I
In circles less public than private and spheres of influence obscure rather than subject to the light of inquiry many consider Todd Mortimer the greatest mind of his age, a mathematical, musical, and technological genius whose output, shared with but a select few whenever he arrives in civilized ports and calls upon the children or colleagues of acquaintances past, inspires others to publish previously unknown manuscripts, propose delicately intuitive proofs to nearly forgotten puzzles, and pose new questions about old problems. A salon in Rio, a post-conference reception in Boston, and sauna near Helsinki count among the most recent sightings.
Renee seeks him out in the first class section of what had once been the true Orient Express, on route from Istanbul to Vienna, from Turkish coffee to Viennese coffee culture.
"A man walks into a bar."
The pale blond man dressed in a dark slender suit and wearing stylish, round-lensed sunglasses puts down his knife and fork. "What sort of bar?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Does to me. Dive bar, cocktail bar, sports bar?" He smiles a narrow smile stretched across a gaunt face.
"It's just the setup, followed by escalation, repetition, and finally, a reveal. The type of bar does not matter."
"Tell it again."
"A guy walks into a bar. He orders a beer." She sits across from him and unwraps the silk scarf from her head and neck, revealing chestnut hair and unblemished tanned skin. Strong and practical yet spidery fingers scurry through purse contents, retrieving a narrow and finely worked mahogany box, which she pushes across the beige plastic table until it rests beside his salad-laden plate. "You should eat more seafood."
"I do not care for fish." He opens the box, lifts out the pen, and accepts the gift with a nod.
"Salmon, sardines ... filled with Omega-3. Brain food."
"Small talk, chit-chat, food and drink. Aren't you going to say hello?"
"Hello. Nice to see you -- it has been ... a while."
"That it has. Wasn't the last time also Vienna?"
"Different circumstances, no?" She turns her chair, crosses her legs, and leans back, elegant yet relaxed in a way befitting an elderly matron, not such a young looking woman. "You are not an easy man to find, you know."
"I like to stay on the move. Things have become ... more difficult ... in recent years. Biometric passports, digital cameras at everywhere, increasing video surveillance, interlinked databases. Too many links, the mere mass of data suggesting structure, even syntax, and primitive semantics emerging from that. And you know, I once proposed, well, gave some suggestions, let us say, about the panopticon -- at the time it was about prison reform. They never built it, you know, but it was such a fascinating idea. That is not why you are here, about such an old idea."
"This is new, me seeking you out -- I always had the fixed address, you were on the move, traveling, learning, interfering, but as you said, enough data out there, and a few inferences could be made. I want your data, your learning." A waiter arrives, she orders, both their faces soften as the conversation turns casual from calculated. In time the InterCity enters the suburbs and then the city, slowing as it passes first gardens, then blocks of apartments, on its way to the West Bahnhof. "Come with me?" she asks as the train halts, and instead of continuing on his way to Paris Todd joins Renee in what had been Augustine's outpost along the Danube, one of many places along the border between Rome and the barbarians. "You're looking anemic, you know. You need more iron in your diet, more red meat."
"You providing the flesh?"
For the first time a smile, soft and expressed through the eyes, comes to her face. "Thought you'd never ask."
II
The ceiling plaster bubbles and forms a ring of nipples; in the center blossoms a smokey glass fixture behind which sleep three bulbs. Against the far wall hangs not a mirror but a hastily painted reproduction of a famous still life, stripped of the allegorical and symbolic codes of the Dutch original, in which in the shadows swarmed flies around overripe fruit, molding bread, and rotting vegetables. Morning sunlight filtered through gauzy white curtains casts a web of light and dark across the antique wood floor, the bed, and the bare and intertwined limbs of slumbering bodies.
"There is no going back." Renee sweeps strings of hair from her eyes and rolls onto her back, observing the ceiling breasts.
"They tell the tale of the fall from grace, of the first man and first woman expelled from the garden. They never found a way to return, but they told their children, who told theirs, and on down the line. And so they had to travel around the world, seeking to reenter paradise via the back door."
"I've decided to have a child."
"This is news." His astonishment shows.
"Five years ago I met a man."
"That part is not new."
"He and I are not alike, less so than you and I, but for the first time in ages I found myself falling in love. We moved in together, then purchased a house, contemplated marriage, but I knew he wanted a family and from the beginning he knew that I did not. I did not tell him that I couldn't, only that I wouldn't, and soon I found myself with an actual Pill prescription from my doctor to continue the ruse, and curious about the effects I took them."
"It has to end."
"In tears. True. It must, that I know, but I wanted it to last longer, and he felt that if it lasted long enough the mythical biological clock would tick, that I would change my mind. Then the unexpected happened." She props herself on her right elbow and explores his textured torso with a finger, "Those hormone pills did effect me, less physiologically and more emotionally, and I had an urge to conceive."
"Hadn't you tried and failed before?"
"I knew so much less about my body then. But now, I knew I had no viable eggs, so donors. The first implant lasted a few weeks, the second a bit longer, but the third made it nearly to term before being stillborn and deformed in a I way I do not wish to describe." Renee shudders and pulls away, rolls out of bed, strolls to the window, and sits in silhouette. "Mark -- that was his name -- he suggested adoption, but the illusion was broken and I left."
"And this is why you sought me out?" Todd stands behind her at the window. "Comfort? Familiarity?"
"Your help." They both reflect, their interactions are always so stilted.
III
"And your first memory?" Renee sits beside him on the transatlantic flight, staring out the window, at the clouds, at the breaks and the deep pillars of white that stretch longingly toward the ocean below. "Ever since we learned to fly," she sighs, "clouds lost their magic."
