Petronelle Flamel Contemplates Radium Water

by Julianna Reidell

Content Warnings: Suicidal Thoughts, Depression, Mild Body Horror

Radithor! An amber-tinted bottle, faded lettering stamped onto its peeling label: A Cure for the Living Dead. It’d been enthusiastically pushed into her hand by some socialite—a washed-up golfer-turned-iron-magnate, if she recalled correctly—and as his eyes interestedly drank in her figure, her mind had skipped over the silly oxymoron of those two words: living/dead. 

This must have been 1928 or so; afterwards, she and Nicolas had made one of their morbid little bets as to just how long Mr. Golfer, if he continued with the regimen at his current rate, had before the Radithor washed him over that ultimate divide: from living to decidedly dead. She’d been pessimistic in her assessment, and so Nicolas won the bet. The poor man lasted four more years; when he went, it was after having already suffered the loss of most of his teeth, as well as his cancerous, crumbling jaw. She wonders now what was done with it. Did they place the jaw—gingerly, gingerly—in the coffin, atop the dead flesh and isotopic half-lives that had so recently been a man devoted to medicinal quackery? Or was it stashed in a jar somewhere (perhaps a box? The Pandora analogy felt all-too relevant)—slated for an impersonal identifying label and further study? 

Perhaps Nicolas knew. Perhaps it had even passed through Nicolas’s laboratory, through his hands, at some point; he’d eased himself into and out of academic and federal-funded work in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and sometimes made a habit of retaining small souvenirs from his various posts. He wouldn’t have kept the jaw himself, though; they’d never been keen on human remains, even relics, even when they were still calling themselves Catholics. It was common enough knowledge that certain cantrips could be cast, certain remedies could be obtained, with a bit of bone here or digit there—blood was always wonderfully potent—but (and perhaps this was illogical, really), it made their work feel tainted, somehow, as though their pursuits had never been about a deeper knowledge of the Lord God and the glories of His creations, but for something profane. Menial, even, depressingly narrow-minded. Illicit knowledge, endless power, deals with the devil… no, Monsieur and Madame Flamel had never been those kind of alchemists. But it was still hard to tell yourself that while, say, washing your hands of the stinking fruits of the charnel house, or methodically dicing away at the ring-finger of a saint. 

All the same, she didn’t think of herself as Catholic anymore. She’d had too many mixed feelings during the Reformation, met too many churchmen of all stripes since. Watched religious wars unfold—and probably helped fund a few too, inadvertently, what with Nicolas always trying to pick the right side to support in his (their) endless good-versus-evil crusade. 

This world, this life is naught but a battle between kindness and cruelty, righteousness and sin. And we must do our part. 

This was what they’d rationalized together, when the giddy astonishment of having perfected the recipe—the philosopher's stone! Eternal life, eternal health, eternal youth—finally faded, and the significance (not to mention the logistics) of living forever began to really rear its head. It seemed they might even have damned themselves, after a fashion: for who (she thought), really, was so short-sighted as to deny themselves the pleasures of eternal rest and Heaven? But everyone had their role to play, they reasoned, and if they themselves were fated never to face Judgement, to move on to another place, then the least they could do before seeing Judgement Day itself was to fulfill that purpose: to influence things (quietly, quietly) for the better here on earth. 

The trouble, though, was that there were just so many conflicts, so many sides, and so few pure-hearted souls, so few saints. And still Nicolas, in the boundless enthusiasm of the first few centuries, had thrown himself into this project, their dreams, this improvement of humanity. It wasn’t so hard to shift things this way and that, behind the scenes, under an endless string of aliases, when gold practically sprang from baser metals at your touch (they had caused the odd case of wild inflation, and probably those terrible, later conflicts in the Black Hills too, but that was the kind of mistake you only made once or twice). 

And with their nudging, things happened. Manuscripts translated from the Arab world hinted at better medicine. The old arts of antiquity began to flourish again. Petronelle herself had founded schools for girls, and taught them to write. Then rumblings of republicanism; Nicolas was all but aglow with these radical new concepts, these freshly-proclaimed natural rights. 

But then came the French Revolution. And for the first time in a long time, the two of them—newly-minted citoyen and citoyenne—began to wonder what it might feel like to die. 

There had been other horrors, of course; they’d even been in England for the plague of 1666. But illness didn’t really touch them. They’d been regularly exposed to smallpox for over a century, with no consequences. Nicolas, who’d once been terribly allergic to bees, now kept an apiary. Alcohol had no effect, either pleasurable or pathetic. Even Radium Water, when that came along over a century later, only ever gave them a slightly fizzy feeling—a tingling of the tongue, a buzz—they’d tested their levels afterward, and still, they never built up. Perhaps that tipsiness, she came to think, was whatever fortified their bodies combatting the deadly rays, the cancer that should’ve been insidiously worming its way in. 

But before Radithor, there was 1794, and surely even the astonishing properties baked into their bodies couldn’t really save them if the Revolutionary Tribunal decided to brand them traitors, to unceremoniously dispose of their heads? 

Nicolas had had so much hope, at the beginning of the thing. But by 10 Thérmidor, the moment of Maximilien Robespierre’s rather spectacular last hurrah, it had all gone out. They’d been in the room, both of them, where the last surviving architects of the Terror had been brought to wait until morning for their turn at the guillotine. Robespierre had tried to pre-empt the thing by shooting himself—or perhaps somebody had shot him? Even then, the reports were contradictory—but whoever it was, they were a lousy shot, because all that had been blown off was a sizable chunk of his jaw (not unlike, she thinks now, poor Mr. Golfer, incessantly chugging his Radithor). 

