Host, p.5
Host, page 5
5
‘Name? You have his name?’ The clerk behind the wooden counter was a large black man with massive shoulders and a gentle face; his hair was greying.
‘Messenger,’ Joe said. ‘Dr Willi Messenger.’
The man scanned two sheets of typed names then frowned and looked at another list. Then he pushed a form at Joe and tapped it with his thumb. On it was printed ‘Sign Name and Name of Party’.
Joe filled it in and handed it back to him.
‘OK, you have a seat. Someone’ll call out for you.’
Joe thanked him and moved away. His place was taken by a black woman with her arm around a sobbing girl. ‘Youton?’ he heard the woman say. ‘You have a Carl Youton in here?’
There was bedlam in the entrance lobby of the morgue. A police officer and an Hispanic woman were having a shouting match; a young man tried to calm the woman. People stood or sat in tiny groups, some bewildered, some numb with grief. The air was sour with the stench of sweat.
Joe walked past a sign on the marbled wall that said ‘Positively No Smoking’, clenching his hands together in anxiety. The defeat of death was all around him: in the crumpled clothes the people wore; in the blocked pores of their skin; in their blank stares. Some of them looked as dead as those they’d come to claim. Victims. Victims who’d kissed their loved ones goodbye and then stepped out into a fresh morning full of plans, maybe to go see a movie that evening, drop by some neighbours, or cook something special. And instead got trashed, and ended up in here. They got trashed in car wrecks, trashed by heart attacks, by muggers, trashed by their own lovers.
‘Death is not necessary, Joe.’
Joe looked round with a start. The words sounded so clear, as if his father had just whispered into his ear. He shivered, sensing Willi with him, suddenly. It was a strange sensation, but one that he’d felt several times in the eleven years since his death and it was as vivid as ever. He could sense his father watching him, waiting to see what he was going to do, how he was going to handle this.
Shakily, he sat down on a vinyl seat beneath a glass showcase displaying framed certificates. Two white youths with straggly hair and tight trousers sat next to him; they looked like they might have been part of a rock band. Joe yawned. Tired, he realized suddenly. It was past midnight English time. A door opened and shut; someone came out, a name was called and another person went in. More people came through from the street; he saw a police car outside; two cops greeted each other in the doorway; someone walked past holding a styrofoam cup of coffee; a curl of steam rose from it. Liquid nitrogen boiled into steam. The vacuum-insulated aluminium dewars that Crycon used each held four bodies. They had a boil-off rate of twelve litres of nitrogen a day. There was a safety margin in them of forty litres. That meant they could survive just over three days before they needed topping up. Before the bodies would become exposed and would start to thaw.
The sound of his name drifted through Joe’s thoughts and he didn’t notice at first that he was being called. Then he climbed to his feet. A woman clerk held open a hatch in the counter and he went through into a small recess where three chairs were lined up in front of a metal grille. A notice said ‘PERSONAL PROPERTY PICK-UP’ and there was a stack of autopsy-request forms.
A tanned man faced him on the other side of the grille in a mint-coloured polo shirt. He was in his late thirties, balding, with a sleek goatee beard that was trimmed short, and his intense stare through the thick lenses of frameless glasses conveyed a purposeful air unrelieved by any hint of humour.
He spoke slowly and precisely, as if wanting to ensure that everything he said was clearly understood. No come-backs. ‘Professor Joseph Messenger?’
Joe nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Pleased to meet you, professor. My name is Howard Barr, I’m the investigating officer for the county coroner in charge of the Crycon disaster. How can I help you?’
‘I’ve come to find out what’s happened to my father and to make new arrangements for him.’
Howard Barr looked down at a form. ‘Professor Wilhelm Rudolf Messenger? That your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re aware of what’s happened at the Crycon Corporation, professor?’
