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“Because they’re all getting divorced,” he said. “All of them. Every banker and hedge fund guy in this town is looking for a way out right now. And if they aren’t looking for a way out, their wives are. We have three guys here who are good with divorce statutes. That’s not enough. We’re gonna have to double or triple the load. We’re talking about cases that could go on for ages. They haven’t even defined the law on most of this stuff yet. Big, big moneymaker. It’s where you’re going to want to be. You don’t want to stay in estate law. It’ll be extinct within two decades.”
“Jesus.”
He then told me a story relayed from one of the divorce partners at some other firm. One day some big swinging dick showed up at the firm, flew past the receptionist, and stormed into his office.
“I want an annulment,” shouted the big swinging dick.
The lawyer was nonplussed. “What?”
“You heard me! I want an annulment, and I want it done quickly.”
“You can’t get an annulment,” the lawyer told him. “You’ve been married to your wife for twenty years.”
“It was under false pretenses.”
“What false pretenses?”
“She got the cure, and so did I. Completely changes the parameters of our original arrangement.”
“Yes, but the cure didn’t exist twenty years ago. For there to be false pretenses, it had to have existed back when you signed the marriage license. And even then, I’m not sure how it would count.”
“Listen, I’m a traditional man. I believe when you take that vow at the altar, you should abide by it. I vowed to stay with that woman all the days of my life. But I figured that was seventy or eighty years, tops. Now I’m supposed to spend the next thousand years with her? That’s insane.”
“I think what you want is a divorce.”
“Why? So she can take everything I own? That woman has been spending every weekend with her personal trainer for six years. And then I have sex five times with a brand manager and I’m the asshole? You tell me how that makes sense. No, I want an annulment. Our marriage never would have existed if this cure had been around.”
“I can’t issue you an annulment under those circumstances. It’s a binding marriage. It lasts forever.”
“But no one told me forever would be this long!” the big swinging dick screamed. “I know I swore to be with her till death, but that was under a different definition of death, was it not?”
The lawyer stammered, “Well, that’s a bit of a gray area right now.”
“Well, ungray it. Make it black or make it white. I don’t care which. I’ll pay you five million if you can get it annulled. Five million. And, if you can’t, you get me my divorce. Then you charge me one hundred million in legal fees. That way, I’m technically broke and she can’t touch the cash. But I only pay you five million, and you ignore the rest of the debt.”
“That’s illegal in about thirty-seven different ways.”
“I don’t care! I want my money, and I want a clean break from that woman. Give her the townhouse if you need a negotiating tool. Between the dog hair and that glass sofa she bought, she’s made the place all but unlivable anyway. And I want it done by fall. I have a two-week vacation in Majorca with our former nanny, and I don’t want to cancel it. Get it done or I’ll find a real lawyer.”
And with that, the big swinging dick stormed right back out. Two hours later, his wife walked into the exact same lawyer’s office, demanding the townhouse, the Hamptons estate, and “alimony for the rest of his miserable existence, regardless of length.”
I’m definitely attending that seminar.
Date Modified: 6/26/2019, 10:10PM
“I Never Thought I Had The Luxury Of Time—Now It’s All I’m Gonna Have”
Katy demanded I go with her to her cure consultation. I explained to her that there was no waiting room in Dr. X’s apartment, and that I thought he probably preferred that everyone come alone. I made a compromise of walking her to the building, waiting outside for her, and grabbing some drinks with her after she got her blood drawn. “You’ll get drunk even faster, since you’ll have less blood in your system,” I explained. She liked the idea.
When we got off the subway and walked east, we could hear the protesters outside the UN. Their numbers have continued to swell. I’m not sure they even take bathroom breaks anymore. The avenue has been barricaded much farther uptown than when I was last caught in the middle of it, as if there’s a permanent weekend street fair. I was tempted to see if any vendors had set up shop among the throngs, selling paper plates of greasy pad thai for two bucks. I resisted.
We stopped at a bagel shop and grabbed a quick lunch before her appointment. Again, Katy brought up every cure-related scenario that came to her mind, both the good and the horrific. Mostly the horrific. She let her guard down a bit as we ate. My best friend is not the world’s most introspective person. But she took a moment to stop being so damn bubbly.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do after this,” she said. “Suddenly, I’m all worried about the future.”
“That’s what Dr. X said. No one he sees thinks about it until they get it done.”
“Am I doing the right thing here? My grandma’s got pancreatic cancer. Is it fair she has to go through that and I get to sidestep it?”
