endlessly, anyway — Peter had a meeting with a major U.S. client at 2:00 P.M.
They went to a little restaurant Peter liked on Sheppard East, out toward Vic Park — a place that made a club sandwich by hacking the turkey breast with a knife, instead of slicing it thin on a machine, and toasting the bread on a grill so that it had brown lines across it. Peter never thought of himself as particularly memorable, but it seemed half the restaurants in North York thought him a regular, even though, excepting Sonny Gotlieb’s, he only came in to any one of them once or twice a month. The server took Colin’s drink order (scotch and soda), but protested he knew what Peter wanted ('Diet Coke with lime, right?'). Once the server was gone, Peter looked at Colin expectantly. “What’s new?”
Colin was grayer than Peter had remembered, but he still wore his wealth ostentatiously, and was sporting a total of six gold rings. His eyes moved back and forth incessantly. “I guess you heard about me and Naomi.”
Peter shook his head. “Heard what?”
“We’ve separated.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “I’m sorry.”
“I hadn’t realized how many of our friends were really just her friends,” said Colin. The server arrived, set down little napkins, deposited the drinks on them, then scurried away. “I’m glad you agreed to come to lunch.”
“No problem,” said Peter. He had never been good at this kind of social situation. Was he supposed to ask Colin what had gone wrong? Peter rarely spoke of private matters, and on the whole didn’t like either asking or answering personal questions. “I’m sorry to hear about you two.” His cliche-dispenser suggested adding, “You always seemed so happy,” but he stopped himself before the thought was given voice — Peter’s own recent experience had taught him to put no stock in appearances.
“We’d been having problems for quite some time,” said Colin.
Peter squeezed his lime into his Diet Coke.
“We weren’t really on the same wavelength anymore.” Apparently Colin had a cliche-dispenser of his own. “We weren’t talking.”
“You just drifted apart,” said Peter, not quite making it a question, not wanting to pry.
“Yeah,” said Colin. He took a liberal swig of his drink, then winced as if it were a masochistic pleasure. “Yeah.”
“You’d been together a long time,” said Peter, again careful to keep his tone flat, to keep the statement from becoming a question.
“Eleven years, if you count the time we lived together before we got married,” said Colin. He cupped his glass in both hands.
Peter wondered idly who had broken up with whom.
“I — I was seeing someone else,” said Colin. “A woman in Montreal. I had to go there every three weeks on business, took the maglev out.”
Peter was dumbfounded. Was everyone screwing outside of marriage these days? “Oh,” he said.
“It didn’t really mean anything,” said Colin, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. “It was just, you know, just a way of getting a message to Naomi.” He looked up. “A cry for help, maybe. You know?”
“Just a cry for help. But she went crazy when I told her. Said that was the last straw. The straw that broke the camel’s back.” Clearly, thought Peter, everyone had a cliche-dispenser. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but I had needs, you know. I don’t think she should have left me over something like that.” The server came in again, depositing Peter’s club sandwich and Colin’s pasta primavera. “What do you think?” asked Colin.
“Anyway,” said Colin, perhaps sensing that it was time to change the subject, “I didn’t ask you to lunch to talk about me. I really wanted to get some advice from you.”
Peter looked at him. “Oh?”
“Well, you and Cathy were at that Life Unlimited seminar. What did you think?”
“Impressive sales pitch,” said Peter.
“I mean, what did you think of the process? You’re a biomedical engineer. Do you think it would really work?”
Peter shrugged. “Jay Leno says Queen Elizabeth has undergone the process — only way to save the monarchy was to make sure that none of her children ever got to sit on the throne.”
Colin chuckled politely, but looked at Peter as if he expected a more serious response. Peter chewed on a bit of his sandwich, then: “I don’t know. The basic premise seems sound. I mean, there are — what? — five basic models for senescence and eventual death.” Peter ticked them off on his fingers. “First, there’s the stochastic theory. It says our bodies are complex machines, and, like all complex machines, something’s bound to break down eventually.
“Second, the Hayflick phenomenon: human cells seem to only be able to divide about fifty times total.
“Third, the smudged-Xerox hypothesis. Small errors are introduced every time DNA is copied, and at some point the copy gets so bad that it doesn’t make sense anymore. Boom! — you’re pushing up daisies.
“Number four is the toxic-waste theory. Something — possibly free radicals — gives your body trouble from the inside.
“And finally, the autoimmune hypothesis, in which your body’s natural defenses become confused and turn upon your own healthy cells.”
Colin nodded. “And no one knows which one is right?”
“Oh, I suspect they’re all right to one degree or another,” said Peter. “But the key thing is that Life Unlimited’s — what did they call them? nannies? — their nannies seem to address all five probable causes. So, yes, I’d say it’s got a good chance of working. There’s no way to know for sure, though, until someone who has undergone the process actually does live for a few centuries.”
“So — so you think it’d be worth the money?” said Colin.
Peter shrugged again. “On the surface, yeah, I guess so. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live forever? But, then again, it’d be a shame to do that if it meant missing out on a wonderful heaven.”
Colin cocked his head. “You’re sounding downright religious, Peter.”
Peter concentrated on finishing his food. “Sorry. Idle thoughts, that’s all.”
“What did Cathy think of Life Unlimited?”
“She didn’t seem very interested,” said Peter.
“Really?” said Colin. “I think it sounds great. I think it’s something I’d very much like to do.”
“It costs a fortune,” said Peter. “You been embezzling from the bank?”
“Hardly,” said Colin. “But I think it would be worth every penny.”
It took three weeks to get two additional recordings of the soulwave departing from human bodies. Peter made one of the recordings at Carlson’s Chronic Care, the same place he’d met Peggy Fennell. This time, the subject was Gustav Reichhold, a man just a few years older than Peter who was dying of complications from AIDS, and had chosen to end his life through doctor-assisted suicide.
The other recording, though, had to be made somewhere else, lest critics charge that the soulwave, far from being a universal component of human existence, was simply some mundane electrical phenomenon related to the wiring in that particular building, or to its proximity to power lines, or to some particular course of treatment used at Carlson’s. So, to get his third recording, Peter had put an ad out on the net:
Wanted: person in very late stages of terminal illness or injury to participate in testing a new biomedical monitoring device. Location: southern Ontario. Will pay participant CDN$10,000. Terminal individuals, or persons with power of attorney for same, please apply in confidence to Hobson Monitoring (net: HOBMON).
Peter felt funny about placing the ad — it seemed so cold. Indeed, his embarrassment probably had a lot to do with why he offered such a large fee. But within two days of the ad going out on the net, Peter had fourteen applicants. He chose a boy — just twelve years of age — who was dying of leukemia. He made the choice as much for compassionate reasons as for varying the sample base: the boy’s family had bankrupted themselves coming to
