“Al. How’s it going?”
Castleman’s brother calls from California at the civilized hour of 8:30 PM, EST.
“I don’t know. Okay, I guess. How about you? Still writing the Great American Novel or whatever you’re doing?”
Castleman recognizes the sarcasm in his brother’s voice but chooses to give a straight answer, a mistake he still makes over and over again. “I’m working on a novel about Ponce de Leon,” he answers. “The fountain of youth.”
“The crazy Spanish dude who sailed around looking for the spring that would make him young again? What was the other thing those guys chased after? The seven cities of gold or some shit like that?”
“More like some-shit-like-that.”
“Did Ponce de Leon get disillusioned or something?”
“Shot with a poison arrow by a Florida Indian, on his second excursion there in 1521. Died on his way back to Havana for medical attention. Probably sixty years old. Sixty-one.”
“Probably?”
“They’re not really sure when he was born, probably about 1560.”
“You know, Roger, we could say we’d discovered the fountain of youth, sell little vials of water. We could do it over the Internet. Advertise in those crazy sci-fi and ‘truth-is-stranger-than-fiction’ magazines. There’d be enough suckers out there to make it worth our while.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. You’ve heard that joke about ‘Evian’ spelled backwards? Same thing. There’d be enough people who’d convince themselves they felt younger. It’s like magnets, or taking vitamins.”
“We’d have the FDA on our asses so fast it wouldn’t be funny.” Castleman wonders why he’s even arguing with him. Surely his brother is not serious.
“The world is full of hoaxes, Roger.”
“I just don’t see myself as a con artist.”
“You ever hear about Doctor Gregor’s cockroach pills?”
“Vaguely,” Castleman equivocates, hoping to stop him, but Al explains anyway.
“Couple decades ago now, early eighties. Guy who called himself Doctor Joseph Gregor claimed he’d developed cockroach-hormone pills that cured acne, menstrual cramps, allergies, shit like that. They were supposed to tap into the legendary survival qualities of cockroaches.”
“Again with the shit-like-that. Doctor Gregor? As in Kafka’s Gregor Samsa?”
“Exactly. He even got about seventy people – his ‘patients’ – to testify to the miraculous curative power of the pills. He was on TV talkshows, had hundreds of articles written about him, a real celebrity –”
“How’d get caught?” Castleman interrupts, thinking he’s got the showstopper (or voice-stopper).
“He didn’t! That’s the beauty of it! He revealed it was all a hoax himself, just a big prank, a practical joke. He could still be operating today, raking in a fortune on his miraculous cockroach pills.”
“Or else languishing in prison.”
“Listen, Roger, I’m in the business. I should know. People like these big promises. It makes them feel better. What’s the harm in that?” Al is the minister of a store-front “church” in LA. He’s been doing this since about the time Castleman quit teaching to write full time, and he makes an implicit “career-change” comparison. Al performs weddings, officiates at funerals, baptisms and potlucks. He once confided to his brother that he got a lot of ass from the women and in the same breath warned Castleman he’d better not rat on him to Wanda, his wife. In fact, it was how he’d met Wanda in the first place. Wanda is something of a huckster herself, Castleman has gathered.
“Look, Al, why’d you call? What’s up?”
“Can’t a man speak to his brother without having to get an appointment? Jesus.”
“Just calling to shoot the shit, huh?”
“Uh – you didn’t tell Mom about Wanda’s little outburst, did you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Wanda’s family’s been threatening to come and ‘visit.’ Of course, their ‘visits’ usually mean coming to mooch off us. They expect us to wait on them, do their laundry. Christ, flush toilets are newfangled things to these people.”
“The Castleman Hotel, huh?” Roger tries to keep his voice neutral; he does not want to get involved in his brother’s family affairs. “So why don’t you want our mother to know? Think she couldn’t handle it?”
“Oh, you know Mom. She can’t stand Wanda. She thinks I married beneath myself. I don’t want to give her any more ammo.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. She’s not going to cut off your allowance or something.” But his comment draws fire.
“She doesn’t give me an allowance!” Al protests.
“All I meant was you’re a big boy now,” Roger assures him, but he gathers that money is an issue between Al and their mother and he wonders if he’s needed to “borrow” from her again. He changes the subject. “Everything’s hunky-dory with you and Wanda, I take it?”
“I guess. She hasn’t mentioned her family lately. I hope they aren’t still planning to descend on us.” The image was of vultures dropping from the sky, Roger guesses.
“Good luck.”
“What about your old lady? She still pushing you around?” Al needs to turn the tables on his brother, and he makes no attempt to disguise his dislike for her, either – flaunts it, rather, taunting his brother.
Roger snorts as if his brother has just made a joke and ignores the crack. His brother is caught up in the classic mother-in-law dispute. “Well, I better get going.”
“Think about that proposition.”
“Proposition?” Castleman is momentarily baffled. What is his brother talking about? What does he mean by a “proposition”?
“You know, the fountain of youth?”

