Cousin Charlie and I sat outside Lifetime Labs, waiting for Grandpa Jo. Vast granite faces loomed over us, radiating stern authority. Battered and worn by time, their frowns remained constant, gazing in scorn upon our lively youth. Fragments of ancient Egypt, dragged across the globe by McKenzie to give history to his post-modern folly of a house. The place now jutted with shining outlet pipes and rusting vents, put there by Life Systems, whose owner so loved the building that he moved his noisy, steaming processing plant inside.
Charlie strummed his guitar with calloused fingertips, filthily serenading the beauty of a long-dead actress. Across the road, willows were weeping into the Tyne, where a dog, tired, tottered to the ground and bent to lap desperately at the murky waters.
***
Inside the building, Grandpa Jo’s breath frosted against the shell of a softly humming sarcophagus. His fingers pressed against thick blue-tinted glass as he squinted tearfully at Grandma Joe’s face. Her cold purple beauty cut to his unsteady heart. The face of forty years ago, a vision that had carried him sane through long decades of prison camps, untouched by time’s unstoppable march.
‘Your wife’s contract specifies her revival should you be found alive,’ said the sharp young doctor. ‘Legally, however, the choice is yours. You can have her revived, leave her here, or even join her, saving yourself for the day when even age can be undone.’
To the medic, the words were business, an official mantra repeated daily.
Jo took his wrinkled hand from the glass, leaving behind five thin patches of frosted skin.
‘I need time to think,’ he said.
***
Grandpa Jo wanted to sit beneath the trees, so Charlie and I helped him across the street and onto a bench beneath the willows. He smiled as he gazed up into the branches.
‘We used to do this when we first met,’ he murmured. His eyes filled with joy, and then tears, as memory rode him hard through his past. ‘Just sit by the river, beneath the trees, and watch them blow in the wind.’ Wincing, he reached out and touched a leaf, blighted by the first yellow scars of Porrit’s Disease. ‘Everywhere I look, the trees are sick.’
‘A lot has changed while you were away, Grandpa,’ I said.
‘Of course it has,’ he said. ‘What bothers me is the things that haven’t.’
Beneath the willows, the river still drifted along, carrying its oily sheen down to the sea.
‘What happened to the trees?’ Grandpa Jo asked.
‘They tried to save them from the war,’ I explained. ‘So many were being lost during bombing raids and tank battles, someone was afraid we might lose all that fine greenery. So they built a special disease, a beautiful, benevolent bug that would make the trees grow quicker. Because if they grew up and reproduced faster, maybe they could replace themselves quicker than we were killing them. We could live in a green and pleasant land, even if it echoed with gunshots and screams.’
Grandpa looked up at the willow and the rust-like stains spreading through its fragile leaves, like cold autumn come in late spring. The wind, rushing past, lifted some leaves from the branches and they burst into dust before our eyes.
‘But a virus is still a virus,’ I continued. ‘It evolved, corrupted, grew beyond its purpose. The trees didn’t just grow faster. They died faster too. The war ended and people stopped dying, but not the trees.’
Grandpa’s gaze still drifted up through the branches, watching the thin memories of leaves scatter into nothingness.
‘So sad to see,’ he said. ‘A life on fast-forward, run to its end and crumbling away in a blink of an eye.’
He looked at me, or perhaps at my father, the two of us muddled sometimes in his mind – the son he had lost and the grandson he had met full-grown. Time stretched out as the wind caressed the river and Charlie sang folksongs to the listless dog. Eventually, Grandpa reached out a hand.
‘Help me up,’ he said. ‘I’ve left her waiting long enough.’
***
Grandpa Jo stood again in front of Grandma’s cryogenic tank. The scar tissue of his cheeks twitched uncontrollably in the damp, chill room. He felt every ache and tremor left by a lifetime of horror and hope. Liver-spotted fingers clenched arthritically at the head of a cane that kept a thrice-broken leg from giving way.
‘Look at me,’ Grandpa Jo said to the bemused young doctor. ‘I have longed for my wife, desperately, unceasingly. Here she is, so much like my memories that I cannot bare to see her face. How could such an angel want me? Or missing me still, could she embrace what I have become?
‘I am too old for her now, and too world-weary to believe in renewed youth. She will wait for the future alone, and I will dream of her in my lonely decay.’
He turned slowly from the tank, a tear welling in his eye.
***
As we walked away from Lifetime Labs, we passed the mongrel dog, still lying at the river’s edge. Its head dangled loosely now, trailing in the water as grease soaked up into its fur, tongue lapping lifeless in the tainted current.
This story was first published in Alienskin Magazine, February 2007.