Thawed

               Here is the full story that earned First Place in the contemporary short story category at the Philadelphia Writers Conference this year. Please excuse the poor formatting, Word Doc's do not convert well to this blogs system and I'm just not patient enough to try to go through and fix the spacing today. Maybe another day. Enjoy:)

Thawed

by Melissa Hart

               His heavy eyes fought against him as he struggled to open them for longer than the shortest of seconds. Bright, glaring lights invaded his closed eyelids and added to his battle to open his eyes. He wanted- no, he needed -to see where he was and what was happening. If only his damned eyes would cooperate.

                Blips and beeps echoed through his head like high-pitched screams. What the hell is happening?

                Phillip was consumed by the noise and the light and the desperate need to open his eyes. He could hear far away voices speaking to him at the same time, one of them felt vaguely familiar but he couldn’t place it.

            “Phillip, listen to me. This is crazy.”

Where had he heard that voice, that line, before?

“Phillip, can you hear me?” said the second voice- an unfamiliar one- breaking through the squeals and beeps of machines. “Phillip. Phillip, can you wake up?”

“Phillip, can you listen to me? You don’t know the risks involved, no one does.”

                What the hell is happening? His eyes wouldn’t stay open, there was no hope his mouth would move in answer to the distant voice.

                “Phillip, if you can hear me try to focus on the sound of my voice” said the unfamiliar voice again, sounding closer.

                “Phillip, I am begging you not to do this.”

                Open up! Phillip silently screamed at his eyes to stay open. Finally, they relented and allowed him to open them, only to be blinded by glaring white lights. Squinting against the invading brightness, Phillip tried to find the source of the voices.

                A face came into focus. The face was only a pair of deep brown eyes peeking out from a green surgical mask and cap. There was no second face, no one else around that Phillip could see.

                “Wha… wha… wh…” Phillip tried to speak, but the words got stuck in his dry throat, cracking as if his words were brittle old pieces of paper that crumble when touched.

                “What is happening?” said the masked face, asking the question Phillip was unable to articulate. Phillip simply blinked in answer.

                “What are you thinking?” the unseen voice said, growing angry.

                Am I dreaming? Phillip wondered.

                The brown eyes smiled with excitement as the voice exclaimed simply “We did it Phillip, we brought you back.”

                Phillips thoughts were fuzzy. He felt as if he should know what the voice meant, but he could not remember.

                “No one can say for sure that this will work. What if it doesn’t? What happens to your money then?” The ghost voice was yelling now.

                “Rest now, Phillip.” said the voice with the eyes reassuringly. Phillip felt a pinch as a needle pricked his arm. “We will talk when you’re more awake, it’s been a big day.” The eyes smiled at Phillip one last time.

                “I can’t even talk to you right now, You’re making a big mistake,” said the ghost voice.

                Phillip closed his eyes and fell into a sedated sleep filled with dreams and voices that did not make any sense.

                                            

                Hours later, Phillip awoke more easily. His eyes opened at will and he found he could move, although stiffly. His thoughts were clearer but he still could not recall why he had awoken in a hospital.

                “Are these even actual medical Doctors Phillip? Or just mad scientists?”

                So I am dreaming. Maybe I’ve gone crazy.

                “Good, you’re awake.” The other voice spoke again and Phillip turned his head towards the sound. The face had a mouth this time, the mask and cap were gone. Pulling a chair to the side of Phillip’s bed, the doctor asked, “Can you speak?”

                “Ye…yes.” Phillip squeaked out the words and winced at the sound that came from his own throat. There was no trace of the formidable voice that belonged to the powerful Phillip James, this was the voice of an old man. The voice of a corpse.

                What the hell is happening to me?

                “Wonderful.” The doctor smiled at Phillip. He was obviously young, a fact that was apparent to Phillip by the unconcealed excitement written all over his face. “Do you know why you’re here?” asked the doctor.

                Phillip shook his head.

                “You don’t know what you’re doing Phillip. We don’t even know if these mad-scientist-Frankenstein-worshipping nut cases know what they are doing either.”

                “You came to this company a long time ago Phillip, you wanted our help to preserve your body when you passed away,” said the Doctor.

                “There’s a reason people die Phillip, we weren’t made to live forever.”

                “Cryogenics,” Phillip stated simply. He was starting to have an idea of why he was here.

                “Yes! That’s right Phillip! It worked and you were frozen cryogenically and brought back to consciousness. You were the first to make it through the process successfully,” the Doctor explained.

                “And what if it doesn’t work? Listen to me Phillip, I’m your brother for crying out loud. These things were not meant to be played with, you don’t know the ultimate price.”

                William. Yes, that’s right, William was against this. I remember…

“How long?” Phillip asked the Doctor.

                “One-hundred and fifty years, Phillip,” said the doctor. His smile took up his entire face and he looked as if he wanted to hop up and down in his seat as he spoke. “Phillip, we brought you back after a hundred and fifty years in the tank. This is wonderful news for science and medicine.” The doctor beamed at Phillip like a proud new father looking at his newborn son.

