The Note Affixed to Your Cryotube

Steven Genise

W riting this to you could cost me my job, but you’re unlikely to recognize me when you wake up. You’d remember me as the concierge still young enough to keep their head shaved, who strapped you into your harness and rubbed the iodine on your left arm, and who very convincingly looked to the right and said What’s that, which distracted you as the needle went in. I got so good at it that day; you were the hundredth person I’d stuck, and I took such pride in the skill by the time of launch that, when I realized I’d never need to do it again, I felt hollow and worthless.

All the old people on their way out trained us just to stick you and not to care, but I imagine that when they were our age, setting out on their trip, they too were idealistic and starry.

But you won’t recognize me now that my braids go down to my knees and my skin bags and wrinkles. You could report me to my superior by saying that I was the one going around distracting the passengers before sticking them with the needle, that I was the tenderest one and the most idealistic, but that was fifty-four years ago now. Those who were in charge back then are long dead, and those in charge now won’t remember what happened a lifetime ago. In fact, as far as you know, you could be reporting my behavior to me. Better to just accept this gift in the spirit in which it was given. Better to move on with your life; mine is at its end anyway, while you’ve got so much before you.

You look the same, of course. Mostly. You haven’t aged, but you’ve a few new cuts. The small one beside your belly button was the first, which you got a year after you went under. They’re all stitched up now, but they’ll need tending to in the coming weeks, and that’s what you’re feeling now when you wake up.

We call your clothing packaging, because for one you’re not really alive and for two it doesn’t work like regular clothing. It’s adhesive and vacuum-sealed so your skin doesn’t dry out and burn, but it wears down over time, so every year we cut it off and repackage you. That was my first time repackaging, and my knife slipped and cut away a moon-shaped sliver of your flesh. I expected blood to gush, to flow. Expected you to move or scream. But of course, you did none of those things, without your heart beating or your lungs flexing, so I just continued on with the packaging.

It wasn’t until a month later that I realized, of course you wouldn’t heal. You’re not really alive. You can’t be bled to death, but neither can your body repair itself. So I wrote a note to myself: Stitch it shut. Appended it to my locker, and tried to remember it for next year when I repackaged you again. But when the time came, the little flap of skin was shriveled and burned, and it crumbled when I took the needle to it and left only the little red crescent moon on your flesh.

What was wrong with me that first year, that I let my knife slip and accidentally cut you like that? It’s never happened since. Maybe it was seeing you for the first time nude but uncowering. I want to draw upon the cognition you had before you put yourself in this tube and say trusting, but trust implies at least some present capacity for cognition. So instead of trusting I’ll say vulnerable. But can a pumpkin be vulnerable, for instance, or a corpse? Perhaps.

Part of it, surely, was our differences. Me, wearing scrubs made from the scratchy wool shorn from the ship’s livestock. You, wearing the vacuum sealed body bag. I don’t even get to see your face until I cut the suit off of you again, but when I do, the same every year: a middle-aged face, with wrinkles but no hair. No braids to mark the passing of your years after thirty. Of course, with the adhesive packaging you needed to be completely shorn of body hair, but in a way it was indeed like you were beginning life anew when we reached the new world, and given your actual age you looked practically like a child in comparison.

The medical record said you were ninety-one, but your body looked like my mother’s at forty, mine at thirty. Yes, that was the distraction, recognizing that I would never reach your age, or even close to it, while you would simply continue on as you always had, for another hundred years maybe. To slip, to cut you, was to bring you closer to the human. Closer to me.

But don’t worry, I only slipped the once.

I cut you deliberately two years later. I was nearing twenty-five and not yet bearing children, which did not please my bosses. A small nick on your thigh, stitched right up, to remind us both that promising two generations of labor in exchange for lifetimes of employment was, to many, a better privilege than they could ever ask for.

At twenty-eight they became stricter, requiring me to stop working during my ovulation window to visit the ship’s inseminary. I gave you that cut just below your ear to reassure you that what we were doing here was worth it.

At thirty, the IVF took, at least for a while, and so I didn’t do anything to you that year. But at thirty-one I gave you your caesarian scar so that I wouldn’t have to be alone with mine. The one on your knee came at thirty-three when I was chasing my son down the hall and I fell. The one on your shoulder for where his puppy bit me. To make it match, I couldn’t use the scalpel. I want you to appreciate the difficulty in acquiring the teeth.

The ones I imagine you noticed first are the long ones down each forearm. They came at thirty-six.

At thirty-seven I had exhausted the company mourning period and had to visit the inseminary regularly again, and that series of tallies on your calf is an accounting of the months, which you can review at your convenience. At forty, I gave you a cut along your side where the ectopic pregnancy was removed. Tallies along the bottoms of your feet, small pinpricks I made with a needle, are for every egg retrieval – these are harmless to you but they’re not stitched up, so you will need to change your socks.

The big tallies down your back are for every month after menopause that they put those eggs back in me.

They never got their second generation out of me, at least not in the way they expected to. But my contract was to provide labor for two trips, so I’ll be heading back home at least. I won’t get there, but I’ll head that way.

And at any rate, I’ve had you all these years, haven’t I? Helplessly lying there. And it’s not just vulnerability, is it? It is about trust. You trusting, the way only someone with your means could afford to trust. And me, trusted the way only someone of my means can be trusted. This is to say, someone necessarily without cynicim because I am someone incapable of personal gain. No freedom after we leave port, and no riches when we return.

When we land, you’ll wake up, you’ll read this note. You’ll nurse your wounds and perhaps ask around for as long as you can who did this to you. But you will have so much else to do before we turn for home again.

And the next batch of concierges will come aboard, young and idealistic as I once was, and I’ll train them to do as I did, just like the generation before trained me. And then we will all depart, and at some point on the return journey I will die, and leave only them to see what I’ve done to you.

Let the training I give, the lessons I teach, make them the only children your company begets of me.

Entrust them with your vulnerability.

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