I nodded. I still felt unable to talk.
It took me a couple days before the world seemed the same place I remembered. Shadows kept startling me. Even after I felt more normal, I still feared things would dissolve or start to move too quickly or too slowly. I worried that everything was just an illusion. I wasn’t hyperactive like John had been, just terrified and unsteady.
I hunted John for a month, in between interviews for locum tenens positions. None of the law school buddies I’d met had kept up with him. His parents had an address that turned out to be a warehouse where John had slung car parts. Someone there had lived in a group house with John and a group of death rockers. Finally someone had heard John had moved to Maine.
It took a day to drive through dense woods, along single-lane highways lined by pumpkin stands and stores with names like The Brass Button. The roads frosted and snow spattered my windshield. It felt as though I were driving back into the frozen wasteland where John and I had spent so much of our young adulthood.
John’s new housemates seemed friendly and crunchy, not at all death rockerish, and they told me where to find the soap factory where John worked. I pictured John, still hyperactive, running five machines at once, possibly juggling at the same time. Instead, he stood in front of a conveyor belt, calmer than I’d ever seen him. His beard had spread out, but otherwise he looked the same. I watched him until his break.
“Remember those lavender and chamomile soaps you liked?” he asked me. “I make those. It’s much more socially beneficial than lawyering would have been.”
“Are you all right?” I asked. He led me across the street to a sandwich shop. It had the local newspaper and a menu with three choices.
He nodded. “I was a tad jumpy for a month after I defrosted. Then I returned to normal. If anything, everyone said I was more mature, considering I hadn’t aged.”
“Then why—”
“I dropped out of law school. I guess you knew.” He shrugged and ordered a bacon roll and cocoa. I got some cookies. “It wasn’t some weird side effect of the freezing process, though. I just wasn’t cut out for law, it turned out. You know, I was just out of college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. Still don’t know. I partly went to law school because everyone expected me to do something high-powered. Including you. Especially you.”
“I didn’t care what you did, I just wanted—”
“You liked me because I was smart, right? And I didn’t want to disappoint. Remember how we used to talk about our future, our careers, all the time? We were going to be a doctor and a lawyer.”
I stood. “I can’t believe you’re trying to blame me! I almost died because of you!”
“Georgie didn’t take care of you? I sublet my place to him, and he promised to—”
“You promised to look after me. Not your friend. You. Why the fuck didn’t you just wake me after you dropped out of law school?”
“I didn’t want to explain to you what a waste it’d all been. I kept thinking if I had seven years, I could make a success at something before I had to face you. Because I knew you’d give me that look—the look you’re giving me right now. You should see it.”
There wasn’t much to say after that. On the long drive south, I dreamed up possible endings to my love story. Like a car crash in a New Hampshire snowdrift. Or maybe an irony-laden moment in which I went back to Maisie and had myself refrozen until John made good or someone invented a cure for fatal stupidity. But I already knew that my life was just going to carry on, at more or less the same pace as everybody else’s, until it one day coasted to a complete stop.
Suicide Drive
You’re late. If we miss history, it’ll be all your fault.
Nah, I don’t really care. I’m just flinging shit at you. You’re the one who wanted to record my reaction to the big day. It’s down here, past the big sliding door. OK. Now we’re sealed in, although it’s not in full lockdown mode, or else we wouldn’t be able to receive any signals or anything.
Yes, this is the place. Pretty boring, huh? This was my whole world until I turned twenty one. Right, the last twenty years of his life.
It doesn’t look that great, but it’s sort of designed to deceive the casual eye, if someone somehow found this place when we weren’t in lockdown. True, we had running water when nobody else did. You could maintain a comfortable existence here for decades, which is what I’ve done, actually. The facilities are pretty nice, when everything’s working properly. But of course, that’s why you’re here. The generator’s just behind that wall hanging, by the way.
From my selfish standpoint, that’s why you’re here. From your standpoint, you’re here to ask about my dad. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything I know about him. Sorghum wine? Bio-snort? Okay, suit yourself. But at least sit down, that chair keeps bobbing up to meet you, and it’s making me nervous.
Okay, so my dad. You know Hitler was a painter, Havel was a playwright, and Mao was a poet. Well, my dad was a musician. Only, he really was a musician. First and foremost. I think he was always happier making music and entertaining people. At the age when he should have been doing a comeback tour, doing bad acoustic versions of all the songs on the Dead First album, he was running the world. Excuse me, “chairing the World Council.” Same diff.
I’m not trying to trivialize his legacy. I’m not. It’s just everything makes more sense if you think of him as a rock star. And just remember, if he’d died when he was your age, he’d still have been famous forever, just for his music. For as long as there were people, anyway.
I mentioned the facilities are great. See that dirty cooking hole? That’s actually the entertainment system. You press a button and you can watch any one of a million fibrespecs. Like this one—it’s like having The Big Engine playing live in your living room. Here, I’ll show you. This is the show where Toony’s stomach implants burst open, and he just keeps drumming, doesn’t even miss a lick. People forget how hardcore they were. Here, we can slow the replay. Look at his facial expression, he’s in agony but he bites it back. Fucking insane.
He didn’t talk about it that much. I was like one year old when we moved here, and right until the end I never knew the whole story. I sort of knew my dad had been someone important, but mostly I thought it was just the rock-star thing. And I thought everybody lived like this. I didn’t realize half the world was starving while we were in our little luxury compound disguised as a shack. In the fibrespecs we watched, people mostly lived like us. I didn’t realize the stories were lies, just like our life.
You know, it was like when Siddhartha Gautama sneaked out of the palace for the first time. Saw the poverty, the clawing need, the people barely hanging on. I hadn’t realized that everyone else lived that way. I walked around just staring at the rags and the filth and the outlines of all those bones, and then I realized that I looked like the richest man on Earth. So I ran the hell back here and locked everything up for a while. The next time I went out, I fucked myself up. And I still looked way out of place. No, I’m not trying to say I’m Buddha. Just an analogy.
Yeah. I think he would have given anything to be here today. It killed him to know that we couldn’t know the outcome of the Gamba Project for fifty years. I’m the age now that he was when it launched. The Suicide Drive.
I know, that’s not the real name. But the Suicide Drive sounds a lot more poetic than the Murtz-Groeger-Zao Quantum Inverse Drive.