“You could still get cancer. You think your grandma would wish it on you?”
“No, I guess not. I don’t know. I never really thought about my life before. I knew it was short, and I knew I should have a good time before it’s over. That was about it. I never thought I had the luxury of time—now it’s all I’m gonna have. I feel like I should probably do something more substantial with it.”
“You’ve always had the luxury of time. You’re twenty-seven. Cure or no cure, that’s still plenty of time up ahead. It’s yours to do with as you please. You’re not obligated to be Mother Teresa now. This just means you have more time to do what you enjoy, or find what you enjoy, I guess.”
“Well, you know what I enjoy.”
“I do indeed.”
She grew alarmed. “What if we run out of booze three hundred years from now?
“Oh, I think measures will be taken to prevent that sort of thing. We don’t need glaciers. But vodka? They won’t let the vodka dry up.”
“Thank God.”
We got up to leave and approached the doctor’s building. We got to the southwest corner of the intersection on First. The doctor’s building was across the avenue, on the southeast corner. The light turned for us to cross. Out of my peripheral vision, on the northwest corner, I saw a tall figure outside a candy shop. Blonde. An impossible body. She didn’t have to turn for me to instantly recognize her. In fact, I had memorized the back of her quite capably. I stopped and held Katy back.
“That’s the blonde! That’s the blonde!”
Katy looked at her. “Oh, she is hot.”
“I have to go talk to her. I’ll meet you out front when you’re finished.”
I broke from Katy to cross the street. Katy hurried into the doctor’s building. As I got to the opposite corner, the blonde turned and looked in my direction. I gave a tentative wave, trying to ascertain if she recognized me or not. She appeared unnerved, turned away from me, and began walking up the avenue. I crossed the street in hopes that she was simply walking away and not walking away from me. She gave another look back, saw me approaching, and quickened her gait. I took the hint and stopped outside the candy store, dejected. She blazed down the avenue, only pausing once to look back at the doctor’s apartment building. I turned to do the same.
And that’s when the doctor’s apartment blew up.
Before I could see anything, I heard a gigantic BOOM! Then a quarter of an instant later the corner of the eighth floor blew out onto First Avenue in a single lash of flame. Right where the doctor’s office once was. A makeshift hailstorm of pulverized white brick pummeled the traffic below. Hot black smoke began quickly scaling the outside of the building. A Freidrich air-conditioning unit—one of those heavy, old-school units—crashed into the sidewalk below. If anyone had been underneath it, it would have destroyed them.
Everything, everyone, everywhere, froze to turn. What the fuck just happened? I looked to the doorway but couldn’t see Katy. She was in there. She was on her way to the eighth floor, or she was there already. I didn’t move. I stood still and hoped everything would suddenly reset and be put back in its proper place, because nothing about this felt possible. It felt absurd, like some kind of prank. The building was on fire and I knew I needed to run in but didn’t know how to run or speak or breathe at the moment. Horrible thoughts about Katy dying circled around my consciousness, like strange footsteps you hear outside your window in the dead of night. I heard the sirens blasting and growing louder and more intense, as if they were meant to echo the cries of those suffering inside.
My body finally unlocked and I began running to the building as the fire truck pulled up alongside it. When I was in the middle of the intersection, I looked down the street and saw two more towers of smoke climbing up and up at points farther to the west, towards the Hudson: one less than half a block away, another much farther across town.
An elderly woman came running out of the building. She carried a small black Scottie with her and wore a gypsy’s head wrap. I stepped in front of her to get her to stop. She stared at me, confused by it all.
“What just happened?” she asked.
I pointed inside. “Did you see anyone else on your way out?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? I’m looking for a brunette woman. In her twenties. You saw her. Tell me you saw her coming out.”
I held her shoulders tight, begging her for a response.
“I didn’t see anything!”
She wrested away from my grip and fled. A small number of tenants came out of the emergency stairwell and ran up First. I held the door open for them, let them pass, and then began flying up the stairs. The flow of tenants petered out as I climbed higher. I got to the eighth floor and came out into a lightly smoky corridor. There was a door to a freight elevator room at the end of the hall and beyond that a door to a second hallway where the doctor’s apartment was. I ran to the end of the corridor and saw the door of the freight elevator room come open. I hoped to see Katy and the doctor hand in hand, making their way out safely. It was a fireman. He stopped me and turned me around.
“My friend is in there!” I screamed.
“I can’t let you go. You have to get downstairs right now. Go. Go!”