‘Not entirely. I haven’t been able to get much information. I’m living in England – I saw a story about Crycon going bust in the newspaper this morning. I tried telephoning before I came over, but all I got was a number unobtainable tone. I arrived just a couple of hours ago, and went straight to Crycon. A police officer told me I had to come here. He said this is where they’re bringing the patients.’
‘Patients?’
There was a hint of contempt in the man’s voice, which irritated Joe, but he kept calm. ‘We consider people in cryonic suspension to be patients.’
Barr replied almost tonelessly. ‘Professor Messenger, all Crycon Corporation’s patients have been transferred here on the order of the State Department for Health to await instructions from their relatives regarding disposal.’
‘How long has my father been here?’
He looked back at his notes. ‘He was signed in at 12.24 p.m. yesterday.’
‘I just saw one of your vans leaving Crycon, driving at forty or fifty miles an hour. Do your staff have any idea how to handle cryonics dewars?’
Barr looked at him oddly.
‘They need to be moved very carefully,’ Joe said. ‘People in suspension are extremely fragile. And they need regular topping up.’
‘Topping up?’
‘With liquid nitrogen.’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have much use for liquid nitrogen here, Professor Messenger. Our electrical refrigeration system is good enough for our purposes.’
‘Not if you’re storing cryonics patients, it isn’t.’ Joe was getting the impression that Barr was hiding something from him. He remembered the fleeting stench of rotting flesh outside Crycon, recalled his nausea, and a debilitating feeling of unreality swept through him; the room seemed to be cramping him, closing in around him. ‘Is there a phone I could use – I’ll have to make some calls – get my father transferred to another cryonics unit. There’s a good one right here in LA. Alcor, I –’ the expression on Barr’s face halted him.
‘Professor, I’m not an expert on cryonics and I don’t want to disillusion you …’ His look had become a little more mellow, bordering on reproachful. ‘But I don’t think that cryonic suspension is a serious option any longer for your father.’
The room closed in further on Joe. He felt terribly afraid that something was more wrong than he realized. That maybe they had autopsied his father.
‘Why do you say that?’
Barr shrugged. ‘I’m not sure the Health Department would allow it.’
Joe felt anger rising in his voice. ‘I think you’ll find the Health Department has no legal right to interfere.’ He tapped himself on the chest. ‘It’s my decision! My father signed the legal papers. Crycon’s gone bust, and I accept I’ll have to pay another cryonics organization – but the Health Department is not dictating to me what I do! And I hope to hell none of your people has damaged his body in any way. I’d like to go see him right now: can you have someone show me where he is?’
Barr shook his head. ‘We don’t allow people to see bodies in here these days. Any viewing has to be done in the funeral parlour.’
‘I have legal custody of his body and I have a right to see him,’ Joe said.
Barr checked his beard by pinching fronds of hair between his forefinger and thumb for some moments. ‘When was the last time you saw your father, professor?’
‘Just after he deanimated in 1982. I helped with the perfusion.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘The preparations for freezing – the removal of his blood and replacing it with cryoprotectant agents.’
‘Your father died in bed?’
‘Yes, in hospital.’
‘I think you might be happier to remember him that way.’
Joe’s anger flared again. ‘I don’t think you understand. I like to remember my dad when he was alive and well – and some day in the future he’s going to be alive and well again.’
Barr sat motionless. ‘Professor Messenger, I can’t comment on the technology of cryogenics.’
‘Everyone likes to comment on it,’ Joe said. ‘Everyone who doesn’t know a goddam thing about it. Would you take me to my father’s body now, please?’
Barr raised a placatory hand. ‘I do have a little knowledge … As I understand, it’s important to freeze people as quickly as possible after certification of death – you gotta start the processes within minutes, to prevent arteries from closing up, and to prevent decay, right?’
Joe looked at him as if he were watching an image on television that was being blurred by interference. ‘More or less. You do that if possible. But you can still suspend people who’ve been dead for a while.’
Again, the man’s expression softened a little. ‘I’m afraid that the bodies in Crycon had been out of suspension for quite a while, professor. The guys in charge of it must have sold off all the equipment before they – disappeared.’
