“There is a whole movement that advocates ‘ageing in place,’” Cyril noted.
“I’m all for it,” Kay said emphatically. “I like it here. I’ve put in loads of work on this house. The conservatory is exquisite. I’m thrilled with the trailing orchid wallpaper in the sitting room. I want us to keep our garden. I want to pour myself a second glass of red wine without having some officious matron whisk it away because it isn’t good for me.”
“There’s still the danger that I whisk it away,” Cyril said.
“Just try.”
In the end, they never put down that stonking deposit for Journey’s End. Giving the ritzy safe haven a miss was a gamble, but, as Kay observed, every decision we make in this life is a gamble, isn’t it?
Yet in the exuberant years of celebration, rejuvenation, and rebirth that followed the conclusion of the coronavirus crisis, Kay and Cyril felt abruptly at odds with the buoyant social mood. The inevitable economic slump in the immediate aftermath was later classified as creative destruction. Soon new restaurants opened and new businesses blossomed. The FTSE traced not a mere V-shape, but a J—soaring stratospherically and fattening everyone’s pension plans. The Wilkinsons felt as if they’d not been invited to the party. Oh, their own private pensions were bursting, but what good was money that they wouldn’t live to spend? First Cyril was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and on top of the disease’s universally poor prognosis the NHS diagnosed it on the late side. On the heels of this crushing news, Kay learnt that the persistent pain and weakness in her shoulder, along with muscle cramps, increasing difficulty walking, and a sudden inability to open her own marmalade jars, had been an early sign of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—or ALS.
“I’m rusty after having left St Thomas’ so many years ago,” Kay said limply at the kitchen table. “So I had to look it up. I might live another four years, but I’ll progress quickly towards paralysis. My favourite symptom: ‘inappropriate laughing or crying.’ In time, I’ll not be able to eat, or talk, or breathe without a ventilator. Maybe it’s time to source that Seconal again.”
“I have another idea,” Cyril said. Though scheduled for chemo, he hadn’t yet committed to a gruelling treatment that for a man of his advanced age would undoubtedly fail. “They’ve made massive leaps in cryogenics the last few years. None of this sticking-you-in-preservative-fluid-like-a-pickle business, but proper suspended animation. You remember that package we saw on Channel Four. They kept a hamster perfectly inert for eighteen months and then woke it up again, to run happily round its cage. What’ve we got to lose? If it turns out that at some later date we can’t be revived after all, we’re goners anyway—and set to die in the most dreadful manners imaginable. There’d still be a sliver of a chance that it works, and by the time we’re revived, pancreatic cancer and ALS are curable.”
“Sure, why not?” Kay said carelessly. So far, a death sentence had inclined her to be flip, even giddy—perhaps as a forerunner of all that inappropriate laughing or crying to come. She leant to seal their agreement with a peck. “My very own Rip Van Wilkinson.”
* * *
The fact that the outer office of Sleeping Beauties Ltd was decorated with Disney paraphernalia didn’t encourage confidence. Rather, cartoons of bunny rabbits and dwarves increased the sense that this dubious endeavour was having a laugh at the clients’ expense. Most of the exhaustive paperwork was to absolve the company of any legal liability. At least the extortionate fees didn’t make either spouse blink. Facing oblivion, these lifetime tightwads had finally registered that money had no value in and of itself, but was only a means to an end, and was therefore only valuable when you spent it. Barring the success of this kooky experiment, both a fiver and £5 million would soon be equally worthless.
“So what’s your prob?” the receptionist asked with the distinct air of not giving a monkey’s. The skinny young woman wore athletic gear to work, and she was chewing gum.
Disinclined to confide their heartache to a bored pencil pusher, Cyril said tersely, “ALS and pancreatic—”
“Yeah, we had a few of those. Pain in the arse, innit?” she said, not moving her gaze from the computer screen. “Any time limit?”
“No, the period is indefinite,” Cyril said. “As we’ve specified, we’re not to be revived until both conditions can be alleviated by medical breakthroughs. The fees are indemnified by a trust. We sent in all the documentation.”
“Does it hurt?” Kay asked with sudden urgency. She’d been too embarrassed to ask before.
“How should I know?” the receptionist said, smack-smack.
“At least at Dignitas we’d get better service,” Cyril grumbled to Kay under his breath.
“Do we need to disrobe?” Kay asked anxiously as the girl led them to the inner sanctum.
