“…neutral colors. How could anyone choose violet?”
“…last time I was at a Day-Glows concert I was seventeen…”
“I shouldn’t be the one doing this.” The man turned, looked over his shoulder. “There’s usually an orientation.” He raised his voice. “Hello?” He turned back around to face her, shrugged, looking bemused. “I guess we’re on our own.” He clasped his hands, leaned in toward Mira. “The truth is, you see, you died in the accident…”
Mira didn’t hear the next few things he said. She felt as if she were floating. It was an absurd idea, that she might be dead yet hear someone tell her she was dead. But somehow it rang true. She didn’t remember dying, but she sensed some hard, fast line — some demarcation between now and before. The idea made her want to flee, escape her body, which was a dead body. Her teeth were corpse’s teeth.
“…your insurance covered the deep-freeze preservation, but full revival, especially when it involves extensive injury, is terribly costly. That’s where the dating service comes in—”
“Where is my mother?” Mira interrupted.
The man consulted his palm again. He nodded. “You had a hitcher. Your mother.” He glanced around again, raised his hand as if to wave at someone, then dropped it.
A hitcher. What an apropos term. “Is she gone?” Mira wanted to say, “Is she dead?” but that had become an ambiguous concept.
“Yes. You need consistent brain activity to maintain a hitcher. Once you die, the hitcher is gone.”
Like a phone number you’re trying to remember, Mira thought. You have to hold it with thought, and if you lose it, you never get it back. Mira felt hugely relieved. From the moment she waked, she kept expecting to hear her mother’s voice. Now she knew it wouldn’t come, and she could relax. She felt guilty for feeling relieved that her mother was dead, but who would blame her? Certainly not anyone who’d known her mother. Certainly not Lynn.
“I have a sister,” she said. “Lynn.” Her jaw moved so stiffly.
“Yes, a twin sister. Now that would be interesting.” The man grinned, his eyebrows raised.
“Is she still alive?”
“No,” he said in a tone that suggested she was a silly girl. “You’ve been gone for over eighty years, sleeping beauty.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if all of that was trivial. “But let’s focus on the present. The way this works is, we get acquainted. We have dates. If we find we’re compatible,” he raised his shoulders toward his ears, smiled his dainty smile, “then I might be enticed to pay for you to be revived, so that we can be together.”
Dates.
“So. My name is Red, and I know from your readout that your name is Mira. Nice to meet you, Mira.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mira murmured. He’d said she died in a car accident. She tried to remember, but nothing came. Nothing about the accident, anyway. The memories that raced up at her were arguments — arguments with her mother. An argument at a shopping mall. Mom hating everything Mira liked, trying to get Mira to go to the Seniors section and buy cheap, drab housedresses. Mom had had no control of Mira’s body (she was only a hitcher, after all), but there are lots of ways to control.
“So. Mira.” Red clapped his hands together. “Do you want to bullshit, or do you want to get intimate?”
The raised eyebrows again, the same as when he made the twins comment. “I don’t understand,” Mira said.
“Weeeell. For example, here’s a question.” He leaned in close, his breath puffing in her ear. “If I revived you, what sorts of things would you do to me?”
Mira was sure that this man’s name was not Red, and she doubted he was here to revive anyone. “I don’t know. That’s an awfully intimate question. Why don’t we get to know each other first?” She needed time to think. Even just a few minutes of quiet, to make sense of this.
Red frowned theatrically. “Come on. Tease me a little.”
Should she tell Red she was gay? Surely not. He would lose interest, and maybe report it to whoever owned the facility. But why hadn’t whoever owned the facility known she was gay? Maybe that was to be part of the orientation she’d missed. Whatever the reason, did she want to risk being taken out of circulation, or unplugged and buried?
Would that be the worst thing?
The thought jangled something long-forgotten. Or more like deeply forgotten; everything in her life was long-forgotten. She’d thought something along those lines once, and there had been so much pain that the pain still echoed, even without the memory. She reached for the memory, but it was sunk deep in a turgid goo that she encountered whenever she tried to remember something. Had she really been able to effortlessly pull up memories when she was alive, or was that just how she remembered it?
“I’m just—” she wanted to say “not in the mood,” but that was not only a cliché, but a vast understatement. She was dead. She couldn’t move anything but her face, and that made her feel untethered, as if she were floating, drifting. Hands and feet grounded you. Mira had never realized. “I’m just not very good at this sort of thing.”
“Well.” Red put his hands on his thighs, made a production of standing. “This costs quite a bit, and they charge by the minute. So I’ll say goodbye now, and you can go back to being dead.”
Go back? “Wait!” Mira said. They could bring her back, and then let her die again? She imagined her body, sealed up somewhere, maybe for years, maybe forever. The idea terrified her. Red paused, waiting. “Okay. I would…” She tried to think of something, but there were so many things running through her mind, so many trains of thought she wanted to follow, none of them involving the pervert leaning over her.
Were there other ways to get permanently “revived”? Did she have any living relatives she might contact, or maybe a savings account that had been accruing interest for the past eighty years? Had she had any savings when she died? She’d had a house — she remembered that. Lynn would have inherited it.
“Fine, if you’re not going to talk, I’ll just say goodbye,” Red snapped. “But don’t think anyone else is coming. Your injuries would make you a costly revival, and there are tens of thousands of women here. Plus men don’t want the women who’d been frozen sixty years before the facility opened, because they have nothing in common with those women.”
“Please,” Mira said.
He reached for something over her head, out of sight.
Mira dreamed that she was running on a trail in the woods. The trail sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper until she was running up big steps. Then the steps entered a flimsy plywood tower and wound up, up. It was dark, and she could barely see, but it felt so good to run; it had been such a long time that she didn’t care how steep it was. She climbed higher, considered turning back, but she wanted to make it to the top after having gone so far. Finally she reached the top, and there was a window where she could see a vast river, and a lovely college campus set along it. She hurried over to the window for a better view, and as she did, the tower leaned under her shifting weight, and began to fall forward. The tower built speed, hurtled toward the buildings. This is it, she thought, her stomach flip-flopping. This is the moment of my death.
Mira jolted awake before she hit the ground.
An old man — likely in his seventies — squinted down at her. “You’re not my type,” he grumbled, reaching over her head.
“Hi.” It came out phlegmy; the man cleared his throat. “I’ve never done this before.” He was a fat man, maybe forty.