He’d told me his decision in the barest words. It was a sound straight from nature, unprocessed, without expressive affect. He didn’t have to tell me that Artis had already been taken down. It was in his voice. There was just the room, the chair, the man in the chair. There was the awkward watchful son. There were the two escorts flanking the doorway.
I waited for someone to make the first move. Then I did, shifting slightly into a more or less formal mourner’s pose, conscious that I’d been wearing the same stale shirt and pants since my arrival here, with underwear and socks I’d scrubbed at dawn, using hand sanitizer.
Soon Ross got out of the chair and moved toward the door and I followed closely, neither of us speaking, my hand in contact with his elbow, not guiding or supporting but only offering the comfort of touch.
Is a man of epic wealth allowed to be broken by grief?
• • •
The escorts were women, one holstered, the younger not. They led us to a space that became an abstract thing, a theoretical occurrence. I don’t know how else to put it. An idea of motion that was also a change of position or place. This was not the first such experience I’d had here, four of us this time observing a silence that felt reverent. I wasn’t sure whether this was due to the sad circumstances or to the nature of the conveyance, the feel of angled descent, the feel of being detached from our sensory apparatus, coasting in a way that was mental more than physical.
I decided to test the setting, to say something, anything.
“What’s it called, this thing we’re in?”
I was pretty sure I’d spoken but could not determine whether my words had produced a sound. I looked at the escorts.
Then Ross said, “It’s called the veer.”
“The veer,” I said.
I put a hand on his shoulder, pressed down, gripped hard, letting him know that I was here, we were both here.
“The veer,” I said again.
I was always repeating things here, I was verifying, trying to establish secure placement. Artis was down there somewhere, at veer’s end, counting drops of water on a shower curtain.
• • •
I stood watching through a narrow glass panel, eye-high. This was my role here, to watch whatever they put in front of me. The team in Zero K was preparing Artis for cryopreservation, doctors and others dressed variously, some in motion, others scanning monitors, adjusting equipment.
Artis was somewhere in their midst, sheeted, on a table. She was visible only momentarily, in fragments, mid-body, lower legs, never a clear view of the face. The team worked over and around her. I didn’t know whether to regard the physical form they were working on as “the body.” Maybe she was still alive. Maybe this was the moment, the second, in which she was being chemically induced to expire.
The other thing I didn’t know was what constituted the end. When does the person become the body? There were levels of surrender, I thought. The body withdraws from one function and then possibly another, or possibly not—heart, nervous system, brain, different parts of the brain down into the mechanism of individual cells. It occurred to me that there was more than one official definition, none characterized by unanimous assent. They made it up as the occasion required. Doctors, lawyers, theologians, philosophers, professors of ethics, judges and juries.
It also occurred to me that my mind was wandering.
Think of Ross on the table if he’d so decided, healthy man in systemic collapse. He was in the anteroom, waiting out the time. I was the sole willing witness, and now her face, a touching glimpse, Artis, team members swinging past in their caps, scrubs, masks, surgical gowns, tunic tops, lab coats.
Then the viewing slot went blank.
• • •
A guide with dreadlocks led us to a site, saying nothing, letting us absorb what we were seeing.
Ross asked a question now and then. He had combed his hair, knotted his tie and adjusted the trim of his suit jacket. The voice was not quite his but he was talking, trying to place himself in the midst of things.
We stood in the aisle above a small sloped gallery and looked at three human figures in a plain space so deftly lit that the outer margins dissolved in shadow. These were individuals in clear casings, in body pods, and they were naked, one man, two women, shaved heads, all three.
Tableau vivant, I thought, except that the actors were dead and their costumes were super-insulated plastic tubes.
The guide told us that these people were among those who had chosen to be taken early. Perhaps they had five or ten years remaining, or twenty, or more. They’d been stripped of their essential organs, which were being preserved separately, brains included, in insulated vessels called organ pods.
“They seem at peace,” Ross said.
The bodies were not formally posed. Eyes were open in glazed wonder, arms loosely at sides, knees naturally knobbed and furrowed, no hair anywhere.
“They’re just standing and waiting,” he said. “All the time in the world.”
He was thinking of Artis, what else, wondering what she was feeling, if anything, and which stage she had reached in the body-cooling process.
Vitrification, cryopreservation, nanotechnology.
Cherish the language, I thought. Let the language reflect the search for ever more obscure methods, down into subatomic levels.
The guide spoke with an accent I took to be Russian. She wore sleek jeans and a long fringed shirt and I tried to convince myself that she was posed in a manner identical to that of the bodies. This was not true but it took me a while to abandon the idea.
Ross kept looking. These were lives in abeyance. Or the empty framework of lives beyond retrieval. And the man himself, my father. I wondered how his change-of-mind would affect his honorary status here, the thrust of executive command. I knew what I was feeling, a sympathy bled white by disappointment. The man had backed down.
He spoke to the guide without taking his eyes off the figures standing before us.
“What do you call them?”
“We are told to call them heralds.”