*

Castleman pops on the computer, looking forward to a peaceful day of writing. Father’s Day and the Summer Solstice have come and gone. Jodie’s gone to the college. Carol and Lily have both departed for summer camp in Maine. He’s alone. He’s completed his revision of the article on the origins or Romeo and Juliet and is going to e-mail the text to the editor, and then he plans to spend the day writing Ponce de Leon’s death scene in Cuba in 1521. Not that he’s finished his novel -- far from it; he hasn’t been working on it for weeks, given his other assignments. But he has awakened this morning feeling optimistic and inspired.
Mug of coffee by the computer, still savoring the NBA championship win by the Pistons, the team he rooted for growing up in Potawatomi Rapids, Castleman watches the computer monitor go from the spangled display of program icons that decorate the azure filed of his screen like an army general’s tunic crammed with pins and medals to the e-mail program as the cheery woman’s voice informs him that he has mail.
In the subject line of the very first message he reads the word Tithonus. Tithonus! The poor guy the goddess Aurora fell for, the brother of Priam, king of Troy when the Greeks lay siege to the city to recover Helen. Aurora asked Zeus to grant Tithonus immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth to go along with it, and so Tithonus grew older and weaker, his voice feeble, his legs too weak use. Aurora turned him into a grasshopper.
Castleman tries to remember if he ever assigned the Tennyson poem in any of his courses at WPCC, but he can’t recall. “Ulysses,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Tennyson’s wonderfully galloping anti-war poem, yes, anthologized in the big English literature textbooks, and maybe some of the King Arthur stuff, but “Tithonus”? He makes a mental note to re-read the poem. He feels a sudden pang to be back in a classroom, discussing Victorian poets with his students, but it passes quickly.
At any rate, the Tithonus in the e-mail turns out to be spam, an advertisement for an anti-aging miracle drug. “The Scientific Breakthrough to Anti-Aging!” the ad’s headline declares in bold type, a smiling middle-aged couple hugging each other beneath it, like a billboard. “Slow time with the ULTIMATE Anti-Aging Product! Tithonus Drastically SLOWS the AGING Process!”
It crosses Castleman’s mind that Al and Wanda (and he?) could surely make the same claim with their hokum scheme. He considers suggesting they invest in an internet pop-up to reel in some suckers. “ENHANCE the Quality and Duration of your Life... IMMEDIATELY!” A series of bullet point claims follows:

• Regenerate your skin, muscle, hair and bones to their youthful levels.
• Increase your energy and endurance.
• Reduce your body fat.
• Restore your potency, libido and sexuality.

Castleman wonders, as he often does, if Ponce’s search for the Fountain of Youth was just a yearning for sexual potency, like Yeats’. Some biographers had even suggested as much, seeing in his naming of Florida a polite way of describing the sexual renewal implicit in the effects of the magical waters.
Another photo of lab-coated physicians, one an eye-catching blond woman, floats above the caption: “Now doctors and scientists alike think of aging as a disease that can be treated and cured. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE!”
But when Castleman clicks on the words, he is prompted to enter his credit card number, and he backs out of the screen.
There’s a testimonial a satisfied customer in Peoria, Illinois: “Yesterday I looked in the mirror as I was shaving and I realized I hadn’t felt this good or looked this young in years! Before I tried Tithonus I was always tired and depressed. I’m a new man!”
What an odd choice of names, Castleman, thinks, as he clicks the delete button. Tithonus. A cynical joke from the drug’s marketers?
Castleman makes a cup of green tea and takes a volume of Tennyson down from the shelves. He reads “Tithonus” and then “Ulysses,” another dramatic monologue involving a character from Greek mythology, with a similar theme. Except, where Tithonus wants to be dead, begs Aurora to release him (“hold me not forever in thine East..”), Ulysses lusts for more life: “I cannot rest from travel; I will drink/Life to the lees...”
Castleman sees himself in a daydream lecturing about “Ulysses” and “Tithonus” and tossing in references to Arthur Hallum, the boy who died young, about whom Tennyson wrote his monumental “In Memoriam” poem, the eulogy that took practically two decades to write, mourning the loss of his friend, his wasted youth.
Instead of a grasshopper, in Tennyson’s poem Tithonus is “A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream/The ever-silent spaces of the East.” If only he still had youth, he’d enjoy his immortality; by contrast, Ulysses wants the immortality to accompany his vigor – still undiminished.
Castleman sits at his desk, daydreaming about the lecture, comparing and contrasting the poems, eliciting discussion from his classroom full of students, the dialogue blossoming out to cover more than just the poems, more than Tennyson, but to encompass the human condition at the center of the verse. Ponce de Leon as college professor. The telephone rings then and Castleman, limping to the kitchen on the heel that has already started to throb, wonders if dying young like Hallum and Romeo doesn’t have its advantages.
“Yo, Rodge, what it be?” Al’s voice comes through the earpiece as if he were in the next room.
“Wow, where are you? Saint Augustine?” Castleman’s tone is satiric as he imagines his brother in Los Angeles, hustling money from his church congregants.
“Nah,” Al replies, “Fort Lauderdale, but it’s basically the same thing.”

