In an entry from his first year in college, Sammy discussed his conception of the elixir’s purpose:
This morning, my psych professor started class by announcing that everyone’s greatest desire—greater than love, money, power, anything—is to be bitten by a vampire. We thought he was joking, but then he wrote “vampire” on the whiteboard, double-underlined, and we stopped laughing. He explained that humans, by nature, are afraid of death, and yet, paradoxically, research has shown that people respond negatively to the idea of living forever. According to a study at Yale, if such an option were available, an overwhelming majority of people said they wouldn’t take it. Their reasons were typically moral: to live forever is against the laws of nature or God, to wish for it hubris, to attain it would mean watching those you love grow old and die. (No one ever mentions that you’d find new people to love.)
This was the crux of his Vampire Theory, that human beings want to live forever but regard choosing to live forever as a moral or spiritual failing. If those things are true, then the ultimate fantasy is vampiric embrace: to have immortality forced upon you, to live forever but be spared the guilt of choosing.
When class ended, I had ten minutes to get to Origins of Literature. We’re reading Gilgamesh. The professor spent almost all of class focused on a single passage from Tablet IX, in which Gilgamesh begins his search for immortality after the death of a comrade:
Gilgamesh for Enkidu, his friend,
Weeps bitterly and roams over the desert.
“When I die, shall I not be like unto Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart.
I am afraid of death and roam over the desert.”
Gilgamesh misses Enkidu, but what pains him most is the realization that he, too, will die. The professor argued that this is the moment—as Gilgamesh learns to fear death—in which he becomes fully human. I sat there in the back of the room, wondering, “What does that make me?”
Next, I had my appointment with Dr. Huang. She asked me today if I really believe in immortality, if I believe true agelessness is an attainable goal. We were in her office, but I’d only just sat down. She was wearing these blue eyeglasses. They must be new, or at least she’s never worn them in front of me. She does this on purpose: small surprises, unexpected questions asked at unexpected times. There was no “How are you?” or “How are you feeling?” Just: “I want to ask you about immortality.”
Here’s what I told her: I don’t believe in immortality, of course, and my interest in the elixir of life is purely theoretical.
Here’s what I really believe: Everything in our body is connected. We learn this from our earliest encounters with anatomy. I’m thinking of that childhood song: the thighbone connects to the hip bone, the hip bone connects to the …
If everything is connected, it follows that there is some way to treat everything at once. I’m talking about what the Greeks called panakeia, the all-healing. My goal is not to live forever but to live happily—to figure out what happiness even means. Can it be done? I don’t know. At least it keeps me busy. An old colleague of my father used to say that the only true panacea is work.
He wouldn’t like me much, that man. He believes mental illnesses are a myth, a metaphor. They are not “real diseases” but simply “problems in living.” The words don’t interest me. I do know that people who have searched for the elixir of life have often suffered from “real diseases”: cancers, malaria, what we now call Alzheimer’s—stuff that shows up on an MRI or autopsy. Their search for the elixir is a response to an alarm sounding in their bodies.
But that’s the problem. Their dying bodies pollute the data and place too short a timer on the search. No one has ever searched for the elixir in response to a mental illness. What’s wrong with me? I’ve never found the word for it, but that same indefinability makes it the ideal condition on which to experiment. What’s wrong with me doesn’t clear up on its own, as malaria sometimes does; it doesn’t kill you, like cancer.
Who knows what’s possible? Any question about possibility is just a sanity test in disguise. That’s what Dr. Huang was really asking this morning: “Are you crazy or are you sane?”
I believe I’m uniquely qualified to search for the elixir of life. Whatever that makes me, that’s what I am.
Good night.
It was one in the morning, and I lay stretched out in bed, the tips of my fingers sandpaper dry. On the floor, I had the stuff we’d taken from the storage unit. The box contained at least some of the materials described in Sammy’s elixir, and though it was slow going, the journals were helping me make sense of them. I read as much as I could each day, in every spare, private moment. I’d reached his grad school years, and it wasn’t until I read his first entries about Catherine, for example, that I understood the CATHERINE vial we found in the storage facility to be what Sammy called the “tribal medicine” in his recipe book.
CATHERINE. It was appropriate that I’d first seen her name that way—all caps, thick ink. Her name had reverberated in my mind since reading Sammy’s account of their courtship. He’d been with a woman. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a dead man’s ex, but I couldn’t help searching his entries for signs of insincerity, for hints that he was only faking with Catherine. It’s not uncommon for closeted gay men to date women, even to marry them—just look at Congress. But nothing in his journals suggested reluctance, displeasure, bared teeth. It didn’t read like playacting.
