Tanner On Ice

Chapter 2

It all started… well, who knows when it started? When I was born, maybe, or when I was conceived, or somewhere in the dim dark past when my great-great-grandfather met my great-great-grandmother and decided he liked the way she combed her hair. Maybe it started on a numbered hill in Korea, where a shard of shrapnel from an incoming artillery round embedded itself in my skull, forever relieving me of the need to sleep. (No one knows exactly how the sleep center works, or why we need to sleep, but mine doesn’t, and I don’t.)

Maybe it started when I got home from Korea and started to make a life for myself. I found a way to earn a living, supplementing the monthly disability check I got from the government. And I found a way to fill up twenty-four wide-awake hours a day, and learned, too, to live out the fantasies other people use up in dreams. I studied languages, and I joined political movements, and I supported lost causes. I had adventures. Somewhere along the way I stonewalled my jailers in Washington by insisting I worked for a government agency and refusing to tell them which one. Then a guy showed up to claim me, evidently believing I worked for him. And, as the years went by, maybe I did. It’s not always easy to tell.

Enough. It all started on a Tuesday afternoon in October, in the pine-paneled basement recreation room of a house in Union City, New Jersey, where a man named Harald Engstrom poured me a glass of brandy.

“The trouble with Scandinavia,” Harald Engstrom said, “is we’re too bloody civilized. We used to be Vikings, for God’s sake! We were the scourge of Europe, more to be feared than the Black Death. We’d raid your coastal villages. We’d butcher your cattle and rape your daughters – or was it the other way around?”

“Well, either way,” I said.

“Exactly. We were a dangerous lot, Evan. And now we never go to war. We are peaceable and prosperous. All our citizens get medical care and education and a government that takes care of them from the cradle to the grave. Even the downtrodden, even those of us in southern Sweden, live a life the rest of the world would envy.”

We were speaking Danish. Harald was from Lund, in southern Sweden, but he did not consider himself a Swede, nor did he consider his homeland to be a part of Sweden. It had once been Danish – most of each of the Scandinavian countries had once belonged to or been a part of one or more of the others – and, as far as Harald was concerned, he and his neighbors and kinsmen were Danes still, and all that remained was for them to wrest control of their benighted province from the damnable (if benevolent) Stockholm government.

“It is difficult to stir up a rebellion against a welfare state,” he said with a sigh. “If we are successful, what happens to our pensions? Evan, I ask you. Would a Viking ask such a question?”

“It’s a problem,” I agreed. “You’ve got to get people to realize they’re oppressed before you can get them to revolt.”

“But you have some ideas.”

I did, and I began to run through them for him. For several years I’d been a member of SKOAL, an acronymic organization committed to restoring lost areas of Sweden and Norway to Danish control. (A fraction of SKOAL claimed Danish hegemony for all of Sweden and Norway, and for part of Finland as well, but I felt their claims were unjustified, and not terribly realistic.) I’d had some correspondence with members in Denmark and Sweden, but Harald was the first SKOALer I’d met face to face.

He nodded as I spoke. “You are truly committed,” he said.

“Absolutely.”

“And you believe you can get assistance from these other groups? The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization? The League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia? The Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society?”

He named some other outfits of which I’m proud to be a member, including one or two I couldn’t recall having mentioned to him. That might have made me suspicious, but who would be suspicious of a Danish Swede (or a Swedish Dane) in the basement of a suburban house in Union City, New Jersey?

“Evan,” he said, “there’s some better brandy, and I insist you try a glass.”

I’d had enough for that hour of the day, but it would have been impolite to refuse. Harald, a blond giant with guileless blue eyes, lumbered into the other room and came back with two glasses of a liquid a little darker than amber. He very deliberately set one in front of me and raised the other in a toast.

“To necessity,” he said.

“Necessity?”

He nodded. “To it we must always bend our will. Skoal!”

“Skoal,” I agreed, although I wasn’t all that sure about the rest of it. But I drank, all the same.

We talked of other things, though I can’t say I remember what they were. What I do remember is that a curious drowsiness began to come over me. My mind wandered. I yawned, and apologized for it.

“You must be tired,” Harald said. “Would you care to lie down for a few minutes, Evan?”

“No, thank you. It’s not necessary.”

“Just for a little while. A nap, eh? I think it’s a good idea. Look at you, you can’t keep your eyes open!”

