ICE MAN 2
They were told they couldn’t get the fairy tale, and X asked,” What are they?”
They were still living at the Regency Hotel on Park Ave . X was the thawed
castrated Ice Man from millennia ago, still government funded for observation,
living with his bride Larina, former Regency housekeeper, and they were in
the living room section of the giant joint suite that housed their also newly wed
guardians Kate and Dill, and baby Jim.
Larina explained, “It’s old classic children’s literature that always ends, ‘And they lived happily ever after’, because most children have no concept of ending.”
“Well, no, we can’t get immortality, but I can go back.”
“Back?”
“Back to Ice.”
“You CAN? You wouldn’t do that. What about us?”
“Together. I’d need you with me to do it.”
“How?”
“Cryogenics.”
“Whoa! I’m alive. That’s for dead people. Maybe you can take being frozen again,
but I’d die.”
“Not with me. And I can only do it with a conjoined mate.”
“We can’t …conjoin.”
“Lips together, holding hands, wrapped around each other the way you like to
sleep.”
“Never hear you complain. What would I do on Ice?”
“What I did here. Learn about it.”
“I’d really miss all of this. You know, kind of used to it.”
“We can go and come back.”
“Like tourists?’
“Sort of. You’ll miss here. I miss Ice.”
“Despite your horrible experiences.”
“I had friends. There were---are---good people there. My cousin Y is one of them.
He preaches forgiveness with what you call justice. It’s endured. I want him to
know that, validate the effect of his ideas on modern society, explain how they’ve
endured.”
“That’s all.”
“And I want to see him again.”
They told Kate and Dill, and Kate informed Cardinal Corcoran, who had married
Larina and X in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Jim Corcoran was originally a Bronx boy
who played stickball and Johnny-on-the pony, and had risen in the Church from
priest to monsignor, to bishop, to cardinal. But it was not until hearing Kate’s
message that he thought knew his vocation. He requested Larina’ s presence for
an audience.
She was greeted informally in the study, a dim shadowy room of soft armchairs,
an old rolltop desk, and bookcases prominently displaying religious titles. Almost
jarring by contrast was a steel table with a computer and printer. A housemaid
brought glasses of water and cups of tea with ceramic side pitchers of sugar and
cream.
“It’s seven evening, but if you’d prefer coffee.”
“No, too late. Tea is fine.”
“Tea it is then. So, Mrs. Marcus tells me your husband is adjusting well. To his new
world.”
“Mrs…..? Oh. Kate. Yes, X is adjusting. Remarkably.”
“But homesick, I hear.”
“He left all he knew behind. He wants to visit.”
“Couldn’t his return be dangerous. Considering they got rid of him in leu of
execution.”
“He thinks he can navigate that.”
“And return again to our time?”
“I’d certainly hope so.”
“He…and you…have a grave responsibility when you go to Ice.”
“I don’t know yet that I will.”
“But you must. Its your purpose, your destiny to go there so he can spread the
faith.”
“So he can…?”
“You can too, but of course would people of his time listen to a woman? History
indicates not, though there have been exceptions. Joan of Arc for one. Do you feel
her fire?”
“Fire is how they killed her. I’m on the chilly side of lukewarm about the
cryogenics. Just the thought of that makes me shiver. And your Excellency, he
doesn’t believe in Christianity. He only professes, practices it for me.”
“Then he professes it and preaches there, even if only for you.”
“Preach a religion that didn’t exist yet? In a time before the Bible. Before Judaism.
Before the Old Testament prophesies.”
“X will pre-prophesize. Tell them in advance the prophecies are coming. Give the
quotes. Then, when it happens, how can they doubt? And you’ll be saving souls in
Ice.”
“Otherwise they’re damned for not knowing?”
“They will know and be saved. Speak to X and have him call my secretary. I need
his bond if he wants this trip arranged. And he’ll have to study the Bible first.”
Kate said the cardinal had the influence to prevent the trip. Larina warned X
he intended a big errand for him, but X went in and met Cardinal Jim----as he
insisted on just being called by male visitors--- in the same private den. That
name distinction wasn’t discriminatory, he insisted. He didn’t want temptation
from being casual with women.
“So, you’re nostalgic. Your wife has told you of a mission but I know you have
reservations.”
“No, I accept I have a calling.”
“I’m not sure I’m relieved you so easily acquiesce. You could go and ignore my
instruction.”
