by Mitch Albom
He met Grace in an elevator in 1965.
Victor was forty. Grace was thirty-one. A bookkeeper for his firm, she wore a modest print dress, a white sweater, and a pearl necklace, her light blond hair done up in a bouffant. Pretty, yet practical. Victor liked that. He nodded as the elevator closed and she looked down, embarrassed to be sharing such close quarters with the boss.
He asked her out through interoffice mail. They went to dinner at a private club. They talked for hours. Victor learned that Grace had been married before, just out of high school. Her husband was killed in the Korean War. She’d buried herself in work. Victor could relate to that.
They rode a limousine to the river. They walked beneath the bridge. They shared their first kiss on a bench looking across to Brooklyn.
Ten months after their elevator encounter, they were wed in front of four hundred guests, twenty-six from Grace’s side, the rest Victor’s business associates.
At first they did so much together—played tennis, visited museums, took trips to Palm Beach, Buenos Aires, Rome. But as Victor’s business mushroomed, their joint activities fell away. He began to travel alone, working on the plane and even more at his destination. They stopped playing tennis. Museum trips grew rare. They never had children. Grace regretted that. She told Victor so over the years. It was one of the things that led them to talk less.
In time, the marriage felt like something spilled. Grace chafed at Victor’s impatience, his penchant for correcting people, his reading during meals, and his willingness to interrupt any social occasion for a business call. He disdained her minor scoldings and how long it took her to get ready for anything, leaving him constantly looking at his watch. They shared coffee in the mornings and the occasional restaurant at night, but as the years passed and their wealth stacked like chips around them—multiple homes, private jets—their life together felt more like a duty. The wife played her role, the husband did the same. Until recently, when, for Victor, all issues had faded behind the shadow of one.
Death.
How to avoid it.
Four days after his eighty-sixth birthday, Victor had visited an oncologist in a New York City hospital
who confirmed the existence of a golfball-sized tumor near his liver.
Victor researched every treatment option. He had always worried about bad health jeopardizing his success, and he spared no expense in exploring a cure. He flew to specialists. He had a team of health consultants. Despite all that, nearly a year had passed, and the results had not been good. Earlier in the day, he and Grace had seen the lead doctor. Grace tried to ask a question, but the words choked in her throat.
“What Grace wants to ask,” Victor said, “is how much time do I have left?”
“Optimistically,” the doctor answered, “a couple of months.”
Death was coming for him.
But death would be in for a surprise.
20
The first voice said, “Longer.”
“Who’s there?” Dor screamed.
He had been trying to escape the cave since the old man left. He searched for passageways. He banged on the karst walls. He tried to lower himself into the pool of tears, but it repelled him with air, as if a million breaths were pushing up from below.
Now a voice.
“Longer,” it said.
He saw only wisps of white smoke on the pool’s surface, and a bright turquoise glow.
“Show yourself!”
Nothing.
“Answer me!”
Then, suddenly, there it was again. A single word. Soft, barely audible, a mumbled prayer wafting up into the cave.
“Longer.”
Longer what? Dor wondered. He crouched on the floor, staring at the incandescent water, desperate, as man grows alone, for the sound of another soul.
The second voice, finally, was a woman’s. It said, “More.”
The third voice, a little boy’s, said the same thing. The fourth—they came more quickly now—mentioned the sun. The fifth spoke of the moon. The sixth was a whisper and repeated, “more, more,” while the seventh said, “another day” and the eighth begged, “go on and on.”
Dor rubbed his beard, which had grown unruly, as had his hair. Despite his isolation, his body functioned normally. It was nourished without food. Replenished without sleep. Dor could walk around the cave’s interior or wet his fingers with the slowly dripping water from the fissure.
But he could not escape the voices from the glowing pool—asking, always asking, for days, nights, suns, moons, and, eventually, hours, months, and years. If he put his hands over his ears, he heard them just as loudly.
And thus, unknowingly, did Dor begin to serve his sentence—
to hear every plea from every soul who desired more of the thing he had first identified, the thing that moved man further from the simple light of existence and deeper into the darkness of his own obsessions.
Time.
It seemed to be running too fast for everyone but him.