They’d done their best to tend to the injury, so the infamous Jacobin could at least put his face back together before he went and lost his head. But Nicolas’s own countenance was so worn and lined that night, wrapping bandages around the man they’d called the Incorruptible, that her own hands had not been as careful as they ought; her knuckles bumped persistently at splinters of jawbone as she worked, undoubtedly hurting their patient. Since their patient was the now-much-reviled Robespierre, she wasn’t sure how much guilt to reasonably feel about that. In any case, though, he hadn’t whimpered or tried to cry out—not until the guillotine, when their hasty bandaging had been unceremoniously ripped off, and what was left of the jaw lurched into its horrible distention once again. Then he died screaming. 

France felt freshly, truly rotten for them, after that. Perhaps it was a new side effect of the immortality, or just experience catching up with them, but the shape of events to come seemed clearer than ever before. They saw Napoleon’s inevitable rise, and the Bourbon kings after him. They left. 

Could the guillotine have killed them? They were more careful after that. But that wasn’t really what came to trouble her, in the days that followed Thérmidor, as they set out for the New World and tried to forget they’d ever known their broken France, known her so deeply, for so long, and loved her in a way that could’ve broken them too. The question she came to mull over, deep in the night, was instead: 

Might Nicolas have wanted the guillotine (and the men behind it; always, there were these men) to kill them? 

Perhaps it was foolish to have still been an idealist, after all this time. She herself had always been more hesitant, with greater judgement and increased reservations. Nicolas seemed to believe that all men were kind souls like himself—and this was endearing, but she could not have survived her life before him, those first two marriages, by seeing men as brimming only with untapped potential and a desire to do good. Still, this sweet current of thinking, his thinking, had been intertwined with hers for so long now, that she had to admit it was a little startling, this botched Revolution and the way it had cannibalized its own leaders—and with it, a cold and clammy notion…

What if time, this linear march, does not mean that progress will persist? What if all we have is this crucible, this combustion of violence and hopes and dashed hope—and the dead, ever the dead—over and over again, and we really have doomed ourselves to see it all? 

Have we ever, truly managed to do good? Real good? 

At all? 

They never discussed it together, not really. But 151 years later, when the United States dropped its new atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the footage of the camps in Germany and further east became known, when former Nazi scientists were brought to America to help the Land of the Free beat the Soviets in sending missiles into space, Nicolas had, one evening, suddenly crumpled, folding to the carpet and clutching at her arms, and he had finally answered the question. 

“Rien,” he choked out, as she held him and fought back her surprise. She herself didn’t cry at anything, not anymore. “Nothing we’ve done has made a damn—a damn bit—of difference.” 

And now here they were, in 1955. Homosexuals and so-called communists were being chased out of government, out of Hollywood; down in Mississippi, rats who dared call themselves men were able to mutilate and murder a Black teenage boy with apparent impunity. Nicolas doesn’t work for the government anymore; he barely tinkers with anything scientific (or alchemical; in their day, there wasn’t much difference) at all. He holds smaller jobs—a grocer, or a librarian—and she hopes that he’s realized that there can be meaning in these day-to-day things all the same. Petronelle has thought of trying to pray again, but she’s not quite sure who to, and why. To beg forgiveness? And in the end, what’s their sin—hubris, or stupidity? 

Perhaps she should pick up a pen again. She used to write, fervently, but eventually, she decided that if nobody could ever read her work, there wasn’t much point to keeping it around, and she burned it all—parchment and vellum, pamphlets and plays and type-written half-manuscripts. It was only a little bit of her soul, really, in the scope of things. 

Perhaps she and Nicolas should have a talk. She’s been watching him more carefully these days, half-afraid that he will do something drastic, and that in doing so he will leave her behind. But if they come to some decision… Well. Perhaps they could go to one of those peaceful little islands, the ones the military is blowing to bits testing their even shinier and newer terrible bombs, and just manage to find themselves in the right place at the right time. Their magically enhanced bodies wouldn’t withstand that, surely. It must be like being inside of a dying sun, a forming star. 

There’s got to be some way, still, to get to Judgement. 

In the meantime, though, she glances again at the little bottle of Radithor. She’s not even sure why she tucked it away, back in the so-called Roaring 20s; perhaps as a little memorabilia of her own. Radithor was banned after Mr. Golfer’s death; that, as much as anything, should serve as a sign that change is possible, that progress can be achieved. Though who knows? Give or take another 100, 150 years, and perhaps they’ll be drinking radium again. Or daubing glow-in-the-dark paint on watches and letting working girls die for the privilege of doing so. Hard-won science could mean nothing; literacy could plummet; women could be forced out of the vote like they were forced home from their factory jobs when the men came home after the last war. 

Can progress ever be linear? Can we make it so? Could we ever? 

Did we ever, ever, do the right thing? 

Nicolas will be home soon. 

And still, there it is. A Cure for the Living Dead. 

She sighs, wrenches the cork off the old bottle, and takes a swig. A familiar fizzing on her tongue, that oh-so-slight blurriness already doing its darndest to numb the terrible sting of her thoughts. 

It can’t kill her, but still—everybody needs to get drunk somehow. 

🜁🜄🜂🜃

Julianna Reidell (she/her) is a recent graduate of Arcadia University, where she majored in English and French. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moss Puppy Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, For Page and Screen, Flowermouth Press, and Baubles from Bones. In her free time, she enjoys reading speculative fiction and learning about everything from Mary Shelley to the French Revolution.