lab is no more than a repurposed dirt trail. ‘They like to keep us tucked away,’ said Annie once, ‘the savages,’ and Varya laughed, though she didn’t know whether Annie was referring to the monkeys or the two of them.

‘I don’t,’ Luke says. ‘I’m a freelancer. This is the first piece I’ve done for them. I work out of Chicago; usually I write for the Tribune . You didn’t see my pitch?’

Varya shakes her head. ‘Dr. Kim deals with those things.’

Though Annie is a researcher, not a public information officer, she has taken on the latter role with ease. Varya is constantly grateful for Annie’s media savvy, so she consented when Annie suggested they take this week’s interview, which will be published in the San Francisco Chronicle . The primate lab is ten years into a twenty-year study. This year, they’ll apply for a second round of competitive funding. Officially, publicity has no bearing on research grants. Unofficially, the foundations that support the Drake like to feel they’re enabling something important, something that has garnered both public excitement and – in the case of primate research – public approval.

‘Have you worked in a newsroom before?’ she asks.

‘In college. I was the paper’s editor in chief.’

Varya nearly laughs. Annie knew exactly what she was doing. Luke Van Galder is a kid.

‘It must be an exciting job. Lots of travel. No two assignments the same,’ she says, though in truth these things do not excite her at all. ‘What did you study in college?’

‘Biology.’

‘So did I. Where at?’

‘St. Olaf. Small liberal arts college outside of Minneapolis. I’m from a farming town in Wisconsin. It was close enough to home.’

Varya’s outfit is appropriate for the lab, which is devoid of natural light and always cold, but not for the outdoors. The heat is making her sweat, so she’s relieved when they reach the main facility, where the grass is manicured and the trees newly planted. Varya leads Luke across a circular driveway and through a revolving door.

‘Holy crap,’ Luke says when they emerge indoors.

The lobby of the Drake is palatial, with two-story ceilings and limestone tree planters the size of kiddie pools. Its floors are made of imported white marble and stretch as wide as a high school cafeteria. One tour group huddles around the western wall, where videos and interactive exhibits play on flat screens. A second group is being led toward the elevators. The elevators are spectacular – modern glass and chrome cubes that look out over the San Pablo Bay – but the only staff member who uses them is a seventy-two-year-old researcher, wheelchair-bound due to rheumatoid arthritis, who studies the nematode worm C. elegans. Everyone else takes the stairs unless ill or injured, even those who work on the eighth floor.

‘This way,’ says Varya. ‘We can talk in the atrium.’

Luke lags behind her, staring. The atrium, modeled after the Louvre, is a glass triangle that faces the Pacific Ocean and Mount Tamalpais. It also functions as a café, with round tables and a juice bar whose line is already ten tourists long. Varya stops at the farthest table and sits, hooking her purse over one of the chair’s arms.

‘It isn’t always this crowded,’ she says. ‘We hold tours for the public on Monday mornings.’