NightScape

Resurrection

Anthony was nine when his mother had to tell him that his father was seriously ill. The signs had been there-pallor and shortness of breath-but Anthony's childhood was so perfect, his parents so loving, that he couldn't imagine a problem they couldn't solve. His father's increasing weight loss was too obvious to be ignored, however.

"But… but what's wrong with him?" Anthony stared uneasily up at his mother. He'd never seen her look more tired.

She explained about blood cells. "It's not leukemia. If only it were. These days, that's almost always curable, but the doctors have never seen anything like this. It's moving so quickly, even a bone marrow transplant won't work. The doctors suspect that it might have something to do with the lab, with radiation he picked up after the accident."

Anthony nodded. His parents had once explained to him that his father was something called a maintenance engineer. A while ago, there'd been an emergency phone call, and Anthony's father had rushed to the lab in the middle of the night.

"But the doctors…"

"They're trying everything they can think of. That's why Daddy's going to be in the hospital for a while."

"But can't I see him?"

"Tomorrow." Anthony's mother sounded more weary. "Both of us can see him tomorrow."

When they went to the hospital, Anthony's father was too weak to recognize him. He had tubes in his arms, his mouth, and his nose. His skin was gray. His face was thinner than it had been three days earlier, the last time Anthony had seen him. If Anthony hadn't loved his father so much, he'd have been frightened. As things were, all he wanted was to sit next to his father and hold his hand. But after only a few minutes, the doctors said that it was time to go.

The next day, when Anthony and his mother went to the hospital, his father wasn't in his room. He was having "a procedure," the doctors said. They took Anthony's mother aside to talk to her. When she came back, she looked even more solemn than the doctors had. Everything possible had been done, she explained. "No results." Her voice sounded tight. "None. At this rate…" She could barely get the words out. "In a couple of days.

"There's nothing the doctors can do?" Anthony asked, afraid.

"Not now. Maybe not ever. But we can hope. We can try to cheat time."

Anthony hadn't the faintest idea what she meant. He wasn't even sure that he understood after she explained that there was something called "cryonics," which froze sick people until cures were discovered. Then they were thawed and given the new treatment. In a primitive way, cryonics had been tried fifty years earlier, in the late years of the twentieth century, Anthony's mother found the strength to continue explaining. It had failed because the freezing method hadn't been fast enough and the equipment often broke. But over time, the technique had been improved sufficiently that, although the medical establishment didn't endorse it, they didn't reject it, either.

"Then why doesn't everybody do it?" Anthony asked in confusion.

"Because…" His mother took a deep breath. "Because some of the people who were thawed never woke up."

Anthony had the sense that his mother was telling him more than she normally would have, that she was treating him like a grown-up, and that he had to justify her faith in him.

"Others, who did wake up, failed to respond to the new treatment," she reluctantly said.

"Couldn't they be frozen again?" Anthony asked in greater bewilderment.

"You can't survive being frozen a second time. You get only one chance, and if the treatment doesn't work…" She stared down at the floor. "It's so experimental and risky that insurance companies won't pay for it. The only reason we have it as an option is that the laboratory's agreed to pay for the procedure" – there was that word again-" while the doctors try to figure out how to cure him. But if it's going to happen, it has to happen now." She looked straight into his eyes. "Should we do it?"

"To save Daddy? We have to."

"It'll be like he's gone."

"Dead?"

Anthony's mother reluctantly nodded.

"But he won't be dead."

"That's right," his mother said. "We might never see him alive again, though. They might not ever find a cure. They might not ever wake him up."

Only much later did Anthony understand the other issues his mother had to deal with. In the worst case, if his father died, at least his life insurance would allow his mother to support the two of them. In the unlikely event that she ever fell in love again, she'd be able to remarry. But if Anthony's father was frozen, in effect dead to them, they'd be in need of money, and the only way for her to remarry would be to get a divorce from the man who, a year after her wedding, might be wakened and cured.

"But it's the only thing we can do," Anthony said.

"Yes." His mother wiped her eyes and straightened. "It's the only thing we can do."

