First Shift - Legacy

Henson shuffled through a drawer of forms while his assistant unbuckled Hal’s coveralls. The men from Security asked if they were needed, checked the restraints a final time, and were waved away. While their boots faded toward the lift, one of them laughed out loud over something the other said, already back to joking.

Troy, meanwhile, lost himself in Hal’s slack face, the slight rise and fall of his old and narrow chest. Here was the reward for remembering, he thought. This man had woken up from the routine of the asylum. He hadn’t gone crazy; he’d had a sudden bout of clarity. He’d cracked his eyes and seen through the mist.

Troy tucked his hands in his armpits and tried to remain calm, to remain detached. He didn’t want Henson to see his trembling hands or suspect that he’d had glimpses as well.

A clipboard was procured from a peg on the wall, the right form shoved into its metal jaws. Troy was handed a pen. He scratched a name, but it didn’t feel right. What was this meaninglessness with a pen when a needle had already bit a man’s flesh? This wasn’t the deed, these forms and ink. The deed was on a table with a slack jaw and drooping lids.

He handed the clipboard back and watched the two doctors work; he wondered if they felt any of what he felt. What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every inmate in this asylum was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt utterly and completely alone?

“Could you get that one for me?”

The medical assistant was down on his knees, twisting a knob on the base of the table. Troy saw that it was on wheels. The assistant nodded toward Troy’s feet.

“Of course.” Troy crouched down to free the wheel. He was a part in this. It was his signature on the form. It was him twisting the knob that would free the table and allow it to roll down the hall.

With Hal under, the restraints were loosened, his coveralls peeled off with care. Troy volunteered with the boots, unknotting the laces and setting them aside. There was no need for a paper gown—that was for the modesty of the awake. An IV needle was inserted and taped down; Troy knew it would plug into the pod. He knew what it felt like to have ice crawl through his veins.

When Henson told them everything was ready, Troy helped guide the foot of the table, the assistant doing most of the pushing. They followed the doctor out the door and down the hallway, past the room Troy had woken up in, past his empty and waiting coffin, and further down toward the room that sang out to him most nights, the room he had wanted to visit that first day of his shift, the room that lay full of some forgotten misery that didn’t want to be remembered. It was a room for the long-sleeping, and it tugged on his gut similar to how the cafeteria yanked on his soul. It was no wonder he felt torn apart living and working in the numb space in between: there was something at either end of the building calling out to him, some hurt too strong to recall but impossible to ignore.

They brought the gurney to a halt outside the reinforced steel doors of the deep-freeze. Troy studied the doors. They seemed familiar. He seemed to remember speccing something similar for a project once, but that was for a room full of machines. No, computers. Shards of the past came back, slid like ghost ships through the mist.

The keypad on the wall chirped as the doctor entered his code. There was the heavy thunk of rods withdrawing into the thick jamb and the hiss and sigh of an unbreathing room as it cracked its mouth.

“The empties are at the end,” Henson said, nodding into the distance.

Troy steered while the assistant pushed. Wheels squeaked and squealed, their echoes filling this inner sanctum. Troy felt guilty about the noise, even though the sleep in that room could not be so easily disturbed.

Rows and rows of gleaming and sealed beds marched by. The gurney and the three men seemed to stand still while the pods drifted past. Troy felt numb. He was out of his own body as a memory returned. The room was chilly. His eyes fell to the readout screens on the bases of each pod. There were green lights solid with life, numbers showing the chill of the frozen, no space needed for a pulse or heartbeat, first names only, no last, no way to connect these strangers to their legacy. No way to connect them to what they’d done.

Cassie, Catherine, Gabriella, Gretchen.

Made-up names.

Gwynn. Halley. Heather.

Everyone in order. No shifts for them. Nothing for the men to fight over. It would all be done in an instant. Step inside the lifeboat, dream a moment, step out onto dry land.

Another Heather. Duplicates without last names. Troy wondered how that would work. He steered blindly between the rows, the doctor and his assistant chatting about the procedure, when a name stabbed at his peripheral, a fierce quake vibrating through his limbs.

Helen. And another: Helen.

Troy lost his grip on the gurney and nearly fell. The wheels squealed to a stop.

“Sir?”

Two Helens. But before him, on a crisp display showing the frozen temps of a deep, deep slumber, another:

Helena.

Troy staggered away from the gurney and the still form of Hal’s nakedness. The echo of the old man’s feeble screams came back to him, insisting he was someone named Carlton. Troy ran his hands along the curved top of the cryopod. She was here. He knew she was, but always in the ephemeral way like how he vaguely knew that his organs were buried within his own body. Except suddenly, everything was exposed. Like skin peeled back, layers of his being forgotten. He was invisible, the lies on the surface transparent. He saw his spleen, wet and shiny. Coils of intestine. These things that were a part of him, things tucked away and now resting visible beneath his palm.

“Sir? We really need to keep moving—”

Troy ignored the doctor. He rubbed the glass shield, the cold inside leaching into his hand, the chill in the air creeping deep into the marrow of his bones. Troy’s gut tightened around a memory—

“Sir—”

A spiderweb of frost covered the glass. He wiped the frozen film of condensation away so he could see inside.

“We need to get this man installed—”

Sealed eyes lay inside that cold and dark place. Skin and air held a tint of blue. Blades of ice, like a snow queen’s mascara, clung to her lashes. It was a familiar face, but this was not his wife.

“Sir!”

The fist in his gut—that hand that clenched desperately around the nothingness—it stirred. It punched upward into his heart. Troy stumbled, hands slapping at the cold coffin for balance, bile rising in his throat with remembrance, his body searching for some medicine to dissolve.

He heard himself gag, felt his limbs twitch, his knees buckle. He hit the ground between two of the pods and shook violently, spit on his lips, strong memories wrestling with the last residue of weak drugs.

The two men in white barked at each other. Footsteps slapped frosted steel and faded toward the distant and heavy door. Shivers and inhuman gurgles hit his own ears and sounded faintly as though they came from him.

But who was he? What was he doing there? What were any of them doing?

The shakes subsided to a vibration, a bass chord thumbed hard and shivering home from some invisible state. Troy settled into this sonorous tremble, the cold floor distant somehow, his body growing numb as his mind became aware.

This was not Helen. His name was not Troy.

He almost had it as feet stomped his way in a hurry. The name was on his tongue as the needle bit his flesh.

Donny.

But that wasn’t right, either.

And then the darkness took him, the cold enveloping him like a hoary cocoon, tightening down around anything from his past that his mind deemed too awful to bear.