Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  We take that in for a moment. They look like active, squeaking rats. Except at some point, they’ve been frozen. “So they were, basically, dead?” I ask.

  “They were.”

  “And now they’re alive?”

  Dr. Fitzspelt nods. “These rats are part of a new phase of our research that has indicated to us that we can achieve quite … let me say, quite remarkable results, provided we take certain steps prior to cryopreservation.”

  Mohit shifts from one foot to the other. “And what are those steps? Clearly you’re getting at something, Doctor. Do you want to tell us what it is?”

  I jab him in the waist. Dr. Fitzspelt is giving us the insider treatment here. The last thing we need is him suddenly deciding we’re just obnoxious teenagers. But if Dr. Fitzspelt’s irritated, his face doesn’t give it away. Instead, he just stares at us, his eyes gleaming and shifting from one of us to the next. Finally, they land on me.

  “I told you the story of the young man whose body was found frozen in the woods, yes?”

  Three nods: me, Mohit, Chloe.

  “Well, these rats have that in common, to a certain extent, with that young man.”

  Next to me, Mohit is getting impatient, I can tell. “In that…?”

  “In that these rats were also frozen before their clinical deaths. Or, put more plainly, we accelerated their deaths, in order to begin the preservation process in the moments before, rather than the moments after, their hearts stopped.”

  None of us says anything. I’m not sure what to say, frankly. I stare at the rats, white, beady-eyed. Alive. Revived. Raised from the dead.

  Except they weren’t dead, not to begin with. That’s the point.

  * * *

  We sit across from Dr. Fitzspelt at his desk once more. This time, the three of us are even more lost for words than we were an hour ago. Mohit keeps shaking his head and looking up at the ceiling like he knows that what he’s thinking would be inappropriate to say.

  I search for the right words to form just one of the many questions swirling in my head. “So, if the procedure has a better chance of working if you—”

  “Let me stop you there,” Dr. Fitzspelt says, cutting in. “We can’t say that for sure. As I said, this is early-stage research. It’s a theory, really, that we’re currently testing on animals.”

  “You’re killing animals by freezing them to death, in order to test whether or not you can wake them up again?” Mohit practically spits the question.

  “That’s … not exactly how I would put it.”

  “How else would you put it? These animals were alive, right? They weren’t actually dying and then frozen at the moment of their natural death. That’s what you told us would happen to Astrid if she goes through with this procedure. Now you’re saying, what? She has a better chance of being revived one day if you … kill her by freezing her?”

  “Mo,” I say under my breath, putting a hand on his arm. He pulls away.

  “I understand your confusion,” Dr. Fitzspelt says patiently. “Let me explain better. The process—which again, to date, has not been tested on a human—is not that death takes place via freezing. What we were able to do with the rats was to begin the process of lowering their body temperatures prior to death. Then, in effect, we stopped their hearts artificially, once their bodies were already cool.”

  “And in a human, you would call that … what?” Mo asks.

  I swallow. I know what I would call it. I also know that it’s not legal in Massachusetts.

  “Euthanasia?” I say, barely audible.

  Chloe jerks her head toward me. “Assisted suicide?”

  Dr. Fitzspelt stammers, clearly unraveling. “It’s—it’s not euthanasia, per se. No, no. It’s … we’re—”

  “It is,” Mo says firmly. “You’re looking for a person who’s dying, like Astrid, but instead of waiting until she’s actually dead to preserve her body, you want to preemptively start the process and kill her before she otherwise would die. And assuming she’s given you permission to do that, as far as I understand it, that means you want to assist in her suicide. That’s what that is.”

  “That is a very misguided way of looking at this.” Dr. Fitzspelt turns away from Mohit and makes eye contact with me. “Astrid, the people who come to us for cryopreservation—they’re like you. They’re dreamers. They’re hopeful. They want to write their own stories, choose their own approach to the end of their present lives. You are young. Your heart is healthy. Based on our research, you could be an excellent candidate for this next era of preservation and revitalization. Of course, I welcome you to join our program under our standard package, which I do believe stands a good chance of success down the road. But this new approach is…” He pauses there, licks the fine film of spit from his lips. “This is our best chance of success. It is the future of science.”