Anthony had expected that it would happen the next day or the day after that. But his mother hadn't been exaggerating that, if it was going to happen, it had to happen now. His unconscious father was a gray husk as they rode with him in an ambulance. At a building without windows, they walked next to his father's gurney as it was wheeled along a softly lit corridor and into a room where other doctors waited. There were glinting instruments and humming machines. A man in a suit explained that Anthony and his mother had to step outside while certain preparations were done to Anthony's father to make the freezing process safe. After that, they would be able to accompany him to his cryochamber.

Again, it wasn't what Anthony expected. In contrast with the humming machines in the preparation room, the chamber was only a niche in a wall in a long corridor that had numerous other niches on each side, metal doors with pressure gauges on them. Anthony watched his father's gaunt naked body being placed on a tray that went into the niche. But his father's back never actually touched the tray. As the man in the suit explained, a force field kept Anthony's father elevated. Otherwise, his back would freeze to the tray and cause infections when he was thawed. For the same reason, no clothes, not even a sheet, could cover him, although Anthony, thinking of how cold his father was going to be, dearly wished that his father had something to keep him warm.

While the man in the suit and the men who looked like doctors stepped aside, a man dressed in black but with a white collar arrived. He put a purple scarf around his neck. He opened a book and read, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." A little later, he read, "I am the Resurrection."

Anthony's father was slid into the niche. The door was closed. Something hissed.

"It's done," the man in the suit said.

"That quickly?" Anthony's mother asked.

"It won't work if it isn't instantaneous."

"May God grant a cure," the man with the white collar said.

Years earlier, Anthony's father had lost his parents in a fire. Anthony's mother had her parents, but without much money, the only way they could help was by offering to let her and Anthony stay with them. For a time, Anthony's mother fought the notion. After all, she had her job as an administrative assistant at the laboratory, although without her husband's salary she didn't earn enough for the mortgage payments on their house. The house was too big for her and Anthony anyhow, so after six months she was forced to sell it, using the money to move into a cheaper smaller townhouse. By then, the job at the lab had given her too many painful memories about Anthony's father. In fact, she blamed the lab for what had happened to him. Her bitterness intensified until she couldn't make herself go into the lab's offices any longer. She quit, got a lesser paying job as a secretary at a real-estate firm, persuaded a sympathetic broker to sell her townhouse but not charge a commission, and went with Anthony to live with her parents.

She and Anthony spent all their free time together, even more than before the accident, so he had plenty of opportunity to learn what she was feeling and why she'd made those decisions. The times she revealed herself the most, however, were when they visited his father. She once complained that the corridor of niches reminded her of a mausoleum, a reference that Anthony didn't understand, so she explained it but so vaguely that he still didn't understand, and it was several years before he knew what she'd been talking about.

Visiting hours for the cryochambers were between eight and six during the day as long as a new patient wasn't being installed. At first, Anthony and his mother went every afternoon after she finished work. Gradually, that lessened to every second day, every third day, and once a week. But they didn't reach that point for at least a year. Sometimes, there were other visitors in the corridor, solitary people or incomplete families, staring mournfully at niches, sometimes leaving small objects of remembrance on narrow tables in the middle of the corridor: notes, photographs, dried maple leaves, and small candles shaped like pumpkins, to mention a few. The company placed no names on any of the niches, so visitors had used stick-on plaques that said who was behind the pressurized door, when he or she had been born, when they had gotten sick, of what, and when they had been frozen. Often there was a bit of a prayer or something as movingly simple as "We love you. We'll see you soon." Here and there, Anthony noticed just a name, but for the most part the plaques had acquired a common form, the same kind of information and in the same order as over the years a tradition had been established.

Over the years indeed. Some of the people in the niches had been frozen at least twenty-five years, he read. It made him fear that his father might never be wakened. His fear worsened each time his mother came back from visiting his father's doctors, who were no closer to finding a cure for his sickness. Eventually his mother took him along to see the doctors, although the visits grew wider apart, every other month, every six months, and then every year. The message was always depressingly the same.