He was right. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But that didn’t make sense. If there was one thing I could always do, it was keep my eyes open. I did close them now and then – to rest them, to go into a yogic relaxation mode – but it was always entirely voluntary. I closed them because I decided to, not because they decided to close of their own accord.

But that’s what they were doing. Closing, all by themselves. And I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. I couldn’t even remember to try…

The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back. I had the sense of coming up from some cold dark place far beneath the earth’s surface. That was true, I realized, only in a symbolic sense. I hadn’t actually gone anywhere, let alone some dungeon in the bowels of the earth. I was still in Harald Engstrom’s house in Union City. I might be in the basement, which was technically below the earth’s surface, though probably not below sea level. And I might not be in the basement after all, because I seemed to be lying on a bed, and I didn’t recall seeing any beds in his basement.

I’d evidently passed out, I thought, and maybe Harald had carried me upstairs to a bedroom. The brandy, I thought – and at once it occurred to me (as it will long since have occurred to you) that there was something in that brandy more to be reckoned with than mere ethyl alcohol.

For God’s sake, he’d slipped me a mickey! I’d been drugged!

“Coming out of it,” someone was saying. Not in Danish, or Swedish either. In English.

“He almost surfaced the last time,” a second voice said, this one female. I noted this, and noted in retrospect that the first voice had been a man’s. “Maybe he’ll make it this time,” she said.

“Don’t say any more,” the man said. “He can hear you.”

Indeed I could, but from that point on there was nothing more to hear.

No words, anyway. I could hear them breathing, if I put my mind to it, and distantly I could hear the hum of machinery and the muted sounds of human activity. I was beginning to get the feeling that I was not in Harald Engstrom’s house after all, but I couldn’t think how or where I might have been moved. I certainly didn’t remember any movement, though I probably wouldn’t if I’d been deeply comatose as a result of whatever had been in that last glass of brandy.

How long had I been out? I was lying on my back with my arms at my sides, and I hadn’t moved a muscle except to breathe, but I moved now, lifting a hand and bringing it to my face.

A sharp intake of breath from one or both of them greeted this move of mine. So they were watching me closely, whoever they were. And they were impressed that I could move.

What was going on here?

I touched my chin, ran my hand up along my cheek. I had shaved that morning, I remembered. Sometimes I skip a day, if all I’m going to do is stay home and write somebody’s thesis and answer my mail, but I’d definitely shaved before my visit to Harald’s house, and my beard had scarcely grown since then. There was a little stubble against the grain, but at worst I’d look like Richard Nixon ten minutes after he left the barber’s chair. So I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a dozen hours, a whole day at the absolute outside.

They still hadn’t said anything. They’d seen me move, and they’d since watched me trying to tell time by my five o’clock shadow, but they hadn’t been willing to comment.

Up to me, evidently.

First I took a quick inventory. I wiggled my toes to make sure I still had them. I tensed muscles here and there, just to assure myself that everything still worked.

Then I opened my eyes.

There were two of them, the man a stocky fellow about my age, the woman a sallow blonde a good deal younger. They were both dressed in white, and the room I was in looked to be a hospital room, and what the hell was I doing there?

I decided to ask them. “Where am I?” I said. “And what am I doing here?”

They exchanged glances. The man – the doctor, I suppose – ignored my question and asked one of his own. What was my name?

I hesitated, not because I didn’t know it but because I wondered if there was any reason to keep it to myself. None I could think of, I decided.

“Evan Tanner,” I said.

“Good,” he said. Not that my name was Evan Tanner, I gathered, but that I was able to supply it. For God’s sake, what did they think was wrong with me?

“How do you feel, Mr. Tanner?”

“I feel fine,” I said.

“Any pain? Dizziness? Anything of the sort?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. I was still lying flat on my back, and it somehow had not occurred to me to sit up. It did now. I sat up a little creakily – you’d have thought I’d been lying down forever – and the woman’s eyes widened. I’m just sitting up in bed, I wanted to tell her. Don’t act like I’m Lazarus, takething up his bed and walkething.

“Still no dizziness, Mr. Tanner?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, it’s great,” I agreed. “But I’ve got a few questions of my own, and if you don’t mind-”

“I’m sure you do,” he said. “But let’s take mine first, shall we?” He brandished a clipboard. “Forms to fill out, you know. And once that’s out of the way I’ll be better able to answer your questions.”

