Ring Game (25 page)

Mrs. Frank leaned in close to the microphone. “Sixty-four!” she shouted, spontaneously breaking into applause for herself.

“And you live here in the Twin Cities?”

Mrs. Frank nodded eagerly.

The interview went on for a few minutes longer. Crow shifted in his seat, feeling trapped. The novelty of the event was wearing thin. This wasn’t his idea of what a Friday night should be, but he was determined to stick it out. He told himself that, if nothing else, he would be exposing himself to a reality he had never before sampled. Maybe it would make a funny story to tell Debrowski, or to fill the time between hands at the next poker game.

Having given her vital statistics, a compendium of her physical ailments, and the names of her six grandchildren, Mrs. Frank was led by Polly to a padded stool, which the toga man had placed at center stage. The lights dimmed, and a low-wattage spotlight waxed directly above her gray head. Rupert Chandra rose from his seat and approached the woman, his dark suit shimmering. He stood behind her, his face in shadow, placed his hands on either side of her neck and began to massage her shoulders as he chanted in a low voice. The chant sounded like “Wonga wanna wolf, wonga wanna wolf.” The tulip dress bunched and wrinkled under his fingers, the woman’s expression went from excited and eager to uncomfortable and concerned. Her hands came up from her lap; Rupert Chandra grabbed them and gently forced them back down, whispering something in her ear. He continued his massage, moving out to the points of her shoulders, then down her back, then up her neck. Mrs. Frank’s expression changed every time he moved his hands—her face went from agonized to orgasmic to grieving to joyful.

The massaging and chanting continued. Crow did not know what was supposed to be happening and, after watching closely for the first few minutes, his attention drifted. He noticed that the majority of the people around him were deeply absorbed in the process. A few appeared to be excited, as if they were seeing some change in the woman on stage. A distinct minority looked, like Crow, bored. He amused himself by picking out individual faces in the crowd and trying to guess their religious background, ancestry, and socioeconomic class. Most were easily placed as protestant, Germanic, and upper-middle class. The faces that drew his attention were those that contrasted with the Waspish majority. He saw signs of Irish here and there, and a significant number of bejeweled, Jewish-looking women. He saw no Africans, Asians, or Hispanics, but one woman, sitting a few seats to his left, defied categorization. Perhaps she had come from the West Indies, or Polynesia. Whatever her ancestry, it had produced a remarkable-looking woman. She had strong but regular features, olive-gold skin tone, golden-brown eyes, and thick slabs of long, rippling, jet black hair framing her forehead and her firm, square jaw. Her lips were full and prominent and painted an odd shade of maroon, matching her long nails. She wore a metallic gold, faux-snakeskin jacket with cartoonishly exaggerated shoulders. Ribbed black capri pants clung to muscular thighs. Her lime green pumps displayed exceptionally high, sharp heels.

Crow had the impression that he’d seen her somewhere before. As he stared at her, trying not to be too obvious about it, sorting through his memories, she turned her head in his direction and smiled. Recognition hit him low and hard.

Flowrean Peeche. His immediate reaction was to stop breathing. In his experience, that was what one did when one got this close to Flowrean. But he’d been sitting within a few feet of her for several minutes now and had smelled nothing other than the crowd’s melange of perfume and breath fresheners. How had he not recognized her? It had to be that he’d never seen her without her dead-goldfish necklace, or in any setting other than Bigg’s gym.

A room-wide rustling and muttering sent Crow’s eyes back to center stage. Rupert Chandra had been working on Mrs. Frank’s face, pulling and prodding and squeezing her wrinkled features. The audience’s reaction was to a visible change in the color of her flesh. It had taken on a glow, as if her dermis had begun to fluoresce, and the sagging skin beneath her jaw had visibly tightened. Rupert Chandra himself, whose head appeared and disappeared from the light as he moved around Mrs. Frank, appeared to be changing as well. Perspiration rolled freely down his forehead and cheeks, and the front of his silk shirt was plastered to his chest, soaking wet. His eyes, which had glittered with vitality not ten minutes earlier, now sagged in braised-looking pouches. Deep lines bracketed his mouth. He seemed to have aged decades.

