I’d gone into work that morning, meaning to only check a few servers and then come home early. But one computer crisis led to another, and then another, and by the time I’d stamped out all those fires, it was six.
As soon as I came in the house, I could feel the tension. Angie was in the kitchen, flinging pots around. She never cooked, but she liked to pretend to. I’ve always been the more domestic one.
I peeked around the door just as she slammed a skillet down on the stove top. She started cracking eggs into it, and I said, “Ang? You okay?”
“Your father was by this morning,” she said, making each word its own sentence.
That took me aback. I hadn’t expected him to make the trip up from Dallas to San Francisco. Just to congratulate us? That made no sense. There had to be some agenda. Dad always had an agenda.
“He left you a note.” She nodded over at the counter. “You should have told me he knew. He kept beaming at me with this creepy, insincere smile, talking about how wonderful it would be to have a grandchild.”
“Maybe he’s softened.” I picked up the envelope. Thick, expensive paper, with a subtle watermark. It was sealed, and I used a knife to open it.
Angie acted like she didn’t care, continuing to break eggs into the pan. She was doing it all wrong, but I didn’t want to point that out to her. Angie in a mood is nothing to court.
The note read:
I put the note down and tried to swallow the lump that had grown in my throat. Dad with cancer? You’d think he’d be able to scare it into remission.
I skimmed through the note again. No mention of the nearly a decade of not talking, no hint of apology for my childhood. Nothing but the cheery assurance that I’d be happy he’d get to see his grandchild. That was my father. When he set his will to something, he got it.
Except in one case. He’d wanted a lot for me. From me. I’d walked away from it all instead.
“Christ,” I said.
Angie said, “What?”
“He’s frozen himself; he wants us to wake him after the baby is born. He’s dying.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, though I could still sense the anger in her. And it was fair, all she knew of him was what I had told her. And now I regretted some of those stories. I told only the bad ones. Ones I could trump up, just a little, and get extra sympathy. How could she expect me to be sad about him? And how could I not be?
“It’s okay. We’ll survive,” I lied.
Dinner that night was awkward. In that way it can be with someone who knows all your warts and isn’t happy with you at the same time. We didn’t fight outright, but each of us sought out slights, looking to take offense.
“I wish you had said you were going to tell him,” she said. “It would have been nice not to have been surprised by him. I hardly even recognized him.”
“Yeah, I can see that. It isn’t like you ever really talked with him before,” I replied, knowing full well it was more my doing than hers.
“Good news is, I’ll have plenty of time to get to know him after the baby is born.” She grinned across the table to me, trying to make peace. I should have taken the offer, but I was stubborn and looking for offense. Like him.
“He’ll only be bothering you for a few months before I put him in the ground. I hope that isn’t too much of a burden.”
She stared back across the table at me before picking up her plate and finishing her meal in the kitchen. I went back to my office and hid from the world in work, just like dear old dad.
A few weeks later, things seemed like they might be better.
It had been rough, but I’d put it behind me. I overrode the dread of seeing my father with the joy of my own child. It made me smile to think of them both, opening their eyes, looking up and smiling at me, knowing I was the one that brought them here. I was even whistling that day, as I fixed failing technology. The power arrays for a set of server racks had gone down, so I was in the basement replacing them, splicing wires back into place. It was heaven for me, to stick my head deep into the bowels of machinery, to fix something physically instead of trying to deal with my emotions. My cell phone didn’t work down there, so I never got the call. Angie had tried. I kept that voicemail, though I am not sure why. It crushes me every time I listen to it, the panic in her voice.
“I’m bleeding, Roddy, I don’t know what to do!” she anguished, her voice cracking. “Come home, Roddy, I need you. I don’t know what to do!”
When I failed to answer, she called her brother, and then an ambulance, but it was too late.
I left the server room, smiling and whistling a jolly tune when my phone buzzed. I listened to the message and rushed to the hospital. By the time I got there, she’d been there for hours and there was nothing left to do. I went to the room and her family was all there already. I hated her for that right then, having a family that would show up for her, that would protect her.