  Those words, again.

  Mohit pushes his chair away from the desk, stands up, and holds his hand out for me. “Astrid, we should go.”

  * * *

  He practically drags me across the parking lot. Chloe trails behind us, trying to snap some pictures of the exterior of the institute on her phone before we leave without her. It’s only then, as we beeline for the Tomato, that the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory pops into my brain: Willie Wonka turns out to be kind of a sad old man. Lonely, wistful, and desperate for some child who might want to carry on his legacy.

  40.

  At first, we’re quiet in the Tomato, just the hum of the engine serving as muted road-trip music as we get back on the road.

  The future of science. Our best chance of success.

  I roll Dr. Fitzspelt’s words over and over in my head, thinking about what they mean in practical terms. I’m already dying. What difference would it make, really, if I died a few weeks or a few months earlier than I would anyway, if it meant a better chance of waking up again one day, of meeting Liam’s future children, of hearing grown-up Mohit play his saxophone in those swanky jazz clubs?

  “We didn’t have to rush out of there like that,” I say finally. “It was rude.”

  “Rude?” Mohit is still seething. “You know what’s rude, Astrid? Bringing us out there for a visit on the pretense of offering a program to freeze your body after your death, only to spring on us that he’s eyeing you as a guinea pig for some underground thing where he takes you from us before you’re actually ready to die, in the interest of furthering his research. Which, by the way, is still highly unlikely to work. And you’d be killing yourself. No. Just no. Never mind the animal testing, which is cruel to begin with.”

  “You asked him, Mo! He was just answering your question. I don’t see how you can really blame him for that. Who knows if he even would’ve mentioned the other thing if you hadn’t asked.”

  Chloe glances at me in the rearview mirror. “It was kind of creepy, though. I mean, there’s a reason they’re not offering that, um, service to the general public. It’d be illegal in most states.”

  “Right. Which is my point—he wasn’t even going to mention it. I think you’re both being too hard on the poor guy.”

  “The poor guy,” Mohit grumbles. “Right.”

  “Anyway, it’s definitely illegal in Massachusetts, because of that ballot initiative from a few years ago,” Chloe adds. “Although I think that was kind of misguided of our voters, don’t you?”

  I still remember the headlines, when the initiative was on the ballot in Massachusetts, and the woman whose name was all over the news, the poster child of the Death with Dignity campaign: Chiara Antony. In her forties, mother of two. She had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. There’s no cure. She was losing her muscle function, but her brain was intact. She was becoming trapped in her own body, she knew it, and she wanted out.

  She’d stuck with me, not because I had any idea at that point that I might be making the same decision, but because even then, when I still thought my own death was a far-off, eventual, by-the-time-I’m-sick-of-living
-anyway thing, I thought, What is a human life if you’re not allowed any agency in how you leave it?

  My mother agreed, clucking her tongue at the television every time Chiara’s face would come on the news. “This poor woman,” she’d say. “She deserves the right to die on her own terms while she still can.”

  “Misguided?” Mo says. “Doctors are supposed to do no harm. It’s kind of in their job description. I think it’s fairly clear that helping someone kill themselves is causing harm. Plus it’s just … interfering with the natural order of things.”

  There’s a persistent ache in my hips and lower back, and my head still has that fuzzy, buzzing feeling I couldn’t put my finger on earlier, only now it’s louder than before. “Your definition of harm is rather narrow, though, don’t you think? I mean, what if treatment itself is causing harm? What if a person has no quality of life? What if their wish is to end their life peacefully, on their own terms?”

