“We’re staying at my parents’ apartment in Chelsea,” she said. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
We took a cab downtown, through streets clogged with traffic and great walls of pedestrians that surged forward at every intersection. This was early 1990s New York, a time when the city seemed on the verge of unmanageable chaos, and although I was, later in life, to live in a very different Manhattan—safe, tidy, and affluent—my first impression of the city was so indelible, so charged with heat and light, that it remains my truest vision of the place. The apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone just off Eighth Avenue—two small rooms, compactly furnished, with a view across Twenty-eighth Street of a small theater known for incomprehensible avant-garde productions and a men’s haberdashery called World of Shirts and Socks. Liz had explained that her parents only used the place when they came into the city to shop or take in a show. Probably nobody had been there in months.
The funeral was at ten the next morning. I called Arianna to tell her where I was staying, and she said that she’d arrange for a car to meet us in the morning and drive us to Riverdale. There was no food in the apartment, so Liz and I went up the street to a small café with tables on the sidewalk. She told me what she knew of Jonas, which wasn’t very much. She’d received only three letters, none very long. I’d never quite understood what he was doing there—he was a biologist, or wanted to be, not an archaeologist—though I knew it had to do with extracting fossilized pathogens from the bones of early hominids.
“Basically,” she said, “he’s squatting in the dirt all day long, dusting rocks with a paintbrush.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Oh, to him it is.”
I knew this to be so. Sharing a room with the man had taught me that, despite his fun-loving exterior, Jonas was deeply serious about his studies, sometimes verging toward obsession. The core of his passion lay in the idea that the human animal was a truly unique organism, evolutionarily distinct. Our powers of reason, of language, of abstract thought—none of these was matched anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Yet despite these gifts, we remained chained to the same physical limitations as every other creature on the earth. We were born, we aged, we died, all of it in a relatively short span of time. From an evolutionary point of view, he said, this simply made no sense. Nature craved balance, yet our brains were completely out of sync with the short shelf life of the bodies that housed them.
Think about it, he said: What would the world be like if human beings could live two hundred years? Five hundred? How about a thousand? What leaps of genius would a man be capable of, with a millennium of accumulated wisdom on which to draw? The great mistake of modern biological science, he believed, was to assume that death was natural, when it was anything but, and to view it in terms of isolated failures of the body. Cancer. Heart disease. Alzheimer’s. Diabetes. Trying to cure them one by one, he said, was as pointless as swatting at a swarm of bees. You might get a couple, but the swarm would kill you in the end. The key, he said, lay in confronting the whole question of death, to turn it on its head. Why should we have to die at all? Could it be that somewhere within the deep molecular coding of our species lay the road map to a next evolutionary step—one in which our physical attributes would be brought into equilibrium with our powers of thought? And wouldn’t it make sense that nature, in its genius, intended for us to discover this for ourselves, employing the unique endowments it had afforded us?
He was, in short, making a case for immortality as the apotheosis of the human state. This sounded like mad science to me. The only things missing from his argument were a slab of reassembled body parts and a lightning rod, and I’d told him as much. For me, science wasn’t about the big picture but the small one—the same modestly ambitious, hunt-and-peck investigations that Jonas decried as a waste of time. And yet his passion was attractive—even, in its own crackpot way, inspiring. Who wouldn’t want to live forever?
“The thing I don’t get is why he thinks the way he does,” I said. “He seems so sensible otherwise.”
My tone was light, but I could tell I’d hit on something. Liz called the waiter over and asked for another glass of wine.
“Well, there’s an answer for that,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“About me.”
This was how I came to learn the story. When Liz was eleven, she had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. The cancer had originated in the lymph nodes surrounding her trachea. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy—she’d had it all. Twice she’d gone into remission, only to have the disease return. Her current remission had lasted four years.