“Puh-lease,” the receptionist said. “This is a cryogenics lab, not a naturist camp. And no offence, but I could skip looking at your wrinkly ass.”
“Oh, no offence taken,” Kay said sourly.
“Sarky, for a past-sell-by.” She seemed to mean it as a compliment.
Two capsules were open and lit from within. There was no getting round their resemblance to caskets.
“Are we supposed to simply—lie there?” Kay asked.
“What else would you do in that thing, Morris dancing?”
“You could be a bit more respectful,” Cyril said. They were both getting rattled by the disconcerting lack of ceremony.
“Look here, you lot getting cold feet?” the receptionist asked. “’Cause you’re gonna get cold feet, even if you go through with it.” She tee-heed. She’d made the joke before.
“Could you give us a moment alone, please?” Cyril requested firmly.
“A minute or two,” she said. “But if what you’re really up to is waffling on and bottling it, I got to warn you that the penalty for pulling out at this point is, like, I don’t know, a gazillion quid.”
In their brief window of privacy, Cyril kissed his wife deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and they withdrew from one another’s lips at last with the same reluctance they both remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim he’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
“See you later,” Kay said.
“See you later,” Cyril said.
The last thing they heard was the sound of that woman’s gum.
* * *
A few seconds after that—or what seemed a few seconds—Cyril opened his eyes to find a dusky-skinned woman of indeterminate race staring down at him with an expression of clinical curiosity. “Hearm ca? Seem ca?”
His eyes were dry and painful. The sound of the woman’s voice hurt. But the pain seemed deeper than his response to sensation. Being here hurt. Being at all.
“Turn lighden,” the woman said, standing upright. She was at least eight feet tall.
The illumination dimmed, which helped the agony of seeing, but only somewhat. Cyril tried to form a word, but making his mouth move was hard work; even harder work was thinking of what to say. Either his neurological system was suffering from a mechanical creakiness, or his brain and facial nerves were functioning perfectly well—in which case what was keeping him from speaking was his mind’s stark instruction that anything that he might say was not worth the effort because it was stupid.
“Waa,” Cyril croaked weakly.
The woman in peculiar clothes—her form-fitting gear was covered in sleek black feathers, as if she were a superhero crossed with a crow—squirted an aerosol into Cyril’s mouth. “Secure!” she said over her shoulder. “Sum viol.” Then a large man with the same indeterminate complexion and gear of blue feathers came to stand watchfully beside the supine specimen.
Whatever had happened to the outside world in that blink of an eye between the closing of the capsule and the raising of its lid again, something had happened to Cyril. He felt like a copy of himself—a poor copy, like the decayed kind you got when you didn’t photocopy from the original, but copied the copy, then copied that copy, and he seemed to be the result of at least ten reproductions on. When he struggled to retrieve his recent memories, the recollections were in fragments: dwarves, bunnies, and a woman’s Lycra workout shirt floated by. Again his mind directed that he needn’t fit the scraps together because they were stupid.
Cyril managed to lick his lips. “Could you please tell me where am I?”
The several people in the room all burst out laughing.
“Pardon me, did I say something humorous?” he puzzled.
They cackled again.
“Sar,” the woman in black feathers said. “Sounya ha!”
“I hate to cause any trouble, but it would be awfully helpful if you could find someone for me who speaks English.” Of course, the request was absurd if no one spoke English. “English?”
As the team crowding round the capsule continued to find him hilarious, Black Birdwoman asked, “Angle?”
“Google Translate?” Cyril proposed with little optimism. These people did not look right, dress right, or talk right. Wherever and whenever he was, the chances of a rather imperfect smartphone application still being extant half a million updates later were nil. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered.
His minders conferred, poking at whatever mechanisms a human race over eight feet tall poked at, until at length a hologram of an older man in a suit of fine golden feathers appeared beside the capsule. Experimentally, Cyril struggled to a sitting position. Everything ached. Not just the bones. Every cell.
“Allowest I introduce I-self,” he said grandly. “I expertise on loster dialection. Service at your. Trans.”
Some expert. Cyril said, “Maybe you could start by explaining what language these people are speaking.”
The “expertise on loster dialection” looked shaken, but when Cyril repeated the request much more slowly he seemed to get it. The holographic projection appeared to be the current equivalent of Hayley’s husband: a linguistics professor. “Angle,” the prof said. “Anglish.”