I set the journal aside and moved from the bed to the floor, where I had a half gallon of quicksilver sitting in a carton as if it were leftovers raided from the fridge. I turned the plastic container upside down, watched the quicksilver travel from one side to the other. I was trying to see it as Sammy did—as the centerpiece to an elixir that could save my father. Instead, the more I looked at the stuff, the more my bedroom felt poisonous.
The mercury reminded me of a day in spring, Sammy’s second semester at LHS. That was baseball season, the Littlefield Yellow Jackets. My position was right field, where no one ever hit the ball, and if they did, I was too surprised to chase it. Back in the dugout, our coach would pat me on the back as if he were about to console me, but he hated to lose, so in the heat of the game all he could manage was “At least no one’s here.”
That day, though, I’d invited a special guest: Mr. Tampari.
“Do you have a game this afternoon?” he’d asked me, after the bell rang and I said goodbye to him. We were in his classroom. Our relationship had been, if not always professional, at least strictly platonic, and I allowed my affection for him to grow only because I considered him unattainable.
“Yeah. We’re playing Saco. You should come watch us.”
Sammy pretended to consider this. “Are you going to hit a touchdown?”
“You know that’s not what it’s called.”
“Are you going to hit the ol’ four-bagger?”
“Stop.”
“The grand salami?”
“I will if you come.”
He closed his grade book. “Are you serious? Because if I sit in the sun with strangers watching sports, and you don’t do anything impressive, you will fail this class.”
I refused to crack a smile; I was serious about wanting him there. “Okay, I promise.”
He sighed in a long, dramatic way. “Fine,” he said, stretching the word out. “I’ll go.”
But these were not promises either of us could keep. As I walked back to the dugout after another strikeout, I searched the stands for any sign of Sammy. Nothing. I found only the bored, stiff smiles of overtired parents, the dirty, sun-kissed faces of little brothers and sisters. By the time I missed another ball in the outfield, I was despondent.
The next morning, I searched for Sammy in the hallway. When I found him, walking in the opposite direction from his classroom, something felt wrong. He was too sweaty for seven in the morning, and his blond hair looked almost leaden in the bad light of the hallway.
“You missed my game.”
“Oh.” He had no idea what I was talking about.
“I hit the winning home run, and my team carried me off the field on their shoulders.”
“Awesome. Really good.” Then, when it was clear I wanted more: “Something came up.”
“Big plans last night?”
“Sort of.” He tried to move past me.
“It’s just that you said you’d come.”
Sammy fixed me with his cloudy eyes. “I know you think you want to know everything,” he said, his voice gravelly and cruel, “but trust me that you don’t.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“I’m your teacher. Not your cheerleader.” He walked away.
I ignored him for the rest of the day. I even skipped our third-period independent study. I spent that hour in the bathroom, imagining him alone in the lab, wondering where I was. What an idiot! I was so in love with him, and whether he liked it or not, I believed that affection made him responsible for me. Someday, I decided, I’d have a young protégé who wanted to fuck me, and I’d be nice to him. I’d show him how barium chloride, sodium silicate, and varying concentrations of carbon dioxide could be used to create microscopic crystal flowers, a whole garden of color, right there on the slide, visible only to us. The flowers would serve as a metaphor for the bond we shared—a special intimacy, but not a boundless one. An intimacy that followed the rules of the experiment, and the first rule of the nanocrystal flowers, I’d tell him, is this: don’t touch them, or they’ll break.
After school, I went to the lab and watched Sammy through the window of the door. I don’t know why I expected otherwise, but he looked the same as that morning. He was hunched over his desk. He had the colored chalk from his blackboard and was pounding it into powder with his fist. It puffed into the air around him. He removed a container from his bag and poured something slow and serous onto the chalk—it was mercury, though I didn’t know that then. His desk was covered in a sticky gypsum goo, and he rolled his hands over this mixture as if he were making the dough for bread. He picked up the dough, rainbow colored from his assortment of chalk, and bit off the end of it as if he were biting the head off a snake. He swallowed. I watched him struggle to keep it down, which he barely did, and then I ran away.
