ELEANOR JACKSON STUDIED her body in her closet door mirror. She had avoided looking into this mirror for several years and always had it covered up by clothes hanging from a row of hooks above it. But now she removed the clothes and inspected her body in fascination.
A waist that had expanded over the decades from its original twenty-five inches to probably thirty-four (she didn’t know for certain since she’d stopped measuring) was probably down to 30 by now. And with no effort. She was not dieting.
She tilted her head up and down and felt her throat, which before had been the usual turkey neck of a seventy-seven-year-old but now looked more like it had in her early fifties. Her gray hair was growing in dark and her breasts had visibly shrunk to their earlier C cup and were situated noticeably higher. Her vision had improved. Though the replacement lenses for her former cataracts wouldn’t change, there were now less floaters and her former slightly double vision was gone.
Her skin alone was a give-away that an incredible rejuvenation was occurring – age spots disappearing, sags and wrinkling in her lower face vanishing and overall, her face looked thinner. In spite of old photos, she had forgotten all this, how she had once looked.
She could now get up off the floor without hanging onto something to pull herself up. She could stay up till eleven PM and sleep till seven in the morning instead of how it had gone for several years, in bed by nine and up at four and probably a few times before that peeing. Yesterday, she’d even played some old funk songs and danced like a maniac for no reason at all, just because she felt like it. Incredible.
“It’s unreal!” shouted her husband as he burst into the kitchen from the basement. “I just took two steps at a time! Chopped all that wood outside and fixed that hole in the shed roof. After lunch, I think I’ll take a ride to the garden center and replace that rhododendron that died. You feel like a quickie maybe?”
A quickie. That was back and the thing was, she wasn’t necessarily happy about it. Not that she would mind a quickie herself but because she’d truly enjoyed the years of being without sexual urges. It had been like returning to the mind of a ten-year-old when the world is a giant science experiment and you happily set about discovering it all. Only with less energy, definitely less. But now she was reexperiencing that time consuming urge to look alluring all the time, to attract the male eye. It had been a pleasure to live without that.
Before she knew it, their week at home was over and it was back to the damn city.
The couple first appeared on a segment of the national evening news, an easily missed bit between what seemed like fifty commercials. But later they were on CNN and eventually one of the few remaining talk shows, though Eleanor demanded that the segment be filmed in their own home, with her and Andrew on their sofa and only for ten minutes at the most. She was shy and had little patience with interruptions of her routines. As she said testily to the show’s host, she hadn’t grown old to be have her well earned project time disrupted. An extrovert, Eleanor Jackson was not. And she had taken up mixed media abstract painting with a vengeance after following artists on YouTube.
“You’ve been enjoying your senior years then?” Host Roni Jackson asked. “Hobbies and all?”
Eleanor wanted to smack her. Talking down to her just because she was old. “I wouldn’t call what I’m doing a hobby,” she said. “I’m serious about it. I probably work at it five or six hours a day. Have I enjoyed my retirement and being a senior in general? For the most part, yes. However, I am good and tired of falling apart and seeing doctors all the time.”
Andrew grunted in agreement and Roni turned to him. “And you, Andrew, what made you want to participate in this project?”
Well duh, Eleanor thought, we’d like to avoid death in the near future, but she politely listened to Andrew who, as usual, come across rationally and kindly. “This could change the entire human race,” he said, looking directly into the camera. “Since we wouldn’t have all that much time left anyway, we’re in the best position to risk the side effects over someone younger, say in their fifties. Someone that age might still have children under their wings and fulltime responsibilities. Someone has to be willing to try this and according to BioForward, we’re the perfect candidates. But the real reason is that we’d like more years together.” He took Eleanor’s hand. “We’re still in love.”
Eleanor smiled. She loved her husband madly, one could say, and fervently hoped reincarnation existed so they could be together again. But now this experiment could give them more time together right now. Or…it could end badly.
“If only we all could be so lucky,” Roni said. “So why are these people the perfect candidates?” she asked, turning to the BioFoward representative, one of the vice presidents, who occupied a chair next to the Jacksons’ sofa.
