Florida

A week before Florida opened, Chuck called a Sunday Meeting. His palms were sweaty. The den was still mostly empty, though one of the little cliques had carved out a claim to the old wraparound couch and settled in territorially. He turned the Wall off.

An hour, the rest trickled in. The kids, and the kid’s kids, and their kids, but to Chuck they were more housemates than whatever Kathy held as ‘family’.

All in their little alliances. The den was crowded. Allison stood in the doorway, arms crossed.

‘Glass off, everyone,’ Chuck said, then waited through the sighs and groans as they disconnected. ‘Florida opens next week.’

Allison, as usual, ‘Couldn’t we have done this online?’

'Who's coming?' one of them asked. A little guy, Jordan or something.

Did Chuck know who was coming up? His mom had parted with her last partner nearly a year back. He’d IM’d sympathy but she’d never acknowledged. His grandparents maybe, the two who still kept in touch. Allison’s daughter’s grandparents on the father’s side, of course, and Livie’s great grandfather usually dropped in. Honestly, you never knew. People just showed up, asking for attention. Some Chuck knew, remembered, most didn’t register ‘til arrival.

‘So what’s the big deal?’ asked Allison. ‘We don’t even know what’s coming.’

Then Brandon said, ‘Remember that time we had, like, fifty all over the House?’

‘My great-grandma had a tent,’ Taylor put in.

Allison said, ‘They come, they come. I’m not doing anything differently.’ She may have well slapped imaginary dust from her hands, so complete was her dismissal.

‘Me neither,’ said Kyle, then the rest repeated much the same.

He stared at the kids. Let them come. We won’t do anything differently.

***

There was then a quick avalanche of grandparents and great, uncles and aunts and their iterations of great and great-great. Cars pulling up, spilling out the relatives, then just as quickly the doors would be slamming and new ones arriving. Chuck flowed in and out of attentiveness, aware that he was making a hash of it, everyone leaving disgruntled. By day six they were all gone, word somehow spread, though Chuck wasn’t sure how or what he did, that company had limited welcome. Without Kathy there was no personal touch. Relatives came and went, trailing their medical machinery.

Chuck, with his mildly diagnosed ADD, his time-intensive gaming work, his relatively relative-free family, just his mother and a few cousins, Chuck managed.

Only his Mom lingered, with a new friend, Stan, this chipper European guy, a hundred-fifty-plus years on him, one of those old mountain climbing types that the world just didn’t produce anymore. He brought with him as a gift a box of bitter chocolates, and smelled faintly of cabbage. The kids eyed his scratchy woolen clothes and bald head, splotchy and bumpy and frankly just a bit fascinating. Fortunately, he wore hats. He wore no Glass. They looked at him and it was a deadzone – just a body, not even an address. Nothing but conversation, and nothing to Tag it to. He was from Estonia, Chuck’s mother said. When there was an Estonia.

‘He’s European,’ his mother said. ‘Old school European.’

‘He’s old,’ Chuck agreed.

The old man took that week to have a heart attack or something medical. Chuck wasn’t home. He’d known the ambulance came to the House from the lawyerly post the medics sent. The medics coming to jump a Floridian was the reason Florida closed in the first place. As to all that, he was mostly annoyed he’d have to follow a paper trail to hell and back to avoid losing the House in bills.

Then his mother called. ‘He has a DNR,’ she said.

Who didn’t? Eventually you checked out. Even with the drugs, augmentations, there came a time, though god knows it was infrequent, when death was more in than out, when you went to the Cooler, sealed you up in a Tampa or Orlando Freezer and waited frozen on the future.

‘No,’ his mom said, whispering. ‘For anything.’

‘Anything? What’s that mean?’

‘Anything. No doctors. No medics. Nothing. He wants to go when it’s his time. No freezing.’

He hadn’t met anyone, really, who was willing to die. Nobody who didn’t get help. ‘That’s un-American,’ Chuck said.

‘I know,’ his mother said, without humor at all.

After a moment, he asked, ‘So why’d the medics jump start him?’

‘He doesn’t wear anything. It’s on paper, in his wallet.’