I nodded.

“Can you tell me the date?”

“Today’s date?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said. “The last I knew it was Tuesday, October fifth. I drank a glass of brandy. It wasn’t enough to get me drunk, so my guess is there was something in it to knock me out. And it feels as though it all happened an hour or two ago, but in that case I wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be making a fuss over me. I’d have to guess that I’ve been unconscious for several days, so… do you want me to take a wild guess? I’m going to say it’s Friday, Friday the eighth of October.”

“And the year?”

“The year?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“That’s the sort of thing they ask people who’ve been hit over the head, to find out just how scrambled their brains are. Mine aren’t scrambled at all, or even shirred or poached, as far as I can tell. It’s 1972.”

“ 1972.”

“Uh-huh. Next I suppose you’re going to ask me who’s president.”

“And what would your answer be?”

“The trickster himself,” I said.

The woman looked puzzled. “The trickster?”

God, were they Republicans? But even a Republican would have had to have heard that sobriquet applied to our Gallant Leader. “Tricky Dick,” I said. “Richard M. Nixon. Only… wait a minute.”

“Yes, Mr. Tanner?”

“There’s an election coming up next month,” I said, “although the result looks like a foregone conclusion. But have I been out of it for a full month?”

“Does that seem possible to you?”

“No,” I said, “but neither does having a quiet drink with a friend” – I almost said comrade, but how would that go over with a pair of Republicans? – “and waking up here. Did they have the election already? And did McGovern somehow put it all together and come out on top?”

They looked at each other again.

“Just a few more questions,” the doctor began, but I wasn’t having any.

“No,” I said, “you answer a question for a change. Did they have the election?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus God. Did McGovern win?”

“No. Nixon carried every state but one.”

“Which one?”

“ Massachusetts.”

“God bless Massachusetts,” I said.

The woman said, “Do you feel all right, Mr. Tanner?”

“You people keep asking me that. I feel fine.”

“You’re holding yourself,” she said, “as if something’s wrong.”

I hadn’t noticed, but she was right. I had my arms folded, with each hand fastened on the opposite upper arm. For warmth, I realized.

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “I’m a little chilly.”

“The room’s quite warm,” she said.

“The room’s warm,” I allowed, “but I’m not. I feel chilled on the inside.”

“On the inside?”

“My bones feel cold,” I said. “The rest of me feels warm enough.”

“Have you ever felt like that before?”

“Not that I remember,” I said, “but then I don’t remember the presidential election, so who’s to say what else might have slipped my mind? He’s still president, is he? Dick Nixon?”

They hesitated, and that was answer enough. “My God,” I said, “he’s not, is he? Don’t tell me there’s been another assassination.”

“No.”

“Then what happened to Nixon?”

“He resigned.”

“He resigned? Presidents don’t resign. Ohmigod. If he resigned, that means Spiro T. Agnew is the president of the United States.”

They exchanged significant glances again. I was really beginning to wish they wouldn’t do that.

“Agnew resigned as well,” the doctor told me.

“They both resigned? Hand in hand, they kicked up their heels and quit?”

“Actually, Agnew resigned first. Gerald Ford was appointed to replace him.”

“The congressman from Michigan?”

“That’s right. Then Nixon resigned, and Ford took over, and he pardoned Nixon.”

“Pardoned him?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For Watergate.”

“Watergate,” I said. “You mean that burglary? That blew up into something big enough to make Nixon and Agnew resign?”

“Agnew resigned because of something else. Some scandal, payoffs and kickbacks while he was governor of Maryland. Nixon resigned because he was about to be impeached, and that was because of Watergate.”

“I don’t know how you can remember all that,” the nurse said admiringly. “They taught us all that, but I can never keep it straight.”

“They taught you?” I said. “Who taught you?”

“You know. In school.”

But why would they have had to teach her? Wouldn’t she have lived through it?

Wait a minute…

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Ford’s not still the president, is he?”

“No, I’m afraid he’s not.”

“Who came after Ford?”

“Carter.”

Carter? Who was that? Aside from the fact that he was now president of the United States -

“And Reagan followed Carter, and-”

“Reagan? You don’t mean Ronald Reagan.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The actor? He’s the president?”

“He was.”