By then, Anthony was fifteen, in his first year of high school. He decided that he wanted to become a doctor and find a way to cure his father. But the next year his grandfather had a heart attack, leaving a small life insurance policy, enough for his mother and his grandmother to keep the house going but hardly enough for Anthony's dreams of attending medical school.

Meanwhile, his mother began dating the sympathetic broker at the real-estate firm. Anthony knew that she couldn't be expected to be lonely forever, that after so much time it was almost as if his father was dead and not frozen, and that she had to get on with her life. But "as if his father was dead" wasn't the same as actually being dead, and Anthony had trouble concealing his unhappiness when his mother told him that she was going to marry the broker.

"But what about Dad? You're still married to him."

"I'm going to have to divorce him."

"No."

"Anthony, we did our best. We couldn't cheat time. It didn't work. Your father's never going to be cured."

"No!"

"I'll never stop loving him, Anthony. But I'm not betraying him. He's the same as dead, and I need to live."

Tears dripped from Anthony's cheeks.

"He'd have wanted me to," his mother said. "He'd have understood. He'd have done the same thing."

"I'll ask him when he wakes up."

When Anthony became eighteen, it struck him that his father had been frozen nine years, half of Anthony's life. If it hadn't been for pictures of his father, he feared that he wouldn't have been able to remember what his father had looked like. No, not had looked like, Anthony corrected himself. His father wasn't dead. Once a new treatment was discovered, once he was thawed and cured, he'd look the same as ever.

Anthony concentrated to remember his father's voice, the gentle tone with which his father had read bedtime stories to him and had taught him how to ride a bicycle. He remembered his father helping him with his math homework and how his father had come to his school every year on Career Day and proudly explained his job at the lab. He remembered how his father had hurried him to the emergency ward after a branch snapped on the backyard tree and Anthony's fall broke his arm.

His devotion to his father strengthened after his mother remarried and they moved to the broker's house. The broker turned out to be not as sympathetic as when he'd been courting Anthony's mother. He was bossy. He lost his temper if everything wasn't done exactly his way. Anthony's mother looked unhappy, and Anthony hardly ever talked to the man, whom he refused to think of as his stepfather. He stayed away from the house as much as possible, often lying that he'd been playing sports or at the library when actually he'd been visiting his father's chamber, which the broker didn't want him to do because the broker insisted it was disloyal to the new family.

The broker also said that he wasn't going to pay a fortune so that Anthony could go to medical school. He wanted Anthony to get a degree in business and that was the only education he was going to pay for. So Anthony studied extra hard, got nothing but A's, and applied for every scholarship he could find, eventually being accepted as a science major in a neighboring state. The university there had an excellent medical school, which he hoped to attend after his Bachelor of Science degree, and he was all set to go when he realized how much it would bother him not to visit his father. That almost made him change his plans until he reminded himself that the only way his father might be cured was if he himself became a doctor and found that cure. So, after saying good-bye to his mother, he told the broker to go to hell.

He went to college, and halfway through his first year, he learned from his mother that the lab had decided that it was futile to hope for a cure. A number of recent deaths after patients were thawed had cast such doubt on cryonics that the lab had decided to stop the monthly payments the cryocompany charged for keeping Anthony's father frozen. For his part, the broker refused to make the payments, saying that it wasn't his responsibility and anyway what was the point since the freezing process had probably killed Anthony's father anyhow.

Taking a job as a waiter in a restaurant, sometimes working double shifts even as he struggled to maintain his grades, Anthony managed to earn just enough to make the payments. But in his sophomore year, he received a notice that the cryocompany was bankrupt from so many people refusing to make payments for the discredited process. The contract that his mother had signed indemnified the company against certain situations in which it could no longer keep its clients frozen, and bankruptcy was one of those situations.

Smaller maintenance firms agreed to take the company's patients, but the transfer would be so complicated and hence so expensive that Anthony had to drop his classes and work full-time at the restaurant in order to pay for it. At school, he'd met a girl, who continued to see him even though his exhausting schedule gave him spare time only at inconvenient hours. He couldn't believe that he'd finally found some brightness in his life, and after he returned from making sure that his father was safely installed in a smaller facility, after he resumed his classes, completing his sophomore and junior year, he began to talk to her about marriage.

