“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 ey
es. “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.
12
Once Upon a Time in Lambeth
“Hold on. Let’s be clear.” Kay swung her feet back to the floor and sat up straight. “You’re proposing that we get to eighty and then commit suicide. You didn’t use the word. Anyone who concocts a plan like that shouldn’t rely on euphemism and evasion.”
“Quite right.” Cyril recited, “I am proposing that we get to eighty and then commit suicide.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Cyril Wilkinson, don’t be ridiculous. Honestly, sometimes!”
Cyril looked wounded. “I was serious.”
“I know,” Kay said, standing up. “That’s what makes it ridiculous.”
“How do you propose we avoid your father’s fate, then?”
“I don’t. Our destiny isn’t wholly in our hands. I realize you don’t like that about the world, but there’s an upside: our destiny isn’t wholly our responsibility, either. Or, if we end badly, our fault.”
“I don’t appreciate you simply dismissing an idea that I’ve given a great deal of thought.” He was sulking.
“You have any number of brilliant ideas, my dear,” she said, kissing the top of his head. “This simply isn’t one of them. By contrast, your proposal that we add a second skylight to the conservatory is spot on.”
“What’s wrong with planning for a clean break?” he asked petulantly.
Blimey, he simply wouldn’t let it go. “Some silly, numerically arbitrary suicide pact is psychologically unrealistic, and besides. I don’t want to kill myself. Is that good enough for you? Occasionally people conduct an old age that is fulfilling, active, and rich. If believing in such a possibility is like believing in fairies, then fine. I believe in fairies.”
Kay put both attractive sherry glasses in the dishwasher. What on earth had she been thinking, drinking at such an early hour? It would have been one thing had she been driven to drown her sorrows over her father, but she was not sorry he was dead. She was merely sorry that she wasn’t sorry.
* * *
It was only four years later that Kay opted for retirement from the NHS at fifty-five. Before she announced the decision to Cyril, she was anxious that he’d regard leaving the service at the earliest opportunity as a betrayal. Worse, she worried that the second career she hoped to cultivate thereafter would elicit his derision. The occupation she aimed to train for wasn’t morally freighted; it had no moral qualities whatsoever. The arrangement of surfaces, shapes, and colours had nothing to do with doing good, though properly pursued it could entail doing well.
Yet when she laid out her tentative plans—nervously, in a spirit that implied she might forget all about the whimsical notion in the face of the slightest discouragement—her husband was astonishingly supportive. He commended the redecoration she’d done in their own home and saw no reason why her innovative design instincts couldn’t be scaled up. He assured his wife that she’d more than put in her time at St Thomas’. He even confessed to a cheerful envy of a trade that could provide her such broad opportunities for creativity. That night, she’d never felt more certain that she’d married the right man. He wasn’t nearly as rigid as the children seemed to imagine. Though he could get wrapped up in his own ambitions and his own way of seeing things, he had a warm nature. He cared passionately about her happiness. He might have been raised in an era when women were expected to assume a muted, subordinate position, but he was not stuck in the 1950s and he was capable of change.
After she graduated from Kingston, the jobs for friends and friends-of-friends eventually gave her a long-shot crack at doing over the lobby of a flash, relatively new hotel called One Aldwych in Covent Garden. Not only did she snag the commission, but her bold yet cosy revamp won a major national design award. Having made the leap to commercial properties, she was soon commanding considerable fees and able to pick and choose which spaces she found inspiring. She acquired a coveted reputation as a designer who never sacrificed functionality for high concept, and who believed that interiors could convey modernity and style without being cold and inhuman. She might have been concerned that Cyril would feel overshadowed or even a trace resentful, but instead her husband was bursting with pride, constantly dragging their friends into restaurants whose dining room décor his wife had devised even when the food was rubbish.
Meanwhile, Cyril finally gave himself credit for having paid his own dues to the NHS. When he retired at sixty-two, the fervent send-off at his Bermondsey clinic moved him to tears, and he forbade any of the nurses, physicians, and receptionists from leaving the do until they’d helped him finish off their farewell gift of a twenty-five-year-old single malt. Back home, he wasn’t long footloose before he started in earnest on his memoirs. He was apologetic about the proje
ct at first, claiming that the manuscript was really for his own satisfaction. Although he harboured small private hopes that perhaps the children might be interested in an account of their father’s life, he nursed no serious expectation that the memoir would ever see print. The process of reviewing his life proved enjoyable for its own sake. When he shyly allowed Kay to read the final draft, Cyril was as abashed by her effusive response as he had been by the unstinting admiration of his former colleagues in Bermondsey. “You needn’t exaggerate!” he begged her. “Darling, it’s enough that you didn’t find the thing unbearably tedious.” Only at her insistence did he email the file to a fellow member of his men’s choir whose wife was an editor at Orion.
Given how riveting she’d found his account, Kay claimed that matters proceeded precisely as she’d expected, but Cyril himself was gobsmacked. Orion made an offer on the memoir within the week, and the size of the advance on the table made him blush. On publication, Fit for Purpose became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. At the urging of his editor, Cyril embarked on a companion volume, and eventually authored a whole series of medically oriented books for laymen, with a wildly popular mix of health tips, folk wisdom, philosophizing about mortality, and anecdotes about anonymized patients. Cyril varied his more humdrum workdays at the computer with signings, festival appearances, and formal lectures at medical schools. He was open-handed with the press in granting interviews.
Indeed, their home in Lambeth became a Mecca for junior doctors suffering from a crisis of commitment, unsure they could take the long hours, the sacrifice of family life, and the devastation of losing patients. Meanwhile, aspirant designers rocked up to see Kay and pick her brain on challenging aspects of their fledgling projects. The mentors were generous with tea and wine, and their house often teemed with young people clamouring for advice, shyly soliciting compliments that would probably mean too much to them, and sharing stories from that poignant phase of life that combined crippling under-confidence with wildly unjustified arrogance within the same five minutes. The young blood around the kitchen table was a tonic. When the acolytes made profuse professions of veneration, the couple were embarrassed at first. Yet they soon learnt to take the tributes in stride, never letting it go to their heads when told repeatedly, “You’re way more fun than friends my own age,” or, “You two understand me loads better than my parents,” or, “Come on—you could both pass for thirty-five!”
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