*

Al is drifting around south Florida, apparently scoping out the scene for a place to set up shop. Al has apparently abandoned his Los Angeles apartment. Castleman has spoken with him twice. The first call had come from Fort Lauderdale, the second from Jupiter. He and Wanda seem to have found a niche in Jupiter. Wanda is reading palms and Al is securing clients for her.
“Magnets,” Al said first thing when he called from Jupiter. It was a statement, as if the answer to a question that had been confounding Roger for years.
“Magnets?”
“Magnets,” Al repeated.
“Okay, what about them? What about magnets?”
“It’s the thing we’re looking for to enhance the waters of south Florida, the final ingredient to our scheme.”
“Our scheme? As in, yours and mine?”
“Hey, I’m just offering you a chance to make a tidy sum of money.”
“What about the magnets? How does that work?”
“There’s an inherent magnetic balance in all human beings,” Al started, and Roger cut him off.
“Is this that animal magnetism shit like that quack Antoine Mesmer tried to pawn off in eighteenth century France?”
“Never heard of him, bro, but the healing powers of magnets are well known. My theory is that we have polar electromagnetic balances in our bodies that somehow get out of harmony during the course of our lifetime. By magnetizing the restorative waters here in Florida, we can re-balance the magnetic fields and stop the aging process, even reverse it.”
“Is this your ‘theory’ or is this just your snakeoil bullshit?”
“I can’t prove anything, but –”
“But you can’t disprove it, either.”
“But the proof is in the pudding, bro. We’ll have testimonials from people who’ve actually tried the therapy. The magnetic elixir. Yeah, I like the sound of that. The magnetic elixir.” Al tried saying it a few more times, changing the emphasis from one syllable to the next. “The magnetic elixir. The magnetic elixir. The magnetic elixir. We may be onto something. Did this guy Balboa say anything about magnets, do you know?”
“You mean Ponce de Leon?”
“Whatever his name was. Is there anything we can use?”
“Not that I know of. He did give Florida its name, and the Tortugas and some other places.”
“Tortugas, tortugas,” Al repeated, to see if he could use the word.
“Listen, Al, are you really –”
“Gotta go. I’ll call you later.” He hung up the phone.

*

Castlemqan reaches over in the dark, picks up the receiver and punches in the code to get his messages. He goes through the various menu options until he clicks on “Old Messages” and selects the first call. Sure enough, Al’s voice comes out of the machine. In the background he hears a vague salsa tune and figures Al is calling from a booth in a café. He’s on his cell, of course.
“Hey, bro, what it be?” Al’s voice says, in the mock-ghetto cadence he frequently uses. “Wanda and I are up here in Saint Augustine, man. We’re staying in a bed and breakfast in the old city – cobblestone streets, quaint cafes. We made the connection, bro. This is the oldest city in the nation, bro! And I scored some water from the St. John River. Got the real stuff, a few gallons. Course it doesn’t really matter where you get it, but just for the sake of authenticity, I guess. You know what I’m saying? I’ll magnetize it, see what I can do about that. Can you ‘magnetize’ water? I’ll see what the options are.
“I figure we can market it to a lot of these old people down here in the land of the retirees on recovering memory alone. You know what I’m saying? There’s such a fear of Alzheimer’s, bro, you wouldn’t believe. You see shit about it all the time. I overhear old farts talking about it all the time. What they can do for it. Who’s got it. What are their chances. Shit like that. Flurizan trials to boost mental function, lowering levels of beta-amyloid, clinical trials of different drugs and blah blah blah. I swear down in Lauderdale Wanda and I heard these two old women go on for a fucking hour about some study at Washington University where they were scraping away brain plaque from mouse brain cells. What it did was reduce the swelling on nerve cell branches, but I don’t know what the fuck that proves. I mean, mice! Suddenly they were remembering past lives? Remembering the names of their children and grandchildren? Remembering that piece of cheese they’d stored in the attic? I mean, what the fuck? You know what I’m saying?
“But I mean, the fear. You can almost smell it. These other two old shits in West Palm, on the beach? They started talking about their ‘senior moments,’ wondering it that meant they had Alzheimer’s. This one old guy couldn’t remember the name of the movie he’d seen the day before and he was freaking out. So the other one was giving dietary and behavior tips. Low-fat, high-antioxidant, blah blah blah. You know what I’m saying?
“Nine-tenths of this fear is susceptible to suggestion. I mean, it’s a win-win. You know what I’m saying? We get their money, they get peace of mind. That’s what they’re really buying. Peace of fucking mind. That’s what we’re really selling. I mean, if somebody’s marketing ‘brain-healthy recipes’ and getting away with it – I mean, there’s even this shit called ‘blueberry-raspberry swirl spring soup’ and they call it ‘brain food.’ I mean, give me a break! You know what I’m saying? If they can sell that shit, we have every right to sell ‘jen-you-wine straight from the fountain youth elixir’ and not feel guilty about it. You know what I’m s–” The message stopped abruptly; Al had run out of tape.