"I don't have much to offer, but.

"You're the gentlest, most determined, most hardworking person I've ever met. I'd be proud to be your wife."

"At the start, we won't have much money because I have to pay for my father's maintenance, but…"

"We'll live on what I earn. After you're a doctor, you can take care of me. There'll be plenty enough for us and our children and your father."

"How many children would you like?"

"Three."

Anthony laughed. "You're so sure of the number."

"It's good to hear you laugh."

"You make me laugh."

"By the time you're a doctor, maybe there'll be a cure for your father and you won't have to worry about him anymore."

"Isn't it nice to think so."

Anthony's mother died in a car accident the year he entered medical school. Her remarriage had been so unsatisfying that she'd taken to drinking heavily and had been intoxicated when she veered from the road and crashed into a ravine. At the funeral, the broker hardly acknowledged Anthony and his fiancee. That night, Anthony cried in her arms as he remembered the wonderful family he had once been a part of and how badly everything had changed when his father had gotten sick.

He took his fiancee to the firm that now maintained his father. Since the transfer, Anthony had been able to afford returning to his hometown to visit his father only sporadically. The distance made him anxious because the new firm didn't inspire the confidence that the previous one had. It looked on the edge of disrepair, floors not dirty but not clean, walls not exactly faded and yet somehow in need of painting. Rooms seemed vaguely underlit. The units in which patients were kept frozen looked cheap. The temperature gauges were primitive compared to the elaborate technology at the previous facility. But as long as they kept his father safe…

That thought left Anthony when he took another look at the gauge and realized that the temperature inside his father's chamber had risen one degree from when he'd last checked it.

"What's wrong?" his fiancee asked.

Words caught in his throat. All he could do was point.

The temperature had gone up yet another degree.

He raced along corridor after corridor, desperate to find a maintenance worker. He burst into the company's office and found only a secretary.

"My father…"

Startled, the secretary took a moment to react when he finished explaining. She phoned the control room. No one answered.

"It's almost noon. The technicians must have gone to lunch."

"For God's sake, where's the control room?"

At the end of the corridor where his father was. As Anthony raced past the niche, he saw that the temperature gauge had gone up fifteen degrees. He charged into the control room, saw flashing red lights on a panel, and hurried to them, trying to figure out what was wrong. Among numerous gauges, eight temperature needles were rising, and Anthony was certain that one of them was for his father.

He flicked a switch beneath each of them, hoping to reset the controls.

The lights kept flashing.

He flicked a switch at the end of their row.

Nothing changed.

He pulled a lever. Every light on the panel went out. "Jesus."

Pushing the lever back to where it had been, he held his breath, exhaling only when all the lights came back on. The eight that had been flashing were now constant.

Sweating, he eased onto a chair. Gradually, he became aware of people behind him and turned to where his fiancee and the secretary watched in dismay from the open door. Then he stared at the panel, watching the temperature needles gradually descend to where they had been. Terrified that the lights would start flashing again, he was still concentrating on the gauges an hour later when a bored technician returned from lunch.

It turned out that a faulty valve had restricted the flow of freezant around eight of the niches. When Anthony had turned the power off and on, the valve had reset itself, although it could fail again at any time and would have to be replaced, the technician explained.

"Then do it!"

He would never again be comfortable away from his father. It made him nervous to return to medical school. He contacted the cryofirm every day, making sure there weren't any problems. He married, became a parent of a lovely daughter, graduated, and was lucky enough to be able to do his internship in the city where he'd been raised and where he could keep a close watch on his father's safety. If only his father had been awake to see him graduate, he thought. If only his father had been cured and could have seen his granddaughter being brought home from the hospital…

One night, while Anthony was on duty in the emergency ward, a comatose patient turned out to be the broker who'd married his mother. The broker had shot himself in the head. Anthony tried everything possible to save him. His voice tightened when he pronounced the time of death.

