Anna smiled. They both took sips of wine. A basket of bread was dropped off, but neither of them reached for it.
“Speaking of legacies and leaving things behind,” Anna asked, “is there a reason you and Helen decided not to have kids?”
Donald placed his glass back on the table. Anna lifted the bottle, but he waved her off. “Well, it’s not that we don’t want them. We just both went directly from grad school to our careers, you know? We kept thinking—”
“That you’ll have forever, right? That you’ll always have time. There’s no hurry.”
“No. It’s not that . . .” He rubbed the tablecloth with the pads of his fingers and felt the slick and expensive fabric slide over the other tablecloth hidden below. When they were finished with their meals and out the door, he figured this top layer would be folded back and carried off with their crumbs, a new layer revealed beneath. Like skin. Or the generations. He took a sip of wine, the tannins numbing his lips.
“I think that’s it exactly,” Anna insisted. “Every generation is waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger. My mom was almost forty when she had me, and that’s getting more and more common.”
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“Maybe we all think we might be the first generation that simply doesn’t die,” she continued, “that lives forever.” She raised her eyebrows. “Now we all expect to hit a hundred and thirty, maybe longer, like it’s our right. And so this is my theory—” She leaned closer. Donald was already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going. “Children used to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along. But now we hope it can simply be us.”
“You mean like cloning? That’s why it’s illegal.”
“I don’t mean cloning—and besides, just because it’s illegal, you and I both know people do it.” She took a sip of her wine and nodded at a family in a distant booth. “Look. He has daddy’s everything.”
Donald followed her gaze and watched the kid for a moment, then realized she was just making a point.
“Or how about my father?” she asked. “Those nano baths, all the stem-cell vitamins he takes. He truly thinks he’s gonna live forever. You know he bought a load of stock in one of those cryo firms years back?”
Donald laughed. “I heard. And I heard it didn’t work out so well. Besides, they’ve been trying stuff like that for years—”
“And they keep getting closer,” she said. “All they ever needed was a way to stitch up the cells damaged from the freezing, and now that’s not so crazy a dream, right?”
“Well, I hope the people who dream such things get whatever it is they’re looking for, but you’re wrong about us. Helen and I talk about having kids all the time. I know people having their first kid in their fifties. We’ve got time.”
“Mmm.” She finished what was in her glass and reached for the bottle. “You think that,” she said. “Everyone thinks they’ve got all the time left in the world.” She leveled her cool gray eyes at him. “But they never stop to ask just how much time that is.”
After dinner, they waited under the awning for Anna’s car service. Donald declined to share a ride, saying he needed to get back to the office and would just take a cab. The rain hitting the awning had changed, had grown somber.
Her ride pulled up, a shiny black Lincoln, just as Donald’s phone began vibrating. He fumbled in his jacket pocket while she leaned in for a hug and kissed his cheek. He felt a flush of heat despite the cool air, saw that it was Mick calling and picked up.
“Hey, you just land or what?” Donald asked.
A pause.
“Land?” Mick sounded confused. There was noise in the background. The driver hurried around the Lincoln to get the door for Anna. “I took a red-eye,” Mick said. “My flight got in early this morning. I’m just walking out of a movie and saw your texts. What’s up?”
Anna turned and waved. Donald waved back.
“You’re getting out of a movie? We just wrapped up our meeting at De’Angelo’s. You missed it. Anna said she emailed you like three times.”
He glanced up at the car as Anna drew her leg inside. Just a glimpse of her red heels, and then the driver pushed the door shut. The rain on the tinted glass stood out like jewels.
“Huh. I must’ve missed them. Probably went to junk mail. Not a big deal. We’ll catch up. Anyway, I just got out of this trippy movie. If you and I were still in our getting-high days, I would totally force you to blast one with me right now and go to the midnight showing. My mind is totally bent—”
Donald watched the driver hurry around the car to get out of the rain. Anna’s window lowered a crack. One last wave, and the car pulled out into light traffic.
“Yeah, well, those days are long gone, my friend,” Donald said distractedly. Thunder grumbled in the distance. An umbrella opened with a pop as a gentleman prepared to brave the storm. “Besides,” Donald told Mick, “some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.”
18
The exercise room on level twelve smelled of sweat, of having been used recently. A line of iron weights sat in a jumble in one corner, and a forgotten towel had been left draped over the bar of the bench press, over a hundred pounds of iron discs still in place.
Troy eyed the mess as he worked the last bolt free from the side of the exercise bike. When the cover plate came off, washers and nuts rained down from recessed holes and bounced across the tile. Troy scrambled for them and pushed the hardware into a tidy pile. He peered inside the bike’s innards and saw a large cog, its jagged teeth conspicuously empty.
The chain that did all the work hung slack around the cog’s axle. Troy was surprised to see it there, would have thought the thing ran on belts. This seemed too fragile. Not a good choice for the length of time it would be expected to serve. It was strange, in fact, to think that this machine was already fifty years old—and that it needed to last centuries more.
He wiped his forehead. Sweat was still beading up from the handful of miles he’d gotten in before the machine broke. Fishing around in the toolbox Jones had loaned him, he found the flathead screwdriver and began levering the chain back onto the cog.
Chains on cogs. Chains on cogs. He laughed to himself. Wasn’t that the way?
“Excuse me, sir?”
Troy turned to find Jones, his chief mechanic for another week, standing in the gym’s doorway.
“Almost done,” Troy said. “You need your tools back?”
“Nossir. Dr. Henson is looking for you.” He raised his hand, had one of those clunky radios in it.
Troy grabbed an old rag out of the toolbox and wiped the grease from his fingers. It felt good to be working with his hands, getting dirty. It was a welcome distraction, something to do besides checking the blisters in his mouth with a mirror or hanging out in his office or apartment waiting to cry again for no reason.
He left the bike and took the radio from Jones. Troy felt a wave of envy for the older man. He would love to wake up in the morning, put on those denim overalls with the patches on the knees, grab his trusty toolbox and work down a list of repairs. Anything other than sitting around while he waited for something much bigger to break.
Squeezing the button on the side of the radio, he held it up to his mouth.
“This is Troy,” he said.
The name sounded strange. In recent weeks, he hadn’t liked saying his own name, didn’t like hearing it. He wondered what Dr. Henson and the shrinks would say about that.