Tomorrow I Will Disappear Again Page 2
Josh made no secret of the fact that my appearance bothered him. He looked for signs of aging even more diligently than I did.
"You look as young as you did when we were married, Mattie, he raged one day. "And I look like hell! I'm gray, bald spot on my head, flab on my stomach. But you never change. I swear, there's something wrong with you!"
One day a year later, babbling like a baby, he told me that he had fallen in love with his secretary who was little more than half his age, and wanted a divorce. There was something he had to do to find himself, he blurted through his tears. He left that night and was never seen again. The house fell into my possession by default since he never claimed any ownership. I sold it and rented an apartment on Caroline Street.
I received a picture of Abigail and her family at Christmas in 1958. Abigail was obviously older than the last time I had seen her. This dispelled any notion that, somehow, I had passed on to her some sort of youth gene.
(I handed the woman a bulky envelope. She took it and began to open it. I raised my hand and she stopped.)
In 1959, after having thought about it for over a year, I decided to start fresh and applied for a new Social Security card claiming that I had never worked. I moved to Mohawk Avenue in Scotia and Matilda Higgins disappeared as if she had never existed. I applied at General Electric for a job and was immediately hired as a file clerk. I had lied on my application stating that I was Jenny Jordan, twenty-one years old, and a graduate of Mount Pleasant High School. There was not a great deal of checking being done by this company at that time and it worked out. At times, I would run into someone I had known at General Electric, but nothing ever came of it.
The Korean War had started in 1950. It had gone badly at first then better. President Truman fired Gen. MacArthur. Eisenhower became president, the hydrogen bomb was tested, television came into people's homes with the Camel Fifteen-minute news program. Also, Howdy Doody, and I Love Lucy. Jet travel became commonplace and Alaska and Hawaii became states. I had opportunities to meet men and to date but avoided long-term relationships. I had become resigned to the fact that my appearance would not change, and did not want to relive the anguish that I had experienced when Josh left. One of the men I had dated spouted one day that I was a cold, mechanical woman, devoid of feelings. He was right.
In the sixties, computers were being used in business more and more. I recognized their future impact on human life much sooner than most and resolved to learn all I could about them. In 1962, soon after John Kennedy was elected president, I left General Electric and started at Union College studying computer science.
Every day I looked in the mirror and saw the same person, a slim woman of about twenty-five, attractive hair, mouth, eyes, ears, and nose seemingly positioned on her face with the skill of an artist. There was never a hint of a wrinkle or shred of gray despite the fact that I was now in my sixties. It wasn't fashionable for a woman to dye her hair so I kept mine unchanged.
President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Lyndon Johnson became president. I received a BS degree in 1964 and joined IBM as a programmer at Endicott, New York. There was an unpopular war in Vietnam. Each night, on color television, people would see our servicemen dying in a far off land. The war brought down the president. He decided not to run for reelection.
Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president. Men walked on the moon. There was an incident at Watergate in Washington. I was now seventy-two and people were asking embarrassing questions about where was I born, and how old I was. While those around me were aging, my appearance seemed carved in stone. I worried that these kinds of persistent questions would cause me to become an object of curiosity, and that I might have to submit to involuntary research. It was time to begin a new life.
Visiting Lawndale Cemetery, I found the grave of an infant and decided to adopt her name. I applied for and received a new birth certificate. It was surprisingly easy to say, and be believed, that I had been born in Binghamton in 1947. I obtained a Social Security card, driver's license, and credit cards. I became Helen Van Allen and abruptly left my IBM office one Wednesday afternoon. I didn't bother even to put the punched cards away or clear papers from my desk.
I went back to Albany, and took a small apartment on S. Pine St. Feeling that medical training would enable me to learn more about my problem, I explored the possibility of obtaining a medical degree. Unhappily I found that, for this, I needed more personal history of Helen Van Allen than was available. However, Albany Med accepted me for nurse training. Personnel believed my story that records had been lost in a fire at Binghamton High School and agreed to give me a test in lieu of transcripts. The hospital congratulated me on my superb scores and the training began.
Jerry Ford was president when I obtained my degree in 1978. I went to work for Mendell Orwitz, a geriatrician, on State Street in Albany. There, during spare time and off-hours, I dug into the documentation that was available about aging. I also sought the council of Dr. Orwitz but, as Omar Khayyam had said, in the end, I went out the same door as I had gone in.
My attention was suddenly drawn to a spectacular occurrence in England where the first test tube baby was born. I read all I could about this but there was nothing that helped me. During the same year, I needed to have a tooth filled. It was a small thing, but this incident gave me hope that I was, after all, a mere mortal being.
I tried again for a medical degree and was accepted at Cornell University soon after Jimmy Carter became president and Voyager began sending pictures from Saturn. My nurse's experience, plus the results of the test that I had taken at Albany Med, made up for my lack of transcripts. I did well and became a doctor specializing in psychiatry at about the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took control of the Soviet Union in 1985. After three years of internship, I opened an office on Greene Street in Hudson.
Having an office of my own partially solved one of my everyday problems. I could better hide from the prying eyes of those who speculated about my age. In my office, patients were much more interested in their personal problems than in what I looked like. No one cared. I could be eighty-five in real life, thirty-eight as Dr. Helen Van Allen, and still safely look Twenty-five.
My practice prospered but my life was unstable. Sooner or later, I would have to assume another identity. I would have to procure new documentation as proof of who I was. Doing this was going to be difficult next time because computers were controlling almost every facet of human activities. I could foresee the day when a person's identity would be established at birth and remain with him or her as an unshakable companion for a lifetime.
I decided that salvation lay in the computer itself. With advances in its capabilities, I predicted that I could probably forge whatever documents I needed in the future. I obtained an IBM personal computer. Teaching myself, I learned MultiMate, then WordPerfect, and finally Microsoft Word with its huge array of fonts. As computer technology improved, I obtained a color copier and a sophisticated printer. No expense was spared for these devices since they would allow me to hold on to my independence and anonymity. At about the time that the Berlin wall came down and the USSR collapsed, I was prepared for any eventuality. The computer also assisted in a personal endeavor. Using CD ROMs with residential databases, I was able to follow the careers of my children, and grandchildren.
On January 1 of this year, I completed my 116th year of life on this earth. Over the years I have witnessed advances in automobile and plane travel, the emergence of electr
onics and advanced computers, space travel, wars, the comings and goings of a dozen presidents, skirts rising and falling like the tide and much more. I am frightened by the fact that there is no hint as to how much more there is ahead of me.
As Dr. Van Allen, I am now sixty-four and it is time to move on. However, before I do, I wanted to have a conference with you because you are a reporter. I'd like to have you tell the world about me and also express my speculation that some January 1, midnight might be another magical time. I want to alert the medical community that another person like me may be born. I invited you here because you are a widely respected journalist with many successes to your credit. If I called a press conference with the story that I just told you, people would say I was crazy. But you're different. Not only are you honored in your field, but you play a personal part in this story that will lend credence to what you report. You see, my dear, you are Abigail's daughter, Dolores. You are my grand daughter. Everything I told you can be verified. The envelope I've handed you contains photos and documents that provide irrefutable proof that what I have told you is true.
(The woman winced when she heard