He joined a medical practice in his hometown after he finished his internship. He started earning enough to make good on his promise and take care of his wife after she'd spent so many years taking care of him. She had said that she wanted three children, and she got them sooner than she expected, for the next time she gave birth, it was to twins, a boy and a girl. Nonetheless, Anthony's work prevented him from spending as much time with his family as he wanted, for his specialty was blood diseases, and when he wasn't seeing patients, he was doing research, trying to find a way to cure his father.

He needed to know the experiments that the lab had conducted and the types of rays that his father might have been exposed to. But the lab was obsessed with security and refused to tell him. He fought to get a court order to force the lab to cooperate. Judge after judge refused. Meanwhile, he was sadly conscious of all the family celebrations that his father continued to miss: the day Anthony's first daughter started grade school, the afternoon the twins began swimming lessons, the evening Anthony's second daughter played "Chopsticks" at her first piano recital. Anthony was thirty-five before he knew it. Then forty. All of a sudden, his children were in high school. His wife went to law school. He kept doing research.

When he was fifty-five and his eldest daughter turned thirty (she was married, with a daughter of her own), the laboratory made a mistake and released the information Anthony needed among a batch of old data that the lab felt was harmless. It wasn't Anthony who discovered the information, but instead a colleague two thousand miles away who had other reasons to look through the old data and recognized the significance of the type of rays that Anthony's father had been exposed to. Helped by his colleague's calculations, Anthony devised a treatment, tested it on computer models, subjected rats to the same type of rays, found that they developed the same rapid symptoms as his father had, gave the animals the treatment, and felt his pulse quicken when the symptoms disappeared as rapidly as they had come on.

With his wife next to him, Anthony stood outside his father's cryochamber as arrangements were made to thaw him. He feared that the technicians would make an error during the procedure (the word echoed from his youth), that his father wouldn't wake up.

His muscles compacted as something hissed and the door swung open. The hatch slid out.

Anthony's father looked the same as when he'd last seen him: naked, gaunt, and gray, suspended over a force field.

"You thawed him that quickly?" Anthony asked.

"It doesn't work if it isn't instantaneous."

His father's chest moved up and down.

"My God, he's alive," Anthony said. "He's actually…"

But there wasn't time to marvel. The disease would be active again, racing to complete its destruction.

Anthony hurriedly injected his father with the treatment. "We have to get him to a hospital."

He stayed in his father's room, constantly monitoring his father's condition, injecting new doses of the treatment precisely on schedule. To his amazement, his father improved almost at once. The healthier color of his skin made obvious what the blood tests confirmed – the disease was retreating.

Not that his father knew. One effect of being thawed was that the patient took several days to wake up. Anthony watched for a twitch of a finger, a flicker of an eyelid, to indicate that his father was regaining consciousness. After three days, he became worried enough to order another brain scan, but as his father was being put in the machine, a murmur made everyone stop.

"…Where am I?" Anthony's father asked.

"In a hospital. You're going to be fine."

His father strained to focus on him."…Who…"

"Your son."

" No… My son's… a child." Looking frightened, Anthony's father lost consciousness.

The reaction wasn't unexpected. But Anthony had his own quite different reaction to deal with. While his father hadn't seen him age and hence didn't know who Anthony was, Anthony's father hadn't aged and hence looked exactly as Anthony remembered. The only problem was that Anthony's memory came from when he was nine, and now at the age of fifty-five, he looked at his thirty-two-year-old father, who wasn't much older than Anthony's son.

"Marian's dead?"

Anthony reluctantly nodded. "Yes. A car accident."

"When?"

Anthony had trouble saying it. "Twenty-two years ago."

"No."

"I'm afraid it's true."

"I've been frozen forty-six years? No one told me what was going to happen."

"We couldn't. You were unconscious. Near death." His father wept.

"Our house?"

"Was sold a long time ago."

"My friends?"

Anthony looked a way.

With a shudder, his father pressed his hands to his face. "It's worse than being dead."

"No," Anthony said. "You heard the psychiatrist. Depression's a normal part of coming back. You're going to have to learn to live again."

"Just like learning to walk again," his father said bitterly.

"Your muscles never had a chance to atrophy. As far as your body's concerned, no time passed since you were frozen."

