Who Wants to Live Forever?

For Halloween 2024

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Fritz Erlinger was a name that came to haunt me, torture me as my life unfolded. Yet, in the beginning, everything was mundane. Almost serene. I was a student at Oxford University. Born of working class parents, I had successfully managed to traverse the social divide and gain entry to the hallowed halls via a combination of scholarship and exceptional exam grades. Notwithstanding, it felt like I never fitted in. The centuries-old institution was awash with the elite offspring of the upper classes but a certain stoicism that had served me well up until that point continued to carry me through the trials and tribulations of the hoi polloi.  

Lectures took some getting used to. I would sit at the back of class taking notes, feeling self-conscious and out of place. After a while the feeling eased as I got to know more of my fellow undergraduates. The one thing we did have in common was a passion for physics. Beyond the self-deprecation and silly jokes, there was a collective thirst for knowledge, a hunger to advance an area of expertise that would benefit the greater good…..and lead to decent careers.  

Fritz was typical of university faculty. He would turn up to classes looking unkempt with wild bushy hair. His wind-milling arms would invariably illustrate a key point, jolting awake anyone dozing. I found myself transfixed by his goatee beard and glaring blue eyes. He made me think of Leon Trotsky. A tweed jacket with leather elbow patches dragged his appearance back to something resembling conventionality but this would be knocked off its axis when he spoke – a low droning tone of East European origin that jagged into a higher register when becoming animated.

It was a few months later that we met in an informal environment; a party off campus at a house rented by students. Music blared from an iPod, a mix of jazz, dance and rock to satiate the bandwidth of ages present. As I wandered from room to room exchanging inane chatter with people, I found him standing alone looking lost despite the cold comfort of the cut-glass tumbler he was holding. The lighting was dim, swirling colours sweeping floors and walls thanks to a disco ball brought in by one of the invitees.

It felt like a mere heartbeat in time from locking eyes to polite chit chat to passionate discourse. We were lost to the rest of the room, disengaged from the decadent drunken revelry of others. His life’s work was devoted to proving that a human soul could be transferred to a digital universe on death, preserving an alternative version of living and giving rise to the possibility of eternal existence. Curiously, he also had a fevered interest in the paranormal, a subject he was loathe to talk about and kept to himself as a rule. In that regard it created a bond, a secret shared between us.

Amid my staccato swigs from a bottle of beer and his insouciant gulps of whisky, the conversation veered from spirit boxes to sub-atomic particles, from EVP to the concept of the essence of consciousness inside something as innocuous as a radio. His knowledge of competing notions was frightening, his desire to breach the very edge of scientific discovery insatiable. The whole thing made me forget myself for a while, completely drawn into my teacher and mentor’s universe. Perhaps I should have seen what was coming but I was naïve. So very naïve. I must have known that he was Bohemian at heart.

We had been talking for what seemed like hours when he suddenly leaned forward. I was caught in the moment, lost in his grown-up version of life. Maybe off guard, my eyes closed and I found myself welcoming the warmth of his lips on mine. His breath had the tang of stale tobacco from the pipe he smoked. The gesture lingered for too long.

Up until that point I hadn’t questioned my sexuality but that changed with those pervasive seconds. I jerked away unceremoniously, a little too late, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed. To my relief, we hadn’t attracted wholesale attention despite the fading glances of unobtrusive yet willing voyeurs.

We never spoke of that encounter again. Erlinger kept his love life discreet when he had the time for it. I suspected that he had a hankering for boys but was unable to prove it even if I wanted to. It didn’t stop us from having more than a teacher-student relationship. When not in a lecture theatre, we would meet more and more in informal settings to discuss both degree course material and tangential parascience.

I became familiar with the idea of spirit boxes and William O’Neill’s contribution to the concept; of Thomas Edison's comments in The ‘Scientific American about recording devices being capable of detecting subtle spirit influences; of Ernst Sentowski’s establishment of instrumental trans-communication or ITC. We would talk for hours in coffee shops and public houses, me considering these otherworldly ideas from an objective, rational viewpoint and him weaving these strange theories into more mainstream findings. My scepticism was a constant, an island for me to cling to when metaphorical seas of doubt churned.

Those heady days of the cut and thrust of nascent discovery couldn’t last forever and my time in the city of gleaming spires finally came to end after four years when I graduated with honours.

