He lifts his eyes to the building across the street-an astonishing, ceramic-clad, honeycomb lattice far beyond anything the present could afford to build. He’s never noticed it before. He glances back down just in time to see the Kabyle girl duck into a building two blocks south: one of the college’s two dormitories. He knows where she lives.
He grabs his valise, skips down six flights of stairs, bursts out to the street, and follows her south. The air is weirdly ionized; the lake smells like ocean. He’s never noticed, but each shoulder-rubbing façade in this police lineup of buildings is a different color. Marble, sandstone, granite: Paris on the Prairie.
He stands across the street from her dormitory, scouring the window grid. He can’t see anything, and he’s just about to skulk away when she appears in a fourth-story window on the right, looking down on the Wabash pageant. She’s smiling at the possibilities beneath her, sizing up the adventure. She sees him; she doesn’t see him. She lifts one hand. The hand holds a leather-bound book. She cradles the small volume from beneath and spreads it face-open against the window. The alien gesture freezes him.
He ducks into the doorway behind him, heart pounding. A musical-instrument store. He pretends to shop for acoustic guitars. He might, in fact, be interested in guitars. He hasn’t touched one since moving back from Tucson.
He leaves the shop ten minutes later, empty-handed. He walks from campus up to the river, just to clear his head. He feels vaguely criminal. He is vaguely criminal.
Home again, he sits on his back deck next to the fire escape, trying to capture in his journal what happened that afternoon. He writes under the yellow deck light as darkness falls, unable to shake her image.
He writes: She pressed the pages to the glass, as if for someone with a powerful telescope on another planet.
He looks up. The night is clear and the wind comes off the moon and literature has just been invented.
PART TWO
WALK ON AIR
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out-you must stay out; and to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand.
– Henry James, Roderick Hudson
The British ethicist with the bloodhound eyes returns to the screen. She’s seated in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Her face is lined by a lifetime spent gate-guarding science’s worst excesses. An Over the Limit caption identifies her: Anne Harter, Author, Designs on Humanity. She says:
More expensive, high-tech antiaging breakthroughs will just produce even more horrendous differences between the haves and have-nots. If we really want to extend the average human life span, then let’s supply clean drinking water to the majority of the planet that doesn’t have it.
Cutaway, and the caption reads: University of Tokyo conference, “The Future of Aging.” Thomas Kurton stands behind a podium, covered in hazelnut curls, fifty-seven going on thirty-two, a Sarastro of the cult of antioxidants. He speaks from the hip:
The script that has kept us in gloom and dread is about to be rewritten. Labs across the globe are closing in on those ridiculous genetic errors that cause life to suicide. Aging is not just a disease; it’s the mother of all maladies. And humankind may finally have a shot at curing it.
Cut back to Oxford: Professor Harter questions the scientific basis to Kurton’s optimism. Back in Todai, Kurton cites the discovery of a single gene mutation that more than doubles the life span of Caenorhabditis elegans.
Oxford:
Aging is not the enemy; the enemy is despair.
Tokyo:
Cure age, and you beat a dozen ailments at once. You might even help depression.
The camera turns the scientist and ethicist into a bickering couple, airing their grievances in front of friends.
A quick jump to Maine, where keen Tonia Schiff asks Kurton:
What about those people who say society can’t survive more old people than it already has?
He can’t ratchet down that boyish smile.
Naysayers have always been around to challenge any human dream. And that’s good! But that objection just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m talking about a future where the aged aren’t old.
Back to Anne Harter, in Oxford:
Dr. Kurton might want to fund an association study for the wishful-thinking gene.
The match is as unfair as genetics. The scientist is brighter, more informed, and more relaxed. All Harter can do is sink her teeth into his ankle and hang on.
Kurton, back in the Maine cabin:
People want to live longer and better. When they can do both, they will. Ethics is just going to have to catch up.
Tonia Schiff sits, her knee to his, enjoying the ride:
How do you think the market will price the fountain of youth?
He does this funny little head-bow of concentration, like he’s never been asked this question and he wants to think about it, for the sheer pleasure of thought.
Well, the market seems to price food and water fairly effectively. It could use a little help pricing medications, I suppose.
Schiff, in something like awe at the man’s ingenuousness:
Do you really mean to live forever?
He rocks good-naturedly and squeezes the back of his neck.
We’ll see how far I get. I’m on calorie restriction, daily workout, and a few supplements, especially megadoses of resveratrol. If I can keep myself healthy for another twenty years, at our present rate of discovery
The techno beat starts up again. Cross-fade to a slowly focusing midrange shot, and the genomicist floats twenty stories in the air over the apocalyptic dreamscape of Hachik Crossing, Shibuya, Tokyo. Below him spreads Times Square squared-spectral neon blazes fringing a bank of LCD screens each several stories high, towering over seven major thoroughfares that converge in the world’s largest pedestrian scramble, which, from twenty stories up, looks like mitosis under the microscope. Multilevel train station, bass-thumping department stores, costume outlets, twisting warrens of mirror-lined game arcades The streetlights stop all traffic, and the accumulated mounds of crowd disgorge into one another, massing into the intersection from all sides in an orderly, omnidirectional tsunami.
Thomas Kurton gazes down on this orgy of the urban dispossessed. The camera follows his gaze: kids as bowerbirds; kids as noble savages; kids as Kogal Californians; kids from the outer reaches of galaxies far, far away; kids as baggy, knee-socked, schoolgirl-sailor prostitutes; kids as mutants-cosplay, Catgirl, GothLoli, maid-nurse-bunny-all in a gentle, frenzied, nightly theatrical performance of rebellion that will wander home at four in the morning to broom-closet apartments and wake up two hours later to head to classes or clerical jobs.
The scientist looks down into the costumed mass and smiles.
We’re trapped in a faulty design, stuck in a bad plot. We want to become something else. It’s what we’ve wanted since the story started. And now we can have it.
The camera follows him into a glass elevator and plunges down into the maelstrom. The transparent capsule opens, and Thomas Kurton disappears into the carnival of midnight Shibuya.