A Short Long Life (novel)

CHAOS

Color Her An Odd Savior        

or        

A Short Long Life        

First draft 1991             

Current version 2013             

Table of Contents    

    1.  Fondling a Bust    

    2.  Do Not Bend Grass

    3.  Hypothetically   

    4.  Theoretically   

    5.  White Mouse Syndrome

    6.  Blown to Smithereens

    7.  Mad Joan  

    8.  House Warming  

    9.  Howling Wind       

    10.  Sitting Bull    

    11.  Carnival   

    12.  Plutonic Love   

    13.  The Last Picnic   

    14.  The Deposition

1    Fondling a Bust

When Joan Fennel was a child with a pet white mouse, the Albert Einstein Fellowship was founded. The directors invited Dr. Albert Einstein to receive the first Unified Field Theorist Award and to be the evening's keynote speaker at the first annual awards dinner. Albert declined the honor in a note typed by his secretary, Amelia.

The directors then sent Albert a fancy certificate with gold-leaf filigree, naming him as the fellowship's honorary president. In the cover letter, addressed to Amelia, the directors asked that she see the certificate "suitably framed to join Dr. Einstein's gallery of deserved degrees and honors." Amelia smiled; her employer had never asked her to frame and hang certificates he received. The fellowship's honorary certificate arrived on an afternoon when Albert was thinking through the mathematical proof of a fifth dimension where time, speed, energy, and mass were not only relative, but were four of a sacrosanct quintuplet. The fifth sibling was as elusive as an alchemist philosopher’s stone. Amelia had just put the cover letter on the large envelope when Albert walked by the open door of her office. Albert had a pencil behind his ear and was patting the empty pocket of his shirt.

"Oh, Dr. Einstein?" Amelia called, holding the certificate for him to see. He stopped and turned to Amelia who pointed to her own ear. Albert smiled and plucked the pencil.

"Yes?"

"You've been elected the honorary president of that fellowship named after you. They've sent you a certificate. Do you want me to have it framed?"

Dr. Einstein stepped to Amelia's desk and took the certificate. He looked at the gold filigree border, turned the sheet over, and pulling a chair close to the desk, sat.

"Just what I need," he said without sarcasm.

Without another word, Albert began writing on the blank side of the certificate. For an eternity, relatively speaking, Amelia watched the scientist scribble line after line of symbols and numbers, formulas stalking that fifth dimension. Putting the pencil again behind his ear and tapping with one finger on the corner of the paper, Albert stared at the equations. Then he shook his head slowly, stood up, and walked out, leaving the certificate on Amelia's desk. The sheet of paper, used on both sides, had lost all value to the scientist.

Amelia typed a 'thank you' note to the directors of the fellowship.

The annual Unified Field Theorist Award was given to scientists, like Albert, whose work furthered development of this theory's mathematical proof. After Albert Einstein's death, scientists doubted the proof would ever be found and doubted the Unified Field Theory was an accurate description of physical reality. So the fellowship's directors amended the award's statement to honor excellence and expertise in any field of scientific research.

When she was twenty-eight, Joan received this official recognition from her colleagues. With considerable and feverish angst, Directors of the Albert Einstein Fellowship broke tradition by choosing a scientist without a penis. Joan’s impeccable scientific methods and her brilliant solutions to esoteric perplexities deserved this recognition. Female colleagues praised Joan for being the first woman to penetrate the Fellowship's male body.

Fellowship directors feared that Joan might take advantage of the awards ceremony, using the platform to advocate feminist policies. A few members of the fellowship had already announced that they would boycott the ceremony, refusing to honor this young woman with their presence. Science journalists from around the nation would be there to record whatever Joan Fennel chose to say.

During her many years in academia, Joan impudently and often scoffed at a colleague's grant-groveling and claims biased by corporate-funding influence. Science journalists liked to quote her boiled sarcasm. Scalded associates whispered rumors about Joan's alleged bedroom experiments that only an X-rated science digest could publish, rumors that no one believed and many relished retelling. Less imaginative, but no less envious colleagues joked about her nose.

