Sunshine

SUNSHINE

I used to dream that we could dig Papa’s body out of the ground and bring him back to life. Now that we have, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s too soon.

We kept his chair in storage for years, including it in our will with a directive to pass it to our last surviving child, hopefully securing their promise to do the same, until one day long from now, Papa might take his throne again and regale future generations with tales of a time long past.

Last week, Aurora had it cleaned and brought over. Now, as I stare at the worn, avocado green recliner, I am filled with dread. Too soon.

I was in third grade. The crackling voice on the intercom interrupted Mrs. Johannsen’s lesson to summon me to the administration office. I was almost relieved. It felt like I’d been holding my breath since recess, and the shoving match with that little jerk from Mr. Hasan’s class. I knew I was in deep trouble. I’ve tried, but I just can’t remember the kid’s name, though I recall with remarkable clarity his nasty little face with it’s close-set eyes and sneering grin. A grin that suddenly evaporated after my final shove had him tripping backwards over the lip of the slide. The back of his head met the asphalt with a crunching thud. I shake my head and chuckle incredulously at the distant memory.

They had us play on asphalt.

I can still see the blood pouring down the back of the kid’s neck, soaking his shirt. That was how I learned that heads bleed a lot. I remember our Vice Principal, Mrs. Decker, leading him back into the building, her arm draped gently around his shoulders, which shook with violent sobs.

He was fine. He was back in class by the time I returned the following week, showing off his stitches and telling anyone who would listen that it only happened because I fought dirty and had tried to kill him. Ben. Oh my God, Ben! For nearly forty years, couldn’t conjur his name, even while rejecting Aurora’s suggestion years ago of “Benjamin” for our first born, saying, “I just don’t like that name.” The kid’s name was Ben.

Snotty little Ben would be okay, but I hadm’t know that yet. With my heart hammering almost audibly, I arrived at the office to find Mrs. Decker waiting. Her face revealed nothing as she led me to her office and ushered me in. “Take your time,” she said softly, then left, closing the door behind her. I had imagined being met by the principal, the school nurse, maybe even the police. I had killed Ben, I was sure of it. Instead, sitting on Mrs Decker’s brown vinyl couch were my parents. Well, Mom and Jake. One and a half parents, I used to call them, to anyone but them. Mom’s face was ashen and streaked with mascara tears. Ben wasn’t dead. Papa was.

More flashes of memory now. The ride home from school that horrible day, me, curled up in the back seat, silently weeping. The cold steel walls of the viewing room. Staring down at the eerily familiar yet unfamiliar face of his swaddled corpse while my young twin brothers laughed and teased each other behind me. My mother loudly hissing “SHHHH,” at them just as I was about to cry. I took the “shhh” as meant for me, and choked down my tears. I made up for that lack of emotional expression in the weeks following.

The four stages of grief are not a linear, predictable journey. Acceptance was especially reluctant to release its grip on my tiny heart. One day, several months after my Papa’s death, I woke feeling strangely saddened to realize that I hadn’t cried myself to sleep the night before.

Papa was, I guess, is, my grandfather. My mother’s father. Her mother had succumbed to cancer just weeks before I was born. Although memories of him have dissolved layer by layer under the corrosive indifference of time, brilliant flashes remain.

Taking the big slide at the water park, scared shitless, Papa holding me tight as we’re spit out the end of the tube and into the pool, laughing and choking on chlorinated water at the same time.

Me and Papa, sneaking into the kitchen after Mom had gone to bed, roasting marshmallows over the bright orange burner of our old electric stove.

Papa excitedly calling me out to the back yard, pointing up to show me the small, apple-faced bird, perched on a phone pole, just across the alley behind our house.

“He looks like a cat-bird,” I said. Papa laughed his warm belly laugh and said,

“That’s a barn owl, Sunshine. He’s out looking for food. Then his face took on new seriousness.

“He shouldn’t be out this time of day, Papa said softly. Must be having a hard time finding food.”

I watched, mesmerized as the strange bird’s apple head swiveled back and forth.

“Hooo, Hooo!,” I called. The owl snapped its head in my direction and held my gaze for a split second, before springing from its perch with a shreiky screech and taking flight.

“That’s not an owl!,” I declared. “That’s not the sound an owl makes!”

Papa laughed. “If its not an owl then what is it?.” he asked. “Or Whoooooo is it?” Still young enough to find delight in Papa’s corny humor, we both giggled as the owl resumed its search for something to eat.

Papa almost never used my name, instead insisting on calling me “Sunshine.” I remember being irritated at that. At some point I decided that if he was going to call me Sunshine, I would call him Sunshine. He seemed to like that just fine. My mother used to love telling the story of Papa picking me up from day care. Apparently when I saw him come in, I bolted up from the sea of cross-legged four-year-olds and squealed, “My Sunshine’s here!” I don’t remember that, but I believe it.

I knew my mother loved me but she had been obsessed with Jake. Jake might have loved Mom, but he really loved weed. Probably still does, if the old fuck is still sucking oxygen. Papa seemed to love everybody at least a little, but for some reason he really loved me, and I knew it. Suddenly I am overcome with guilt at the realization that right now I am terrified of him.

