Dr Merck sighed. He laid down his pen. (Imagine the psychologist who would have suggested that particular movement to him. The thought that would have gone into that simple, tired act designed to convey just the right level of regret or resolve.)
“We might have one option,” he said.
He glanced down at his notepad as if unwilling to look me in the eye. I remember being terrified that the consultation would end there. That he’d look up and smile and send me on my way. And if I complained and said: yes? yes? what other option? He’d look blankly and pretend he’d said nothing of the sort.
When he did look up he was very solemn. This, I’m sure, was how he’d been told to present the idea to me. If there had been a hint of celebration in his voice I might have thought naturally of the negatives. If he’d tried to congratulate me on cheating death, maybe I would have thought more carefully about what he was really proposing. I wished desperately that you were with me. I don’t even remember why you weren’t but I suspect now Rosen had arranged it that way. You’d attended all my other consultations. Taking notes. Calming me. You always were more practical than me, more rational. If you’d been there we would have taken more time to think, we would have weighed the pros and cons. As it was, I had already made my decision.
“These treatments I mentioned … Imagine if you could last until the research comes to fruition,” Dr Merck said. “Imagine if we could give the scientists here the forty, maybe fifty, years they need to make the kind of advances they’re going to need for your condition to become treatable.”
I shook my head. “But you already told me. I have six months.”
Dr Merck leaned forward. “You have six months, Mr King. Yes.”
I have just taken a break from writing to deal with my medications. Every day I hook myself up to the big machine and sit there for an hour while it whirrs and ticks and administers whatever the computer thinks is the right amount of medication for me. The medications I take cause my skin to get thin and crack. I have sore patches that never heal and mouth ulcers so bad I can hardly eat.
After my medications I do my daily checks. Cabin pressure. Waste processing system. Fuel load. Navigation check. I have to turn the big silver handle to vent the toilet module. I have to bleed the coolant system. I have to key in a special code to switch to auxiliary power and back again. Why? I’m not sure. What do I do if it fails? I have no idea. It is all documented in meticulous detail in a lever arch file the like of which I have not seen since I was at school. My suspicion: some psychologist on Rosen’s team thought it would be good to keep me busy. I don’t dare question it. I do as the doctors say and I consider myself lucky to be here. But I don’t think they realised how precious time would feel up here. At 299780km/s the opportunities for reconciliation are smaller than they ought to be.
My medication cycle takes about 4.6 days in your frame of reference.
I take an afternoon nap and a month goes by.
I have been here 132 days. On Earth, forty years have passed.
I came home from Dr Merck’s in a frenzy, do you remember? “There’s a treatment but we have to move quickly!” I said. Why was there never enough time? Why did I never sit down and just talk to you? We have argued about time since the beginning, don’t you think? In the early days we thought we were arguing about work but really it was always about time. How much time should I spend working instead of being with my family? Was it okay to miss a weekend, a month of evenings, to spend one of Ben’s birthdays out of town? I argued that I was investing in our future. You argued that I was missing our present.
I remember packing. I remember you trying to talk to me and me not listening. I was throwing clothes into a suitcase and telling you at the same time that we were out of options. I remember you sitting down. You drew your knees up to your chest. Even though we had known this was the most likely outcome, I remember how white you turned.
“We’re coming with you,” you said when I finally told you where I was going.
“Fine,” I said. “But we have to leave now.”
Did you resent me for leaving as I did? Did you think I should have stayed and lived out my last few months with you and Ben? That would have been the normal thing to do, wouldn’t it? Perhaps, in that, you thought there would be time for reconnection. Perhaps those last six months would have contained more value than forty years lived in any other way. But I didn’t see it like that. I was not a normal man. I had built one of the most profitable companies in the world. I had created a range of products that had turned the industry on its head. Why should I not have options other men didn’t? I didn’t want to talk to you because I was afraid you would try to change my mind. The decision was simple, and I wanted to keep it that way: roll over and die, or live.
Two months of training. So much training. Briefings. Psych. analysis. Technical instruction. Emergency procedures. A whole team of people employed to prepare me for something nobody had experienced before. You and Ben were there but we didn’t see much of each other. I remember, once, coming back to our apartment. Ben engrossed in his laptop. You moving around quietly, tidying, laying out dinner for me. “Have you eaten?” you said. “I’m sorry, Ben was hungry, I ate with him.” I remember how slowly you moved, how little you talked. You must have been going out of your mind. The whole site was a custom built campus and launch centre. There was nobody there who was not employed to send me on my way. What did you do all day? Did you walk in the hills in the blinding heat? Did you use the gym and avoid the eyes of those scientists and engineers who were dedicated to taking me away? I’m sorry, I never even asked. I was afraid you would get angry.
You had every right to be angry. Do you remember when the business first began to take off? There was one time in particular that I keep coming back to. It was right after we made the decision to float. We were lying in bed and I was talking you through the numbers for the first time. “We’re rich,” you said, with that simplicity of yours that was not naivety but an astuteness most people will never understand.
“We’re much more than rich,” I said.
“We should celebrate, take a holiday,” you said.
“Soon, I promise.”
You got angry then. “When?”
“Now’s not the right time.”
“It’s never the right time.”
I thought you were being unreasonable. I thought you should understand that I had to be there for the business. I’m sorry we argued then. Arguments like that can’t be erased, they only fade under new experiences. But there was never enough time was there?
We met Michael Rosen only twice. You didn’t like him. He made his money from biotech so I guess he was used to people disliking him. He was the one who insisted I “die” rather than make public what was really happening. Publicity, he maintained, was of no value to him. I didn’t like him either, but unlike you I wanted to like him. He was an impressive man. Where my business had revolutionised an industry, his had created a dozen new industries at least. But he needed me, dammit. He must have spent billions on his project with no guarantee of a customer: he’d built a vessel capable of prolonged, self-sustaining space flight; his team had devised propulsion technology decades ahead of anything NASA was capable of ... Even he must have been running low on funds by now.