When she was just a child, Joan fell, like Sir Newton's apple, from a tree. The distortion of the broken cartilage had become more pronounced with age. Joan could have gone to a plastic surgeon; her mother regularly visited plastic surgeons, and just because her mother did, Joan did not.

On the day of the fellowship's pompous and catered ceremony, Joan composed a short speech designed to leave the directors standing with their trousers bunched at their ankles. She intended to refuse their magnanimous gesture and to expose their pretentious, chauvinistic backsides to the public. The opening sentence of her speech came to Joan as she was rinsing shampoo from her hair. After stepping from the shower, she tracked small wet footprints to the kitchen. She returned to the bathroom with a portable tape recorder, and while toweling dry, she spoke to the machine.

"By accepting this award, I am being honored for thinking cleverly and working carefully, but dare I hope to stand equal to the venerated men who have selected me for this honor? Among the members of the selection committee is a director of this Fellowship, the renowned Dr. Franklin B. Tittle, who lends his name and prestige to any associate's treatise and who thereby receives credit for experiments he never conducted and for articles he never authored. Then there is the learned Dr. Samuel J. Goldstein, who recognizes the value of education and has fifteen doctorate degrees framed and hanging on his office wall; fourteen of these are from a Southwest university known to be a publishing house of mail-order diplomas. And there is the industrious Dr. Richard Chessman, whose professional and private life verifies the deleterious effects of alcohol when mixed with water and ice in a pint beaker, and who is available, to the highest bidder, as an authority for or against any theory. My, oh my, how can I hope to stand as an equal at the side of flim, flam, and sot? I therefore refuse this honor and the fellowship you offer."

After Joan toweled dry, the phone rang. Joaquin said he would be unable to accompany Joan's parents to the awards dinner. Captain Joaquin Alguer wanted to attend the awards dinner, but he couldn't get off duty; he was career military.

Joaquin had been Joan's one and only childhood friend. He was five years old when the moving van stopped in front of the vacant house down the block; Joaquin watched the truck being unloaded, saw Joan in a purple hooded sweatshirt with a white mouse peaking from the open collar.

“What’s its name?” he asked.

“Mako.”

“Make Oh?”

“Mako, a kind of shark.”

“Yeah, I know,” Joaquin bluffed.

Joan let him feed Mako bits of white bread she rolled into small pills.

“The pills are magic,” she said “They allow Mako to live forever, to always be my friend.”

Joaquin became Joan’s friend and was with her that summer when Joan broke her nose. Joaquin was sitting in the crotch of two branches when Joan lost her grip on the tree's smooth gray bark. Her hands slipped, and she hung, swinging by one leg until the muscles gave out. Joan fell, nose first, three meters to the dry, hard dirt. Joaquin comforted her; that was when he fell in love with Joan.

Joan’s nose, broken in the accident, never did heal well, and as she grew up the nose favored one cheek more than the other, until as an adult, when Joan looked directly at you, her nose offered a quarter profile much like a Picasso painting of a face. Some people couldn’t stop staring at her nose, but Joaquin saw around the nose and loved Joan and thought she was beautiful.

Joan's parents, Jack and Leslie Fennel, arrived fashionably late at the Albert Einstein Fellowship Annual Awards Dinner. A parking valet took Jack's keys. The valet wore a bright red blazer with brass buttons. Jack wore a new toupee, a rented tux, and a cheap imitation of a wristwatch people wore to impress other people. Leslie had selected his ensemble for the evening. Jack saw his car drive away without him, then flashed that wristwatch, raising and twisting his arm to bring the watch dial out from under his cuff, to confirm another five minutes had passed without anything unforgettable happening.

Jack and Leslie were proud of their daughter. They had no clear idea of what she had accomplished, but they were happy to claim credit for having raised Joan. Their primary contribution had been microscopic, genetic.

The prestige-conscious audience at the awards dinner ignored the Fennels, denied their fellowship. Leslie sat next to Jack and scanned the faces along both sides of their banquet table. She wondered where the celebrities were. Leslie had imagined the awards dinner would be an event similar to the Academy Awards. She kept her rabbit fur around her shoulders; the auditorium was cool, and the audience, cooler. The diamond stud earrings in Leslie's earlobes were paste. The deep blue evening dress draped her surgically sculptured breasts. Her auburn hair had been colored and coiffed by a salon. She glanced around for a photographer; she wanted to be ready.

