And it never had enough time. It begged Heaven to extend the hours. The appetite was endless. The requests never stopped.
Until slowly, gradually, Dor came to rue the very thing that once consumed him.
He did not understand the purpose of this slow torture, and he cursed the day he numbered his fingers, he cursed the bowls and the sun sticks, he cursed all the moments he had spent away from Alli when he could have been with her, listening to her voice, laying his head against hers.
Mostly he cursed the fact that while other men would die and meet their fate, he, apparently, was going to live forever.
THE IN-BETWEEN
24
Sarah was casual when she saw Ethan the next morning.
At least she tried to be. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, ripped jeans, and Nikes. He dropped boxes of pasta and apple juice on the counter.
“What’s up, Lemon-ade?”
“Not much,” she said, scooping oatmeal.
As he opened the boxes, she stole a few glances, hoping for clues to whatever had caused his cancellation. She wanted him to mention it—she certainly wouldn’t—but he unpacked the food at his normal laconic pace and whistled a rock melody.
“That’s a great song,” she said.
“Yeah.”
He resumed whistling.
“So what happened last night?”
Oh, God. Had she just blurted that out? Stupid, stupid!
“I mean, it doesn’t matter,” she tried to add.
“Yeah, sorry I couldn’t—”
“Whatever—”
“Bad timing—”
“No, it’s cool.”
“Cool.”
He crushed the now empty boxes and put them in the oversized trashcans.
“You’re good to go,” he announced.
“Sure am.”
“See you next week, Lemon-ade.”
He exited the way he always did, digging his hands into his pockets and bouncing on the balls of his feet. That was it? she thought. What did he mean by next week? Next Friday night? Or next Saturday morning? Why didn’t she ask? Why was it always up to her to ask?
A homeless man with a blue cap stepped to the window and took his oatmeal.
“Extra bananas?” he asked.
Sarah loaded his bowl—he asked the same thing every week—and he said, “Thank you,” and she mumbled, “No problem,” then she grabbed a paper towel and wiped around the last apple juice bottle Ethan had unpacked; the top had come loose and it had spilled all over.
25
“Inside those?” Victor asked, pointing.
“Yes,” the man said. His name was Jed. He ran the cryonics facility.
Victor gazed at the huge fiberglass cylinders. They were round and fat, about twelve feet high, the color of day-old snow.
“How many people does each one hold?”
“Six.”
“They’re frozen in there now?”
“Yes.”
“How are they … positioned?”
“Upside down.”
“Why?”
“In case anything should happen near the top, the most important thing is to protect the head.”
Victor squeezed his cane and tried to mask his reaction. As a man used to elegant lobbies and penthouse offices, he was put off by the look of this place. Located in an industrial park in a nondescript New York suburb, it was a single-level brick building with a loading dock on the side.
Inside was equally unimpressive. A small set of rooms in the front. A lab where the bodies began the freezing process. A big open warehouse where the cylinders stood side by side, six people per unit, like an indoor cemetery with linoleum floors.
Victor had insisted on visiting the day after he received the reports. He had stayed up all night, skipping his sleeping pills, ignoring the pain in his stomach and back. He’d read everything twice. Although it was a relatively new science (the first person cryogenically frozen was in 1972), the thinking behind cryonics was not illogical. Freeze the dead body. Wait for science to advance. Unfreeze the body. Bring it back to life and cure it.
The last part, of course, would be the trickiest. But look at how mankind had advanced during his lifetime, Victor figured. Two of his childhood cousins had died of typhoid and whooping cough. Today, they’d have lived. Things changed. “Don’t get too attached to anything,” he reminded himself, including accepted knowledge.
“What’s that?” he asked. Near the cylinders, a white wooden box, partitioned by numbers, held several bouquets of flowers.
“For when family members come to visit,” Jed explained. “Each number corresponds to a person in a cylinder. The visitors sit over there.”
He pointed to a mustard-colored couch, pushed against the wall. Victor tried to picture Grace sitting in such a ratty thing. It made him realize he could never tell her about this idea.
She wouldn’t accept it. Not a chance. Grace was a steadfast churchgoer. She did not believe in meddling with fate. And he was not about to argue with her.
No. This final plan would be up to him. We are, as we die, who we most were in life, and since he was nine years old, Victor had been accustomed to doing for himself.
He made a mental note: No visitors. No flowers. And pay whatever it took to get his own cylinder.
If he were going to wait centuries to be reborn, he would do it alone.
26
All caves begin with rain.
The rain mixes with gas. The new acidic water eats through rocks, and tiny fractures grow into passageways. Eventually—after many thousands of years—these passageways might create an opening large enough for a man.
So Dor’s cave was already a product of time. But inside, a new clock was ticking. From the ceiling, where the old man had cut a fissure, the dripping water gradually formed a stalactite.
And as that stalactite dripped onto the cave floor, a stalagmite began to rise.
Over the centuries, the two points grew toward each other, as if drawn by magnets, but so slowly that Dor never took notice.
Once, he had prided himself on keeping time with water. But man invents nothing God did not create first.
Dor was living in the biggest water clock of all.
He never thought about this. Instead, he stopped thinking altogether.
He stopped moving. He no longer stood up. He put his chin in his hands and held still amid the deafening voices.
Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.
As the voices from Earth increased exponentially, Dor heard them without distinction, the way one hears falling raindrops. His mind dulled from inactivity. His hair and beard grew comically long, as did the nails of his fingers and toes. He lost any concept of his own appearance. He had not seen his image since he and Alli went to the great river and smiled at their reflection in the water.
He wanted desperately to hold on to every memory like that. He squeezed his eyes shut to recall every detail. Until finally, at some unmarked point in his purgatory, Dor shook the lethargy of his darkness, sharpened the edge of a small rock, and began to carve on the walls.