I must have slept, I’m sorry. The medication makes me tired. I snooze and you have to wait another three weeks for your letter. I’m sorry it took me so long to write. I have lived these past 132 days in a different frame of reference from the rest of the world. On Earth an automated system (devised and maintained by Rosen’s team) aggregates the top news stories and takes a random sample of the world’s media output. It fires a continuous, ultralow frequency signal into space which my passing ship picks up (suitably blue-shifted), decodes, and delivers to me each day alongside my morning meds. In the past four months I’ve watched the world in fast forward. I’ve watched wars erupt and fade. I’ve seen joy and suffering flicker past in the blink of an eye. I’ve seen heroes, despots, superstars, and supreme leaders come and go in less time than it takes me to figure out how to vent the toilet module. I admit, I was surprised by how quickly my business failed and was forgotten. I watched our son grow up, attend medical school, become a surgeon, get married and divorced (twice). And somehow, along the way, I abandoned you.
What was it like for you after I left? Did you hate me? I told myself I didn’t have a choice. Live, or roll over and die. It was simple. I told myself it was only six months. I see things differently now. You were there for me when we thought I had only six months to live. But in my frame of reference it was you who had only six months.
I enjoyed your letters. So warm. So ordinary. Morsels of information about how Ben was doing at school. His school exams. His first girlfriend (you were so worried she would break his heart). If you hated me you hid it well. But I think you tipped your hand, because maybe you forgot it had been only a week and a half for me and I was sick as a dog for most of that time. I read all three years of your letters in a single sitting, and the growing distance was undeniable. You grieved for me, just as if I’d really died. And then you got over me. I should have written then, but I didn’t know how. I was a ghost. Far from cheating death I had become everything we fear most about death. I lingered and observed. I agonised over past misdeeds. But I had no more opportunities to set them straight. What right did I have to haunt you? I thought. Surely, if I wrote now it would be for my sake not yours.
That was a difficult week. I was alone. The change in medications and the weightlessness made me sick. I’m not ashamed to admit that I spent most of that week trying to figure out how to open the external doors. If I could have figured out how to vent myself into space I would have done so in a second, but Rosen had protected his investment more carefully than that. Another week or two passed, and there were no more letters from you.
Ben started writing to me after he’d finished medical school. I’m glad he did. If he hadn’t I’m sure I would have figured out that bloody door sooner or later. I hear your voice in his writing. The way he tells me about the little things. His jobs. His girlfriends. His marriages. His children. It seems to me he is a good man. If he has a flaw it is that his eye is always on the next thing instead of the current one. He looked forward to his early retirement for the best part of a decade, and then the moment he retired he regretted it and started making plans to go back to work. I hope you are smiling when you read this. I hope it reminds you of me as much as it reminds me of myself.
He avoids talking about you. I imagine he’s afraid of upsetting me. I try not to push him too hard in my letters but I have managed to squeeze a few details from him over the years. He tells me that you travelled, that you were known for a while as something of a philanthropist, and that you gave considerably more to health projects abroad than you did to cancer research. You see? He has your sense of humour, I’m sure you know that already. I know that you never remarried, but I hope that you had some lovers along the way. He tells me that you have grown more frail in recent years. You get confused sometimes, but your mind is still sharp and you like to make our grandchildren laugh. He tells me the nurses take good care of you.
My ship has started decelerating. In ten days (or two years) I will be home. My doctors—the new lot, Dr Merck died twenty years ago and I don’t miss him—can barely contain themselves. I am the world’s first time traveller. I expect I shall be famous (briefly anyway, trust me, I know how brief it all is). There will be people who will expect me to build a business again, perhaps they will expect me to recreate what I once had. Rosen’s people have suggested I think about a book deal. I shall have to do something because my accountants tell me the money is all gone.
Rosen died not long after Merck. Liver failure. Though I’m sure you know that. If he is out here in his own capsule he will have to wait another month or two before they can reliably grow him a new one. But somehow I don’t think so. Something in the way the other doctors talk. The questions they don’t ask more than the ones they do. I don’t think he took the treatment. I knew from the beginning I was his guinea pig. Naively I assumed it was the technology he needed to validate.
I’m coming back, my love. What was terminal 132 days ago is now treatable with a single injection. I will suffer some nausea, some people feel dizzy for a week or two I’m told, but these are the least of my side effects. Our beautiful son is five years older than I am and I have no idea which of us is supposed to act the grown up. Our youngest grandson is twelve, about the same age Ben was when I left. And you …
You used to tell me I was unable to live in the moment. I disagreed. Everyone lives in the moment, I said. But you were right, I see that now. We deny death, we can’t help it. We talk about it, we pretend to accept it, but it is a slippery concept. Even in those moments when I had no hope, death was never more than a blank, unprocessed mass for me.
Ben says I can stay with him when I get out of hospital. He tells me the woods up near his house are beautiful and that he likes to take his son riding there sometimes. So now I have another strange idea in my head. I thought maybe we could go together to the woods, and we could watch our grandson ride his bike. Would you mind that? We could walk side by side with the dried leaves under our feet and the bare branches over our heads just like we did once before. I used to expect so much from life but now this is all I can think to ask. Would you hold my arm and laugh if I can think of a joke to tell? I know I have no right. But if you are willing, I think the universe will be kind.
Adam Connors is a recovering physicist. His stories have appeared in Comma Press’ Brace Anthology, Shooter Magazine, and a few other small press publications. He lives in Hertfordshire and splits his time between writing, family, and working for a large west coast technology company.
