Sammy and Catherine arrived in Belize City in the spring of 2002. Ostensibly, they were there for a chapter in Sammy’s book on supercentenarians—people who live past the age of 110. He’d arranged to witness the autopsy of Anna Flowers Magaña, a native Belizean who had, before her death, claimed to be 123 years old.
A driver was waiting for them outside the airport. He was big, bordering on fat, and maybe of Indian descent, maybe Middle Eastern. He took Catherine’s bags and handed her a Tupperware container filled with oatmeal cookies. “Thank you for arranging all of this,” the driver said to Sammy. His accent was British, his voice slightly too high for his size. He looked like a bass but sounded more like a tenor. He wore khaki pants with sandals, a cotton button-down with several buttons open. His eyelashes were very long.
“Thanks for the cookies,” Sammy said.
In the car, Sammy and Catherine sat close together in the backseat. They drove west out of the city toward the Cayo District, but the driver didn’t know where he was going. At Princess Margaret Drive, he rode the roundabout three full times before picking a turn at random.
“Sorry,” the driver said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow.”
“You drive like it,” Catherine said.
“You work with Dr. Radkin?” Sammy asked.
“Yes. I don’t even own a car.”
Sammy had paid for Joseph Radkin to conduct the autopsy. As the leading expert in the field of gerontology, Radkin had made a lot of money promoting himself as the man most likely to defeat aging. He traveled the world conducting autopsies of supercentenarians with his research group, the Association for Gerontology Exploration.
The driver pulled onto Central American Boulevard and straight into a police checkpoint. They waited in a row of cars. The driver watched Sammy and Catherine in the rearview. “Do either of you have a watch?”
Catherine held up her wrist. “Are we about to bribe someone? Because I would be okay with that.”
The driver laughed. “I just want you to time something.”
They pulled up to the gate. A policeman in sunglasses approached the car, hand on hip.
“Either he’ll wave us through immediately,” the driver said, “or he’ll stare at us in silence for exactly thirty seconds and then wave us through. Time it. You’ll see.”
Sammy and Catherine exchanged a look. In his journal, Sammy would complain that Radkin had sent a moron to pick them up. The policeman walked to the driver’s side window. He waved them on immediately.
“Damn. You would have been impressed if he’d waited the thirty seconds, yeah?”
“We can circle around and do it again,” Catherine offered.
“I’m sorry,” Sammy said. “Who are you, again?”
The driver turned half in his seat to smile at Sammy. “Sadiq.”
Sammy, Catherine, and Sadiq arrived after sundown at their resort hotel—an upscale lodge along Privassion Creek. Radkin would only fund these trips himself if the deceased’s date of birth could be supported with valid documentation, but Anna Flowers Magaña didn’t have anything like that. So Sammy lured Radkin to Belize with a free rain-forest vacation. The resort was situated in a pocket of the Maya Mountains, at the edge of a forest preserve. Palm trees and kraabu shrubs lined the gravel driveway. A row of thatched-roof cottages horseshoed the infinity pool. Catherine and Sammy would be staying in the Honeymoon Cabana.
Sadiq led them to the main lodge. There, in the dining room, Radkin was holding court for a wide circle of resort staff. It was Sammy’s first sight of him in person. He was short and thin, dressed in khaki shorts and a powder-blue polo shirt. He wore one pair of glasses on his nose, another perched on his head, and yet a third hooked in the pocket of his button-down. His graying beard couldn’t quite hide the craters of severe childhood acne, and his mouth seemed always to be moving, regardless of whether he was speaking.
“I want you to imagine,” he was telling his audience, “that your body is a book. And here is the first line of your book, listen close: ‘Year after year and night on night I keep / On the Atreidæ’s roof, like house-dog true, / My weary watch and scan the host of heaven— / Bright powers that shine along the sky.’” Radkin surveyed his audience and switched out one pair of glasses for another. “I trust that someone recognizes this passage?”
No one spoke.
“Correct. Your body’s book was written by Aeschylus. But we know what happens to a book over time. First you spill some coffee on the pages, and the stain blots out one of the words. Instead of ‘on the Atreidæ’s roof’ we now have only ‘on the roof.’ No biggie, okay? That word is hard to say and no one’s going to miss it.