Her brother Mike stepped in front of the door as I tried to go in. “She’s sleeping,” he said, in a way that I knew he was lying. Sarah, her mother, was crying quietly on a stool across the hall.
“I have to see her,” I said.
“No, that’s not a good idea.” He blocked the doorway.
My anger rose, making me stand taller, looming back at him. Her family had never liked me, never liked my father or the work he had done. Never respected me or what I had done for her. The hours I had put in, so I could support us, without needing my father or his money. They just didn’t understand.
“I have to see her,” I said again and pushed forward.
Mike was bigger than me, but at this point I didn’t care. Everything was falling apart, I needed to do something, anything, to try and put it back together. He pushed me back and that’s when I swung at him. In pure rage and frustration. I swung for my father, already as good as dead, lying cold and not breathing on a slab somewhere. I swung for the baby my father had wanted and I would never get to see. I swung for Angie, because I didn’t have anything else I could do for her. Most of all, I swung to wipe that smug look off his face as he pushed me back, thinking he could take better care of her than I could. We were both bloodied and panting by the time the orderlies separated us, her mother screaming for us to stop.
I looked up and saw Angie, sad and tired in the open door. The hospital gown fell straight down where there used to be a bump, one I had caressed and kissed not twelve hours ago. She’d been through so much and I had done so little for her, leaving her alone. I wanted to tell her I would do better, that I could fix this, that things would be okay.
“Go away, Roddy,” she said. “Just go away.”
I stared at her then, one orderly still gripping my arm, in case I was still wild with rage.
“I can fix this, Ang, you know I can,” I pleaded.
“Go away,” she said again, eyes filling with tears. She shut the door. I heard her slump down onto the floor on the other side as she said it again. “Go away.”
🕛
And so, I did. I went away from everything then. I went back to our house and straight to the basement and started drinking. The next several months were a blur. I lost my job, Mike had come and moved Angie’s things out. I tried to slur an apology to him, my breath stinking from days of alcohol and self-neglect. I could tell he felt sorry for me, and it made it worse. I wanted him to hate me like I hated myself, but I wasn’t even worth that anymore. I don’t remember if I was still technically employed at that time or not, but I wouldn’t be for long, if so.
I took my counseling from bartenders, whose advice was cheaper than a therapist’s.
“You need to let go, man,” Cody said, wiping down the counter. “Let go.” He starfished his hand, wriggling his seven fingers. “You know what they tell codependent people? Detach with love.”
Detach with love. Both my father and Angie had detached. Neither with love.
“If your dad wants a baby, that’s his thing,” Cody said. “He could do a clone.”
“Technically, they’re illegal,” I said.
“Technically, my bio-mod’s illegal,” he said, wiggling his hand again. “Unregulated science.”
“He doesn’t want a baby,” I said. “He wants a new me. He wants another shot at making me what he wanted me to be. Uptight and regulated and wound like a top. Just like him.”
“Harsh.” Cody slid a whiskey towards me. I could see the conversation already fading in his memory as he turned to pour for the next guy.
I stared into my whiskey, then raised it in a toast.
“To fatherhood,” I said. And I wasn’t sure what I was toasting.
I even haunted worse places for a few weeks, doing any drug that came my way. I liked the new designer ones, the ones concocted to knock you over the head and put you down, like rex and g-pills. But that was too sleazy, and a little too expensive when stacked up against cheap but effective booze. Gin was my usual poison, kept in the freezer so it burned like ice going down.
Everything fell apart, and only one thing made me start putting it back together.
🕒
“Time to wake the Grandpa!” my phone buzzed one morning. I stared at it bleary-eyed, not even sure what the words meant. Then it hit me, Dad had set a calendar reminder. Tomorrow was the day I was to go and wake him.
It paused for a moment, and then chirped happily again, “Time to wake the Grandpa!”
Fear and shame mingled in the pit of my stomach, a sour boil of unhappiness. I thumbed off the reminder and put the phone down on the table, face down, and pushed it away from me as though it were a loaded gun.
If it had been, though, maybe I could have escaped. How would my father like those apples? Wake up not only to no baby, but minus his son as well.
Would he care?
Why did I care if he cared?