“Did you know?,” my mother had croaked through pale, cracked lips.

“Know what, Momma?,” I said, as I held her frail hand in the ICU of Good Samaritan Hospital. Before she slipped away that night, defeated by the same vicious disease that took her mother, she stunned me with a fantastical story of gruesome, twisted hope.

I was twenty when Mom died. Jake had long since moved on and I was now truly an orphan. An orphan living with new and extremely troubling knowledge. I remembered how my mother, my brothers and myself had been the only people allowed to see Papa one last time before the bag was zipped up and his body was whisked away. Papa hadn’t been buried at Spring Grove Cemetery, as I had long believed. Papa has spent the last four decades entombed in one of thousands of vats of liquid nitrogen in an underground facility eighty one miles Northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Aurora takes my hand and gazes into my rheumy eyes. “Your Papa’s coming home,” she whispers.

I have vague of recollection of excited diatribes about the future of humanity and the wonders that mankind can achieve. I had little interest in his ramblings at the time and now ache with the desire to remember more of his words.

The future is here, Papa. Oh fuck, the future is here.

Papa died at his doctor’s office, in the middle of a physical. He dropped, mid-sentence, from the exam table in such an absurdly grotesque manner that the doctor thought for a brief moment that he was. I’ve never been able to clearly define irony, but Papa’s death sure had the stink of it. He went the way we all do. His heart stopped. Only in his case, unlike my mother’s demise years later, there was no painfully slow run up to the main event. When he couldn’t be revived, per Papa’s prior directive, the cryonics team had been dutifully called. Some thirty eight years and four months later, the cryonics team called me.

After first undergoing repair of his vasculatory system, my grandfather remained at the facility for a six month rehabilitation and assessment process. They tell us he is a six. The minimum viable result for successful reintegration. The technicians boil their reams of analysis down to an inelegant ten point scale. Any subject landing at five or under is to be “re-vitrified and entombed for potential future revival,” or, simply buried. Because simple revival and repair fulfills and effectively cancels the original contract, the second-chance option requires a do-over with the accounting department as well. Not surprisingly, many inheritors of re-animated ancestors that don’t revive properly are either unable or unwilling to make the investment. Funerals for the long dead have now become commonplace.

As a six, Papa has been deemed a near complete physical success, but cognitively “expresses some potential for moderate improvement and memory retention.” The words some and moderate in the same sentence? Mind those egg shells, fellas. The more I read, the less I feel I understand. Pretty much what I grasp is that he can eat, shit, bathe, dress and undress without help, but a game of scrabble probably isn’t happening any time soon. The options regarding his future were left to me.

It was Aurora who had insisted. “You can get your Sunshine back,” she said, meeting my numb stare with tears pooling under her dark brown eyes. After nearly two dozen years together, there are still times when my love for her renders me powerless. So Papa is coming home.

Adrenaline floods my bloodstream as the Cryovation van pulls into our driveway. Aurora silently sidles up and wraps herself gently around me, whispering “breathe.” I tremble so intensely it feels more like high frequency vibration.

Earlier, I had propped the front door open and moved a table out of the way to make room for a wheelchair, maybe, or a stretcher? I had no idea. I needn’t have bothered.

A young orderly exits the passenger side of the van and comes around to the driver’s side, opening the sliding door. He extends his arm and guides a tall, lanky man out of the vehicle. They stand motionless, while the driver exits the van and takes the tall man’s other arm. Together, they walk slowly up the driveway. It walks. He walks.

Aurora weeps openly.

I stare at him now. He sits in his chair, so far oblivious to our attempts to engage. His posture in the chair is as I remember, reclined comfortably, his head tilted slightly to the left, but his stare is blank. Aurora fed him soup earlier, and he finished the bowl, even saying “Thank you, dear,” when she wiped his chin. He doesn’t know who she is, of course. According to the mountain of discharge material that I’ve just barely begun to plow through, during the memory reconstruction phase, he did respond to my name a couple of times, saying only “A good boy. Good, good boy.” For all I knew he was remembering a dog he’d had when he was a kid. Am I in there, Papa?

Adrenal glands dump another load and my anxiety spikes again.

Damn you, Aurora.

My grandfather had wanted to see the future. He looked forward to a second, distant life- one of peace and harmony and untold technological wonders. Instead, not even four decades after his first natural death, he returns to a world arguably worse for wear and sits silently in a ratty chair, staring down at his clasped hands.

I stand and draw the curtains on the picture window. The old pear tree that has dominated that view for most of my life has just begun to bud. Papa turns slowly and gazes out the window. Suddenly his eyes find the old shed, still standing in the corner of the yard. His face turns to me, his eyes now bright and locking onto mine.

“Hooooooo,” he says, drawing the sound out until it dies in a gentle whisper.

My heart gallops and I drop to my knees in front of him, taking his hands.

“That’s right,” I manage to choke. “Hooo,” I manage to rasp. Returning my grasp, he gazes out the window and time slows to a gentle, solemn flow. Then, the sparkle in his eyes abruptly gone, he withdraws his hands, drops his head, and stares blankly at his lap.