Death.
How to avoid it.
Four days after his eighty-sixth birthday, Victor had visited an oncologist in a New York City hospital
who confirmed the existence of a golfball-sized tumor near his liver.
Victor researched every treatment option. He had always worried about bad health jeopardizing his success, and he spared no expense in exploring a cure. He flew to specialists. He had a team of health consultants. Despite all that, nearly a year had passed, and the results had not been good. Earlier in the day, he and Grace had seen the lead doctor. Grace tried to ask a question, but the words choked in her throat.
“What Grace wants to ask,” Victor said, “is how much time do I have left?”
“Optimistically,” the doctor answered, “a couple of months.”
Death was coming for him.
But death would be in for a surprise.
20
The first voice said, “Longer.”
“Who’s there?” Dor screamed.
He had been trying to escape the cave since the old man left. He searched for passageways. He banged on the karst walls. He tried to lower himself into the pool of tears, but it repelled him with air, as if a million breaths were pushing up from below.
Now a voice.
“Longer,” it said.
He saw only wisps of white smoke on the pool’s surface, and a bright turquoise glow.
“Show yourself!”
Nothing.
“Answer me!”
Then, suddenly, there it was again. A single word. Soft, barely audible, a mumbled prayer wafting up into the cave.
“Longer.”
Longer what? Dor wondered. He crouched on the floor, staring at the incandescent water, desperate, as man grows alone, for the sound of another soul.
The second voice, finally, was a woman’s. It said, “More.”
The third voice, a little boy’s, said the same thing. The fourth—they came more quickly now—mentioned the sun. The fifth spoke of the moon. The sixth was a whisper and repeated, “more, more,” while the seventh said, “another day” and the eighth begged, “go on and on.”
Dor rubbed his beard, which had grown unruly, as had his hair. Despite his isolation, his body functioned normally. It was nourished without food. Replenished without sleep. Dor could walk around the cave’s interior or wet his fingers with the slowly dripping water from the fissure.
But he could not escape the voices from the glowing pool—asking, always asking, for days, nights, suns, moons, and, eventually, hours, months, and years. If he put his hands over his ears, he heard them just as loudly.
And thus, unknowingly, did Dor begin to serve his sentence—
to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions.
Time.
It seemed to be running too fast for everyone but him.
21
Sarah read Ethan’s text on her phone.
Her heart dropped.
“Can we do this next week? Sumthin I gotta go 2 2nite. See u at shlter, OK?”
Her knees buckled, like a marionette’s with the strings released. “No!” she screamed to herself. “Not next week. Now! That’s what we agreed! I put on all this makeup!”
She wanted to change his mind. But a text message demanded a response, and if she took too long, he might think she was angry.
So instead of saying no, she typed: “No problem.”
She added: “See u at shelter.”
Then she threw in: “Have fun.”
She pressed the send button and noted the time: 8:22.
She leaned against a traffic sign and tried to tell herself it was not her fault, he had not bailed out because she was too geeky or too fat or she talked too much or anything like that. He had something to do. It happened, right?
“Now what?” she wondered. The night was an empty crater. She could not go home. Not while her mother was still up. She had no way to explain a five-minute journey in high heels.
Instead she trudged to a nearby coffee shop and bought herself a chocolate macchiato and a cinnamon bun. She sat in the back.
“Eight twenty-two?” she said to herself. “Come on!”
But inside, she was already counting the days until next week.
22
Victor had always been able to see a problem, find its weak spot, and crack it open.
Failing companies. Deregulation. Market swings. There was invariably a hidden key; others were just missing it.
He took the same approach with death.
At first, he’d fought his cancer with conventional means—surgery, radiation, chemotherapy that left him weak and vomiting. But while these treatments had some halting effect on the tumor, his kidneys weakened, and he was forced onto dialysis three days a week, a process he tolerated only by having his chief assistant, Roger, with him the entire time, so Victor could dictate messages and be updated on business. He refused to miss a minute of the workday. He checked his watch constantly—“Let’s go, let’s go,” he’d mumble. He hated being stuck like this. Hooked to a machine to remove waste from his blood? What kind of position was that for a man like him?
He tolerated it until he could tolerate it no more. Men like Victor looked to the bottom line, and after a year, he knew the bottom line was this:
He could not win.
Not the conventional way. Too many people had tried. It was a bad bet, hoping for a miracle.
And Victor did not make bad bets.
So he turned his attention away from the illness and focused instead on time—time running out—which was, for him, the real issue.
Like other men of enormous power, Victor could not imagine the world without him. He felt almost obligated to stay alive. Cancer was a stumble. But the real hurdle was human mortality.
How could he crack that?
He finally found his opening when a researcher from his West Coast offices, responding to his requests on “immortality,” faxed a stack of material on cryonics.
Cryonics.
The preservation of humans for later reanimation.
Freezing yourself.
Victor read through the pages, then took his first satisfied breath in months.
He could not beat death.
But he might outlast it.
23
The pool of voices was formed by Dor’s tears,
but he was only the first to weep. As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down.
Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity. And the desire for more became an endless chorus in Dor’s cave.
More time. A daughter holding her ailing mother’s hand. A horseman riding to beat the sunset. A farmer fighting a late harvest. A student huddled over piles of papers.
More time. A man with a hangover smacking his alarm clock. An exhausted worker buried in reports. A mechanic under the hood with impatient customers waiting.
More time. It was the choke of Dor’s existence, all he ever heard, millions of voices surrounding him like gnats. Although he’d lived when the world spoke but one language, he was granted the power to understand them all now, and he sensed by the sheer volume that Earth had become a very crowded place, and mankind did much more than hunt or build; it labored, it traveled, it made war, it despaired.