🕕
Sleek furniture in shades of Arctic blue and icy white filled the CryoCorps waiting room. The temperature in here felt ten degrees cooler than outside, but it didn’t stop the rush of blood to my cheeks, the feeling of my heart pounding in my throat.
“Roderick Peralta?” The voice was as cool as the air, and came from a limpid-eyed man so pretty it couldn’t be natural. “I’m Pita, your
cyro-counselor. This way.” He led me to a private office.
“My father’s cryo-counselor, you mean,” I blurted as I sat down in the chair across from him.
He folded his hands on the table and smiled at me, his stare meeting mine. “Actually, Mr. Peralta, that’s not how this works. You are your father’s representative.”
I frowned.
“The designated awakener.”
“What?”
“You are his representative and decide when he is woken.” He flipped through the pages. “I see it’s set for the birth of your child. Congratulations.”
“My wife miscarried,” I said.
His smile didn’t falter. I wasn’t sure he’d understood me.
But apparently, he had, because he said, “Your father paid for the process for up to twenty years, in case of…difficulties.”
Difficulties. What a word for it. Angie lost and bleeding and alone, me first with my head buried in a machine, then later buried in booze. But wheels were spinning.
“You mean I could try again.”
“Well,” he said. “You and your wife, presumably. Unless you’d plan to go another route, like cloning or an artificial womb.”
It was like coming out of fog into sunlight. Yes. Yes. My father could have his grandchild. He could afford to wait a little for it—surely not twenty years, but long enough to find someone else, woo them. Convince them to do it. I wasn’t a bad man. There was a woman out there who I hadn’t disappointed yet. Somewhere.
🕘
At least, that was what I thought until the doctor gave me the news.
I’d just gone in for a regular checkup. All part of my turning over a new leaf, starting a new life-path, one that would lead to a baby for my father. I was aglow with good intentions. I even toyed with the idea of calling up Angie. But what would I say? What could I say? So, instead I booked an appointment and went in to be measured and tested, never expecting to find out I was…
“Sterile?” I squeaked out. “But…”
“Played around with any advanced chemicals lately?” he asked. “Like, say, g-pills?”
My look told him what he needed to know. He printed out the article for me. Unexpected side effect. Irreversible sterility. They’d even been thinking of developing some sort of birth control based on it, until they found out about the irreversible part.
What was I going to do?
At home I stewed and paced. Finally, I slipped on a jacket and went for a walk.
Evening, with fog coming in over the city, spreading with the darkness. Streetlights just beginning to hum themselves into life. People going back and forth on the street, talking to themselves.
No one talking to me. Why should they?
What did I care whether or not my father woke to find his expected grandchild? Wasn’t his concern just another sign of his contempt for me, a hope that maybe with this one he’d be able to see all the dreams he’d tried to impose on me finally realized?
Maybe that was what I should do, the biggest slap in the face I could give him. Wake up by himself, no one to greet him. Not a grandchild. Not me.
Let him be by himself the way I was right now.
But even while I was trying to marshal all my anger, to convince myself what to do, I kept imagining his face and the devastation on it. The same devastation that he’d tried so hard not to show all of the times I’d failed at the hurdles he’d set before me, thinking I’d be able to jump them easily.
Maybe it was a sign of his love that he wanted this grandkid. Something of mine. Something he could shower love on since he found it so difficult to show it towards me.
I stopped and looked down the hillside. I was at least a mile from home now, and I’d used that mile to climb without realizing it. Now all of San Francisco was laid out in front of me, lost and dim in the fog, with the Bay Bridge lights running back and forth under the white mass in a muted glow.
I knew what to do.
I sat down to write a last letter.
And then I laid down on that length of cold metal, smelling of disinfectant and steel, and let myself slip away into sleep.
Part of me didn’t want to wake up.
🕛
I didn’t expect anyone to be there the day I was decanted. But there was a nurse at the foot of the bed, her arms full of blanket. She handed me an envelope.
The nurse handed me the bundle. A baby, squirming and red-faced. I took it automatically and pulled the blanket away where it had been tucked down over its face.
I looked down into my father’s eyes.