"Winter, perhaps age two or three." Unlike Renee he avoids the bright reflected morning light and focuses on the device in his hands, on which he continues to tinker. "And the fire. The house burning. Those of us who lived fled, or perhaps the reverse."
"Is that why for so long you visited death upon others?" Her voice is more curiosity than accusation, informed by a century of psychotherapy and trauma as diagnostic paradigm. She looks up; he looks down.
"You mean the boats and rats?"
"For example. When I first heard of the fire in London, I thought of you as well."
"That fire was not mine. As for the plague, for years I told myself it was a prank that escalated, that I simply lost control. I got sick, too, you know. The fever, the black swelling."
"But you got better."
"We always did, always do. But I did not want to, I hoped that perhaps that time it would be final, that I would not get up again."
"I always hated the pain, not the dying itself," she whispers.
"The drowning --"
"-- and washing ashore, unable to breath until I cough up enough water but feeling the tightness in my chest the entire time."
"And fire --"
"-- I think that could end it all, but each time I tried it, each time, and there were many, I screamed, howled, even as I melted, and pulled away, threw myself to the ground to put out the flames, and wept once I again had tears."
"And you could not share it, for until you healed no one could or would set eyes upon you, and after you healed there were no scars, no history or evidence?"
"I think that is why I stopped trying to end it all, why I settled into a series of comfortable lifestyles." She relates this and tales of her earlier trips from Istanbul to Vienna, to Venice, to Florence, the trafficking of scrolls and scholars. "It was so long after the boat incident, you realize, but in part it was in response to you, to undo the damage you did, but, I suppose, also an attempt on my part to live, even if it had to be anonymously."
They fall back into silence. A meal -- in beef, chicken, and vegetarian varieties -- is served; glasses of water, wine, and soft drinks are distributed and then collected; a movie, edited for content, plays. Passengers stumble aft to the lavatories; turbulence leads to the lighting of fasten-seatbelt lights; more beverages are served and another movie follows the first.
"Every time I come back, I remember it, the first moments of consciousness, of reawakening, but I do not remember the first time, my birth. I want to remember that."
IV
In San Francisco they leave the airport and begin a search for Joshua.
"I know that he is not the first, but of those of us we know, he is the oldest, isn't he?"
"He endures it the best, but learned to keep himself apart, which is why you need my help, isn't it?"
"Finding him, yes. And because of what we had. I never forgot that, and I do not blame you." They travel by car, down the coast. She drives but he provides the directions.
"If we had not undergone the change, we would not be here to discuss it now --"
"-- but we could have been together, we could have had our own children. And they could have had children, down the line."
"Looking for the backdoor to paradise, you mean?"
"It's a modern conceit of mine, I did not think in such a way back then, I needed Milton and Kleist, I needed Latin to die and vulgar languages to flourish." They stop at a roadside vegetable market near Half-Moon Bay, then further south in a forested park, and then later near Monterey. "Joshua had children, I think, but from before the change. I think he used to visit them, keep track of them over the centuries."
"My flesh rots." There is a sudden bitterness in her voice. "I think of it as a pear, an overripe giant pear in a sweltering room, a cellar, musty, grimy, mottled skin cracking, lush flesh leaking, bugs over me, inside me. The human body is so full of parasites, intestinal bacteria, the tape worms, the yeast, the fungus under nails, and these things fail to take hold, and my meat they cannot eat. I am barren to them. My cells still divide and do not suffer from telomere shortening, I produce undifferentiated stem cells that regenerate damaged organs and appendages, and my immune system defeats all infections. I am a living cancer." Renee's fingers grasp the wheel, her knuckles whiten. "I did not ask for this undeath."
With Joshua, Renee hopes, they can combine his knowledge of the human body with Todd's technological genius. "I have to do this, you know. It surprises me that you, that Joshua, that any of us are still sane. It's not all biochemical, not all cells and altered DNA. There are the plaques, shale-like buildups in the brain, the prion disorders my white cells cannot defeat, that my stem cells cannot regenerate." Her recitation of diseases to which even immortality does not provide immunity fades as the miles go by. "We become real zombies."
Half way down the coast near Cambria they find the man, a mixture of hermit, sculptor, and guru, lean but muscular, bearded but groomed. Nudes fill his home overlooking the surf, but in the basement bubble beakers. "The famous still life paintings," he explains, "come from an age when most still believed in spontaneous generation, of life from mere material. Only later did we learn that not only was that nonsense, but that every living cell is a daughter cell, its mother a daughter, and so on, back through time to those original prokaryotes. We still have not become creators of life from nothing."
For all his lifetimes spent in study of the human form, Joshua informs Renee with soft regret, even with the newest technology he cannot remake her human. His tubes produce only proteins, his sculptures never move on their own, yet gears in Todd's mind spin in harmony and plans take form. "The mind matters," he mutters, "and even when old cells die, skin is shed, as long as the mind remains we think of ourselves as our self."
V
When Renee's body dies they reduce it to ashes and observe it for weeks, and only when after this time no sign of life emerges from the grey dust does Todd fully disassemble the wires, electrodes, and circuitry that had connected her nervous system to that of a fetus growing in the womb of a young woman named Lily, a friend of Joshua, though Todd safeguards the design in case he, too, choses a new life. Joshua knows that his own time has not yet come. Lily separates from her boyfriend but choses to keep the child, and she returns home to her mother in that old Pennsylvania steel town. Todd leaves for Paris and returns to the nomadic life.
Lily's mother throws a baby shower, inviting neighbors and friends, and shortly thereafter Lily experiences contractions two and a half minutes apart, though she has weeks left before the due date. When her water breaks her family rushes her to the hospital for an early delivery.
Hours later, reawakened, Renee experiences her rebirth.