“Well,” Jane had replied, “he broke a promise too, didn’t he?” She meant his marriage vows, one of which had been, at Jim’s own insistence, that the two of them would remain together beyond death. At first that just meant they would be eternity to each other. Then, later, Jane understood it to mean they would cleave to each other beyond the efforts of their individual experiences of grief (past, present, and future) to drive them apart. Which it did try to do, over and over, and yet they always managed (sometimes triumphantly, she would like to say) to muddle through. Always together, never apart was what they had promised, even if they never quite permanently vanquished their respective intimacy issues. But now Jane was quite sure that remaining together beyond death meant nothing at all if it didn’t mean that neither of them would sign up alone for an afterlife — and never mind that it was as fake and stupid as any scheme of ordinary religion. The whole terrible surprise of this Polaris Incident, as her mother liked to call it, felt somehow like Jim had left her for somebody else, like infidelity added to death. If she thought for a minute that he would understand, Jane might have tried to tell these things to Dick, before her mother took the phone away from her and hung up on him.
Jane stood for the hymns during the service but did not sing. Her aunt Millicent, who had arrived as always in tow with her mother, warbled prettily beside her, her voice very much like her sister’s, but without the confidence, strength, or control. Millicent had been out of her mind with dementia for almost five years. “As the deer panteth for the water,” she sang, smiling, “so my soul longeth after thee!” When she saw Jane looking at her, she winked, and Jane thought, Exactly — this whole thing is a practical joke. She knew already from her work — because her young patients sometimes died — how the world could seem unreal to the bereaved. That was something Jim used to talk about all the time, how he had spent the afternoon on the moons of Jupiter or in darkest Narnia, when he meant he had been professionally immersed in somebody else’s grief. It was all supposed to seem unreal or impossible, but it wasn’t supposed to be ridiculous.
“Do you mean to tell me,” Jane had asked Brian, the Polaris customer-service representative, “that you think what you did was legal?”
“Of course, Dr. Cotton.” He had a quality to his voice that she would describe to her mother as furry, meaning that when she tried to picture what he looked like she could only visualize a teddy bear, its face stuck in a stupid sympathetic half-smile. “Can you imagine that we would offer our service if it wasn’t?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s legal in Florida,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. That doesn’t mean I won’t have the health department come confiscate every last drop of liquid nitrogen in your filthy buckets.”
“We call them dewars. And, Dr. Cotton, I just want to tell you that everything you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”
“Normal?” she said, and then she shouted, “I don’t think you people are allowed to use that word!”
At the funeral, they sang “Abide with Me” and “When We Were Living” and listened to a succession of eulogies. Jane’s mother had sat up all night writing a sermon on the death of Abigail Adams, in which she expounded upon the gifts of time and silence, but it was Dick and his friends, who sat in a block and wore Viking helmets, who gave most of the speeches, telling stories — each one felt more endless than the last — about Jim at work and at play.
Jane tried not to listen to any of the eulogies because it felt like all the speakers were conspiring to make her break down. Now she appreciated how fire arrows and a hurly match and Renaissance Fair turkey legs and even the burning boat and burning body would be easier to deal with than this train of perfectly sincere people who wielded their affectionate memories of Jim like heavy cudgels, all aimed directly at her face. And how many times could somebody hit you in the face before you started to cry?
Millicent was lifting her dress by slow inches and looking slyly around the crowded church. She rarely disrobed completely, but she liked to flash her panties. Jane gently smoothed the dress down over Millicent’s lap, then pulled her aunt’s head to her shoulder. Dick had ascended the pulpit to imagine out loud the wonders of the future into which Jim would wake. He told them all not to be sad, because Jim wasn’t really dead: When you thought about it, he had just undertaken a truly remarkable journey. Dick confessed he’d been just as astonished as anyone that Jim had arranged to take this particular journey, but wasn’t that exactly the gift he had left them all, the very good news that every one of them could follow their dear friend into the future and be with him forever? He said more, but Jane plugged her ears and leaned forward, trying to look funeral-casual, as if she were overwhelmed with sadness rather than anger and disgust. She did not stand up and shout, That’s not how it was supposed to be! She and Jim were going to be together forever in oblivion, and now this fool was inviting the whole church to an imaginary afterlife that Jane wouldn’t have any part in.
“It’s a mistake,” she had told Brian. “You have to understand. He wouldn’t have believed in what you do. I know he wouldn’t. He didn’t believe in anything but right now.”
“I know it must be a shock,” Brian said. “And I’m very sorry. But it happens very commonly. I can tell you you’re not the first spouse that’s been surprised like this.”
“It’s not what he believed,” Jane said, as if Brian simply hadn’t heard her. “And what you’re talking about isn’t even possible. So, please, just tell me what I have to do to get his head back from you.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cotton,” he’d said. “What you’re asking for—that’s not possible. The way we understand the situation, that would be like killing him. Do you see what I mean?”
She did not see. Or rather, all she could see when she tried was Jim’s head frozen in a block of water, an enormous novelty ice cube. Or she saw his head being lowered by the hair into a bubbling and spitting pool of liquid nitrogen, then accidentally dropped on a marble floor, his features scattering every which way in shards. Or she saw his pale bloodless face suspended in a tall jar of blue barbershop disinfectant, eyes lifeless but not blank, still full of horror at how he had fallen for a bait and switch. She demanded proof that they had actually done what they had been contracted to do, that they hadn’t just wrapped his head in toilet paper and tossed it out in the hospital trash.
“Of course,” Brian said. “We maintain full video documentation of the vitrification process.” And while Polaris wasn’t required by any law to show that to her, they certainly would, if she wanted them to. Did she want them to?
He waited very patiently while she failed to answer, not hanging up or even asking if she was still there. And when her silence transitioned to quiet sobs, he waited even a little longer before he said, “I really am sorry, Dr. Cotton. I’m so sorry for your perceived loss.”