“Well…” I glance at Mohit, seated in the chair next to me. Dr. Klein looks at him, too. He avoids both our eyes.
“I take it there’s a reason your mother isn’t here?” Dr. Klein squints at me. She knows me too well.
“I just want your opinion on something.”
“My medical opinion or my wise-adult personal opinion?”
“Uh, both, maybe? I’ve been looking into…” I pause, suddenly aware of how ridiculous this is going to sound. But I’m here now. “I’ve been learning about cryonics?”
She shifts in the chair, nods. “Okay.” She’s not looking at me like I’ve lost a screw, at least.
“So I just wanted to know what you … know. About this.”
“Well, Astrid,” she says, “look.” She cocks her head one way and then the other as though she’s weighing her potential responses in her brain. “No one knows that much about cryonics. It’s a very new field.”
“But is it … I mean, could they, like, freeze me?”
Dr. Klein laughs a little bit. “‘Freezing’ isn’t quite accurate, as I understand it. I think a specialist would tell you that it’s a preservation process called vitrification, which is a little bit different from just shoving a body in a freezer. But yes, basically that’s what we’re talking about.” She pauses, choosing her next words carefully. “Astrid, may I put on my doctor hat first here?”
I nod.
“I know you’re discouraged by your latest scan. I am, too. But we’re not at the end, not yet. We have some different options for chemo. And I really think you should consider this clinical trial.”
Mohit nods enthusiastically next to me. “See, that’s what I told her, too. It has real promise, right?”
“Mo, stop.” I put a hand on his knee to calm him.
“It has promise,” Dr. Klein concurs. “Is it a long shot? Any trial is, by definition. But is it as much of a long shot as cryopreservation? I wouldn’t even put them in the same category. The former is reliant on the most advanced understanding we have of how cancers work, and the latter is…” She stops, considers it. “The latter is not.”
“I might not even get a place in the trial, though,” I say, “so I’m just considering my options. Do you think cryopreservation has—I don’t know—any promise? At all?”
Dr. Klein stares at me for a long, quiet moment. Then she exhales. “Astrid, I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re a scientist at heart. Cryopreservation is a far-out, long-game, future-future science. It’s not going to save your life. You won’t wake up a year from now in brand-new-with-tags condition.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure you do,” she goes on. “This technology is so far beyond our current bounds of understanding that it seems more like magic than science. But I can’t tell you it’s impossible, because it isn’t. It might not be possible, but it isn’t im-possible, not yet. That’s what makes it science, not fantasy. I don’t know if it’s a good bet or not. No one knows. But I can understand why, as a scientist, you would be intrigued by it.”
* * *
Mohit is silent in the car on the way home. I watch the city go by out the window: fall leaves drifting from their branches in a show of red and orange and yellow confetti celebrating the turn of another season; a couple pushing a baby in an SUV-sized stroller while a toddler bounds ahead of them on a scooter; two kids holding hands, our age-ish, the boy with a mop of red hair and the girl with long, beaded cornrows.
“How cold do you think it is right now at the Mount Everest base camp?” I ask Mo, apropos of nothing. “Like, at this time of year, is it winter already? Or same as here?”
“Huh? Why?”
“Well…” I’ve always wanted to see the Himalayas. I don’t know why, really. I don’t like hiking. Frankly, I don’t even like the outdoors all that much. Mohit calls me “indoorsy,” and it’s not a lie. But I’ve always wanted to see those mountains, ever since I watched a documentary with my dad when I was little about all the people who’ve died on Everest. One of my favorite guidebooks to date is The Trekker’s Guide to Nepal, which describes the trip to Everest in glorious detail.
When I’d first told Mohit about my fascination with big mountains I’ll never climb, he’d promised to take me to the Himalayas one day. Most of his extended family still live in Gujarat, in the northwestern part of India, and some in Mumbai, but he has an aunt and uncle in Kufri, not far from the northern border, in a home built into the side of the Himalayan foothills. I imagine it’s one of those places that takes planes and trains and automobiles and hiking by foot to get to. I’ve never been to a place like that.