“English. Seriously.” Cyril felt an unfocused dread, because if these people were speaking whatever hash his mother tongue had become, then they would require an amount of effort that his belligerent mind was informing him point-blank it would refuse to make. “And could you be so kind as to tell me where I am exactly?”
The audience was hooting again, and the hologram shot them a chastening look. “Lun,” he said.
“London?” Cyril inferred. “London, England, in the United Kingdom.”
The interlocutor was having trouble again. “Lon-don,” he seemed to remember. “Ing, Unite King?” he said. “Go more no.”
Well, they predicted the breakup of the United Kingdom after the UK left the EU, and though Cyril was once a passionate unionist—the factual information was available to him; it just needed dusting off—now he didn’t care. The Scots were always troublemakers, and the Barnett formula for the distribution of revenue had never been fair to English taxpayers.
“So the Unite King go more no,” Cyril recapitulated caustically. “Could you also—”
“Sar!” the hologram said. “How say you ‘Unite King go more no’?”
“The United Kingdom is no more.” Back in the world ten minutes and he was already teaching his captors, or whatever they were—who with their poncy future what-all might instead have been teaching him a thing or two, and Cyril was already tired.
The hologram punched excitedly at a device. “Treasury grove of lingualistic histrionics!”
“Treasure trove of linguistic history,” Cyril decoded, bored. “And sorry to be so basic, but I seem to have been down for the count rather a while. What year is this?”
The answer was incomprehensible. After more agonized back and forth, Cyril at least established that they no longer dated years from the birth of Christ, and it was pretty much impossible to establish what, you know, Star-date Whathaveyou it was in relation to the 2020s. Luckily, the year was a matter of supreme indifference, really.
Yet amidst the extensive back and forth about base ten, which was apparently like asking these people about cave drawings, it dawned on Cyril that he should have asked a pressing question at the very first. Having still not asked it was disturbing, insofar as Cyril could be disturbed at all—although he sensed that his previous incarnation would have been quite disturbed indeed. How could he have taken so long to inquire: where was his wife?
* * *
Cyril was assured he could soon reunite with the other ancient hominid in the second capsule of the pair, but beforehand they were both required to undergo a thorough health check.
When his species’ amiable descendants helped him out of the capsule, Cyril was relieved that his legs bore his weight; suspended animation didn’t appear to entail the muscle wastage of lolling in bed. But as a young man, he’d been tall for his generation, a generous six foot one. Now he stood a good two and a half feet shorter than these strapping new-age specimens, beside whom he looked like a dwarf. The literal loss of stature smarted. By inference, then, however peculiar he felt, some inner kernel remained unchanged: a sort of under-seer that had always been there waiting and watching from within. The man he had been before taking the cryogenic plunge would have disguised this quintessence from himself as something loftier or more ineffable, but his newly brutal iteration had no problem identifying the kernel for what it was: ego.
The childlike humiliation of staring straight at his caretakers’ diaphragms was intensified by self-consciousness about his clothing. Amidst this sleekly aviary kit, a navy woollen cardigan with wooden buttons and a roll collar, a once-crisply-ironed ivory button-down that had badly creased, and comfortably roomy belted slacks with a break in the leg could as well have been the ruffs, pantaloons, tights, and pointy buckled shoes of a comedic BBC period drama.
As the team led their historical curiosity gingerly towards some sort of medical facility, they treated him with the exaggerated care with which palaeontologists might handle a rare, newly unearthed fossil. Given the task ahead, Cyril was obliged to dredge up one memory that remained sombrely intact, and that alone seemed capable of making him feel something—in this case, tainted, corrupted, and doomed.
Awkwardly, the words “cancer” and even “cell” left his holographic translator baffled. Thus Cyril was obliged to elaborate about many proliferating bad creatures attacking and overwhelming the good creatures and then rushing to other points in the body to do more bad things . . . He sounded like an idiot. In the end he simply located his pancreas as best he could and pointed.
He was led into another unadorned room. A woman shone an orange light in both eyes, and a moment later he was lying on a gurney naked under a blanket, so he must have been sedated.
“All fix,” the hologram said, a little smugly.
It was more than the British Cancer Society could ever have dreamt of.
Once again Cyril had the nagging sense that he probably should have asked another question earlier, and once again having failed to ask it didn’t especially distress him, but before he awakened as a photocopy of himself this apparent absence of concern would have distressed him greatly. Could they also cure ALS?