                “A hundred…” said Phillip, trailing of his words not out of inability too form them, but inability to process what he had just heard.

                “And fifty!” said the doctor.

                They actually did it. Phillip lay silent as he let it seep through his brain that he had been dead-no, frozen- for a hundred and fifty years and was lying thawed out in a hospital bed.

                “How much are you willing to pay? What price is too high?”

                Shut up William. You’ve lost this argument, I’m back.

 His heart was beating. His mind was thinking clear thoughts. His eyes could see. His hands could move. His lungs were taking in air. And they thought I was crazy, he thought. A small smile crept into the corners of Phillips lips. Phillip James is back. Watch out world, here I come.

“…certain sacrifices we had to make,” said the doctor. Phillip had been so lost in his own thoughts that he had not realized the doctor was still speaking. “I don’t want you to let these detract from the over-all miracle of you being brought back, but you have to know that you will not be a hundred percent of what you once were.”

“What price is too high?”

                The doctor was serious now. His face was still friendly, and his brown eyes continued to smile reassuringly but the naked excitement was gone from his voice and his face. As he continued to explain to Phillip that his revival had gone smoothly but not without concerns, Phillip began to get edgy.

“I don’t understand,” said Phillip. His voice came to him easy now, but it was still the croak of an aged man. “What sacrifices?”

“You have children Phillip, leave your money to them. Don’t risk it on a science that we don’t know much about.”

“Phillip, please understand that when you died cryogenics was still a new field of science,” Said the young doctor. “Scientists thought that the state you went into the tank was the state you would emerge in and that anything wrong with you at that time could be fixed in the future,” the doctor calmly explained. “We know now that just isn’t the case.”

“What sacrifices?” asked Phillip. He was growing impatient, he was Phillip James and he was used to calling the shots. In his old life no snot nose kid would stand there and go on and on without cutting right to the chase.

“Fine! Freeze your damn self if you have to, but at least…”

“A human body in a cryogenic state is kind of like a steak in the freezer,” said the doctor. “For a certain amount of time, the state it was in prior to freezing is preserved, but after awhile it does begin to degenerate. “ The doctor was beginning to get visibly nervous, the smile was still on his face but his eyes could no longer meet with Phillips and darted around the room instead. “A steak gets freezer burnt after too long, and given enough time in the freezer will eventually begin to rot.”

“… leave the company and the money to the kids.”

“What sacrifices?” repeated Phillip.

Rot? What the hell does a rotting steak have to do with me?

“We had to remove both of your legs, Phillip,” said the doctor simply. Meeting Phillip’s eyes with his own again, he added “and there are spots at various places on the rest of your body where we were unable to do anything about the decomposition.”

“Decomposition?” asked Phillip in disbelief.

“Phillip,” said the doctor, taking a deep breath before continuing, “you are essentially rotting from the outside in.” The doctor broke his eye contact with his patient again and looked down at his own feet.

“Rotting…” said Phillip in a hoarse whisper. How can I be rotting? Phillip thought. I was cryogenically frozen for Christ’s sake! “So I’m dying again,” said Phillip out loud. It was a simple statement, not a question. Phillip knew there was no way a rotting body would be able to survive.

“Not exactly,” said the doctor. “You will need to have daily injections of a preservative-basically a low dose of embalming fluid- but I believe we can hold off the deterioration for somewhere close to ten years. “ The doctor looked at Phillip again, “but I should warn you, your appearance is not what you were probably hoping for.”

“This is the most selfish God complex I have ever hear of!”

Shut up William! I’ve done it, I’ll live two lifetimes while your coward’s corpse is rotting (Rotting! How can I be rotting?) six feet under.

“”Mirror,” said Phillip.

“I don’t think…”

“Mirror.  Now.” Phillip would continue to demand things in this life as was his right as Phillip James, one of the world’s most wealthy men. No one, doctor or otherwise, would keep him from getting what he wanted. He got what he wanted in his old life and, damn it, he would get it in this life as well. Rotting skin or no rotting skin, no one would deny him what he asked for.

Looking into the mirror the doctor handed him Phillip cringed. His face looked like the corpse his voice sounded like. The whites of his eyes were graying and the pupils filming over, he had hollow spaces under his sinking eyes. The once pink flesh of his cheeks was now scattered with small gaping wounds that were turning green around the edges. His nose was bony and the nostrils seemed to be disintegrating. He was too scared of his own image to look for long and threw the mirror on the ground where it smashed into pieces.

“What price are you willing to pay to live forever Phillip? To bequeath your money to yourself after your death… it’s the most presumptuous and absurd thing I have ever heard of!”

At least my corpse can still move and breath, William. So I guess I get the last laugh anyway.

Calming himself, Phillip realized it didn’t matter. He had come this far, he would go farther. He was still one of the richest men alive.

He would buy himself a cure.