3.
I awoke comfortably a few days later in a stark room that was blindingly white from floor to ceiling. Roughly the size of a three-car garage, the room was far too large for its contents—several pieces of unfamiliar medical equipment and the bed I lay in. A sizeable pane of observation glass separated the room from the outside hallway. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. My skin felt moist and supple. I was surprised I could move my arms back and forth with scarcely a hint of soreness. I was dressed in a shiny, metallic gown that was loose and soft.
The door opened with a loud beep, and a short Caucasian guy in blue scrubs walked in. He looked to be in his early thirties. His large brown cow eyes matched his frumpy chestnut hair, and his puffy cheeks overpowered his small, flat chin.
“How does it feel to be alive?” the man asked.
“Never known anything different.”
“Sense of humor intact.” The man smiled at me and leaned awkwardly against the bed.
“What’s so funny about that?”
“You know, you have never known anything different . . .”
“What are you trying to say? Did I have to be resuscitated after the plane crash or something?”
“Oh, OK, now I understand.” The man’s cheerful expression turned serious, but I wasn’t sure why. He sat down at the foot of the bed.
“Your name is Royce, right?”
“I’m Alex.”
“Nice to meet you, Alex. Now are you going to tell me what in the hell happened to me?”
“I can tell you what I know about your case. If you need more information than that, I suppose you can try speaking with the doctors.”
“So you’re not a doctor?”
“No. I’m a technician.”
“What kind of technician?”
“Cryogenics.”
I didn’t like hearing that word. I lost focus and found myself staring right through Alex.
“Do you realize you signed up for cryopreservation?”
I nodded slightly.
“You died after a plane crash. You suffered a heart attack.”
“But I’m not dead.”
“Not anymore. We brought you back to life.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. You were frozen for . . .” Alex stared at the ceiling while he performed the math in his head, “a good thirty-five years.”
“Holy . . .” My thoughts evaporated, and the room started spinning. Then it hit me. I looked at Alex and burst into hysterical laughter.
“You son of a bitch!” I gave Alex a playful shove on the shoulder. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you? Who put you up to this? Was it Gary? That guy never misses an opportunity to bust my balls over wanting to get frozen.”
I looked around the room. “That bastard really went all out.” I pinched the front of my gown and lifted the fabric toward Alex. “I mean, look at this thing!”
The men in the white coats now stood outside in the hallway. As soon as Alex saw them, his expression turned dire and his voice stern. “This is not a practical joke.”
“Come on, man. I’ve been through a lot. Just let me see my wife and son.”
“Listen to me. When they come in here, do not tell them what I told you. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. Just do everything they say, and you’ll be fine.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Just do what they say, all right? I’ll come back later. I promise.”
Alex jumped up and started to fiddle with the machine next to my bed. He shuffled out with his head down as soon as the men in the white coats entered the room. At first, they stood near the doorway and marveled like I was some kind of exotic animal. One man pointed at me and shared an observation that sent the group into a flurry of debate. They repeated this dumbfounding cycle multiple times before approaching me.
“Feeling better, Mister Brooyear?” the man with the flashlight asked. The others deferred to him.
“Better than when?”
“The last time we saw you, of course.”
“Yes, you could say that. Seeing as how I’m no longer on fire.”
My irritation vexed the man in charge. “Yes, an unfortunate complication of reanimation. A small price to pay for being alive, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Not so sure about that. I mean, I didn’t go to medical school or anything, but I never heard of anyone burning alive just because they had a heart attack.”
“Mister Brooyear—”
“Royce. You can call me Royce.”
The man in charge gave me a caustic smile. “Yes . . . Royce.” His tone was acerbic. “Your demeanor is precisely what I would expect in an American from your era. Indeed, you did not study medicine. You were a capitalist, were you not?”
“Still am. Aren’t we all?” My comment spawned sideways glances and laughter from the men in the ivory coats.
“Well then, it appears that you will have to rely on the care we provide. And you are in remarkable condition for a man who has been cryopreserved for nearly forty years.” He looked at his minions. They nodded in approval. “Your vital signs are perfect, and we were able to return your skin’s elasticity. How does it feel, your skin?”
“Ya, about this whole charade you’ve got going on here. Don’t you think it’s a little much?”
“I know nothing about this charade you speak of,” the man in charge bellowed.
He and his cohort seemed confused and even offended by my comment. This confused me.
“Look, dude, I’m not buying it. I know I haven’t been frozen and brought back to life.”
“This is not a game, Mister Brooyear. You are a zenith of scientific discovery. You are the first cryonic ever to be successfully reanimated. Schoolchildren millennia from now will learn your name.”