Chandra’s hands continued to flutter over the woman’s face and neck. His chanting had become hoarse, and now sounded like “Wagga omma oof.” His fingers darted and stroked her as if she was a harp. Mrs. Frank had settled into a vacant, mesmerized gape, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was sitting on a stage with hundreds of people watching, being massaged by a sweaty man in an iridescent black silk suit.

Once he caught the drift of the anti-aging demonstration, Crow had expected an illusion of some sort. He thought that Chandra might be able to knock a few years off the woman’s apparent age, maybe by inducing some mild swelling, bringing the blood to the surface to give her that flush of youth, but mostly by creating a state of total relaxation, a hypnotic effect, making her believe that the years were falling away. Creating anticipation and desire on the part of the audience would also be an important part of the package. They would see what they wanted to see. It would be no great trick for a charismatic and clever conjurer to produce the flush of youth in the old woman’s timeworn features. The same techniques were used again and again by evangelical preachers who regularly convinced wheelchair-bound believers to stand and take a few tottering steps.

But Mrs. Frank’s transformation went far beyond such psychological trickery. He watched as Chandra’s manipulations caused lines and wrinkles to fall away from the old woman’s entranced features. Her lips grew fuller, her eyes larger, her cheeks became smooth and unblemished. The effect was utterly convincing. For all his self-imposed, fortified skepticism, Crow felt a part of himself wanting to believe. He had seen lesser examples of reverse aging in middle-aged people who had fallen suddenly in love, for example, or who had undergone cosmetic surgery, or spent a month at a remote health spa, but he had never witnessed so rapid and extreme a reversal of aging as this. Mrs. Frank looked younger than Liz Taylor had at forty, fifty, or even sixty.

Without warning, Veronica Frank slumped forward, Rupert Chandra’s hands flew out to the side and his chanting abruptly ended. Giving forth a loud moan, he took four shaky steps backward, then collapsed. The stage lights flared to full brightness. The toga man and Chuckles, the big man who had opened the program, lifted their unconscious leader and carried him off the stage. The audience began to seethe, people rising half out of their seats, talking to one another, all asking the same questions—is he all right? Is
she
all right? What happened? Did someone call 911? The voices rose in pitch and volume. The woman on the stage appeared dazed, her upper body resting on her thighs, head hanging, arms dangling, hands flopping like dying fish on the stage floor. The sound from the audience rose to a hysterical drone. Polly rushed out onto the stage and embraced Mrs. Frank. She whispered something, then helped her up. The two women faced the auditorium.

The panicky buzzing subsided into slack-jawed wonder as the people got their first look at Mrs. Veronica Frank since the lights had brightened. Except for her gray hair and her baggy, boomerang-print dress, she now appeared in every respect to be a woman in her early thirties.

Flo was thrilled and fascinated by what she had seen on stage, but not surprised, amazed, or frightened. After all, she had performed much greater metamorphoses on her own self. As a teenager she had gone from black virgin, to whore, to white virgin in a matter of minutes. Later in life, she had used weight training to transform herself from a fearful, scrawny young woman into a broad-shouldered, rock-hard Amazon. And by working at Solid Sam’s, she had lifted herself from the trash-heap of her old neighborhood to her own condo on the twenty-third floor of the Greensward, with downtown Minneapolis laid out like a game-board below her.

Flo understood that the process of becoming someone new begins and ends between the ears. Even changing clothes, getting ready for work, or putting on a dressy outfit like the one she was wearing, began with a vision. Believing it and seeing it, that was the first and most difficult step. Once you can see, you can believe, and once you believe, you can slide into the attitude; once you own the attitude, then you got your shot at it, whatever it is. Once you got your shot, then you’ve got to believe you can make it. And once you make it, you’ve got to believe it was you that made it happen. The process was ongoing.

With Joe Crow, for instance, she had the belief and she had the attitude, and now she was waiting for her shot.

Funny how these things worked out. She’d been watching Crow, driving past his house a few times a day. Sometimes his car was there, sometimes it wasn’t. She had seen him once through his window, talking on the phone. She had been parked across the street from his place earlier that evening, fantasizing, and when Crow drove off in his yellow car, Flo had followed. Now here they were, sitting in the same room, witnessing a miracle together.

