you could go backward
—Shakespeare
I’m in a wilderness, near death, parched and exhausted. Around me lie remnants of scattered skeletons. I’m desperate to find shelter. I hear distant thunder and watch as sand devils cross the desert, twisting into human forms. Suddenly, there’s an eerie rattling sound followed by a snapping noise, and one by one the skeletons about me come together, bone to bone.
I wake up, heart pounding and drenched with sweat. I reach out, grab the plastic water bottle on my night table and drain the contents.
Three a.m.—another dark night of the soul.
Paging Professor Converse—Professor Edward Converse. Please come to the Baggage Registration desk.
My pulse is racing. I’ve forged so many documents and changed identities so often that I always dread being caught.
I approach the desk cautiously, noting the absence of any police or airline security personnel.
“I’m Professor Converse,” I say confidently, smiling at the pretty young girl.
“You left your overnight bag in the lounge, Professor. One of the wait staff brought it to the desk.”
I breathe a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you so much,” I grin, “It’s my carry-on bag.”
“No problem, “ she chirps.
I hate that expression—“no problem”—it both dates me and draws a line between us, though apparently not to her. She’s gushing a little—forgivable for a girl in her mid twenties who probably figures I’m in my mid thirties, but she’s off by eighty years.
My mind flashes back to 1964. I was working in a secret research project at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute answerable only to Hughes himself. The project I was heading had one stated goal—to utilize the science of microbiology to understand the genesis of life itself.
Hughes, of course, had personal motives to fund the research, as he was obsessed with the possibility of stopping or reversing the aging process.
In a year when the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for something as mundane as research on the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty-acid metabolism, I was learning how to use proteins and molecules to turn off and on the genes that governed aging.
Unfortunately, Hughes became reclusive and erratic and never benefitted from my findings. Since I reported directly to him and nobody else, I retained all records of the research and experimental results.
The program was terminated in 1966 as Hughes’ emotional health began to decline, and he succumbed to severe obsessive-compulsive symptoms. I took all my research data and quietly departed.
I began a new life with a new identity and continued my reverse aging study using myself as guinea pig.
I went from being a sixty-year old man with mild hypertension and arthritis to having the body and appearance of a thirty-five old, and then had to deal with the subsequent social adjustments which were not always pleasant.
I found I could stay in one locale using the same identity for a decade, but then it became necessary to move on before people began questioning my apparent ability, ‘to sip at the fountain of youth’ as one of my colleagues so aptly described it.
And now, here I am again, boarding a jet to Florida to begin another new life as a university professor, this time teaching Literature.
I’m a modern Faust who longs to embrace everything, but I’ve become a Midas who can’t grasp hold of things.
The truth is, I’ve become a ghost.