The Long Part

The board counts in heartbeats instead of seconds, and my father was down to nine a minute when I finally let myself believe we were going to go through with it.

Nine. Then a long nothing, the kind of pause that sent me running for a cart my first year on the deck, and then a tenth beat, slow, almost an afterthought. We call that stretch the long part. It's where most families come apart. They've signed the consent, they've said their goodbyes, and then they watch the number fall and some animal piece of them stands up and decides this isn't sleep, this is the other thing, and they grab my sleeve.

My father didn't grab anybody. He'd been the one pushing since the day the clinic put a name to what was eating the nerves in his hands and told him nobody would have a fix for it inside his lifetime. Not inside the part of his lifetime that ran at normal speed, anyway. He'd hung cabinets and door trim for forty years. Those hands were most of who he was.

I should explain where we were, because it isn't a hospital, whatever the brochures want you to think. It's a long cold room on the fourth floor of a building that used to make insurance calls, and it holds two hundred and forty people on cooling decks, stacked three high, each one wrapped in a gray gel sleeve with a line running into the femoral and a line running out. The room is kept at four degrees. You can see your breath over the sleepers. Most of them have been under longer than I've worked here, and I've worked here six years.

The thing slows you down. That's the whole product. A pump takes your blood out warm and puts it back cold until the cold holds on its own, and a drip keeps your cells from tearing apart in the cold, and your body forgets it's supposed to be in a hurry. Heart rate drops. Then it drops again. The deck I run takes people from a normal sixty or seventy beats down to the teens, and then we decide, with the family, how far past that to go.

There are two ways past. You can buy a wake date. You pick a year, you pay for the years between, and a clock somewhere agrees to bring you up on schedule whether the world is ready for you or not. Or you can park. Parking means no date. Parking means a beat every few minutes, metabolism down near the floor, and you come up when the thing that's wrong with you can be fixed and not one day before. Parking is cheaper, because cheap is what you get when you stop promising anyone a future.

My father wanted to park.

We'd fought about it in the intake room, which is the only warm room on the floor, with two chairs and a plant that I'm fairly sure is plastic. I'd run the numbers for him like I run them for strangers. A wake date six years out was what he could afford. Six years, and he comes up still sick, into a world that still can't help him, and we do this again, except he's six years frailer and there's less of him to cool.

"So it buys nothing," he said.

"It buys six years where I know where you are," I said. "Where there's a day on a calendar."

He looked at me for a while. His hands were shaking on the armrests, that fine tremor that had started the whole thing, and he didn't try to hide it the way he did at dinner.

"You've parked people," he said. "How many of them have you brought back up?"

I didn't answer, which was an answer.

In six years on the deck I have brought up exactly four people, and all four had wake dates, and three of them sued the building inside a month because the world they woke into had moved on without leaving a note. The parked don't come up. Their cures don't arrive. Their money runs out, or their families do, and the building has a clause for that, and the clause is that nothing happens. They just stay. Two hundred and forty people at four degrees, and the oldest contract on my deck was signed before I was born.

Lewis trained me on all of it. He's been running cold decks since before they were legal for anything but the dying, and he has a way of talking about the sleepers that took me years to stop hating. He calls them the patient patients. He says it flat, no smile, while he checks the lines.

"You want him on a date," Lewis said, the morning of, while we prepped the deck. "I get it. Dates are for the ones standing up." He tapped the sleeve of the woman below my father's slot, a parked contract from the thirties, frost on the label where the sleeve runs coldest. "She's not waiting for medicine. Medicine came for her thing eleven years ago. Nobody's paid to wake her and ask."

"Then why's she still cold?"

"Because warming her up is a decision," he said, "and parking her was just a form." He pulled his gloves tight. "Your dad knows exactly what he's choosing. That's rarer than you'd think down here. Don't take it from him because you can't stand the math."

I wanted to tell him the math was the only honest thing in the building. I didn't, because he already knew, and because my father was waiting in the warm room with his coat still on like he might change his mind, and I knew he wouldn't.

So we did it. I cleaned the insertion sites myself. I won't pretend my hands were steady, but they were steadier than his, and that felt like the last useful thing I had. The drip went in. The pump took the first warm pull and gave it back cold, and he made a small sound, the sound you make stepping into water that's deeper than you thought, and then he settled.

I watched the board.

Sixty. Forty. The twenties, where people start to look like they're sleeping and stop looking like they're leaving. The teens. Nine, and the long part, that gap that used to make me reach for the cart. I didn't reach. I'd disabled the slow-rate alarm an hour before, the way you do for a park, because the whole point is to go slower than the thing that would call for help.

Six beats. Then a beat, and a wait I could have walked the length of the room in, and another beat. The number on his sleeve stopped being a rate you could read. One every four minutes. One every five. The board stopped trying to average it and just showed the last one, and the time since, counting up in green while everything in him counted down.

I logged the contract. Park, indefinite, condition-of-wake noted in a field nobody reads. I wrote the condition out longer than I needed to, the exact name of the thing in his nerves, so that if anyone ever did read it they'd know he wasn't asking for forever. He was asking for one specific morning that hasn't been invented yet.

Then there was nothing left to do that the room wouldn't do on its own for the next however-long, so I put my hand flat on the gel over his chest and waited for the next beat. It came. I didn't wait for the one after. You can stand there for the one after and the one after that and lose the whole afternoon, and Lewis caught my eye from the far end of the deck and didn't say anything, which is how he says it.

I took the stairs because the elevator is slow and I couldn't be in a slow thing right then. Outside it was the ordinary warm of a city afternoon, buses and the smell of hot asphalt, everybody moving at the speed people move, sixty beats, seventy, hearts going like they had somewhere to be. Mine was. I could feel it in my throat on the steps, fast, wasteful, spending itself.

He'll come up the morning they can fix him, or he won't come up at all, and from where he is now those are the same length of time. I'm the one still falling toward my own number at full speed, one a second, no date, no park, the long part coming for me the regular way. I stood on the sidewalk and let the crowd go around me and I counted my own pulse until I lost the count, which didn't take long, because it was going so fast.