Freelance Illustrator

I toured their factory. I saw the place where what was left of me would find its rest. A pool of nitrogen, wherein we guests will sleep for ages, waiting for the race of future not-quite-mortals who'll erase the ill that brought us there, and then invest our frozen bones with life again. The rest is up to us: to find ourselves a place in that future world.

But what caught at me was the cold: ice to freeze these cancer sores 'into limbo. That future paradise was too remote (and wasn't guaranteed). Pain flame and cryogenic reservoir: the first time that I died was fire and ice.

The final months of life, I had to bide, and let the cancer win. An accident, a stroke, a murder or a suicide any end that's swift, convenient would mean the brain would start to die without the tubes and wires in place to save the cells that make us who we are. A final bout with pain, indignity, hospital smells and lights and noise, noise.

Then death. And then the blood sucked out, replaced with slippery stuff that doesn't freeze. The pool of nitrogen...but I could feel. I wasn't dead enough. At least it was relief from uncontrolled cancer fire, as pain drugs lost their hold.

I do remember that the doctors said the senses would be gone; no ear nor eye nor skin for silence, dark, and cold. But I suspect that they could tell I wasn't dead. I wonder if they knew this gelid bed becomes a bed of dreams. You don't quite die, but live through life again-and magnify, with inching slowness, pain and shame and dread.

Recalling every kid I tattled on. Recapitulating every mean seduction, lie, double cross and vice that soured my eighty years. Would I have gone if I had known what I was getting when I told them go ahead and throw the dice?

Not quite dead. I wondered if they knew for centuries I wondered-then for more than centuries I plotted, and I swore a sick revenge on that unholy crew, who locked me in this frozen cell, this brew of steamy cold.

But slowly, reason bore dull fruit: since no one yet had come ashore from this frigid sea, they had no clue to hint that we might dream as well as sleep. And though it felt like centuries that rolled along, waiting for this sudden leap of logic-it was moments, rendered old and slow in this frozen brain's deep surrender to the cryogenic cold.

I know I lost my mind, knowing this that if I slept for just one hundred years before the warming metamorphosis, I'd live a million centuries of fears and pains recalled—a track of frozen tears and silent screams that crawled its creeping way to Dante's final circle: to the biers of ice reserved for those who have to pay the price for playing God.

I screamed away a few millenniums in that cold hell, or maybe microseconds. I didn't stay insane for longer than Rome rose and fell, Please. Thaw or kill these frozen brains; these old and torn, worn and stitched remains.

Time. I had time. Dust turns into stars, stars turn into rock, in the millenniums I screamed away in madness. But as the sun will one day cool to red, to brown, to black; so cooled my lunacy. If it left scars, it also paid this priceless premium: no one's sanity was ever won back from such a long and twisted track.

I do remember crazy people. Poor Bernice, who had it all: cool intelligence, beauty, youth, my love. The way that she destroyed that body makes me glad to be alive, without the inconvenience of the body that I so gladly wore.

What I'd seen as prison was complete freedom!—-inconceivable to those who simply live. Bars of time enclose your cage: your heart will beat two billion beats and then your mind will stop. My mind cheats the grave; my body will not decompose in all this time I have. Time that froze not the mind, but just the dying meat.