“Years pass. Now the ink begins to fade, hastened perhaps by the acids in that coffee accident you’ve long forgotten. Now we lose ‘like house-dog true.’ It’s unreadable. And we’re a little sad at this point because that’s a lovely phrase, a lovely analogy for a man who feels affection but lacks true freedom of affection. C’est la vie. The sentence still makes sense.
“We’re getting older now. ‘Weary watch’ fades to ‘watch,’ and those ‘bright powers’ lose their brightness. You’re ninety years old—a good long life—and all that’s left, basically, of that long, poetic sentence, is ‘I am on the roof.’ And you’re just waiting for any of those last five words to disappear and for the sentence to lose its meaning. That’s my nice way of saying time’s up, curtains, you’re dead.
“And here’s the amazing thing. Whenever that last word does fade away—let’s say you’re in the hospital and you spill some Jell-O on it—the doctors will say that’s how you died. Cause of death: spilled his Jell-O. But we know better. We know that the final spill was just the last in a long series of spills that started with that hot cup of coffee.
“My friends and I, my friends who are doctors, call this informational entropy. That’s just a fancy way of saying that aging is a loss of information. Right now you lovely young people are like a very complicated, very beautiful sentence—a sentence written by Aeschylus, by Melville, by Walter Abish. As you get to be my age, that sentence becomes simpler and simpler—if you want the truth, we’re talking not about sentences but intricate physiologic processes—until one small accident, an accident you would hardly notice as a twenty-year-old, up and kills you as a ninety-year-old. What we’re trying to do, myself and the AGE, is figure out how to restore those words as you lose them, how to retrace those missing words with new, fresh ink.”
Radkin’s assistants initiated a polite round of applause. The resort staff eyed the doors. They had horses to feed and cabanas to restock with champagne. Lizards the color of pool water climbed the walls and puffed their necks at one another. Sadiq led Sammy and Catherine through the tables and caught Radkin’s attention with a raised hand. Radkin grabbed a glass of wine from his table and moved to meet them halfway. As he neared, Sammy could see that he was wearing, below his shorts, a set of midnight-blue shin pads.
Radkin clasped Sammy’s hand and said, “I hope you have strong stomachs. Tomorrow is going to be gross.”
Sadiq opened the hatch of the cooler and pulled out the corpse of Anna Flowers Magaña. He wheeled the body bag to the autopsy table, where Sammy, Catherine, and Radkin were waiting in scrubs and protective masks. The city morgue had just been renovated, and it sparkled in stainless steel like a new American kitchen. The renovations came after a lawsuit in which a woman claimed her husband’s body had been stored in the same unit as another corpse, their unripe faces pressed together in a sallow kiss.
Sammy scribbled notes on a legal pad as Sadiq unzipped the body bag. Catherine watched through her fingers. Anna’s face appeared first, her eyes and mouth closed beneath a curly bob of chalk-white hair. Her thin lips, unsupported by teeth, had collapsed inward and left her cheeks hollow. Photographs of Anna as a young woman showed a dark-haired, fair-skinned Belizean, the daughter of a white mother and a father who, before his retirement, had been the only trained fireman on Caye Caulker.
Sadiq pulled the zipper down to her toes, exposing her body. Her arms were hairless and thin; they finished at the shoulder in a knotted mass of bone. Her breasts lay small and flat across her chest. Her hands had been taken by arthritis. The pinkies bent inward toward the thumbs, pulling all of the other fingers down with them. To ease the pain of this, for the past three decades Anna had kept her hands balled in a fist.
Radkin turned on a digital voice recorder and announced the start of the autopsy. As he did, Sadiq slid his arms under the body, with one arm at the buttocks and the other at the base of the neck. He grunted, lifted with his knees, and dumped the body with a thud onto the autopsy table.
“Oh,” Catherine said from behind her hands.
Sadiq placed a rubber block under Anna’s back, arching her spine and revealing the outlines of her ribs against the skin. She reminded Sammy of the sacrificial sculptures he’d seen in the ruins outside Mexico City, those little Chacmools with their bellies offered to the gods. Sadiq removed a large scalpel from the instrument tray and, with no hesitation, plunged it into Anna’s left shoulder. He leveraged his weight onto the handle and guided the blade down under the curve of the breasts. The sound of the incision was like scissors passing through wet paper. Blood emerged at the wound and cascaded down the rib cage into the spigot of the autopsy table. Sadiq terminated the incision at the xiphoid process and moved around the table to draw an identical line from the other shoulder.