*

“Everything’s falling into place. I’m putting a bunch of magnets in the water vats, letting it stew so the water can absorb all the electromagnetic goodness out of the fuckers. Meanwhile, I’m busy getting together a clientele –”
“What do you mean?”
“You know an inability to smell may be an early warning for Alzheimer’s?”
“Excuse me?”
“There are ten specific smells that if you can’t smell them it might mean you’ll go on to develop Alzheimer’s.”
“You point is?”
“Well, if there’s a way of reversing it...”
“What are they? The odors.”
“Oh, God. Let’s see, lemon, lilac, leather – oh, I don’t know – clove, gas, soap, smoke...did I say leather?”
“Yes. Anyway, so you’re convincing these people they can’t smell and creating a fear of Alzheimer’s?”
“It may be a way of predicting it is all. Pineapple, menthol and strawberry.”
“You better watch what you’re doing, Al. You could get into serious trouble. Fraud. Conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy? What are you talking about?”
“You and Wanda. It could be a federal charge, too, considering you’ve crossed state lines, coming to Florida from California. Besides, weren’t you going to advertise on the internet?”
“I hadn’t thought of it, but now that you suggest it, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
“Bullshit, Rodge! You just fucking asked me if I was going to do it.”
“But I wasn’t suggesting –”
“You’re as much a part of this ‘conspiracy’ as anybody, bro.”
“God damn it, Al! I’m just trying to make a living here in Baltimore!”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“As a writer!”
“And what are you writing?”

*

“Al, what’s up?” Castleman says when he recognizes the voice on the other end of the line. It’s early in the evening. The kids are home from school, buzzing with gossip about classmates; Jodie has dinner going, and he and she are watching the evening news while the pots simmer on the stove. “Where you calling from?”
“I’m calling from a homeless shelter they set up in an elementary school here in Jupiter,” Al says, his voice forlorn.
“Wanda’s out getting us some food. Hamburgers and French fries and shit like that.”
“It’s really a wreck there? I’ve seen some of the damage on the evening news.”
“Fuck – sailboats washed up on the shores, roofs flying off houses, no electricity. Shit. It’s a wreck. Store owners are pulling down the planks on the businesses, checking the damage. Shit. It’s a real disaster. Lots of water destruction from all that rain. Stock inventories wrecked and ruined. Shit. The cops still won’t let a lot of the residents check their homes because of the power lines, and they’re pissed off.”
“How about the beaches?”
“Most of them are still closed, which has the sightseers pissed off. I heard there was some erosion. Completely ruined the Labor Day weekend at Disneyworld and all that shit up in Orlando. Not that I give a rat’s ass. There’s a sign somewhere over near Indiantown Road that says ‘Kiss My Frances’. I thought it was kind of funny. Shit, I practically got creamed by a roof that went flying off a building on Indiantown Road. It was like something out of The Wizard of Oz.”
“I take it you lost everything?”
“Basically, except for some clothing and personal belongings.”
“You’ve given up on the project?”
“The fountain of youth? It may still be a way of recouping my losses. I already went to all that trouble setting my customers up. Don’t know if they’ll go for it now, all the other shit they have to deal with. I’ve got to reassess my options. You still in on it?”
“Al, I never was.”