During the two days the time traveller would be kept under medical observation before he could be reunited with his spouse, the golden interlocutor suggested that Cyril do both himself and his keepers a favour by sitting down to converse at length. Their dialogue would be fed into a self-learning computer, the result of which would be, effectively, Google Translate.
Over the course of their discussions, the hologram explained in his groping way that homo sapiens sapiens of today regarded itself as a single organism (what he actually said was “singular orgasm”)—which as a socialist Cyril should have found appealing, and didn’t. (The teeming hive concept did help explain why so far his caretakers had neither asked his name nor introduced themselves by name.) Because this collective entity required few components to function efficiently, the number of humans on the planet had been greatly reduced. Old Cyril would have been anxious about how this diminution was accomplished. New Cyril was merely relieved that maybe this meant he wouldn’t have to meet all that many eight-foot-six strangers after all. When he asked why everyone seemed to be the same agreeable walnut colour, the translator was stymied by a concept of “race” that didn’t mean “human race.” Well, thank God for that. Interbreeding? However the homogeneity of hue had been achieved, Cyril was glad to see the back of the cosmetics contest.
All this stuff was vaguely interesting to the extent that anything was, but by their last morning Cyril was distracted. About to reunite with his wife that afternoon after however many zillion years, he felt not eager anticipation but anxiety.
After a revoltingly bitter lunch—something dreadful had happened either to human taste buds or to the ability of the species to cook—Cyril’s new best mate led him into a simple room with a small table, two cups of liquid, and two simple chairs. A moment later from an opposite door a very short figure, almost a midget, entered with a female escort. The tiny person looked incredibly old and rather shell-shocked. Beside her minder’s streamlined plumage, the pocketed below-the-knee dress looked sack-like and frumpy. Surely this gradual, arduous process of “recognizing” his wife was not the form. In the past he would simply have seen her.
When the hologram moved towards the door, Cyril panicked. “You’re not going to go?”
“You speaken same losted linguilism, yes?” the hologram puzzled. “So no requiration of trans.”
“Oh, right, of course,” Cyril said. He wasn’t about to say aloud that he didn’t want to be left alone with her.
When Kay’s escort departed, he could swear that she also shot her minder a mournful glance. Cyril walked more slowly and stiffly to his seat than recent awakening from suspended animation justified, for his body having been put on pause had made moving around again no harder than pressing play. The only activity he found fiendishly difficult was existing at all.
Perhaps if there’d been time to script this reunion in advance, they’d have blocked the scene with an embrace. As it was, not only did they not touch, but neither party acted as if it occurred to them to do so. They took their time sitting. When Kay finally looked up, her eyes were cardboard. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Cyril said.
Time passed.
“How was it for you?” Cyril asked. A trite inquiry after sexual congress, but neither took up the joke.
Her face flickered with annoyance. “There is nothing to remember. So what kind of a question is that?”
They sat.
“Did they cure the ALS?” Cyril remembered to ask.
“Yes,” she said stonily.
Of course, he might have noticed when she walked in that she no longer displayed those classic symptoms of stumbling and poor balance. But picking up on these improvements would have displayed the kind of attentiveness that came naturally in relation to someone whose pains were in some sense your pains too, whose death sentence was your death sentence too, and this woman could have been anybody.
Cyril took a sip of the liquid and made a face. He hadn’t even wanted any, since the flavour was as punishing as he’d anticipated. But it was something to do.
“The food here is terrible,” he said.
“I think they think it’s very sophisticated,” she said, though her delivery was aimless. “I think we’re being fed what to them is haute cuisine. They think they’re feeding us like royalty.” The thought seemed to exhaust her, and her gaze kept sliding off her husband’s face as if it were covered in cold cream and she couldn’t get visual traction.
“The English they speak now,” he said, realizing with embarrassment that he was “making conversation” in a manner he couldn’t recall ever having done in previously effortless exchanges with his wife. “There are no more adverbs. There are no declensions—no I versus me, she versus her. In the written form, after everyone got hopelessly confused about how to use commas and semicolons, they reduced all punctuation to the forward slash. All letters are lower case, and all spelling is phonetic. Those fashionable truncations from our day—prob for problem, cab for cabernet, uni, bro; the way Hayley started saying obs, which got on your nerves—now they’ve done it to everything, chopped all the long words into snack size. Their vocabulary is miniscule, because it’s ‘more efficient.’ If we want to learn to communicate, mastering the dialect is probably doable, even at our age.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dully. “I can’t say that I care.”