When the two cuts had joined below the sternum, Sadiq brought the blade straight down toward the belly button. Here the sound gained, somehow, additional moisture—this was a dish sponge squeezed again and again over an empty sink. Anna’s stomach wept blood. Sadiq carried the scalpel all the way to the pubic bone.
Radkin had acquired a smaller blade. He pressed his thumb into the wound at the sternum and began to peel the skin up toward Anna’s face, slicing at the muscles and connective tissue.
“Fuck me,” Sammy whispered.
“Worst vacation ever,” said Catherine.
Radkin continued this way until the chest flap had been pulled entirely over Anna’s head, hiding her face and exposing the bones of her rib cage. She looked like someone who had swallowed a live hand grenade. Sammy came in close to observe the strap muscles of the neck. They reminded him of the cordage on a sailboat—sinewy and strong, tangled and overlapping in an intricate bouquet that only made sense to an expert.
To crack the ribs, Radkin used what looked to Sammy like common pruning shears—the kind his mother used to trim her azalea bushes. Sadiq followed behind with the scalpel. They attacked the rib cage and then lifted it off the body, lickety-split, as if they were removing the case from a desktop computer. Anna’s heart and lungs came into view.
The human heart, Don once told Sammy, is like the Grand Canyon. You’ve heard a lot about it, you’ve seen a million pictures, but when you’re finally there in person, you still forget to blink. This was Sammy’s first. He circled the body. A healthy heart looks like a bloody biceps, all flexed muscle and coiled energy. You’d want it by your side in a bar fight. But this was the heart of the world’s oldest woman. The intricacy was there, but none of the power. Anna’s heart resembled leftover turkey.
Radkin and Sadiq removed the organs en masse and dissected them at the foot of the autopsy table. Sadiq opened the intestines and emptied their contents into the sink. It was as though he had tipped a Porta Potti upside down. The smell of shit and bile geysered out of the drain. Radkin and Sadiq continued, undisturbed, to butcher the organs. They took tissue samples for microscopic evaluation.
Later, they’d get the results: diverticulitis in the colon, fibrosis and atrophy of the pancreas, acute congestion of the liver. In the lungs, bilateral bronchopneumonia with pleural adhesions. Pyelonephritis of the kidneys and a trabeculated bladder. None of this was surprising. Her body showed the expected, desiccated wear of a long life. She was born in the nineteenth century. She had seen her parents die, her brothers die, and four of her five children. She had seen her first husband ripped in half, literally, by the hurricane of 1908. She did not age gracefully, and she did not see her longevity as a gift. She asked her daughter, months before she died, if she had been forgotten by God.
After they’d finished with the torso, Radkin and Sadiq came for Anna’s brain. Sadiq sliced from ear to ear and then scalped her. The skull came into view. Radkin applied the electric saw. As Sadiq returned to the sink, he slipped and dropped his scalpel. It clattered to the floor near Radkin’s feet. Instinctively, Sammy knelt to retrieve it, and so did Sadiq. They looked at each other. Sadiq’s eyes were small but expressive. He smiled beneath his mask. Sammy started to feel something, and then, from above them, Radkin turned off the saw and separated the top half of the skull from the bottom. There was a loud sucking sound, and Sadiq and Sammy stood together to watch Radkin place the brain in a jar.
That night, Sammy and Catherine caravanned with Radkin’s crew to a party at Altun Ha, a set of Mayan ruins located an hour north of Belize City. The governor-general (a significant financial backer of the AGE) had arranged for the group to have private access to the site after hours. Radkin invited colleagues from all over the region to attend, including some from as far as El Salvador. There were a lot of scientists, a lot of alcohol, and a little bit of food.
Sammy and Catherine stretched out on the grass drinking beer in front of Structure B-4, the Temple of Masonry Altars. Catherine draped her legs over Sammy’s lap. She was twenty-five years old and had the tan, angular face of the perpetually outdoors. She kept her dirty-blond hair cut short so that it would stay out of her face in the jungle. To some she might have seemed like a tomboy, but for an anthropologist she was positively elegant.
