Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  He was gone.

  “I’ll wait here,” said the Devil. “Shall I?”

  ZACHARY RUSHED IN as the doctor was signing Norm Reasoner’s chart, dragging a plastic tub the size of a coffin filled with twenty-seven bags of party ice behind him.

  It took twenty minutes to get Reasoner packed out the front door and into a rented hearse (you can rent hearses!).

  “Too slow,” Zachary muttered, running a stop sign.

  At home, in the garage, he began the process of getting his client “canned.” Reasoner couldn’t go into the flash-freezer or the nitrogen cocoon until there was something in his tissue to stop ice from forming, and Zachary couldn’t put the antifreeze in until his blood was out.

  “Party ice?” remarked the Devil, appearing at his elbow.

  “Either help or get out of the way.”

  Dumping blood in the storm gutter was probably not strictly legal, Zachary thought as he rigged up a mortuary needle and a garden hose. Sometimes it was a good thing he had the Devil on his side.

  “But really, you’re telling me, with a straight face,” said the Devil, moving aside, “you think this is the future? These people, living forever?”

  “You got a better idea, white man?”

  The Devil frowned. “I’m not white. I’m one of those swarthy colors, like Puerto Rican.”

  “Puerto Rican isn’t a color,” snapped Zachary, “and I’m not having this conversation with you.”

  FOR TWO HOURS, Zachary pumped Reasoner’s chest like he was performing CPR, squeezing the heart until he forced the final gurgle of blood out down the drain. “Okay,” he said. “He’s ready for the antifreeze stuff.”

  “This kind of thing presents me with a problem,” said the Devil, handing Zachary a plastic jug. “I mean, is he dead or not? What’s the status of his soul?”

  “You can’t go to Heaven,” said Zachary, “if your soul’s on hold, I wouldn’t think.”

  The Devil grinned. “That’s true!” he said.

  AFTER A WHILE, bored, and realizing he wasn’t going to get Zachary to look at the computer, the Devil went out for steak and ice cream.

  By midnight, Zachary got Reasoner leaning upright inside the first hot-water heater, pulled on a specially treated face mask, and started adding liquid nitrogen.

  He kept falling asleep, which frightened him. He imagined splashing liquid nitro on himself. It would be like getting burned. Liquid nitrogen was deep space in a jar.

  He awoke one time to discover his father standing in the utility room door, looking out over the phalanx of water heaters in what had once been his garage.

  Proud Henry looked baffled. He had looked that way a lot, the last year or so. A stroke had paralyzed half of his face, and his left shoulder slumped, too. His gray plaid bathrobe hung loose, on its way to falling open. He wasn’t tying it with both hands, Zachary figured, the way the therapists had taught him. If he got in the habit of being lazy, they’d been warned, Proud Henry would lose coordination all over.

  Zachary was too tired, tonight, to lecture his father.

  “What happens to your soul,” slurred Proud Henry, “when you … ice … like this?”

  His language, like his body, sometimes lost direction.

  “We were just wondering that same exact thing,” said Zachary.

  “I mean,” said the old man, “what if you get up to Heaven, and you’re happy perfectly up there for a hundred years, then all of a sudden you get sent back down to Earth because your body has been … has got … defrosted?”

  “I don’t know,” was all Zachary could say.

  Proud Henry stood and watched for another minute or so. He was a client, too.

  Then he said, “Good night.”

  “Night, Pop,” answered Zachary.

  AND HE DID BURN HIMSELF with the liquid nitro, before it was all over. But he got Reasoner canned, minus a working thermometer, and went to bed, where he dreamed about trying to stay awake.

  Dreams can be cruel.

  AS IF NORM REASONER were some kind of death spark, business picked up. More people signed on, and died off regularly. The fresh income allowed Zachary to start advertising the newly named enterprise “Horizon Cryonics” and to spend money on specially coated thermometer sensors. He was left with the difficulty of having to open the capsules in order to get a reading, which caused the temperature to spike, but he forced himself to stop worrying about things he couldn’t yet change. Things were looking up, one solution at a time.