The rep was a polished looking man in his early sixties, tanned and muscular under his custom-made gray suit. “The Jacksons were chosen out of thirty thousand applicants and have been put through as many medical tests as an astronaut. We know everything about the condition of their bodies and brains. At age seventy-seven, they are naturally not in perfect health. But on the other hand, they’re not decrepit either. Neither suffer from heart disease though they do have some hardening of the arteries and their glucose is elevated – not enough to be classified as diabetic but heading there. They both do physical exercise and generally eat right for Americans. Their mental capacity is good for their age, though of course not equal to someone in their fifties. In other words, they’re in reasonably good condition for their age group. Both of them have had hip replacements so if the age reversal works, the implants will have to remain. New bone will just grow around them. It will be the most interesting experiment in human history to watch.”
“And,” asked Roni, “what could the side effects be?”
“Well, they could die,” said the rep. “The faster cell turnover could turn into cancer. They might have unpleasant psychological side effects. Their friends and family might be resentful. People can be jealous. It’s hard to predict what all could happen.”
Roni turned back to the Petersons. “And you’re willing to risk these potential occurrences?” she said.
Eleanor shrugged. “Obviously we are,” she said, “or we wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
And Andrew said, “What is life without taking risks?”
The treatment began the following Tuesday at BioForward laboratories and was professionally filmed for later showing on news stations. It would not be shown live in case there was a bad reaction to the infusion. “Let’s get a good angle,” said the director. The administering doctor was a petite endocrinologist, Dr. Indira Varma.
Eleanor and Andrew sat in side-by-side chairs hooked up to receive their first infusion. They looked like people getting chemo.
“They are not each receiving the exact same mixture,” Dr. Varma said to the camera. “Each one is getting an emulsion tailored to his or her personal genetics. This first infusion will take two hours. Afterwards, they might or might not experience side effects. We don’t know. Test animals have reacted differently depending on the species or individual. At the next infusion, which will take place in two weeks, we will report the reactions and results from this current one.”
Eleanor Peterson looked her seventy-seven years. She was twenty pounds overweight, thick around the middle, had a turkey neck, sagging breasts, wrinkled crepey skin and coarse gray hair. She had long forgotten what it felt like to feel pretty or sexy and settled for just not being offensive by keeping herself clean and neat. Her wardrobe consisted of stretch pants and tunic tops and when she went out somewhere, earrings. Andrew also looked his age, though he did retain some of his muscularity. He was bald, also had sagging skin and like his wife, aimed for neat and clean and nothing more in the looks department. Andrew had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a tendency to gastrointestinal upheavals while Eleanor suffered from migraines, IBS, high cholesterol, and slightly elevated blood pressure. Both of them felt that their knees were degenerating and dreaded the thought of having to have those replaced.
As the two sat in their chairs receiving their infusions, the camera and lighting purposely highlighted their aging skin and general decrepitude.
Two weeks later, they were back for the second infusion. This time announcer Darryl Jackson worked with the camera crew.
“Now Eleanor, we want to ask you some questions. Did you suffer any side effects from the first infusion? And have you noticed any changes in your body or general condition?”
Eleanor looked much the same as before, but she said, “My eczema seems to have cleared up. I had a headache for three days and a bit of the runs afterwards but nothing else happened, no.”
Andrew said, “I could do a few more sit-ups at the gym. Nothing else and no, no side effects.” He too looked the same as before.
Eleanor seemed slightly more cheerful than the last time, which wasn’t saying much. But her usual prickly demeanor was subdued.
Two more weeks passed and this time there was a visual difference. Darryl jumped on it. “Um, Eleanor, we cannot help but notice some changes in your appearance, which, being gentlemen here, we don’t dare comment on, but…well, wow.”
Eleanor was annoyed with his hesitation and said so. “Look,” she said, “we’re doing a scientific experiment here and if I was a lab rat, you’d just come out and say that my body looks sleeker and my fur healthier than before, right?”
“Well, yeah,” said the host.
“I’ve gone down a size without any effort,” she said. “My waist feels smaller and my bra cup size went down. I’ve also noticed my hair roots are darker.”
“Well, the bra size thing is depressing,” joked the host.
“Not really,” Eleanor said. “Old lady boobs are not exactly Playboy material.”
