Чарли Андерс: Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

As for Antonia, I think this whole experience toughened her up, and made her realize that being a little bit wild-animal wasn’t a bad thing for a fairy princess. And that Anthony Kiedis really doesn’t have the singing range he thinks he has. And that when it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. And that running away from your problems only works for so long. There were a few other lessons, all of which I printed out and laminated for her. She still sings in the bar, but she’s made a couple of trips back to Sylvania during the crescent moon, and they’re working on a cure for her. She could probably go back and be a princess if she wanted to, but we’ve been talking about going into business together and opening some straight-up karaoke bars in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. She’s learning to KJ. I think we could rule the world.

I never felt like a real college girl until I met John my senior year. He and I stayed up all night talking and then ran around campus chalking pastel hearts and portraits of Václav Havel on the cement walkways. A manic fox with wavy brown hair, he could come to rest suddenly and eye me with a playful stillness that made me ache. He managed to be both clever and smart, lean as well as dimpled. When he touched my hand and made an observation about the geometry of my fingers and the just-discovered significance of something I’d said a week earlier, lust tightened all the muscles from my stomach down to my knees.

By winter senior year, John and I were spending every night together and the rest of the world seemed both insignificant and enchanted, a Smurf village at our feet. He was my first love. Spring found us standing on an ancient stone bridge, arms around each other and bodies glued from sternum to ankle, watching algae bloom underwater. We breathed in sync. I leaned into John’s shoulder and inhaled slowly. The gathering warmth seemed to well up from the center of the Earth, instead of the returning sun.

A year later, we barely saw each other. We had gone from inseparable to schedule-challenged. I’d enrolled at UVA Med and John studied law at Princeton. We figured we’d spend every weekend together, then it became every other weekend, and finally it was Christmas and John became “hello stranger.”

Things came to a head when I visited John the spring after graduation. I had somehow let two months go by without inhaling the bramble scent of John’s neck. He seemed a long-lost best friend. But after the first rush of seeing John again, the visit flew by and we barely had a moment to talk. Our whole weekend together consisted of law study sessions, games of tennis, and parties where everyone talked about law and tennis.

I confronted John on Sunday afternoon. “Maybe we should see other people,” I said, dying for John to contradict me. His room had no furnishings, save for a bed and a desk with a framed picture of me, looking fizzy and blonde.

“I wish we’d met later in life,” John said. “When we’d done all the heavy lifting and career shit. But I do know the kind of connection we have is unique. We may never see anything like it again. We owe it to ourselves to keep it together.” He wept and so did I, and then we kissed and soon we were naked on the bed together crying and kissing and I missed my train back to UVA.

I took a triumphant, blessing warmth back to UVA with me, and felt its heat death over the next few days. I believed everything John had said, and yet it wasn’t enough. We went back to brief emails and occasional phone calls. Our relationship wasn’t on the back burner, it was in a meat locker miles from the kitchen.

That frozen feeling in the midst of spring prodded my imagination just as I walked past the cryonics lab where my friend Maisie worked, in a boxy red brick converted tobacco warehouse. Inside, I tried to see where workers had hefted bales and rolled cigarettes. Now it was all plasterboard walls and purring machines.

The next thing I knew, I had talked to Maisie for a few hours. Maisie showed me equipment and introduced me to her boss and coworkers. I had already learned in med school that you could slow the body’s functions to a standstill using a combination of intravenous drugs and industrial coolants. Maisie spouted phrases like “metabolic coma” and “molasses-slow polymerase.” An idea took shape.

I called John a few days later. “Just think about it. You said it would have been better if we’d met later in life. This way we can. We’ll be like no other couple, as extraordinary in our courtship as our connection. No, hear me out. It’ll be at least seven years before we can pay attention to each other. And during that time, we each have to be able to relocate to a random location, like the President at Defcon Five. We both work in fields designed for single-achiever families. Well, this is the answer!” I finished my pitch, breathless. I knew John could easily shoot down my fairy-godmother solution.

Instead he considered carefully. Of course, being a law student, he asked about the legalities. I explained the cryo lab wasn’t officially part of the university, it was a private company that benefited from the university’s talent pool. The FDA had approved stage three cryo trials about five years earlier, and maybe a hundred people around the country were in suspension now. We would have to sign a stack of release forms the thickness of a Gideon Bible.

“So you’re sure this new technique is safe? No side effects?” John asked, and I offered reassurance. “So I slide into this overgrown lipstick tube for seven years. You keep me sitting in your room around all through med school and residency, like some kind of statue. Then when you finish residency, we turn the tables. I go out and conquer the universe, while you turn into the world’s lowest-maintenance girlfriend. Right? Then fourteen years from now, we’re both just seven years older and fully qualified to live where we want and do our jobs. It’s an audacious plan. No doubt about that.”

“You mean you’ll think about it?”

“I mean it reminds me of why I fell in love with you in the first place, Willa. Nobody else could have come up with such sensible lunacy. Let me get back to you.”

We each talked to our friends and families. Everyone made fun of my plan, but I sensed a tinge of envy at how bold and romantic it was.

“If I say yes, how do I know you’ll awaken me?” John asked a few days later.

“Because I’ll miss your conversation,” I laughed. “You’ll be a boring stiff.”

John said okay. A month or so later, he ate his favorite meal (fish tacos) and we had boisterous sex. Then he put on a white suit and black tie and we drove to the medical school, where Maisie and her boss Dr. Abbye did some last-minute tests on John and then put him on a slab, which slid inside a great silver shell.

A few hours later, I had a new decoration for my apartment: a shiny chrome tube that stood against one wall, with a big window showing John’s face. John’s expression looked sardonic from some angles, mournful from others. He stood in the corner of my bedroom, casting a blue glow in the middle of the night. I got used to his presence there, only to have it startle me anew when I’d just gotten out of the shower or sat scratching myself in bed. I got used to explaining John to the lovers I brought home, but also to going to other people’s places instead. Once a month, I trimmed John’s beard and fingernails. When I went away on vacation, I got a friend to come in once a day and check on John, whose bio monitors never hinted at trouble. I compared him sometimes to the cadaver I dissected at school—inanimate but intimate. Except John had a world of potential the cadaver lacked.