“Was? Who’s president now?”

“ Clinton.”

“ Clinton? DeWitt Clinton was governor of New York State back in the nineteenth century. He dug the Erie Canal. Well, not personally, but you know what I mean.” They were exchanging glances again, and I began to wonder if this place was in fact a mental hospital. If so, maybe it was where I belonged.

“And there was a George Clinton,” I said. “I think he was a vice-president, but I can’t remember who he served under. Has this Clinton got a first name?”

“Bill.”

“Bill Clinton,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

“He was governor of Arkansas,” the woman said, “before he was elected president.”

“And he succeeded Reagan?”

“First there was Bush,” the man said.

“Bush?”

“George Bush.”

The name was familiar, though I couldn’t think why.

“Bush followed Reagan,” I said, “and Clinton followed Bush.”

“Yes.”

“And Clinton ’s in there now.”

“That’s correct.”

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. What did that add up to, twenty years? And any or all of them could have had more than a single four-year term, and-

I looked at the backs of my hands. They looked just as I remembered them. No liver spots, no signs of age since I had looked at them last. I looked down at the rest of me and saw that I was wearing a hospital gown. I had somehow failed to notice this until now, but it didn’t come as a great shock. I was, by the looks of things, in a hospital. What else should I be wearing?

I said, “I want a mirror.”

“Mr. Tanner, if you’ll just-”

“No, dammit, I won’t just. Bring me a mirror.” They looked at each other again, damn them. “The hell with it,” I said, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The doctor moved to support me if I fell, but I waved him aside. There was a bathroom, and I walked to it, and there was a mirror over the sink, and, not without trepidation, I looked into it.

And there was my own face staring back at me, looking none the worse for wear. No older, and certainly no wiser.

“No dizziness,” the doctor was saying, “even in an upright position. No problem with motor skills.”

“We noticed his muscle tone was excellent.”

“True,” he said. “Still and all, it’s quite miraculous. Theory is one thing, but when you see it right before your eyes-”

I turned on him. “All right,” I said savagely, “who’s the president?”

“Mr. Tanner, I believe I told you-”

“I know what you told me, and I know what the mirror’s telling me, and the two don’t go together.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose they do.”

“Who’s the president?”

“William Jefferson Clinton.”

“And what’s the date?”

“March fourteenth.”

“Well, that’s good. I haven’t missed St. Patrick’s Day. What year?”

“Mr. Tanner-”

“What year?”

“ 1997,” he said.

“ 1997.”

“Yes.”

“March 14, 1997.”

“Yes. It’s a Friday.”

“I drank a glass of brandy on Tuesday and woke up on a Friday. That would be remarkable enough, but this particular Friday happens to be twenty-five years later. Well, twenty-four and a half, anyway. It’s like Rip Van Winkle, isn’t it?”

“Sort of,” he said. She looked puzzled, and I wondered if she knew who Rip Van Winkle was. She was young enough to have trouble remembering who Nixon and Agnew were, so how could you expect her to cope with Washington Irving?

“Except it’s not,” I said. “He slept for twenty years, and he woke up with a long white beard. I don’t even need a shave. Or have you people been shaving me?”

“No, we haven’t.”

“So presidents have come and gone, and my beard hasn’t grown at all. That’s hard to believe. As far as I can tell, I’m not a day older than I was when I drank that brandy. I gather there must have been a drug in it, but was there also an eyedropper’s worth of water from the fountain of youth?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly,” I echoed. “Is this all some mind-control experiment? It’s not really 1997, is it?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“I was born in 1933,” I said, “so if it’s really 1997, I ought to be sixty-four years old. Do I look sixty-four years old?”

“No,” he said without hesitation. “You look about thirty-nine.”

“I am about thirty-nine. And it’s 1972, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s 1997.”

“It’s 1997 and I’m thirty-nine.”

“According to the calendar, you’re sixty-four. But yes, I’m going to agree with your last statement. It is indeed 1997, and you are indeed thirty-nine years old.”

I looked at him. He looked at me. I said, “I give up. How can that be possible?”

“Mr. Tanner,” he said, “have you ever heard of cryonics?”

Well, of course I had. Based on the notion that biological processes ground to a halt at a lower temperature, cryonics postulated that dead people might be frozen for years on end, then thawed when science had advanced to the point of finding a cure for whatever it was that had killed them. Today’s incurable illness might be a mere nuisance twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now, when a pill or a shot or a surgical procedure could make you fit as a fiddle again.