From his infusion chair, Andrew laughed and stuck out his arm to make a Popeye muscle. From the angle he was sitting, the viewer could also notice that his neck was definitely tighter.
“How old would you say you feel now?” asked Darryl.
“I don’t know,” said Andrew. “Definitely not seventy-seven.”
“About sixty,” said Eleanor firmly. “And it’s great. As far as I’m concerned, we could stop there.”
“How about you?” Darryl asked Andrew. “You want to stop now?”
“Hell, no,” said Andrew. “I haven’t felt this good for years. I forgot what it was like to not be in pain somewhere all the time. And look at my stomach!” He patted it. “Flatter and harder!”
“How is your life being affected?” asked Darryl. “Are you doing things differently at home?”
“Yes,” said Eleanor, “If by home, you mean the hotel room. We’re looking into vacation sites. Before, since we were always seeing some specialist or other, one of us every other week it seemed, we were concerned about Medicare not covering things if we got sick out of the country. But now we feel more confident. But of course, we can’t go anywhere yet since we need to be examined and tested all the time.”
It wasn’t just that. Because the world was watching this experiment, the couple had little privacy. They currently lived in a four-star hotel with all their meals and physical needs provided. They were even allowed to have their cat there, along with internet service and an area for Eleanor to engage in her art work. But it wasn’t the same as home and Andrew, being a bit of an outdoors person, was bored. He often walked around the city, into the parks and through the museums. Sometimes Eleanor joined him, other times she worked out at BioForward where the doctors monitored her progress. Sometimes the press followed them but Andrew wore hats and sunglasses and when Eleanor went out, she wore wigs. Besides, their appearance kept changing.
“I wish we could go home,” said Andrew.
“I do too,” said Eleanor, “but we signed up for this and I think the goal is middle age. I’m assuming around forty. They haven’t been totally clear on that. They did say we could go home the week after next for a full week.”
“I think they want to take us back to youth,” said Andrew,” and if they can manage that, I’m fine with it.”
Eleanor didn’t comment, though she was beginning to have some concerns. While she definitely was enjoying her waist slimming and having much more energy, she was bored with the city and especially with interviews of which there were plenty. “I want my life back,” she said.
Soon they were allowed a week at home. She was bursting with enthusiasm. To see her own work room again, their bedroom, the cozy living room, her desktop computer instead of this current annoying laptop, and the big oak tree in the back yard, oh, how she missed it all. At the same time, she was feeling her old interest in social activities coming back, the urge to participate in local groups, clubs and projects. Going out in the evenings to local events and having people over, something she and Andrew had pretty much given up on since everyone had seemed to be moving away to be with their children, going south to avoid the winters or suffering illness and dying. Plus, they’d been tired in the evenings.
“Andrew,” she said that night in bed, “we need to make new friends. The old ones we have left – they won’t be able to keep up with us. They won’t be interested in anything we’d be into now.”
“I don’t know,” said Andrew.
“Well, think about it,” she said. “Do you really relish going out to breakfast with George or Dave? George can hardly walk and just talks about his medical procedures. Dave mainly talks about how he is going to raise a ruckus at the next township meeting. Is this really what you feel like doing now?”
He didn’t answer but she knew him so well that she could almost hear his brain wheels turning. He might want to get his old bicycle out again or maybe do some scuba diving. He’d want to go swimming somewhere, do more serious muscle building at the gym. Start some new, involved building project. More than that, he might go back to work. That would be complicated since he had once run his own business in the city and where they lived now would involve learning local regulations, business insurance and what all.
And what about health insurance? Would they have to give up Medicare? They were still seventy-seven years old – well actually, Andrew was turning seventy-eight in a week and in a couple of months, so would she.
She had to go on birth control again; her periods had returned and that was not pleasant. The discomfort and the smell, it all came back. But her energy was magnificent! And she slept like a teenager now, out like a light, dead to the world, refreshed in the morning.
Unfortunately, infusion time came around again and they were back in the hotel and being interviewed in BioForward while the rejuvenating chemicals flowed into their veins.
“Today,” said Darryl, “Dr. Varma is going to reveal the results of tests taken the past two days and give an estimate of the Jacksons’ estimated body ages as they are now. Let us welcome her now!”
