The Time Keeper Part 7

"They're frozen in there now?"

"Yes."

"How are they ... positioned?"

"Upside down."

"Why?"

"In case anything should happen near the top, the most important thing is to protect the head."

Victor squeezed his cane and tried to mask his reaction. As a man used to elegant lobbies and penthouse offices, he was put off by the look of this place. Located in an industrial park in a nondescript New York suburb, it was a single-level brick building with a loading dock on the side.

Inside was equally unimpressive. A small set of rooms in the front. A lab where the bodies began the freezing process. A big open warehouse where the cylinders stood side by side, six people per unit, like an indoor cemetery with linoleum floors.

Victor had insisted on visiting the day after he received the reports. He had stayed up all night, skipping his sleeping pills, ignoring the pain in his stomach and back. He'd read everything twice. Although it was a relatively new science (the first person cryogenically frozen was in 1972), the thinking behind cryonics was not illogical. Freeze the dead body. Wait for science to advance. Unfreeze the body. Bring it back to life and cure it.

The last part, of course, would be the trickiest. But look at how mankind had advanced during his lifetime, Victor figured. Two of his childhood cousins had died of typhoid and whooping cough. Today, they'd have lived. Things changed. "Don't get too attached to anything," he reminded himself, including accepted knowledge.

"What's that?" he asked. Near the cylinders, a white wooden box, part.i.tioned by numbers, held several bouquets of flowers.

"For when family members come to visit," Jed explained. "Each number corresponds to a person in a cylinder. The visitors sit over there."

He pointed to a mustard-colored couch, pushed against the wall. Victor tried to picture Grace sitting in such a ratty thing. It made him realize he could never tell her about this idea.

She wouldn't accept it. Not a chance. Grace was a steadfast churchgoer. She did not believe in meddling with fate. And he was not about to argue with her.

No. This final plan would be up to him. We are, as we die, who we most were in life, and since he was nine years old, Victor had been accustomed to doing for himself.

He made a mental note: No visitors. No flowers. And pay whatever it took to get his own cylinder.

If he were going to wait centuries to be reborn, he would do it alone.

26.

All caves begin with rain.

The rain mixes with gas. The new acidic water eats through rocks, and tiny fractures grow into pa.s.sageways. Eventually-after many thousands of years-these pa.s.sageways might create an opening large enough for a man.

So Dor's cave was already a product of time. But inside, a new clock was ticking. From the ceiling, where the old man had cut a fissure, the dripping water gradually formed a stalact.i.te.

And as that stalact.i.te dripped onto the cave floor, a stalagmite began to rise.

Over the centuries, the two points grew toward each other, as if drawn by magnets, but so slowly that Dor never took notice.

Once, he had prided himself on keeping time with water. But man invents nothing G.o.d did not create first.

Dor was living in the biggest water clock of all.

He never thought about this. Instead, he stopped thinking altogether.

He stopped moving. He no longer stood up. He put his chin in his hands and held still amid the deafening voices.

Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.

As the voices from Earth increased exponentially, Dor heard them without distinction, the way one hears falling raindrops. His mind dulled from inactivity. His hair and beard grew comically long, as did the nails of his fingers and toes. He lost any concept of his own appearance. He had not seen his image since he and Alli went to the great river and smiled at their reflection in the water.

He wanted desperately to hold on to every memory like that. He squeezed his eyes shut to recall every detail. Until finally, at some unmarked point in his purgatory, Dor shook the lethargy of his darkness, sharpened the edge of a small rock, and began to carve on the walls.

He had carved on Earth but always as a form of timekeeping, counting, notching moons and suns, the earliest math in the world.

What Dor carved now was different. First he made three circles to remember his children. He gave each of them a name. Then he carved a quarter moon to remind him of the night he told Alli, "She is my wife." He carved a box shape to remind him of their first home together-his father's mud-brick house-and a smaller box to symbolize the reed hut they shared.

He drew an eye shape to remind him of Alli's lifted gaze, the look that made him feel tipped over. He drew wavy lines to suggest her long dark hair and the serenity he felt when he buried his face inside it.

