Potion Prophecy

It might be difficult now to believe, but when I was an undergraduate I was something of a prodigy. We all were, my little group of friends back then. We were chemistry students, except for Connie, who was an English Literature student yet somehow managed to keep up with us, her room littered with dusty old books about alchemy and natural philosophy. At first the four of us would just go to the pub after lectures. But soon, bored with our courses and at odds with the world, we started doing some recreational chemistry. And for all of us, for whatever reason, chemistry was basically synonymous with potionmaking. There was no conscious decision to eschew biochemistry and molecular synthesis. From the moment we broke into that basement lab, potions and lotions were all that mattered, and life became playful, oriented around novel new ointments, elixirs and creams. It was an incredibly happy time in my life.

Within a few months of playing around, experimenting in the lab, getting drunk and sleeping with each other, we seemed to have stumbled upon something brilliant. We had concocted a special potion that seemed to totally halt the process of aging, with no observable side effects. We tested it on plant cells, then on worms, then on a baby rat we trapped by the river bank. They just stopped growing and decaying, until we stopped giving them the potion, at which point it resumed as normal. It was like the test subjects became impervious to time. Our professors were confused but eventually impressed, and arranged for us to present at a research conference in London. We all drank heavily the night before and turned up hanging and reeking of booze and ambiguous lust. The room was half-full, but everyone seemed mightily impressed, except for one old man in the front row, who sat with his arms crossed and a frown on his face.

That evening, when we were drinking in the pub over the road from the conference centre, which was called The Cow and Bollock, the old guy walked through the door and came right up to our table.

–Mind if I join you for just one drink? he said, in a soft Scandi lilt. I was at your presentation earlier. It was very interesting. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

–Sure, I said. What’s your name? (The other two came and joined us.)

–Melchior, he told us. I’m Dr. Melchior. Formerly of Helsingborg University. Now emeritus… and trying to enjoy a retirement of sorts! Heh (he chuckled).

We all went round and introduced ourselves, and there was a short lull. I broke the tension: –Based on your reaction earlier, I take it you weren’t impressed?

Dr. Melchior smiled, showing some tobacco-stained teeth, and not as many as you’d expect. –No, no, I enjoyed it. It was very novel. A purple potion that stops aging in its tracks. Potential immortality. Hell, if it can stop aging, I’m sure it can stop autoimmune diseases, or maybe even cancer. Yep. It’s rare that a research project by young scientists makes me cast my mind towards the future, not the past. (We smiled back at him, relieved that he hadn’t found some fatal flaw.)

But then he quickly stopped smiling, and his eyes turned very dark.

–I’m serious, boys and girls. This little potion you’ve brewed up is going to change the world, and I think you know that. Or actually, you think you know it, but you don’t. You think you’ll sell the formula to AstraZeneca and get filthy rich and a Nobel prize, and you’ll get to stay young and beautiful for hundreds of years to come. But that’s not quite how things are going to play out.

I was enjoying this knackered old Swede’s cantankerous energy.

–Go on then, how do you think it’s going to play out? Is someone going to steal our formula or something?

We all laughed, including Melchior. While he was laughing, he reached into his bag and unfurled a large scroll, made out of what was probably papyrus.

–After your presentation, I felt a bit queasy, and I went back to my house to have a nap. While I was sleeping, I witnessed a prophecy, the most vivid I’ve ever witnessed in my long life. I made haste to write it down. Would you like to hear it?

We looked at each other, holding back giggles.

–Yeah, alright. Go on then.

Melchior’s Prophecy

When I was gorgeous and giddy and firmly in my prime, this was a nation of spring chickens and young bucks above all else. The campus was a battlefield of signals and signs. My first foray into the chemical arts was in 1968, where I dreamed up a Molotov cocktail with salt on the rim, thrown languidly at fascist policemen astride dappled grey horses on Helsingborg University’s nicest quad. The elixir was potent and the deed was done, combusting in a curious freeze frame beneath the ecclesiastical sun. Shards of glass got lodged into cop skull — a sight which itself got lodged into my cerebellum and shaped my life from henceforth on. I was inescapably in love with home-brewed potions and giddy potential contained in each tender droplet. For younguns like yourselves the potion is the natural conclusion of an unfettered mind and an unsullied young body with time on its hands. And at your age I just couldn’t let it go. I was stirring the cauldron in the dead of night, to the detriment of studies and lovers alike. I guess it was like some dirty cathexis, where after nights in the lab the potions would speak, a vulnerable voice, be gentle with me. All of which is to say, I understand how you’ve been feeling, and you deserve a congratulation on what you’ve managed to brew, and I’d be remiss not to reward you with a sincere salute.

(Melchior stood up and saluted us all in turn, before peering once again at his scroll.)

Of course from that point on you’ll be wildly rich, and my prophecy showed me how the money is spent. Though with this part of my dream it seems the Almighty squirted me with the waters of Lethe, and I struggle to match the fate with the face. I trust you will know whose destiny is whose.

One of you will spend it in the most foolhardy way. After a few years of your potion’s ubiquity you’ll wake up and find that you can no longer live, the itch is too itchy, you’ll want to expand and scratch and drive onwards and up. You’ll pitch to investors: it’s all very well that we don’t have to die but what of the scandal of babies born with disorders or depression or defective genes? Let’s nip the suffering in the bud before it has chance to flourish. You’ll found an experimental sperm bank to improve the world’s germ plasm, which will haemorrhage money, and I’m sorry to say you’ll come to be viewed as a bit of a joke. One of you will withdraw into nature and spend your money on beautiful art, seeking the inscrutable lifestyle which served us fine before the well got poisoned sometime between the death of Prince Albert and the launch of the iPod. But disquiet will still fray at the edges, causing the paintings to show inconsistencies and hint at weird things. Like Sofonisba Anguissola’s “The Chess Game,” about which you’ll come to believe that there’s something supernatural and scary lurking in silence just out of the frame. Another of you will simply consume, a spender and playboy of global repute, and your potion keeps you healthy although your waistband balloons, and if any of you are happy then I suppose it’s you. And the last of you will unfortunately die, because of course death will persist if you simply get killed, and you will be cut down in the peak of your prime by a lover’s jealous other, as has happened throughout the entirety of time.