  Soon, Zachary found himself struggling to keep up with the demands of canning, freezing, maintaining the water heaters, and continuing his desperate search for better technology.

  The Devil offered to lend a hand, but only if Zachary agreed to give the computer a try.

  Zachary had no choice; he couldn’t afford paid help.

  The fact was, Zachary had been afraid of the computer. Being able to crunch numbers in his head wasn’t the same as being able to master a machine designed to mimic the human brain. What if it was beyond him?

  It wasn’t.

  Once he sat down and actually looked at the neglected box, it made sense. It worked like an electronic flowchart, and processed information in ways he could grasp. The trouble was, there was no way to tell it what he wanted it to do, and no way for it to tell him what it had done.

  “It needs a language,” he told the Devil.

  “Teach it Spanish,” suggested the Devil, busy lining the inside of water heater number six. “Spanish is spicy.”

  Zachary focused every watt of his electrocuted brain on the problem. His posture suffered, and his drooling made a comeback—Mrs. Bull Horse worried that Proud Henry’s stroke had proved contagious—but after two weeks, he managed to succeed where a lot of the early computer wizards were failing. On spools of tape, in hole-punch patterns, he had written a language the computer could read, and which he could use to write instructions.

  He put the computer to work.

  The next morning, Zachary was standing by the workbench when the Devil arrived (late) for work, materializing out of the floor. The computer picked that same moment to spit out three feet of tape.

  “What’s it doing?” asked the Devil, eating orange chicken out of a Chinese take-out container. Cheating, with a fork.

  “Oh, you’ll be proud. It’s telling me how fast the nitro is boiling off in capsules two and three.”

  “How fast is it boiling off? Too fast?”

  “I don’t know. I have to write another program to read the ribbon.”

  The Devil finished his chicken. He left the empty container on the workbench, and knocked on the second water heater.

  “Don’t do that,” said Zachary.

  “How are our people-sicles doing, anyway?”

  “Fine.”

  “Aw! I thought you’d say they were ‘cool’ or something. Wouldn’t you piss yourself if she knocked back?”

  WITHIN WEEKS, ZACHARY had four clients in water heaters.

  Now, when the computer belched ribbon, he fed the ribbon into a box of his own invention, made of rubber wheels and magnets.

  The box communicated with a small black-and-white television set by means of a Gordian knot of labeled wires.

  Numbers appeared on the screen.

  “Everything is stable,” Zachary told the Devil, feeling a little like a mad, but very successful, scientist. He found that he felt, more than ever before, a warm and fatherly affection for his frozen people.

  Then his mouth tightened.

  “Except for four,” he said, “which is bleeding off faster than I’d like.”

  “Shit!” cried the Devil.

  “No, it’s okay. That’s Mrs. Yu. She’s still cooling, so the temperature exchange is faster, for now.”

  “Ah,” said the Devil. “It’s strange, isn’t it, the way something so morbid and sick can sound like it makes perfect sense?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  EXCEPT MRS. YU kept boiling her nitro away.
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  Three days after canning, when she and her capsule were the same temperature, the nitro was still disappearing.

  Zachary opened the tank and had a look.

  The readings were right.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the Devil, climbing up beside him.

  “The tank is bleeding. Or it’s not sealed right. Or this stuff boils off faster depending on outside heat and humidity. I don’t know.”

  “What about the other tanks?”

  “I was going to check them.”

  The other tanks had problems, too. All registered low.

  Especially Norm Reasoner.

  Alarmed, Zachary broke the seal on Norm’s water heater. Even through his face mask he could smell it.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  The fog cleared away, and there was Norm, hardly more than a skeleton, flesh sagging like rotten blue-green leather.

  “Mrs. Reasoner’s gonna want a refund,” said the Devil.