"But as far as my mind goes? Learn to live again? That's something nobody should have to do."

"Are you saying that Mom and I should have let you die? Our lives would have gone on just the same. Mom would have been killed whether you were frozen or you died. Nothing would have changed, except that you wouldn't be here now."

" With your mother gone…"

Anthony waited.

"With my son gone.

"I'm your son."

"My son had his ninth birthday two weeks ago. I gave him a new computer game that I looked forward to playing with him. I'll never get to see him grow up."

"To see me grow up. But I'm here now. We can make up for lost time."

"Lost time." The words seemed like dust in his father's mouth.

"Dad" – it was the last time Anthony used that term-"this is your grandson Paul. These are your granddaughters Sally and Jane. And this is Jane's son Peter. Your great-grandson."

Seeing his father's reaction to being introduced to grandchildren who were almost as old as he was, Anthony felt heartsick.

"Forty-six years? But everything changed in a second," his father said. "It makes my head spin so much…"

"I'll teach you," Anthony said. "I'll start with basics and explain what happened since you were frozen. I'll move you forward. Look, here are virtual videos of-"

"What are virtual videos?"

"Of news shows from back then. We'll watch them in sequence. We'll talk about them. Eventually, we'll get you up to the present."

Anthony's father pointed toward the startlingly lifelike videos from forty-six years earlier." That's the present."

"Is there anything you'd like to do?"

"Go to Marian."

So Anthony drove him to the mausoleum, where his father stood for a long time in front of the niche that contained her urn.

"One instant she's alive. The next…" Tears filled his father's eyes. "Take me home."

But when Anthony headed north of the city, his father put a trembling hand on his shoulder. "No. You're taking the wrong direction."

"But we live at-"

"Home. I want to go home."

So Anthony drove him back to the old neighborhood, where his father stared at the run-down house that he had once been proud to keep in perfect condition. Weeds filled the yard. Windows were broken. Porch steps were missing.

"There used to be a lawn here," Anthony's father said. "I worked so hard to keep it immaculate."

"I remember," Anthony said.

"I taught my son how to do somersaults on it."

"You taught me."

"In an instant." His father sounded anguished. "All gone in an instant."

Anthony peered up from his breakfast of black coffee, seeing his father at the entrance to the kitchen. It had been two days since they'd spoken.

"I want to tell you," his father said, "that I realize you made an enormous effort for me. I can only imagine the pain and sacrifice. I'm sorry if I'm…No matter how confused I feel, I want to thank you."

Anthony managed to smile, comparing the wrinkle-free face across from him to the weary one that he'd seen in the mirror that morning. "I'm sorry, too. That you're having such a hard adjustment. All Mom and I thought of was, you were so sick. We were ready to do anything that would help you."

"Your mother." Anthony's father needed a moment before he could continue. "Grief doesn't last just a couple of days."

It was Anthony's turn to need a moment. He nodded. "I've had much of my life to try to adjust to Mom being gone, but I still miss her. You'll have a long hard time catching up to me."

"I…"

"Yes?"

"I don't know what to do."

"For starters, why don't you let me make you some breakfast." Anthony's wife was defending a case in court. "It'll be just the two of us. Do waffles sound okay? There's some syrup in that cupboard. How about orange juice?"

The first thing Anthony's father did was learn how to drive the new types of vehicles. Anthony believed this was a sign of improving mental health. But then he discovered that his father was using his mobility not to investigate his new world, instead to visit Marian's ashes in the mausoleum and to go to the once-pristine house that he'd owned forty-six years previously, a time period that to him was yesterday. Anthony had done something similar when he'd lied to his mother's second husband about being at the library when actually he'd been at the cryofirm visiting his father. It worried him.

"I found a 'For Sale' sign at the house," his father said one evening at dinner. "I want to buy it."

"But…" Anthony set down his fork. "The place is a wreck."

"It won't be after I'm finished with it."

Anthony felt as if he argued not with his father but with one of his children when they were determined to do something that he thought unwise.

"I can't stay here," his father said. "I can't live with you for the rest of my life."

"Why not? You're welcome."

"A father and his grown-up son? We'll get in each other's way."