“Makes sense,” he said.
“Showing the way, making the path.”
“Being early, being first,” he said.
“They do not wait.”
“They do it before they have to do it.”
“Heralds,” she said.
“They look serene.”
Thinking of Artis, seeing her, determined to go with her. But he had backed down. The idea of joining her had been driven by some deranged tide of love. But once sworn to the act, he needed to be true to it. The full swing of life and career, man at the center of money’s magnetic field. Okay, I’m making too much of his reputation and material worth. But this is a component of the outsized life. Too much engenders too much.
He took a seat in the last row and after a while I joined him. Then I looked at the bodies.
There was the question of who they were, everything that had gone before, the inexpressibly dense experience of a man or woman alive on the earth. Here, they were laboratory life-forms shaved naked in pods and drawn together as one unit whatever the means of canning and curing. And they were located in a space that was anonymous, no where or when, a tactic that matched every aspect of my experience here.
The guide explained the meaning of the term Zero K. This was rote narration, with plotted stops and restarts, and it concerned a unit of temperature called absolute zero, which is minus two hundred and seventy-three point one five degrees celsius. A physicist named Kelvin was mentioned, he was the K in the term. The most interesting thing the guide had to say was the fact that the temperature employed in cryostorage does not actually approach zero K.
The term, then, was pure drama, another stray trace of the Stenmark twins.
“We’ll leave together. We’ll pack and leave,” Ross said.
“I’ve been packed since I arrived.”
“Good.”
“There’s nothing to pack.”
&nb
sp; “Good. We’ll leave together,” he said again.
These were the commonplace words, the sounds he needed to make in order to restore a sense of function. I had a feeling there was more to come, possibly not so reassuring to either one of us.
“I told myself finally, dead of night, that I had a responsibility to keep living. Suffer the loss, live and suffer and hope it gets easier—not easier but so deeply embedded, the loss, the absence, that I can carry it. To go with her would have been the wrong kind of surrender. I had no right. It was an abuse of privilege. What did you say to me when we argued?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said if I went with her, it would reduce you. My over-dominance, the thing you can’t escape. Even loving her too much, even choosing to die too soon. It would have been the kind of surrender in which I gain control instead of relinquishing it.”
I studied body color. Woman, man, woman. The range was narrow but is it possible to be precise about skin color in any situation? Yellow brown black white, all wrong except as convenient labels. Did I want to resort to nuances of tone, to amber, umber, lunar? When I was fourteen I would have died trying.
“In the end what did I do? I tried to face it,” he said. “And this meant I had to tell her. I sat next to the bed in the dim room. Did she understand what I was saying? Did she hear me at all? I wasn’t sure. Did she forgive me? I kept asking her to forgive me. Then I rambled, on and on. Did I need a response? Did I fear a response? Forgive me. Wait for me. I will join you soon. On and on, whispering. I thought maybe she can hear me if I whisper.”
“She may have been alive but she was beyond any kind of contact.”
“Then I just sat there until they came to take her down.”
Some sag here and there, completely normal, in chest, breasts and bellies. Look long enough and even the shaved heads of the women begin to seem consistent with the primal chill of nature. This was a function of the pods, I thought, the detailed rigor of scientific method, humans stripped of adornment, spliced back to fetushood.
The guide said there was something else we might find interesting to look at.
How many days now, how many interesting things to look at? The screens, the catacombs, the skull on the wall in the stone room. They were drenching me in last things. I thought about these two words. This is eschatology, isn’t it? Not just the damped echo of a life that slides away but words with all-encompassing impact, beyond appeals to reason. Last Things. I told myself to stop.
Ross lowered his head, closed his eyes.
Thinking of Artis. I imagined him at home, sitting in his study with a whiskey in hand, hearing himself breathe. The time he’d visited her on a dig somewhere at desert’s edge outside a Bedouin village. I try to see what he sees but can only imagine her in another desert, this one, in whole-body suspension, eyes closed, head shaved, a sliver of mind still intact. He has to believe this—memories ingrained in brain tissue.
Departure time soon. Armored car waiting, smoked windows, driver with sidearm. An overtone of protection that makes me feel small, weak and threatened.
But was it simply love that made him want to join her? Maybe I preferred to think that he was driven by a dark yearning, a need to be deprived of what he is and what he possesses, stripped of everything, hollowed out, organs stored, body propped alongside others in a colony of pods. It is the same undercurrent of self-repudiation that made him change his name, only deeper and stronger. A dark yearning, I liked that. But what was my point? Why did I want to imagine such a thing about my father? Because this place is drenching me in bad blood. And because this is the song-and-dance version of what happens to self-made men. They unmake themselves.
When he joins her, in three years or thirteen, will nanotechnologists steer their ages downward? And on being revived, whenever that is, the first moment of their earthly afterlife, will Artis be twenty-five years old, twenty-seven, Ross thirty or thirty-one? Think of the soulful reunion. Let’s have a baby. And where will I be, how old and begrudging and piss-stained, how spooked to be embracing my spirited young father and newborn half-brother, who has my withered finger gripped in his tiny trembling hand.