With each new carving, he spoke out loud.

He was doing what man does when left with nothing.

He was telling himself his own life story.

27.

Lorraine knew there was a boy involved.

Why else would her daughter have worn heels last night? She only hoped Sarah hadn't picked a jerk like her father.

Grace knew Victor was frustrated.

He hated to lose. And it saddened her that this last fight, against a terminal illness, was destined to be a defeat.

Lorraine heard the front door open, and Sarah, without a word, whisked upstairs to her room.

It was how life worked between them now. They lived together but apart.

Things were different even a few years ago. When Sarah was in eighth grade, a girl in gym cla.s.s stuffed a volleyball under her shirt and, unaware Sarah was within earshot, cooed to a group of boys, "Hey, guys, I'm Sarah Lemon, can I have your French fries?" Sarah raced home crying and buried herself in her mother's lap. Lorraine stroked her hair and said, "They should all be expelled, every one of them."

She missed being of comfort like that. She missed the way they once leaned on each other. She heard Sarah moving about upstairs and wanted to speak with her. But the door was always closed.

Grace heard Victor return from his outing.

"Ruth, he's home," she said into the phone, "let me call you back."

She came to the door and took his coat.

"Where were you?"

"The office."

"You had to go on Sat.u.r.day?"

"Yes."

He hobbled down the hallway, still using his cane. She didn't ask about the manila folder under his arm. Instead she said, "Do you want some tea?"

"I'm all right."

"Something to eat?"

"No."

She remembered a time when he'd kiss her at the door, lift her a few inches off the ground and spoil her with questions like "Where do you want to go this weekend? London? Paris?" Once, on the balcony of a seaside villa, she said she wished she'd met him earlier in life, and he said, "We're gonna make up for that. We're gonna live a long time together."

She reminded herself there were moments like that once, and that she had to be patient now, more compa.s.sionate; she could not know what he was feeling inside-the dwindling days, the impending death. However cranky or distant he got, she was determined to make the little time they had left more like the start of their life together, and less like the vast, joyless middle.

She did not know, as Victor disappeared into his study, that he was thinking about another life altogether.

28.

Mankind is connected in ways it does not understand-even in dreams.

Just as Dor could hear voices from souls he could not see, so, too, on occasion, could a sleeping man or woman see his image from beyond.

In the seventeenth century, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth featured a skeleton looking over one shoulder, and an old, bearded man looking over the other. The skeleton was meant to represent death, but the mysterious bearded figure was, the artist claimed, a symbol of time that had come to him in a dream.

A nineteenth-century etching depicted another bearded man, this one holding an infant, symbolizing the New Year. No one knows why the artist chose this image. He also told colleagues he had seen it in a dream.

In 1898, a bronze sculpture showed a more robust man, still bearded but bare-skinned and fit, holding a scythe and an hourgla.s.s and positioned over a giant clock in a rotunda. The model for this bearded man remains a mystery.

But he was referred to as "Father Time."

And Father Time sits alone in a cave.

He holds his chin in his hands.

This is where our story began. From three children running up a hillside to this lonely s.p.a.ce, a bearded man, a pool of voices, the stalact.i.te now within a millimeter of the stalagmite.

Sarah is in her room. Victor is in his study.

It is this time. Right now.

Our time on Earth.

And Dor's time to be free.

FALLING.

29.

"What do you know about time?"

Dor looked up.

The old man had returned.

On our calendar, it had been six thousand years. Dor gaped in disbelief. When he tried to speak, no sound came forth; his mind had forgotten the pathway to his voice.

The old man stepped quietly about the cave, examining the walls with great interest. On them he saw every symbol imaginable-circle, square, oval, box, line, cloud, eye, lips-emblems for each moment Dor recalled from his life. This is when Alli threw the stone ... This is when we walked to the great river ... This is the birth of our son ...

The final symbol, in the bottom corner, was the shape of a teardrop, to forever remind Dor of the moment Alli lay dying on the blanket.

The end of his story.

At least to him.

The old man bent down and stretched out his hand.