Joe was horrified. ‘Sold off the equipment? You mean the dewars?’
‘Everything.’
‘When?’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t have that information.’ He hesitated. ‘What I’m trying to tell you, professor, is that I don’t think your father’s body is as well preserved as you might be expecting. In my view he would not now be recoverable from suspension even if such a thing ever became possible.’
Joe looked back at his face in silence. Looked at the notice again. PERSONAL PROPERTY PICK-UP. Ordinary words made threatening because of their connection with death. Staring at the polished wood surface beneath the grille, he felt that he could be in a de luxe version of the condemned cell, except that it was his father who was in it, not him. ‘I take the view that at some point in the future doctors will be able to reconstruct our entire bodies from the DNA coding in just one intact cell. I don’t care how bad my father’s condition is, I intend having him re-suspended immediately.’ Joe blinked slowly, entwining his fingers. ‘I made a promise to my father and I intend keeping that promise. I’d be grateful if you’d let me see him now.’
The hardness returned to Barr’s features. ‘Professor, I’m just going to emphasize one more time that I think you’ll find it very distressing.’
‘That’s my decision.’ Joe remembered his father as the big tough guy who had been scared of nothing all his life, and he remembered the husk he’d seen in the hospital bed. And now he had braced himself for something else.
Howard Barr stood up. ‘If you go to the doorway by the elevators on the far side of the lobby, I’ll meet you there.’
Joe walked back across the lobby, and found the recess through to the elevators. Barr opened the door from the far side, then led the way down a corridor past a hive of offices, the soles of his immaculate white trainers silent on the floor.
They went through into an icily cold room with a white tiled floor and walls lined with tiers of stainless steel lockers. There was a pungent reek of disinfectant.
Barr stopped, checked the sheet of paper he was holding, and ran his eyes up the bank of lockers in front of him. Each one had a number and a slot for a tag. In the slot of the third one up, 37C, was a typed card that read: ‘Dr W. Messenger.’
The man looked flintily at Joe. ‘Sure?’
Joe swallowed back a lump in his throat. Eleven years. A lot had happened in eleven years; memories had faded, and grief had eased also, but his father’s image was still alive in his mind. He could sense again, now, that strong feeling of his father watching him, waiting for his reaction, waiting to see how he would keep his promise. He felt bolstered by it, as if the old man was winking at him, and saying, ‘That’s the way! Don’t put up with any shit from this smartass jerk.’
Barr removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket, tore them free of their sterile pack and rolled them on. Then he leaned forward and pulled the handle. The door opened easily and in the darkness beyond Joe could make out a lumpy blue plastic sheet; he could feel the blast of freezing air that escaped.
Then Barr pulled out a long, narrow tray on well-oiled castors on which lay a human form encased in the sheeting. He raised a fold in the sheeting, revealing a zipper. He looked at Joe once more, then pulled the zipper open in one long motion.
Joe was wholly unprepared for the stench and it hit him like a fist in his stomach. It was the smell of forgotten meat left in the trunk of a car for a month; of a drain being unblocked; of sour milk; of diarrhoea. Then he saw his father’s face and a cry tore itself free from his throat.
He had to turn away, momentarily blinded by the horror, stumbling, gulping in disbelief. He reached the far wall and was halted by the cold steel lockers, but he did not turn round; he could not endure even one more fragmentary glimpse.
He stood, shaking, his face pressed against the lockers. ‘No,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh, God, please no!’
The steel was sliding, as if he was in an elevator that was sinking; he tried to hold on to it, but his hands slid downwards. He saw the name ‘Mrs R. Waliewska’ typed on a tag, and ‘Mr D. Perlmutter’ as if they were floors at which he might get off, then he sagged down on to his knees and buried his head in his hands. He was squeezing his eyelids shut against the inhuman horror of his father’s face, with its rictus grin that had not been there when Willi Messenger had died.