“I want to see my cousin Y.”
There was still some of that early street kid in the cardinal, and without
consciously intending to show condescension to what he couldn’t help thinking,
after all, was a mutilated eunuch refugee from a prehistoric society of barbarians,
he knew he was smirking.
“And why might that be?”
“He’s my cousin, and I want to talk to him”
Pointing, trying to neutralize his expression, he knew he still seemed
ridiculing.
“That’s the reason you’re going to Ice? To see your cousin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, since its up to me if you can go, please indulge me. What you will you
say to him?”
“Are there any recording devices in this room?”
“None.”
“Doors can hide ears.”
“So, Just whisper it in my ear then, lad”
The ‘lad’, as he looked in comparison, even if millennia older, crossed to the
cardinal’s armchair, leaned down and whispered in the old man’s ear.
It was not a short message. Even with his strong athletic body, X’s back
began to ache from bending over. Cardinal Jim tensed. His face contorted. When
X finally finished, he paled. He broke into a cold sweat, fell in a swoon
and slumped back in his chair.
X summoned the housekeeper, and she knew what to do. Lift his head,
reassure, help him drink from the glass of water. Regaining senses, realizing X
was still there, he said,
“Out of my sight. Go.”
“GO?”
“ Study the catechism and read the Bible.”
“But go?”
“Go.”
Cryogenics and the Church are not pals, but the archdiocese raised no objection
to this pair of live freezings. Larina asked X if, by any chance, they could get back
to Ice before Z cut him, but they could only go back to the Freezing Place after
the first dispatch occurred. The Cryogenics Center filmed the event, kept
classified the information that the pair did indeed vanish, and maintained the
pod to which they hoped they’d eventually go back.
Upon landing in Ice, they were not longer frozen.
Larina said, “I feel like I’m dreaming.”
“How do you think I felt? Right now, its like all of it was a strange dream I just
woke up from. I might believe that, except you’re here to confirm it happened.”
“Where in your world are we?”
“Near my home.”
“I’m glad we thought of Arctic clothes.”
“But this modern gear makes us look like space travelers.”
“Well, close, huh? Time travelers. What do we do? Where do we go?”
“We don’t want my father to know I’m here.”
“Won’t be easy to spread Christianity hiding.”
“That’s why we have to find Y.”
“If your father catches you?”
“He’ll do what he wants. Refreeze or execute.”
”And me?”
“We don’t get caught. You want to do some sightseeing, don’t you?”
“Sure, that’s what I’m here for.”
“Everything will be tourism. But first we need to get local clothes. ”
Back in that New York place, X had died his hair black, re-grown his beard and
made that black too. He wouldn’t be the visual outcast he’d been before. Y would
provide them with contemporary garments.
“You made some kind of promise to Cardinal Corcoran?”
“Propagation of the faith. And I’m a true convert to your religion now”
“You’ll get Y to preach for you?”
“ Y is preaching his own belief of forgiveness.”
“Does that contradict Jesus.?”
“Y’s forgiveness is the Ice kind. You find he who wronged you, forgive him, but
teach him forgiveness.”
“That sounds Christian.”
“Hardly. You teach him by doing to him as he did to you, having him pray for
you and ask your forgiveness.”
“Now that’s contradicting the Christ. Do unto others as they do unto you.”
“In Ice, the very idea of forgiving is radical. Only revenge is a virtue. But I lived in
your world. What Y taught remains. You call it justice.”
“Accountability”
“Revenge.”
“In the world we just left, what’s the point of influencing anything? Everything
that happened happened. ”
“But Y is still here, alive. Your Einstein was…is…right.”
“Einstein’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“No one’s seen him lately.”
“Now he hasn’t even been born yet. Neither have you. He exists in other planes.”
“ You think you can convert Y to Christianity?”
X displayed their copy of the Bible that survived the journey.
“I don’t know. Maybe modify his ideas.”
“That you say somewhat endured anyway.”
“ Not as scripture.”
“He won’t be able to read a Bible in English.”
“I’ll interpret.”
“Cardinal Corcoran wants you to do this?”
“He just didn’t tell me how to do it.”
“How will you change Y’s preaching?”
“Not by confronting. And we need him now. You’ll find he’s a good man.”
“And later? Subtly?”
“First things first.”