“You’ve been there at this time of year, haven’t you?” I press.
“Not really. I mean, the altitude at Mount Everest base camp is a lot higher than anywhere I’ve been. It’s probably already winter there, yeah.”
“So you can’t really go there until spring, huh?”
“Astrid.” Mohit understands now where I’m going with this. If I can’t get there now, if we can’t get on a plane tomorrow and go, I’ll never see it.
I stare out the window again, imagining those icy hills cutting a path straight into the sky. “I’ll miss it all.”
Mohit shakes his head. “Come on. You can come to India with us next summer. Are you kidding? My parents would love that.” It’s true, Mr. and Mrs. Parikh have been inviting me on their annual family trip to India ever since Mo and I started dating, but that first summer I was in treatment, and last summer I had the internship with Dr. Klein. “Or the summer after. And all the summers—”
“Be real. There are no more summers.”
“You don’t know that.”
My body aches. A dark shadow, bigger than any floater I’ve ever seen, crosses into my line of sight and blocks part of my peripheral vision on the right side. I close my eyes against it. This is what it will be like if I lose my sight, darkness on darkness. I mean, when I lose my sight, because that’s what happens before you die from brain cancer. You lose all the things that help you interpret the world: sight, movement, appetite. Memory. Then breath.
Mohit is right, though. Maybe there are still summers ahead of me, just many years from now.
“What if I didn’t have to miss it all? What if this death was just the next thing to happen, not the last thing?”
We stop at a red light. Mo turns to me and puts his hand on my leg. It still makes my heart race, Mohit’s touch against my body. His forehead crinkles, deep in thought.
“What would you be, though? Would you still be a person?”
“What is a person?” I shrug. “Is a person more than our electrical signals, pinging back and forth?”
Mohit laughs. “Oh my gosh, Astrid.” He always says “gosh,” not “god.” He only says “God” when he actually means it. “You are more than electrical signals. That I can tell you from personal experience.”
“I don’t know if I’d still be a person,” I say. “Maybe I’d just be an Astrid-like avatar. Maybe I’d be Astrid’s personality in another person’s body. Maybe I’d be Astrid’s electrical signals in an app. I have no idea. It’s worth trying to find out, though, isn’t it?”
He draws a long, deep breath, and my chest contracts.
“Yes,” he says finally. “You are worth trying anything.”
11.
When Chloe answers the door the next morning, she’s already shoving Stanley back into the house so she can come outside with me.
“Come on, we’re going out.” She locks the door behind her.
“What’s the rush, dude? I just got here.”
“The moms are fighting about Christmas. Already. It’s freakin’ October. Whatever. I don’t feel like listening to it.”
Chloe had been predicting her mothers’ split for a while before it happened—I mean, even I’d seen Cynthia and Annalisa arguing over the fact that Cynthia had put the near-empty milk carton back in the fridge, or that Annalisa had worked too late, or that Cynthi
a’s mother was overbearing and intrusive, all of which seemed true. So it’s not like it was a secret that they weren’t getting along, but it still wasn’t pretty when they actually separated.
“They’re driving me bananas,” Chloe says. “You’d think they would just ask me how I want to divvy up the holidays this year, no? I’m not a child.”
“Sorry.”
Holidays with divorced parents suck, I get that. I mean, my father stopped doing any kind of “material celebrations” when he moved to a commune off the grid in Arizona, so those have been easy enough for me and Liam, but for a while after they split, my parents would fight over our school vacations. Mom couldn’t afford to take us anywhere, but she would still want to do these elaborate staycations, where we’d play tourists and do all the touristy things you don’t normally do (read: take a ridiculous Duck Tour through the city and hope you don’t pass anyone you know from school along the route). And Dad would want us to come visit him in Arizona, saying Mom owed him the time because she had us all the rest of the year. They’d go around and around until they’d broker some kind of compromise—basically an annual trip to Dad’s over the summer, when we could visit him and still have enough free time to come home and staycation before school started. It took a couple of years, but they finally figured out a routine.