There had been rumors, I remembered, that various prominent persons had had themselves frozen after death. It seemed to me I’d heard it said about Walt Disney, though I couldn’t be sure whether he was ultimately going to be thawed or simply animated.

It sounded nice in theory. It was a new wrinkle in the hopeless war against mortality, and while it might not extend the normal life span, it might serve as a weapon against early death. If your heart failed, well, we’ll just freeze you until artificial hearts have been perfected. Same with the liver and lungs. Whatever’s wrong with you, sooner or later medical science will work out a way to fix it, and when that happens we’ll warm you up and set you straight.

The trouble was that it was still highly theoretical. While various cryonic facilities around the country had various deceased citizens as clients – “Many are cold and a few are frozen” was the phrase which leapt unbidden to mind – no one had as yet been thawed out to see if it was possible to restart his engine. (Some of the frozen ones were disembodied brains, the doctor told me. It seemed that it was considerably less expensive to have your brain frozen than to have them do your whole body. It struck me as a false economy. How could you go about reviving a frozen brain, and what on earth would you do with it? You needed a body for it, and where would you go for a volunteer? I suppose you could transplant it into the body of a horse, say, but would you really want to return to life as Mister Ed?)

And it was still as theoretical as ever, the fact notwithstanding that I had a pulse once again after a quarter-century in the deep freeze. All my pulse proved was that you could successfully freeze and thaw the living, something they’d long since established through experiments with fish, frogs, and the occasional mammal, including at least a few human volunteers. Such volunteers had never spent more than a day or two frozen stiff, but, if time essentially stopped for one when the body temperature got low enough, then a few days and a couple of dozen years were all one.

That was the theory, anyway, and I looked to be the living proof of it. Dramatic proof at that, if I said so myself. Twenty-five years at zero degrees – I’m guessing at that, nobody was ever able to tell me the precise temperature at which I was maintained – twenty-five years, by God, and I didn’t even need a shave.

How had this happened to me? That’s what I wanted to know, and Dr. Fischbinder wasn’t much help on that point. (That was his name, Warner Fischbinder, and he was an M.D. and a specialist in heroic procedures. At first I thought that meant he saved people trapped in burning buildings, but it turned out his specialty involved treating patients brought back from the very brink of death. His associate, the sallow blonde, was Laura Westerley, and she was a doctor as well, specializing in internal medicine, which, if you think about it, ought to take in just about everything but dermatology. I’d assumed she was a nurse, because most women in white had been nurses when I was frozen. That was just one of the things that were not the same anymore.)

“You were found,” Fischbinder told me, “in a frozen-food locker in the sub-basement of a house in Union City, New Jersey.”

“At 673 Parkside Avenue,” I said.

“You remember the address after all these years?”

“As if it were yesterday. As far as I’m concerned, it was yesterday.”

“Yes, of course. For years the house was owned and occupied by a family named Akesson.”

“Swedish Danes,” I said. “Or Danish Swedes.”

“You know them?”

I shook my head. “I knew a man named Harald Engstrom, and the last thing I remember was drinking a drink he poured for me. He was staying at a friend’s house, and Akesson must have been the friend. And I wound up in the family freezer, next to the cans of Birdseye frozen orange juice.”

“Not the family freezer.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly mean-”

“I doubt the family could have known about it,” he explained. “This was a special hi-tech unit, state-of-the-art in 1972 and still impressive all these years later. And it was installed in a sub-basement of the Akesson house, a small one-room affair reached through a trapdoor in the floor of the furnace room. Someone had run an electrical line to the chamber, and that supplied the power to keep the thing running and you well frozen. And there was also a backup system, a battery-operated generator that would kick in and power the chamber if the power lines were down in a storm. Whoever did this wasn’t taking any chances that you would thaw prematurely.”

“Then how come I’m not still there?”

“The family sold the house,” he said. “It changed hands a couple of times, as a matter of fact. The most recent tenant was doing some remodeling, and had reason to take up the tile floor in the basement instead of just laying new tile on top of it. And in the course of it they discovered the trapdoor, and went to see where it led.”

“They were probably expecting buried treasure,” I said, “and found me instead. But how did they know to call someone who would know what to do?”

