The Long Road to Forever

Act I — The News

The radio was playing a country song about a truck that had more sense than a man. Frank didn't change the station. He just kept his hands on the wheel at ten and two and watched the white lines on the interstate pass under the Freightliner like the ticks of a clock he couldn't read. He was hauling auto parts from Detroit to Pittsburgh. Sixteen hours behind the wheel. Maybe seventeen if the rain came back, which it might. The sky was gray and heavy, the way it gets in April when nothing is blooming yet and everything looks like it has already survived winter and is tired about it.

The radio announcer's voice changed. The country song faded out and something sharper came in. A news bulletin.

Frank reached for the dial but didn't turn it. He kept driving.

"—FDA approval today for what the company calls Elixir, the first fully human genetic lifespan extension treatment. The procedure involves a single intravenous injection followed by a twenty-four hour monitoring period. Cost to consumers: five hundred thousand dollars for the brand-name version. A generic alternative, produced by several overseas manufacturers, is expected to enter the market within twelve months at a lower price point. The FDA has not approved any unlicensed or black-market versions. Side effects in clinical trials included a thirty percent mortality rate for the generic formulations."

Frank kept driving. He thought about Janine first. Then he thought about the five hundred thousand dollars and how much it sounded like something he could move in a year if the freight kept coming and the diesel didn't double again. He thought about his hands on the wheel, how the knuckles were swollen and the skin was dry and cracked like the roads in January.

He drove six more hours without speaking to the dispatcher. He passed through Pennsylvania, through the stretches where the hills were bare and the trees were still just sticks with no leaves on them. He parked at a truck stop outside Altoona and sat in the cab for a long time with the engine off, listening to the diesel ticks as the metal cooled. Then he took out his phone and called Janine.

She answered on the second ring.

"Frank?" Her voice was careful. She never sounded careful on the phone anymore. That was new.

"I heard about Elixir," he said.

"They're paying for it, Frank. The company. It's free for me."

He could hear something behind her voice. Excitement, maybe. Or fear. Or both at once. She had never been good at hiding what she felt, and maybe that was why it had worked at the beginning and why it hadn't worked later.

"How soon?" he said.

"Next month. I have an appointment on the first of May."

He looked out the window at the truck stop parking lot. There was a woman in a red jacket walking toward the convenience store. She was carrying a paper cup of coffee and a bag of something that crinkled when she moved. A snack. Something she didn't need but wanted anyway.

"When you do it," he said, "what happens?"

"I go into hibernation for twenty-four hours. The treatment rewrites part of my telomere structure. When I wake up, I'll be—well, I'll still be thirty-five. And I'll stay thirty-five. For a long time. They say two hundred, three hundred years is possible with boosters."

"Two hundred years," he said.

"Yes."

He thought about his father at sixty-seven, coughing up blood into a paper hand towel at the VA hospital, the doctor saying three years maybe, the doctor being wrong by two. He thought about how his father had come home from the Youngstown mill every day with metal dust under his fingernails that no amount of scrubbing would remove. He thought about how his father had worked there for forty-two years and how the mill had closed in 2028 and how his father had lasted three more years and then stopped.

"Frank?" Janine said. "Are you there?"

"Yes," he said. "I'm here."

"You sound—do you sound mad?"

"No," he said. And it was true. He wasn't mad. He was something else. Something he couldn't name without saying it out loud and liking it even less.

"I don't want to watch you grow old, Frank," she said. "When I come back, I'll still be thirty-five, and you'll be—you'll already be dead."

She said it without cruelty. That was the worst part. She said it like she was telling him the weather.

They hung up. He sat in the cab until the woman in the red jacket came back out of the convenience store with her crinkling bag. He watched her get into a blue sedan and drive away. Then he started the engine and got back on the road.

Act II — The Borrowing

He finished the Detroit to Pittsburgh run and came back toward Youngstown two days later. He didn't sleep on the second night. He drove through the night the way he always did when he needed to think, which wasn't often, because the highway had never been especially good at thinking for him.