“Is anyone alive? I’m looking for Katy Johannson.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
I relented and walked back to the stairwell. The fireman turned and reentered the freight elevator room and I immediately doubled back to go find Katy. The fireman was still on the other side of the door, now clearly angry I had defied him. He raised a fist and sent me back where I came from. I heard a huge crash, like a ceiling caving in and I pictured my best friend pressed and flattened and desperate for air. The door to the stairwell came open and a wave of firemen filed by at top speed and pushed me to the side. Heavier smoke began to fill the hallway and I began to swoon and feel as if the walls and floors of the building were molten and elastic. I retreated to the stairwell like a pathetic child and listened to the firemen shouting orders at one another from the other side of the door. I sat there trying to absorb every sound and sight because it was all I could do. I wasn’t remotely qualified to take any sort of bold action. All I could seize was proximity. I felt the urge to run to the doctor’s apartment and sit down in the blaze. I hoped for Katy to pass me by or call me but instead there was a big deafening nothing. So I sat on the gray concrete steps in the sickly fluorescent lighting, waiting. I don’t know how long I was there. No one passed by. Eventually, another fireman opened the door to the hall and ordered me down to the ground level.
I walked down the stairs and out into the street. I smelled my sleeves and they reeked of smoke, of things burned that should never be burned. Up First, I could see one more plume of smoke. Down First, I heard the swarm of protesters yelling and screaming. People were running up the avenue, some to the bridge, instinctively, as a sort of automatic 9/11-type gut response. Many seemed to have the palpable urge to get off the island, to get as far away from the center of the imaginary bull’s-eye as humanly possible.
I stayed where I was, as close to Katy as the FDNY would allow. I checked my phone and saw the EXPLOSIONS ROCKING MANHATTAN headline. The cops and firefighters continued shuttling in and out, saying nothing to me because saying nothing is what they have to do. I checked Katy’s status updates. There was nothing since the last one she posted three minutes before the explosion. She must have posted it while she was in the elevator.
DrinksOnKatyJ: U FOLKS BETTER GET USED TO THE IDEA OF ME
STICKING AROUND HERE A LONG, LONG TIME! 12:13PM
That was the last thought going through her mind. She was ready to welcome another thousand years of joy and happiness, and I had promised it to her. I had brought her to this place. I had planted that thought in her mind. I could’ve stayed strong and never told her a goddamn thing, but I barely put up a fight. Deep down, I wanted her to know it all. I wanted the cheap thrill of being her little cure matchmaker.
And now she’s gone. No hospital admitted her. No one saw her leave. There’s nothing left of her. All the extra plans and hopes and dreams she had for herself will remain just that, forever.
I can’t move.
Date Modified: 7/3/2019, 4:08PM
At The Protests
Our apartment is uncomfortably spacious now. I see the wine stains on the couch, and I hear Katy’s manic giggling like she’s still present. I don’t ever recall seeing her moody or displeased, which makes her abrupt and violent end all the more unbearable. All I can do is keep drinking and banter with her in my mind.
A pro-cure blogger named Ladyhawke posted another account of what happened yesterday, as witnessed from outside the UN. Apparently, she was one of the protesters.
HOW MANY HAVE TO DIE?
We were facing the UN and screaming our heads off when the explosion drowned us out for a millisecond. But no one knew what the hell was going on. One person in the crowd screamed, “They’re trying to kill us!” and that was enough to set people fleeing in every direction. One guy pushed me to the ground so he could run past me. I was lucky; I saw another guy who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, fall and get his head stepped on. I have no clue if he ever got back up. I got up and immediately began running up First Avenue. I assumed it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it was a terrorist attack. But I thought it was, you know, a terrorist terrorist attack. Someone from Saudi Arabia or something. My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets and not at the road ahead of them. So I got bumped into from behind and from the side, as if someone had released a stampede of blind bulls onto the street. I got kicked in the back of the leg. Now I have a black welt there the size of a lemon.
Needless to say, now that we know what really happened, that these doctors had been systematically targeted—I’d argue they were assassinated—we are pissed. We’re already gathering outside the UN and the Capitol right now. We will number in the tens of thousands by morning, I can promise you that. How many more doctors will the president allow to be blown to pieces before he finally realizes he’s made a huge mistake? We’ve been protesting peacefully for months, but these pro-death people—who got what they wanted, by the way—are free to just randomly kill innocent people? These are doctors who treasure life enough to bestow more of it upon the rest of us. We’re through being nice about this. We’re not taking no for an answer this time around.