Stan also carried paper money, and metal keys one stuck in little holes on doors and turned. The medics scanned him for instructions, found none, then shocked him back, doped him up, pumped in whatever neuralizers, liver enzymes, kidney boosters and whatnot he needed, then slapped the paperwork to the House.

When Chuck got home Stan was on the daybed in one of the spare bedroom/offices. Several kids were in the room.

‘…Nothing,’ the old man was saying when Chuck entered. ‘Not in years. Have no need of it. Everyone else is connected.’

Momentarily confused, Chuck understood then they were speaking of Glass and links.

‘No phone?’

‘A simple one. Just for talking.’

Murmurs.

‘Medical? Monitor?’

A shrug. ‘You are alive until you are not,’ he said with that light European accent.

‘How do you survive?’ Allison asked.

‘The old fashioned way,’ Stan said. ‘Savings.’

He was like some mythical creature, spotted dimly in the tree line once a generation, come stomping into their lives.

He looked at Chuck. ‘That is the third time they have done this to me. Can’t any person read?’

‘If you wear nothing, how did they know to come?’ Chuck asked.

‘Me,’ Allison said. ‘I came out on the porch and he was, like, blue. I nine-elevened.’

‘I suppose I’m obliged to thank you,’ Stan said. ‘Though next time...’

Next time. It was clear from the silence that everyone was thinking hard. Chuck wondered if letting him die was legal, even a Blanket DNR might not be binding. Written on paper. He looked forward to their departure.

In the morning, Stan was in the backyard, on an old aluminum and plastic-webbed folding lawnchair. Chuck unfolded another. Just enough plastic remained to hold his weight, They had a deck and a nice patch of grass mowed weekly by the House. A scattering of toys, a swingset starting to rust, a bicycle well on its way. Annete, only in her twenties, still in school, Allison’s daughter, sat gingerly on the edge of a molded plastic picnic table.

Stan was saying, ‘… it wasn’t anything many people lived through. Not then, not at my age, so young…’ Chuck felt destined to always enter the middle of Stan’s conversations.

‘He was born in Estonia,’ Annette said. ‘Before the war,’ and it took a moment of confusion before Chuck even understood what war. Only later would he add the numbers.

Annette got up and Chuck realized she was just being polite hanging with Stan, that Chuck was the replacement company, her excuse to escape.

Though it was morning, the moon was out, a pale gray circle on the blue sky, looking more in front of it than behind. ‘The moon,’ Stan said wistfully. ‘When I was a younger man, America, the government, first sent a man to the moon and all of us entertained the notion of going there. You have no idea what they went through for the trip. A tin can. Some gasoline. A slingshot, really.’

‘Retirement colony,’ Chuck said. Low gravity. Sterile environment. Perfect vacuum for the nano. One could add fifty years or more emigrating to the moon. And who knew what would be discovered in that fifty years. Hang on that long and you might live forever. ‘Mom’s talked about the moon,’ Chuck said. But she was a teacher before retirement and her plan was good enough for Earth, for the vast medical estates of Florida anyway.

‘You can’t come back,’ Stan said. ‘Not at our age. Not advised. But I must confess thoughts about the moon. Not for longevity, just tourism.’

‘I couldn’t afford it,’ Chuck said, to allay any thoughts that he was stingy. Co-workers had mortgaged their homes, cashed in options, dug deep debt, just to get their parents off Earth. It was nearly as expensive, but for these two weeks every two years, to pay the insurance to have her here in Virginia.

‘How old are you?’ Stan asked. ‘If I may pry. So hard to tell these days.’

‘93,’ Chuck said. ‘Or 89. I lose track.’

‘No retiring for you?’ Stan said. ‘Just work work work?’

Chuck had nothing to say.

‘Anette is your daughter?’ the old man asked.

‘Grandchild,’ Chuck said. ‘Through Allison, from Kathy and me. The only one we share.’

‘The missing Kathy,’ Stan said.

‘She’s not really gone,’ Chuck said. ‘I could find her. The kids. She’s in Thailand, I think, yoga, you know….She still connects.’ He wasn’t sure. Nobody ever planted anymore. It was like so many relationships, something left alone once severed. People come and go, but will never be gone. Kathy was out there. He could look for her easily. No doubt there were kids in contact already, and if he asked…

‘It’s not like you live alone,’ Stan pointed out.