I never asked Sammy about that day. It was strange enough that I could pretend I’d misunderstood, and the next day at school he was back to normal. He called on me more than once to answer a question, even when other hands were raised. After class, he asked me to stay behind for a “quick chat” but was interrupted by a boy, whose name I can’t remember, who had just failed the midterm exam. He didn’t understand why.
“Well, look at your diagram in number four,” Sammy said. “What’s missing?”
The boy scrunched up his face but couldn’t find the answer. To help him, Sammy mimed taking deep breaths.
“Ah, dude,” the boy said. “I forgot oxygen. Can I get another try?”
“No can do.”
“Dude, please.”
Sammy shook his head. “In the words of Eminem, you only get one shot.”
“Dude. Dude.”
“The sooner you stop begging me for something I can’t give you, the sooner you can start studying for the final.”
The boy stood quiet, possibly trying to make himself cry. But no tears came, and he zipped up his bag and left.
The moment the door closed, Sammy burst into laughter. “Thanks for staying after, dude.” Sammy’s eyes were wet from laughing. “I have a question for you.”
“Dude, hit me with it.”
He blotted his eyes with his sleeve and asked if I had any interest in a field trip the next day during our independent study. He wanted to take a tour of a local company that manufactured, of all things, organic deodorant and toothpaste. Of course I agreed.
“All right, dude,” he said. “It’s a date.” Only after reading his journals did this moment, and the way he smiled, come back to me. It was a wild, reckless smile—a smile that, in hindsight, marked the start of our affair as much as our first time in bed. All of the things that had once been barriers between us burned up in the light of that smile like fog being cleared by the sun. The rules of the experiment had changed. Now, we could touch the flowers.
I’d been keeping these two sides of Sammy separate: my lover, and the eccentric who wrote the recipe book. But as mercury began to seep through my memories of Sammy, I had to face the reality of its influence. We had not grown close, as I’d thought, in the halls of the high school, in the chemical-rich air of the lab, in the cramped confines of his studio apartment. No, we made love in the cave of gloom.
In his journal from the day after my baseball game, he wrote:
Scary couple of days. Yesterday’s entry contains several paragraphs of illegible words. I don’t remember writing them.
I do remember waking from a nap, in the early afternoon, to the sound of the Widow sending a telefax in the garage. I also remember deciding, awake and angry, to drive to the storage unit. I can only speculate on what happened next. When I finally came to, back in my apartment after a school day that I apparently did attend (!), I woke up with a mouthful of blackboard chalk. I waited for a phone call telling me that I’m fired, but none came.
When I first recovered, I found something new on my desk: a postcard from S, from the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (!). He wrote to say Hello, I Miss You. How he even found me here I don’t know. But now it all makes sense: I was woken by the Widow, checked the mail, found the postcard, went crazy. Is that an oxymoron, to say going crazy makes sense?
Good night.
PS: Where does the word “dude” come from? The OED attributes it to the late nineteenth century but does not know its origins. The Boston Journal, on June 2, 1885, refers to the “intense dudeness of Lord Beaconsfield.”
Although the box from the storage unit contained none of this so-called Appetizer, the Dor, it did contain the Entrée: quicksilver, tribal medicine, B. rossica, rapamycin, and P. cupana. The problem was quantity. I had everything I needed of the quicksilver, but the tribal medicine, the CATHERINE vial, was nearly empty—if it were a jar of peanut butter, I would have thrown it away. The B. rossica had been wrapped in computer paper secured with tape, but I didn’t even need to unwrap it to know I had much less than the three ounces required in Sammy’s recipe. The same was true of the rapamycin; I needed fifteen milligrams and had, based on the dosages listed on the bottle, less than five.
Why had Sammy left me with so little to work with? There were two possibilities, as I saw them:
It was early in our summer vacation when he’d attacked the wall, the third week of June. It was the same day our rats arrived: Number 5, Number 7, Number 37, Number 42, and Number 50. Those were the numbers they came with, and Sammy advised me not to name them.
“Don’t fall in love,” he told me. “There’s no place for love in the lab.”
That first day, Sammy spent a good eight hours teaching me how to care for them. He showed me how to hold the rats in one hand with their belly up, firmly but gently, and he showed me where the needle would go to inject the P. cupana: in those bellies, just below the liver. I was too hesitant at first, too afraid of hurting them, and the rats fought me for it, squeaking and snapping. Eventually, I learned.