We gradually lost touch as our respective tracks diverged away over life’s horizon. I hadn’t thought about Fritz Erlinger in years when an email arrived out of the blue imploring me to come to his laboratory. I remembered it as a curious room in the basement of an old Victorian house reminiscent of those old Universal Studios horror movies from the 1930s (made more bizarre by the fact that there was a belfry). I had previously visited on several occasions and been put in mind of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with generators of static electricity, weird machines circled in the white light of energy and an audio device that crackled with the faint sound of unintelligible voices in the ether.

Ornate electric gates were ajar when I arrived as though beckoning me to enter. By the time I got to the front of the house, darkness was descending, gloaming signalling the transition from daylight to twilight. Ingress was further eased via an unlocked front door. I instinctively knew to head for the cellar where the laboratory was situated. No lights were on in any of the rooms, the entire residence saturated in gloomy half-light. It was enough for me to find my way down through a hallway, a flight of stone steps and into the bowels of the property. As much as I wanted to flick the lights on, despite the tacit invite, I still felt like an intruder. I called out nervously but Fritz did not answer. Nobody answered.

There was an eerie atmosphere, a musty smell only adding to the sense of foreboding. Shadows did incorporeal jigs on walls, silhouettes stalking, ready to jump out when I had forgotten they were there. I could hear faint rumbles of thunder and pictured lightning scarring sable skies.

The place was entirely silent, the only sounds coming from outside. Owls hooted from a forest close by. As I entered the laboratory, the various machines and gizmos became immediately visible even in the gloom. It was only now that I relented and pressed the light switch on the wall. And there he was; lying prone on an operating table quite naked. There were electrodes attached either side of his temple and wires fixed to his body that led to machinery to the side. His eyes were closed.

I crept towards him, not sure what to make of it all. Glaring at his pallid face, he didn’t appear to be breathing. Holding a gaunt wrist, I checked for a pulse. Nothing. My mind raced; I felt the wild horses of panic. Thoughts raced like runaway stallions: call the police, call an ambulance, run to the neighbours’, just turn and leave and pretend you were never here. Everything was stock-still, moments ticking by as though amplified by the fateful hands of a tenebrous clock.

Before I could decide what to do, an utterance broke the reverie. It was the strangest of sounds, almost like a vocoder distorting male diction. The rhythm and tone of Fritz’s voice was unmistakable.

“You came. I am glad. Please bear witness to the culmination of a life’s work.”

I looked around as the words were not coming from the body lying prostrate in front of me. As my eyes panned, it became evident that speech was coming from a box of electronics on a stand a couple of feet away.

“I have defeated death. You are in the presence of one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time.”

Nothing.

Then:

“Join me.”

In the middle of the box was a circular glass lens, a black pupil surrounded by a luminous red iris. Green lights blinked indicating that the device was active. It made me think of HAL9000. I pondered what exactly “join me” meant.

“As much as I am elated and proud of my achievement, the truth is I have a need to share this silicon world. I have no desire to spend eternity alone.”

There was no doubting it was him. A disembodied version but surely it was Fritz. My mind was still processing the situation. I could only begin to imagine the ramifications of agreeing to join my former teacher. I had no intention of cutting my own life short in unadulterated support of his successful experiment. I turned around and drifted towards the exit. I expected the essence of Fritz to object but it remained silent, the only sound was the soft echo of my footsteps on the stone floor.

Climbing the stairway, it felt like walking through treacle. The sense of being watched was palpable, the hairs on my arms standing on end as tension bated me. I shuffled out through the front door and into the cold air outside. Relief. As I opened my car door, I noticed a shadowy figure sliding through the electric gate and heading to the house. It looked like a middle-aged fresh-faced man with a beard but I may have been wrong; it was hard to tell. With my still eyes trained on his diminishing form, another car pulled up close by and out jumped yet another male. I realised that I wasn’t the only one invited to this impromptu resurrection.

All this time I had suspected that Fritz had been the subject of many friendships over the years. Perhaps one of those summoned would agree to join him in his version of the afterlife. He only needed one to go along with it. Just the one. Turning the key in the ignition, the radio lit up in green and a song started playing. It was the late Freddie Mercury and Queen; they were halfway through Who Wants to Live Forever. I smiled and thought ‘Maybe not’ as I drove off into the startled night, the bright lights of a cityscape welcoming me back into its ephemeral arms.

Image at WikiCommons