“There was a notice posted,” he said. “Hand lettered in block capitals. I don’t recall the wording, but the point of it was that the unit contained a living human being in a frozen state, and that it should not be opened or the power shut off except under the supervision of qualified medical personnel.”

“And that’s where the two of you come in.”

“Not immediately, but soon enough.”

“And you brought me here, or someone did, anyway. Where’s here, anyway? Where are we?”

“ New York University Medical Center.”

“On First Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“And you thawed me out. I suppose it took awhile.”

“It was a very gradual process.”

“When you asked me my name,” I said, “it was the same as asking me who was the president. You already knew the answer.”

“Your name is Evan Michael Tanner. And there is a government file on you. I’ve seen parts of it, but only parts of it.”

“How was I identified? Fingerprints?”

He shook his head. “There was a small suitcase found next to the chamber in which you were frozen. In it were clothes, which I presume were yours.”

“I was wearing a striped shirt with a button-down collar,” I said, “and a pair of khaki pants, and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. And don’t look so surprised, Doctor. Can’t you remember what you were wearing yesterday?”

“I can’t,” he said, “but I know that most people can. Those are in fact the clothes that were in the suitcase, along with shoes and socks and underwear. There were also a watch and wallet, and the wallet held identification, along with membership cards in a variety of organizations. Are you really a member of the Flat Earth Society?”

“Well, I was for many years,” I said, “but if I haven’t paid my dues in twenty-five years they may have dropped me from the rolls.”

“Then there really is such an organization?”

“There was,” I said. “I can only hope there still is.”

“And they believe…”

“That man should trust the evidence of his senses,” I said, “which make it very clear that the earth is flat.”

“How can you possibly believe that?”

“And how can you possibly believe otherwise? Oh, I know how entrenched the globularist heresy has become, but-”

“But to believe as you do now, after men have walked on the moon. Or was that…”

“After my time?” I shook my head. “The moon walk happened three years ago. Well, more like twenty-eight years ago, come to think of it. I could explain it in Planoterrestrial terms, but I don’t expect it would convince you. Anyway, the real point of the Flat Earthers hasn’t got that much to do with the shape of the planet. It’s philosophical, and it’s about trusting one’s own interpretation of evidence and not…”

“And not what?”

“And not swallowing everything the Establishment tells you. The only reason you believe the world is round – or spherical, really – is that’s what they told you in school. And the only reason I believe I spent twenty-five years colder than a welldigger’s ass in the Klondike is because you told me so. Now I can’t imagine why you’d want to lie to me, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening, but I’d feel a lot more in tune with my Flat Earth principles if you could show me some supporting evidence.”

He started to say something, then decided to humor me and slipped out of the room. The woman asked if I really thought they were making this up to fool me. I didn’t, and told her so. “But if I see something concrete,” I said, “it’ll help me believe it.”

Fischbinder came back with a copy of the New York Times. The date was right – March 14, 1997 – and there was a front-page story about the president, who did indeed seem to be named Clinton. There was turmoil in the Middle East, for a change, and there was trouble as well in Zaire and Bosnia. There was a map, and Bosnia seemed to be a country, and not just a province of Yugoslavia. In fact they all seemed to be countries, Bosnia and Croatia and Macedonia and Serbia and Slovenia.

Could I be dreaming? Because I had dreamed of the day when all the parts of Yugoslavia would be sovereign nations, I and my brothers in a handful of disparate groups. If the newspaper was to be believed, the day had come while I lay frozen and unknowing. And now, from the looks of things, the citizens of all these new republics were busy killing one another. Not quite the heaven on earth I’d had in mind, but still…

“I don’t suppose it would be that difficult,” I said, “to have a newspaper printed.”

They exchanged glances again. Neither of them actually said the word paranoia, but I could almost hear it just the same. And I guess I knew I was being unrealistic. They might have dummied up the front page of a newspaper, with some imaginative headlines over blocks of jumbled type. They do that all the time in the movies. But this was a whole copy of the New York Times, pages and pages of it, with ads and photos and stories all the way through.

And it cost sixty cents, I noticed. The last time I bought it, all it set me back was a quarter.

