The Time Keeper Part 18

Only two things bothered him.

He was still inside his body.

And what about the girl?

She'd worn a green T-s.h.i.+rt and black sweatpants and was not at all familiar. A loose, random thought? he wondered. One of those faces that appears in a dream but you just can't identify?

Anyhow, she was gone now. He moved past the giant storage tanks of liquid nitrogen and wondered if he hadn't, in another dimension, already been placed inside one. Maybe that was it. His body inside, his soul outside? How might time be moving elsewhere when it wasn't moving here?

He tried to touch the cylinders, but made no contact. He tried to grab a ladder, but his palms could not grip the sides. In fact, he could not feel anything he saw. It was like trying to feel your reflection in the mirror.

"What is this place?"

He spun around. The girl had returned. She was holding her elbows as if she were cold.

"Why am I here?" She was trembling. "Who are you?"

Now Victor was lost. If his soul were projecting, there would be no explanation for this, another person equally conscious and in the same s.p.a.ce, asking questions.

Unless ...

Her body was inside the tanks? She, too, was being frozen?

"What is this place?" she repeated.

"You don't know?"

"I've never seen it before."

"It's a laboratory."

"For what?"

"Storing people."

"Storing ...?"

"Freezing them."

Her eyes widened and she stepped back. "I don't want ... I don't want ..."

"Not you," he concluded.

He walked to a cylinder and again tried to touch it. Nothing. He saw the flowers in the numbered white boxes and tried to kick them, but could not displace a petal.

It made no sense now. His body? This girl? All his carefully controlled plans? He turned his back and slid down, sitting on the floor but feeling no floor beneath him.

"Are people inside those things?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And you were supposed to be?"

He looked away.

She sat down, too, a respectful distance away.

"G.o.d ...," she whispered. "Why?"

67.

Victor, over the years, rarely spoke about his life to strangers.

He almost never gave interviews, believing that, in finance, secrecy was an ally. Information might be inadvertently shared, and the next day a rival would beat you to the punch. The quick and the dead. That was the joke about life forms in the business world. Only two kinds. The quick and the dead.

Now Victor Delamonte was neither.

This setting-this nothingness in the cryonics facility-was either purgatory or a hallucination. Whatever the case, Victor had no more use for secrets. So he told a girl in sweatpants what he had told almost no one else, about his cancer, about the kidney disease and the dialysis, about his plan to outmaneuver death with a second lifetime deep in the future.

He told her he should not be here, in this warehouse. He told her he was supposed to awaken many years from now, as a fully living medical miracle, not some ghost.

She listened to his story. She even nodded at some scientific references, which surprised him. This girl was smarter than she looked-considering she looked as if she'd slept on a park bench. He stopped before admitting he was seconds away from ice immersion in the other room. It seemed like too much.

At one point, the girl asked how his wife felt about him freezing himself.

Victor hesitated.

"Oh," she said. "You didn't tell her."

Smarter than she looked.

68.

Sarah Lemon used to talk with her parents.

Listening to Victor reminded her of that. As a child she would sit on the floor of their bedroom, twirling the frills on a throw pillow and answering their questions about school. She was a straight-A student, gifted at math and science, and her father, Tom, a lab technician, would stand at the mirror, run a hand through his thinning blond hair, and tell her to keep it up; if she wanted to be a doctor, he expected nothing less. Lorraine, who sold radio advertising, would lean back in the bed, drag on a cigarette, and say, "I'm proud of you, sweetie. Run and get me one of those ice cream bars, will you?"

"You don't need another ice cream bar," Tom would say.

They divorced when Sarah was twelve. Lorraine got the house, the furniture, all the ice cream bars she wanted, and full-time custody of their only child. Tom got a hair transplant, a boat, and a young female friend named Melissa, who had no interest in spending time with someone else's daughter. They married and moved to Ohio.