Chuck finally asked, ‘Your family?’

‘None,’ Stan said. ‘All gone.’

‘Children?’

‘A son. Frozen. Waiting the cure for a neurological disease, and the certain solution to defrosting.’

‘Grandkids?’

‘Two,’ Stan said. ‘And their children, and those children only know of me. I’ve been, but it’s a burden. I think you understand. Smiles, an awkward hug. A day of painful pleasantries. Your mother says I should visit.’

His mom opened the back door and asked what they were doing.

‘Nothing,’ Chuck said, feeling guilty for no good reason at all. ‘Just getting ready to come inside.’

They went in and watched the news. Several choppers hovered over I95 at Jacksonville, playing spotlights across a miles deep backup. The Governor of Georgia had called for insurance checks on every citizen coming in, turning up a surge of illegals hoping to loop into Georgia’s new pharmacy plans.

‘Such desperation to stay alive,’ Stan said sadly.

Chuck agreed that there was something messed up about the whole affair.

‘When I was younger,’ Stan said, ‘we’d often say that we didn’t want to grow old. ‘I’d rather die fast!’ we’d say. There was no alternative. Dementia, arthritis, osteoporosis, nosehair, all these certainties. We were swept off on cancer. The lucky went fast. Ten seconds. A clutch. Gone.’

Chuck’s mom said, ‘Sush, you’re scaring us,’ but she was smiling with a kind of victory. A few birthdays scrolled down the Entertainment sidebar, and she took off on a story about old Keannu Reeves movies and what a power he’d been before turning to politics and all that. It’s what all the actors did, after acting.

Then there was a report about Florida threatening to close its borders with half the population out on Furlough. Nobody really took it seriously, but of course everyone took it seriously.

The Refrigerator was frantic. All the staples low or gone. Chuck had put a hold for Florida – too many changes confused things and food went to waste and fines built up. Now the fridge was panicking.

‘That looks serious,’ Stan said.

‘It’s serious to the fridge,’ Chuck said.

‘I always preferred doing the shopping in person,’ Stan said. ‘You went down the aisles, perusing.’

Perusing.

Stan said to Chuck’s mom, ‘Perhaps we should consider returning early, lest they close the border on us.’

‘Nonsense,’ His mother said.

Cue the good son. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Chuck said. ‘Florida threatens every time.’

‘Of course,’ Stan said, ‘but most threats eventually come to some sort of head.’

‘The state just wants more money.’

‘As well they deserve it,’ Stan replied. ‘For removing so many unpleasantries.’

‘You’re going out the old fashioned way,’ Chuck told him.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ his mother said, and then as if the two thoughts were connected, ‘I have to go back. There are fines.’

Two days before the Furlough ended, an uncle, Chuck’s mother’s brother, called. ‘I’m on my way to Tampa,’ he said. ‘Do you mind? A visit?’

The uncle – Peter – hadn’t been through in decades. A recluse. ‘It’s these new pills,’ he said. ‘Brain pills. Makes me crave company.’ After he arrived there was long reminiscing that drove both Stan and Chuck out to the yard. An hour later, his mother was leaving with Peter and Stan was still behind, his mother giving Chuck a kind of ‘can you take him?’ look that indicated all sorts of drama he had completely missed or misinterpreted the entire time they were there.

‘There’s only so much room in the car,’ his mother said to Stan. ‘You can find another ride?’ The whole moment was terrifically awkward, but then she was gone and Stan was still there at the door, looking out at the car heading back to Florida.

The old man shrugged. ‘I’ll find a ride, out of your hair. Company is like fish. After three days…. In the meantime, a nap?’

Chuck shrugged. No doubt the kids could find him an Uber soon enough.

Later in the afternoon, Allison was in the kitchen and he asked, ‘Stan?’ with the hopeful expectation he’d be gone and no goodbyes needed.

‘Outside,’ Allison said. ‘In the back.’

The old man had found a cat, had it on his lap, was burrowing his old fingers at its neck. Chuck could hear the purring from the doorway.

‘Yours?’ Stan asked.

Chuck shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’ He Glassed it, read the chip. ‘Mittens. The neighbor’s.’ The cat appeared to go to sleep in Stan’s lap. Allergens, Chuck thought.