She looked at Crow, who was staring intently at Mrs. Frank. What was he thinking? His face betrayed nothing, so Flo simply assumed that his thoughts reflected her own. She was sure he did not like being in this unfamiliar room crowded with strangers. They had that in common, she and Joe Crow. So why was he here? Was he, too, struggling to believe? Not an easy thing, Flo thought, despite having witnessed it. Some things were simply too incredible. For instance, Flo could not believe that if she flapped her arms fast enough she could fly, or that money would materialize in her purse of its own accord, or that she possessed the strength to bench press five hundred pounds. But she had
seen
the woman transformed. She
wanted
to believe. Flo began to alter her version of reality to make room for the possibility of age reversal. Maybe she had been wrong in some of her lifelong assumptions. Maybe she should be more flexible. Another ten or fifteen or one hundred years, it might come in handy.

The woman with the platinum wig, Polyhymnia something, was talking again. Flo did not like her much, but she admired the way she came off as both intimate and untouchable. Flo had noticed this quality in other public figures, an ability to be inside you and on the other side of the universe, all at the same time.

Polyhymnia was inviting those who wanted to learn more to join her in the reception area. She also promised an up-close look at the new Mrs. Veronica Frank. She led Mrs. Frank off the stage and down the hallway.

Buzzing and scuffling, the gathering rose unevenly, many of the women having trouble untangling their purses and bags from the chair legs. The rows emptied into the aisles and headed for the exit. Flo tried to keep Crow in sight, but was blocked by a cluster of chattering matrons who had stopped in the middle of the aisle to give one another verbal recaps of what they had seen. She jumped up onto one of the seats and surveyed the exiting crowd. Crow’s dark hair did not appear in the sea of gray, white, silver, and blond. Had he already made it out of the room? Flo scanned the crowd again, and this time she saw him—not heading for the exit, but climbing onto the empty stage. He looked back over the crowd, his eyes pausing briefly on Flo, then walked quickly into the wings.

During the Second Age of Mankind, which began with the discovery of the cell in 1665, the average human lifespan increased from thirty-six to over seventy years. The collapse of the Western military-industrial complex and the decimation of the human race by AIDS, Ebola, influenza, and Lyme disease will mark the end of the Second Age. This process will begin with the dawning of the millennium and will continue throughout the twenty-first century. On January 1, 2100, the mantle of world leadership will be assumed by a new race of Immortals: the Amaranthines.

—The Amaranthine Book of Truths

T
HE OFFICIAL TEACHINGS OF
the Amaranthine Church of the One forbade the use of alcoholic beverages, tobacco, or caffeine. The ACO also counseled the Faithful to avoid red meat, refined sugar, and saturated fats. The Faithful expected to live a very long time and were therefore expected to take good care of their bodies. This was common sense. Why spend eternity in a wheezing, alcoholic haze? Or waddle through the next millennium with thighs swishing, or a belly hanging out over your belt?

No one would want that—especially not Rupert Chandra who, before his extraction, had smoked three packs of Winstons a day, weighed in excess of 300 pounds, and whose idea of healthy eating had been to swallow a handful of vitamins and herbal medicines with a Bloody Mary for breakfast. That was the old Rupe, the mortal Rupe. The new Rupe was a clean machine.

Nevertheless, Rupe felt he deserved a good stiff drink after making it through another anti-aging demonstration. About four ounces of Glenfiddich would release the tension he felt in his chest. And a small cigar, one of the slim Havanas he’d brought back from his last trip to England, would help quell the mild nausea he’d been experiencing the past few days. That was his reward to himself, both for having achieved immortality and for shouldering the burden of leadership.

Rupe propped his feet atop his desk blotter and reclined in his high-backed leather chair. The sun’s last tangential rays sliced across his office, illuminating golden dust motes and blue curls of cigar smoke. He sent a series of smoke rings toward the sunbeam, watched them catch the light, waver, then disintegrate. He swirled the scotch in his glass. Yes, this was a well-deserved reward. He had done his job and done it well. He had created the perfect illusion, had opened the door, had shown the Pilgrims a way to believe. Now it was up to Polly and the rest of the Faithful.