Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

“You know they are, Travis. They have to be. They’re just scared, I bet. We have this way of putting certain ideas out of our minds . . . we do that. Humans, I mean. We have to bury things, hopes and dreams, so deep sometimes that it takes a little while to access those things once we need them again.”

  “So you think they just need more time to understand that I’m really back?”

  “It’s not that, no,” he said. “I think they just need more time to understand why you’re back and what that means to their lives. Maybe you think that’s selfish, but I’d bet you anything they’ve been talking to each other just about every day since you’ve been back and trying to figure out how to deal with this thing. You woke up from a nap and everyone was older and different, but they’ve stayed up a lot of nights thinking about you, Travis. They’ve grieved you for years and now they’re being asked to un-grieve you, and, sadly, that just isn’t something that very many people understand because, well, it’s never been a possibility before now.”

  “Did Lawrence go through this too?” I asked, feeling like this wasn’t the first time Dr. Saranson had had this conversation.

  “He did. Yeah. But I’ll let him tell you about that. I think it would be really good for you. For both of you. What do you say?”

  “I think I’m ready.”

  “Great. I’m going to give him your number, and I bet he’ll be calling you very soon.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Travis?”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s all going to work out. I promise.”

  “Sure it will,” I said.

  “And I’ll see you next week, right? For your first checkup? I’m flying down on Wednesday. You can tell me all about school.”

  • • •

  Three days before my first day back to school, Mom came into my bedroom and woke me up. I looked at my alarm clock, and since I was in that just-awake haze, it took me a second or two to figure out if it was midnight or noon.

  “Lawrence Ramsey’s on the phone for you,” she whispered, sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “What?” I sat up, squinting my eyes. It was definitely daytime because sunlight was filtering in through the curtains and heating up the side of my face.

  “Lawrence Ramsey. He’s waiting for you.” She held a cordless phone with one hand, her other covering the bottom of it.

  “Can you give me, like, five minutes?” I said, yawning.

  “What do you want me to do, Travis? Chit-chat?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed or amused, but I didn’t care. I nodded my head and got up to use the bathroom. When I came back, she was sitting in the same spot and repeating “Yeah . . . yeah . . . uh-huh” into the receiver. She waved me over.

  “Okay, Mr. Ramsey. Well, here’s Travis. Yes. You too. Okay. Bye-bye.”

  “Hello?” I said, sitting down.

  “Well, if it isn’t the man of the hour!” he said.

  He had a kind voice, one much less animated than his public persona used. I’d seen him in so many interviews that I knew his whole story. I knew how he lost both of his parents to cancer by the time he was out of college. I knew he met his wife ten years before by accident when he, then an air-conditioner repairman, showed up to the wrong house and she pretended her A/C was broken just to get to know him. I knew they named their twin daughters after their respective grandmothers, Francine and Delilah. And I knew that he was thirty-six years old when they told him he would die. You could ask anyone you met and they’d tell you something about the life of Lawrence Ramsey and how it was a miracle that such a “good man” had been given a second chance to be happy, that he would get to see his children grow up after all.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re all over the place, kiddo. Letterman even made a joke about you in his monologue last night. Funny stuff.”

  “Am I ever going to get used to all this?”

  “Well, the public’s known about you for, what, a week or so? They’re still hassling me and I’ve been back for six months. So sorry to say, but I doubt it.”

  The Saranson Center had officially announced my reanimation the week before, so the news had been flooded with all these stories about how I got sick and volunteered for the surgery and all. They kept showing old photos of me because, thankfully, my age allowed me a little more privacy than it had Lawrence, and they couldn’t show up at our house or anything like that.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “Lucky you’re so young. They’ll probably be at your school, though. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Just be ready. Duck your head down and walk past them as fast as you can. Vultures. All of ’em.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Travis. I’m sure you’re still feeling really overwhelmed, and here I am shooting even more crazy stuff at you.”

  “It’s okay. Thanks for calling. Dr. Saranson said it might help us both.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “We’re the sole members of a very exclusive club, you and me.”

  “It’s just all so . . .”

  “Fucked up?” he said. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “You’re right.”

  “Let me ask you something. If you don’t mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “When you woke up and people, I dunno, maybe your mom and dad or whoever, they started saying how much they missed you. Did that make you feel weird? It made me feel so weird.”

  “Yes,” I said, maybe a little too loudly. “So weird. I mean, I love them, but I just saw them.”

  “Right? I wake up and I see my wife standing there, and my first thought was, Damn, how’d she find time to get her hair cut in this hospital? And then I realize that the kids standing beside her are my kids. They’re my kids with five years added to each of them, and I’m pretty sure I passed out from the shock. Then I come to again and she’s telling me all about missing me so much, and all I can think about is how different they all look.”

  “I feel kind of guilty about it,” I said. “I see the way my folks look at me, and I feel like I’m supposed to be acting some special way around them, like I’m supposed to be proving how grateful I am to be back when I don’t even really feel like I left in the first place. And of course I’m grateful. I’m not sick anymore. I wake up and suddenly I can stand up on my own again; no one has to help me to the bathroom or feed me. I think everyone forgets that the last thing I remember is months and months of dying.”