The facial flesh had withdrawn, leaving just bare bone poking through the patches of rotten, leathery skin still attached in parts. The remains of Willi’s hair, straggly and coarse, protruded from the desiccated remains of his scalp like stuffing from a busted sofa. The eye sockets were empty, scooped out by the blowflies weeks ago, maybe months ago.
Joe wept, silently. Wept the way he had done in the morgue after his infant son Barty had died, when the police officer had given him one trainer and a blackened wristwatch and asked him to identify them. Wept as the shock rocked through him.
6
Monday 18 January, 1993. Sussex.
Normally Joe liked the drive from his home to the university. It was five miles, mostly along a highway that rose and sank in undulating sweeps traversing the edge of the Downs, and on a fine morning like today the views across the hills and fields were spectacular. They gave a sense of open space that was one of the few things he really missed about Canada.
But his journey this morning was marred by jet-lag, which had lingered even though he’d flown back from Los Angeles last Tuesday. And the booming resonance of the blown exhaust on his Saab was aggravating the sinus headache he’d woken up with. And annoying him. He liked machines to work properly and always got irritated when they didn’t. The car was only two years old, but he had driven over something in the dark and hadn’t yet had time to get it fixed. His father would have fixed it himself, he thought, with a twinge of guilt; but it was years since Joe had touched the mechanics of a car; he could never justify the time.
The Isaac Newton University had been conceived as Britain’s equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had been designed as one architect’s vision of the perfect university, and built from scratch in 1963. The campus, entirely of red brick and concrete, was a weird hybrid of rounded contours and sharp angles, of bridges, arches, colonnades and linear crisscrossing walkways. It had been carefully landscaped to blend into the Downland setting, and was dotted with dinky ornamental lakes and streams, as well as with trees and shrubs that looked so neat they might have been plastic. There was a stilted air of Legoland about the place that was always heightened out of term-time when there were fewer people around. Joe thought it looked like the kind of instant, vaguely utopian city man might build in outer space. Except in only thirty years it had weathered badly and had already gone horribly to seed.
He parked his grey Saab in the lot behind the COGS – Cognitive Sciences – building, and switched off the ignition, greeting the silence that followed with considerable relief. Then he climbed out, locking the door.
A strong wind was blowing as he lugged his briefcase across the lot and down the steps between the COGS and the Biology buildings. Both were four-storey blocks connected by an enclosed aerial walkway on the third floors that owed something, but not much, to the Bridge of Sighs.
There was a boxed-in tank behind the Biology block marked ‘Danger – Liquid Nitrogen’ and the words brought back a sudden image of his father when Joe was about six, taking jars of bees out of the fridge, and getting yelled at by Joe’s mother. Willi Messenger had thought nothing of using his home as a laboratory.
The Christmas vacation was normally a time Joe enjoyed, when he was able to recharge a little; but right now, tired, and guilt-ridden because he had not kept a closer eye on Crycon, he didn’t feel he’d had any break at all. Signing the cremation consent had been hardest, harder even than sitting with the funeral director in the small chapel, staring at his father’s coffin on the catafalque as the chaplain recited the short committal service. Watching the curtains close. Gone.
Dr Messenger, your father is calling out for you. He wants to speak to you very badly … There’s something he wants to tell you very desperately. It seems like he wants to warn you about something.
He was never going to know what it was now. Sure, he had brought back a tiny amount of his father’s skin and a little hair in an icebox, and that was now in cryonic suspension; but the brain had gone completely, eaten away by blowflies, and even if it became possible to reconstruct the body from his DNA some time in the future, would any of Willi’s knowledge remain intact? Joe doubted it.
The wind cut through his clothes. He was wearing a Burberry mackintosh over a tweed jacket, blue cord trousers and suede lace-up brogues, the kind of clothes he figured gave just a dash of English gentry to his appearance, although the effect was marginalized by his tie. It was covered in flying pigs. He liked to wear wild ties, they made people smile. And he needed a few smiles right now.
