“My, you certainly don’t beat about the bush.”
“At best you will be seen here as circus acts,” the therapist continued, as if being called pestersome and repulsive wasn’t cruel enough. “Your sense of yourself is constructed more than you realize from the other people you’ve known and cared for. Even the nemeses you’ve despised have helped form your defining context. Now all you have for context is your wife.”
Cyril looked to his lap. He felt inklings of something like shame. “Kay,” he said heavily, though he wondered if citing anyone’s name in this communitarian blob was an act of sedition. “Something has happened to her.”
“Something has happened to you both,” the therapist corrected. “Previous interviews would suggest that you’ll find what has happened to you even harder to accept than the changes in your spouse.”
“I don’t understand it,” Cyril said. “When we signed the papers at Sleeping Beauties Ltd—a ridiculous name for a scientific enterprise—I didn’t have any real confidence that we’d survive. But to my astonishment, although I may still be in my eighties, I can walk, eat, and sleep; as far as I can tell, my body is working as well as before, and now if I can believe your medic I don’t even have pancreatic cancer any more. So why is everything so . . . stark, and . . . plain, and . . . dead?”
“Recall a packet of mince that’s been in the freezer for a long time,” the therapist returned. “When you thaw the meat, it’s still made of protein, and it will still nourish you in a purely nutritional sense. But all its delicate flavours have been lost. On the edges, the colour has gone grey and the texture is dry; the water has separated from the fibres, which have become unpleasantly tough and chewy. As we don’t eat ‘mince’ today, I took that image from your memory, so I’m certain you know what I’m talking about. And I have to say, I picked up that memory and fled, because I don’t know how you can stand it in there. Your mind is a cold cave, and I’m still choking on its dry dust.”
Cyril was strangely certain which memory the therapist had pilfered. With great fanfare, he had presented his wife with a cubic chest freezer for their first anniversary, making them brave early adopters of what was not yet a standard-issue middle-class white good. As if to please the Gods of preservation, they offered up to the appliance a ritualistic pound of mince—for in those days, freezing was an entertainment. Perhaps in time the totemic packet was simply forgotten and obscured by fresher fare. While the lump knocked about for years, its butcher’s paper tore and its twine loosened. She finally thawed the once-ceremonial mound when they were preparing to move to the house in Lambeth. The meat was awful. The family stoically suffered through their patties anyway.
“Not only your body was metaphorically put on ice,” the counsellor carried on, “but also, well, your essence, your finer feelings; if you will, your soul. We’ve seen it before. In fact, we’ve seen it every time. For lack of a better term, you have freezer burn.”
* * *
The Wilkinsons were provided shared quarters, which like all the structures in this future—this present—were simple and serviceable. Had she ever pursued that absurd whim of hers to become an interior designer, Kay would have scavenged few clients here. Like the language, the décor was pared down to essentials.
They stood that evening gawkily, unsure whether to stand or sit or sit where, as if they’d not spent over sixty years going about their business and intersecting by chance and then convening to a purpose in the same house.
“I talked to some sort of therapist,” Cyril said. It didn’t seem right to say absolutely nothing.
“Yes,” Kay said. She still had that dazed look, as if she were in a cartoon, a bear in a bow tie had just hit her over the head with a skillet, and the animator had drawn asterisks for eyes. “I talked to one as well.”
“I didn’t find him comforting.”
“I don’t think the intention was comfort.”
This woman who was his wife had a peculiar smell: musty with a disturbing overlay of sweetness, like an unpeeled onion. Indeed, the odour was worse than peculiar; it was repellent. Yet his mind informed him that this was the same way she had always smelt. He’d no comprehension of how he had ever been able to stand it.
“. . . Do you suppose they can fly?” Cyril proposed lifelessly.
She looked at him as if he were daft. “What.”
“The suits, covered in those fine feathers.”
She couldn’t rouse herself to a reply. The conversation was going nowhere.
“Shall we go to bed?” Cyril suggested in desperation.
“All right.”
As he undressed, he didn’t feel shy or embarrassed—in the glare of that pernicious plainness, the unveiling of a naked body didn’t appear to expose anything other than what-was—nor did he feel ashamed of a figure whose droops and mottles also simply were. He did shoot a glance at the shrivel between his legs in idle wonderment that a woman would ever have found it captivating, and that made him realize that he’d never asked if these neo-humans still had sex. But of course he hadn’t asked. His curiosity was desiccated.
Kay also undressed with plainness. They looked at each other unclothed and it was the same as looking at the wall or a chair. Nothing stirred.
Cyril had always slept on the left-hand side of the bed, territory he reclaimed reflexively. It