‘Just don’t bring it inside,’ he said. ‘The House won’t like it.’

‘The House will object,’ said Stan. They were silent for awhile but for the low murmur of the animal.

‘I consider Mexico,’ Stan said. ‘Going back. In the old days I spent many wonderful weeks in Mexico, in the old towns along the ocean.’ The old were always talking about what had been lost, as if the past held answers and truth. Chuck mulled his response, and as usual the pause became its own thing and there was just silence.

Stan said, pushing down the conversational path, ‘It’s quite impossible to die. You have to see it. These, these…factories, factories for people. Like insects. Everything is watched, watched for death. You fall sick and they are there, in moments, ready. Too far and they slop you up, freeze you for later, like a roast.’

‘In Mexico?’ Chuck asked, then realized he’d lost the thread, again somehow coming into the middle. Florida. ‘I’ve seen them.’ Online. They hadn’t seemed so bad. Everyone peaceful, lined up in tubes, clean and still. ‘It’s only time, before they get to the heart of everything. Cure it all.’

‘Death is a troublesome business,’ Stan said. “In the meantime, there is Florida.’

‘And the moon,’ Chuck said, gazing upward.

Somehow the moment never came when the old man left, and then the Florida Furlough was over and Stan was still in the House. The pressure, on the House, on the Family, never materialized. Without Glass, without links or Presence, the House acted as if Stan wasn’t there – closed doors on him, tapped the vacuum gently on his leg as if he were furniture.

Chuck’s mom messaged but didn’t ask. ‘Tell her,’ Stan said when he mentioned it, ‘I’ve gone. If she asks.’ But she never did. 'I am the past,’ Stan said when Chuck brought it up, as if that explained anything.

He was illegal now, for certain, though he assured Chuck that ‘financial matters would be settled, should they arise.’ Whatever that meant. In any case, the bill from the first jump start never arrived, and it was easy to just overlook the affair. Stan wasn’t family. Had no connection at all.

He spent his days outside in the little yard, on the lawnchair, reading paper books he had the kids Amazon, for which he paid in cash.

There was no moment when he looked at Chuck or whispered some wisdom or made some fantastic gesture before heading off to the unknown. One afternoon they were outside talking, the cat as always on his lap. Chuck went inside for another beer, lingered over one thing or another for an hour or so, and when he came back out the old man was cold and the cat was gone.

And that was that.

He’d never seen a dead person before, not in real life. On the screen, sure. But when the thing settles down like some bird in your yard, like some freakishly huge bird come down out of the sky, as if now standing there on two bird legs kind of looking at you bird-like – first one eye, then the other – that sharp and dangerous beak out there like a sword. Then what?

Stan was dead. He looked peaceful, asleep. No, he wasn’t asleep. Once you knew, you couldn’t mistake it for sleep.

That’s when Allison came banging out the screen door.

She knew. She took one look at the scene and knew, didn’t scream or freak. She looked, mostly, like she was trying to hold in tears.

‘What’re you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I should make some calls,’ Chuck said, resigned to be the grown-up, dreading the initial step. Once done, others would take over. He moved to 911 his Glass.

‘Call who?’ Allison asked. Then, as if the question had been answered, discussed, mulled, and brought 30 steps forward, ‘You can’t. It’s not that he’s dead. It’s that you let him.’

‘I did not!’ Chuck said. ‘He wanted. I wasn’t here. The House’ll confirm.’

‘Doesn’t matter. You know that.’

He did. He did know. It didn’t matter. There was a responsibility to keep things going.

‘He has a DNR,’ Chuck said. ‘I’m not legally bound.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not legal,’ she said. ‘And they’ll take him away, freeze him….where? He doesn’t have family. He’ll be alone.’ Now she really was crying. Chuck imagined Stan, some centuries from now, revived. Would he curse? Curse them all? An hour of brain death, anyway, without augmentation, any device – everything Chuck knew said there was no turning that back.

He hardly knew the man. There was little record of Stan. No Presence. The disconcerting hole of Stan’s space. Negative awareness, absence even before he died.

His old fingers were linked over his tight round drum of an old man stomach. One foot had rolled a bit to the side. His pants were wool. He had those brown socks, thin as nylon, shoes without laces.

