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Featured Writing

Frozen Jellyfish Blues

by Geoff Cole

(an excerpt)

Milton secured the nylon straps to the next cryo-coffin in the back of his truck and gave the thumbs up to night crane operator who swung the coffin into the receiving bay. Milton saw the knot slip, but didn’t have time to shout a warning before the black plastic coffin crashed to the concrete floor. On impact, the lid popped open, spilling a gout of Barbicide-blue coolant and several tubes that looked like bottom-of-the-pool worms. Then the corpsicle’s hand slipped out to the wrist, the frozen fingers curled around a tattoo etched onto the palm. The tattoo was a Man o’ War jellyfish, a tattoo Milton knew as well as his hand. Seeing it here made him forgot how to breathe.

“You Second Chance boys are getting sloppy,” the operator said to Milton from his crane. “I’m not cleaning that shit up.”

Milton ignored the crane operator and fell to his knees beside the cryo-coffin. It was Pam’s tattoo, Pam’s hand. Four months earlier, lying in bed one rainy December morning, he’d asked Pam why she’d picked a jellyfish.

“Because of the way they feed,” she’d said, showing off the tattoo. “The bulk of the Man o’ War floats on the surface.” She’d pressed her palm and the jellyfish’s body to his naked chest. “They reach these almost invisible tentacles deep into the ocean, more than ten metres below their bodies.” She’d sent her fingers, along which the tattooed tentacles writhed, searching past his navel. When she got to the waistband of his boxers, she’d said, “Whatever those tentacles find they drag up to the light to be devoured by the jellyfish.”

“So, what are you dragging up to the light?” he’d asked, but she’d found something else and he’d forgotten his question.

Jutting out of the plastic coffin, the hand and the arm attached to it were as blue and lifeless as the ink in which the tattoo was painted. It was Pam in the coffin. Milton took hold of the frozen hand with the same care he’d use to remove a seventy-five year-old Led Zeppelin vinyl from its cardboard sleeve.

“What’s your problem, Tank-head?” the operator asked. He jumped down beside Milton.

“Nothing, nothing,” Milton said. He eased her hand and the tubes back into the coffin. “The knot slipped. I’m going to have to load this one up and ship it back to Second Chance head office for inspection.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the stiff,” the receiver said. He looked at the gauges on Pam’s coffin, the same gauges Milton checked as he sealed the heavy plastic lid of the unlabeled cryo-coffin. What remained of Pam’s vital signs was stable. He’d seen those low, static numbers on a thousand corpsicles, but these were different. These were Pam’s. She was in a cryo-coffin in the back of his truck. She was dead. And Second Chance Cryonics, his employer, was delivering her preserved body to Haffenblach Imports.

“Second Chance sells their dead,” Pam had told him that last morning they were together. “They harvest the organs and sell them overseas. Whatever is left they sell offshore for cattle and pork feed. It sounds unbelievable, but I am this close to being able to prove it’s true. I’ve even heard rumours of necrophile clubs that purchase Second Chance’s better preserved clients. You see why I have to find out, Milt? I didn’t want to use you, but I needed to know what you knew.”

“My boss is expecting a full order,” the operator said, bringing Milt back from that final morning. “Twenty-two corpsicles, it says right here. Don’t short-change me.”

“You can’t have her,” Milton said. The operator took a step back. Milton realized he’d curled his right hand into a fist and was holding it between Pam’s coffin and the operator.

“Whatever, you fucking Tank-head,” the operator said, hopping back up onto the loading platform. Milton unloaded the rest of the frozen corpses and drove out of the bay. Two blocks away, he pulled over. He reached under his seat and pulled out a bottle containing a clear liquid that had the slimy consistency of pop syrup. He took off the lid, ran the rim beneath his nose. The sweet, medicinal aroma of Tank filled his head with the release it promised.

He threw the bottle out the window and watched it arc out under a flickering umbrella of light from a dying street lamp and then disappear into the darkness with a wet crunch.

When they’d split up, the morning he’d pushed her until she revealed her little secret, she’d made him promise: “Never tell anyone about us, Milt, or you could be in terrible danger. Your employer is more ruthless than you can imagine. Even if you don’t believe anything else I’ve told you, believe that. Promise me you’ll keep quiet about us.”