But this is Chloe’s first holiday season since the split, and her moms both have big families with what she refers to as “robust traditions,” so I can already imagine it’s going to get ugly.
“I mean, I’m old enough to have a say in things, aren’t I?” She shoulders her bag. “Where are we going, by the way?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was going to your house.”
“Mom C’s house, you mean.” Chloe has always referred to her mothers as Mom A and Mom C, which started affectionately when she was little but later became a running joke—as in, “Where’s Mom B?” Annalisa, Mom A, is staying with friends while she looks for a new apartment.
“It’s still your house,” I say.
But Chloe’s not listening. She’s already taking off down the block. “I just don’t want to sit around and try to plug my ears anymore. The benefit of them splitting in the first place was that I didn’t have to hear them bitching at each other all the damn time. Now they just do it over speaker phone, and I still have to listen to it.” Then she stops in her tracks and looks at me. “Your hair looks truly excellent like that.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Who’s your stylist?”
“Overpriced hipster salon. I should’ve gone to SuperCuts and saved my money.”
“I’m LOLing on the inside, really.”
“Not technically LOLing, then, is it?”
We walk in silence a few blocks, Chloe keeping several paces ahead of me but periodically pausing for me to catch up. Halfway up Mass. Ave., by the stationery store that always entices me to spend money on pricey notebooks I’ll never fill and decorations for holiday parties I won’t be hosting, Clo stops.
“Andy’s?” she asks.
I’d already assumed that’s where we were headed, since it’s usually where we end up by force of inertia.
Andy’s Diner looks like it’s been unchanged since the 1970s, menu included, with cracking vinyl booths and revolving stools that list one way or the other. There’s a small analog TV mounted in the corner, almost always playing some Boston sporting event or another depending on the season, and the waitresses are mildly unfriendly in an appealing way that makes you want to tip them extra so they’ll feel better.
Our usual waitress, the one with long acrylic nails and teased bangs that have perhaps not been without hairspray since the mid-eighties, gives us a curt nod when we come in. We take the booth by the front window.
“You did your hair,” the waitress comments dryly as she drops a pair of laminated menus in front of us. Her thick Boston accent—“Yah did yah hayuh”—was probably a prerequisite for getting a job here.
“I did her hair!” Chloe offers proudly. I can’t help but let out a snicker at her not-so-humble humble-brag.
“For real?” The waitress looks impressed. “Don’t waste that talent. You ladies want coffee, right?”
A few minutes later, we’re both huddled over steaming mugs. I take mine black, have ever since freshman year. Chloe, meanwhile, douses hers in milk and sugar.
“Are you aiming for coffee, or molten coffee ice cream?”
“The latter, obvs.”
I sip mine without replying for a moment, watching her attend to her glucose-filled concoction. “So getting back to your life,” I say, “what do you want to do about Christmas? If they give you a choice?”
Chloe stirs her coffee and watches it spin toward the center, a liquid tornado. She shrugs. “I mean, whatever. They can duke it out over me. I don’t care.”
“It sounded like you cared twenty minutes ago.”
“If they could be reasonable about the whole thing, then yeah. I’d probably go to New Jersey for Thanksgiving”—that’s Cynthia’s family—“and then be here for Christmas. My cousin will be in town from Milan, so obviously I’d like to see him.”
“Does he still have the Italian-model girlfriend?”
She nods. “You know she’s not actually a model, right? She’s in med school. She’s just very attractive. But yes, that girlfriend.”
“Well, anyway,” I say, “that seems reasonable.”
The waitress comes back with our food: eggs over easy and bacon for me, a waffle with strawberries for Chloe. Plus more coffee for both of us.
“Right, except we did Christmas here last year. So Mom C is all like, ‘It’s my family’s turn for Christmas.’ Except they’re Jews! So they don’t even care!”
