anti-ageing with all the resources at their disposal. These middle-aged obsessives had become playboys and playgirls, with perfect physiques, whose sex lives were the subject of relentless tabloid gossip, and…
All too soon, the first piece, a playful scherzo, comes to an end. The hall explodes with applause. I bask in it for a moment. Then my hands hover over the keys again, and…
And there was Andrei Makov.
Andrei was a triple Gold Medal winner at the 2032 Olympics in Seoul. He was nineteen years old, and he broke the world record in three separate events – the 400 metres, the 800 metres and the triathlon. Andrei’s achievement was formidable, the result of ten years of intensive training. With his tall, gangly frame and his intense Russian stare, he became an international teen idol, as well as going down in sporting history as one of the all-time greats.
Andrei’s most remarkable achievement was to challenge the African domination of running events, which over the years had seen the African runners seize medal after medal after medal. These athletes, mainly from Kenya, were gifted with bodies that defied all previous standards of human performance.
Then along came Andrei… who left the poor Kenyan runners literally gasping in his wake. Andrei’s approach was inner-focused, based on an explicitly Zen training method that liberated chi while also scientifically analysing and improving length of stride, oxygen intake, and all the other controllable aspects of the human performance.
And when he ran, he seemed more than human.
In 2044, Makov won five more Olympic gold medals – for the 400 metres, the triathlon, the pentathlon, freestyle swimming, and weightlifting. Never before has a single athlete dominated such a vast range of events. Makov was bulkier now, but still had that lean and dangerous look. His physical strength came not from a ripped physique, but from relaxed muscle fibres of vast tensile strength. Makov had studied pilates, he was a black belt seventh dan in goju ryu karate, and he was also a keen undersea diver. His versatility was matched only by his sang froid. Everything he did, he did effortlessly. At the age of thirty-five he took up tennis for the first time. At the age of thirty-six, he won the tennis Grand Slam, defeating the number 1, 2 and 3 seeds in humiliating straight sets. At the age of thirty-nine, he won the Tour de France and, at his own insistence, was drug-tested before and after and shown to be totally clean.
But at the age of forty, Andrei developed a brain tumour. Over the space of three excruciating years, he dipped in and out of madness, as he intensively studied the nature of his disease and the possible remedies. Andrei refused to take chemotherapy and radiotherapy, because he felt they interfered with his perception of his own chi. Instead he used complementary medicine to control the growth of the tumour. And Andrei then volunteered himself as a guinea pig for a radical new therapy which used a viral agent to mutate the tumour. The tumour would not be excised from his brain; it would be transformed, it would become part of his brain.
The technique was successful; the tumour went into recession, and became a benign “spare brain” which, as an unexpected side-effect, activated the rejuvenation mechanisms in Andrei’s body. And so, without any radiation treatment or injections or gene therapy, Andrei’s body began its journey to eternal youth. The viral agent had the further effect of clarifying and cleaning the neural pathways, almost like a defragmenting and disk-cleaning program. After the treatment, Andrei’s memory was crystal-sharp, and his ability to manipulate numbers mentally was astounding.
His judgement, however, was all too fallible. Andrei retired from athletics and went into business. He lost millions in the course of fifteen years, after being cheated by a series of sophisticated advisers, all of them advocating arcane mathematical approaches to investing. He fell in love with a glamorous actress, who cuckolded him and then did a kiss and tell. He fell in love with an attractive nuclear scientist, who drove him to the brink of violence with her paranoid jealousies. And he fell in love with two sisters, who wrote a book about him mocking his every word and deed. And, finally, a tabloid spy succeeded in filming him having sex with two hookers in St Petersburg, one of whom was only fifteen; and the resulting scandal shattered his reputation in his home country.
Andrei became addicted to alcohol, heroin, cocaine and chocolate. His body weight ballooned. He became a parody figure.