"But we've gotten along so far."

"I want to buy the house."

Continuing to feel that he argued with his son, Anthony gave in as he always did. "All right, okay, fine. I'll help you get a loan. I'll help with the down payment. But if you're going to take on this kind of responsibility, you'll need a job."

"That's something else I want to talk to you about."

His father used his maintenance skills to become a successful contractor whose specialty was restoring old-style homes to their former beauty. Other contractors tried to compete, but Anthony's father had an edge: he knew those houses inside and out. He'd helped build them when he was a teenager working on summer construction jobs. He'd maintained his when that kind of house was in its prime almost a half century earlier. Most important, he loved that old style of house.

One house in particular – the house where he'd started to raise his family. As soon as the renovation was completed, he found antique furniture from the period. When Anthony visited, he was amazed by how closely the house resembled the way it had looked when he was a child. His father had arranged to have Marian's urn released to him. It sat on a shelf in a study off the living room. Next to it were framed pictures of Anthony and his mother when they'd been young, the year Anthony's father had gotten sick.

His father found antique audio equipment from back then. The only songs he played were from that time. He even found an old computer and the game that he'd wanted to play with Anthony, teaching his great-grandson how to play it just as he'd already taught the little boy how to do somersaults on the lawn.

Anthony turned sixty. The hectic years of trying to save his father were behind him. He reduced his hours at the office. He followed an interest in gardening and taught himself to build a greenhouse. His father helped him.

"I need to ask you something," his father said one afternoon when the project was almost completed.

"You make it sound awfully serious."

His father looked down at his calloused hands. "I have to ask your permission about something."

"Permission?" Anthony's frown deepened his wrinkles.

"Yes. I…It's been five years. I…Back then, you told me that I had to learn to live again."

"You've been doing a good job of it," Anthony said.

" I fought it for a long time." His father looked more uncomfortable.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know how to…"

"Say it."

"I loved your mother to the depth of my heart."

Anthony nodded, pained with emotion.

"I thought I'd die without her," his father said. "Five years. I never expected…I've met somebody. The sister of a man whose house I'm renovating. We've gotten to know each other, and…Well, I…What I need to ask is, would you object, would you see it as a betrayal of your mother if…"

Anthony felt pressure in his tear ducts. "Would I object?" His eyes misted. "All I want is for you to be happy."

Anthony was the best man at his father's wedding. His stepmother was the same age as his daughters. The following summer, he had a half-brother sixty-one years younger than himself. It felt odd to see his father acting toward the baby in the same loving manner that his father had presumably acted toward him when he was a baby.

At the celebration when the child was brought home from the hospital, several people asked Anthony if his wife was feeling ill. She looked wan.

"She's been working hard on a big trial coming up," he said.

The next day, she had a headache so bad that he took her to his clinic and had his staff do tests.

The day after that, she was dead. The viral meningitis that killed her was so virulent that nothing could have been done to save her. The miracle was that neither Anthony nor anybody else in the family had caught it, especially the new baby.

He felt drained. Plodding through his house, he tried to muster the energy to get through each day. The nights were harder. His father often came and sat with him, a young man next to an older one, doing his best to console him.

Anthony visited his wife's grave every day. On the anniversary of her death, while picking flowers for her, he collapsed from a stroke. The incident left him paralyzed on his left side, in need of constant care. His children wanted to put him in a facility.

"No," his father said. "It's my turn to watch over him."

So Anthony returned to the house where his youth had been wonderful until his father had gotten sick. During the many hours they spent together, his father asked Anthony to fill in more details of what had happened as Anthony had grown up: the arguments he'd had with the broker, his double shifts as a waiter, his first date with the woman who would be his wife.

"Yes, I can see it," his father said.

The next stroke reduced Anthony's intelligence to that of a nine-year-old. He didn't have the capacity to know that the computer on which he played a game with his father came from long ago. In fact, the game was the same one that his father had given him on his ninth birthday, two weeks before his father had gotten sick, the game that he'd never had a chance to play with his son.

One morning, he no longer had a nine-year-old's ability to play the game.

