Хлоя Бенджамин: The Immortalists

They began together: before any of them were people, they were eggs, four out of their mother’s millions. Astonishing, that they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws – like strangers caught for seconds in the same elevator.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I love them. I do my work in tribute to them.’

‘You don’t think any part of it is selfishness?’

‘What?’

‘There are two major theories about how to stop aging,’ Luke parrots. ‘The first is that you should suppress the reproductive system. And the second theory is that you should suppress caloric intake.’

‘I should never have told you anything. You’re too young to understand; you’re a child.’

‘I’m a child? I am?’ Luke laughs sharply, and Varya recoils. ‘You’re the one trying to convince yourself the world is rational, like there’s anything you can do to put a dent in death. You’re telling yourself that they died because of x , and you lived because of y , and that those things are mutually exclusive. That way you can believe you’re smarter; that way you can believe you’re different. But you’re just as irrational as the rest of them. You call yourself a scientist, you use words like longevity and healthful aging , but you know the most basic story of existence – everything that lives must die – and you want to rewrite it.’

He leans closer still, until their faces are inches apart. She cannot look at him. He is too near, he wants too much from her – she can smell his breath, a bacterial fudge cut by the Genmaicha’s roasted grain.

‘What do you want from your life?’ he asks, and when she is silent, he grabs her wrist and squeezes. ‘You want to continue on like this forever? Like this?’

‘And what do you want? To save me? Does it make you feel good, to be the savior? Make you feel like a man?’ She’s struck him: his hand drops, and his eyes shine. ‘Don’t lecture me; you don’t have the right, and you certainly don’t have the experience.’

‘How would you know?’

‘You’re twenty-six years old. You grew up on a goddamn cherry farm. You had two healthy parents and a big brother who loved you so much he let you have his precious hanky.’

She edges out from behind the door of the refrigerator and walks to the front door. Later she’ll try to sort out what happened – later she’ll turn the conversation over and over in her mind, wondering how she might have saved it before it plummeted for good – but now she wants him gone. If he stays any longer, she’ll do something terrible.

But Luke doesn’t leave. ‘He didn’t let me have it. He died.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Varya, tightly.

‘Don’t you want to know how? Or do you only care about your own tragedies?’

The truth is that she does not want to know; the truth is that she has no room for anyone else’s pain. But Luke, framed in the arched doorway between the living room and the kitchen, has already begun to speak.

‘The thing you have to know about my brother is that he looked out for me. My parents had always wanted another child, but they couldn’t have one, and so they got me. Asher was ten when I was adopted. He could have been jealous. But he wasn’t jealous: he was kind, and generous, and he took care of me. We lived in New York at the time, upstate. When we moved to Wisconsin we had more land but a smaller house, and we had to share a room. Asher was thirteen; I was a toddler. What middle schooler wants to share a room with a three-year-old? But he never complained.

‘I was the difficult one. I was the brat. I wanted to see how far I could push them: Are you still glad you got me? If I do this, will you want to send me back? Once I ran out of the house and wriggled under the porch and stayed there for hours, because I wanted to hear them looking for me. Another time I went with Asher to the trees and hid right when it was time to leave with the harvester. This became a game we did, me hiding at exactly the wrong time, the most annoying time, and Asher always put down what he was doing and looked for me and then when he found me we’d start working.’

She puts a hand out, as if to stop him. She does not want to hear what comes next, she can’t stand it – her body is already crawling with dread – but Luke ignores her, continuing on.

‘One day we went to the grain bins. At that time we had chickens and cows, and in April, the grain had to be checked for clumps. Asher lowered himself into the bin. I was supposed to stand on a platform at the top and watch him so I could call for help if anything went wrong. Once he was inside he looked up at me and smiled. He was crouched on the top of the crust; it was yellow, it looked like sand. “Don’t you dare,” he said. And I smiled back at him and climbed down the ladder and ran.

‘I hid between the tractors, because that’s where he knew to come looking for me. But he didn’t come. After a couple of minutes I knew there was something wrong, that I’d done something bad, but I was scared. So I stayed there. Asher had brought two picks into the grain bin; he used them to break up the clumps. When I left he’d tried to use them to climb out. But they made too many holes. He sank within the first five minutes. But it took longer for him to be crushed, and then suffocated. They found pieces of corn in his lungs.’

For seconds, Varya is silent. She stares at Luke and he at her. The air feels charged and weighty, as though only the force of their gaze is keeping something aloft between them. Then Varya falters.

‘Please go,’ she says. Her hand on the door is slick; she’ll have to wipe it down when he leaves.

‘Are you kidding me? That’s all you have to say?’ he asks, his voice cracking. ‘Unbelievable.’ He walks to the couch and retrieves his shoes, shoving his feet – his floppy-eared, gray-toed socks – inside them. Varya opens the door. It’s all she can do not to scream at him, scream after him, when he shoves past her and down the stairs.

She watches from the window as he walks to his car and speeds out of the lot with a jolt. Then she grabs her keys and does the same. She tracks him for two lights before she loses her nerve. What could she possibly say? At the next stop sign, she does a U-turn and goes the opposite way, to the lab.

Annie isn’t there. Neither is Johanna, or any of the other techs. Even Clyde has left for the night. Varya walks to the vivarium – indignant screeching from the monkeys, who are frightened by the suddenness of her entrance – and finds Frida’s cage.

She thinks Frida is sleeping before she sees that the monkey’s eyes are open. She lies on her side with her left forearm in her mouth.

Frida has engaged in self-mutilation before – the bite on her thigh, for example – but she has always hidden the behavior. Now she scrabbles shamelessly at her own bone, the flesh around it a mangled gash of blood and tissue.

‘Come on,’ barks Varya, ‘come here,’ and opens the door of the cage. Frida looks up but does not move, so Varya crosses to the opposite wall and retrieves a leash, which she hooks around Frida’s neck and uses to pull the monkey out onto the floor. The other animals scream, and Frida turns to look at them, wild with sudden awareness. She sits and hugs her arms around her knees, rocking, so Varya has no choice but to tug and tug until she is dragging Frida’s body across the floor. She is nauseated by Frida’s frailty. Formerly eleven pounds, the monkey is now only seven and barely able to hold herself erect. At the next yank, she keels over, onto her back, and the leash begins to choke her. The other monkeys increase their pitch – they sense Frida’s weakness, they are excited by it – and Varya, frenzied, reaches down to lift the creature in her arms.