Publicly, Sarah took her mother's side, said she was happy to be staying with "the good parent," the one who hadn't messed things up. But deep down, like many children, she missed the absent party and wondered how much she was to blame for the marriage's collapse. The less her father called, the more she ached for him; the more her mother hugged her, the less she wanted the embrace. She looked like her mother and she sounded like her mother, and by eighth grade, she began to feel like her mother, unloved or perhaps unlovable. She ate too much and she put on weight, and she distanced herself from other kids and stayed inside studying because her father had admired that and maybe deep down she thought it would bring them closer. She sent him her grades every semester. Sometimes he responded with a note. "Good girl, Sarah. Keep it up." Sometimes he didn't.

By high school, her friends were few and her routine was predictable: science labs, bookstore browsing, weekends at home on the computer, parties something she heard about-past tense-during Monday morning homerooms when other kids were bragging. She'd been approached by a few boys from her math cla.s.ses and she'd gone out with a couple of them-to movies, a school dance, video arcades-even made out a few times to see what everyone was talking about, but those boys eventually stopped calling and she was privately relieved. She never felt the slightest spark and figured she never would.

Ethan changed all that. He put an end to her deadening drift. The thought of his face replaced all her other thoughts. She would drop the world for Ethan. She had.

But he had never really wanted her. And in the end, he exposed her for what she'd always feared she was: pathetic. After that, there was no bottom to the pit.

She told most of this to Victor, the old man in the bathrobe, after he had told her his story about the freezing thing and his wife. They were alone in this eerie warehouse, and Sarah felt so frazzled and confused and she figured maybe he knew more than he let on. But the further she got into the Ethan story, the more she felt the old soak of depression. She stopped just before the final moments in the garage, with the vodka and the sad song and the engine running. She wasn't going to admit she had tried to kill herself. Not to a total stranger.

When he asked how she had gotten to this facility, she said she didn't know-and she truly did not-she'd just woken up holding an hourgla.s.s.

"I kind of remember being carried."

"Carried?"

"By this guy."

"What guy?"

"He works in a clock shop."

Victor looked at her as if she'd just been painted pink. From behind a cylinder, they heard a noise.

69.

Dor coughed.

His eyes opened, as if coming out of sleep, although he hadn't slept in thousands of years. He was lying on the floor, and he blinked several times before he realized that Victor and Sarah were standing over him.

They immediately peppered him with questions-"Who are you?" "Where are we?"-as Dor tried to clear his head. He remembered only the screaming colors and everything going black and a sensation of him falling through the air and the hourgla.s.s-where was the hourgla.s.s?-and then he saw it in Sarah's grip, the top reattached, and he realized that if they were alive, he had guessed correctly. Now he could- Wait.

Had he coughed?

"What do you have to do with all this?" Victor asked.

"How did I get here?" Sarah said.

"Was I drugged?"

"Where's my house?"

"Why do I feel healthy?"

"Where's the car?"

Dor could not focus. He had coughed. In his eternity in the cave, he had never coughed, sneezed, or even breathed hard.

"Talk to us," Victor said.

"Talk to us," Sarah said.

Dor looked down at his right hand. The flesh had returned to his fingers. His fist was clenched shut. He uncurled it.

A single grain of sand.

On the wall of his cave, Dor once carved the shape of a rolling pin.

It symbolized the delivery of their first child. A difficult pregnancy in Dor's time required midwives to soothe the belly with oils or a special rolling pin. Dor watched as they did this over Alli's womb, and Alli cried out as they prayed for her. The baby came, healthy, and Dor often wondered how such a simple thing-a rolling pin, found in even the poorest dwellings-could affect such a monumental event.

The answer, he was later told by an Asu, was that only a magical rolling pin could do it. Magic came from the G.o.ds. And when the G.o.ds touched something, the normal became the supernatural, the simple became the wondrous.

A rolling pin to bring forth a child.

A grain of sand to stop the world.

Now Dor looked at a young girl in sweatpants, and an old man in his bathrobe, and he realized the magic of the elements had brought him this far.

What remained would be up to him.

"Just tell us," Sarah said, her voice starting to quiver. "Are we ... dead?"

Dor struggled to his feet.

"No," he said.

For the first time in six thousand years, he felt tired.

"You have not died," he began. "You are in the middle of a moment."

He held out the grain of sand. "This moment."

"What are you talking about?" Victor asked.