Sammy felt something slither across his ankle. He shot up and made a noise. The sound of his scream attracted Radkin, Sadiq, and another man—a biochemist from Mexico City with a massive LED flashlight. The man shined the torch at Sammy’s feet.
“Are you bit?” Sadiq asked.
“No. But I wish you hadn’t said that as though it’s a real possibility.”
“Come join us by the fire,” said Radkin. “We’re talking about existence.”
So the five of them walked together to tomb F8/1, where someone had built a makeshift firepit that was very much against the rules. There, twenty or so scientists were laughing and arguing with one another over the future of gerontology.
Radkin opened a fresh beer and saluted those gathered: “To the singularity.”
They drank. The biochemist put the flashlight under his chin as if he were about to tell a ghost story. “Once upon a time,” he said in a dark voice, “there was a soluble protein that became … insoluble.”
Laughter. Radkin, sitting across the fire from Sammy and Catherine, said, “My friend isn’t too impressed by my research.”
The biochemist waved him off. “It’s fine enough in the short term.”
“And in the long term?” someone said.
“Alien overlords,” said another.
The biochemist chuckled. “Radkin’s work will help those of us currently living to live a little longer. No doubt about that. But the future of longevity isn’t in medicine, or pharmaceuticals, or even biotechnology.”
“Nanotechnology,” said Sadiq.
“Bingo.” The biochemist tapped his nose. “Specifically nanorobotics.”
The crowd groaned. “Clap your hands if you believe in fairies,” said Radkin.
“I do believe in what I can’t see,” said the biochemist. “While you’re traveling all over the world to carve up old people, there’s an engineer somewhere building nanorobots that will be able to reverse every cause of death known to man.”
“Unless the cause of death is ‘murdered by nanorobots,’” said Sadiq.
Radkin shook his head. “So let’s say these nanorobots can, indeed, replicate healthy cells. I would ask, in such a case, whether they are bringing you back to life or simply a copy of you?”
The fire popped.
“Whatever happens in the next century,” said another of Radkin’s crew, “eventually we’ll be uploading our consciousness to computers. We’ll use our bodies for reproduction and then discard them.”
“Amen to that,” said Catherine.
“I concede the possibility of robotic avatars,” said Sadiq. “But we won’t be uploading our ‘consciousness,’ whatever that is. We’ll be implanting our actual brains into the machine.”
In the distance, someone climbing the steps of the pyramid-temple was singing the theme from Rocky. Sammy could see the man’s silhouette framed against the moon, his arms raised, fists clenched.
“You’ve been awfully quiet,” Radkin said to Sammy.
Sammy held up his hands. “I’m just here to learn.”
Radkin kept his eyes fixed on Sammy, but Sadiq gestured to Catherine. “How about you? What does the future hold?”
Catherine took a drink. “You’re all talking big, but here you are, a bunch of men, sitting among the ruins and poking at a fire with sticks. This is the future.”
Most of the men laughed, but Radkin didn’t. He was still looking at Sammy. “You’re not off the hook so easily.”
Sammy cocked his head. “What are you fishing for?”
“I’m wondering why you’re here.”
“I told you, I’m writing a book.” Sammy hoped this sounded truer to others, to Catherine, than it did to him. “Don’t you think your work should be part of it?” Sammy drank from his bottle.
Radkin licked his lips, which had been dried out by the fire. “Maybe. But I’m still wondering why you’re here. We could have met in the States.”
Sammy considered what to say. Obviously, Radkin knew. Sammy wasn’t interested at all in Radkin’s research, which was the same sort of Big Pharma approach that bred the countless, endless antidepressants that had done so little to help Sammy. He’d brought him to Belize to play a different role: drug mule. Radkin’s credentials gave him medical clearance to carry biological samples—Anna’s samples—across international borders. Sammy had arranged for several ingredients he needed for his elixir to meet him there in Belize and to be placed in the same container that held Anna’s specimens. These materials included Heartorex, a dietary supplement banned in the United States; a recently discovered species of Belize feather worm; and, most embarrassingly, the dried scrotum of the endangered Mesoamerican river turtle. The issue was not just about protecting his secret, but also his dignity.
“Maybe we should talk in private,” Sammy said.
Catherine looked on, alert and confused.