She could see people didn’t spend a lot of unnecessary time outdoors. The few
they encountered looked like animals, covered in fur, including on their faces.
Over their eyes were transparent oval shapes that look like, but couldn’t be
plastic.
X explained, “They’re shells, kept warm with coals. They carry the coals and more
shells in a pouch. So their eyes don’t freeze.”
People, on foot or horseback, or in dog or horse-pulled sleds and wagons, moved
quickly, seeming too cold to mind others (them) who’d found alternate covering.
Ice itself was beautiful. Walking paths looked to be dug every day, lined with
high shoulders of shoveled snow and ice. There were small dome ice
structures, igloos. “For non-royals,” X said. There were rectangular buildings,
also of ice, the size of three story apartment buildings, windowless but with
chimneys, and many palaces of ice rose majestically like cathedrals.
X informed her, “We have fire for warmth and cooking. That causes melting, but
with the speed everything freezes again, the fires don’t do lasting damage. We’re
mostly carnivores, hunters, but eat herbs and leaves and nuts, Besides dogs and
horses, we keep cows for cheese and milk, and chickens for eggs. All the animals
are housed indoors or they’d die, the cattle are fed from human foraging. That’s
what those rectangular buildings are for, people upstairs, separated animals
below. The castles are for royals. The very poor live in the igloos with the
animals, but make partitions. Y has two igloos, the extra one for animals. Two
igloos is an upper lower class convention of status.”
“But he’s your cousin. Royalty.”
“His choice, to not live with more than he needs. Of the people.”
When they got to Y’s igloo, there were bear and deer carcasses outside. X told
her, “That means he just came home from hunting.”
X called out in his language. The building had a wooden door so covered with Ice it looked to be of ice, except that it opened on timber hinges. Y and X shouted greetings to each other. X took her arm and they went in. It wasn’t so cold inside. The edifice broke the wind, there was a fire. The two men continued shouting, bumped chests, then X made an arm reference to Larina. Y approached her and rubbed his nose across her forehead. The act was warm and consoling. Then a woman appeared. X brushed his nose across her forehead, made that introductory arm gesture again toward Larina, and told her, “This is El, his wife.” El approached Larina and did the same nose-forehead greeting.
“What do I do?”
“As she did.. She’s the host so she went first.”
Larina complied. “This is so strange. What did you tell them about me?”
“That you are royalty too. La Reina. The Queen. That’s what they’ll call you in Ice.”
“The QUEEN?”
“Here. My queen.”
“But your father is the king.”
“On Ice, every man is king.
“Oh. Well…”
Maybe in confirmation of that, she realized there seemed to be a dozen pre-teens running around. El wasn’t old enough to have had all of them, and on closer examination the count was seven. They just moved so much she’d thought a dozen.
They sat at a low table, and she had her first meal of bear meet, a bit chewy at first, but flavored with herbs, twigs, nuts, butter and cheese, served on flat wooden plates. Utensils were fingers, and they drank warmed milk from wooden mugs. There were no whole vegetables, and she thought of vitamin deficiencies. In these hardy people? A very modern consideration.
There was a homemade alcoholic brew made from seaweed, and they imbibed, if not exactly enjoyed, it. A bit bitter, but it made the men talkative. X presented Y with his holy book from the future, opened it to the beginning, and began to interpret. She fell asleep on her fur cushion long before X was even into the first quarter of the lesson.
The floor was also fur, and she’d found the sleeping arrangement. You slept where you were, under a fur wrap. Your former dinner cushion was also your pillow. Under such living arrangements, it was not likely the children needed sex education There was a slit in the ceiling that let smoke out, and the fire was left burning.
When she awoke, she guessed there hadn’t been any conjugal activity unless she slept through it, and X was beside her.
He said, “El is foraging with the children, and Y is giving a preach before he goes to work with his fellow hunters.”
“Do you think you convinced him?”
“I know I aroused his curiosity.”
But Y had had instant conversion. He asked Z to baptize him. He wanted to preach this new word, these gospels of the future, except…
X told her. “His problem is, by teaching forgiveness through God, he’ll contradict his previous teaching of human forgiveness with retaliation. That itself was a blasphemous idea for people who believe revenge is a virtue”
Y could no longer believe his old truth. He was a Christian, but there was no Christ yet. They couldn’t comprehend a God, much less God as man, who could forgive, and people could only try. God was sun, an impersonal life giver. Asking forgiveness from the sun was laughable.