The petite, white coated doctor entered from the left, holding her tablet. “Well, I have some interesting results,” she said. She looked like she might burst. Looking toward Andrew, she said, “Mr. Jackson, I have the pleasure of telling you that you are now, in actual biological terms, thirty-seven years old. Mrs. Jackson, you are forty. The differenced in biological age will probably be equal after your body is subjected to more time with the higher estrogen you’re producing. Now a question I want to present to you both is how far do you want to go? Naturally, since this is the first try using this effusion on humans, we can’t say what will happen if we keep going with this. With mice and chimpanzees, the regression continues to youth. I would estimate to the late teens. If we continued past that point in animal aging, some of the mice died and others stayed where they were. We did not take chimps past that.”
“What happens,” said Darryl, “if you stop altogether. Did the animals age faster than normal? Did they quickly return to the normal condition of their true age?”
Dr. Varma quickly glanced at the Jacksons and back to the camera. “The reactions were varied,” she said. “Seventy-one percent of the subjects remained at the biological age that they had arrived at with the treatment and then aged normally from that point. Eighteen percent aged more rapidly than normal after cessation of treatment and slowed down to normal aging rate after a while. The remaining eleven percent died.”
Darryl couldn’t prevent a look of horror from crossing his face and quickly glanced at the Jacksons still in their chairs receiving their infusions. “Um, do the Jacksons know about this?”
“They do,” said Varma.
“And knowing that, they still chose to do this?”
“They did,” said the doctor.
For a few seconds, Darryl was quiet. Then he said to the future viewers, “Well, folks, I have to say that this couple is indeed very brave. They are akin to someone who volunteers to go to Mars. The world needs brave adventurers like this for the advancement of humankind.” And with that, he signed off for that episode.
Eleanor was beginning to experience fears and foremost among them was the feeling that she and Andrew were growing apart. The former coziness of their relationship was slipping away. The matter of sex bothered her in ways that she had long forgotten. Urges to do it more frequently when before, she would have been free to concentrate on her work or reading or just pondering the state of the world. But now this sexual “drug” pulsed through her veins again and distracted her from what was important. She had fantasies about her husband and other men, made up men in her mind, men from decades before, men on TV, men she passed in the street. She worried that Andrew would be bored with her, that he was sick of her, that he, with his new and returned sexual power would want other women, want decide to dump her and go off to a new bachelor life far from her old boring self. All of this took up much of her mental life and she resented it. She had been free of that kind of thinking for years.
One evening in their hotel room after a disappointing dinner out, she brought up what was eating at her. “Andrew, I want to stop now. I mean it, I’m tired of all this.”
He had been jokingly admiring himself in the mirror, turning this way and that, teasing her with his taut abs and tight butt. “What?” he said. “Why would you want to stop? Why shouldn’t we continue till we’re twenty or something? Seriously, are you crazy?”
She looked at him sadly. “I don’t want to be twenty again, Andrew. For a woman, there are advantages to being and looking forty. I just had another infusion that will take me down from forty and I don’t want any more. I want to stay where I am.”
He looked at her incredulously. “What advantages does a forty-year-old woman have over a twenty-year-old?”
“She knows who she is. She looks like she knows who she is. She can look sexy and she can look like she means business. Out in the world, she is taken more seriously than a woman in her twenties. I feel good now and I don’t want to risk losing this. I think you should stop now too. Why do you want to be that young and stupid again?”
“Who says I’d be stupid?” he countered. “We haven’t lost our well-earned knowledge about life! We haven’t lost our memories!”
“No, but as we get younger, I notice the hormone thing pulling more weight, distracting me from what’s important. I am more easily pulled in directions I don’t want to go. Andrew, if I am, say, late or mid mid-thirties in a week or so, that’s where I want to stay. I can control my youthful wildness, so to speak, and do something worthwhile, like go back to school and take on a new profession. This is assuming we stay in good health and not deteriorate like some of those poor animals. Andrew, we’re going to have to go to work. I sincerely doubt that Social Security and Medicare are going to continue to support us. It would be no surprise to me if the government showed up at our door in a few weeks with a lawyer or two in tow.”
“But we have our savings!” said Andrew.