21
Sarah read Ethan’s text on her phone.
Her heart dropped.
“Can we do this next week? Sumthin I gotta go 2 2nite. See u at shlter, OK?”
Her knees buckled, like a marionette’s with the strings released. “No!” she screamed to herself. “Not next week. Now! That’s what we agreed! I put on all this makeup!”
She wanted to change his mind. But a text message demanded a response, and if she took too long, he might think she was angry.
So instead of saying no, she typed: “No problem.”
She added: “See u at shelter.”
Then she threw in: “Have fun.”
She pressed the send button and noted the time: 8:22.
She leaned against a traffic sign and tried to tell herself it was not her fault, he had not bailed out because she was too geeky or too fat or she talked too much or anything like that. He had something to do. It happened, right?
“Now what?” she wondered. The night was an empty crater. She could not go home. Not while her mother was still up. She had no way to explain a five-minute journey in high heels.
Instead she trudged to a nearby coffee shop and bought herself a chocolate macchiato and a cinnamon bun. She sat in the back.
“Eight twenty-two?” she said to herself. “Come on!”
But inside, she was already counting the days until next week.
22
Victor had always been able to see a problem, find its weak spot, and crack it open.
Failing companies. Deregulation. Market swings. There was invariably a hidden key; others were just missing it.
He took the same approach with death.
At first, he’d fought his cancer with conventional means—surgery, radiation, chemotherapy that left him weak and vomiting. But while these treatments had some halting effect on the tumor, his kidneys weakened, and he was forced onto dialysis three days a week, a process he tolerated only by having his chief assistant, Roger, with him the entire time, so Victor could dictate messages and be updated on business. He refused to miss a minute of the workday. He checked his watch constantly—“Let’s go, let’s go,” he’d mumble. He hated being stuck like this. Hooked to a machine to remove waste from his blood? What kind of position was that for a man like him?
He tolerated it until he could tolerate it no more. Men like Victor looked to the bottom line, and after a year, he knew the bottom line was this:
He could not win.
Not the conventional way. Too many people had tried. It was a bad bet, hoping for a miracle.
And Victor did not make bad bets.
So he turned his attention away from the illness and focused instead on time—time running out—which was, for him, the real issue.
Like other men of enormous power, Victor could not imagine the world without him. He felt almost obligated to stay alive. Cancer was a stumble. But the real hurdle was human mortality.
How could he crack that?
&n
bsp; He finally found his opening when a researcher from his West Coast offices, responding to his requests on “immortality,” faxed a stack of material on cryonics.
Cryonics.
The preservation of humans for later reanimation.
Freezing yourself.
Victor read through the pages, then took his first satisfied breath in months.
He could not beat death.
But he might outlast it.
23
The pool of voices was formed by Dor’s tears,
but he was only the first to weep. As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down.
Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity. And the desire for more became an endless chorus in Dor’s cave.
More time. A daughter holding her ailing mother’s hand. A horseman riding to beat the sunset. A farmer fighting a late harvest. A student huddled over piles of papers.
More time. A man with a hangover smacking his alarm clock. An exhausted worker buried in reports. A mechanic under the hood with impatient customers waiting.
More time. It was the choke of Dor’s existence, all he ever heard, millions of voices surrounding him like gnats. Although he’d lived when the world spoke but one language, he was granted the power to understand them all now, and he sensed by the sheer volume that Earth had become a very crowded place, and mankind did much more than hunt or build; it labored, it traveled, it made war, it despaired.
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 altogethe
r.
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.
He had carved on Earth
but always as a form of timekeeping, counting, notching moons and suns, the earliest math in the world.
What Dor carved now was different. First he made three circles to remember his children. He gave each of them a name. Then he carved a quarter moon to remind him of the night he told Alli, “She is my wife.” He carved a box shape to remind him of their first home together—his father’s mud-brick house—and a smaller box to symbolize the reed hut they shared.
He drew an eye shape to remind him of Alli’s lifted gaze, the look that made him feel tipped over. He drew wavy lines to suggest her long dark hair and the serenity he felt when he buried his face inside it.
With each new carving, he spoke out loud.