“What’s the date?” Mira asked, still groggy.
“January third, twenty-three fifty-two,” the man said. Nearly thirty years had passed. The man wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I feel a little sick for being here, like I’m a child molester or something.” He frowned. “But there are so many stories out there of people finding true love in the drawers. My cousin Ansel met his second wife Floren at a revival center. Lovely woman.”
The man gave her a big, sloppy smile. “I’m Lycan, by the way.”
“I’m Mira. Nice to meet you.”
“Your smile is a little wavery, in a cute way. I can tell you’re honest. You wouldn’t use me to get revived and then divorce me. You have to watch out for that.” Lycan sat at an angle, perhaps trying to appear thinner.
“I can see how that would be a concern,” Mira said.
Lycan heaved a big sigh. “Maybe meeting women at a bridesicle place is pathetic, but it’s not as pathetic as showing up at every company party alone, with your hands in your pockets instead of holding someone else’s, or else coming with a woman who not only has a loud laugh and a lousy sense of humor, but is ten years older than you and not very attractive. That’s pathetic. Let people suspect my beautiful young wife was revived. They’ll still be jealous, and I’ll still be walking tall, holding her hand as everybody checked her out.”
Lycan fell silent for a moment. “My grandmother says I’m talking too much. Sorry.”
So Lycan had a hitcher. At least one. It was so difficult to tell — you got so good at carrying on two conversations at once when you had a hitcher.
“No, I like it,” Mira said. It allowed her precious time to think. When she was alive, there had been times in Mira’s life when she had little free time, but she had always had time to think. She could think while commuting to work, while standing in lines, and during all of the other in-between times. Suddenly it was the most precious thing.
Lycan wiped his palms. “First dates are not my best moments.”
“You’re doing great.” Mira smiled as best she could, although she knew the smile did not reach her eyes. She had to get out of here, had to convince one of these guys to revive her. One of these guys? This was only the third person to revive her in the fifty years that the place had been open, and if the first guy, the pervert, was to be believed, she’d become less desirable the longer she was here.
Mira wished she could see where she was. Was she in a coffin? On a bed? She wished she could move her neck. “What’s it like in here?” she asked. “Are we in a room?”
“You want to see? Here.” Lycan held his palm a foot or so over her face; a screen embedded there flashing words and images in three dimensions transformed into a mirror.
Mira recoiled. Her own dead face looked down at her, her skin grey, her lips bordering on blue. Her face was flaccid — she looked slightly unbalanced, or mentally retarded, rather than peaceful. A glittering silver mesh concealed her to the neck.
Lycan angled the mirror, giving her a view of the room. It was a vast, open space, like the atrium of an enormous hotel. A lift was descending through the center of the atrium. People hurried across beautifully designed bridges as crystal blue water traced twisting paths through huge transparent tubes suspended in the open space, giving the impression of flying streams. Nearby, Mira saw a man sitting beside an open drawer, his mouth moving, head nodding, hands set a little self-consciously in his lap.
Lycan took the mirror away. His eyes had grown big and round.
“What is it?” Mira asked.
He opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind, shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Please, tell me.”
There was a long pause. Mira guessed it was an internal dispute. Finally, Lycan answered. “It’s just that it’s finally hitting me at a gut leveclass="underline" I’m talking to a dead person. If I could hold your hand, your fingers would be cold and stiff.”
Mira looked away, toward the ceiling. She felt ashamed. Ashamed of the dead body that housed her.
“What’s it like?” he whispered, as if he were asking something obscene.
Mira didn’t want to answer, but she also didn’t want to go back to being dead. “It’s hard. It’s hard to have no control over anything, not when I can be awake, or who I talk to. And to be honest, it’s scary. When you end this date I’m going to be gone — no thoughts, no dreaming, just nothingness. It terrifies me. I dread those few minutes before the date ends.”
Lycan looked sorry he’d asked, so Mira changed the subject, asking about Lycan’s hitchers. He had two: his father and his grandmother.
“I don’t get it,” Mira said. “Why are there still hitchers if they’ve figured out how to revive people?” In her day, medical science had progressed enough that there was hope of a breakthrough, and preservation was common, but the dead stayed dead.
“Bodies wear out,” Lycan said, matter-of-factly. “If you revive a lady who’s ninety-nine, she’ll just keep dying. So, tell me about yourself. I see you had a hitcher?”
Mira told Lycan about her mother, and Lycan uttered the requisite condolences, and she pretended they were appropriate. She held no illusions about why she had agreed to host her mother. It was, in a sense, a purely selfish motive: she knew she couldn’t live with the guilt if she said no. It was emotional blackmail, what her mother did, but it was flawlessly executed.
But I’m dying. Mira, I’m scared. Please. Even across eighty years and death, Mira could still hear her mother’s voice, its perpetually aggrieved tone.
An awful darkness filled her when she thought of her mother. She felt guilty and ashamed. But what did she have to feel ashamed of? What do you owe your mother if the only kindness she had ever offered was giving birth to you? Do you owe her a room in your mind? What if you loved a woman instead of a “nice man,” and your mother barely spoke to you? How about if your soulmate died, painfully, and your mother’s attempt to console you was to say, “Maybe next time you should try a man.” As if Jeanette’s death justified her mother’s disapproval.
“What if I actually find someone here, and she agrees to marry me in exchange for being revived?” Lycan was saying. “Would people sense she was too good-looking to be with me, and guess that I’d met her at a bridesicle place? We’d have to come up with a convincing story about how and where we met — something that doesn’t sound made-up.”
“Bridesicle?”
Lycan shrugged. “That’s what some people call this sort of place.”
Then even if someone revived her, she would be a pariah. People would want nothing to do with her. Her mother’s voice rang in her mind, almost harmonizing the line.
I want nothing to do with you. You and your girlfriend.
“I’m afraid it’s time for me to say goodbye. I should circulate. But maybe we can talk again?” Lycan said.
She didn’t want to die again, didn’t want to be thrown into that abyss. She had so much to think about, to remember. “I’d like that,” was all she said, resisting the urge to scream, to beg this man not to kill her. If Mira did that, he’d never come back. As he reached over to turn her off, Mira used her last few seconds to try to reach for the memory of her accident. It sat like a splinter under her skin.
Lycan came back. He told her it had been a week since his first visit. Mira had no sense of how much time had passed, the way you do when you’ve been asleep. A week felt the same as thirty years.
“I’ve talked to eleven women, and none of them were half as interesting as you. Especially the women who died recently. Modern women can be so shallow, so unwilling to seek a common ground. I don’t want a relationship that’s a struggle — I want to care about my wife’s needs, to be able to say, ‘no, honey, let’s go see the movie you want to see,’ and count on her saying, ‘no, that’s okay, I know how much you want to see that other one.’ And sometimes we would see her movie, and sometimes mine.”