  “Travis, not to freak you out or anything, but I’m probably going to cry when I get off this phone. I’ve waited a long time to have this conversation with someone.”

  “Me too, Mr. Ramsey,” I said.

  “No. Now, you call me Lawrence. My dad was Mr. Ramsey and he was a dickhead.”

  “Fair enough.” I laughed.

  “Well, listen, Travis. I should probably run, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m here. Any time you need to talk, just call me, okay? And maybe we’ll eventually figure all this weird shit out together. And don’t be fooled by that guy in the truck commercials, okay? I don’t have a damn clue what I’m doing back here, but I figure I might as well make a buck or two off my fifteen minutes of fame while I can.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Thanks, Lawrence. Talk soon.”

  “You bet, Travis.”

  We didn’t talk long enough to discuss what it was like to be attached to a new body, but I knew we’d get to that eventually. He’d been so easy to talk to, and I could tell he felt the same way about me. Relief, I guess. I think we were both so relieved on the phone that it was hard to decide which of our million questions to ask first. Like, I wanted to know how long it took for his friends to treat him normally again. And I wanted to know if things with his wife were the same as they’d been before he left. He’d obviously had to make this whole new persona up for the media, so maybe I’d need a Travis, the Head Kid character to get through this too. I couldn’t hide from reporters my whole life, after all. There’d b
e a day when I’d have to know what to say to them.

  But first I had to go back to school. And I had to do it without Kyle or Cate. I wouldn’t know a single person there except the teachers and the principal. I’d be stuck in high school while all my friends were off living their lives and working their jobs and going to their college classes and partying. This was all so ridiculous, and when things got this way before, the only two people I could talk to were Cate and Kyle. But now they were part of the problem. They weren’t there. They weren’t there when I woke up, and they wouldn’t be there when I went back to school. Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There’s no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you’d want to return.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE RETURN

  The day before I went back to school, I found out that there is an urn containing my ashes hidden in the closet of the guest bedroom. I discovered this when I was in there looking for an extra blanket for my new cold-natured body.

  Oh, I thought to myself. This sure is an odd place to keep a heavy vase.

  So I brought it out to the living room and asked my parents, who were both staring at their cell phones, what was in it.

  “Shit.” My mom was no longer looking at her phone.

  “Why would you keep a vase full of shit in the closet?”

  “Travis, watch your mouth,” Dad said.

  “Have a seat, honey.”

  There is no delicate way to tell a person that he is holding a container full of the incinerated remains of his own body. Had there been a better way, I might not have accidentally dropped the urn right onto the hardwood floor, which made my mom scream and my dad immediately jump down on all fours and start sweeping the ashes into a pile with his bare hands, almost as if he were trying to save each and every molecule of my former self.

  “Go get the vacuum!” Mom shouted.

  “We can’t use a vacuum on Travis’s ashes!” he yelled back.

  This is about the time I walked outside and sat down on the front steps. It was October, so it was pretty cool in Kansas City, too cool to be wearing just a T-shirt and gym shorts borrowed from my dad. I still didn’t have any clothes, or much else for that matter, so my parents had planned to take me shopping later that day. I was guessing that dropping my leftovers all over the living room floor had slowed things down a bit.

  Ashes. I don’t know why I was so surprised. I mean, they had to do something with what was left of me after the surgery. God knows that body wasn’t worth a damn to anyone. By the time Dr. Saranson offered to turn me into Frankenstein, I was barely able to sit up by myself. I spent most of my days in the downstairs guest bedroom, in a hospital bed, watching old TV shows all night and sleeping all day because of the pain meds. I’m not sure why so many people get addicted to pain pills because, at a certain point, not feeling anything becomes much more painful than the disease eating away at your cells.

  So yeah. They burned that mother, stuck it in a nice blue-and-white vase, and it’s probably been on the mantel for five years, reminding everyone who visits that these people, my parents, are broken and sad. No one else got to know, by the way. Just my family and close friends. You don’t want to go telling everyone that a dying kid volunteered to be decapitated and that his parents signed off on it. At least not until it all turns out well.

  Now everyone knows. Travis Coates: The Second Cryogenics Survivor in History. Once I was famous for dying, in my own little way. People came to visit me and bring me flowers and pray with me and such. They came to get closure. Teachers, classmates, old ladies from church. They all came to say good-bye. Now I’m famous for living, and I can tell you this much: people expect a lot more out of you when you’re not lying in a hospital bed doped out of your mind. One minute I’m dying, and the next I’m supposed to be this beacon of hope for everyone around me? This miracle kid? I knew how to die, but I wasn’t so sure about being a living hero yet.

  I sat there on the front steps, and just as I was about to go back inside, hoping my parents had dealt with the creepy mess without inhaling too much of it in the process, a black truck pulled into the driveway. I knew who it was before he could even cut the engine off. Kyle Hagler, my best friend, had driven straight from the future to my front door.