“How long will that last with inflation and possibly fifty more years of life?”
She could see his face take on his mulish look, the one that no argument could prevail against. “Well, I’m going to continue,” he said firmly. “I’ll start up the business again. Or maybe something different. Maybe I’ll go to college.”
She felt a terribly stab in her stomach. It was him telling her goodbye, that’s what it boiled down to.
“But Andrew,” she said, “what about us? What about our marriage? We’ve had such a good one.”
He looked away and took a long time answering. “Well, if you go down to your twenties, we’ll be together. I guess we can still be together even if you don’t.”
“Oh, Andrew,” she said, shaking her head. She looked at him with his now full head of dark hair, his glowing skin, his wide shoulders and sweet brown eyes and burst into sobs.
Three days later, she called BioForward and told them she was done. Several top dogs got on the phone to try and talk her out of it and within an hour Dr. Varma and a steely faced assistant arrived at her their hotel room. Andrew was out.
“You signed a contract,” the assistant said. She was the kind of icy blonde Alfred Hitchcock had liked.
“Yes, I did,” said Eleanor, “and it has a clause that says I can stop at any time.”
“At a loss of renumeration,” said the blonde.
“I don’t care,” said Eleanor. “I’ve already told the media I’m stopping and that you will undoubtedly try to make me continue. I gave then a copy of the agreement and have retained a lawyer. Andrew does not plan to stop, so you can continue to use him. Understand, I think it’s sad that he is allowing himself to be dangerously exploited but, as much as I love him, he’s a free agent.”
Varma and the assistant backed off like angry vampires repulsed by a cross and Eleanor packed her bags. Her eyes filling with tears, she left Andrew a note and called an Uber to the airport.
After Eleanor’s lawyer straightened out her finances (she was still receiving Social Security and Medicare since after all, she was now seventy-eight), she enrolled in college in a program to become a physician’s assistant. Physically, she was almost old enough to be everyone’s mother and in actual age everyone’s grandmother. The instructors and students knew who she was and all about her situation, though after a while the novelty wore off and she was treated like anyone else. She and Andrew talked on the phone but had not seen each other since she left New York almost a year before.
Since then, he had traveled the world, being shown off at medical and other scientific conferences and in interviews on talk shows from Paris to Japan. “So how old are you now really?” she asked him on a call to Australia.
“About twenty,” he said.
A long moment of silence. “Do you want a divorce? If you do, I more than understand.” In fact, she had gone on a dinner date with one of her instructors, a former internist who had opted for teaching now. Nothing sexual had occurred, but if things continued on a natural course… He was fifty-one and divorced.
It took Andrew a while to answer. “I guess that would be the right thing to do,” he said. “I do love you though. That hasn’t stopped.”
“I’m old enough biologically to be your mother,” Eleanor said.
“That’s not the only reason that we might want to separate.” He paused, then said, “I probably went too far. They warned me after I passed the biological age of thirty. It turns out that’s what they wanted us to go to, but I chose to keep going. The growth hormones and all, well, I have bone cancer now. They’ll do what they can to treat it. I just found out here in Melbourne and am flying home in two days while BioForward lines up specialists to treat it.”
She felt as if someone had stabbed her in the heart. “Oh, Andrew, I’ll come to New York. They’ll understand at school.”
“Don’t stop your education over this,” he said. “I might be under treatment for a long time.”
“You can come home. Get your treatments and between them, come home. What do they project? Do they think they can get it under control?”
“I won’t know till I get home. They’re in contact with the doctors here and getting things organized. You know, it’s as important to them as it is to me, obviously.”
“They should have stopped you at thirty,” she said angrily. She still loved him more than anyone in the world. It was like someone was digging out her heart.
“I have to ask you one thing,” he said. “If I am going to die, will you be with me?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I will be with you; I will take care of you. You’re my everything.”
The internist instructor had faded into oblivion.
— MARGARET KARMAZIN
Margaret Karmazin’s credits include stories published in many literary and science fiction magazines. The Pennsylvania writer’s stories in The MacGuffin, Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review and Mobius were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She has stories included in several anthologies, published a YA novel, REPLACING FIONA, a children’s book, FLICK-FLICK & DREAMER and a collection of short stories, RISK.