“I mean, they’re the kind of Jews who have a Christmas tree.”
“Right, but it’s not exactly their holiday. You can’t claim everything. I also went there for Rosh Hashanah. Just for dinner. They don’t even go to synagogue.”
“Sorry, Clo. It sucks.”
“It must seem kind of lame to you. It sucks, but it’s not, like, cancery.”
“Glad I can provide you with perspective on your personal suckage. Suckiness is not a zero-sum game, though.”
She takes a bite off a triangle of waffle soggy with syrup. “What exactly is a zero-sum game, anyway?”
“I don’t really know,” I confess. “It just sounded right.”
“Not to change the subject or anything, but what did you decide about the clinical trial?”
My body fills with that weird adrenaline-rush feeling, like you’re about to do something terrifying and want to step back from the edge of the cliff but know you can’t. I don’t know why I feel this way: talking to my best friend—about anything, really—shouldn’t be terrifying. Chloe, of all people I know, won’t judge me for my curiosity about cryopreservation. But I can’t quite get over this feeling that every time I start to talk about freezing my remains, I sound like a total lunatic. Because who believes in this kind of shit?
I don’t even believe in it. Except, maybe, possibly, I do.
“Dr. Klein sent my details in, all my test results. They have to decide if I meet the criteria. Even if I get a place in it, though…”
“What?”
“It’s such a long shot, Clo. I could be getting the placebo, you know. And even if I’m not, these things almost never work well enough to actually help the people in the trial. It’s more like helping doctors figure out how to help other people down the road.”
“Right.” She looks mildly dejected as she shoves the food around on her plate.
“Plus, it won’t be pleasant. Dr. Klein said it could be even worse than chemo. Anyway, I don’t know. I’m just thinking about, like, beyond that. My options.”
Chloe narrows her eyes. “What does that mean?”
I launch into my explanation of cryopreservation, at least as much as I understand of it. Chloe listens with a strawberry perched on her fork,
hovering midway between her plate and her mouth. She barely blinks until I’m done talking.
“So,” I conclude, “basically, yeah. I’m thinking about preserving my dead body in a freezer in Arizona. Thoughts? Reactions? Questions from the crowd?” The adrenaline feeling escapes my body like air dissipating from a balloon while you try to tie it closed. I slice into an egg and watch the yolk seep out from the middle, a yellow puddle creeping toward the edge of my plate.
Chloe shakes the shock off her face and eats the strawberry. “I mean, I … It sounds…” She searches for a coherent thought.
I can’t blame her for not knowing what to say. “Nuts?”
“No. I mean, yes. Kind of? But it also sounds … I don’t know. Sort of awesome?”
It’s exactly the reaction I expected from Chloe, and I could cry and hug her for it all at once.
“I guess the question is, How do they know if it’ll work or not?”
“They don’t,” I say. “We don’t.”
Chloe chews her food for a long, thoughtful moment. “Shit, Astrid. I mean, you want to be a neuroscientist. If that’s not going to happen…” She trails off.
“This is a way to be part of science, right?”
She sits back in the booth and stares at her plate for a minute. Finally, she nods. “Then you should go for it, this cryo-thing, or at least learn about it. What do you have to lose?”
“Right? If I’ll be dead anyway, the worst that’ll happen is … I’ll stay dead.”
Her face twitches a little at the word, but she brushes it off. “How much does the whole thing cost?”
Does health insurance cover body freezing? It suddenly occurs to me that in my curiosity about the possibilities of cryopreservation, I’ve never asked the most basic questions about how I’d pay for this.
Chloe’s face melts condescendingly, which irritates me for a minute. “Astrid, you haven’t found out how much it costs?”
“Not yet,” I confess.
“Seems like kind of an important piece of information, no? I mean, not that you’re not worth it, if it could actually work. But it could be, like, a lot of money.”
Fear of Missing Out Page 5