Factual memory informed him that this woman was once vigorously, even frenetically interested in everything—often to no purpose. Perhaps her current apathy was “more efficient.”
“Do you feel . . .” He wasn’t sure of the adjective. “Lost?”
Kay had the look on her face of a classic stroke victim with “slow processing speed.” “That’s too specific,” she said at last. “I’m not sure what feeling is.”
The whole texture of this encounter recalled his ungainly efforts at courting at uni, before he met Kay. It was the texture of a bad date.
“Well, it worked,” Cyril said, unable to repress a note of sourness.
“What worked.” Again, the irritation.
“Our grand plan,” Cyril said, with corresponding irritation. “We went into cold storage. When we woke up, both our terminal conditions were curable.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “So?”
He had no idea what he’d ever seen in this woman.
* * *
When they were finally rescued from each other what seemed like hours later but was really more like ten minutes, the hologram told Cyril that he would now need to see a different kind of doctor.
“You and your spouse are the oldest cryogenically preserved specimens we have ever revived,” the Different Kind of Doctor said clearly and grammatically. Wearing a flashy feather suit whose crimson was reminiscent of the male cardinal, he had a diode or something attached to his head. Google Translate was a success. “I cannot believe how long it takes to say anything,” he added under his breath.
“Cryogenics was still in its infancy,” Cyril said. “But if we didn’t give it a try, we were going to die.”
“Why did you not want to die?”
“That seems like a stupid question.”
“If our research on much fresher specimens is any guide, you now think everything is stupid.”
Cyril felt caught out, and also resentful, as if the therapist had been spying. “In this future—”
“It is not the future. It is the present. That is one of the many things you are going to have trouble with.”
“In this present, then. You don’t fear dying or try to avoid it? Or do you not die?”
“We die,” the human cardinal said blithely. “But all that matters is the continuation of . . . I am not happy with this expression of yours, ‘the hive.’ I detect it refers to insects. This is too reductive.”
Cyril proposed, with a nod to the counsellor’s garb, “How about, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’?”
The therapist’s expression remained flinty. Perhaps such a psychic high priest was above a sense of humour. “The whole to which I refer is something you have no understanding of, and no capacity to understand.”
“Sorry, but I’d call that rather insulting.”
“We aren’t troubled by offending your vanities. There was a time, when the unity of our greater organism was more fragile, that we’d have regarded your primitive individualism as a grave threat. Had you been reanimated in an earlier era, you might have been stoned to death. But now our solidarity is unassailable, and we’re more likely to regard you as quaint, or more probably as pathetic.”
“With all due respect”—the standard introductory flourish with which Members of Parliament had always begun an abusive harangue—“you don’t know me at all. I’ve never advocated ‘primitive individualism.’ All my life, I’ve been an ardent socialist . . .” Cyril’s huffing and puffing collapsed. One of the most dreadful side effects of suspended animation was a horrifying inability to lie to himself. He had been neither a socialist nor an egalitarian. He had espoused socialism in the interest of his own glorification, and he had always felt superior to everyone else.
“That’s a prime example of what we find pathetic,” the doctor said. “This idea that there’s such a thing as ‘getting to know you.’ As if others will be mesmerized by your unplumbable depths, and we’re sure to be fascinated by your amusing eccentricities, ironic inconsistencies, and arresting complexities. There’s nothing special about you, as there’s nothing special about any of us. Your only personal distinction is hubris and ignorance. We know we’re all the same, and being interchangeable doesn’t bother us in the slightest. That’s why death leaves modern humans unfazed. Whereas for you the notion of being just one more fungible worker bee, to use your disagreeable analogy, is intolerably demeaning, and you cling to the farcical fancy that your subtraction from humanity would leave a gaping hole.”
“Maybe I used to think that,” Cyril said glumly. “Not any more.”