  “Wow,” he muttered after stepping out of the car. He leaned against the hood with one hand.

  “Well, you look different.” I walked across the yard, squinting in the afternoon sun.

  “You look exactly the same,” he said. “Shit. You look exactly the same, Travis. I mean, from, like, here up.” He took one hand, flattened out, and moved it from his neck to his forehead.

  “You’re tall,” I said. “And . . . handsome. You’re handsome, dude.”

  “We’re both tall now, huh?” He stepped closer, looking me up and down.

  He laughed a bit, and I noticed how his smile was the only thing proving this was actually him. The old Kyle Hagler was shorter than I was, which was terribly short for our age, and a little chubby around the middle. He had a voice that was higher than you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old boy, and he wore shirts that were always a little too tight. And his blue jeans. I’m not even sure where one buys pleated blue jeans, but it was possible and he proved it every day.

  But this new Kyle was about my height—my new height, that is—was dressed in nice slacks and a button-down shirt, and had a voice that immediately threw me off. It was a great voice. Powerful but not threatening. He had grown up. The slight hint of a man he’d always been was replaced with a pretty impressive new form. It was weird.

  “Should we hug or something?”

  I was barely able to finish my question before he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and squeezed me into his chest. Two best friends hugging strangers’ bodies that were somehow now their own. He was crying, but it was quiet enough to be appreciated and not pitied. It was the best kind of crying. He let go for a second and wiped his face with the back of one sleeve before holding me by each shoulder and sort of just staring at me for a while with this expression that I’m still convinced no other person has ever had, a combination of shock, joy, pain, and terror. It was like I could see all his memories of me projected into the air between us, rushing and swirling around and enveloping us both in a nostalgic haze.

  “I missed you, man.”

  “I would say the same,” I said. “But I just saw you, like, three weeks ago.”

  “Weird. It really feels that way?”

  “It’s like I just took a nap or something and now everything’s different. Everyone’s older.”

  “Does it hurt?” He sort of nodded toward my neck.

  “Can’t feel a thing. Gonna be a righteous scar, though. I guess I can live with it.”

  “I think you’ll make do.”

  “They say scars give you edge,” I said.

  “That right? What about coming back from the dead? Think that’ll get you laid?”

  We went into the house, and my parents both got teary as they greeted and hugged him and immediately forced him to take a seat in the living room. I wondered if they looked at him the same way I did. I wondered if they saw the grown-up who walked in or the kid who used to practically live here.

  I looked around and any evidence of the ashes was now gone. Part of me hoped they’d thrown it all away, just flushed the pile of dirt down the toilet and forgotten all about it. But the other part of me, the part that was still toggling between life and death and still very confused about how to define either, hoped that they’d hidden the ashes away somewhere safe, somewhere to be found when needed.

  My parents insisted on Kyle staying for lunch, and then they ordered a pizza because my mom obviously hadn’t started liking cooking any more than she had before I’d left. We set up shop at the kitchen bar, Kyle and I taking the same seats our past selves had taken most nights of the week back when we’d binge on Mike & Ikes
and study for Ms. Grady’s ridiculous biology exams and compare answers for Mrs. Lasetter’s never-ending Algebra 1 homework assignments. I was always much better at science than math, and Kyle was the opposite, so it worked perfectly that way. We piggybacked off each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s real friendship, right?

  “Tell me you’ll get to go back as a junior.” Kyle shoved pizza into his face.

  “Sophomore. I missed way too much the first time. I don’t have the credits.”

  “Shit. Well, I have epically bad news, then.”

  “What? Don’t say it. Do not say it, Kyle.”

  “Lasetter.”

  “Damn it. Kill me now.”

  “Turns out that isn’t so easy.”

  “No kidding. I can’t believe she’s still there. I guess I just thought hell would’ve opened up and taken her back by now.”

  “She made Audrey cry last year. Twice,” he said.

  “Audrey. Wow. Your little sister’s in high school? Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. She’s seventeen. She’s older than you now, dude.”

  “This gets so much weirder every day.”

  “Have you seen Cate yet?” he asked. We both knew the conversation would turn to her sooner or later.

  “Not yet. Maybe she doesn’t know.”

  “Everyone knows, Travis. I talked to her last week—she’s pretty freaked out.”

  “She is? She told you that? I know it’s weird. I know. But it’s me, Kyle. Why wouldn’t she just be happy?”

  “She is, Travis. Of course she is. It’s just . . . well, she’s been seeing this guy for a while, you know. They’re engaged.”

  “Mom told me,” I said. “You know him?”

  “Met him once. We all had dinner. He’s a good guy. So there’s that,” Kyle added.

  “There is that.”

  “You gonna try to reach her?” he asked.

  “Eventually. I have to, don’t I? Doesn’t she want to see me?”

  “There’s no way, no matter how long it’s been or how different she is, that she wouldn’t want to see you. You know that.”

  “And you?” I said. “Why’d it take you so long?”