I did love them—their tired eyes, their wiggling noses, the way they slept on top of one another and sometimes, most adorably, in their little hammocks. They didn’t look traumatized. Their coats were white and full, their appetites normal. Even though Sammy preached the value of scientific distance, the rats’ arrival had obviously excited him. He showed me how to set up the water maze, humming as he did it. We cleared out the supply closet to make space for the maze, and so we were surrounded by shelves and boxes and file cabinets, all pushed to the far edge of the wall.
I watched Sammy work, and now and then I would have mental flashes of his naked body, just small pieces: a bead of sweat on his lower back, a round belly button, a bare knee. If I pictured his body all at once, I would lose the ability to think. The school was completely empty, but we would never, ever touch each other outside his apartment. That was something we’d agreed upon without needing to say it.
The water maze looked like a kiddie pool but with a hard acrylic shell. It was five feet in diameter and one foot deep. We filled the maze using a rubber hose connected to a tap and stirred tempera paint into the water, watched it darken in a slightly sinister way. A water maze isn’t a “maze” the way we usually think of one; there is no way out of it. Instead, it has a hidden platform—obscured by the dark paint—where the rat can stand and rest. Once you place the rat in the water maze, you time how long it takes him to find the hidden platform. If the rat is healthy, he’ll get better and better at it over time—he’ll remember where it is.
“We used to use milk powder instead of paint,” Sammy said. We were crouched in front of the maze, and I could see our reflections slowly disappear as the paint spread. “You haven’t smelled anything until you’ve smelled sour milk mixed with rat shit.”
I wrinkled my nose and watched the hidden platform become hidden, vanishing under the dark water. “Did you ever do a science fair?”
He shook his head. “Never. Are they actually fun?”
I told him they were. My favorite part was talking to the judges, being judged by them, but not the way my high school classmates and even some of my teachers judged me. These judges were my people. A few of them actually wore dark-plastic pocket protectors, the kind you usually only see in “nerd” Halloween costumes. Once, in the middle of my explanation of hepatic stellate cells, one of the judges closed his eyes and said, “Mm, I love learning,” as if he were biting into a piece of chocolate cake.
“Huh,” Sammy said. “I’ve never really fit in anywhere.”
I looked at him, delighted that he was opening up to me, but also somewhat disbelieving. He was so beautiful. I couldn’t imagine him ever feeling alone. Sometimes I did feel bad for the popular girls, the really pretty ones, who seemed to be drowning in attention. I thought of Jody Girardi, a senior, and how every time she opened her locker, a thousand eyes fell upon her perfectly round backside, muscles straining as she went tippy-toes to reach her history textbook. I had always thought she didn’t notice—she seemed to operate in a cloud of beauty-induced carelessness. But one day I was leaning against the wall near her locker as she searched through her bag for soda money. Behind her, Shaun Bowa punched his friend on the shoulder, gestured to Jody’s ass, and mimed biting into it like a hamburger. They were perfectly silent, even in laughter, but I watched as Jody’s face turned red, her eyes shut tight in exhaustion. She knew everything and always had.
Sammy clapped his hands together. “Let’s get our test subjects and see what’s been done to them.”
I opened the cage and lifted Number 50 out of his bed. Number 50 was the smallest rat, but his tail was a full centimeter longer than that of the others, and this gave him a toylike appearance—it was easy to imagine him being dangled in front of a cat. He was also our primary test subject: Number 50 would be receiving the highest dose of P. cupana.
I scratched his ears through the rubbery fabric of my gloves and carried him to the water maze. Sammy held the stopwatch, and when he nodded for me to proceed, I lowered Number 50 into the water. He began to swim a lap around the perimeter of the circular pool.
“Why is he hugging the walls like that?” Sammy asked, and this was not a sincere question—it was a quiz.
“Thigmotaxis,” I said, drawing upon a textbook he’d given me on behavioral neuroscience. “His impulses tell him to remain in contact with the vertical surface.”
Sammy said nothing, which meant I was right. Number 50 was looking for a way out of the maze, but there was no such exit. He swam quickly, propelled by doggy paddles around the perimeter. Eventually, his survival instincts pushed him away from the wall and toward the center of the pool. In Sammy’s hand, the stopwatch ticked the seconds. We were timing Number 50’s escape latency; that is, the time it took for him to reach a full stop on the platform.
When a minute had passed, I grabbed him by the tail and pulled him to the platform, held him there, allowed him to see where it was.
“Even if you put him back in the water right now,” Sammy said, “he wouldn’t be able to find the platform again.”
“Okay.” I began to lift Number 50 out of the water maze.
