“Would you stop saying that?” he shouted. “I am not going to explode!”
But then he did.
1.17
Jim came to visit and stood right here, Jane thought, and paused to marvel, despite herself, at the size of the room. A moment later it occurred to her that Jim was there right now. She wanted to turn to Sally and grab her by the strange, harness-like piece of macramé and turquoise jewelry she was wearing, and shake her, and cry, “It’s a tomb!” But of course it’s a tomb, she thought. All pyramids are tombs. The gigantic room, as big as a warehouse, was sprayed with blue and green light that gathered in long pools separated by columns of deep shadow. The dewars were arranged in neat glinting aisles. It was cool but not cold. Jane had thought she’d be able to see her breath in the air.
“May I give the dewars my blessing?” Sally asked. She’d brought out a set of crystals on a string and was twirling them gently.
“Of course you may,” Poppy said. “Though it’s probably not strictly necessary.” She smiled at Jane. “They’re down here on the bottom for a reason, behind nine layers of fail-safes that anticipate every kind of disaster that’s ever happened on the earth and several that haven’t happened yet but just might one day.”
“Now I’m asking for their blessing,” Sally intoned. She had her eyes closed, and her crystal was whizzing. Bill was standing with his arms outstretched to the dewars, smiling and humming. “They’re alive!” he whispered, loud as a shout. “I can feel them!”
“Of course they’re alive, silly,” said Poppy. “We are all alive.” She closed her eyes, and seemed to have a little moment of her own.
“May I touch one?” Jane asked, trying to approximate a look of wonder like everyone else was wearing. She found it wasn’t hard — dewar-haunted looked a lot like dewar-reverent.
“ ’Fraid not!” said Poppy. “But you can get close enough to touch one.” Her smile was bright blue in the funny submarine light. “Go on. I trust you!”
Jane took a breath, and a step toward the dewars, then took off running, as fast as she could, into the stubby chrome forest. “Hey!” Poppy said. “Hey! That’s not okay!”
You need to get in deep, Hecuba had written. The Kiss needs to circulate, and the closest air intake is at least thirty yards from the door. Did you memorize the schematic?
Yes, Jane had typed. She had pored over it. She had studied it so hard she had dreamed every night since of walking through an endless field of frozen heads, looking for her husband. So there was something familiar about her flight into this forest of silver tree trunks, a feeling that she had already been doing this forever, or that she would be doing this forever.
I just want to see his face, Jane had written. But of course there weren’t any windows on the dewars. And though she had followed the path she marked out on the plans (stolen, Hecuba said when she emailed them, by a lady from Newark, whose husband had died on their honeymoon), she couldn’t know for sure that she was even in Jim’s neighborhood of the graveyard, and it was too dark to be certain of the serial numbers on the dewars. But she stopped in front of the one she thought was right, and put her hand on it.
Poppy’s shouting already sounded very near, but Jane didn’t hurry. She rested her head against the dewar, thinking to herself, Jim would know what to say. All she could think of was “Oh, Jim, what did you do?” That came out in a not-very-elegant croak, and then she had nothing else to say, like any other time in their marriage when it was her turn to chase, and his to withdraw like a pouting child, after a fight. And really that’s all this was, she told herself. If she could just calm down for a moment and establish the right perspective, then she would see that this was just another awful fight, and it had fallen to her, as it did sometimes, to take the risk of reconciling them.
She brought out the Kiss, asking herself if blowing it all over his dewar, a total discharge of her rage in one furious, shrieking breath, would be exactly the first step of that reconciliation. She opened the envelope and took a great preparatory inhalation.
She held the breath, and held it, even while her eyes filled with tears, the dewars shimmering in front of her. She carefully resealed the envelope and put it back in her pocket, and only then did she exhale, the breath long and quiet, with her head resting on Jim’s dewar, and with the very last of it she whispered, “Always together.” When Poppy found her at last, she was slumped quietly against the cool metal surface.
“Holy Future!” Poppy shrieked. “What are you doing!” She pulled Jane back roughly by her arm, then fluttered around the dewar, checking lights and gauges.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Jane said.
“Something horrible,” Poppy said. “That’s for sure. I’m taking you to see Brian right now.”
“Yes,” Jane said. “I’m ready to see him now.” Poppy marched her back to the door, where Sally and Bill were standing nervously. Jane wanted to bleat at them, but suddenly felt too tired for it. It was a tense, silent ride back up to the ground floor. Poppy put Jane in the front seat, where she could keep an eye on her. Sally leaned forward, at one point, to whisper that if Jane had fucked this up for them all she was going to make her very sorry, but Jane was too tired, or just not angry enough anymore, to turn around and tell her to fuck off.
Brian’s office was a wide stretch on the second floor with a view through a stand of poplars to the lake. Poppy left her standing at the glass wall, giving her one last long frown before she went. Brian came in and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it before she let him turn her around. His large soft beard made his whole face seem soft, and his eyes were in fact as black as the buttons on a teddy bear’s face.
“Dr. Cotton,” he said at last, but only after Jane had started to cry. “Welcome. Come sit with me.” He led her to a conference table and pulled out a chair.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she said. Taking the Kiss in its envelope from her pocket, she put it on the table and said, “I only came up here to give you this. It’s some kind of poison or whatever. It will shut down your dewars. Thaw your heads. But it’s over now. I just wanted to see his face. Or something like that.”
“I knew it!” Brian said, pounding the table with one hand and making a kind of wiggly, celebratory motion in the air with the other one. He was just as young as he had sounded — far too young and handsome, she thought, to be caught up in this atrocious business of death, but then she always thought that when she met a young, handsome funeral director or pathologist, one who looked as if he should smell like a sweaty boy instead of formaldehyde and sweet rot. And the beard! It was as soft and curly as she had imagined, identical in texture and length to his hair, so the overall effect, with his plump cheeks and black button eyes, was that he seemed to be peeking at her from behind a bush. He took her hand, catching it again when she pulled away. “I knew you would do it,” he said.
“Do what?” Jane asked.
“Pass the test,” he said, indicating the unopened envelope on the table with his eyes.