Allison gently touched the back of Stan’s hand, just with the tips of her fingers.

‘He’s already cold,’ she said.

He was there and not there.

‘He’ll be found if anyone comes looking,’ Allison said.

‘Well let’s hope nobody does.’ Would they? There was always a trail. The rideshares led to the house, then another. Or not. But he had no bills that they knew of. There was money out there, probably, in a bank’s vast reptilian memory. There was probably, in Florida, an apartment. Books, clothes. Would someone come looking? It seemed…doubtful. They could troll the House’s files, find Stan there in Glass, but that data was a vast sea unless you knew where to look. Unless you had cause to look.

Chuck looked at his unused yard, a graveyard of toys.

‘We can bury him here,’ he said. It was a day of great swellings and releases. Stan’s death. Allison’s arrival. This decision - each moment seemed to push out like some tremendous bubble – swell and swell with moment – then push away.

He ordered a shovel and a pair of work gloves and 20 minutes later found himself digging a hole, throwing the dirt onto a long-deflated kiddie pool. It came as no surprise how much work digging a hole entailed, how many obstacles there were in the ground after a foot or so – rocks mostly. He ordered a pickaxe.

In the end he didn’t get much deeper than 3 or 4 feet, not the 6 of literature, and the hole was ragged and amateurish. ‘He wanted this, you know,’ Allison said. ‘Kind of planned it.’ She’d watched him work with an eye to the screen door. The yard was rarely used, recently less so since Stan was out there so much.

Chuck had no comment, just his thoughts, too complicated and overlapping, too webby by half. He dug.

During one of his many breaks, Allison asked, ‘What was it like? I mean, like, the moment. The…’ She paused long enough for it to be clear that the word itself was filled with superstition.

Chuck as usual was silent.

They didn’t want to touch him. Allison got the feet. The House lawnmower edged out against the pile of dirt, then nearly drove into the hole. Chuck had Stan by the shoulders, was pushing the lawnmower out of the way with one foot. The body tumbled into the hole; Stan’s leg caught the edge, appearing determined to remain aboveground and Alison unceremoniously kicked at the brown loafer, the thin sock, the pale ankle.

She said, ‘We can’t tell them he’s here. They’ll talk.’ They agreed to a secret.

Allison and Chuck stood over the grave.

He wrestled for a moment with a future when Stan went missing and others came looking. Surely someone would come, he thought, but then considered all the event of Florida, the embargoes and hysteria, and Stan’s curious old-fashioned independence. In a way, he’d been preparing for this kind of moment – for a real funeral, not some semi-permanent stall in a cryobox.

Chuck said as much to Allison, or something of an attempt to say it at the moment, when the thoughts were all jumbled up with his own exhaustion having dug the grave, the various unfamiliar new pains and sores and blisters.

She agreed.

They stared down at the body for a moment longer. Last words were called for, but Chuck had nothing at all to say.

Allison took a handful of dirt, held her arm out over the void of the hole, then slowly tipped her palm as the dirt spilled down. ‘Ashes to ashes?’ she said.

‘Dust to dust?’ Chuck said.

Together, they both said, ‘That’s all I know’ and that little laugh borne of a confused hysteria.

As Chuck was shoveling the dirt back into the hole, Allison said, ‘I’ll kind of miss him.’

It looked too much like a grave, roughly square at the edges, roughly six feet long, dirt mounded into a wide ridge, so Chuck shoveled some out and tamped down the ragged squares of sod he’d cut when the whole exercise began.

He was absurdly sore, from shoulders to calves, but the pain removed a lot of the emotion. A rough outline of the grave made the lawn a graveyard, which worried him, but he was uncertain he wanted there to be nothing left behind at all.

There was also the lawnchair he’d died in. Aluminum, with pastel plastic weave – a kind of lime and tangerine, faded by sun – collapsible, meant for the car and beach. He folded the foot and head back upon the frame, the legs still out, into a kind of table, then dragged the empty kiddy pool into a pile near the other end of the grave.

Allison came back out. Chuck was adjusting the collapsed lawnchair.

‘That the headstone?’ she asked.

‘I suppose it is,’ Chuck said, wondering what else to put on the shrine.