  No one says anything for a long moment. Mohit has shifted away from me, his face pressed against the Tomato’s window. When he finally turns back to meet my eyes, his face is wet with tears.

  Mohit never cries.

  Or never that he lets me see.

  “I’m not saying I’m going to do this,” I say quietly. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying—people have the right to their choices.”

  He sighs. “Fine. Point taken. I just don’t want you to put your hopes in this thing—this procedure, whatever you want to call it—so much that you miss out on everything you could be enjoying while you’re still here. It could be a huge sham.”

  “You’re not talking about my hopes, though, are you? Because if it does turn out to be a sham, I’ll never know.”

  Mohit’s cheeks redden, and his eyes get glossy again.

  I go on. “Really, it’s your hopes you’re talking about. You don’t want to put your hopes in this.”

  He shrugs and looks away.

  “But you could be dead by the time I wake up, too! Or you could be seventy years old, in which case, Mo, you’re not going to care anymore. You’re going to have moved on. Everyone will have moved on, except me. I’ll still be sixteen.”

  “Seventeen,” Chloe says softly from behind the wheel. “Your birthday is coming up.”

  “Seventeen. Whatever. My point is, this isn’t anyone’s call but mine, because by the time the possibility is even remotely plausible, you’ll all have long forgotten me anyway.”

  “Screw you, Astrid.”

  He says it so quietly I almost can’t hear him. Except I can, and it stings.

  “Chloe, pull over,” he says more loudly.

  “Huh?”

  “Please pull over.”

  I hear the click of the Tomato’s blinker, and Chloe maneuvers us to the shoulder and stops the engine. Mohit moves far faster than I possibly can. He hops down the stairs and onto the road.

  By the time I manage to follow him, he’s stalked angrily out onto the desert land by the side of the road. He settles himself onto a low, red rock, staring in the opposite direction from the highway. I go to him slowly, touch his shoulder.

  He doesn’t turn or even react at all at first. His face is damp.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  Mo shakes his head firmly but doesn’t say anything.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  He swallows. The pulse of that Adam’s apple makes my heart swell.

  “You’re right, Astrid. It is about me. And your mother. And Chloe. And Liam. It is about the people who love you. Because we’re the ones who will be left behind to live with an Astrid-shaped hole in the universe. We don’t want to lose you before we have to. And it isn’t fair to ask us to.”

  I sit on a rock next to him. Neither of us speaks. What does an Astrid-shaped hole look like? I picture an Astrid cutout in the earth’s atmosphere, like the outline of a body on the ground at a crime scene, only me, breaking my way out of civilization, out of the universe, into whatever is beyond it.

  Eventually, Mo gets to his feet, dusts the red earth from his jeans, and lumbers back toward the Tomato. I follow him.

  41.

  We don’t say anything else as we pass through the outskirts of Sedona. As the signs of the city start to dissipate and the long highway stretches out beyond us, we pass a sign for Red Rock State Park. Five miles.

  “Let’s stop,” I say.

  Mohit’s resting his head against the back of the bench seat opposite me. Now he opens his eyes but doesn’t move. “Stop for what?” He’s still sore from our argument, I can tell.

  “Aren’t we on a road trip of great Americana? May as well take advantage of what’s in front of us. Plus, there’s probably a bathroom.”

  We park near a visitor center with curved walls built of uneven red bricks and low, beamed ceilings. At the gate, a woman in a vest takes our entrance fees. She hastily prints three tickets and hands them to Mohit, tucked in a folded map. “Trails are marked in your map, no going off-trail. Park closes at five o’clock.”

  I glance at my phone: it’s just past two.

  When Chloe and I come out of the visitor center bathroom, Mohit is studying the map. “I think we should take this one here, Smoke Trail.” He runs his finger along a blue dotted line.

  “That’s the shortest one,” I say, taking the map from his hands.

  I can feel a look passing between him and Chloe. Neither says anything.