  Zachary stared into space for a long time. His face became the face of a man trying to accept a difficult and agonizing reality. He looked at the garage full of water heaters with sad, knowing eyes. Then he sank into a lawn chair with an expression he had never worn before. It was the expression of a man who is giving up on something.

  “They’re all going to want refunds,” he said.

  SHUTTING DOWN HORIZON didn’t happen without a degree of turmoil. It wasn’t that people wanted their money back. It was about hope. These people wanted to come back from the dead in some shiny future, and that future had folded like a bad land deal.

  As for three remaining clients who were already dead, there was no good way to do it. The clients had known it might not work. They had signed carefully crafted legal work saying they knew it. Now their relatives would have to pay morticians to come and get their shrunken blue-green loved ones, and do something final with them.

  Zachary mailed notices saying no more payments would be accepted. Any Horizon funds not already spent would be refunded. This came to sixty-three dollars and ten cents, which came to twenty-one dollars and three cents per customer.

  He mailed the money.

  Three nights later, someone threw a rock through the front window.

  That was the extent of the turmoil. Zachary figured he’d gotten off easy.

  THE EVENING AFTER the rock, Zachary was staring into space some more, drooling and pretending to watch TV with his father, when the doorbell rang. Zachary ignored it. So did Proud Henry.

  Mrs. Bull Horse answered the door, then presented herself in the living room, standing in front of the TV. “There’s a man here to see you,” she told Zachary. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and go talk to him.”

  Her voice had a new edge to it, Zachary thought. Frowning, wiping his chin, he got up and shuffled down the hall, where he found a thickset man with a buzz cut waiting in the foyer, twisting a ball cap in his hands.

  “Hello,” said Zachary, reminding himself to shake hands.

  “Mr. Bull Horse,” said the man, “I’m Clifton Michael. I’ve come to see you about Horizon.”

  Of course he had.

  “Mr. Michael,” he said, “I appreciate your interest, but Horizon has failed. I don’t know what you’ve heard—”

  “I’ve heard,” said Clifton Michael. “But I had to talk to you anyway. I hope you’ll hear me out.”

  Zachary did not want to hear Clifton Michael, but the man’s voice had an edge similar to what Zachary had just heard from his mother. Determined, and compelling. Mrs. Bull Horse stepped up and offered lemonade. Clifton Michael accepted, and they wound up sitting in the living room. Proud Henry abandoned the couch to give them some privacy.

  “I’m listening,” said Zachary.

  “I’ll come to the point,” said Clifton. “See, three years ago, I lost my wife to hepatitis. She needed a liver transplant, and could have used a service like what you did with your company. But your company wasn’t around then.”

  “It’s not around now,” Zachary interjected. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “She left behind our one-year-old,” said Clifton, as if Zachary hadn’t spoken. “April. She’s four now. And she has leukemia.”

  Aw, shit, thought Zachary, seeing where this was going.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But, Mr. Michael—”

  “I’ve done all right in road construction,” said Clifton, becoming urgent. “I have the kind of money you’d need to activate one of your … freezing units, whatever you call them. I’ve read your advertising, and—”

  Zachary let Clifton talk. Here was a man who was losing his family. First the wife, and now his child. It wouldn’t hurt to let him say what he’d come to say. Talking helped. Zachary had learned this much, at least, from doing business with the dying.

  Except Clifton Michael didn’t want therapy. He wanted a new chance for his little one, however slim that chance appeared.

  “The water heaters don’t work,” Zachary finally said. “That’s all they are. Did you know that? Water heaters filled with nitrogen.”

  “There’s more to it than that, Mr. Bull Horse,” said Clifton. “You don’t strike me as a con man or a dilettante.”

  Clifton let his eyes do the talking, after that. His sad, iron-willed eyes.