“We have digressed. If I may resume: from what we’ve patched together, there were a number of ghastly instances in which cryogenics went wrong. More than one subject was buried alive. Or bodies were put into perfect stasis but the minds remained alert—much like what you call ‘locked-in syndrome’—so that by the time the subjects were reanimated, they were irretrievably insane, and a danger to themselves or to others. Sometimes consciousness was revived in decomposing corpses. As a result, for a long period whilst you and your wife were in a state of hiatus, the practice was banned. So you’re quite a rarity. The records from your era are nearly all destroyed. You might usefully fill in some gaps for us. But I’m here to warn you that you are in imminent danger of wilful self-destruction—colloquially, ‘topping yourself.’ That would entail our so-called hive losing a valuable asset. To prevent that loss, I need to prepare you for what to expect. At the moment, you are thinking that the immediate shock of emergence into a new world is the hard part. You assume that later you will get acclimatized, and learn the language, make friends even, and fit in. It’s therefore important for you to understand at the outset that your experience of a time in such contrast to your own will only get more difficult. You will never get acclimatized or make friends as you understand them. You will never fit in.”
“That’s not very welcoming,” Cyril objected.
“I want you to imagine you are a dinosaur in a natural history museum that has been miraculously brought to life. So you can pound down the street. Are you going to fit in?”
“You got that from my conversation with that professor chap. It was a metaphor.”
“The dinosaur is a good metaphor. You stand out in the landscape. People will stare at you. You are clumsy and can’t communicate. The only thing wrong with the metaphor is that you are freakishly stunted.”
Once more, Cyril was stung. “I used to be considered on the tall side.”
“Get over it,” the clinician said brutally. “We are in the early stages of developing full clairvoyance, which is one reason language is being minimized; it will soon die off, like the vestigial tail or the appendix. You will feel left out. I assure you that being in a room with people nodding and laughing whilst not even needing to say anything is a great deal more isolating than being at a party where all the cool people give you the cold shoulder.”
“You can read my mind?”
“Crudely. If I care to. Though to be honest, your head is not a place where I particularly wish to go.”
Cyril was about to say defensively, “Being me isn’t that bad!” but stopped himself. It was that bad. It was terrible, and he did not know why.
“You see, when you opted to ‘go to sleep,’ as you’re prone to misconceive suspension,” the therapist continued, “you didn’t take seriously the possibility that when you ‘awoke’ all your acquaintances, your colleagues, your friends, your family, including your own children and their children, would have long before vanished. We’ve had cryogenic revivals make absurd efforts to locate blood descendants. Even when successful, they discover they’ve no connection to their progeny either emotionally or, to the eye, biologically. These great-great-great-etcetera children who never asked to be tracked down tend to regard their resurrected ancestors as pestersome and in no little part repulsive. That pasty skin you’ve got. It’s disturbing, like the colour of a naked mole rat.”
“My, you certainly don’t beat about the bush.”
“At best you will be seen here as circus acts,” the therapist continued, as if being called pestersome and repulsive wasn’t cruel enough. “Your sense of yourself is constructed more than you realize from the other people you’ve known and cared for. Even the nemeses you’ve despised have helped form your defining context. Now all you have for context is your wife.”
Cyril looked to his lap. He felt inklings of something like shame. “Kay,” he said heavily, though he wondered if citing anyone’s name in this communitarian blob was an act of sedition. “Something has happened to her.”
“Something has happened to you both,” the therapist corrected. “Previous interviews would suggest that you’ll find what has happened to you even harder to accept than the changes in your spouse.”
“I don’t understand it,” Cyril said. “When we signed the papers at Sleeping Beauties Ltd—a ridiculous name for a scientific enterprise—I didn’t have any real confidence that we’d survive. But to my astonishment, although I may still be in my eighties, I can walk, eat, and sleep; as far as I can tell, my body is working as well as before, and now if I can believe your medic I don’t even have pancreatic cancer any more. So why is everything so . . . stark, and . . . plain, and . . . dead?”
“Recall a packet of mince that’s been in the freezer for a long time,” the therapist returned. “When you thaw the meat, it’s still made of protein, and it will still nourish you in a purely nutritional sense. But all its delicate flavours have been lost. On the edges, the colour has gone grey and the texture is dry; the water has separated from the fibres, which have become unpleasantly tough and chewy. As we don’t eat ‘mince’ today, I took that image from your memory, so I’m certain you know what I’m talking about. And I have to say, I picked up that memory and fled, because I don’t know how you can stand it in there. Your mind is a cold cave, and I’m still choking on its dry dust.”