"I haven't seen Joan, have you?" she asked; Jack didn’t say.

A waiter offered a platter with hors d'oeuvres, pates of undefinable origin, Jack leaned to Leslie's ear and whispered, "God gave us teeth to chew and bowels to do the mixing. I certainly hope the dinner will be something recognizable." Jack liked a meal of meat and potatoes, and refused to eat any food already mashed and mixed. Jack thought of himself as a good cook. He had taught himself to enjoy planning meals, broiling cuts of beef, and boiling frozen vegetables. In thirty years of marriage, Leslie hadn't cooked one meal.

The same waiter brought a platter of Vienna sausages on toothpicks, but the tray passed over Jack. He wanted two or twelve of those juicy wieners, but didn't assert himself. Jack had never learned how to take, he had only learned how to wait. Raised by industrious, mediocre parents, he had learned that life was a god's way of strengthening souls; those pearly gates don't open for weak souls or souls sick with sin. Confident that his parent’s god did have infinite wisdom and would reveal Jack’s own unique fate, he had waited and waited, and often felt guilty for feeling impatient.

During the awards dinner, Jack frequently consulted his watch. This habit distracted people sitting near Jack and Leslie at the long banquet table; none realized this was a symptom of Jack's impatience with his hand-me-down god.

The entree, a shellfish gumbo, looked to Jack like boiled garbage. He stirred the contents of the wide bowl and found many of the morsels still in sea shells. “Crap,” he thought and isolated a piece of boiled potato. He ate it. The rented tux fit too snugly at his shoulders. Raising and twisting his hand to reveal the time, Jack looked like a man lifting a wriggling eel out of his gumbo.

The elegant woman sitting at his left scooted her chair away from Jack, and her distinguished escort did likewise to make room. A chain reaction continued along the Fennels' side of the table. The last diner on that side of the table, a small and bald scientist, meekly moved his chair to the end of the table. For the rest of the evening, this scholar craned to see the ceremonies proceeding on the stage behind him.

The Fennels had not yet seen their daughter. As various honors were announced, someone in the audience stood and walked to the stage to receive an award. The Unified Field Theorist Award was the last and most prestigious. As the announcer introduced this final award and the credits of Dr. Fennel, Joan appeared from backstage left. The audience's eyes turned to her, and the speaker also glanced at Joan, anxious about what she might say as soon as she reached the podium. Joan wore a simple green dress. Her blonde hair was neatly brushed. She wore basic black flats on her feet. Leslie appraised her daughter and groaned.

"Her taste is all in her mouth!" Leslie whispered to Jack. "I took that child with me every time I went to boutiques and salons. Just look at her; she looks like the janitor's daughter. And I wish she would get her nose done."

Joan shook hands with the speaker, grasped the bronze trophy (a shrunken bust of Albert Einstein) and stepped to the microphone. She looked at the audience. Her eyes rested a moment on Jack and Leslie. Joan smiled at her parents, then said, "Thank you." After meeting the gaze of the audience, she faced the row of seven men seated on the dais behind her. Dr. Chessman swallowed so hard that people at the farthest banquet table saw his Adam's apple bob; everyone on the stage heard the man swallow. Joan looked calmly at each of the men, then she turned and walked off stage left. Relief wafted over the audience, like dandelion seed puffs floating on a breeze.

Joan accepted the bronze Einstein bust not because it recognized her past work and not because it symbolized her victory in a battle of sexes. A Unified Field Theorist Award recipient traditionally took a year's sabbatical for independent research. This sabbatical was made possible by the Fellowship's hundred-thousand-dollar check. The check always arrived by messenger three days after what the fellowship members and directors dorkily called "the night we fondle a bust." Joan accepted the award because she wanted that money and that year of independent research to prove that the natural process of aging was not at all natural.

