Turnabout (10 page)

Everyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats—all regular chairs now, no wheelchairs. Even the ones who had been in wheelchairs for decades were walking on their own now. Amelia thought it was easier to force yourself to walk when you knew the skill was going to come back. She’d resigned herself to a wheelchair after she broke her hip at ninety-five and overheard the doctor say, “Doesn’t all that physical therapy seem like a waste? The therapists will struggle and cajole and kill themselves getting her to
walk, and she’ll just fall again a month or two later. Or die.” So she really couldn’t understand Mr. Johnson wanting to give up unaging. Except for the doctors and, now, an occasional nurse or aide, she hadn’t seen anyone in five years who wasn’t unaging. It was easy to forget that wasn’t the natural order of things.

“You fixed the problems of aging,” Mr. Johnson said now, stubbornly. “You say you’re gonna fix our memories. Maybe you can fix me for more unaging, too. Later. But I can tell you this: You’re not going to make me lose anything about Lucille.”

“But if you write it all down—,” Dr. Jimson started. The doctors had asked all the Turnabout patients to keep what they called Memory Books, to record what they were about to forget. “A temporary measure,” Dr. Reed called it. “Like using candles during a power outage.” Amelia wondered how much longer he could keep saying that. She had five Memory Books now, one for each year that had disappeared from her mind.

“Writing’s not the same as remembering,” Mr. Johnson said forlornly.

The doctors exchanged glances.

“Okay,” Dr. Reed said gently. “Meeting dismissed.”

There were whispers up and down the hallways the rest of that day: “He’s going to do it—” “No, he’s not—” “Well, I heard he already took the medicine—” “The doctors are trying an experimental
memory treatment on him instead.” Amelia wondered why the doctors had kept everyone so well informed about everything else but were suddenly so secretive now. Mrs. Flick roamed the halls of the agency, looking for Mr. Johnson, and came back to report, “No one saw him leave the meeting.”

Amelia counted squares in her cross-stitch, lost track, and gave up on it. “They’ll tell us what happened,” she said. “They always do.”

Mrs. Flick nodded. “Yeah. If I hear the doctors getting all hepped up about those telly-mirrors one more time, I’m going to croak.”

Amelia stuck her needle back in her cross-stitch, guessing at the right place. “Now we’re going to have to listen to lots more. Dr. Reed will compare Mr. Johnson’s telomeres to all of the rest of ours. Then Dr. Jimson will talk about how his wrinkles won’t go away, but ours will, because of all the millions of cells in the skin, which is our largest organ—”

Mrs. Flick laughed because Amelia had mimicked the doctors so precisely. Funny imitations hadn’t been part of her pre-Turnabout life. She sometimes had the feeling that she herself would be the biggest surprise of this second chance at life. She took a few more stitches.

“You don’t reckon anything went wrong with Mr. Johnson, do you?” Mrs. Flick asked.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “Probably not. Nothing except him making a foolish decision.”

But she felt guilty saying that. Roy had died when she was fifty. She had years and years before she would lose any memories of him. So far she’d really lost only the memory of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren she barely knew. She still had pictures. As for her other relatives—the children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews—those she preferred to remember as their younger selves anyhow.

An aide poked her head in the door.

“The doctors are calling a meeting in fifteen minutes in the conference room,” she said.

“About Mr. Johnson again?” Mrs. Flick asked.

The aide shrugged. “They don’t tell me nothing.”

Amelia folded her cross-stitch and stood up, trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. She and Mrs. Flick shuffled out the door together, joining the stream of other people already moving down the hallway. Amelia was struck by a strange desire to join hands, the way she’d held hands with her sisters and cousins on her first day walking to school, all those years ago. Today she stifled the longing for comfort. She wasn’t a frightened seven-year-old. She was a woman of the Turnabout. She could handle whatever was going to happen on her own.

When they got to the conference room, Dr. Reed was already standing at the podium. He didn’t look up until Dr. Jimson shut the doors and went to stand beside him.

“Everyone is here now,” she said dully.

Dr. Reed looked down at the paper in front of him.