One evening soon after, Y returned tired. Tired from the hunt, and demoralized by the reception to his new message.
He told X, “They aren’t ready. And It negates what I already taught. I lose credibility. There was today something I never encountered before---ridicule.”
“You have to persist.”
“I’ll lose them completely. From the book you’ve shown me, I believe I can convince them with martyrdom. But I have no enemies.”
“The ridiculers?”
“A few who entertain themselves by not taking me seriously. Not with the incentive to martyr me, and smart enough to know doing such would give legitimacy. But X, you.”
“Me? Me, what?”
“Can you martyr me, then leave again?”
“I can’t kill you. My cousin. You have done nothing to be killed for. And killing is against the commandments, a sin.”
Even if staged as a murder, suicide was not to be considered. In Ice, that was the ultimate disgrace. In the new religion, it was the unforgivable sin, because it was too late then for repentance.
Y chose freezing, having his previously never used attendants arrange it, on the basis he had finished his preaching here, and was going into the future to spread the message. That would save his legacy, and he believed in the stated possibility of a continuation later in time. It wasn’t physically possible to go with X and Larina to their New York pod. There was no way to know when, where, or if he would ever be found and thawed. He requested, and X gave him, the Bible to take wherever he’d end up, in a maybe more opportune place. Y also took El and their children with him. Who knew what those children might accomplish somewhere else?
There was no grieving allowed, no sad goodbyes to express, because Y said this was God’s will. He left final instructions for his attendants for when he was gone. They were to prepare X and Larina for freezing and transport, in their embrace, at the exact spot they arrived, and from where X had been first dispatched.
The attendants fulfilled their last obligation to Y.
Facing the long coma, X and Larina needed a little levity with each other.
She said, “It may not seem later like much time has passed, but we’ll be down a long time. I hope I have some dreams.”
“I didn’t have, that I remember. But while we’re lying waiting for the new world again, a lot of things will happen. Long before our arrival, Y could come as John the Baptist”
“Oh, you’re blending religions. That’s Buddhist talk.”
“No, he can’t reincarnate. He hasn’t died. More like Einstein talk.
“Time and space. But Einstein was Jewish.”
“Irrelevant to his ideas. He was a scientist, a scholar.”
“That Old Testament is pretty historical.”
“He wasn’t religious, but his theory encourages the possibility of
alternate realities. And so, if such exist, of immortality.”
“But you can only know the one you’re in.”
They awoke. They still thought independently but their consciousnesses were conjoined. A uniformed guide led them to an elevator, then out of the Cryogenics facility to the street. The sky was blue, the day clear and sunny, the city displaying the usually hidden vibrant colors and pastel hues it reveals of itself on such a day. Dill and Kate were waiting. Cardinal Corcoran was smiling beside a rabbi, a monk, a mullah and a minister, like they were principals in a joke they’d tell about themselves. The mayor was there. They could see Saint Patrick’s, and all the grand skyscrapers that are midtown. On a giant screen set against the side of a corporate office building, by video link they saw President East. The mayor said, “Today, City Hall, tomorrow the White House.” The police were gently restraining young autograph seekers. A blizzard of confetti, to imitate ticker tape, was falling from the office windows. The celebration had the passion of old black and white film footage Kate had seen of New York at the end of World War Two.
And oh, they had so much to tell everybody, and to ask. Had Y been found? If not, would they look for him, and for El and their family?
But the structure that they just came from, that housed the pod, wasn’t there. Then neither was the street. Everything had turned black and white like in the old newsreel she remembered. They were beside a big rock in a weedy lot. Early New York buildings remained, old and damaged, much smaller than the skyscrapers they just saw, no longer repaired nor maintained, and those were dissolving. There were no people. New York was a ghost town, then it disappeared. New York never was. Kate and Dill didn’t exist. St Patrick’s wasn’t there, so no Cardinal Corcoran. Y and Ice were very distant. Were they anywhere? Were they ever?
They were vanishing in front of each other. Maybe they existed somewhere. Maybe in a lot of somewheres. Not here. Not now. She thought what they had just seen, first modern New York, then early New York, auld acquaintances brought to mind, must have been ethereal memories or hallucinations.
Here and now, where they were…where they weren’t….there was…wasn’…was…n’t…an…y…thi…ng…