—Ladyhawke
I don’t know where any of this is going, and I don’t know which side will come out on top, or which side even deserves to. All I know is I feel an increasing urge to get the hell away from it all.
Date Modified: 7/4/2019, 8:47PM
“A Little Bit Of Bloodshed Now Or
A Lot Later On”
Katy’s family is making funeral arrangements. All the organized grieving happens at light speed, as if it must be done before you realize what you’re grieving over. I miss Katy desperately. The bomb goes off in my mind every five minutes, and I’m left no less shaken by it each time. I have fevered daydreams of a blonde running from me and taking out a phone, pushing the secret code number that kills my best friend. I told the police about her. Every detail of her face and figure. I could have sculpted it from clay. They had a crude sketch drawn and posted. No one has responded. I’m not terribly optimistic.
I’ve spent most of my time reading everything I can about the bombings. The same articles over and over again. I don’t know why I keep reading them—perhaps to help drive the reality of it home. They just released a partial list of the doctors killed. Their count (minus bystanders like Katy) appears to have settled at nine: Charles Bane III, Sofia Gonzalez, Gim Lau, Jocelyn McManus, Vishal Mehta, Frederick Polycronis, DDS, Ian Rosenhaus, Pameer Sanji, and Ameet Thakkar. I know Dr. X wasn’t a woman, nor was he Indian or Asian (unless he was very, very good at keeping his identity hidden, which it seems now he was not). That leaves three possibilities from this list: Bane, Polycronis, and Rosenhaus. At some point, they’re going to release his picture. I don’t know if I can stand to find out which one is him. I gave him seven thousand bucks in cash to keep me young for the rest of my life. And now he’ll never get to use it. The fact that he gave himself the cure only makes the finality of his death harder to take. Who the hell knows how many lifetimes were just robbed from him.
I should have seen something like this coming. What happened in Oregon should have prepared me for it. But the truth is, I didn’t pay much heed to what took place in Oregon. It happened all the way across the country, so I guess even news about murder suffers from East Coast bias. There’s the added fact that I live in Manhattan. When you live here, you can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
I can’t do that anymore. What happened yesterday and what happened in Oregon are now so strongly bonded that it feels like Eugene is located right across the Hudson. A reporter named Mike Dermott wrote a huge piece about Oregon last week. I never bothered to read it before. But I’ve now read it a dozen times in the past couple hours. I can nearly recite it from memory. Copied from Slate:
THE MAN WHO CONQUERED DEATH
By Mike Dermott
Graham Otto never set out to conquer death. Actually, he was just hoping to help out the redheads of the world.
“I’m a redhead,” he noted in his private journal, which I was granted exclusive access to by the Otto family. “I’ve yet to meet a redheaded guy who enjoys being a redhead.” The name of the gene is MCR1. It’s located on chromosome 16. And according to the complete map of the human genome, it’s the gene that causes red hair (along with a rare condition called brittle cornea syndrome). Working with a team of fellow geneticists, Otto targeted this gene in hopes of finding a way to color hair through gene therapy. “It wasn’t the most noble of genetic experiments,” he wrote. “It was the sort of thing a wealthy university like U. Oregon does from time to time, when it feels like playing around.”
“He was excited about the potential business aspect of it. We all were,” recalls his wife, Sarah. “Frankly, I was just thrilled at the prospect of never having to pay three hundred dollars for highlights ever again.”
He didn’t fit the traditional scientist mold. Otto had attended Oregon on a partial scholarship for track and placed as high as eighth in the two-mile event at the 2000 Prefontaine Classic. He was an outgoing man, who always preferred company while working in the lab and who was always able to talk about his work in ways that laymen found not only accessible but downright fascinating.
“I think that’s what made him such a great teacher,” says UO President Raymond Lack. “He was passionate about his work, but not to the point where he became insular. You never felt like he was talking over your head about any of this stuff. He made it sound interesting, even entertaining. And trust me, that’s rare among his peers. I’ve always considered his communication skills a rare gift for anyone, in any profession.”
In terms of changing hair color through gene therapy, Otto was a miserable failure. The problem wasn’t extracting the redhead protein from gene. That proved easy for Otto and his self-described team of “Hair Bears.” The problem was replacing the color. “If you take away a person’s genetically predisposed color, you essentially give them colorless hair—albino hair,” he wrote. “You have to eliminate that protein in the gene and you have to find a way to add the color of your preference, and that’s where the engineering becomes close to a technical impossibility.” Otto experimented with altering proteins found elsewhere in the DNA helix of fruit flies (who can have red eyes that are triggered by the same gene), trying to activate a different color. “We tried blue. We tried brown. We tried green. Nothing worked.”
