This Ananias, or false prophet (artist), was settled here-he had a narrow apartment along the side of the hospital building. His quarters were around the corner, so I couldn't see them from my bed. I had a glimpse of his bookcases and a green wall-to-wall car pet. The Christmas tinsel attendant was very deferential to the artist, who, for his part, took no notice of me. Nil! I wasn't allowed to register an impression. By which I mean only that I didn't fit into any of his concepts.
This TV _artiste__, anyway, had the air of being long settled here, but it soon was evident that he was leaving that day. Cardboard boxes were carried out of his flat-or wing. The movers were stacking items. The books were disappearing from the shelves, the shelves themselves were dismantled in a tremendous hurry. A van was backed in and swiftly loaded, and then in a long green-gold gown the artist's old wife came out, stooped, and was helped into the cab of the truck. She wore a silk hat. The TV artist stuck his carpet slippers into the pockets of his topcoat, he put on loafers and crawled in beside her.
The male attendant was there to see him off, and then he said to me, "You're next. We need the space, and my orders are to get you out this minute." Immediately a crew dismantled the shelves and took everything to pieces. The surroundings were knocked down like theater flats. Nothing was left. A moving van meanwhile backed in, and my street clothes, my Borsalino, electric razor, toilet articles, CDs, et cetera, were stuffed into supermarket shopping bags. I was helped into a wheelchair and lifted into a trailer truck. There I found an office-no, a nurse's station, small but complete, with electric lights. The tailgate came up; the upper doors were not shut and the van roared directly underground, down into a tunnel. It continued for a time at top speed. Then we stopped, the giant engine idling. It went on idling.
There was only one nurse in attendance. She saw that I was agitated and offered to shave me. I admitted I could use a shave. She therefore lathered me and did the job with a disposable Schick or Gillette. Few nurses understand how to shave a man. They lay on the foam without softening the beard first as old-time barbers used to do with hot towels. When you haven't been soaped and soaked the scraping blade pulls the stubble and your face stings.
I said to the nurse that I was expecting my wife Rosamund at four o'clock, and it was already well past four on the big circular clock. "Where do you think we are?" The nurse couldn't say. My guess was that we were underneath Kenmore Square in Boston, and if they had stopped the engine idling we would have been able to hear the Green Line subway trains. It was now going on six o'clock, whether a. m. or p. m. who could say? We were now docking slowly beside a pedestrian passageway where people-not too many-went up into the street or came down from it.
"You look a little like an Indian brave," the nurse said. "Also you've lost so much weight that you're more wrinkled, and the beard grows inside the furrows. It's hard to get at. Were you stout once?"
"No, but my build has changed many times. I always looked better sitting than standing," I said, and despite my sad heart I laughed.
She wasn't able to make anything of these remarks.
And there had been no van. I had had to vacate my room-it was urgently needed-and I was moved in the night to another part of the hospital. "Where have you been?" I said to Rosamund when she arrived. I was annoyed with her. But she explained that she had suddenly sat up in bed wide awake and uneasy about me. She telephoned the intensive care unit, learned that I had been transferred, jumped into a cab and rushed over.
"It's evening," I said.
"No, it's dawn."
"And where am I?"
The attending nurse was remarkably quick and sympathetic. She pulled the curtain around my bed and said to my wife, "Take off your shoes and get in with him. A few hours of sleep are what you need. Both of you."
One more brief vision, for purposes of orientation.
Vela figures in this one.
So here are the two of us on exhibit for all the world to judge. Her open, elegant hand directs attention to my uneasy posture.
She and I find ourselves in this scenario standing before the polished stone wall of a bank interior-an investment bank. On this occasion we were again on the outs. But I had come to the bank to meet at her request. She was escorted by a Spanish-looking and very elegant man in his mid-to late-twenties. A third man was present as well, a banker who spoke in French. Before us, set into the glamorous marble wall, were two coins. One a U. S. dime, the other a silver dollar with a diameter often or twelve feet.
Vela introduced me to the Spanish companion. It wasn't much of an introduction, since he did not acknowledge me. She then said, explaining simply, "Until now I never had any experience of glamorous sex before, and I figured, in what you always call the sexual revolution, I should have a sample of it-to find out for once what I was deprived of with you."
I said, "It's like a huge rabbit hutch, millions of rabbits, with the does sampling all the buck rabbits."
But this first phase of the meeting was quickly behind us. Its purpose, evidently, was to fill me with guilt and inject me with a mental solvent or softener.
"Can you tell me where we are?" I asked. "And why we are meeting here in front of these coins? They signify-what?"
Then the banker came forward and said that over a period of years the dime on the right would turn into the dollar with the ten-foot diameter.
"How long will it take?"
"A century or a little more."
"Well, I don't doubt the arithmetic is right-but for whom would this be done?"
"For yourself," said Vela.
"Me? And how do you figure?"
"Through cryonics," she said. "A person lets himself be frozen and stored. A century later they thaw him or her back to life. Don't you remember that we read in a tabloid how Howard Hughes had himself frozen and would be thawed and revived when they found a cure for the disease which was killing him? This is called cryonics."
"Let's hear what you want me to do. Guesswork is no use. What have you got in mind-when would you like me frozen?"
"You'd do it now. I'd go later. Then we'd wake up together in the twenty-second century."
The gray glow and the high polish of the marble slabs were calculated to persuade anybody of eternal dollar stability. But it was also the facade of a cold-storage plant-or crypt. This was foolish, perhaps. Your body would be stacked with other investors behind the marble facade. You would lie in a lab with technician-priests who tended you generation after generation, regulating the temperature, the moisture, and keeping tabs on your condition.
"You'd live again," Vela said. "Figure the compound interest per million. We would both live."
"Companions of old age?…"
The bank man, actually wearing a cutaway coat, said in a practiced voice, "By then the life span will be upward of two hundred years."
"It's the only chance for our marriage," Vela told me.