Sammy grabbed my wrist. “Wait. Never just take my word for it. You have to see for yourself.”
So I lowered Number 50 into the water maze for a second time, and he began to swim. Sammy was right. If Number 50 had been a healthy rat, he would have shown at least some improvement on this second try. But Number 50 wasn’t healthy. In the previous study, he was electroshocked so many times—the electrodes placed near his dime-size brain—that his memory functions were shot. He couldn’t remember where to find the platform. He simply began his lap anew, hugging the walls. Without my intervention, he would have drowned.
When we were finished, Sammy invited me back to his apartment for dinner. “Have you ever made sushi?” he asked, and I didn’t tell him that I’d never eaten sushi and had only the barest conception, from cooking shows, of its shape and color.
It was just after five when we arrived, which meant his little apartment had received a full day’s worth of summer sun. The air inside was hot and dry, and this bothered Sammy more than it bothered me. I remembered what he’d said—“I’ve never really fit in anywhere”—and it was true that he never seemed comfortable. He was always too hot or too cold, always adding or removing layers. I watched him walk to the kitchen and fish an ice cube out of the freezer, which he ate in four loud crunches.
Once he cooled down, he started the rice cooker and stretched out on the bed. I stood awkwardly and indecisively in the kitchen. I wanted to have sex as soon as possible, but I liked, too, that he seemed to want me around even when we weren’t having sex.
Sammy caught my eye and motioned me over. He was holding a thin manila folder, and he placed it next to him on the bed. “Check this out.”
I scooted onto the mattress and opened the folder. It contained a couple of images, and I knew I was looking at MRI scans of two brains—human brains, not rat. The brains were white and gray, set against a black background. It was like an inkblot test, and you could see so many things depending on your mood—a smiley face, a family of upside-down bats. Each image had a couple of red arrows pointing to different areas of interest, but no labels indicated what those areas were. Behind me, Sammy was sitting up so that he could see over my shoulder.
“It’s actually the same brain,” he said, reading my mind. “One is before electroshock therapy, the other is after. Can you tell which is which?” Another quiz.
I considered this. They looked awfully similar. Neither one had any obvious abnormalities, none of the big white spaces that would indicate a tumor or lesion. But the arrows were pointing to mirrored places on either side of the brain, and this was a clue.
I held up one of the scans. “This is after?”
Sammy looked at me the way he sometimes did—with an intensity that was flattering and strange. “Are you guessing or do you know?”
As far as I could tell, the arrows were pointing to the hippocampi—the thin, seahorse-shaped ridges at the floor of the brain. In one image, these ridges seemed slightly larger, and I assumed this to be “after.” If electroshock therapy could improve a person’s mood—and that was the goal—then it would happen there, and it would maybe be visible.
“Good,” Sammy said, when I finished explaining my rationale. “Our P. cupana, if it works, will activate the NMDA receptors in the hippocampus, thus strengthening memory.”
I handed the photos back to Sammy, and he looked at them for only a second before placing them in the folder, shutting it, and tossing it to the floor. He’d been impressed by my answer, but he seemed far away.
After a moment, I asked him if he was okay.
“The truth is,” he said, ignoring my question, “no one truly understands how ECT works. Is the hippocampus where happiness lives? Where memory lives? If so, how can electroshock improve one but decrease the other, and what does this say about our relationship with time?”
He sometimes spoke like this in the classroom, and just as in those moments, I didn’t know if his questions were rhetorical or if I was supposed to answer. I would learn, during my project, that ECT really worked for people. It made them feel better. But Sammy was right: there was so much we didn’t know, and every time someone was hooked up to one of those machines, it was a bit like sending a message into the deepest parts of space, not knowing who or what would answer.
“It’s just sick,” Sammy was saying. “Those rats are lost in their own minds.” He was staring at his hands, as though he had conducted the earlier study. Then—this happened fast, in an absolute blur of motion—he turned at the waist and put his fist through the wall.
A hole appeared above his headboard, his arm vanishing into it as if he were being eaten alive. The sound it made—like a basketball being run over by a car—echoed throughout the studio. Sammy retreated to the floor and tucked his fist into his stomach. He sat cross-legged, eyes wide, nursing his swollen knuckles. His stunned expression was that of a man waking up from a seizure.
I hadn’t moved from my position on the bed. The hole loomed behind me, dark and out of place. I imagined an MRI of the apartment, the hole a bright white lesion.