Exasperated one night in the lab, Otto became careless. In the midst of deadening the red protein in that day’s current batch of flies, he removed an extra protein from the gene as well. “I knew exactly what I had done,” he wrote. “But it was late, and I didn’t feel like starting over. Every good scientist knows that if you contaminate the original sample, you toss it. But I didn’t. I figured it wouldn’t make a difference in the end, so I went ahead and injected the vector. It was pure sloppiness.” When Otto returned the following morning, nothing unusual had occurred. He tried to introduce a new color protein into the flies’ DNA, but it again failed. He placed the batch of flies aside and began taking on a new group of test subjects.
But then something odd happened to that tainted sample of flies. “They wouldn’t die. A fruit fly usually lives for less than two months. And even then, within twenty-four hours or so, you usually begin seeing a handful of them drop. But none of the flies I injected with the vector dropped. Ever. They just kept flying around.”
Up until Otto’s serendipitous mistake, it was assumed that biological aging was controlled by hundreds, if not thousands, of separate genetic proteins found in the body—proteins that worked in concert to determine the rate of aging across various parts of an individual. “We always assumed that a thousand different internal mechanisms and external factors worked together to trigger the aging process,” says Dr. Phillip Frank, head of genetics at the National Institutes of Health. “When you think about it, you begin aging from the second you’re born. Our studies showed that specific proteins in your body activated all the different physiological processes and free radicals that go into both growing up and growing old. There was no master switch.”
Until Graham Otto came around.
The tainted fruit flies carried on living for weeks and weeks, with an apparently limitless supply of energy. The only dead fruit flies Otto found in their container were their offspring (the altered genes, Otto discovered, weren’t passed on), the offspring of their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring’s offspring. The original flies remained alive and fluttering about indefinitely. Otto acted quickly, retracing his footsteps from that late night in the lab, finding the supposedly unimportant protein he had mistakenly altered, and replicating the experiment again, without altering the original protein in the gene. Again, the altered flies had a seemingly indefinite lifespan.
The supposedly innocuous portion of the gene Otto had messed with turned out to be much more important than he had ever envisioned. He rushed to form his own independent biotech firm and called a lawyer to draft a patent for the protein. “Normally, this is something you do over the course of years,” he told Lack in an e-mail. “But we’re doing it in a week, because if we can replicate it across species, maybe there’s something there.” And replicate it he did, across mice, rats, guinea pigs, and others, including his own aging golden retriever, Buggle. In all instances, the altered animals appeared ageless when compared to their respective control groups, never growing old past the day the vector was introduced into their system. And all of them remain alive and well today, in tourist displays set up by the university—except for Buggle, who remains comfortably in the Otto household.
Despite his extroverted nature, Otto wasn’t known as a cocky, presumptuous man. The only careless thing he did in his life was to mistakenly alter the wrong gene in those fruit flies. So when he published his findings, he insisted only on reporting what he had found, and didn’t speculate on the potential enormous worldwide impact of his research. Nevertheless, many in his field declared it junk science. “It was just too easy of an answer,” says Dr. Frank. Still, while many questioned Otto’s findings, they didn’t hesitate to recreate his experiments. And they soon found that his discovery was everything he said it was. Far more than that, actually. “He understated the results, because he didn’t want to sound like some kook. He refused to call it a cure for aging,” says Sarah Otto. “But that’s what it was, and the follow-up research proved it.”
To see if the gene therapy worked in humans, Otto solicited an unlikely test group: patients with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. “A disease like Alzheimer’s is triggered specifically by the advance of age,” Otto wrote in a subsequent email to Lack. “So if we administer the cure to people who are just developing the disease, we can do two things. One, we can potentially prevent further damage to their brains. Two, we can see within a shorter period of time if the cure takes hold. Normally, when you do a CAT scan of Alzheimer’s patient, you see changes—sometimes rather drastic changes—to the brain over a short time span. You can see the dark spots, the ‘cobwebs,’ as it were.”
The ten initial test subjects received monthly CAT scans after being administered the cure. “In every case, the cobwebs stopped growing,” noted Otto in his second published report. “The dark spots on their brains remained dark but never expanded, which is unheard of in Alzheimer’s patients. We studied them for over a year and not one of them saw the disease advance past the early stages. Their brains remained perfectly, blessedly intact.” Two of the patients have since died from unrelated causes; the remaining eight are alive and well.