The dramatic bullshit he was feeding me only strengthened my resolve that this nightmare was all just an elaborate prank. “So you say I was dead for four decades, and you brought me back to life. What year does that make this?”
“Ok, Doc. If it’s twenty forty-seven, then where are all the cool gizmos? Show me a flying car.”
“A what?” One of the other men whispered in the man in charge’s ear. “Uh, now I understand, Mister Brooyear.”
“Royce.”
“You want me to prove to you that this is the future, Royce?”
I nodded.
The man in charge reached into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a small metallic cylinder, the size of an AA battery. He pointed the cylinder at me, and it emitted a three-dimensional hologram of an anatomical male.
“You see this, Mister Brooyear? This is an image of you. I can see every aspect of your anatomy. You see this? This is your skin. Now, this, this is your skeletal structure. You broke your right femur as an adolescent, did you not?”
I nodded. He adjusted the position of his index finger on the cylinder, and the hologram displayed my internal organs.
“Here is your heart, and these are your coronary arteries.” The image zoomed in on an artery and passed right through the arterial wall. The perspective was amazing, and the image crystal clear. It was as if we were cruising along inside my artery. “See how they are free of plaque? When we corrected your condition, we gave you a fresh start.” He adjusted the perspective. “Now look here, you know what this is?”
“Looks like a lung.”
“Correct. You see this dense mass here? You have a small hamartoma.”
“Terrific. So why didn’t you use your super science to take that thing out?”
“You are a smart one. The tumor is benign. It will not be causing you any difficulties.” He shut the hologram down with a look of pure satisfaction and returned it to his pocket. He stared at me and folded his arms. “You did not have anything like that in twenty ten, now did you?”
“Actually, doc, I’m not impressed. I saw one of those things in Star Wars.”
He reeled back. A minion gasped audibly, and others shook their heads. The man who had explained the flying car reference leaned in deferentially toward the man in charge to explain Star Wars. He was furious. He reminded me of a cartoon character who was about to boil over and shoot steam from his ears. Pushing his buttons was a real treat. I leaned back comfortably against my pillow.
“You want to see something special, do you?”
He barked orders at the history buff who scurried out of the room. The man in charge stood there stoically. It made me uneasy to see how quickly he’d grown calm.
The history buff burst back into the room holding a scalpel and a handheld device that looked like a credit card reader. He handed them to the man in charge who nodded at the others. They held me down. He stepped on a lever on the floor. Wide plastic straps lashed out from beneath the bed and wrapped around my shoulders, waist, and knees to pin me to the mattress. He stretched a rubber surgical glove over each hand slowly and deliberately.
“I am going to show you something that you will never forget.” He took the scalpel from the history buff and placed it gingerly on the thickest part of my right forearm.
“What are you doing?” I screamed.
“Welcome to the future,” he said with a caustic smile.
I watched in horror as he pushed on the scalpel until it punctured the skin. A stream of blood ran down my elbow onto the bleached bed sheet. I felt a surge of adrenaline and struggled violently to free myself from the straps. It was useless.
“Please, no, no. Stop!” I pleaded.
He didn’t even look up. He dragged the scalpel down the length of my forearm, stopping just above the wrist. The arm pulled apart on either side of the blade, exposing white pustules of fat above thick sinewy braids of muscle tissue. Blood spilled from both sides of the incision and pooled on the mattress before dripping to the floor.
He returned the scalpel to the history buff, who passed him the mysterious handheld device. With nervous apprehension, my bulging eyeballs followed every move he made. They felt as if they might leap out of their sockets to try and stop him. He placed the device at the top of the wound. The device whirred and buzzed, and I felt a tingling against my skin. He tapped buttons. It let out a loud beep, and he pushed the device slowly along the wound site, just as he had moments before with the scalpel. I thought I was hallucinating. The wound trailing the machine closed and completely healed. When it reached my wrist, he turned the machine off and pulled it away. The only evidence of the trauma was a light, slightly elevated scar, much like what you’d expect to see after years of healing. The physical pain that remained was insignificant, but the emotional scars were deep. I released the tension from my muscles and lay there in silence, paying no heed to my captors.
He stood above my head. He methodically removed his gloves, tugging at each finger in a cadence that punctuated his comment. “Tell me, Mister Brooyear, did you enjoy your flying car?”
When I failed to respond, he knelt and whispered into my ear, “I want you to understand something, Mister Brooyear; I can return you to your prior state just as easily as I brought you out of it. Think of this the next time you are feeling clever.”
He stood up, and the men in the white coats left the room.