“I regret to inform you,” he began reading in a monotone, “that Edward Johnson died at one fifty-seven this afternoon. He received an injection of the antitelomerase stimulator PT-2 at one forty-five and apparently suffered a violently allergic reaction. My wife and I offer our condolences to all of you, who are, essentially, his surviving family.”

Dr. Reed backed away from the podium, reminding Amelia of dozens of press conferences she’d seen where the president comes in, announces bad news, then leaves before anyone can ask any questions. Dr. Reed, normally so talkative, showed no inclination to say any more.

He had already turned his back on the crowd before a voice rang out.

“Now, wait just a cotton-picking minute!” one of the women yelled. “You can’t just leave it like that! Why didn’t it work? What went wrong? Is that what’s going to happen to the rest of us?”

Dr. Reed stepped back to the podium. He leaned into the microphone and whispered, “I don’t know.”

Hysteria broke out then. People screamed, “But
you have to know!” “How could you let this happen?” “But Mr. Johnson believed in you—”

Dr. Jimson rapped on the podium until the hubbub subsided enough that she could make her voice heard.

“Silence!” she screamed. “Silence. Don’t yell at us! PT-2 worked on mice. It worked on monkeys! We had every reason—well, almost every reason—to expect it to work on Mr. Johnson. We didn’t know—”

“But you’re supposed to know—,” someone hollered.

Dr. Jimson hit the podium again.

“We can’t know everything!” she screamed. Amelia watched in amazement.
She’s going to cry. Dr. Jimson, the ice queen, is going to cry.
But Dr. Jimson didn’t. She swallowed hard and seemed to regain her composure.

Still, her loss of control momentarily shocked the crowd into silence. That gave Mrs. Flick an opening to say, in a perfectly calm voice, “Then maybe Mr. Johnson isn’t dead.”

Everyone turned to stare at her. She went on.

“Maybe it’s just a coma. Like before,” Mrs. Flick said. “Remember? You all thought we died after the first shot. But you were wrong. Maybe you’re wrong now.”

“No.” Dr. Jimson was shaking her head wildly. “No. You don’t understand. You’d have to see—”

“We’ve got to show them the video,” Dr. Reed said in a hollow voice.

Dr. Jimson turned to stare at him. But for once he was a few steps ahead of her. He was already turning the TV toward the crowd and hitting buttons on the remote control.

The picture that appeared on the screen was of Mr. Johnson sitting in this very room. His shirt-sleeve was rolled up, and Amelia could see the swath of orange antiseptic already swabbed on his arm. Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson both hovered over him.

“I’ll ask you one last time,” the Dr. Reed on the screen said in a patient voice. “Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

“One hundred percent,” Mr. Johnson replied, his voice ringing with confidence.

“Okay,” Dr. Reed said doubtfully. He picked up a syringe and eased the needle into Mr. Johnson’s arm. He pushed on the syringe, and the yellowish liquid inside disappeared into Mr. Johnson’s arm.

“Feeling all right?” Dr. Jimson asked.

“Just fine,” Mr. Johnson said. But his face had already begun to change before he said the second word. His cheeks went hollow, his eyes bulged, his jowls drooped. His body hunched over. He was aging. Rapidly. Amelia looked over at the untelevised Dr. Reed to see if he had hit the fast-forward
button on the remote. But that was crazy, because even fast-forward couldn’t condense decades into seconds. On the screen Mr. Johnson shriveled further, faster. Amelia almost felt relieved when his head dropped forward, obviously in death. At least it was over for him.

The televised Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson could only stand back in horror.

The real Dr. Jimson rushed to her husband’s side and grabbed for the remote.

“For God’s sake,” she shrieked. “Don’t show them everything!”

She stabbed a finger at the remote and the TV screen went black.

“His body disintegrated,” Dr. Reed mumbled, as if in a trance. “Into dust. Right before our eyes.”

Dr. Jimson slapped her husband.

Chaos broke out in the room once more. People screamed and sobbed and pleaded. The doctors made no effort to restore order.

Amelia sat still and silent, so numb she barely noticed when a chair hit her in the leg. People were throwing things? Somehow it made sense to her. This was a horrible shock. This wasn’t Louise Swanson killing herself because of her son’s betrayal. This was Mr. Johnson getting the cure they all planned to get someday, and having it kill him. She’d spent the last five years believing she was virtually immortal
now—they all believed that. She’d never realized how much that had changed her outlook on everything. How could she believe in her own mortality again? Did she have to? Couldn’t the doctors fix PT-2?

