The biannual convention of the Immortalism Inc. used to be a swanky affair. They’d hire a conference room in a chi-chi West End hotel and lay on good food, wine and a smattering of celebrity speakers. Soap stars, mostly. Sometimes some of the younger stars, after snuffling cocaine, would start to couple behind the lush vegetation in the corners of the dim arboreal room. Large fronds would tremble and shake and emit the muffled but unmistakable sounds of coitus. But money’s tighter these days. Which is why we were in a carvery just beyond the Chertsey ring-road and the only celebrity on show was an ex-Radio 1 dj suffering from Bell’s Palsy.
Nevertheless, we refused to let that dampen our spirits. We smiled and chatted as we milled about, waiting to collect our colour-coded name tags before taking our seats in the designated conference area with its faux-pine finish.
“There’s no seating plan,” we were told. “Sit where you like.”
But you couldn’t really sit where you liked.
There was an unspoken seating plan. The distinguished, the middlemost and the johnny-cum-lateleys, stretching in higgledy-piggledy rows of injection moulded plastic office chairs all the way back the salad bar. It’s hard to know where I’d be seated without Mary, but because of Mary I was seated in the front row, second from the end on the right-hand side (facing the stage), with my super memory Sony dictaphone resting carefully on my lap to help with the minutes. An august quiet fell over the carvery as David Franklin emerged through the Fire Exit and grandly took the stage.
After standing, gripping the edges of the IKEA lectern and staring out into the audience for what felt like a whole minute but may have been no more than forty-five seconds, David said, “Someone once asked me if it was too late to cryonically treat Lenin. I just looked at him and said: ‘I’m surprised at you, Henry. You should know all about perfusion by now. You should know about the absolute necessity of treating a Sleeper immediately, before any form of necrosis has had a chance to set in. Lenin’s dead. He’s dead in all the ways that Immortalism Inc. seeks to banish forever. He’s terminally dead. It’s just hardened mulch in there. What the Russians are preserving is arrested decay. That’s what people see when they file through the crypt. The impossibility of Future Life. Finality. Death as the end. That’s why they feel sombre, quiet, even doomed as those guttering orange shadows flicker across their faces. But that, as you know, is for the history books. A body frozen inside time. At the C.I.P we freeze bodies outside of time. Our patented StoraFreeze tanks are the closest mankind has come to the true vessels of Time Travel. This is why we can offer people not just a better future, but the future––the world as it will come to be. We are offering life.’”
I don’t see why David let on that it was me who asked that question. It was a cheap shot. I don’t know what Mary likes so much about him. The guy’s a slimy ratfink, if you want my opinion.
After that dig I lost interest in the whole thing. I mean it’s all here on the dictaphone so I’ll have to listen to it sooner or later when I come to transcribe it for next month’s bulletin, but I stopped paying attention last night.
Instead I found myself thinking about our new cryonic head. We’ve had heads in our basement before, so why is this one suddenly playing on my mind? I suppose it’s the first time since we’ve had a head in the house that I’ve been shot at. In fact it’s the first time I’ve ever been shot at. Or at least it’s the first time I’ve been shot at and been aware of it, I suppose. Who knows how many bullets have been directed at me by lesser marksman. I could spend my days walking through a rain of badly aimed bullets for all I know. I’m probably not. But I could be. You should never rule these things out.
Still, the question remains: why this head? Why the dark fascination with Albert’s frozen head above any of the other frozen heads?
After giving David a rapturous standing ovation we made our way to the self-service buffet. Frank Milton was at the head of the queue, heaping food on to his plate that everyone knew he wouldn’t eat. No one said anything though because of Frank’s wife running off with one of her fifth grade students. The whole thing made the national press, where Frank’s wife went on record as saying that even teenagers with their first inept drunken fumblings were a marked improvement to making love with her ex-husband. How about that for the end of love. How about that for the final nail in the coffin of your romantic dreams. So we queued patiently.
David was over at the salad bar, holding an empty paper plate and staring intently into the amazing green eyes of a pretty girl in violent red boots. He said, “Cryonics is life insurance. Real life insurance. Because right now your life insurance isn’t really life insurance at all. It’s death insurance. It’s not your life that benefits, it’s someone else's. You don’t see any of it. You’re dead.” It was good advice but I’d heard it all before. Besides I was still rankled by the gratuitous way he’d name-checked me, just to score points with Mary.
Another thing that kept distracting me was the paper plates everyone was carrying. Every time I glimpsed one out of the corner of my eye I kept mistaking it for a circular saw. Confusing the corrugated edging for serrated teeth.
After I’d finally collected my sausage and chips and found a place to stand Mike Thomson walked over, tapped his nose and said, “Sub rosa, Henry.”
“Sorry?” I said, thinking he was talking about the wine.
“You have no idea, do you,” Mike said, gazing at me with his sad brown eyes.
Mike’s a sweet guy with an impressively cleft chin, but he was one of the diehard Edmund Cantrell supporters and now whenever he drinks his conversation lapses into crypto-paranoid utterances.
“No idea about what Mike?”
“About who you’ve got there.”
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it,” Mike said.
“Sorry, Mike, I don’t really know what you mean.”
“No, Henry. I know you don’t,” he said. I thought Mike was going to elaborate but instead he clutched the back of his neck and dropped to his knees. A pale, stricken look giving way to a glassy unfocused gaze before he finally toppled forward and hit the ground. The beer from his plastic cup foaming rabidly on the floor for a moment or two before sinking into the thin dun seventies-style carpet.
Almost immediately, Jon Votisky, C.I.P’s massive, florid surgeon, appeared from nowhere, scooped Mike up, threw him over his shoulder and wandered off again. How on earth had Jon had gone unnoticed until then? He has a ruddy sun-blasted complexion that looks like the sound of frying meat, wears Hawaiian shirts, often with leis, and has a habit of belching into his colourfully patterned armpits. But there he was appearing and disappearing with Mike slung over his shoulder. Vast, adipose, enigmatic, yet strangely likeable. The whole thing seemed like a dream. I mean I know drink hits everyone differently, but it seemed to hit Mike in the back of the neck. I gazed down at my own beer and then tipped it away, just in case.
Mary appeared with a plate of cold cuts and a fresh beer.