The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
“No. I’ve simply never—not since then, I haven’t—”
She inhales sharply, a soundless hiccup. When Luke grasps her meaning, he startles. “You haven’t had a relationship since the professor? You’ve had nothing?”
“Not nothing. But a relationship? No.”
She prepares herself for his pity. Instead, he looks indignant, as if Varya has deprived herself of something essential.
“Aren’t you lonely?”
“Sometimes. Isn’t everyone?” she says, and smiles.
Abruptly, Luke stands. She thinks he’s going to the bathroom, but he walks into the kitchen and stands at the sink. He presses his palms to the counter; his shoulders are hunched like Frida’s. In front of the sink, on the windowsill, is her father’s watch. After Klara’s death, Daniel went to the trailer in which Klara and Raj had been living. Raj had collected items that he thought the Gold family would want: an early business card; Saul’s gold watch; an old burlesque program, which showed Klara Sr. dragging a group of men on leashes. It wasn’t much, but Daniel was grateful for the gesture. He called Varya from the airport.
“The trailer, on the other hand. It’s not that it was filthy—it was fairly nice, as trailers go. But the fact of the trailer itself.” Daniel’s voice was furtive, almost muffled. “This seventies-era Gulf Stream, and Klara lived there for over a year”—much of that while docked at a trailer park called King’s Row, he added, as if to add insult to injury. Under Klara’s side of the bed, he’d found a small group of strawberry stems. At first he mistook it for a clump of grass, brought inside on somebody’s shoe. They were feathery with mold; he threw them away in the rec room. But he would send Varya the watch, which had been Simon’s before it was Klara’s and Saul’s before it was Simon’s.
“It’s a man’s watch,” Varya told him. “You should keep it.”
“No,” said Daniel, in the same, covert tone, and she understood that he had seen something that unsettled him, something he did not want to carry home.
“Luke?” she calls now.
He coughs and reaches for the handle of the fridge. “Mind if I—?”
Stop, she thinks, but he’s already there, he has pulled the door open and seen it.
“You keep the monkeys’ food in here?” he calls, though when he turns to her, his bewilderment is already giving way to understanding.
The door hangs open. From the living room, Varya can see the rows of prepacked meals inside. On the top shelf are her breakfasts, mixed fruit in plastic bags with two tablespoons of high-fiber cereal. On the lower shelf are her lunches: nuts with beans or, on weekends, a slab of tofu or tuna. Her dinners are in the freezer, cooked weekly and then divided into foil-wrapped portions. Taped to the side of the refrigerator, the side that faces Luke, is an Excel spreadsheet with each meal’s caloric count, as well as its vitamin and mineral content.
In the first year of her restriction, she lost fifteen percent of her body weight. Her clothes became baggy, and her face took on the narrow insistence of a greyhound’s. She observed these changes with curious detachment: she was proud to be able to resist the temptation of sweets, carbs, fat.
“Why do you do this?” Luke asks.
“Why do you think?” she says, but she balks when she sees him coming toward her. “Why are you angry? Is it not my right to decide how to live?”
“Because I’m sad,” says Luke, thickly. “Because to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost? Of course, your monkeys never had the choice.”
It is impossible to convey the pleasure of routine to someone who does not find routine pleasurable, so Varya does not try. The pleasure is not that of sex or love but of certainty. If she were more religious, and Christian, she could have been a nun: what safety, to know what prayer or chore you’ll be doing in forty years at two o’clock on a Tuesday.
“I’m making them healthier,” she says. “They’ll live longer lives because of me.”
“But not better ones.” Luke comes to stand over her, and she presses back against the couch. “They don’t want cages and food pellets. They want light, play, heat, texture—danger! All this bullshit about choosing survival over life, as if we ever have control over either one. It’s no wonder you feel nothing when you see them in their cages. You feel nothing for yourself.”
“And how should I go about my life? Should I live like Simon, who cared for no one but himself? Should I live in a fantasy world, like Klara?”
She peels away from the couch, careful not to touch him, and strides into the kitchen. There she reopens the door of the refrigerator and begins to restack the bags of food that jostled when Luke closed the door.
“You blame them,” he says, following her, and Varya turns toward him the anger she feels for her siblings, the anger that simmers constantly inside her. If they had only been smarter, more cautious. If they had shown self-awareness, shown humility—if they had shown patience! If they had not lived as though life were a mad dash toward some unearned climax; if they had walked instead of fucking run.
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 leav
“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.