When the shock wore off, Sammy went to the bathroom and closed the door. I sat that way for several minutes, waiting for him. Eventually the rice cooker dinged, and the starchy smell of it infused the still-warm air of the apartment. Two little black boxes of seaweed were lined up on the counter, a rice paddle, a chef’s knife, a cutting board.
When the bathroom door finally opened, Sammy emerged with a warm, apologetic smile.
“Dude,” he said. “Dude.”
“Dude,” I replied, because I knew this was his way of apologizing.
“Listen, dude. That was, like, totally crazy, dude.”
I stifled a smile. “It’s fine, dude.”
As though this settled the matter, he went to the kitchen and prepared the sushi rice. The smell of vinegar and sugar filled the air. Thirty minutes later, we made sushi—California rolls, with avocado, cucumber, and sticks of fake crab—and when my rolls came out looking like sad, dying mushrooms, we abandoned the endeavor and threw ourselves onto the bed, the rice left hardening in the bowl, the avocado left oxidizing on the counter.
It was hard not to lose faith, remembering Sammy’s strangest behaviors. I actually thought about it: closing the recipe book, putting away the journals, going to bed. I was very, very tired. If I gave up now, I would be failing Sammy, but I would also be protecting my memory of him.
I was distracted from these thoughts by an odor emanating from the box of ingredients. The B. rossica was unsealed, contained as it was by a single sheet of paper. This meant the smell of it had entered the room—mild, earthy, but with a hint of sweetness, like dark chocolate. I lifted the groundcone out of the box and removed the paper covering. The herb was long and purple-brown, with rows of flaky knobs and a chunkier, knotted root. It looked like a pinecone’s gangly younger brother. Drowsily, almost absentmindedly, I searched the scientific literature for references to the herb and was surprised to find, almost immediately, an article about the herb’s effects on aging in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology.
ANTI-AGING ACTION OF BOSCHNIAKIA ROSSICA ON WISTAR RATS
by L. Xianming
Abstract: This study aimed to determine the anti-aging properties of the dried herb of Boschniakia rossica. The herb’s extract was administered to Wistar rats, and its free radical scavenging ability was analyzed using electron spin resonance spectrometry. The results showed that plasma from the test rats demonstrated statistically significantly higher free radical scavenging activity than that of the control population. Clinical observations of the test rats included improved appetite and endurance. Within the limitations of this study, the author suggests that B. rossica offers potential anti-aging function(s) via mechanisms of free radical scavenging and the prevention of age-related disorders.
As I came to the end, I nearly glossed over the paper’s acknowledgments section, which usually contained thanks to research assistants or department secretaries. L. Xianming’s acknowledgment read as follows: The author thanks Samuel Tampari, New York University, for his ideas and feedback on this study.
My drowsiness lifted. It was a small thing but also big, to see Sammy’s name this way, in a published study. It took everything I was reading and placed it back in the world of the living. I was beginning to search for other references to his name when I noticed something on the floor. The computer paper holding the B. rossica, I had thought, was blank—just an ad hoc wrapping Sammy had thrown together. But as it flattened out on the carpet, I saw that it contained images and a bit of handwritten text. I picked up the paper. Two photographs appeared to have been taken with a digital camera and printed out, probably on the old inkjet Sammy kept under his bed and plugged in only when he needed it.
Both of the images were of Number 50.
The first picture showed Number 50 in his cage, and I could recognize Sammy’s bathroom in the background—the picture had been taken the night Sammy died. Number 50 was lying sideways on the floor of the cage, but he wasn’t sleeping. His eyes were open. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or merely in the final stages of death, but either way, it was not a pretty picture. Next to the image, in pencil, Sammy had written, 11:55 p.m.
But in the next picture, Number 50 was out of his cage and sitting in the palm of Sammy’s hand. (You could have shown me pictures of a thousand hands and I would have been able to identify Sammy’s—the long fingers, the strong sun line, the little scar below the pinkie where he’d cut himself dissecting a frog.) Number 50 was awake, alert, alive, with his nose lifted and his lopsided ears pointed in Sammy’s direction. His long tail dangled over the side of Sammy’s index finger and disappeared into the border of the image. Sammy’s time stamp said, 12:35 a.m.
All of this would have been more than enough to excite me, but a final note was on the bottom of the page, in the exact same space where, if the paper had been part of the recipe book, you’d find the How did it taste?
In all capitals, with the pencil pressed hard to the page, Sammy had written, DUDE.