rewind

Whatever you do, never run back to what broke you
—Frank Ocean

I’m in a wilderness, near death, parched and exhausted. Around me lie remnants of scattered skeletons. I’m desperate to find shelter.

Off in the distance is a rumble of distant thunder and I 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.

The next day, feeling rusty and exhausted from my fitful sleep, I'm at the airport waiting to board my plane.

Paging Professor Converse—Professor Edward Converse. Please come to the Baggage Registration desk.

My pulse is racing. Which document or identity did I screw up now?.

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’m working in a secret research project at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute answerable only to Hughes himself. The project I’m heading has one stated goal—to utilize the science of microbiology to understand the genesis of life itself.

Hughes, of course, has personal motives to fund the research. He’s obsessed with the possibility of stopping or reversing the aging process.

In a year when the Nobel Prize in medicine is awarded for something as mundane as research on the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty-acid metabolism, I’m learning how to use proteins and molecules to turn off and on the genes that govern aging.

Unfortunately, Hughes becomes reclusive and erratic, and never benefits from my findings. Since I report directly to him and nobody else, I retain all records of the research and experimental results.

The program is terminated in 1966 as Hughes’ emotional health begins to decline, and he succumbs to severe obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

I take all my research data and quietly depart.

I begin a new life with a new identity and continue my reverse aging study using myself as guinea pig.

I go 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 have to deal with the subsequent social adjustments which are not always pleasant.

I find I can stay in one locale using the same identity for a decade, but then it becomes necessary to move on before people begin questioning my apparent ability, ‘to sip at the fountain of youth’ as one of my colleagues so aptly describes it.

And so, 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 can’t grasp hold of anything.

And the truth is, I’ve become a ghost.

© 2017, John J Geddes. All rights reserved

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