After receiving the award, Joan took a year and traveled to a village in eastern Russia where the peasants reportedly live extremely long lives, native people who have no access to modern medicine, who are no different from other people in these countries, except they live longer.

Joan wanted to find what gave those people a long life.

Joan and Joaquin often argued about the benefit of longevity while they were in high school. Joan believed that long life and wisdom were inseparable. Joaquin, on the other hand, believed if we could all live, say, two hundred years, we would be pretty much as we are today—some two hundred year old saints and some two hundred year old tyrants and bigots. The argument would go round and round since they were just talking hypothetically.

No longer hypothetical, Joan flew to Moscow, then traveled overland to the village. A government-appointed interpreter traveled with her, and basked in the hospitality and vodka of the peasants who avidly listened to his stories of the American woman and life in Moscow, while Joan collected soil and water samples, tissue samples from people, animals, and plants.

When she returned from Russia, several articles were written about her research. Being the first woman scientist honored by the Albert Einstein Fellowship, Joan was good copy for science journals.

A portion of one article published at that time:

Imaginative legend or immaculate logic?

Medieval folklore claimed that a magical spring restored youth to anyone who bathed in or drank from its waters. Some people believed this spring was the Water of Life found in the Garden of Eden. Others believed this spring could be found in the Far East.

When Juan Ponce De Leon anchored his ship among islands in the Caribbean, he thought he had found the Far East. Island natives spoke of a fountain of youth on what is now Bimini Island.

So the intrepid explorer set out to find Bimini. He landed at Palm Beach and thought Florida was Bimini, but he did not find the fountain, only flowers. He headed south and thought the Yucatan was Bimini, but he did not find the fountain there either.

Dr. Joan Fennel says that Ponce de Leon did not ask the right question.

Joan didn't mind the light tone and humor in the articles about her research. She needed the publicity to catch the attention of whoever would finance the lab portion of her research. NASA picked up the ball and established the De Leon Project.

Joaquin didn’t go with Joan to Russia, but he did go visit her lab at NASA. He was surprised her lab was so small. The room was crowded with refrigerators storing the soil, plant, and tissue samples collected from the village. Joan was the only person there. He had expected a busy lab with many assistants looking for truth under microscopes. Joan explained that NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on cryogenics, an unproved and impractical method of prolonging astronaut lives, trying to find a way to slow down the aging process so humans can survive interplanetary space flights. She said NASA didn't believe she would find the fountain of youth, but they could spend a few hundred-thousand dollars on her gamble. If she was right, they could sell those cryogenic freezers to Ben and Jerry for their ice cream.

At NASA, a computer program analyzed the samples that Joan had collected. Joan found what she called a trace element that existed in that Russian village in higher concentrations then in Seattle or Omaha. Joan concocted a clear odorless and tasteless potion and tested it on lab rats. She could lead a rat to the fountain of youth and she could make that rat drink, but the rat still died after the usual process of aging.

Joan asked the right question. She found why those peasants live long lives, but she had no proof, and in the early 1980s when Congress cut NASA's budget, NASA scrapped the De Leon Project. She boxed up all the samples, folded all the track-fed computer printouts, and shipped everything to a small house in her home town that her father had given her.

About a year later, Joan visited Joaquin at his apartment. She knocked, he opened the door.

“The villagers never claimed their animals lived long,” she said and breezed by Joaquin.

On her own time, Joan had continued working on the De Leon Project. She was convinced her potion only worked on humans. Then, then she offered Joaquin the chance to live forever, or at least a very long time. She had already taken the potion, so when she handed him a dose, he drank it. Joaquin hoped eventually they would be the lovers he had imagined they should be — young with time on their side.

But Joan said that the two of them were not a broad enough sample to prove her theory. She wanted Joaquin to help with her experiment. Joaquin’s job with the Army at that time was to produce Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) and Joan wanted him to mix her tasteless, odorless potion with the other additives injected into the rations. And he did it, because he loved her. Joaquin arranged to have this particular batch of MREs shipped to the South Pole for the sixty people isolated for the winter at the McMurdo Research Station. This was a perfect test for her potion. She had the roster of the staff there that winter and could track them through out their long lives.