Cyril was strangely certain which memory the therapist had pilfered. With great fanfare, he had presented his wife with a cubic chest freezer for their first anniversary, making them brave early adopters of what was not yet a standard-issue middle-class white good. As if to please the Gods of preservation, they offered up to the appliance a ritualistic pound of mince—for in those days, freezing was an entertainment. Perhaps in time the totemic packet was simply forgotten and obscured by fresher fare. While the lump knocked about for years, its butcher’s paper tore and its twine loosened. She finally thawed the once-ceremonial mound when they were preparing to move to the house in Lambeth. The meat was awful. The family stoically suffered through their patties anyway.
“Not only your body was metaphorically put on ice,” the counsellor carried on, “but also, well, your essence, your finer feelings; if you will, your soul. We’ve seen it before. In fact, we’ve seen it every time. For lack of a better term, you have freezer burn.”
* * *
The Wilkinsons were provided shared quarters, which like all the structures in this future—this present—were simple and serviceable. Had she ever pursued that absurd whim of hers to become an interior designer, Kay would have scavenged few clients here. Like the language, the décor was pared down to essentials.
They stood that evening gawkily, unsure whether to stand or sit or sit where, as if they’d not spent over sixty years going about their business and intersecting by chance and then convening to a purpose in the same house.
“I talked to some sort of therapist,” Cyril said. It didn’t seem right to say absolutely nothing.
“Yes,” Kay said. She still had that dazed look, as if she were in a cartoon, a bear in a bow tie had just hit her over the head with a skillet, and the animator had drawn asterisks for eyes. “I talked to one as well.”
“I didn’t find him comforting.”
“I don’t think the intention was comfort.”
This woman who was his wife had a peculiar smell: musty with a disturbing overlay of sweetness, like an unpeeled onion. Indeed, the odour was worse than peculiar; it was repellent. Yet his mind informed him that this was the same way she had always smelt. He’d no comprehension of how he had ever been able to stand it.
“. . . Do you suppose they can fly?” Cyril proposed lifelessly.
She looked at him as if he were daft. “What.”
“The suits, covered in those fine feathers.”
She couldn’t rouse herself to a reply. The conversation was going nowhere.
“Shall we go to bed?” Cyril suggested in desperation.
“All right.”
As he undressed, he didn’t feel shy or embarrassed—in the glare of that pernicious plainness, the unveiling of a naked body didn’t appear to expose anything other than what-was—nor did he feel ashamed of a figure whose droops and mottles also simply were. He did shoot a glance at the shrivel between his legs in idle wonderment that a woman would ever have found it captivating, and that made him realize that he’d never asked if these neo-humans still had sex. But of course he hadn’t asked. His curiosity was desiccated.
Kay also undressed with plainness. They looked at each other unclothed and it was the same as looking at the wall or a chair. Nothing stirred.
Cyril had always slept on the left-hand side of the bed, territory he reclaimed reflexively. It was already difficult to remember that, however many eons had elapsed in real time, subjectively only a handful of nights had passed since they last shared a mattress. Yet this evening he nestled awkwardly against a foreign body. Throughout the night as well, Kay was constantly flopping an arm across his pillow or kicking him in the shin, and he found it hard to quell his irritation even though he knew she wasn’t assaulting him on purpose. She mumbled in her sleep, and he was confounded how he could ever have found these habitual vocalizations of dialogue in her dreams the faintest bit endearing; only a proper English upbringing prevented him from exclaiming, “Shut up!” Whenever she flung off the bedclothes he got cold; whenever she pulled them up he got hot. An instep shoved against his calf would shock him awake with its Arctic, scaly skin, whilst a hand splatted against his neck made him feel the same panic to get it off him that he might have felt had a bat dropped from the ceiling. It wasn’t a large enough bed to establish a separate fiefdom, and no matter how he lay beside, wrapped around, or intertwined with this woman who was still his wife, he could not get comfortable. Nothing fit.
When Kay first opened up the pound of thawed mince after a long day of packing their possessions for the removal men, he’d noticed her poking at the meat with a sigh of disappointment before breaking it in half to begin forming patties. In the very middle of the mound, perhaps no more than an ounce had still looked like beef. The remnant remained a vibrant red, and one might postulate that if this central titbit had been rescued from the rest, it would still have retained its original flavour. Something at the heart of Cyril’s psyche had been preserved in just this manner, and in the early hours before dawn it was this morsel that wept and wept and wept.