A young woman and a young man peer into the chain-link fence to catch a glimpse of the arboreal mystery. The army of guards and researchers make it very well impossible, but every once in a while, inside the compound, one—if one is patient and lucky enough—can catch said glimpse of a dwarf and wrinkled tree bearing dull green grey fruit of a most peculiar shape—round with several banana-shaped nodules, not unlike a human hand. One bite of this strange fruit, it is rumoured, and the aging process screeches back to a death-defying crawl, or “creep.” That’s the rumour anyway.
The news agencies keep it conservative. Mice on a diet of daily fruit rations seem to be living, on average, two months longer than control mice. Except for the ones that don’t. A twenty-seven-year-old chimpanzee on an exclusive diet of the anti-aging fruit since its discovery twelve years ago has stopped aging completely.
The young woman and man—a couple—read these reports ravenously. Both the skeptically conservative and the wildly imaginative. They, like every other single person on the planet, want a fruit for themselves. And their chance of getting one is two in the population of the world. There is no orchard of these fruit trees with a smiling farmer in overalls filling up barrels by the bushel and sending them off to market. Only this single tree. Bearing its strange, completely sterile fruit. Origins yet to be determined.
The tree receives the full scrutiny of scores of botanists and researchers, but they search in vain. A nine-year-old discovered the tree on the outlying land of her parents’ property. Tasted it under a friend’s dare. The parents slowly grew aware of something being wrong when the child failed to outgrow her clothes for two consecutive years. Apparently she had been secretly eating the fruit with reckless abandon since she had discovered it. The study of her growth (or lack thereof) was cut short however, when a car struck her dead in a Walmart parking lot.
Researchers daily run tests to discover the tree’s origins. Pore over meteorological studies searching for the possibility of an asteroid impact twelve years ago that may have lain some alien spore, seed, bulb. Still. Origins remained yet to be determined.
The following week, the young woman attends a small dinner party of her closest friends. After dinner, with the china whisked away, the host stands up. Flings back her dark waves, smuggles a mischievous laugh. “You will not believe what I have got my hands on.” Her accomplice enters, carrying, on a teak Dansk serving tray, a hairy greenish orb with six fingers.
Chairs fly back. The guests gasp, they swear, they exclaim disbelief. “NO WAY.” declares our young heroine. The accomplice sets down the tray.
“How the hell did you get that?”
“My father. One of the guys he golfs with owns one of the research stations…” she trails off. Slides a fine Wüsthof from the table. “I’m not sure exactly how this works.” She attempts to peel the hoary skin, but ends up spilling some of the flesh using this method. “Okay, this isn’t it. It’s like Jello pudding in there.”
“Do the knobby pieces break off?” wonders aloud an olive-skinned woman.
The host looks up, mentally counting the guests. Eight. “Maybe.” She saws off the fruit’s protrusions, careful to contain the custard. “Someone has to share the big piece with me.” Our heroine volunteers.
The other women huddle around to claim their respective shares. “Oh my god,” exhales a red-haired woman. “It’s divine!” The other women chime in their agreement. “Totally.” “Utter oo-mami.” “So good!” The guests linger, the wine runs dry, and the night sky outside stretches taut, threatening to leak light.
The next day, the young woman relays the novel experience to the young man. The young man feels a twinge of jealousy, but mostly, he feels happy vicariously. And now they have a source. Which is lucky. Because the young woman and her friends are soon going to need it. A few days later, the cravings begin. Clamorous, maddening, insatiable. Even more distressful, ignoring the cravings results in accelerated aging.
It seems that while researchers had exerted extensive energy studying the anti-aging effects of consuming the fruit, not until recently had anyone considered the effects of not consuming the fruit. How very unlucky for our young woman. And thus the black market explodes, no price being too much for a hopeful drop of this elixir. The father does not want to live with the weight of his daughter’s death on his hands. Nor that of her friends’.
Of course the tree could hardly produce fruit quickly enough to supply eight people with regular rations. Let alone the countless others who had unsuspectingly tried it. So it is only a matter of months before the young woman receives her last ration, the tree now completely barren with no signs of producing additional fruit—at least not anytime soon. The young man left a long time ago.
The no-longer-young woman and the no-longer-young host sit next to each other on the back porch steps at the host’s house. They have aged considerably. The host much less so. She keeps secret a stash of creep fruit in the shed behind her house. Unbeknownst to her, the no-longer-young woman already knows this.
“I’m sorry. Beyond words.” sheepishly confides the old host.
“I know.” replies the old woman. Hidden in her jacket pocket is a key to the shed. And the quick sharp blade of a Wüstof. “I am too.”
® 2009