The next morning, from a rest area outside New Castle, he called his ex-boss at the logistics company. Tommy O'Keefe. Tommy had been the one who hired him fifteen years ago and the one who had stopped returning his calls three years ago, when Frank's hours got cut and the arguments at home got louder. Tommy answered on the fourth ring.

"Frank. Hey. Long time."

"I need to borrow some money, Tommy."

There was a pause. Tommy was a man who knew how to delay answers. It was a skill he'd developed over forty years in middle management.

"What kind of money are we talking about?"

"Five hundred thousand dollars."

"Frank—"

"I know what it sounds like."

"You know what it sounds like. You sound like you're having a rough patch, and you will get through it, like you always do. But five hundred—"

"I'm not asking for a gift."

"You're asking for five hundred thousand dollars. You're not going to pay it back, Frank. And you know it."

Frank looked out at the rest area. There was a single oak tree in the center of the grass, and its branches were bare and pointed at the sky like it was reaching for something it would never catch.

"Thanks anyway," he said.

He called the gambling friend from his second marriage. Ray Desanto. Ray owed him money from a bet on a horse race in 2019 and had never paid him back. When Ray answered, Frank explained the situation. Ray listened. Then Ray said he was short this month, and maybe next month, and he was working on something, and Frank, look, he owed him too, really, it just—

Frank said, "I'll think about it," and hung up before Ray could finish the sentence that would have made Frank feel worse.

He went to the church on Maple Avenue on Sunday morning. St. Brigid's. The building was painted a color that used to be white and was now the color of old teeth. The pastor, a young man named Father Marcus, was sympathetic. He was the kind of young man who looked sympathetic because he was still learning that sympathy was the only currency most people had to give each other. He had two hundred dollars in the offering plate. He offered it to Frank without being asked, which was generous and also a way of closing the conversation.

"I can give you two hundred dollars, Frank. And I can pray."

"Thanks," Frank said. "I think I'm done with prayer."

Father Marcus looked confused. Frank walked out.

He called Janine and asked her for a loan. She hung up. He called her back five minutes later and she let it ring until the voicemail picked up. He didn't leave a message. He just stood in the parking lot of the truck stop with the phone pressed to his ear and listened to the beep and then hung up himself.

Every "no" had a reason. No one was cruel. That was what made it worse. Cruelty would have been honest. Cruelty would have been a door slamming. This was doors opening slightly and then closing again, gently, like someone was trying not to wake a baby.

Act III — The Black Market

Dennis Moretti called him on a Tuesday. His name came through the grapevine, which in this case was a dispatcher at the logistics company who knew everything because she knew nothing and repeated everything. Moretti operated out of a chiropractor's office in Cleveland. He was a small-time dealer who had been a pharma rep before Elixir went underground and had learned, in the intervening years, that being mean was a useful skill in the same way that being fast was useful on the highway—it kept you alive.

"Frank Holloway," Moretti said when he answered. "I heard you're looking to buy."

"How do you know my name?"

"People talk. Look, I have a source. Gray channel injection. Not FDA approved. Not illegal yet, but it will be. Three hundred thousand dollars. Thirty percent mortality rate."

"That's a lot of percent."

"It's your life. I'm offering you a chance at eighty-five instead of sixty. You drive a truck. You're divorced. Your lungs are starting to go. What's the difference between dying at sixty and dying at eighty-five?"

Frank was sitting on the couch in his apartment, the one above the shuttered laundromat on West Federal Street. The apartment smelled like stale coffee and the carpet had a stain in the corner that had been there since he moved in four years ago and would be there when he left. Preacher was in the armchair by the window, watching a daytime talk show and coughing into a handkerchief every three minutes or so.

"What's the source?" Frank said.

"Does it matter?"

"It matters if it's going to kill me."

"It matters less than not dying at all. You're forty-five. You have maybe twenty years. Twenty years, Frank. That's not a lot. That's nothing, really. You want twenty more years? Three hundred thousand. You want thirty? That's the black market. Thirty percent you die on the table. Seventy percent you wake up and you're good for another forty, maybe fifty."