But at the age of fifty, Andrei went into training again, determined to halt the decline. He attempted to win a place at the forthcoming Olympics, but failed to make the grade in any of the qualifying events. Andrei was still a strong, fit man. But he was no longer the fastest sprinter in the world, or the best swimmer, or the strongest weightlifter. He was, of course, over the hill. His friends advised him to try the marathon, traditionally the event in which older athletes can still credibly compete.
And so Andrei spent five years training for the marathon; and then he ran five marathons in five days, following in the footsteps of the ageing heart-diseased Ranulph Fiennes, who achieved a similar feat in the late twentieth century. The difference is that Fiennes’s triumph was to actually complete all his events, at painstakingly slow speed. But Andrei ran and won all five marathons, at a terrifying pace. And, after breaking the world marathon records five times in a row, he finished each race with a sprint of legendary and astonishing swiftness.
On the basis of this triumph, though now in his mid-fifties, Andrei won a chance to compete in the Olympics again, despite attempts to have him banned on the grounds that his spontaneous rejuvenation contravened the rules about drug-taking for athletes. At the 2064 Olympics he set a new world record for the 400 metre sprint. He outclassed runners who were decades younger than him.
And in so doing, he challenged once and for all the dominant Western myth: the myth of decline. In Eastern culture, the prevailing myth was the opposite; it was of the aged sensei who was faster, stronger and more skilful than his younger acolytes. But we in the West have always swallowed the dream of gilded youth; and consequently, we made a world fit for the young to squander.
Andrei’s triumph broke all those rules, and shattered for ever the old paradigms. Suddenly, age became a state to which people should aspire, rather than a fate to be dreaded. Andrei was a hero who changed the world.
And then one night he went to see a pianist play at Carnegie Hall…
… and here I am again, on stage, playing the piano in front of my adoring public.
My next piece was a zest-filled Brahms waltz, which went well. Then I segued into a delightful jazz improvisation based on a Dizzy Gillespie riff. My heart sang with joy; I felt superhuman.
But slowly, my ease and fluency deserted me. I froze with fear at the beginning of the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto. At one point, I stopped entirely. The audience was hushed. Sweat beaded my brow and a tiny drop fell and splashed a piano key.
Then I continued, and the audience sighed, and were with me. If I’d planned it, I couldn’t have managed more adroitly. I’d won their hearts! I’d played the underdog card!
But my exultation slowly faded. As the evening continued, I felt the shuffle of feet, the exaggerated coughs, as sympathy ebbed away at the sheer… awful… fucking… mediocrity of my piano playing. I’d got away with so much with my flashy, entertaining introductory pieces. But now that I was playing the Beethoven, it became evident that my legato was stiff, my articulation uneven, and my crescendi and diminuendi too consciously “worked at”. I had flash, and flair, but I was slowly and cruelly revealed as a pub pianist with aspirations.
Naturally, after the event, I blamed the orchestra. The piano. My nerves. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that for all my ability and mastered technique, I didn’t care enough – about the music, about the audience, about what my fingers were doing. So there is, after all, a mystery X element – commitment, soul, passion – call it what you will. After decades of practice, I could play the piano; the piano would never play me.
But enough self-laceration. The point is: it doesn’t matter that I gave a mediocre piano recital at the Carnegie Hall. It matters that I did it at all. I had mocked the capricious God who endows some with great talents for music or sport, and endows others like me with fuck-all. So I laughed off the bad reviews, the book sales went through the roof, and I was the success of the season.
And so after the first flush of embarrassment, I felt triumphant, and vindicated.
And of course, I also that night met Andrei, who I had idolised from afar for many years. There was nearly a ten-year age gap between us – I was eighty-one, he was seventy-three. But he looked, frankly, older than me. He had a blaze of silver hair which he proudly refused to darken. There were deep laughter lines around his eyes, and his skin was thick and weathered. But these outward signs of ageing merely enhanced his extraordinary air of energy and fitness. He walked like proud air, his movements were effortless. And he saw everything. Without visibly flicking his eyes, he could see every person in a crowded room and remember their appearance and the colours they