"His neurological functions are decreasing rapidly," the specialist said.

"Nothing can be done?" Anthony's father asked.

"I'm sorry. At this rate…In a couple of days.

Anthony's father felt as if he had a stone in his stomach.

"We'll make him as comfortable here as possible," the specialist said.

"No. My son should die at home."

Anthony's father sat next to the bed, holding his son's frail hand, painfully reminded of having taken care of him when Anthony had been sick as a child. Now Anthony looked appallingly old for sixty-three. His breathing was shallow. His eyes were open, glassy, not registering anything.

Anthony's children and grandchildren came to pay their last respects.

"At least he'll be at peace," his second daughter said.

Anthony's father couldn't bear it. "He didn't give up on me. I won't give up on him."

"That theory's been discredited," the specialist said.

"It works."

"In isolated cases, but-"

"I'm one of them."

"Of the few. At your father's age, he might not survive the procedure."

"Are you refusing to make the arrangements?"

"I'm trying to explain that with the expense and the risk-"

"My son will be dead by tomorrow. Being frozen can't be worse than that. And as far as the expense goes, he worked hard. He saved his money. He can afford it."

"But there's no guarantee a treatment will ever be developed for brain cells as damaged as your son's are."

"There's no guarantee it won't be developed, either." "He can't give his permission."

"He doesn't need to. He made me his legal representative." "All the same, his children need to be consulted. There are issues of estate, a risk of a lawsuit."

"I'll take care of his children. You take care of the arrangements."

They stared at him.

Anthony's father suspected they resisted the idea because they didn't want to drain money from their inheritance. "Look, I'm begging. He'd have done this for you. He did it for me. For God's sake, you can't give up on him."

They stared harder.

"It's not going to cost you anything. I'll work harder and pay for it myself. I'll sign control of the estate over to you. All I want is, don't try to stop me."

Anthony's father stood outside the cryochamber, studying the stick-on plaque that he'd put on the hatch. It gave Anthony's name, his birthdate, when he'd had his first stroke, and when he'd been frozen. "Sweet dreams," it said at the bottom. "Wake up soon."

"Soon" was a relative word, of course. Anthony had been frozen six years, and there was still no progress in a treatment. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be progress tomorrow or next month. There's always hope, Anthony's father thought. You've got to have hope.

On a long narrow table in the middle of the corridor, there were tokens of affection left by loved ones of other patients: family photographs, a baseball glove, and a guitar pick. Anthony's father had left the disc of the computer game that he and Anthony had been playing. "We'll play it again," he'd promised.

It was Anthony's father's birthday. He was forty-nine. He had gray in his sideburns, wrinkles in his forehead. I'll soon look like Anthony did when I woke up from being frozen and saw him leaning over me, he thought.

He couldn't subdue the discouraging notion that one of these days he'd be the same age as Anthony when he'd been frozen. But now that he thought about it, maybe that notion wasn't so discouraging. If they found a treatment that year, and they woke Anthony up, and the treatment worked…We'd both be sixty-six. We could grow old together.

I'll keep fighting for you, Anthony. I swear you can count on me. I couldn't let you die before me. It's a terrible thing for a father to outlive his son.

Douglas €. Winter is a fiction writer (Run), critic (books about Stephen King and Clive Barker), anthologist, and attorney. His first anthology, Prime Evil (1988), is one of the great collections of the macabre. In the mid-1990s, he phoned to tell me about a second anthology he Was planning: Millennium. When published in 1997, the book was retitled Revelations because of a conflict with a TV series that had the same name, but the original title Millennium gives you a sense of what Doug had in mind. He invited various writers to choose a decade in the twentieth century and write an apocalyptic story about it, one that would be rooted in history and give a sense of the ultimate issues that the decade had faced. I was immediately intrigued, As many of my novels show, the professor in me has always loved working with history. The forties, fifties, and sixties had already been taken, Doug said, so which of the remaining decades did I want? The teens, I said. Because of the First World War? No, although the war would be in the story. The subject I wanted to dramatize had been potentially more apocalyptic than the war and foreshadowed later similar global threats. It gave me nightmares.