But you must appreciate this is bigger than you. Man itself stands to be transformed by your tasty little tincture. Those of us currently alive will bear the brunt of the burden — it gets easier for babies born in a world where death is optional and rare and mostly limited to those who kill and maim in gangs or armies. But what solace applies for those of us who have long since sagged and are beginning to rot, or whose nearest and dearest have already gone? The rage they will feel will be profound, with no real object beyond it not being fair. And of course my generation controls the property market and decides most elections, so get ready for governments of unparalleled vice. And conversely for those of you lucky enough to be right in your prime when the potion arrives, you will behave abominably night after night; the kind of hedonism that usually precedes total collapse, sucking and fucking on Mandy and Mkat on weekday nights where previously you’d just curl up with a really good book. Through necessity your scientist friends will make gigantic strides in the prophylactic arts, making wafer thin condoms which reflective panels which seem to increase the girth of the cock. Sadly, love now feels impossibly hard, despite a dizzying array of beautiful people packed like sardines on every bus. You’ll stick through the decades with the man of your dreams and then just like that your head has been turned, a child abandoned, a soulmate spurned.

Now, onto the world itself, which hardly liked us even when we died. After a few decades, the various phyla will start smelling a rat. The mushrooms and fungus will catch on first — no fresh human bodies six feet under soil upon which to dance all mycotic and meek. Animal carcasses are fine but nothing to scream about for a precocious young mushroom with the world at its feet, for whom nothing gets the electrical signals pulsing like the complex terroir of human meat. That poindexter of nature, the fungal freak, always ahead of the curve, and they’ll ring the alarm. This sentiment will come to be shared by most of the creatures who roam the earth. The majestic badger, Mr Fox’s friend, becomes a mighty foe, unable to sublimate its rage about dying and decaying while man sallies forth, and being eaten by badgers becomes one of the main causes of death in a world without death from natural causes. Eventually the world’s protest will extend beyond the realm of organisms and into phenomena in general. Volcanoes and earthquakes and all that shit, and spooky events whose impact is largely just symbolic; in 30 years a pillar of light appears in the North Sea and just stays there; the colossal squid supersedes the giant squid and swims around at increasingly shallow depths; every apple starts tasting mealy and mushy, like a Cox’s Orange Pippin, even the really expensive ones crossbred by scientists not unlike yourselves. And so on.

In any case, it won’t be enough. Your achievement, monumental though it is, will be largely swallowed by the passage of time, and the people will hunger for new frontiers. They’ll say fine, so much for the oblivion that awaited after death, but what of the nothing that preceded our birth? Aren’t both oblivions the same thing, and an equal injustice for science to conquer? And the three of you still surviving will heed this call and reunite, a little slower and a lot more wizened, and you will purchase state of the art lab space and brew potions together like in your salad days. But the task at hand is too imprecise. The public want to experience the past, but we don’t exist before we’re conceived, we’re at best testicular homunculi and that’s no way to witness the world. So the potion needs to elicit some kind of third person view, an invisible camera spanning the whole damn thing. This must be constructed or somewhere in the brain, and your potionmaking nous has dried up and gone. The liquid you make is no better than the acid I took in my university dorm. You’re there in Petrograd in 1919, but the Bolsheviks have trebuchets and additional limbs, you’re really just tripping, a voyeur peeping out through a ghostly hole. After a few years you disband once again and leave it to the young bucks to figure out how to redeem the past.

The carousel stops after a few hundred years, when the Almighty’s withered finger emerges briefly from the clouds, and no one is surprised when it wags back and forth. People stop drinking the potion that same afternoon. Share prices plummet and depression ensues, which when you combine it with the first sagging of flesh in hundreds of years, leads to a rather bleak societal mood. But slowly and surely things improve. The potion swilling generation finally gets old and nature picks them off one by one. The three of you that survive all cling on to life, spunky old codgers who squandered their wealth. My favourite part of this prophecy is the bit where you craft bootleg ointments in the nursing home, when you escape the surveillance of nurses 350 years your junior. You will walk with a stick around the parks and canals of the gleaming city of the future, bowled over by the sheer beauty of the world, and you will want to keep on living despite God’s clear instruction to the contrary. The factories have stopped brewing the potion but you remember how to make it, it was simple really. No one could stop you if that’s what you chose. And that’s where the prophecy became blurry and indistinct, and I woke up sweaty and bursting for a piss. Speaking of…! And he shuffled past me and wandered off to the bog.

———

We finished our pints and went to another pub, where we had a good laugh about the eccentric old fool we’d had the pleasure of meeting. We drank several pints and went back to our hotel, where Connie and I had a drunken fumble, and fell asleep. We didn’t talk to each other at all on the train back up north. A few weeks later, someone asked in the group chat if we still wanted to take the meeting with the guy from AstraZeneca. I think it was me who said let’s just take a few weeks to think about what we should do. Those weeks turned into a year, and interest in our research slowly died down. Journalists stopped calling and a rumour started that it was all just performance art. I suppose the moment we cancelled the meeting with AstraZeneca it dissolved Dr Melchior’s prophecy, which was surely just the ramblings of a drunk old Swedish idiot anyway. I couldn’t find any trace of him online, and there is no university in Helsingborg.