Sitting in the truck, his hands sticky from spilled Tank and tears, Milton wanted to howl. He climbed through the small door in the back of his cab and stood beside the lone cryo-coffin. He was afraid to open it, but he had to see her one more time. Two weeks earlier he’d kicked her out of his apartment and what he thought was his life, Pam taking her jellyfish-tattooed hand and their love with her.

He pried the lid open. She floated in a sea of blue Formasure and antifreeze. A vacuum-cleaner tube was crammed into her mouth. Thousands of wires and tubes swarmed over her flesh, like she was the hub of some warped communications network. He wanted to pull her out of the coffin and take her into his arms, to shake away the cold and the death that had somehow claimed her, and make her laugh again, but he couldn’t risk removing a single wire. He didn’t know which ones were critical to keeping her preserved.

His earphone chimed Zeppelin’s “Your Time is Gonna Come,” Brewer at dispatch calling. In a panic, Milton resealed the coffin and climbed back into the cab.

“Milt,” Brewer said. Brewer’s thin, avian face was projected onto the windshield’s Heads Up Display. “What’s going on, buddy? I just got a call from the receiver at Haffenblach. He said you dropped a coffin and were acting funny. What’s the matter, man? You take too much Tank?”

Milton wanted to tell him everything. Brewer was one of his few friends. On Friday mornings after a long shift they’d head out for eggs and Guinness and sometimes a shared bottle of Tank. They talked about the losing streak the Canucks couldn’t seem to shake; they calculated to the cent what they thought Bollywood’s top actresses would charge for a night with them; sometimes they even talked about things that mattered. Other than Pam, Brewer was one of the few people Milton had told about losing his family during the influenza pandemic. Brewer lost loved ones during that merciless flu as well, and he often told Milton about the difficulty he was having trying to get his new wife pregnant. Milton trusted Brewer, but he trusted Pam more.

“Yeah, it must have been the Tank. I’ll be back to the office soon; I just need to shake this off.”

The truck chunked into gear, the fuel cells making an insectlike whine to get the big vehicle moving.

“Cindy,” he said, addressing the personal computer that resided on a slim plastic card in his wallet, “I need obituaries for Vancouver, the last two weeks.”

A search window popped up in the corner of the HUD. In an artificial female tone that was nothing like Pam’s throaty, on-the-verge-of-laughter voice, Cindy asked him to narrow down the search. Milton didn’t know what else to provide. Pam had kept so much from him. He imagined she was born sometime between 2012 and 2022, which put her between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. He knew Pam was her first name, but she’d refused to give him anything else. Even her ethnicity was questionable: her eyes could have been Asian, her lips African, her cheekbones European, or he could have it all wrong.

The search was fruitless. Milton pounded the steering wheel.

“Cindy, just list all the women in that age range who’ve died within the last two weeks.”

The list was longer than he expected. Cancer. Suicide. Recreational and vocational accidents. Murder. Each one with a face beside it.

“Stop,” he said. The image projected onto the windshield froze. It was Pam’s face, but the name was wrong. Abigail Glenmorris. It was Pam; he could pick her face out from a crowd of billions, the face of the woman floating in the coffin. Those tear-shaped blue eyes, a smile that could stop a war.

“Pam,” he said, and read the obituary. A Skytrain accident. The police suspected she might have been pushed in front of the train that took her life. They’d apprehended a numeth-head who had her purse. The last line of the obituary made Milton want to be sick:

Abigail’s parents wish to thank Second Chance Cryonics, who has generously offered to cryonically preserve Abigail free of charge in the hopes that the fatal wounds of this senseless tragedy may be healed in the years to come. A public service will be held Wednesday, April 17, at the Second Chance Chapel in Surrey.

In an anguished whisper, Milton told Cindy to close the window. He’d missed Pam’s funeral. The thought filled him with guilt that wrung his insides like food poisoning. Only a creeping sense of outrage that calmed his internal combustion. One of the things Pam had said to him on their last morning together repeated in his head:

“Your employer is more ruthless than you can imagine.”

Milton didn’t want to believe it, but his mind kept returning to the same conclusion: Second Chance had killed her. And now they were trying to get rid of the evidence.