She didn’t realize she’d spoken the question aloud until Mrs. Flick answered, “You mean the way they fixed our memories? Hey, stop that!”

Amelia turned and saw that Mrs. Flick was fending off a crazed man flailing his arms at everything and everyone in sight. Finally the melee around her registered with her eyes and ears. In the front a gang of men had advanced on the two doctors and were pounding on their backs, screaming, “How dare you! You lied to us!” Another group was trying to stop the first, with cries of, “Don’t hurt them! They’re our only hope!”

Amelia blinked in astonishment. How could all the others be acting like this? They were old. Old people took bad news sitting down. They swallowed all their hopes and dreams and fears and nodded off toward death.

Except she was wrong. The people around her weren’t old anymore. Neither was she. Sure, they’d all lived a long time, and they still sported the white hair and wrinkles and bald pates that marked them as elderly. But part of being old was knowing you were near the end. And none of them did. None of them were. That’s why they’d reacted to the news of Mr. Johnson’s death like teenagers in a riot.

Amelia stood up, steadying herself with one hand on the arm of the chair. She looked with pity at Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson. But there was nothing she could do to help them.

“I have to leave,” she said to no one in particular. She walked out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind her. Then she went to her room to pack.

Melly and Anny Beth lay flat on their backs in the sand, peering up at the night sky. The stars wheeled over their heads. Melly picked up a pebble and threw it as far as she could toward the moon. The pebble went straight up, then plopped back into the sand a few yards away. In spite of her problems, in spite of the uncertainty, something about the sound of the falling stone made Melly feel good. Maybe it was just those crazy teenage hormones coursing through her veins. Or maybe it was just life. After almost two hundred years perhaps she’d learned to appreciate it. She took deep breaths of the clean desert air.

“Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if we’d never left the agency?” she asked Anny Beth.

“No,” Anny Beth said. She propped herself up on one arm and drew waves in the sand with one finger. “It would have been eighty more years of the same thing. Meetings twice a day with the doctors. So much talk about telomeres that our brains would glaze over. Constant gossip about, ‘They’ve almost fixed the memory problem,’ ‘The Cure will work the next time.’ We’d spend all our lives wondering whether or not we were going to be able to live forever.”

Melly threw another pebble at the sky. “It was the other people I had to get away from,” she said. “More than the doctors. If I were only around others who were unaging, I would go crazy.”

“Thanks,” Anny Beth said. “Want me to leave now?”

“You’re different,” Melly said. “You don’t dwell on things.”

“Whatever,” Anny Beth said. Her waves in the sand turned into circles, then swirls. “But I thought you were crazy that day you said you were leaving. I’m glad you talked me into coming along.”

“Remember that form they made us sign? How many ways can they make you say, ‘I will not contact any of my family, go anywhere that I might be recognized, or take my story to the media’?”

“Well, there were about two hundred clauses on that form. So about that many times,” Anny Beth replied.

Neither of them talked for a few minutes, and Melly could almost make herself believe they were just ordinary teenagers hanging out looking at the sky. (Did ordinary teenagers do that anymore? she wondered. They had the last time Melly was fifteen.)

“I could get to like this place,” Anny Beth said. “Puts me in mind of Kentucky.”

“What?” Melly asked. “Let me remind you:
Kentucky has trees, grass, and mountains. All this place has is sand. I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

“And that’s how I felt in Kentucky. When I was eighteen—the last time, I mean—I hated that so bad.”

“So you should hate this, too,” Melly said.

“Nah, there’s no such thing as being nowhere anymore. All you need is a phone line, and you’re connected to the whole world.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Melly said, and shivered, thinking of the tabloid reporter again. Once the agency gave them new ID, she wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Would she?

They heard the phone ringing back in their hotel room.

“Let the computer get it?” Anny Beth asked.

“No, it might be Agatha.”

“So?”

“We need to be nice to her, especially right now. And remember all those job applications we put in today? It may be someone calling for an interview.”