Frida drops her head to Varya’s shoulder and rests her arm on Varya’s breast. Varya gasps. She wears no protective gear, and the wound, which releases a foul odor of decay, sticks to her sweater. She begins to jog, Frida’s forehead bouncing into her clavicle, and enters the kitchen. The puzzle feeders are stacked against the wall, but Varya wants the loose pellets, the huge bins of open food, and the treats that are given to the unrestricted monkeys: apples and bananas and oranges, grapes, raisins, peanuts, broccoli, shaved coconut, each in their own bucket. She pulls out the buckets and bins and sets them on the floor with Frida on her waist. Then she puts Frida down before the troughs.
“Go,” she snaps. “Eat!” but Frida stares blankly at the feast. Varya urges more loudly, pointing, and Frida unfurls her left hand. Her legs are splayed on the floor like a toddler’s, her knees bent; the soles of her feet are soft and gray. Varya watches greedily as Frida reaches for the raisins, but before her hand enters the bin, she changes course and brings her forearm to her face. She opens her mouth, finds the wound, and chews.
Varya reaches down to pull Frida’s hand away and sobs. The wound is matted with hair but very deep. Frida may have cracked the bone.
“Eat,” cries Varya. She crouches to reach into the bin of raisins and brings her hand to Frida’s lips. Frida snuffles. Slowly, slowly, she takes the first raisin in her mouth. Varya uses both hands to scoop again. Soon her fingers are covered in flecks of food and flesh, but she continues, reaching now into the bin of coconut, the peanuts, the grapes. “Oh, good,” says Varya; “Oh, my baby,” words she has not used in decades, words she used only once—Luke crowning, her body splitting to accommodate his sudden life.
When Frida turns away from Varya’s hand, Varya tempts her with another kind of fruit or a differently shaped pellet. Frida eats these, too, and then she vomits: clear mucus, bile, a river of raisins. Varya keens. She wipes Frida’s mouth, her patchy scalp, and her salmon-colored, translucent ears, for the animal is sweating. Vomit flows hotly over Varya’s pants. She must call the veterinarian. But at the thought of calling the veterinarian—what Dr. Mitchell will ask Varya, what Varya will have to explain—she cries harder.
So she will hold Frida, until Dr. Mitchell comes; she will comfort her, she will make Frida feel better. She drags the animal onto her lap. Frida’s eyes are glassy and unfocused, but she wriggles, she wants to be left alone. Varya squeezes more tightly. “Shh-shh,” she whispers. “Shh-shh.” Still Frida struggles to get away, and still Varya clings. She is over, she is done for. What does it matter? She wants to hold something, she wants to be held. She does not let go until Frida brings her face to Varya’s, her lips soft against Varya’s chin, and bites down.
35.
Varya did not call the vet. The next morning, Annie found her and Frida asleep in the kitchen—Varya with her back against a stack of boxes, Frida on a top shelf—and screamed.
In the hospital, Varya thought she would die: first from something contract
With each day she ate the hospital food, she grew more alert. She had not inhabited her body so wholly since childhood. Now the world rushed toward her in all its texture and sensation. She felt the acid misery of each wound-cleaning and the papery brush of the hospital sheets, which she was too depleted to inspect. When the nurse drew close, Varya smelled a shampoo she’s sure Klara once used. Occasionally she saw Annie sleeping on a chair pulled up to her bed, and once, in a moment of coherence, she asked Annie not to tell Gertie what had happened. Annie looked grim and disapproving, but she nodded. Varya would tell Gertie someday, but telling her about the bite meant telling her about everything else, and she could not do that yet.
Frida had been flown to an animal hospital in Davis. Her bone had cracked, as Varya feared. A surgeon amputated her arm at the shoulder. But the only way to know whether Frida had rabies was to cut off her head and test the brain. Varya pleaded for leniency: she herself had no symptoms, and if Frida did have rabies, the monkey would die within days.
Two weeks later, Varya meets Annie at a café on Redwood Boulevard. Upon entering, Annie smiles—she wears street clothes, slim black pants with a striped tee and clogs, her hair loose—but her discomfort is obvious. Varya orders a vegetarian wrap. Ordinarily, she would not eat, but her experiment was undone in the hospital, and she hasn’t found the conviction to start over.
“I talked to Bob,” Annie says when the waiter leaves. “He’ll let you resign voluntarily.”
Bob is Drake’s CEO. Varya does not want to know how he reacted when told that she put a twenty-year experiment in jeopardy. Frida was in the restricted group. In feeding her, Varya nullified Frida’s data and compromised the analysis as a whole: with Frida’s results omitted, the number of restricted monkeys to controls will be skewed. All this is not to mention the publicity disaster that will arise should word get out that a high-ranking Drake researcher suffered a breakdown, endangering staff and animals in the process. When Varya thinks of how hard Annie must have pushed for Bob to allow a voluntary resignation, she fills with shame.