He was rescued by the sound of shouting near Structure D2. The group of them quit the fire and ran toward the noise. They found two men at each other’s throat. One was a microbiologist from Belize, the other a microbiologist from Guatemala. A few months prior, a Belizean patrolman had shot and killed a Guatemalan national just a few miles from Sammy’s hotel.
The men grappled with each other at the base of the tower. The smaller one wrapped his arms around the other’s neck and pulled him into a headlock. They wrestled in breathy silence, stumbling across the grass like a four-legged animal, their feet tangled with each other’s. Their movement carried them too fast to stay standing. They went hard to the ground, and this gave the larger one the advantage. He pinned the smaller man under his knees and landed one, two, three, hard blows to the face and ribs. His victim moaned and spit blood.
The rest of the scientists watched with the apathy of the bystander, but Sammy stepped forward. The Mayans who built Altun Ha believed the human body was created from maize—white corn for bones, yellow corn for flesh, black corn for eyes, red corn for blood. These two men were beating the corn out of each other, and one of Sammy’s thoughts came to him, with its usual suddenness: he wanted a piece of it. He threw himself on the men.
“Sammy!” said Catherine.
He wedged himself between the two combatants. The small man was happy for the assistance; the tall one, less so. The three of them kicked and clawed at one another. Sammy felt an icy pain in his gut, but he stayed on, pried at the tall man’s hands. He pushed him off the beaten man and to the dirt of the causeway. With the two men separated, Sammy rolled away and clutched at his stomach. He’d been stabbed with a penknife, right above the belly button. Not too deep. Just enough to bleed through his fingers.
Catherine ran to him and helped him sit up. She removed her sweater and held it against his stomach. “The hell was that?” she said.
A month later, the tall man would send Sammy a surprisingly heartfelt e-mail of apology, but that night he ran into the woods as though anyone cared enough to chase him. Sadiq offered his hand and pulled Sammy standing. Sadiq guided him back to his truck and treated his injury while Catherine returned to the fire to fetch their belongings.
“Interesting night for you,” Sadiq said. He cleaned the cut with antiseptic. Sammy’s shirt was on the hood of the car.
Sammy breathed through his nose. “I’m not always myself.”
Sadiq pulled the gauze tight. “Catherine thinks your research is theoretical.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re actually making … what do I call it, an elixir?”
Sammy was too tired, and too stabbed, to lie. Maybe a part of him felt, I can trust this man. “Yes, I’m actually making it.”
“Is there even a book?”
Sammy remembered himself and the stakes of this discussion. He pushed Sadiq’s hand away. “How do you know all this?”
“Dr. Radkin doesn’t take money from just anyone. We looked into you. Can I continue with the bandage, please?”
Sammy reluctantly lowered his guard. “What does that mean, looked into me?”
Sadiq finished dressing the wound and inspected his work. “My people have a saying. Don’t try to solve your problems when it’s the middle of the night and you’ve been knifed by a Guatemalan.”
Sammy chuckled, and it hurt. “So what happens to my materials? Will Radkin smuggle them for me?”
“He won’t. But I’ll take care of it.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I’m not sure yet. I guess you interest me.”
“Well, thanks.” Then, to Sammy’s own surprise, he placed his hand over Sadiq’s. They touched that way for five seconds, then Catherine returned with a fresh change of clothes.
Sadiq kept his word: Sammy’s drugs and feather worms and turtle scrotums made it safely to New York. Ultimately, after all that trouble, they proved totally worthless.
Back in America, Catherine and Sammy waited in line for a taxi, exhausted, leaning on their luggage. It was evening. Catherine hadn’t spoken to him the entire flight. She just jammed those little earbuds in her ears and scowled at the clouds through the window. When they landed, she strode immediately off the plane, leaving Sammy to pull their heavy suitcase out of the overhead. He thought she might leave him and go back to their apartment alone—he thought it might be over—but a part of him knew that she would allow him to explain this incident, too, just as he’d explained the time he forgot her days after meeting her, the time he attacked her in her own home, the time he dropped out of NYU and began writing a book she’d never seen. She would forgive him because love is like that: it convinces.
It was their turn to get a taxi. As the cab pulled up to the curb, Sammy pulled Catherine’s headphones out of her ears. “Hey,” he said when she turned to him, “maybe we should get married?”