The Immortalists(97)

‘It’s a man’s watch,’ Varya told him. ‘You should keep it.’

‘No,’ said Daniel, in the same, covert tone, and she understood that he had seen something that unsettled him, something he did not want to carry home.

‘Luke?’ she calls now.

He coughs and reaches for the handle of the fridge. ‘Mind if I –?’

Stop, she thinks, but he’s already there, he has pulled the door open and seen it.

‘You keep the monkeys’ food in here?’ he calls, though when he turns to her, his bewilderment is already giving way to understanding.

The door hangs open. From the living room, Varya can see the rows of prepacked meals inside. On the top shelf are her breakfasts, mixed fruit in plastic bags with two tablespoons of high-fiber cereal. On the lower shelf are her lunches: nuts with beans or, on weekends, a slab of tofu or tuna. Her dinners are in the freezer, cooked weekly and then divided into foil-wrapped portions. Taped to the side of the refrigerator, the side that faces Luke, is an Excel spreadsheet with each meal’s caloric count, as well as its vitamin and mineral content.

In the first year of her restriction, she lost fifteen percent of her body weight. Her clothes became baggy, and her face took on the narrow insistence of a greyhound’s. She observed these changes with curious detachment: she was proud to be able to resist the temptation of sweets, carbs, fat.

‘Why do you do this?’ Luke asks.

‘Why do you think?’ she says, but she balks when she sees him coming toward her. ‘Why are you angry? Is it not my right to decide how to live?’

‘Because I’m sad,’ says Luke, thickly. ‘Because to see you like this breaks my fucking heart. You cleared the decks: you had no husband, no kids. You could have done anything. But you’re just like your monkeys, locked up and underfed. The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end? At what cost? Of course, your monkeys never had the choice.’

It is impossible to convey the pleasure of routine to someone who does not find routine pleasurable, so Varya does not try. The pleasure is not that of sex or love but of certainty. If she were more religious, and Christian, she could have been a nun: what safety, to know what prayer or chore you’ll be doing in forty years at two o’clock on a Tuesday.

‘I’m making them healthier,’ she says. ‘They’ll live longer lives because of me.’

‘But not better ones.’ Luke comes to stand over her, and she presses back against the couch. ‘They don’t want cages and food pellets. They want light, play, heat, texture – danger! All this bullshit about choosing survival over life, as if we ever have control over either one. It’s no wonder you feel nothing when you see them in their cages. You feel nothing for yourself.’

‘And how should I go about my life? Should I live like Simon, who cared for no one but himself? Should I live in a fantasy world, like Klara?’

She peels away from the couch, careful not to touch him, and strides into the kitchen. There she reopens the door of the refrigerator and begins to restack the bags of food that jostled when Luke closed the door.

‘You blame them,’ he says, following her, and Varya turns toward him the anger she feels for her siblings, the anger that simmers constantly inside her. If they had only been smarter, more cautious. If they had shown self-awareness, shown humility – if they had shown patience! If they had not lived as though life were a mad dash toward some unearned climax; if they had walked instead of fucking run.

They began together: before any of them were people, they were eggs, four out of their mother’s millions. Astonishing, that they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws – like strangers caught for seconds in the same elevator.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I love them. I do my work in tribute to them.’

‘You don’t think any part of it is selfishness?’

‘What?’

‘There are two major theories about how to stop aging,’ Luke parrots. ‘The first is that you should suppress the reproductive system. And the second theory is that you should suppress caloric intake.’

‘I should never have told you anything. You’re too young to understand; you’re a child.’

‘I’m a child? I am?’ Luke laughs sharply, and Varya recoils. ‘You’re the one trying to convince yourself the world is rational, like there’s anything you can do to put a dent in death. You’re telling yourself that they died because of x, and you lived because of y, and that those things are mutually exclusive. That way you can believe you’re smarter; that way you can believe you’re different. But you’re just as irrational as the rest of them. You call yourself a scientist, you use words like longevity and healthful aging, but you know the most basic story of existence – everything that lives must die – and you want to rewrite it.’

He leans closer still, until their faces are inches apart. She cannot look at him. He is too near, he wants too much from her – she can smell his breath, a bacterial fudge cut by the Genmaicha’s roasted grain.

‘What do you want from your life?’ he asks, and when she is silent, he grabs her wrist and squeezes. ‘You want to continue on like this forever? Like this?’