  “Here: the Eagle’s Nest Overlook is the highest point in the park,” I say. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Without waiting for them, I head off in the direction of the trail entrances, marked by a set of colored signs.

  “Astrid,” Mo says, coming after me. It doesn’t take much effort for him to catch up. His face is set in a hard, frustrated line. “Can you not be ridiculous right now?”

  I whirl around. “Oh? How am I being ridiculous?”

  “We’re not going to do the longest, hardest trail in the park. Be realistic.”

  I’m about to fight him harder, but I think better of it. When I look from him to Chloe, she’s pleading with me, too, red-faced and biting her bottom lip. They came all this way for me, not just the physical trip but the emotional one. To respect my choices. Which is exactly what I’ve been wanting, really: some say in how all this goes down.

  I soften my tone. “What if we just go a little bit toward Eagle’s Nest? If I’m not feeling up to it, we’ll stop.”

  They exchange a glance. Then Mo sighs, and puts his arm through mine.

  * * *

  The earth leaves rusty orange dust on our sneakers as we wind our way along the Eagle’s Nest Loop, along a trail lined with short green shrubbery and things that look like cacti, but what do I know. The sun is past its peak, but we still warm up quickly as we walk. I peel off my sweatshirt almost immediately and curse myself for putting it on in the first place.

  “Hold on a sec.” I perch on a rock on the trail’s edge.

  Mo hands me his water, looking desperate to say “I told you so.” I know that’s what he’s thinking. We’ve been walking for all of ten minutes, and I already need a break.

  “Okay?” he asks as I tip a few small sips toward the back of my throat. If I drink too much, we’ll run out. Plus, I doubt there are any bathrooms along the Eagle’s Nest Loop, and I’m not really one for squatting in the brush.

  Chloe shields her eyes with one hand and looks out over the park. In the near-ish distance, more piles of red rock rise up against the horizon, dotted with greenery. I wonder what view is waiting for us from the highest point in the park. We have to get there.

  I pass the bottle back to Mohit, and he helps me to my feet again.

  We follow the trail in a slowly rising loop around the park. It’s not too steep, fortunately, and if I take a break every few minutes to catch my breath and sip some water, it’s manageable. Mohit finds me a branch along the side of the trail and I lean on it as I walk, which helps me ignore the throbbing that’s progressiv
ely radiating from my head to my temples and down my spine. We don’t say much as we walk. Mostly, I’m focused on the rusty ground in front of me, one step at a time, and sucking as much dry, desert air into my lungs as I can.

  Finally, we round a sloping corner, and just up ahead can see the trail’s summit, a rolling ledge of red rocks. I force myself forward to the very top and throw the walking stick down at my feet in triumph.

  Beyond us, the park stretches out in acres of warmth in every direction. Straight across from where we stand, two huge side-by-side rock formations look like those drip castles I used to make at the beach when I was little, the kind where you take the wettest sand and let it slip from your clasped hand. One is an almost perfectly cylindrical tower that looks not unlike a natural-world version of the capsules in Dr. Fitzspelt’s lab. Its neighbor to the right is larger and more irregular, with a sloped top and ridges running up and down its body, so it looks like it’s made of thin slices of rock collapsed together.

  It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before, the view from up here. It’s the perfect complement to the view from Lucy’s belly: an altogether otherworldly landscape, everything from the smells to the colors to the sound of the wind distinct from the coast, but right here on this same land mass.

  The view burns into my memory, mine for as long as I have memories.

  I lean against a boulder, taking the weight off my lower back. My legs have gone nearly numb. Mohit sidles up next to me and slips an arm around my shoulder without saying anything.

  I press my cheek to his sleeve. “Are you still mad?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe a little.” Neither of us looks at the other. Instead, we both stare out over the land below us, our eyes collecting the same images, or maybe different ones. He smells slightly sweaty. As close as we are, I can feel a chasm opening between us, the one that’s probably inevitable between a person whose life is fading and a person whose life is really just beginning.