Frank looked at Preacher, who was now watching a woman on the talk show argue with her daughter about a man neither of them seemed to like very much. Preacher caught Frank's eye and nodded, the way he did when he understood something without wanting to talk about it.

"Send me the details," Frank said.

Moretti sent a text with an address, a phone number, and a warning: Don't tell anyone you're coming. The address was on Euclid Avenue, two floors above a closed chiropractor's office. The entrance was through the back, through a parking lot that smelled like urine and wet cardboard.

Frank drove to Cleveland on a Thursday. He didn't tell anyone. He loaded up the Freightliner with a small shipment of brake components and drove west through the evening, watching the sun go down behind a sky that was the color of dirty copper.

On the way, he passed through a former steel town. He couldn't remember the name. It didn't matter. It was one of many. The buildings were shells. The windows were gone. The roofs had collapsed in places, and the interior was visible from the highway—a skeleton of rusted beams and broken concrete, like something that had been alive once and had died a long time ago and was still waiting for someone to notice.

He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned mill and killed the engine. He sat in the cab and looked through the windshield at the rusted blast furnace. The rust made a color he had seen all his life. It was the color of Youngstown. It was the color of the bridge over the Mahoning that had been closed since 2019. It was the color of the inside of his father's lungs on the X-ray.

He thought about his father again. Forty-two years in that mill. Came home every day smelling of metal and sweat. Died at sixty-seven from lung cancer. Got three years past the expected lifespan. Three years. Was that a victory or a joke? His mother had called them vacation years. She had taken him to Lake Erie those three summers, and they had sat on the beach and watched the freighters move slowly across the water, carrying steel to places that still had mills and still had people who believed the future would be different from the past.

Frank sat in the abandoned mill for four hours. The sun went down. The temperature dropped. He didn't move. He just sat in the cab of the Freightliner and thought about time and what it meant to a man who spent most of it behind a wheel, moving from one point on a map to another, collecting miles like other people collected coins or stamps or memories.

When he emerged, the sky was dark and the air was cold and he had made a decision.

Act IV — The Truck

He did not go to the clinic. He did not call Dennis Moretti. He turned the Freightliner around on the highway and got back on the road toward Youngstown.

The radio was playing an Elixir commercial. A woman's voice, smooth and calm, the kind of voice that had been tested with focus groups and found to be non-threatening to people of all political persuasions.

"With time, you have everything," the woman said. "Why let a number on a calendar define your life? Elixir. Because tomorrow is not a promise. It's a choice."

Frank turned off the radio. The cab was quiet except for the engine. He could hear the diesel running, low and steady, the way it had been running for twenty-five years and the way it would keep running as long as he kept putting fuel in the tank and oil in the sump and doing the small maintenance things that kept a big machine from falling apart.

He was driving home. He knew this the way he knew things about the road, with the flat certainty of a man who had spent a quarter century behind the wheel. The road ahead was long and mostly empty. He would be forty-six when he got there. Then forty-seven. Then forty-eight. Janine would still be thirty-five. Eventually she would look at photos of him and not recognize the man with the gray hair and the stooped shoulders. And that would hurt. It would hurt a lot.

But he would have driven the truck. He would have carried the loads. He would have paid the mortgage, eventually. He would have sent his daughter money for books even if she never thanked him. He would have sat with Preacher in the last weeks before he died and held his hand while he coughed blood into the handkerchief. Preacher had told him once, over a beer that Frank bought and Preacher drank slowly while talking about nothing in particular: "I don't want to live to three hundred. I want to live to seventy and not spend the last twenty years wishing I hadn't."

Frank turned onto Route 45, the road home. The streetlights passed overhead like metronomes, marking time he would not buy, could not buy, did not need.

The road stretched out in front of him, straight and gray and unadorned, the way all good roads should be. He put his hands on the wheel at ten and two and kept driving.

--