“I’m being silly,” I admitted. “I think I believed you from the beginning, and the paper’s a convincer, even if it does raise two questions for every one it answers. But, see, I look the same. You both probably look a lot older than you did in 1972, but I didn’t know you then, so you couldn’t prove it to me. You know what they say, seeing is believing, and if I could just see something that would cut through this inner skepticism of mine…”

Wordless, Fischbinder took me by the arm and led me to a window. We were evidently on a high floor, facing south and west, and we had a good view of the city. And it was New York, of course, and there were buildings I recognized – the Chrysler building, the Empire State – but there were also plenty of buildings that had not been there the last I looked.

I took it all in in silence, my mind racing yet standing still. I could feel myself struggling to adjust to this new reality. Because that’s what it was – reality. Seeing isn’t necessarily believing, not all the time, but I was seeing and I was believing. It was 1997 – for God’s sake, just three years short of the millennium – and Yugoslavia was five different countries, and I was sixty-four years old. I’d lived a mere thirty-nine years, but I was sixty-four all the same.

I said, “Why?”

“Why?”

“Why me? Well, why anybody, but I’m the person it happened to, and I can’t figure out why. Why did someone think it was a good idea to freeze me like a package of breaded shrimp and hide me away from the world for all these years?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Somebody has to,” I said.

“There was a letter,” he said, “but no one could read it. Then a man from Washington came to collect it. I suppose they found somebody there who could make it out, but they haven’t sent us word as to what it said, and somehow I don’t think they will.”

“Not unless things have changed a lot in the past twenty-five years,” I said.

“But I kept a copy.”

“They let you do that?”

“I’d already made a copy,” he said, “before they turned up, and I kept it. It seems to be some Germanic language, but it’s definitely not German.”

It was Old Norse, and I could see why they’d have had to take it to an expert to get it translated. I missed a few words here and there myself, but I got enough to make sense out of it, if you want to call it that.

“Harald Engstrom was not the man he pretended to be,” I said.

“Harald Engstrom? Was he the man-”

“Who gave me the brandy? Uh-huh. And he was supposed to be an activist in SKOAL, working to bring about the independence of Southern Sweden. But actually he was an agent provocateur of the Stockholm government.”

“Oh?”

“He wanted to learn just how committed I was to the cause,” I went on, “and evidently I convinced him of the depth of my feelings, and that meant I was a dangerous man. He saw it as his patriotic duty to nullify me.” I read some more, shook my head. “But he couldn’t just slit my throat and leave it at that,” I said. “He was too Scandinavian.”

“Too Scandinavian?”

I nodded. “Too civilized. Too highly evolved. Too humane. No more death penalty, not even for enemies of the state. He couldn’t kill me, but he had to neutralize me, and that meant putting me on ice.”

“For twenty-five years?”

“Forever, if the folks in Union City hadn’t taken up the basement floor. But I don’t think it was supposed to go on that long. As soon as SKOAL was eliminated as a political force, he’d have had me thawed and returned to society. But I think something must have happened to him. Maybe he got hit by a bus. Or maybe some players on the other side decided that he was dangerous, and he’s tucked away in a meat locker somewhere, hovering at zero degrees. That would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it?”

“And the people who owned the house?”

“Engstrom’s friends?” I tapped the letter. “He mentions them. They didn’t even know about his little excavation project beneath the furnace room, let alone that they were harboring a low-temperature guest. So if anything happened to Engstrom, I would just stay there until hell froze over.” I frowned. “That’s the wrong metaphor, but you get the idea.”

“What I don’t get,” Laura Westerley said, “is why he was afraid of you. Something about Swedes and Danes?”

I gave her a very brief rundown of the aims of SKOAL and the grievances of the southern Swedes, and she seemed understandably incredulous. “It was never a movement with a whole lot of political credibility,” I said, “but neither was Slovenian separatism, for God’s sake, and they’ve got their own country now. My God, it just occurred to me. There wasn’t anything in the paper, not that I noticed, but it could have happened anytime in the past twenty-five years. But did it?”

“What?”

“Was there an armed revolt in Sweden? Did the Danish Swedes break away?”

“It’s been pretty peaceful there,” Fischbinder said.

“Well, maybe it’ll stay that way,” I said forcefully, “and maybe it won’t. We’ll have to see. Where are my clothes?”

“Your clothes?”

“My clothes. My striped shirt and khaki pants and whatever else I was wearing. I’m going home.”