Nanobots—a child’s word.
I kept looking straight ahead, looking and thinking. The fact that these individuals, these heralds, had chosen to be rendered dead well before their time. The fact that their bodies had been emptied of indispensable organs. The fact of containment, alignment, bodies set in assigned positions. Woman man woman. It occurred to me that these were humans as mannequins. I allowed myself to think of them as brainless objects playing out a reversal of the spectacle I’d encountered earlier—the mannequins hunched in their burial chamber, in hoods and robes. And now this freeze-frame of naked humans in pods.
The guide told us again that there was another area of possible interest.
I wanted to see beauty in these stilled figures, an imposing design not of clockwork bodies but of the simple human structure and its extensions, inward and out, each individual implacably unique in touch, taste and spirit. There they stand, not trying to tell us something but suggesting nonetheless the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth.
Instead I wondered if I was looking at the controlled future, men and women being subordinated, willingly or not, to some form of centralized command. Mannequined lives. Was this a facile idea? I thought about local matters, the disk on my wristband that tells them, in theory, where I am at all times. I thought about my room, small and tight but embodying an odd totalness. Other things here, the halls, the veers, the fabricated garden, the food units, the unidentifiable food, or when does utilitarian become totalitarian.
Was there a hollowness in these notions? Maybe they were nothing more than an indication of my eagerness to get home. Do I remember where I live? Do I still have a job? Can I still bum a cigarette from a girlfriend after a movie?
The guide had told us about brains preserved in insulated vessels. Now she added that heads, entire heads with brains intact, were sometimes removed from the bodies and stored separately. One day in decades to come the head will be grafted to a healthy nanobody.
And would all the revivified lives be identical, trimmed tight by the process itself? Die a human, be reborn an isometric drone.
I nudged my father and said quietly, “Do they ever get a hard-on, dead men in pods? Jolted by some malfunction, a shift in temperature levels that creates a kind of zing running through the body and causing their dicks to spring up, all the men at once, in all the pods.”
“Ask the guide,” he said.
I gave him a backhand tap on the arm and we got up and followed the woman down a corridor that tapered to the degree that we had to proceed, finally, single-file. Sound began to pale, our footsteps fading, the brush-touch of our bodies against the confining walls.
There is one thing more, something interesting, the guide had said.
We stood in the entranceway of a large white room. The walls did not have the same rough surface I’d seen elsewhere. This was hard smooth rock and Ross put his hand to the wall and said that it was fine-grained white marble. He knew this, I did not. The room was stone cold and, at first, in every direction, it was all the same, nothing but walls, floor and ceiling. I spread my arms in a dumb dramatic gesture to render the size of the grand space but restrained myself from trying to estimate length, width and height.
I moved forward, briefly, and Ross followed. I looked past him to the guide, waiting for her to say something, give us some clue to the nature of the site. Was it a site or just an idea for a site? My father and I studied the room together. I tried to imagine what I was seeing even as I saw it. What made the experience so elusive? A large room, a couple of men standing and looking. A woman at the entrance, dead still. An art gallery, I thought, with nothing in it. The gallery is the art, the space itself, the walls and floor. Or an enormous marble tomb, a mass gravesite emptied of bodies or waiting for bodies. No ornamental cornice or frieze, just flat walls
of shiny white marble.
I looked at Ross, who was staring past me toward a far corner of the room. It took me a moment, everything here took me a moment. Then I saw what he saw, a figure seated on the floor near the junction of the two walls. Small human figure, motionless, seeping gradually into my level of awareness. I had to tell myself that I was not somewhere else trying to visualize what I was actually seeing, here and now, in solid form.
My father walked in that direction, hesitantly, and I followed, walking and pausing. The seated figure was a girl, barefoot, legs crossed. She wore loose white pants and a white knee-length blouse. One arm was raised and bent toward the body at neck level. The other arm was waist-high at a matching angle.
We stopped walking, Ross and I. We were still some distance from the figure but it seemed an intrusion, a violation, to move any closer. Hair trimmed in a mannish cut, head bowed slightly, feet positioned with bottoms turned upward.
Was I sure that it was not a boy?
Her eyes were closed. I knew that her eyes were closed even if this was not evident from where we stood. Her youth was not necessarily evident but I felt free to believe that she was young. She had to be young. And she had no nationality. She had to be nationless.
A chill white silence everywhere in the room. Did I fold my arms across my chest to contain my response to the beauty of the scene, or was I just cold?
We backed away then, slightly, simultaneously. Even if I knew the reason for her presence and her pose, it would defy all meaning. Meaning was exhausted in the figure itself, the sight itself.
“Artis would know how to interpret this,” Ross said.
“And I would ask her whether it’s a boy or girl.”
“And she would say what’s the difference.”
The fact of life, one small body with beating heart in this soaring mausoleum, and she would be here long after we were gone, day and night, I knew this, a space conceived and designed for a figure in stillness.