  Zachary didn’t want to do it, for a lot of reasons. For one, he was out of the business. For another, he liked for his clients to make their decisions with clear, well-informed minds, and April wasn’t old enough for that. Zachary worried that Clifton Michael was acting, and willing to throw away a lot of money, out of desperation.

  Desperation was bad business, bad science, and a bad reason for anything.

  Zachary met the father’s huge, wet, not-quite-crying eyes, and saw the right thing to do.

  He told Clifton Michael “No.”

  And went to bed hating himself.

  CLIFTON MICHAEL PLAYED a dirty trick. He came back the next day, with April.

  Aw, shit, Zachary thought, again.

  April had wide, wondering eyes, and a way of falling in love very quickly with people—all people—in the way dogs have. She could shriek and laugh, but most often she spoke softly.

  Clifton Michael knew enough to sit back, shut up, and let his baby do all the work.

  April and Zachary talked about cats. Zachary amused her by pressing two bottle caps over his eyelids.

  She shrieked. Then she vanished down the hall.

  Zachary and Clifton talked about road construction.

  April returned with other things for Zachary to stick in his eyes: a toothbrush. A bar of soap. A Dixie cup.

  When a child that young, especially one you know is going to die, falls in love with you, you can’t help falling in love in return.

  And when her father stops talking about road construction and asks one last time if you’ll accept his check and please just try, that’s all he’s asking, you say “Yes.”

  IT HAPPENS FASTER than you are ready for. April goes in the hospital once, and comes home, and goes back, and does not come home. By the time you get there with your plastic casket full of party ice, her father, shell-shocked, has already got a pile of ice from the cafeteria, and you pack her away together. Of course it reminds you of your sister in her iron lung fifteen years ago, and you realize she would be twenty-five now.

  You advise Clifton Michael not to come with you to the house. You tell him he wouldn’t want to see the liquid nitrogen process. You tell him, “That’s not how you want to remember your daughter.”

  He believes you. He trusts you. You and the crazy shit in your parents’ garage are all this man has left.

  You go home and can the little dead girl in the unit you have prepared.

  You advise Clifton Michael to go ahead and have a funeral. He refuses.

  “I’m not going to think of it that way,” he insists. “She’s been put under, just as if she had appendicitis, and they’ll wake her up when they can. It’s just a medical procedure.”r />
  And you leave him with that queer, haunted hope, flipping channels in the empty hospital room.

  THE NEXT DAY, everything changes.

  With April Michael’s water heater humming steadily in the corner, you are sitting at what you have finally come to think of as your computer. You are putting in numbers like when April Michael was born, and how much she weighed, and how old she was when she got sick. You put these numbers into a program you have written.

  You add other numbers. Numbers that tell about research, and money, and leukemia, and cells and ice and history. And you run these numbers through the computer and make a tape, and you run the tape through the reader and new numbers come up on the monitor, and they tell you that it will be one hundred years before people know all the things they’ll need to know before they can pop the cork on April Michael and make her live again, and make her well.

  And you look at the numbers, but it’s not the numbers you see. You look at this machine you have made, with its tapes and TV and switches and wires, and you realize the Devil, this wonderful friend of yours, is standing behind you—you can see him reflected like ectoplasm in the monitor—and you say, “This machine can make things happen faster. It’s like a little electric God. If everyone had one of these in their office, on their desk, even at home, think how much faster things could happen. Things that need to happen.”

  You think about how you and your sister and old Walter Bull Horse used to meditate and play bass guitar, and it was as if you shared the same flash of life and soul in those hours, and you think computers could be like that, too. They could talk to one another. All over the world. And you see it in the future, not far away, but right there, this year, and next year. This is how you will change the world.

  The Devil leans forward and looks at the screen and says, “How do you know these numbers are even right?”

  And you say, “Because I’m a fucking genius, that’s how.”

  EVERYTHING TO DO with computers was happening in San Francisco.

  So Zachary got ready to move to San Francisco. Mrs. Bull Horse said it was going to be a tough nut looking after his dad by herself.